The Project Gutenberg EBook of "Persons Unknown", by Virginia Tracy This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: "Persons Unknown" Author: Virginia Tracy Illustrator: Henry Raleigh Release Date: September 27, 2011 [EBook #37545] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "PERSONS UNKNOWN" *** Produced by Roland Schlenker, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net "PERSONS UNKNOWN" BY VIRGINIA TRACY ILLUSTRATIONS BY HENRY RALEIGH NEW YORK THE CENTURY CO. 1914 Copyright, 1914, by The Century Co. Copyright, 1914, by The Ridgway Company Published, October, 1914 TO MY FELLOW-CONSPIRATORS HELEN L. KLOEBER AND JESSIE C. SOULE When winter's breath was on the pane, Through dusk and snow, wild winds and rain, I fled to your bright hearth again To read about a Shadow! You lit the lamp, you brewed the tea, Pulled up the deepest chair for me, And set yourselves to guess and see— What ailed that minx, Christina? What Herrick found—what Nancy knew— Whose motor raced the county through— What could that harsh Policeman do— You never failed to argue; Of moonlight, murders, lovers, threats, Vengeance and kisses, siren's nets, And pale, dark men with cigarettes, Not once I found you weary! Through broken music, sudden light In the deep darkness, jewels bright, Persons unknown in unknown plight, You still sought unknown persons; Authors, if you would straightway know Where faith and cheer and counsel grow, Suggestions flourish and hints flow: Go ask my Nancy Cornish! Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before CONTENTS BOOK FIRST THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND I WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT 3 II HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED 7 III SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND 12 IVHERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING 14 VHERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER 19 VI HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR 25 VII HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY 36 VIII MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS 51 IXJOE PATRICK IS DETAINED 58 XJOE PATRICK ARRIVES 67 XI PERSONS UNKNOWN 89 XII HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE 96 BOOK SECOND THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN I HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT 103 II IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED 115 III HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S WAY 124 IVTHE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD 133 VHERRICK HEARS A BELL RING 158 VI AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL 166 VII MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY 170 VIII A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS 177 IXPRESTO CHANGE: "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME!" 184 XMIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DÉSIR—" 190 XI KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT 201 XII AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW 206 XIII THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION SCENE 215 XIVACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS 219 XV"WHEN STARS GROW COLD" 222 BOOK THIRD WILL O' THE WISP I GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY 231 II CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY 242 III SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY 254 IVA LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS 270 VTHE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA WAS 283 VI THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT 292 VII VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE 298 VIII JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR 305 IXA SIGN IN THE SKY 314 X"THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES 324 XI THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE TO A COMIC OPERA 334 XII THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS: "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I!'" 343 XIII "WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE 356 XIVTHE SICILIAN TRAITOR: "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE VIEW" 365 XVONE WITNESS SPEAKS 377 XVI THE LAST SHADOW: "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW ME!" 380 XVII HERSELF 385 BOOK FOURTH THE LIGHTED HOUSE I THE HOSTESS PREPARING 389 II THE EXPECTED COMPANY 399 III THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM 401 IVTURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL— 423 VCARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX 433 VI THE DARKEST HOUR: "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I MADE MY BATTLE STAY!" 447 VII THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT 459 VIII IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR 481 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before Frontispiece Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders 10 "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression; may I? 76 "'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope!'" 86 "There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it—I know!" 160 Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name 296 "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool! Thank God, I've done with you!" 420 "Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and through—?" 