QyartEy _-_ - E I ke - i, = m 0-A ntek.;SHELL -E-A — U1I0BRART OF THE I BEQUEST OF IRVING KANE POND C.E. 1879, A.M. (HoN.) 1911 1 iliall ullu f_ _ :" -) i; jr'' k" " III" "I 11, j y "'-.1 IIK, vvi-c Vlfto Nwt1v (U 16*u I &- & ^44000.%oft 4.'.. I1+.. "I i VI THE QUARTZ EYE By HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER TIIE REAL ADVENTURE TIHE PAINTED SCENE T IE THIOROUCGHBRED AN AMERICAN FAMILY MARY WOLLASTON REALI LIFE JOSErPHr (;REIER AND HIS DAUGHTER TI1; (.)THER SIDIE" '1TH INNOCENTS TiHI ('{RBIN NECKLACE PI 1LL()P1KNA T 'I' E I iE (;INN IRS THl, F ('I.()CK STRIKES IWO The QUART z EYE dA eMystery in Ultra Violet 3y HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY PUBLISHERS INDIANAPOLIS ki'''%'kFtp''?Fckipcc*ckipchkj kc AgrkSFckf COPYRIGHT, 1928 BY THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY FIrST EDITIOx Printed in the United States of America ('r i 'Y RI.r, 90I28 Rilt 'l'tl ( 'tW I.L Ilutil ibulNt. (COMPAMY I' l rr ll ti tlle Ul traviolt CONTENTS CH9APTER I II III IV V VI VII ViII IX X xi XII. XIII XIV Xv XVI XVII XVIII MARKED "DANGER"t.. THE FIRE TRICK. FEELING KIDNAPPED * THREE QUEER THINGS. LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL THE LETTER. JANE CONTRIBUTES. A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE. MUSHROOMS. WRAPPED IN A RUG THINKING IT OVER RAIDED A BARGAIN WITH LINDA THE BLOODSTAINED HAND ONE THING SETTLED. SOME ONE COMES BACK THE ONLY THING To Do How WE FOUND OUT. PAGE *. II *.25 *.43 * 58.96 *. 137 * *152 *. 167 * * 84 * *195 * *207 * *223 * *244 * * 257 * * 276 * *302 THE QUARTZ EYE THE QUARTZ EYE CHAPTER I MARKED DANGER"' W E DON'T tell this story exactly alike, but since I'm the one who's writing it, it's my version that you'll have to be content with. I begin by denying indignantly that I was asleep at the wheel. I did have a good deal on my mind-the parting of the ways; crossing the Rubicon; burning my bridges; that sort of thing-and I won't pretend that I could have remembered, if catechized, a single incident of the drive from the time of my leaving Berger's instrument shop, with the new spectrophotometer he'd made up for me, until about ten seconds before the smash. But the sewer, or whatever it was into which I drove my car, was at least five miles from Berger's, on the direct road to my laboratory, and I'd come as far as that without accident. It was an unusually good case of automatism, that's all. II 12 THE QUARTZ EYE Of course the weakness of the automatist's position is that he mustn't be startled, and I was. I don't want you to think that even in that catastrophic moment I blamed the girl who was driving the jade-green RollsRoyce for shrieking a warning at me, but I still think that if she hadn't I might have ducked into some driveway or gone up over the curb, and, after she'd gone by, backed out again and gone my way intact. What did happen was this: I saw the other car when it was quite a long way off coming along toward me like a green streak. I suppose I noticed it not so much because it was a noticeable sort of car as because it fitted in somehow with the sort of thing I'd been thinking about. The man I'd seen Ellen Thomas marrying that morning would, no doubt, buy her some such car as soon as they got back from their honeymoon. I couldn't blame Ellen for marrying him nor for wanting that kind of car. I wasn't broken-hearted because she wasn't marrying me. I'd never, as a matter of fact, quite asked her to. You see, I couldn't just have said, "Ellen, be mine!" I'd have had to say, "Look here, I've given up my nonsense. I've got a job that starts out at so many thousand a year, and I'm prepared to be a regular person. Will you take a chance that I'll get away with it?" _ __ _~_ _~~ MARKED C DAN GER'' I3 There'd been moments in the past couple of years when I thought that if I'd have said that, she'd have said, "Yes." It was, of course, nothing to Ellen's discredit that she should have wanted at least as much of a concession as that from me before taking the plunge. As is, I'm several degrees less marriageable than a milkman. I've a very inadequate income as things go these days, and I'm saddled with a consuming passion for exploring certain methods of studying the ultra-minute world that lies beyond the revelation of visible light. I have a little makeshift laboratory where I also live, comfortably enough, where I'm my own undisputed boss, and where now and then I get a surmise of something that gives me a tremendous thrill. In the main I think I get as much pleasure out of existence as any one I know. But I have moments of misgiving; hours when I'm sorry for myself, when I try to think of myself as a noble fellow who has sacrificed all for the cause of pure science. I occasionally meet a well-dressed classmate, exuding success from all his pores, whom I shake hands and chat and part with cordially enough and then spend a childish half-hour thinking up horrible humiliations for. Sterrett, whom Ellen had just married, is one of _ I4 THE QUARTZ EYE _ I I I the most intolerably prosperous of these persons. A perfectly good chap. I haven't a thing against him. And Ellen was awfully nice about it. She broke the news of her engagement to me by hand, and then sent Sterrett around to call on me by way of an olivebranch. All the same, or all the more, the invitation to her wedding had given me a twinge. My first impulse in response to it had been to buy her a large, ostentatious wedding present, costing at least five times as much as I could afford. But instead of doing that I shook myself together and burned my boats. I went around to Berger and had him make me up a perfectly extravagant spectrophotometer. It took my whole income for a month to pay for it. It was going to be immensely useful to me in the line I'd taken up lately. There was a long sequence of determinations that I was waiting to make with it. But what it meant to me as I drove it home that afternoon in my little old second-hand sedan was the wedding present I hadn't given Ellen. Which perhaps accounts for my gazing rather sourly at the jade-green Rolls-Royce that came sailing along toward me on the other side of the road. It really is jade-green, though. The color wasn't all in my eye. It is what I believe is called a town car. The sort of car, anyhow, where a social distinction is unmistak MARKED DA N G E R 15 ably established by putting the chauffeur out in front with no shelter, not even a roof over his head. But the green Rolls-Royce wasn't being driven by a chauffeur. The person at the wheel was a girl. Moreover, she looked somehow, though I wasn't in sharp enough focus to take in details, like the sort of girl you'd expect to see riding inside a car like that. I was vaguely considering this paradox when she turned a horrified look on me and screamed, "Look out!" I did then, but it was too late to do any good. Right in front of me, cut across the whole of my half the street, was a sewer or trench, dug, I suppose, to lay water or gas pipes in, and guarded by a little temporary red fence, which had "Danger!" or "Public Service," or something of that sort painted on it. I couldn't have been going very fast-the little bus used to trundle along most comfortably at about twenty-two miles an hour-but my brakes were the old-fashioned two-wheel kind and pretty well worn at that. If I'd been one thing or the other, either my normally alert self or the fairly competent automaton I'd been a moment earlier, I might have rolled up on to the sidewalk or into a drive, if there was one there. I might even have pulled across to the left and trusted to the girl's quick-wittedness and skill to avoid a colli I6 THE QUARTZ EYE sion. But being for the moment under the control of neither my cerebrum nor my spinal cord, I just kept on straight ahead through the little red fence, and brought up with my front wheels dangling in the trench and my crank case sitting down hard on the asphalt. I was reflecting stupidly what a lot of broken glass a windshield makes when it's all dumped into your lap at once when the green car backed alongside. "What were you trying to do?" the girl asked, not sharply but with a good deal of voltage. "Were you asleep?" Then, after a pause, "You ought not to drive like that! You frightened me half out of my wits." Her first question I was willing to ignore. It wasn't a very intelligent one, the obvious answer to it being that I hadn't been trying to do anything. But the second question, as to whether I'd been asleep at the wheel, called, I felt, for a reply. My mind was ready with a dignified denial, but for some reason or other I couldn't seem to say anything. It wasn't until, after that momentary pause, she reproached me with having frightened her that I got myself together and spoke. What I said, to my own intense surprise, and obviously to hers, was something that sounded a little like, "Haw!" It's impossible to convey it exactly in 0 MARKED D AN GER ' i7 - letters of the alphabet because I was breathing in at the time, instead of out. When I tried to apologize for it I did it again. Out of the corner of my eye-for I felt a certain hesitancy about trying to turn my head for a better look-I saw her open her door with an ungloved hand and the next moment she was standing beside me. Even in my confusion I was aware of something at once charming and masterly about the way she moved. Just notice, the next time you get a chance, what a fussy awkward piece of business it is to slide out from under the steering wheel of a car and clamber down into the road. Well, when she does it, it's all a single beautiful act. There's a certain poetry about it. She said, calmly enough, but with conviction, "You're hurt." I was so sure I wasn't that I was beginning to feel intensely ridiculous. I'd got a blow-I could feel it now-from the lower sector of my steering wheel, and it interfered, somehow, with my control of my breathing apparatus. My diaphragm was a bit jumpy, which was why I'd made those funny noises when I'd tried to speak. 1 did manage to say now, much more explosively than I intended, "Not at all!" "Don't try to move until I get some of this glass out of the way," she commanded. IS THE QUARTZ EYE I felt more foolish than ever, but I obeyed her like a well-trained child. I didn't know why at the time, but I've more or less figured it out since. Physical competence when carried to the point of genius, as she carries it, is irresistible. She intends to do a thing, she is doing it, and the thing is done-without haste, without effort, without the conceivable possibility of a false or a wasted movement. You watch entranced, and your protest, if you were minded to make it, arrives by freight after it's all over. I sat still and let her clear away the broken glass. Meanwhile I cautiously tested my ribs with a fairly deep breath or two, and when I thought I could manage it I started speaking my piece. It was rather jerky, but still intelligible. "You're being most awfully kind," I said, "but I'm not a real casualty, and I can't let you go on bothering about me." She didn't argue the point, she just went on picking up glass. "I'm sorry I frightened you," I resumed. "I don't wonder I did. But I really wasn't asleep." At that she looked up at me thoughtfully. "Well, if you drive like that when you're awake.." she began. She wasn't precisely smiling, but from somewhere MARKED "DANGER 9 19 behind her deep grave look the realization came to me that from her point of view my performance must have been utterly ludicrous. I managed to say something of the sort, and brought up a rather second-rate sort of smile to go with it. "I suppose so," she said. "They're always telling me I haven't any sense of humor. It did look exactly like some of the things Mr. Fields does,-on the stage, I mean,-serious and horrifying. I almost thought for a minute that this was going to end that way. I mean, that there was some trick about it. But I can't laugh at things like that until I know the person isn't going to be hurt. And then it's too late." She went on without giving me time to comment on that point of view, or even to perceive the significance of it, "I want to be sure that you aren't. Let me help you get down. You needn't be afraid. I'm awfully strong." Somehow I didn't doubt that, though she was such a slender little thing. But I didn't much want to do as she said. I knew I wasn't hurt seriously, but I wasn't a bit sure that I could twist out from under that wheel without giving an involuntary yelp or two, and I felt I looked enough of an ass already. I started speaking another little piece about how kind she'd been, and how unnecessary it was that she should be detained any longer, but I didn't get anywhere with it. So I bucked ~._ L _i_ __ _I_ _~ 20 THE QUARTZ EYE up and got out by myself, with no more of a vocal obbligato than one grunt. "There!" I said, when I was established on a pair of wabbly but sufficient legs. "Now you can see that I'm all right." She didn't stop to debate the point but opened the door to the passenger compartment of her car. It was upholstered in silver mohair, the most sumptuous thing I'd ever looked at. "I'll take you wherever you were going," she announced. "Your car will be all right till you can telephone your garage to send a wrecking wagon." She saw that I meant to protest, and added with an edge of urgency in her voice, "Let's get away before people begin crowding around and asking questions." We had the nucleus of a crowd already. A bunch of little boys were running up, shouting to one another that there'd been an accident, and a butcher's delivery cart had pulled up where it blocked all the rest of the road. I said, "Please don't bother, but I can't go and leave this thing. I've got a new spectrophotometer in there that I was taking to my laboratory." The big word sounded a bit silly, perhaps because I saw her eyes widen at it, and I hurried on to explain that it was an optical instrument, very complicated and w MARKED DANGER" 21 - -------- --- - — ~ I - very delicate. "If you'll be good enough to send me the first empty taxi you see..." "If it will go in a taxi it will go in my car," she said. I don't know exactly why I couldn't acquiesce more graciously. Perhaps it was because, having made my great decision and bought a spectrophotometer instead of Ellen's wedding present, I wanted a grievance against all persons who rode in Rolls-Royce cars; wanted to feel, at all events, that we were separated by a great abyss. I said, rather peevishly I'm afraid, "That's perfectly foolish. Look at the thing," and I turned abruptly and tugged at the handle of my car door. The movement proved to be a little too abrupt. Some one of the muscles around my ribs had a kink in it, and I again involuntarily said, "Haw!" She took me by the arm and propelled me toward her car. "Don't be silly," she commanded. "Get in." Meekly I did as I was told. Then she turned to the butcher's delivery boy. "Will you help me, please?" she asked. He'd been watching us, as detached as if we'd been a close-up in a movie, but at her request he came instantly to life. In another minute the big, rough, newspaper-stuffed wooden box was pushed in at my 22 THE QUARTZ EYE feet, she was again at the wheel, and we were rolling away, the crowd, now of considerable proportions, gazing after us blankly. She hadn't waited to ask me where I lived. It was plain that the gathering crowd had made her nervous. Indeed she'd urged our getting away before any one began asking questions. Some cruising motor-cop was in her mind, I suppose. At the next street intersection she turned to the right and through the plate-glass window that was closed between us I could see that she relaxed a little. Now she turned and spoke into the silver trumpetshaped thing beside her head. I had to pick up the flexible speaking-tube in order to hear what she said. "Tell me where you want to go." I never felt sillier in my life than when I spoke my address into the tube, like a millionaire addressing his chauffeur. She nodded in a matter-of-fact sort of way, and devoted her attention to driving. I doubt if I have made you realize how very swiftly everything had happened. I've no means of knowing exactly, but I'm sure three and a half minutes would cover everything from the time of her shrieking "Look out!" when she saw me about to do my dive into the sewer to her assenting nod when I told her the address I wanted her to drive me to. _ ___ MARKED DANGER" 23 -- It wasn't until then that I caught up with the procession sufficiently to begin wondering who in the world she was, or even to begin thinking about her at all. I'd taken some profound impressions from her, but you couldn't call them thoughts. The words I found going through my head sounded like the title of a detective story, "The Adventure of the Missing Chauffeur." Missing, he almost palpably was. The gorgeous equipage simply called aloud for the presence of an imperturbable topsergeant-like person at the wheel, and in imagination I saw him left behind somewhere on a curb, gazing furiously up and down the street, yet deterred from notifying the police of his loss by a hunch that he knew who it was who had run away with his car. Was the girl a runaway? Had she commandeered, say, her father's car on some urgent but forbidden errand? No, not her father's. This wasn't a man's car at all. Her mother's, then? But it couldn't be an urgent errand or she wouldn't have stopped to rescue me. Had she taken it then just for a lark? That didn't fit. No frivolous young snip could have overridden my protests and carried me off, me and my spectrophotometer, without wasting a word or a second, as she had done. She might be young-she didn't look much over twenty-but she wasn't light-headed. 24 THE QUARTZ EYE But, except for caprice, why had she insisted on rescuing me? If she'd been in the remotest way responsible for my asinine accident it might have been attributed to conscience. If I'd been really hurt, it might have been pity. And if I'd been ten years younger and ten times better-looking, it might, I suppose, conceivably have been romance. But what the devil was it? CHAPTER II THE FIRE TRICK HE took a corner pretty fast, and as I reached out to steady myself my hand came down upon a little heap of things that had been riding unnoticed on the seat beside me, three or four letters tucked back into their ripped-open envelopes, a gold-mesh bag, and a copy of a theatrical magazine. This last had been opened and lay face down. She had been sitting where I sat now, the implication seemed to be, reading her mail, glancing at her magazine, waiting for her chauffeur to start off and take her somewhere. And then for some curious reason she'd sprung up, taken his seat at the wheel and started off without him-a thing one wouldn't do except in very peculiar circumstances. I deliberately read the address on the topmost of the envelopes, "Miss Linda Defoe." The name was faintly familiar to me, though I couldn't pin a single associative fact to it. For that matter I disentangled now from the swift series of impressions she'd made 25 26 THE QUARTZ EYE upon me while she was getting me out of my car, a puzzling one of familiarity; puzzling because, while I was sure I never had seen her before, I felt as if I must have. By way of abandoning the puzzle, which was beginning to irritate me, I picked up the magazine and straightened its rumpled pages. There, as big as the format would permit, was a picture of her. Her name was printed under it, but not a line of explanation as to who she was. The significance of that omission didn't strike me at the time. She must be an actress of some sort, I decided, perhaps just some exceptionally celebrated chorus girl. They, I understood, frequently possessed motor-cars like this one. Possibly her driving it herself and doing a gratuitous taxi business was the result of a bet, or more probably an arrangement with her press-agent: a publicity stunt. I had to admit, though, and it annoyed me, that this explanation didn't square very well with her eagerness to get away from the scene of the wreck. She'd been avoiding publicity, not courting it. Well, the nut was too hard to crack. I'd have to let the mystery go unsolved. We'd be home in a minute. When she pulled up at my door I'd get out, and, kinks or no kinks, I'd lift my box down to the sidewalk. After she'd driven away I'd get young Oscar THE FIRE TRICK 27 Horwitz to come out of his father's tailor shop and carry it up to my laboratory. I must have had a misgiving even then that this program wouldn't be carried out, or I shouldn't have spoken to myself so emphatically about it. She was down from her seat and had the door open before I could discover how to work the handle. And then continuously, as part of the same movement (I don't think I'm insisting too much on this. I don't believe there's another living thing, except among some of the lither sort of wild animals, that can move as she does) she reached into the car at my feet, took out the box, and started across the sidewalk with it, while I helplessly called after her to put it down. "Don't be silly," she again admonished me. "Get out your key and let me in." "All right," I grumbled. "But you don't know what you've let yourself in for. It's all the way up." "If I couldn't climb stairs," she remarked, "I wouldn't be much good. But how about you? I could see it hurt as you came up the steps. You'd better let me go ahead and then you won't have to hurry." She added, "Thank you," when I unlocked the door, as if I'd been doing her a favor. I thought of something. "You can't go off and leave a car like that," I warned her. 28 T HE QUARTZ EYE "Why?" she asked. "No one will try to steal it. See, it's got a guard around it already." I looked. It was perfectly true. A cluster of little boys were gazing at it with awe. They probably thought it belonged to the mayor. She went straight up to the top of the house without a pause. She was panting a little when I arrived, but she hadn't bothered to put the box down. Naturally I asked her to come inside and sit down and rest a minute. "I don't need a rest," she told me. "But I'd like to come in." I grinned over the thought of how she'd look when she saw the place. Really, it serves all my purposes admirably. It's the top floor of a typical house on the north side of a cross-town street, with big rooms fore and aft, and a cluster of unlighted dungeons in the waist. The previous occupant had been a photographer who'd made the whole of the end of the back room into a studio window. As there were no high buildings anywhere around I had a practically uncolored north light, invaluable for my purposes. This was my laboratory proper. In theory, the other big room at the front of the house was my home, where I ate, slept and so on. In the middle of the house, alongside my dark bathroom, THE FIRE TRICK 29 or bath dark room, whichever you wanted to call it, was what had been built for a kitchenette. As a matter of fact, I lived all over the place, did most of my simple cooking, and kept a perpetual coffee pot in the laboratory handy to the Bunsen burners. I used to shave and brush my hair in there too, since it was the only place where there was a mirror I could see myself in. It was natural, too, that my laboratory activities should have overflowed pretty extensively into my bed sitting-room. Never since I moved into it had the place been set in order for visitors. But just now it was more chaotic than usual, since for the past few months I'd been experimenting with the luminosities of various substances under ultra-violet excitation, so that in addition to the litter one expects to find in a physicist's workshop, there were chemical messes all over the place besides. As I said, I allowed myself a grin as I unlocked the door and invited Miss Defoe inside. I anticipated, with a perverse sort of pleasure, the way her fine nose would wrinkle and her shoulders shrug disdainfully over the revelation that awaited her. It wasn't a very amiable grin. I was aware of that at the time. Well, she didn't look around at all until she'd found a place to set my box. Then she straightened up, put 30 THE QUARTZ EYE her shoulders back, drew in a long breath through her nose, and laughed. "I knew it would be like this," she said. It had been a pleased laugh. There was no mistaking it. "Like what?" I asked suspiciously. "Oh, I don't know. Sort of homelike." "There's a fairly comfortable chair, anyhow," I told her, and dusted it with a handy rag so that it shouldn't ruin her dress. Then I asked her to excuse me for a moment while I telephoned about sending a wrecking wagon for my car. Five minutes later, when I came back from the telephone, I found her moving about in a gingerly way, investigating. "I haven't touched anything," she assured me. "I suppose I'd be electrocuted on the spot if I did." I told her I might be able to show her some rather funny tricks, but that they would be pretty harmless. "Sunburn's about the worst accident that could happen to you up here just now," I concluded. She took that, somewhat to my surprise, with a nod of intelligence. "I know," she said. "There was a funny sort of light in our show last year. It wasn't on the stage. They used it to make some pearls that a girl wore shine in the dark. They were supposed _~ I THE FIRE TRICK 3I to hold the pearls in front of the light just before she went on the stage with them. She was late one night and thought it would be easier to stand in front of the light with the pearls on. She got burned really badly. It made her look funny, because the pearls were her whole costume." That interested me, since it had never occurred to me that they were using the short wave end of the spectrum for stage effects. I'd have asked her more about it, but she said just then that she'd like to use my telephone if she might. Whatever reluctance I felt to show her my other room, which looked about thirty per cent. worse than the laboratory, I concealed and conducted her in there. I spare myself the details. She showed no signs of noticing anything amiss, but as she was about to unhook the receiver she hesitated. "If you are busy I don't need to do this," she said. I told her I wasn't as busy as all that, but she said I didn't understand. "I was going to telephone my chauffeur to come out here and drive me home, but I can drive myself back perfectly well. It will be just an excuse for staying here a while." "I'd love to have you stay," I startled myself by telling her. I wasn't so much surprised that I said it 32 THE QUARTZ EYE as that I meant it. I went back into my laboratory to consider the phenomenon while she telephoned, but I didn't make much progress, mainly, I suppose, because every beautifully clear word she said was audible where I sat. I listened without shame. She wasn't finding her chauffeur. She asked for him confidently at the first place she called, apparently the garage where she kept the car, and the note of her voice was one of slightly incredulous surprise as she echoed their information that he wasn't there. She immediately called another number, his boarding-house, I guessed, and here also she drew blank. By this time I made out that she was deeply perplexed, if not a little frightened. She called a third number and got no answer. Then she went back and called the garage again, this time on a crisp authoritative note. She told them to send out a man to her who could drive her car. It interested me to note that she wasn't obliged to refer again to me for my address. She'd remembered it from the time I'd told it to her through the speakingtube in the green Rolls-Royce. She was looking, I thought, rather disturbed as she came back into the laboratory, and I told her I hoped nothing had gone wrong. "So do I,' she said soberly. "There have been i ~__ ~ I __ _ __ _ _ __ THE FIRE TRICK 33 - -I enough funny things happening to me lately, and if anything happened to Paul..." She finished that sentence with her hands. They expressed a sort of controlled desperation. "I'm sure nothing has," she added instantly. "He's your chauffeur?" I asked. She nodded. "It's the queerness of it that gets me," she said. "See if it seems queer to you. "I sent him off in the car this morning to do two errands for me. When he came back he was going to drive me out into the country. I wanted to get an early start because, of course, I had to be back by five o'clock. It was getting sort of late-I mean, it had taken him longer than I thought it would to do the two errands-and every now and then I looked out the window to see if he was back. Finally I looked and saw the car there. I supposed he'd be on the way up in the elevator with the thing I'd sent him for, but he wasn't. I went down in the elevator and got into the car. I waited ten minutes and he didn't come back. By that time I was cross with him, so I got up in front and drove off by myself. "It was a silly thing to do because I couldn't do what I'd meant to, in the country, without having seen him first. So after I'd gone a few miles I turned around and started back. That's when I met you. I_ 34 THE QUART 1 TZ EYE "Well, I've been trying to find Paul, and he isn't anywhere; that is, he isn't at his boarding-house and he isn't at the garage, and there's nobody at my flat. It's Jane's day out. But if Paul had gone up and told her that the car and I had both gone without him, she'd have stayed right there until she heard from me. HIave you got any explanation for it, or does it seem queer to you, too?" I remarked that there was an obvious explanation, but that probably it didn't fit the facts. "He was going up, either by another elevator or by the stairs, while you were coming down, and what seemed like ten minutes to you while you were waiting in the car in a hurry to be off was likely to have been little more than one." "It was ten minutes by this watch," she said, rather crisply, exhibiting a diamond-encrusted, platinum affair on her wrist. "It doesn't keep very good time, but it isn't as wild as that. There's only one elevator in the building, the kind you run yourself. It's an old private house made over into flats. You can see the stairs practically all the way from the elevator." "It does begin to feel a little like the beginning of a detective story," I conceded. "'The Adventure of the Missing Chauffeur.' I thought of that while you were driving me out here. But it will probably turn I ____ _ __ _ ____ __ THE FIRE TRICK 35 - - — out to be natural enough when you know the answer. Some one he knew, some one there in the building possibly, may have asked him to do something that took longer than he thought it would. And if he happened to come back, around the corner, let's say, just in time to see you drive off he may have been cross with you. Most professional chauffeurs hate to have their cars driven by amateurs, no matter how well they drive. He thought he knew where you were going and that the trip would take several hours. He's taken the day off." "He does hate to have me drive the car," she admitted, but I could see that my explanation hadn't more than half convinced her. By way of getting rid of the problem she shook herself, not her head but her whole body, like a wet dog, and then, with a smile, asked me to show her some tricks. I remember wondering a little why I wasn't annoyed at this naive request. It always did annoy me intensely when my friends made it, their idea being that as long as I insisted on wasting my time amusing myself with colored lights, I might as well amuse them too on request. I obeyed Linda like a lamb. I darkened the laboratory and began showing her a few rather unusual spectra. She proved to be a 36 THE QUARTZ EYE delightful person to show things to. She didn't fill the air with little outcries of astonishment, but she asked good questions. I don't mean well-informed questions, but questions that showed that her mind really worked. So that when the chauffeur from the garage whistled up the speaking-tube and Linda, having told him to get in the car and wait, that she'd be right down, turned to me and said she wished she didn't have to go, I believed her and volunteered one final trick as a climax. I hadn't yet drawn back the curtains and the artificial light I had on wasn't very bright. I washed my hands in a basin of what purported to be ordinary water and coming toward her with them outstretched, as if I were looking for a towel showed them to her, suddenly dripping liquid fire. She did cry out at that, and not with simple astonishment; more as if she'd found something-or come upon some exciting surmise. Then, as I started to tell her how the trick was done, she interrupted very decisively, ordering me not to tell her. She wouldn't explain her prohibition either; simply insisted that she didn't want to know. "There's something I do want to know, though," she went on, waiting to shake hands with me until I should have dried my hands. "I want to know your name and telephone number, if it isn't in the book." THE FIRE TRICK 37 I was rather horrified at the omission and hastened to supply it. "My name's Wallace Carter," I said, "and the telephone is listed in the book." I didn't think it necessary to add that my telephone has a switch by means of which it can be utterly turned off while I'm at work. I took the hand she held out to me. She gave me a good honest grip, kept hold of me for several seconds, and then smiled. "Are you curious, at all?" she asked. "It's my one besetting virtue," I told her. Then I saw what she meant and added, "I do know your name. I saw it under your photograph in that magazine I found in the car." "Have you seen my show?" she asked. I was foolish enough to try, in admitting that I hadn't, to conceal the fact that I hadn't the slightest idea what show she meant. "How are your ribs?" she asked. "Are they well enough for you to come and see it to-night?" Her eyes had a glint of mischief in them. I could see no difficulty about saying I'd come. "I'd be delighted," I told her, salving my conscience by the use of the conditional tense. "All right," she said. "There'll be a ticket for you at the box-office window. Just tell the box-office man 38 THE QUARTZ EYE 1.. who you are, and he'll give it to you. But you must promise to come back and see me afterward." "Come back?" I echoed. "Back stage. Tell the stage doorman who you are, too. He'll take care of you." She was openly laughing at me now. She knew I hadn't the remotest idea what theater to go to. Quite unexpectedly, though, to myself, I took up her challenge. "It's most awfully kind of you," I said. "I'll be there." I did insist, in spite of the fact that she forbade me to, on seeing her safely into her car. The new chauffeur was evidently a man she knew, for she greeted him pleasantly as Jim before turning to take a final farewell of me. "That's a promise," she reminded me. "You'll come back to my dressing-room after the show." "Yes," I told her boldly, "I'll be there." I had several hours before me and I figured I could find her somehow. I had, I think, told her the truth in claiming curiosity as my one authentic virtue. It was, of course, curiosity and nothing else that had led me into accepting her challenge to discover what her show was and what she was doing in it. It would have been a fact THE FIRE TRICK 39 39 worth thinking about, if I had happened to note it, that hitherto no object of my curiosity in anything like so intense a degree had ever been human, let alone feminine. The puzzle itself was too engrossing to leave me any room for wondering why I had been engrossed with it. She must have spent the better part of an hour in my laboratory, but I was now no nearer accounting for her, imagining an environment that could have produced her, than when she had driven away with me in her jade-green car. Where, for instance, had she got her beautiful, though not at all smart, speech? What sort of training had enabled her to move about the way she did? How did she happen to be in possession of a Rolls-Royce and, apparently, a place in the country? What had she meant by saying that she wouldn't be much good if she couldn't climb stairs? And why had she found my pigsty of a laboratory pleasurably homelike? Why hadn't she let me tell her the simple device that had made my hands glow with liquid fire? What sort of queer things had been happening to her lately? Why had she stopped her car when she saw me drive into the sewer? Why had she wanted to come into my laboratory? Would she remember to leave a ticket in my name at the box-office window of some, as yet unidentified, theater? And would there be a stage _.____ 40 THE QUARTZ EYE - -- -- -- -- -- doorman somewhere who would know what to do with me if I told him my name was Wallace Carter? There was nothing systematic about these questions. They were rolling about, bumping into one another and caroming off in unexpected directions, like the balls in some hilariously inexpert game of kelly pool, none of them getting settled by going into a pocket. I'd have to do something a little more to the point than this, I thought, if I were going to succeed in locating her theater before half past eight to-night. I didn't, though. The matter was settled by my young sister's calling me up and asking me to come to dinner. She's married to John Goodrich, one of those successful classmates of mine that I was talking about, and she keeps a maternal, but slightly aggrieved, eye on me. I don't mean that to sound disparaging. She's an awfully good sort and I'm genuinely fond of her. To-day, though, I detected, even over the telephone, an uncomfortably soulful note in the voice that asked me for dinner, and I said, almost automatically, that I didn't believe I could come. "Of course you aren't being asked to meet anybody," she assured me. "It's just ourselves, and you needn't dress unless you like." I asked, "Why 'of course'?" "Oh, I know you must be feeling kind of low to THE FIRE TRICK 41 night," she told me, "and I thought perhaps you wouldn't mind letting us cheer you up a little." I ought to have twigged at once. She'd taken Ellen's decision to marry Sterrett a lot harder than I had, Ellen having represented to her my one chance for reclamation to a righteously successful life. But my recent preoccupation had put everything else completely out of my head, including the fact that I'd seen Ellen married that morning. "I'm not feeling low in the least," I told her cheerfully. "In point of fact, I am thinking of getting dressed to-night, anyhow, and going to the theater. I don't suppose you'd happen to know what show a girl named Linda Defoe is playing in?" "Carty, you're the limit," she told me disgustedly. "Do you mean to say you don't know? She's in The Follies, of course." "Well," I said, "that's where I'm going then. Thanks for asking me to dinner just the same." "Come to dinner with us anyway," she proposed. "I'll telephone Jack to get the seats-he can get them if anybody can-and we'll all go over together afterward." I told her, in a perfectly brotherly way, that I thought I'd rather go by myself. "You won't be able to get in," she assured me. 42 THE QUARTZ EYE "They're closing in two weeks and doing a perfectly terrific business." "One of the things I'm curious about," I said, "is to find out whether I can get in." "Oh," she cried disgustedly, "I give you up!" "Don't do that, Doris!" I urged with proper contrition. "Let me come to dinner to-morrow night, instead. I'd like to awfully." She forgave me at once and asked me to come. She's a very satisfactory sister. But it would be interesting to see whether, for once, my pull was as efficacious as Jack Goodrich's. CHAPTER III FEELING KIDNAPPED DON'T know for sure whose seat I sat in, but I suspect it was Mr. Ziegfeld's. It was, at any rate, on the aisle and in the fourth or fifth row. And of course I found out who she was. I found out, that is to say, what more or less everybody else in town already knew; what you, no doubt, have been perfectly aware of ever since I told you the name on the envelope that lay beside me on the seat of her car. I don't know whether or not you've ever tried to analyze her charm. I think I was a little more confident that night of having found the secret of it than I've ever been since. She sings, of course, charmingly, having devoted several years of study to the development of an unusually good voice. Her dancing falls just far enough short of that of the people who've been dancers, so to speak, from their cradles, to be, to me anyhow, a little more artless and appealing than theirs. She's an authentic acrobat of the first class, and she's 43 44 THE QUARTZ EYE I4 TH QURT EYE II -I.... I no doubt entitled to be rated, upon the purely physical facts of her appearance, an extraordinarily pretty girl. But none of these endowments or accomplishments touches the thing. I was so deeply absorbed in trying to define the thing that did touch it that in the lobby between acts I neglected to avoid my old friend Masters. Indeed, I actually rammed him. He is one of our lighter-minded novelists, a thorough man of the town and a very entertaining chap. As a rule I enjoy an encounter with him. To-night, though I didn't know why, I felt a little embarrassed. "Of course the intelligentsia of this town," he observed, after I'd apologized for stepping on him, and we'd exchanged hellos, "have fallen for her with a crash, but I didn't expect to find you here. Who brought you?" I was shy of acknowledging that I was there at her personal command. Indeed, I hardly believed it myself. And the fact that I seemed to have caught a gleam of purely personal recognition in her eyes within a few minutes of her first coming out on the stage made it seem more unreasonable, rather than less so. I wouldn't have dared claim an acquaintance with her. I evaded the question a little lamely. "Oh, I just came," I said. And added, "In pursuit of an experiment, if you like." _ _..____ ____I FEELING KIDNAPPED 45 "Trying to find out what it is she does?" he asked. "Well, you won't. Our bright young esthetes have been debating the question all this season without getting anywhere. I've got a better explanation than any of them, and it doesn't really explain anything. She does the least that it's possible to do to get the effect she wants, and she's got something about her that makes you look at her microscopically. With a sort of superattention, do you see? So that not one of the smallest things she does is lost. When you're in love with a girl you look at her like that. Every movement of an eyebrow is more important to you than an earthquake. Well, Linda enforces that kind of attention from everybody in her audience. How does she do it? I don't know. Neither do you. And you never will." I was now glad that I'd encountered Masters. He provided a thread for my liquid thoughts to crystallize upon. "The attention is stimulated to the high degree you speak of," I told him, "by a contrast-well, by a series of contrasts-between what she appears to be and what she does. All her movements are the last word in sophistication, and yet she herself appears artless. They fling her around like a rag doll and she remains unruffled, exquisite. She does tremendous things with a faintly perplexed air, as if they were happening to her, and had never happened before, and she thought 46 THE QUARTZ EYE she liked them. She's incredibly detached from it; a perfect non-participant all the time. I've got it now! Her real charm lies in the fact that she has no sense of humor." "Another good man gone wrong," said Masters with a sigh and a dispassionate look at me. "They're all like that. The more intelligent they are, the worse drivel they talk. Look here, would you like to meet her? The Mitchells have promised to bring her up to my place Sunday night for a quiet little party. She's very hard to get, but they know her better than anybody. The Constantine Mitchells, you know." I had heard of Constantine Mitchell. I think I'd even seen one of his weird plays. "You'd better come," Masters persisted. "It will be a good party even if they don't get her." He reeled off a list of dazzling names by way of proving it. The bell rang just then. "I doubt if I can come," I said, "but I'll let you know." I was glad of a chance to escape without committing myself any further. I must discover what that stage doorkeeper would do with me upon my telling him who I was before I involved myself any deeper. All that Masters had told me about her, mostly by implication to be sure, left me worse bewildered than FEELING KIDNAPPED 47 I had been before. Miss Defoe was, apparently, the sort of person who a hundred years ago would have been spoken of as the toast of the town, one of no more than a handful of its first-class celebrities. What did she want of me? What possible interest could she have in me who had as good as admitted to her face that I had never heard of her before this afternoon? Perhaps, by George, it was nothing but this unique and inconceivable ignorance of mine that had roused her curiosity! She wanted to see what sort of silly ass I'd look after I'd found out who she was. When I thought of that I began to feel a little less confident of her having no sense of humor. Well, she'd earned a grin at my expense. I'd go back and share it with her. All the same I was feeling rather breathless-scared, if you want it in a word of one syllable-when, following an usher's instructions, I pushed open a door at the end of a little corridor that ran behind the boxes. I had a strong, and as it proved an entirely correct, hunch that I was getting into something. But my immediate fears were groundless. Miss Defoe had dealt as competently with the stage doorman as she had with the man at the box-office. The moment I told him who I was he conducted me to a near-by door and knocked upon it. _ __ 48 THE QUARTZ EYE I drew a long breath and got a firm hold on the opening lines of my speech. I'd spent quite a little time during the last act, at moments when she wasn't on the stage, upon the speech and I thought it was pretty good. Not flowery at all, but expressing in words of simple sincerity my admiration for her performance. The door was opened by an elderly woman in a black dress, not forbidding exactly, but rather aggressively non-committal. Explanatorily I pronounced my name but, something I hadn't done before in years, stuttered over it. "Oh, hello!" called Linda. "I hoped it was you. Come in." The words had the effect of somehow dissolving the maid, or dresser, or whatever she was-I haven't the slightest recollection of her presence after thatand coming into the room I saw the star of the evening in a kimono, I suppose, and sitting down, I think, before her dressing-table. She must already have got her make-up off since I wasn't conscious of it. Again she wasn't precisely smiling. The only indication of the grin I'd decided she was entitled to was a sparkle that seemed to come from deep down in her eyes. Now was the time for my speech but she derailed my opening sentence by asking, "How did you find out where to come?" FEELING KIDNAPPED 49 It would have been polite, I suppose, to pretend I'd known all along, but the same quality about her that makes you obey her without stopping to think makes you tell her the truth. "My married sister, Doris," I confessed, "called me up just after you left and invited me to dinner. I told her I wanted to go and see your show instead and asked her where I'd find you. She was much more disgusted at my ignorance than you showed any signs of being, this afternoon. She told me with justifiable emphasis that I was the limit." Now she smiled outright, a friendly, heart-warming smile, not a shadow of derision in it. "You liked it, didn't you?" she asked. "You're glad you came?" "Yes," I said, and took another long breath. Here, certainly was the cue for my speech. But once more she got in ahead of me. "Are you doing anything this evening?" she asked. To a person who gets up at seven o'clock every morning, ready for the day's work, this question, asked under the impending shadow of midnight, was a little confusing. "I hadn't planned doing anything more," I blurted out. I managed to add through her laugh, "I mean, I've already had a perfectly wonderful evening." "Well," she said, "if you'll take me home I'll dress ___ _____ 50 THE QUARTZ EYE - -- ---- - - - - now and we'll talk afterward. You won't be bored waiting, will you? I shan't be long." I told her I was sure I shouldn't be. I'd never been on a stage before and I'd enjoy looking around. I don't think she was very long about dressing. Certainly I found food enough for my curiosity to occupy the time in the empty stage with its switchboards and its lights. It would be a wonderful toy for a man to play with. But, at that, it could command from me to-night only a very divided attention. I registered the different items I was staring at as things I'd like to look at sometime. My preoccupation with the girl I was waiting for was never broken. When she came out of her room she took my arm as if I'd been a comfortable sort of old friend and led me from the stage down a kind of tunnel to the street. Her car was waiting at the curb, and my first thought was that Paul must have turned up, for the man at the wheel wasn't the one that they'd sent out to my laboratory in the afternoon. Then I realized from the tightening of Linda's clutch upon my arm that he was a stranger to her. "You know where to take me, do you?" she asked him dubiously. "Yes, Miss Defoe," he answered, and recited an address just off Washington Square. FEELING KIDNAPPED 5I She nodded, and we got in. "Paul's still missing, then?" I ventured. She nodded absently, and it was the better part of a minute before she spoke. Then it was to say with a conviction which I didn't believe was very real, "Oh, he'll turn up in the morning." In the next breath she asked, "Do you have hunches, and do you believe in them?" Her hunch, unless I guessed wrong, was that Paul wouldn't turn up; that he was gone for good. But I didn't tell her so. "I give most of my hunches a chance to prove themselves," I said. "Just as a matter of curiosity. As I told you this afternoon, I'm insatiably curious." "That's why you came to the theater to-night," she remarked. "Well, you're not curious about me any more, are you?'" "More than ever," I told her. "I'm curious as to why you stopped your car this afternoon when you saw me drive into the ditch, and why you took me home and lugged that spectrophotometer of mine up to the top of the house, and liked my laboratory. You said it looked, 'homelike,' of all words. I don't know why you stayed and made me a visit, and invited me to come and see your show to-night, and seemed pleased rather than otherwise when you saw I'd never heard 52 THE QUARTZ EYE - -- of it. And of course now that I've found out what a tremendous person you are it's all more of a puzzle than it was this afternoon." She laughed. "Do you feel as if you were being kidnapped now?" "A little," I said. "Well, you are-a little," she conceded, but didn't stop to tell me what she meant by that. "Why, I don't think there's anything mysterious about it," she said. "Of course I stopped when you drove into the ditch. Anybody would have. Then-well, I don't know. I could see you'd been thinking so hard about something else that you hadn't seen that red fence or anything, and I wanted to find out what you were like. And then I saw you were nice." "How? As I remember it I wasn't very nice to you." "Oh, but you were. You might have been furious with me because it hadn't been my fault that you went into the ditch. And you wanted to be let alone and I wouldn't let you alone. But you did what I wanted you to, just the same. What's the use trying to explain things like that? I did have a hunch about you, that very first minute." "Are you still playing it?" She nodded with a faint smile, and still rather gravely. She didn't offer to tell me what it was. _ FEELING KIDNAPPED 53 - "I'm glad you're coming home with me, anyhow," she said. "It's silly, but I'd have been afraid to come alone, without Paul, I mean. The last time I came home without him-last Monday night; he was sick that night and I took a taxi-I was held up." "Where?" I asked. "And how?" We had turned off the lower avenue and the car was stopping before one of the fine, dignified old houses that characterize the neighborhood. "Right here," she said, a little nervously. "The taxi had driven off and I was just letting myself in. I'll tell you about it when we get inside." It would have been easy enough to do to-night if I hadn't been with her. On the stoop outside the front door she had paused and opened her wrist-bag to get out her latch-key. The street was very quiet, deserted so far as I could see. The man might have stolen up and taken cover in the shadows of the areaway while she was paying off her taxi. I didn't wonder she'd been nervous about coming home alone to-night with a strange chauffeur. I was conscious of a slight quickening of my own pulse as I peered over the balustrade to be sure there was no one hiding down there to-night, and my muscles relaxed a little as the door clicked shut behind us. I think it was a relief to her too. Standing close beside me she waited a moment to give me a chance to look about. 