I had some work to do at the office, work that the interview with Hunter had interrupted, and half past eight that night found me at my desk. But my mind strayed from the papers before me. After a useless effort to concentrate, I gave it up as useless, and by ten o"clock I was on the street again, my evening wasted, the papers in the libel case of the _Star_ against the _Eagle_ untouched on my desk, and I the victim of an uneasy apprehension that took me, almost without volition, to the neighborhood of the Fleming house on Monmouth Avenue. For it had occurred to me that Miss Fleming might not have left the house that day as she had promised, might still be there, liable to another intrusion by the mysterious individual who had a key to the house.
It was a relief, consequently, when I reached its corner, to find no lights in the building. The girl had kept her word. a.s.sured of that, I looked at the house curiously. It was one of the largest in the city, not wide, but running far back along the side street; a small yard with a low iron fence and a garage, completed the property. The street lights left the back of the house in shadow, and as I stopped in the shelter of the garage, I was positive that I heard some one working with a rear window of the empty house. A moment later the sounds ceased and m.u.f.fled footsteps came down the cement walk. The intruder made no attempt to open the iron gate; against the light I saw him put a leg over the low fence, follow it up with the other, and start up the street, still with peculiar noiselessness of stride. He was a short, heavy-shouldered fellow in a cap, and his silhouette showed a prodigious length of arm.
I followed, I don"t mind saying in some excitement. I had a vision of grabbing him from behind and leading him--or pushing him, under the circ.u.mstances, in triumph to the police station, and another mental picture, not so pleasant, of being found on the pavement by some pa.s.ser-by, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life. But I was not apprehensive. I even remember wondering humorously if I should overtake him and press the cold end of my silver mounted fountain pen into the nape of his neck, if he would throw up his hands and surrender.
I had read somewhere of a burglar held up in a similar way with a shoe-horn.
Our pace was easy. Once the man just ahead stopped and lighted a cigarette, and the odor of a very fair Turkish tobacco came back to me.
He glanced back over his shoulder at me and went on without quickening his pace. We met no policemen, and after perhaps five minutes walking, when the strain was growing tense, my gentleman of the rubber-soled shoes swung abruptly to the left, and--entered the police station!
I had occasion to see Davidson many times after that, during the strange development of the Fleming case; I had the peculiar experience later of having him follow me as I had trailed him that night, and I had occasion once to test the strength of his long arms when he helped to thrust me through the transom at the White Cat, but I never met him without a recurrence of the sheepish feeling with which I watched him swagger up to the night sergeant and fall into easy conversation with the man behind the desk. Standing in the glare from the open window, I had much the lost pride and self contempt of a wet cat sitting in the sun.
Two or three roundsmen were sitting against the wall, lazily, helmets off and coats open against the warmth of the early spring night. In a back room others were playing checkers and disputing noisily. Davidson"s voice came distinctly through the open windows.
"The house is closed," he reported. "But one of the bas.e.m.e.nt windows isn"t shuttered and the lock is bad. I couldn"t find Shields. He"d better keep an eye on it." He stopped and fished in his pockets with a grin. "This was tied to the k.n.o.b of the kitchen door," he said, raising his voice for the benefit of the room, and holding aloft a piece of paper. "For Shields!" he explained, "and signed "Delia.""
The men gathered around him, even the sergeant got up and leaned forward, his elbows on his desk.
"Read it," he said lazily. "Shields has got a wife; and her name ain"t Delia."
"Dear Tom," Davidson read, in a mincing falsetto, "We are closing up unexpected, so I won"t be here to-night. I am going to Mamie Brennan"s and if you want to talk to me you can get me by calling up Anderson"s drug-store. The clerk is a gentleman friend of mine. Mr. Carter, the butler, told me before he left he would get me a place as parlor maid, so I"ll have another situation soon. Delia."
The sergeant scowled. "I"m goin" to talk to Tom," he said, reaching out for the note. "He"s got a nice family, and things like that"re bad for the force."
