She sat there stilled, but not quieted, under her husband's eye, and watched Worth's meeting with the other man, whom I heard the boy call Jim Edwards, and with whom he shook hands, but who met him, as Mrs. Bowman had, as though there had been something recent between them; not like people bridging a long gap of absence.
And this man, tall, thin, the power in his features contradicted by a pair of soft dark eyes, deep-set, looking out at you with an expression of bafflement, defeat—why did he face Worth with the stare of one drenched, drowned in woe? It wasn't his wedding. He hadn't done Worth any dirt in the matter.
And I was wedged in beside the beautiful dark girl, without having been presented to her, without even having had the luck to hear what name Worth used when he spoke to her. At last the flurry of our coming settled down (though I still felt that we were stuck like a sliver into the wedding party, that the whole thing ached from us) and Dr. Bowman proposed the health of the happy couple, his bedside manner going over pretty well, as he informed Vandeman and the rest of us that the bridegroom was a social leader in Santa Ysobel, and that the hope of its best people was to place him and his bride at the head of things there, leading off with the annual Blossom Festival, due in about a fortnight.
Vandeman responded for himself and his bride, appropriately, with what I'd call a sort of acceptable, fabricated geniality. You could see he was the kind that takes such things seriously, one who would go to work to make a success of any social doings he got into, would give what his set called good parties; and he spoke feelingly of the Blossom Festival, which was the great annual event of a little town. If by putting his shoulder to the wheel he could boost that affair into nation-wide fame and place a garland of rich bloom upon the brow of his fair city, he was willing totake off his neatly tailored coat, roll up his immaculate shirtsleeves and go to it.
There was no time for speech making. The girls wanted to dance; bride and groom were taking the one o'clock train for the south and Coronado. The orchestra swung into "I'll Say She Does."
"Just time for one." Vandeman guided his bride neatly out between the chairs, and they moved away. I turned from watching them to find Worth asking Mrs. Bowman to dance.
"Oh, Worth,dearest! I ought to let one of the girls have you, but—"
She looked helplessly up at him; he smiled down into her tense, suffering face, and paid no attention to her objections. As soon as he carried her off, Jim Edwards glumly took out that one of the twins I had at first supposed to be the elder, the remaining Thornhill girls moved on Dr. Bowman and began nagging him to hunt partners for them.
"Drag something up here," prompted the freckled tomboy, "or I'll make you dance with me yourself." She grabbed a coat lapel, and started away with him.
I turned and laughed into the laughing face of the dark girl. I had no idea of her name, yet a haunting resemblance, a something somehow familiar came across to me which I thought for a moment was only the sweet approachableness of her young femininity.
Bowman had found and collared a partner for Ernestine Thornhill, but that was as far as it went. The little one forebore her threat of making him dance with her, came back to her chair and tucked herself in, snuggling up to the girl beside me, getting hold of a hand and looking at me across it. She rejoiced, itseems, in the nickname of Skeet, for by that the other now spoke to her whisperingly, saying it was too bad about the dance.
"That's nothing," Skeet answered promptly. "I'd a lot rather sit here and talk to you—and your gentleman friend—" with a large wink for me—"if you don't mind."
At the humorous, intimate glance which again passed between me and the dark girl, sudden remembrance came to me, and I ejaculated,
"I know you now!"
"Only now?" smiling.
"You've changed a good deal in seven years," I defended myself.
"And you so very little," she was still smiling, "that I had almost a mind to come and shake hands with you when Ina went to speak to Worth."
I remembered then that it was Worth's recognition of her which had brought him to his feet. I told her of it, and the glowing, vivid face was suddenly all rosy. Skeet regarded the manifestation askance, asking jealously,
"When did you see Worth last, Barbie? You weren't still living in Santa Ysobel when he left, were you?"
I sat thinking while the girlish voices talked on. Barbie—the nickname for Barbara. Barbara Wallace; the name jumped at me from a poster; that's where I first saw it. It linked itself up with what Worth had said over there about the forlorn childhood of this beguiling young charmer. Why hadn't I remembered then? I, too, had my recollections of Barbara Wallace. About seven years before, I hadfirst seen her, a slim, dark little thing of twelve or fourteen, very badly dressed in slinky, too-long skirts that whipped around preposterously thin ankles, blue-black hair dragged away from a forehead almost too fine, made into a bundle of some fashion that belonged neither to childhood nor womanhood, her little, pointed face redeemed by a pair of big black eyes with a wonderful inner light, the eyes of this girl glowing here at my left hand.
The father Worth spoke of brusquely as "the professor" was Elman Wallace, to whom all students of advanced psychology are heavily indebted. The year I heard him, and saw the girl, his course of lectures at Stanford University was making quite a stir. I had been one of a bunch of criminologists, detectives and police chiefs who, during a state convention were given a demonstration of the little girl's powers, closing with a sort of rapid pantomime in which I was asked to take part. A half dozen of us from the audience planned exactly what we were to do. I rushed into the room through one door, holding my straw hat in my left hand, and wiping my brow with a handkerchief with the right. From an opposite door, came two men; one of them fired at me twice with a revolver held in his left hand. I fell, and the second man—the one who wasn't armed—ran to me as I staggered, grabbed my hat, and the two of them went out the door I had entered, while I stumbled through the one by which they had come in. It lasted all told, not half a minute, the idea being for those who looked on to write down what had happened.
Those trained criminologists, supposed to have eyes in their heads, didn't see half that really took place,and saw a-plenty that did not. Most of 'em would have hung the man who snatched my hat. Only one, I remember, noticed that I was shot by a left-handed man. Then the little girl told us what really had occurred, every detail, just as though she had planned it instead of being merely an observer.
"Pardon me," I broke in on the girls. "Miss Wallace, you don't mean to say that you really know me again after seeing me once, seven years ago, in a group of other men at a public performance?"
"Why shouldn't I? You saw me then. You knew me again."
"But you were doing wonderful things. We remember what strikes us as that did me."
She looked at me with a little fading of that glow her face seemed always to hold.
"Most memories are like that," she agreed listlessly. "Mine isn't. It works like a cinema camera; I've only to turn the crank the other way to be looking at any past record."
"But can you—?" I was beginning, when Skeet stopped me, leaning around her companion, bristling at me like a snub-nosed terrier.
"If you want to make a hit with Barbie, cut out the reminiscences. She does loathe being reminded that she was once an infant phenom."