54 THE QUARTZ EYE It was a very quiet house. The rather dimly lighted hall, with its tessellated marble floor and its high ornate ceiling, would have been a beautiful room if the graceful, springing curve of the stair had not been disfigured by the installation of an impertinent little help-yourself elevator. I recalled something she had said to me about it this afternoon. It would have been in the highest degree unlikely that her chauffeur could have walked up the stairs while she was riding down in the elevator without their seeing each other. "Tell me about the hold-up," I said. "There isn't much to tell. I'd got out my key and was unlocking the door. I hadn't heard a sound of anybody coming up the steps, but he must have been right behind me. I'd got the key in the lock and turned it when his hand took hold of my face. It had a glove on, a thick glove, like deerskin. He pressed the back of my head against his chest. My nose was swollen the next day so I thought it might have been broken. And of course he covered my mouth too so that I couldn't scream. "I tugged at his wrist and tried to bite his hand, but I couldn't get anything but the glove. He snatched my bag off of my wrist, and I suppose he put it in his pocket. Then he began to-to search me, probably to see if I had a revolver or anything. That wasn't what S S l - w - s o FEELING KIDNAPPED 55 I thought then. It made me wild to have him pawing over me like that, and I fought so hard I guess he thought I was going to get away from him. "Anyhow, he hit me on the head, and that was the last I knew. But he must have pushed me into the hall-I'd already unlocked the door, you see-and shut it after me and gone away. When the Mitchells came home, a few minutes later, they found me on the floor, just coming to. Constantine Mitchell and his wife. They have the flat just above mine." She slipped her hand inside my arm as she'd done back there on the stage and started to lead me to the elevator. When I hung back a little she said, "You won't find any clues-cigarette ashes or finger-printshere now, Mr. Holmes. This was last Monday night." It was all right for her to laugh, but I didn't want any change of scene until I'd had a moment to review this one in. It had been a very slick job, that holdup. Had the hold-up man been lucky, or well informed? She must come home every night at almost the same minute. That pause of hers at the top of the stairs while she fished for her latch-key was probably habitual. Of course, a perfectly casual bandit might have happened to be lurking there and seen his opportunity. Yet, would he have waited until after she'd __ 56 THE QUARTZ EYE unlocked the door before he grabbed her? Pretty risky, that would have been. If, though, the man had happened to know how deserted it was in here at this hour of the night, he was very happily inspired to let his victim provide him with a place for disposing of herself before making his attack. He pushed her inside, pulled the door shut behind her and walked away like a visitor leaving the house. Well informed, rather than lucky, I was inclined to think. And I wondered how sick Paul really had been that night. That heavy deerskin glove suggested a chauffeur to me. "Was the hold-up," I asked, stubbornly holding my ground despite her tug at my arm, "one of the funny things you said enough of had been happening lately when you were up in my laboratory this afternoon?" "Oh, I suppose so," she admitted reluctantly. "The only funny thing about it was that he didn't take this watch,"-it was the one she'd showed me that afternoon,-"and I must have been holding it right under his nose while I was trying to pull his hand away from my face. He was probably rattled by my fighting so hard. Come along up and let's forget about it." The moment the elevator stopped at her floor the door to her apartment was opened by an elderly FEELING KIDNAPPED 57 woman, fifty, for a guess, with a remnant of good looks about her. She didn't seem to be a maid, exactly, and yet Linda didn't introduce me to her. Her face changed at the sight of me but in what sense I couldn't be sure. My rather far-fetched guess was that, not committing herself at all as regarded me, she was nevertheless relieved that I was not some one else. She had a rather drawn look and the thing I felt perfectly sure of was that she had been waiting, tense as a worried cat, for her mistress to come home. CHAPTER IV THREE QUEER THINGS LINDA said, in her friendly unceremonious way, "Hello, Jane," and then asked her a low-voiced question. "Anything more?" I made it out to be. "Not to-night, thank God," the woman answered, not at all, I perceived, in a profane spirit. Then she asked, "Will you be wanting anything besides your regular supper to-night?" Linda laughed at the breadth of this hint as she turned to me with the explanation. "My regular supper is nothing but graham crackers and milk. But Jane's a real cook. Her omelettes are wonderful. She'll love getting you something. You needn't be starved, you know, even if I did kidnap you." "Supper isn't one of my meals," I told her, "but in a purely convivial spirit I'll join you in a bowl of milk." That seemed to please her. "You are nice," she said, as if I had done her a favor. 58 __ THREE QUEER THINGS 59 With an exuberant motion, something like that of a boy home from school, she ridded herself of her hat and coat-Jane, I noticed, hadn't offered to touch them-and turned to me with a gesture of... oh, I may as well stop trying to describe her gestures. This one said, when put into prosaic words, that something pleasant, of whose outcome she couldn't be quite sure, was about to happen. Apparently it related to me, though where I came in I hadn't an idea. Apparently she didn't mean me to know yet, for she said explanatorily, "Oh, the grind's over for to-day, you see." "It looked as little like a grind as anything I ever saw," I told her. "That's nice, because it means you really liked it." Here was another chance for my speech but I felt rather beyond that now. I contented myself with saying, "I did." "A whole lot?" "A tremendous lot." She drew a deep breath, apparently a prelude to something, but then changed her mind. "Well," she said, "it's a grind just the same. And I'm glad it's closing week after next. Because my new show that I'm going to have in the fall is going to be much more exciting. You see, it's being written especially for me." 60 THE QUARTZ EYE "Do you mean," I asked, "that you're going to be starred in it all by yourself?" "I am, but that isn't why it's so exciting. I'm going back to the circus in it." The speech wasn't quite intelligible to me, but Jane who came in just then with two bowls of milk and a plate of graham crackers on a tray understood it well enough and echoed the words "Back to the circus!" with a sniff of scorn. Linda didn't seem surprised at the interruption. She greeted it with a grimace of resignation and explained to me as we sat down to the table and began our nursery meal, "Jane thinks we'll never be happy unless we really go back." "And should never have left it in the first place," Jane added. "I do." Then, seeming to sense Linda's intention to apply closure to the argument, she added with a rush, "And you can't deny that none of these things would have happened to you if you'd stayed in the circus where you belong." Linda flared up. It was quite a sight. "I won't have it!" she declared. "I won't have you start that again. Not while Mr. Carter's here, anyhow." But it was I who for the moment routed Jane. I saw she meant to stand her ground, and in the interests of peace, innocent as the League of Nations, I asked THREE QUEER THINGS 6I, i - ~,,,,......... Linda, "Do you mean you ever were in the real circus?" Jane gave me a blighting look of disgust, and left the room. "I was born in the circus," Linda said. "I never knew anything else until I was twelve years old. We've been circus for generations-four, anyhowand my father and mother were great circus peopleMaurice and Margaret Defoe." She pronounced the names gently, with an affectionate pride that I found infinitely touching. I'd have given a lot to be able to say in a tone of honest recognition, "Of course," but I couldn't. "They had the most beautiful flying-trapeze act that's ever been seen under a top. When you meet Connie Mitchell ask him about them. They were great friends." I asked in some surprise if he was circus too, but Linda said no. "He traveled with us for several years, three or four, as one of the publicity men. He'd go out ahead for a week and then come back and join us for a day or two. I've known him almost as long as I can remember. But the circus was only a way of earning a living, with him. He always, even then, wanted to write. 62 THE QUARTZ EYE II IIII I I I I "But with people like father and mother, it's in their blood. They never could have been anything else. And I never could if they hadn't died when I was twelve years old. Even as it was, though I went to school, I came back to the circus summers for three or four years. Then they found I had a voice, or thought they did, and took me out of it altogether." There was audible in her tone an echo of tragedy. Her speaking of the death of her parents as one event, as if they'd died together-in an accident probably-I thought accounted for it. So, though I wanted to hear more about that strange early life of hers-curiosity again-I said, "I can see, then, how exciting it must be that your new play is going to be about the circus, even though I don't suppose you'll do any real circus stunts in it." "Oh, but that's what I'm going to do!" she cried. "That's the whole point of the thing. I'm going to do a real act on the wire." "Do you mean," I asked in consternation, "what I'd call a tight-rope act? How can you, after being out of it so long?" "Why, I never have been out of it," she said. "I've always had a wire that I could work on somewhere around. There's one in this house, up in a sort of shed they've built on the roof. That's really why I came __ I I_ THREE QUEER THINGS 63 - I I I here to live. Elsie Mitchell owns the building and she put it up for me. I bought a little place this spring up in the country, just three or four acres and an old orchard and a tumble-down farmhouse. Of course it will be nice to see the Sound from the top of the hill, and eat apples off the trees, but the reason that I got it was so that I could have my wire up, outdoors. Oh, I can do a real act! One that the old show people that came to see me do would applaud because it was good and not because it was me. The only trouble is that Mr. Ziegfeld doesn't much want me to do it." I thought I understood his reluctance. "Naturally," I observed. "It would be pretty serious business to build the sort of production he makes for the only star that could possibly play the part and then have her break her leg the opening night." "'Break her leg'!" Linda echoed disgustedly. "If I could only be as safe everywhere else as I am on a wire nothing would ever happen to me. No, that isn't it. He can't see it as an effect, that's all. He says that no matter how good I am on a wire, even if I'm as good as I think, the audience won't get excited unless we can do something to the act to make it different from anything anybody ever saw in a circus. He's been trying for weeks to think of something that will make it different. Well. " 64 THE QUARTZ EYE (I wish you could see how she was looking at me just then. She had finished her bowl of milk and laid down her spoon. She was suddenly breathless, ablaze with eagerness, half afraid and half amused, and wholly irresistible.) "... well, now don't you know why I kidnapped you? I want you to do it for us." I'm glad you can't see how I must have looked. I was vaguely aware that she wasn't asking me to learn to walk the tight rope myself, but I shouldn't have been any more flabbergasted if she had. "Oh, don't look so wild!" she cried. "Wait till I tell you what made me think of it. And can't you smoke, or something?" Mechanically I fished out a packet of cigarettes but as usual I hadn't any matches. Linda discovered my want almost before I did and called to Jane to bring me some. She waited till I got a light and allowed me a deep inhalation or two to calm my excitement, I suppose, before she went on. "You know the last thing you did up in the laboratory this afternoon, the way you made your hands turn to fire? Well, it came over me, with a bang, right then, that that was what we wanted. I want you to make me look like that, all over. Out in the middle of the wire, you know. Will you?" THREE QUEER THINGS 65 You can't get rid of an old habit easily, like taking off an overcoat, even if Linda is looking at you. I saw what she wanted and I caught my breath at it. But all the same, rather perhaps for that reason, I drew myself in like a wary old mud turtle. "Certainly I couldn't do it with any apparatus I've got in my laboratory," I told her. "Up on the wire out in the middle of the stage you'd be a long way off from any possible light sources. You see, it's a beam of invisible light that does the business." "You mustn't tell me how it's done," Linda interrupted vehemently. "Not that I'd understand if you did But you mustn't tell anybody; not yet." Naturally enough the old mud turtle drew his head a little farther in at that. "My dear Miss Defoe," I said, priggishly I'll admit, "I'm not in the business of making mysteries. I'm spending my life trying to solve a few of them." "People who like me," she observed dispassionately, "call me Linda." Then she smiled straight into my eyes. "What do people who like you call you?" she asked. That was the end of the mud turtle. "Carty, mostly," I told her sheepishly. "I'm sorry I was disagreeable. I can't promise anything till I've had time to think about it, but I will do that." _ _ _ __ _ _ 66 THE QUARTZ EYE - -I --- I haven't told you about Jane. She had apparently regarded Linda's summons to fetch me matches as an invitation to the party. She'd been standing by ever since. I'd been only vaguely aware of her, amused merely that Linda should hlave taken her incursion so completely for granted. 1 don't think she'd taken much interest in our conversation up to now, but what I said about making a business of solving mysteries evidently caught her ear. She thought, and was destined for quite a while to go on thinking, that I was a detective. She barged in now with a crash, saying to me, "If solving mysteries is your business we've got one for you right here." Linda flared up again. "Jane," she cried, "will you please go to bed I" But Jane, it appeared, was not one of the people Linda could exact obedience from. She didn't even flinch. "In my room up-stairs?" she inquired ironically. "After what happened here just this afternoon? I will not. When I go to bed to-night it will be on the davenport in the sitting-room." It seemed a rather tense moment, and I intervened again. "What did.happen this afternoon?" I asked. "Oh, Jane's frightened," Linda said disgustedly, "and she's trying to frighten me. She came in this I - - ' - --- THREE QUEER THINGS 67 afternoon just before five o'clock-it was her day out, you know. She let herself in the back door with her own key and she thinks she heard, a minute or two later, somebody open this door from the inside and go out." "'Thinks'!" said Jane darkly. "And perhaps it was only thinking that anybody had been here a week ago when I came home." "No," Linda admitted ruefully, "we had a burglar here, all right." "A nice burglar he was!" said Jane. "Do you mean," I asked Jane, "that you think he wasn't a regular burglar?" Linda surrendered. "Oh, all right," she said, "I'll tell you about it since you're so curious. "It was a week ago, Jane's day out again, you see. Elsie Mitchell had driven me out to the farm. That's my new little place up in the country I told you about. We wanted to measure the windows for some curtains I was going to have made. Jane had gone out at noon and had come back a little before five to get my dinner. They'd been here during that time. "Connie Mitchell thinks they'd tried to get into his flat too. He'd stayed home, with a headache. He heard somebody moving around that he couldn't account for and called out to know who was there. 68 THE QUARTZ EYE When nobody answered and he didn't hear anything more, he thought he'd been mistaken. "They must have come in the front door downstairs. That might have been easy enough, for sometimes you think it's locked when it isn't. They probably rode right up in the elevator. They pried open my door with a chisel, or a jimmy, or something. You can look at the marks if you like. They might have telephoned from the drug store on the corner to make sure that nobody was here." I asked how much they'd got away with. Jane snorted, "Nothing!" and added apologetically, "so to speak," at a gesture of dissent from Linda. But Linda herself admitted they hadn't taken much. "There were a few things on my dressing-table-not very valuable; I don't go in for jewelry much-that they took and some money that I keep in this table drawer for Jane. She does all my marketing and likes to pay cash for things. I think that's all. At least it's all we missed." "This place," said Jane, "looked as if a cyclone had been here. Drawers pulled out and emptied on the floor; boxes broken into, old boxes from the storage that you could see wouldn't have anything valuable in them; even bundles of old letters cut open and scattered around. It took me a week to put the place to rights." THREE QUEER THINGS 69 I I I I I I III II IIII I I II II I III.................. "Oh, they knew I was an actress," said Linda. "They probably thought they'd find diamonds tucked away all over the place." "In bundles of old letters?" Jane inquired ironically. "Well, you just can't explain that," said Linda. Then she turned to me, "Or do you think you can?" "How about a blackmailer?" I suggested. "I don't know what their technique is, but I should think it might be something like that. I suppose a professional blackmailer might assume that a person as much in the public eye as you are might have some letters that she'd pay handsomely to get back." I didn't like the idea much and I avoided looking at Linda while I expounded it. But her laugh of pure amusement brought my eyes back to her face. "They were stung if that's what they were looking for. But most likely that's what it was. They probably didn't know I was circus or they wouldn't have bothered with me." I muffed the implication in that at the time. I didn't know then that families like Linda's, the aristocrats of the circus, didn't have compromising letters, never were corespondents in divorce cases. It's a perfectly real aristocracy and the only respectable one in the world. _ I I __ __ 70 THE QUARTZ EYE 70~II TH QURT EYE Jane, it seemed, hadn't been much impressed with my explanation. "Was it a blackmailer then that broke into the farmhouse the next day?" I hadn't hitherto taken Jane's ideas very seriously. I'd been inclined to side with Linda and laugh at them. But this remark stung me broad awake in an instant. "Tell me about what happened at the farmhouse," I demanded. "I went down there with the Mitchells last Sunday. It isn't really furnished but it's a nice place for a picnic. I sent down some things last week, some furniture and some rugs, and some old trunks full of things that had been in storage. They got in there by breaking a pane of glass and unlocking a window. Connie thinks they did it on Saturday because they knew I'd be playing a matinee and that it must have been done by daylight because they hadn't tried to cover up any of the windows. I don't think it had anything to do with my matinee. I think a party of hoodlums in an automobile drove up and saw the place was empty and broke in. All they took was the picnic stuff I had there, some canned goods and a thermos bottle. They made an awful mess of the place-of course. But then they would." Jane was about to offer a dissenting opinion here, but Linda got in ahead of her. __ __. THREE QUEER THINGS 7I i iiiiii 1i....iii "Oh, yes, I'm going to tell him about the trunks. I don't know whether they'd been opened or not, but the storage seals had been cut. Of course that might have happened earlier. Maybe the truckman did it when he delivered them." "Was anything missing from the trunks?" I asked. "I don't know," she said indifferently." "I haven't an idea what was in them in the first place." That seemed queer to me, but she didn't seem to feel that it called for explanation. And the next question I was ready to ask her carried me past it. "What did the police have to say about it?" I wanted to know. There was a complex interchange of looks between Linda and Jane which I interpreted correctly. "Do you mean," I went on, scandalized, "that they don't know anything about it? That you haven't reported any of these things?" "Oh, that's the way the Mitchells talk!" Linda cried. "I don't see why I should if I don't want to. Nothing that's happened has done me any harm to speak of. It's perfectly beastly for an actress to have to tell the police she's been robbed. The papers all get funny about it and people laugh and ask each other why these press-agents can't think up something new." "There is something in that," I conceded. "If any 72 THE QUARTZ EYE of these things had happened by itself I'd say you were right to ignore it. But look at the way these things have happened. A week ago this apartment was broken into; the very next day, last Saturday, it was the farmhouse; and on the following Monday night you were held up. That's the order of events, isn't it?" She nodded. "In other words, your house was searched, and then you summer place, and then your person. You've got something, Linda, that somebody wants." Linda's look, turned from one to the other of us, expressed nothing but the liveliest exasperation. "But I haven't anything that anybody could want. Can't you take my word for that?" "I can take your word, of course, that you don't know what it is, or that you don't know you've got it." She stood tense and thoughtful for a moment. Then suddenly she smiled. "Well, if we don't know what it is," she asked, "how do we know that they haven't got it by now? Or haven't found they were mistaken in thinking I had it?" She came over to me and took me by the elbows. "You don't know, Carty," she declared. "You can't possibly know. You don't know there is any something or any somebody. Things can just happen, can't they? Of course they can! Forget about it, and __ THREE QUEER THINGS 73 - let me forget about it. Don't think anything about me except how you're going to make me glow all over, the way your hands did this afternoon, up there on the wire in the middle of the second act." Jane uttered a last snort and strode out of the room, having seen that I'd surrendered. She was right. I had. I venture to believe that almost any man would have while Linda held him and looked at him like that. And there was something, besides, to be said for her argument, especially for the truth of her assertion that things could simply happen. No one knows that better than a man who spends his life in a laboratory. Just because three somewhat similar phenomena occur in close succession you can't accept it as proved that they are a causal sequence. I tried to bolster myself up with that reflection. But when quite a bit later, horribly late for me, I closed her house door behind me, I found I didn't really believe that these three attempts were coincidences. I felt, indeed very strongly, that there was something sinister about them. I paused a moment at the foot of the steps gazing into the dark area, and then, partly because I was afraid to, went down into it, to see whether it really furnished cover for a robber or not. I emerged without misadventure but my nerves felt tense and jumpy and I found myself wondering as 74 THE QUARTZ EYE 74 T- ' QUARZ I walked off toward my subway station whether the man I could hear walking along in my direction on the other side of the deserted street and half a block behind me wasn't following me. That seemed so silly that I pulled myself together and began thinking in a more orderly manner. I thought of several things I wished I had asked Linda, and of one rather important one that I should have pointed out to her. She had asked triumphantly how we could know that Some One hadn't either found what he wanted by this time or made up his mind she didn't have it. That question narrowed itself down, I now perceived, to the contents of her hand-bag. If he'd found what he was looking for in the flat or in the farmhouse, he wouldn't have held her up. She must know everything that had been in the bag, and if there was nothing among its contents which could possibly be the object of any one's cupidity, or fear, or desire for revenge, then Some One hadn't yet got the thing he was so desperately determined on having. Pretty obvious that was. Hadn't Linda already seen that for herself? Had she suddenly energized her magnetic field and deflected me because she'd seen that I was, as the children say, getting warm? Was there something that she didn't want to answer that she was afraid I'd ask? THREE QUEER THINGS 75........... II I..... m Why had she been so vehement about not wanting the police? Was there some one she wanted shielded whom she feared they would suspect? Whom would the police be likely to suspect? They generally began with servants, didn't they? I grinned over the notion of suspecting Jane before my mind had time to jump to the other one, the missing chauffeur, Paul. Paul had been very much in the foreground of my mind while she told me about the hold-up. The deerskin glove had made me think of him, and my theory that the robber had been well informed rather than lucky, pointed at him almost exclusively. Who would know as well as he the hour of her return? Who'd had as many chances to observe that habitual pause for the latch-key? Who would be so sure he was safe shoving her inside that door and leaving her there? How about the two burglaries? Linda had gone to the farm the day the flat had been broken into. Hadn't Paul most likely driven her there? No, by George, he hadn't! It was Elsie Mitchell who had driven her out in her car. Paul knew it was Jane's day out. Paul was safe inside the house even if any one happened to see him there. Certainly he was indicated here as circumstantially as he had been in the hold-up. What had Paul been doing on Saturday afternoon, the day the farmhouse had been broken into? It was 76 THE QUARTZ EYE likely, since she had two performances that day, that she gave it to him for a day off. I must ask Linda about that. Who was he, anyhow? How long had he worked for her? How much did she know about him? And how the devil had it happened, in the light of his disappearance to-day, that neither Jane nor Linda had mentioned him to-night while the "funny things" that had happened lately were being talked about? Was he the reason why Linda wouldn't appeal to the police? And did Jane suspect that this was the reason? These questions, and a swarm like them, kept me in a sort of trance until I got home. However, there was no ditch marked by a fragile "Danger!" sign in my way, and no girl driving a jade-green Rolls-Royce to rouse me inopportunely from my preoccupation. I must have dropped my nickel in the subway turnstile and waited for the right train. I must have looked at another wayfarer who waited beside me on the platform and took the same train I did, for I remembered him a little later. But I wasn't conscious of him at the time and didn't notice where he got off. I hadn't any sense of being followed as I walked the rest of the way to my apartment. I went in by the laboratory door as I generally did, and turned up the lights in there. I noticed that quite a strong south breeze had sprung up. It was coming _ _F ___ _~ THREE QUEER THINGS 77 -- in through a front window, which I had left open, and I could hear it blowing papers around, so I went in pretty briskly to shut it. I didn't, though. I stuck my head out of the window instead. A man was going down my steps, and since I'm the only tenant of that building who sleeps in it at nightthe first floor is the tailor shop and the second floor is vacant-I was curious as to what this stranger had come up into my entry for. He must have got there after I did for there'd been no one in the passage nor on the stairs when I went up. Had he come in to read the name on my card under my speaking-tube? There wasn't light enough to see much of him, but I could make out that he was wearing a cap, a lightcolored, baggy sort of cap such as golf-players use. The man who had waited beside me on the subway platform had worn a cap like that. It recalled him to me perfectly. I decided it must be Paul, who had seen me come out of Linda's house and followed me home,-it was one of those instinctive unscrutinized conclusions that all of us come to sometimes,-but I couldn't for the life of me make out why he should have taken any interest in where I lived, or in what my name was. I didn't know whether I'd tell Linda about the incident or not. CHAPTER V LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL EXT morning, as soon as I'd finished breakfast, I switched off my telephone and settled down to a day's work. I put Linda firmly out of my mind and kept repeating this exercise at half-hour intervals or so all day, until about five thirty when she scared me out of a year's growth by blowing a perfectly terrific blast on my speaking-tube. She didn't know, it appeared, how well it worked. "I know you'll think I'm a pest," she said apologetically, "but if you aren't too awfully busy, I'd like to come up for a few minutes." "Oh, it's quitting time anyhow," I told her, just as if I'd done an honest day's work. "Come on up." I'm under a great handicap, though, with Linda. I can't bluff her at all. She was so deprecatory when I let her in the laboratory door, flushed and actually a little breathless over the idea that she was disturbing some solemn bit of scientific research, that I told her the truth at once. 78 __ _ __ __ _ I LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 79 - -- "You couldn't have come to call on a more worthless loafer than I've been to-day, and I'm terribly glad you came. The only thing I have to criticize is the way you blew into my speaking-tube. A gentle breath, hardly more than a sigh, will do the trick." She laughed, but didn't follow the digression. "Why have you been a worthless loafer?" she asked. "I hoped you'd be working hard on my fire trick." I explained to her that I'd gone home to supper last night with an actress, stayed until a scandalously late hour, and found myself with so many things to think about after I'd got home that I'd got nowhere near enough sleep. "Laboratory work's funny business," I concluded. "It isn't like art, for example. No careless rapture about it, you know. You've got to be feeling good enough to be precise about every silly detail. If you're too lazy to boil the distilled water just before you use it and it's had time to pick up some gas or other you hadn't counted on, why you begin finding out a whole lot of things that aren't so." I was rather surprised to hear myself going on like that. What lured me was the fact that she looked as if she understood what I was talking about. She did, too. "That's like the circus," she said. "That's the dif 80 THE QUARTZ EYE ference between the circus and musical comedy. You can do something just a little bit wrong in The Follies and it doesn't matter. It matters to Mr. Ziegfeld, but he doesn't kill you. But if you do something a little wrong on the trapeze or in an equestrian act... Well, you don't, that's all. If I were in the circus now, between shows like this, as soon as I'd had my dinner in the cook-tent I'd have had my practise wire put up and gone to work-instead of coming around to bother you with some more of my troubles." I realized when she spoke of its being between shows that since it was Saturday she'd just given a matinee performance and would have to be back at the theater in another hour or two for the evening one. She hadn't made this visit idly. "Is it something about Paul?" I asked. "He hasn't turned up, has he?" She'd been sitting in my easy chair, but when I said that she came to her feet all in one beautiful movement that made me catch my breath. "What made you think it was about Paul?" she asked. "I was followed home from your house last night by somebody," I told her, "and I guessed-it was nothing more-that it might be he." "You were followed home!" she echoed incredulously. "Why? Why should any one follow you just _ __ I _I __ LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 8I because you'd come to see me? Are you sure you weren't mistaken?" "Not at all sure," I said. "I only think I was. I've no idea what the man looked like except that he wore a cap." I gave her the details as I've already given them to you. "I don't believe it was Paul," she said thoughtfully when I'd finished, "but I sort of wish I did." I made a guess at what she meant by that. "Because his following me home would mean that he hasn't run away, and you're afraid he has?" She nodded, indicating relief as well as surprise at the accuracy of my guess, and I ventured another. "Wasn't he the real reason why you were so anxious not to call the police?" I blurted out the question without stopping to think that she might see a rather ugly insinuation in it. To my relief she didn't. "I may as well tell you all about him," she said. "I might have last night if it hadn't been for Jane. She's always been prophesying that no good would come of him. I engaged him last fall, just a week or two after I'd bought the car. I'd already tried three chauffeurs and none of them would do at all. One of them drank, and two of them were toplofty and objected to my hours. I' went back to the agency rather desperate and _ 82 THE QUARTZ EYE found Paul in the waiting-room. He didn't look very promising. He was horribly pale and rather shabby. I thought he must have been ill. He heard me say what I wanted and asked for the job. He said he was a first-class chauffeur but that he hadn't been able to get work because of his references. He'd been almost a year in jail. Somehow I had a hunch about him when he said that-just the way I had about you when you drove into the ditch. I sat down and asked him to tell me about it. "He'd been driving several months for a woman, quite well known. I've heard about her. She's rich and in society, and all that.-Well, she lost a twentythousand-dollar pearl necklace, and accused him of having stolen it. Her story was that she'd had it on when she'd got into the car to go to a party somewhere and as soon as she got to the party and took off her cloak she saw that it was missing. She called him up from the party and told him she'd lost it in the car. But she hadn't. At least it wasn't there. She had him arrested and he couldn't get bail. So he had to stay in jail until the time of his trial. When he was tried he was acquitted. "He thinks she stole the pearls herself to get the insurance on them. But of course he couldn't prove that. Well, he couldn't get a job because he'd been in jail, _ __ I____ ___ I I__ LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 83 and, of course, he hadn't any money. He was desperate when he spoke to me. I believed his story and I engaged him." She flushed and her eyes brightened with tears. "Carty, he was perfectly wonderful. He was a beautiful driver and he was clever and kind, and willing to take any amount of trouble to do anything I wanted. I knew he was loyal to me. I couldn't possibly have doubted it. But you can see why I didn't want to tell the police about the things that had been happening. They'd find out that he'd been indicted and in jail for months and acquitted without really being proved innocent. They'd have arrested him again on suspicion.And I wouldn't have it, that's all. Do you blame me?" I'd been thinking while she talked, fitting in the facts she was giving me about Paul with the surmised fragments I'd been trying to arrange into a puzzle picture last night. It seemed that the thing was, if not complete, at least becoming intelligible. All the same, when she finished I agreed that I couldn't blame her for believing in him. I thought it must have been that my voice hadn't sounded right, for I saw a little grimace of pain flicker across her face before she turned and went to her easy chair. "Well, I haven't told you what has happened to 84 THE QUARTZ EYE day," she said. "And I didn't tell you all about yesterday. I told you I'd sent him on two errands yesterday morning but I didn't tell you what they were. One of them was to get a valise from the Belmont Hotel. A man from Iowa, Hallstrom his name was, had written me a letter two or three days ago saying that he'd brought on some things for me that he thought must have belonged to my father. He'd bring them around himself, or I could send for them. He was sailing yesterday on the Mauretania. I meant to call him up. I did try once or twice, but he wasn't in. So yesterday morning I told Paul to go to the Belmont and get the valise. That was one of the errands. "The other.. Well, I'll tell you why I did it. Paul had worried dreadfully about the things that had been happening to me; the burglars at the flat, and the farmhouse broken into, and the hold-up. I'm sure he knew that I didn't dream of thinking he had anything to do with it, but I think perhaps he saw that his being there was the reason I didn't call the police. Well, there was going to be an auction sale yesterday in a nice old house a mile or two down the road from my farm. I thought it would be fun to go and I really thought there might be quite a lot of things there that I could buy. My place isn't really furnished at all, you see. I'd be a stranger there, of course, and I thought it would __ LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 85 - -- -- be easier to pay cash for what I was going to buy than to try to get them to take my check. I hate explaining who I am, anyhow. Well, my other errand was to give Paul a check for five hundred dollars and tell him to cash it for me. I thought it might-cheer him up a little. He's often cashed small checks for me-twentyfive or fifty dollars, so they knew him at the bank of course. He always went to the same window." "Have you called up the bank," I asked, "to find out whether he did cash it?" "I didn't have to," she said. "They called me up that morning to ask if it was all right, the check being ten times as big as anything he'd ever cashed there before for me. I suppose they thought he might have raised it. I told the man it was all right, so I'm sure they gave him the money. Last night I thought perhaps he'd had his pocket picked on his way out of the bank and was ashamed to come back. But still it looked pretty bad. "When I got to the theater this morning it looked worse. There was a message for me that they'd found a valise in the wash-room of the Grand Central Station last night. It had my name written on it on a tag. It had been broken open but there were still quite a lot of things in it. I asked them to send it right up to the theater and they did. It's in my dressing-room now. 86 THE QUARTZ EYE - -I "The valise was my father's. I remember it perfectly. Mr. Hallstrom must have locked it up, because it had been pried open. I don't know whether there'd been anything valuable in it or not. All that was left were some things my father had had about him the night he died. I suppose Paul must have broken it open to see if there was anything in it he wanted before he took the train for somewhere. Anyhow, that's what it looks like. "I hated to go home to Jane, so I came to you. I suppose I was hoping you'd explain it some other way." I wished I could have. She lay back slackly in her chair, with averted head and half-closed eyes, infinitely wistful. I didn't want to go any further with Paul just then. I looked at my watch and asked her how much time she had before she must go back to the theater. "Time enough for dinner," she said. "Can I have dinner with you?" She had looked at me as she asked the question and she followed it instantly with an explanatory, "At your regular place, wherever you go. I don't want a loud bright restaurant." I hoped that was candid of her. At least I hoped she hadn't seen an arrested movement of my hand toward my left trousers pocket. LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 87 f i l I I Jl l -l~ I l.. "There's an Italian grocer down the street," I explained, "whose wife's a wonderful cook, and he sets out a couple of tables in the back room of his grocery. If you like an exotic atmosphere about your eating place you might enjoy it. Otherwise I can cook you a meal of sorts right here." It was rather thrilling the way she came to life at that. She'd brightened perceptibly at the notion of the Italian grocery, but at my afterthought, at the idea of eating here in this, so to speak, scientific pigsty, spreading her bread and butter with a spatula and drinking out of a beaker, she simply blazed up with eagerness. She insisted on helping me, so I let her set my table while I, over the Bunsen burners, made a fresh pot of coffee, fried some ham and eggs, and warmed up some creamed potatoes. My cooking's all right. It's appearances that are against me. But she seemed to like them as well as anything. "My, it's nice of you to let me do this!" she said. "If I'd gone home to Jane I'd have just sat and cried with plain misery until it was time to go back to the theater." And when I asked her why she liked it so much, she fell back on the same funny word she'd used yesterday. "I don't know. It's so homelike here," she said. "Well, I like it," I told her. "It's comfortable and convenient. But those of my friends who've ever got THE QUARTZ EYE in here spread the most terrible reports of it. And I'd never think of calling it homelike myself. I'd like to know why it strikes you that way." She's never much interested in trying to explain things like that. But when she saw I wanted to know, she obediently thought it over. " I suppose," she said, "it must be because you work where you live. It's all mixed up together. Well, that's like the circus. Our house, where we lived, was always full of things we used, and, of course, when we were traveling with the show it was the same way. People whose houses are nothing but places to come back to when they're through work seem kind of tame to me. This is-you know what I mean-richer." It was the second time she'd used the circus as a means of interpreting me. Somehow it made me feel as if I knew her awfully well, ever so much better than I'd ever know Ellen, whom I'd known since her childhood if not since mine. We didn't mention Paul again until we'd finished dinner. As soon as I lighted my pipe she went straight back to him. "I suppose you'd think I was perfectly silly if I told you I didn't believe, even now, that he'd just deliberately stolen that money. But somehow, in spite of everything, it doesn't make sense. He was grateful, _ _ __ _I LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 89 I -- he thought I'd saved him from-well, you knowdespair, that's all. And he liked me. I'd have gone anywhere with him. And I can't believe he was just a plain mean crook. Well, can you think of anything that helps?" "Let me ask you one question," I said, "and then I'll tell you the story as it looks to me. Did Paul have a day off?" She frowned in perplexity as she answered, "Yes. Saturday. Why? Carty, you aren't going to try to make me think he did all these other things. I won't believe that." "Well, it's only a story, but it seems to me it hangs together, Linda. Of course it may not be true. Anyhow I think it leaves him in a better light than this supposition you revolt at, that he robbed you and bolted just to get hold of your five hundred dollars. "You said he was desperate when you found him in that intelligence office. He must have been. A year in jail would almost destroy anybody. He must have been smarting under a sense of injustice. He must have hated not only the woman who'd put him there, but all rich complacent people. Hated them like hell. And he must have got acquainted, there in jail, with a lot of criminals who told him he was a boob to play straight. Well, we needn't try to go into details. He ~__ 90 THE QUARTZ EYE 90 THE QUARTZ EYE was tried, and acquitted, and he couldn't get a job. Maybe some old jail acquaintance of his picked him up, let him have a little money, got him into something. He may have drifted in with a bunch of burglars, or automobile bandits. Perhaps had been involved in two or three robberies. Perhaps he was trying all the while to find a job that would enable him to go straight. And finally you give him his chance. "Well now we come to this mysterious something of yours that somebody wants. And that somebody gets hold of Paul. Paul's in his power. If he refuses to obey his orders it means that they'll expose him, show him up to you-which is what would hurt him the worst-as a crook. A week ago yesterday, when Mrs. Mitchell drove you up to the shack, it being Friday and Jane's day out, it was the simplest thing in " the world for him to ransack the flat. He'd be perfectly safe once he'd got in the front door. "His only possible danger would lie in encountering Constantine Mitchell either on the way out or on the way in, and he probably would have had an explanation for him. Whatever was wanted, the thoroughness of the search he must make would make it impossible for him to cover up his tracks, so he gives the thing the look of a burglary by stealing just as little as he can. He hasn't found the thing they've told him to look for. _ _I __ __ LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 91 He goes back and reports a failure. 