The Window at the White Cat | Page 8

of
Carter had made me suspicious of him. Under an arc light I made the
first note in my new business of manhunter and it was something like
this:
Anderson's drug-store.
Ask for Mamie Brennan.
Find Delia.

Advise Delia that a policeman with a family is a bad bet.
Locate Carter.
It was late when I reached the corner of Chestnut and Union Streets,
where Fred had said Allan Fleming had come to grief in a cab. But the
corner-man had gone, and the night man on the beat knew nothing, of
course, of any particular collision.
"There's plinty of 'em every day at this corner," he said cheerfully. "The
department sends a wagon here every night to gather up the pieces,
automobiles mainly. That trolley pole over there has been sliced off
clean three times in the last month. They say a fellow ain't a graduate of
the automobile school till he can go around it on the sidewalk without
hittin' it!"
I left him looking reminiscently at the pole, and went home to bed. I
had made no headway, I had lost conceit with myself and a day and
evening at the office, and I had gained the certainty that Margery
Fleming was safe in Bellwood and the uncertain address of a servant
who might know something about Mr. Fleming.
I was still awake at one o'clock and I got up impatiently and consulted
the telephone directory. There were twelve Andersons in the city who
conducted drug-stores.
When I finally went to sleep, I dreamed that I was driving Margery
Fleming along a street in a broken taxicab, and that all the buildings
were pharmacies and numbered eleven twenty-two.

CHAPTER III
NINETY-EIGHT PEARLS
AFTER such a night I slept late. Edith still kept her honeymoon
promise of no breakfast hour and she had gone out with Fred when I

came down-stairs.
I have great admiration for Edith, for her tolerance with my uncertain
hours, for her cheery breakfast-room, and the smiling good nature of
the servants she engages. I have a theory that, show me a sullen servant
and I will show you a sullen mistress, although Edith herself disclaims
all responsibility and lays credit for the smile with which Katie brings
in my eggs and coffee, to largess on my part. Be that as it may, Katie is
a smiling and personable young woman, and I am convinced that had
she picked up the alligator on the back-stairs and lost part of the end of
her thumb, she would have told Edith that she cut it off with the bread
knife, and thus have saved to us Bessie the Beloved and her fascinating
trick of taking the end of her tail in her mouth and spinning.
On that particular morning, Katie also brought me a letter, and I
recognized the cramped and rather uncertain writing of Miss Jane
Maitland.
"DEAR MR. KNOX: "Sister Letitia wishes me to ask you if you can
dine with us to-night, informally. She has changed her mind in regard
to the Colored Orphans' Home, and would like to consult you about it.
"Very truly yours, "SUSAN JANE MAITLAND."
It was a very commonplace note; I had had one like it after every
board-meeting of the orphans' home, Miss Maitland being on principle
an aggressive minority. Also, having considerable mind, changing it
became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although
not nearly so stable.
(Fred accuses me here of a very bad pun, and reminds me, quite
undeservedly, that the pun is the lowest form of humor.)
I came across Miss Jane's letter the other day, when I was gathering the
material for this narrative, and I sat for a time with it in my hand
thinking over again the chain of events in which it had been the first
link, a series of strange happenings that began with my acceptance of
the invitation, and that led through ways as dark and tricks as vain as

Bret Harte's Heathen Chinese ever dreamed of, to the final scene at the
White Cat. With the letter I had filed away a half dozen articles and I
ranged them all on the desk in front of me: the letter, the bit of paper
with eleven twenty-two on it, that Margery gave me the first time I saw
her; a note-book filled with jerky characters that looked like Arabic and
were newspaper shorthand; a railroad schedule; a bullet, the latter
slightly flattened; a cube-shaped piece of chalk which I put back in its
box with a shudder, and labeled 'poison', and a small gold buckle from
a slipper, which I--at which I did not shudder.
I did not need to make the climaxes of my story. They lay before me.
I walked to the office that