I glanced at my dark eyed girl; she bent her head affirmatively. She wouldn't have been capable of Skeet's rudeness, but plainly Skeet had not overstated her real feeling. I had hardly begun an apology when the dancers rushed back to the table with the information that there was no more than time to make the Los Angeles train; there was an instant grasping of wraps,hasty good-bys, and the party began breaking up with a bang. Worth went out to the sidewalk with them; I sat tight waiting for him to return, and to my surprise, when he finally did appear, Barbara Wallace was with him.
"Don't look so scared!" she said smilingly to me. "I'm only on your hands a few minutes; a package left to be called for."
I had watched them coming back to me at our old table, with its telephone extension, the girl with eyes for no one but Worth, who helped her out of her wrap now with a preoccupied air and,
"Shed the coat, Bobs," adding as he seated her beside him, "The luck of luck that I chanced on you here this evening."
That brought the color into her face; the delicate rose shifted under her translucent skin almost with the effect of light, until that lustrous midnight beauty of hers was as richly glowing as one of those marvellous dark opals of the antipodes.
"Yes," she said softly, with a smile that set two dimples deep in the pink of her cheeks, "wasn't it strange our meeting this way?" Worth wasn't looking at her. He'd signaled a waiter, ordered a pot of black coffee, and was watching its approach. "I didn't go down to the wedding, but Ina herself invited me to come here to-night. I had half a mind not to; then at the last minute I decided I would—and I met you!"
Worth nodded, sat there humped in a brown study while the waiter poured our coffee. The minute the man left us alone, he turned to her with,
"I've got a stunt for you."
"A—a stunt?"
The light failed abruptly in her face; her mouth with its soft, firm molding, its vivid, floral red, like the lips of a child, went down a bit at the clean-cut corners. A small hand fumbled the trimming of her blouse; it was almost as if she laid it over a wounded heart.
"Yes," he nodded. "Jerry's got something in his pocket that'll be pie for you."
She turned to me a look between angry and piteous—the resentment she would not vent on him.
"Is—is Mr. Boyne interested in stunts—such as I used to do?"
"Sure," Worth agreed. "We both are. We—"
"Oh, that was why you wanted me to come back with you?" She had got hold of herself now. She was more poised, but still resentful.
"Bobs," he cut straight across her mood to what he wanted, "Jerry Boyne is going to read you something it took about 'steen blind people to see—and you'll give us the answer." I didn't share his confidence, but I rather admired it as he finished, poising the tongs, "One lump, or two?"
Of course I knew what he meant. My hand was already fumbling in my pocket for the description of Clayte. The girl looked as though she wasn't going to answer him; she moved to shove back her chair. Worth's only recognition of her attitude was to put out a hand quietly, touch her arm, not once looking at her, and say in a lowered tone,
"Steady, Bobs." And then, "Did you say one lump or two?"
"None." Her voice was scarcely audible, but I saw she was going to stay; that Worth was to have his way, to get from her the opinion he wanted—whatever that might amount to. And I passed the paper to him, suggesting,
"Let her read it. This is too public a place to be declaiming a thing of the sort."
She hesitated a minute then gave it such a mere flirt of a glance that I hardly thought she'd seen what it was, before she raised inquiring eyes to mine and asked coldly,
"Why shouldn't that be read—shouted every ten minutes by the traffic officer at Market and Kearny? They'd only think he was paging every other man in the Palace Hotel."
I leaned back and chuckled. After a bare glance, this sharp witted girl had hit on exactly what I'd thought of the Clayte description.
"Is that all? May I go now, Worth?" she said, still with that dashed, disappointed look from one of us to the other. "If you'll just put me on a Haight Street car—I won't wait for—" And now she made a definite movement to rise; but again Worth held her by the mere touch of his fingers on her sleeve.
"Wait, Bobs," he said. "There's more."
"More?" Her eyes on Worth's face talked louder than her tongue, but that also gained fluency as he looked back at her and nodded. "Stunts!" she repeated his word bitterly. "I didn't expect you to come back asking me to do stunts. I hated it all so—working out things like a calculating machine!" Her voice sank to a vehement undertone. "Nobody thinking ofme as human, with human feelings. I have never—done—one stunt—since my father died."
She didn't weaken. She sat there and looked Worth squarely in the eye, yet there was a kind of big gentleness in her refusal, a freedom from petty resentment, that had in it not so much a girl's hurt vanity as the outspoken complaint of a really grieved heart.
"But, Bobs," Worth smiled at her trouble, about the same careless, good-natured smile he had given little Pete when he flipped him the quarter, "suppose you could possibly save me a hundred thousand dollars a minute?"
"Then it's not just a stunt?" She settled slowly back in her chair.
"Certainly not," I said. "This is business—with me, anyhow. Miss Wallace, why do you think a description like that could be shouted on the street without any one being the wiser?"
"Was it supposed to be a description?" she asked, raising her brows a bit.
"The best we could get from sixteen or eighteen people, most of whom have known the man a long time; some of them for eight years."
"And no one—not one of all these people could differentiate him?"
"I've done my best at questioning them."
She gave me one straight, level look, and I wondered a little at the way those velvety black eyes could saw into a fellow. But she put no query, and I had the cheap satisfaction of knowing that she was convinced I'd overlooked no details in the quiz that wentto make up that description. Then she turned to Worth.
"You said I might save you a lot of money. Has the man you're trying here to describe anything to do with money—in large amounts—financial affairs of importance?"
Again the little girl had unconsciously scored with me. To imagine a rabbit like Clayte, alone, swinging such an enormous job was ridiculous. From the first, my mind had been reaching after the others—the big-brained criminals, the planners whose instrument he was. She evidently saw this, but Worth answered her.
"He's quite a financier, Bobs. He walked off with nearly a million cash to-day."
"From you?" with a quick breath.
"I'm the main loser if he gets away with it."
"Tell me about it."
And Worth gave her a concise account of the theft and his own share in the affair. She listened eagerly now, those innocent great eyes growing big with the interest of it. With her there was no blind stumbling over Worth's motive in buying a suitcase sight unseen. I had guessed, but she understood completely and unquestioningly. When he had finished, she said solemnly,
"You know, don't you, that, if you've got your facts right—if these things you've told me are square, even cubes of fact—they prove Clayte among the wonderful men of the world?"
Worth's big brown paw went out and covered her little hand that lay on the table's edge.
"Now we're getting somewhere," he encouraged her. As for me, I merely snorted.
"Wonderful man, my eye! He's got a wonderful gang behind him."
"Oh, you should have told me that you know there is a gang, Mr. Boyne," she said simply. "Of course, then, the result is different."
"Well," I hedged, "there's a gang all right. But suppose there wasn't, how would you find any wonderfulness in a creature as near nothing as this Clayte?"
