"Whew! Who's the dark girl? She's a beauty!"

"Dark girl?" Worth had interest enough to lean into the place where I got my view; after he did so he remained to stare. I sat and grinned while he muttered,

"Can't be.... I believe it is!"

Something to make him sit up and take notice now. I didn't wonder at his fixed study of the young creature. Not so dressed up as the others—I think she wore what ladies call an evening blouse with a street suit; a brunette, but of a tinting so delicate that she fairly sparkled, she took the shine off those blonde girls. Her small beautifully formed, uncovered head had the living jet of the crow's wing; her great eyes, long-lashed and sumptuously set, showed ebon irises almost obliterating the white. Dark, shining, she was a night with stars, that girl.

"Funny thing," Worth spoke, moving his head to keep in line with that face. "How could she grow up to be like this—a child that wasn't allowed any childhood? Lord, she never even had a doll!"

"Some doll herself now," I smiled.

"Yeh," he assented absently, "she's good looking—but where did she learn to dress like that—and play the game?"

"Where they all learn it." I enjoyed very much seeing him interested. "From her mother, and her sisters, or the other girls."

"Not." He was positive. "Her mother died when she was a baby. Her father wouldn't let her be with other children—treated her like one of the instruments in his laboratory; trained her in her high chair; problems in concentration dumped down into its tray, punishment if she made a failure; God knows what kind of a reward if she succeeded; maybe no more than her bowl of bread and milk. That's the kind of a deal she got when she was a kid. And will you look at her now!"

If he kept up his open staring at the girl, it would be only a matter of time when the wedding party discovered him. I leaned back in my chair to watch, while Worth, full of his subject, spilled over in words.

"Never played with anybody in her life—but me," he said unexpectedly. "They lived next house but one to us; the professor had the rest of the Santa Ysobel youngsters terrorized, backed off the boards; but I wasn't a steady resident of the burg. I came and went, and when I came, it was playtime for the little girl."

"What was her father? Crank on education?"

"Psychology," Worth said briefly. "International reputation. But he ought to have been hung for the way he brought Bobs up. Listen to this, Jerry. I got off the train one time at Santa Ysobel—can't remember just when, but the kid over there was all shanks and eyes—'bout ten or eleven, I'd say. Her father had her down at the station doing a stunt for a bunch of professors. That was his notion of a nice, normal development for a small child. There she sat poked up cross-legged on a baggage truck. He'd trained her to sit in that self balanced position so she could make her mind blank without going to sleep. A freight train was hitting a twenty mile clip past the station, and she was adding the numbers on the sides of the box cars, in her mind. It kept those professors on the jump to get the figures down in their notebooks, but she told them the total as the caboose was passing."

"Some stunt," I agreed. "Freight car numbers run up into the ten-thousands." Worth didn't hear me, he was still deep in the past.

"Poor little white-faced kid," he muttered. "I dumped my valises, horned into that bunch, picked her off the truck and carried her away on my shoulder, while the professor yelled at me, and the other ginks were tabbing up their additions. And I damned every one of them, to hell and through it."

"You must have been a popular youth in your home town," I suggested.

"I was," he grinned. "My reason for telling you that story, though, is that I've got an idea about the girl over there—if she hasn't changed too much. I think maybe we might—"

He stood up calmly to study her, and his tall figure instantly drew the attention of everybody in the room. Over at the long table it was the sharp, roving eye of the snub-nosed flapper that spied him first. I saw her give the alarm and begin pushing back her chair to bolt right across and nab him. The sister sitting next stopped her. Judging from the glimpses I had as the party spoke together and leaned to look, it was quite a sensation. But apparently by common consent they left whatever move was to be made to the bride; and to my surprise this move was most unconventional. She got up with an abrupt gesture and started over to our table—alone. This, for a girl of her sort, was going some. I glanced doubtfully at Worth. He shrugged a little.

"Might as well have it over. Her family lives on one side of us, and Brons Vandeman on the other."