'Well,' they tell him, 'there are some things up at her place in the country. Search there.' Of course his having complied before makes it a foregone conclusion that he'll follow his instructions this time. "His day off, with you playing two performances, gives him a perfect opportunity. He ransacks that place without finding what he wants, and reports' again. 'Well,' they say, 'she's got it on her, then. If you don't find it, we will.' So he plays sick on Monday night and holds you up." "He didn't do that," Linda cried impetuously. "I know he didn't do that. He never would have grabbed me like that. And he never would have hit me on the head." "In desperation?" I suggested. "When he thought you were going to break away and turn around and see who he was? Linda, who else was there to know so exactly when you'd be coming home from the theater? To know that you always stopped at the top of the steps to get out your latch-key? Who else was there who'd wait until you'd unlocked the door before attacking you? He knew he could get rid of you by pushing you inside. From the time that you first told me about that hold-up I've never been able to see any one but Paul in it. Well, he searches, and I suppose 92 THE QUARTZ EYE he fails again to get the thing he wants. We can be sure he failed, unless you can think of some article in your hand-bag that might have been what they wanted. What was in the bag? Can you remember?" "A little money, my latch-key, my compact, a shopping list. Nothing any more important than that, anyway. And not enough money to be worth holding me up for." "Well then," I went on, "we'll take it that he's failed all around. And he reports his failures to the people who forced him into the thing. Perhaps they're ugly about it. Perhaps they think he's lying about his failure to have found it. Perhaps they threaten to expose him, give him away to you, anyhow. "Or perhaps-and I think this is just as likelyhe's so sick of himself and of his treachery to you that he can't bear it any more. The money you had him draw out of the bank would be enough to take him a long way off somewhere and give him a fresh start. Perhaps he thinks he can earn it back and send it to you. He has the bag on his hands and he doesn't want to keep it. So he breaks it open to make sure it doesn't contain anything he wants, and takes a midnight train out of town. "You can't call him straight, of course, if he did all that, but somehow I can see a man who had been LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 93 straight and who wanted to be straight again and was loyally devoted to you doing it. There's the story, and it may be wrong from the start to the finish." I knew it must be painful to her, and in order not to seem to be waiting to force her acceptance of it, I changed the subject by asking her if it wasn't time I was taking her back to the theater. It was, nearly, and on her election to walk rather than take a taxicab, we set out at once. It was very nice, but a little incredible, to be walking along with her in that leisurely, domestic sort of way, exactly as if she weren't a celebrity at all. I had nothing to say, since I wasn't willing to go back to Paul and no casual topics presented themselves. But the silence didn't matter a bit. Finally she remarked, "To-morrow's Sunday. Would you like to come with me and the Mitchells up to the farm for a picnic-if it's a nice day, that is?" I'm more likely than not to do a good day's work on Sunday, but I didn't mention this habit to her. I told her I'd like to come very much. "There's going to be just one rule about that picnic if we go," she said firmly, after we'd walked another block. "Nobody's to mention burglaries, or hold-ups, or any other kind of mystery. We'll just have a good time." __ 94 TH~HE QUARTR TZ EYE 94 TH QURT EYE _ I agreed to that heartily enough though I doubted, even then, whether the rule would hold. I'd have said good-by to her at the stage door, but she asked me to come in a minute. "As long as you're here," she remarked, "I'd like to have you look at that valise." It was a pigskin kit-bag, beautifully made, and except for the brutal treatment it had received last night, it was in surprisingly good condition. It had been pried at and hacked open with the greatest roughness. I couldn't imagine Paul, or any other good mechanic, being either as clumsy or as violent as that, and for the first time I felt some doubt of the correctness of my explanation. "I remember that valise as well as if I'd seen it yesterday," Linda told me soberly. "Father was awfully proud of it and careful of it. Connie Mitchell gave it to him. He had one exactly like it himself." "What's in it?" I asked "They're things that were left at the hospital the night my father died. Nothing but his clothes, I guess. I haven't gone through it very carefully. I hate to, somehow. It was a little private hospital and Mr. Hallstrom's father was the doctor that owned it." I didn't examine the contents very closely. They seemed to comprise a suit of clothes and some odds and LOOKING WORSE FOR PAUL 95 ends of wearing apparel. But the reason I didn't go into that was that as I sat down on the only spare chair in Linda's dressing-room and lifted the bag to my knees, I felt something on the under side that my fingers thought they recognized, something not yet entirely dried. When Linda turned away to answer a question of her dresser I closed the bag and turned it upside down for a look at the dark stain on the bottom of it. "Do you mind," I asked as carelessly as I could, "if I take this bag back with me to the laboratory? I'd like to look through it a little more at leisure." "I wish you would," she said. "Somehow I hate to take it home with me." I offered to come back and take her home after the performance, but she told me that wasn't necessary. She'd hired Jim, the man who'd come out to the laboratory to get her car yesterday afternoon, as her regular chauffeur. I was glad to have her off my hands for a while, for the bag was going to provide me with a busy evening. I was going to make a careful microscopic analysis all right, but I felt pretty sure in advance what the result of it would be. I knew the feel of dried blood, or at least I thought I did. CHAPTER VI THE LETTER T HE bag wasn't very heavy so I carried it home afoot. I had a good deal to think about and can't swear that I went straight home by the most direct route. I got there eventually and without misadventure about a quarter past eight, and the first thing, naturally, that I did on getting into the laboratory was to empty the bag of its contents-I chucked them into Linda's easy chair-and set about soaking off the suspected blood stain in normal salt solution. It took a little contriving to manage this, since the bag was too big to sit down bodily in any basin I possessed. I had to put the stained end in the water and prop up the other on a pile of books. I had just accomplished this when I was summoned by a blast on my speaking-tube, not as hair-raising a one as Linda had startled me with that afternoon, but pretty urgent just the same. "Is that you, Carty?" my brother-in-law's voice wanted to know. "Are you all right?" 96 __ __ __ __ _ _ THE LETTER 97 T H E LE TE 97 "Of course I'm all right," I told him. "Why not?" "Well, Doris wants a look at you," he said. "Shall I bring her up?" "Of course," I told him again. "Glad to see you both." My cordiality had gone down the wrong way, if the faint grunt I heard at the other end of the tube meant anything. Were they annoyed with me? I hadn't done anything wrong, had I? There lurked in the back of my mind a familiar sort of feeling that I had and I wasn't surprised when Doris's pretty, frightened, reproachful face made it evident. "Oh Carty, you pill!" she cried. "If you really were all right, why didn't you telephone?" Even then I didn't know what it was all about and had to ask. "When you said you wouldn't come to dinner with us last night," she explained, "you asked if you might come to-night instead. When you didn't come, nor telephone, nor answer when we telephoned to you... Oh, Jack told me I was a silly to worry about you, and of course he was right. But I couldn't help thinking that you might be ill alone up here, or perhaps have had an accident with one of your machines." I kissed her and told her I was sorry, as indeed I was. "I'm a low-down dog," I told her. "And if - l l z ^ 98 THE QUARTZ EYE 1 -- -- John says the word, I'll turn on one of my machines right now and have an accident." I shouldn't have said that. I ought never to try to be funny when John Goodrich is involved. To take the edge off it I turned back to Doris and made her a real excuse. "I've had so many unusual things to think about since yesterday afternoon," I said, "that your invitation to dinner went plumb out of my mind." To my intense surprise she said, in a sort of aside, "I know, poor old Wally!" She never called me Wally except in emotional moments. "Don't you care!" Good heavens, she must have thought I meant I'd been thinking about Ellen all day! "I don't think," John observed genially by way, I suppose, of taking my mind off my troubles, "that I've ever seen this place in quite such a hell of a mess before." I looked around, and doubted if he had. I had gone off to the theater with Linda without, of course, stopping to wash up our dinner dishes, or even to clear them away. The table was as we'd left it, or rather, it had been as we'd left it until I had, more or less, swept a place in the middle of it for my pan of warm salt solution that the bag was standing in. The pile of books that supported the other end of it were, so to speak, just in the outskirts of the butter. THE LETTER 99 "Is that kit-bag meant to be standing in a pan of water?" John wanted to know. "Yes," I told him, a little annoyed at his tone. "I think you might have guessed that it didn't fall in. I am soaking a stain off it that I'm going to take a look at through my microscope a little later." "Well, it looks slightly nutty to me," said John. "To say nothing of plunking it down in the middle of your dinner, why look through your miscroscope at a little dirt off an old kit-bag in the first place?" I decided it was time to suppress John. "I'm doing it because I've become a detective," I told him, with the implausibility of perfect truth. "I suspect this stain to be blood. If it shows the characteristic shadows of red corpuscles and they measure up to right size, then I'll know it's mammalian blood. In order to find out for sure whether it's human blood or not-though I strongly suspect it is-I'll have to take a little of it over to my friend Webb and have him shoot it into one of his specially prepared guinea-pigs." John took it as I had expected him to. "Oh, all right," he conceded with a flush, "I admit it was none of my business." I was rather afraid that Doris would resent my impertinence, but she didn't take it that way. She denies now, with a touch of asperity, that she thought, even __ I00 THE QUARTZ EYE ILl I L ~ III II! I I I II II I JI II J I I for a moment, that I was going, as John had put it, "slightly nutty," but I still believe she did, and I don't think it's to be wondered at. Blood stains must have seemed a long way off my beat, to her. She was very gentle. She didn't exactly stroke my brow, but her manner suggested it. "You can surely stop detecting over the week-end, can't you? Leave this horrible place and come home with Jack and me and spend a quiet Sunday. Then Monday we could come back and I'd get a cleaning woman... Oh well, not the cleaning woman then if the thought of her makes you so wild. But how about the rest of the program?" "No," I said, "I've got to go on and detect all I can to-night. But I've already agreed to take a day off to-morrow. I'm going to have a Sunday in the country. Sit down, my dear Doris, and smoke a cigarette, and try to get it out of your mind that I'm a pitiable person. This is a horrible place to you but it isn't to me. The last visitor I had here commented on its homelike appearance." She wouldn't sit down, though, and she wouldn't be comforted. She made a cautious tour of the place, finding fresh horrors at every turn. "W\as the person who had dinner with you here tonight," she asked-I'd been rather expecting the ____ THE LETTER IOI duplicity of the dishes to lead her to that discovery and wondered a little nervously how far she might go with it, "the one who thought it seemed homelike up here?" I admitted that it was. "Well," she said, "I can imagine what he was like." I decided not to contradict that assertion. I think she wondered a little that I didn't at least make some comment on it, but her eye alighted just then upon the heap of things in the easy chair, the things I'd taken out of the kit-bag before putting it to soak. She looked at them in a puzzled sort of way and then fastidiously, one garment at a time, she picked them up. "How perfectly disgraceful! Carty, how did you ever let a good suit of clothes get in such a condition as this? Where's it been? I hope you send it to the cleaner's before you try to wear it." "I will," I told her. Instantly-I suppose it would be any woman's instinct-she began going through the pockets. I started to protest but then observed that she was evidently finding them empty. However, as she gave the skirt of the coat a final pat before laying it down she discovered something. "There's a letter down here inside the lining," she _I ____ I02 THE QUARTZ EYE - -- ----- said. "It's funny, because I didn't notice any holes in the pockets. Oh, I see what it is. Look, the rip isn't in the pocket itself. It's in the top seam where it's sewed to the lining." Before I could stop her she'd plunged her bare arm through the aperture and begun feeling around inside the lining. I saw a surprised look come into her face as her fingers encountered the thing she was seeking. "Carty, it's sealed up!" she said. "It's a letter you've never read. I hope it isn't some love-letter you've forgotten about." She happened to look at me as she said that, and I can make a pretty good guess at what she must have thought she saw in Biy face, for her own changed. She flushed in sudden embarrassment and she kept her eyes fixed on mine as she drew the letter out and handed it to me. I put it in my coat pocket without glancing at it any more than she had done. "I'll bet," said John, "that he forgets to read it again." I told him, off the top of my mind, that it was quite likely. I was in the grip of a strong hunch that this find of Doris's was important and that I was landed with a problem that might turn out embarrassing regarding the disposal of it. Incidentally, I was guilty of the inhospitable wish that my visitors would go and leave me THE LETTER I03 free to get to work. It was to happen sooner than I could have expected. John, turning away when he saw I wasn't going to furnish any more amusement about the letter, was peering down idly at the bag and the pan of water it was soaking in when he suddenly uttered a "Hello!" of surprise and asked, "This isn't yours, is it, Doris?" He'd picked up a small object that none of us had noticed before and carried it around to her. She took it from him, glanced at it, flushed bright pink again, and said, "No, of course it isn't mine. It must belong to some friend of Carty's." "What is it?" I asked as she held it out in an accusatory manner toward me. "It's a compact, quite an expensive one. I'd see she got it back if I were you. I admit I was wrong in guessing what sort of person it was who had dinner with you." I said-and I swear I said it in good faith, though I might have known how both of them would take it, "It was Miss Defoe who had dinner with me. It must belong to her, of course." "Linda Defoe?" John asked, with a guffaw. He was pleased, I suppose, to think that Doris was getting a dose of the same medicine I had administered to him a little earlier. _______ Io4 THE QUARTZ EYE 104 THE QUARTZ EYE She took it the same way, for her flush deepened and the look in her eyes turned cold. "Come along, Jack," she said. "I'll promise not to worry about him any more." She added, from the landing, by way of valedictory, "I'm glad Ellen didn't marry you" Well, if it came to that, I was too. I felt rather guilty about letting Doris go like that, under the double misapprehension that I'd been merely laughing at her and that I'd sought relief for my sorrow in losing Ellen with the first ramshackle girl of the town that I could pick up. If John hadn't been there I'd have called her back and told her all about it, or at least enough about it to make her believe that I'd been telling her the truth. But in John's presenceyou'd realize this if you knew him-the thing simply couldn't be done. I'll admit besides that, guilty as I felt, I experienced a sort of relief in Doris's declared intention of washing her hands of me for a while. For the next few days I could see I wasn't going to want her around in a pinafore and a pair of rubber gloves trying to tidy up my laboratory. She'd done her part in finding that letter which I might easily enough have missed. As soon as they were gone I took it out of my pocket. The envelope was a stiff expensive note-paper that had been through the mail, postmarked from _ ___ ____ _ __ __ THE LETTER 105 THE, LETTER..... St. Louis, September 16, I916, and addressed to Maurice Defoe, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, care of the circus. It was slightly distended and from the feel must have had at least two folded sheets inside. I remember noticing that my hand shook a little as I returned it to my pocket and that I was puzzled to account for my excitement and for the strength of my conviction that the thing had a profound importance, that there was a heavy responsibility upon me to decide before I saw Linda to-morrow morning what I should do with it. In the interest of orderly procedure I postponed thinking about it, or tried to, in favor of settling the question of the nature of the stain on the bag which was now soaking off satisfactorily in my pan of normal salt solution. But my mind didn't come into really sharp focus on the problem that had been in undisputed occupation of it half an hour earlier until I saw through the high power objective of my microscope the unmistakable shadow-like forms of red corpuscles. They were colorless, of course, since all the hemoglobin had washed out of them. Measured by the micromillimetric scale they were the right size to be human blood, but this, of course, wasn't conclusive. My friend Webb over at the physiological laboratory would have to help me out here. It takes about three weeks to sensitize a guinea _ __ io6 THE QUARTZ EYE pig for this test but I thought it likely that he had one already prepared. I emptied the contents of my pan into a sterilized bottle, sealed it up, and then settled down in my easy chair to think. There was reasonable ground now for the assumption that the series of queer things that had been happening to Linda during the past fortnight had culminated in a murder. On the same hypothesis the murder involved Paul. But whether as the murderer or the murderer's victim, it was not so easy to guess. At least I tried to tell myself that it was not by way of evading the fact that I had found it too easy. No laboratory man is worth his salt as a research worker unless he is accessible to a hunch, but unless he can keep his hunches from running away with him, he is a mischievous fool. My instantaneous reaction back there in Linda's dressing-room to the discovery of what I believed to be blood on the kit-bag had been the conviction that Paul was exonerated thereby; that he'd given his life in the defense of Linda's property. But I hadn't as yet discovered a fact nor even been able to invent a series of plausible surmises in support of that idea. Well then, let me adopt the other and see where that would lead me. Yesterday morning Linda had given him a check THE LETTER I07 for five hundred dollars to cash at the bank and had told him to call at the Belmont Hotel for a valise. He had decided to abscond with it, as well as with the money. But why? Why had he bothered to go to the Belmont and get the valise at all, unless he knew more about its contents than Linda herself knew? All right, assume that he did know that it contained something of great value, intrinsic or otherwise. He goes to the Belmont Hotel and gets it. He has the money, five hundred dollars in currency, in his pocket. Why doesn't he then walk across the street to the Grand Central Station, buy his ticket to some point unknown, and get on the next train, bag and all, dealing with the lock at his leisure? He hadn't done that. It had been late at night when the rifled bag had been found in the station wash-room. What's more, he'd returned the car. Some one had, at all events, since it had been left standing at the curb before her house. Well, let's suppose that that might have been professional pride. But it was a queer punctilio all the same. Nevertheless, assume that it was what he did. Assume that he got out of the car in front of Linda's house, took the bag, and walked over to the subway with it. It must even then have been early in the afternoon. What had he done with himself all the rest of the day? And why, once more, had he ................. II I I................ I08 THE QUARTZ EYE wanted to leave the bag behind? It was a perfectly inconspicuous article of luggage with Maurice Defoe's initials blind-tooled on the side of it in small letters. No, the story simply didn't make sense that way. It needed the presence in it of some one else, the Some One I had excogitated last night after hearing Linda's story, the Some One who had wanted something that he now believed to be in that bag. Somewhere, somehow, he'd murdered Paul to get possession of it. That would account for the frantic brutality with which the bag had been broken open. Had Some One found what he wanted at last? Or was the sinister series of funny things-funny!-to go on happening to Linda? Well, not if I could help it. I'd taken it on-it was perhaps a little odd how thoroughly I'd taken it on considering that I'd known her only a little more than twenty-four hours, but I glanced at that aspect of it only out of the tail of my eye-and I was going to see it through. Linda, confound her and bless her heart, hadn't, so far, been willing to take my speculations about Some One and the something he wanted very seriously. The only deep concern she'd shown from first to last was over being forced to believe that Paul was not the loyal friend she'd taken him for. She'd hushed up Jane; ____ THE LETTER o09 THE LETTER 109 she had, it seemed, refused to listen to the Mitchells; she'd tried to coax me into forgetting everything but what she called her fire trick; she wouldn't admit that she had a known enemy in the world or that she could guess at the existence of any possession of hers that any one could desperately want. Could she really be as completely in the dark as all that? Or had she some surmise of her own so appalling that she didn't want it scrutinized? Well, the latter alternative was possible, yet it wasn't easy to adopt. I believed I knew her too well to be taken in even by an unconscious deception. All right then, I'd assume that she was just as innocent as she said she was. I put the tiller of my thoughts down hard and came about on the other tack. Last night when Linda had told me, reluctantly, the story of the funny things that had been happening to her during the past week I had perceived that three of them had the look of being a related sequence: the search, almost on successive days, of her apartment, of her cottage in the country and of her person. The theft and rifling of the kit-bag might be considered as the fourth event of this sequence. I recalled what Linda had said about it this afternoon. She remembered it perfectly as her father's. She had no idea what it had contained when it was IO THE QUARTZ EYE taken from the Belmont but all that was left after it had been rifled were some things that had been about him the night he died. Mr. Hallstrom, from somewhere in Iowa, had brought them on the other day apparently from a merely dutiful feeling that they ought to have been turned over to her. Why he hadn't sent them to her years ago I didn't know. Anyhow, there could have been nothing in the bag which hadn't lain there undisturbed since Maurice Defoe's death, which had occurred, Linda said, when she was twelve. And yet, my hypothetical Some-one-who-wantedsomething had broken into that bag and searched it, though the cost of the search had been, I believed, a murder. The thing that Some One wanted, then, must have belonged not to Linda, but to her father. Was that theory reconcilable with the two burglaries? How about the farmhouse? It wasn't completely furnished, she had said, but she had sent down some furniture and some rugs and some old trunks full of things that had been in storage. Yes, by jove, and the storage seals on the trunks had been cut! And I remembered now how oddly it had struck me at the time that when I had asked Linda what had been in the trunks she should have told me indifferently that she hadn't an idea. Yes, the burglary at the farmhouse fitted in. __ ___ THE LETT E R III And the search of the apartment did too. Hadn't Jane remarked that they'd broken open old boxes and even cut open packets of letters? The place had looked, she said, as if a cyclone had been there. Letters... Was it a letter Some One had been looking for? Was it by any possible chance the letter Doris had just found in the lining of Maurice Defoe's coat? Had Some One, in his haste, overlooked a thing that had been under his hand? It would be a pretty formidable sort of letter if twelve years after it had been written it could still be worth committing a murder for. It must be a matter of life or death to somebody. But of course I was assuming too much. It wouldn't do to run away with an idea like that. I heaved myself out of my easy chair and for the first time made a close examination of the things that had been in the bag. Regarded severally there was nothing extraordinary about them, but as soon as I had listed them in my mind they provided me with a curious fact to think about. They comprised a suit of clothes-coat, waistcoat and trousers-of well-tailored English tweed, light colored, rather gay; a silk shirt; a collar; a cravat; a belt; a suit of athletic underwear; a pair of silk socks, and a pair of low tan shoes. All the wash I I2 THE QUARTZ EYE clothes had been worn since they'd been laundered. In other words, they comprised exactly what a man wears, and nothing else. Apparently they were what Maurice Defoe had had on when they took him to the hospital where he died. That puzzled me when I stopped to think about it. He wouldn't, of course, have gone to the hospital dressed like that if he and his wife had, as I'd supposed, died as the result of a fatal accident in the ring. Where had I got so clearly the idea that they had? Linda hadn't explicitly told me so. She'd said she'd still have been in the circus if her father and mother hadn't died when she was twelve years old. The words had made so deep an impression on me that I was sure I remembered them exactly. I could fairly hear the tragic tone that enveloped them. Unless their death had been a single event she wouldn't have phrased it that way. She'd have said, "My father and mother both died." They might have been killed in some other sort of accident, of course-a skidding automobile, a train wreck. But then, why after all hadn't she said they were killed? I tried to tell myself that this was getting too finespun, but this didn't rid me of the feeling that there had been something sinister about the tragedy; something that Linda herself, perhaps, didn't know about; TH LE TE I_ 13_ I THE LETTER II3 _I i i i i i i i i i i _ _ something that had been kept from her. I remembered the tone of tender pride in which she'd spoken of them. And I remembered something else. When I'd surmised a professional blackmailer, believing that an actress like Linda might have some letters she'd pay to get back, she'd laughed and said that if they'd known she was circus they wouldn't have bothered with her. Again I took from my pocket the letter addressed in a woman's handwriting to Maurice Defoe. The "gentlemanly" thing to do would be to hand it over intact to Linda. Well, I couldn't do that. I might be an officious meddler, but I didn't dare let her see that letter or even know of its existence until I knew what it contained. I felt like a crook as I slit open the envelope, but before I'd read three lines I was glad I'd done it. "Dear Mr. Defoe: You probably don't take the trouble to read letters from girls you don't know, but I'm not one of your admirers, and this isn't that kind of a letter. You don't know who I am. I am perfectly sure you've never even heard of me. If you want to know who I am before you take the trouble to read the rest of this letter, ask Constantine Mitchell. Don't pay any attention to what he says, but see how he looks. "I suppose I ought to be ashamed to write this but I'm not. I am too, crazily in love with him to care what anybody thinks, and he was in love with me until II 4 TIIE QUARTZ EYE your wife took him away from me. If you don't believe this from what you can see for yourself if you look, send for me and I'll meet you wherever you say and tell you enough to make you believe. "I'm not crazy-except about him. It isn't his fault. He'd be all right if people would let him alone. She wouldn't let him alone and she thinks she's got him. I don't know whether you care or not. Maybe you've got tired of her and don't mind her having a lover. I don't either, as long as it isn't Connie. But she can't have him. And unless you do something about it, I will. He belongs to me, I tell you, and I'm not going to have him taken away. If you tell her to let him alone and see that she does, he'll come back to me. I know he will. We were two people that were made for each other. I can understand him and I can take care of him. "Don't think that I'm just a poor jealous fool and tear up this letter without doing anything about it. If you do, something will happen that you won't like as well as having to tell your beautiful wife to keep her hands off Constantine Mitchell. This is your last chance." The handwriting as the letter progressed had got harder and harder to read, and the signature was almost illegible. Of the last name I could be sure of nothing beyond the capital B it began with. But the first name I made out to be Elsie. Was it nothing more than a coincidence that the name of Constantine Mitchell's wife was Elsie, too? CHAPTER VII JANE CONTRIBUTES INDA had spoken of getting an early morning start to the picnic by way of avoiding the crowd in the roads, but "early" it had then appeared meant sometime not very much after noon. I was to expect them to call for me somewhere about twelve thirty. There was no reason why I shouldn't have spent half the morning in bed, except that habit made it impossible. By nine o'clock I'd read the morning paper thoroughly enough to make sure there was nothing in it about Paul's disappearance, eaten my breakfast and dressed for the day. But there wasn't time to make it worth while getting to work, and by eleven I was too restless to hang about my place any longer, so I called up Linda's apartment and told Jane, who answered the phone, that I'd come down-town and start from there. It was a handsome May morning, and I elected to walk in the hope that the novelty of the exercise would distract my mind. I didn't want to think any more, if I15 ii6 THE QUARTZ EYE I could help it, until I could get some new facts to think about. I expected, in spite of Linda's taboo on the subject, that the day would produce a few. As I approached the house I saw Jane coming out of it. She saw me at the same time and waited for me to come up. She, at least, had issued no orders against talking about the mystery, and I was glad of a chance to have a little chat with her. She told me they'd had a peaceful night. "Linda," she added a little dryly, "was sound asleep until you telephoned." I didn't, even at that, realize the enormity of calling up a working actress before twelve o'clock on Sunday. But I did perceive that I'd been a little impetuous and said I supposed I had arrived somewhat ahead of time. Jane confirmed this. "She isn't dressed yet, but she won't be long now. I'm going to the delicatessen around the corer to get some things for your picnic dinner." My suggestion that I go along with her and help carry the things back seemed to please her, and we set off up the street on more amicable terms than I'd hoped to arrive at with Jane. She hadn't, I was sure, altogether approved of me last Friday night. "No," she said, referring to the peaceful condition of affairs at the flat, "there haven't any more funny JANE CONTRIBUTES II7 - - -- things happened since Paul cleared out. I always knew there was something wrong about him. He was too good to be true. He was a good riddance and cheap at the five hundred dollars he got away with, though I'm careful about money." I let this go by. There seemed to be no point in taking up the cudgels in Paul's defense with her. I didn't know whether Linda had told her about the rifled valise or not and didn't try to find out. We talked of nothing more important than the prospects for the picnic until we reached the little Italian shop a street or two away where Jane was going for her supplies. She had no special instructions, it appeared, as to what to get. After she'd bought a few things that her own plans called for she asked me if I saw anything that struck my fancy by way of a special dish. My eye had already been attracted by some boxes of specially good-looking mushrooms and I asked her how they would do. She gave me a rather odd look-I don't mean she gave it to me particularly; it was merely because she happened to be looking my way-and said, "Why, Linda likes them and eats them too whenever it happens. It will be all right if the Mitchells don't come. And I don't believe they will." THE QUARTZ EYE I said that if there was any doubt about it we'd better have something else instead, but she seemed rather pleased with the idea and ordered the box wrapped up. "It doesn't matter if he does come," she said. "There'll be plenty else for him to eat." I never asked an idler question in my life than when I inquired as we left the shop whether mushrooms disagreed with Mr. Mitchell, but it drew an amazing comment from Jane. "Linda hasn't told you, then, how her father and mother died." "Good lord!" I cried. "Do you mean. She nodded gravely. Then, having given that time to sink in, with solemn gusto she told me all about it. "They always were crazy about mushrooms, both Margaret and Maurice, but especially Maurice. He liked good things to eat too well, anyway. His stomach wasn't what it should have been the last two or three years of his life. He'd had several bad attacks. Everybody used to tell him he ought to have a good going over by some big doctor, but I guess he was afraid to. He was always taking digestion pills of one sort or another. Well, it came to the same thing in the end. "The three of them, he and Margaret and Constantine Mitchell, had supper in their car one night after _ _ ______.___ JANE CONTRIBUTES II9 the evening performance. It was something they did quite often when he was with the show. They had a mess of mushrooms. I suppose Margaret must have picked them up somewhere. She used to poke around the markets whenever she had a chance, looking for things he liked. She cooked the mushrooms herselfshe was a good cook-and the three of them ate them all. Before morning Margaret and Maurice were both dead, and Mitchell so near it that it was a miracle that he ever got well. It left him a wreck for a year or two. He never came back to the circus after that. Naturally, he never eats mushrooms. But Linda's eaten them ever since I've cooked for her. She was only a little girl when it happened, of course,-twelve years old." "Were you with the circus at that time?" I asked Jane. "I was Margaret's dresser," she said. "Her family, the Willings, brought me up. I've always been with the circus until I left to go with Linda." Well, I had plenty to think about now, but no time to do it in. We were back at Linda's door and the jade-green Rolls-Royce was now standing at the curb with Jim at the wheel. We left our purchases with him to be packed in the car, and Jane ran me up in the little elevator to the apartment. __ 120 THE QUARTZ EYE ii iiji _ Ia i I i i i _iiii iiiiiiii "I'm all ready," Linda called when she heard Jane unlocking the door, "but now we'll have to wait for Carty." "I've got him here with me," Jane told her, and an audible gasp and a scurry made it appear that her readiness was only approximate. However, she did emerge again in a minute or two and waved me a friendly hello. At least her greeting began that way. I think, too, she said something about its being a gorgeous day and asked me if I felt like a picnic. I can't tell what it was that got me. Up to that moment my feelings toward her, all that I'd recognized the existence of, had seemed sensible enough. Perhaps it was her bravery against the background of terror I'd spent most of the past night groping about in. Anyhow, she broke over me like a wave. I don't think I said anything. My impression is that she didn't give me time to answer that question of hers. She stopped short and looked at me, and the next thing I knew we were face to face within hand's reach. I don't know what had become of Jane. She'd probably gone into the kitchen to collect baskets and parcels. Linda said, "You've been having a horrible time. I don't believe you've had any sleep. I hope you'll take this for a holiday, Carty." And with that, in the simplest way in the world, she kissed me. JANE CONTRIBUTES 12I No one but a fool could have taken it for anything more than it was meant to be, yet it wouldn't be belittled into anything less. It was an unprecedented event for me. Kisses in my experience, if one barred the perfunctory ones, had always been frightfully serious affairs; alpine summits laboriously attained, with clouds of moral implications drifting around them. This thing had happened to us so naturally that I hardly knew which of us had done it. It left me calm, but enormously contented. I told her truthfully, "It feels a good deal more like a holiday now than it did half an hour ago." She nodded as if that were something settlzd and began loading me up with things that were to go down to the automobile. It was only one trip for the three of us, but we all had our hands full. As we were on the point of leaving the flat Jane thought of something. "There's some mail there on the table that came in yesterday afternoon. When you didn't come home for dinner I forgot all about it." "Blow the mail!" said Linda cheerfully. "That can wait until to-morrow." Jane didn't approve of this. I don't think she understands holidays very well. "There's a registered package in it," she insisted. Linda gave in. "All right. Stick it in your pocket, Carty." 122 THE QUARTZ EYE She stood watching while I slid the little handful of letters into the side pocket of my overcoat, but when she saw the size of the package I was trying to squeeze in after them, she protested. It was nothing but pure stubbornness that made me tell her my pockets were used to being stretched and could hold anything. I had no idea that the decision had any importance one way or the other. Then I resumed my load and the three of us set out together. Jim stowed our bundles for us, Jane got up in front with him, Linda and I settled ourselves inside, and not quite an hour late after all, we rolled off. The box of mushrooms caught my eye and I remarked with what I hope sounded like proper concern, "So the Mitchells decided not to come." "I don't believe they'll come," Linda answered. "They may drive down in their own car, later. Elsie was in for a minute this morning. Connie had had a bad night, she said; he didn't get to sleep till about six o'clock and she wasn't going to call him. There's supposed to be some sort of party on to-night they want me to go to, but I said I didn't know whether I wanted to go or not." Oddly enough, I remembered about it. "Masters' party!" I exclaimed. "He asked me to that. Invited me to come and meet you." _ __ ____ __ ___ __ JANE CONTRIBUTES 123 -- She did a perfectly delicious thing when I told her that. She gave a contented little laugh and patted my hand. Then she said, "If the Mitchells don't want to go and we do, you can take me, yourself. I guess they will want to, though, if they know you're going. They both want to meet you. I told them about you, last night. Elsie seemed specially interested. That's why she was so disappointed about to-day." "What did you tell them about me?" I tried to make it sound as if I meant it to be funny. "Did you tell them you'd taken on a detective?" She seemed a little hurt at that. "I didn't tell them you knew anything about that. I was sick of talking about it. I'd had to tell them about how the valise came back, broken open and all. I wanted to talk about something pleasant for a change. So I told them how I'd gone to your laboratory and what a nice place it was, and how nice you were-and how I hoped you were going to do me a fire trick for the new show." She added, more to herself than to me after a moment of thoughtful silence, "I suppose Elsie was so pleased because she thought Connie wouldn't be." As if the sound of her own words had startled her, she sat erect, looking round at me in consternation. "I don't know why I said that," she gasped. "I'm not even sure I mean it. It just popped out." 124 THE QUARTZ EYE "Let's talk about it a little, anyhow," I suggested. "Then if you want it buried it can be. Mitchell was a great friend of your father and mother. He knew you as a little girl. Did you go right on seeing him after they died?" "I didn't see him for years. Not till last fall. They've been living abroad mostly for the last two or three years-ever since they were married, that is-in Capri and places like that. I'd never met her before. I thought, right at first, that she liked me better than he did, but he and I got to talking about old times in the circus and after that we got on all right. When they asked me to take the flat below theirs-it's her building, you know-I did it like a shot. It was like finding real friends. "He's sort of shy and poetic and absent-minded, not a bit like the terrific plays he writes, and I suppose women do fall in love with him a good deal. Of course I never could because I think of him as belonging with father and mother. Elsie takes care of him and runs things for him. I think he must have had a pretty hard tinme until she married him." "Who was she, before that? Do you happen to know what her maiden name was?" I hoped the question sounded as if it had been idly asked. Evidently it did. _____I_ JANE CONTRIBUTES I25 -- -- "She'd been married to a man named Miller, a business man with quite a lot of money. They hadn't any children and when he died he left it all to her. I don't think that's why Connie married her, though. She's very pretty and attractive, and I know he's awfully fond of her." "Still, it might make her pretty sensitive," I suggested, "to his seeming to be fond of any one else." "Well, I never noticed anything like that, as far as I was concerned, until two or three weeks ago. And I never really noticed anything until the other night. Thursday, it was. The day before I met you. They'd come down to have supper with me in my flat, after the show, of course. And all at once, just as they were getting ready to go I saw her simply glaring at me. It was-sort of horrible." "You hadn't been doing anything that might have annoyed her? Holding Mitchell's hand, or anything like that?" She flushed and shook her head. "Nor talking about anything, either-that left her out, you know. Like old times in the circus... Yes we did, too! But it couldn't have been that." "Tell me about it," I said. "We'd been talking about the queer things that had been happening to me, specially the hold-up. They 126 THE QUARTZ EYE were keeping at me to report it to the police. And to change the subject I told them how I was going to have Paul take me to the auction, to get things for the farmhouse. Then, just as they were going, I remembered Mr. Hallstrom's letter-the man from Iowa, you know-and handed it over to Connie to read. I was telling Elsie who he was and what he said in the letter, and how I was going to send Paul to get the valise the first thing in the morning. She didn't seem to be listening. She was watching Connie read, until he gave the letter back to me. When I turned from putting it back in my desk I found her-glaring at me, just as I said. Looking as if she'd like to kill me. "I don't know what happened after that, except that they got out, somehow. I didn't see either of them again until last night. Then she telephoned as soon as I came in, exactly as if nothing had happened and asked me to come up and have my supper with them. I thought I'd better go. She seemed all right, themonly rather pleased, I thought, to hear about you.