She sat and thought for a moment, drawing imaginary lines on the table top, finally looking up at me with a narrowing of the lids, a tightening of the lips, which gave an extraordinary look of power to her young feminine face.
"In that case, Clayte would inevitably be one of the wonderful men of the world," she repeated her characterization with the placid, soft obstinacy of falling, snow. "Didn't you stop a minute—one little minute, Mr. Boyne—to think it wonderful that a man so devoid of personality as that—" she slanted a slim finger across the description of Clayte—"Didn't you add up in your mind all that you told me about the men disagreeing as to which side he parted his hair on, whether he wore tan shoes or black, a fedora or derby, smoked or didn't,—absolutely nothing left as to peculiarities of face, figure, movement, expression, manner or habit to catch the eye of one single observer among the sixteen or eighteen you questioned—surely you added that up, Mr. Boyne? What result did you get?"
"Nothing," I admitted. "To hear you repeat it, of course it sounds as if the man was a freak. But hewasn't. He was just one of those fellows that are born utterly commonplace, and slide through life without getting any marks put on 'em."
"And is it nothing that this man became a teller in a bank without infringing at all on the circle of his nothingness? Remained so shadowy that neither the president nor cashier can, after eight years' association, tell the color of his hair and eyes? Then add the fact that he is the one clerk in the bank without a filed photograph and description on record with your agency—what result now, Mr. Boyne?"
"A coincidence," I said, rather hastily.
"Don't, please, Mr. Boyne!" her eyes glowed softly as she smiled her mild sarcasm. "Admit that he has ceased to be a freak and becomes a marvel."
"As you put it—" I began, but she cut in on me with,
"I haven't put it yet. Listen." She was smiling still, but it was plain she was thoroughly in earnest. "When this cipher—this nought—this zero—manages to annex to himself a million dollars that doesn't belong to him, his nothingness gains a specific meaning. The zero is an important factor in mathematics. I think we have placed a digit before the long string of ciphers of Clayte's nothingness."
"Nothing and nothing—make nothing." I spoke more brusquely because I was irritated by her logic. "You called the turn when you spoke of him as a zero. There are digits to be added, but they're the gang that planned and helped—and used zero Clayte as their tool. You're talking of those digits, not Clayte."
"I believe Bobs'll find them for you, Jerry—if you'll let her," said Worth.
"Oh, I'll let anybody do anything"—a bit nettled. "I'm ready to have our friend Clayte take his place, with the pyramids and the hanging gardens of Babylon, among the earth's wonders; but you've got to show me."
"All right." Worth gave the girl a look that brought something of that wonderful rose flush fluttering back into her cheeks. "I'm betting on her. Go to it, Bobsie—let him in on your mathematical logic."
"You used the word 'coincidence,' Mr. Boyne." She leaned across toward me, eyes bright, little finger tip marking her points. "Allow one coincidence—that the only description, the only photograph missing from your files are those of the self-effacing Clayte. To-day Clayte has proved to be a thief—"
"In seven figures," Worth threw in, and she smiled at him.
"You would call that another coincidence, Mr. Boyne?"
I nodded, rather unable at the moment to think of a better word to use.
"Two coincidences," she went on,—"we are still in mathematics—you can't add. They run by geometrical progression into the impossible."
The phone rang. While I turned to answer it, my mind was still hunting a comeback to this. The call was from Foster, just in from Ocean View and reporting for instructions. Covering the transmitter with my hand, I told Worth the situation and asked,
"Any suggestions?"
"Not I," he shook his head. I added, a bit sarcastically,
"Or you, Miss Wallace?"
"Yes," she surprised me. "Have your man Foster find three women who have seen Edward Clayte; get from them the color of his hair and eyes; tell him to have them be exact about it."
"Fine! But you know they'll not agree, any more than the other people agreed."
"Oh, yes they will," she laughed at me a little. "Don't you notice that a girl always says a blue-eyed man or a brown-eyed man? That's what she sees when she first meets him, and it sticks in her mind. Girls and women sort out people by types; small differences in color mean something to them."
I didn't keep Foster waiting any longer.
"Hello," I spoke quickly into the transmitter. "Get busy and dig out any women clerks of the bank, stenographers, scrub-women there, or whatever, and ask them particularly as to the exact shade of Clayte's hair and eyes. Get Mrs. Griggsby again at the St. Dunstan. I want at least three women who can give these points exactly. Exactly, understand?"
He did, and I thanked Miss Wallace for her suggestion.
"Now that," I said, "is what I want; a good, practical idea—"
"And it won't be a bit of use in the world to you," she laughed across the table into my eyes. "Why, Mr. Boyne, you've found out already that there are too many Edward Claytes, speaking in physical terms, for you to run one down by description. There are three of him here, within sight of our table right now—and the place isn't crowded."
I grinned in half grudging agreement, and found nothing to say. It was Worth who spoke.
"Like to have you go a step further in this, if you would," and when she shook her head, he went on a bit sharply. "See here, Bobs; you and I used to be pals, didn't we?" She nodded, her look brightening. "Well then, here's the biggest game I've been up against since I crawled out of the trenches and shucked my uniform. I come to you and give you the high-sign—and you throw me down. You don't want to play with me—is that it?"
"Oh, Worth! I do. I do want to play with you," she was almost in tears now. "But you see, I didn't quite understand. I felt as though you were sort of putting me through my paces."
"Sure not," Worth drove it at her like a turbulent urchin. "I'm having the time of my young life with this thing, and I want to take you in on it."
"If—if you fail you lose a lot of money; wasn't that what you said?" she questioned.
"Oh, yes," he nodded, "Nothing in it if there weren't a gamble."
"And if he wins out, he makes quite a respectable pile," I added.
"What I want of you now," he explained, "is to go with us to Clayte's room at the St. Dunstan—the room he disappeared from—look it over and tell us how he got out and where he went."
He made his request light-heartedly; she considered it after the same fashion; it seemed to me all absurdity.
"To-morrow morning—Sunday," she said. "No office to-morrow," she sipped the last of her blackcoffee slowly. "All the rest of the facts there ever will be about Edward Clayte are in that room—aren't they?" Her voice was musing; she looked straight ahead of her as she finished softly, "What time do we go?"
"Early. Does nine o'clock suit you?" Worth didn't even glance at me as he made this arrangement for us both. "We'd scoot up there now if it wasn't so late."
"I've no doubt you'll find the place carpeted with zeros and hung with noughts and ciphers." I couldn't refrain from joshing her a little. She took it with a smile glanced across the room, looked a little surprised, and half rose with,
"Why, there they are for me now."