And then the bride was with us. She didn't overdo the thing—much; only held out her hand with a slightly pleading air as though half afraid it would be refused. And it was a curious thing to see that pretty, delicate featured, schooled face of hers naïvely drawn in lines of emotion—like a bisque doll registering grief.

Gilbert took the hand, shook it, and looked around with the evident intention of presenting me. I saw by the way the lady gave me her shoulder, pushing in, speaking low, that she didn't want anything of the sort, and quietly dropped back. I barely got a side view of Worth's face, but plainly his calmness was a disappointment to her.

"After these years!" I caught the fringes of what she was saying. "It seems like a dream. To-night—of all times. But you will come over to our table—for a minute anyhow? They're just going to—to drink our health—Oh, Worth!" That last in a sort of impassioned whisper. And all he answered was,

"If I might bring Mr. Boyne with me, Mrs. Vandeman." At her protesting expression, he finished, "Or do I call you Ina, still?"

She gave him a second look of reproach, acknowledging my introduction in that way some women have which assures you they don't intend to know you in the least the next time. We crossed to the table and met the others.

If anybody had asked my opinion, I should have said it was a mistake to go. Our advent in that party—or rather Worth Gilbert's advent—was bound to throw the affair into a sort of consternation. No mistake about that. The bridegroom at the head of the table seemed the only one able to keep a grip on the situation. He welcomed Worth as though he wanted him, took hold of me with a glad hand, and presented me in such rapid succession to everybody there that I was dizzy. And through it all I had an eye for Worth as he met and disposed of the effusive welcome of the younger Thornhill girls. Either of the twins, as I found them to be, would, I judged, have been more than willing to fill out sister Ina's unexpired term, and the little snub-nosed one, also a sister it seemed, plainly adored him as a hero, sexlessly, as they sometimes can at that age.

While yet he shook hands with the girls, and swapped short replies for long questions, I became conscious of something odd in the air. Plain enough sailing with the young ladies; all the noise with them echoed the bride's, "After all these years." They clattered about whether he looked like his last photograph, and how perfectly delightful it was going to be to have him back in Santa Ysobel again.

But when it came to the chaperone, a Mrs. Dr. Bowman, things were different. No longer young, though still beautiful in what I might call a sort of wasted fashion, with slim wrists and fragile fingers, and a splendid mass of rich, auburn hair, I had been startled, even looking across from our table, by the extreme nervous tension of her face. She looked a neurasthenic; but that was not all; surely her nerves were almost from under control as she sat there, her rich cloak dropped back over her chair, the corners caught up again and fumbled in a twisting, restless hold.

Now, when Worth stood before her appealing eyes, she reached up and clutched his hand in both of hers, staring at him through quick tears, saying something in a low, choking tone, something that I couldn't for the life of me make into the greeting you give even a beloved youngster you haven't seen for several years.

At the moment, I was myself being presented to the lady's husband, a typical top-grade, small town medical man, with a fine bedside manner. His nice, smooth white hands, with which I had watched him feeling the pulse of his supper as though it had been a wealthy patient, released mine; those cold eyes of his, that hid a lot of meaning under heavy lids, came around on his wife. His,

"Laura, control yourself. Where do you think you are?" was like a lash.

It worked perfectly. Of course she would be his patient as well as his wife. Yet I hated the man for it. To me it seemed like the cut of the whip that punishes a sensitive, over excited Irish setter for a fault in the hunting field. Mrs. Bowman quivered, pulled herself together and sat down, but her gaze followed the boy.

She sat there stilled, but not quieted, under her husband's eye, and watched Worth's meeting with the other man, whom I heard the boy call Jim Edwards, and with whom he shook hands, but who met him, as Mrs. Bowman had, as though there had been something recent between them; not like people bridging a long gap of absence.

And this man, tall, thin, the power in his features contradicted by a pair of soft dark eyes, deep-set, looking out at you with an expression of bafflement, defeat—why did he face Worth with the stare of one drenched, drowned in woe? It wasn't his wedding. He hadn't done Worth any dirt in the matter.