476 BOOK FIRST THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND CHAPTER I WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT "Ask Nancy Cornish!" The phrase might have exploded into Herrick's mind, it leaped there with such sudden violence, distinct as the command of a voice, out of the smothering blackness of the torrid August night. He started up instantly, as if to listen, sitting upright on the bed from which he had long since tossed all covering. Then he frowned at the tricks which the heat was playing upon even such strong nerves as his. In the unacknowledged homesickness of his heart his very first doze had brought him a dream of home; then the dream had slid along the trail of desire to a cool sea beach, where he and Marion used to be taken every summer when they were children, and a fog had rolled in along this beach which, at first, he had welcomed because it was so deliciously cold. It was no longer his sister who was there beside him; it was no less unexpected a person than the Heroine of the novel he was writing and whose conduct in the very next chapter he had been trying all day to decide. It was a delightful convenience to have her there, ready to tell him the secret of her heart! He saw that she had brought the novel with her, all finished. She held it out to him, open, and he read one phrase, "When Ann and her lover were down in Cornwall." He asked her what that was doing there—since her name was not Ann and he had never imagined her in Cornwall. And then the fog rolled up between them, blotting out the book, blotting out his Heroine; that fog became a horror, he was lost in it, and yet it vaguely showed him the shadowy forms of shadowy persons—he hoped if they were his other characters they really weren't quite so shadowy as that!—one of whom threateningly cried to him through the fog, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" And here he was, now, actually conscious of a great rush of energy and intention, as if he really had some way of asking Nancy Cornish, or anything to ask her, if he had! He remembered perfectly well, now, who she was—a little red-headed girl, a friend of his sister; a girl whom he had not seen in eight years and did not care if he never saw again. What had brought her into his dreams? She certainly had no business there. No girl had any business anywhere inside his head for the present, except that Heroine of his, whose photograph he had had framed to reign over his desk. It was a photograph which he had found forgotten, last winter, in the room of a hotel in Paris, and it had seemed to him the personality he had been looking for. Of the original he knew no more than that. But he knew well enough she was not Nancy Cornish. The novel was his first novel; and, after a long day of laborious failure at it, Herrick, in pure despair of his own work, had early flung himself abed. He had lain there waking and restless upon scorching linen, reluctantly listening, listening; to the passage of the trolley cars on upper Broadway; to the faint, threatening grumble of the Subway; the pitiful crying of a sick baby; the advancing, dying footfalls; to all the diabolic malevolence of shrieking or chugging automobiles. The mere act of sitting up, however, recalled him from the mussy stuffiness in which he had been tossing. Why, he was not buried somewhere in a black hole! He was occupying his landlady's best bedroom—the back parlor, indeed, of Mrs. Grubey's comfortable flat. Well, and to-morrow, after two months of loneliness, of one-sided conversations with the maddeningly mute countenance of his Heroine and of swapping jokes, baseball scores, weather prophecies, and political gossip with McGarrigle, the policeman on the beat, he was going to take lunch with Jimmy Ingham, the most eminent of publishers. Everything was all right! That peculiar sense of waiting and watching was growing on him merely with the restless brooding of the night, which smelt of thunder. In that burning, motionless air there was expectancy and a crouching sense of climax. Yet it was not so late but that, in the handsome apartment house opposite, an occasional window was still lighted. The pale blinds of one of these, directly on a level with Herrick's humbler casement, were drawn to the bottom; and Herrick vaguely wondered that any one should care to shut out even the idea of air. Just then, behind those blinds, some one began to play a piano. The touch was the touch of a master, and Herrick sat listening in surprise. The tide of lovely melody swept boldly out, filling the air with soaring angels. Could people be giving a party? Herrick got to his feet and struck a match. Five minutes past one! If he dressed and went down to the river, he would wake Mrs. Grubey and the Grubey children. He resigned himself; glancing at the precious letter of appointment with Ingham on his desk, and at the photograph of his Heroine, looking out at him with her quiet eyes; shy and candid, tender and bravely boyish, and cool with their first youth. To her he sighed, thinking of his novel, "Well, Evadne, we must have faith!" He turned out the light again, stripped off the coat of his pajamas, sopped the drinking water from his pitcher over his head and his strong shoulders, and drew an easy chair up to the window. Down by the curb one of those quivering automobiles seemed to purr, raspingly, in its sleep. Some one across the street was talking on and on, accompanied by the musician's now soft and improvising touch. Then, in Herrick's thoughts, the voice, or voices, and the fitful, straying music began to blend; and then he had no thoughts at all. He was wakened by a demonic crash of chords. His eyes sprang open; and there, on the blind opposite, was the shadow of a woman. She stood there with her back to the window, lithe and tense, and suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before. For a full minute she stood so; and then the gesture broke, as though she might have covered her face. The music, scurrying onward from its crash, had never ceased; it had risen again, ringing triumphantly into the march from Faust, a man's voice rising furiously with it, and it flashed over Herrick that they might be rehearsing some scene in a play. Then the sound of a pistol-shot split through the night. Immediately, behind the blind, the lights went out. CHAPTER II HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED The sleepy boy at the switchboard of the house