I had my arm done up temporarily in Baltimore and took the next train home. I
was pretty far gone when I stumbled out of a cab almost into the scandalized
arms of Mrs. Klopton. In fifteen minutes I was in bed, with that good woman
piling on blankets and blistering me in unprotected places with hot-water
bottles. And in an hour I had a whiff of chloroform and Doctor Williams had set
the broken bone.
I dropped asleep then, waking in the late twilight to a realization that I was
at home again, without the papers that meant conviction for Andy Bronson, with
a charge of murder hanging over my head, and with something more than an
impression of the girl my best friend was in love with, a girl moreover who was
almost as great an enigma as the crime itself.
“And I’m no hand at guessing riddles,” I groaned half aloud.
Mrs. Klopton came over promptly and put a cold cloth on my forehead.
“Euphemia,” she said to some one outside the door, “telephone
the doctor that he is still rambling, but that he has switched from green
ribbons to riddles.”
“There’s nothing the matter with me, Mrs. Klopton,” I
rebelled. “I was only thinking out loud. Confound that cloth: it’s
trickling all over me!” I gave it a fling, and heard it land with a soggy
thud on the floor.
“Thinking out loud is delirium,” Mrs. Klopton said imperturbably.
“A fresh cloth, Euphemia.”
This time she held it on with a firm pressure that I was too weak to resist. I
expostulated feebly that I was drowning, which she also laid to my mental
exaltation, and then I finally dropped into a damp sleep. It was probably
midnight when I roused again. I had been dreaming of the wreck, and it was
inexpressibly comforting to feel the stability of my bed, and to realize the
equal stability of Mrs. Klopton, who sat, fully attired, by the night light,
reading Science and Health.
“Does that book say anything about opening the windows on a hot
night?” I suggested, when I had got my bearings.
She put it down immediately and came over to me. If there is one time when Mrs.
Klopton is chastened—and it is the only time—it is when she reads
Science and Health. “I don’t like to open the shutters, Mr.
Lawrence,” she explained. “Not since the night you went
away.”
But, pressed further, she refused to explain. “The doctor said you were
not to be excited,” she persisted. “Here’s your beef
tea.”
“Not a drop until you tell me,” I said firmly. “Besides, you
know very well there’s nothing the matter with me. This arm of mine is
only a false belief.” I sat up gingerly. “Now—why don’t
you open that window?”
Mrs. Klopton succumbed. “Because there are queer goings-on in that house
next door,” she said. “If you will take the beef tea, Mr. Lawrence,
I will tell you.”
The queer goings-on, however, proved to be slightly disappointing. It seemed
that after I left on Friday night, a light was seen flitting fitfully through
the empty house next door. Euphemia had seen it first and called Mrs. Klopton.
Together they had watched it breathlessly until it disappeared on the lower
floor.
“You should have been a writer of ghost stories,” I said, giving my
pillows a thump. “And so it was fitting flitfully!”
“That’s what it was doing,” she reiterated. “Fitting
flitfully—I mean flitting fitfully—how you do throw me out, Mr.
Lawrence! And what’s more, it came again!”
“Oh, come now, Mrs. Klopton,” I objected, “ghosts are like
lightning; they never strike twice in the same night. That is only worth half a
cup of beef tea.”
“You may ask Euphemia,” she retorted with dignity. “Not more
than an hour after, there was a light there again. We saw it through the chinks
of the shutters. Only—this time it began at the lower floor and
climbed!”
“You oughtn’t to tell ghost stories at night,” came
McKnight’s voice from the doorway. “Really, Mrs. Klopton, I’m
amazed at you. You old duffer! I’ve got you to thank for the worst day of
my life.”
Mrs. Klopton gulped. Then realizing that the “old duffer” was meant
for me, she took her empty cup and went out muttering.
“The Pirate’s crazy about me, isn’t she?” McKnight said
to the closing door. Then he swung around and held out his hand.
“By Jove,” he said, “I’ve been laying you out all day,
lilies on the door-bell, black gloves, everything. If you had had the sense of
a mosquito in a snow-storm, you would have telephoned me.”
“I never even thought of it.” I was filled with remorse.
“Upon my word, Rich, I hadn’t an idea beyond getting away from that
place. If you had seen what I saw—”
McKnight stopped me. “Seen it! Why, you lunatic, I’ve been digging
for you all day in the ruins! I’ve lunched and dined on horrors. Give me
something to rinse them down, Lollie.”
He had fished the key of the cellarette from its hiding-place in my shoe bag
and was mixing himself what he called a Bernard Shaw—a foundation of
brandy and soda, with a little of everything else in sight to give it snap. Now
that I saw him clearly, he looked weary and grimy. I hated to tell him what I
knew he was waiting to hear, but there was no use wading in by inches. I ducked
and got it over.
“The notes are gone, Rich,” I said, as quietly as I could. In spite
of himself his face fell.
“I—of course I expected it,” he said. “But—Mrs.
Klopton said over the telephone that you had brought home a grip and I
hoped—well, Lord knows we ought not to complain. You’re here,
damaged, but here.” He lifted his glass. “Happy days, old
man!”
“If you will give me that black bottle and a teaspoon, I’ll drink
that in arnica, or whatever the stuff is; Rich,—the notes were gone
before the wreck!”