And I was wedged in beside the beautiful dark girl, without having been presented to her, without even having had the luck to hear what name Worth used when he spoke to her. At last the flurry of our coming settled down (though I still felt that we were stuck like a sliver into the wedding party, that the whole thing ached from us) and Dr. Bowman proposed the health of the happy couple, his bedside manner going over pretty well, as he informed Vandeman and the rest of us that the bridegroom was a social leader in Santa Ysobel, and that the hope of its best people was to place him and his bride at the head of things there, leading off with the annual Blossom Festival, due in about a fortnight.

Vandeman responded for himself and his bride, appropriately, with what I'd call a sort of acceptable, fabricated geniality. You could see he was the kind that takes such things seriously, one who would go to work to make a success of any social doings he got into, would give what his set called good parties; and he spoke feelingly of the Blossom Festival, which was the great annual event of a little town. If by putting his shoulder to the wheel he could boost that affair into nation-wide fame and place a garland of rich bloom upon the brow of his fair city, he was willing to take off his neatly tailored coat, roll up his immaculate shirtsleeves and go to it.

There was no time for speech making. The girls wanted to dance; bride and groom were taking the one o'clock train for the south and Coronado. The orchestra swung into "I'll Say She Does."

"Just time for one." Vandeman guided his bride neatly out between the chairs, and they moved away. I turned from watching them to find Worth asking Mrs. Bowman to dance.

"Oh, Worth, dearest! I ought to let one of the girls have you, but—"

She looked helplessly up at him; he smiled down into her tense, suffering face, and paid no attention to her objections. As soon as he carried her off, Jim Edwards glumly took out that one of the twins I had at first supposed to be the elder, the remaining Thornhill girls moved on Dr. Bowman and began nagging him to hunt partners for them.

"Drag something up here," prompted the freckled tomboy, "or I'll make you dance with me yourself." She grabbed a coat lapel, and started away with him.

I turned and laughed into the laughing face of the dark girl. I had no idea of her name, yet a haunting resemblance, a something somehow familiar came across to me which I thought for a moment was only the sweet approachableness of her young femininity.

Bowman had found and collared a partner for Ernestine Thornhill, but that was as far as it went. The little one forebore her threat of making him dance with her, came back to her chair and tucked herself in, snuggling up to the girl beside me, getting hold of a hand and looking at me across it. She rejoiced, it seems, in the nickname of Skeet, for by that the other now spoke to her whisperingly, saying it was too bad about the dance.

"That's nothing," Skeet answered promptly. "I'd a lot rather sit here and talk to you—and your gentleman friend—" with a large wink for me—"if you don't mind."

At the humorous, intimate glance which again passed between me and the dark girl, sudden remembrance came to me, and I ejaculated,

"I know you now!"

"Only now?" smiling.

"You've changed a good deal in seven years," I defended myself.

"And you so very little," she was still smiling, "that I had almost a mind to come and shake hands with you when Ina went to speak to Worth."

I remembered then that it was Worth's recognition of her which had brought him to his feet. I told her of it, and the glowing, vivid face was suddenly all rosy. Skeet regarded the manifestation askance, asking jealously,

"When did you see Worth last, Barbie? You weren't still living in Santa Ysobel when he left, were you?"

I sat thinking while the girlish voices talked on. Barbie—the nickname for Barbara. Barbara Wallace; the name jumped at me from a poster; that's where I first saw it. It linked itself up with what Worth had said over there about the forlorn childhood of this beguiling young charmer. Why hadn't I remembered then? I, too, had my recollections of Barbara Wallace. About seven years before, I had first seen her, a slim, dark little thing of twelve or fourteen, very badly dressed in slinky, too-long skirts that whipped around preposterously thin ankles, blue-black hair dragged away from a forehead almost too fine, made into a bundle of some fashion that belonged neither to childhood nor womanhood, her little, pointed face redeemed by a pair of big black eyes with a wonderful inner light, the eyes of this girl glowing here at my left hand.

