"Whoever killed my father—and it was murder, Mr. Knox—whoever did it is going free to save a scandal. All my—friends"—she smiled bitterly—"are afraid of the same thing. But I can not sit quiet and think nothing can be done. Imustknow, and you are the only one who seems willing to try to find out."
So it was, that, when I left the house a half hour later, I was committed. I had been commissioned by the girl I loved—for it had come to that—to clear her lover of her father's murder, and so give him back to her—not in so many words, but I was to follow up the crime, and the rest followed. And I was morally certain of two things—first, that her lover was not worthy of her, and second, and more to the point, that innocent or guilty, he was indirectly implicated in the crime.
I had promised her also to see Miss Letitia that day if I could, and I turned over the events of the preceding night as I walked toward the station, but I made nothing of them. One thing occurred to me, however. Bella had told Margery that I had been up all night. Could Bella—? But I dismissed the thought as absurd—Bella, who had scuttled to bed in a panic of fright, would never have dared the lower floor alone, and Bella, given all the courage in the world, could never have moved with the swiftness and light certainty of my midnight prowler. It had not been Bella.
But after all I did not go to Bellwood. I met Hunter on my way to the station, and he turned around and walked with me.
"So you've lain down on the case!" I said, when we had gone a few steps without speaking.
He grumbled something unintelligible and probably unrepeatable.
"Of course," I persisted, "being a simple and uncomplicated case of suicide, there was nothing in it anyhow. If it had been a murder, under peculiar circumstances—"
He stopped and gripped my arm.
"For ten cents," he said gravely, "I would tell the chief and a few others what I think of them. And then I'd go out and get full."
"Not on ten cents!"
"I'm going out of the business," he stormed. "I'm going to drive a garbage wagon: it's cleaner than this job. Suicide! I never saw a cleaner case of—" He stopped suddenly. "Do you know Burton—of theTimes-Post?"
"No: I've heard of him."
"Well, he's your man. They're dead against the ring, and Burton's been given the case. He's as sharp as a steel trap. You two get together."
He paused at a corner. "Good-by," he said dejectedly. "I'm off to hunt some boys that have been stealing milk bottles. That's about my size, these days." He turned around, however, before he had gone many steps and came back.
"Wardrop has been missing since yesterday afternoon," he said. "That is, he thinks he's missing. We've got him all right."
I gave up my Bellwood visit for the time, and taking a car down-town, I went to theTimes-Postoffice. The Monday morning edition was already under way, as far as the staff was concerned, and from the waiting-room I could see three or four men, with their hats on, most of them rattling typewriters. Burton came in in a moment, a red-haired young fellow, with a short thick nose and a muggy skin. He was rather stocky in build, and the pugnacity of his features did not hide the shrewdness of his eyes.
I introduced myself, and at my name his perfunctory manner changed.
"Knox!" he said. "I called you last night over the 'phone."
"Can't we talk in a more private place?" I asked, trying to raise my voice above the confusion of the next room. In reply he took me into a tiny office, containing a desk and two chairs, and separated by an eight-foot partition from the other room.
"This is the best we have," he explained cheerfully. "Newspapers are agents of publicity, not privacy—if you don't care what you say."
I liked Burton. There was something genuine about him; after Wardrop's kid-glove finish, he was a relief.
"Hunter, of the detective bureau, sent me here," I proceeded, "about the Fleming case."
He took out his note-book. "You are the fourth to-day," he said. "Hunter himself, Lightfoot from Plattsburg, and McFeely here in town. Well, Mr. Knox, are you willing now to put yourself on record that Fleming committed suicide?"
"No," I said firmly. "It is my belief that he was murdered."
"And that the secretary fellow, what's his name?—Wardrop?—that he killed him?"
"Possibly."
In reply Burton fumbled in his pocket and brought up a pasteboard box, filled with jeweler's cotton. Underneath was a small object, which he passed to me with care.
"I got it from the coroner's physician, who performed the autopsy," he said casually. "You will notice that it is a thirty-two, and that the revolver they took from Wardrop was a thirty-eight. Question, where's the other gun?"
I gave him back the bullet, and he rolled it around on the palm of his hand.
"Little thing, isn't it?" he said. "We think we're lords of creation, until we see a quarter-inch bichloride tablet, or a bit of lead like this. Look here." He dived into his pocket again and drew out a roll of ordinary brown paper. When he opened it a bit of white chalk fell on the desk.
"Look at that," he said dramatically. "Kill an army with it, and they'd never know what struck them. Cyanide of potassium—and the druggist that sold it ought to be choked."
"Where did it come from?" I asked curiously. Burton smiled his cheerful smile.
"It's a beautiful case, all around," he said, as he got his hat. "I haven't had any Sunday dinner yet, and it's five o'clock. Oh—the cyanide? Clarkson, the cashier of the bank Fleming ruined, took a bite off that corner right there, this morning."
"Clarkson!" I exclaimed. "How is he?"
"God only knows," said Burton gravely, from which I took it Clarkson was dead.
Burton listened while he ate, and his cheerful comments were welcome enough after the depression of the last few days. I told him, after some hesitation, the whole thing, beginning with the Maitland pearls and ending with my drop down the dumb-waiter. I knew I was absolutely safe in doing so: there is no person to whom I would rather tell a secret than a newspaper man. He will go out of his way to keep it: he will lock it in the depths of his bosom, and keep it until seventy times seven. Also, you may threaten the rack or offer a larger salary, the seal does not come off his lips until the word is given. If then he makes a scarehead of it, and gets in three columns of space and as many photographs, it is his just reward.
So—I told Burton everything, and he ate enough beefsteak for two men, and missed not a word I said.
"The money Wardrop had in the grip—that's easy enough explained," he said. "Fleming used the Borough Bank to deposit state funds in. He must have known it was rotten: he and Clarkson were as thick as thieves. According to a time-honored custom in our land of the brave and home of the free, a state treasurer who is crooked can, in such a case, draw on such a bank without security, on his personal note, which is usually worth its value by the pound as old paper."
"And Fleming did that?"
"He did. Then things got bad at the Borough Bank. Fleming had had to divide with Schwartz and the Lord only knows who all, but it was Fleming who had to put in the money to avert a crash—the word crash being synonymous with scandal in this case. He scrapes together a paltry hundred thousand, which Wardrop gets at the capital, and brings on. Wardrop is robbed, or says he is: the bank collapses and Clarkson, driven to the wall, kills himself, just after Fleming is murdered. What does that sound like?"
"Like Clarkson!" I exclaimed. "And Clarkson knew Fleming was hiding at the White Cat!"
