Part 27 (1/2)

”I waited an hour,” he finished, ”before she came; I dropped to sleep or I would have gone without her. About half-past one she came along, and a gentleman with her. He put her in the cab, and I took her to the city.

When I saw in the paper that a lady had disappeared from Bellwood that night, I knew right off that it was my party.”

”Would you know the man again?”

”I would know his voice, I expect, sir; I could not see much: he wore a slouch hat and had a traveling-bag of some kind.”

”What did he say to the woman?” I asked.

”He didn't say much. Before he closed the door, he said, 'You have put me in a terrible position,' or something like that. From the traveling-bag and all, I thought perhaps it was an elopement, and the lady had decided to throw him down.”

”Was it a young woman or an old one,” I asked again. This time the cabby's tone was a.s.sured.

”Young,” he a.s.serted, ”slim and quick: dressed in black, with a black veil. Soft voice. She got out at Market Square, and I have an idea she took a cross-town car there.”

”I hardly think it was Miss Maitland,” I said. ”She was past sixty, and besides--I don't think she went that way. Still it is worth following up. Is that all?”

He fumbled in his pocket, and after a minute brought up a small black pocket-book and held it out to me. It was the small coin purse out of a leather hand-bag.

”She dropped this in the cab, sir,” he said. ”I took it home to the missus--not knowing what else to do with it. It had no money in it--only that bit of paper.”

I opened the purse and took out a small white card, without engraving.

On it was written in a pencil the figures:

C 1122

CHAPTER XVII

HIS SECOND WIFE

When the cabman had gone, I sat down and tried to think things out. As I have said many times in the course of this narrative, I lack imagination: moreover, a long experience of witnesses in court had taught me the unreliability of average observation. The very fact that two men swore to having taken solitary women away from Bellwood that night, made me doubt if either one had really seen the missing woman.

Of the two stories, the taxicab driver's was the more probable, as far as Miss Jane was concerned. Knowing her child-like nature, her timidity, her shrinking and shamefaced fear of the dark, it was almost incredible that she would walk the three miles to Wynton, voluntarily, and from there lose herself in the city. Besides, such an explanation would not fit the blood-stains, or the fact that she had gone, as far as we could find out, in her night-clothes.

Still--she had left the village that night, either by cab or on foot. If the driver had been correct in his time, however, the taxicab was almost eliminated; he said the woman got into the cab at one-thirty. It was between one-thirty and one-forty-five when Margery heard the footsteps in the attic.

I think for the first time it came to me, that day, that there was at least a possibility that Miss Jane had not been attacked, robbed or injured: that she had left home voluntarily, under stress of great excitement. But if she had, why? The mystery was hardly less for being stripped of its gruesome details. Nothing in my knowledge of the missing woman gave me a clue. I had a vague hope that, if she had gone voluntarily, she would see the newspapers and let us know where she was.

To my list of exhibits I added the purse with its inclosure. The secret drawer of my desk now contained, besides the purse, the slip marked eleven twenty-two that had been pinned to Fleming's pillow; the similar sc.r.a.p found over Miss Jane's mantel; the pearl I had found on the floor of the closet, and the cyanide, which, as well as the bullet, Burton had given me. Add to these the still tender place on my head where Wardrop had almost brained me with a chair, and a blue ankle, now becoming spotted with yellow, where I had fallen down the dumb-waiter, and my list of visible reminders of the double mystery grew to eight.

I was not proud of the part I had played. So far, I had blundered, it seemed to me, at every point where a blunder was possible. I had fallen over folding chairs and down a shaft; I had been a half-hour too late to save Allan Fleming; I had been up and awake, and Miss Jane had got out of the house under my very nose. Last, and by no means least, I had waited thirty-five years to find the right woman, and when I found her, some one else had won her. I was in the depths that day when Burton came in.

He walked into the office jauntily and presented Miss Grant with a club sandwich neatly done up in waxed paper. Then he came into my private room and closed the door behind him.

”Avaunt, dull care!” he exclaimed, taking in my dejected att.i.tude and exhibits on the desk at a glance. ”Look up and grin, my friend.” He had his hands behind him.

”Don't be a fool,” I snapped. ”I'll not grin unless I feel like it.”

”Grin, darn you,” he said, and put something on the desk in front of me.