The father Worth spoke of brusquely as "the professor" was Elman Wallace, to whom all students of advanced psychology are heavily indebted. The year I heard him, and saw the girl, his course of lectures at Stanford University was making quite a stir. I had been one of a bunch of criminologists, detectives and police chiefs who, during a state convention were given a demonstration of the little girl's powers, closing with a sort of rapid pantomime in which I was asked to take part. A half dozen of us from the audience planned exactly what we were to do. I rushed into the room through one door, holding my straw hat in my left hand, and wiping my brow with a handkerchief with the right. From an opposite door, came two men; one of them fired at me twice with a revolver held in his left hand. I fell, and the second man—the one who wasn't armed—ran to me as I staggered, grabbed my hat, and the two of them went out the door I had entered, while I stumbled through the one by which they had come in. It lasted all told, not half a minute, the idea being for those who looked on to write down what had happened.

Those trained criminologists, supposed to have eyes in their heads, didn't see half that really took place, and saw a-plenty that did not. Most of 'em would have hung the man who snatched my hat. Only one, I remember, noticed that I was shot by a left-handed man. Then the little girl told us what really had occurred, every detail, just as though she had planned it instead of being merely an observer.

"Pardon me," I broke in on the girls. "Miss Wallace, you don't mean to say that you really know me again after seeing me once, seven years ago, in a group of other men at a public performance?"

"Why shouldn't I? You saw me then. You knew me again."

"But you were doing wonderful things. We remember what strikes us as that did me."

She looked at me with a little fading of that glow her face seemed always to hold.

"Most memories are like that," she agreed listlessly. "Mine isn't. It works like a cinema camera; I've only to turn the crank the other way to be looking at any past record."

"But can you—?" I was beginning, when Skeet stopped me, leaning around her companion, bristling at me like a snub-nosed terrier.

"If you want to make a hit with Barbie, cut out the reminiscences. She does loathe being reminded that she was once an infant phenom."

I glanced at my dark eyed girl; she bent her head affirmatively. She wouldn't have been capable of Skeet's rudeness, but plainly Skeet had not overstated her real feeling. I had hardly begun an apology when the dancers rushed back to the table with the information that there was no more than time to make the Los Angeles train; there was an instant grasping of wraps, hasty good-bys, and the party began breaking up with a bang. Worth went out to the sidewalk with them; I sat tight waiting for him to return, and to my surprise, when he finally did appear, Barbara Wallace was with him.

CHAPTER IV

"I've got a stunt for you."

"A—a stunt?"

The light failed abruptly in her face; her mouth with its soft, firm molding, its vivid, floral red, like the lips of a child, went down a bit at the clean-cut corners. A small hand fumbled the trimming of her blouse; it was almost as if she laid it over a wounded heart.

"Yes," he nodded. "Jerry's got something in his pocket that'll be pie for you."

She turned to me a look between angry and piteous—the resentment she would not vent on him.

"Is—is Mr. Boyne interested in stunts—such as I used to do?"

"Sure," Worth agreed. "We both are. We—"

"Oh, that was why you wanted me to come back with you?" She had got hold of herself now. She was more poised, but still resentful.

"Bobs," he cut straight across her mood to what he wanted, "Jerry Boyne is going to read you something it took about 'steen blind people to see—and you'll give us the answer." I didn't share his confidence, but I rather admired it as he finished, poising the tongs, "One lump, or two?"

Of course I knew what he meant. My hand was already fumbling in my pocket for the description of Clayte. The girl looked as though she wasn't going to answer him; she moved to shove back her chair. Worth's only recognition of her attitude was to put out a hand quietly, touch her arm, not once looking at her, and say in a lowered tone,

"Steady, Bobs." And then, "Did you say one lump or two?"

"None." Her voice was scarcely audible, but I saw she was going to stay; that Worth was to have his way, to get from her the opinion he wanted—whatever that might amount to. And I passed the paper to him, suggesting,

"Let her read it. This is too public a place to be declaiming a thing of the sort."

She hesitated a minute then gave it such a mere flirt of a glance that I hardly thought she'd seen what it was, before she raised inquiring eyes to mine and asked coldly,

"Why shouldn't that be read—shouted every ten minutes by the traffic officer at Market and Kearny? They'd only think he was paging every other man in the Palace Hotel."