opposite did not seem to feel in the situation any of the urgency which had brought Herrick into that elegant vestibule, barefoot and with nothing but an unbuttoned ulster over his pajama trousers. The boy said he guessed the shot wasn't a shot; he guessed maybe it was an automobile tire. There couldn't be a lady in 4-B, anyhow; it was just a bachelor apartment. Well, he supposed it was 4-B because there was always complaints of him playing on the piano late at night. The switchboard called him imperatively as he spoke, and he reluctantly consented to ring up the superintendent. Instinctively, he refrained from interfering with Herrick when that young man possessed himself of the elevator and shot to the fourth floor. There was no further noises, no call for help, no woman's fleeing figure. But Herrick's sense of locality guided him down a little hall, upon which, toward the front, only two apartments opened. One of these was lettered 4-B. If Herrick had not stopped for his boots he had for his revolver and it was with the butt end of this that he began hammering upon the sheet-iron surface of that door. There was no answer. Was he too late? The other door opened the length of a short chain. A little man, with wisps of woolly gray standing up from his head as if in amazement, brought his face to the opening and quavered, "Be careful! You'll get hurt! Be—" "Good God!" cried Herrick. "There's a woman in there!" "A woman! Why—I thought I heard a woman—!" It was not so long since Herrick's reporting days but that he believed he could still work the trick pressure by which two policemen will burst in the strongest lock. But he now gave up hope of the woolly gentleman as an assistant and turned his attention to the brass knob. "Get me a screw-driver!" "Theodore!" came a voice from behind the woolly gentleman, "Don't you open our door! It's no business of yours!" Herrick, glancing desperately about him for any aid, was sufficiently aware that he might be making a fool of himself for nothing. But the young fellow felt that was a risk he had to take. In the long hall crossing the little one he could hear doors opening; the clash of questioning voices mingled with excited cries—And then came a girl's voice shrilling, "Isn't anybody going to do anything?" A husky business voice roared from secure cover, "You don't know what you may be breaking into, young man! You may get yourself in trouble." Herrick growled through his teeth an imprecation that ended in "Hand me a screw-driver, can't you? And a hammer!" The sweat was pouring down his face from the pressure of his strength upon the lock, but the lock held. What was going on in there? Or—what had ceased to go on? He could hear Theodore tremblingly protesting, "I have telephoned for the superintendent—He has the keys. It's the superintendent's business—" Had the one shot done the trick? Then, above the stairhead, across the longer hall, appeared the helmet of a policeman. At his heels came the superintendent, carrying the keys. The policeman was jolted from his first idea of arresting Herrick by Herrick's welcoming cry, "Get a gait on you, McGarrigle!" which proclaimed to him a valued acquaintance; then, with a hand shaking with excitement, the half- dressed superintendent fitted the key in the lock. The lock turned but nothing happened. The door was bolted on the inside. The re-captured elevator was heard in the distance, and the superintendent sang out, "Get the engineer! Hurry! Make him hurry!—You heard no cries—no?" he asked of Herrick. And he stood wiping his face and breathing hard, his brow dark with trouble. The halls had begun to be bravely peopled. Also, a second policeman had arrived. And the information spread that one of these reassuring figures had been left in the hall downstairs and that another had gone to the roof. Curiosity, comparatively comfortable and respectable, now, made itself audible and even visible on every side; some adventurers from the street had sallied in. When McGarrigle asked the superintendent, "Any way we can get a look in?" some one immediately volunteered, "There's Mrs. Willing's apartment right across the entrance-court. You can see in both these rooms from hers." "Only two rooms?" "Parlor, bedroom and bath," said somebody in the tone of a prospectus. "You go see what you can see, Clancy," said McGarrigle to the second policeman. "Now, Mr. Herrick?" Herrick told what he knew, and McGarrigle, his eyes resting with admiration on the extremely undraped muscles of his informant, plied him with attentive questions. Herrick's own eyes were on the engineer's steel. Would it never spring the bolt? "If only she'd cry out!" he said. "Why doesn't she make some sign?" "You're sure 'twas him fired?" "That shadow had no revolver." "He's done for her, then. Els't he'd never have barricaded himself like, in there. He didn't give himself a dose, after?" "Only the one shot." "If there's an inquest you'll be wanted." "All right.—But why hasn't he tried to gain time with some kind of parley—some kind of bluff?" "Knows he's cornered. He'll show fight as we go in on him. If there's more than one—" The bolt gave. McGarrigle turned like a fury. "Clear the hall," he cried. There was a confused movement. Obedient souls disappeared. Clancy returned and reported the front room invisible from Mrs. Willing's side window, the shade of its own side window being down. In the bedroom and bath all lights out, but shades up and nothing stirring. "Any hall?" The superintendent replied in the negative. "No fire-escapes, you say?" "No. Fireproof building." "They're right ahead of us, then." Again, with a long shudder, the door gave. The whole hall seemed to give a gasping breath. McGarrigle growled. "I'll have no mix-up in this hall!" He favored Herrick with a wink that said, "See me clear 'em out!" "Clancy, you stay here by the door; pick out half a dozen of 'em that see it through and hold 'em to be witnesses." The halls were cleared. Locks clicked as if by simultaneous miracles and even the adventurers from the street could be heard in full flight. Herrick and McGarrigle exchanged grim smiles. "Now! You keep back, Mr. Herrick! Clancy, look out!" The engineer jumped to one side. The door swung open. Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders It gave directly into the dark room which had lately been full of light and music and a woman's passionate grace. Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders. No shadow, now, on the white blind. Whatever was within the dusk simply waited. Herrick, pushing past Clancy, entered the room with McGarrigle. Behind them the superintendent leaned in and pressed an electric button. Light sprang forth, flooding everything. The room was empty. CHAPTER III SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND "Get-away, eh!" said McGarrigle, grimly. The superintendent, shaken and wide-eyed, responded only "The bolt!" They glanced round them, non-plused. The large living-room upon which they had entered was richly furnished, but it had no screens nor hidden corners, and, on that summer night, the windows were undraped. The doorway in which they stood faced the great window which took up nearly all the frontage of the room. The door opened against the left wall. Just beyond the door, along that left wall, stood the piano; beyond that a couch; between the head of the couch and the front window the wall was cut, up to the molding, by one of those high, narrow doors which, in a modern apartment house, indicate the welcome, though inopportune, closet. This door was the single object of suspicion; then, an overturned chair caught their attention. It lay between the great library-table which, standing horizontally, almost halved the room, and the narrow strip of paneling of wall to the right of the main door in which the superintendent had pressed the button for the lights. In the right wall, opening on the entrance-court, directly opposite the piano, but also with its blind drawn, was another window of ordinary size. "The bedroom," said the superintendent, moistening his lips, "'s on the court, there." Then they observed, to their right, the bedroom's arch hung with heavy portières. And the sight of these portières carried with it a cold thrill. But—"There ain't anybody in there!" Clancy persisted. McGarrigle walked over to the door in the wall and tried it. It was locked and there was no key in the lock. "What's this?" "A closet." "Open it, engineer. Clancy, you stand by him." He went up to the portières, opened them with some caution and peered in. Faced only by an empty room he jerked at the portières to throw them back; they were very heavy and the humidity made their rings stick to the pole so that Deutch, running to his assistance, held one aside for him, while with his other hand he himself fumbled to spring on the bedroom light. Herrick was hard upon McGarrigle's heels, but, a look round revealing nothing, he was struck by a sudden fancy and, recrossing the living-room, raised the shade. No, the little balcony was wholly empty. The great window had been made in three sections, and the middle section was really a pair of doors that opened outward on this balcony. Clancy commented upon the foolishness of their not opening in as he watched Herrick step through them into the calm night that offered no explanation of that bolted emptiness. Herrick stepped to the end of the balcony and craned round toward the entrance-court. From the now lighted bedroom window there was no access to any other. He glimpsed McGarrigle's head stuck forth from the bathroom for the same observation. And it somehow surprised him that a trolley car should still bang indifferently past the corner; that, just opposite, that automobile should still chug away, as if nothing had happened. Then he heard a cry from the superintendent, followed by the policeman's oath. Herrick ran into the bedroom and stopped short. On the floor at the foot of the bed lay the body of a young man in dinner clothes. He had been shot through the heart. CHAPTER IV HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING There was something at once commonplace and incredible about it—about the stupid ghastliness of the face and about the horrid, sticky smear in the muss of the finely tucked shirt. That gross, silly sprawl of the limbs!—was it those hands that had called forth angelic music? The dead man was splendidly handsome and this somehow accentuated Herrick's revulsion. McGarrigle bent over the body. After a moment he said to the superintendent, "No use for a doctor. But if you got one, get him." "He's dead!" said the superintendent. "It's suicide!" He spoke quietly, but with a dreadfully repressed and labored breath. "Officer, can't you see it's suicide?" He called up the doctor, and then to the silent group he again insisted, "It's him shot himself. The door was bolted on the inside. He had to shoot himself!" McGarrigle was at the 'phone, calling up the station. Turning his head he responded, "Where's the weapon?" They had got the closet open now; no one there. No one in the bedroom closet. No one under the big brass bed, in the folds of the portières, behind the piano, under the couch. No one anywhere. Nor any weapon, either. Herrick and Clancy began to examine the fastening of the door. It was an ordinary little brass catch—a slip-catch, the engineer called it—which shot its bolt by being turned like a Yale lock. "If this door shut behind any one with a bang, could the catch slip of itself?" The engineer shook his head. The hall was long since full again, though the adventurers were ready to pop back at a moment's notice; pushing through them came the doctor. Herrick did not follow him into the bedroom. The room he stood in had a personality it seemed to challenge him to penetrate. His most pervasive impression was of cool coloring. The portières were of a tapestry which struck Herrick as probably