"Now, then, take the other theory," he said, pushing aside his cup. "Wardrop goes in to Fleming with a story that he has been robbed: Fleming gets crazy and attacks him. All that is in the morning—Friday. Now, then—Wardrop goes back there that night. Within twenty minutes after he enters the club he rushes out, and when Hunter follows him, he says he is looking for a doctor, to get cocaine for a gentleman up-stairs. He is white and trembling. They go back together, and find you there, and Fleming dead. Wardrop tells two stories: first he says Fleming committed suicide just before he left. Then he changes it and says he was dead when he arrived there. He produces the weapon with which Fleming is supposed to have killed himself, and which, by the way, Miss Fleming identified yesterday as her father's. But there are two discrepancies. Wardrop practically admitted that he had taken that revolver from Fleming, not that night, but the morning before, during the quarrel."
"And the other discrepancy?"
"The bullet. Nobody ever fired a thirty-two bullet out of a thirty-eight caliber revolver—unless he was trying to shoot a double-compound curve. Now, then, who does it look like?"
"Like Wardrop," I confessed. "By Jove, they didn't both do it."
"And he didn't do it himself for two good reasons: he had no revolver that night, and there were no powder marks."
"And the eleven twenty-two, and Miss Maitland's disappearance?"
He looked at me with his quizzical smile.
"I'll have to have another steak, if I'm to settle that," he said. "I can only solve one murder on one steak. But disappearances are my specialty; perhaps, if I have a piece of pie and some cheese—"
But I got him away at last, and we walked together down the street.
"I can't quite see the old lady in it," he confessed. "She hadn't any grudge against Fleming, had she? Wouldn't be likely to forget herself temporarily and kill him?"
"Good Lord!" I said. "Why, she's sixty-five, and as timid and gentle a little old lady as ever lived."
"Curls?" he asked, turning his bright blue eyes on me.
"Yes," I admitted.
"Wouldn't be likely to have eloped with the minister, or advertised for a husband, or anything like that?"
"You would have to know her to understand," I said resignedly. "But she didn't do any of those things, and she didn't run off to join a theatrical troupe. Burton, who do you think was in the Fleming house last night?"
"Lightfoot," he said succinctly.
He stopped under a street lamp and looked at his watch.
"I believe I'll run over to the capital to-night," he said. "While I'm gone—I'll be back to-morrow night or the next morning—I wish you would do two things. Find Rosie O'Grady, or whatever her name is, and locate Carter. That's probably not his name, but it will answer for a while. Then get your friend Hunter to keep him in sight for a while, until I come back anyhow. I'm beginning to enjoy this; it's more fun than a picture puzzle. We're going to make the police department look like a kindergarten playing jackstraws."
"And the second thing I am to do?"
"Go to Bellwood and find out a few things. It's all well enough to say the old lady was a meek and timid person, but if you want to know her peculiarities, go to her neighbors. When people leave the beaten path, the neighbors always know it before the families."
He stopped before a drug-store.
"I'll have to pack for my little jaunt," he said, and purchased a tooth-brush, which proved to be the extent of his preparations. We separated at the station, Burton to take his red hair and his tooth-brush to Plattsburg, I to take a taxicab, and armed with a page torn from the classified directory to inquire at as many of the twelve Anderson's drug-stores as might be necessary to locate Delia's gentleman friend, "the clerk," through him Delia, and through Delia, the mysterious Carter, "who was not really a butler."
It occurred to me somewhat tardily, that I knew nothing of Delia but her given name. A telephone talk with Margery was of little assistance: Delia had been a new maid, and if she had heard her other name, she had forgotten it.
I had checked off eight of the Andersons on my list, without result, and the taximeter showed something over nineteen dollars, when the driver drew up at the curb.
"Gentleman in the other cab is hailing you, sir," he said over his shoulder.
"The other cab?"
"The one that has been following us."
I opened the door and glanced behind. A duplicate of my cab stood perhaps fifty feet behind, and from it a familiar figure was slowly emerging, carrying on a high-pitched argument with the chauffeur. The figure stopped to read the taximeter, shook his fist at the chauffeur, and approached me, muttering audibly. It was Davidson.
"That liar and thief back there has got me rung up for nineteen dollars," he said, ignoring my amazement. "Nineteen dollars and forty cents! He must have the thing counting the revolutions of all four wheels!"
He walked around and surveyed my expense account, at the driver's elbow. Then he hit the meter a smart slap, but the figures did not change.
"Nineteen dollars!" he repeated dazed. "Nineteen dollars and—look here," he called to his driver, who had brought the cab close, "it's only thirty cents here. Your clock's ten cents fast."
"But how—" I began.
"You back up to nineteen dollars and thirty cents," he persisted, ignoring me. "If you'll back up to twelve dollars, I'll pay it. That's all I've got." Then he turned on me irritably. "Good heavens, man," he exclaimed, "do you mean to tell me you've been to eight drug-stores this Sunday evening and spent nineteen dollars and thirty cents, and haven't got a drink yet?"
"Do you think I'm after a drink?" I asked him. "Now look here, Davidson, I rather think you know what I am after. If you don't, it doesn't matter. But since you are coming along anyhow, pay your man off and come with me. I don't like to be followed."
He agreed without hesitation, borrowed eight dollars from me to augment his twelve and crawled in with me.
"The next address on the list is the right one," he said, as the man waited for directions. "I did the same round yesterday, but not being a plutocrat, I used the street-cars and my legs. And because you're a decent fellow and don't have to be chloroformed to have an idea injected, I'm going to tell you something. There were eleven roundsmen as well as the sergeant who heard me read the note I found at the Fleming house that night. You may have counted them through the window. A dozen plain-clothes men read it before morning. When the news of Mr. Fleming's mur—death came out, I thought this fellow Carter might know something, and I trailed Delia through this Mamie Brennan. When I got there I found Tom Brannigan and four other detectives sitting in the parlor, and Miss Delia, in a blue silk waist, making eyes at every mother's son of them."
I laughed in spite of my disappointment. Davidson leaned forward and closed the window at the driver's back. Then he squared around and faced me.
"Understand me, Mr. Knox," he said, "Mr. Fleming killed himself. You and I are agreed on that. Even if you aren't just convinced of it I'm telling you, and—better let it drop, sir," Under his quiet manner I felt a threat: it served to rouse me.
"I'll let it drop when I'm through with it," I asserted, and got out my list of addresses.
"You'll let it drop because it's too hot to hold," he retorted, with the suspicion of a smile. "If you are determined to know about Carter, I can tell you everything that is necessary."
The chauffeur stopped his engine with an exasperated jerk and settled down in his seat, every line of his back bristling with irritation.
"I prefer learning from Carter himself."
He leaned back in his seat and produced an apple from the pocket of his coat.
"You'll have to travel some to do it, son," he said. "Carter left for parts unknown last night, taking with him enough money to keep him in comfort for some little time."
"Until all this blows over," I said bitterly.
"The trip was for the benefit of his health. He has been suffering—and is still suffering, from a curious lapse of memory." Davidson smiled at me engagingly. "He has entirely forgotten everything that occurred from the time he entered Mr. Fleming's employment, until that gentleman left home. I doubt if he will ever recover."