I leaned back and chuckled. After a bare glance, this sharp witted girl had hit on exactly what I'd thought of the Clayte description.

"Is that all? May I go now, Worth?" she said, still with that dashed, disappointed look from one of us to the other. "If you'll just put me on a Haight Street car—I won't wait for—" And now she made a definite movement to rise; but again Worth held her by the mere touch of his fingers on her sleeve.

"Wait, Bobs," he said. "There's more."

"More?" Her eyes on Worth's face talked louder than her tongue, but that also gained fluency as he looked back at her and nodded. "Stunts!" she repeated his word bitterly. "I didn't expect you to come back asking me to do stunts. I hated it all so—working out things like a calculating machine!" Her voice sank to a vehement undertone. "Nobody thinking of me as human, with human feelings. I have never—done—one stunt—since my father died."

She didn't weaken. She sat there and looked Worth squarely in the eye, yet there was a kind of big gentleness in her refusal, a freedom from petty resentment, that had in it not so much a girl's hurt vanity as the outspoken complaint of a really grieved heart.

"But, Bobs," Worth smiled at her trouble, about the same careless, good-natured smile he had given little Pete when he flipped him the quarter, "suppose you could possibly save me a hundred thousand dollars a minute?"

"Then it's not just a stunt?" She settled slowly back in her chair.

"Certainly not," I said. "This is business—with me, anyhow. Miss Wallace, why do you think a description like that could be shouted on the street without any one being the wiser?"

"Was it supposed to be a description?" she asked, raising her brows a bit.

"The best we could get from sixteen or eighteen people, most of whom have known the man a long time; some of them for eight years."

"And no one—not one of all these people could differentiate him?"

"I've done my best at questioning them."

She gave me one straight, level look, and I wondered a little at the way those velvety black eyes could saw into a fellow. But she put no query, and I had the cheap satisfaction of knowing that she was convinced I'd overlooked no details in the quiz that went to make up that description. Then she turned to Worth.

"You said I might save you a lot of money. Has the man you're trying here to describe anything to do with money—in large amounts—financial affairs of importance?"

Again the little girl had unconsciously scored with me. To imagine a rabbit like Clayte, alone, swinging such an enormous job was ridiculous. From the first, my mind had been reaching after the others—the big-brained criminals, the planners whose instrument he was. She evidently saw this, but Worth answered her.

"He's quite a financier, Bobs. He walked off with nearly a million cash to-day."

"From you?" with a quick breath.

"I'm the main loser if he gets away with it."

"Tell me about it."

And Worth gave her a concise account of the theft and his own share in the affair. She listened eagerly now, those innocent great eyes growing big with the interest of it. With her there was no blind stumbling over Worth's motive in buying a suitcase sight unseen. I had guessed, but she understood completely and unquestioningly. When he had finished, she said solemnly,

"You know, don't you, that, if you've got your facts right—if these things you've told me are square, even cubes of fact—they prove Clayte among the wonderful men of the world?"

Worth's big brown paw went out and covered her little hand that lay on the table's edge.

"Now we're getting somewhere," he encouraged her. As for me, I merely snorted.

"Wonderful man, my eye! He's got a wonderful gang behind him."

"Oh, you should have told me that you know there is a gang, Mr. Boyne," she said simply. "Of course, then, the result is different."

"Well," I hedged, "there's a gang all right. But suppose there wasn't, how would you find any wonderfulness in a creature as near nothing as this Clayte?"

She sat and thought for a moment, drawing imaginary lines on the table top, finally looking up at me with a narrowing of the lids, a tightening of the lips, which gave an extraordinary look of power to her young feminine face.

"In that case, Clayte would inevitably be one of the wonderful men of the world," she repeated her characterization with the placid, soft obstinacy of falling, snow. "Didn't you stop a minute—one little minute, Mr. Boyne—to think it wonderful that a man so devoid of personality as that—" she slanted a slim finger across the description of Clayte—"Didn't you add up in your mind all that you told me about the men disagreeing as to which side he parted his hair on, whether he wore tan shoes or black, a fedora or derby, smoked or didn't,—absolutely nothing left as to peculiarities of face, figure, movement, expression, manner or habit to catch the eye of one single observer among the sixteen or eighteen you questioned—surely you added that up, Mr. Boyne? What result did you get?"

