I could feel the sting of the powder smoke on my up-thrust wrist.

The Man
Who Couldn't Sleep

By ARTHUR STRINGER

AUTHOR OF
"The Prairie Wife," Etc.

With Frontispiece
By FRANK SNAPP

A. L. BURT COMPANY
Publishers ———— New York

Published by arrangement with BOBBS MERRILL COMPANY

COPYRIGHT 1919
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
Printed in the United States of America

To Harvey, of the dome-like pate,
The dreamy eye, the Celtic wit
And kindly heart, I dedicate
This blithe romance conceived and writ
By one of that triumvirate
Who knew Defeat, yet conquered it.

CONTENTS

The Man Who Couldn't Sleep

CHAPTER I

RUNNING OUT OF PAY-DIRT

To begin with, I am a Canadian by birth, and thirty-three years old. For nine of those years I have lived in New York. And by my friends in that city I am regarded as a successful author.

There was a time when I even regarded myself in much the same light. But that period is past. I now have to face the fact that I am a failure. For when a man is no longer able to write he naturally can no longer be reckoned as an author.

I have made the name of Witter Kerfoot too well known, I think, to explain that practically all of my stories have been written about Alaska. Just why I resorted to that far-off country for my settings is still more or less a mystery to me. Perhaps it was merely because of its far-offness. Perhaps it was because the editors remembered that I came from the land of the beaver and sagely concluded that a Canadian would be most at home in writing about the Frozen North. At any rate, when I romanced about the Yukon and its ice-bound trails they bought my stories, and asked for more.

And I gave them more. I gave them blood-red fiction about gun-men and claim-jumpers and Siwash queens and salmon fisheries. I gave them supermen of iron, fighting against cold and hunger, and snarling, always snarling, at their foes. I gave them oratorical young engineers with clear-cut features and sinews of steel, battling against the forces of hyperborean evil. I gave them fist-fights that caused my books to be discreetly shut out of school-libraries yet brought in telegrams from motion-picture directors for first rights. I gave them enough gun-play to shoot Chilcoot Pass into the middle of the Pacific, and was publicly denominated as the apostle of the Eye-Socket School, and during the three-hundred-night run of my melodrama, The Pole Raiders, even beheld on the Broadway sign-boards an extraordinarily stalwart picture of myself in a rakish Stetson and a flannel shirt very much open at the throat, with a cow-hide holster depending from my Herculean waist-line and a very dreadful-looking six-shooter protruding from the open top of that belted holster. My publishers spoke of me, for business reasons, as the Interpreter of the Great Northwest. And I exploited that territory with the industry of a badger. In my own way, I mined Alaska. And it brought me in a very respectable amount of pay-dirt.

But I knew nothing about Alaska, I had never even seen the country. I "crammed up" on it, of course, the same as we used to cram up for a third-form examination in Latin grammar. I perused the atlases and sent for governmental reports, and pored over the R.N.W.M.P. Blue Books, and gleaned a hundred or so French-Canadian names for half-breed villains from a telephone-directory for the city of Montreal. But I knew no more about Alaska than a Fiji Islander knows about the New York Stock Exchange. And that was why I could romance so freely, so magnificently, about it!

I was equally prodigal of blood, I suppose, because I had never seen the real thing flow—except in the case of my little niece, when her tonsils had been removed and a very soft-spoken nurse had helped me out of the surgery and given me a drink of ice-water, after telling me it would be best to keep my head as low as possible until I was feeling better. As for firearms, I abhorred them. I never shot off an air-rifle without first shutting my eyes. I never picked up a duck-gun without a wince of aversion. So I was able to do wonderful things with firearms, on paper. And with the Frozen Yukon and firearms combined, I was able to work miracles. I gave a whole continent goose-flesh, so many times a season. And the continent seemed to enjoy it, for those airy essays in iron and gore were always paid for, and paid for at higher and higher rates.

While this was taking place, something even more important was taking place, something which finally brought me in touch with Mary Lockwood herself. It was accident more than anything else, I think, that first launched me in what is so indefinitely and often so disparagingly known as society. Society, as a rule, admits only the lions of my calling across its sacred portals. And even these lions, I found, were accepted under protest or the wing of some commendable effort for charity, and having roared their little hour, were let pass quietly out to oblivion again. But I had been lucky enough to bring letters to the Peytons and to the Gruger-Philmores, and these old families, I will be honest enough to confess, had been foolish enough to like me.

So from the first I did my best to live up to those earlier affiliations. I found myself passed on, from one mysteriously barricaded seclusion to the other. The tea-hour visit merged into the formal dinner, and the formal dinner into the even more formal box at the Horse-Show, and then a call to fill up a niche at the Metropolitan on a Caruso-night, or a vacancy for an Assembly Dance at Sherry's, or a week at Tuxedo, in winter, when the skating was good.

I worked hard to keep up my end of the game. But I was an impostor, of course, all along the line. I soon saw that I had to prove more than acceptable; I had also to prove dependable. That I was a writer meant nothing whatever to those people. They had scant patience with the long-haired genius type. That went down only with musicians. So I soon learned to keep my bangs clipped, my trousers creased, and my necktie inside my coat-lapels. I also learned to use my wits, and how to key my talk up to dowager or down to debutante, and how to be passably amusing even before the champagne course had arrived. I made it a point to remember engagements and anniversaries, and more than once sent flowers and Millairds, which I went hungry to pay for. Even my pourboires to butlers and footmen and maids stood a matter, in those earlier days, for much secret and sedulous consideration.

But, as I have said, I tried to keep up my end. I liked those large and orderly houses. I liked the quiet-mannered people who lived in them. I liked looking at life with their hill-top unconcern for trivialities. I grew rather contemptuous of my humbler fellow-workers who haunted the neighborhood theaters and the red-inkeries of Greenwich Village, and orated Socialism and blank-verse poems to garret audiences, and wore window-curtain cravats and celluloid blinkers with big round lenses, and went in joyous and caramel-eating groups to the "rush" seats at Rigoletto. I was accepted, as I have already tried to explain, as an impecunious but dependable young bachelor. And I suppose I could have kept on at that rôle, year after year, until I developed into a foppish and somewhat threadbare old beau. But about this time I was giving North America its first spasms of goose-flesh with my demigod type of Gibsonian engineer who fought the villain until his flannel shirt was in rags and then shook his fist in Nature's face when she dogged him with the Eternal Cold. And there was money in writing for flat-dwellers about that Eternal Cold, and about battling claw to claw and fang to fang, and about eye-sockets without any eyes in them. My income gathered like a snow-ball. And as it gathered I began to feel that I ought to have an establishment—not a back-room studio in Washington Square, nor a garret in the Village of the Free-Versers, nor a mere apartment in the West Sixties, nor even a duplex overlooking Central Park South. I wanted to be something more than a number. I wanted a house, a house of my own, and a cat-footed butler to put a hickory-log on the fire, and a full set of Sévres on my mahogany sideboard, and something to stretch a strip of red carpet across when the landaulets and the limousines rolled up to my door.

So I took a nine-year lease of the Whighams' house in Gramercy Square. It was old-fashioned and sedate and unpretentious to the passing eye, but beneath that somewhat somber shell nested an amazingly rich kernel of luxuriousness. It was good form; it was unbelievably comfortable, and it was not what the climber clutches for. The cost of even a nine-year claim on it rather took my breath away, but the thought of Alaska always served to stiffen up my courage.

It was necessary to think a good deal about Alaska in those days, for after I had acquired my house I also had to acquire a man to run it, and then a couple of other people to help the man who helped me, and then a town car to take me back and forth from it, and then a chauffeur to take care of the car, and then the service-clothes for the chauffeur, and the thousand and one unlooked for things, in short, which confront the pin-feather householder and keep him from feeling too much a lord of creation.

Yet in Benson, my butler, I undoubtedly found a gem of the first water. He moved about as silent as a panther, yet as watchful as an eagle. He could be ubiquitous and self-obliterating at one and the same time. He was meekness incarnate, and yet he could coerce me into a predetermined line of conduct as inexorably as steel rails lead a street-car along its predestined line of traffic. He was, in fact, much more than a butler. He was a valet and a chef de cuisine and a lord-high-chamberlain and a purchasing-agent and a body-guard and a benignant-eyed old godfather all in one. The man babied me. I could see that all along. But I was already an overworked and slightly neurasthenic specimen, even in those days, and I was glad enough to have that masked and silent Efficiency always at my elbow. There were times, too, when his activities merged into those of a trained nurse, for when I smoked too much he hid away my cigars, and when I worked too hard he impersonally remembered what morning horseback riding in the park had done for a former master of his. And when I drifted into the use of chloral hydrate, to make me sleep, that dangerous little bottle had the habit of disappearing, mysteriously and inexplicably disappearing, from its allotted place in my bathroom cabinet.