-I don't know why I've been bothering you with all this. Let's talk about something else." Well, I hadn't, I think you'll find it easy to believe, any light chit-chat to contribute to a conversation, just then, so by way of giving her something to think about, I pulled out the bundle of letters and the registered JANE CONTRIBUTES 127 package I'd crammed into my pocket as we were leaving the flat and suggested that she go over her mail. She didn't seem to care much for the idea but she took the stuff I handed her and began looking through it. I settled back to try to think, but before I'd even started getting my new facts sorted out she called my attention to one of her letters. It was on the stationery of the Belmont Hotel. We read it simultaneously, each holding on to a corner. "Dear Miss Defoe: I've no reason for doubting that the man who has called for your father's valise is your chauffeur, just'as he says he is, but since he has no authority from you I am taking the precaution of removing the valuables from it and will send them to you separately by registered mail. I trust they reach you safely. Yours most sincerely, Conrad Hallstrom." You might think Linda would have dropped a letter like that half read and would have set about feverishly tearing open the registered package. But she didn't do that. She sat for quite a while holding it thoughtfully in her hands. She might almost have been debating whether to open it at all. "It's funny," she said at last, "the way my father and mother have begun seeming so much more real to me just lately. For a long time, after I'd got over missing them and wanting them every day, they hardly ____ _ I28 THE QUARTZ EYE seemed real at all. Everything about my life had changed. I was doing such different things. And I hadn't anything that had belonged to them to remind me of them. All their things were packed up and put in storage after they died. "I remembered them, and I loved to think of them. But it was like remembering a dream. And I guess I must have wanted to have it that way. I know I sort of dreaded taking the things out of storage even when I had a place to put them. And while I know I'm going to go through everything some day-going to see what there is and put it all to rights-I keep putting off doing it. I sort of dread doing it. I suppose that's why I wasn't nicer to Mr. Hallstrom and why I didn't want to look at the things that were in the valise. Well, I've been silly long enough. Cut the strings for me, Carty." The package was a shallow box containing three or four items separately wrapped in jeweler's paper. The first thing Linda unwrapped was a watch on a chain that had a cigar cutter at the end of it. Linda handed the watch to me but kept the cigar cutter in her fingers, stroking it. "It's funny how things come back," she said. "He smoked one cigar a day, and he always lighted it in the cook-tent after dinner. I used to cut off the end for JANE CONTRIBUTES 129 - -- him with this. The band had a picture of an old man with a white beard on it." The watch case was of plain, unornamented yellow gold. But the name on the dial was that of one of the greatest Swiss firms of watchmakers. "There's a picture of mother inside the case," Linda said. "Open it and let's look." I exclaimed at sight of it and Linda, when she looked, knew why. "I do look like her, don't I?" she said. "Except for the hair it might be a picture of you," I said. "Have you a spare pocket for them?" Linda asked, as I snapped down the lid. "I didn't bring my wristbag with me." I had, and I put the watch away. The next thing she unwrapped was a cigarette case, gold again, and of exquisite workmanship, but perfectly unornamented. Linda said, before she opened it, "He smoked cigarettes with straw tips. Do you suppose there are any left inside?" There were. It was half full of them. It was a little eerie to feel as close as that to a man who had been in his grave twelve years. She unwrapped a bunch of keys and handed it to 1130 TH3E QUARTZ EYE me without comment. And I on my part offered none, though it seemed to me then that they might prove to have more bearing on the mystery I was struggling with than anything else in the package. One of them I thought might unlock a secret that was of importance to somebody. There was also a small key wrapped up all by itself, and this had a small tag on it which identified it as the key to the pigskin bag. Linda was holding the last article from the box in her hands, feeling of it through the wrappings. "Oh, I know what this is," she said after a moment of perplexity. "It's his snuff-box." I exclaimed at that, "Do you mean he took snuff?" "No," she said, "he kept his medicine in it. He had indigestion and he was always taking pills and things. He hated carrying little boxes and bottles in his pockets, and mother found this snuff-box for him. She got it in London when we were over there the winter before he died. It's really old, and awfully valuable, I guess. Mother was terribly extravagant sometimes. It's got a coat of arms on the lid with three little animals walking along and looking back over their shoulders." I knew nothing about snuff-boxes, but I had no trouble in believing that Margaret Defoe had paid an extravagant sum for this. I had an idea that it would JANE CONTRIBUTES I3I make a collector's mouth water. It was of gold, for one thing, and even allowing for a fairly high alloy, its bullion value must have been considerable. I didn't wonder that Mr. Hallstrom had hesitated about turning it over to an unauthorized messenger. Nevertheless, from my point of view the contents of the registered package were disappointing. Excepting, possibly, the keys, it contained nothing that my hypothetical Some One would conceivably commit a murder for. Linda opened the snuff-box and looked inside. "His medicine's still in it, Carty," she said. "Look. All these little capsules. Aren't they horrid?" She reached forward and shook them out the open window. Then she closed the box and handed it to me. "I'm loading you up like a camel," she said. But I told her I didn't mind, and found a pocket for it. "Well, that's over," she said with a little sigh. And with that she leaned back comfortably against my shoulder and shut her eyes. Her hand closed lightly on my nearest one. The caress didn't affect me as you might have expected it to. It was completely expressive of her feeling of contentment, of her untroubled security with me, and it roused my protective instinct to the highest __ 132 THE QUARTZ EYE........ _ I I I.... pitch. She, I knew, must be remembering old things, recalling one tender trivial detail of her childhood after another. I'd have liked to share her mood with her, but there was no time for that. I went to work trying to reconstruct my story so that the facts I'd learned this morning would fit into it. It must be reconstructed radically. The main inferences I'd hung the story on last night had broken down. I had surmised a scandal connected with the death of Maurice and Margaret Defoe and with Constantine Mitchell's relation to the pair. I'd thought of it as something that Linda had been kept in the dark about. That had been demolished by the story Jane told me on the way home from the delicatessen. Was it possible that Jane had been handing me out an official version adopted years ago to hide a scandal from outsiders? That possibility might have been worth considering if I'd questioned Jane about the circumstances in which Maurice and Margaret Defoe had died. That hadn't been my question. I'd asked her whether mushrooms disagreed with Constantine Mitchell. There'd been absolutely no reason for her volunteering the story. Besides, Jane was too outspoken a person to tell a lie as well as that. The more useful hypothesis was that she'd been JANE CONTRIBUTES 133 telling me the truth. She'd been with the Defoes at the time of their death; she'd been intimately associated with Margaret all her life. Her way of speaking of the pair made it clear that they'd been devoted to each other. And equally clear that there'd been nothing about their friendship for Mitchell to cause any adverse comment. I felt absolutely certain that Jane would have caught the scent of scandal if there had been any and that she couldn't have helped dropping a faint hint of it to me. All right, I'd wash my surmise off the slate. What was left? Well, the unopened letter in the lining of Maurice Defoe's coat was left. The letter that some woman named Elsie had written him and that he hadn't bothered to read. In the light of my assurance that Margaret Defoe had not been unfaithful to her husband, had not seduced Mitchell from another loyalty and become his mistress, this Elsie came out in rather clearer colors as a morbidly jealous woman, utterly reckless, possibly actually unbalanced by her infatuation for Mitchell. What effect had the tragedy had upon her? It must have happened within a few days of her mailing that letter in St. Louis. Had it destroyed the tottering balance of her mind and was she now dead, or shut up in what is politely known as a sanatorium? 134 THE QUARTZ EYE Or had it roused her to a sense of her own folly so that she had pulled herself together and married, presently, a rich respectable man by the name of Miller? There was no serious improbability about one Elsie's falling in love with a man and his marrying another. I gave that possibility, though, no more than the courtesy of a bare recognition. Two Elsies got me nowhere, whereas one and the same Elsie would carry me, I thought, almost to the point where the whole story made sense. There was no use speculating why she didn't rush to Mitchell's bedside, nurse him through his long illness, and marry him out of hand, then. She might have been ill for a while herself; had a nervous breakdown. She'd written like a person on the verge of one. It was no good trying to pick her up again until after her husband, Miller, had died, leaving her at least moderately rich. By that time Mitchell had written a fairly successful play or two and his name was conspicuous enough to make him easy to find. She'd found him, and being rich and, according to Linda, still very pretty, she'd had, it was safe to assume, no trouble in marrying him, taking charge of him, carrying him off to Capri. Eventually, of course, his profession carried him back to New York. There Elsie found a factor in the situation she couldn't have counted on. She found JANE CONTRIBUTES '3 135 little Linda Defoe, Margaret's daughter, grown up into a celebrity, and a stage celebrity at that. She couldn't have prevented her husband from meeting the girl, and she probably didn't at first see any particular danger in it. She thought it, no doubt, the part of wisdom to take the initiative in making friends with her. It might even have been at her suggestion rather than her husband's that Linda rented the empty flat beneath their own. If there were any possible danger she'd rather have it under her eye. Presently though, she must have begun to feel that she'd made a mistake. Mitchell couldn't fail to be struck by Linda's resemblance to her mother; probably spoke of it to his wife, and in doing so reawakened the forgotten jealousy. He and Linda talked over old times. Poison to Elsie these talks must have been. She remembered that frantic letter she'd written to Maurice; wondered what had become of it; wondered what she had said in it. Linda talked about getting her father's and mother's things out of storage where they've been all those years. She did get them out eventually, took part of them in at the flat and sent the rest down to the cottage in the country. She was going to look them all over some day. Would she find that letter when she did? Was Linda falling in love with Connie, as women had always been wont to do? Was Connie falling in _ 136 THE QUARTZ EYE mmmi love with her? If she found that letter, would she show it to him? Of course she would. The thing became an obsession with her. She must find that letter before Linda did. The story Linda had told her about Paul made her think of him as a convenient tool. It was easy to find out enough about him to put him in her power. So the three funny things happened: the two burglaries and the hold-up. Paul couldn't find the letter-of course he couldn't. But last Thursday night while Connie was reading Mr. Hallstrom's letter, Linda told Elsie about what it said. Maurice Defoe's valise containing the things that had been upon his person the night he died! If the damnatory letter was still in existence it would be, with practical certainty, in that bag. Linda said she meant to send Paul to the hotel to get it the first thing in the morning. So Elsie as well as Linda, was on the watch for Paul's return. She intercepted him somehow. And then.. Well, I'd done enough guessing. What I needed now was a few more facts. Even as a piece of guesswork, though, it didn't hold together quite as well as I wished. There were soft spots in it, certainly two. And I was still guessing away as hard as ever when Linda sat erect and squeezed my hand. "Wake up, Carty!" she cried. "We're there! Have you had a nice nap?" CHAPTER VIII A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE IT WAS Jim's first trip, so Jane was telling him where to go. We turned through a gap in the stone fence and followed a worn cart track around the flank of a rather bleak little hill before we got a view of any of the buildings or of the orchard from whose trees Linda hoped eventually to eat apples. When I got my first glimpse, though, I understood Linda's having fallen in love with it. The little white house and the barn had the look of having, of their own choice, nestled down in a particularly snug hollow, and of liking it there. There were two or three big friendly maple trees standing around, and a lot of old-fashioned bushes which even I recognized: snowball, and syringa, and lilac. The depleted ranks of the orchard occupied the farther slope of the little cup-shaped valley. The cart track led only to the barn; Jim had left it and driven into the deep grass that grew around what I correctly guessed to be the kitchen door. There he I37 I38 THE QUARTZ EYE and Jane climbed down and began carrying our luggage inside. "Come along!!" said Linda. "I want you to look around a little before you go in." So we waded off through the grass and the clover. She offered to take me up to the top of the hill and show me the Sound, but I declined. I could see the small end of it any day, I told her, by sticking my head out of my window. "Well, that's the way I feel about it myself," she agreed. "But it's supposed to be our principal view. Come along and look at the barn instead. You can't see anything like that out of your window. Most of the artistic people," she added as we strolled along arm in arm toward this objective, "say that it stands where the house ought to and that I ought to live in it instead of in the house. Everybody has ideas for remodeling it." By now we were inside the big open door, and she concluded by asking, "Well, what do you think?" "I think it's a nice little barn, as is, and I'd leave it alone. I'd leave the whole place alone as much as I possibly could. It looks comfortable. It's been neglected of course, and that's half the charm of it." "It's funny," she remarked, "how many things you say that are just what I think. I'd like to have this for a real barn; keep a pony in it, and a cow." A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE I39 "With a crumpled horn," I suggested, "and a threelegged milk stool tied with a blue ribbon." "And a cat, and a rooster. It would be fun, wouldn't it?" "I could be the man..." I broke off there as my memory of the rhyme ran on a little further. It might have been taken as a proposal of marriage. But she went on with the idea composedly enough. "You aren't all tattered and torn," she said, surveying me candidly, "but I'm glad you aren't all dressed up, just the same. Come along and look at the house." She walked out into the yard as she spoke but I hung back. The peaceful drowsiness of the place was beginning to act on me like a drug, but I'd seen something that I thought I ought to think about: the imprint of a set of automobile tires clearly marked, almost modeled in the mud they'd brought in with them, on the floor. They looked hardly broad enough for the lordly Rolls-Royce. "It was a week ago to-day, wasn't it," I asked as I rejoined her in the yard, "that you and the Mitchells came down and found the cottage had been broken into? What car did you come in?" "My car," she said. "I remember that was a fine day," I remarked, "and I know it hasn't rained since. But the day be 140 THE QUARTZ EYE - -- -- --- -- -- fore-a week ago yesterday, that is-it rained hard, didn't it?" "Yes," she said, "I think it did." "How was it the day before that? The day Mrs. Mitchell drove you out?" "It rained a little, that day." "What car did you drive in?" "Elsie's limousine," she said. Then she looked at ne. "Carty, you're detecting again," she declared. "i won't have it! You're tired. Your eyes look tired. I don't believe that was a nap you took in the car. I think you were detecting all the time." "Just guessing a little," I conceded, as we moved on again toward the kitchen door. "Trying to tell myself a story that would make sense." I glanced at the tires of the Rolls-Royce. The treads were not the ones that had left their imprint on the barn floor. Linda broke off a sprig from a syringa bush that was growing near the doorway, inhaled the fragance from it for a moment, and then drew it through the buttonhole in the lapel of my coat. "I'm not going to take you into the house," she announced. "I don't trust you. You'd be looking for the broken window and finding clues. I know where I'm going to take you." A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE I4I She led me through the grass to one of the big maple trees. Two of its buttress-like roots formed a little hollow, and the ground, sloping gently away below it, made a natural seat that looked really comfortable. "Give me your overcoat," she commanded. It was certainly warm enough here in the sun without it. She folded it expertly into a cushion and put it down. But she wouldn't hear of taking the seat herself. She bullied me into it without very much trouble, and seating herself cross-legged beside me, picked a clover blossom and began methodically sucking the honey out of all the rolled-up petals. I had my hat pulled down over my eyes but not so far that I couldn't watch her. Presently, though, the charm worked, and I stopped watching. I slept so deeply I was a long while waking up. I gazed blankly around the empty landscape with only a slowly returning sense of where I was. I felt as if some enchantress had put a spell on me. Well, I was glad she'd had the grace to take herself off. A man sound asleep with his hat pulled over his eyes, his shoulders slanted one way and his head lopping over the other, isn't much of a sight for a girl to sit and look at very long. My seat was now in the shade, the sun having got 142 THE QUARTZ EYE behind a big bank of clouds. I got up rather creakingly and put on my overcoat and walked back toward the cottage. It took me a minute or two to account for a change I saw in the landscape, but I waked up a little more when I did. The car was gone. I stuck my head in the kitchen door and called a hollow hello, which got no response. Apparently I was alone on the place. I didn't mind that. I was pretty sure they hadn't driven back to town without me. I strolled around the house and there found I hadn't been left alone on the place after all. Down the hill, quite a distance off and seen against a background of some more distant trees so that she had the look of being in mid-air, I saw Linda on her wire. I knew, that is, that it must be Linda and that she must be on her wire. If I'd believed in the existence of wood nymphs or Peter Pans or Ariels, I'd have thought it was a creature of that sort. She had on a greenish garment like a child's romper, which left her arms and legs bare. It was a sexless sort of garment. The rhythms of her body seemed to give the lie to the belief that she had any weight at all, let alone that it was supported by and balanced upon a trembling unstable wire. I'm not going to try to tell you how beautiful it was. If you yourself have seen her on a wire, you'll A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE 4 I43 know, and until you have, you never will. Only there was an additional loveliness about it out there among the trees that Sunday afternoon in May, in what she did without an audience, or at least without the consciousness of one, spontaneously and for her own delight. I forbore f or a while to draw any nearer. I even meditated stealing away. I had an absurd fear that if she saw me she might be startled and fall. Presently, though, she did see me, stretched up on her toes, I think, and greeted me with a full arm wave. "Come down and be sociable," she called. So I, nothing loath, obeyed. She said she wasn't going to work very much longer. The car would be back pretty soon and when it came, Jane could start cooking our dinner. She'd gone to try to find a farmer who'd sell her some milk. Apparently Linda had been at play before, but now she went seriously to work. I can't tell you half the incredible things she did. She sat down on the wire; she did things on it that a gymnast does on a horizontal bar. She lay out on it with one leg dangling as negligently as if she'd been lying in a hammock. She was simply and completely master of the thing. "If Mr. Ziegfeld had ever seen you on a wire," I remarked, "he wouldn't think you needed any fire trick." _ __ _____ 144 THKE QUARTZ EYET 4 4.... T A E She came down at that with a swing and a swoop and stood, panting a little, beside me. "You're going to do it for me just the same," she said. I didn't contradict her. She acknowledged the fact that I did not with an approving pat on my shoulder and then turned to cast off the tackle that had maintained the tension of her wire. I saw what she wanted done and told her I'd attend to it. It was blowing up cool now the sky was clouding over and I didn't want her to get chilled. Just then we heard her car coming back, or thought we did. "All right," she said. "Bring the wire up and put it in the barn. We keep it there so that it won't get rusty. I'll tell Jane to begin getting dinner while I dress. We won't wait for the Mitchells. I'm as hungry as a bear. They're sure not to come if it looks like rain. Thunder-storms drive him perfectly wild." It took me two or three minutes to get the wire detached from its tackle and coiled so that I could carry it. When it was done I followed at my leisure the route she'd taken to the house. As I cleared the little rise of land I saw that the car we'd heard driving in hadn't been Linda's. It was instead a rather smart-looking, maroon-colored coupe. Linda stood near it talking in animated fashion to a A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE I45 man, telling him how glad she was he'd come. Neither of them had seen me and I slowed down a bit, a little at a loss, as one is likely to be in a situation of that sort, whether to come straight up and interrupt them or not, and faintly disturbed, too, that Linda, warm from her exertions, should be standing there in the cool breeze without nearly enough on. I guessed the man to be Mitchell, and wondered rather uncomfortably whether he'd driven out without his wife. Then I saw that he hadn't. I dragged my gaze away from them merely in order not to be caught staring, and it happened to alight on one of the upper windows in the two-story part of the house. It was open, and standing back from it a little, gazing down with a formidable, rather feline intentness at the pair I had hesitated to interrupt, was a woman. I couldn't see much more than what was suggested by her feral pose; indeed I didn't stop for more than that but moved forward to make my presence known to the others. Linda caught sight of me first. "Oh, here he is!" she said. "Carty, this is Connie Mitchell. They've come, after all. Elsie's up in my room taking off her things.-And I'm going in," she added, with a voluntary shiver, "to put some on." Mitchell shook hands with me and nodded a farewell to her simultaneously. __ I46 THE QUARTZ EYE - - -- -- -- "I don't feel much like going indoors," he said, "do you? There's my favorite bench beside the barn door. I like to sit there and chew a straw, and whittle." I had assented to his proposal somehow and now followed him over toward the barn, where, after putting Linda's wire inside, I found him on the bench. Undeniably he was a highly attractive person. He was still boyish looking despite his probable forty years, strikingly handsome, but untainted by any trace of complacent consciousness of the fact, pleasantly vague in manner-you could see at a glance that any strong preoccupation would make him absent-mindedyet with an occasional flash of romantic brightness and intensity both in his look and in his smile. I didn't wonder that women, as Linda said, were always falling in love with him, nor that his wife was jealous of him. But I corrected at once an inference I'd drawn from these facts. He wasn't a lady-killer in the least, but the sort of person men could like. Offhand I liked him myself. He was in knickers and a Norfolk jacket, and he took off a baggy golf cap and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. As I sat down beside him he said a surprising thing. "I owe you an apology, Mr. Carter, for the com A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE 147 mission of a gross impertinence. I don't know whether you know it or not, but it's true just the same. I followed you home the other night." I stared at him. "That was you!" I exclaimed. "You knew you were being followed, then. Well, I don't wonder. I'd never tried to do such a thing bef ore. But I came home pretty late that night just in time to see you come up out of our area. I've been worried about Linda lately,-both my wife and I have been,-about some queer things that have been happening to her." "Heavens!" I cried. "If you saw me come out of your area I don't wonder that you followed me home. What I don't see is why you didn't turn me over, then and there, to the first policeman." "I think that's probably what I'd have done," he said, "if it weren't that Linda had put us all under a categorical injunction that the police weren't to be taken into the matter at all. It worked out fortunately in this case. I'd have felt particularly silly if I'd had you arrested and then found out who you were. I feel foolish enough over having followed you home. As a matter of fact, I've never confessed, either to Linda or to my wife, that I did. But don't you think, just the same, that she's making a mistake in doing nothing about it?" _ I48 THE QUARTZ EYE - -- -- - -- I answered non-committally and diffusely, trying to talk enough to keep him from perceiving that I wasn't really saying anything. One could understand, I observed, the reluctance of an actress like Linda to do anything that might look like a threadbare bid for publicity. Of course, if the same sort of queer things went on happening she'd be forced to take the police in on it. But if she'd got to the end of the series I supposed she could afford to forget about it. He disconcerted me then by remarking, "You know, then, what's happened so far?" I remembered Linda's having told me on the drive down that she'd said nothing to the Mitchells of my self-assumed activities as a detective. "Why," I said lamely, "I guess I've heard most of it-thanks largely to Jane. She seemed to take the incidents a good deal more seriously than Linda did. At least," I added, "she took them seriously until Paul finally absconded with Linda's five hundred dollars. But from what she told me this morning I take it she feels much relieved, though, as she says, she's careful about money. She regards his clearing out as cheap at the price." Mitchell asked me a question, gravely, his manner intent. "Is that your opinion? I mean, that Paul was at the bottom of the whole thing?" It wasn't easy to give him an evasive answer, but I __ A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE 149 managed it. I said that I'd never seen Paul. I'd had two accounts of him, one from Linda, which was partial to him, and one from Jane, who was obviously prejudiced against him. "Your opinion on that matter," I concluded, "is worth a lot more than mine." I didn't look at him as I spoke and my mind was occupied with something very remote from my words. It had occurred to me almost with the force of an explosion that he might have stumbled upon some horrifying suspicion of his own wife. If she were indeed the woman who had written the letter which Doris had found in the lining of Maurice Defoe's coat, a passionate, reckless person like that might have left some telltale clue lying about. She very likely would have roused his suspicion just from the psychological picture of herself she'd been presenting him during the past ten days. What a hellish position it would be for a man to be in! "I can't throw any real light on Paul," he said soberly in answer to that last suggestion of mine. "But maybe, as Linda says, I've taken the whole affair too seriously. Of course my affection for her is of very long standing. I couldn't bear to have anything happen to her. I've felt that I ought to have done more to protect her. But I haven't seen quite what I could do. I'm rather a broken reed in a situation like this. 150 THE QUARTZ EYE I hoped when I'd heard that she'd made friends with you and when I learned who you were... Wellthat you wouldn't confine your interest in her to the fire trick she says you're going to invent for her next show." "I don't believe," I said, "that any man she made friends with could confine his interest in her in that manner. Anyhow, I'm sure it would be impossible for me to." The big green car drove up just then and afforded a welcome interruption. As long as it was obviously impossible to ask Mitchell what his wife's maiden name had been and whether he'd known her back in the days when he was a publicity man with the circus, I didn't much want to go on talking over the mystery with him. "There comes a bright prospect of dinner," I said, getting on my feet. "And I suppose we'd better begin getting in a frame of mind for it. Linda's put a taboo on the mystery for to-day, anyhow. She says this is to be a Sunday in the country. So I propose we make the most of it." He agreed, with a rather melancholy smile which that glimpse I'd had of his wife at the window made it easy for me to understand, and moved off toward the house. I paused to light a fresh cigarette and take a look at the sky before I followed him. It was going A GLIMPSE OF ELSIE 151 to rain, for a fact. Linda's picnic dinner would have to be eaten indoors. I paused again for a look at Mitchell's coupe which stood before the door. It was done idly, and my glance at the tires was automatic. But the tread was the same as that of the tires that had left their print upon the barn floor! It gave me a bad wrench, for a moment. It was Elsie's car, not her husband's, which I'd expected to leave incriminatintg prints.-Wait a minute, though! Her car was a limousine. She'd never have taken her own chauffeur on an errand like that. Of course she'd borrowed Connie's car. And taken Paul along to drive it for her? CHAPTER IX MUSHROOMS IF IT had not been for my earlier glimpse of her at the window I think that all my theories about Elsie Mitchell would have gone up in smoke with my first look at her in Linda's kitchen. She entered the room from another door just as I came in from the outside. There was no one else in the room at that moment and she greeted me with an instantaneous smile, said, "I'm sure this must be Mr. Carter. I'm Elsie Mitchell," and came across the room to shake hands with me. She was a very small woman, a couple of sizes smaller than Linda, who isn't very big, herself, and across a fairly large room you could have taken her for a pert schoolgirl. She had blonde hair, big blue eyes, and a tiny nose and mouth. The largeness of her head and face undoubtedly accented the smallness of these features. The fairness of her skin lent credibility to the color of her hair. I don't profess expertness in such matters, but I'd venture a guess that her blondeI52 M U S H ROO M S 153 ness was natural. As she came nearer, and especially when her face relaxed into repose after the effort of that welcoming smile, you could see lines in it that betrayed her true age as not much less than her husband's. I'll admit, though, that my description is a hostile one. Linda was perfectly justified in speaking of her as very pretty and attractive. And as for the possibility that a woman with a weak little mouth and an insignificant nose like that and those wide-open, baby blue eyes, could be a murderess, or even a housebreaker, it was fantastic-or would have seemed so if I hadn't remembered how she'd stood looking down on Linda and her husband from that upper window. I felt a reluctance to shake hands with her, but I don't think I betrayed it. "Linda's up-stairs dressing," she told me brightly. "And Connie's out in the wash-house helping Jane cook. I'm supposed to be setting the table because it looks too much like rain to eat outdoors. Aren't you crazy about this place of Linda's?" I remarked that I hadn't been in the house before. I'd spent most of the afternoon, I told her, sleeping out under a tree. I thought she looked a little skeptical at that, but she didn't question it and proceeded to explain the place to me. This was really the kitchen and had been used as _~ _ I54 THE QUART TZ EYE~ '54 THE QUARTZ EYE such. It must be a hundred and fifty years old at least. There was a huge bake-oven built into the chimney beside the fireplace. Linda's culinary operations, however, were all conducted in the little lean-to she'd spoken of as the wash-house, which contained a pump and a sink and a modern oil-stove. I agreed with Mrs. Mitchell that this was much too attractive a room to be desecrated by an oil-stove. It occupied the whole width of the broad squat gable, with windows on both sides as well as in the end, and it went right up to the hand-hewn rafters. It was sparsely furnished, which to my mind added to the pleasantness of it; unless you counted two built-in cupboards, there was nothing but a plain drop-leaf table and a few chairs. Mrs. Mitchell, it appeared, regretted this. She'd been trying to persuade Linda to have built-unless she could find proper old ones-a pair of oak settles to flank the fireplace. I exhibited a hypocritical interest in this project and asked what I could do to help with the supper. "I'd be glad if you'd help me move that table away from the window," she surprised me by saying. "Anywhere, more in the middle of the room. Over here by the fireplace would do. It's getting so dark outside that we'll have to light the lamp, anyway." MU S H ROOMS I55 I still didn't see any point to the change and must have looked rather unconvinced for she added, with an edge of irritation in her voice, "My husband can't bear to sit near a window in a thunder-storm. I'd like to get the table away before he comes in and notices that we're changing it." Apparently she was fond of him and not merely jealous. But any one, with nothing else to go on, who watched her as I did while she fussed about setting the table and who listened to the commonplaces she talked, would have sworn she never in her life had been in the grip of a violent passion or done a revolutionary thing. I almost would have sworn it myself. I changed my mind a few minutes later. Linda had come down-stairs and decided that it would be pleasant to have a fire, which I undertook to build. There was plenty of big wood in the wood box but a scarcity of kindling, and on my mentioning it, she remembered having seen a Cape Cod lighter in one of the closets up-stairs. She was busy helping Mrs. Mitchell with the table and as Mitchell appeared just then from the washhouse, his duties as assistant cook at an end, she asked him to go up and get it. He started off obediently but presently called back a question that made it plain he hadn't an idea where he was to look. 156 THE QUARTZ EYE Linda called, "I'll show you," put down whatever was in her hands and darted after him up the stairs. It was the most innocently natural thing in the world. I was crouching before the fireplace, and, thinking that I might do well enough after all with the kindling I had, I turned but without rising to call after them that they needn't bother. I didn't do it, though. It's the only time in my life that I ever felt my voice freeze in my throat. Oblivious of my presence in the room the woman stood staring at the door they'd gone out by, her pretty doll's face convulsed with fury. It was a transformation to haunt a man's dreams. If it had been a look like that that Linda had told me of having seen when they were discussing Hallstrom's letter, I didn't wonder she'd been appalled. It was gone in a moment as she heard them coming back down-stairs. I think, though, that Mitchell caught the aftermath of it, for he was very silent for a long time after that. Indeed he hardly spoke at all until, half-way through the meal, he suddenly began to talk. The thunder-storm, which began in earnest about the time we sat down at the table, may have accounted for it, though, except for what his wife had just told me, I shouldn't have guessed that it distressed him. He didn't betray it in any of the obvious ways, M USH ROO M S I57 didn't flinch at the flashes of lightning, nor change color when the thunder pealed. Indeed his wife showed more of the symptoms of fright than he, and I suspected it had been on her own account she wanted the table moved away from the window until I guessed from the way she kept looking at him that it was her husband's state of mind that alarmed her. He was in a queer mood, for a fact; drawn in on himself; introverted, as the psychologists would say, to a point where he seemed all but unconscious of what was going on about him. It was like sitting down to dinner with a somnambulist. It was an uncanny sort of meal, vaguely terrifying from the start. Linda was more like her normal self than any of the rest of us, but even she was embarrassed and distressed over the blight that had settled upon her picnic. She attributed it wholly, I think, to the other woman's jealousy. The thing that obsessed me at the beginning of the meal was those damned mushrooms. Jane hadn't put them on the table yet, and I was wondering what would happen to Mitchell when she did. He might have discovered them when he was helping Jane out in the wash-house, or he might not. I got every now and then an imploring glance from Linda that could only mean she wanted me to talk. I58 THE QUARTZ EYE ---- -- - -- -- --- I'd have obeyed her if I could, but every topic I could think of seemed to me to be loaded with dynamite and I didn't feel that high explosives were what that party needed. But Elsie Mitchell wasn't so scrupulous. She, for whatever motives you please to assign,-malice, bravado, anything but friendliness,-broke through Linda's taboo and began talking about Paul; speculating whether any more funny things were going to happen to Linda or whether she was finally rid of him, and wondering what his motive could have been for stealing Mr. Hallstrom's valise. "Poor Paul," Linda said. "He couldn't have got anything out of it after all. Mr. Hallstrom had wrapped up all father's valuables separately-his snuffbox, and his watch, and his cigarette case-and sent them to me by registered mail. It was sort of ghostly, because his cigarettes were still in his cigarette case, and the digestion pills he used to take in the snuff-box. So there couldn't have been anything in the bag when Paul got it but father's old clothes." "I should think he'd have kept the valise, anyway," Mrs. Mitchell remarked. "Connie still swears by his; carries it everywhere." She added with an unpleasant sort of laugh, "It's a pity Paul couldn't have stolen his that day instead of your father's. It had a brand-new M U S H ROO M S 159 pair of twenty-four-dollar silk pajamas in it, and goodness knows what, besides." This remark, lugged in as it was, was perfectly recognizable as one of those deadly domestic digs which husbands and wives sometimes publicly indulge in at each other's expense. You don't know where the venom in them lies, and you're too bored to care. In this instance I welcomed it as carrying us away, permanently I hoped, from Paul. I don't know whether it would have worked as well as that all by itself or not, but the storm took a hand just then with an interruption of its own. There was a perfectly terrible glare of lightning and an appalling crash. It had struck, we found out later, a tree not fifty yards from the house. "You've got good nerves," Linda remarked approvingly to me when we had, as it were, come to. I happened to be the only one of us who had sat tight. The others had all sprung away from the table. "I suppose," Mrs. Mitchell said, with a silly sort of laugh, "it's probably because he makes artificial lightning in his laboratory. I've always thought that a laboratory must be a fascinating place. I should think everybody would have one, now, so that you could test your bootleg liquor without giving it all away in samples." I6o THE QUARTZ EYE I had begun assuring her that testing gin for wood alcohol was not one of the things my laboratory was equipped to do, when I saw that I'd been providentially supplied with something I could talk about. I knew they'd be bored but I didn't care. I began telling them what I really did in my laboratory. I explained to them how the factor that controlled the visibility of an ultra-minute object was not the power of the lenses you looked at it through, but the wave length of the light you looked at it by. You couldn't see a thing that was smaller than the length of the wave of light. The only way to render the smallest micro-organism visible was by photographing it through a microscope, using quartz lenses throughout, by a light whose wave length was so short as to make it invisible to the eye. You had to stain most things, I went on to say, in order to make them visible through the microscope, and invisible light affected these stains in such peculiar ways that I'd found I had to make a study of the whole subject. "And that's how," I concluded, directing the remark to Linda, (both women sat across the table from me) "I came upon the thing that's going to do your fire trick. You never can tell when you start where you're going to bring up." "No," Elsie Mitchell said, with a note of finality, "you certainly can't." ___ M U S H ROO M S i6I U S Om... Well, I'd done my best. I'd been discoursing away steadily for fifteen minutes and my talk had at least covered the arrival of the mushrooms. Jane had brought them in and gone out again, and nothing had happened. There was a dead silence for a minute or two after Elsie Mitchell's remark had dismissed my laboratory to limbo. I think we were all startled-I know I was-when Constantine Mitchell broke it. "A night like this," he said, "takes me back. Rain drumming on the big top and the lightning showing green through the wet canvas. The crowd getting uneasy, squirming on their seats. The animals getting uneasy, too; the keepers watching the elephants, on the one chance in a hundred of a stampede. And the show going on all the while as if nothing could possibly happen." He had begun talking dreamily, like a man entranced, and the effect of it at first was to make my flesh creep a little, but as he went on his manner became more animated and his far-away voice took on a new timbre. The circus, as it happened, had never been one of the romances of my life,-I don't think it often is to one whose boyhood has been spent in a great city,-but listening to him, I felt it and understood it. Linda might say what she liked about his not having been real circus, but he must have been a great ___ I62 TH E QUARTZ EYE publicity man; all the greater, perhaps, for his having kept an outsider's view of it. I wondered, but didn't interrupt him to ask, whether he had ever written a book or a play about it. I had an idea that if he had Linda would have told me of it. I felt pretty sure from the look in her face that she'd never heard him talk like this before. He took us through the whole circus day, from early in the morning when the folk climbed sleepily down from their cars in a strange town-name unknown, perhaps-and inquired their way to the lot where the cook-tent had been up for hours and breakfast was waiting for them, till eleven o'clock at night when they climbed back into the same cars, the cooktent with its equipment and its servitors already well on the way to the next town, concocted their little suppers and went to bed in what was the only home they had for six months in the year. He wasn't very consecutive about it. It was a mosaic of brilliant details that you were allowed to fit into a pattern for yourself. The dressing-tent with its long line of little uniform trunks, moved every day yet always in the same relative place; the French pastrycook, temperamental as an opera singer; the dean of the clowns, a fine, dignified, old gentleman of seventy, spending his busy mornings making animal heads of M U S H R OOM M S i63 papier-mache for totally different sorts of animals to wear. He told about the getting ready, in something more like bustle than you could find at any other time of the day, for the parade, old Albert, the odd-job elephant (it appeared that elephants always had names like that), being summoned from his peaceful hay to butt or lift a gaudy wagon out of the rut a six-horse team couldn't stir it from and then shuffling away casually, when his keeper's back was turned, into the women's dressingtent to pick up an odd loaf of bread or so that some one was sure to have saved for him. He talked about what circus people were like, how friendly and unsuspicious, how simply good. He spoke of Linda's father and mother; how they had befriended him; how many times after the show they'd asked him to supper with them in the half of a car that was their house; what a homelike place it was and how much, by skilful contriving, they managed to pack into it-even Margaret's little piano that Linda used to hate so to have to practise on. "They took good care of her," he said, speaking oddly as if that Linda were a totally different person from the girl at whose table he sat. "Margaret would have given her life for her. She lived for her. No child ever had a better start. Regular as a clock. She i64 THE QUARTZ EYE never sat up for any of our little suppers. Always sound asleep in her berth before that. Yet Margaiet didn't want her to grow up in the circus. She wanted her taken out of it." I hadn't missed a word of it, but I had been watching with increasing tensity the two women who sat across the table from me. Mrs. Mitchell, after her first startled look at her husband when he began to talk, had lowered her eyes and settled her face into a mask of patient endurance. At least she meant it to betray no more than that. But as time went on the lines in it were bitten in deeper and the planes of it sagged until she looked haggard, old-fifty years old. And toward the end, when he began to speak of Linda's parents and of Linda herself, I could see her knuckles whiten every now and then, as she clenched her hands. Linda hadn't at first, as I'd seen plainly enough, wanted him to talk about the circus. She'd listened with reluctance. Presently, though, the spell had got her. Her face came alight. I could see memories go over it like ripples over water-echoes of things he was saying. She never spoke nor moved and she seemed even to be breathing small in order not to break in upon his mood. And yet it was she, and not his wife, who interrupted him. The interruption came-it was not in words-as MUSHROOMS I65................ he was saying she never was at any of their suppers, always sound asleep in her berth. She gave a little gasp-that was all it was-and a queer look came into her eyes. He went on without pausing and said what he evidently wanted to say about her mother's wish that she leave the circus. Then, breaking off, he asked her: "Have you remembered something? It must seem like a dream to you." "It used to. It's seemed realer lately and I've been remembering things. But this thing that I remembered just now is-queer. It's really awfully queer. I haven't thought of it since I was a little girl. "That last night, Connie, the night father and mother died, I wasn't asleep when you had supper. I pretended to be. I pretended it because I was a greedy little pig and loved creamed mushrooms. And I thought if I stayed awake and kept quiet till father and mother had gone to bed, I could sneak out and eat any that they might have left. "Connie, I did sneak out and there were a lot left. You couldn't have eaten very much, any of you. And I ate them all. Ate the dish up clean. And then I got back into bed. "I hadn't got to sleep when I heard mother begin to groan and then father got up and dressed and went to get help. I never saw him after that. Some other people came and got mother. And they were both I66 THE QUARTZ EYE dead by morning and you were, nearly. But the mushrooms didn't even make me sick. "I felt horribly guilty and ashamed of-of having done something they wouldn't have wanted me to just before they died. Nobody asked me about it and I didn't tell. I forgot it just as quickly as I could.-But why do you suppose the mushrooms didn't hurt me? I suppose all the poison ones must have been in the part you ate, or else I must be immune to that kind of poison. But it's queer, isn't it?" I knew, of course, long before she'd done speaking that Margaret and Maurice Defoe had been murdered and that Mitchell had escaped an attempted murder by something like a miracle. By no conceivable perversion of probabilities could all the death-cup fungus in that dish have been eaten by chance by the three adults and the harmless mushrooms left. And an immunity to death-cup would be about as incredible as an immunity to prussic acid. The three had been poisoned, but who had been the poisoner? I hadn't had time to explore the ghastly surmise that leaped into my mind when I felt a pressure on my knees that made me look across the table. Mitchell's wife, her face chalk white, had slumped down in her seat and was sliding under the table. She was in a dead faint. CHAPTER X WRAPPED IN A RUG LINDA saw what was happening in time, not indeed to catch Mrs. Mitchell, but to break the force of her fall. Between us we lugged her away from the table and stretched her out flat on the floor near one of the windows, which I then opened. A simple fainting fit like that creates more consternation in a convivial company than its importance deserves, but in this instance I felt it a relief, and I suspect Linda did, to be given an excuse for doing something. Jane heard the commotion of course, and came in to see what it was all about. I got a hunch from her manner that she didn't like the woman any better than I did. However, she set about helping Linda revive her in a perfectly competent way. She went back to the wash-house for a bucket of water and dashed a handful of it in Mrs. Mitchell's white face. It was the first time I'd ever seen this old-fashioned remedy applied. It worked to the extent of producing a gasp, and probI67 I68 THE QUARTZ EYE ably started the heart going again, for the face lost the deathlike quality of its pallor. As soon as I saw that, I turned my attention to Mitchell. He had been pacing the room like a man distraught, coming up to look at her, then turning away as if he couldn't bear the sight. He didn't offer to do anything; hadn't touched her from the moment she'd slumped out of her chair. His excitement and distraction hadn't, however, until now impressed me as especially remarkable, if one took into account what a temperamental, high-strung sort of chap he was. But when I said to him reassuringly, "She's coming around now, I think. She's breathing again and getting a little color," it struck me that he didn't respond to this observation at all. He made a mechanical, halfarticulate reply, as if he hadn't listened to what I'd said. That set me wondering. I recalled the surmise that had broken over me while we sat on the bench beside the barn door, that he had some reason for suspecting his wife in connection with the queer things that had been happening to Linda. But had he also connected these queer things with the murder of Maurice and Margaret Defoe and with the not quite successful attempt upon his own life? He must know a lot more about the situation than I supposed if his __ __ _ _ __ _ _ WRAPPED IN A RUG I69 mind had bridged that twelve-year gap. But what he did now looked rather like it. As the signs of returning animation about the fainting woman became stronger, he stopped walking about the room and stood near by, watching her. He still didn't offer to stoop over and chafe her hands, or to touch her in any way. He seemed to be waiting for something. At last she spoke faintly, "I'm all right now. I'm sorry to have made so much trouble. I don't know why I was so silly. Is Connie here?" Even then he didn't speak. It was Jane who answered her question, humoringly, as one would speak to a scared child. "I should say he was here! He's been charging up and down this room like a wild man. You've scared him half out of his wits." She opened her eyes, but apparently they were too swimmy to see much with, for she closed them again with a little sigh. I thought for a minute that she was going to slip off again, but she didn't. Queerly enough, Jane's assurance satisfied her. She hadn't seen Mitchell, I was sure. But it struck me that her speaking had been what he waited for, for the next moment he came around to me, took me by the arm and led me toward the door in I70 THE QUARTZ EYE II II I I II II I I II I I n I IL IIUIii II 7 — --- an urgent, peremptory manner that showed him still to be in a state of high excitement. 'I must go back to town at once," he said. "It's of the first importance. She isn't well enough to travel and I can't wait for her. Anyhow, she'll do better in the big car. I'm sure Linda will make room for her." He picked up his hat and overcoat, and he so obviously wanted to get away without attracting attention that I opened the door for him and accompanied him to the car outside. "Make my apologies to Linda, won't you?" I told him I would, and added that I had very much enjoyed meeting him and that I hoped to see him again before long. "Yes," he said, absently again, "I hope so." With that he started his motor, backed through the grass into the cart track and whipped away. When I came back into the kitchen Linda looked up at me and asked, "Did Connie go for a doctor? He needn't have. She's going to be all right." If I'd been a little quicker witted I'd have adopted this excuse for his rushing off like that; accepted it by implication, anyhow. But instead, I blurted out that he'd gone back to town and had left word that we were to bring Mrs. Mitchell in with us. WRAPPED IN A RUG 17I The information had an extraordinary effect on his wife. "He's gone, has he!" she cried, sitting erect in spite of Jane's protests. "Why did you let him go before he talked with me? He ought to have given me a chance. Why did you let him go, you fool! He's gone!" She began laughing and crying hysterically. Jane pulled her unceremoniously to her feet, but put an arm around her when she reeled. "We'd best put her on one of the beds up-stairs, I guess," she said. She was still sobbing and laughing wildly as they half carried her out of the room. Left to my own devices I sat down, rather limply, before the fire I'd built and lighted a cigarette. I told myself firmly that this was a good chance to think things out a little. But as a matter of fact, I sat there with a perfectly vacant mind. My memory was well occupied, though, with pictures of Linda: Linda listening to Connie Mitchell's talk about the circus; Linda dancing along like a playful faun upon her wire; Linda sucking the honey out of that clover blossom; Linda kissing me and telling me she hoped I'd take this Sunday in the country for a holiday. What a holiday! At that I wouldn't have traded it for any other day that I could remember. I wished Connie Mitchell hadn't run off and left us to bring his wife back to town with us. I certainly I72 THE QUARTZ EYE didn't like that woman. I was sorry for her-at least I recognized that I ought to be. Every little while, even now, the murmur of voices that came to me from the bedroom up-stairs was torn by a cry of manifest despair. After quite a while, when things had quieted down a little, Linda came back into the kitchen alone. "Oh, Carty," she cried, "I'm glad you're here! Take me out of this for a little while, will you? We've promised Elsie that if she'll be quiet for half an hour, lie still and rest and not cry or talk, we'll start back to town. Jane will take care of her. Let's go out. It's stopped raining, hasn't it?" "Yes," I said after having opened the door to investigate, "but everything's soaking wet." "There's a sort of path up the hill that's too rocky to be very wet, and at the top there's an old broken settee we could sit on. Oh, Carty, don't be sensible!" "I don't feel sensible," I told her. "And I'm all for trying the little path up the hill. You ought to have on something warmer than that, though. Where's your coat?" She'd worn to her picnic a suit of homespun, or something of the sort, but she'd discarded the coat that went with it and what had been underneath was what I think is called a blouse, of ivory-colored silk. WRAPPED IN A RUG I73 -- - -- - -- -- "This is warmer than it looks," she said. "And my coat's in the room where Elsie is. I won't go back for it." "How's this?" I asked, picking up an automobile rug that had been flung down in a heap on the windowseat. "Will this do?" She frowned at it absently and then said, "Yes, of course. That will be fine. Come along." I knew it would be more manageable if I stopped to fold it but I felt I'd fussed enough, so I wadded it up anyhow and started after her. It certainly was not a sensible excursion. The deep grass, knee high, was heavy with water and we had to wade about in it quite a while before we could find the beginning of the path. Linda professed to know where it was, and acted as guide, leading me along by the hand. It was still daylight of course-not much after sunset-but the sky was still heavily clouded over. I thought it was more likely to rain again than not. It was something of a scramble getting up the hill for the path was steep as well as slippery. My rug escaped once or twice, as I had feared it would, and was rather draggled before we got to the top. We found it pretty windy up there, and the distant Sound, when Linda dutifully pointed it out, was a leadcolored strip about as beautiful as the gutter on a roof. II_.................................................................. I74 THE QUARTZ EYE '74 THE QUARTZ EYE The place had the cardinal merit of solitude, however. We were too high above the road for it to be visible and there wasn't a habitation in sight. I didn't feel the need of any romantic accessories; sunsets or afterglows or rising moons. I shook out the wettish rug over the wetter settee and invited Linda to sit down and wrap herself up in it. She pointed out that it was big enough for both of us, and this amendment I adopted. The settee proved more comfortable than its appearance prophesied. Indeed, after a few adjustments we were very snug indeed. I began by holding up the rug with my left arm which naturally went around behind her, but presently found it worked better if I transferred this duty to my other hand. She put her head down on my shoulder. She felt as soft and warm and contented in there as a kitten. "We've got to talk," she said, "but we won't begin for a while." Talk about what had happened, she must have meant, for almost at once she said, "Isn't it ridiculous to like anybody as well as this when you've known him two days?" I said that I didn't think it was ridiculous. In the circumstances I wouldn't even call it rash. "Anyhow," I added, "you've got nothing on me." WRAPPED IN A RUG 175 She argued that she had. "At least, I've liked you longer than you've liked me. I liked you the first second I saw you. You were thinking so hard and you looked so cross. You were cross, too. You didn't like me a bit at first. You'd have liked to wring my neck." "Oh, I wouldn't have gone as far as that under any circumstances," I said. "But I admit I was peevish." The word seemed to amuse her. I felt her chuckle at it. "And what I can't understand is," I concluded, "why you liked me that way." "Anybody can be nice," she said, "when they're feeling amiable. But when you find some one who can be cross and nice, as well as nice and cross.. Oh well, I see there's no use reporting this conversation any further. But eventually, after a rather sober silence, "Carty," she asked, "can you understand it at all? Have you any idea what it's all about? She thinks that Connie's left her; that he'll never forgive her. She said two or three times, 'It was all my fault! He must know it was all my fault!' I asked her once what she meant, and she just stared at me as if she didn't know who I was; as if she thought I was some one else; almost as if I were a ghost. Do you believe in ghosts, Carty?" 176 THE QUARTZ EYE I told her I didn't, and then suggested, "You may have reminded her of your mother. You look a lot like her, you know." "But it was Connie who knew my father and mother, not Elsie. She never knew my mother.-Did she?" "I think she may have seen her and known who she was. Do you know anything about her, Linda? Where she came from or what her name was before she married Miller?" She sat erect and stared at me. "Carty, you asked me that this morning. Did you think then, long before this happened, that she might have known my father and mother?" "It was one of the possibilities I was playing with," I told her. Apparently she saw I didn't want to go any further with it just then, for after an intent look at me she put her head down again and answered my question. "I'm sure I never heard what her maiden name was, and I don't really know where she comes from. But she's spoken once or twice about St. Louis as if she knew it pretty well." Well, that fitted in all right. The envelope of that letter in Maurice's coat was postmarked St. Louis. "It's a little bit funny," Linda went on, "that I WRAPPED IN A RUG I77 don't know more about her. We've been together a lot since last fall but she's never talked much about herself. She never seems to like to have Connie talk about old times, either. I suppose she's done something probably that she wants to forget about. But why should it have anything to do with what I was saying just before she fainted? And why did Connie think it had?" "What makes you think he thought it had?" "Well, naturally, I was looking at him when I started to tell about what happened that night in the car. But he didn't look at me. He was looking at her. A sort of terrified look, as if he'd guessed something or understood something, and as if he was waiting for her to look at him. Carty, what horrible thing had she done? And what could anything I said have to do with his guessing?" I hated to do it but I couldn't see how the thing could be evaded any longer. I know that, in spite of the warmth of the rug and her body nestled so close to mine, my teeth were chattering so that I could hardly speak. "What you said was that it was you who finished off that dish of mushrooms that were supposed to have poisoned them. They'd eaten hardly any and had left you nearly the whole lot. Well, that means-it must 178 THE QUARTZ EYE - - - -- mean; there's no getting away from it-that it wasn't the mushrooms that poisoned them. They were poisoned, but it was by something else." She sat erect at that, gazing at me with horrorstricken eyes; then wilted down, shuddering, into the shelter of my arm again. I didn't try to press the matter any further for a while, contenting myself with holding her close. "Was that what you were thinking this morning," she asked at last, "up at the flat when I saw how worried and tired you looked?" "No," I told her. "Jane had been telling me on the way home from the delicatessen that they died from eating poisoned mushrooms. I had no reason to doubt that until your story showed that it was impossible." "Well then, where did Elsie come in? What made you think she'd anything to do with it?" "There was a letter in the valise," I said; "in the lining of your father's coat, signed by an Elsie somebody. I couldn't make the name out very well. It began with B. She was in love with Constantine Mitchell, and she was jealous of your mother. She thought he was falling in love with her. She wanted your father to do something about it. It was a frenzied sort of letter and it had a threat in it. Your father never read it. It was still sealed when I found it. WRAPPED IN A RUG 179 "I thought when I'd opened and read it that she must be the Some One I'd been talking to you about and that the letter was the thing she wanted. She wanted to find it and destroy it before you found it. I thought she'd used some hold she'd had over Paul to make him try to get it for her, from the fear that if you found it you might show it to her husband. "The motive troubled me a little, as not strong enough to account for the violence of her efforts to get it back. But if she did carry out her threat to do something, and the assumption now is that she did, the letter of course is incriminating. She'd have to get it back. She couldn't know a moment's security until she did." "I'm glad father didn't read that letter," Linda said thoughtfully. I agreed. She mused a while in silence; then began thinking aloud. "I was nothing but a little girl of course, but then twelve isn't so awfully young after all. I must have known quite a lot. I know that mother was awfully fond of Connie. Father was, too. They sort of looked after him. People naturally do that. He's helpless, and so up and down, depressed and then awfully confident. When he first came out with us as a publicity man he didn't know anything about the circus at all. 180 THE QUARTZ EYE I used to take him around and show him things. And father must have helped him a lot. "I remember mother used to do his mending for him. He always sat with us-at our table, I meanin the cook-tent, whenever he came back with the show. I used to love to have him come back because he nearly always brought a present. He gave father that kit-bag, too. I don't believe he ever gave mother anything. But then, he wouldn't. They don't do things like that in the circus. "Of course he must have adored her. She was the kindest gayest thing and lovely to look at. In her tights and tunic, or when she was all undressed, she didn't look solid at all. She hadn't any big muscles the way most acrobats have. She was just like a little statue. I think she was always happy. I know I never saw her cry in my life. "It's funny she should have told Connie she didn't want me to grow up in the circus. She adored the circus. And she liked trouping better than anything else. The year never began with her until we left the Garden and started out under the tops. Why didn't she want me to grow up in it?" I couldn't answer that. "She was devoted to your father, wasn't she? That was what I gathered from what Jane told me this morning." WRAPPED IN A RUG I81 "They just lived together," Linda said simply. "They were just like that"-she interlocked her fingers with mine by way of illustration-"in everything. I know they were. I couldn't have been wrong about it. We lived in such close quarters, you see. How could Elsie have thought there was anything wrong between them?" "Well, we know she's jealous," I said, "and jealousy doesn't need facts to go on. She needed something to account for Mitchell's seeming less fond of her, I suppose, and fitted your mother into the picture." "But you couldn't murder any one, could you," Linda protested, "unless you were sure?" "You couldn't," I conceded, "and I couldn't. But then, most likely, neither of us could murder anybody, anyhow. It seems probable that she did. Linda, do you remember anything else standing around, partly eaten, in the car the night you ate the mushrooms? A box of candy, for instance; probably a box of homemade candy that might have come to your mother in the mail?" "No," she said, "I don't remember anything like that. I can't remember a thing but the mushrooms. Still it might have been there just the same." It had been drizzling for the past few minutes and now unmistakably it began to rain. I82 THE QUARTZ EYE "Come along," I said, "we must be getting back into the house. They're probably waiting for us." For all that we stood there for a moment looking at each other. "Poor old Carty!" she said. "What a nightmare I've let you in for. This was to be your holiday, your Sunday in the country." "Well, part of it's been a holiday," I reminded her. With that I bundled her up in the blanket like an Indian, kissed her and started her off down the hill. As we passed one of the kitchen windows on our way around the house she paused for a glance inside. "They seem to be ready to go," she said. "I'm afraid we've kept them waiting." I looked in, too. All I could see of Mrs. Mitchell was her back, for she sat with her hat and coat on, bolt upright, in one of Linda's splint-bottom chairs, facing the fire. But seen even so, the febrile hysteric tension about her was apparent-to my imagination, at least. Jane, standing over her more or less, presented an interesting contrast. She'd got everything done, our ill-fated picnic supper cleared away, the dishes undoubtedly washed, everything that was to go back in the car piled neatly on the table. She was ready for anything, and perfectly calm. She was not even annoyed that we'd kept her waiting. WRAPPED IN A RUG 183 Linda made her wait a minute longer, for she thought of something more she wanted to say to me and she stopped outside the door to say it. "Carty, I simply don't believe Elsie did it. It doesn't seem as if she did it." Some inarticulate instinct had been trying to tell me the same thing and I'd been trying not to listen to it. "She practically admitted she did it," I argued. "That's why," said Linda, with her hand on the latch. "What she said was that it was all her fault." I let her go in alone while I went up to the barn where Jim had put the car on his return with Jane and the milk, to tell him he could drive up to the door. My conscience, as well as half my inclination, told me I ought to ride outside with him. I didn't want Jane left outside in the rain, and I knew the three women would be much more comfortable inside without a fourth passenger. And there wasn't much point in riding with Linda unless I could be alone with her. I'd really prefer an hour's solid solitude to think in. What I didn't like was the idea of leaving Linda cooped up with that horrible woman. She was horrible, whether she was a murderess or not. I didn't know that Linda would even be safe with her, until I thought of Jane, and grinned. I could count on Jane to look after her. CHAPTER XI THINKING IT OVER M Y PLAN for riding outside encountered spirited opposition from Linda, but I stuck to it and carried my point. Really I wasn't uncomfortable out there. The car, it appeared, was provided with an emergency curtain which unrolled forward and buttoned down to the top of the windshield. Also, I had a rug to wrap up in-the one Linda and I had taken up to the settee. This was a sentimental choice, I'll admit, and one that was a little dashed by a lack-luster observation of Mrs. Mitchell that it was one of theirs that they had brought down with them in the coupe. It kept me warm, anyhow. I couldn't have done any of Jim's driving for him even if I'd been disposed to, for the rain completely obscured my half of the windshield. He was a beautiful driver, anyhow, and the big car under his hands threaded its way through the pelting traffic of Sunday picnickers-caught by the rain and hurrying back to 184 THINKING IT OVER town-at an imperturbable thirty-five miles an hour almost as easily, it seemed, as if we'd had a clear night and a clear road. So I settled down to think. The thing I wanted to examine was that instinct of mine that agreed with Linda's declaration that it didn't seem as if Elsie Mitchell had committed the murder. Why-when there was a motive, a threat, an opportunity and a practical admission of guilt pointing to her-didn't it seem as if she had done it? My thoughts were not altogether new. Riding down with Linda this morning, before the death of Maurice and Margaret Defoe figured in my reflections at all, when I was trying, merely, to tell myself a consistent story that established Mrs. Mitchell as the person responsible for two burglaries and a hold-up, I had found at least two serious soft spots in my hypothesis. Mrs. Mitchell, according to my story, had made use of a hold she'd contrived to get on Paul to force him to make the search for her, to act as her agent in the commission of three successive crimes. Well, the first stubborn question was, why had she wanted an agent? Why hadn't she ransacked at least the flat and the farmhouse for herself? A woman always believes herself better at looking for and finding things than any mere man. And when I _ _ I86 T HE QUARTZ EYE - - the object sought was a letter written by herself, identifiable at a glance by her own handwriting, the persuasion would have been even stronger. Furthermore, she couldn't have turned Paul loose to look for that letter without giving him the opportunity to read it for himself, and thereby putting herself quite as much in his power as he ever could have been in hers. To me, now, assuming as I did that the threat in that letter foreshadowed the commission of a murder, the notion that she'd have given Paul, or any one else, the chance to read it seemed fantastic. The letter, to be sure, was in a sealed envelope, but the woman couldn't have known that, or even guessed it. Some extraneous idea gave a faint tap on the door of my mind just then, but I wouldn't let it in. I was busy. It could come again. Mrs. Mitchell couldn't have managed the hold-up by herself, of course. No flabby little woman like that could have held Linda, taken at no matter how great a disadvantage, for five seconds. The search of the farmhouse might have offered some difficulties too. I doubted somehow if Mrs. Mitchell even knew how to drive a car. But what in the world was there to have prevented her searching Linda's flat-the first and likeliest place to look for what she wanted-for herself? She was Linda's landlord. She had, no doubt, a key to her _ _ __ _ _ _ _ __ _ _ _ I THINKING IT OVER I87 - - --- door. She could have no trouble in picking a time when the place was certain to be deserted. How did I know, though, that in this case she hadn't made the search for herself? It was only a guess of mine that the two burglaries and the hold-up had been committed by the same person. Yes, but for the burglary of the flat Mrs. Mitchell had a perfect and complete alibi. It had been on that afternoon-the time precisely fixed by Jane's going out and coming back-that Elsie, with her limousine and with her chauffeur, had driven Linda down to the farmhouse to measure the windows for the curtains. Well, that was that. I'd let it alone-there was nothing else I could do with it-and go on to the next discrepancy my theory involved me in. The letter hadn't been found, either in the flat or the farmhouse or on Linda's person. For three days, then, after the hold-up on Monday night, there would have seemed to be an almost overwhelming probability that it had been destroyed. But on Thursday night Linda had told Mrs. Mitchell about the pigskin bag, which, after having lain undisturbed ever since Maurice's death in Dr. Hallstrom's little hospital out in Iowa, was now waiting at the Belmont Hotel for Linda to call for it. She was going to send Paul to get it the first thing in the morning. No wonder Elsie had glared. Her fancied security I88 THE QUARTZ EYE had been shattered in a moment and in its place stood the appalling likelihood that the letter was in that bag and would, to-morrow morning, be in Linda's hands. So Elsie had intercepted Paul. I hadn't even tried to guess how. I'd have to skip all that-the blood on the bag; the question whose blood it was, Paul's or another's. I'd assume Elsie, somehow at last, in possession of it, frantically breaking it open. The way it had been hacked and ineffectually pried at had looked more like a woman's violence than like a man's. It was opened, anyhow, and she searched it. Well then,-here was the thing that had troubled me,-why hadn't she found the letter? Doris had found it casually and inadvertently. I almost believed I could have found it myself, if she hadn't. But I was assuming that a woman who had gone through hell to get hold of that bag had overlooked the thing she wanted in it. And why, by the way;-this was a new difficulty,had she had to go through hell for it? Why hadn't Paul, who had done her bidding in so many harder things, turned it over to her? Helped her spring the lock-a feat that wouldn't have offered any difficulties for him-let her search it at her leisure and then sprung it shut again and taken it on to Linda? THINKING IT OVER I89 Had some one else than Paul been Elsie's agent in the two burglaries and the hold-up, and had that undiscovered X finally murdered Paul to get possession of the bag for her? Was the letter after all the thing the bag had been broken open and ransacked for? Or had Elsie been searching for something else? Had she found the thing she wanted, or could it be one of the valuables Hallstrom had abstracted and sent on separately by registered mail? The keys, of course, would be a possibility. I'd thought of that this morning. But they took one so far afield as to render speculation unprofitable. The watch with Margaret's picture inside the lid? The cigarette case, half full of Maurice's old straw-tipped cigarettes? Those were innocent, surely. How about the snuff-box, though, with those unpleasant looking little capsules in it that he used to take to relieve his indigestion? Had Linda made a mistake in emptying them out so casually into the road? Wait a minute, though! The person the frantic jealous girl, who had written that letter-with its threat-to Maurice, had hated and wanted to be rid of was Margaret. She couldn't have expected to get rid of the woman who she fancied stood between herself and her former lover by poisoning Maurice's medicine. _ __ I90 THE QUARTZ EYE -- - - - - _..L No, I'd better go back to my purely hypothetical box of home-made candy, or its equivalent. Loaded with arsenic, probably. That would cause symptoms near enough like those produced by the poisonous mushrooms to be attributed to it in the circumstances without question. But if Elsie had sent that box of poisoned candy to Margaret in the expectation of her eating it and being killed by it, why had it come as a shock to her-a shock so violent as to render her unconscious-to learn a dozen years later from Linda's lips that Margaret had not died of eating poisonous mushrooms? For a moment I thought I had it. It wasn't because Linda had been telling the story, but because Constantine Mitchell had been hearing it! It was a fear that he'd be led to a surmise of her own guilt. What was it she had been babbling to Linda after they'd taken her up-stairs? "It was all my fault! He must know it was all my fault!" Linda had quoted that sentence again as we stood in the rain outside the kitchen door as a reason for her disbelief that Elsie could have done it. I hadn't then seen what she meant. I did now. Would a woman who had, by the administration of poison, murdered two people and all but murdered the man she was in love with, have spoken of it as "all her fault" that they had died? _ I _____ _ _____ ____ THINKING IT OVER I9I - It would be an absolutely unthinkable phrase to use in a case like that. What was the simple natural meaning of the phrase? Why, one used it, one invariably used it, by way of accepting the ultimate moral responsibility for something some one else had done. "It was all my fault that he caught cold. I ought to have reminded him to take his umbrella!" What had Elsie done? She'd written a mad letter to Maurice Defoe asserting, in her frantic jealousy, that his wife had taken Constantine Mitchell as her lover. She may have regretted it the moment it was put in the mail. And then, apparently, the possible dreadful consequences of her letter were averted by an even more dreadful accident. She learned to-night that it had been no accident but a murder. She must believe, she can't escape the belief, that Maurice himself was the murderer-murderer and suicide. And she cries out in hysterical and well-merited agony that it was all her fault. Could she have hit upon the right explanation of the tragedy? I don't know how long I sat under the nightmare conviction that she had and that Linda might find out the truth. At last with a gasp of relief, I remembered a fact I'd been forgetting. Maurice Defoe had never read her letter. I'd found it sealed in the lining of his coat. 19:2 THE QUARTZ EYE I was a little ashamed of my panic. An experience like this, certainly the intellectual part of it, was nothing new to me. It's all in a day's work for a man whose domain is a research laboratory to find his hypotheses broken reeds, his data unclassifiable and selfcontradictory. What he does is to stop floundering in the bog of guesses and assumptions and go back to the causeway, however frail and narrow, of things he knows. The two burglaries and the hold-up were facts. Paul's disappearance with Linda's five hundred dollars was a fact. The sealed letter in Maurice Defoe's coat lining was a fact. And the blood-, mammalian but not necessarily human, on the pigskin bag, was a fact. But Elsie Mitchell's connection with any of these facts was pure assumption. I didn't even know that she was the Elsie who'd written the letter to Linda's father, though I still regarded it as probable. Her responsibility for the four searches of Linda's person and possessions had been nothing but a guess, and I doubted now if it had been a useful one. Let me get back on the causeway again. I'd seen her staring down through the window at her husband and Linda, as tense as a cat watching the approach of a dog which was unaware of the cat's presence. I'd seen her doll face convulsed with fury _ ~_ THINKING IT OVER I93 when the same pair had gone up to look for the Cape Cod lighter. I'd seen her go off in a dead faint when Linda told about stealing out of her berth and eating the mushrooms after that fatal supper party. And I knew something of how she'd been carrying on since. I knew, too, that I detested her and hated having Linda anywhere within her reach, but I conceded that from a scientific point of view this last fact was irrelevant. Its place was in a different series. Nevertheless, I asked myself, what of it? and for the rest of the drive I allowed my thoughts a holiday. Perhaps the fact that it had stopped raining; that Jim had run to the side of the road, wiped off the windshield and rolled back his little curtain so that we had a clearing sky overhead, had something to do with my change of mood. I was willing to call it a day. Lord, what a day! It had been arranged that I was to be let off at my house. There was no sensible reason, of course, for taking me all the way down to Washington Square. All the same it was with an unreasonable reluctance that I climbed down at my bit of curb and stuck my head in the window to say good night. Jane was sitting like a grenadier on one of the folddown seats; Mrs. Mitchell was in the far corner, leaning back. For a moment the cruel glare of a spot-light 194 THE QUARTZ EYE -- -- '94 THE QUARZ from a car turning around in the street showed me her middle-aged, childish face, flaccid between storms of emotion, her tear-washed eyes still smoldering, and all my old horror of her returned. But Linda leaned forward just then and blotted her out. "Good night, Carty," she said. "I can't see you in the dark, whether you've been thinking again or not, but you won't any more to-night, will you?" "I will agree not to," I told her, "or at least not to worry, if you'll promise to let Jane sleep on the davenport in the living-room." "All right," she said with a laugh, "I'll promise. Good night." With which final farewell she kissed me. It hadn't been an anticlimax after all. I got the impression as she dropped back into her seat that Jane had been somewhat startled by this caress. Well, I didn't wonder. But it didn't matter. Lord, but Linda was in luck, having some one like that to take care of her when I couldn't. CHAPTER XII R A I D E D T WASN'T until Linda's car had driven away that I became aware of another that had driven up behind it, and that Miles, my brother-in-law's chauffeur, was leaving the wheel to come around and open the car door. It seemed that Doris hadn't completely washed her hands of me after all. She and John both got out. John was wearing his poker face and Doris was unusually bright eyed, which meant that both of them were intensely curious about the car they had seen drive off and what I had to do with its passengers. But neither of them spoke about it. "It's lucky we caught you," my sister said. "We've come to take you to a party you've forgotten about." "What party?" I asked incredulously. "I don't believe I've forgotten one." "John Masters'," she informed me crisply. "He told us he'd asked you and that you'd said you'd let him know if you'd come. But that he hadn't heard '95 I96 THE QUARTZ EYE from you and you'd probably forgotten, and would we come around and get you? So we have; and if you'll let us come up to your horrible laboratory, we'll wait while you dress." "I'd love to have you come up," I told her, "but I don't want to make you climb two long flights of stairs under false pretenses. I don't think I'm going to the party." Doris had been too well brought up to stamp her foot but she looked as if she'd like to. "Any reason?" she inquired. "Or shall we just tell John Masters that you won't come?" "You might tell him," I suggested, "that I'd been spending the day in the country and hadn't got home yet. That, by the way," I added, "happens to be perfectly true. I just this minute landed here." "In that green Rolls-Royce?" John Goodrich asked indifferently. "Yes," I said, and as I didn't want to risk annoying Doris again by making her think I was laughing at her, I forbore to mention whose car it was. "Well," John remarked, after waiting to see whether I wasn't going to add anything to my monosyllabic affirmative, "it's still rather early to go to the party. I think if you don't mind we'll come up and smoke a cigarette before we trek along." R A I D E D I97 Doris agreed. "Perhaps," she said, "we can talk the old pill into going with us, after all." "Perhaps so," I admitted as I led the way up the dark two flights of stairs. "Anything can happen; I've been finding that out this past day or two." I let them in the laboratory door-it's the one I generally use-with the mildly satisfactory conviction that they'd find the place in better order than when they'd visited it last night. I almost said something of the sort but on second thought decided to let them notice it for themselves. It was just as well I did, for John laughed when I turned on the light and Doris uttered a little wail of suppressed despair. I managed to say nothing. I was going to have trouble enough answering my own questions without bothering with a lot of theirs. Act as if nothing had happened, talk pleasant piffle for a few minutes, get them to go as soon as I could-that was the thing to do-and then find out what had been taken in the raid I could see had been made on my rooms, and start telling myself, all over again, a story that would fit. Meanwhile I emptied Linda's chair-it had been hers since Friday afternoon-and dusted it out for Doris. She accepted it a little dubiously and John found one for himself. __ __ __ I98 THE QUARTZ EYE "Who," he asked, lighting a cigarette at the same time to make the question seem sufficiently casual, "who was the Grand Duke who brought you back from the country?" "Grand Duchess," I amended. "At least I'm not sure of her precise rank. She's up at the top of a very real aristocracy, at all events." But I found my self-restraint unequal to the task I'd set myself. "Excuse me a minute," I added. "I want to get rid of this overcoat." With that poor pretext I went into my front room. Not even John Goodrich could have thought, after seeing what I saw there, that this was the sort of mess I lived in, normally. It would have been obvious to anybody that the place had been broken into and desperately ransacked. It looked, as Jane had said of Linda's flat, as if a cyclone had been there. Bureau and desk drawers had been dumped out in heaps on the floor, on the bed and on my flat-topped desk, and then scattered, kicked about. I saw, too, where the raider had got in. The door from this room into the hall had been pried, or simply kicked, open. The bolt guard was lying on the floor, the screws, still in the screw holes, showing on their threads bits of the old wood they had pulled out through. _ _ R A I D E D I99 But I didn't delay over trifles like that. I went straight to the closet where I had left the pigskin bag. It was gone, all right. It wasn't hard to make sure of that. But the letter was the main thing, and to make sure that it had been taken wasn't going to be so easy. I had left it, carelessly I'll admit, lying out on the top of my desk, but it was the primary axiom of my way of living that nobody, not even a charwoman, ever came into my quarters but myself. I never put anything away except for my own convenience. All around this desk letters, papers, memoranda, pamphlets, even unused stationery, lay in drifts. The desk top must have served as a sorting ground and been swept clear again and again. The only way to be sure that the letter had been taken-that is, that it had been, as I believed, the thing the marauder was afterwould be to prove to myself that it wasn't there. A job I couldn't undertake until I had got rid of my guests. I could hear the murmur of their voices from the laboratory. They seemed to be entertaining each other in there well enough. I'd take one hasty look. I did, and was lost. I've no idea how long it was after thattwenty minutes to half an hour, if you want a guess-when I was startled by Doris's calling out, "Carty, what in the world are you doing in there? Dressing for the party, after all?" 200 THE QUARTZ EYE I didn't want them barging in here and I emerged hastily. "No," I said, "I can't possibly go to the party now. I find I've some important work to do." John Goodrich laughed. "You said," he explained, "that you were going into the other room to take off your overcoat." It seemed I had forgotten it; I took it off now and he laughed again. But Doris had a flush of annoyance in her cheeks. "Do you make excuses like that," she asked, "-work to do at this hour Sunday evening-because you want to be rude or because it's easier than to say something believable?-Like that you have a headache?" "I told you the truth," I answered. "My mistake!-Excuse me a minute," I added. It had occurred to me to wonder whether the raider, to give verisimilitude to the burglary-as by taking the money out of Jane's cash-drawer-had gone off with some of the really precious stuff here in the laboratory, platinum electrodes, dishes and so on. I walked off abruptly, forestalling what looked like the beginning of an apology from Doris, to the cupboard where I kept these things, to investigate. The drawer had been searched, beyond a doubt, for the stuff had been thoroughly stirred up and pawed over but nothing seemed to be missing. The raider must either RAIDED 20I have been ignorant of its value or have ceased to care about keeping up appearances. I went back to Doris. "I beg your pardon, my dear," I said. "What were you going to say?" I began listening dutifully enough but I recognized the discourse, almost at once, as one of Doris's pleadings with me to lead a better life and my mind slipped back to its main preoccupation. The pigskin bag was certainly gone and I was all but sure the letter was. This squared nicely with my previously held surmise about Elsie Mitchell. Last night at supper in their apartment after the show, Linda had told the Mitchells about me. Not that I was trying to solve her mystery, to be sure, but that I had a laboratory. Elsie's notion about a laboratory, as had been made plain at supper this evening, must have been derived from the movies. She'd probably suspected me at once. She'd dropped in on Linda this morning to say that Connie had had a bad night and that she was going to let him sleep. That would have given her three clear hours and she could have come up here as well as not, with her helper, whoever he was. She'd had a double triumph in finding not only the letter but the pigskin bag as well. I didn't altogether like the story. It wasn't easily - -- S 202 THE,QUARTZ EYE - -- --- -- reconcilable with what her attitude toward me had been all day. If she'd known me for her enemy and had just outwitted me without my being as yet aware of it, wouldn't she have shown a little more interest in me? It would have needed a pretty good actress to play at indifference as well as that, and I didn't believe she was an actress. I couldn't credit her either with the imagination or the self-control. Oh well, I was probably spinning it too fine, again. The facts were plain enough and the inferences hardly less so. She had known my place was going to be abandoned for the day. By not starting out on the picnic with us she'd made herself an opportunity for searching it. The two things she must have wanted had been taken. It was as easy to see that, as it must have been for her to find them. But at that I caught my breath and stared blankly at my pretty sister's face. My house of cards had fallen down again. Assume Elsie Mitchell and her helper-Paul or whoever he might be-breaking into my door about the time Linda and Jane and I were starting for the country. The letter lies on my desk in plain sight. The bag is in the closet, the first place where any one would look for it. Why, then, the frantic further search? To make it look like an ordinary burglary? Im __ _I I RAID ED 203 R i DE i - 2 possible, when I couldn't miss the significance of the two things that had been taken. No. Some-one-whowanted-something wanted something else! And hadn't found it. "Carty, what's the matter with you?" Doris cried. "What makes you look like that? I don't believe you've been listening to a word I've said." I tried to look intelligent and sympathetic but without success. Lord, but I wished they'd go and let me alone! There was no doubt about her look, though. There was real concern mingled with a touch of fright in it. "This horrible place-yes it is horrible!-is driving you batty," she declared with intense conviction. "Carty, dear, do come away from it to-night! Come to the party with us. There's still time for you to dress. It'll do you lots of good. Come on! I'll bet you've forgotten who's going to be there. Linda Defoe. The girl you telephoned me about, Friday night, and I told you she was in The Follies. John Masters told us he saw you there and that you and he talked about her. Well, don't you want to meet her?" "She isn't going to be there," I volunteered thoughtlessly. "If she were, I'd go." "Of course she's going to be there," Doris insisted. "The party's being given for her." 204 THE QUARTZ EYE I tried to retrieve my mistake by not answering this assertion, but by now my brother-in-law had his eye on me. "What makes you think she isn't going to be there?" he wanted to know. "Because," I answered-he might as well have it now as later-"I think she'd have mentioned it when I got out of her car, just now. We talked of it as a possibility this morning and then forgot all about it. I'm sure she hasn't thought of it since." lie ran his index finger around inside his collar as if to ward off an apoplexy, a gesture I'd hitherto believed confined to the stage. "Are you trying to tell me...?" he began. "I don't insist on telling you anything," I interrupted. "But if you'd like to know, I went down with her this morning to a little farm place she has, on a sort of picnic. Her maid went with us and the Constantine Mitchells were there part of the time. I was saying good night to her down there at the curb when you drove up." "Then it was true!" Doris broke in. "What youi told us last night about her being here to dinner with you? You asked her up here? To a place like this!"' "I didn't ask her up here," I explained rather sulkily. "She came, and after we'd talked a while she asked if she might stay to dinner. So I fried some ham and _ __ _ __ _. ___ I R AI D E D 205 eggs over the Bunsen burner, there, and we ate them. That's all there was to it." "And the afternoon before that, when I called you up, you'd never even met her!" "Oh, I'd met her, all right," I answered, "but as it happened I'd never heard of her, and when she asked me to come and see her show, I didn't know what show it was. So when you telephoned, I asked you." "My God!" John whispered. Looking at him, I saw he'd never be the same man again; at least, not where I was concerned. Well, that was all right. I wasn't sorry it had happened but I couldn't, I felt, waste any more time. I didn't suspect, of course, how little it had been wasted, nor what an enormous debt of gratitude I owed them for having come in. "I'll tell you all about it some other time," I said. "You run along now to your party, or Masters will think you aren't coming, either." "What shall we tell him about you?" Doris meekly asked. "Tell him anything you like. Tell him it's a case of life and death.