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The Man Who Couldn't Sleep

by Arthur Stringer · English · Gutenberg #33645 · 528,948 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Man Who Couldn't Sleep

Author: Arthur Stringer

Illustrator: Frank Snapp


        
Release date: November 25, 2010 [eBook #33645]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33645

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHO COULDN'T SLEEP ***




Produced by Al Haines









[Frontispiece: I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on my
up-thrust wrist.]





The Man

Who Couldn't Sleep



By ARTHUR STRINGER


AUTHOR OF

"The Prairie Wife," Etc.




With Frontispiece

By FRANK SNAPP




A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers -------- New York

Published by arrangement with BOBBS MERRILL COMPANY




COPYRIGHT 1919

THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY


_Printed in the United States of America_




  To Harvey, of the dome-like pate,
    The dreamy eye, the Celtic wit
  And kindly heart, I dedicate
    This blithe romance conceived and writ
  By one of that triumvirate
    Who knew Defeat, yet conquered it.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

    I  Running Out of Pay-Dirt
   II  The Ox-Blood Vase
  III  The Stolen Wheel-Code
   IV  The Open Door
    V  The Man from Medicine Hat
   VI  The Irreproachable Butler
  VII  The Panama Gold Chests
 VIII  The Dummy-Chucker
   IX  A Rialto Rain-Storm
    X  The Thumb-Tap Clue
   XI  The Nile-Green Roadster




The Man Who Couldn't Sleep



CHAPTER I

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT

To begin with, I am a Canadian by birth, and thirty-three years old.
For nine of those years I have lived in New York.  And by my friends in
that city I am regarded as a successful author.

There was a time when I even regarded myself in much the same light.
But that period is past.  I now have to face the fact that I am a
failure.  For when a man is no longer able to write he naturally can no
longer be reckoned as an author.

I have made the name of Witter Kerfoot too well known, I think, to
explain that practically all of my stories have been written about
Alaska.  Just why I resorted to that far-off country for my settings is
still more or less a mystery to me.  Perhaps it was merely because of
its far-offness.  Perhaps it was because the editors remembered that I
came from the land of the beaver and sagely concluded that a Canadian
would be most at home in writing about the Frozen North.  At any rate,
when I romanced about the Yukon and its ice-bound trails they bought my
stories, and asked for more.

And I gave them more.  I gave them blood-red fiction about gun-men and
claim-jumpers and Siwash queens and salmon fisheries.  I gave them
supermen of iron, fighting against cold and hunger, and snarling,
always snarling, at their foes.  I gave them oratorical young engineers
with clear-cut features and sinews of steel, battling against the
forces of hyperborean evil.  I gave them fist-fights that caused my
books to be discreetly shut out of school-libraries yet brought in
telegrams from motion-picture directors for first rights.  I gave them
enough gun-play to shoot Chilcoot Pass into the middle of the Pacific,
and was publicly denominated as the apostle of the Eye-Socket School,
and during the three-hundred-night run of my melodrama, _The Pole
Raiders_, even beheld on the Broadway sign-boards an extraordinarily
stalwart picture of myself in a rakish Stetson and a flannel shirt very
much open at the throat, with a cow-hide holster depending from my
Herculean waist-line and a very dreadful-looking six-shooter protruding
from the open top of that belted holster.  My publishers spoke of me,
for business reasons, as the Interpreter of the Great Northwest.  And I
exploited that territory with the industry of a badger.  In my own way,
I mined Alaska.  And it brought me in a very respectable amount of
pay-dirt.

But I knew nothing about Alaska, I had never even seen the country.  I
"crammed up" on it, of course, the same as we used to cram up for a
third-form examination in Latin grammar.  I perused the atlases and
sent for governmental reports, and pored over the R.N.W.M.P. Blue
Books, and gleaned a hundred or so French-Canadian names for half-breed
villains from a telephone-directory for the city of Montreal.  But I
knew no more about Alaska than a Fiji Islander knows about the New York
Stock Exchange.  And that was why I could romance so freely, so
magnificently, about it!

I was equally prodigal of blood, I suppose, because I had never seen
the real thing flow--except in the case of my little niece, when her
tonsils had been removed and a very soft-spoken nurse had helped me out
of the surgery and given me a drink of ice-water, after telling me it
would be best to keep my head as low as possible until I was feeling
better.  As for firearms, I abhorred them.  I never shot off an
air-rifle without first shutting my eyes.  I never picked up a duck-gun
without a wince of aversion.  So I was able to do wonderful things with
firearms, on paper.  And with the Frozen Yukon and firearms combined, I
was able to work miracles.  I gave a whole continent goose-flesh, so
many times a season.  And the continent seemed to enjoy it, for those
airy essays in iron and gore were always paid for, and paid for at
higher and higher rates.

While this was taking place, something even more important was taking
place, something which finally brought me in touch with Mary Lockwood
herself.  It was accident more than anything else, I think, that first
launched me in what is so indefinitely and often so disparagingly known
as society.  Society, as a rule, admits only the lions of my calling
across its sacred portals.  And even these lions, I found, were
accepted under protest or the wing of some commendable effort for
charity, and having roared their little hour, were let pass quietly out
to oblivion again.  But I had been lucky enough to bring letters to the
Peytons and to the Gruger-Philmores, and these old families, I will be
honest enough to confess, had been foolish enough to like me.

So from the first I did my best to live up to those earlier
affiliations.  I found myself passed on, from one mysteriously
barricaded seclusion to the other.  The tea-hour visit merged into the
formal dinner, and the formal dinner into the even more formal box at
the Horse-Show, and then a call to fill up a niche at the Metropolitan
on a Caruso-night, or a vacancy for an Assembly Dance at Sherry's, or a
week at Tuxedo, in winter, when the skating was good.

I worked hard to keep up my end of the game.  But I was an impostor, of
course, all along the line.  I soon saw that I had to prove more than
acceptable; I had also to prove _dependable_.  That I was a writer
meant nothing whatever to those people.  They had scant patience with
the long-haired genius type.  That went down only with musicians.  So I
soon learned to keep my bangs clipped, my trousers creased, and my
necktie inside my coat-lapels.  I also learned to use my wits, and how
to key my talk up to dowager or down to debutante, and how to be
passably amusing even before the champagne course had arrived.  I made
it a point to remember engagements and anniversaries, and more than
once sent flowers and Millairds, which I went hungry to pay for.  Even
my _pourboires_ to butlers and footmen and maids stood a matter, in
those earlier days, for much secret and sedulous consideration.

But, as I have said, I tried to keep up my end.  I _liked_ those large
and orderly houses.  I liked the quiet-mannered people who lived in
them.  I liked looking at life with their hill-top unconcern for
trivialities.  I grew rather contemptuous of my humbler fellow-workers
who haunted the neighborhood theaters and the red-inkeries of Greenwich
Village, and orated Socialism and blank-verse poems to garret
audiences, and wore window-curtain cravats and celluloid blinkers with
big round lenses, and went in joyous and caramel-eating groups to the
"rush" seats at _Rigoletto_.  I was accepted, as I have already tried
to explain, as an impecunious but dependable young bachelor.  And I
suppose I could have kept on at that role, year after year, until I
developed into a foppish and somewhat threadbare old _beau_.  But about
this time I was giving North America its first spasms of goose-flesh
with my demigod type of Gibsonian engineer who fought the villain until
his flannel shirt was in rags and then shook his fist in Nature's face
when she dogged him with the Eternal Cold.  And there was money in
writing for flat-dwellers about that Eternal Cold, and about battling
claw to claw and fang to fang, and about eye-sockets without any eyes
in them.  My income gathered like a snow-ball.  And as it gathered I
began to feel that I ought to have an establishment--not a back-room
studio in Washington Square, nor a garret in the Village of the
Free-Versers, nor a mere apartment in the West Sixties, nor even a
duplex overlooking Central Park South.  I wanted to be something more
than a number.  I wanted a house, a house of my own, and a cat-footed
butler to put a hickory-log on the fire, and a full set of _Sevres_ on
my mahogany sideboard, and something to stretch a strip of red carpet
across when the landaulets and the limousines rolled up to my door.

So I took a nine-year lease of the Whighams' house in Gramercy Square.
It was old-fashioned and sedate and unpretentious to the passing eye,
but beneath that somewhat somber shell nested an amazingly rich kernel
of luxuriousness.  It was good form; it was unbelievably comfortable,
and it was not what the climber clutches for.  The cost of even a
nine-year claim on it rather took my breath away, but the thought of
Alaska always served to stiffen up my courage.

It was necessary to think a good deal about Alaska in those days, for
after I had acquired my house I also had to acquire a man to run it,
and then a couple of other people to help the man who helped me, and
then a town car to take me back and forth from it, and then a chauffeur
to take care of the car, and then the service-clothes for the
chauffeur, and the thousand and one unlooked for things, in short,
which confront the pin-feather householder and keep him from feeling
too much a lord of creation.

Yet in Benson, my butler, I undoubtedly found a gem of the first water.
He moved about as silent as a panther, yet as watchful as an eagle.  He
could be ubiquitous and self-obliterating at one and the same time.  He
was meekness incarnate, and yet he could coerce me into a predetermined
line of conduct as inexorably as steel rails lead a street-car along
its predestined line of traffic.  He was, in fact, much more than a
butler.  He was a valet and a _chef de cuisine_ and a
lord-high-chamberlain and a purchasing-agent and a body-guard and a
benignant-eyed old godfather all in one.  The man _babied_ me.  I could
see that all along.  But I was already an overworked and slightly
neurasthenic specimen, even in those days, and I was glad enough to
have that masked and silent Efficiency always at my elbow.  There were
times, too, when his activities merged into those of a trained nurse,
for when I smoked too much he hid away my cigars, and when I worked too
hard he impersonally remembered what morning horseback riding in the
park had done for a former master of his.  And when I drifted into the
use of chloral hydrate, to make me sleep, that dangerous little bottle
had the habit of disappearing, mysteriously and inexplicably
disappearing, from its allotted place in my bathroom cabinet.

There was just one thing in which Benson disappointed me.  That was in
his stubborn and unreasonable aversion to Latreille, my French
chauffeur.  For Latreille was as efficient, in his way, as Benson
himself.  He understood his car, he understood the traffic rules, and
he understood what I wanted of him.  Latreille was, after a manner of
speaking, a find of my own.  Dining one night at the Peytons', I had
met the Commissioner of Police, who had given me a card to stroll
through Headquarters and inspect the machinery of the law.  I had
happened on Latreille as he was being measured and "mugged" in the
Identification Bureau, with those odd-looking Bertillon forceps taking
his cranial measurements.  The intelligence of the man interested me;
the inalienable look of respectability in his face convinced me, as a
student of human nature, that he was not meant for any such fate or any
such environment.  And when I looked into his case I found that
instinct had not been amiss.  The unfortunate fellow had been "framed"
for a car-theft of which he was entirely innocent.  He explained all
this to me, in fact, with tears in his eyes.  And circumstances, when I
looked into them, bore out his statements.  So I visited the
Commissioner, and was passed on to the Probation Officers, from whom I
caromed off to the Assistant District-Attorney, who in turn delegated
me to another official, who was cynical enough to suggest that the
prisoner might possibly be released if I was willing to go to the
extent of bonding him.  This I very promptly did, for I was now
determined to see poor Latreille once more a free man.

Latreille showed his appreciation of my efforts by saving me seven
hundred dollars when I bought my town car--though candor compels me to
admit that I later discovered it to be a used car rehabilitated, and
not a product fresh from the factory, as I had anticipated.  But
Latreille was proud of that car, and proud of his position, and I was
proud of having a French chauffeur, though my ardor was dampened a
little later on, when I discovered that Latreille, instead of hailing
from the _Bois de Boulogne_ and the _Avenue de la Paix_, originated in
the slightly less splendid suburbs of Three Rivers, up on the St.
Lawrence.

But my interest in Latreille about this time became quite subsidiary,
for something much more important than cars happened to me.  I fell in
love.  I fell in love with Mary Lockwood, head-over-heels in love with
a girl who could have thrown a town car into the Hudson every other
week and never have missed it.  She was beautiful; she was wonderful;
but she was dishearteningly wealthy.  With all those odious riches of
hers, however, she was a terribly honest and above-board girl, a
healthy-bodied, clear-eyed, practical-minded, normal-living New York
girl who in her twenty-two active years of existence had seen enough of
the world to know what was veneer and what was solid, and had seen
enough of men to demand mental camaraderie and not "squaw-talk" from
them.

I first saw her at the Volpi sale, in the American Art Galleries, where
we chanced to bid against each other for an old Italian table-cover, a
sixteenth-century blue velvet embroidered with gold galloon.  Mary bid
me down, of course.  I lost my table-cover, and with it I lost my
heart.  When I met her at the Obden-Belponts, a week later, she
confessed that I'd rather been on her conscience.  She generously
offered to hand over that oblong of old velvet, if I still happened to
be grieving over its loss.  But I told her that all I asked for was a
chance to see it occasionally.  And occasionally I went to see it.  I
also saw its owner, who became more wonderful to me, week by week.
Then I lost my head over her.  That _apheresis_ was so complete that I
told Mary what had happened, and asked her to marry me.

Mary was very practical about it all.  She said she liked me, liked me
a lot.  But there were other things to be considered.  We would have to
wait.  I had my work to do--and she wanted it to be _big_ work,
gloriously big work.  She wouldn't even consent to a formal engagement.
But we had an "understanding."  I was sent back to my work, drunk with
the memory of her surrendering lips warm on mine, of her wistfully
entreating eyes searching my face for something which she seemed unable
to find there.

That work of mine which I went back to, however, seemed something very
flat and meager and trivial.  And this, I realized, was a condition
which would never do.  The pot had to be kept boiling, and boiling now
more briskly than ever.  I had lapsed into more or less luxurious ways
of living; I had formed expensive tastes, and had developed a fondness
for antiques and Chinese bronzes and those _objets d'art_ which are
never found on the bargain-counter.  I had outgrown the Spartan ways of
my youth when I could lunch contentedly at Child's and sleep soundly on
a studio-couch in a top-floor room.  And more and more that rapacious
ogre known as Social Obligation had forged his links and fetters about
my movements.  More than ever, I saw, I had my end to keep up.  What
should have been a recreation had become almost a treadmill.  I was a
pretender, and had my pretense to sustain.  I couldn't afford to be
"dropped."  I had my frontiers to protect, and my powers to placate.  I
couldn't ask Mary to throw herself away on a nobody.  So instead of
trying to keep up one end, I tried to keep up two.  I continued to bob
about the fringes of the Four Hundred.  And I continued to cling
hungrily to Mary's hint about doing work, gloriously big work.

But gloriously big work, I discovered, was usually done by lonely men,
living simply and quietly, and dwelling aloof from the frivolous
side-issues of life, divorced from the distractions of a city which
seemed organized for only the idler and the lotos-eater.  And I could
see that the pay-dirt coming out of Alaska was running thinner and
thinner.

It was to remedy this, I suppose, that I dined with my old friend Pip
Conners, just back to civilization after fourteen long years up in the
Yukon.  That dinner of ours together was memorable.  It was one of the
mile-stones of my life.  I wanted to furbish up my information on that
remote corner of the world, which, in a way, I had preempted as my own.
I wanted fresh information, first-hand data, renewed inspiration.  And
I was glad to feel Pip's horny hand close fraternally about mine.

"Witter," he said, staring at me with open admiration, "you're a
wonder."

I liked Pip's praise, even though I stood a little at a loss to discern
its inspiration.

"You mean--this?" I asked, with a casual hand-wave about that Gramercy
Square abode of mine.

"No, sir," was Pip's prompt retort.  "I mean those stories of yours.
I've read 'em all."

I blushed at this, blushed openly.  For such commendation from a man
who knew life as it was, who knew life in the raw, was as honey to my
ears.

"Do you mean to say you could get them, up _there_?" I asked, more for
something to dissemble my embarrassment than to acquire actual
information.

"Yes," acknowledged Pip with a rather foolish-sounding laugh, "they
come through the mails about the same as they'd come through the mails
down here.  And folks even read them, now and then, when the gun-smoke
blows out of the valley!"

"Then what struck you as wonderful about them?" I inquired, a little at
sea as to his line of thought.

"It's not _them_ that's wonderful, Witter.  It's you.  I said you were
a wonder.  And you are."

"And why am I a wonder?" I asked, with the drip of the honey no longer
embarrassing my modesty.

"Witter, _you're a wonder to get away with it_!" was Pip's solemnly
intoned reply.

"To get away with it?" I repeated.

"Yes; to make it go down!  To get 'em trussed and gagged and hog-tied!
To make 'em come and eat out of your hand and then holler for more!
For I've been up there in the British Yukon for fourteen nice
comfortable years, Witter, and I've kind o' got to know the country.  I
know how folks live up there, and what the laws are.  And it may strike
you as queer, friend-author, but folks up in that district are
uncommonly like folks down here in the States.  And in the Klondike and
this same British Yukon there is a Firearms Act which makes it against
the law for any civilian to tote a gun.  And that law is sure carried
out.  Fact is, there's no _need_ for a gun.  And even if you did
smuggle one in, the Mounted Police would darned soon take it away from
you!"

I sat staring at him.

"But all those motion-pictures," I gasped.  "And all those novels
about--"

"That's why I say you're a wonder," broke in the genial-eyed Pip.  "You
can fool _all_ the people _all_ the time!  You've done it.  And you
keep on doing it.  You can put 'em to sleep and take it out of their
pants pocket before they know they've gone by-by.  Why, you've even got
'em tranced off in the matter of everyday school-geography.  You've had
some of those hero-guys o' yours mush seven or eight hundred miles, and
on a birch-bark toboggan, between dinner and supper.  And if that ain't
genius, I ain't ever seen it bound up in a reading-book!"

That dinner was a mile-stone in my life, all right, but not after the
manner I had expected.  For as I sat there in a cold sweat of
apprehension crowned with shame, Pip Conners told me many things about
Alaska and the Klondike.  He told me many things that were new to me,
dishearteningly, discouragingly, devitalizingly new to me.  Without
knowing it, he poignarded me, knifed me through and through.  Without
dreaming what he was doing, he eviscerated me.  He left me a hollow and
empty mask of an author.  He left me a homeless exile, with the iron
gates of Fact swung sternly shut on what had been a Fairy Land of
Romance, a Promised Land of untrammelled and care-free imaginings.

That was my first sleepless night.

I said nothing to Pip.  I said nothing to any one.  I held that vulture
of shame close in my arms and felt its unclean beak awling into my
vitals.  I tried to go back to my work, next day, to lose myself in
creation.  But it was like seeking consolation beside a corpse.  For
me, Alaska was killed, killed forever.  And blight had fallen on more
than my work.  It had crept over my very world, the world which only
the labor of my pen could keep orderly and organized.  The city in
which I had seemed to sit a conqueror suddenly lay about me a flat and
monotonous tableland of ennui, as empty and stale as a circus-lot after
the last canvas-wagon has rumbled away.

I have no intention of making this recountal the confessions of a
neurasthenic.  Nothing is further from my aims than the inditing of a
second City of Dreadful Night.  But I began to worry.  And later on I
began to magnify my troubles.  I even stuck to New York that summer,
for the simple reason that I couldn't afford to go away.  And it was an
unspeakably hot summer.  I did my best to work, sitting for hours at a
time staring at a blank sheet of paper, set out like tangle-foot to
catch a passing idea.  But not an idea alighted on that square of
spotless white.  When I tried new fields, knowing Alaska was dead, the
editors solemnly shook their heads and announced that this new offering
of mine didn't seem to have the snap and go of my older manner.  Then
panic overtook me, and after yet another white night I went straight to
Sanson, the nerve specialist, and told him I was going crazy.

He laughed at me.  Then he offhandedly tapped me over and tried my
reflexes and took my blood pressure and even more diffidently asked me
a question or two.  He ended up by announcing that I was as sound as a
dollar, whatever that may have meant, and suggested as an afterthought
that I drop tobacco and go in more for golf.

That buoyed me up for a week or two.  But Mary, when she came in to
town radiant and cool for three days' shopping, seemed to detect in me
a change which first surprised and then troubled her.  I was bitterly
conscious of being a disappointment to somebody who expected great
things of me.  And to escape that double-edged sword of mortification,
I once again tried to bury myself in my work.  But I just as well might
have tried to bury myself in a butter-dish, for there was no effort and
no activity there to envelope me.  I was coerced into idleness, without
ever having acquired the art of doing nothing.  For life with me had
been a good deal like boiling rice: it had to be kept galloping to save
it from going mushy.  Yet now the fire itself seemed out.  And that
prompted me to sit and listen to my works, as the French idiom
expresses it, which is never a profitable calling for a naturally
nervous man.

The lee and the long of it was, as the Irish say, that I went back to
Doctor Sanson and demanded something, in the name of God, that would
give me a good night's sleep.  He was less jocular, this time.  He told
me to forget my troubles and go fishing for a couple of weeks.