There was just one thing in which Benson disappointed me. That was in his stubborn and unreasonable aversion to Latreille, my French chauffeur. For Latreille was as efficient, in his way, as Benson himself. He understood his car, he understood the traffic rules, and he understood what I wanted of him. Latreille was, after a manner of speaking, a find of my own. Dining one night at the Peytons', I had met the Commissioner of Police, who had given me a card to stroll through Headquarters and inspect the machinery of the law. I had happened on Latreille as he was being measured and "mugged" in the Identification Bureau, with those odd-looking Bertillon forceps taking his cranial measurements. The intelligence of the man interested me; the inalienable look of respectability in his face convinced me, as a student of human nature, that he was not meant for any such fate or any such environment. And when I looked into his case I found that instinct had not been amiss. The unfortunate fellow had been "framed" for a car-theft of which he was entirely innocent. He explained all this to me, in fact, with tears in his eyes. And circumstances, when I looked into them, bore out his statements. So I visited the Commissioner, and was passed on to the Probation Officers, from whom I caromed off to the Assistant District-Attorney, who in turn delegated me to another official, who was cynical enough to suggest that the prisoner might possibly be released if I was willing to go to the extent of bonding him. This I very promptly did, for I was now determined to see poor Latreille once more a free man.

Latreille showed his appreciation of my efforts by saving me seven hundred dollars when I bought my town car—though candor compels me to admit that I later discovered it to be a used car rehabilitated, and not a product fresh from the factory, as I had anticipated. But Latreille was proud of that car, and proud of his position, and I was proud of having a French chauffeur, though my ardor was dampened a little later on, when I discovered that Latreille, instead of hailing from the Bois de Boulogne and the Avenue de la Paix, originated in the slightly less splendid suburbs of Three Rivers, up on the St. Lawrence.

But my interest in Latreille about this time became quite subsidiary, for something much more important than cars happened to me. I fell in love. I fell in love with Mary Lockwood, head-over-heels in love with a girl who could have thrown a town car into the Hudson every other week and never have missed it. She was beautiful; she was wonderful; but she was dishearteningly wealthy. With all those odious riches of hers, however, she was a terribly honest and above-board girl, a healthy-bodied, clear-eyed, practical-minded, normal-living New York girl who in her twenty-two active years of existence had seen enough of the world to know what was veneer and what was solid, and had seen enough of men to demand mental camaraderie and not "squaw-talk" from them.

I first saw her at the Volpi sale, in the American Art Galleries, where we chanced to bid against each other for an old Italian table-cover, a sixteenth-century blue velvet embroidered with gold galloon. Mary bid me down, of course. I lost my table-cover, and with it I lost my heart. When I met her at the Obden-Belponts, a week later, she confessed that I'd rather been on her conscience. She generously offered to hand over that oblong of old velvet, if I still happened to be grieving over its loss. But I told her that all I asked for was a chance to see it occasionally. And occasionally I went to see it. I also saw its owner, who became more wonderful to me, week by week. Then I lost my head over her. That apheresis was so complete that I told Mary what had happened, and asked her to marry me.

Mary was very practical about it all. She said she liked me, liked me a lot. But there were other things to be considered. We would have to wait. I had my work to do—and she wanted it to be big work, gloriously big work. She wouldn't even consent to a formal engagement. But we had an "understanding." I was sent back to my work, drunk with the memory of her surrendering lips warm on mine, of her wistfully entreating eyes searching my face for something which she seemed unable to find there.

That work of mine which I went back to, however, seemed something very flat and meager and trivial. And this, I realized, was a condition which would never do. The pot had to be kept boiling, and boiling now more briskly than ever. I had lapsed into more or less luxurious ways of living; I had formed expensive tastes, and had developed a fondness for antiques and Chinese bronzes and those objets d'art which are never found on the bargain-counter. I had outgrown the Spartan ways of my youth when I could lunch contentedly at Child's and sleep soundly on a studio-couch in a top-floor room. And more and more that rapacious ogre known as Social Obligation had forged his links and fetters about my movements. More than ever, I saw, I had my end to keep up. What should have been a recreation had become almost a treadmill. I was a pretender, and had my pretense to sustain. I couldn't afford to be "dropped." I had my frontiers to protect, and my powers to placate. I couldn't ask Mary to throw herself away on a nobody. So instead of trying to keep up one end, I tried to keep up two. I continued to bob about the fringes of the Four Hundred. And I continued to cling hungrily to Mary's hint about doing work, gloriously big work.

But gloriously big work, I discovered, was usually done by lonely men, living simply and quietly, and dwelling aloof from the frivolous side-issues of life, divorced from the distractions of a city which seemed organized for only the idler and the lotos-eater. And I could see that the pay-dirt coming out of Alaska was running thinner and thinner.

It was to remedy this, I suppose, that I dined with my old friend Pip Conners, just back to civilization after fourteen long years up in the Yukon. That dinner of ours together was memorable. It was one of the mile-stones of my life. I wanted to furbish up my information on that remote corner of the world, which, in a way, I had preempted as my own. I wanted fresh information, first-hand data, renewed inspiration. And I was glad to feel Pip's horny hand close fraternally about mine.

"Witter," he said, staring at me with open admiration, "you're a wonder."

I liked Pip's praise, even though I stood a little at a loss to discern its inspiration.

"You mean—this?" I asked, with a casual hand-wave about that Gramercy Square abode of mine.

"No, sir," was Pip's prompt retort. "I mean those stories of yours. I've read 'em all."

I blushed at this, blushed openly. For such commendation from a man who knew life as it was, who knew life in the raw, was as honey to my ears.

"Do you mean to say you could get them, up there?" I asked, more for something to dissemble my embarrassment than to acquire actual information.

"Yes," acknowledged Pip with a rather foolish-sounding laugh, "they come through the mails about the same as they'd come through the mails down here. And folks even read them, now and then, when the gun-smoke blows out of the valley!"

"Then what struck you as wonderful about them?" I inquired, a little at sea as to his line of thought.

"It's not them that's wonderful, Witter. It's you. I said you were a wonder. And you are."

"And why am I a wonder?" I asked, with the drip of the honey no longer embarrassing my modesty.

"Witter, you're a wonder to get away with it!" was Pip's solemnly intoned reply.

"To get away with it?" I repeated.

"Yes; to make it go down! To get 'em trussed and gagged and hog-tied! To make 'em come and eat out of your hand and then holler for more! For I've been up there in the British Yukon for fourteen nice comfortable years, Witter, and I've kind o' got to know the country. I know how folks live up there, and what the laws are. And it may strike you as queer, friend-author, but folks up in that district are uncommonly like folks down here in the States. And in the Klondike and this same British Yukon there is a Firearms Act which makes it against the law for any civilian to tote a gun. And that law is sure carried out. Fact is, there's no need for a gun. And even if you did smuggle one in, the Mounted Police would darned soon take it away from you!"

I sat staring at him.

"But all those motion-pictures," I gasped. "And all those novels about—"

"That's why I say you're a wonder," broke in the genial-eyed Pip. "You can fool all the people all the time! You've done it. And you keep on doing it. You can put 'em to sleep and take it out of their pants pocket before they know they've gone by-by. Why, you've even got 'em tranced off in the matter of everyday school-geography. You've had some of those hero-guys o' yours mush seven or eight hundred miles, and on a birch-bark toboggan, between dinner and supper. And if that ain't genius, I ain't ever seen it bound up in a reading-book!"

That dinner was a mile-stone in my life, all right, but not after the manner I had expected. For as I sat there in a cold sweat of apprehension crowned with shame, Pip Conners told me many things about Alaska and the Klondike. He told me many things that were new to me, dishearteningly, discouragingly, devitalizingly new to me. Without knowing it, he poignarded me, knifed me through and through. Without dreaming what he was doing, he eviscerated me. He left me a hollow and empty mask of an author. He left me a homeless exile, with the iron gates of Fact swung sternly shut on what had been a Fairy Land of Romance, a Promised Land of untrammelled and care-free imaginings.

That was my first sleepless night.

