The Window at the White Cat | Page 8

got up impatiently and consulted the telephone directory. There were twelve Andersons in the city who conducted drug-stores.
When I finally went to sleep, I dreamed that I was driving Margery Fleming along a street in a broken taxicab, and that all the buildings were pharmacies and numbered eleven twenty-two.

CHAPTER III
NINETY-EIGHT PEARLS
AFTER such a night I slept late. Edith still kept her honeymoon promise of no breakfast hour and she had gone out with Fred when I came down-stairs.
I have great admiration for Edith, for her tolerance with my uncertain hours, for her cheery breakfast-room, and the smiling good nature of the servants she engages. I have a theory that, show me a sullen servant and I will show you a sullen mistress, although Edith herself disclaims all responsibility and lays credit for the smile with which Katie brings in my eggs and coffee, to largess on my part. Be that as it may, Katie is a smiling and personable young woman, and I am convinced that had she picked up the alligator on the back-stairs and lost part of the end of her thumb, she would have told Edith that she cut it off with the bread knife, and thus have saved to us Bessie the Beloved and her fascinating trick of taking the end of her tail in her mouth and spinning.
On that particular morning, Katie also brought me a letter, and I recognized the cramped and rather uncertain writing of Miss Jane Maitland.
"DEAR MR. KNOX: "Sister Letitia wishes me to ask you if you can dine with us to-night, informally. She has changed her mind in regard to the Colored Orphans' Home, and would like to consult you about it.
"Very truly yours, "SUSAN JANE MAITLAND."
It was a very commonplace note; I had had one like it after every board-meeting of the orphans' home, Miss Maitland being on principle an aggressive minority. Also, having considerable mind, changing it became almost as ponderous an operation as moving a barn, although not nearly so stable.
(Fred accuses me here of a very bad pun, and reminds me, quite undeservedly, that the pun is the lowest form of humor.)
I came across Miss Jane's letter the other day, when I was gathering the material for this narrative, and I sat for a time with it in my hand thinking over again the chain of events in which it had been the first link, a series of strange happenings that began with my acceptance of the invitation, and that led through ways as dark and tricks as vain as Bret Harte's Heathen Chinese ever dreamed of, to the final scene at the White Cat. With the letter I had filed away a half dozen articles and I ranged them all on the desk in front of me: the letter, the bit of paper with eleven twenty-two on it, that Margery gave me the first time I saw her; a note-book filled with jerky characters that looked like Arabic and were newspaper shorthand; a railroad schedule; a bullet, the latter slightly flattened; a cube-shaped piece of chalk which I put back in its box with a shudder, and labeled 'poison', and a small gold buckle from a slipper, which I--at which I did not shudder.
I did not need to make the climaxes of my story. They lay before me.
I walked to the office that morning, and on the way I found and interviewed the corner-man at Chestnut and Union. But he was of small assistance. He remembered the incident, but the gentleman in the taxicab had not been hurt and refused to give his name, saying he was merely passing through the city from one railroad station to another, and did not wish any notoriety.
At eleven o'clock Hunter called up; he said he was going after the affair himself, but that it was hard to stick a dip net into the political puddle without pulling out a lot more than you went after, or than it was healthy to get. He was inclined to be facetious, and wanted to know if I had come across any more k. v's. Whereupon I put away the notes I had made about Delia and Mamie Brennan and I heard him chuckle as I rang off.
I went to Bellwood that evening. It was a suburban town a dozen miles from the city, with a picturesque station, surrounded by lawns and cement walks. Streetcars had so far failed to spoil its tree-bordered streets, and it was exclusive to the point of stagnation. The Maitland place was at the head of the main street, which had at one time been its drive. Miss Letitia, who was seventy, had had sufficient commercial instinct, some years before, to cut her ancestral acres--their ancestral acres, although Miss Jane hardly counted--into building lots, except perhaps an