I couldn't see anybody that she might mean, except a man who had walked the length of the place talking to the head waiter, and now stood arguing at the corner of what had been Bronson Vandeman's supper table. This man evidently had his attention directed to us, turned, looked, and in the moment of his crossing I saw that it was Cummings. There was not even the usual tight-lipped half smile under that cropped mustache of his.
"Good evening." He looked at our faces, uttering none of the surprise he plainly felt, letting the two words do for greeting to us all, and, as it seemed, to me, an expression of disapproval as well. The young lady replied first.
"Oh, Mr. Cummings, did they send you for me? Where are the others?"
She had come to her feet, and reached for the coatwhich Worth was holding more as if he meant to keep it than put it on her.
"I left your chaperone waiting in the machine," Cumming's tone and look carried a plain hurry-up. Worth took his time about the coat, and spoke low to the girl while he helped her into it.
"You'll go with us to-morrow morning?"
She gave me one of those adorable smiles that brought the dimples momentarily in her cheeks.
"If Mr. Boyne wants me. He hasn't said yet."
"Do I need to?" I asked. The question seemed reasonable. There she stood, such a very pretty girl, between her two cavaliers who looked at each other with all the traditional hostility that belonged to the situation. She smiled on both, and didn't neglect me. I settled the matter with,
"Worth has your address; we'll call for you in my machine." And I got the idea that Cummings was asking questions about it as he went away holding her arm.
"Do you think the little girl will really be of any use?" I spoke to the back of Worth's head as he continued to stare after them.
"Sure. I know she will." He shoved his crumpled napkin in among the coffee service, and we moved toward the desk. "Sure she will," he repeated. "Wonder where she met Cummings."
At the Palace Hotel Sunday morning where I went to pick up Worth before we should call for little Miss Wallace, he met me in high spirits and with an enthusiasm that demanded immediate physical action.
"Heh," I said, "you look fine. Must have slept well."
"Make it rested, and I'll go you," he came back cheerfully.
He'd already been out, going down to the Grant Avenue corner for an assortment of Bay cities papers not to be had at the hotel news-stands, so that he could see whether our canny announcement of Clayte's fifteen thousand dollar defalcation had received discreet attention from the Associated Press.
For my part, our agency had been able to get hold of three women who had seen Clayte and remembered the event; Mrs. Griggsby; a stenographer at the bank; and the woman who sold newspapers at the St. Dunstan corner. Miss Wallace's suggestion had proven itself, for these three agreed with fair exactness, and the description run in the late editions of the city papers was less vague than the others. It gave Clayte's eyes as a pale gray-blue, and his hair as dull brown, eliminating at least all brown-eyed men. Worth asserted warmly,
"That girl's going to be useful to us, Boyne." Icouldn't well disagree with him, after using her hint. We were getting out of the elevator on the office floor when he looked at me, grinned boyishly, and added, "What would you say if I told you I was being shadowed?"
"That I thought it very likely," I nodded. "Also I might hazard a guess at whose money is paying for it."
He gave me a quick glance, but asked no questions. I could see he was enjoying his position, up to the hilt, considered the attentions of a trailer as one of its perquisites.
"Keep your eyes open and you'll spot him as we go out," he said as he left the key at the desk.
It was hardly necessary to keep my eyes open to see the lurking figure over beyond the easy-chairs, which started galvanically as we passed through the court, and a moment later came sidling after us. Little Pete had left my machine at the Market Street entrance—Worth was to drive me—and we wheeled away from a disappointed man racing for the taxi line around the corner.
"More power to his legs," Worth said.
"Oh, I don't know," I grunted as we cut into Montgomery, negotiated the corner onto Bush Street's clear way, striking a fair clip at once. "That end of him already works better than the other. How did you get wise?"
"Barbara Wallace telephoned me to look out for him," he smiled, and let my car out another notch once we'd passed the traffic cop at Kearny.
I myself had foreseen the possibility—but only as a possibility—that Dykeman would put a man on Worth's coat-tails, since I knew Dykeman and hadbeen at that bank meeting; yet I had not regarded it as likely enough to warn Worth; and here was this girl phoning him to look out for a trailer. Was this some more of her deductive reasoning, or had Cummings dropped a hint?
She was waiting for us in front of the Haight Street boarding house that served her for a home, and we tucked her between us on the roadster's wide seat. At the St. Dunstan we found my man, left there since the hour of the alarm the day before, and everybody belonging to the management surly and glum. The clerk handed me Clayte's key across the morning papers spread out on his desk. Apartment houses dislike notoriety of this sort, and the St. Dunstan set up to be as rabidly respectable, as chemically pure as any in the city. Well, no use their blaming me; Clayte was their misfortune; they couldn't expect me to keep the matter out of print entirely.
The three of us crowded into the automatic elevator, and I pressed the seventh floor button. The girl's eyes shone under the wisp of veil twisted around a knowing little turban. She liked the taste of the adventure.
"That man came this way—with that suitcase," she breathed, "—maybe set it down right there when he pressed the button—just as Mr. Boyne did now!"
It was a fine morning; the shades had been left up, and Clayte's room when I opened the door was ablaze with sunlight.
"How delightful!" Barbara Wallace stopped on the threshold and looked about her. I expected the scientific investigating to begin; but no—she was all taken up with the beauty of sunlight and view.
The seventh was the top floor. The St. Dunstan stood almost at the summit where Nob Hill slants obliquely to north and east, and Powell Street dizzies down the steep descent to North Beach and the Bay. The girl had run to a window, and was looking out toward the marvelous show of blue-green water and distant Berkeley hills.
"Will you open this window for me, please?" she asked. I stepped to her side, forestalling Worth who was eyeing the room's interior with curiosity.
"You'll notice the burglar-proof sash locks," I said as I manipulated this one. She gave only casual interest, her attention still on the view beyond. The steel latch, fastened to the upper sash, locked into the socket on the lower sash by a lever-catch. "See? I must pull out this little lever before I can push the hasp back with my thumb—so. Now the window may be shoved up," and I illustrated.
"Yes," she nodded; then, "Look at the wisps of fog around Tamalpais's top. Worth, come here and see the violet shadows of the clouds on the bay."
"North wind coming up," agreed Worth, stepping to the farther window.
"It's bringing in the fog," she said; then abruptly, giving me the first hint that little Miss Wallace considered herself on the job, "Will it not latch by itself if you jam it shut hard?"
"It will not." I illustrated with a bang. The latch still remained open. "I must close it by hand." I pushed the hasp into the keeper, and, snap—the lever shot back and it was fast.