With Carter gone, his retreat covered by the police, supplied with funds from some problematical source, further search for him was worse than useless. In fact, Davidson strongly intimated that it might be dangerous and would be certainly unpleasant. I yielded ungraciously and ordered the cab to take me home. But on the way I cursed my folly for not having followed this obvious clue earlier, and I wondered what this thing could be that Carter knew, that was at least surmised by various headquarters men, and yet was so carefully hidden from the world at large.
The party newspapers had come out that day with a signed statement from Mr. Fleming's physician in Plattsburg that he had been in ill health and inclined to melancholia for some time. The air was thick with rumors of differences with his party: the dust cloud covered everything; pretty soon it would settle and hide the tracks of those who had hurried to cover under its protection.
Davidson left me at a corner down-town. He turned to give me a parting admonition.
"There's an old axiom in the mills around here, 'never sit down on a piece of metal until you spit on it.' If it sizzles, don't sit." He grinned. "Your best position just now, young man, is standing, with your hands over your head. Confidentially, there ain't anything within expectorating distance just now that ain't pretty well het up."
He left me with that, and I did not see him again until the night at the White Cat, when he helped put me through the transom. Recently, however, I have met him several times. He invariably mentions the eight dollars and his intention of repaying it. Unfortunately, the desire and the ability have not yet happened to coincide.
I took the evening train to Bellwood, and got there shortly after eight, in the midst of the Sunday evening calm, and the calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.
I walked slowly up the main street, which was lined with residences; the town relegated its few shops to less desirable neighborhoods. My first intention had been to see the Episcopal minister, but the rectory was dark, and a burst of organ music from the church near reminded me again of the Sunday evening services.
Promiscuous inquiry was not advisable. So far, Miss Jane's disappearance was known to very few, and Hunter had advised caution. I wandered up the street and turned at random to the right; a few doors ahead a newish red brick building proclaimed itself the post-office, and gave the only sign of life in the neighborhood. It occurred to me that here inside was the one individual who, theoretically at least, in a small place always knows the idiosyncrasies of its people.
The door was partly open, for the spring night was sultry. The postmaster proved to be a one-armed veteran of the Civil War, and he was sorting rapidly the contents of a mail-bag, emptied on the counter.
"No delivery to-night," he said shortly. "Sunday delivery, two to three."
"I suppose, then, I couldn't get a dollar's worth of stamps," I regretted.
He looked up over his glasses.
"We don't sell stamps on Sunday nights," he explained, more politely. "But if you're in a hurry for them—"
"I am," I lied. And after he had got them out, counting them with a wrinkled finger, and tearing them off the sheet with the deliberation of age, I opened a general conversation.
"I suppose you do a good bit of business here?" I asked. "It seems like a thriving place."
"Not so bad; big mail here sometimes. First of the quarter, when bills are coming round, we have a rush, and holidays and Easter we've got to hire an express wagon."
It was when I asked him about his empty sleeve, however, and he had told me that he lost his arm at Chancellorsville, that we became really friendly When he said he had been a corporal in General Maitland's command, my path was one of ease.
"The Maitland ladies! I should say I do," he said warmly. "I've been fighting with Letitia Maitland as long as I can remember. That woman will scrap with the angel Gabriel at the resurrection, if he wakes her up before she's had her sleep out."
"Miss Jane is not that sort, is she?"
"Miss Jane? She's an angel—she is that. She could have been married a dozen times when she was a girl, but Letitia wouldn't have it. I was after her myself, forty-five years ago. This was the Maitland farm in those days, and my father kept a country store down where the railroad station is now."
"I suppose from that the Maitland ladies are wealthy."
"Wealthy! They don't know what they're worth—not that it matters a mite to Jane Maitland. She hasn't called her soul her own for so long that I guess the good Lord won't hold her responsible for it."
All of which was entertaining, but it was much like an old-fashioned see-saw; it kept going, but it didn't make much progress. But now at last we took a step ahead.
"It's a shameful thing," the old man pursued, "that a woman as old as Jane should have to get her letters surreptitiously. For more than a year now she's been coming here twice a week for her mail, and I've been keeping it for her. Rain or shine, Mondays and Thursdays, she's been coming, and a sight of letters she's been getting, too."
"Did she come last Thursday?" I asked over-eagerly. The postmaster, all at once, regarded me with suspicion.
"I don't know whether she did or not," he said coldly, and my further attempts to beguile him into conversation failed. I pocketed my stamps, and by that time his resentment at my curiosity was fading. He followed me to the door, and lowered his voice cautiously.
"Any news of the old lady?" he asked. "It ain't generally known around here that she's missing, but Heppie, the cook there, is a relation of my wife's."
"We have no news," I replied, "and don't let it get around, will you?"
He promised gravely.
"I was tellin' the missus the other day," he said, "that there is an old walled-up cellar under the Maitland place. Have you looked there?" He was disappointed when I said we had, and I was about to go when he called me back.
"Miss Jane didn't get her mail on Thursday, but on Friday that niece of hers came for it—two letters, one from the city and one from New York."
"Thanks," I returned, and went out into the quiet street.
I walked past the Maitland place, but the windows were dark and the house closed. Haphazard inquiry being out of the question, I took the ten o'clock train back to the city. I had learned little enough, and that little I was at a loss to know how to use. For why had Margery gone for Miss Jane's mailafterthe little lady was missing? And why did Miss Jane carry on a clandestine correspondence?
The family had retired when I got home except Fred, who called from his study to ask for a rhyme for mosque. I could not think of one and suggested that he change the word to "temple." At two o'clock he banged on my door in a temper, said he had changed the rhythm to fit, and now couldn't find a rhyme for "temple!" I suggested "dimple" drowsily, whereat he kicked the panel of the door and went to bed.
The funeral occurred on Monday. It was an ostentatious affair, with a long list of honorary pall-bearers, a picked corps of city firemen in uniform ranged around the casket, and enough money wasted in floral pillows and sheaves of wheat tied with purple ribbon, to have given all the hungry children in town a square meal.
Amid all this state Margery moved, stricken and isolated. She went to the cemetery with Edith, Miss Letitia having sent a message that, having never broken her neck to see the man living, she wasn't going to do it to see him dead. The music was very fine, and the eulogy spoke of this patriot who had served his country so long and so well. "Following the flag," Fred commented under his breath, "as long as there was an appropriation attached to it."
And when it was all over, we went back to Fred's until the Fleming house could be put into order again. It was the best place in the world for Margery, for, with the children demanding her attention and applause every minute, she had no time to be blue.
Mrs. Butler arrived that day, which made Fred suspicious that Edith's plan to bring her, far antedated his consent. But she was there when we got home from the funeral, and after one glimpse at her thin face and hollow eyes, I begged Edith to keep her away from Margery, for that day at least.
Fortunately, Mrs. Butler was exhausted by her journey, and retired to her room almost immediately. I watched her slender figure go up the stairs, and, with her black trailing gown and colorless face, she was an embodiment of all that is lonely and helpless. Fred closed the door behind her and stood looking at Edith and me.