I _did_ go fishing, but I fished for ideas.  And I got scarcely a
strike.  To leave the city was now more than ever out of the question.
So for recreation I had Latreille take me out in the car, when a
feverish thirst for speed, which I found it hard to account for, drove
me into daily violations of the traffic laws.  Twice, in fact, I was
fined for this, with a curtly warning talk from the presiding
magistrate on the second occasion, since the offense, in this case, was
complicated by collision with an empty baby-carriage.  Latreille, about
this time, seemed uncannily conscious of my condition.  More and more
he seemed to rasp me on the raw, until irritation deepened into
positive dislike for the man.

When Mary came back to the city for a few days, before going to the
Virginia hills for the autumn, I looked so wretched and felt so
wretched that I decided not to see her.  I was taking veronal now, to
make me sleep, and with cooler weather I looked for better rest and a
return to work.  But my hopes were ill-founded.  I came to dread the
night, and the night's ever-recurring battle for sleep.  I lost my
perspective on things.  And then came the crowning catastrophe, the
catastrophe which turned me into a sort of twentieth-century Macbeth.

The details of that catastrophe were ludicrous enough, and it had no
definite and clear-cut outcome, but its effect on my over-tensioned
nerves was sufficiently calamitous.  It occurred, oddly enough, on
Hallow-e'en night, when the world is supposed to be given over to
festivity.  Latreille had motored me out to a small dinner-dance at
Washburn's, on Long Island, but I had left early in the evening,
perversely depressed by a hilarity in which I had not the heart to
join.  Twice, on the way back to the city, I had called out to
Latreille for more speed.  We had just taken a turn in the outskirts of
Brooklyn when my swinging headlights disclosed the figure of a man, an
unstable and wavering man, obviously drunk, totter and fall directly in
front of my car.

I heard the squeal of the brakes and the high-pitched shouts from a
crowd of youths along the sidewalk.  But it was too late.  I could feel
the impact as we struck.  I could feel the sickening thud and jolt as
the wheels pounded over that fallen body.

I stood up, without quite knowing what I was doing, and screamed like a
woman.  Then I dropped weakly back in my seat.  I think I was sobbing.
I scarcely noticed that Latreille had failed to stop the car.  He spoke
to me twice, in fact, before I knew it.

"Shall we go on, sir?" he asked, glancing back at me over his shoulder.

"_Go on!_" I shouted, knowing well enough by this time what I said,
surrendering merely to that blind and cowardly panic for
self-preservation which marks man at his lowest.

We thumped and swerved and speeded away on the wings of cowardice.  I
sat there gasping and clutching my moist fingers together, as I've seen
hysterical women do, calling on Latreille for speed, and still more
speed.

I don't know where he took me.  But I became conscious of the consoling
blackness of the night about us.  And I thanked God, as Cain must have
done when he found himself alone with his shame.

"Latreille," I said, breathing brokenly as we slowed up, "did we--_did
we kill him_?"

My chauffeur turned in his seat and studied my face.  Then he looked
carefully back, to make sure we were not being followed.

"This is a heavy car, sir," he finally admitted.  He said it coolly,
and almost impersonally.  But the words fell like a sledge-hammer on my
heart.

"But we couldn't have killed a man," I clamored insanely, weakly, as we
came to a dead stop at the roadside.

"Forty-two hundred pounds--and he got both wheels!" calmly protested my
enemy, for I felt now that he was in some way my enemy.

"What in heaven's name are you going to do?" I gasped, for I noticed
that he was getting down from his seat.

"Hadn't I better get the blood off the running-gear, before we turn
back into town?"

"Blood?" I quavered as I clutched at the robe-rail in front of me.  And
that one word brought the horror of the thing home to me in all its
ghastliness.  I could see axles and running-board and brake-bar
dripping with red, festooned with shreds of flesh, maculated with
blackening gore.  And I covered my face with my hands, and groaned
aloud in my misery of soul.

But Latreille did not wait for me.  He lifted the seat-cushion, took
rubbing-cloths from the tool-box and crawled out of sight beneath the
car.  I could feel the occasional tremors that went through the
frame-work as he busied himself at that grisly task.  I could hear his
grunt of satisfaction when he had finished.  And I watched him with
stricken eyes as he stepped through the vague darkness and tossed his
telltale cloths far over the roadside fence.

"It's all right," he companionably announced as he stepped back into
the car.  But there was a new note in the man's demeanor, a note which
even through that black fog of terror reached me and awakened my
resentment.  We were partners in crime.  We were fellow-actors in a
drama of indescribable cowardice, and I was in the man's power, to the
end of time.

The outcome of that catastrophe, as I have already said, was
indefinite, torturingly indefinite.  I was too shaken and sick to
ferret out its consequences.  I left that to Latreille, who seemed to
understand well enough what I expected of him.

That first night wore by, and nothing came of it all.  The morning
dragged away, and my fellow-criminal seemingly encountered nothing
worthy of rehearsal to me.  Then still another night came and went.  I
went through the published hospital reports, and the police records,
with my heart in my mouth.  But I could unearth no official account of
the tragedy.  I even encountered my good friend Patrolman McCooey,
apparently by accident, and held him up on his beat about Gramercy Park
to make casual inquiries as to street-accidents, and if such things
were increasing of late.  But nothing of moment, apparently, had come
to McCooey's ears.  And I stood watching him as he flatfooted his way
placidly on from my house-front, with one of my best cigars tucked
under his tunic, wondering what the world would say if it knew that
Witter Kerfoot, the intrepid creator of sinewy supermen who snarl and
fight and shake iron fists in the teeth of Extremity, had run like a
rabbit from a human being he had bowled over and killed?

I still hoped against hope, however, trying to tell myself that it is
no easy thing to knock the life out of a man, passionately upbraiding
myself for not doing what I should have done to succor the injured,
then sinkingly remembering what Latreille had mentioned about the
weight of my car.  Yet it wasn't until the next night, as I ventured
out to step into that odiously ponderous engine of destruction, that
uncertainty solidified into fact.

"_You got him_," announced my chauffeur out of one side of his mouth,
so that Benson, who stood on the house-steps, might not overhear those
fateful words.

"Got him?" I echoed, vaguely resenting the man's use of that personal
pronoun singular.

"Killed!" was Latreille's monosyllabic explanation.  And my heart
stopped beating.

"How do you know that?" I demanded in whispering horror.  For I
understood enough of the law of the land to know that a speeder who
flees from the victim of his carelessness is technically guilty of
manslaughter.

"A man I know, named Crotty, helped carry the body back to his house.
Crotty's just told me about it."

My face must have frightened Latreille, for he covered his movement of
catching hold of my arm by ceremoniously opening the car door for me.

"Sit tight, man!" he ordered in his curt and conspiratorial undertone.
"Sit tight--for it's all that's left to do!"

I sat tight.  It was all there was to do.  I endured Latreille's
accession of self-importance without comment.  There promptly grew up
between us a tacit understanding of silence.  Yet I had reason to feel
that this silence wasn't always as profound as it seemed.  For at the
end of my third day of self-torturing solitude I went to my club to
dine.  I went with set teeth.  I went in the hope of ridding my system
of self-fear, very much as an alcoholic goes to a Turkish-bath.  I went
to mix once more with my fellows, to prove that I stood on common
ground with them.

But the mixing was not a success.  I stepped across that familiar
portal in quavering dread of hostility.  And I found what I was looking
for.  I detected myself being eyed coldly by men who had once posed as
my friends.  I dined alone, oppressed by the discovery that I was being
deliberately avoided by the fellow-members of what should have been an
organized companionability.  Then I took a grip on myself, and
forlornly argued that it was all mere imagination, the vaporings of a
morbid and chlorotic mind.  Yet the next moment a counter-shock
confronted me.  For as I stared desolately out of that club window I
caught sight of Latreille himself.  He stood there at the curb, talking
confidently to three other chauffeurs clustered about him between their
cars.  Nothing, I suddenly remembered, could keep the man from
gossiping.  And a word dropped in one servant's ear would soon pass on
to another.  And that other would carry the whisper still wider, until
it spread like an infection from below-stairs to above-stairs, and from
private homes to the very housetops.  And already I was a marked man, a
pariah, an outcast with no friendly wilderness to swallow me up.

I slunk home that night with a plumb-bob of lead swinging under my ribs
where my heart should have been.  I tried to sleep and could not sleep.
So I took a double dose of chloral hydrate, and was rewarded with a few
hours of nightmare wherein I was a twentieth-century Attila driving a
racing-car over an endless avenue of denuded infants.  It was all so
horrible that it left me limp and quailing before the lash of daylight.
Then, out of a blank desolation that became more and more unendurable,
I clutched feverishly at the thought of Mary Lockwood and the
autumn-tinted hills of Virginia.  I felt the need of getting away from
that city of lost sleep.  I felt the need of "exteriorating" what was
corroding my in-most soul.  I was seized with a sudden and febrile ache
for companionship.  So I sent a forty-word wire to the only woman in
the world I could look to in my extremity.  And the next morning
brought me a reply.

It merely said, "Don't come."

The bottom seemed to fall out of the world, with that curt message, and
I groped forlornly, frantically, for something stable to sustain me.
But there was nothing.  Bad news, I bitterly reminded myself, had the
habit of traveling fast.  _Mary knew_.  The endless chain had widened,
like a wireless-wave.  It had rolled on, like war-gas, until it had
blighted even the slopes beyond the Potomac.  For Mary _knew_!

It was two days later that a note, in her picket-fence script that was
as sharp-pointed as arrow-heads, followed after the telegram.


"There are certain things," wrote Mary, "which I can scarcely talk
about on paper.  At least, not as I should prefer talking about them.
But these things must necessarily make a change in your life, and in
mine.  I don't want to seem harsh, Witter, but we can't go on as we
have been doing.  We'll both have to get used to the idea of trudging
along in single harness.  And I think you will understand why.  I'm not
exacting explanations, remember.  I'm merely requesting an armistice.
If you intend to let me, I still want to be your friend, and I trust no
perceptible gulf will yarn [Transcriber's note: yawn?] between us, when
we chance to dine at the same table or step through the same
_cotillion_.  But I must bow to those newer circumstances which seem to
have confronted you even before they presented themselves to me.  So
when I say good-by, it is more to the Past, I think, than to You."


That was the first night, I remember, when sleeping-powders proved of
no earthly use to me.  And this would not be an honest record of events
if I neglected to state that the next day I shut myself up in my study
and drank much more _Pommery-Greno_ than was good for me.  I got drunk,
in fact, blindly, stupidly, senselessly drunk.  But it seemed to drape
a veil between me and the past.  It made a bonfire of my body to burn
up the debris of my mind.  And when poor old patient-eyed Benson mixed
me a bromide and put me to bed I felt like a patient coming out of
ether after a major operation.  I was tired, and I wanted to lie there
and rest for a long time.




CHAPTER II

THE OX-BLOOD VASE

It was a week later, and well after two, in the dullest ebb of earth's
deadest hour, when Benson lifted the portiere and stepped into my room.

I put down the book at which my brain had been scratching like a dog
scratching at a closed door.  It was a volume of Gautier's _nouvelles_.
I had just reached that mildly assuaging point in _Une Nuit de
Cleopatre_ where the mysterious arrow, whistling through the palace
window of a queen bored almost to extinction, buries itself quivering
in the cedar wainscoting above her couch.

But the incident, this time, seemed to have lost its appeal.  The whole
thing sounded very empty and old, very foolish and far-away.  The
thrill of drama, I cogitated, is apt to leak out of a situation when it
comes to one over a circuit of two thousand moldering years.  So I
looked up at my servant a little listlessly and yet a little puzzled by
what was plainly a studied calmness of appearance.

"Benson, why aren't you in bed?"

"If you will pardon me, sir," began the intruder, "I've a gentleman
here."

He was so extraordinarily cool about it that I rose like a fish at the
flash of something unusual.

"At this time of night?" I inquired.

"Yes, sir."

"But what _kind_ of gentleman, Benson?"

Benson hesitated; it was the sort of hesitation that is able to
translate silence into an apology.

"I think, sir, it's a burglar."

"A what?" I demanded, incredulously.

"The fact is, sir, I 'appened to hear him at the lock.  When he forced
the door, sir, not being able to work the lock, I was waiting for him."

The dropped aspirate was an unfailing sign of mental disturbance in
Benson.  I closed my book and tossed it aside.  It was only drama of
the second dimension, as old and musty as a mummy.  And here,
apparently, was adventure of the first water, something of my own world
and time.

"This sounds rather interesting, Benson.  Be so good as to show the
gentleman up."

I sat down, with a second look at the dragging hands of the little
French clock on my mantel.  But Benson still seemed a trifle ill at
ease.

"I--I took the liberty of tying him up a bit, sir," explained that
astute old dissembler, "being compelled, as it were, to use a bit of
force."

"Of course.  Then untie him as much as necessary, and fetch him here.
And you might bring up a bottle of _Lafitte_ and a bite to eat.  For
two, if you please."

"Yes, sir," he answered.  But still he hesitated.

"The revolver, sir, is in the cabinet-drawer on your left."

There were times when old Benson could almost make me laugh; times when
the transparencies of his obliquities converted them into something
almost respectable.

"We won't need the revolver, Benson.  What I most need I fancy is
amusement, distraction, excitement, anything--anything to get me
through this endless hell of a night."

I could feel my voice rise on the closing words, like the uprear of a
terrified racehorse.  It was not a good sign.  I got up and paced the
rug, like a castaway pacing some barren and empty island.  But here, I
told myself, was a timely footprint.  I waited, as breathless as a
Crusoe awaiting his Friday.

I waited so long that I was beginning to dread some mishap.  Then the
portiere parted for the second time, and Benson led the burglar into
the room.

I experienced, as I looked at him, a distinct sense of disappointment.
He was not at all what I expected.  He wore no black mask, and was
neither burly nor ferocious.  The thing that first impressed me was his
slenderness--an almost feline sort of slenderness.  The fact I next
remarked was that he was very badly frightened, so frightened, in fact,
that his face was the tint of a rather soiled white glove.  It could
never have been a ruddy face.  But its present startling pallor, I
assumed, must have been largely due to Benson's treatment, although I
was still puzzled by the look of abject terror which gave the captive's
eyes their animal-like glitter.  He stood before me for all the world
as though a hospital interne had been practising abstruse bandaging
feats on his body, so neatly and yet so firmly had the redoubtable
Benson hobbled him and swathed his arms in a half-dozen of my best
Irish linen table-napkins.  Over these, again, had been wound and
buckled a trunk-strap.  Benson had not skimped his job.  His burglar
was wrapped as securely as a butcher wraps a boned rib-roast.

My hope for any diverting talk along the more picturesque avenues of
life was depressingly short-lived.  The man remained both sullen and
silent.  His sulky speechlessness was plainly that of a low order of
mind menaced by vague uncertainties and mystified by new surroundings.
Blood still dripped slowly down the back of his soiled collar, where
Benson's neat whelp had abraded the scalp.

Yet his eyes, all the time, were alert enough.  They seemed to take on
a wisdom that was uncanny, the inarticulate wisdom of a reptile,
bewildering me, for all their terror, with some inner sense of vicious
security.  To fire questions at him was as futile as throwing pebbles
at an alligator.  He had determined, apparently, not to open his lips;
though his glance, all this time, was never an idle or empty one.  I
gave up, with a touch of anger.

"Frisk him," I told the waiting Benson.  As that underworld phrase was
new to those respectable Anglian ears, I had to translate it.  "See if
he's carrying a gun.  Search his pockets--every one of them."

This Benson did, with an affective mingling of muffled caution and open
repugnance.  He felt from pocket to pocket, as gingerly as small boys
feel into ferret holes, and with one eye always on the colorless and
sphinx-like face beside him.

The result of that search was quite encouraging.  From one pocket came
an ugly, short-barreled Colt.  From another came two skeleton keys and
a few inches of copper wire bent into a coil.  From still another came
a small electric flashlight.  Under our burglar's coat, with one end
resting in his left-hand waistcoat pocket, was a twenty-inch steel
"jimmy."  It was a very attractive tool, not unlike a long and
extremely slender stove lifter, with a tip-tilted end.  I found it
suggestive of tremendous leverage-power, tempting one to test its
strength.  It proved as inviting to the hand as a golfer's
well-balanced "driver."

From the right-hand waistcoat pocket Benson produced a lady's gold
watch, two finger rings, a gold barrette, and a foot or two of
old-fashioned locket chain, of solid gold.  There was nothing to show
who the owner of this jewelry might be.

"I suppose you just bought this at Tiffany's?" I inquired.  But the
needle of antiphrasis had no effect on his indurated hide.  His
passivity was beginning to get on my nerves.  He might have been a wax
figure in the Eden Musee, were it not for those reptiliously alert and
ever exasperating eyes.  I stood up and confronted him.

"I want to know where this stuff came from."

The white-faced burglar still looked at me out of those sullen and
rebellious blinkers of his.  But not a word passed his lips.

"Then we'll investigate a little farther," I said, eying his somewhat
protuberant breast-bone.  "Go on with the search, Benson, and get
everything."  For it was plain that our visitor, before honoring us
that night, had called at other homes.

I watched Benson with increased interest as his fastidiously exploring
hand went down inside the burglar's opened waistcoat.  I saw him feel
there, and as he did so I caught a change of expression on our
prisoner's face.  He looked worried and harassed by this time; he
seemed to have lost his tranquil and snake-like assurance.  His small,
lean head with the pathetically eager eyes took on a rat-like look.  I
knew then the end toward which my mind had been groping.  The man was
not snake-like.  He was rat-like.  He was a cornered rat.  Rat seemed
written all over him.

But at that moment my eyes went back to Benson, for I had seen his hand
bringing away a small vase partly wrapped in a pocket-handkerchief.
This handkerchief was extremely dirty.

I took the vase from his hand, drawing away the rag that screened it.
Only by an effort, as I did so, was I able to conceal my surprise.  For
one glance at that slender little column of _sang-de-boeuf_ porcelain
told me what it was.  There was no possibility of mistake.  One glimpse
of it was enough.  It was from the Gubtill collection.  For once before
my fingers had caressed the same glaze and the same tender contours.
Once before, and under vastly different circumstances, I had weighed
that delicate tube of porcelain in my contemplative hands.

I sat back and looked at it more carefully.  I examined the crackled
groundwork, with its brilliant mottled tones, and its pale ruby shades
that deepened into crimson.  I peered down at the foot of enameled
white with its slowly deepening tinge of pale green.  Then I looked up
at the delicate lip, the lip that had once been injured and artfully
banded with a ring of gold.  It was a vase of the K'angshi Period, a
rare and beautiful specimen among the Lang Yao monochromes.  And
history said that thirty years before it had been purchased from the
sixth Prince of Pekin, and had always been known as "The Flame."

Both Anthony Gubtill and I had bid for that vase.  Our contest for it
had been a spirited one, and had even been made the subject of a
paragraph or two in the morning papers.  But an inexplicably reckless
mood had overtaken that parsimonious old collector, and he had won,
though the day after the Graves sale I had been a member of that
decorously appreciative dinner party which had witnessed its
installation between a rather valuable peach-bloom amphora of
haricot-red groundwork, with rose spots accentuated by the usual clouds
of apple-green, and a taller and, to my mind, much more valuable
ashes-of-roses cylindrical Lang Yao with a carved ivory base.  We had
looked on the occasion as somewhat of an event, for such things
naturally are not picked up every day.  So the mere sight of the vase
took me back to the Gubtill home, to that rich and spacious house on
lower Fifth Avenue where I had spent not a few happy evenings.  And
that in turn took my thoughts back to a certain Volpi sale and an old
Italian table-cover of blue velvet.  From the table-cover they flashed
on to Mary Lockwood and the remembered loveliness of her face as we
stood side by side staring down at the gold galloon along the borders
of that old vestment.  Then I drew memory up short, with a wince, as I
suddenly realized that the wanderer had been penetrating into strictly
forbidden paths.

I put the vase down on my table and turned away from it, not caring to
betray my interest in it, nor to give to the rat-like eyes still
watching me any inkling of my true feelings.  Yet the thought of such
beauty being in the hands of a brute like that sickened me.  I was
angered by the very idea that such grace and delicacy should be
outraged by the foul rags and the even fouler touch of a low-browed
sneakthief.  I resented the outrage, just as any normal mind would
resent a jungle ape's abduction of a delicate child.

I turned and looked the criminal up and down.  I noticed, for the first
time, that his face was beaded with sweat.

"Might I inquire just what you intend doing with this?" I asked, gazing
back, against my will, at the fragile little treasure known as The
Flame.

The man moved uneasily, and for the first time.  For the first time,
too, he spoke.

"Give it to its owner," he said.

"And who is its owner?"

He looked from me to the vase, and then back again.

"It belongs to a pal o' mine over t' Fifth Avenue," he had the
effrontery to assert.

"And where did you get it?"

"Out o' hock!"

I couldn't restrain a touch of impatience as my glance fell on the all
too eloquent implements of burglary.

"And you expect me to swallow that?" I demanded.

"I don't give a dam' what you swallow.  I know the trut' when I'm
sayin' it!"

"And you're telling me the truth?"  I found it hard to keep my anger
within bounds.

"Sure," was his curt answer.

"That's a cowardly lie!" I cried out again.  "You're a coward and a
liar, like all your sneaking kind, that skulk about dark corners, and
crawl under beds, and arm yourself to the teeth, and stand ready to
murder innocent women, to strike them down in the dark, rather than be
found out!  It's cowardice, the lowest and meanest kind of cowardice!"