"Nothing," I admitted. "To hear you repeat it, of course it sounds as if the man was a freak. But he wasn't. He was just one of those fellows that are born utterly commonplace, and slide through life without getting any marks put on 'em."

"And is it nothing that this man became a teller in a bank without infringing at all on the circle of his nothingness? Remained so shadowy that neither the president nor cashier can, after eight years' association, tell the color of his hair and eyes? Then add the fact that he is the one clerk in the bank without a filed photograph and description on record with your agency—what result now, Mr. Boyne?"

"A coincidence," I said, rather hastily.

"Don't, please, Mr. Boyne!" her eyes glowed softly as she smiled her mild sarcasm. "Admit that he has ceased to be a freak and becomes a marvel."

"As you put it—" I began, but she cut in on me with,

"I haven't put it yet. Listen." She was smiling still, but it was plain she was thoroughly in earnest. "When this cipher—this nought—this zero—manages to annex to himself a million dollars that doesn't belong to him, his nothingness gains a specific meaning. The zero is an important factor in mathematics. I think we have placed a digit before the long string of ciphers of Clayte's nothingness."

"Nothing and nothing—make nothing." I spoke more brusquely because I was irritated by her logic. "You called the turn when you spoke of him as a zero. There are digits to be added, but they're the gang that planned and helped—and used zero Clayte as their tool. You're talking of those digits, not Clayte."

"I believe Bobs'll find them for you, Jerry—if you'll let her," said Worth.

"Oh, I'll let anybody do anything"—a bit nettled. "I'm ready to have our friend Clayte take his place, with the pyramids and the hanging gardens of Babylon, among the earth's wonders; but you've got to show me."

"All right." Worth gave the girl a look that brought something of that wonderful rose flush fluttering back into her cheeks. "I'm betting on her. Go to it, Bobsie—let him in on your mathematical logic."

"You used the word 'coincidence,' Mr. Boyne." She leaned across toward me, eyes bright, little finger tip marking her points. "Allow one coincidence—that the only description, the only photograph missing from your files are those of the self-effacing Clayte. To-day Clayte has proved to be a thief—"

"In seven figures," Worth threw in, and she smiled at him.

"You would call that another coincidence, Mr. Boyne?"

I nodded, rather unable at the moment to think of a better word to use.

"Two coincidences," she went on,—"we are still in mathematics—you can't add. They run by geometrical progression into the impossible."

The phone rang. While I turned to answer it, my mind was still hunting a comeback to this. The call was from Foster, just in from Ocean View and reporting for instructions. Covering the transmitter with my hand, I told Worth the situation and asked,

"Any suggestions?"

"Not I," he shook his head. I added, a bit sarcastically,

"Or you, Miss Wallace?"

"Yes," she surprised me. "Have your man Foster find three women who have seen Edward Clayte; get from them the color of his hair and eyes; tell him to have them be exact about it."

"Fine! But you know they'll not agree, any more than the other people agreed."

"Oh, yes they will," she laughed at me a little. "Don't you notice that a girl always says a blue-eyed man or a brown-eyed man? That's what she sees when she first meets him, and it sticks in her mind. Girls and women sort out people by types; small differences in color mean something to them."

I didn't keep Foster waiting any longer.

"Hello," I spoke quickly into the transmitter. "Get busy and dig out any women clerks of the bank, stenographers, scrub-women there, or whatever, and ask them particularly as to the exact shade of Clayte's hair and eyes. Get Mrs. Griggsby again at the St. Dunstan. I want at least three women who can give these points exactly. Exactly, understand?"

He did, and I thanked Miss Wallace for her suggestion.

"Now that," I said, "is what I want; a good, practical idea—"

"And it won't be a bit of use in the world to you," she laughed across the table into my eyes. "Why, Mr. Boyne, you've found out already that there are too many Edward Claytes, speaking in physical terms, for you to run one down by description. There are three of him here, within sight of our table right now—and the place isn't crowded."