"I tell you, honey," he declared, "thatbrought into a cheerful home is sufficient cause for divorce. Isn't it, Jack?"
"She is ill," Edith maintained valiantly. "She is my cousin, too, which gives her some claim on me, and my guest, which gives her more."
"Lady-love," Fred said solemnly, "if you do not give me the key to the cellarette, I shall have a chill. And let me beg this of you: if I ever get tired of this life, and shuffle off my mortality in a lumber yard, or a political club, and you go around like that, I shall haunt you. I swear it."
"Shuffle off," I dared him. "I will see that Edith is cheerful and happy."
From somewhere above, there came a sudden crash, followed by the announcement, made by a scared housemaid, that Mrs. Butler had fainted. Fred sniffed as Edith scurried up-stairs.
"Hipped," he said shortly. "For two cents I'd go up and give her a good whiff of ammonia—not this aromatic stuff, but the genuine article. That would make her sit up and take notice. Upon my word, I can't think what possessed Edith; these spineless, soft-spoken, timid women are leeches on one's sympathies."
But Mrs. Butler was really ill, and Margery insisted on looking after her. It was an odd coincidence, the widow of one state treasurer and the orphaned daughter of his successor; both men had died violent deaths, in each case when a boiling under the political lid had threatened to blow it off.
The boys were allowed to have their dinner with the family that evening, in honor of Mrs. Butler's arrival, and it was a riotous meal. Margery got back a little of her color. As I sat across from her, and watched her expressions change, from sadness to resignation, and even gradually to amusement at the boys' antics, I wondered just how much she knew, or suspected, that she refused to tell me.
I remembered a woman—a client of mine—who said that whenever she sat near a railroad track and watched an engine thundering toward her, she tortured herself by picturing a child on the track, and wondering whether, under such circumstances, she would risk her life to save the child.
I felt a good bit that way; I was firmly embarked on the case now, and I tortured myself with one idea. Suppose I should find Wardrop guilty, and I should find extenuating circumstances—what would I do? Publish the truth, see him hanged or imprisoned, and break Margery's heart? Or keep back the truth, let her marry him, and try to forget that I had had a hand in the whole wretched business?
After all, I decided to try to stop my imaginary train. Prove Wardrop innocent, I reasoned with myself, get to the bottom of this thing, and then—it would be man and man. A fair field and no favor. I suppose my proper attitude, romantically taken, was to consider Margery's engagement ring an indissoluble barrier. But this was not romance; I was fighting for my life happiness, and as to the ring—well, I am of the opinion that if a man really loves a woman, and thinks he can make her happy, he will tell her so if she is strung with engagement rings to the ends of her fingers. Dangerous doctrine? Well, this is not propaganda.
Tuesday found us all more normal. Mrs. Butler had slept some, and very commendably allowed herself to be tea'd and toasted in bed. The boys were started to kindergarten, after ten minutes of frenzied cap-hunting. Margery went with me along the hall when I started for the office.
"You have not learned anything?" she asked cautiously, glancing back to Edith, at the telephone calling the grocer frantically for the Monday morning supply of soap and starch.
"Not much," I evaded. "Nothing definite, anyhow. Margery, you are not going back to the Monmouth Avenue house again, are you?"
"Not just yet; I don't think I could. I suppose, later, it will have to be sold, but not at once. I shall go to Aunt Letitia's first."
"Very well," I said. "Then you are going to take a walk with me this afternoon in the park. I won't take no; you need the exercise, and I need—to talk to you," I finished lamely.
When she had agreed I went to the office. It was not much after nine, but, to my surprise, Burton was already there. He had struck up an acquaintance with Miss Grant, the stenographer, and that usually frigid person had melted under the warmth of his red hair and his smile. She was telling him about her sister's baby having the whooping-cough, when I went in.
"I wish I had studied law," he threw at me. "'What shall it profit a man to become a lawyer and lose his own soul?' as the psalmist says. I like this ten-to-four business."
When we had gone into the inner office, and shut out Miss Grant and the whooping-cough, he was serious instantly.
"Well," he said, sitting on the radiator and dangling his foot, "I guess we've got Wardrop for theft, anyhow."
"Theft?" I inquired.
"Well, larceny, if you prefer legal terms. I found where he sold the pearls—in Plattsburg, to a wholesale jeweler named, suggestively, Cashdollar."
"Then," I said conclusively, "if he took the pearls and sold them, as sure as I sit here, he took the money out of that Russia leather bag."
Burton swung his foot rhythmically against the pipes.
"I'm not so darned sure of it," he said calmly.
If he had any reason, he refused to give it. I told him, in my turn, of Carter's escape, aided by the police, and he smiled. "For a suicide it's causing a lot of excitement," he remarked. When I told him the little incident of the post-office, he was much interested.
"The old lady's in it, somehow," he maintained. "She may have been lending Fleming money, for one thing. How do you know it wasn't her hundred thousand that was stolen?"
"I don't think she ever had the uncontrolled disposal of a dollar in her life."
"There's only one thing to do," Burton said finally, "and that is, find Miss Jane. If she's alive, she can tell something. I'll stake my fountain pen on that—and it's my dearest possession on earth, next to my mother. If Miss Jane is dead—well, somebody killed her, and it's time it was being found out."
"It's easy enough to say find her."
"It's easy enough to find her," he exploded. "Make a noise about it; send up rockets. Put a half-column ad in every paper in town, or—better still—give the story to the reporters and let them find her for you. I'd do it, if I wasn't tied up with this Fleming case. Describe her, how she walked, what she liked to eat, what she wore—in this case what she didn't wear. Lord, I wish I had that assignment! In forty-eight hours she will have been seen in a hundred different places, and one of them will be right. It will be a question of selection—that is, if she is alive."
In spite of his airy tone, I knew he was serious, and I felt he was right. The publicity part of it I left to him, and I sent a special delivery that morning to Bellwood, asking Miss Letitia to say nothing and to refer reporters to me. I had already been besieged with them, since my connection with the Fleming case, and a few more made no difference.
Burton attended to the matter thoroughly. The one o'clock edition of an afternoon paper contained a short and vivid scarlet account of Miss Jane's disappearance. The evening editions were full, and while vague as to the manner of her leaving, were minute as regarded her personal appearance and characteristics.
To escape the threatened inundation of the morning paper men, I left the office early, and at four o'clock Margery and I stepped from a hill car into the park. She had been wearing a short, crepe-edged veil, but once away from the gaze of the curious, she took it off. I was glad to see she had lost the air of detachment she had worn for the last three days.
"Hold your shoulders well back," I directed, when we had found an isolated path, "and take long breaths. Try breathing in while I count ten."