The sweat stood out on his face in glistening drops.

"What's eatin' you, anyway?" he demanded.  "What 'ave I done?"

I pushed the cluster of women's jewelry closer to him.

"You've done some of the meanest and dirtiest work a man can stoop to.
You've skulked and crawled and slunk through the dark to rob women and
children!"

"Who's given _you_ a license to call me a coward?"

"Do you dare to intimate there's anything but low and arrant cowardice
in work like this?"

"Just try it," he said with a grin that made his face hideous.

"Why should I try it?" I demanded.  "Do you suppose because I don't
carry a jimmy and gun that I can't face honest danger when I need to?"

I glanced round at my den walls, studded with trophies as they were,
from the bull moose over the fireplace to the leopard pelt under my
heels.  The other man followed my glance, but with a lip-curl of
contempt.  He had jumped to the conclusion, of course, that those
relics of encounter in the open stood as a sort of object-lesson of
bravery which belonged to me in person.

"Bah," he said, apparently glad to crowd me off into some less personal
side-issue, "_that's_ all play-actin'.  Get up against what I have, and
you'd tone down your squeal.  Then you'd walk into the real thing."

"The real thing, black-jacking chambermaids and running like a pelted
cur at the sight of a brass button!"

I could see his sudden wince, and that it took an effort for him to
speak.

"You'd find it took nerve, all right, all right," he retorted.  "And
the kind o' nerve that ain't a cuff-shooter's long suit."

My movement of contempt brought him a step or two nearer.  But it was
Benson who spoke first.

"Hadn't we better have the police, sir?" he suggested.  The burglar,
with his eyes on my face, stepped still closer, as though to shoulder
any such suggestion as Benson's out of the issue.

"You just go out in the middle of the night," he went on, with derisive
volubility.  "Go out at night and look at a house.  Stand off, and look
at it good and plenty.  Then ask yourself who's inside, and what's
doin' behind them brick walls, and who's awake, and where a shot's
goin' to come from, and what chances of a getaway you'll have, and the
size of the bit you'll get if you're pinched.  Just stand there and
tell yourself you've got to get inside that house, and make your haul
and get away with the goods, that you've got to do it or go with empty
guts.  Try it, and see if it takes nerve."

I must have touched his professional pride.  I had trifled with that
ethical totem-pole that is known as honor among thieves.

"All right," I said, suddenly turning on him as the inspiration came to
me.  "We'll try it, and we'll try it together.  For I'm going to make
you take this stuff back, and take it back to-night."

I could see his face cloud.  Then a sudden change came over it.  His
rat-like eyes actually began to twinkle.

"I think we ought to have the police, sir," reiterated Benson,
remembering, doubtless, his encounter below-stairs.  "He's an uncommon
tricky one, sir."

I saw, on more sober second thought, that it would be giving my friend
too much rope, too many chances for treachery.  And he would not be
over-nice in his methods, I knew, now that I had him cornered.  A
second idea occurred to me, a rather intoxicating one.  I suddenly felt
like a Crusader saving from pollution a sacred relic.  I could catch
the whimper of some unkenneled sense of drama in the affair.

"Benson," I said, "I'm going to leave this worthy gentleman here with
you.  And while you look after him, I'm going to return this
peach-bloom vase to its owner."

"He ain't in town to-night," broke in my troubled burglar.

"And to demonstrate to his somewhat cynical cast of mind that there's
nothing extraordinary in his particular line of activity, I propose to
return it in the same manner that it was taken."

Benson looked troubled.

"I beg pardon, sir, but mightn't it get us all into a bit of trouble?
Couldn't we leave it until morning, sir, and talk it over quiet-like
with your friend Mr. McCooey, or with Lieutenant Belton, sir, or the
gentleman from the Pinkerton office?"

"And have a cuff-shooter running for help over such a triviality?
Never, Benson, never!  You will make yourself comfortable here with
this gallant gentleman of the black-jack, and keep this handsome Colt
of his quite close about you while you're doing it.  For I'm going to
take this piece of porcelain back where it belongs, even though I have
to face a dozen lap-dogs and frighten every housemaid of Twelfth Street
into hysterics."

Nobody, I have more than once contended, is altogether sane after
midnight.  This belief came back to me as I stood before that
gloomy-fronted Fifth Avenue house, in that ebb-tide hour of the night
when even Broadway is empty, wondering what lay behind the brownstone
mask, asking myself what dangers lurked about that inner gloom,
speculating as to what sleepers stirred and what eyes, even as I stood
there, might be alert and watching.

As Benson had suggested, I might have waited decorously until daylight,
or I might have quietly ascended the wide stone steps and continued to
ring the electric push-bell until a sleepy servant answered it.  But
that, after all, seemed absurdly tame and commonplace.  It was without
the slightest tang of drama, and I was as waywardly impatient to try
that enticing tip-tilted instrument of steel on an opposing door as a
boy with a new knife is to whittle on the nursery woodwork.

There was a tingle of novelty even in standing before a grimly
substantial and altogether forbidding-looking house, and being
conscious of the fact that you had decided on its secret invasion.  I
could no longer deny that it took a certain crude form of nerve.  I was
convinced of this, indeed, as I saw the approaching figure of a
patrolman on his rounds.  It caused me, as I felt the jimmy like a
staybone against my ribs, and the flashlight like a torpedo-head in my
pocket, to swing promptly about into Twelfth Street and walk toward
Sixth Avenue.  I experienced a distinct glow of satisfaction as the
patrolling footsteps passed northward up the quietness of the avenue.

But the house itself seemed as impregnable as a fortress.  It
disheartened me a little to find that not even a basement grill had
been disturbed.  For the second time I turned and sauntered slowly
toward Sixth Avenue.  As I swung eastward again I found that the last
house on the side-street, the house abutting the Fifth Avenue mansion
which was the object of my attack, was vacant.  Of that there could be
no doubt.  Its doors and windows were sealed with neatly painted
shutters.

This, it occurred to me, might mark a possible line of approach.  But
here again I faced what seemed an impregnable position.  I was backing
away a little, studying that boarded and coffin-like front, when my
heel grated against the iron covering of a coal-chute.  This coal-chute
stood midway between the curb and the area railing.  I looked down at
it for a moment or two.  Then something prompted me to test its edge
with the toe of my shoe.  Then, making quite sure that the street was
empty, I stooped down and clutched at the edge of the iron disk.  It
was quite heavy.  But one tug at it showed me that its lock-chain had
been forced apart.

It took but a moment to lift the metal shield to one side of the
chute-head.  It took but another moment to lower myself into the chute
itself.  I could see that it was a somewhat ignominious beginning.  But
I felt buoyantly sure that I was on the right track.  It took an effort
to work the iron disk back over the opening.  It also required many
strange contortions of the body to worm my way down into that narrow
and dirty tunnel.

My rather peremptory advent into the coal-bin resulted in a startling
amount of noise, noise enough to wake the soundest of sleepers.  So I
crouched there for several seconds, inhaling dust, and listening and
wondering whether or not the walls above me harbored a caretaker.  Then
I took out the pocket searchlight, and, with the pressure of a finger,
directed my ray of illumination against a wooden partition bisected by
a painted wooden door.

A distinct sense of disappointment swept through me as I stooped down
to examine this door and found that it had already been forced open.  I
knew, however, that I was following in the footsteps of my more
experienced predecessor.  Then came a storeroom, and then a
laundry-room, with another jimmied door at the head of the stairway
leading to the first floor.

Here I stood waiting and listening for some time.  But still again
nothing but darkness and silence and that musty aroma peculiar to
unoccupied houses surrounded me.  I felt more at home by this time, and
was more leisurely in my survey of the passage upward.  I was, of
course, confronted by nothing more disturbing than ghost-like furniture
covered with ticking and crystal-hung chandeliers encased in
cheesecloth.  I began to admire my friend the burglar's astuteness in
choosing so circuitous and yet so protected a path.  There was almost
genius in it.  His advance, I felt sure, was toward the roof.  As I had
expected, I found the scuttle open.  The lock, I could see, had been
quite cleverly picked.  And, so far, there had not been a mishap.

Once out on the housetop, however, I foresaw that I would have to be
more careful.  As I clambered up to the higher coping-tiles that marked
the line of the next roof, I knew that I had actually broken into the
enemy's lines.  Yet the way still seemed clear enough.  For, as I came
to the roof-scuttle of the second house I found that it, too, remained
unlocked.  My predecessor had made things almost disappointingly easy
for me.  Yet, in another way, he had left things doubly dangerous.  I
had to bear the brunt of any mis-step he may have made.  I was being
called to face the responsibility of both his intrusion and my own.

So it was with infinite precaution that I lifted the scuttle and leaned
over that little well of darkness, inhaling the warmer air that seeped
up in my face.  With it came an odor quite different to that of the
house I had just left.  There was something expository in it, something
more vital and electric, eloquent of a place inhabited, of human beings
and their lairs and trails, of movement and life and vaguely defined
menaces.  It was, I fancied, a good deal like that man-smell which
comes down-wind to a stalked and wary elk.

I stepped down on the iron ladder that led into the uncertain darkness,
covering the trap after me.  I began to feel, as I groped my way
downward, that the whole thing was becoming more than a game.  I was
disturbed by the thought of how deep I had ventured into an
uncertainty.  I began to be oppressed by the thought of how complicated
my path was proving.  I felt intimidated by the undetermined
intricacies that still awaited me.  A new anxiety was taking possession
of me, a sort of low fever of fear, an increasing impatience to replace
my precious porcelain, end my mission, and make my escape to the open.

It began to dawn on me, as I groped lower and lower down through the
darkness, that a burglar's calling was not all beer and skittles.  I
began to feel a little ashamed of my heroics of an hour before.

Then I drew up, suddenly, for a sound had crept to my ears.  The tingle
that ran through my body was not wholly one of fright.  Yet, as I stood
there in the darkness with one hand against the wall, I caught the
rhythm of a slow and muffled snoring.  There was something oddly
reassuring in that reiterated vibration, even though it served to
emphasize the dangers that surrounded me.  It was not unlike the sound
of a bell-buoy floating up to a fog-wrapped liner's bridge.

I was no longer a prey to any feeling of hesitancy.  I was already too
deep in the woods to think of turning back.  My one passion now was to
complete the circuit, to emerge on the other side.

I began to wonder, as I felt for the stair banister and groped my
cautious way down the treads, just how the burglar himself had effected
that final exit from the house.  And the sooner I got away from the
sleeping quarters, I felt, the safer I would be.  Every bedroom was a
shoal of dangers, and not all of them, I very well knew, would be
equipped with the same generous whistling-buoy as that I had just left
behind me.  There was, too, something satisfying in the knowledge that
I was at least getting nearer and nearer the ground-floor.  This was
due, not so much to the fact that I was approaching a part of the house
with which I was more or less familiar, but more to the fact that my
descent marked an approach to some possible pathway of escape.  For
that idea was now uppermost in my mind, and no aviator with a balky
motor ever ached to get back to earth more eagerly than I.

The utter darkness and silence of the lower halls were beginning to get
on my nerves.  I was glad to feel the newel-post, which assured me that
I had reached the last step in my descent.  I was relieved to be able
to turn carefully and silently about to the left, to grope toward a
door which I knew stood before me in the gloom, and then cautiously to
turn the knob and step inside.

I knew at once, even before I took the flashlight from my pocket, that
I was in the library.  And the room that opened off this, I remembered,
half cabinet-lined study and half informal exhibition-room, was the
chamber wherein Anthony Gubtill treasured his curios.  It would take
but a minute or two, I knew, to replace his priceless little porcelain.
And another minute or two, I felt, ought to see me safely out and on my
way home.

I stood with my back to the door, determined that no untimely blunder
should mar the end of my adventure.  My first precaution was to thrust
out my flashlight and make sure of my path.  I let the incandescent ray
finger interrogatively about the massively furnished room, resting for
a moment on marble and metal and glass-fronted book-shelf.  I
remembered, with almost a smile of satisfaction, the little _Clytie_
above the fireplace, and the _Hebe_ in bronze that stood beside the
heavy reading-lamp.  This lamp, Gubtill had once told me, had come from
Munich; and I remembered his chuckle over the fact that it had come in
a "sleeper" trunk and had evaded duty.

Then I let the wavering light travel toward the end of the glimmering
and dark-wooded reading-table.  I stood there, picking out remembered
object after object, remarking them with singular detachment of mind as
my light continued to circle the end of the room.

Then I quietly made my way to the open door in the rear, and bisecting
that second room with my spear of light, satisfied myself that the
space between the peach-bloom amphora and the ashes-of-roses Yang Lao
with the ivory base was indeed empty.

I stood listening to the exotic tick of a brazen-dialed Roumanian
clock.  I lingered there, letting my bald light-shaft root like a
hog's-snout along that shelf so crowded with delicate tones and
contours.  I sighed a little enviously as I turned toward the other end
of the room.

Then, of a sudden, I stopped breathing.  Automatically I let my thumb
lift from the current-spring of my storage-lamp and the light at once
went out.  I stood there with every nerve of my body on edge.  I
crouched forward, tingling and peering into the darkness before me.
For I had suddenly discovered that I was not alone in the room.

There, facing me, picked out as distinctly as a baby spot-light picks
out an actor's face, I had seen the owner of the house himself, not ten
paces from me.  He was sitting in a high-backed armchair of green
leather.  He must have been watching me from the first, every moment
and every movement.  He had made no effort to interrupt or intercept
me.  He had been too sure of his position.

I waited for what seemed an interminable length of time.  But not a
sound, beyond the querulous tick of the clock, came to my ears.  Not
even a movement took place in the darkness.

The undefined menace of this silence was too much for me.  The whole
thing grew into something strangely like a nightmare.  I moved away,
involuntarily, wondering what I should say, and after what fashion I
should begin my foolish explanation.  I crouched low and backed off
obliquely, as though some value lay in the intervention of space, and
as though something venomous were confronting me.  I fell slowly back,
pawing frenziedly about me for some sustaining tangibility to which to
cling.  As I did so my body came in contact with some article of
furniture--just what I could not tell.  But I shied away from it in a
panic, as a colt shies at a fallen newspaper.

My sudden movement threw over a second piece of furniture.  It must
have been some sort of collapsible screen, for it fell to the floor
with an echoing crash.  I waited, holding my breath, with
horripilations of fear nettling every limb of my body, knowing only too
well that this must indeed mark the end.

But there was no movement, no word spoken, no slightest sound.  I
stared through the darkness, still half expectant.  I tried to tell
myself that it may have been mere hallucination, that expectant
attention had projected into my line of vision a purely imaginary
fig-lire.  I still waited, with my heart pounding.  Then the tension
became more than I could endure.  I actually crept forward a step or
two, still peering blindly through the darkness, still listening and
waiting.

Then I caught my breath with sudden new suspicion, with a quick fear
that crashed, bullet-like, through the film of consciousness.  It was
followed by a sickening sense of shock, amounting almost to physical
nausea.

I once more raised the flashlight.  This time my hand shook perceptibly
as I turned the electric ray directly in front of me.  I let the minute
circle of illumination arrow through the darkness, direct to the white
face that seemed to be awaiting it.  Then I let it come to a rest.

I remember falling back a step or two.  I may have called out, but of
that I am not sure.  Yet of one thing I was only too certain.  There
before me sat Anthony Gubtill.  _He was quite dead_.

My first feeling was not altogether one of terror.  It was accompanied
by a surge of indignation at the injustice, at the brutality, of it
all.  I was able to make note of the quilted dressing-gown that covered
the relaxed body.  I was collected enough to assume that he had
overheard the intruder; had come to investigate, and had been struck
down and cunningly thrust into a chair.  This inference was followed by
a flash of exultation as I remembered that his murderer was known, that
the crime could easily be proved against him, that even at the present
moment he was safe in Benson's custody.

I moved toward the dead man, fortified by the knowledge of a vast new
obligation.  It was only after I had examined the face for a second
time and seen how death had been caused by a cruelly heavy blow, dealt
by some blunt instrument, that the enormity of my own intrusion into
that house of horror came home to me.  I felt a sudden need for light,
for sobering and rationalizing light.  Even the ticking from the
brazen-faced clock had become something phantasmal and unnerving.

I groped feverishly and blindly about in search of an electric
switch-button.  Then, of a sudden, I stopped again, my movement
arrested by a sound.

I knew, as I stood and listened, that it was only the purr of an
automobile, faint and muffled from the street outside.  But it suddenly
brought home to me the awkwardness of my position.  To be found in that
house, or even to be seen leaving it, was no longer a desirable thing.
My foolhardy caprice, before an actuality so overawing, dwindled into
something worse than absurdity.  And thought came back at a bound to
the porcelain in my pocket.  I recalled the old-time rivalry between
the dead man and myself for The Flame.  I recalled the details of my
advent between those walls where I stood.  And my blood went cold.  It
was not a matter of awkwardness; it was a matter of peril.  For who, I
again asked myself, would believe a story so absurd, or accept an
excuse so extravagant?

The clock ticked on accusingly.  The sound of the automobile stopped.
I had just noted this with relief when the thud of a quietly closed
door fell on my startled ears.  Then came the murmur of voices.  There
was no longer any doubt about the matter.  A motor had come to the
door, and from it certain persons had entered the house.

I crept to the library and listened.  Then I tiptoed back and closed
the door of the inner room.  I felt more secure with even a half-inch
panel between me and what that inner room held.

Then I listened.  I began to hear the padded tread of feet.  Then came
the sound of another opened door, and then the snap of a light-switch.
There was nothing secret about the new invasion.  I knew, as I shrank
back behind one of the high-backed library chairs, that the front of
the house was already illuminated.

Then came the sound of a calling voice, apparently from the head of the
stairs.  It was a cautious and carefully modulated voice; I took it for
that of a young man of about twenty.

"Is that you, Caddy?"

Then came a silence.

"I say, is that you, Orrie?" was demanded in a somewhat somnolent
stage-whisper.  There was something strangely reassuring in that
commonplace boyish voice.  Anthony Gubtill, I knew, had no immediate
family.  I vaguely recalled, however, some talk of a Canadian nephew
and niece who had at times visited him.

"Sh--s--sh!" said a woman's voice from the lower hall, "Don't wake
Uncle Anthony."

It must have been a young woman.  Her voice sounded pensive, like that
of a girl who might be coming home tired from a dance at Sherry's.
Yet, knowing what I did, its girlish weariness took on a pathos
indescribably poignant.

"It's an awful hour, isn't it?" asked a second man's voice from the
lower hall.  There were sounds that seemed to imply that wraps were
being removed.

"Almost four," came the answer from above.  "Had a good time, Caddy?"

I heard a stifled yawn.

"Rather," answered the girl's voice.

"I say, Orrie, bring up those Egyptian gaspers for a puff or two, will
you?" requested the youth from above, still in a stage-whisper.  "And,
Caddy, be sure the latch is on."

"On what?" demanded Orrie.

"The door, you idiot!" was the sleepily good-natured retort.

Then I suddenly ducked low behind my chair-back, for the young man
called Orrie had flung open the library door.  He came into the room
gropingly, without switching on the electrics.  I could see his trim
young shoulders, and the white blur of his shirt-front.  Behind him,
framed in the doorway, stood a young girl of about twenty, a blonde in
pale blue, with bare arms and bare shoulders.  Her skin looked very
soft and baby-like in the strong sidelight.  I could not repress
something that was almost a shudder at the thought of this careless
gaiety and youth so close to the grim tragedy behind me, so unconscious
of the awakening that might come to them at almost any moment.

"_Do_ hurry!" said the tired girl, as the young man fumbled about the
table-end.  I realized, as I peeped out at her, that my first duty
would be to keep those round young eyes from what might confront them
in that inner room.

"I've got 'em!" answered the man.  He stood a moment without moving.
Then he turned and walked out of the room, quietly closing the door
behind him.

I emitted a gasp of relief and stood up once more.  Nothing alive or
dead, I determined, would now keep me in that house.  Yet for all that
new-born ecstasy of impatience, I was still compelled to wait, for I
could hear the occasional sound of feet and a whisper or two from
behind the closed door.  Then all sound died away; the gloom and
silence again engulfed me.

I took the Yang Lao porcelain from my pocket, unwrapped it, and crept
back to the inner room.  I groped along the wall in the darkness,
circling wide about the green-leather chair in the center.  I put the
vase back on its cabinet, without so much as flashing my light.  Then I
circled back along the wall, felt for the library door, and groped
cautiously across the perilous breadth of the furniture-crowded
chamber.  It took me several seconds to find the door that opened into
the hallway.  Once through it and across the hall, I knew, only a
spring-latch stood between me and the street.  So I turned the knob
quickly and swung back the door.

But I did not pass through it.  For, instead of darkness, I found
myself confronted by a blaze of light.  In that blaze of light stood
three waiting and expectant figures.  What most disturbed me was the
fact that the man called Orrie held in his hand a revolver that seemed
the size of a toy-cannon.  This was leveled directly at my blinking
eyes.  The other youth, in cerise pajamas with orange colored frogs and
a dressing-gown tied at the waist with a silk girdle, stood just behind
him, holding an extremely wicked-looking Savage of the magazine make.
Behind this youth again, close by the newel-post, stood the girl in
blue, all the sleepiness gone out of her face.