"But a window like that couldn't be opened fromoutside, even without the locking lever," she remarked, gazing again toward the Marin shore.
"A man with the know—a burglar—can open the ordinary window latch in less than a minute," I told her. "With a jimmy pinched between the sash and the sill, a recurring pressure starts the latch back; nothing to hold it. This—unless he cuts the glass—is burglar-proof."
Worth, at her shoulder, now looked down the sheer descent which exaggerated the seven stories of the St. Dunstan; because of its crowning position on the hill and the intersection of streets, we looked over the roofs of the houses before us, far above their chimney tops. I caught his eye and grinned across the girl's head, suggesting,
"Besides, we weren't trying to find how some one could break into this room, but how they could break out. Even if the latches had not been locked, there wouldn't be an answer in these windows—unless Clayte could fly."
"Might have climbed from one window ledge to the next and so made his way to the fire-escape," Worth said, but I shook my head.
"He'd be seen from the windows by the tenants on six floors—and nobody saw him. Might as well take the elevator or the stairs—which he didn't."
But the girl wasn't listening to any of this. Her expression attentive, alert, she was passing her hand around the edge of the glass of either sash, as though she still dwelt on my suggestion of cutting the pane; and as we watched her, she murmured to herself,
"Yes, flying would be a good way." It made me laugh.
And then she turned away from the windows and had no more interest in any of them, going with me all over the rest of the room with rather the air of a person who thought of renting it than a high-brow criminal investigator hunting clews.
"He lived here—years, you say?" I nodded. She slid her hand over the plush cushions of a morris chair, threw back the covers of an iron bed in one corner and felt of the mattress, then went and stood before the bare little dresser. "Why, the place expresses no more personality than a room in a transient hotel!"
"He hadn't any personality," I growled, and got the flicker of a smile from her eye.
"What about those library books he carried in the suitcase?" Worth came in with an echo from the bank meeting.
"Some more bunk," I said morosely. "So far we've not been able to locate him as a patron of any public or private library, and the hotel clerk's sure his mail never contained a correspondence course—in fact, neither here nor at the bank can any one remember his getting any mail. If he ever carried books in that suitcase as Knapp believed, it was several years back."
"Several years back," Miss Wallace repeated low.
"Myself, I've given up the idea of his studying. This crime doesn't look to me like any sudden temptation of a model bank clerk, spending his spare hours over correspondence courses. I rather expect to find him just plain crook."
"Oh, no," the girl objected. "It's too big and too well done to have been planned by a dull, commonplace crook."
"Right you are," I agreed, with restored good humor. "A keen brain planned this, but not Clayte's. There had to be an instrument—and that was Clayte—also, likely, one or more to help in the getaway."
The getaway! That brought us back with a thump to the present moment. Our pretty girl had been all over the shop now, glanced into bathroom, closet and cupboard, noted abandoned hats, clothing and shoes, the electric plate where Clayte got his breakfast coffee and toast, asked without much interest where he ate his other meals, and nodded agreeingly when she found that he'd been only an occasional customer at the neighboring restaurants, never regular, apparently eating here and there down-town. She seemed to get something out of that; what I didn't know.
"You speak of this crime not being committed on impulse," she turned to me at length. "How long ahead should you say he planned it?"
"Or had it planned and prepared for him," I reminded her.
"Well, that, then," she conceded with slight impatience. "How long do you think it might have been planned or prepared for? Years?"
"Hardly that. Not more than a year probably. A gang like this wouldn't hold together on a proposition for many months."
The black brows over those clear, childlike eyes, puckered a bit. I saw she wasn't at all satisfied with what I had said.
"Made all the observations you want to, Bobs?" Worth asked.
"All here. I want to see the roof." She gave us rather a mechanical smile as she silently ticked herpoints off on her fingers, appealing to me with, "I'm depending upon you for such facts as I have been unable to observe for myself, so if you give me wrong facts—make mistakes—I'll make mistakes in deduction."
There was such confidence in her deductive abilities that a tinge of irony crept into my tones as I replied,
"I'll be very careful what opinions I hold."
"I don't mind the opinions," this astounding young woman took me up gaily. "I never have any of my own, so I don't pay attention to anybody else's. Butdobe careful of your facts!"
"I'll try to," was all I said. Worth cut in with,
"Do you consider the roof another fact, Bobs?"
"I hope to find facts there," she answered promptly.
"Remember," I said, "your theory means another man up there, and you haven't yet—"
"Please, Mr. Boyne, don't take two and two and make five of them at this stage of the game," she checked me hastily, and I left them together while I made a hurried survey of the hall ceilings, looking for the scuttle. There was no hatchway in view, so I started down to the clerk to make inquiry. As I passed Clayte's open door, Miss Wallace seemed to be adjusting her turban before the dresser mirror, while Worth waited impatiently.
"Just a minute," I called. "I'll be right back," and I ducked into the elevator.
When I returned with a key and the information that the way to the roof ran through the janitor's tool-room at the far end of the hall, I found my young people already out there. Worth was trying the tool-room door.
"Got the key?" he called. "It's locked."
"Yes." I took my time fitting and turning it. "How did you know this was the room?"
"I didn't," briefly. "Bobs walked out here, and I followed her. She said we'd want into this one."
She'd guessed right again! I wheeled on her, ejaculating,
"For the love of Mike! Tell a mere man how you deduced this stairway. Feminine intuition, I suppose."
I hadn't meant to be offensive with that last, but her firm little chin was in the air as she countered,
"Is it a stairway? It might be a ladder, you know."
It was a ladder, an iron ladder, as I found when I ushered them in. My eyes snapped inquiry at her.
"Very simple," she said. Worth was pushing aside pails and boxes to make a better way for her to the ladder's foot. "There wouldn't be a roof scuttle in the rented rooms, so I knew when you called in to tell us there was none in the halls."
"I didn't. I said nothing of the sort." Where was the girl's fine memory that she couldn't recollect aman's words for the little time I'd been gone! "All I said was, 'Just a minute and I'll be back.'"
"Yes, that's all you said to Worth." She glanced at the boy serenely as he waited for her at the ladder's foot. "He's not a trained observer; he doesn't deduce even from what he does observe." There were twinkling lights in her black eyes. "But what your hurried trip to the office said to me was that you'd gone for the key of the room that led to the roof scuttle."
Well, that was reasonable—simple enough, too; but,
"This room? How did you find it?"
She stepped to the open door and placed the tip of a gloved finger on the nickeled naught that marked the panels.