She was very tractable—unusually so, I imagined, for her. We swung along together for almost a half-hour, hardly talking. I was content merely to be with her, and the sheer joy of the exercise after her enforced confinement kept her silent. When she began to flag a little I found a bench, and we sat down together. The bench had been lately painted, and although it seemed dry enough, I spread my handkerchief for her to sit on. Whereupon she called me "Sir Walter," and at the familiar jest we laughed like a pair of children.
I had made the stipulation that, for this one time, her father's death and her other troubles should be taboo, and we adhered to it religiously. A robin in the path was industriously digging out a worm; he had tackled a long one, and it was all he could manage. He took the available end in his beak and hopped back with the expression of one who sets his jaws and determines that this which should be, is to be. The worm stretched into a pinkish and attenuated line, but it neither broke nor gave.
"Horrid thing!" Margery said. "That is a disgraceful, heartless exhibition."
"The robin is a parent," I reminded her. "It is precisely the same as Fred, who twists, jerks, distorts and attenuates the English language in his magazine work, in order to have bread and ice-cream and jelly cake for his two blooming youngsters."
She had taken off her gloves, and sat with her hands loosely clasped in her lap.
"I wish some one depended on me," she said pensively. "It's a terrible thing to feel that it doesn't matter to any one—not vitally, anyhow—whether one is around or not. To have all my responsibilities taken away at once, and just to drift around, like this—oh, it's dreadful."
"You were going to be good," I reminded her.
"I didn't promise to be cheerful," she returned. "Besides my father, there was only one person in the world who cared about me, and I don't know where she is. Dear Aunt Jane!"
The sunlight caught the ring on her engagement finger, and she flushed suddenly as she saw me looking at it. We sat there for a while saying nothing; the long May afternoon was coming to a close. The paths began to fill with long lines of hurrying home-seekers, their day in office or factory at an end.
Margery got up at last and buttoned her coat. Then impulsively she held out her hand to me.
"You have been more than kind to me," she said hurriedly. "You have taken me into your home—and helped me through these dreadful days—and I will never forget it; never."
"I am not virtuous," I replied, looking down at her. "I couldn't help it. You walked into my life when you came to my office—was it only last week? The evil days are coming, I suppose, but just now nothing matters at all, save that you are you, and I am I."
She dropped her veil quickly, and we went back to the car. The prosaic world wrapped us around again; there was a heavy odor of restaurant coffee in the air; people bumped and jolted past us. To me they were only shadows; the real world was a girl in black and myself, and the girl wore a betrothal ring which was not mine.
Mrs. Butler came down to dinner that night. She was more cheerful than I had yet seen her, and she had changed her mournful garments to something a trifle less depressing. With her masses of fair hair dressed high, and her face slightly animated, I realized what I had not done before—that she was the wreck of a very beautiful woman. Frail as she was, almost shrinkingly timid in her manner, there were times when she drew up her tall figure in something like its former stateliness. She had beautiful eyebrows, nearly black and perfectly penciled; they were almost incongruous in her colorless face.
She was very weak; she used a cane when she walked, and after dinner, in the library, she was content to sit impassive, detached, propped with cushions, while Margery read to the boys in their night nursery and Edith embroidered.
Fred had been fussing over a play for some time, and he had gone to read it to some manager or other. Edith was already spending the royalties.
"We could go a little ways out of town," she was saying, "and we could have an automobile; Margery says theirs will be sold, and it will certainly be a bargain. Jack, are you laughing at me?"
"Certainlynot," I replied gravely. "Dream on, Edith. Shall we train the boys as chauffeurs, or shall we buy in the Fleming man, also cheap."
"I am sure," Edith said aggrieved, "that it costs more for horse feed this minute for your gray, Jack, than it would for gasolene."
"But Lady Gray won't eat gasolene," I protested. "She doesn't like it."
Edith turned her back on me and sewed. Near me, Mrs. Butler had languidly taken up the paper; suddenly she dropped it, and when I stooped and picked it up I noticed she was trembling.
"Is it true?" she demanded. "Is Robert Clarkson dead?"
"Yes," I assented. "He has been dead since Sunday morning—a suicide."
Edith had risen and come over to her. But Mrs. Butler was not fainting.
"I'm glad, glad," she said. Then she grew weak and semi-hysterical, laughing and crying in the same breath. When she had been helped up-stairs, for in her weakened state it had been more of a shock than we realized, Margery came down and we tried to forget the scene we had just gone through.
"I am glad Fred was not here," Edith confided to me. "Ellen is a lovely woman, and as kind as she is mild; but in one of her—attacks, she is a little bit trying."
It was strange to contrast the way in which the two women took their similar bereavements. Margery represented the best type of normal American womanhood; Ellen Butler the neurasthenic; she demanded everything by her very helplessness and timidity. She was a constant drain on Edith's ready sympathy. That night, while I closed the house—Fred had not come in—I advised her to let Mrs. Butler go back to her sanatorium.
At twelve-thirty I was still down-stairs; Fred was out, and I waited for him, being curious to know the verdict on the play. The bell rang a few minutes before one, and I went to the door; some one in the vestibule was tapping the floor impatiently with his foot. When I opened the door, I was surprised to find that the late visitor was Wardrop.
He came in quietly, and I had a chance to see him well, under the hall light; the change three days had made was shocking. His eyes were sunk deep in his head, his reddened lids and twitching mouth told of little sleep, of nerves ready to snap. He was untidy, too, and a three days' beard hardly improved him.
"I'm glad it's you," he said, by way of greeting. "I was afraid you'd have gone to bed."
"It's the top of the evening yet," I replied perfunctorily, as I led the way into the library. Once inside, Wardrop closed the door and looked around him like an animal at bay.
"I came here," he said nervously, looking at the windows, "because I had an idea you'd keep your head. Mine's gone; I'm either crazy, or I'm on my way there."
"Sit down, man," I pushed a chair to him. "You don't look as if you have been in bed for a couple of nights."
He went to each of the windows and examined the closed shutters before he answered me.
"I haven't. You wouldn't go to bed either, if you thought you would never wake up."
"Nonsense."
"Well, it's true enough. Knox, there are people following me wherever I go; they eat where I eat; if I doze in my chair they come into my dreams!" He stopped there, then he laughed a little wildly. "That last isn't sane, but it's true. There's a man across the street now, eating an apple under a lamppost."
"Suppose youareunder surveillance," I said. "It's annoying to have a detective following you around, but it's hardly serious. The police say now that Mr. Fleming killed himself; that was your own contention."
He leaned forward in his chair and, resting his hands on his knees, gazed at me somberly.
"Suppose I say he didn't kill himself?" slowly. "Suppose I say he was murdered? Suppose—good God—suppose I killed him myself?"
I drew back in stupefaction, but he hurried on.
"For the last two days I've been wondering—if I did it! He hadn't any weapon; I had one, his. I hated him that day; I had tried to save him, and couldn't. My God, Knox, I might have gone off my head and done it—and not remember it. There have been cases like that."
His condition was pitiable. I looked around for some whisky, but the best I could do was a little port on the sideboard. When I came back he was sitting with bent head, his forehead on his palms.