I said nothing to Pip. I said nothing to any one. I held that vulture of shame close in my arms and felt its unclean beak awling into my vitals. I tried to go back to my work, next day, to lose myself in creation. But it was like seeking consolation beside a corpse. For me, Alaska was killed, killed forever. And blight had fallen on more than my work. It had crept over my very world, the world which only the labor of my pen could keep orderly and organized. The city in which I had seemed to sit a conqueror suddenly lay about me a flat and monotonous tableland of ennui, as empty and stale as a circus-lot after the last canvas-wagon has rumbled away.

I have no intention of making this recountal the confessions of a neurasthenic. Nothing is further from my aims than the inditing of a second City of Dreadful Night. But I began to worry. And later on I began to magnify my troubles. I even stuck to New York that summer, for the simple reason that I couldn't afford to go away. And it was an unspeakably hot summer. I did my best to work, sitting for hours at a time staring at a blank sheet of paper, set out like tangle-foot to catch a passing idea. But not an idea alighted on that square of spotless white. When I tried new fields, knowing Alaska was dead, the editors solemnly shook their heads and announced that this new offering of mine didn't seem to have the snap and go of my older manner. Then panic overtook me, and after yet another white night I went straight to Sanson, the nerve specialist, and told him I was going crazy.

He laughed at me. Then he offhandedly tapped me over and tried my reflexes and took my blood pressure and even more diffidently asked me a question or two. He ended up by announcing that I was as sound as a dollar, whatever that may have meant, and suggested as an afterthought that I drop tobacco and go in more for golf.

That buoyed me up for a week or two. But Mary, when she came in to town radiant and cool for three days' shopping, seemed to detect in me a change which first surprised and then troubled her. I was bitterly conscious of being a disappointment to somebody who expected great things of me. And to escape that double-edged sword of mortification, I once again tried to bury myself in my work. But I just as well might have tried to bury myself in a butter-dish, for there was no effort and no activity there to envelope me. I was coerced into idleness, without ever having acquired the art of doing nothing. For life with me had been a good deal like boiling rice: it had to be kept galloping to save it from going mushy. Yet now the fire itself seemed out. And that prompted me to sit and listen to my works, as the French idiom expresses it, which is never a profitable calling for a naturally nervous man.

The lee and the long of it was, as the Irish say, that I went back to Doctor Sanson and demanded something, in the name of God, that would give me a good night's sleep. He was less jocular, this time. He told me to forget my troubles and go fishing for a couple of weeks.

I did go fishing, but I fished for ideas. And I got scarcely a strike. To leave the city was now more than ever out of the question. So for recreation I had Latreille take me out in the car, when a feverish thirst for speed, which I found it hard to account for, drove me into daily violations of the traffic laws. Twice, in fact, I was fined for this, with a curtly warning talk from the presiding magistrate on the second occasion, since the offense, in this case, was complicated by collision with an empty baby-carriage. Latreille, about this time, seemed uncannily conscious of my condition. More and more he seemed to rasp me on the raw, until irritation deepened into positive dislike for the man.

When Mary came back to the city for a few days, before going to the Virginia hills for the autumn, I looked so wretched and felt so wretched that I decided not to see her. I was taking veronal now, to make me sleep, and with cooler weather I looked for better rest and a return to work. But my hopes were ill-founded. I came to dread the night, and the night's ever-recurring battle for sleep. I lost my perspective on things. And then came the crowning catastrophe, the catastrophe which turned me into a sort of twentieth-century Macbeth.

The details of that catastrophe were ludicrous enough, and it had no definite and clear-cut outcome, but its effect on my over-tensioned nerves was sufficiently calamitous. It occurred, oddly enough, on Hallow-e'en night, when the world is supposed to be given over to festivity. Latreille had motored me out to a small dinner-dance at Washburn's, on Long Island, but I had left early in the evening, perversely depressed by a hilarity in which I had not the heart to join. Twice, on the way back to the city, I had called out to Latreille for more speed. We had just taken a turn in the outskirts of Brooklyn when my swinging headlights disclosed the figure of a man, an unstable and wavering man, obviously drunk, totter and fall directly in front of my car.

I heard the squeal of the brakes and the high-pitched shouts from a crowd of youths along the sidewalk. But it was too late. I could feel the impact as we struck. I could feel the sickening thud and jolt as the wheels pounded over that fallen body.

I stood up, without quite knowing what I was doing, and screamed like a woman. Then I dropped weakly back in my seat. I think I was sobbing. I scarcely noticed that Latreille had failed to stop the car. He spoke to me twice, in fact, before I knew it.

"Shall we go on, sir?" he asked, glancing back at me over his shoulder.

"Go on!" I shouted, knowing well enough by this time what I said, surrendering merely to that blind and cowardly panic for self-preservation which marks man at his lowest.

We thumped and swerved and speeded away on the wings of cowardice. I sat there gasping and clutching my moist fingers together, as I've seen hysterical women do, calling on Latreille for speed, and still more speed.

I don't know where he took me. But I became conscious of the consoling blackness of the night about us. And I thanked God, as Cain must have done when he found himself alone with his shame.

"Latreille," I said, breathing brokenly as we slowed up, "did we—did we kill him?"

My chauffeur turned in his seat and studied my face. Then he looked carefully back, to make sure we were not being followed.

"This is a heavy car, sir," he finally admitted. He said it coolly, and almost impersonally. But the words fell like a sledge-hammer on my heart.

"But we couldn't have killed a man," I clamored insanely, weakly, as we came to a dead stop at the roadside.

"Forty-two hundred pounds—and he got both wheels!" calmly protested my enemy, for I felt now that he was in some way my enemy.

"What in heaven's name are you going to do?" I gasped, for I noticed that he was getting down from his seat.

"Hadn't I better get the blood off the running-gear, before we turn back into town?"

"Blood?" I quavered as I clutched at the robe-rail in front of me. And that one word brought the horror of the thing home to me in all its ghastliness. I could see axles and running-board and brake-bar dripping with red, festooned with shreds of flesh, maculated with blackening gore. And I covered my face with my hands, and groaned aloud in my misery of soul.

But Latreille did not wait for me. He lifted the seat-cushion, took rubbing-cloths from the tool-box and crawled out of sight beneath the car. I could feel the occasional tremors that went through the frame-work as he busied himself at that grisly task. I could hear his grunt of satisfaction when he had finished. And I watched him with stricken eyes as he stepped through the vague darkness and tossed his telltale cloths far over the roadside fence.

"It's all right," he companionably announced as he stepped back into the car. But there was a new note in the man's demeanor, a note which even through that black fog of terror reached me and awakened my resentment. We were partners in crime. We were fellow-actors in a drama of indescribable cowardice, and I was in the man's power, to the end of time.

The outcome of that catastrophe, as I have already said, was indefinite, torturingly indefinite. I was too shaken and sick to ferret out its consequences. I left that to Latreille, who seemed to understand well enough what I expected of him.

That first night wore by, and nothing came of it all. The morning dragged away, and my fellow-criminal seemingly encountered nothing worthy of rehearsal to me. Then still another night came and went. I went through the published hospital reports, and the police records, with my heart in my mouth. But I could unearth no official account of the tragedy. I even encountered my good friend Patrolman McCooey, apparently by accident, and held him up on his beat about Gramercy Park to make casual inquiries as to street-accidents, and if such things were increasing of late. But nothing of moment, apparently, had come to McCooey's ears. And I stood watching him as he flatfooted his way placidly on from my house-front, with one of my best cigars tucked under his tunic, wondering what the world would say if it knew that Witter Kerfoot, the intrepid creator of sinewy supermen who snarl and fight and shake iron fists in the teeth of Extremity, had run like a rabbit from a human being he had bowled over and killed?

I still hoped against hope, however, trying to tell myself that it is no easy thing to knock the life out of a man, passionately upbraiding myself for not doing what I should have done to succor the injured, then sinkingly remembering what Latreille had mentioned about the weight of my car. Yet it wasn't until the next night, as I ventured out to step into that odiously ponderous engine of destruction, that uncertainty solidified into fact.

"You got him," announced my chauffeur out of one side of his mouth, so that Benson, who stood on the house-steps, might not overhear those fateful words.

"Got him?" I echoed, vaguely resenting the man's use of that personal pronoun singular.

"Killed!" was Latreille's monosyllabic explanation. And my heart stopped beating.

"How do you know that?" I demanded in whispering horror. For I understood enough of the law of the land to know that a speeder who flees from the victim of his carelessness is technically guilty of manslaughter.