"The significant zero again, Mr. Boyne," she laughed. "Here it means the room is not a tenanted one, and is therefore the way to the roof. Shall we go there?"
"Well, young lady," I said as I led her along the trail Worth had cleared, "it must be almost as bad to see everything that way—in minute detail—as to be blind."
"Carry on!" Worth called from the top of the ladder, reaching down to aid the girl. She laughed back at me as she started the short climb.
"Not at all bad! You others seem to me only half awake to what is about you—only half living," and she placed her hand in the strong one held down to her. As Worth passed her through the scuttle to the roof, I saw her glance carelessly at the hooks and staples, the clumsy but adequate arrangement for locking the hatch, and, following her, gave them more careful attention, wondering what she had seen—plenty that Idid not, no doubt. They had no tale to tell my eyes.
Once outside, she stopped a minute with Worth to adjust herself to the sharp wind which swept across from the north. Here was a rectangular space surrounded by walls which ran around its four sides to form the coping, unbroken in any spot; a gravel-and-tar roof, almost flat, with the scuttle and a few small, dust covered skylights its only openings, four chimney-tops its sole projections. It was bare of any hiding-place, almost as clear as a tennis court.
We made a solemn tour of inspection; I wasn't greatly interested—how could I be, knowing that between this roof and my fugitive there had been locked windows, and a locked door under reliable human eyes? Still, the lifelong training of the detective kept me estimating the possibilities of a getaway from the roof—if Clayte could have reached it. Worth crossed to where the St. Dunstan fire escape came up from the ground to end below us at a top floor window. I joined him, explaining as we looked down,
"Couldn't have made it that way; not by daylight. In open view all around."
"Think he stayed up here till dark?" Worth suggested, quite as though the possibility of Clayte's coming here at all was settled.
"My men were all over this building—roof to cellar—within the hour. They'd not have overlooked a crack big enough for him to hide in. Put yourself in Clayte's place. Time was the most valuable thing in the world with him right then. If ever he got up to this roof, he'd not waste a minute longer on it than he had to."
"Let's see what's beyond, then," and Worth led the way to the farther end.
The girl didn't come with us. Having been once around the roof coping, looking, it seemed to me, as much at the view as anything else, she now seemed content to settle herself on a little square of planking, a disused scuttle top or something of the sort, in against one of the chimneys where she was sheltered from the wind. Rather to my surprise, I saw her thoughtfully pulling off her gloves, removing her turban, all the time with a curiously disinterested air. I was reminded of what Worth had said the night before about the way her father trained her. Probably she regarded the facts I'd furnished her, or that she'd picked up for herself, much as she used to the problems in concentration her father spread in the high chair tray of her infancy. I turned and left her with them, for Worth was calling me to announce a fact I already knew, that the adjoining building had a roof some fifteen feet below where we stood, and that the man, admitting good gymnastic ability, might have reached it.
"Sure," I said. "But come on. We're wasting time here."
We turned to go, and then stopped, both of us checked instantly by what we saw. The girl was sitting in a strange pose, her feet drawn in to cross beneath her body, slender hands at the length of the arms meeting with interlaced finger-tips before her, the thumbs just touching; shoulders back, chin up, eyes—big enough at any time, now dilated to look twice their size—velvet circles in a white face. Like a Buddha; I'd seen her sit so, years before, an undersized girl doing stunts for her father in a public hall; and even then she'd been in a way impressive. But now, in the fullness of young beauty, her fine head relieved against the empty blue of the sky, the free winds whipping loose flying ends of her dark hair, she held the eye like a miracle.
Sitting here so immovably, she looked to me as though life had slid away from her for the moment, the mechanical action of lungs and heart temporarily suspended, so that mind might work unhindered in that beautiful shell. No, I was wrong. She was breathing; her bosom rose and fell in slow but deep, placid inhalations and exhalations. And the pale face might be from the slower heart-beat, or only because the surface blood had receded to give more of strength to the brain.
The position of head of a Bankers' Security Agency carries with it a certain amount of dignity—a dignity which, since Richardson's death, I have maintained better than I have handled other requirements of the business he left with me. I stood now feeling like a fool. I'd grown gray in the work, and here in my prosperous middle life, a boy's whim and a girl's pretty face had put me in the position of consulting a clairvoyant. Worse, for this was a wild-cat affair, without even the professional standing of establishments to which I knew some of the weak brothers in my line sometimes sneaked for ghostly counsel. If it should leak out, I was done for.
I suppose I sort of groaned, for I felt Worth put a restraining hand on my arm, and heard his soft,
"Psst!"
The two of us stood, how long I can't say, somethingbesides the beauty of the young creature, even the dignity of her in this outré situation getting hold of me, so that I was almost reverent when at last the rigidity of her image-like figure began to relax, the pretty feet in their silk stockings and smart pumps appeared where they belonged, side by side on the edge of the planking, and she looked at us with eyes that slowly gathered their normal expression, and a smile of rare human sweetness.
"Itishorrid to see—and I loathe doing it!" She shook her curly dark head like a punished child, and stayed a minute longer, eyes downcast, groping after gloves and hat. "I thought maybe I'd get the answer before you saw me—sitting up like a trained seal!"
"Like a mighty pretty little heathen idol, Bobs," Worth amended.
"Well, it's the only way I can really concentrate—effectively. But this is the first time I've done it since—since father died."
"And never again for me, if that's the way you feel about it." Worth crossed quickly and stood beside her, looking down. She reached a hand to him; her eyes thanked him; but as he helped her to her feet I was struck by a something poised and confident that she seemed to have brought with her out of that strange state in which she had just been.
"Doesn't either of you want to hear the answer?" she asked. Then, without waiting for reply, she started for the scuttle and the ladder, bare headed, carrying her hat. We found her once more adjusting turban and veil before the mirror of Clayte's dresser. She faced around, and announced, smiling steadily across at me,
"Your man Clayte left this room while Mrs. Griggsby was kneeling almost on its threshold—left it by that window over there. He got to the roof by means of a rope and grappling hook. He tied the suitcase to the lower end of the rope, swung it out of the window, went up hand over hand, and pulled the suitcase up after him. That's the answer I got."
It was? Well, it was a beaut! Only Worth Gilbert, standing there giving the proceeding respectability by careful attention and a grave face, brought me down to asking with mild jocularity,
"He did? He did all that? Well, please ma'am, who locked the window after him?"
"He locked the window after himself."
"Oh, say!" I began in exasperation—hadn't I just shown the impractical little creature that those locks couldn't be manipulated from outside?
