The Window at the White Cat | Page 5

his
party in the state; the man of whom one of his adversaries had said,
with the distinct approval of the voting public, that he was so low in the
scale of humanity that it would require a special dispensation of
Heaven to raise him to the level of total degradation. But he and
Fleming were generally supposed to be captain and first mate of the
pirate craft that passed with us for the ship of state.
"Mr. Schwartz and my father are allies politically," the girl explained
with heightened color, "but they are not friends. My father is a
gentleman."
The inference I allowed to pass unnoticed, and as if she feared she had
said too much, the girl rose. When she left, a few minutes later, it was
with the promise that she would close the Monmouth Avenue house
and go to her aunts at Bellwood, at once. For myself, I pledged a
thorough search for her father, and began it by watching the scarlet
wing on her hat through the top of the elevator cage until it had
descended out of sight.
I am afraid it was a queer hodgepodge of clues and sentiment that I
poured out to Hunter, the detective, when he came up late that

afternoon.
Hunter was quiet when I finished my story.
"They're rotten clear through," he reflected. "This administration is
worse than the last, and it was a peach. There have been more suicides
than I could count on my two hands, in the last ten years. I warn
you--you'd be better out of this mess."
"What do you think about the eleven twenty-two?" I asked as he got up
and buttoned his coat.
"Well, it might mean almost anything. It might be that many dollars, or
the time a train starts, or it might be the eleventh and the twenty-second
letters of the alphabet--k--v."
"K--v!" I repeated. "Why that would be the latin cave--beware."
Hunter smiled cheerfully.
"You'd better stick to the law, Mr. Knox," he said from the door. "We
don't use Latin in the detective business."

CHAPTER II
UNEASY APPREHENSIONS
PLATTSBURG was not the name of the capital, but it will do for this
story. The state doesn't matter either. You may take your choice, like
the story Mark Twain wrote, with all kinds of weather at the beginning,
so the reader could take his pick.
We will say that my home city is Manchester. I live with my married
brother, his wife and two boys. Fred is older than I am, and he is an
exceptional brother. On the day he came home from his wedding trip, I
went down with my traps on a hansom, in accordance with a

prearranged schedule. Fred and Edith met me inside the door.
"Here's your latch-key, Jack," Fred said, as he shook hands. "Only one
stipulation--remember we are strangers in the vicinity and try to get
home before the neighbors are up. We have our reputations to think of."
"There is no hour for breakfast," Edith said, as she kissed me. "You
have a bath of your own, and don't smoke in the drawing-room."
Fred was always a lucky devil.
I had been there now for six years. I had helped to raise two young
Knoxes--bully youngsters, too: the oldest one could use boxing-gloves
when he was four--and the finest collie pup in our end of the state. I
wanted to raise other things--the boys liked pets--but Edith was like all
women, she didn't care for animals.
I had a rabbit-hutch built and stocked in the laundry, and a dove-cote
on the roof. I used the general bath, and gave up my tub to a younger
alligator I got in Florida, and every Sunday the youngsters and I had a
great time trying to teach it to do tricks. I have always taken it a little
hard that Edith took advantage of my getting the measles from Billy, to
clear out every animal in the house. She broke the news to me gently,
the day the rash began to fade, maintaining that, having lost one cook
through the alligator escaping from his tub and being mistaken, in the
gloom of the back-stairs, for a rubber boot, and picked up under the
same misapprehension, she could not risk another cook.
On the day that Margery Fleming came to me about her father, I went
home in a state of mixed emotion. Dinner was not a quiet meal: Fred
and I talked politics, generally, and as Fred was on one side and I on
the other, there was always an argument on.
"What about Fleming?" I asked at last, when Fred had declared that in
these days of corruption, no matter what the government was, be was
"forninst" it. "Hasn't he been frightened