I lighted the cigar, which had been my excuse for loitering on the pavement, and went on. It sounded involved for a novice, but if I could find Anderson"s drug-store I could find Mamie Brennan; through Mamie Brennan I would get Delia; and through Delia I might find Carter. I was vague from that point, but what Miss Fleming had said of Carter had made me suspicious of him. Under an arc light I made the first note in my new business of man-hunter and it was something like this:
Anderson"s drug-store.
Ask for Mamie Brennan.
Find Delia.
Advise Delia that a policeman with a family is a bad bet.
Locate Carter.
It was late when I reached the corner of Chestnut and Union Streets, where Fred had said Allan Fleming had come to grief in a cab. But the corner-man had gone, and the night man on the beat knew nothing, of course, of any particular collision.
"There"s plinty of "em every day at this corner," he said cheerfully.
"The department sinds a wagon here every night to gather up the pieces, autymobiles mainly. That trolley pole over there has been sliced off clean three times in the last month. They say a fellow ain"t a graduate of the autymobile school till he can go around it on the sidewalk without hittin" it!"
I left him looking reminiscently at the pole, and went home to bed. I had made no headway, I had lost conceit with myself and a day and evening at the office, and I had gained the certainty that Margery Fleming was safe in Bellwood and the uncertain address of a servant who _might_ know something about Mr. Fleming.
I was still awake at one o"clock and I got up impatiently and consulted the telephone directory. There were twelve Andersons in the city who conducted drug-stores.
When I finally went to sleep, I dreamed that I was driving Margery Fleming along a street in a broken taxicab, and that all the buildings were pharmacies and numbered eleven twenty-two.
CHAPTER III
NINETY-EIGHT PEARLS
After such a night I slept late. Edith still kept her honeymoon promise of no breakfast hour and she had gone out with Fred when I came down-stairs.
I have a great admiration for Edith, for her tolerance with my uncertain hours, for her cheery breakfast-room, and the smiling good nature of the servants she engages. I have a theory that, show me a sullen servant and I will show you a sullen mistress, although Edith herself disclaims all responsibility and lays credit for the smile with which Katie brings in my eggs and coffee, to largess on my part. Be that as it may, Katie is a smiling and personable young woman, and I am convinced that had she picked up the alligator on the back-stairs and lost part of the end of her thumb, she would have told Edith that she cut it off with the bread knife, and thus have saved to us Bessie the Beloved and her fascinating trick of taking the end of her tail in her mouth and spinning.
On that particular morning, Katie also brought me a letter, and I recognized the cramped and rather uncertain writing of Miss Jane Maitland.
"DEAR MR. KNOX:
"Sister Let.i.tia wishes me to ask you if you can dine with us to-night, informally. She has changed her mind in regard to the Colored Orphans" Home, and would like to consult you about it.
"Very truly yours,
"SUSAN JANE MAITLAND."
It was a very commonplace note: I had had one like it after every board-meeting of the orphans" home, Miss Maitland being on principle an aggressive minority. Also, having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.
(Fred accuses me here of a very bad pun, and reminds me, quite undeservedly, that the pun is the lowest form of humor.)
I came across Miss Jane"s letter the other day, when I was gathering the material for this narrative, and I sat for a time with it in my hand thinking over again the chain of events in which it had been the first link, a series of strange happenings that began with my acceptance of the invitation, and that led through ways as dark and tricks as vain as Bret Harte"s Heathen Chinee ever dreamed of, to the final scene at the White Cat. With the letter I had filed away a half dozen articles and I ranged them all on the desk in front of me: the letter, the bit of paper with eleven twenty-two on it, that Margery gave me the first time I saw her; a note-book filled with jerky characters that looked like Arabic and were newspaper shorthand; a railroad schedule; a bullet, the latter slightly flattened; a cube-shaped piece of chalk which I put back in its box with a shudder, and labeled "poison," and a small gold buckle from a slipper, which I--at which I did not shudder.
