introduced the house detective.
"I"ve just heard of the--murder," Glenn began. "I was in the dining-room, being relieved for my little midnight luncheon as usual, when I heard of it, and I thought that perhaps you might want to know something that happened just before I went off duty."
"Yes; anything," broke in Kennedy.
"It was early in the evening," returned the clerk, slowly, "when a messenger left a little package for Captain Shirley--said that Captain Shirley had had it sent himself and asked that it be placed in his room. It was a little affair in a plain, paper-wrapped parcel. I sent one of the boys up with it and a key, and told him to put the package on the writing-desk tip here."
Kennedy looked at me. That, then, was the way something, whatever it might be, was introduced into the room.
"When the captain came in," resumed the night clerk, "I saw there was a letter for him in the mailbox and handed it to him. He stood before the office desk while he opened it. I thought he looked queer. The contents seemed to alarm him."
"What was in it?" asked Kennedy. "Could you see?"
"I got one glimpse. It seemed to be nothing but a little scarlet bead with a black spot on it. In his surprise, he dropped a piece of paper from the envelope in which the bead had been wrapped up. I thought it was strange, and, as he hurried over to the elevator, I picked it up.
Here it is."
The clerk handed over a crumpled piece of notepaper. On it was scrawled the word "Gadhr," and underneath, "Beware!" I spelled out the first strange word. It had an ominous sound--"Gadhr." Suddenly there flashed through my mind the letters Shirley had tried to print but had not finished, "G A D."
Kennedy looked at the paper a moment.
"Gadhr!" he exclaimed, in a low, tense tone. "Revolt--the native word for unrest in India, the revolution!"
We stared at each other blankly. All of us had been reading lately in the despatches about the troubles there, hidden under the ban of the censorship. I knew that the Hindu propaganda in America was as yet in its infancy, although several plots and conspiracies had been hatched here.
"Is there any one in the hotel whom you might suspect?" asked Kennedy.
Grady cleared his throat and looked at the night clerk significantly.
"Well," he answered, thoughtfully, "across the hall there is a new guest who came to-day--or, rather, yesterday--a Mrs. Anthony. We don"t know anything about her, except that she looks like a foreigner. She did not come directly from abroad, but must have been living in New York for some time. They tell me she asked for a room on this floor, at this end of the hall."
"H"m!" considered Kennedy. "I"d like to see her--without being seen."
"I think I can arrange that," acquiesced Grady. "You and Jameson stay in the bedroom. I"ll ask her to come over here, and then you can get a good look at her."
The plan satisfied Kennedy, and together we entered the bedroom, putting out the light and leaving the door just a trifle ajar.
A moment later Mrs. Anthony entered. I heard a suppressed gasp from Kennedy.
"The woman in the photograph!" he whispered to me.
I studied her face minutely from our coign of vantage. There was, indeed, a resemblance, too striking to be mere coincidence.
In the presence of Grady, she seemed to be nervous and on guard, as though she knew, intuitively, that she was suspected.
"Did you know Captain Shirley?" shot out Grady.
Kennedy looked over at me and frowned. I knew that something more subtle than New York police methods would be necessary in order to get anything from a woman like this.
"No," she replied, quietly. "You see, I just came here to-day." Her voice had an English accent.
"Did you hear a shot?"
"No," she replied. "The voices in the hall wakened me, though I did not know what was the matter until just now."
"Then you made no effort to find out?" inquired Grady, suspiciously.
"I am alone here in the city," she answered, simply. "I was afraid to intrude."
Throughout she gave the impression that she was strangely reticent about herself. Evidently Kennedy had not much faith that Grady would elicit anything of importance. He tiptoed to the door that led from the bedroom to the hall and found that it could be opened from the inside.
While Grady continued his questioning, Craig and I slipped out into the hall to the room which Mrs. Anthony occupied.
It was a suite much plainer than that occupied by Shirley. Craig switched on the light and looked about hastily and keenly.
For a moment he stood before a dressing-table on which were several toilet articles. A jewel-case seemed to attract his attention, and he opened it. Inside were some comparatively trifling trinkets. The thing that caused him to exclaim, however, was a necklace, broken and unstrung. I looked, too. It was composed of little crimson beads, each with a black spot on it!
Quickly he drew from his pocket the photograph he had taken from Shirley"s baggage. As I looked at it again there could be no doubt now in my mind of the ident.i.ty of the original. It was the same face. And about the neck, in the picture, was a necklace, plainly the same as that before us.
"What are the beads?" I asked, fingering them. "I"ve never seen anything like them."
"Not beads at all," he replied. "They are Hindu prayer-beans, sometimes called ruttee, jequirity beans, seeds of the plant known to science as Abrus precatorius. They produce a deadly poison--abrin." He slipped four or five of them into his pocket. Then he resumed his cursory search of the room. There, on a writing-pad, was a note which Mrs.
Anthony had evidently been engaged in writing. Craig pored over it for some time, while I fidgeted. It was nothing but a queer jumble of letters:
SOWC FSSJWA EKNLFFBY WOVHLX IHWAJYKH 101MLEL EPJNVPSL WCLURL GHIHDA ELBA.
"Come," I cautioned; "she may return any moment."
Quickly he copied off the letters.
"It"s a cipher," he said, simply, "a new and rather difficult one, too, I imagine. But I may be able to decipher it."
Kennedy withdrew from the room and, instead of going back to Shirley"s, rode down in the elevator to find the night clerk.
"Had Captain Shirley any friends in the city?" asked Craig.
Glenn shrugged his shoulders.
"He was out most of the time," he replied. "He seemed to be very occupied about something. No, I don"t think I ever saw him speak to a soul here, except a word to the waiters and the boys. Once, though," he recollected, "he was called up by a Mrs. Beekman Rogers."
"Mrs. Beekman Rogers," repeated Kennedy, jotting the name down and looking it up in the telephone-book. She lived on Riverside Drive, and, slender though the information was, Kennedy seemed glad to get it.
Grady joined us a moment later, having been wondering where we had disappeared.
"You saw her?" he asked. "What did you think of her?"
"Worth watching," was all Kennedy would say. "Did you get anything out of her?"
Grady shook his head.