The sight of that wide-eyed and eager trio irritated me beyond words.
There was no longer any thrill in the thing.  I had gone through too
much; I could not react to this newer emergency.  I kept wondering if
the idiot with the Colt realized just how delicate a pressure would
operate the trigger on which I could see his finger shaking.  But that
shake, it was plain, was more from excitement than fear.

"We've got him!" cried the youth in the cerise pajamas.  I might have
been a somewhat obstinate black bass wheedled into his landing-net,
from the way he spoke.

"Don't move!" commanded the older of the two, wrinkling his brow into a
frown of youthful determination.  "Don't you dare move one inch, or
I'll put a hole through you."

I had no intention of moving.

"Watch his hands," prompted the younger man.  "He ought to put 'em up."

"Yes, Orrie, he ought to put them up," echoed the girl by the
newel-post.  She reminded me, with her delicate whites and pinks and
blues, of the cabinet of porcelain at which I had so recently stared.

"Back up through the door," cried Orrie.  "Come on--back up!"

I wearily obeyed this somewhat equine order.  Then he commanded me to
hold my hands above my head.  I did so without hesitation; I had no
wish to argue while that Colt was staring me in the eyes.

They followed me, Indian file, into the room.  It was the girl who
closed the door as Orrie switched on the lights.  She stood with her
back to it, studying my face.  I could see that I rather interested
them all.  But in that interest I detected no touch of either
friendliness or respect.  The only one I seemed to mystify was the girl
at the door.

"Have you anything to say?" demanded Orrie, squaring his shoulders.

"Yes, I have a great deal to say," I told him.  "But I prefer saying it
to you alone."

I could see his movement of disdain.

"Will you listen to that!" commented the youth in the cerise pajamas.

"And if you will be so good as to stop poking that pistol in my face,"
I continued with some heat, "and then send these children out of the
room, I shall say what I have to, and do it very briefly!"

"Children!" came in an indignant gasp from the girl at the door.

"We'll stick by you, old man," assured the youthful hero in cerise,
with his heels well apart.

"And just why should I closet myself with a burglar?" inquired the
astute Orrie, staring at me with the utmost insolence.  Yet I could see
that at least the precision of my articulation was puzzling him a bit.

"That's asinine," I retorted.  "I'm not a burglar, and you ought to
know it."

To my astonishment, a little tripartite ripple of laughter greeted this
statement.

"Then what are you?" asked the incredulous Orrie.

I knew there was no further use beating about the bush.

"Yes, who are you?" demanded the other youth.

He still held the magazine-revolver balanced in his right hand.  The
truth had to come out.

"I'm Witter Kerfoot," I told them, as steadily as I could.  "Kerfoot,
of Gramercy Park West."

"What number?"

I gave him the number.  I could see the trio exchange glances; they
were plainly glances of amusement.  My young friends, I could see, were
enjoying a home melodrama, a melodrama in which I was obviously the
most foolish of villains.  I began to feel a good deal like a
phonograph grinding out a comic record.

"And with that face!" ejaculated the man called Orrie.

The quiet contempt of his glance caused me to shift about, so I could
catch a glimpse of myself in the Venetian mirror between the
book-shelves.  That glimpse was indeed a startling one.  I had quite
forgotten the transit through the coal-hole.  I could not even remember
how or when I broke my hat-crown.  I had remained as unconscious of the
scratch across my cheek as I was of the garret cobwebs that festooned
my clothing.  I saw as I peeped into the mirror only a sickly-hued and
grimy-looking footpad with dirty hands and a broken hat.  It was no
wonder they laughed.  My environment for the last hour had not been one
that tended toward consciousness of attire.  I was about to remove my
disgracefully disfiguring headgear when the younger man swung about on
me with the Savage thrust point-blank in my face.

"Don't try any of that!" he gasped.  "You keep up those hands."

The whole situation was so beside the mark, was so divorced from the
sterner problem confronting both them and myself, that it dispirited
and angered me.

"We've had about enough of this tommy-rot!" I protested.

"Yes, we'll cut out the tommy-rot, and get him tied," proclaimed the
man with the Colt.

"Then search him first," prompted the young man.  "Here, Caddy, take
Orrie's Colt while he goes through him," he commanded, in the
chest-tones of a newly-acquired savagery, "and if he tries to move,
wing him!"

The girl, wide-eyed and reluctant, took the heavy revolver.  Then Orrie
advanced on me, though in an altogether wary and tight-lipped manner.
To continue my protests, I saw, would be only to waste my breath.
There was nothing to do but submit to the farce.

I said nothing as he produced the telltale flashlight.  I also remained
silent as he triumphantly unearthed the jimmy and the damnatory
skeleton keys.  I could see the interchange of exultant glances as
these were tossed out on the polished table-top.

"Get the straps from the golf bags!" suggested the youth with the
Savage.  I could not help remembering how this scene was paralleling
another of the same nature and the same night, when Benson and I had
been the masters of the situation.

The man called Orrie seemed a little nonplussed at the fact that he had
found no valuables in my outer pockets, but he did not give up.  He
grimly ignored my protests as he explored still deeper and dug out my
monogramed wallet, and then a gold cigarette-case, on which my name was
duly inscribed.  He turned them over in his hand a couple of times and
examined them carefully.  Then a great light seemed to come to him.  He
succumbed, as even his elders have done, to a sudden sense of drama.

I saw him dart to the outer room and catch up a telephone directory.
He riffled through the pages with quick and impatient fingers.  Then he
strode back, and looked me up and down.

"I know what this man's done," he cried, his eyes alight with
conviction.

"What?" demanded the younger man.

"He's visited more than this house to-night.  He's gone through Witter
Kerfoot's, as well.  He's taken these things from there.  And now _it's
up to us to take him back with them_!"

I could see the sheer theatricality of the situation clutch at his two
listeners.  I could see them surrender to it, although the girl still
seemed to hesitate.

"Hadn't I better call Uncle Anthony?" she suggested.

At one breath her words brought me back to both the tragedy that lay so
close at hand, and the perilous complexity of my own position.

"No, that's foolish!" cut in Orrie.  "The car's still outside.  Caddy,
I think you'll have to come along.  You can sit with Jansen on the
driving-seat."

The hero of the maneuver turned back to me.  I was thinking mostly of
the soft-eyed girl with the baby-white skin, and how I could get her
safely away.

"Will you come quietly?" my captor demanded of me.

"Yes," I answered, without looking up, "I'll come quietly."

It was the girl's voice, a little shrill with excitement, that next
broke the silence.

"Orrie, he's not a burglar!" she cried out, in her treble-noted
conviction.

"Then what is he?"

"He's a gentleman."

"What makes you think so?" demanded the indifferent Orrie as he
motioned me, with a curt movement of his Colt-barrel, toward the hall
door.

"I know by his nails!" was her inconsequential yet quite definite reply.

Orrie laughed.

"Then you'd give tea and macaroons to every burglarious barber out of
Sing Sing," he scoffed.  "And our real answer's waiting for us in
Gramercy Square."

It seemed to take but a minute or two in the car to swing us from
Twelfth Street up to Twentieth, and then eastward into the stillness of
the square.  My captors had insisted that I should not talk.  "Not a
word!" commanded Orrie, and I could feel his insolent gun-barrel
against my ribs as he gave the command for the second time.  They were
drunk, I could see, with the intoxication of their exploit.  They were
preoccupied with inhaling their subtle sense of drama.  With the
dictatorial self-sufficiency of true inebriety they had enjoined me
from every effort at explanation.  The bubble, they felt, was far too
pretty a one to be pricked.

They alighted, one in front of me and one behind me, still carrying
their foolish and murderous-looking firearms.  The girl remained in her
seat.  Then the three of us grimly ascended my steps.

"It's needless to ring the bell," I wearily explained.  "My pass-key
will admit you."

"But I insist on ringing," said Orrie as I fitted the key to the lock.

"I shall be compelled, in that case, to call the officer who is
watching us from the corner," was my quiet response.

"Call and be hanged, then!" was the younger man's ultimatum.

One word over their shoulders brought my old friend McCooey, the
patrolman, across the corner and up the steps.  I swung open the door
as he joined us.  Then I turned on the hall lamps and faced my two
captors.

"Officer, I want you to look at me very carefully, and then assure
these gentlemen I am Witter Kerfoot, the owner and occupant of this
house."

"Sure he's Kerfoot," said the unperturbed McCooey.  "But what's the
throuble this time?"

"Something more serious than these gentlemen dream of.  But if the
three of us will go quietly upstairs, you'll find my man Benson there.
You'll also find another man, tied up with half a dozen--"

McCooey, from the doorway, cut me short.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't be stayin' to see your joke out."

"But you've got to."

"Fact is, sir," he explained, in a lowered voice, "Creegan, av
Headquarthers, has a Sing-Sing lifer bottled up in this block, and I'm
holdin' wan end av the p'lice lines--a jail-breaker, sir, and a tricky
wan, called Pip Foreman, the Rat!"

"The Rat?" I echoed.

"The same, sir.  But I must be off."

"Don't go," I said, closing the door.  "_Your man's up-stairs, waiting
for you_!"

"Waitin' for me?" he demanded.  "What man?"

"The man they call the Rat," I tried to explain to him.  "And I'll be
greatly obliged to you, McCooey, if you'll make as short work of this
situation as you can, for the truth of the matter is, I feel rather
tired, and fancy there's five or six hours of good honest sleep
awaiting me!"




CHAPTER III

THE STOLEN WHEEL-CODE

I was in for a night of it.  I realized that as I lay back in my big
green library-chair and closed my eyes.  For somewhere just in front of
those tightly closed lids of mine I could still see a briskly revolving
sort of pin-wheel, glowing like a milk-white orange against a murky
violet fog that paled and darkened with every beat of my pulse.

I knew the symptoms only two well.  The entire encampment of
Consciousness was feverishly awake, was alert, was on the _qui-vive_.
That pulsing white pin-wheel was purely a personal matter between me
and my imagination.  It was something distinctly my own.  It was _Me_.
And being essentially subjective, it could be neither banished nor
controlled.

So I decided to make for the open.  To think of a four-poster, in any
such era of intensified wakefulness, would be a mockery.  For I was the
arena of that morbid wakefulness which brought with it an over-crowded
mental consciousness of existence far beyond my own physical vision, as
though I had been appointed night-watchman for the whole round world,
with a searching eye on all its multitudinous activities and
aberrations.  I seemed able to catch its breathing as it slept its
cosmic sleep.  I seemed to brood with lunar aloofness above its teeming
plains, depressed by its enormous dimensions, confused by its
incomprehensible tangle and clutter of criss-cross destinies.  Its
uncountable midnight voices seemed to merge into a vague sigh, so
pensively remote, so inexpressibly tragic, that when I stood in my
doorway and caught the sound of a harebrained young Romeo go whistling
down past the Players' Club his shrill re-piping of a Broadway
roof-song seemed more than discordant; it seemed desecration.  The fool
was happy, when the whole world was sitting with its fists clenched,
awaiting some undefined doom.

It was long past midnight, I remembered as I closed the door.  For it
must have been, an hour and more since I had looked out and seen the
twelve ruby flashes from the topmost peak of the Metropolitan Tower
signaling its dolorous message that another day had gone.  I had
watched those twelve winks with a sinking heart, finding something
sardonic in their brisk levity, for I had been reminded by a telltale
neurasthenic twitching of my right eyelid that some angling Satan known
as Insomnia was once more tugging and jerking at my soul, as a fly-hook
tugs and jerks at a trout's mouth.

I knew, even as I wandered drearily off from my house-door and paced as
drearily round and round the iron-fence park enclosure, that I was
destined for another sleepless night.  And I had no intention of
passing it cooped up between four walls.  I had tried that before, and
in that way, I remembered, madness lay.

So I wandered restlessly on through the deserted streets, with no
active thought of destination and no immediate sense of direction.  All
I remembered was that the city lay about me, bathed in a night of
exceptional mildness, a night that should have left it beautiful.  But
it lay about me, in its stillness, as dead and flat and stale as a
tumbler of tepid wine.

I flung myself wearily down on a bench in Madison Square, facing the
slowly spurting fountain that had so often seemed to me a sort of
visible pulse of the sleeping city.  I sat peering idly up at the
Flatiron Building, where like an eternal plowshare it threw its eternal
cross furrows of Fifth Avenue and Broadway along the city's tangled
stubble of steel and stone.  Then I peered at the sleepers all about
me, the happy sleepers huddled and sprawled along the park benches.  I
envied them, every mortal of that ragged and homeless army!  I almost
hated them.  For they were drinking deep of the one thing I had been
denied.

As I lounged there with my hat pulled down over my eyes, I listened to
the soothing purr and splash of the ever-pulsing fountain.  Then I let
my gaze wander disconsolately southward, out past the bronze statue of
Seward.  I watched the driver of a Twenty-third Street taxicab of the
"night-hawk" variety asleep on his seat.  He sat there in his faded hat
and coat, as motionless as metal, as though he had loomed there through
all the ages, like a brazen statue of Slumber under his mellowing
_patina_ of time.

Then, as I gazed idly northward, I suddenly forgot the fountain and the
night-hawk chauffeur and the sleepers.  For out of Fifth Avenue, past
where the double row of electric globes swung down the gentle slope of
Murray Hill like a double pearl-strand down a woman's breast, I caught
sight of a figure turning quietly into the quietness of the square.  It
attracted and held my eye because it seemed the only movement in that
place of utter stillness, where even the verdigris-tinted trees stood
as motionless as though they had been cut from plates of copper.

I watched the figure as it drew nearer and nearer.  The lonely midnight
seemed to convert the casual stroller into an emissary of mystery, into
something compelling and momentous.  I sat indolently back on my park
bench, peering at him as he drifted in under the milk-white arc lamps
whose scattered globes were so like a scurry of bubbles caught in the
tree branches.

I watched the stranger as closely as a traveler in mid-ocean watches
the approach of a lonely steamer.  I did not move as he stood for a
moment beside the fountain.  I gave no sign of life as he looked slowly
about, hesitated, and then crossed over to the end of the very bench on
which I sat.  There was something military-like about the slim young
figure in its untimely and incongruous cape overcoat.  There was also
something alert and guardedly observant in the man's movements as he
settled himself back in the bench.  He sat there listening to the purr
and splash of the water.  Then, in an incredibly short space of time,
he was fast asleep.

I still sat beside him.  I was still idly pondering who and what the
newcomer could be, when another movement attracted my attention.  It
was the almost silent approach of a second and larger figure, the
figure of a wide-shouldered man in navy blue serge, passing quietly in
between the double line of bench sleepers.  He circled once about the
granite-bowled ring of the fountain.  Then he dropped diffidently into
the seat next to the man in the cape overcoat, not five feet from where
I sat.

Something about him, from the moment he took up that position,
challenged my attention.  I watched him from under my hat-brim as he
looked guardedly about.  I did not move as he let his covert eyes dwell
for a moment or two on my lounging figure.  I still watched him as he
bent forward and listened to the deep breathing of the man so close
beside him.

Then I saw a hand creep out from his side.  There was something quick
and reptilious in its movements.  I saw it feel and pad about the
sleeping man's breast.  Then I saw it slip, snake-like, in under the
cloth of the coat.

It moved about there, for a second or two, as though busily exploring
the recess of every possible pocket.

Then I saw the stealthy hand quietly but quickly withdrawn.  As it came
away it brought with it a packet that flashed white in the lamplight,
plainly a packet of papers.  This was thrust hurriedly down into the
coat pocket of the newcomer next to me.  There was not a sound.  There
was no more movement.

The wide-shouldered man sat there for what must have been a full minute
of time.  Then he rose quietly to his feet and started as quietly away.

It wasn't until then that the full reality of what he had done came
home to me.  He had deliberately robbed a sleeping and unprotected man.
He was at that moment actually carrying away the spoils of some
predetermined and audacious theft.  And I had sat calmly and
unprotestingly by and watched a thief, a professional "dip," enact a
crime under my very eyes, within five feet of me!

In three quick steps I had crossed to the sleeping man's side and was
shaking him.  I still kept my eyes on the slowly retreating figure of
the thief as he made his apparently diffident way up through the
square.  I had often heard of those street harpies known as
"lush-dips," those professional pickpockets who prey on the wayside
inebriate.  But never before had I seen one at work.

"Quick!  Wake up!" I cried, with a desperate shake at the sleeper's
shoulder.  "You've been robbed!"

The next move of that little midnight drama was an unexpected and
startling one.  Instead of being confronted by the disputatious
maunderings of a half-wakened sleeper, as I expected, I was suddenly
and firmly caught by the arm and jerked bodily into the seat beside him.

"You've been robbed!" I repeated, as I felt that firm grip haul me
seatward.

"Shut up!" said a calm and very wide-awake voice, quite close to my
ear.  I struggled to tear my arm away from the hand that still clung to
it.

"But you've been _robbed_!" I expostulated.  I noticed that his own
gaze was already directed northward, toward where the blue-clad figure
still moved aimlessly on under the arc lamps.

"How do you know that?" he demanded.  I was struck by his resolute and
rather authoritative voice.

"Why, I saw it with my own eyes!  And there goes the man who did it!" I
told him, pointing northward.

He jerked down my hand and swung around on me.

"Watch that man!" he said, almost fiercely.  "But for heaven's sake
_keep still_!"

"What does this mean?" I naturally demanded.

He swept me with one quick glance.  Yet he looked more at my clothes, I
fancy, than at my face.  My tailor seemed to be quite satisfactory to
him.

"Who are you?" he asked.  I took my time in answering, for I was
beginning to resent his repeated note of superiority.

"My name, if that's what you mean, happens to be the uneuphonious but
highly respectable one of Kerfoot--Witter Kerfoot."

"No, no," he said with quick impatience.  "_What_ are you?"

"I'm nothing much, except a member of a rather respectable club, and a
man who doesn't sleep overly well."

His eyes were still keenly watching the slowly departing figure.  My
flippancy seemed to have been lost on him.  His muscular young hand
suddenly tightened on my sleeve.

"By God, sir, you _can_ help me!" he cried, under his breath.  "You
must!  I've a right to call on you, as a decent citizen, as--"

"Who are you?" I interrupted, quite myself by this time.

"I'm Lieutenant Palmer," he absently admitted, all the while eying the
moving figure.

"And I've got to get that man, or it'll cost me a court-martial.  I've
_got_ to get him.  Wait!  Sit back here without moving.  Now watch what
he does!"

I saw the thief drop into an empty bench, glance, down at his
time-piece, look carelessly about, and then, lean back with his legs
crossed.  Nothing more happened.

"Well," I inquired, "what's the game?"

"It's no game," he retorted, in his quick and decisive tones.  "It's
damn near a tragedy.  But now I've found him!  I've placed him!  And
_that's_ the man I'm after!"

"I don't doubt it," I languidly admitted.  "But am I to assume that
this little bench scene was a sort of, well, a sort of carefully
studied out trap?"

"It was the only way I could clinch the thing," he admitted.

"Clinch what?" I asked, conscious of his hesitation.

"Oh, you've got to know," he finally conceded, "now you've seen this
much!  And I know you're--you're the right sort.  I can't tell you
everything.  But I'm off the _Connecticut_.  She's the flagship of our
Atlantic fleet's first division, the flagship of Rear-Admiral Shrodder.
I was sent to confer with Admiral Maddox, the commandant of the Navy
Yard.  Then I was to communicate with Rear-Admiral Kellner, the
supervisor of Naval Auxiliaries.  It was in connection with the navy's
new Emergency Wheel-Code.  I can't explain it to you; there's a lot of
navy-department data I can't go into.  But I was ashore here in New
York with a list of the new wireless code signals."

"And you let them get away?"

"There was no letting about it.  They were stolen from me, stolen in
some mysterious way I can't understand.  I've only one clue.  I'd dined
at the Plaza.  Then I'd gone to the ballroom and sat through the
amateur theatricals for the French Hospital.  I'd been carrying the
code forms and they'd been worrying me.  So I 'split the wheel,' as we
say in the service.  I mean I'd divided 'em and left one half locked up
at my hotel while I still carried the other half.  Each part, I knew,
would be useless without the other.  How or when they got the half I
was carrying I can't tell, for the life of me.  I remember dancing two
or three times in the ballroom after the theatricals.  But it couldn't
have been any of those women.  They weren't that sort."

"Then who was it?"  For the first time a sense of his boyishness had
crept over me.

"That's just it; I don't know.  But I kept feeling that I was being
shadowed.  I was almost positive I was being trailed.  They would be
after the second half, I felt.  So I made a dummy, and loafed about all
day waiting for a sign.  I kept it up until to-night.  Then, when I
actually found I was being followed, every move I made, I--"

His voice trailed off and he caught at my arm again.

"See, he's on the move again!  He's going, this time.  And _that's_ the
man!  I want you to help me watch him, watch every step and trick.  And
if there's a second man, I'm going to get you to follow him, while I
stick to this one.  It's not altogether for myself, remember; it's more
for the whole Service!"

We were on our feet by this time, passing northward along the asphalted
walks that wound in and out between the trees.