"Wait. Examine carefully the wooden part of the upper sash, at the lock—again," she urged, but without making any movement to help. "You'll find what we overlooked before; the way he locked the sash from the outside."
I turned to the window and looked where she had said; nothing. I ran my fingers over the painted surface of the wood, outside, opposite the latch, and a queer, chilly feeling went down my spine. I jerked out my knife, opened it and scraped at a tiny inequality.
"There is—is something—" I was beginning, when Worth crowded in at my side and pushed his broad shoulders out the window to get a better view of my operations, then commanded,
"Let me have that knife." He took it from myfingers, dug with its blade, and suddenly from the inside I saw a tiny hole appear in the frame of the sash beside the lock hasp. "Here we are!" He brought his upper half back into the room and held up a wooden plug, painted—dipped in paint—the exact color of the sash. It had concealed a hole; pierced the wood from out to in.
"And she saw that in her trance," I murmured, gaping in amazement at the plug.
I heard her catch her breath, and Worth scowled at me,
"Trance? What do you mean, Boyne? She doesn't go into a trance."
"That—that—whatever she does," I corrected rather helplessly.
"Never mind, Mr. Boyne," said the girl. "It isn't clairvoyance or anything like that, however it looks."
"But I wouldn't have believed any human eyes could have found that thing. I discovered it only by sense of touch—and that after you told me to hunt for it. You saw it when I was showing you the latch, did you?"
"Oh, I didn't see it." She shook her head. "I found it when I was sitting up there on the roof."
"Guessed at it?"
"I never guess." Indignantly. "When I'd cleared my mind of everything else—had concentrated on just the facts that bore on what I wanted to know—how that man with the suitcase got out of the room and left it locked behind him—I deduced the hole in the sash by elimination."
"By elimination?" I echoed. "Show me."
"Simple as two and two," she assented. "Out ofthe door? No; Mrs. Griggsby; so out of the window. Down? No; you told why; he would be seen; so, up. Ladder? No; too big for one man to handle or to hide; so a rope."
"But the hole in the sash?"
"You showed me the only way to close that lock from the outside. There was no hole in the glass, so there must be in the sash. It was not visible—you had been all over it, and a man of your profession isn't a totally untrained observer—so the hole was plugged. I hadn't seen the plug, so it was concealed by paint—"
I was trying to work a toothpick through the plughole. She offered me a wire hairpin, straightened out, and with it I pushed the hasp into place from outside, saw the lever snap in to hold it fast. I had worked the catch as Clayte had worked it—from outside.
"How did you know it wasthiswindow?" I asked, forced to agree that she had guessed right as to the sash lock. "There are two more here, either of which—"
"No, please, Mr. Boyne. Look at the angle of the roof that cuts from view any one climbing from this window—not from the others."
We were all leaning in the window now, sticking our heads out, looking down, looking up.
"I can't yet see how you get the rope and hook," I said. "Still seems to me that an outside man posted on the roof to help in the getaway is more likely."
"Maybe. I can't deal with things that are merely likely. It has to be a fact—or nothing—for my use. I know that there wasn't any second man because of the nicks Clayte's grappling hook has left in the cornice up there."
"Nicks!" I said, and stood like a bound boy at a husking, without a word to say for myself. Of course, in this impasse of the locked windows, my men and I had had some excuse for our superficial examination of the roof. Yet that she should have seen what we had passed over—seen it out of the corner of her eye, and be laughing at me—was rather a dose to swallow. She'd got her hair and her hat and veil to her liking, and she prompted us,
"So now you want to get right down stairs—don't you—and go up through that other building to its roof?"
I stared. She had my plan almost before I had made it.
At the St. Dunstan desk where I returned the keys, little Miss Wallace had a question of her own to put to the clerk.
"How long ago was this building reroofed?" she asked with one of her dark, softly glowing smiles.
"Reroofed?" repeated the puzzled clerk, much more civil to her than he had been to me. "I don't know that it ever was. Certainly not in my time, and I've been here all of four years."
"Not in four years? You're sure?"
"Sure of that, yes, miss. But I can find exactly." The fellow behind the desk was rising with an eagerness to be of service to her, when she cut him short with,
"Thank you. Four years would be exact enough for my purpose." And she followed a puzzled detective and, if I may guess, an equally wondering Worth Gilbert out into the street.
The neighbor to the south of the St. Dunstan was the Gold Nugget Hotel, a five story brick building and not at all pretentious as a hostelry. I knew the place mildly, and my police training, even better than such acquaintance as I had with this particular dump, told me what it was. Through the windows we could see guests, Sunday papers littered about them, half smoked cigars in their faces, and hats which had a general tendency to tilt over the right eye. And here suddenly I realized the difference between Miss Barbara Wallace, a scientist's daughter, and some feminine sleuth we might have had with us.
"Take her back to the St. Dunstan, Worth," I suggested. Then, as I saw they were both going to resist, "She can't go in here. I'll wait for you if you like."
"Don't know why we shouldn't let Bobs in on the fun, same as you and me, Jerry." That was the way Worth put it. I took a side glance at his attitude in this affair—that he'd bought and was enjoying an eight hundred thousand dollar frolic, offering to share it with a friend; and saying no more, I wheeled and swung open the door for them. The man at the desk looked at me, calling a quick,
"Hello, Jerry—what's up?"
"Hello, Kite. How'd you come here?"
The Kite as a hotelman was a new one on me. Last I knew of him, he was in the business of making book at the Emeryville track; and I supposed—if I ever thought of him—that he'd followed the ponies south across the border. As I stepped close to the counter, he spoke low, his look one of puzzled and somewhat anxious inquiry.
"Running straight, Jerry. You may ask the Chief. What can I do for you?"
Rather glad of the luck that gave me an old acquaintance to deal with, I told him, described Clayte, Worth and Miss Wallace standing by listening; then asked if Kite had seen him pass through the hotel going out the previous day at some time around one o'clock, carrying a brown, sole leather suitcase.
The readers of the Sunday papers who had been lured from their known standards of good manners into the sending of sundry interested glances in the direction of our sparkling girl, took the cue from the Kite's scowl to bury themselves for good in the voluminous sheets they held, each attending strictly to his own business, as is the etiquette of places like the Gold Nugget.
"About one o'clock, you say?" Kite muttered, frowning, twisted his head around and called down a back passage, "Louie—Oh, Louie!" and when an overalled porter, rather messy, shuffled to the desk, put the low toned query, "D'you see any stranger guy gripping a sole leather shirt-box snoop by out yestiddy, after one, thereabouts?" And I added the information,
"Medium height and weight, blue eyes, light brown hair, smooth face."