"A man I know, named Crotty, helped carry the body back to his house. Crotty's just told me about it."

My face must have frightened Latreille, for he covered his movement of catching hold of my arm by ceremoniously opening the car door for me.

"Sit tight, man!" he ordered in his curt and conspiratorial undertone. "Sit tight—for it's all that's left to do!"

I sat tight. It was all there was to do. I endured Latreille's accession of self-importance without comment. There promptly grew up between us a tacit understanding of silence. Yet I had reason to feel that this silence wasn't always as profound as it seemed. For at the end of my third day of self-torturing solitude I went to my club to dine. I went with set teeth. I went in the hope of ridding my system of self-fear, very much as an alcoholic goes to a Turkish-bath. I went to mix once more with my fellows, to prove that I stood on common ground with them.

But the mixing was not a success. I stepped across that familiar portal in quavering dread of hostility. And I found what I was looking for. I detected myself being eyed coldly by men who had once posed as my friends. I dined alone, oppressed by the discovery that I was being deliberately avoided by the fellow-members of what should have been an organized companionability. Then I took a grip on myself, and forlornly argued that it was all mere imagination, the vaporings of a morbid and chlorotic mind. Yet the next moment a counter-shock confronted me. For as I stared desolately out of that club window I caught sight of Latreille himself. He stood there at the curb, talking confidently to three other chauffeurs clustered about him between their cars. Nothing, I suddenly remembered, could keep the man from gossiping. And a word dropped in one servant's ear would soon pass on to another. And that other would carry the whisper still wider, until it spread like an infection from below-stairs to above-stairs, and from private homes to the very housetops. And already I was a marked man, a pariah, an outcast with no friendly wilderness to swallow me up.

I slunk home that night with a plumb-bob of lead swinging under my ribs where my heart should have been. I tried to sleep and could not sleep. So I took a double dose of chloral hydrate, and was rewarded with a few hours of nightmare wherein I was a twentieth-century Attila driving a racing-car over an endless avenue of denuded infants. It was all so horrible that it left me limp and quailing before the lash of daylight. Then, out of a blank desolation that became more and more unendurable, I clutched feverishly at the thought of Mary Lockwood and the autumn-tinted hills of Virginia. I felt the need of getting away from that city of lost sleep. I felt the need of "exteriorating" what was corroding my in-most soul. I was seized with a sudden and febrile ache for companionship. So I sent a forty-word wire to the only woman in the world I could look to in my extremity. And the next morning brought me a reply.

It merely said, "Don't come."

The bottom seemed to fall out of the world, with that curt message, and I groped forlornly, frantically, for something stable to sustain me. But there was nothing. Bad news, I bitterly reminded myself, had the habit of traveling fast. Mary knew. The endless chain had widened, like a wireless-wave. It had rolled on, like war-gas, until it had blighted even the slopes beyond the Potomac. For Mary knew!

It was two days later that a note, in her picket-fence script that was as sharp-pointed as arrow-heads, followed after the telegram.

"There are certain things," wrote Mary, "which I can scarcely talk about on paper. At least, not as I should prefer talking about them. But these things must necessarily make a change in your life, and in mine. I don't want to seem harsh, Witter, but we can't go on as we have been doing. We'll both have to get used to the idea of trudging along in single harness. And I think you will understand why. I'm not exacting explanations, remember. I'm merely requesting an armistice. If you intend to let me, I still want to be your friend, and I trust no perceptible gulf will yarn [Transcriber's note: yawn?] between us, when we chance to dine at the same table or step through the same cotillion. But I must bow to those newer circumstances which seem to have confronted you even before they presented themselves to me. So when I say good-by, it is more to the Past, I think, than to You."

That was the first night, I remember, when sleeping-powders proved of no earthly use to me. And this would not be an honest record of events if I neglected to state that the next day I shut myself up in my study and drank much more Pommery-Greno than was good for me. I got drunk, in fact, blindly, stupidly, senselessly drunk. But it seemed to drape a veil between me and the past. It made a bonfire of my body to burn up the debris of my mind. And when poor old patient-eyed Benson mixed me a bromide and put me to bed I felt like a patient coming out of ether after a major operation. I was tired, and I wanted to lie there and rest for a long time.

CHAPTER II

THE OX-BLOOD VASE

It was a week later, and well after two, in the dullest ebb of earth's deadest hour, when Benson lifted the portière and stepped into my room.

I put down the book at which my brain had been scratching like a dog scratching at a closed door. It was a volume of Gautier's nouvelles. I had just reached that mildly assuaging point in Une Nuit de Cléopâtre where the mysterious arrow, whistling through the palace window of a queen bored almost to extinction, buries itself quivering in the cedar wainscoting above her couch.

But the incident, this time, seemed to have lost its appeal. The whole thing sounded very empty and old, very foolish and far-away. The thrill of drama, I cogitated, is apt to leak out of a situation when it comes to one over a circuit of two thousand moldering years. So I looked up at my servant a little listlessly and yet a little puzzled by what was plainly a studied calmness of appearance.

"Benson, why aren't you in bed?"

"If you will pardon me, sir," began the intruder, "I've a gentleman here."

He was so extraordinarily cool about it that I rose like a fish at the flash of something unusual.

"At this time of night?" I inquired.

"Yes, sir."

"But what kind of gentleman, Benson?"

Benson hesitated; it was the sort of hesitation that is able to translate silence into an apology.

"I think, sir, it's a burglar."

"A what?" I demanded, incredulously.

"The fact is, sir, I 'appened to hear him at the lock. When he forced the door, sir, not being able to work the lock, I was waiting for him."

The dropped aspirate was an unfailing sign of mental disturbance in Benson. I closed my book and tossed it aside. It was only drama of the second dimension, as old and musty as a mummy. And here, apparently, was adventure of the first water, something of my own world and time.

"This sounds rather interesting, Benson. Be so good as to show the gentleman up."

I sat down, with a second look at the dragging hands of the little French clock on my mantel. But Benson still seemed a trifle ill at ease.

"I—I took the liberty of tying him up a bit, sir," explained that astute old dissembler, "being compelled, as it were, to use a bit of force."

"Of course. Then untie him as much as necessary, and fetch him here. And you might bring up a bottle of Lafitte and a bite to eat. For two, if you please."

"Yes, sir," he answered. But still he hesitated.

"The revolver, sir, is in the cabinet-drawer on your left."

There were times when old Benson could almost make me laugh; times when the transparencies of his obliquities converted them into something almost respectable.

"We won't need the revolver, Benson. What I most need I fancy is amusement, distraction, excitement, anything—anything to get me through this endless hell of a night."

I could feel my voice rise on the closing words, like the uprear of a terrified racehorse. It was not a good sign. I got up and paced the rug, like a castaway pacing some barren and empty island. But here, I told myself, was a timely footprint. I waited, as breathless as a Crusoe awaiting his Friday.

I waited so long that I was beginning to dread some mishap. Then the portière parted for the second time, and Benson led the burglar into the room.

I experienced, as I looked at him, a distinct sense of disappointment. He was not at all what I expected. He wore no black mask, and was neither burly nor ferocious. The thing that first impressed me was his slenderness—an almost feline sort of slenderness. The fact I next remarked was that he was very badly frightened, so frightened, in fact, that his face was the tint of a rather soiled white glove. It could never have been a ruddy face. But its present startling pallor, I assumed, must have been largely due to Benson's treatment, although I was still puzzled by the look of abject terror which gave the captive's eyes their animal-like glitter. He stood before me for all the world as though a hospital interne had been practising abstruse bandaging feats on his body, so neatly and yet so firmly had the redoubtable Benson hobbled him and swathed his arms in a half-dozen of my best Irish linen table-napkins. Over these, again, had been wound and buckled a trunk-strap. Benson had not skimped his job. His burglar was wrapped as securely as a butcher wraps a boned rib-roast.

My hope for any diverting talk along the more picturesque avenues of life was depressingly short-lived. The man remained both sullen and silent. His sulky speechlessness was plainly that of a low order of mind menaced by vague uncertainties and mystified by new surroundings. Blood still dripped slowly down the back of his soiled collar, where Benson's neat whelp had abraded the scalp.

Yet his eyes, all the time, were alert enough. They seemed to take on a wisdom that was uncanny, the inarticulate wisdom of a reptile, bewildering me, for all their terror, with some inner sense of vicious security. To fire questions at him was as futile as throwing pebbles at an alligator. He had determined, apparently, not to open his lips; though his glance, all this time, was never an idle or empty one. I gave up, with a touch of anger.