I grinned in half grudging agreement, and found nothing to say. It was Worth who spoke.

"Like to have you go a step further in this, if you would," and when she shook her head, he went on a bit sharply. "See here, Bobs; you and I used to be pals, didn't we?" She nodded, her look brightening. "Well then, here's the biggest game I've been up against since I crawled out of the trenches and shucked my uniform. I come to you and give you the high-sign—and you throw me down. You don't want to play with me—is that it?"

"Oh, Worth! I do. I do want to play with you," she was almost in tears now. "But you see, I didn't quite understand. I felt as though you were sort of putting me through my paces."

"Sure not," Worth drove it at her like a turbulent urchin. "I'm having the time of my young life with this thing, and I want to take you in on it."

"If—if you fail you lose a lot of money; wasn't that what you said?" she questioned.

"Oh, yes," he nodded, "Nothing in it if there weren't a gamble."

"And if he wins out, he makes quite a respectable pile," I added.

"What I want of you now," he explained, "is to go with us to Clayte's room at the St. Dunstan—the room he disappeared from—look it over and tell us how he got out and where he went."

He made his request light-heartedly; she considered it after the same fashion; it seemed to me all absurdity.

"To-morrow morning—Sunday," she said. "No office to-morrow," she sipped the last of her black coffee slowly. "All the rest of the facts there ever will be about Edward Clayte are in that room—aren't they?" Her voice was musing; she looked straight ahead of her as she finished softly, "What time do we go?"

"Early. Does nine o'clock suit you?" Worth didn't even glance at me as he made this arrangement for us both. "We'd scoot up there now if it wasn't so late."

"I've no doubt you'll find the place carpeted with zeros and hung with noughts and ciphers." I couldn't refrain from joshing her a little. She took it with a smile glanced across the room, looked a little surprised, and half rose with,

"Why, there they are for me now."

I couldn't see anybody that she might mean, except a man who had walked the length of the place talking to the head waiter, and now stood arguing at the corner of what had been Bronson Vandeman's supper table. This man evidently had his attention directed to us, turned, looked, and in the moment of his crossing I saw that it was Cummings. There was not even the usual tight-lipped half smile under that cropped mustache of his.

"Good evening." He looked at our faces, uttering none of the surprise he plainly felt, letting the two words do for greeting to us all, and, as it seemed, to me, an expression of disapproval as well. The young lady replied first.

"Oh, Mr. Cummings, did they send you for me? Where are the others?"

She had come to her feet, and reached for the coat which Worth was holding more as if he meant to keep it than put it on her.

"I left your chaperone waiting in the machine," Cumming's tone and look carried a plain hurry-up. Worth took his time about the coat, and spoke low to the girl while he helped her into it.

"You'll go with us to-morrow morning?"

She gave me one of those adorable smiles that brought the dimples momentarily in her cheeks.

"If Mr. Boyne wants me. He hasn't said yet."

"Do I need to?" I asked. The question seemed reasonable. There she stood, such a very pretty girl, between her two cavaliers who looked at each other with all the traditional hostility that belonged to the situation. She smiled on both, and didn't neglect me. I settled the matter with,

"Worth has your address; we'll call for you in my machine." And I got the idea that Cummings was asking questions about it as he went away holding her arm.

"Do you think the little girl will really be of any use?" I spoke to the back of Worth's head as he continued to stare after them.

"Sure. I know she will." He shoved his crumpled napkin in among the coffee service, and we moved toward the desk. "Sure she will," he repeated. "Wonder where she met Cummings."

CHAPTER V

"That girl's going to be useful to us, Boyne." I couldn't well disagree with him, after using her hint. We were getting out of the elevator on the office floor when he looked at me, grinned boyishly, and added, "What would you say if I told you I was being shadowed?"

"That I thought it very likely," I nodded. "Also I might hazard a guess at whose money is paying for it."

He gave me a quick glance, but asked no questions. I could see he was enjoying his position, up to the hilt, considered the attentions of a trailer as one of its perquisites.