"I've thought it all out," he said painfully. "My mother had spells of emotional insanity. Perhaps I went there, without knowing it, and killed him. I can see him, in the night, when I daren't sleep, toppling over on to that table, with a bullet wound in his head, and I am in the room, and I have his revolver in my pocket!"
"You give me your word you have no conscious recollection of hearing a shot fired."
"My word before Heaven," he said fervently. "But I tell you, Knox, he had no weapon. No one came out of that room as I went in and yet he was only swaying forward, as if I had shot him one moment, and caught him as he fell, the next. I was dazed; I don't remember yet what I told the police."
The expression of fear in his eyes was terrible to see. A gust of wind shook the shutters, and he jumped almost out of his chair.
"You will have to be careful," I said. "There have been cases where men confessed murders they never committed, driven by Heaven knows what method of undermining their mental resistance. Yon expose your imagination to 'third degree' torture of your own invention, and in two days more you will be able to add full details of the crime."
"I knew you would think me crazy," he put in, a little less somberly, "but just try it once: sit in a room by yourself all day and all night, with detectives watching you; sit there and puzzle over a murder of a man you are suspected of killing; you know you felt like killing him, and you have a revolver, and he is shot. Wouldn't you begin to think as I do?"
"Wardrop," I asked, trying to fix his wavering eyes with mine, "do you own a thirty-two caliber revolver?"
"Yes."
I was startled beyond any necessity, under the circumstances. Many people have thirty-twos.
"That is, I had," he corrected himself. "It was in the leather bag that was stolen at Bellwood."
"I can relieve your mind of one thing," I said. "If your revolver was stolen with the leather bag, you had nothing to do with the murder. Fleming was shot with a thirty-two." He looked first incredulous, then relieved.
"Now, then," I pursued, "suppose Mr. Fleming had an enemy, a relentless one who would stoop to anything to compass his ruin. In his position he would be likely to have enemies. This person, let us say, knows what you carry in your grip, and steals it, taking away the funds that would have helped to keep the lid on Fleming's mismanagement for a time. In the grip is your revolver; would you know it again?"
He nodded affirmatively.
"This person—this enemy finds the revolver, pockets it and at the first opportunity, having ruined Fleming, proceeds humanely to put him out of his suffering. Is it far-fetched?"
"There were a dozen—a hundred—people who would have been glad to ruin him." His gaze wavered again suddenly. It was evident that I had renewed an old train of thought.
"For instance?" I suggested, but he was on guard again.
"You forget one thing, Knox," he said, after a moment. "There was nobody else who could have shot him: the room was empty."
"Nonsense," I replied. "Don't forget the warehouse."
"The warehouse!"
"There is no doubt in my mind that he was shot from there. He was facing the open window, sitting directly under the light, writing. A shot fired through a broken pane of one of the warehouse windows would meet every requirement of the case: the empty room, the absence of powder marks—even the fact that no shot was heard. There was a report, of course, but the noise in the club-house and the thunder-storm outside covered it."
"By George!" he exclaimed. "The warehouse, of course. I never thought of it." He was relieved, for some reason.
"It's a question now of how many people knew he was at the club, and which of them hated him enough to kill him."
"Clarkson knew it," Wardrop said, "but he didn't do it."
"Why?"
"Because it was he who came to the door of the room while the detective and you and I were inside, and called Fleming."
I pulled out my pocket-book and took out the scrap of paper which Margery had found pinned to the pillow in her father's bedroom. "Do you know what that means?" I asked, watching Wardrop's face. "That was found in Mr. Fleming's room two days after he left home. A similar scrap was found in Miss Jane Maitland's room when she disappeared. When Fleming was murdered, he was writing a letter; he said: 'The figures have followed me here.' When we know what those figures mean, Wardrop, we know why he was killed and who did it."
He shook his head hopelessly.
"I do not know," he said, and I believed him. He had got up and taken his hat, but I stopped him inside the door.
"You can help this thing in two ways," I told him. "I am going to give you something to do: you will have less time to be morbid. Find out, if you can, all about Fleming's private life in the last dozen years, especially the last three. See if there are any women mixed up in it, and try to find out something about this eleven twenty-two."
"Eleven twenty-two," he repeated, but I had not missed his change of expression when I said women.
"Also," I went on, "I want you to tell me who was with you the night you tried to break into the house at Bellwood."
He was taken completely by surprise: when he had gathered himself together his perplexity was overdone.
"With me!" he repeated. "I was alone, of course."
"I mean—the woman at the gate."
He lost his composure altogether then. I put my back against the door and waited for him to get himself in hand.
"There was a woman," I persisted, "and what is more, Wardrop, at this minute you believe she took your Russia leather bag and left a substitute."
He fell into the trap.
"But she couldn't," he quavered. "I've thought until my brain is going, and I don't see how she could have done it."
He became sullen when he saw what he had done, refused any more information, and left almost immediately.
Fred came soon after, and in the meantime I had made some notes like this:
1. Examine warehouse and yard.
2. Attempt to trace Carter.
3. See station agent at Bellwood.
4. Inquire Wardrop's immediate past.
5. Take Wardrop to Doctor Anderson, the specialist.
6. Send Margery violets.
Burton's idea of exploiting Miss Jane's disappearance began to bear fruit the next morning. I went to the office early, anxious to get my more pressing business out of the way, to have the afternoon with Burton to inspect the warehouse. At nine o'clock came a call from the morgue.
"Small woman, well dressed, gray hair?" I repeated. "I think I'll go up and see. Where was the body found?"
"In the river at Monica Station," was the reply. "There is a scar diagonally across the cheek to the corner of the mouth."
"A fresh injury?"
"No, an old scar."
With a breath of relief I said it was not the person we were seeking and tried to get down to work again. But Burton's prophecy had been right. Miss Jane had been seen in a hundred different places: one perhaps was right; which one?
A reporter for theEaglehad been working on the case all night: he came in for a more detailed description of the missing woman, and he had a theory, to fit which he was quite ready to cut and trim the facts.
"It's Rowe," he said confidently. "You can see his hand in it right through. I was put on the Benson kidnapping case, you remember, the boy who was kept for three months in a deserted lumber camp in the mountains? Well, sir, every person in the Benson house swore that youngster was in bed at midnight, when the house was closed for the night. Every door and window bolted in the morning, and the boy gone. When we found Rowe—after the mother had put on mourning—and found the kid, ten pounds heavier than he had been before he was abducted, and strutting around like a turkey cock, Rowe told us that he and the boy took in the theater that night, and were there for the first act. How did he do it? He offered to take the boy to the show if he would pretend to go to bed, and then slide down a porch pillar and meet him. The boy didn't want to go home when we found him."
"There can't be any mistake about the time in this case," I commented. "I saw her myself after eleven, and said good night."
TheEagleman consulted his note-book. "Oh, yes," he asked; "did she have a diagonal cut across her cheek?"