"Frisk him," I told the waiting Benson. As that underworld phrase was new to those respectable Anglian ears, I had to translate it. "See if he's carrying a gun. Search his pockets—every one of them."

This Benson did, with an affective mingling of muffled caution and open repugnance. He felt from pocket to pocket, as gingerly as small boys feel into ferret holes, and with one eye always on the colorless and sphinx-like face beside him.

The result of that search was quite encouraging. From one pocket came an ugly, short-barreled Colt. From another came two skeleton keys and a few inches of copper wire bent into a coil. From still another came a small electric flashlight. Under our burglar's coat, with one end resting in his left-hand waistcoat pocket, was a twenty-inch steel "jimmy." It was a very attractive tool, not unlike a long and extremely slender stove lifter, with a tip-tilted end. I found it suggestive of tremendous leverage-power, tempting one to test its strength. It proved as inviting to the hand as a golfer's well-balanced "driver."

From the right-hand waistcoat pocket Benson produced a lady's gold watch, two finger rings, a gold barrette, and a foot or two of old-fashioned locket chain, of solid gold. There was nothing to show who the owner of this jewelry might be.

"I suppose you just bought this at Tiffany's?" I inquired. But the needle of antiphrasis had no effect on his indurated hide. His passivity was beginning to get on my nerves. He might have been a wax figure in the Eden Musée, were it not for those reptiliously alert and ever exasperating eyes. I stood up and confronted him.

"I want to know where this stuff came from."

The white-faced burglar still looked at me out of those sullen and rebellious blinkers of his. But not a word passed his lips.

"Then we'll investigate a little farther," I said, eying his somewhat protuberant breast-bone. "Go on with the search, Benson, and get everything." For it was plain that our visitor, before honoring us that night, had called at other homes.

I watched Benson with increased interest as his fastidiously exploring hand went down inside the burglar's opened waistcoat. I saw him feel there, and as he did so I caught a change of expression on our prisoner's face. He looked worried and harassed by this time; he seemed to have lost his tranquil and snake-like assurance. His small, lean head with the pathetically eager eyes took on a rat-like look. I knew then the end toward which my mind had been groping. The man was not snake-like. He was rat-like. He was a cornered rat. Rat seemed written all over him.

But at that moment my eyes went back to Benson, for I had seen his hand bringing away a small vase partly wrapped in a pocket-handkerchief. This handkerchief was extremely dirty.

I took the vase from his hand, drawing away the rag that screened it. Only by an effort, as I did so, was I able to conceal my surprise. For one glance at that slender little column of sang-de-boeuf porcelain told me what it was. There was no possibility of mistake. One glimpse of it was enough. It was from the Gubtill collection. For once before my fingers had caressed the same glaze and the same tender contours. Once before, and under vastly different circumstances, I had weighed that delicate tube of porcelain in my contemplative hands.

I sat back and looked at it more carefully. I examined the crackled groundwork, with its brilliant mottled tones, and its pale ruby shades that deepened into crimson. I peered down at the foot of enameled white with its slowly deepening tinge of pale green. Then I looked up at the delicate lip, the lip that had once been injured and artfully banded with a ring of gold. It was a vase of the K'angshi Period, a rare and beautiful specimen among the Lang Yao monochromes. And history said that thirty years before it had been purchased from the sixth Prince of Pekin, and had always been known as "The Flame."

Both Anthony Gubtill and I had bid for that vase. Our contest for it had been a spirited one, and had even been made the subject of a paragraph or two in the morning papers. But an inexplicably reckless mood had overtaken that parsimonious old collector, and he had won, though the day after the Graves sale I had been a member of that decorously appreciative dinner party which had witnessed its installation between a rather valuable peach-bloom amphora of haricot-red groundwork, with rose spots accentuated by the usual clouds of apple-green, and a taller and, to my mind, much more valuable ashes-of-roses cylindrical Lang Yao with a carved ivory base. We had looked on the occasion as somewhat of an event, for such things naturally are not picked up every day. So the mere sight of the vase took me back to the Gubtill home, to that rich and spacious house on lower Fifth Avenue where I had spent not a few happy evenings. And that in turn took my thoughts back to a certain Volpi sale and an old Italian table-cover of blue velvet. From the table-cover they flashed on to Mary Lockwood and the remembered loveliness of her face as we stood side by side staring down at the gold galloon along the borders of that old vestment. Then I drew memory up short, with a wince, as I suddenly realized that the wanderer had been penetrating into strictly forbidden paths.

I put the vase down on my table and turned away from it, not caring to betray my interest in it, nor to give to the rat-like eyes still watching me any inkling of my true feelings. Yet the thought of such beauty being in the hands of a brute like that sickened me. I was angered by the very idea that such grace and delicacy should be outraged by the foul rags and the even fouler touch of a low-browed sneakthief. I resented the outrage, just as any normal mind would resent a jungle ape's abduction of a delicate child.

I turned and looked the criminal up and down. I noticed, for the first time, that his face was beaded with sweat.

"Might I inquire just what you intend doing with this?" I asked, gazing back, against my will, at the fragile little treasure known as The Flame.

The man moved uneasily, and for the first time. For the first time, too, he spoke.

"Give it to its owner," he said.

"And who is its owner?"

He looked from me to the vase, and then back again.

"It belongs to a pal o' mine over t' Fifth Avenue," he had the effrontery to assert.

"And where did you get it?"

"Out o' hock!"

I couldn't restrain a touch of impatience as my glance fell on the all too eloquent implements of burglary.

"And you expect me to swallow that?" I demanded.

"I don't give a dam' what you swallow. I know the trut' when I'm sayin' it!"

"And you're telling me the truth?" I found it hard to keep my anger within bounds.

"Sure," was his curt answer.

"That's a cowardly lie!" I cried out again. "You're a coward and a liar, like all your sneaking kind, that skulk about dark corners, and crawl under beds, and arm yourself to the teeth, and stand ready to murder innocent women, to strike them down in the dark, rather than be found out! It's cowardice, the lowest and meanest kind of cowardice!"

The sweat stood out on his face in glistening drops.

"What's eatin' you, anyway?" he demanded. "What 'ave I done?"

I pushed the cluster of women's jewelry closer to him.

"You've done some of the meanest and dirtiest work a man can stoop to. You've skulked and crawled and slunk through the dark to rob women and children!"

"Who's given you a license to call me a coward?"

"Do you dare to intimate there's anything but low and arrant cowardice in work like this?"

"Just try it," he said with a grin that made his face hideous.

"Why should I try it?" I demanded. "Do you suppose because I don't carry a jimmy and gun that I can't face honest danger when I need to?"

I glanced round at my den walls, studded with trophies as they were, from the bull moose over the fireplace to the leopard pelt under my heels. The other man followed my glance, but with a lip-curl of contempt. He had jumped to the conclusion, of course, that those relics of encounter in the open stood as a sort of object-lesson of bravery which belonged to me in person.

"Bah," he said, apparently glad to crowd me off into some less personal side-issue, "that's all play-actin'. Get up against what I have, and you'd tone down your squeal. Then you'd walk into the real thing."

"The real thing, black-jacking chambermaids and running like a pelted cur at the sight of a brass button!"

I could see his sudden wince, and that it took an effort for him to speak.

"You'd find it took nerve, all right, all right," he retorted. "And the kind o' nerve that ain't a cuff-shooter's long suit."

My movement of contempt brought him a step or two nearer. But it was Benson who spoke first.

"Hadn't we better have the police, sir?" he suggested. The burglar, with his eyes on my face, stepped still closer, as though to shoulder any such suggestion as Benson's out of the issue.

"You just go out in the middle of the night," he went on, with derisive volubility. "Go out at night and look at a house. Stand off, and look at it good and plenty. Then ask yourself who's inside, and what's doin' behind them brick walls, and who's awake, and where a shot's goin' to come from, and what chances of a getaway you'll have, and the size of the bit you'll get if you're pinched. Just stand there and tell yourself you've got to get inside that house, and make your haul and get away with the goods, that you've got to do it or go with empty guts. Try it, and see if it takes nerve."

I must have touched his professional pride. I had trifled with that ethical totem-pole that is known as honor among thieves.

"All right," I said, suddenly turning on him as the inspiration came to me. "We'll try it, and we'll try it together. For I'm going to make you take this stuff back, and take it back to-night."