"You mean this man's a sort of agent, a foreign spy, after your naval
secrets?" I asked, as we watched the figure in blue circle casually out
toward Fifth Avenue.

"That's what I've got to find out.  And I'm going to do it, if I have
to follow him to hell and back!" was the young officer's answer.  Then
he suddenly drew up, with a whispered warning.

"You'd better go west, toward Broadway.  Then walk north into Fifth
Avenue again, toward Brentano's corner.  I'll swing up Madison Avenue
on the opposite side of him, and walk west on Twenty-sixth Street.
Don't speak to me as we pass.  But watch him, every moment.  And if
there's a second man, follow him!"

A moment later I was sauntering westward toward the old Hoffman House
corner.  As I approached the avenue curb I saw the unperturbed figure
in blue stop beside the Farragut Monument on the northwest fringe of
Madison Square.  I saw him take out a cigar, slowly and deliberated
strike a match on the stonework of the exedra, and then as slowly and
deliberately light his cigar.

I felt, as I saw it, that it was some sort of a signal.  This suspicion
grew stronger, when, a moment later, I saw a woman step out of a
near-by doorway.  She wore a plumed Gainsborough hat and a
cream-colored gown.  Over her slender young shoulders, I further made
out, hung an opera cloak of delicate lacework.

She stood for a moment at the carriage step, as though awaiting a car
or taxi.  Then she quickly crossed the avenue and, turning north,
passed the waiting man in blue.  She passed him without a spoken word.

But as the cream-colored figure drifted nonchalantly by the
broad-shouldered man I caught a fleeting glimpse of something passing
between them, a hint of one hand catching a white packet from another.
It was a hint, and nothing more.  But it was enough.

My first impulse, as I saw that movement, was to circle quickly about
and warn Palmer of what had taken place.  A moment's thought, however,
showed me the danger of this.  And the young lieutenant, I could see,
had already changed his course, so that his path southward through the
center of the square paralleled that of the other man now walking more
briskly along the avenue curb.

He had clearly stated that I was to watch any confederate.  I had no
intention to quibble over side-issues.  As I started northward, indeed,
after that mysterious figure in the Gainsborough hat and the
cream-colored gown, a most pleasurable and purposeful tingle of
excitement thrilled up and down my backbone.

I shadowed her as guardedly as I was able, following her block by block
as she hurried up the empty thoroughfare that was now as quiet and
lonely as a glacial moraine.  My one fear was that she would reach the
Waldorf, or some equally complex beehive of human life, before I could
overtake her.  Once there, I knew, she would be as completely lost as a
needle in a haystack.

She may have suspected me by this time, I felt, for twice I saw her
look back over her shoulder.

Then I suddenly stopped and ducked into a doorway.  For a moment after
I saw a taxicab come clattering into the avenue out of Thirty-third
Street I discovered that, at her repeated gesture, it was pulling up
beside the curb.

I stood well back in the shadow until she had climbed into the seat,
the door had slammed shut, and the driver had turned his vehicle about
and started northward again.  Then I skirted along the shop fronts,
darted across the street, and made straight for the hotel cabstand and
a taxi driver drowsily exhaling cigarette smoke up toward the tepid
midnight skies.  The bill I thrust into his hand took all the sleep out
of his body and ended the incense to the morning stars.

"Up the avenue," I said as I clambered in.  "And follow that taxicab
two blocks behind until it turns, and then run up on it and wait."

It turned at Forty-second Street and went eastward to Lexington Avenue.
Then, doubling on its tracks, it swung southward again.  We let it
clatter on well ahead of us.  But as it turned suddenly westward, at
the corner of Twenty-third Street, we broke the speed laws to draw once
more up to it.  Then, as we crossed Twenty-third Street, I told the
driver to keep on southward toward Gramercy Square.  For I had caught
sight of the other taxi already drawn up at the curb half-way between
Lexington and Fourth Avenues.

A moment after we jolted across the car tracks I slipped away from my
cab and ran back to the cross-street on foot.  As I reached the corner
I caught sight of a figure in a cream-colored gown cross the sidewalk
and step quickly into the doorway of a shabby four-storied building.

I had no time to study this building.  It might have been an antiquated
residence turned into a cluster of artist's studios, or a third-rate
domicile of third-rate business firms.  My one important discovery was
that the door opened as I turned the knob and that I was able quietly
and quickly to step into the dark hallway.

I stood there in the gloom, listening intently.  I could hear the light
and hurried click of shoe heels on the bare tread-boards of the stairs.
I waited and listened and carefully counted these clicks.  I knew, as I
did so, that the woman had climbed to the top floor.

Then I heard the chink of metal, the sound of a key thrust into a lock,
and then the cautious closing of a door.  Then I found myself
surrounded by nothing but darkness and silence again.

I stood there in deep thought for a minute or two.  Then I groped my
way cautiously to the foot of the stairs, found the heavy old-fashioned
balustrade, and slowly and silently climbed the stairway.

I did not stop until I found myself on the top floor of that quiet and
many-odored building.  I paused there, at a standstill, peering through
the darkness that surrounded me.

My search was rewarded by the discovery of one thin streak of yellow
light along what must have been the bottom of a closed door.  Just
beyond that door, I felt, my pursuit was to come to an end.

I groped my way to the wall and tiptoed quietly forward.  When I came
to the door, I let my hand close noiselessly about the knob.  Then,
cushioning it with a firm grasp, I turned it slowly, inch by inch.

The door, I found, was locked.  But inside the room I could still hear
the occasional click of shoe heels and the indeterminate noises of an
occupant moving quietly yet hurriedly about.

I stood there, puzzled, depressed by my first feeling of frustration.
Then I made out the vague oblong of what must have been a window in the
rear of a narrow hall.  I tiptoed back to this window, in the hope that
it might lead to something.  I found, to my disappointment, that it was
barred with half-inch iron rods.  And this meant a second defeat.

As I tested these rods I came on one that was not so secure as the
others.  One quiet and steady wrench brought an end-screw bodily out of
the half-rotted wood.  Another patient twist or two entirely freed the
other end.

I found myself armed with a four-foot bar, sharpened wedge-like at each
end for its screw head.  So I made my way silently back to the pencil
of yellow light and the locked door above it.  I stood there listening
for a minute or two.  All I could hear was the running of tap water and
the occasional rustling of a paper.  So I quietly forced the edge of my
rod in between the door and its jamb, and as quietly levered the end
outward.

Something had to give under that strain.  I was woefully afraid that it
would be the lock bar itself.  This I knew would go with a snap, and
promptly betray my movement.  But as I increased the pressure I could
see that it was the socket screws that were slowly yielding in the pine
wood jamb.

I stopped and waited for some obliterating noise before venturing the
last thrust that would send the bolt free of the loosening socket.  It
came with the sudden sound of steps and the turning off of the running
tap.  The door had been forced open and stood an inch or two from the
jamb before the steps sounded again.

I waited, with my heart in my mouth, wondering if anything had been
overheard, if anything had been discovered.  It was only then, too,
that the enormity of my offense came home to me.  I was a
house-breaker.  I was playing the part of a midnight burglar.  I was
facing a situation in which I had no immediate interest.  I was being
confronted by perils I had no means of comprehending.  But I intended
to get inside that room, no matter what it cost.

I heard, as I stood there, the sound of a drawer being opened and
closed.  Then came a heel-click or two on the wooden floor, and then an
impatient and quite audible sigh.  There was no mistaking that sigh.
It was as freighted with femininity as though I had heard a woman's
voice.  And nothing was to be gained by waiting.  So I first leaned my
iron rod silently against the door corner.  Then, taking a deep breath,
I stepped quickly and noiselessly into the lighted room.

I stood there, close beside the partly opened door, blinking a little
at the sudden glare of light.  There was an appreciable interval before
the details of the scene could register themselves on my mind.

What I saw was a large and plainly furnished room.  Across one corner
stood a rolltop desk, and from the top of this I caught the glimmer of
a telephone transmitter.  In the rear wall stood two old-fashioned,
low-silled windows.  Against this wall, and between these two windows,
stood a black iron safe.

Before the open door of this safe, with her back turned to me, was the
woman in the cream-colored gown.  It was quite plain that she was not
yet aware of my presence.

She had thrown her hat and cape aside, and was at the moment bending
low over the dark maw of the opened safe, reaching into its recesses
with one white and rounded arm.  I stood there watching her, wondering
what move would be most effective.  I made no sound; of that I was
certain.  Yet some sixth sense must have warned her of my presence.
For without rhyme or reason she suddenly stood erect, and swinging
about in her tracks, confronted me.

Her face, which had been a little flushed from stooping, went white.
She stared at me without speaking, her eyes wide with terrified wonder.
I could see her lips slowly part, as the shock of what she beheld began
to relax the jaw muscles along the olive-white cheek.

I stared back at her with a singularly disengaged mind.  I felt, in
fact, very much at my ease, very much the master of the situation.  As
an opponent, I could see, she would be more than mysterious.  She
would, in fact, be extremely interesting.

Her next move, however, threw a new complexion on the situation.  For
she unexpectedly let her hand dart out to the wall beside her, just
behind the safe top.  As she did so, I could hear the snap of a switch
button; the next moment the light went out.  It left the room in
impenetrable darkness.

I stood there, unprepared for any offensive or defensive movement.  Yet
my enemy, I knew, was not idle.  As I stood peering unavailingly
through the gloom I could hear the quick thud of the safe door being
shut.  Then came the distinct sound of a heavy key being thrust and
turned in a metal lock--the safe, obviously, was of the old-fashioned
key-tumbler make--and then the noise of this key being withdrawn.  Then
came a click or two of shoe heels, a rustle of clothing, and a moment
later the startlingly sharp shattering of a window-pane.

The woman had deliberately locked the safe and flung the key through
the window!  She had stolen a march on me.  She had defeated me in the
first movement of our encounter.  My hesitation had been a mistake, a
costly mistake.

"Be so good as to turn on that light!" I commanded.

Not a sound came from the darkness.

"Turn on that light," I cried.  "Turn on that light or I'll fire!  I'll
rake every foot of this room!"  And with that I gave a very significant
double click to my cigarette case spring.

The light came on again, as suddenly as it went out.  I discreetly
pocketed my cigarette case.

The woman was standing beside the safe, as before, studying me with her
wide and challenging eyes.  But all this time not a word had come from
her lips.

"Sit down!" I commanded, as authoritatively and yet as offhandedly as I
could.  It was then that she spoke for the first time.

"Thank you, I prefer to stand!" was her answer.  She spoke calmly and
distinctly and almost without accent.  Yet I felt the voice was, in
some way, a foreign one.  Some vague substratum of the exotic in the
carefully enunciated tones made me surmise that she was either an
Austrian or a Gallicized Hungarian, or if not that, possibly a Polish
woman.

"You will be here for some time," I hinted.

"And you?" she asked.  I noticed an almost imperceptible shrug of her
softly rounded shoulder.  Rice powder, I imagined, somewhat increased
its general effect of dead-whiteness.

"I'll be here until that safe is opened," was my retort.

"That long?" she mocked.

"That long!" I repeated, exasperated at her slow smile.

"Ah, then I shall sit down," she murmured as she caught up the lace
cape and adjusted it about her shoulders.  "For, believe me, that will
be a very, very long time, monsieur!"

I watched her carefully as she crossed the room and sank into a chair.
She drew her cream-colored train across her knees with frugal and
studious deliberateness.

It suddenly flashed over me, as I watched her, that her ruse might have
been a double-barreled one.  Obliquity such as hers would have unseen
convolutions.  It was not the key to the safe she had flung through the
window!  She would never have been so foolish.  It was a trick, a
subterfuge.  She still had that key somewhere about her.

"And now what must I do?" she asked as she drew the cloak closer about
her shoulders.

"You can hand me over the key to that safe," was my answer.

She could actually afford to laugh a little.

"That is quite impossible!"

"I want that key!" I insisted.

"_Pardon_, but is this not--dangerous?" she mildly inquired.  "Is it
not so, to break into houses at midnight, and rob women?"

It was my turn to laugh.

"Not a bit of it," I calmly assured her.  "And you can judge if I'm
frightened or not.  There's something much more dangerous than _that_!"

She was again studying me with her puzzled and ever-narrowing eyes.

"Which means?" she prompted.

"Well, for example, the theft of government naval codes, among other
things."

"You are very, very drunk," she retorted with her quietly scoffing
smile.  "Or you are insane, quite insane.  May I not lock my jewels in
my own safe?  Ah, I begin to see--this is a trick, that you may steal
from me!"

"Then why not send for the police?" I challenged, pointing toward the
telephone.

A look of guile crept into her studious eyes.

"You will permit that?" she asked.

"I invite it," was my answer.

"Then I shall call for help."

"Only from the police."

"Yes; I shall call for help," she repeated, crossing to the telephone.

I leaned forward as she stood in front of it.  I caught her bare arm,
in my left hand, just below the elbow.  As I drew it backward it
brought her body against mine, pinning her other arm down close against
my side.

The thing was repugnant to me, but it was necessary.  As I pinioned her
there, writhing and panting, I deliberately thrust my right hand into
the open bosom of her gown.  I was dimly conscious of a faint aura of
perfume, of a sense of warmth behind the soft and lace-fringed
_corsage_.  But it was the key itself that redeemed the rude assault
and brought a gasp of relief to my lips--the huge brass key, as big as
an egg beater.

"_Lache!_" I heard gasped into my ear.

The woman staggered to a chair, white to the lips; and for a moment or
two I thought she was going to faint.

"Oh, you _dog_!" she gasped, as she sat there panting and staring at me
with blazing eyes.  "_Cochon_!  Cur!"

But I paid little heed to her, for the wine of victory was already
coursing and tingling through my veins.

"You know, you can still call the police," I told her as I faced the
heavy black door of the safe.  One turn of the wrist, I knew, would
bring me face to face with my prize.

A sudden movement from the woman, as I stooped over the safe door,
brought me round in a flash.  She was on her feet and half-way across
the room before I could intercept her.  And I was not any too gentle,
I'm afraid, for the excitement of the thing had gone to my head.

That earlier assault at my hands seemed to have intimidated her.  I
could see actual terror in her eyes as I forced her back against the
wall.  She must have realized her helplessness.  She stared up into my
face, bewildered, desperate.  There was something supple and
panther-like about her, something alluring and yet disturbing.  I could
see what an effective weapon that sheer physical beauty of hers might
be, once its tigerish menace had been fully sheathed.

"Wait!" she cried, catching at my arm.  "If there is anything you want
I will give it to you."

"There are several things I want," was my uncompromising answer.

"But why should you want them?" she asked, still clinging to my arm.

"It's my duty to take them," I replied, unconscious of any mendacity.
"That's what I'm sent here for!  That's why I've watched the man who
gave you the packet!"

"What packet?"

"The packet you took in Madison Square an hour ago; the packet you
locked in this safe!  And if you like I'll tell you just what that
packet is!"

"This is some mistake, some very sad mistake," she had the effrontery
to declare.  Her arm still clung to me.  Her face was very close to
mine as she went on.  "I can explain everything, if you will only give
me the time--everything!  I can show you where you are wrong, and how
you may suffer through a mistake like this!"

"We can talk all that over later," I promptly told her, for I was
beginning to suspect that her object now was merely to kill time, to
keep me there, in the hope of some chance discovery.  I peered about
the room, wondering what would be the quickest way out of my dilemma.

"What are you going to do?" she asked as she watched me shove a chair
over against the wall, directly beside the safe.

"I'm going to seat you very comfortably in this very comfortable
chair," I informed her, "and in this equally comfortable corner
directly behind the safe door.  And at the first trick or sign of
trouble, I'm afraid I'm going to make a hole right through one of those
nice white shoulders of yours!"

She sat down without being forced into the chair.  Her alert and
ever-moving eyes blazed luminously from her dead-white face.  I knew,
as I thrust the huge key in the safe lock and turned it back that she
would have to be watched, and watched every moment of the time.

I had already counted on the safe door, as it swung back, making a
barrier across the corner in which she sat.  This I found to be the
case.  I took a second precaution, however, by shoving a tilted
chair-back firmly in under the edge of the safe lock.

I knew, as I stooped before the open strong box, that she could make no
sudden move without my being conscious of it.  I also knew that time
was precious.  So I reached into the depths of the almost empty safe
and lifted out a number of papers neatly held together by a rubber band.

These I placed on the safe top.  Then I snapped off the band and
examined the first document.  On the back of it, neatly inscribed in
French, was the eminently satisfactory legend: "Plans and
Specifications; Bs. Lake Torpedo Company, Bridgeport."  The next packet
was a blue print of war projectiles, and on the back of it was written:
"Model Tracings, through Jenner, from the Bliss & Company
Works--18--Self-Projectors."

The third packet carried no inscription.  But as I opened it I saw at a
glance what it was.  I knew in a moment that I held before me the
governmental wheel-code of wireless signals in active service.  It was
the code that had been stolen from Lieutenant Palmer.  The fourth and
last paper, I found, was plainly the dummy which had been taken from
the same officer that night in Madison Square.  The case was complete.
The chase was over and done.

"In the cash drawer, on the right, you will find more," quietly
remarked the young woman watching me from the side of the safe.

"It's locked," I said, as I tugged at the drawer knob.  I stood erect
at her sudden laugh.

"Why not take everything?" she asked, with her scoffing smile.

And I saw no reason why I shouldn't; though a suspicion crossed my mind
that this might be still another ruse to kill time.  If such it was, I
faced it at once, for I sent my boot heel promptly in against the
wooden cash drawer, smashing it at one blow.

She had been mistaken, or had deliberately lied, for the drawer was
empty.  And I told her so, with considerable heat.

"Ah, we all make mistakes, I think," she murmured with her enigmatic
shrug.

"What I want to know," I said as I banded the four papers together and
thrust them down in my pocket, "is just how you got that first code
from my young friend the lieutenant?"

She smiled again, a little wearily, as I swung the safe door shut and
locked it.  She did not rise from the chair.  But as I stood
confronting her, something in my attitude, apparently, struck her as
distinctly humorous.  For she broke into a sudden and deeper ripple of
laughter.  There was, however, something icy and chilling in it.  Her
eyes now seemed more veiled.  They had lost their earlier look of
terror.  Her face seemed to have relaxed into softer contours.

"Would you like to know?" she said, lifting her face and looking with
that older, half-mocking glance into my own.  She was speaking slowly
and deliberately, and I could see the slight shrug she gave to one
panther-like shoulder.  "Would _I_ be so out of place in a ballroom?
Ah, have not more things than hearts been lost when a man dances with a
woman?"

"I see--you mean you stole it, at the Plaza?"

"Not at all, monsieur!" she murmured languidly back.  Then she drew a
deeper breath, and sat more rigid in her straight-back chair.

Something about her face, at that moment, puzzled me.  It seemed to
hold some latent note of confidence.  The last trace of fear had fled
from it.  There was something strangely like triumph, muffled triumph,
in it.

An arrow of apprehension shot through me, as I stooped peering into her
shadowy eyes.  It went through my entire body, sharp as an electric
shock.  It brought me wheeling suddenly about with my back to her and
my face to the open room.

Then I understood.  I saw through it all, in one tingling second.  For
there, facing me, stood the figure of a man in navy blue.  It was the
same figure that I had followed through the square.

But now there was nothing secretive or circuitous about his attitude.
It was quite the other way; for as he stood there he held a
blue-barreled revolver in his hand.  And I could see, only too plainly,
that it was leveled directly at me.  The woman's ruse had worked.  I
had wasted too much time.  The confederate for whom she was plainly
waiting had come to her rescue.

The man took three or four steps farther into the room.  His revolver
was still covering me.  I heard a little gasp from the woman as she
rose to her feet.  I took it for a gasp of astonishment.

"You are going to kill him?" she cried in German.

"Haven't I got to?" asked back the man.  He spoke in English and
without an accent.  "Don't you understand _he's a safe-breaker_?  He's
broken into this house?  So!  He's caught in the act--he's shot in
self-defense!"

I watched the gun barrel.  The man's calm words seemed to horrify the
woman at my side.  But there was not a trace of pity in her voice as
she spoke again.

"Wait!" she cried.

"Why?" asked the man with the gun.

"He has everything--the code, the plans, everything."

"Get them!" commanded the man.

"But he's armed," she explained.

A sneer crossed the other's impassive face.

"What if he is?  Take his gun; take everything!"

The woman stepped close to where I stood.  Again I came within the
radius of her perfumes.  I could even feel her breath on my face.  Her
movements were more than ever panther-like as she went through my
pockets, one by one.  Yet her flashing and dextrous hands found no
revolver, for the simple reason there was none to find.  This puzzled
and worried her.

"Hurry up!" commanded the man covering me.

She stepped back and to one side, with the packet in her hand.

"Now close the windows!" ordered the man.

My heart went down in my boots as I heard the thud of that second
closed window.  There was going to be no waste of time.

I thought of catching the woman and holding her shield-like before me.
I thought of the telephone; the light-switch; the window.  But they all
seemed hopeless.

The woman turned away, holding her hands over her ears.  The
incongruous thought flashed through me that two hours before I had
called the city flat and stale; and here, within a rifle shot of my own
door, I was standing face to face with death itself!

"Look here," I cried, much as I hated to, "what do you get out of this?"

"_You!_" said the man.