Louie looked at me dubiously.
"How big a guy?" he asked.
"Five feet seven or eight; weighs about hundred and forty."
"Blue eyes you say?"
"Light blue—gray blue."
"How was he tucked up?"
"Blue serge suit, black shoes, black derby. Neat, quiet dresser."
Louie's eyes wandered over the guests in the office questioningly. I began to feel impatient. If there was any place in the city where my description of Clayte would differentiate him, make him noticeable by comparison, it was here. Neat, quiet dressers were not dotting this lobby.
"Might be Tim Foley?" he appealed to the Kite, who nodded gravely and chewed his short mustache. "Would he have a big scar on his left cheek?"
"He would not," I said shortly. "He wasn't a guest here, and you don't know him. Get this straight now: a stranger, going through here, out; about one o'clock; carried a suitcase."
"Bulls after him?" Louie asked, and I turned away from him wearily.
"Kite," I said, "let me up to your roof."
"Sure, Jerry." Released, the porter went on to gather up a pile of discarded papers.
"Could he—the man I've described—come through here—through this office and neither you nor Louie see him?" I asked. The Kite brought a box of cigars from under the counter with,
"My treat, gentlemen. Naw, Jerry; sure not—not that kind of a guy. Louie'd 'a' spotted him. Most observing cuss I ever seen."
Miss Wallace, taking all this in, seemed amused. As I turned to lead to the elevator I found that again she wanted a question of her own answered.
"Mr. Kite," she began and I grinned; Kite wasn't the Kite's surname or any part of his name; "Who is the guest here with the upstairs room—on the top floor—has had the same room right along—for five or six years—but doesn't—"
"Go easy, ma'am, please!" Kite's little eyes were popping; he dragged out a handkerchief and fumbled it around his forehead. "I've not been here for any five or six years—no, nor half that time. Since I've been here most of our custom is transient. Nobody don't keep no room five or six years in the Gold Nugget."
"Back up," I smiled at his excitement. "To my certain knowledge Steve Skeels has had a room here longer than that. Hasn't he been with you ever since the place was rebuilt after the earthquake?"
"Steve?" the Kite repeated. "I forgot him. Yeah—he keeps a little room up under the roof."
"Has he had it for as long as four years?" the young lady asked.
"Search me," the Kite shook his head.
But Louie the overalled, piloting us the first stage of our journey in a racketty old elevator that he seemed to pull up by a cable, so slow it was, grumbled an assent to the same question when it was put to him, and confirmed my belief that Skeels came into the hotel as soon as it was rebuilt, and had kept the same room ever since.
Miss Wallace seemed interested in this; but all the time we were making the last lap, by an iron stairway, to that roof-house we had seen from the top of the St. Dunstan; all the time Louie was unlocking the door there to let us out, instructing us to be sure to relock it and bring him the key, and to yell for him down the elevator shaft because the bell was busted, the quiet smile of Miss Barbara Wallace disturbed me. She followed where I led, but I had the irritating impression that she looked on at my movements, and Worth's as well, with the indulgent eye of a grown-up observing children at play.
On the roof of the Gold Nugget we picked up the possible trail easily; Clayte hadn't needed to go through the building, or have a confederate staked out in a room here, to make a downward getaway. For here the fire escape came all the way up, curving over the coping to anchor into the wall, and it was a good iron stairway, with landings at each floor, and a handrail the entire length, its lower end in the alley between Powell and Mason Streets. Looking at it I didn't doubt that it was used by the guests of the Gold Nugget at least half as much as the easier but more conspicuous front entrance. Therefore a man seen on it would be no more likely to attract attention than he would in the elevator. I explained this to the others, but Worth had attacked a rack of old truck piled in the corner of the roof-house, and paid little attention to me, while Miss Wallace nodded with her provoking smile and said,
"Once—yes; no doubt you are exactly right. I wasn't looking for a way that a man might take once, under pressure of great necessity."
"Why not?" I countered. "If Clayte got away by this means yesterday—that'll do me."
"It might," she nodded, "if you could see it as a fact, without seeing a lot more. Such a man as Clayte was—a really wonderful man, you know—" the dimples were deep in the pink of her cheeks as she flashed a laughing look at me with this clawful—"a really wonderful man like Clayte," she repeated, "wouldn't have trusted to a route he hadn't known and proved for a long time."
"That's theory," I smiled. "I take my hat off to you, Miss Wallace, when it comes to observing and deducing, but I'm afraid your theorizing is weak."
"I never theorize," she reminded me. "All I deal with is facts."
She had perched herself on an overturned box, and was watching Worth sort junk. I leaned against the roof-house, pushed Kite's donated cigar unlighted into a corner of my mouth and stared at her.
"Miss Wallace," I said sharply, "what's this Steve Skeels stuff? What's this reroofing stuff? What's the dope you think you have, and you think I haven't? Tell us, and we'll not waste time. Tell us, and we'll get ahead on this case. Worth, let that rubbish alone. Nothing there for us. Come here and listen."
For all answer he straightened up, looked at us without a word—and went to it again. I turned to the girl.
"Worth doesn't need to listen to me, Mr. Boyne," she said serenely. "He already has full faith in me and my methods."
"Methods be—be blowed!" I exploded. "It's results that count, and you've produced. I'm willing to handit to you. All we know now, we got from you. Beside you I'm a thick-headed blunderer. Let me in on how you get things and I won't be so hard to convince."
"Indeed, you aren't a blunderer," she said warmly. "You do a lot better than most people at observing." (High praise that, for a detective more than twenty years in the business; but she meant to be complimentary.) "I'm glad to tell you my processes. How much time do you want to give to it?"
"Not a minute longer than will get what you know." And she began with a rush.
"Those dents in the coping at the St. Dunstan, above Clayte's window—I asked the clerk there how long since the building had been reroofed, because there were nicks made by that hook and half filled with tar that had been slushed up against the coping and into the lowest dents. You see what that means?"
"That Clayte—or some accomplice of his—had been using the route more than four years ago. Yes."
"And the other scars were made at varying times, showing me that coming over here from there was quite a regular thing."
"At that rate he would have nicked the coping until it would have looked like a huck towel," I objected.
"A huck towel," she gravely adopted my word. "But he was a man that did everything he did several different ways. That was his habit—a sort of disguise. That's why he was shadowy and hard to describe. Sometimes he came up to the St. Dunstan roof just as we did; and once, a good while ago, there were cleats on that wall there so he could climb down herewithout the rope. They have been taken away some time, and the places where they were are weathered over so you would hardly notice them."