I could see his face cloud. Then a sudden change came over it. His rat-like eyes actually began to twinkle.

"I think we ought to have the police, sir," reiterated Benson, remembering, doubtless, his encounter below-stairs. "He's an uncommon tricky one, sir."

I saw, on more sober second thought, that it would be giving my friend too much rope, too many chances for treachery. And he would not be over-nice in his methods, I knew, now that I had him cornered. A second idea occurred to me, a rather intoxicating one. I suddenly felt like a Crusader saving from pollution a sacred relic. I could catch the whimper of some unkenneled sense of drama in the affair.

"Benson," I said, "I'm going to leave this worthy gentleman here with you. And while you look after him, I'm going to return this peach-bloom vase to its owner."

"He ain't in town to-night," broke in my troubled burglar.

"And to demonstrate to his somewhat cynical cast of mind that there's nothing extraordinary in his particular line of activity, I propose to return it in the same manner that it was taken."

Benson looked troubled.

"I beg pardon, sir, but mightn't it get us all into a bit of trouble? Couldn't we leave it until morning, sir, and talk it over quiet-like with your friend Mr. McCooey, or with Lieutenant Belton, sir, or the gentleman from the Pinkerton office?"

"And have a cuff-shooter running for help over such a triviality? Never, Benson, never! You will make yourself comfortable here with this gallant gentleman of the black-jack, and keep this handsome Colt of his quite close about you while you're doing it. For I'm going to take this piece of porcelain back where it belongs, even though I have to face a dozen lap-dogs and frighten every housemaid of Twelfth Street into hysterics."

Nobody, I have more than once contended, is altogether sane after midnight. This belief came back to me as I stood before that gloomy-fronted Fifth Avenue house, in that ebb-tide hour of the night when even Broadway is empty, wondering what lay behind the brownstone mask, asking myself what dangers lurked about that inner gloom, speculating as to what sleepers stirred and what eyes, even as I stood there, might be alert and watching.

As Benson had suggested, I might have waited decorously until daylight, or I might have quietly ascended the wide stone steps and continued to ring the electric push-bell until a sleepy servant answered it. But that, after all, seemed absurdly tame and commonplace. It was without the slightest tang of drama, and I was as waywardly impatient to try that enticing tip-tilted instrument of steel on an opposing door as a boy with a new knife is to whittle on the nursery woodwork.

There was a tingle of novelty even in standing before a grimly substantial and altogether forbidding-looking house, and being conscious of the fact that you had decided on its secret invasion. I could no longer deny that it took a certain crude form of nerve. I was convinced of this, indeed, as I saw the approaching figure of a patrolman on his rounds. It caused me, as I felt the jimmy like a staybone against my ribs, and the flashlight like a torpedo-head in my pocket, to swing promptly about into Twelfth Street and walk toward Sixth Avenue. I experienced a distinct glow of satisfaction as the patrolling footsteps passed northward up the quietness of the avenue.

But the house itself seemed as impregnable as a fortress. It disheartened me a little to find that not even a basement grill had been disturbed. For the second time I turned and sauntered slowly toward Sixth Avenue. As I swung eastward again I found that the last house on the side-street, the house abutting the Fifth Avenue mansion which was the object of my attack, was vacant. Of that there could be no doubt. Its doors and windows were sealed with neatly painted shutters.

This, it occurred to me, might mark a possible line of approach. But here again I faced what seemed an impregnable position. I was backing away a little, studying that boarded and coffin-like front, when my heel grated against the iron covering of a coal-chute. This coal-chute stood midway between the curb and the area railing. I looked down at it for a moment or two. Then something prompted me to test its edge with the toe of my shoe. Then, making quite sure that the street was empty, I stooped down and clutched at the edge of the iron disk. It was quite heavy. But one tug at it showed me that its lock-chain had been forced apart.

It took but a moment to lift the metal shield to one side of the chute-head. It took but another moment to lower myself into the chute itself. I could see that it was a somewhat ignominious beginning. But I felt buoyantly sure that I was on the right track. It took an effort to work the iron disk back over the opening. It also required many strange contortions of the body to worm my way down into that narrow and dirty tunnel.

My rather peremptory advent into the coal-bin resulted in a startling amount of noise, noise enough to wake the soundest of sleepers. So I crouched there for several seconds, inhaling dust, and listening and wondering whether or not the walls above me harbored a caretaker. Then I took out the pocket searchlight, and, with the pressure of a finger, directed my ray of illumination against a wooden partition bisected by a painted wooden door.

A distinct sense of disappointment swept through me as I stooped down to examine this door and found that it had already been forced open. I knew, however, that I was following in the footsteps of my more experienced predecessor. Then came a storeroom, and then a laundry-room, with another jimmied door at the head of the stairway leading to the first floor.

Here I stood waiting and listening for some time. But still again nothing but darkness and silence and that musty aroma peculiar to unoccupied houses surrounded me. I felt more at home by this time, and was more leisurely in my survey of the passage upward. I was, of course, confronted by nothing more disturbing than ghost-like furniture covered with ticking and crystal-hung chandeliers encased in cheesecloth. I began to admire my friend the burglar's astuteness in choosing so circuitous and yet so protected a path. There was almost genius in it. His advance, I felt sure, was toward the roof. As I had expected, I found the scuttle open. The lock, I could see, had been quite cleverly picked. And, so far, there had not been a mishap.

Once out on the housetop, however, I foresaw that I would have to be more careful. As I clambered up to the higher coping-tiles that marked the line of the next roof, I knew that I had actually broken into the enemy's lines. Yet the way still seemed clear enough. For, as I came to the roof-scuttle of the second house I found that it, too, remained unlocked. My predecessor had made things almost disappointingly easy for me. Yet, in another way, he had left things doubly dangerous. I had to bear the brunt of any mis-step he may have made. I was being called to face the responsibility of both his intrusion and my own.

So it was with infinite precaution that I lifted the scuttle and leaned over that little well of darkness, inhaling the warmer air that seeped up in my face. With it came an odor quite different to that of the house I had just left. There was something expository in it, something more vital and electric, eloquent of a place inhabited, of human beings and their lairs and trails, of movement and life and vaguely defined menaces. It was, I fancied, a good deal like that man-smell which comes down-wind to a stalked and wary elk.

I stepped down on the iron ladder that led into the uncertain darkness, covering the trap after me. I began to feel, as I groped my way downward, that the whole thing was becoming more than a game. I was disturbed by the thought of how deep I had ventured into an uncertainty. I began to be oppressed by the thought of how complicated my path was proving. I felt intimidated by the undetermined intricacies that still awaited me. A new anxiety was taking possession of me, a sort of low fever of fear, an increasing impatience to replace my precious porcelain, end my mission, and make my escape to the open.

It began to dawn on me, as I groped lower and lower down through the darkness, that a burglar's calling was not all beer and skittles. I began to feel a little ashamed of my heroics of an hour before.

Then I drew up, suddenly, for a sound had crept to my ears. The tingle that ran through my body was not wholly one of fright. Yet, as I stood there in the darkness with one hand against the wall, I caught the rhythm of a slow and muffled snoring. There was something oddly reassuring in that reiterated vibration, even though it served to emphasize the dangers that surrounded me. It was not unlike the sound of a bell-buoy floating up to a fog-wrapped liner's bridge.

I was no longer a prey to any feeling of hesitancy. I was already too deep in the woods to think of turning back. My one passion now was to complete the circuit, to emerge on the other side.

I began to wonder, as I felt for the stair banister and groped my cautious way down the treads, just how the burglar himself had effected that final exit from the house. And the sooner I got away from the sleeping quarters, I felt, the safer I would be. Every bedroom was a shoal of dangers, and not all of them, I very well knew, would be equipped with the same generous whistling-buoy as that I had just left behind me. There was, too, something satisfying in the knowledge that I was at least getting nearer and nearer the ground-floor. This was due, not so much to the fact that I was approaching a part of the house with which I was more or less familiar, but more to the fact that my descent marked an approach to some possible pathway of escape. For that idea was now uppermost in my mind, and no aviator with a balky motor ever ached to get back to earth more eagerly than I.

The utter darkness and silence of the lower halls were beginning to get on my nerves. I was glad to feel the newel-post, which assured me that I had reached the last step in my descent. I was relieved to be able to turn carefully and silently about to the left, to grope toward a door which I knew stood before me in the gloom, and then cautiously to turn the knob and step inside.