genuine Gobelin, but with their famous blue faded to a refreshing dullness and he now remembered that in handling them he had found them lined with a soft but very heavy satin of the same shade, as if to give them all possible substance. The stretched silk, figured in tapestry, which covered the walls, had been dyed a dull blue, washed with gray, to match them; and, to Herrick, this tint, sober as it was, somehow seemed a strange one for a man's room. In couch and rugs and lampshades these notes of gray and blue continued to predominate, greatly enhanced by all the woodwork, which, evidently supplied by the tenant, was of black walnut. He had been no anchorite, that tenant. In the corner between the bedroom and the court window the surface of a seventeenth century sideboard glimmered under bright liquids, under crystal and silver. Beyond that window all sorts of rich lusters shone from the bindings of the books that thronged shelves built into the wall until they reached the great desk standing in the farthest right hand corner to catch the front window's light. A lamp stood on this desk, unlighted. At present all the illumination in the room came from three other lamps; one that squatted atop of the grand piano, between the now flameless old silver candelabra; one, almost veiled by its heavy shade, in the middle of the library table; and one, of the standing sort, that rose up tall from a sea of newspapers at the head of the couch. All these lamps, worked by the same switch, were electric, and the ordinary electric fixtures had been dispensed with; the light was abundant, but very soft and thrown low, with outlying stretches of shadow. It was not remarkable that it had failed to show them the murdered man until the electricity in the bedroom itself had been evoked. Herrick looked again at the couch. Its cushions had lately been rumpled and lounged upon; at its head, under the tall lamp, stood a teakwood tabouret, set with smoking materials on a Benares tray. At its foot, as if for the convenience of the musician, a little ebony table bore a decanter and a bowl of ice; the ice in a tall glass, half-empty, was still melting into the whiskey; in a shallow Wedgewood saucer a half-smoked cigarette was smoldering still. "McGarrigle!" said Herrick, in a low voice. "Hallo!" "He was shot in here, after all. I was sure of it." And he pointed to the foot of the piano stool. Still well above the surface of the hardwood flooring was a little puddle of blood. McGarrigle contemplated this with a kind of sour bewilderment. "Well, the coroner's notified. You'll be wanted, y'know, to the inquest." "What's this?" asked somebody. It was a long chiffon scarf and it lay on the library table under the lamp. Clancy lifted it and its whiteness creamed down from his fingers in the tender lights and folds which lately it had taken around a woman's throat. Just above the long silk fringe, a sort of cloudy arabesque was embroidered in a dim wave of lucent silk. And Herrick noticed that the color of this border was blue-gray, like the blue-gray room. As they all grimly stared at it, the superintendent exclaimed, "I never saw it before!" McGarrigle looked from him to the scarf and commanded, in deference to the coming coroner, "You leave that lay, now, Clancy!" Clancy left it. But something in the thing's frail softness affected Herrick more painfully than the blood of the dead man. In no nightmare, then, had he imagined that shadow of a woman! She had been here; she was gone. And, on the floor in there, was that her work? Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal. On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if they expected the tragedy to be reënacted for their benefit. They all turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the nearest man said, "Have they got him?" "Him?" "Why, the murderer!" "Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman." "Indeed! Well, have they caught her?" "They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that it's a suicide." "Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always supposed to be suicides!" The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes." "Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'—I accept the correction. Any poor fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit suicide!—I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down the street. Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that suicide.— What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how —in God's name, how!—had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!" CHAPTER V HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers of consciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, with to-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his own life-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and passed out of his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him. Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick had passed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheon with an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, this was a critical period in his fortunes. At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live a singularly baffled life—a life of artificial stagnation. His first twenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinary popularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd, Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be known as the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but for generations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It was Bryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty already largely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, brought him a little fortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish and Southern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clear glance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at once peppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tall youth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather an aggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; with a kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all his dealings—just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihood and enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin, and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared very much more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physical type which is at once large and slender—broad shouldered and deep chested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light of flank—it had surprised nobody when he became, as if naturally, spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was the craftmanship in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang from his vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York Record; soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down like sticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrick died, and it was presently found that her money had been a long time gone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocent creature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanity of speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which had come to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland was prescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of their straitened circumstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, during the first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short stories which had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had been thought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in book form, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all too painful, too futile, too muffling! He seemed to be meant for but two uses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's business affairs and to assist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, which was his father's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His father suffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made him suffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do no secretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering he thought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this, uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marion and for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth—and he had not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation, this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's life sacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile and poverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks; and there grew up in him a passionate consideration for women, a romantic faith in their essential nobility, a romantic devotion to their right to happiness. Snatched from all the populous clamor and dazzle of his boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl and the Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow; sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fashioned; perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living, mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous, lost, world. Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick followed the Chaldeans, the Babylonians, and the Kassites; within a few months Marion was married; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in his pocket, famished for adventure and companionship, with the appetite of a man and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis of his five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stone desert of New York in summer—a New York already changed, and which seemed to have dropped him out! But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him; and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house of Ingham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, at last, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad, Ingham—himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him at the same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law,—had responded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough! Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time to remember when he had last looked at his watch in that room. Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn't going to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest at lunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be too superior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving for his complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to do away with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And, before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith in his Heroine! He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over to her, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous—You darling!" Lose faith in her! The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, represented a very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to the sea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hair all seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, in her whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick was sure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair, with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which had wholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid and wide-set; in a shifting world they were entirely brave. This was what touched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignity of her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all the alert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courage of a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longed to try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall little girl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she come adventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all during those dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; in the Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue's deserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how things would look to that young eagerness—no more ardent, had he but realized it, than his own! —"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promising with Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moon rise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about the moon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his best shirt, he called her Sal. A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled him to the illustrious circumstance that he was by way of being a hero of a murder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it was destined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door something which, as he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule, Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough scrap of paper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall- paper—a ragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largely symbolizes apartment-house refinement— and which confronted him from its smoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, graceful hand, For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat? But should not Apollos stay in when it rains? It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but all the appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of this neighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. He was forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of the Grubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath and it occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road was to send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers. Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself. He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carrying three. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met his eyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. It began—"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but—" He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read: DEATH BAFFLES POLICE. James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in Apartment— Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the second Grubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E. Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase, "Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House." CHAPTER VI HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR Hermann Deutch was a shortish, middle-aged Jew, belonging to the humbler classes and of a perfectly cheap and cheerful type. But at the present moment he was not cheerful. He showed his harassment in the drawn diffidence of his sympathetic, emotional face, and in every line of what, ten or fifteen years ago, must have been a handsome little person. Since that period his tight black curls, receding further and further from his naturally high forehead, had grown decidedly thin, and exactly the reverse of this had happened to his figure. But he had still a pair of femininely liquid and large black eyes, brimming with the romance which does not characterize the cheap and cheerful of other races, and Herrick remembered him last night as very impressionably, but not basely, nervous. He now fixed his liquid eyes upon Herrick with an anxiety which took humble but minute notes. Since the young fellow was at least half-dressed in very well-cut and well-cared-for, if not specially new, garments, it was clear to Mr. Deutch's reluctant admiration that he was thoroughly "high-class!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his hands and plunged. "I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I want to ask you.—You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr. Herrick.—Well, I will, thanks,"—as he dropped into a chair. "I—I won't keep you a minute—" "I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted. The news in his paper had made him feel as if he had just been disinherited and, now that the dead man was a personality so much nearer home, his brain rang with a hundred impressions of pity and wonder and excitement. But he sympathized with poor Mr. Deutch; it could be no sinecure to be the superintendent of a murder! Then, recollecting, "What made you so certain it was suicide?" he asked suddenly. "What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there." "There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired." The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well, now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if there was a lady there last night—but there couldn't have been—well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't have seen her so very plain, now could you?" "What are you driving at?" Herrick asked. "Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr. Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand—" "While he played the piano with the other?" "Mr. Herrick, there couldn't have been any lady there!" He bridled. "It's against the rules—that time o' night! I wouldn't ever allow such a thing. There's never been a word against the Van Dam since I been running it. Why, Mr. Herrick, if there was to be that kind of talk, especially if she was to murder the gentleman and all like that, I'd be ruined. And so'd the house. It ain't one o' these cheap flat buildings. We got leases signed by—" "Oh, I see!" Herrick felt his temper rising. But he tried to be reasonable while he added, "I'm very sorry for you. But there was a woman there. I've reported so already to the police. Even if I had not, I couldn't go in for perjury, Mr. Deutch." "No, no! Of course not! Of course! I wouldn't ask you! You don't understand me! It's not to take back what you said already to the police. That'd get you into trouble. And it couldn't be done. I couldn't expect it. It's not facts you might go a little easy on, Mr. Herrick; it's your language!" "What!" "It's your descriptive language, Mr. Herrick. If only you wouldn't be quite so particular—" "Look here!" said Herrick with his odd, brusk slowness. "I didn't know it myself last night. But Mr. Ingham wasn't altogether a stranger to me." Deutch stared at him. "He had friends in the town I come from and a good many people I know are going to be badly cut up about his death. I was to have met him on business this very day. Now you can see that I don't feel very leniently to the person—not even to the woman—who murdered him. I don't believe he killed himself. He had no reason to do it. If there's anything I can do to prove he didn't, that thing's going to be done. If there's any word of mine that's a clue to tell who killed him, I can't speak it often enough nor loud enough. Understand that, Mr. Deutch. And, good-morning." "Oh, my God! Oh, dear! But my dear sir—" "And let me give you a word of warning. If you keep on like this what people will really say is, that you knew there was a woman there and that it was you who connived at her escape!" "All right!" cried Mr. Deutch, unexpectedly. "Let 'em say it! I got no kick coming if people tell lies about me, any. All I want stopped is the lies you're putting into people's heads about Miss Christina." "Miss Christina!" Herrick exclaimed. He stared, wondering if the poor worried little soul had gone out of his head. "I never mentioned any woman's name. I didn't know any to mention. I never heard of any Miss Christina!" "You told the policeman the way she made motions, moving around and all like that, it made you think maybe they were rehearsing something out of a play." "Did I? Well?" Mr. Deutch possessed himself of the newspaper which Herrick had dropped upon the bed, and pointed to the last line of the murder story. It ran: "About a year ago Mr. Ingham became engaged to be married to Christina Hope, the actress." And Herrick read the line with a strange thrill, as of prophecy realized. "Oh—ho!" he breathed. "Oh—ho!" hysterically mocked the superintendent. "You see what it makes you think, all right. Even me!—that was what brought her first to my mind, poor lady. The police officers may have forgot it or not noticed, any. But if you say it again, at the inquest, you'll make everybody think the same thing. And it's not so!" he almost shrieked. "It's not so. It's a damn mean lie! And you got no right to say such a thing!" "That's true," said Herrick, intently. After his impulsive whistle he had begun to furl his sails. He had heard vaguely of Christina Hope, as a promising young actress who had made her mark somewhere in the West, and was soon to attempt the same feat on Broadway. He knew nothing to her detriment. "Ain't it hard enough for her, poor young lady, with him gone and all, but what she should have that said about her! And it wouldn't stop there, even! She was there alone with him at night, they'd say, with their nasty slurs. She'd never stand a chance. For there ain't any denying she's on the stage, and that's enough to make everybody think she's guilty—" "Oh, come! Why—" "Wasn't it enough for you, yourself?" Herrick opened his lips for an indignant negative, but he closed them without speaking. "The minute you seen that paragraph you felt 'She's just the person to be mixed up with things that way.' And then you grabbed hold of yourself and said, 'Why, no. She may be as nice as anybody. Give her the benefit of the doubt.' But there's the doubt, all right. You're an edjucated gennelman," said Mr. Deutch, sympathetically, "but all these prejudiced, old-fashioned farmers and low-brows like they got on juries—people like them, and Miss Christina—Oh! Good Lord! Ach, don't I know 'em! Mr. Herrick, it's my solemn word, if you say that at the inquest to turn them on to Miss Christina, you—" "I shan't say it at the inquest," Herrick said. He was astonished at the completeness of the charge in his own mind. He was convinced, now, in every nerve, that Ingham had met death at the hands of his betrothed. But the very violence of his conviction warned him not to lay such a handicap upon other minds. His chance phrase, his chance impression, must color neither the popular nor the legal outlook. "I shall take very good care, you may be sure, to say nothing of the kind. Here!" he cried, "you want a drink!" For Mr. Deutch, at this emphatic assurance, had put his plump elbows on his plump knees and hidden his moon face, his spaniel eyes, with plump and shaky fists. He drank the whiskey Herrick brought him and slowly got himself together; without embarrassment, but with a comfort in his relaxation which made Herrick guess how tight he had been strung. As he returned the glass he said, "If you knew what a lot we thought, Mr. Herrick, me and my wife, of the young lady, I wouldn't seem anywheres near so crazy to you." Herrick sat down on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves and regarded his guest. Strict delicacy required that he ask no questions. But he was human. And he had been a reporter. He said, "You used to see her with Mr. Ingham?" "Oh, great Scott, Mr. Herrick, we knew her long before that! Long before ever he set eyes on her. When she was a tiny little thing and her papa had money, he used to get his wine from my firm. He was such a pleasant-spoken, agreeable gentleman that when I went into business for myself I sent him my card. It wasn't the wine business, Mr. Herrick, it was oil paintings. I always was what you might call artistic; I got very refined feelings, and business ain't exactly in my line. I had as high-class a little shop as ever you set your eyes on; gold frames; plush draperies, electric lights; fine, beautiful oil paintings—oh, beautiful!—by expensive, high-class artists; every...