-No, I don't mean anything by that. Tell him I had some important work to do that couldn't wait. That's really true. Good night." It was compunction, I suppose, for having herded 206 THE QUARTZ EYE them out so unceremoniously that kept me standing at the head of the stairs watching them down. It was a disgracefully dark hallway. One dusty little carbon filament lamp in the ceiling was supposed to shine down the stairs well and light the whole three floors. As they vanished around the turn on the second floor I heard the sound of a scurry, a cry of surprise from Doris and a "What the devil!" from John, and then a girl's figure came leaping up my stairs as though in flight. I caught her as she came up and propelled her on through my door. I called down reassuringly to John and Doris, "It's all right. Good night!" and shut the door. Then I took Linda by the arms. "Oh my dear!" I cried. "Tell me what's the matter!" CHAPTER XIII A BARGAIN WITH LINDA Is DON'T believe anything's the matter," she panted. "Not if you're all right.-You are, aren't you?" She gave me a good hard hug, apparently by way of finding out. "I'm all right as far as I know," I told her. "What made you think I wasn't?" "Well, it isn't quite as silly as it sounds. When I tried to telephone you and you didn't answer and I called the supervisor and told her I knew you were there and she said you didn't answer, it was sort of a last straw." "My damned switch!" I cried contritely. "I have one you know, so that I won't be bothered by its ringing when I don't want to answer. I had it switched off all day yesterday and forgot to turn it on again. I can telephone perfectly well from here, you see, even when it's off." Apparently the cold masculine selfishness of this ar 207 _ _I __ _ 208 THE QUARTZ EYE -- rangement didn't strike her. She hadn't been listening very intently, anyhow. "Were the people I passed on the stairs," she asked, "the ones who drove up just as we were leaving you here?" I said they were. "My young sister, Doris, and her husband," I went on to explain. "They had stopped to persuade me to go along with them to John Masters' party." As this reminder drew blank with her, I added, "They offered me, like a treat for a good boy, a chance to go there and meet you." She conceded this the tribute of an absent smile, but what she said was: "They've been here with you all the time, then." I didn't get the bearing of that. "Yes," I said, "they came up with me and made me quite a call." "Well," she remarked rather soberly and not yet quite out of her abstraction, "I think I'm glad I came, anyhow." I was on the point of asking her why, for her manner had pointed to some special reason, but I forgot all about it when she took off her hat and jacket, chucked them on to a table in the corner and asked me where she could find a drink of water. There was something so completely entrancing about watching her make herself mistress of the place A BARGAIN WITH LINDA 209 in this unceremonious fashion that I'd have forgotten anything in the delight of it. I told her where the water was-I didn't offer to fetch it for her-and she went off and helped herself as simply as if no other possibility could have occurred to her. I don't think she was quite unconscious of it though. The friendly pat she gave my shoulder as she passed me on her way back to her chair seemed to thank me for having treated her that way. "I suppose," I said, "before I get too sunk in contentment to want to be told anything, I'd better ask you what it was you wanted to telephone me about." She sighed. "I'll tell you pretty soon, when I get around to it. It doesn't seem quite as important now as it did then. I'm getting sort of contented, myself. I'll tell you one thing, though. I'm glad I kissed you good night down here in the car." "I've never regarded it as a regrettable incident, myself," I remarked. My frivolity hadn't sprung from any failure to appreciate the growing seriousness, indeed the now-evident menace, of our situation. We were getting to close quarters with Some-one-who-wanted-something and unless I could discover, and pretty promptly, too, who he was and what he wanted, I believed it likely that the next "funny" thing to happen in the series 210 THE QUARTZ EYE would be the murder, attempted, anyhow, of both Linda and myself. Nevertheless, I hadn't been able to resist stealing a minute to play with her. "All right," I added. "Tell me why you're glad you did it." "I think it must have relieved Elsie's mind," she began, but the faint heightening of her color was so charming that it betrayed me into interrupting her again to ask, "Was that why you did it?" She smiled at this but said, "You've got enough mysteries to work out without taking on any more. Listen, and don't make it hard for me to talk sense. Elsie told me what made her so angry the night I showed Connie Mitchell Mr. Hallstrom's letter. It took her quite a while to get around to it, but all she said makes me think it's true. "She admits she's insanely jealous of Connie. She says she always has been and that it has made her do dreadful things-things she could never forgive herself for. I suppose she must have meant the letter she wrote my father but she didn't say so. She was telling me for a warning, she said. If I ever wanted a happy life I mustn't let myself be jealous. "She said she wouldn't have made friends with me in the first place if she hadn't thought, the first two or three times she saw Connie and me together, that he A BARGAIN WITH LINDA 211 _ l l~l....II......... didn't exactly like me. He did act sort of queer at first, but as soon as we'd had a chance to talk about old times he settled down and seemed to like having me around. Really, though, he's never been interested in me. I've been somebody he could talk to about father and mother. "But Elsie never believed that. She thought I was trying to take him away from her. She said to-night that she'd been watching us for weeks, trying to make sure that we never had a chance to be alone together, but always believing, just the same, that we managed it, somehow. She must have had a horrible time. "Last Monday night, for instance-the night I was held up-she and Connie were asked to a party at the Howlands'. They live right in our block. He wouldn't go with her. Said he had to work that night, but he'd join her there later. She thought it was because he knew Paul was sick, and wanted to bring me home from the theater. And she got so worked up about it that when he did come to the party, she had a headache and made him take her straight home. Of course they found me on the floor just coming to from the hold-up. And then Connie was furious with her. He said it was all her fault that he hadn't brought me home. "Well, Thursday night, just as they were going, I got out Mr. Hallstrom's letter and showed it to Con 212 THE QUARTZ EYE nie. While he read it I was telling her what was in it. But she was watching him all the while, and she thought she saw his face change. "What she thought was, that I had written some message for him on the letter; telling him where to meet me the next day, or something like that. And when I put the letter back in my desk, without showing it to her, she was sure she was right. "She said he acted excited and absent-minded that night when they were going to bed. He had told her that he was going to play golf the next day with some friends up near Poughkeepsie and the next morning he packed his bag-the one like father's-saying that he might decide to stay all night. She said he was awfully rude to her, not answering her at all when she asked him questions; getting into a perfect rage when she only suggested that his car was disgracefully muddy and he ought to have it washed. "Well, she saw me drive off in my car the next morning-without Paul. Remember?-and she was perfectly sure that we were both going up to the farm. Separately, you know. To meet there. So she took her car and went after us. She stopped at the auction I had told her I was going to and saw I wasn't there, and that made her surer than ever. Of course, there was no one at the farm but that didn't prove that we A BARGAIN WITH LINDA 213 hadn't gone somewhere else. She went to the village and telephoned to Poughkeepsie, to one of the men Connie had said he was going to play golf with. The man said Connie wasn't there. He'd telephoned that he'd had a breakdown with his car and wasn't coming. "She came back home, then, as fast as she could. She knew it was Jane's day out so she got into my flat and searched my desk for Mr. Hallstrom's letter. She'd just found it, and seen that there was no message written on it, when she heard Jane coming in. Jane stayed in the kitchen a minute or two and that gave her time to get out, but Jane heard her shut the door. "That's what we were talking about that night when I brought you home with me from the show. Two nights ago, Carty, that's all it was!" My response to what was implied in that last suggestion must have struck her as inadequate-it could have been no more than a very absent smile-for it drew a puzzled look from her. I didn't want her on the main track of my thoughts just then so I asked, "How does all that leave you feeling about her?" "I ought to be awfully sorry for her, I suppose. She must be terribly unhappy. Yet I couldn't help feeling, while she told me all about it, right before Jane, too-it was while we were riding home from here in the car-that she was really sort of proud of it. That _ ___ _ __ __ __ 214 T HTE QUARTZ EYE - -- ---- ------ -- -- -- she thought it showed how much of a person she was to have feelings as deep as that. "I thought she'd be just as ready to suspect me another time, and to break into my flat and go through my things in the hope of finding something. I thought of that even before I got home. It seemed almost as if she was warning me to look out and not do anything more to make her jealous. "She really is wildly in love with Connie, though. Jane and I went with her to her flat and when she found that Connie hadn't got back yet she went all to pieces. It wouldn't have been human-or safe, I thought-to leave her alone like that so I made Jane promise to stay with her until Connie got back. "I was afraid it might be half breaking my promise to you, but I couldn't think of anything else to do. I couldn't have stood it to stay with her myself. But I'd have tried to telephone you about that-even if it hadn't been for the other thing." "What other thing?" "My flat had been broken into again, some time today. The place was just about wrecked. It looked wilder than it did the other time. Not as if it had been searched so thoroughly, but as if the person who had done it had been in an awful hurry, or furiously angry, or-or insane, Carty. That was what frightened me A BARGAIN WITH LINDA 215: ': i,![...,mil I L IL lI I,1[ L [C._ when you didn't answer your telephone. I was afraid something might have happened to you." "Nothing had been taken, had it? You didn't miss anything?" "I don't know. I didn't stop to look. As soon as the supervisor said your phone didn't answer I rushed out and got a taxi and came up here as fast as I could. But why do you think nothing was taken?" "Because my place has been visited, too, since I left it this morning. Two of the things that I figured Somebody wanted have been taken; Elsie's letter to your father-that appears to be gone at any rate. I haven't had time to make sure of it. But the valise I brought back from the theater last night certainly is. The letter was in it, you know; in the lining to your father's coat." Linda wasn't listening to details. She had come to her feet in a blaze of sudden wrath. "I won't have it!" she said. "We've stood this long enough." She was walking past me, headed for the passage to my front room when I stopped her by asking what she was going to do. "I'm going to telephone to the police. They can come up here first and then, when we've told them about it, they can go home with me." "Don't call them, yet," I said. I had spoken so :2i6 THE QUARTZ EYE earnestly that she knew I was serious about it, but for all that she was reluctant to yield. "Why not?" she wanted to know. "It's bad enough, the silly way they've been bothering me. But when they begin breaking in here-following you home... i' I said, by way of offering her a distraction, "The man who followed me home, Friday night, was Constantine Mitchell. He told me about it this afternoon. He saw me come tup out of your area-about two o'clock in the morning it was, you remember-and he looked upon me, naturally enough, in the light of a suspicious character. So he followed along to see who I was." I was talking off the top of my mind and trying at the same time to think. I knew I wasn't ready for the police. I had at once too much to tell them and too absurdly little. Linda, I could see, hadn't yet relinquished her intention to go into my other room then and there and telephone. "Give me a few minutes more," I pleaded. "I'm not making light of it. I think it probably looks more serious to me than it does to you. But give me till morning. It has made nonsense, so far, but I believe I'm on the edge of making sense of it." I was sincere in that. My belief had become so A BARGAIN WITH LINDA 217 much stronger during the past few minutes that the moment I saw she had turned back from the passage that led to my front room and my telephone, I forgot all about her and started doing in my head a problem in subtraction. I did it once; and then I did it over again. The answer was the same. All that was left, all that could be left for Somebody-who-wanted-something to want, were the things I'd been carrying around in my pockets all day; the things that Mr. Hallstrom-whoever he was-had sent to Linda by registered mail. Standing by my table I took them thoughtfully out of my pockets one by one. The bunch of keys. I couldn't conceive of anybody committing four crimes to get possession of a key. One of them might be the key to a safety deposit box that Maurice Defoe had had somewhere, but you didn't get access to a box of that kind by getting possession of the key. The watch, with Margaret's picture that looked like Linda, in the lid. The cigar cutter at the other end of the chain that went with it. The cigarette case, still half full of Maurice Defoe's straw-tipped cigarettes. Last of all, the snuff-box. That might, I reflected, have contained, unlikely as it seemed, the solution to our mystery. But that clue, if it had been a clue, had 218 THE QUARTZ EYE been lost. Had Linda not emptied out those unpleasant looking little capsules into the highway as we drove along this morning... I opened the box now, but it was hardly a conscious act. It was more an automatic accompaniment to my thoughts. It was empty all right, but what I saw held me staring. There was a greenish incrustation perceptible in spots all over the bottom of it and quite thick in one of the corners. It didn't want to come out when I scraped at it with my finger nail. It actually appeared, under the closest scrutiny I could give it without a glass, to have pitted the surface of the metal. I carried it over to my work table, stuck a jeweler's glass in my eye, and saw that I was right. It had. Linda had been watching me all the while without a word. She followed me when I crossed to my work table, and again stood beside me. "Linda," I asked her, "do you remember what the inside of this box was like when your father used to keep his medicine in it? Was it clean and shiny, or was it like this?" "I know it must have been shiny," she said. "Father was terribly particular about having things clean. He'd never have put anything into his mouth that came out of a box that looked like that. Carty, what are you doing?" A BARGAIN WITH LINDA 219 1~~~ ~ ~ ~ A i,,..........,,!, ~!.....!-i I had begun carefully scraping out the green incrustation over a clean filter paper. As I did so I told her why. "If this box used to be clean and shiny, then the stuff that's been in it since Mr. Hallstrom's father shut up the box in the pigskin bag the night your father died, must be the stuff that has eaten into the gold. They've always called gold a noble metal because there are so few things that will attack it. It doesn't tarnish, you know. Stuff like sulphur that would have eaten right through a silver snuff-box in this length of time wouldn't have touched this box in a hundred years. So whatever this is that could eat into it, even a little, must be queer stuff. I've got to have a try at finding out what it is." She paled as she asked, "Do you think that was the poison, Carty?" "I don't know. It's inconceivable that it can have been a remedy for indigestion." I glanced at the deepening horror in her face and looked away again. When I'd finished scraping out the box she took it from me, closed the lid and held it gently in her two hands. To avoid a silence I went on talking. "I'll try to analyze this stuff," I said, "but I can't be sure that I'll succeed. There's nowhere near enough _ __ __ __ ____ ___ 220 THE QUARTZ EYE.... - - I IJ..... of it for a chemical analysis. I may be able to get it with the spectrograph-that thing over there that you were looking through the first time you came up here. I'll make a photograph of its spectrum to-night. Tomorrow I'll get some samples of things I suspect it may be-mercury, arsenic, and so on-and photograph their spectra. Then I'll compare them and see if I've got the right one." She put down the box and took me by the arms. As she looked up at me I saw there were tears in her eyes. "Carty," she pleaded, "don't go on with it. Not to-night, at least. We've had enough horrors for one day. I want time to think. "And besides," she went on, a smile breaking through, "I want you to have a night's sleep. I don't believe you've had one-not a real one-since last Thursday night." She actually laughed as she added, "Since before I knew you. I'll go home now and let you go to bed. No, I won't go home either. I don't want to go back there. I'll go over to the Algonquin. I used to live there and I know they can find a place for me." I was filled with a sudden childish disappointment at the thought of her going away now. It was too silly an emotion to be pampered, and I thought I was suppressing it successfully when I said, "That's a perfectly sensible program. Your half of it, at any rate." A BARGAIN WITH LINDA 221 "Of course it isn't very late," she said. "It can't be much after ten o'clock, can it? Would you rather I didn't go just yet?" Apparently I hadn't hidden my feelings as well as I thought. "Carty, if I stay a while longer will you let the horrors alone altogether; stop thinking and analyzing and detecting? You're hungry, aren't you? I am. I don't believe any of us ate much on our dreadful picnic. I'll tell you what I'll do if you'll promise to be good. If you'll sit down in that big chair and stay still, I'll get us a supper, of sorts. I saw where your ice-box was when I went to get my drink of water. After we've had something to eat we'll talk a while, and then, when I see you looking too sleepy to do any more work to-night, we'll go out and find the first respectable looking taxi and I'll bring you back here in it and then go on to the hotel." I shouldn't have made that bargain, but I did. She wouldn't admit any amendments to it. I wasn't to be allowed to cooperate at all. I subsided, just as I'd done two days ago, five minutes after she'd first spoken to me, into the obedient child, and sat watching while she began her preparations for supper. After congratulating myself that I had washed my breakfast dishes that morning, I stopped thinking. I didn't even dream. I didn't need to. She was the dream. 222 THE QUARTZ EYE She asked me if I wanted coffee. I owned I did and when I assured her that it had no power to keep me awake, she started a pot of it over one of the Bunsen burners. She decided to scramble up some eggs, but put off beginning this operation to give the coffee a chance. While she waited she cleared my little table, the one we'd dined at last night-to the scandal afterward of my sister Doris. Well, this meal was one we were destined never to eat. CHAPTER XIV THE BLOODSTAINED HAND SHE had gone back to my bench where her cookery was and as she raised her arm to reach across and light the second of my Bunsen burners, I saw a dark mark of some sort on the side of her white blouse. It was in the idlest sort of curiosity that I asked, "What have you been getting into? Is my pantry as dirty as all that?" "Where?" she wanted to know. "Down on your side there, over your left ribs." She craned around trying to see it and couldn't very well, so she walked out in front of my mirror. It is a scientific, not a personal, mirror, but it serves the latter purpose well enough. Before it she held up her arm again for a look. "Why," she cried, "it's a hand print!" She laughed a little uneasily, and added, "'The Adventure of the Bloodstained Hand.' Thank heaven it isn't the right color for blood." 223 __ 224 THE QUARTZ EYE ~ I I.., I I I JII. III... But I was out of my chair, staring. Evidently my look frightened her. Her own eyes widened. "Carty, you don't mean that it could be blood." "Blood doesn't stay red very long," I told her. "Yes, it could be, as far as that goes. But-but, whose hand is it?" "Why, yours." She added, "It must be yours. Nobody else's hand has been there." She tried to smile at that but the result was pretty tremulous. "Don't you remember? When we were sitting on that old broken down settee on top of the hill? But what made your hand bleed? I haven't any pins. Did you scratch it on a thorn, or something?" My mind, which had stalled for a moment like a cold motor, had by that time got to going again. "I couldn't have torn that hand on anything," I said. "Until we got to the top of the hill it was practically wrapped up in the rug I was carrying. The rug was in a heap when I picked it up and I didn't stop to fold it. Half of it kept slipping away all the time we were climbing the path, and getting draggled in the grass. Don't you remember how wet it was when I spread it out for us to sit on?" "Yes," she said, "but what's that got to do withwith this mark?-Carty, how can it be blood?" "I remember," I went on, "that I began holding it THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 225 around you with my left hand; the one that was around behind you. I remember how unpleasant the corner of it that II had hold of felt. I folded it in when IF changed hands. And I put that hand close against you where the mark is." She was gazing at me, incredulous but with a dawning terror in her eyes, as she repeated her question, "But how can it be blood?" "Do you remember what rug it was?" I asked in turn. "Didn't Mrs. Mitchell say it was one of hers?" She didn't reason it through, of course. She didn't even guess. What she did was motivated by pure instinct. I never saw a synthesized act that was as quick as this of hers in unfastening whatever it was that held that blouse at the collar and stripping the thing over her head. She flung it away from her and stood before me shuddering. As I picked it -up she asked me, for the third time, "How can it be blood?" "The first thing to do," I said, "is to find out whether it is. It may not be. It may be nothing but iron rust. It won't take us very long to make sure." I carried the blouse over to my work-table where I flushed a shallow tray with distilled water, emptied this out and poured in a little of my normal salt solution. Then very carefully, using a pad of sterile gauze as a __ _ _ 226 THE QUARTZ EYE - -- - -- I brush, I began dusting the stuff that made the mark into the tray. It was thoroughly dried, of course, and it came off the fine smooth fabric of the silk quite easily, as I hoped it would. "There," I said at last; "if that's blood there's enough to show." I tried to hand the blouse back to Linda but she wouldn't touch it. I asked her if she wouldn't go and sit down in her big chair, but she wanted to stay by me. I got out my microscope. It was adjusted as it had been last night when I had used it for a similar purpose. It didn't take me two minutes to see the thing I expected on the slide. I invited Linda to take a look down the tube, too, telling her to look for the same sort of things she sometimes saw before her eyes after she'd been looking into a glare of light. I thought it might take the horror off the idea a little if she looked at it that way. She did as I suggested, but she was pretty white as she turned away. I'd have evaded explanations and surmises if I could, but I knew from the way she said, "Tell me what it means now, Carty," that I must do as she asked. It would be a heavy shock to her. Until to-night, indeed until ten minutes ago when she'd stripped off that blouse, she hadn't had the least idea that any of THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 227 the "funny" things that had been happening to her had been more serious than annoyances. She'd spoken only a little earlier, when she'd wanted to telephone for the police, of the "silly way" they'd been "bothering" her! But there'd be no use trying to break the thing gently. "There was blood on the pigskin bag, too, Linda," I said. "I found it and analyzed it last night. The bag must have been standing, for a good while, in quite a pool of it to have soaked up as much as it did. "Well, a corner of that rug, that came out of the Mitchells' car, has been soaking in a pool of blood, too. The same one perhaps. It got dried before it was noticed. But when I wet it again, dragging it through the grass to-night, some of the blood came off on my hand. "I can't swear that it's human blood-either this or that on the bag. It might be a dog's, almost any mammal's. But it may be a man's. It may be Paul's. Or the blood of somebody Paul killed. Or of somebody Paul never saw. And the blood on the rug may be different from the blood on the bag." I'd been hoping, as I went on adding one grisly detail to another, that she'd ask me to stop, and when I noted just now that the coffee was boiling over I welcomed the little interruption. I crossed the room and _~.____ ___ ____ ___ __ 228 THE QUARTZ EYE put out the flame and turned back to her, about to suggest a more cheerful subject, when I saw that she was sitting very still in her chair-listening to something, apparently-and asked, "What is it?" "Nothing, I guess," she answered, relaxing a little. "I thought I heard the stairs creak." "No doubt you did," I told her. "They creak all the time, by themselves, especially at night. The whole house does. But I don't wonder you're getting jumpy. Linda, let's scramble our eggs and drink our coffee and forget the horrors for a while. You were saying yourself just now that we'd had enough of them for to-night." "No," she said. "It's different now, Carty." I couldn't deny that it was. We were no longer dealing with a technical hypothesis of mine about a crime that might or might not have been committed a dozen years ago, nor with the moral question of bringing to punishment some one who had long lived a harmless life. What we were now, figuratively, peering into the shadows for was an active murderer, ready to strike again. There was no flaw in Linda's courage. She wasn't trying to evade or postpone anything, now. "You think it was Paul's blood, don't you?" she asked me, steadily. THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 229 I nodded. "And you think some one murdered him because he had father's valise." "That's still the way I tell myself the story," I said. "You think," she pressed on, "that the reason she didn't find what she murdered Paul for, was because Mr. Hallstrom had taken the snuff-box out of the bag and sent it to me by registered mail. That's why she searched my flat to-day, after we'd started for the picnic; and this place of yours. And you think the stuff in the snuff-box was poison, and that's why she had to get it as well as her letter and the valise.-And she came to my house, to-day, on a picnic!" "You've got it partly right," I said, "but not altogether. I don't think Elsie Mitchell poisoned your father and mother." She astonished me by saying desperately, "I don't either. She said it was her fault, though, and I believe that was true." I thought I knew what she meant, but I hated to ask her. She went on, though, almost without hesitation but in a hard dry voice that showed how bitter the words were. "I think she made father do it. Made him believe, somehow, that what she said in the letter was true." "He never read the letter," I reminded her. "The 230 THE QUARTZ EYE envelope was still sealed when I found it in the lining of his coat." "He may have sealed it up again after he read it," she said. "Or, when he didn't pay any attention to that one, she may have sent him another that he did read. Or she may have followed us to one of those towns in Iowa where we were playing and talked to him." These were possibilities I admit I hadn't thought of and I took a minute to think them over. But what I was able to say after that moment of thought, was: "Your father didn't commit suicide, Linda. He was murdered just as truly as your mother was. I'll tell you why I'm so sure. If he had done what Mrs. Mitchell thinks he did, the capsules in the snuff-box, even if they were poisoned, would have incriminated no living person. No one would commit another murder to cover up an indirect moral responsibility for one that had been committed a dozen years before. She might have wanted her letter back. But it wasn't the letter that the person who broke into the bag was looking for." A shuddering sob of relief from Linda showed me that she had followed my reasoning here. I stopped arguing, went over to her and took her in my arms tq comfort her. THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 231 She was still just as she'd been when she stripped off her blouse. Neither of us had thought of it until I noticed now how marble cold her bare arms were. After a moment I said, "I'm going to get you something warmer to put on." I saw her own jacket lying on the corner table where she had tossed it, along with her hat, but I wilfully ignored it. It would be more fun, I thought, to have her wrapped up in something of my own, a bathrobe or a sweater. I walked as far as the door to the passage that led to my bedroom. It was about three-quarters closed and I pulled it open. As I did so, I saw my bedroom door, at the far end of the passage, move slightly in the contrary direction. I stood stockstill at that-for the natural change in air pressure would have moved it the other way-and in the same instant I heard a faint but unmistakable sound, the solid cluck of the cocking of a revolver. The stairs hadn't creaked by themselves just now. Some-one-who-wanted-something had closed in! Over my shoulder I said to Linda, "Oh, I'd forgotten! Your own jacket is right here." I hadn't, consciously, formed any plan but the germ of it was in my perception that I must not shut that door again. I left it wide open when I walked to the corner table to get Linda's jacket. 232 THE QUARTZ EYE I did not, of course, need any time for reflection in order to see that our case was desperate. The factors in it were simultaneously apparent, like a threatened mate in a game of chess. Some One, who had already committed one murder for the possession of the incriminating snuff-box, would not hesitate at one or two more. There was no weapon of any sort in the laboratory. I was cut off from my telephone. Flight was out of the question, since the laboratory door into the outside hall was as far from the head of the stairs as the door into my bedroom that he had broken open. All that, I saw in one instantaneous glance. I thought of two chances-you could hardly call them hopes-as I crossed the room to where Linda's jacket was. One was that if Some One believed he could secure his safety without killing Linda as well as me, he would probably prefer it that way. The other was, that so long as nothing led him to suspect my knowledge of his presence he'd probably go on listening, learning all he could of my theories of the crime and what persons, if any, I'd confided them to. If he thought Linda knew or suspected his guilt she'd be marked for destruction as clearly as I was. But if he had not come up the stairs until Linda heard them creak, he would, as well as I could remember, have heard nothing of the second blood stain that had got transferred from the rug to Linda's blouse. THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 233 I won't pretend that I'd thought all this out, as clearly as it has been set down here, in the few seconds it took me to cross the room and pick up her jacket, but the substance of it must have been in my mind. I knew I must keep her from guessing he was there and that I must keep him interested in what I said to her. I saw, too, that I couldn't risk contradicting anything I'd said to her during the past ten minutes, at least, since this would give the whole desperate game away. She thanked me for the jacket casually enough. "That's all right," she said when I brought it to her. Her look was, perhaps, slightly intent but that didn't matter. Her looks didn't. "You don't have to go for a few minutes yet, do you?" I suggested. "I won't keep you very long, but I need a little time to think and it will be easier if I can tell you what I'm thinking about. I've just had a hunch that I'm on the wrong track with the snuff-box." She stared at that, but all she said was, "Yes, I'll stay, of course. As long as you want me to." "Sit down, then. We'll both sit down and be comfortable." I went over and held the big chair for her, moving it as I did so a little away from its former position and turning it round. "Now," I added, "I'll sit here, where I can look at you." 234 THE Q UARTZ EYE I lighted a cigarette, too, and noted with satisfaction that my hand was steady enough. "You know what I've been doing," I began, "ever since you first told me about the queer things that had been happening to you. I've been constructing hypotheses, in plain English, making guesses, trying to tell myself a story that would fit what facts I had. Then a new fact would turn up and I'd have to tell myself a new story. I adopted the snuff-box theory because it looked at first as if it would fit in with and explain everything that we know happened. But I thought of something just now that makes me doubt whether it will explain the facts." I got up, strolled over to my work-table and picked up the filter paper with the venomous looking green stuff on it. "What are you doing, Carty?" she asked. I'd expected the question. "I'm putting away this stuff that I scraped out of the snuff-box," I told her. I had to chance her noticing that I was tucking it in my waistcoat pocket. She didn't. "Of course I'll try to make an analysis of it to-morrow sometime, just to be on the safe side. But I doubt whether it will get us anywhere. You see, Linda.." I'd begun speaking without knowing what I was going to say, but, thank God, I did see, then, a plausible THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 235 doubt to cast upon my theory. I had to wipe the cold sweat off my forehead and draw a deep breath or two before I dared face her and go back to my chair. "Try to tell yourself the story and see where you come out; the story, I mean, that the poison that killed your father and mother and almost killed Constantine Mitchell, came out of the snuff-box. You could account for the poisoning of your father that way, but it won't explain the poisoning of the other two. What was supposed to be in the snuff-box-the only stuff that ever had been in it since your father carried it-was his medicine. Well, a man doesn't pass his medicine around, to his wife and to their guest at supper, for a treat. "The only thing that will explain the poisoning of all three of the people at that table, will be something all three of them might have eaten. That's why I first assumed a box of home-made candy that might have been sent to your mother in the mail. It didn't fit in very well, didn't explain, I mean, as the right thing must, everything that has happened. But I do know that when we find what we're looking for it will be something that might have been shared by all three of those people." I hadn't been looking at her much while I talked, for all I sat squarely facing her. Now, though, turn 236 236 THE QUARTZ EYE ing an uneasy glance her way I saw that she had been taking it all in and was turning it over thoughtfully in her mind. It was a good mind, too. Too good, I feared. It didn't seem to have struck her that I'd been making much of a case. It was desperately flimsy. Could I let it go at that? The thing would fall to pieces at a breath! Yet at that moment I could think of nothing more substantial to add to it, and it was for no other reason than that I dared not let the silence hang between us any longer that I began talking again. "I doubt if the poisoner meant to kill all three of them, though. He-or she-probably hated one of them so fanatically that the incidental death of the other two seemed not to matter."' Linda brought me up short. "Well, why," she asked, "doesn't that fit Elsie? She hated my mother. At least she wanted her dead so that Connie would go back to her. She didn't care anything about my father. She'd never even seen him, had she? And it probably never occurred to her that Connie would be having supper with them, that night. Carty, why did you say just now that you thought she didn't do it?" My mind stalled again. I sat staring at her, speechless. She looked back at me with her wistful smile. "Do you mind if I try to help a little?" she asked. "Perhaps it's foolish to think I can, but you've been THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 237 thinking about it so long-and you're so tired! You know you saw, right from the first, that there must be a Some-one-who-wanted-something. You made me see that there must be. And you kept coming closer and closer to what that something was. It wasn't at the flat, nor at the cottage. It wasn't anything I carried around with me. It wasn't anything that was in father's valise when Some One killed Paul and hacked open the valise and looked for it. So it must have been one of the things Mr. Hallstrom sent me by mail. One of those four things that are there on the table now. Carty, if it isn't the snuff-box, what can it be?" I don't know how long I sat gazing, in the apathy of despair, from one to another of the three objects from Hallstrom's package that were not the snuff-box. It probably was not more than a few seconds-indeed I doubt if I had more than a few seconds' grace just then-but it seemed an eon. The keys, the watch, the cigarettes; the keys, the watch, the cigarettes-the cigarettes.. Suddenly I laughed. It frightened Linda, and I don't wonder. It may well have had an hysterical sort of sound. "It's all right," I told her. "I laughed because I've been such a fool. With that cigarette case staring at me all the while. I've got it, Linda. I want a minute to think, but I've got it." :238 238 THE QUARTZ EYE There was nothing trumped up about my confidence, either. For the first time since the nightmare began I saw something better ahead than a bare escape. I saw victory. My mind wouldn't stall again. The paralysis was past. I'd known occasional luminous moments in my life but never a better one than this. Well, I'd never been in such mortal need of one, either. "Linda," I asked, "did your mother smoke?" It was the longest chance I had to take and I wanted it behind me. The question startled Linda, but she gave me the answer I wanted. "Not very much. She didn't like it much. But she did sometimes, when she thought that would make it a better party. Father liked her to." "Well," I said, "she smoked that night, Linda, that last night after their supper party. You don't have to remember it," I added as I saw her face clouded with perplexity, "I'm sure of it now. It can't be anything else." I picked up the cigarette case and sprung it open. "Assumptions are all right," I remarked. "They're all we research people have to start from. But an unrecognized assumption is the very devil. I said only a few minutes ago that in looking f or the poison we'id got to find something that all three of them might have eaten. I was assuming without realizing it, that you THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 239 ~_ i.......................... i iI II I can be poisoned only by something you swallow. I don't know how long that would have kept me floundering if you hadn't set me right by bringing me back to the things in the registered package." "Do you mean," Linda asked incredulously, "that they were poisoned by smoking those cigarettes? Can people be poisoned that way, Carty?" "It's unusual enough," I said, "so that I shouldn't have thought of it if I hadn't been forced to it by the subtraction of every other possibility. But poisonings of that general sort do occur now and then. If you can believe the tradition, they're very old. It's generally believed that Catherine de Medici used to put her enemies out of the world by giving them poisoned candles to stand beside their beds at night. The victim lighted it and died under the lethal gas it gave out, the candle burning itself away during the night. In the morning there was nothing left to show how he'd died, and the only reason for surmising that his death hadn't been due to natural causes was the fact that it had occurred so opportunely for the great Catherine. Poe wrote a story once about a murder like that." I took one of the straw-tipped cigarettes out of the case and snuffed at it curiously. "Are you going to analyze it?" Linda asked. "I'm not much of a toxicologist," I confessed. 