I knew at once, even before I took the flashlight from my pocket, that I was in the library. And the room that opened off this, I remembered, half cabinet-lined study and half informal exhibition-room, was the chamber wherein Anthony Gubtill treasured his curios. It would take but a minute or two, I knew, to replace his priceless little porcelain. And another minute or two, I felt, ought to see me safely out and on my way home.

I stood with my back to the door, determined that no untimely blunder should mar the end of my adventure. My first precaution was to thrust out my flashlight and make sure of my path. I let the incandescent ray finger interrogatively about the massively furnished room, resting for a moment on marble and metal and glass-fronted book-shelf. I remembered, with almost a smile of satisfaction, the little Clytie above the fireplace, and the Hebe in bronze that stood beside the heavy reading-lamp. This lamp, Gubtill had once told me, had come from Munich; and I remembered his chuckle over the fact that it had come in a "sleeper" trunk and had evaded duty.

Then I let the wavering light travel toward the end of the glimmering and dark-wooded reading-table. I stood there, picking out remembered object after object, remarking them with singular detachment of mind as my light continued to circle the end of the room.

Then I quietly made my way to the open door in the rear, and bisecting that second room with my spear of light, satisfied myself that the space between the peach-bloom amphora and the ashes-of-roses Yang Lao with the ivory base was indeed empty.

I stood listening to the exotic tick of a brazen-dialed Roumanian clock. I lingered there, letting my bald light-shaft root like a hog's-snout along that shelf so crowded with delicate tones and contours. I sighed a little enviously as I turned toward the other end of the room.

Then, of a sudden, I stopped breathing. Automatically I let my thumb lift from the current-spring of my storage-lamp and the light at once went out. I stood there with every nerve of my body on edge. I crouched forward, tingling and peering into the darkness before me. For I had suddenly discovered that I was not alone in the room.

There, facing me, picked out as distinctly as a baby spot-light picks out an actor's face, I had seen the owner of the house himself, not ten paces from me. He was sitting in a high-backed armchair of green leather. He must have been watching me from the first, every moment and every movement. He had made no effort to interrupt or intercept me. He had been too sure of his position.

I waited for what seemed an interminable length of time. But not a sound, beyond the querulous tick of the clock, came to my ears. Not even a movement took place in the darkness.

The undefined menace of this silence was too much for me. The whole thing grew into something strangely like a nightmare. I moved away, involuntarily, wondering what I should say, and after what fashion I should begin my foolish explanation. I crouched low and backed off obliquely, as though some value lay in the intervention of space, and as though something venomous were confronting me. I fell slowly back, pawing frenziedly about me for some sustaining tangibility to which to cling. As I did so my body came in contact with some article of furniture—just what I could not tell. But I shied away from it in a panic, as a colt shies at a fallen newspaper.

My sudden movement threw over a second piece of furniture. It must have been some sort of collapsible screen, for it fell to the floor with an echoing crash. I waited, holding my breath, with horripilations of fear nettling every limb of my body, knowing only too well that this must indeed mark the end.

But there was no movement, no word spoken, no slightest sound. I stared through the darkness, still half expectant. I tried to tell myself that it may have been mere hallucination, that expectant attention had projected into my line of vision a purely imaginary fig-lire. I still waited, with my heart pounding. Then the tension became more than I could endure. I actually crept forward a step or two, still peering blindly through the darkness, still listening and waiting.

Then I caught my breath with sudden new suspicion, with a quick fear that crashed, bullet-like, through the film of consciousness. It was followed by a sickening sense of shock, amounting almost to physical nausea.

I once more raised the flashlight. This time my hand shook perceptibly as I turned the electric ray directly in front of me. I let the minute circle of illumination arrow through the darkness, direct to the white face that seemed to be awaiting it. Then I let it come to a rest.

I remember falling back a step or two. I may have called out, but of that I am not sure. Yet of one thing I was only too certain. There before me sat Anthony Gubtill. He was quite dead.

My first feeling was not altogether one of terror. It was accompanied by a surge of indignation at the injustice, at the brutality, of it all. I was able to make note of the quilted dressing-gown that covered the relaxed body. I was collected enough to assume that he had overheard the intruder; had come to investigate, and had been struck down and cunningly thrust into a chair. This inference was followed by a flash of exultation as I remembered that his murderer was known, that the crime could easily be proved against him, that even at the present moment he was safe in Benson's custody.

I moved toward the dead man, fortified by the knowledge of a vast new obligation. It was only after I had examined the face for a second time and seen how death had been caused by a cruelly heavy blow, dealt by some blunt instrument, that the enormity of my own intrusion into that house of horror came home to me. I felt a sudden need for light, for sobering and rationalizing light. Even the ticking from the brazen-faced clock had become something phantasmal and unnerving.

I groped feverishly and blindly about in search of an electric switch-button. Then, of a sudden, I stopped again, my movement arrested by a sound.

I knew, as I stood and listened, that it was only the purr of an automobile, faint and muffled from the street outside. But it suddenly brought home to me the awkwardness of my position. To be found in that house, or even to be seen leaving it, was no longer a desirable thing. My foolhardy caprice, before an actuality so overawing, dwindled into something worse than absurdity. And thought came back at a bound to the porcelain in my pocket. I recalled the old-time rivalry between the dead man and myself for The Flame. I recalled the details of my advent between those walls where I stood. And my blood went cold. It was not a matter of awkwardness; it was a matter of peril. For who, I again asked myself, would believe a story so absurd, or accept an excuse so extravagant?

The clock ticked on accusingly. The sound of the automobile stopped. I had just noted this with relief when the thud of a quietly closed door fell on my startled ears. Then came the murmur of voices. There was no longer any doubt about the matter. A motor had come to the door, and from it certain persons had entered the house.

I crept to the library and listened. Then I tiptoed back and closed the door of the inner room. I felt more secure with even a half-inch panel between me and what that inner room held.

Then I listened. I began to hear the padded tread of feet. Then came the sound of another opened door, and then the snap of a light-switch. There was nothing secret about the new invasion. I knew, as I shrank back behind one of the high-backed library chairs, that the front of the house was already illuminated.

Then came the sound of a calling voice, apparently from the head of the stairs. It was a cautious and carefully modulated voice; I took it for that of a young man of about twenty.

"Is that you, Caddy?"

Then came a silence.

"I say, is that you, Orrie?" was demanded in a somewhat somnolent stage-whisper. There was something strangely reassuring in that commonplace boyish voice. Anthony Gubtill, I knew, had no immediate family. I vaguely recalled, however, some talk of a Canadian nephew and niece who had at times visited him.

"Sh—s—sh!" said a woman's voice from the lower hall, "Don't wake Uncle Anthony."

It must have been a young woman. Her voice sounded pensive, like that of a girl who might be coming home tired from a dance at Sherry's. Yet, knowing what I did, its girlish weariness took on a pathos indescribably poignant.

"It's an awful hour, isn't it?" asked a second man's voice from the lower hall. There were sounds that seemed to imply that wraps were being removed.

"Almost four," came the answer from above. "Had a good time, Caddy?"

I heard a stifled yawn.

"Rather," answered the girl's voice.

"I say, Orrie, bring up those Egyptian gaspers for a puff or two, will you?" requested the youth from above, still in a stage-whisper. "And, Caddy, be sure the latch is on."

"On what?" demanded Orrie.

"The door, you idiot!" was the sleepily good-natured retort.

Then I suddenly ducked low behind my chair-back, for the young man called Orrie had flung open the library door. He came into the room gropingly, without switching on the electrics. I could see his trim young shoulders, and the white blur of his shirt-front. Behind him, framed in the doorway, stood a young girl of about twenty, a blonde in pale blue, with bare arms and bare shoulders. Her skin looked very soft and baby-like in the strong sidelight. I could not repress something that was almost a shudder at the thought of this careless gaiety and youth so close to the grim tragedy behind me, so unconscious of the awakening that might come to them at almost any moment.

"Do hurry!" said the tired girl, as the young man fumbled about the table-end. I realized, as I peeped out at her, that my first duty would be to keep those round young eyes from what might confront them in that inner room.

"I've got 'em!" answered the man. He stood a moment without moving. Then he turned and walked out of the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

I emitted a gasp of relief and stood up once more. Nothing alive or dead, I determined, would now keep me in that house. Yet for all that new-born ecstasy of impatience, I was still compelled to wait, for I could hear the occasional sound of feet and a whisper or two from behind the closed door. Then all sound died away; the gloom and silence again engulfed me.