"And what good will that do?"

"It'll probably shut your mouth, for one thing!"

"But there are other mouths," I cried.  "And I'm afraid they'll have a
great deal to say."

"I'm ready for them!" was his answer.

I could see his arm raise a little, and straighten out as it raised.
The gun barrel was nothing but a black "O" at the end of my line of
vision.  I felt my heart stop, for I surmised what the movement meant.

Then I laughed outright, aloud, and altogether foolishly and
hysterically.

The strain had been too much for me, and the snap of the release had
come too suddenly, too unexpectedly.  I could see the man with the gun
blink perplexedly, for a second or two, and then I could see the
tightening of his thin-lipped mouth.  But that was not all I had seen.

For through the half-closed door I had caught sight of the slowly
raised iron rod, the very rod I had wrenched from the outer hall
window.  I had seen its descent at the moment I realized the finality
in those quickly tightening lips.

It struck the arm on its downward sweep.  But it was not in time to
stop the discharge of the revolver.  The report thundered through the
room as the bullet ripped and splintered into the pine of the floor.
At the same moment the discharged firearm went spinning across the
room, and as the man who held it went down with the blow, young Palmer
himself swung toward me through the drifting smoke.

As he did so, I turned to the woman with her hands still pressed to her
ears.  With one fierce jerk I tore the rubber-banded packet of papers
from her clutch.

"But the code?" gasped Palmer, as he tugged crazily at the safe door.

I did not answer him, for a sudden movement from the woman arrested my
attention.  She had stooped and caught up the fallen revolver.  The man
in blue, rolling over on his hip, was drawing a second gun from his
pocket.

"Quick!" I called to Palmer as I swung him by the armpit and sent him
catapulting out through the smoke to the open door.  "Quick--and duck
low!"

The shots came together as we stumbled against the stairhead.

"Quick!" I repeated, as I pulled him after me.

"But the code?" he cried.

"I've got it!" I called out to him as we went panting and plunging down
through that three-tiered well of darkness to the street and liberty.
"I've got it--I've got everything!"




CHAPTER IV

THE OPEN DOOR

"Shall I call the car, sir?" asked the solicitous-eyed Benson, covertly
watching me as I made ready for the street.

"No," was my studiously detached retort, "I intend to walk."

"Latreille was asking, sir, if you would care to have the car laid up."

The significance of that bland suggestion did not escape me.  And it
did not add to my serenity of mind.

"Just what business is that of Latreille's?" I demanded, with a prickle
of irritation.  My patient-eyed old butler averted his glance, with a
sigh which he didn't seem quite able to control.

"And at the end of the month," I went on, "I intend to discharge that
man, I'm tired of his insolences."

"Yes, sir," Benson softly yet fervently agreed.

My nerves were on edge, I knew, but I wasn't looking for sympathy from
my hired help.  And when I swung the door shut behind me I am afraid it
was a movement far from noiseless.

I was glad to get out into the open, glad to get away from old Benson's
commiserative eyes, and have space about me, and cool air to breathe,
and uncounted miles of pavement to weary my legs on.

I noticed, as I turned, into Fifth Avenue, that the moving finger of
light on the Metropolitan clock-dial pointed to an hour past midnight.
So I veered about that delta of idleness, where the noontide turbulence
of Broadway empties its driftwood into the quietness of the square, and
pursued my way up the avenue.

No one can claim to know New York who does not know its avenues in
those mystical small hours that fall between the revolving
street-sweeper and the robin-call of the first morning paper.  Fifth
Avenue, above all her sisters, then lies as though tranquillized by
Death, as calm as the Coliseum under its Italian moonlight.  She seems,
under the stars, both medievalized and spiritualized.  She speaks then
in an intimate whisper foreign to her by day, veiling her earthlier
loquacity in a dreaming wonder, softening and sweetening like a woman
awaiting her lover.  The great steel shafts enclosed in their white
marble become turrets crowned with mystery.  And the street-floor
itself, as clean and polished as a ballroom, seems to undulate off into
outer kingdoms of romance.  An occasional lonely motor-car, dipping up
its gentle slopes like a ship treading a narrow sea-lane buoyed with
pearls as huge as pumpkins, only accentuates the midnight solitude.

So up this dustless and odorless and transmuted avenue I wandered, as
passively as a policeman on his beat, asking of the quietness when and
how I might capture that crown of weariness known as sleep.

I wandered on, mocked at by a thousand drawn blinds, taunted by a
thousand somnolently closed doors.  I felt, in that city of rest, as
homeless as a prairie wolf.  The very smugness of those veiled and
self-satisfied house-fronts began to get on my nerves.  The very
taciturnity of the great silent hostelries irritated me; everything
about them seemed so eloquent of an interregnum of rest, of relaxed
tension, of invisible reservoirs of life being softly and secretly
filled.

Yet as I came to the open width of the Plaza, and saw the wooded gloom
of Central Park before me, I experienced an even stronger feeling of
disquiet.  There seemed something repugnant in its autumnal solitudes.
That vague _agoraphobia_ peculiar to the neurasthenic made me long for
the contiguity of my own kind, however unconscious of me and my
wandering they might remain.  I found myself, almost without thought,
veering off eastward into one of the city's side-streets.

Yet along this lateral valley of quietness I wandered as disconsolately
as before.  What impressed me now was the monotony of the house-fronts
which shouldered together, block by block.  Each front seemed of the
same Indiana limestone, of the same dull gray, as though, indeed, the
whole district were a quarry checker-boarded by eroding cross-currents
out of the self-same rock.  Each tier of windows seemed backed by the
same blinds, each street-step barricaded by the same door.  I stopped
and looked up, wondering if behind those neutral-tinted walls and
blinds were lives as bald and monotonous as the materials that screened
them.  I wondered if an environment so without distinction would not
actually evolve a type equally destitute of individuality.

I turned where I stood, and was about to pass diffidently on, when one
of the most unexpected things that can come to a man at midnight
happened to me.

Out of a clear sky, without a note or movement of warning, there
suddenly fell at my feet a heavy bundle.

Where it came from I had no means of telling.  The house above me was
as silent and dark as a tomb.  The street was as empty as a church.
Had the thing been a meteor out of a star-lit sky, or a wildcat leaping
from a tree-branch, it could not have startled me more.

I stood looking at it, in wonder, as it lay beside the very
area-railing on which my hand had rested.  Then I stepped back and
leaned in over this railing, more clearly to inspect the mystery.
Whatever it was, it had fallen with amazingly little noise.  There was
no open window to explain its source.  There had been no wind to blow
it from an upper-story sill.  There was no movement to show that its
loss had been a thing of ponderable import.  Yet there it lay, a
mystery which only the deep hours of the night, when the more solemnly
imaginative faculties come into play, could keep from being ridiculous.

I stood there for several minutes blinking down at it, as though it
were a furred beast skulking in a corner.  Then I essayed a movement
which, if not above the commonplace, was equally related to common
sense.  I stepped in through the railing and picked up the parcel.  I
turned it over several times.  Then I sat down on the stone steps and
deliberately untied the heavy cord that baled it together.

I now saw why I had thought of that falling bundle as an animal's leap.
It was completely wrapped in what I took to be a Russian-squirrel
motor-coat.  The tightly tied fur had padded the parcel's fall.

Enclosed in that silk-lined garment I found a smaller bundle, swathed
about with several lengths of what seemed to be Irish point lace.
Inside this again were other fragments of lacework.  Through these I
thrust my exploring fingers with all the alert curiosity of a child
investigating a Christmas-tree cornucopia.

There, in the heart of the parcel, I found a collection which rather
startled me.  The first thing I examined was a chamois bag filled with
women's rings, a dozen or more of them, of all kinds.  I next drew out
a Florentine _repousse_ hand-bag set with turquoises and seed-pearls,
and then a moonstone necklace, plainly of antique Roman workmanship.
Next came a black and white Egyptian scarab, and then, of all things, a
snuff-box.  It was oval and of gold, enameled _en plein_ with a
pastoral scene swarming with plump pink Cupids.  Even in that uncertain
light it required no second glance to assure me that I was looking down
at a rare and beautiful specimen of Louis XV jeweler's art.  Then came
a small photograph in an oval gold frame.  The remainder of the strange
collection was made up of odds and ends of jewelry and a
leather-covered traveling-clock stamped with gilt initials.

I did not take the time to look more closely over this odd assortment
of valuables, for it now seemed clear that I had stumbled on something
as disturbing as it was unexpected.  The only explanation of an
otherwise inexplicable situation was that a house-breaker was busily
operating somewhere behind the gray-stone wall which I faced.

The house behind that wall seemed to take on no new color at this
discovery.  Its inherent sobriety, its very rectangularity of outline,
appeared a contradiction of any claim that it might be harboring a
figure either picturesque or picaresque.  It was no old mansion stained
with time, dark with memories and tears.  It carried no atmosphere of
romance, no suggestion of old and great adventures, of stately ways and
noble idlers, of intrigues and unremembered loves and hates, of silence
and gloom touched with the deeper eloquence of unrecorded history.  It
was nothing more than a new and narrow and extremely modern house, in
the very heart of a modern New York, simple in line and as obvious in
architecture as the warehouses along an old-world water-front, as bare
of heart as it was bald of face, a symbol of shrill materialities, of
the day of utility.  It could no more have been a harbor for romance, I
told myself, than the stone curb in front of it could be translated
into a mountain-precipice threaded with brigand-paths.

Yet I went slowly up those unwelcoming stone steps with the bundle
under my arm.  The thief at work inside the house, I assumed, had
simply tied the heavier part of his loot together and dropped it from a
quietly opened window, to be gathered as quickly up, once he had
effected his escape to the street.  The sudden afterthought that it
might have been dropped for a confederate caused me to look carefully
eastward and then as carefully westward.  But not a sign of life met my
gaze.  My figure standing puzzled before that unknown door was the only
figure in the street.

Heaven only knows what prompted me to reach out and try that door.  It
was, I suppose, little more than the habit of a lifetime, the almost
unconscious habit of turning a knob when one finds oneself confronted
by a door that is closed.  The thing that sent a little thrill of
excitement through my body was that the knob turned in my hand, that
the door itself stood unlocked.

I stooped down and examined this lock as best I could in the uncertain
light.  I even ran a caressing finger along the edge of the door.
There was no evidence that it had been jimmied open, just as there was
nothing to show that the lock itself did not stand intact and
uninjured.  A second test of the knob, however, showed me that the door
was unmistakably open.

My obvious course, at such a time, would have been to wait for a
patrolman or to slip quietly away and send word in to police
headquarters.  But, as I have already said, no man is wholly sane after
midnight.  Subliminal faculties, ancestral perversions, dormant and
wayward tendencies, all come to the surface, emerging like rats about a
sleeping mansion.  And crowning these, again, was my own neurasthenic
craving for activity, my hunger for the narcotizing influence of
excitement.

And it has its zest of novelty, this stepping into an unknown and
unlighted house at three o'clock in the morning.  That novelty takes on
a razor-edge when you have fairly good evidence that some one who has
no business there has already preceded you into that house.

So as I stepped inside and quietly closed the door after me, I moved
forward with the utmost care.  Some precautionary sixth sense told me
the place was not unoccupied.  Yet the darkness that surrounded me was
absolute.  Not a sound or movement came to my ears as I stood there
listening, minute after minute.  So I crept deeper into the gloom.

My knowledge of that stereotyped class of residence provided me with a
very fair idea of where the stairway ought to stand.  Yet it took much
prodding and groping and pawing about before I came to it.  One flicker
of a match, I knew, would have revealed the whole thing to me.  But to
strike a light, under the circumstances, would be both foolish and
dangerous.  No house dog, I felt, would interrupt my progress; the mere
remembrance of the intruder above me set my mind at rest on this point.

I came to a stop at the head of the first stairway, puzzled by the
completeness of the quiet which encompassed me.  I directed my
attention to each quarter of the compass, point by point.

But I might have been locked and sealed in a cistern, so complete was
the silence, so opaque was the blackness.  Yet I felt that nothing was
to be gained by staying where I was.

So I groped and shuffled my way onward, rounding the banister and
advancing step by step up the second stairway.  This, I noticed, was
both narrower and steeper than the first.  I was also not unconscious
of the fact that it was leading me into a zone of greater danger, for
the floor I was approaching, I knew, would be the sleeping floor.

I was half-way up the stairway when something undefined brought me to a
sudden stop.  Some nocturnal adeptness of instinct warned me of an
imminent presence, of a menace that had not yet disclosed itself.

Once more I came to a stop, straining my eyes through the darkness.
Nothing whatever was to be seen.  Along the floor of the hallway just
above my head, however, passed a small but unmistakable sound.  It was
the soft _frou-frou_ of a skirt, a skirt of silk or satin, faintly
rustling as a woman walked the full length of the hall.  I had just
made a mental register of the deduction that this woman was dressed in
street-clothes, and was, accordingly, an intruder from outside, rather
than a sleeper suddenly awakened, when a vague suffusion of light
filled the space above me and was as quickly quenched again.

I knew the moment I heard the soft thud of wood closing against wood,
that a door had been quietly opened and as quietly closed again.  The
room into which that door led must have been faintly lighted, for it
was the flowering of this refracted light that had caught my attention.

I went silently up the stairs, step by step, listening every now and
then as I advanced.  Once I reached the floor level I kept close to the
wall, feeling my way along until I came to the door I wanted.

There was no way whatever of determining what stood on the other side
of that door, without opening it.  I knew what risks I ran in
attempting any such movement.  But I decided it was worth the risk.

Now, if a door is opened slowly, if every quarter-inch of movement is
measured and guarded, it can, as a rule, be done noiselessly.  I felt
quite sure there was not one distinguishable sound as I cautiously
turned that bronze knob and even more cautiously worked back the door,
inch by inch.

I came to a stop when it stood a little more than a foot from the jamb.
I did not, at first, attempt to sidle in through the aperture; that
would have been needlessly reckless.  I stood there waiting,
anticipating the effect the door-movement might have had on any
occupant of the room, had it been seen.

While I waited I also studied that portion of the chamber which fell
within my line of vision.  I saw enough to convince me that the room
was a bedroom.  I could also make out that it was large, and from the
rose-pink of its walls to the ivory-white of its furnishings it stood
distinctly feminine in its note.

There was, I felt, a natural limit to that period of experimental
inaction.  The silence lengthened.  The crisis of tedium approached,
arrived, and passed.  Audaciousness reconquered me, and I actually
advanced a little into the room.  Steadying myself with one hand on the
door-frame, I thrust my body through the narrow aperture until the
whole four walls lay subject to my line of vision.

The first thing I noticed was a green-shaded electric lamp burning on
what seemed to be a boudoir writing-table.  It left the rest of the
room in little more than twilight.  But after the utter darkness
through which I had groped, this faint illumination was quite adequate
for my purposes.

I let my gaze pivot about the room, point by point.  Then, if I did not
gasp, there was at least a sudden and involuntary cessation of
breathing, for standing beside a second door at the farther end of the
room was a woman dressed in black.  On her head was a black hat, round
which a veil was tightly wound, the front of it apparently thrust up
hurriedly from her face.  But what startled me was the fact that both
her attitude and her position seemed such an exact duplication of my
own.

With one hand, I noticed, she clung to the frame of the door.  With the
other hand she held back a heavy portiere, which hung across this
frame.  I could see the white half-oval of her intent face as she stood
there.  Something about her suggested not the spying intruder so much
as the secret listener.  Her attention seemed directed toward some
object which her eyes were not seeing.  It appeared as though she stood
waiting to overhear a sound which meant much to her.

As I peered past her through the dim light I could catch a faint
glimmer of green and white marble, with here and there the high-lights
reflected from polished nickel.  I knew then that the room into which
she was peering was a bathroom, and this bathroom, I concluded, opened
on a second sleeping-chamber which held the _raison d'etre_ of her
motionless apprehension.  I directed my glance once more at the woman.
Something almost penitential in her attitude brought the sudden thought
to my mind that she had committed a crime at the mere memory of which
she was already morally stricken.  Unexpected discovery, I began to
suspect, had driven her to an extreme which she was already beginning
to regret.  There was, in fact, something so pregnant and portentous in
that unchanging attitude of hers that I began to feel it would be a
mean surrender on my part to evade the issue in which I had already
risked so much.  So I moved silently into the room, crossing it without
a sound, until I dropped into a high-backed _fauteuil_ upholstered in
embossed and pale-green leather.

I sat there studying her, unaccountably at my ease, fortified by the
knowledge that I was the observer of an illicit intrusion and that my
own presence, if impertinent, might at least be easily explained.  I
saw her sigh deeply and audibly, and then gently close the door,
dropping the curtain as she turned slowly away.

I watched her as she crossed to the dresser, looked over the toilet
articles on it, and then turned away.  She next skirted a heavy
cheval-mirror, crossed to the writing-table with her quick yet quietly
restless movements, and from this table caught up what seemed to be a
metal paper-knife.  She moved on to an ivory and mother-of-pearl desk,
which, apparently, she already knew to be locked.  For after one short
glance toward the curtained door again, she inserted the edge of the
knife in a crack of this desk and slowly pried on the lock-bar that
held it shut.

I saw her second apprehensive glance toward the curtained door as the
lock sprung with a snap.  She sank into a chair before it, breathing
quickly, obviously waiting a minute or two to make sure she had not
been overheard.  Then with quick and dextrous fingers she rummaged
through the desk.  Just what she swept from one of the drawers into her
open hand-bag I could not distinguish.  But I plainly saw the package
of letters which she took up in her hand, turned over and over, then
carefully and quietly secreted within the bosom of her dress.  She
looked deeper into the desk, examined an additional paper or two which
appeared not to interest her, and slowly swung back the cover.

Then she slowly rose to her feet, standing beside the desk.  She let
her gaze, as she stood there, wander about the room.  I could
distinctly see the look on her face, the hungry and unhappy look of
unsatisfied greed.  I sat motionless, waiting for that expression to
change.  I knew that it must change, for it would be but a moment or
two before she caught sight of me.  But I had seen enough.  I felt sure
of my position--in fact, I found a wayward relish in it, an almost
enjoyable anticipation of the shock which I knew the discovery of my
presence there would bring to her.  I even exulted a little in that
impending dramatic crisis, rejoicing in the slowness with which the
inevitable yet epochal moment was approaching.

Her eyes must have dwelt on my figure for several seconds before her
mind became convinced of my actual presence there.  She did not scream,
as I thought she was about to do when I saw one terrified hand go up to
her partly open lips.  Beyond that single hand-movement there was no
motion whatever from her.  She simply stood mere, white-faced and
speechless, staring at me out of wide and vacant eyes.

"Good evening--or, rather, good morning!" I said, with all the calmness
at my command.

For one brief second she glanced back toward the curtained door, as
though behind it lay a sleeper my words might awaken.  Then she stared
at me again.

She did not speak.  She did not even move.  The intent and staring
face, white as a half-moon in a misty sky, seemed floating in space.
The faint light of the room swallowed up the lines of her black-clad
figure, enisling the face in the unbroken gloom of a Rembrandt-like
background, making it stand out as though it were luminous.

It was a face well worth studying.  What first struck me was its
pallor.  Across this the arched, faintly interrogative eyebrows gave it
a false air of delicacy.  The eyes themselves had a spacious clarity
which warned me my enemy would not be without a capable enough mind,
once she regained possession of her wits.  Her mouth, no longer
distorted by terror, was the nervous, full-lipped mouth of a once
ardent spirit touched with rebellion.

She was, I could see, no every-day thief of the streets, no ordinary
offender satisfied with mean and petty offenses.  There would, I told
myself, always be a largeness about her wrong-doing, a sinister
brilliance in her illicit pursuits.  And even while I decided this, I
was forced to admit that it was not precisely terror I was beholding on
her face.  It seemed to merge into something more like a sense of
shame, the same speechless horror which I might have met with had I
intruded on her bodily nakedness.  I could see that she was even
beginning to resent my stare of curiosity.  Then, for the first time,
she spoke.

"Who are you?" she asked.  Her voice was low; in it was the quaver of
the frightened woman resolutely steeling herself to courage.

"That's a question you're first going to answer for me," was my calmly
deliberate retort.

"What are you doing here?" she demanded, still confronting me from the
same spot.  I remembered the bundle of loot which I had dropped just
outside the door.

"I can answer that more easily than you can," I replied, with a slight
head-movement toward the broken desk-top.

Once more her glance went back to the curtained door.  Then she studied
me from head to foot, each sartorial detail and accessory of clothing,
hat, gloves, and shoes, as though each must figure in the resolution of
some final judgment.

"What do you want?" she demanded.

I preferred to leave that question unanswered.

"What do you intend to do?" she demanded, once more searching my face.

I resented the way in which she anticipated my own questions.  I could
see, from the first, that she was going to be an extraordinarily adept
and circuitous person to handle.  I warned myself that I would have to
be ready for every trick and turn.

"What do you suppose I'm going to do?" I equivocated, looking for some
betraying word to put me on firmer ground.  I could see that she was
slowly regaining her self-possession.

"You have no right in this house," she had the brazenness to say to me.

"Have _you_?" I quickly retorted.  She was silent for a second or two.

"No," she admitted, much as she would like to have claimed the contrary.