240 THE QUARTZ EYE "Webb over at the physiological laboratory must know a dozen times as much about poisons as I do. I'll take two or three of these cigarettes to him to-morrow. I was going to see him anyway, to take him the blood sample that I got from the pigskin bag last night." She must have seen my face go blank just then, for she cried out, "Carty, what is it?" "Nothing but an idea," I answered. Well, that was God's own truth. It was one. "I'll tell you what I'm going to do to-night, though, Linda. I'm going to break my bargain with you. As soon as I've taken you down to the corner and tucked you into a taxicab, I'm coming back to make a spectroanalysis of one of these cigarettes to-night. A good spectrograph will give Webb the hint he needs. These gas poisons have always baffled chemists. He might not be able to find it at all. A good spectrograph may do the whole business. Linda, if it works I may be able to solve more mysteries than this one." "I won't hold you to your bargain," she said. "'I don't suppose I could if I tried. But, Carty, you won't send me home? You'll let me stay and watch?" I found myself in a quandary. I wasn't ready to deal with that request yet; wouldn't be for another five minutes perhaps. But I dared not let the answer wait. THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 24I "I hate to be a crab," I said, "but I can't let you stay, Linda. Not while I'm at work on a job like this. It can't be successful unless everything goes like clockwork. Unless I've got my mind running absolutely cold and undistracted. There's too much at stake on this thing. You're a dear, you know," I added, a little more lightly, "but you are a distraction." She was hurt by that, as I'd foreseen she'd be. "I'll tell you what I'll do by way of a compromise," I suggested. "I'll let you stay while I'm getting things ready. I will, that is, if you'll sit perfectly still and ask no questions." Without waiting for her to say that she'd accept the compromise, I began at once with my preparations, moving as swiftly as I could and talking to her all the time. To any of my scientific friends this talk of mine would have sounded like the babbling of a disordered mind, but I didn't care as long as it served. In my heart I was thanking God that my laboratory dark room was made light-proof not by a door but by a U-shaped passage hung with black lusterless cloth. I talked to Linda harder than ever when I was in there. I didn't look at her much, but my occasional glances revealed her sitting rather tensely in her easy chair, watching what I did with manifestly growing perplexity. It was a risk I had to run and one that, of course, 242 THE QUARTZ EYE I I I I II I I I I I I I I I I IIIII.. grew greater every moment. She knew what my spectrograph was and, superficially, how it worked. I'd used it in projecting the spectra I'd shown her the first time she'd visited my laboratory. I don't think she noticed anything queer at first-not, for example, when I wheeled up my big filtered Cooper-Hewitt, the thing I'd employed in producing that fire trick. But it couldn't have been long before she perceived that I was doing things that didn't correspond to what I was talking about. Some of the apparatus I'd been setting up, grotesquely was not adapted for making a spectrograph of one of the straw-tipped cigarettes. Before I had finished I could feel her gazing at me, her eyes big with bewilderment and misgiving. When she saw what I did last of all she came right up out of her chair. She was like some wild thing that has sensed danger. But she didn't cry out. I couldn't go to her until I'd tied the end of the fine cotton thread that was in my hand. "Put on your hat," I said cheerfully. "I'll be ready by then, and I'll take you down to the corner and put you into a taxicab." "No," she said quietly. "I won't go, Carty! Not yet." My thread was tied at last. I wondered if it was too late. But I stopped to put on my own hat and over THE BLOODSTAINED HAND 243 coat before I walked across the room to where she stood. She said again, as I drew near, "I'm not going, Carty. Not till I know.. I interrupted her. "There won't be any danger in making this analysis, if that's what you're frightened about. Were you thinking I might be poisoned, too, by one of the cigarettes? No, I'll tell you why I don't want you here, my dear. It's because I can't stop thinking about you. You've had possession of more than half my mind ever since I've been at work. I can't go on with it, like that." She wasn't convinced. It wasn't good enough. I said, "Do you know what I want now? I want to kiss you." She smiled rather uncertainly at that and came to me, but she hadn't surrendered. I put my right arm around her but it wasn't my lips that met hers. I put my left hand over her mouth. Then at her ear, barely forming the voiceless words with my lips, I said: "Some One is in my bedroom. Some-one-whowants-something. If he thinks I'm coming back after you've gone, he'll let us get away." CHAPTER XV ONE THING SETTLED EALLY it had been an insult my putting my hand over her mouth like that. In my preoccupation with the vital necessity that she must not cry out I had forgotten the instantly responsive high courage that was at once her birthright and her tradition. I'd forgotten what a very fine aristocrat she was. Without a start or a change of color, without even an uncontrolled glance at the door across which I'd just stretched that barely visible thread of gray cotton, she gave a quiet nod of understanding, and without resentment, took my hand away. "Play up," I whispered. "Pretend we're not in a hurry." And again she nodded. At that I let her go, but she didn't instantly move away. Instead, with a faint smile on her lips to show me that I needn't be afraid for her, she held them up to me, offering the kiss I'd asked for. I'd barely 244 ONE THING SETTLED 245 touched them, though, when she drew back with a little gasping cry of protest. "Carty!" she exclaimed. "They could have used that for the movies!" I caught my cue. To our listener it was to sound as if the kiss had lasted ever since I'd asked for it. "I'm sorry," I said. "You're not angry, are you?" "No," she told me judiciously, "I don't think so. Only, I see you're right. I mustn't stay here any longer if you've got to work. It's getting disgracefully late, anyhow. I'll start along now, I think." I agreed grumpily, "Oh, I suppose that's sensible." "Of course it is," she said crisply. "And you know," she had the effrontery to add, "it isn't really necessary for you to come down with me and find me a taxi, unless you want to." "Well, I do want to," I said, "so we needn't argue about whether I'd have to if I didn't." At no time since I'd heard the click of the revolver had I felt anything that I recognized as crude terror. But now with safety almost in sight, I had to resist an almost overwhelming surge of it. The worst of it was when, taking a last look around the laboratory to see that everything was as I meant it to be, I noticed Linda's white blouse, with a good deal of the blood stain still left upon it, lying on my work-table and 246 THE QUARTZ EYE realized that I must cross the room in front of that open door to the passage to get it. I wonder now how I managed to walk over to it in a leisurely way, stuff it into my pocket, and say casually to Linda as I rejoined her, "You haven't forgotten anything, have you?" She answered indifferently, "I guess not. Are you going to leave all the lights burning?" "It wouldn't make any appreciable difference in the size of my electric-light bill if I did," I told her, "but I may as well turn off part of them." I snapped the switch that cut off the ceiling light and satisfied myself that there was still enough left for Some One to see by. I didn't want him poking around there with a torch. Then I opened the door and stepped out ahead of Linda into the passage. That was a critical moment, of course. If Some One had changed his mind about letting us get away he'd have only to step out into the passage through the broken door and take a shot at me from the dark. It was his last chance, as well as his best one. He didn't take it. I held the door for Linda and pulled it shut with a bang after her. Logically I should have been a good deal less frightened after that, but I confess I was not. All the way down those two flights of stairs, out the front door, down the steps, and up ONE THING SETTLED 247 the ill-lighted empty street-the longest cross-town block in the world, it seemed to me that night-I had to fight down an almost overmastering impulse to break into a run, dragging Linda with me. Linda insists, I don't know how truthfully, that she was on the ragged edge of a panic herself, and that if anything had happened all the way along that streetif a door had opened or a window had shut-she'd have scuttered like a scared rabbit. And when I profess myself incredulous of this in the light of her apparent calm at the time, she says that I seemed perfectly unconcerned myself and that that was the only thing that held her together. So far as either of us can remember we didn't speak a word until we'd reached the corner, hailed a cruising taxi, and found ourselves safe inside. The thing I vividly remember is my absurd sense of having been asked an outrageously unfair question when the taxidriver wanted to know, "Where to?" "I don't care where," I told him furiously. "Carnegie Hall!" Then as we started with a jerk, I dropped back in my seat and gasped out a "Thank God!" As I look back on it my fear seems a good deal less unreasonable than I believed it to be at the time. It was probable of course that the man we'd left in the laboratory would do exactly what I wanted him to; __ _ __ _ _ ___ ___ _ ____ __ __ 248 THE QUARTZ EYE ~)/ I -...... I - I- 7-.......l JlJ Jlm -. J 2f.I spend ten minutes gathering up the things I'd left lying about for him to find, and go away. If he didn't do that, it was reasonable to suppose that he'd wait there for me to come back alone. But there had been a third chance, that he'd discover before we'd been gone t. minutes that he'd been tricked, and if he'd done that, I'd certainly have come after us. I'm glad I didn't tize that possibility at the time. After ve'd ridden a block or two Linda asked, "Had he been there all the while, Carty?" As I considered the matter, it seemed likely to me that he had. He'd naturally have expected to find the snuff-box in Linda's flat so he went there first, and all but wrecked the place looking for it. He'd probably wasted some precious time under a conviction that it must be there. When he'd been forced to accept the fact it wasn't, he'd come up to my place and ransacked it in the same way. He might still have been looking for it when Linda's car drove up and let me out at the curb, or he might have finished the search and come to the conclusion that I had the thing on me. In either case he'd have been in the building when we drove up. The vacant second floor of the building, or for that matter the dark shadows of the hallway itself on that floor, provided a place where he could safely lie in wait. ONE THING SETTLED 249 What had spoiled his plan, of course, was the fact that John and Doris came in with me and that they were on the way down-stairs when Linda came back. They'd passed each other right on the second floor. It was terrifying to think what miraculous luck we'd had. Why, though, as soon as they'd gone, hadn't he followed her right up? He might have hoped she'd stay only a few minutes. He might not have wanted to risk meeting her on the stairs. Something, though, had given him the idea that she meant to make me a visit. The smell of our coffee, perhaps. It was just after it had boiled over that Linda heard the stairs creak. I began trying to explain this guess of mine to Linda, but found a mechanical difficulty in talking. The fact was that the moment the taxi had started off with us, I had begun to shiver, and instead of getting better the thing got worse. My knees trembled, my hands shook, until I was shuddering like a man in an ague. I couldn't even clench my teeth tight enough to keep them from chattering. I kept on trying for a while, hoping that Linda wouldn't notice and that the fit would pass, but it was no wonder that she looked at me, presently, in the half dark of the cab and cried out, "Carty, what's the matter?" "I don't know," I said. "I'm not cold. I suppose _ 250 THE QUARTZ EYE. I IlI I _ I I it's the after-effect of having been so horribly frightened." I still think, though subsequent events make another explanation arguable, that this was the real one. I'm not a superman at all, nor habituated to deeds of violence. Even my war job, though I was in uniform, never took me outside one of the government laboratories. I'd been through a hideous half-hour-I still turn rather cold at the memory of it-and some of the symptoms of extreme fright developed after the danger was over. Linda would have it, though, that I was ill. She put her arm around me, crowded her warm young body up as close to me as she could get it, and, when that didn't stop my shuddering, she became alarmed. "What can I do with you?" she demanded desperately. "Where can I take you? I can't take you home. It wouldn't be safe there. He might come there. Carty, isn't there anybody?" My mind was working all right, anyhow. I had a clear inspiration. "There's my sister's house," I said. "We can go there." It was the one perfect place to leave her while I went back and finished my night's work, and it gave me, besides, the excuse I wanted for getting hold of John Goodrich. ..... i - - -......... - -.......... ONE THING SETTLED 251 I didn't mention these considerations to Linda, though. I simply shuddered out the address and she passed it on to the taxi-driver. It's only socially speaking that Doris and I live a long way apart. Geographically, it's not far. If it had been I might have been obliged to malinger a little in order to entice Linda into the house. It's a rather formidable-looking place and she might have balked at it. But I was still honestly shaky when we arrived there, and though the aid of the taxi-driver, impressed by Linda to help me out of the cab, was perfectly superfluous, I didn't feel in honor bound to rebel at it. "I doubt if the butler's gone to bed yet," I said, as they rang the door-bell. "However, if he has, I've got a latch-key. Doris and John went to Masters' party, you know. They won't be home yet." As I heard Ledyard's good, solid, flat feet approaching the door, I took a firm grip on Linda's arm. He and I are quite good friends, and if she could have seen him as he probably was two minutes ago, in his shirtsleeves, smoking a quiet pipe in the kitchen with the cook, she'd have recognized him at once as an entirely human being, but his official appearance is a bit formidable. He showed concern, genuine though imperturbable, at the sight of me. I must really have looked rather 252 THE QUARTZ EYE rocky or he wouldn't have said, the moment we'd got rid of the taxi-driver, "I hope you're not ill, sir!" "I've had a bit of a shake-up," I told him, "but as far as my health is concerned it's nothing serious. I'll want a drink of my brother's Bourbon and then I'll be all right. He and Mrs. Goodrich haven't conme in yet, I suppose." "Not yet, sir. I believe they went to a party at Mr. Masters'." I nodded. "I wish you'd telephone them there. Ask for my brother and tell him I want him and Mrs. Goodrich to come home; at once if they can arrange it. Tell him I've got Miss Defoe here with me. Then if you'll bring the whisky to the library... There's a fire there, isn't there?" "Oh yes, sir!" "We'll wait there, then. Whisky and, I think, some sandwiches, Ledyard." "Shan't I do that previous to telephoning, sir? It may take some time to get through to Mr. Goodrich." "Yes," I said. "The whisky first, anyhow." There was a couch in the library, but I declined it in favor of a big chair facing the fire, though I saw at the time that the choice didn't exactly meet Linda's views. She didn't of course want me to go on shuddering with an ague any longer that it was necessary. But ONE THING SETTLED 253 I knew she'd feel more comfortable if she had an actual casualty to exhibit to John and Doris when they came bome. She wouldn't relax and take it easy in the other big chair. Indeed, she wouldn't settle down in any chair at all, but moved restlessly about. Every one of Ledyard's entrances-and there were at least three of them, maybe more-startled her a little. I was reminded of Alice wishing that the Cheshire cat wouldn't keep appearing and disappearing on and from the branch of a tree. When he left the room after announcing that Mr. and Mrs. Goodrich were starting home at once, she said with a sigh, "Thank heaven!" I knew what she meant, well enough, but since it was fun to tease her a little, I said, "Are you as anxious about me as all that? You needn't be." "I'm not," she said. "You look so much better I don't believe they'll see why they had to come home from the party." "They'll see a perfectly good reason for having come home," I assured her. "They only went to the party in order to meet you. Anyhow, I'm still pretty cold. Feel and see for yourself." I wasn't, very, but in contrast to the warmth of her hands I seemed so. "I suppose I could find you a rug somewhere," she said. 254 THE QUARTZ EYE ll I1!1 I IIII Ill I I II I I J............ IllIll I ' - III III II II "Sit down here in my lap and curl up like a kitten," I suggested. "You're warmer than any rug." "Not in this house," she said, shaking her head at me somberly, "with that enormous butler gliding in every two minutes." "He won't come in again, or at least he isn't likely to. That's what you were thanking heaven for just now. And, if he did, it needn't worry you. He wouldn't show the slightest embarrassment. I doubt if he'd feel any. He was butler to some thumping London aristocrat before John got him. He's probably used to anything." "Houses like this," she said, gazing around at the paneled walls-they are rather overpoweringly baronial, I'll admit-"I can't get used to. Nor to the people who live in them. I always get rattled when I meet them. That's why I don't like to go to parties." "You won't find anything to rattle you about John. He's as easy as an old shoe. He's a banker, but they're only formidable when you owe them money." "It isn't him I mind so much as it is his wife." "Doris? Doris is nothing but my young sister." "Well, I'm getting a little afraid of you. I didn't know you could order butlers around like that." "It's the least exercised of my talents," I told her. "You're likely never to see me do it again.-Linda, we ONE THING SETTLED 255 can hear Ledyard when he lets them in. I want you here where I can feel you, so that I'll know that the whole thing isn't a dream. It seems a little like that sometimes. As if I might wake up any minute and find myself in my little old sedan with the broken windshield in my lap, wondering how I'd managed to drive into that ditch." She came, at that, and sat where the broken glass had been. But it was quite a little while before she felt soft, as if she was contentedly at home there. "Why did you drive into the ditch?" she asked. "What were you thinking about so hard and looking so cross about when I first saw you driving along?" "I was thinking," I told her, "about Ellen Thomas. I'd seen her getting married that morning-day before yesterday that was. Good lord, they've hardly more than started on their honeymoon!" "Is she a girl you wanted to marry?" Linda asked. "Well, I'd considered asking her to marry me," I admitted, "off and on." "Off and on, how long?" she wanted to know. "Oh, about six years," I said. She chuckled at that. She has a sense of humor. It ventures out oftenest when she's a little sleepy. "Why didn't you ask her? Didn't she like your laboratory?" ~_ 256 THE QUARTZ EYE - -- -- "Heavens, she never saw it! But if she had she wouldn't have called it homelike, Linda. And from what she heard of it I expect she regarded it as a bad influence." "And you thought about her, off and on, for six years. Does it always take you as long as that?" "No, not always," I answered reflectively. "I think the girl must be a factor in the result. In the last case I speeded up a lot. I only needed about six hours." "Six hours!" she exclaimed. "Why, it's..." "Six hours to make up my own mind in," I interrupted. "There's the girl's point of view to be considered, of course. I don't want her saying, when I ask her, 'This is so sudden, Mr. Carter!'" "No, I don't suppose you'd want her to say that," Linda agreed. "But how long do you think you'd have to wait to be sure she wouldn't?" "Why, the period I'd had in mind," I confessed, "was about six days. That would take it to next Thursday afternoon, about three o'clock." I couldn't keep up the play any longer, though. I freed one of my hands and turned her face so that I could look into it. "Linda, darling," I said, "I can't wait, not even six seconds. I've got to know, now." She didn't speak. Her eyes filled up but she looked back at me, soberly, steadily, and nodded her head. CHAPTER XVI SOME ONE COMES BACK T THINK that John, in his haste to find out what they had been summoned home for, must have opened the front door with his latch-key. Anyhow, we didn't hear Ledyard letting them in. They did not actually surprise us in the easy chair-we were both on our feet, in fact, when they caught their first glimpse of us-but it must have been pretty apparent that we'd just sprung out of it. I've noticed that it's the air of perfectly inhuman unconcern about each other that people try to put on when they've been interrupted in a kiss that gives them away, but even when you know it you go ahead and do it just the same. There was no sense in my being embarrassed, but I was; vicariously, perhaps, since I saw Linda make a panicky beginning at buttoning up her jacket-her blouse was still in my overcoat pocket-and then give it up. I ought to have put an arm around her and said, "Here are Doris and John, Linda," which would 257 258 THE QUARTZ EYE have put us all on a proper footing at once. Instead I performed a conventional introduction, as if they'd been meeting each other at John Masters' party. After that I began limping through an explanation. "Miss Defoe's flat had been broken into to-night," I said. "She found it ransacked and wrecked in a rather maniacal way, and there were circumstances that led me to believe she was in real personal danger. That's why I brought her here to you," I concluded. "I want you to put her up for the night." "But I brought him here!" Linda cried. She was blushing painfully and on the edge of tears. "He was having a horrible sort of chill in the taxicab and I didn't know what to do. He told me I could bring him here. That's why the butler telephoned for you to come home." John, though his successful ways irritate me sometimes, is cardinally both well-bred and kind. He spoke first, and he rose to the situation handsomely. "I'm glad you brought each other," he said. "And I'm glad you brought us home from a party that was turning out to be a dud. I'm awfully sorry, of course, about what happened at your flat, but I'm tickled to death that it brought you here to us." It was Doris, though, who said and did the perfect thing. SOME ONE COMES BACK 259 I'd been having a funny experience ever since she came into the room, seeing her not as my young sister-a person taken for granted and impossible to be afraid of-but as Linda's future sister-in-law. I suppose something like it happens to every man on the first encounter in his presence between his people and the girl he's going to marry. Looking at her now it struck me as rather heartless of her to be as well dressed as that. The special object of my resentment was her chinchilla evening wrap. Why did she have to come in looking like a stage duchess? But, as I said, it was she who, with one perfect act, smashed the ice. She said suddenly to Linda-and it was almost her first word, "I'm not afraid of you a bit, even if you are a famous person," and on the words she went straight over to her and kissed her. That did the business, of course. Everything got done that the situation called for. But when the mele was over, we men both felt a little out of it. I speak for John with perfect confidence. He wore a look of stubborn incredulity when he shook hands with me. Then-I am sure he thought of it because it would give him a chance for a few minutes to escape from the room-he said, "I'll go and tell Miles he can put up the car. I had him wait. Didn't know just what we'd find when we got here." 26o THE QUARTZ EYE I shook my head at him, and,noting that the girls seemed to be pretty well occupied with each other, ventured to say under my breath, "Don't do that." But I needn't have said even so much. In the realm of action John's as quick as lightning. If he weren't he couldn't have made the football record he did in college, nor play polo the way he does now. Nor, I suppose, put over big deals with such unvarying success. He caught instantly the import of my head shake and my glance toward Linda and Doris. He had on his poker face and he cut across my words with a nod of complete understanding. He strolled over to where his cigars were, brought me one, got his own well alight, and then said comfortably, "After a picnic in the country and all the excitement, of burglars and what-not, it's a pretty good bet, Doris, that Linda's tired and ready for bed. I want to put another drink into Carty, here, and see that he's all right before I let him go. But you two girls had better toddle along, don't you think?" Doris may have thought this a little abrupt. She may even have perceived that she was receiving orders. But if she did, she obeyed like a dutiful little wife just the same. Linda, in her desire to escape, was completely taken in. She was, for her, quite bitterly indignant about it afterward when she found out what I SOME ONE COMES BACK 26I had done. She suspected nothing now, however, and went along with Doris like a lamb. As soon as they were out of hearing I said to John, "Last night up in my laboratory when I told you about the blood stain on that kit-bag, you thought I was trying to be funny. I rather expected you to take it that way, but it was true. And it did turn out to be blood; blood that smells of murder. "I believe that the man who committed the murder was hidden in my bedroom to-night while Linda and I were in my laboratory. That may sound crazy to you, but I want you to act on the assumption that it isn't. I kept him interested listening to some impromptu theories of the crime I was telling Linda and managed to get her away, leaving him with the idea that I'd be coming back alone in a few minutes. "I think there are about three chances in four that he'll have taken some bait I left there for him and gone away. There's a fourth chance that he'll have waited for me to come back, with the idea of murdering me. That's why I don't want to go back alone." "You don't look as crazy as that sounds," said John. "But-what do the police say about it?" "They don't know anything about it," I told him. He was deeply disturbed at that. "Murder, you know," he said, "is serious business. Nothing for 262 262 THE QUARTZ EYE amateurs to play with. A man who doesn't report one to the authorities is technically an accessory after the fact, a criminal himself." "I know that," I said, "but here's the situation: The only real fact I've got is that the man I believe was murdered disappeared two days ago. He was Linda's chauffeur, and as he had five hundred dollars of her money with him when he disappeared, the police would laugh at any other idea than that he'd absconded. Be-. yond that I've nothing but inferences." "Guesswork," John commented. "If you like. But if I find out to-morrow that that blood is human blood, by shooting it into a guinea-pig, just as I said last night, and if I find that the stuff I scraped out of an old snuff-box is arsenic, or some other poison, I'll have something that isn't guesswork~. "If I went to the police to-night and asked them to arrest the man I have in mind on the strength of the only story I have to tell them, they'd lock me up for a lunatic. I'm not one, though. And I'm about eighty per cent. sure that when I've settled what I can settle within the next few hours, the thing will click. Do you want to be in on the party, or shall I go back to the laboratory by myself?" "Don't be a damned fool!" said John. "I'm in on it and so is Miles. He's at least as good as I am. He SOME ONE COMES BACK 263 was a non-cor in my company. If there's any rough stuff, he and I can manage it for you. We'd better have a gun apiece, I suppose." From some near-by arsenal of his he procured three weapons-one of them was an old-fashioned, singleaction Colt and the other two were automatics-and we stole out of the house like a pair of conspirators. Miles, with the car, was still at the curb. John told him where we were going and added, "Do you mind helping round up a murderer, Miles?" The man smiled. "Glad of a little excitement, Captain," he said. "It's serious, you know," John insisted. "That is, it may be." "You can count me in, sir," Miles said quietly, whereupon John handed him one of the automatics and climbed into the car after me. I was prepared to be asked a lot of questions as soon as the car started, as to what poison in a snuff-box could have to do with a murder involving bloodshed, who I thought the murderer was, why he had hidden himself in my bedroom, and so on, and I was wondering a little wearily how, in the few short blocks we had to go, I could tell enough of the story to make sense. I ought to have known John better than to think he would waste time like that. We were playing a four to _ __I_ 264 THE QUARTZ EYE one shot-according to my calculations; probably more like forty to one according to John's-that we might find a dangerous criminal waiting for me in my rooms, and before we went in to get him John wanted a plan of the battle. "There are only two doors from the hall into your place, aren't there? One into the lab and one into your bedroom?" "That's all," I said, "and the one into my bedroom has been broken in. I found it that way while you and Doris were there; when I went in to take off my overcoat and forgot to." He considered this in silence for a minute. I was afraid he was resenting a little the fact that I'd kept him and Doris in the dark about it at the time, but again I did him less than justice. "You think he'd been there, earlier, and gone away." "Not far away. Down to the floor below. Nobody lives there and it's dark. That's probably where he was when you and Doris and I came up." "The point is," John said, keeping to it, "whether he knows that you know your bedroom door has been forced and won't hold." "I don't see why he should. I let you and Doris into the laboratory, and out the same way just before SOME ONE COMES BACK 265 Linda came. There wasn't anything said about the place having been broken into and he found everything in the front room just about as he'd left it. The chances are he thinks I never went into the front room at all." "It's not good enough to bank on," John decided after another minute. "No, simple tactics are always best. I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll walk right up-stairs in a perfectly ordinary way. You and Miles go to the laboratory door and knock. That'll make him think it isn't you, but some friends of yours, and he'll sit tight for a minute. Then you begin to knock hard. Hammer on the door as if you meant to get in. That'll keep him interested and give me time to slip down to the other door and walk in. Then I'll come down the passage and take him in the rear." I want John to have the credit for that plan. I thought then, and do still, that it was a good one. But I insisted on an amendment to it. I was to be the flanking party while John and Miles hammered on the laboratory door. "For two reasons," I said. "The first is that I know my way around in there and am not half as likely to stumble over something in the dark. The other is that I think I'd shoot a lot quicker than you would at the person, if any, that we find in there." ,266 THE QUARTZ EYE John didn't think much of my second reason, but the first one was irrefutable and he gave in to it. We carried out the plan, when the time came, in a spirited manner and I'm pretty sure that if there'd been any one waiting for me in the laboratory we'd have got him. I found the place deserted, however. In spite of the fact that this was what I'd prophesied as the likelier result I felt rather foolish as I shouted to them not to break down the door and then went over and opened it for them. "Nobody home?" John asked with a grin. Miles was smiling, too. I didn't stop to answer the gibe, however. "Come in," I said, and walked across the room to my worktable. "You're witnesses now," I added. "You want to listen to what I say and notice what I do." The first thing I did was to take a folded filter paper out of my waistcoat. "This greenish stuff," I said, opening it out for them to see, "is what I scraped out of an old snuff-box that had belonged to Linda's father. When I discovered that some one was in the other room and realized that he'd heard me talking to her about the stuff, telling her that I believed it to be arsenic of some sort, I put down another filter paper and shook out on it a little chromium oxide out of that reagent bottle up there on the shelf. You see it's about the same SOME ONE COMES BACK 267 k~I L I I I 11 ' - -. I l I 1, Il il [. I l _ J ~ _. --- color. Both the snuff-box and the paper with the chromium oxide on it were lying on this table when Linda and I left this room and they're both gone now. They're part of the bait I was telling you about." Out of another pocket I took a small bottle. "This," I said, "has got some of the blood in it that I soaked off the kit-bag you saw up here last night. I've another blood sample, too, that I got from somewhere else, but that doesn't come into this story, since the murderer didn't happen to hear me telling Linda about it and doesn't know it exists. "He did hear me telling her I was going to take the blood from the kit-bag to a physiological laboratory to-morrow to find out if it was human, so there was some more incriminatory evidence he wanted. He'd already got hold of the kit-bag. I jabbed my finger with a needle and drew off a little blood into another bottle, and I left that for bait. That's gone, too." Both my witnesses were getting interested, in about the same degree, I think. At least they'd stopped grinning at me. I went on with my story. "Of course, as soon as I knew he was listening I began barking up the wrong tree. I got up a theory that Linda's father and mother had been poisoned by smoking some doped cigarettes. Those cigarettes in that open case over there are some that Maurice Defoe 268 THE QUARTZ EYE had in his pocket the night he died. Thanks to detective stories most non-scientific people have a vague idea that one can be poisoned that way. It was pretty thin, of course, but I got away with it. I told Linda I was coming back later to-night to make a spectral analysis of the cigarettes. Those, you notice, are lying out in plain sight just as I left them. The man in the other room knew I could analyze them till kingdom come without finding anything." "Well," John remarked now that I gave him a chance to speak, "I don't say it wasn't clever. Apparently the man was here, and with Linda on your hands I don't see that you could have done any more than you did; kid him along into letting you go away with her and into thinking you hadn't anything on him. "But, damn it, Carty, you haven't anything on him! All he's got to do is to throw away his phony samples that he took from here, and the kit-bag, of course, and where are you? You go to the police and say, 'Here's some arsenic, and here's some blood,'-I don't see yet what they've got to do with each other-'and I want you to arrest so-and-so.' They'll tell you to take a jump into the East River! How can you prove that it was your man who took the bait away?" "Well," I said, "I think I can. I think I've taken his picture. Look here. Do you see this thread? SOME ONE COMES BACK 269 When we left here it was all in one piece; one end of it was fastened to the camera shutter and it ran, about thigh high across the passage door he had to come out of. A man coming out without seeing it, would break it just about as it's broken now." "Good lord!" John cried. "Do you mean to say you took a flash-light of him?" He answered his own question, though, before I could. "But why the devil, if the flash went off, didn't he see what had happened and smash the camera?" "He'd have done it, of course, if a flash had gone off," I said. "But there wasn't any flash that he could see. There's a quartz lens in this camera and it was an ultra-violet ray I took his picture by." "I should think," John remarked, "that one of those barber-shop blue lights, turning on and off, would have given him almost as much to think about as the flash." "Ultra-violet isn't blue," I told him patiently, "nor violet, nor anything else you can see. It's beyond the visible spectrum altogether." He remained incredulous about it; wanted to know if I meant to say I could take a man's picture in the dark. "If you'll stand in that doorway for five minutes in the dark I'll guarantee you a fine coat of sunburn. 270 THE QUARTZ EYE I'll accommodate you any time when we've nothing more important to do. Just now, as I said, I want you for a witness. I want you, both of you, to look at this camera and notice that it's pointed at the doorway to the passage, so that a man coming out of the passage and breaking the thread would automatically be in its range. Notice that I'm putting back the slide in the plate-holder and taking the plate-holder out of the camera. Now come into the dark room with me and watch me develop the plate." I'd meant Miles to come along, too, but apparently he thought it wouldn't be according to the etiquette to follow us without being explicitly invited and I was, by that time, too much excited to notice that he'd stayed behind. I wasn't quite as confident that the thing had come off completely right as I let John Goodrich believe I was. There was a horribly good chance that some smal! unforeseeable obstacle might have wrecked my plan. I think that from the time I flowed the developer over the plate I held my breath until I saw, by the dim ruby light in the dark room, the parallel shadows that were going to be the two sides of the door frame, with another shadow between them that must be Some One's face. By now, John was as excited as I was, staring with SOME ONE COMES BACK 271 all his eyes while I rocked the tray and the image darkened into obscurity again. "You aren't overdoing it, are you?" he whispered. I replied in the same voiceless way that I wasn't, and added, "The thing's about ready now, though, for the fixing bath." We both jumped galvanically at Miles's voice, even before we'd had time to make sense of what he said. That was exciting enough, too. "I beg your pardon," he announced quietly, "but I think some one's coming up the stairs." John left the dark room instantly. As soon as I could safely dispose of my plate I followed him but I f ound that already he was in command. Miles was to open the door wide, if our visitor knocked, and step away out of range as he did so. John stationed himself where he could command both doors. He'd unbuttoned both his coat and his waistcoat and had the barrel of his revolver stuck down inside the band of his trousers. His right hand, resting on the butt of it, was half concealed by the skirt of his coat. "You be host," was John's order to me. "Act natural and ask him to come in. Leave the rest of it to Miles and me." I agreed to that, but with a mental reservation. I kept my right hand in my pocket. _ __ _ / THE QUARTZ EYE There was something disconcertingly matter-of-fact about the steady approach of those mounting footsteps. They sounded neither furtive nor angry nor hurried. But for the circumstances and the hour of the night it wouldn't have been possible to believe that some one of my friends wasn't dropping in on me for a casual call. I saw it was affecting John that way. His hand strayed uncertainly from the revolver butt and then back to it again. Without hesitation our visitor came to the laboratory door and knocked. Miles opened it and we saw Constantine Mitchell blinking at us from the doorway. I said, under instructions, "Oh, good evening! Come in!" "Thank you," Mitchell answered as he stepped inside. "It's an outrageous hour to knock on any man's door but I won't interrupt your labors for more than a moment." "No interruption at all," I assured him politely. "You know my brother-in-law, John Goodrich, don't you?" They had met, it seemed. John, horribly self-conscious about his revolver, feeling a fool and coming as near to looking it as he could, stammered out a reminder of the fact. I don't believe Mitchell remembered him, but he pretended to adequately enough. SOME ONE COMES BACK 273 Then he said to me, "I didn't like to risk telephoning you at this hour of night so I came, on the chance, and seeing your lights, ventured up. Do you know anything about Linda? Anything of her present whereabouts, I mean?" "Oh, yes," I told him. "That is, I think I do. She found when she got home from our picnic that her flat had been broken into again..." "Yes," he interrupted, "I know about that." "Well, she tried to telephone me about it and when my phone didn't answer-it happened to be switched off-she got rather alarmed and came up here. She said she didn't want to go back home for the night, and in the light of all that's happened I don't wonder. When she left here she spoke of going to the Algonquin. I took her down and put her in a taxi." "That's a relief," he said. "The poor child has been having so disturbing a time, this past week and more! I hope she's about at the end of it." "I do, too," I told him. This was the end of his errand, it seemed, but he paused for a deliberate look about the laboratory. One thing I saw his glance rest on a little longer than it should, was the open cigarette case with the cigarettes, their number undiminished, within it. I thought he colored a little at the sight of it. 274 THE QUARTZ EYE "You labor to all hours, I see," he remarked. "I don't wonder. It must be a fascinating place. I'd like to make a tour of its marvels sometime. Are you a scientist, also, Mr. Goodrich?" "Nothing like that," said John. "In fact I'm a complete boob at it. I never knew until to-night that a man's picture could be taken by invisible light. I didn't know there was such a thing. I always thought the ultra-violet they talk about was something you could see." "Yes," Mitchell said slowly, "I was under the same impression myself. I take it the experiment was successful?" "I guess so. We're just developing the plate, but it seemed to be coming out all right," John said. "Wouldn't you say so, Carty?" "Oh, entirely," I agreed blankly. There seemed no point in saying anything else. "Well, I won't keep you any longer," Mitchell said. "Good night!" Even John felt something queer about it. We all stood listening until we heard him leave the house. "He's a strange sort of gink," John said then. "But do you mind telling me why you lied to him about Linda instead of letting him know she was spending the night with us?" SOME ONE COMES BACK 275 "All I'll tell you now is, that I'm damned glad I did. Come along and watch me finish up the picture you've been so chatty about. You, too, Miles." But John was still wrestling with his perplexity. "What did you make of him, Miles?" he asked. "He had a gun on him," the man said. "Did you notice that, sir?" "No, I didn't," John admitted. "Well, that makes it rummer than ever.-All right, let's finish off the picture." I was anxious to make a short job of it. There'd be no use asking any advice from John till it was done. So I hardly more than flushed the hypo off the plate, dried it in alcohol, made a velox print of it and developed it. "There!" I said, turning up the light in the dark room. "Take a look at that!" John stared at it in blank bewilderment. "But, good God!" he cried. "That's a picture of Constantine Mitchell!" "Yes," I said. "It couldn't have been a picture of any one else." CHAPTER XVII THE ONLY THING TO DO OHN didn't waste much time staring either at the print or at me. He turned to the chauffeur with an order. "Drive the car up to the house, will you, Miles?" (We'd left it around the corner in order not to give too much advance notice of our raid.) "You can wait in it until we come down. I don't think you're likely to be shot at. You may as well keep your eye open, though." "I'll do that," Miles assured him. As soon as he'd gone, John asked, "Did you seriously mean that you'd thought all along that Mitchell would be the man?" "Not till to-night; a few minutes after you and Doris left to go to the party and Linda came up here. His wife gave him dead away to Linda, without knowing she was doing it, of course, on their way home from here. I haven't worked it out yet, but I'm sure it's all there." "Then why the devil," John demanded, "did you let 276 THE ONLY THING TO DO 277 him get away just now? Why didn't you give Miles and me the high sign to grab him?" "Because I don't know yet," I explained, "that I've a scrap of real evidence to hold him on, except the picture, and I hadn't identified that when he was here. I was stalling for time. I don't know yet whether my two blood samples are human blood. I can't know till I take them to Webb to-morrow. I'm morally certain that there was poison in the snuff-box. But whether the two or three milligrams of stuff that I scraped out of it will show what it is, in the spectrograph, I don't know. Even then it isn't a case. I wanted him to go away feeling secure." "Well, he didn't," John said. "I gummed that up." "I don't think he would have anyway," I said. "He'd noticed the cigarettes and he must have known he'd been tricked." "What's he going to do now, then? That's the thing for us to figure out." I answered, "I don't see that there's anything much he can do. The thing's escaped him, do you see?spread out. He wouldn't harm anybody out of malice. He impresses me as an extraordinarily kindly sort of chap. Probably hasn't a grudge against anybody in the world. All he wanted was to be safe. And look what it's taken him through in the last nine days: two _ __ __ 278 THE QUARTZ EYE burglaries-wait-three-four burglaries, a hold-up, and a murder. To say nothing of his last little party here to-night.-'And all for the want of a horseshoenail.'" Apparently John's third reader was a forgotten thing. He said with a stare, "You're feverish." "No, humorous, that's all," I told him. But at that I imagine he was right. I was beginning to feel like the devil, anyhow, and it was rather creakily that I moved over to my work-table. "I suppose I'd better go ahead and make that analysis to-night," I said, halfheartedly. But John decided that that could wait. "The way you're looking now," he said, "you couldn't analyze a soft-boiled egg. Come along home and go to bed. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll leave Miles here to guard the place to-night and drive you home myself. Switch on your phone, though, so we can talk to him if we want to." I didn't resist very vigorously. And so it turned out that my week-end excursion into the world of violent adventure, which had begun by a ride in a jade-green town car with Linda Defoe as chauffeur, ended with one in an equally palatial limousine with John Goodrich out in front of the glass driving me to his house. THE ONLY THING TO DO 279 For this was the end-of the danger, anyhow. The last event of the series had already happened, though we didn't know it till the next day. I didn't, indeed, know about it for several days, my bulletins being confined to reassuring assertions that everything was all right, and admonitions that I mustn't worry. For as soon as John had escorted me into the house at the end of our drive, he looked me over with a company commander's eye, gave me aspirin instead of whisky, and ordered me to bed. I have a vague daylight memory of Doris in a pink bathrobe sticking a clinical thermometer into my mouth; and after that, of all the phantasmagoria that accompanies a temperature of one hundred and three or four and a smart attack of what they call "flu"; clarifying gradually into night and day, with an appropriate nurse for each; doctor's visits; orange juice; glimpses of Linda and of Doris and John becoming more frequent and less momentary. Finally, with a mind as clear as a bell and an utterly acquiescent laziness of body, I was told that it was Sunday, that my temperature was normal, and that if I promised to lie still and not try to do any talking to speak of, I might be allowed to know what had been happening during the past week. The bare fact of Constantine Mitchell's death I'd been told of earlier. ______ ____ 280 THE QUARTZ EYE ' Evidently he had summarized his situation pretty much as I had and come to the conclusion that the safety, which was all he wanted, was unattainable. He had, however, perceived the one final thing that he could do, and he'd had the courage to do it. A few blocks down from the corner where Linda and I had picked up our taxicab, he walked out in front of a street-car and was instantly killed. The cars go down hill pretty fast at that time of night, when they have the lights in their favor, and his body was flung nearly to the curb. The motorman and two passengers who were riding on the front platform, declared that he started across the track, although they were only a few feet away, as if he were totally unaware that any car was coming, and that there'd been no human chance of saving him. Nevertheless, the idea that it was deliberate suicide never occurred to them. They all spoke of him, in one way or another, at the coroner's inquest as absentminded. He must have made up his mind to it deliberately, for the gun Miles had noted he had on him when he made his final call at the laboratory, was not on his person when the police ambulance picked him up. They took his body, strangely unmangled, to a near-by undertaking establishment where it remained until after the coroner's inquest. THE ONLY TI-ING TO DO 281 The news of the fatal accident was telephoned about three o'clock in the morning to the Mitchells' apartment, where Jane took the message. Mrs. Mitchell, as might have been expected, collapsed on having the news broken to her, and Jane had her hands full for a while. It wasn't until five o'clock or so that she could turn her patient over to the doctor and an emergency nurse of his providing, and go down to the flat below. She was terrified of course to find the place wrecked, and no Linda in it. She called my laboratory at once to get news or to give it, as the case might be, and was answered by the voice of Miles. I'd like to have overheard their conversation. He'd had no instructions what to say in case a stranger telephoned and he had had, in the conversation he'd overheard between John and me after Mitchell left us, a hint that Linda's whereabouts were to be kept dark. Miles is himself a person with a good deal of strength of character, and I gathered from Linda's account of Jane's that he began by denying that he possessed any knowledge that was at Jane's disposal. She thought at first he was a policeman. Finally he tried to satisfy her with the assurance that if the person she was talking about was named Linda, she was all right. But before the conversation was over, Jane knew where her mistress was. 282 THE QUARTZ EYE At eight o'clock she turned up at Doris's house with a suitcase full of Linda's things, and the news-it wasn't in the morning papers-of Mitchell's death. Doris was urging Linda to stay at her house and Jane, with a reason that she didn't tell Linda at the time, urged that the invitation be accepted. There was no point, she said, in Linda's being at home for the next few days. So that was the way the matter was arranged. Linda, I think it worth noting, didn't miss a performance at the theater. John and Doris both escorted her there on Monday night and saw the performance from the front. If anything had been needed to complete her conquest of the pair of them, this fact supplied it. It filled them both with something approaching awe that after what she'd been through-they knew the full tale of it by that time-she could go through her performances as if nothing had happened: gaily, unflaggingly, charming her audience out of its wits, as if horror and exhaustion and grief had never come near her. She did nothing, I suppose, that went beyond the very fine code of her profession, but John and Doris are talking about it yet. Doris went with her to the theater every night that week and waited to bring her home again. THE ONLY THING TO DO 283 My laboratory, after Miles had put a new lock on the bedroom door, was left to itself. Jane spent most of the time putting Linda's wrecked flat to rights, and ministering to poor Mrs. Mitchell. That was the tale of our domestic events. 