"No," I said for the second time.
My next visitor was a cabman. On the night in question he had taken a small and a very nervous old woman to the Omega ferry. She appeared excited and almost forgot to pay him. She carried a small satchel, and wore a black veil. What did she look like? She had gray hair, and she seemed to have a scar on her face that drew the corner of her mouth.
At ten o'clock I telephoned Burton: "For Heaven's sake," I said, "if anybody has lost a little old lady in a black dress, wearing a black veil, carrying a satchel, and with a scar diagonally across her cheek from her eye to her mouth, I can tell them all about her, and where she is now."
"That's funny," he said. "We're stirring up the pool and bringing up things we didn't expect. The police have been looking for that woman quietly for a week: she's the widow of a coal baron, and her son-in-law's under suspicion of making away with her."
"Well, he didn't," I affirmed. "She committed suicide from an Omega ferry boat and she's at the morgue this morning."
"Bully," he returned. "Keep on; you'll get lots of clues, and remember one will be right."
It was not until noon, however, that anything concrete developed. In the two hours between, I had interviewed seven more people. I had followed the depressing last hours of the coal baron's widow, and jumped with her, mentally, into the black river that night. I had learned of a small fairish-haired girl who had tried to buy cyanide of potassium at three drug-stores on the same street, and of a tall light woman who had taken a room for three days at a hotel and was apparently demented.
At twelve, however, my reward came. Two men walked in, almost at the same time: one was a motorman, in his official clothes, brass buttons and patches around the pockets. The other was a taxicab driver. Both had the uncertain gait of men who by occupation are unused to anything stationary under them, and each eyed the other suspiciously.
The motorman claimed priority by a nose, so I took him first into my private office. His story, shorn of his own opinions at the time and later, was as follows:
On the night in question, Thursday of the week before, he took his car out of the barn for the eleven o'clock run. Barney was his conductor. They went from the barn, at Hays Street, down-town, and then started out for Wynton. The controller blew out, and two or three things went wrong: all told they lost forty minutes. They got to Wynton at five minutes after two; their time there was one-twenty-five.
The car went to the bad again at Wynton, and he and Barney tinkered with it until two-forty. They got it in shape to go back to the barn, but that was all. Just as they were ready to start, a passenger got on, a woman, alone: a small woman with a brown veil. She wore a black dress or a suit—he was vague about everything but the color, and he noticed her especially because she was fidgety and excited. Half a block farther a man boarded the car, and sat across from the woman. Barney said afterward that the man tried twice to speak to the woman, but she looked away each time. No, he hadn't heard what he said.
The man got out when the car went into the barn, but the woman stayed on. He and Barney got another car and took it out, and the woman went with them. She made a complete round trip this time, going out to Wynton and back to the end of the line down-town. It was just daylight when she got off at last, at First and Day Streets.
Asked if he had thought at the time that the veiled woman was young or old, he said he had thought she was probably middle-aged. Very young or very old women would not put in the night riding in a street-car. Yes, he had had men who rode around a couple of times at night, mostly to sober up before they went home. But he never saw a woman do it before.
I took his name and address and thanked him. The chauffeur came next, and his story was equally pertinent.
On the night of the previous Thursday he had been engaged to take a sick woman from a down-town hotel to a house at Bellwood. The woman's husband was with her, and they went slowly to avoid jolting. It was after twelve when he drove away from the house and started home. At a corner—he did not know the names of the streets—a woman hailed the cab and asked him if he belonged in Bellwood or was going to the city. She had missed the last train. When he told her he was going into town, she promptly engaged him, and showed him where to wait for her, a narrow road off the main street.
"I waited an hour," he finished, "before she came; I dropped to sleep or I would have gone without her. About half-past one she came along, and a gentleman with her. He put her in the cab, and I took her to the city. When I saw in the paper that a lady had disappeared from Bellwood that night, I knew right off that it was my party."
"Would you know the man again?"
"I would know his voice, I expect, sir; I could not see much: he wore a slouch hat and had a traveling-bag of some kind."
"What did he say to the woman?" I asked.
"He didn't say much. Before he closed the door, he said, 'You have put me in a terrible position,' or something like that. From the traveling-bag and all, I thought perhaps it was an elopement, and the lady had decided to throw him down."
"Was it a young woman or an old one," I asked again. This time the cabby's tone was assured.
"Young," he asserted, "slim and quick: dressed in black, with a black veil. Soft voice. She got out at Market Square, and I have an idea she took a cross-town car there."
"I hardly think it was Miss Maitland," I said. "She was past sixty, and besides—I don't think she went that way. Still it is worth following up. Is that all?"
He fumbled in his pocket, and after a minute brought up a small black pocket-book and held it out to me. It was the small coin purse out of a leather hand-bag.
"She dropped this in the cab, sir," he said. "I took it home to the missus—not knowing what else to do with it. It had no money in it—only that bit of paper."
I opened the purse and took out a small white card, without engraving. On it was written in a pencil the figures: C 1122
When the cabman had gone, I sat down and tried to think things out. As I have said many times in the course of this narrative, I lack imagination: moreover, a long experience of witnesses in court had taught me the unreliability of average observation. The very fact that two men swore to having taken solitary women away from Bellwood that night, made me doubt if either one had really seen the missing woman.
Of the two stories, the taxicab driver's was the more probable, as far as Miss Jane was concerned. Knowing her child-like nature, her timidity, her shrinking and shamefaced fear of the dark, it was almost incredible that she would walk the three miles to Wynton, voluntarily, and from there lose herself in the city. Besides, such an explanation would not fit the blood-stains, or the fact that she had gone, as far as we could find out, in her night-clothes.
Still—she had left the village that night, either by cab or on foot. If the driver had been correct in his time, however, the taxicab was almost eliminated; he said the woman got into the cab at one-thirty. It was between one-thirty and one-forty-five when Margery heard the footsteps in the attic.
I think for the first time it came to me, that day, that there was at least a possibility that Miss Jane had not been attacked, robbed or injured: that she had left home voluntarily, under stress of great excitement. But if she had, why? The mystery was hardly less for being stripped of its gruesome details. Nothing in my knowledge of the missing woman gave me a clue. I had a vague hope that, if she had gone voluntarily, she would see the newspapers and let us know where she was.
To my list of exhibits I added the purse with its inclosure. The secret drawer of my desk now contained, besides the purse, the slip marked eleven twenty-two that had been pinned to Fleming's pillow; the similar scrap found over Miss Jane's mantel; the pearl I had found on the floor of the closet, and the cyanide, which, as well as the bullet, Burton had given me. Add to these the still tender place on my head where Wardrop had almost brained me with a chair, and a blue ankle, now becoming spotted with yellow, where I had fallen down the dumb-waiter, and my list of visible reminders of the double mystery grew to eight.