"Of course not!  And I imagine you realize what your presence here
implies, just as what your discovery here entails?"

"Yes," she admitted.

"And I think you have the intelligence to understand that I'm here for
motives somewhat more disinterested than your own?"

"What are they?" she demanded, letting her combative eyes meet mine.

"That," I calmly replied, "can wait until you've explained yourself."

"I've nothing to explain."

There was a newer note in her voice again--one of stubbornness.  I
could see that the calmness with which I pretended to regard the whole
affair was a source of bewilderment to her.

"You've got to explain," was my equally obdurate retort.

Her next pose was one of frigidity.

"You are quite mistaken.  We have nothing whatever to do with each
other."

"Oh, yes we have.  And I'm going to prove it."

"How?"

"By putting an end to this play-acting."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It was meant for one."

"What right have you to threaten me?"

She looked about as she spoke, almost wearily.  Then she sank into the
chair that stood beside the ravaged writing-desk.  It was all diverting
enough, but I was beginning to lose patience with her.

"I'm tired of all this side-stepping," I told her.  An answering look
of anger flashed from her eyes.

"I object to your presence here," she had the effrontery to exclaim.

"You mean, I suppose, that I'm rather interfering with your night's
operations?"

"Those operations," she answered in a fluttering dignity, "are my own
affairs."

"Of course they are!" I scoffed.  "They _have_ to be!  But you should
have kept them your own affairs.  When you drop a bundle of swag out of
a window you shouldn't come so perilously near to knocking a man's hat
off."

"A bundle of swag?" she echoed, with such a precise imitation of wonder
that I could plainly see she was going to be the astutest of liars.

"The loot you intended carrying off," I calmly explained.  "The stuff
you dropped down beside the house-step, to be ready for your getaway."

"My what?"

"Your escape.  And it was rather clever."

"I dropped nothing," she protested, with a fine pretense of
bewilderment on her face.

"Nor let it roll quietly off a front window-ledge?" I suggested.

"I was near no window--it would be impossible for me to open a window,"
she protested.  Her words in themselves were a confession.

"You seem to know this house pretty well," I remarked.

"_I ought to--it's my own_," was her quick retort.

"It's your own?" I repeated, amazed at the woman's mendacity.

"It _was_ my own," she corrected.

I peered quickly about the room.  It held three doors, one behind the
woman, opening into the bathroom, a second opening into the hallway,
and a third to the rear, which plainly opened into a clothes-closet.
There had been too much of this useless and foolish argument.

"Since your claim to proprietorship is so strong," I said as I crossed
to the hall door, and, after locking it, pocketed the key, "there are
certain features of it I want you to explain to me."

"What do you mean?" she asked, once more on her feet.

"I want to know," I said, moving toward the curtained door beside her,
"just who or what is in that front room?"

The look of terror came back to her white face.  She even stood with
her back against the door, as though to keep me from opening it, making
an instinctive gesture for silence as I stood facing her.

"I'm going to find out what is in that room," I proclaimed, unmoved by
the agony I saw written on her guilty face.

"Oh, believe me," she said, in supplicatory tones, a little above a
whisper, "it will do no good.  It will only make you sorry you
interfered in this."

"But you've made it my duty to interfere."

"No; no; you're only blundering into something where you can do no
good, where you have no right."

"Then I intend to blunder into that room!"  And I tore the portiere
from her grasp and flung it to one side.

"Wait," she whispered, white-faced and panting close beside me.  "I'll
tell you everything.  I'll explain it--everything."

The tragic solemnity of that low-toned relinquishment brought me up
short.  It was my turn to be bewildered by an opponent I could not
understand.

"Sit down," she said, with a weary and almost imperious movement of the
hand as she advanced into the room and again sank into the chair beside
the writing-desk.

"Now what is it you want to know?" she asked, with only too obvious
equivocation.  Her trick to gain time exasperated me.

"Don't quibble and temporize that way," I cried.  "Say what you've got
to, and say it quick."

She directed at me a look which I resented, a look of scorn, of
superiority, of resignation in the face of brutalities which I should
never have subjected her to.  Yet, when she spoke again her voice was
so calm as to seem almost colorless.

"I said this was my home--and it's true.  This was once my room.
Several weeks ago I left it."

"Why?" I inquired, resenting the pause which was plainly giving her a
chance to phrase ahead of her words.

"I quarreled with my husband.  I went away.  I was angry.  I--I--
There's no use explaining what it was about."

"You've got to explain what it was about," I insisted.

"You couldn't possibly understand.  It's impossible to explain," she
went quietly on.  "I discharged a servant who was not honest.  Then he
tried to blackmail me.  He lied about me.  I had been foolish,
indiscreet, anything you care to call it.  But the lie he told was
awful, unbelievable.  That my husband should ask me to disprove it was
more than I could endure.  We quarreled, miserably, hopelessly.  I went
away.  I felt it would be humiliating to stay under the same roof with
him."

"Wait," I interposed, knowing the weak link was sure to present itself
in time.  "Where is your husband now?"

She glanced toward the curtained door.

"He's in that room asleep," she quietly replied.

"And knowing him to be asleep you came to clean out the house?" I
promoted.

"No," she answered without anger.  "But when service was begun for an
interlocutory decree I knew I could never come back openly.  There were
certain things of my own I wanted very much."

"And just how did you get into the house?"

"The one servant I could trust agreed to throw off the latch after
midnight, to leave the door unlocked for me when I knew I would never
be seen."

"Then why couldn't that trusted servant have secured the things, these
things you came after?  Without all this foolish risk of your forcing
your way into a house at midnight?"

Her head drooped a little.

"I wanted to see my husband," was the quiet-toned response.  Just how,
she did not explain.  I had to admit to myself that it was very good
acting.  But it was not quite convincing; and the case against her was
too palpably clear.

"This is a fine cock-and-bull story," I calmly declared.  "But just how
are you going to make me believe it?"

"You don't have to believe it," was her impassive answer.  "I'm only
telling you what you demanded to know."

"To know, yes--but how am I to know?"

She raised her hand with a movement of listless resignation.

"If you go to the top drawer of that dresser you will see my photograph
in a silver frame next to one of my husband.  That will show you at a
glance."

For just a moment it flashed through me as I crossed the room that this
might be a move to give her time for some attempted escape.  But I
felt, on second thought, that I was master enough of the situation to
run the risk.  And here, at least, was a point to which she could be
most definitely pinned down.

"The other drawer," she murmured as my hand closed on the fragile
ivory-tinted knob.  I moved on to the second drawer and opened it.  I
had thrust an interrogative finger down into its haphazard clutter of
knick-knacks, apparently thrown together by a hurried and careless
hand, when from the other end of the room came a quick movement which
seemed to curdle the blood in my veins.  It brought me wheeling about,
with a jump that was both grotesque and galvanic.

I was just in time to see the figure that darted out through the
suddenly opened door of the clothes-closet.

I found myself confronted by a man, a thin-lipped, heavy-jawed man of
about thirty-five, with black pinpoint pupils to his eyes.  He wore a
small-rimmed derby hat and a double-breasted coat of blue cheviot.  But
it was not his clothes that especially interested me.  What caught and
held my attention was the ugly, short-barreled revolver which was
gripped in the fingers of his right hand.  This revolver, I noticed,
was unmistakably directed at me as he advanced into the room.  I could
not decide which was uglier, the blue-metaled gun or the face of the
man behind it.

"Get back against that wall," he commanded.  "Then throw up your hands.
Get 'em up quick!"

I had allowed her to trap me after all!  I had even let myself
half-believe that pleasant myth of the slumbering husband in the next
room.  And all the while she was guarding this unsavory-looking
confederate who, ten to one, had been slinking about and working his
way into a wall-safe even while I was wasting time with diverting but
costly talk.

And with that gun-barrel blinking at me I had no choice in the
matter--I was compelled to assume the impotent and undignified attitude
of a man supplicating the unanswering heavens.  The woman turned and
contemplated the newcomer, contemplated him with a fine pretense of
surprise.

"_Hobbs,_" she cried, "_how did you get here?_"

"You shut up!" he retorted over his shoulder.

"What are you doing in this house?" she repeated, with a sustained show
of amazement.

"Oh, I'll get round to _you_, all right, all right," was his second
rejoinder.

Hobbs' left hand, in the meanwhile, had lifted my watch from its pocket
and with one quick jerk tore watch and chain away from its waistcoat
anchorage.

"You're a sweet pair, you two!" I ejaculated, for that watch was rather
a decent one and I hated to see it ill-treated.

"Shut up!" said Hobbs, as his hand went down in my breast-pocket in
search of a wallet.  I knew, with that gun-barrel pressed close against
my body, that it would be nothing short of suicidal to try to have it
out with him then and there.  I had to submit to that odious pawing and
prodding about my body.  But if my turn ever came, I told myself, it
would be a sorry day for Hobbs--and an equally sorry one for that
smooth-tongued confederate of his.

"You're a sweet pair!" I repeated, hot to the bone, as that insolent
hand went down into still another pocket.

But it did not stay there.  I saw a sudden change creep over the man's
face.  He looked up with a quick and bird-like side-movement of the
head.  It was not until he wheeled about that I realized the reason of
the movement.

The actual motive behind the thing I could not fathom.  The real
significance of the tableau was beyond my reach.  But as I looked up I
saw that the woman had crept noiselessly to the hall door, and with a
sudden movement had thrust out her hand and tried to open this door.
But as I had already locked it, and still carried the key in my pocket,
her effort was a useless one.  Just why it should enrage her
confederate was more than I could understand.  He ignored me for the
time being, crossing the room at a run and flinging the woman in black
away from the door-knob.  She, in turn, was making a pretense to resent
that assault.  Why she should do this I did not wait to ask.  I saw my
chance and took it.

Half-a-dozen quick steps brought me to the bathroom door, one turn of
the knob threw it open, and another step put me through it and brought
the door closed after me.  There was, I found, a key in the lock.
Another second of time saw that key turned.  A quick pad or two about
the cool marble wall brought my hand in contact with the light-switch.

The moment the light came on I darted to the inner door and tried it.
But this, to my dismay, was locked, although I could catch sight of no
key in it.  I ran back for the key of the first door, tried it, and
found it useless.  At any moment, I knew, a shot might come splintering
through those thin panels.  And at any moment, should they decide on
that move, the two of them might have their own door into the hallway
forced open and be scampering for the street.

I reached over and wrenched a nickeled towel-bar away from the wall
opposite me.  One end of this I deliberately jabbed into the
white-leaded wood between the frame and the jam of the second door.  I
was about to pry with all my force, when the sound of yet another voice
came from the room before me.  It was a disturbed yet sleepy voice,
muffled, apparently, by a second portiere hung on the outside of the
second door.

"Is that you, Simmonds?" demanded this voice.

I continued to pry, for I felt like a rat in a corner, in that bald
little bathroom, and I wanted space about me, even though that meant
fresh danger.  The mysteries were now more than I could decipher.  I no
longer gave thought to them.  The first thing I wanted was liberation,
escape.  But my rod-end bent under the pressure to which I subjected
it, and I had to reverse it and try for a fresh hold.

I could hear, as I did so, the sudden sound of feet crossing a floor,
the click of a light-switch, and then the rattle of the portiere-rings
on the rod above the door at which I stood.

"Who locked this door?" demanded the startled voice on the other side.
For answer, I threw my weight on the rod and forced the lock.  I still
kept the metal rod in my hand, for a possible weapon, as I
half-stumbled out into the larger room.

Before me I saw a man in pajamas.  He was blond and big and his hair
was rumpled--that was all I knew about him, beyond the fact that his
pajamas were a rather foolish tint of baby-blue.  We stood there, for a
second or two, staring at each other.  We were each plainly afraid of
the other, just as we were each a little reassured, I imagine, at the
sight of the other.

"For the love of God," he gasped, wide-eyed, "who are you?"

"Quick," I cried, "is this your house?"

"Of course it's my house," he cried back, retreating as I advanced.  He
suddenly side-stepped and planted his thumb on a call-bell.

"Good!" I said.  "Get your servants here quick.  We'll need them!"

"Who'll need them?  What's wrong?  What's up?"

"I've got two burglars locked in that room."

"Burglars?"

"Yes, and they'll have a nice haul if they get away.  Have you got a
revolver?"

"Yes," he answered, jerking open a drawer.  I saw that his firearm was
an automatic.

"Where's the telephone?" I demanded, crossing the room to the door that
opened into the hall.

"On the floor below," he answered.  He pulled on a brown blanket
dressing-gown, drawing the girdle tight at the waist.

"You can get to it quicker than I can," I told him.  "Give me the gun,
and throw on the lights as you go down.  Then get the police here as
soon as you can."

"What'll you do?" he demanded.

"I'll guard the door," I answered as I all but pushed him into that
hallway.  Then I swung-to the door after me, and locked it from the
outside.  "Quick, the gun," I said.  There was no fear on his face now,
yet it was natural enough that he should hesitate.

"What are you?  An officer?"

There was no time for an explanation.

"Plain-clothes man," was my glib enough answer, as I caught the pistol
from his hand.  He switched on the hall lights.

He was half-way to the top of the stairs when a woman's scream, high
pitched and horrible, echoed out of the room where I had the two
confederates trapped.  It was repeated, shrill and sharp.  The face of
the big blond man went as white as chalk.

"_Who is that!_" he demanded, with staring eyes, facing the locked door
of the second room.  Then he backed off from the door.

I flung a cry of warning at him, but it did not stop his charge.  His
great shoulder went against the paneled wood like a battering-ram.
Under the weight of that huge body the entire frame-facing gave way; he
went lunging and staggering from sight into the dimly-lit inner room.

I waited there, with my gun at half-arm, feeling the room would
suddenly erupt its two prisoners.  Then, at a cry from the man, I
stepped quickly in after him.

I had fortified myself for the unexpected, but the strangeness of the
scene took my breath away.  For there I beheld the man called Hobbs
engaged in the absurd and extraordinary and altogether brutal
occupation of trying to beat in his confederate's head with the butt of
his heavy revolver.  He must have struck her more than once, even
before the man in the hairy brown dressing-gown and the blue pajamas
could leap for him and catch the uplifted arm as it was about to strike
again.

The woman, protected by her hat and veil and a great mass of thick
hair, still showed no signs of collapse.  But the moment she was free
she sat back, white and panting, in the same high-armed _fauteuil_
which I myself had occupied a half-hour before.  I made a leap for her
companion's fallen revolver, before she could get it, though I noticed
that she now seemed indifferent to both the loss of it and the outcome
of the struggle which was taking place in the center of that pink and
white abode of femininity.

And as I kept one eye on the woman and one on the gun in my hand, I,
too, caught fleeting glimpses of that strange struggle.  It seemed more
like a combat between wildcats than a fight between two human beings.
It took place on the floor, for neither man was any longer on his feet,
and it wavered from one side of the room to the other, leaving a swath
of destruction where it went.  A table went over, a fragile-limbed
chair was crushed, the great cheval-glass was shattered, the
writing-desk collapsed with a leg snapped off, a shower of toilet
articles littered the rugs, a reading-lamp was overturned and went the
way of the other things.  But still the fight went on.

I no longer thought of the woman.  All my attention went to the two men
struggling and panting about the floor.  The fury of the man in the
shaggy and bear-like dressing-gown was more than I could understand.
The madness of his onslaught seemed incomprehensible.  This, I felt,
was the way a tigress might fight for her brood, the way a cave-man
might battle for his threatened mate.  Nor did that fight end until the
big blond form towered triumphant above the darker clad figure.

Then I looked back at the woman, startled by her stillness through it
all.  She was leaning forward, white, intent, with parted lips.  In her
eyes I seemed to see uneasiness and solicitude and desolation, but
above them all slowly flowered a newer look, a look of vague exultation
as she gazed from the defeated man gasping and choking for breath to
the broad back of the shaggy-haired dressing-gown.

I had no chance to dwell on the puzzle of this, for the man enveloped
in the shaggy-haired garment was calling out to me.

"Tie him up," he called.  "Take the curtain-cords--but tie him tight!"

"Do you know this man?" something in his tone prompted me to ask, as I
struggled with the heavy silk curtain-cords.

"It's Hobbs."

"I know that, but who's Hobbs?"

"A servant dismissed a month ago," was the other's answer.

"Then possibly you know the woman?" I asked, looking up.

"Yes, possibly I know the woman," he repeated, standing before her and
staring into her white and desolate face.  It took me a moment or two
to finish my task of trussing the wrists of the sullen and sodden
Hobbs.  When I looked up the woman was on her feet, several steps
nearer the door.

"Watch that woman!" I cried.  "She's got a load of your loot on her!"

My words seemed merely to puzzle him.  There was no answering alarm on
his face.

"What do you mean?" he inquired.  He seemed almost to resent my effort
in his behalf.  The woman's stare, too, seemed able to throw him into
something approaching a comatose state, leaving him pale and helpless,
as though her eye had the gift of some hypnotic power.  It angered me
to think that some mere accidental outward husk of respectability could
make things so easy for her.  Her very air of false refinement, I felt,
would always render her viciousness double-edged in its danger.

"Search her!" I cried.  "See what she's got under her waist there!"

He turned his back on me, deliberately, as though resenting my
determination to dog him into an act that was distasteful to him.

"What have you there?" he asked her, without advancing any closer.

There was utter silence for a moment or two.

"Your letters," she at last answered, scarcely above a whisper.

"What are they doing there?" he asked.

"I wanted them," was all she said.

"Why should you want my letters?" was his next question.

She did not answer it.  The man in the dressing-gown turned and pointed
to the inert figure of Hobbs.

"What about him?  How did _he_ get here?"

"He must have followed me in from the street when the door was
unlocked.  Or he may have come in before I did, and kept in hiding
somewhere."

"Who left the door unlocked?"

"Simmonds."

"Why?"

"Because he could trust me!"

There was a muffled barb in this retort, a barb which I could not
understand.  I could see, however, that it had its effect on the other
man.  He stared at the woman with sudden altered mien, with a foolish
drop of the jaw which elongated his face and widened his eyes at the
same moment.  Then he wheeled on the sullen Hobbs.

"_Hobbs, you lied about her!_" he cried, like a blind man at last
facing the light.

He had his hand on the bound and helpless burglar's throat.

"Tell me the truth, or by the living God, I'll kill you!  You lied
about her?"

"About what?" temporized Hobbs.

"You know what!"

Hobbs, I noticed, was doing his best to shrink back from the throttling
fingers.

"It wasn't my fault!" he equivocated.

"But you lied?"

Hobbs did not answer, in words.  But the man in the dressing-gown knew
the answer, apparently, before he let the inert figure fall away from
his grasp.  He turned, in a daze, back to the waiting and watching
woman, the white-faced woman with her soul in her eyes.  His face
seemed humbled, suddenly aged with some graying blight of futile
contrition.

The two staring figures appeared to sway and waver toward each other.
Before I could understand quite what it all meant the man had raised
his arms and the woman had crept into them.

"Oh, Jim, I've been such a fool!" I heard her wail.  And I could see
that she was going to cry.

I knew, too, that that midnight of blunders had left me nothing to be
proud of, that I had been an idiot from the first--and to make that
idiocy worse, I was now an intruder.

"I'll slip down and look after that phoning," I mumbled, so abashed and
humiliated that as I groped wearily out through the door I stumbled
over the Russian-squirrel bundle which I had placed there with my own
hands.  It was not until I reached the street that I realized, with a
gulp of relief, how yet another night of threatening misery had been
dissembled and lost in action, very much as the pills of childhood are
dissembled in a spoonful of jelly.




CHAPTER V

THE MAN FROM MEDICINE HAT

I sat in that nocturnal sun-parlor of mine, known to the world as
Madison Square, demanding of the quiet night why sleep should be denied
me, and doing my best to keep from thinking of Mary Lockwood.  I sat
there with my gaze fixed idly on a girl in black, who, in turn, stared
idly up at _Sagittarius_.

Then I lost interest in the black-clad and seemingly cataleptic
star-gazer.  For I was soon busy watching a man in a rather odd-looking
velour hat.  My eyes followed him from the moment he first turned
eastward out of Fifth Avenue.  They were still on him as he veered
irresolutely southward again into the square where I sat.

The pure aimlessness of his movements arrested my attention.  The
figure that drifted listlessly in past the Farragut Statue and wandered
on under the park trees in some way reminded me of my own.  I, too,
knew only too well what it was to circle doggedly and sullenly about
like a bell-boy paging the corridors of night for that fugitive known
as Sleep.

So I continued to watch him, quietly and closely.  I had lost my
interest in the white-faced girl who sat within twenty paces of me,
looking, silent and still, up at the autumn stars.

It was the man's figure, thereafter, that challenged my attention, for
this man marked the only point of movement in what seemed a city of the
dead.  It was, I remembered, once more long past midnight, the hour of
suspended life in the emptied canyons of the lamp-strung streets when
the last taxi had hummed the last reveler home, and the first
milk-wagons had not yet rattled up from the East River ferries.

So I sat there listlessly watching the listlessly moving figure with
the wide hat-brim pulled down over its face.  There was something still
youthful about the man, for all the despondent droop to the shoulders.
I asked myself idly who or what he could be.  I wondered if, like
myself, he was merely haunted by the curse of wakefulness, if the same
bloodhounds of unrest dogged him, too, through the dark hours of the
night.  I wondered if he, too, was trying to escape from the grinding
machinery of thought into some outer passivity.