I did not need to make the climaxes of my story. They lay before me.
I walked to the office that morning, and on the way I found and interviewed the corner-man at Chestnut and Union. But he was of small a.s.sistance. He remembered the incident, but the gentleman in the taxicab had not been hurt and refused to give his name, saying he was merely pa.s.sing through the city from one railroad station to another, and did not wish any notoriety.
At eleven o"clock Hunter called up; he said he was going after the affair himself, but that it was hard to stick a dip net into the political puddle without pulling out a lot more than you went after, or than it was healthy to get. He was inclined to be facetious, and wanted to know if I had come across any more k. v"s. Whereupon I put away the notes I had made about Delia and Mamie Brennan and I heard him chuckle as I rang off.
I went to Bellwood that evening. It was a suburban town a dozen miles from the city, with a picturesque station, surrounded by lawns and cement walks. Street-cars had so far failed to spoil its tree-bordered streets, and it was exclusive to the point of stagnation. The Maitland place was at the head of the main street, which had at one time been its drive. Miss Let.i.tia, who was seventy, had had sufficient commercial instinct, some years before, to cut her ancestral acres--_their_ ancestral acres, although Miss Jane hardly counted--into building lots, except perhaps an acre which surrounded the house. Thus, the Maitland ladies were reputed to be extremely wealthy. And as they never spent any money, no doubt they were.
The homestead as I knew it, was one of impeccable housekeeping and unmitigated gloom. There was a chill that rushed from the old-fashioned center hall to greet the new-comer on the porch, and that seemed to freeze up whatever in him was spontaneous and cheerful.
I had taken dinner at Bellwood before, and the memory was not hilarious.
Miss Let.i.tia was deaf, but chose to ignore the fact. With superb indifference she would break into the conversation with some wholly alien remark that necessitated a rea.s.sembling of one"s ideas, making the meal a series of mental gymnastics. Miss Jane, through long practice, and because she only skimmed the surface of conversation, took her cerebral flights easily, but I am more unwieldy of mind.
Nor was Miss Let.i.tia"s dominance wholly conversational. Her sister Jane was her creature, alternately snubbed and bullied. To Miss Let.i.tia, Jane, in spite of her sixty-five years, was still a child, and sometimes a bad one. Indeed, many a child of ten is more sophisticated. Miss Let.i.tia gave her expurgated books to read, and forbade her to read divorce court proceedings in the newspapers. Once, a recreant housemaid presenting the establishment with a healthy male infant, Jane was sent to the country for a month, and was only brought back when the house had been fumigated throughout.
Poor Miss Jane! She met me with fluttering cordiality in the hall that night, safe in being herself for once, with the knowledge that Miss Let.i.tia always received me from a throne-like horsehair sofa in the back parlor. She wore a new lace cap, and was twitteringly excited.
"Our niece is here," she explained, as I took off my coat--everything was "ours" with Jane; "mine" with Let.i.tia--"and we are having an ice at dinner. Please say that ices are not injurious, Mr. Knox. My sister is so opposed to them and I had to beg for this."
"On the contrary, the doctors have ordered ices for my young nephews," I said gravely, "and I dote on them myself."
Miss Jane beamed. Indeed, there was something almost unnaturally gay about the little old lady all that evening. Perhaps it was the new lace cap. Later, I tried to a.n.a.lyze her manner, to recall exactly what she had said, to remember anything that could possibly help. But I could find no clue to what followed.
Miss Let.i.tia received me as usual, in the back parlor. Miss Fleming was there also, sewing by a window, and in her straight white dress with her hair drawn back and braided around her head, she looked even younger than before. There was no time for conversation. Miss Let.i.tia launched at once into the extravagance of both mola.s.ses and b.u.t.ter on the colored orphans" bread and after a glance at me, and a quick comprehension from my face that I had no news for her, the girl at the window bent over her sewing again.