'Meanwhile, the tragic death of the well-known dramatist, Constantine Mitchell, was getting the very considerable attention it deserved from the newspapers. They all ran handsome appreciations of his strange futuristic plays, and printed tributes-very genuine ones-from his colleagues and others to his high character, his unfailing kindliness and his modesty. They even published bulletins, for the first day or two, upon the alarming condition of his unconsolable widow, and chronicled with gratification the symptoms of her recovery. The coroner's inquest uncovered nothing beyond the tragic surface facts, and the jury brought in a verdict, of course, of death by accident. The funeral, which occurred on Friday of that week, was impressive to the point of being a public event. That, rather summarily, was the story I listened to that Sunday morning, lying in bed, under injunctions not to talk. I think you can understand my not taking the nap they recommended when they left me. I had a good deal to think about. _ __ I 284 THE QUARTZ EYE -- -- -.,- _. I thought about it pretty much all the rest of that day and a good part of that night. I wanted to talk to Linda about it, but the authorities wouldn't let me. Orders were that I was not to be excited, and they paid no attention to the obvious fact that I'd have found it far less exciting to go to a fire on the driver's seat of a hook and ladder truck than to lie in bed in a silent room, bottled up by a hushful nurse, with the things I had to think about whirling around in my head. It's horribly silly the way people treat invalids. But Linda knew how I felt, and on Monday afternoon, when the nurse took her two hours off, she announced her intention of taking care of me without assistance. "I think," she declared after she'd shut the door and pulled up a chair to the side of my bed, "that they're likely to drive you into another fever if they don't let you talk. I know it isn't because I want to be talked to and told what it was all about that I'm going to let you do it. We'll sit like this," she went on, holding my hand in such a way that her finger-tips rested on my wrist, "and if you get excited and your heart begins to bump, I'll make you stop." On that heavenly understanding, we proceeded. I couldn't, though, satisfactorily obey her injunction to begin at the beginning. "The beginning's still THE ONLY THING TO DO 285 a mystery to me," I admitted. "I don't know exactly what happened the night of that supper party in the car, and I can't see at all why it happened. I guess it's likely that it will remain a mystery. "I think it's limited to Mitchell, though. I thinfl you knew your father and mother, and I don't believe there was any emotional fact in the life of either of them that you weren't fully aware of at the time. "But I start in with Mitchell, when he and his wife came back from Europe last fall, when he found you the sensational celebrity that I'm always forgetting you are, and met you. I remember your telling me you thought he didn't like you very well just at first. "Well, of course you recalled the tragedy to him, and that might have been the whole explanation. It would have been the natural explanation if he'd avoided you. But if meeting you recalled a crime of his that he'd thought buried for a dozen years, he wouldn't dare avoid you. He'd want to find out whether you suspected, ever so faintly, that a crime had been committed. He'd want assurance, and more assurance. It would terrify him to talk to you about old times and about your father and mother, yet he wouldn't be able to resist doing it." Linda nodded soberly. "It might have been like that," she said. "I guess it was. He'd ask me ques 286 THE QUARTZ EYE tions about them suddenly, change the subject, and then change back again." "One of the things he asked you," I said, "-kept asking you, probably-was whether you had any keepsakes of your mother's and father's." "Carty, he did!" she cried. "How did you know that?" "I didn't know it," I told her. "I assumed it because the story won't work out any other way. Linda, darling, remember who he was all the time. He was my Some-one-who-wanted-something, and the something he wanted was the snuff-box. That, somehow, was the center of his crime. It might be harmless. It might have been emptied and scoured. But he couldn't know, and as the thing obsessed him more and more profoundly, he felt he could have no security nor peace in this world until he knew. "Well, nothing you told him could set his mind at rest. You suspected nothing; your childhood with your father and mother seemed like a dream to you; you had no mementoes of it. On the other hand, the mementoes existed. All your father's and mother's effects had been stored and you might get them out of storage some day. "Eventually you took the flat beneath theirs, and bought the little farm, and did what he'd been fearing THE ONLY THING TO DO 287 you would do. You had the stored things brought from the warehouse." "You know," she said, "I wouldn't have done it when I did, and I mightn't have done it yet, if it hadn't been for Connie himself. He talked about those things so much I felt a reproach in it. For myself, I wanted it to go on seeming like a dream." It was as ironic, you know, as anything in any of his plays, the way the man from the first, in pursuit of a safety that was already his if he could only have believed it, dug himself deeper and deeper into the pit. "Well," I said, "now we're down to a couple of weeks ago. Part of the things are stored in the flat and part of them at the farmhouse. You haven't looked through them yet, but you're going to as soon as you get a free day. And then the first of the funny things happened. Mitchell, of course, was the burglar who broke into your flat." "Why should he break in?" Linda objected. "He and Elsie had a key." "It had to look like a burglary," I pointed out. "He couldn't make as thorough a search as he must make and cover the traces of it. So he jimmied the doorleft some chisel marks on it, anyhow-and stole a few odds and ends of your jewelry and Jane's petty cash. Lord, how he must have hated doing that!" _ __ 288 THE QUARTZ EYE "Why do you suppose," Linda asked, "when he was looking for the snuff-box he cut open those old packages of letters?" I admitted that I hadn't guessed that out very clearly. I didn't know enough about what had happened twelve years ago. "If he'd noticed during the last day or two of your father's and mother's life any change in their manner toward him, he might have suspected that Elsie had had something to do with it. She may at some time since have made him some admission or asked some question that indicated she'd written some such letter as she actually did write. "Or, it may not have been that at all. It may have been just a part of his obsessive desire to make sure that there wasn't anything, written about that time, that could give him away. He knew approximately how much time he had, of course, since it was Jane's day out and you and Mrs. Mitchell had driven to the farmhouse to measure the windows for curtains." "Where was he that day?" she asked. "I mean where was he supposed to be?" "At home, with a headache. Don't you remember, he told you afterward he thought they'd tried to get into his flat, too? He'd heard some one moving around, he said, and he called out to know who was there." THE ONLY THING TO DO 289 She nodded, somberly, at that. Then she said, with a little shiver, "It's sort of horrible, you see. He was the oldest friend I had. I thought he really liked me." "He did," I assured her, "immensely. He had a profound affection for you. In the end that was what saved our lives. But he had one fixed idea, the idea of getting hold of that snuff-box before you did, and everything else had to give way to that. "Of course, the negative result of his search of the flat left him another job to do. He did it the next day. He drove that little coupe of his down to the farm in the rain. I saw the muddy tracks of his tires on the barn floor the day we went down to the picnic. Don't you remember my asking you a lot of questions about the weather and what cars you'd used, and you told me I was detecting again and took me off under that big maple tree and put me to sleep? "When he and his wife came down a little later in the coupe, I saw that the tire treads were the same as those that had left the tracks on the barn floor, but at that time, fresh from reading Elsie's letter, I was thinking about her. He'd tried to make that burglary look like the work of a gang of hoodlums. And if the trunks from the storage warehouse hadn't been sealed, he would have got away with it." "And the next day," Linda commented, "when we I _ 1_ _ _ 290 THE QUARTZ EYE -- all went down together and found what had happened, he was furious with me for sticking to it that I didn't want to call the police." "Of course he was. The police never would have suspected him. But I imagine he couldn't help wondering, when you refused to call them in, whether it mightn't be because you suspected something. Had you, by any chance, already found the snuff-box and were you carrying it around with you? It wasn't a reasonable fear, but fears engendered by a fixed idea never are. Look at Elsie's fears that you were sending him messages behind her back. They were self-engendered, too. "As soon as the possibility occurred to Mitchell that you might be carrying the snuff-box about with you, he was in torture again. He'd got to make sure you weren't. Paul reported sick Monday and that gave him his chance. He told his wife he had some work to do and wouldn't go to the Howlands' party with her. She was right in suspecting it had something to do with you, but she had the wrong reason. Mitchell knew the minutiae of your time-table as well as Paul did. He probably came down and hid in the area not more than five minutes before you drove up in your taxicab. He robbed you, slugged you, and pushed you inside the door. THE ONLY THING TO DO 29I "He wasn't really taking a very long chance. If you'd heard him stealing up the steps behind you and turned and seen him there, you'd have thought it nothing but a rather crude sort of practical joke. You didn't, though, and he went through with it. "'And that, so far as he could see, finished the job. The snuff-box, even if it still had the poison in it, was not among your possessions. It had disappeared somehow, and he was safe; as safe, at least, as he could hope to be. Elsie's jealousy played into his hands that night, for her bringing him straight back home and their finding you there in the hall, just recovering consciousness, made what looked like a perfect alibi for him." I made rather a long pause there and Linda asked me if I wasn't getting tired. We did take a little recess. She pushed the chair away and sat on the edge of the bed. "I didn't stop because I was tired," I confessed presently. "I stopped because I've got to the place where I can't see my way through so clearly. But I'd better go on with it. "It was Thursday night that you showed him Hallstrom's letter and told Elsie at the same time what was in it. I don't wonder she saw his face change. It showed him he wasn't safe, after all. The danger, in fact, was more acute than it had ever been before. The II __ _ __ 292 THE QUARTZ EYE - — I — I history of that bag made it almost certain that the snuff-box would be in it. You told him you were going to send Paul to the Belmont Hotel the next morning to get it. He must manage somehow to get it first. Well, there's where I stick. "I can see a plan he might have made. It was a plan like the others, in that it wouldn't involve doing anybody any serious harm. He knew exactly what the valise at the Belmont was like. He had a valise exactly like it. We know he got it out and packed it that Friday morning on the pretext he gave his wife, that he might spend the night at Poughkeepsie. "According to the plan I make for him, he was going to encounter Paul somewhere, presumably at the check-room counter at the Belmont, and contrive to exchange bags with him somehow. There'd be a perfectly easy explanation that he'd picked up the wrong one by mistake. Paul would bring Connie's bag to you, he'd search your father's bag at his leisure and bring it back to you that night, half chagrined and half amused over his mistake. "I don't know whether he ever made that plan or not. If he did, it went tragically wrong somehow. The journey your father's bag made between the Belmont Hotel and the wash-room in the Grand Central Station across the street, where it was found pried open THE ONLY THING TO DO 293 and with a blood stain on the bottom of it, is one that I can't tell myself the story of. "I can't tell Paul's story either. We know it was Paul who went to the bank, for unless the teller had known him he wouldn't have given him the money. We don't know that it was he that Hallstrom gave the bag to in the Belmont, since Hallstrom didn't know him. We don't even know that it was he who brought back your car." Linda surprised me here by contradicting me. "Oh, but we do!" she said. "At least somebody saw Paul out in front of the house after my car had come back. Oh don't look so wild, Carty! I didn't know it until to-day. Jane told me this morning. And she didn't know it until yesterday. "There's a woman named Vane, who lives in the apartment below mine. I think it's her son she keeps house for. He's a lot younger than she is, anyway. I guess she's a well-meaning old thing, but Jane's found her rather a pest since Connie died. She wants to come up and weep with Elsie, and when Elsie won't see her, she talks to Jane. Jane thinks it's nothing but curiosity. I suppose it is partly that. "Well, she told Jane yesterday, in rather an awestruck way, that she'd seen Connie starting off to play golf only two days before he'd died. She was sitting 294 THE QUARTZ EYE in her front window, watching. Jane thinks she spends most of her time doing that. She said she saw Connie's little coupe drawn up at the curb behind my car, and she was amused at the contrast, because mine was so clean and shiny and his was all covered with mud. She said he never did seem to care anything about keeping his car washed. "But here's the point. She said she saw Paul helping him get started. They came out together, Connie with his valise and Paul carrying Connie's golf-bag. It's an enormous one. He always wanted every kind of club there was. Paul put the golf-bag in the rumble, but Connie took the other one inside the car with him. And then Paul went back into the house. "She'd got up to leave the window thinking, Jane says, there wouldn't be anything more to see, but she did stay to watch Connie drive off. He must have forgotten something after all, she said. Because right after he started she saw Paul running down the street after him, carrying another bag.-Carty, is that it? Does that show you how it happened?" "Sit perfectly still for a minute," I told her, "and let me think." But I don't believe it was sixty seconds before I told her I thought I had it. "That was Mitchell's plan," I said. "And it was better than the one I made for him. It didn't involve THE ONLY THING TO DO 295 his explaining why he turned up at the Belmont. He'd got his car parked at the curb, you see, and he had his bag all packed. He watched at his front window until he saw Paul drive up in your car. Then he brought up the elevator to his floor and rode down in it, with his valise and his golf-bag, knowing Paul would be waiting at the foot of the elevator for it to come down. "Paul probably offered to help him with his things. If he didn't, Mitchell asked him to. Paul put down your father's valise-it would be perfectly safe there, of course-and took the golf-bag. Mitchell followed him with your father's bag instead of his own. There were ten chances to one the thing would work just as he meant it to. "But the moment Paul came back into the house and picked up the other bag he saw it was the wrong one. Probably there was a difference in weight. Mitchell couldn't have calculated that. Paul dashed out after him; caught up with him, I suppose, at the corner where Mitchell would have been stopped by the lights. He must have opened the car door; tried to explain to Mitchell that he'd made a mistake. "There's no good trying to figure out exactly what happened after that. If Mitchell got the light just then and pretended not to understand what Paul meant, Paul may have got into the car voluntarily. Or _ _.__ _ ___ I 296 THE QUARTZ EYE -- ----- Mitchell may, in desperation, have hit him over the head with something and dragged him in. "What I'm sure of is that Mitchell must have driven miles that day with a dead man sitting in the car beside him. No one could have seen anything through the muddy glass. He drove until he found a secluded spot somewhere-there are plenty of them within fifty miles of town-where he could conceal the body and search the bag. Then he found he'd committed a useless murder after all, since the thing he had to have wasn't there. "He wasn't a careful, deliberate criminal, and he made some mistakes. It was a mistake to call up his friend in Poughkeepsie and say he wasn't coming to play golf. That call could be traced, I suppose, and it might give us a lead as to where to look for Paul's body. And he didn't notice the blood that had been soaked up by your father's kit-bag or by the rug." Linda was looking pretty white but she was determined to go on with it. "Why do you suppose he brought the kit-bag back anyhow? Why didn't he leave it hidden where he left Paul?" "I suppose," I answered, thinking it out, "he didn't want to leave anything with the body that would serve to identify it, as that bag would. In the meantime he wanted it to look as if Paul had absconded. And leav THE ONLY THING TO DO 297 ing the bag broken open in the station wash-room seemed to point that way. It was all you thought of, and very likely it's all I'd have thought of if I hadn't noticed the blood on it. "Well, there isn't much more. He got home late that night and put up his car. And then, as he was approaching his house, he probably saw me come out of it; before I went into the area, you see. That made him think you'd told me about the hold-up, and heaven knew how much more. "He couldn't feel safe then until he knew who I was, and he followed me home; not skilfully enough so that he could be sure I didn't know he'd followed me. I turned out to be perfectly harmless. But he took the precaution of telling me at the picnic that he'd followed me home in his zeal for looking after you. "Apparently everything was quieting down. He was safe after all. But at supper that night you told him two things that turned him desperate again. You told him how Hallstrom had sent you the snuff-box, with the capsules still in it. But you didn't tell himyou can't have told him, though I don't remember how it happened you didn't-that you'd brought the things along with you to the picnic and emptied the capsules into the road; or that the snuff-box was in my pocket at that minute." 298 THE QUARTZ EYE "I think the thunder came just about then," said Linda, "and made us all jump." "That may have been it. Anyhow," I said, "he was left with the impression that the snuff-box, with the capsules still in it, was in your flat. And a few minutes after that, you told him how you'd got up and eaten the mushrooms. I think he must have had a nightmare fear that what you'd said had given him away to his wife; that she'd be able to understand what he'd done. And he waited until she'd recovered consciousness and had spoken. Then he started back to town as fast as he could drive, to get into your flat, find the snuff-box, and get the capsules out of it. "He probably was a maniac, or pretty near it, when he couldn't find the thing there. Then he thought of me. He knew by that time that you'd confided more to me than you'd told him you had, and he rushed up to my place. He was still there in the building when John and Doris came in with me. "There, thank God! That's the end of that horrible story! At all events, it's as near the end as we're ever likely to come." I'd felt her trembling for quite a while but it wasn't until I'd pushed my way doggedly to the end that she gave a little voiceless sob, put her face down beside mine, clung to me and wept. At last she sat THE ONLY THING TO DO 299 erect again, dried her wet face and remarked with a sort of smile, "That's no way to treat an invalid. But, Carty, what are we going to do?" That was too hard a problem for me to solve offhand. Anyhow, the nurse, coming home just then, didn't give me a chance to try. She was scandalized at the emotional atmosphere she'd found traces of in the room and promptly drove Linda out. But that evening after dinner, feeling a whole lot better for my talk with Linda and strong enough to defy the medical authorities, I called John into consultation. When you want a plain, common-sense opinion, he can do as well by you as anybody. Doris had gone to the theater with Linda. It was the last week of the show, thank the lord! I abridged the story as much as I could, but I had to give him all the essentials of it, and he had smoked three of his long cigars down to their butts before I'd got to the end of it. I finished by asking him, as Linda had asked me, what we were going to do about it. He didn't try to answer that question offhand himself. He said at last, "We'll leave the old tragedy out of consideration altogether. It's never been questioned that Linda's father and mother died from eating poisoned mushrooms. We know they didn't; Linda knows it, and Mrs. Mitchell knows it. But we can hunt 300 T HE QUARTZ EYE until hell freezes over without finding any real evidence of how or why they were poisoned, and who did it. We've got a pretty good guess who did it and it may be corroborated by the half-thimbleful of stuff you scraped out of that snuff-box. No, that's out." "It won't stay out," I argued. "It will be dragged into the other case as a motive." "All right, let it come in as a motive. It's the other case I'm thinking about: Linda's poor devil of a chauffeur. He sounds like a good loyal chap. It seems hard to leave him under a cloud; under the suspicion the other man threw on him of having deliberately absconded. But hell, what can you do? Think what an attempt to do anything about it would involve." "Legally I suppose I haven't any choice," I remarked. "I've a certain amount of real evidence there that a man's been murdered." John added it up. "You've got the old gossip's testimony that she saw him putting Mitchell's golf-bag into his car, and later running down the street after him with a bag in his hand. You think you'll be able to prove blood on the bag and on the rug that was in his car. If you could trace the telephone call and the route of the car, it might give you a lead toward finding the chauffeur's body. And you've got a picture of Mitchell coming into your laboratory from the passage. If THE ONLY THING TO DO 30I ~l I I I, -7,, Ill I - '.... L _ Mitchell were alive now it would be up to you to tell your story to the district attorney. But damn it, the man's dead!" "Mitchell's dead, I agree. But John, here's the conundrum. Paul's disappeared and I've some reason to believe he was murdered. The blood on the bag, if it turns out to be human, points that way. Well, suppose Mitchell didn't murder him, and somebody else did. Then by keeping that evidence dark, I'm shielding the real murderer. The question is, you see, whether this story of mine, ninety per cent. guesswork, I'll admit, is sound or not." John thought a while. "I don't call that guesswork any more," he said. "Invisible light, that's what you've done it by-ultra violet. I tell you what I'd do. Pour my blood samples down the drain and my little squill of scrapings, smash the negative of Mitchell's picture and burn the print, and call it a day. Say that that's the end of it. If they ever find the chauffeur's body you compound a felony and keep it dark that you know anything about it. Because, damn it, Carty, you don't really know anything about it and you never will. You'll never come any closer to it. The man's dead and the thing's finished." I agreed with John about that. But as it turned out, we were both wrong. CHAPTER XVIII HOW WE FOUND OUT T HE next day, or the next but one, I escaped from my gilded cage of invalidism and went back to live in the laboratory. It was no more than what it is fashionable nowadays to call a gesture. I felt if I went on letting them pamper me much longer there was no telling what sort of fatty degeneration my spirit might succumb to. But I didn't seriously expect to do much work. Linda's show was to close Saturday night and I was going to all the performances. There was a plausible but perfectly mendacious pretense that this saturation in the atmosphere of the theater was undergone with the idea of helping me when I went to work next summer on her fire trick. Really I went for the thrill I infallibly got when I watched her on the stage-I get it yet, if you want to know-from a total disbelief that she was in any way personally attached to me; and yet from knowing all the while, in some quiet corner of my mind, that the 302 HOW WE FOUND OUT 303 moment she came off the stage she was going to change into the Linda who was going to marry me Monday. I wouldn't have tried to explain this to John or even to Doris, but Linda understood it well enough. Already we had our plans laid in the minutest detail. Right after the wedding we were going to abandon Jane and Jim and the jade-green RollsRoyce and drive out all by ourselves to the farm, disconnect the telephone, ignore the rural free delivery and live for three or four weeks like a pair of Arcadians. We did it, too, I'll say here in case I don't get around to mentioning it again. Anyhow you'll no doubt find it easy to believe that the only research work I did during the three or four days I lived in the laboratory resulted in the purchase of a wedding ring and a small but sufficiently commodious car that we could drive ourselves. In the latter transaction they allowed me seventy-five dollars on my shattered sedan, which I regarded as liberal, not to say quixotic, on their part. Linda, though, seemed to feel that I'd been rather heartless not to keep it. "It wouldn't go into the house," I argued, "and it isn't the right material for a lawn ornament." "I suppose not," she agreed. "And it probably wouldn't have turned out to be a suitable toy for the children, either." 304 THE QUARTZ EYE I'm afraid I'm marking time. It's a lot more fun to talk about things like this than to get to work and chronicle the last thing-the last two things-that happened. But here goes! On Saturday morning, the day of Linda's last two performances, I got a note from Elsie Mitchell, asking me if I would come to see her that afternoon as she had some matters of importance to talk to me about. The barest glance at it transformed one of my surmises into a certainty, for the unformed tremulous scrawl in which it was written was the same as that of the letter that I'd found in Maurice Defoe's coat lining. There'd never been but one Elsie! There was no getting around a request like that, of course. I'd have to go, but I dreaded it like the very devil. The possibilities latent in that interview were enough to give a man a nightmare. Luckily I hadn't much leisure for contemplating them. I was admitted to the apartment by a small,thickshouldered, white-haired, worn-looking old man who introduced himself to me as Mr. Bechman and spoke of Elsie as his daughter. It was plain that he'd been expecting my arrival and that there was something he wanted to say to me before I saw Mrs. Mitchell. "I understand you are a very old friend of my daughter's late husband," he began. _ __ _I __ _I HOW WE FOUND OUT 305....I "I'm afraid I can't claim to be that," I told him. "Really, I had nothing more than a slight acquaintance with him." The old gentleman seemed both surprised and perplexed at this assertion. "There must be something more than that," he said. "At least my daughter thinks there is. She seems to be hoping something from your visit. I trust you will say anything you can.... She is suffering, Mr. Carter, from something more than the loss of her husband. Much as she loved him it can not all be that. Something is preying upon her mind. I must not keep you longer. She knows you are here and will wonder what we are saying." He was an infinitely pathetic figure and I said, as I rose to follow him to the room where his daughter was waiting to receive me, that if I had any comfort for her I would surely give it. "And it's possible," I added, "that I may find I have." It was in a room that must have been Mitchell's study, and seated at his desk, that I found her. She looked more doll-like than ever in the big chair and her white face and ash blonde hair made an incongruous contrast with the dead black of her mourning. "I understand," she began without any greeting whatever, "that you are going to marry Linda Defoe." I said in as natural a manner as I could manage that 3o6 THE QUARTZ EYE - --- --,..... I was and, uninvited, took a chair. Apparently it was what she meant me to do. "She's been here to see me, twice," she went on in a thin bodiless voice. "I wouldn't see her. I'll never see her in my life if I can help it. And yet, there's something I want to ask her. And I thought that perhaps you"-her face contorted itself in a grimace of pain-"would help me." "I will if I can," I said. The dead-alive voice went on. "She used to talk about meaning sometime to go through her father's and mother's old things; trunks and boxes that had been in storage since they died. There must be a lot of old letters that they didn't throw away. There may be one... Perhaps she's found it already." "She hasn't found it. I know the one you mean." "You've read it, then," she broke in quickly. "You must have or you wouldn't know." "Yes," I admitted, "I thought I'd better. I found it in Maurice Defoe's coat, in the valise Hallstrom sent Linda. Linda hasn't read it, though, and you may rest assured she never will, for it's been destroyed. And," I went on after an instant's hesitation, "I can tell you something else that I think you'll be glad to know. Maurice Defoe never read it, either. It was still sealed up in its envelope when I found it." HOW WE FOUND OUT 307 Her face which had been staring into mine since I'd begun to speak showed no more change of expression than a mask, but as I finished, the tears welled into her eyes and trickled unchecked down her white cheeks. "It was kind of you to tell me that," she said. "I don't know why anybody should be kind to a horrible person like me." But before I could speak the miserable disclaimer that was on my tongue she snatched the admission back. "I suppose you think I was a fool to write that letter. Well, I wasn't. I'd write it again to-morrow, to you,-if Connie wasn't dead. Her mother took him away from me. He was mine and she wanted him. And she got him. Even after she was dead he went on thinking about her. I married Jacob Miller to make him think I didn't care. And I was happier with him than I've ever been, before or since. I wasn't jealous of him. He could have had fifty mistresses. But after he died I was a fool again and I asked Connie to marry me. He told me he'd forget her. But he didn't. As soon as he saw her daughter-he acted at first as if he didn't like her, but that was a blind to take me in-he began falling in love with her and she went to work to take him away from me, too. He'd have been alive now, if it hadn't been for her." In a sense remote from her meaning, I thought that 308 THE QUARTZ EYE was probably true, but I had to try to say something. "I don't know whether my assurance can have any weight with you, but I can give it with the utmost confidence. Your husband was not in love with Linda nor she with him." "You're not jealous," she said contemptuously. "You're like the other woman's husband. You wouldn't bother, any more than he did, to read a letter that another woman wrote you about her. You think you know so much. Why, you fool, she was with him the night he died! That's why he rushed away from the picnic and why she was in such a hurry to get rid of me when she had brought me home. I know it! Something tells me so. It was because he'd just left her and had his mind full of her that he walked in front of that street-car." I got up to go, having had about all of it I could stand, but I said, as gently as I could, "Linda was with me that evening. She came back to my laboratory and we went together to my sister's house. She never saw your husband after he left the farm." Her tears came again and she said, "I'm glad you told me that," in a tone of gratitude. But in the next breath she went on, "You think you know all about it. You think there was nothing between them. You've tried to be kind to me. If you hadn't, I'd never have _ __ ___ HOW WE FOUND OUT 309 - I showed you this. Look at it! I found it in his safedeposit box, yesterday. It was sealed but I tore it open. I put everything back, though. She's welcome to anything he wanted to give her. Maybe you'd like to see what it is." It was a big linen envelope, torn open at the end. By the feel, its contents were rather miscellaneous. I read what was written on the envelope. It said, "For Linda." "I see it's meant for her," I remarked. "I'll take it to her if you wish." "Do as you like about that," she answered. "If I were you, though, I'd look at it first." I found her father waiting anxiously for me in the hall. I told him I hoped I'd been able to relieve her trouble a little. In turn he told me something I was glad to hear. "As soon as she's able to travel," he said, "mother and I are going to take her to Europe." Linda was dining with me at the laboratory that night, and as I hadn't known how long my interview with Mrs. Mitchell would take, we'd arranged that she was to come there from her matinee, just as she'd done a fortnight before. Out of sentiment, admitting that we were silly and not caring whether we were or not, we agreed on the same meal that I'd improvised on the former occasion. This time, though, finding myself __ __ 310 THE QUARTZ EYE ii I.....Jill....I II III ~....... J I with half an hour to spare, I made some advance preparations: set the table, and so on. So when I heard a faint chirp on the speaking-tube I was ready for her. She'd taken my instructions literally about sighing gently into the whistle down at the other end. She reproached me vigorously, as I'd expected her to, for having stolen a march on her in preparing our meal in advance. "There's a reason," I told her. "There's something we've got to take a look at and I want to get it over with." "Not that, Carty! Not any more horrors! Can't we just leave it buried?-Oh, I suppose not. What is it?" "That's the way I feel about it, too," I told her. "But this is surely the last." It wasn't quite, but I believed I was telling the truth. I handed her the big linen envelope. She read the words, "For Linda" with a puzzled frown. "That's his handwriting. Carty, what is this?" she demanded. "Where did it come from?" "His wife found it in his safe-deposit box. It was sealed up then, and she ripped it open and looked inside. She gave it to me, poor soul, in the belief that it was going to blast our lives." HOW WE FOUND OUT 3II "What is in it, Carty?" she asked. And when I told her I didn't know, she demanded, "Why not? Why didn't you look?" "I thought it would be more fun if we looked at it together," I said. "And I wasn't even afraid of seeming afraid to, bless your heart!" She stopped to kiss me, rather deliberately, over that. "You go right on," she commented, "doing everything just exactly right. Oh well, let's get it over with!" With that she shook out the contents of the envelope over our dinner-table. We both gasped and stared at what we saw. Then I, by way of waiting to see whether Linda's mind would reach the same conclusion that mine had, busied myself picking up some loose change-quarters, nickels and dimes-that had bounded from the table and rolled about the floor. When I returned to the table with the little handful I'd gathered, I saw by the look in her face that she understood. "This proves it, I think," I said. "It's all here, isn't it?" "I guess so," she assented absently. "Oh, of course it is." "You'd minimized your losses rather," I told her. It was true that none of the jewelry that had been 312 THE QUARTZ EYE taken from her dressing-table in the first burglary was of any great value. But there were quite a lot of items: big and little bar pins; a bracelet with a turquoise in it; a jade pendant on a gold chain. "There's more loose money than I thought," she said. "Oh, I know! It's what was in my wrist-bag as well as what was in Jane's drawer. And there's my old compact. I've got them both back now. But Carty, that's the horrible thing! I hate to touch it. Do you suppose there's any blood on it?" What she was pointing at was a packet of twentydollar bills. "I told Paul that morning to get twenties. And he always got new bills for me." As I picked them up to count them she turned away from the table, dropped into her big chair, and covered her face with her hands. "There are twenty-five of them," I told her. "It's all here." "I remember you said how he must have hated stealing my jewelry and the money out of Jane's cashdrawer. But Carty, why did he rob poor Paul? Why couldn't he have buried the money with him?" "It had to look like a robbery," I pointed out to her. "A murdered man with five hundred dollars in his pocket would give the police too much to think aboqt." "And why did Connie keep it and send it back to IHOW WE FOUND OUT 3I3 I I. me in this horrible way? Why should a murderer care whether he stole a few things or not?" "He wasn't a murderer, exactly," I said. "Well, I don't suppose many of them are. But he was an unusually clear case of a man dominated by a fixed idea: the idea of making himself safe. He did kill Paul, and he'd have killed you and me, but only when the groove of his idea left him no other way to turn." "He didn't kill my father and mother that way," she argued. I agreed that this was probably true. "We'll never know how that happened," I said. "This is surely the end of it." It wasn't, though; not quite. I'd walked over to my work-table and she asked me what I was doing. "I'm going to follow John's advice now," I said. "I haven't done it before. But now that we know we're right, I'm going to destroy my evidence. The man's dead, with a big reputation and a good name, and so far as I'm concerned, he can keep both of them." "Carty," she asked, "doesn't Elsie know? How can she help knowing if she looked at the things that were in that envelope?" I didn't feel equal to trying to account completely for the workings of a mind like Elsie Mitchell's. _ _ 3I4 THE QUARTZ EYE "She's got a fixed idea, too," I said. "And in this case it's been serviceable to her. She didn't stop to identify that jewelry as stuff she must have seen you wear, nor connect these bills with the money Paul had drawn from the bank. They were all valuables that he meant to give you, and that was good enough proof for her that he was your lover. Whether there was any lurking misgiving in behind that, I don't know. If there was, she's buried it." Lovers are said to be cruel and I can understand how their preoccupation with each other can look so to their less blissful friends. We may seem rather hard-hearted when I confess that the shadow of the Mitchells' tragedy lifted from our spirits the moment we began cooking the ham and eggs and the creamed potatoes, and thatt it was with the lightest hearts in the world we set out to the theater where Linda was going to give her last performance of the season. There was another party of John Masters-that we were really going to this time-booked to follow the performance. I saw him, however, before that, for we ran into each other again between the acts, this time down in the smoke-room. He had two grievances against me: one that I'd kept Linda away from his former party, and the other, that I'd been disingenuous concerning my real relations with her the last time we'd talked HOW WE FOUND OUT 315 about her between acts. It wasn't possible to explain how illusory both these grievances were. But I wanted to act friendly, anyhow, so I made him smoke one of my cigarettes instead of one of his own, told him we were surely coming to his party to-night, and got him to sit down, like a long-lost brother, for a little chin. It wasn't until then that I realized that I hadn't, really, anything to talk to him about. But in two minutes he said something that made me sit up. "I believe you're just the man I want," he said. "You're a dab at science; know all about chemistry and stuff like that. Here's a question for you. Could anybody really be poisoned by taking snuff? Without knowing anything was wrong with it at the time, you see, but dying in horrible agony a few hours later?" "Broadly speaking, no," I told him. "But then, nobody takes snuff anyhow, nowadays." "This isn't a question of nowadays," he explained. "This is costume stuff-swords and ruffles." I suppose I looked rather surprised, for he went on. "Heavens, this is nothing I'm writing! I swear to God I'm innocent! I've never poisoned a character in my li fe. No-it's rather confidential, I suppose, but I believe I'll tell you about it. I'm in a rather awkward position and I believe I'd like your advice. Not literary, you know. 3i6 THE QUARTZ EYE "You must know her, since she's such a great friend of Miss Defoe's: poor Mitchell's widow. She sent for me this afternoon to come down and have a cup of tea with her. What it boiled down to was a short story of his-I guess it must be the only one he ever wrote; he stuck tight to the theater, that chap. And judging from this thing, it's just as well he did. "It wasn't with his other manuscripts. She found it, she said, in his safe-deposit box at the bank. She assumes it's a classic, of course,-I doubt if she's actually read it herself,-and wants it printed. I suppose there are plenty of magazine editors who'd run the thing, right now, for its news value. But I've read it, and it won't help his reputation a bit. A conscientious executor would tear it up. The question is, is his widow the kind of person you could say a thing like that to? I've got a hunch she isn't." "Tell me about the story," I said. "I don't set up for a literary critic, but I'd like to hear about it, anyhow." "Oh, it's got one of his wild ideas in it. But he's made a mess of it by trying to treat it two ways at once. He calls it The Snuff-Box, and it's costume stuff, as I said. I think he started out to do it as an imitation of some of Stevenson's things. The Sire de Maletroit's Door or A Lodging for the Night-you ____ HOW WE FOUND OUT 317 know what I mean. Graceful and witty and objective as a red apple. But Mitchell's got it all mucked up with a lot of psychoanalysis. So the thing works out a mess both ways." "All right," I said, "now tell me the story." He sighed wearily, but gave in. "Why, there's a Count and a Countess, very swanky, top-notch people-lots of etiquette. They've got one child, a girl, getting taught all the accomplishments: plays the harp; dances the minuet; does crewelwork-whatever that is. There's a young man, a poet sort of chap, in love with the Countess; romantically, of course. He'd die before he'd let her guess. She's perfectly loyal to the Count, and the poet assumes she's happy with him. Then he makes up his mind she isn't. He thinks it's up to him to save her by putting the Count out of the way. He'd like to challenge him to a duel, but his social position doesn't admit of it. Counts don't fight duels with poets. "It's pretty tepid so far, but here comes the kick. He's got some poison-the poet has, that is-some rare deadly poison that some friend of his gave him. And he does a lot of thinking about how he can apply it, honorably, to the Count. Finally he gets his chance. "The Count uses some highly special kind of snuff and the supply has run out. He asks the poet to get 3i8 THE QUARTZ EYE some for him. The poet's a strictly honorable chap, you see, and doesn't want to take an unfair advantage. He gets two packages of snuff and poisons one of them, and then wraps them up again exactly alike. When the Count asks for his snuff he'll give him one of the packages, not knowing which it is. Then he'll take some out of the other package himself. Fair enough, you see; fifty-fifty. "But the Countess gums the game. She's in high spirits after their little supper party, and reaches out for the Count's snuff-box, playfully, you know, and takes a sniff or two herself before the poet can stop her. So the poet helps himself out of the same box, not knowing yet whether it's been poisoned or not. "There's a lot of agony after that, but that's the substance of it. It mightn't be such a bad story if it were done right; kept artificial all the way through, like a Pompeian fresco. But, of course, when you try to get real people into it, it goes crazy.-WAell, what would you do about it? What would you say to Mrs. Mitchell, I mean?" "What I'd do," I told him, "would be to put the manuscript in a good hot fire." He looked rather surprised at my vehemence, then laughed and said: "Come along; the curtain's up." __ __ HOW WE FOUND OUT 319 "I think I'll stay here and smoke another pipe,' I told him. There wasn't any doubt I needed it. I knew now what had happened that night in the Defoe's private car, and, in the main, what had been happening for a good while before that. I could see Maurice and Margaret and young Linda, happy, honest, self-expressed people, befriending the young romantic Constantine Mitchell; Mitchell falling in love with Margaret-platonically, of course, and deciding she wasn't happy with her husband and that she wanted Linda taken out of the circus. I remembered Jane's telling me of the bad attacks Maurice had had two or three of, about the fear among his friends that he'd die in one of them some day unless he had a good going over by a big doctor, and how he was afraid to go and took digestion pills, instead. I could see the arsenic, bought easily enough in some small-town drug store, and carried around, for weeks, perhaps, in Mitchell's pocket; a part of his daydream merely-the dream of that fantastic duel-and yet giving him a sense of power. And then, one evening, most likely, just before the show, when Mitchell was going into the town on an errand, Defoe asked him to go to the drug store and fill his prescription. The day-dream became a program of conduct. 320 THE QUARTZ EYE Mitchell came back to the lot with two pill-boxes in his pocket. I didn't follow that ghastly evening any farther. It was plain enough, too plain! I could even see why the romantic egotist, to justify his nobility, had written the story, afterward, and why he had tried to dress it up in swords and wigs and ruffles. I went up to my seat in the theater. I wanted a look at Linda to drive the nightmare out of my head. I decided then that this last chapter-or first-of the tragedy was one she could be spared and I didn't tell her about it; not for more than three weekswhich I think a very creditable record. It was our last Arcadian day at the farm. We were going back to town next morning to work. We were lying out in the grass under the maple tree. Linda was in her romper, letting the sun tan her beautiful legs and arms a shade or two deeper than they were already. She'd been working on her wire and I thought she was asleep but by and by she began talking dreamily-for the first time since our marriage-about Mitchell, the "Conuije" of her childhood memories. And then, suddenly, she rolled up on one elbow and looked down into my face. "Tell me all about it, Carty," she commanded. "I'm sure you know." HOW WE FOUND OUT 321 So I told her the whole story. I was glad when it was over. She was shivering and clinging to me like a frightened child before I got to the end. "I'm glad I haven't any secrets I really don't want you to know," I told her crossly. "When you turn on me like that, I open up like an umbrella." She laughed, as I'd hoped she would. It was between a laugh and a sob that she said, "I'm glad you aren't a literary man, Carty. Do me my fire trick if you think it will be fun, but don't ever be any more of an author than that!" "I won't," I told her. THE END I THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN DATE DUE SEP I Form 7079 7-51 30M S UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN 3 9015 03301 3163 = -- - rr - -- - = _-- =- - - -- - ~- -- - - - - - ~p ~5= _ - = _ _ _~~l~~~f --- —-— ~