I took the Yang Lao porcelain from my pocket, unwrapped it, and crept back to the inner room. I groped along the wall in the darkness, circling wide about the green-leather chair in the center. I put the vase back on its cabinet, without so much as flashing my light. Then I circled back along the wall, felt for the library door, and groped cautiously across the perilous breadth of the furniture-crowded chamber. It took me several seconds to find the door that opened into the hallway. Once through it and across the hall, I knew, only a spring-latch stood between me and the street. So I turned the knob quickly and swung back the door.

But I did not pass through it. For, instead of darkness, I found myself confronted by a blaze of light. In that blaze of light stood three waiting and expectant figures. What most disturbed me was the fact that the man called Orrie held in his hand a revolver that seemed the size of a toy-cannon. This was leveled directly at my blinking eyes. The other youth, in cerise pajamas with orange colored frogs and a dressing-gown tied at the waist with a silk girdle, stood just behind him, holding an extremely wicked-looking Savage of the magazine make. Behind this youth again, close by the newel-post, stood the girl in blue, all the sleepiness gone out of her face.

The sight of that wide-eyed and eager trio irritated me beyond words. There was no longer any thrill in the thing. I had gone through too much; I could not react to this newer emergency. I kept wondering if the idiot with the Colt realized just how delicate a pressure would operate the trigger on which I could see his finger shaking. But that shake, it was plain, was more from excitement than fear.

"We've got him!" cried the youth in the cerise pajamas. I might have been a somewhat obstinate black bass wheedled into his landing-net, from the way he spoke.

"Don't move!" commanded the older of the two, wrinkling his brow into a frown of youthful determination. "Don't you dare move one inch, or I'll put a hole through you."

I had no intention of moving.

"Watch his hands," prompted the younger man. "He ought to put 'em up."

"Yes, Orrie, he ought to put them up," echoed the girl by the newel-post. She reminded me, with her delicate whites and pinks and blues, of the cabinet of porcelain at which I had so recently stared.

"Back up through the door," cried Orrie. "Come on—back up!"

I wearily obeyed this somewhat equine order. Then he commanded me to hold my hands above my head. I did so without hesitation; I had no wish to argue while that Colt was staring me in the eyes.

They followed me, Indian file, into the room. It was the girl who closed the door as Orrie switched on the lights. She stood with her back to it, studying my face. I could see that I rather interested them all. But in that interest I detected no touch of either friendliness or respect. The only one I seemed to mystify was the girl at the door.

"Have you anything to say?" demanded Orrie, squaring his shoulders.

"Yes, I have a great deal to say," I told him. "But I prefer saying it to you alone."

I could see his movement of disdain.

"Will you listen to that!" commented the youth in the cerise pajamas.

"And if you will be so good as to stop poking that pistol in my face," I continued with some heat, "and then send these children out of the room, I shall say what I have to, and do it very briefly!"

"Children!" came in an indignant gasp from the girl at the door.

"We'll stick by you, old man," assured the youthful hero in cerise, with his heels well apart.

"And just why should I closet myself with a burglar?" inquired the astute Orrie, staring at me with the utmost insolence. Yet I could see that at least the precision of my articulation was puzzling him a bit.

"That's asinine," I retorted. "I'm not a burglar, and you ought to know it."

To my astonishment, a little tripartite ripple of laughter greeted this statement.

"Then what are you?" asked the incredulous Orrie.

I knew there was no further use beating about the bush.

"Yes, who are you?" demanded the other youth.

He still held the magazine-revolver balanced in his right hand. The truth had to come out.

"I'm Witter Kerfoot," I told them, as steadily as I could. "Kerfoot, of Gramercy Park West."

"What number?"

I gave him the number. I could see the trio exchange glances; they were plainly glances of amusement. My young friends, I could see, were enjoying a home melodrama, a melodrama in which I was obviously the most foolish of villains. I began to feel a good deal like a phonograph grinding out a comic record.

"And with that face!" ejaculated the man called Orrie.

The quiet contempt of his glance caused me to shift about, so I could catch a glimpse of myself in the Venetian mirror between the book-shelves. That glimpse was indeed a startling one. I had quite forgotten the transit through the coal-hole. I could not even remember how or when I broke my hat-crown. I had remained as unconscious of the scratch across my cheek as I was of the garret cobwebs that festooned my clothing. I saw as I peeped into the mirror only a sickly-hued and grimy-looking footpad with dirty hands and a broken hat. It was no wonder they laughed. My environment for the last hour had not been one that tended toward consciousness of attire. I was about to remove my disgracefully disfiguring headgear when the younger man swung about on me with the Savage thrust point-blank in my face.

"Don't try any of that!" he gasped. "You keep up those hands."

The whole situation was so beside the mark, was so divorced from the sterner problem confronting both them and myself, that it dispirited and angered me.

"We've had about enough of this tommy-rot!" I protested.

"Yes, we'll cut out the tommy-rot, and get him tied," proclaimed the man with the Colt.

"Then search him first," prompted the young man. "Here, Caddy, take Orrie's Colt while he goes through him," he commanded, in the chest-tones of a newly-acquired savagery, "and if he tries to move, wing him!"

The girl, wide-eyed and reluctant, took the heavy revolver. Then Orrie advanced on me, though in an altogether wary and tight-lipped manner. To continue my protests, I saw, would be only to waste my breath. There was nothing to do but submit to the farce.

I said nothing as he produced the telltale flashlight. I also remained silent as he triumphantly unearthed the jimmy and the damnatory skeleton keys. I could see the interchange of exultant glances as these were tossed out on the polished table-top.

"Get the straps from the golf bags!" suggested the youth with the Savage. I could not help remembering how this scene was paralleling another of the same nature and the same night, when Benson and I had been the masters of the situation.

The man called Orrie seemed a little nonplussed at the fact that he had found no valuables in my outer pockets, but he did not give up. He grimly ignored my protests as he explored still deeper and dug out my monogramed wallet, and then a gold cigarette-case, on which my name was duly inscribed. He turned them over in his hand a couple of times and examined them carefully. Then a great light seemed to come to him. He succumbed, as even his elders have done, to a sudden sense of drama.

I saw him dart to the outer room and catch up a telephone directory. He riffled through the pages with quick and impatient fingers. Then he strode back, and looked me up and down.

"I know what this man's done," he cried, his eyes alight with conviction.

"What?" demanded the younger man.

"He's visited more than this house to-night. He's gone through Witter Kerfoot's, as well. He's taken these things from there. And now it's up to us to take him back with them!"

I could see the sheer theatricality of the situation clutch at his two listeners. I could see them surrender to it, although the girl still seemed to hesitate.

"Hadn't I better call Uncle Anthony?" she suggested.

At one breath her words brought me back to both the tragedy that lay so close at hand, and the perilous complexity of my own position.

"No, that's foolish!" cut in Orrie. "The car's still outside. Caddy, I think you'll have to come along. You can sit with Jansen on the driving-seat."

The hero of the maneuver turned back to me. I was thinking mostly of the soft-eyed girl with the baby-white skin, and how I could get her safely away.

"Will you come quietly?" my captor demanded of me.

"Yes," I answered, without looking up, "I'll come quietly."

It was the girl's voice, a little shrill with excitement, that next broke the silence.

"Orrie, he's not a burglar!" she cried out, in her treble-noted conviction.

"Then what is he?"

"He's a gentleman."

"What makes you think so?" demanded the indifferent Orrie as he motioned me, with a curt movement of his Colt-barrel, toward the hall door.

"I know by his nails!" was her inconsequential yet quite definite reply.

Orrie laughed.

"Then you'd give tea and macaroons to every burglarious barber out of Sing Sing," he scoffed. "And our real answer's waiting for us in Gramercy Square."

It seemed to take but a minute or two in the car to swing us from Twelfth Street up to Twentieth, and then eastward into the stillness of the square. My captors had insisted that I should not talk. "Not a word!" commanded Orrie, and I could feel his insolent gun-barrel against my ribs as he gave the command for the second time. They were drunk, I could see, with the intoxication of their exploit. They were preoccupied with inhaling their subtle sense of drama. With the dictatorial self-sufficiency of true inebriety they had enjoined me from every effort at explanation. The bubble, they felt, was far too pretty a one to be pricked.

They alighted, one in front of me and one behind me, still carrying their foolish and murderous-looking firearms. The girl remained in her seat. Then the three of us grimly ascended my steps.

"It's needless to ring the bell," I wearily explained. "My pass-key will admit you."