I saw him thread his indeterminate way along the winding park walks.  I
saw him glance wearily up at the massive austerity of the Metropolitan
Tower, and then turn and gaze at the faded Diana so unconcernedly
poised above her stolen Sevillian turrets.  I saw him look desolately
about the square with its bench-rows filled with huddled and motionless
sleepers.  These sleepers, with their fallen heads and twisted limbs,
with their contorted and moveless bodies, made the half-lit square as
horrible as a battlefield.  Clouded by the heavy shadows of the park
trees, they seemed like the bodies of dead men, like broken and sodden
things over which had ground the wheels of carnage.  The only murmur or
sound of life was the fountain, with its column of slowly rising and
slowly falling water, like the tired pulse-beat of the tired city.

The man in the velour hat seemed to find something companionable in
this movement, for he slowly drew nearer.  He came within three benches
of where I sat.  Then he flung himself down on an empty seat.  I could
see his white and haggard face as he watched the splashing fountain.  I
could see his shadowy and unhappy eyes as he pushed back his hat and
mopped his moist forehead.  Then I saw him suddenly bury his head in
his hands and sit there, minute by minute, without moving.

When he made his next movement, it was a startling one.  It sent a
tingle of nerves scampering up and down my backbone.  For I saw his
right hand go down to his pocket, pause there a moment, and then
suddenly lift again.  As it did so my eye caught the white glimmer of
metal.  I could see the flash of a revolver as he thrust it up under
the hat-brim, and held the nickeled barrel close against his temple,
just above the lean jaw-bone.

It was so sudden, so unexpected, that I must have closed my eyes in a
sort of involuntary wince.  The first coherent thought that came to me
was that I could never reach him in time.  Some soberer second thought
was to the effect that even my interference was useless, that he and
his life were his own, that a man once set on self-destruction will not
be kept from it by any outside influence.

Yet even as I looked again at his huddled figure, I heard his little
gasp of something that must have been between fear and defeat.  I saw
the arm slowly sink to his side.  He was looking straight before him,
his unseeing eyes wide with terror and hazy with indecision.

It was then that I decided to interfere.  To do so seemed only my plain
and decent duty.  Yet I hesitated for a moment, pondering just how to
phrase my opening speech to him.

Even as I took a sudden, deeper breath of resolution, and was on the
point of crossing to his side, I saw him fling the revolver vehemently
from him.  It went glimmering and tumbling along the coppery-green
grass.  It lay there, a point of high light against the darkness of the
turf.

Then I looked back to the stranger, and saw his empty hands go up to
his face.  It was a quiet and yet a tragic gesture of utter misery.
Each palm was pressed in on the corded cheek-bones, with the
finger-ends hard against the eyeballs, as though that futile pressure
could crush away all inner and all outer vision.

Then I turned back toward the fallen revolver.  As I did so I noticed a
figure in black step quietly out and pick up the firearm.  It was the
white-faced girl who had sat looking up at the stars.  Before I fully
realized the meaning of her movement, she slipped the weapon out of
sight, and passed silently on down the winding asphalt walk, between
the rows of sleepers, toward the east.  There was something arresting
in the thin young figure, something vaguely purposeful and appealing in
the poise of the half-veiled head.

I vacillated for a moment, undecided as to which to approach.  But a
second glance at the man in the velour hat, crouched there in his utter
and impassive misery, caused me to cross over to him.

I put a hand on his flaccid shoulder, and shook it.  He did not move at
first, so I shook him again.  Then he directed a slow and resentful
glance at me.

"I want to have a talk with you," I began, puzzled as to how to
proceed.  He did not answer me.

"I want to help you if I can," I explained, as I still let my hand rest
on his shoulder.

"Oh, go 'way!" he ejaculated, in utter listlessness, shaking my hand
from his shoulder.

"No, I won't!" I quite firmly informed him.  He shrank back and moved
away.  Then he turned on me with a resentment that was volcanic.

"For God's sake leave me alone!" he cried.

A sleeper or two on near-by benches sat up and stared at us with their
drowsily indifferent eyes.

"Then why are you making a fool of yourself like this?" I demanded.

"That's my own business," he retorted.

"Then you intend to keep it up?" I inquired.

"No, I don't," he flung back.  "_I can't._"

"Then will you be so good as to talk to me?"  His sullen anger seemed
strangely removed from that exaltation which tradition imputes to last
moments.  It even took an effort to be patient with him.

"No, I won't," was his prompt retort.  It dampened all the quixotic
fires in my body.  Then he rose to his feet and confronted me.  "And if
you don't get out of here, I'll kill you!"

His threat, in some way, struck me as funny.  I laughed out loud.

But I did not waste further time on him.

I was already thinking of the other figure, the equally mysterious and
more appealing figure in black.

I swung round and strode on through the trees just in time to see that
somber and white-faced young woman cross Madison Avenue, and pass
westward between a granite-columned church and the towering obelisk of
a more modern god of commerce.  I kept my eyes on this street-end as it
swallowed her up.  Then I passed out through the square and under the
clock-dial and into Twenty-fourth Street.

By the time I had reached Fourth Avenue I again caught sight of the
black-clad figure.  It was moving eastward on the south side of the
street, as unhurried and impassive as a sleep-walker.

When half-way to Lexington Avenue I saw the woman stop, look slowly
round, and then go slowly up the steps of a red-brick house.  She did
not ring, I could see, but let herself in with a pass-key.  Once the
door had closed on her, I sauntered toward this house.  To go farther
at such an hour was out of the question.  But I made a careful note of
the street number, and also of the fact that a slip of paper pasted on
the sandstone door-post announced the fact of "Furnished Rooms."

I saw, not only that little was to be gained there, but also that I had
faced my second disappointment.  So I promptly swung back to Madison
Square and the fountain where I had left the man in the velour hat.  I
ran my eye from bench to bench of sleepers, but he was not among them.
I went over the park, walk by walk, but my search was unrewarded.  Then
I circled about into Broadway, widening my radius of inspection.  I
shuttled back and forth along the side-streets.  I veered up and down
the neighboring avenues.  But it was useless.  The man in the velour
hat was gone.

Then, to my surprise, as I paced the midnight streets, a sense of
physical weariness crept over me.  I realized that I had walked for
miles.  I had forgotten my own troubles and that most kindly of all
narcotics, utter fatigue, crept through me like a drug.

So I went home and went to bed.  And for the first time that week I
felt the Angel of Sleep stoop over me of her own free will.  For the
first time that week there was no need of the bitter lash of chloral
hydrate to beat back the bloodhounds of wakefulness.  I fell into a
sound and unbroken slumber, and when I woke up, Benson was waiting to
announce that my bath was ready.

Two hours later I was ringing the bell of a certain old-fashioned
red-brick apartment-house in East Twenty-fourth Street.  I knew little
enough about such places, but this was one obviously uninviting, from
the rusty hand-rail to the unwashed window draperies.  Equally
unprepossessing was the corpulent and dead-eyed landlady in her faded
blue house-wrapper; and equally depressing did I find the slatternly
and bared-armed servant who was delegated to lead me up through the
musty-smelling halls.  The third-floor front, I was informed, was the
only room in the house empty, though its rear neighbor, which, was a
bargain at two dollars and a half a week, was soon to be vacated.

I took the third-floor front, without so much as one searching look at
its hidden beauties.  The lady of the faded blue wrapper emitted her
first spark of life as I handed over my four dollars.  The listless
eyes, I could see, were touched with regret at the thought that she had
not asked for more.  I tried to explain to her, as she exacted a
deposit for my pass-key, that I was likely to be irregular in my hours
and perhaps a bit peculiar in my habits.

These intimations, however, had no ponderable effect upon her.  She
first abashed me by stowing the money away in the depths of her open
corsage, and then perplexed me by declaring that all she set out to do,
since her legs went back on her, was to keep her first two floors
decent.  Above that, apparently, deportment could look after itself,
the upper regions beyond her ken could be Olympian in their moral
laxities.

As I stood there, smiling over this discovery, a figure in black
rustled down the narrow stairway and edged past us in the half-lit hall.

The light fell full on her face as she opened the door to the street.
It outlined her figure, as thin as that of a medieval saint from a
missal.  It was the young woman I had followed from Madison Square.

Of this I was certain--from the moment the light fell on her
thin-cheeked face, where anxiety seemed to have pointed the soft oval
of the chin into something mask-like in its sharpness.  About her,
quite beyond the fact that her eyes were the most unhappy eyes I had
ever seen, hung a muffled air of tragedy, the air of a spirit both
bewildered and baffled.  But I could see that she was, or that she had
been, a rather beautiful young woman, though still again the
slenderness of the figure made me think of a saint from a missal.

I was still thinking of her as I followed the sullen and slatternly
servant up the dark stairs.  Once in my new quarters, I glanced
absently about at the sulphur-yellow wallpaper and the melancholy
antiquities that masqueraded as furniture.  Then I came back to the
issue at hand.

"Who is that young woman in black who happened to pass us in the hall?"
I casually inquired.

"_Can_ that!" was the apathetic and quite enigmatic retort of the
bare-armed girl.  I turned to inquire the meaning of this obvious
colloquialism.

"Aw, cage the zooin' bug!" said my new-found and cynical young friend.
"She ain't that kind."

"What is she?" I asked, as I slipped a bill into the startled and
somewhat incredulous hand of toil.  The transformation was immediate.

"She ain't nothin'!" was the answer.  "She's just a four-flush, an
also-ran!  And unless she squares wit' the madam by Sat'rday she's
goin' to do her washin' in somebody else's bath-tub!"

Through this sordid quartz of callousness ran one silver streak of
luck.  It was plain that I was to be on the same floor with the girl in
black.  And that discovery seemed quite enough.

I waited until the maid was lost in the gloom below-stairs and the
house was quiet again.  Then I calmly and quietly stepped out into the
little hall, pushed open the door of the rear room, and slipped inside.
I experienced, as I did so, a distinct and quite pleasurable quickening
of the pulse.

I found myself in a mere cell of a room, with two dormer windows facing
a disorderly vista of chimney-pots and brick walls.  On the sill of one
window stood an almost empty milk-bottle.  Beside the other window was
a trunk marked with the initials "H. W." and the pretty-nearly
obliterated words "Medicine Hat."

About the little room brooded an almost forlorn air of neatness.  On
one wall was tacked a picture postcard inscribed "In the Devil's Pool
at Banff."  On another was a ranch scene, an unmounted photograph which
showed a laughing and clear-browed girl on a white-dappled pinto.  On
the chintz-covered bureau stood a half-filled carton of soda-biscuits.
Beside this, again, lay an empty candy-box.  From the mirror of this
bureau smiled down a face that was familiar to me.  It was a
magazine-print of Harriet Walter, the young Broadway star who had
reached success with the production of _Broken Ties_, the same Harriet
Walter who had been duly announced to marry Percy Adams, the son of the
Traction Magnate.  My own den, I remembered, held an autographed copy
of the same picture.

Beyond this, however, the room held little of interest and nothing of
surprise.  Acting on a sudden and a possibly foolish impulse, after one
final look at the room and its record of courageous struggles, I took a
bank-note from my waistcoat pocket, folded it, opened the top drawer of
the bureau and dropped the bill into it.  Then I stood staring down
into the still open drawer, for before me lay the revolver which the
girl had carried away the night before from Madison Square.

In a few moments I went back to my own room and sat down in the
broken-armed rocking-chair, and tried desperately to find some key to
the mystery.  But no light came to me.

I was still puzzled over it when I heard the sound of steps on the
uncarpeted stairway.  They were very slow and faltering steps.  As I
stood at the half-opened door listening, I felt sure I heard the sound
of something that was half-way between a sob and a gasp.  Then came the
steps again, and then the sound of heavy breathing.  I heard the rustle
of paper as the door of the back room was pushed open, and then the
quick slam of the door.

This was followed by a quiet and almost inarticulate cry.  It was not a
call, and it was not a moan.  But what startled me into sudden action
was the noise that followed.  It was a sort of soft-pedaled thud, as
though a body had fallen to the floor.

I no longer hesitated.  It was clear that something was wrong.  I ran
to the closed door, knocked on it, and a moment later swung it open.

As I stepped into the room I could see the girl lying there, her
upturned face as white as chalk, with bluish-gray shadows about the
closed eyes.  Beside her on the floor lay a newspaper, a flaring
head-lined afternoon edition.

I stood staring stupidly down at the white face for a moment or two
before it came to me that the girl had merely fallen in a faint.  Then,
seeing the slow beat of a pulse in the thin throat, I dropped on one
knee and tore open the neck of her blouse.  Then I got water from the
stoneware jug on the wash-stand and sprinkled the placid and colorless
brow.  I could see, as I lifted her up on the narrow white bed, how
bloodless and ill-nurtured her body was.  The girl was half starved; of
that there was no shadow of doubt.

She came to very slowly.  As I leaned over her, waiting for the
heavy-lidded eyes to open, I let my glance wander back to the newspaper
on the floor.  I there read that Harriet Walter, the young star of the
_Broken Ties_ Company, had met with a serious accident.  It had
occurred while riding down Morningside Avenue in a touring-car driven
by Percy Alward Adams, the son of the well-known Traction Magnate.  The
brake had apparently refused to work on Cathedral Hill, and the car had
collided with a pillar of the Elevated Railway at the corner of
One-hundred-and-ninth Street.  Adams himself had escaped with a
somewhat lacerated arm, but Miss Walter's injuries were more serious.
She had been taken at once to St. Luke's Hospital, but a few blocks
away.  She had not, however, regained consciousness, and practically
all hope of recovery had been abandoned by the doctors.

I was frenziedly wondering what tie could bind these two strangely
diverse young women together when the girl beside me gave signs of
returning life.  I was still sousing a ridiculous amount of water on
her face and neck when her eyes suddenly opened.  They looked up at me,
dazed and wide with wonder.

"What is it?" she asked, gazing about the room.  Then she looked back
at me again.

"I think you must have fallen," I tried to explain.  "But it's all
right; you mustn't worry."

My feeble effort at reassuring her was not effective.  I could see the
perplexed movement of her hands, the unuttered inquiry still in her
eyes.  She lay there, staring at me for a long time.

"You see, I'm your new neighbor," I told her, "and I heard you from my
room."

She did not speak.  But I saw her lips pucker into a little sob that
shook her whole body.  There seemed something indescribably childlike
in the movement.  It took a fight to keep up my air of bland optimism.

"And now," I declared, "I'm going to slip out for a minute and get you
a little wine."

She made one small hand-gesture of protest, but I ignored it.  I dodged
in for my hat, descended the stairs to the street, got Benson on the
wire; and instructed him to send the motor-hamper and two bottles of
Burgundy to me at once.  Then I called up St. Luke's Hospital.  There,
strangely enough, I was refused all information as to Harriet Walter's
condition.  It was not even admitted, in fact, that she was at present
a patient at that institution.

The girl, when I got back, was sitting in a rocking-chair by the
window.  She seemed neither relieved nor disturbed by my return.  Her
eyes were fixed on the blank wall opposite her.  Her colorless face
showed only too plainly that this shock from which she had suffered had
left her indifferent to all other currents of life, as though every
further stroke of fate had been rendered insignificant.  She did not
even turn her eyes when I carried the hamper into the room and opened
it.  She did not look up as I poured the wine and held a glass of it
for her to drink.

She sipped at it absently, brokenly, reminding me of a bird drinking
from a saucer-edge.  But I made her take more of it.  I persisted,
until I could see a faint and shell-like tinge of color creep into her
cheeks.

Then she looked at me, for the first time, with comprehending and
strangely grateful eyes.  She made a move, as though to speak.  But as
she did so I could see the quick gush of tears that came to her eyes
and her gesture of hopelessness as she looked down at the newspaper on
the floor.

"Oh, I want to die!" she cried brokenly and weakly.  "I want to die!"

Her words both startled and perplexed me.  Here, within a few hours'
time, I was encountering the second young person who seemed tired of
life, who was ready and walling to end it.

"What has happened?" I asked, as I held more of the Burgundy out for
her to drink.  Then I picked up the afternoon paper with the flaring
head-lines.

She pointed with an unsteady finger to the paper in my hands.

"Do you know her?" she asked.

'"Yes, I happen to know her," I admitted.

"Have you known her long?" asked the girl.

"Only a couple of years," I answered.  "Since she first went with
Frohman."

The possible truth flashed over me.  They were sisters.  That was the
strange tie that bound them together; one the open and flashing and
opulent, and the other the broken and hidden and hopeless.

"Do you know Harriet Walter?" I asked.

She laughed a little, forlornly, bitterly.  The wine, I imagined, had
rather gone to her head.

"I _am_ Harriet Walter!" was her somewhat startling declaration.

She was still shaken and ill, I could see.  I took the Burgundy glass
from her hand.  I wanted her mind to remain lucid.  There was a great
deal for me still to fathom.

"And they say she's going to die?" she half declared, half inquired, as
her eyes searched my face.

"But what will it mean to you?" I demanded.

She seemed not to have heard; so I repeated the question.

"It means the end," she sobbed, "the end of everything!"

"But why?" I insisted.

She covered her face with her hands.

"Oh, I can't tell you!" she moaned.  "I can't explain."

"But there must be some good and definite reason why this young woman's
death should end everything for you."

The girl looked about her, like a life-prisoner facing the four blank
walls of a cell.  Her face was without hope.  Nothing but utter misery,
utter despair, was written on it.

Then she spoke, not directly to me, but more as though she were
speaking to herself.

"_When she dies, I die too!_"

I demanded to know what this meant.  I tried to burrow down to the root
of the mystery.  But my efforts were useless.  I could wring nothing
more out of the unhappy and tragic-eyed girl.  And the one thing she
preferred just then, I realized, was solitude.  So I withdrew.

The entire situation, however, proved rather too much for me.  The more
I thought it over the more it began to get on my nerves.  So I
determined on a prompt right-about-face.  I decided to begin at the
other end of the line.

My first move was to phone for the car.  Latreille came promptly
enough, but with a look of sophistication about his cynical mouth which
I couldn't help resenting.

"St. Luke's Hospital," I told him as I stepped into the car.

At that institution, however, I was again refused all information as to
the condition of Harriet Walter.  It was not even admitted, when I
became more insistent, that any such person was in the hospital.

"But I'm a friend of this young lady's," I tried to explain.  "And I've
a right to know of her condition."

The calm-eyed official looked at me quite unmoved.

"This young lady seems to have very many friends.  And some of them
seem to be very peculiar."

"What do you mean by that?" I demanded.  For answer he pointed to a
figure pacing up and down in the open street.

"There's another of these friends who've been insisting on seeing her,"
he explained, with a shrug of extenuation.

The uniformed attendant of that carbolized and white-walled temple of
pain must have seen my start as I glanced out at the slowly pacing
figure.  For it was that of a young man wearing a velour hat.  It was
the youth I had met the night before in Madison Square.

"Do you happen to know that man's name?" I asked.

"He gave it as Mallory--James Mallory," was the answer.

I wasted no more time inside those depressing walls.  I was glad to get
out to the street, to the open air and the clear afternoon sunlight.  I
had already decided on my next step.

Whether the man in the velour hat recognized me or not, I could not
say.  If he did, he gave no sign of it.  Yet I could see that he
resented my addressing him, although he showed no surprise as I did so
by name.  It was not until I point-blank asked if he had been inquiring
about Harriet Walter that any trace of interest came into his face.

He replied, with considerable ferocity, that he had.  One glimpse of
the unsteady fingers and twitching eyelids showed me the tension under
which he was struggling.  I felt genuinely sorry for him.

"I happen to know Miss Walter," I told him, "and if you'll be so good
as to step in my car, I can tell you anything you may want to know."

"Is your name Adams?" the white-faced youth suddenly demanded.

"It is not," I answered, with considerable alacrity, for his face was
not pleasant to look at.

"Then why can you tell me what I want to know?" he asked, still eying
me with open hostility.  I struggled to keep my temper.  It was a case
where one could afford to be indulgent.

"If we each have a friend in this lady, it's not unreasonable that we
should be able to be friends ourselves," I told him.  "So let's clear
the cobwebs by a spin down-town."

"Gasoline won't wash my particular cobwebs away," he retorted.  There
was something likable about his audacious young face, even under its
cloud of bitterness.

"Then why couldn't you dine with me, at a very quiet club of mine?" I
suggested.  "Or, better still, on the veranda of the Clairemont, where
we can talk together."

He hesitated at first, but under my pressure he yielded, and we both
got in the car and swung westward, and then up Riverside to the
Clairemont.  There I secured a corner piazza-table, overlooking the
river.  And there I exerted a skill of which I had once been proud, in
ordering a dinner which I thought might appeal to the poignantly
unhappy young man who sat across the table from me.  I could see that
he was still looking at me, every now and then, with both revolt and
sullen bewilderment written on his lean young face.  It would be no
easy matter, I knew, to win his confidence.

"I suppose you think I'm crazy, like the rest of them?" he suddenly
demanded.  I noticed that he had already taken his third drink of wine.

"Why should I think that?"

"I

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