I was not proud of the part I had played. So far, I had blundered, it seemed to me, at every point where a blunder was possible. I had fallen over folding chairs and down a shaft; I had been a half-hour too late to save Allan Fleming; I had been up and awake, and Miss Jane had got out of the house under my very nose. Last, and by no means least, I had waited thirty-five years to find the right woman, and when I found her, some one else had won her. I was in the depths that day when Burton came in.
He walked into the office jauntily and presented Miss Grant with a club sandwich neatly done up in waxed paper. Then he came into my private room and closed the door behind him.
"Avaunt, dull care!" he exclaimed, taking in my dejected attitude and exhibits on the desk at a glance. "Look up and grin, my friend." He had his hands behind him.
"Don't be a fool," I snapped. "I'll not grin unless I feel like it."
"Grin, darn you," he said, and put something on the desk in front of me. It was a Russia leather bag.
"Theleather bag!" he pointed proudly.
"Where did you get it?" I exclaimed, incredulous. Burton fumbled with the lock while he explained.
"It was found in Boston," he said. "How do you open the thing, anyhow?"
It was not locked, and I got it open in a minute. As I had expected, it was empty.
"Then—perhaps Wardrop was telling the truth," I exclaimed. "By Jove, Burton, he was robbed by the woman in the cab, and he can't tell about her on account of Miss Fleming! She made a haul, for certain."
I told him then of the two women who had left Bellwood on the night of Miss Jane's disappearance, and showed him the purse and its inclosure. The C puzzled him as it had me. "It might be anything," he said as he gave it back, "from a book, chapter and verse in the Bible to a prescription for rheumatism at a drug-store. As to the lady in the cab, I think perhaps you are right," he said, examining the interior of the bag, where Wardrop's name in ink told its story. "Of course, we have only Wardrop's word that he brought the bag to Bellwood; if we grant that we can grant the rest—that he was robbed, that the thief emptied the bag, and either took it or shipped it to Boston."
"How on earth did you get it?"
"It was a coincidence. There have been a shrewd lot of baggage thieves in two or three eastern cities lately, mostly Boston. The method, the police say, was something like this—one of them, the chief of the gang, would get a wagon, dress like an expressman and go round the depots looking at baggage. He would make a mental note of the numbers, go away and forge a check to match, and secure the pieces he had taken a fancy to. Then he merely drove around to headquarters, and the trunk was rifled. The police got on, raided the place, and found, among others, our Russia leather bag. It was shipped back, empty, to the address inside, at Bellwood."
"At Bellwood? Then how—"
"It came while I was lunching with Miss Letitia," he said easily. "We're very chummy—thick as thieves. What I want to know is"—disregarding my astonishment—"where is the hundred thousand?"
"Find the woman."
"Did you ever hear of Anderson, the nerve specialist?" he asked, without apparent relevancy.
"I have been thinking of him," I answered. "If we could get Wardrop there, on some plausible excuse, it would take Anderson about ten minutes with his instruments and experimental psychology, to know everything Wardrop ever forgot."
"I'll go on one condition," Burton said, preparing to leave. "I'll promise to get Wardrop and have him on the spot at two o'clock to-morrow, if you'll promise me one thing: if Anderson fixes me with his eye, and I begin to look dotty and tell about my past life, I want you to take me by the flap of my ear and lead me gently home."
"I promise," I said, and Burton left.
The recovery of the bag was only one of the many astonishing things that happened that day and the following night. Hawes, who knew little of what it all meant, and disapproved a great deal, ended that afternoon by locking himself, blinking furiously, in his private office. To Hawes any practice that was not lucrative was bad practice. About four o'clock, when I had shut myself away from the crowd in the outer office, and was letting Miss Grant take their depositions as to when and where they had seen a little old lady, probably demented, wandering around the streets, a woman came who refused to be turned away.
"Young woman," I heard her say, speaking to Miss Grant, "he may have important business, but I guess mine's just a little more so."
I interfered then, and let her come in. She was a woman of medium height, quietly dressed, and fairly handsome. My first impression was favorable; she moved with a certain dignity, and she was not laced, crimped or made up. I am more sophisticated now; The Lady Who Tells Me Things says that the respectable women nowadays, out-rouge, out-crimp and out-lace the unrespectable.
However, the illusion was gone the moment she began to speak. Her voice was heavy, throaty, expressionless. She threw it like a weapon: I am perfectly honest in saying that for a moment the surprise of her voice outweighed the remarkable thing she was saying.
"I am Mrs. Allan Fleming," she said, with a certain husky defiance.
"I beg your pardon," I said, after a minute. "You mean—the Allan Fleming who has just died?"
She nodded. I could see she was unable, just then, to speak. She had nerved herself to the interview, but it was evident that there was a real grief. She fumbled for a black-bordered handkerchief, and her throat worked convulsively. I saw now that she was in mourning.
"Do you mean," I asked incredulously, "that Mr. Fleming married a second time?"
"He married me three years ago, in Plattsburg. I came from there last night. I—couldn't leave before."
"Does Miss Fleming know about this second marriage?"
"No. Nobody knew about it. I have had to put up with a great deal, Mr. Knox. It's a hard thing for a woman to know that people are talking about her, and all the time she's married as tight as ring and book can do it."
"I suppose," I hazarded, "if that is the case, you have come about the estate."
"Estate!" Her tone was scornful. "I guess I'll take what's coming to me, as far as that goes—and it won't be much. No, I came to ask what they mean by saying Allan Fleming killed himself."
"Don't you think he did?"
"I know he did not," she said tensely. "Not only that: I know who did it. It was Schwartz—Henry Schwartz."
"Schwartz! But what on earth—"
"You don't know Schwartz," she said grimly. "I was married to him for fifteen years. I took him when he had a saloon in the Fifth Ward, at Plattsburg. The next year he was alderman: I didn't expect in those days to see him riding around in an automobile—not but what he was making money—Henry Schwartz is a money-maker. That's why he's boss of the state now."
"And you divorced him?"
"He was a brute," she said vindictively. "He wanted me to go back to him, and I told him I would rather die. I took a big house, and kept bachelor suites for gentlemen. Mr. Fleming lived there, and—he married me three years ago. He and Schwartz had to stand together, but they hated each other."
"Schwartz?" I meditated. "Do you happen to know if Senator Schwartz was in Plattsburg at the time of the mur—of Mr. Fleming's death?"
"He was here in Manchester."
"He had threatened Mr. Fleming's life?"
"He had already tried to kill him, the day we were married. He stabbed him twice, but not deep enough."
I looked at her in wonder. For this woman, not extraordinarily handsome, two men had fought and one had died—according to her story.
"I can prove everything I say," she went on rapidly. "I have letters from Mr. Fleming telling me what to do in case he was shot down; I have papers—canceled notes—that would put Schwartz in the penitentiary—that is," she said cunningly, "I did have them. Mr. Fleming took them away."
"Aren't you afraid for yourself?" I asked.
"Yes, I'm afraid—afraid he'll get me back yet. It would please him to see me crawl back on my knees."