He wheeled and stared at me, the bottle in his hand. “Lost, strayed or
stolen?” he queried with forced lightness.
“Stolen, although I believe the theft was incidental to something
else.”
Mrs. Klopton came in at that moment, with an egg-nog in her hand. She glanced
at the clock, and, without addressing any one in particular, she intimated that
it was time for self-respecting folks to be at home in bed. McKnight, who could
never resist a fling at her back, spoke to me in a stage whisper.
“Is she talking still? or again?” he asked, just before the door
closed. There was a second’s indecision with the knob, then, judging
discretion the better part, Mrs. Klopton went away.
“Now, then,” McKnight said, settling himself in a chair beside the
bed, “spit it out. Not the wreck—I know all I want about that. But
the theft. I can tell you beforehand that it was a woman.”
I had crawled painfully out of bed, and was in the act of pouring the egg-nog
down the pipe of the washstand. I paused, with the glass in the air.
“A woman!” I repeated, startled. “What makes you think
that?”
“You don’t know the first principles of a good detective
yarn,” he said scornfully. “Of course, it was the woman in the
empty house next door. You said it was brass pipes, you will remember.
Well—on with the dance: let joy be unconfined.”
So I told the story; I had told it so many times that day that I did it
automatically. And I told about the girl with the bronze hair, and my
suspicions. But I did not mention Alison West. McKnight listened to the end
without interruption. When I had finished he drew a long breath.
“Well!” he said. “That’s something of a mess,
isn’t it? If you can only prove your mild and child-like disposition,
they couldn’t hold you for the murder—which is a regular
ten-twent-thirt crime, anyhow. But the notes—that’s different. They
are not burned, anyhow. Your man wasn’t on the train—therefore, he
wasn’t in the wreck. If he didn’t know what he was taking, as you
seem to think, he probably reads the papers, and unless he is a fathead,
he’s awake by this time to what he’s got. He’ll try to sell
them to Bronson, probably.”
“Or to us,” I put in.
We said nothing for a few minutes. McKnight smoked a cigarette and stared at a
photograph of Candida over the mantel. Candida is the best pony for a heavy
mount in seven states.
“I didn’t go to Richmond,” he observed finally. The remark
followed my own thoughts so closely that I started. “Miss West is not
home yet from Seal Harbor.”
Receiving no response, he lapsed again into thoughtful silence. Mrs. Klopton
came in just as the clock struck one, and made preparation for the night by
putting a large gaudy comfortable into an arm-chair in the dressing-room, with
a smaller, stiff-backed chair for her feet. She was wonderfully attired in a
dressing-gown that was reminiscent, in parts, of all the ones she had given me
for a half dozen Christmases, and she had a purple veil wrapped around her
head, to hide Heaven knows what deficiency. She examined the empty egg-nog
glass, inquired what the evening paper had said about the weather, and then
stalked into the dressing-room, and prepared, with much ostentatious creaking,
to sit up all night.
We fell silent again, while McKnight traced a rough outline of the berths on
the white table-cover, and puzzled it out slowly. It was something like this:
“You think he changed the tags on seven and nine, so that when you went
back to bed you thought you were crawling into nine, when it was really seven,
eh?”
“Probably—yes.”
“Then toward morning, when everybody was asleep, your theory is that he
changed the numbers again and left the train.”
“I can’t think of anything else,” I replied wearily.
“Jove, what a game of bridge that fellow would play! It was like
finessing an eight-spot and winning out. They would scarcely have doubted your
story had the tags been reversed in the morning. He certainly left you in a bad
way. Not a jury in the country would stand out against the stains, the
stiletto, and the murdered man’s pocket-book in your possession.”
“Then you think Sullivan did it?” I asked.
“Of course,” said McKnight confidently. “Unless you did it in
your sleep. Look at the stains on his pillow, and the dirk stuck into it. And
didn’t he have the man Harrington’s pocket-book?”
“But why did he go off without the money?” I persisted. “And
where does the bronze-haired girl come in?”
“Search me,” McKnight retorted flippantly. “Inflammation of
the imagination on your part.”
“Then there is the piece of telegram. It said lower ten, car seven.
It’s extremely likely that she had it. That telegram was about me,
Richey.”
“I’m getting a headache,” he said, putting out his cigarette
against the sole of his shoe. “All I’m certain of just now is that
if there hadn’t been a wreck, by this time you’d be sitting in an
eight by ten cell, and feeling like the rhyme for it.”
“But listen to this,” I contended, as he picked up his hat,
“this fellow Sullivan is a fugitive, and he’s a lot more likely to
make advances to Bronson than to us. We could have the case continued, release
Bronson on bail and set a watch on him.”
“Not my watch,” McKnight protested. “It’s a family
heirloom.”
“You’d better go home,” I said firmly. “Go home and go
to bed. You’re sleepy. You can have Sullivan’s red necktie to dream
over if you think it will help any.”
Mrs. Klopton’s voice came drowsily from the next room, punctuated by a
yawn. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she called, with the suspicious
lisp which characterizes her at night, “somebody called up about noon,
Mr. Lawrence. It was long distance, and he said he would call again. The name
was”—she yawned—“Sullivan.”