"Keep your eyes open and you'll spot him as we go out," he said as he left the key at the desk.

It was hardly necessary to keep my eyes open to see the lurking figure over beyond the easy-chairs, which started galvanically as we passed through the court, and a moment later came sidling after us. Little Pete had left my machine at the Market Street entrance—Worth was to drive me—and we wheeled away from a disappointed man racing for the taxi line around the corner.

"More power to his legs," Worth said.

"Oh, I don't know," I grunted as we cut into Montgomery, negotiated the corner onto Bush Street's clear way, striking a fair clip at once. "That end of him already works better than the other. How did you get wise?"

"Barbara Wallace telephoned me to look out for him," he smiled, and let my car out another notch once we'd passed the traffic cop at Kearny.

I myself had foreseen the possibility—but only as a possibility—that Dykeman would put a man on Worth's coat-tails, since I knew Dykeman and had been at that bank meeting; yet I had not regarded it as likely enough to warn Worth; and here was this girl phoning him to look out for a trailer. Was this some more of her deductive reasoning, or had Cummings dropped a hint?

She was waiting for us in front of the Haight Street boarding house that served her for a home, and we tucked her between us on the roadster's wide seat. At the St. Dunstan we found my man, left there since the hour of the alarm the day before, and everybody belonging to the management surly and glum. The clerk handed me Clayte's key across the morning papers spread out on his desk. Apartment houses dislike notoriety of this sort, and the St. Dunstan set up to be as rabidly respectable, as chemically pure as any in the city. Well, no use their blaming me; Clayte was their misfortune; they couldn't expect me to keep the matter out of print entirely.

The three of us crowded into the automatic elevator, and I pressed the seventh floor button. The girl's eyes shone under the wisp of veil twisted around a knowing little turban. She liked the taste of the adventure.

"That man came this way—with that suitcase," she breathed, "—maybe set it down right there when he pressed the button—just as Mr. Boyne did now!"

It was a fine morning; the shades had been left up, and Clayte's room when I opened the door was ablaze with sunlight.

"How delightful!" Barbara Wallace stopped on the threshold and looked about her. I expected the scientific investigating to begin; but no—she was all taken up with the beauty of sunlight and view.

The seventh was the top floor. The St. Dunstan stood almost at the summit where Nob Hill slants obliquely to north and east, and Powell Street dizzies down the steep descent to North Beach and the Bay. The girl had run to a window, and was looking out toward the marvelous show of blue-green water and distant Berkeley hills.

"Will you open this window for me, please?" she asked. I stepped to her side, forestalling Worth who was eyeing the room's interior with curiosity.

"You'll notice the burglar-proof sash locks," I said as I manipulated this one. She gave only casual interest, her attention still on the view beyond. The steel latch, fastened to the upper sash, locked into the socket on the lower sash by a lever-catch. "See? I must pull out this little lever before I can push the hasp back with my thumb—so. Now the window may be shoved up," and I illustrated.

"Yes," she nodded; then, "Look at the wisps of fog around Tamalpais's top. Worth, come here and see the violet shadows of the clouds on the bay."

"North wind coming up," agreed Worth, stepping to the farther window.

"It's bringing in the fog," she said; then abruptly, giving me the first hint that little Miss Wallace considered herself on the job, "Will it not latch by itself if you jam it shut hard?"

"It will not." I illustrated with a bang. The latch still remained open. "I must close it by hand." I pushed the hasp into the keeper, and, snap—the lever shot back and it was fast.

"But a window like that couldn't be opened from outside, even without the locking lever," she remarked, gazing again toward the Marin shore.

"A man with the know—a burglar—can open the ordinary window latch in less than a minute," I told her. "With a jimmy pinched between the sash and the sill, a recurring pressure starts the latch back; nothing to hold it. This—unless he cuts the glass—is burglar-proof."

Worth, at her shoulder, now looked down the sheer descent which exaggerated the seven stories of the St. Dunstan; because of its crowning position on the hill and the intersection of streets, we looked over the roofs of the houses before us, far above their chimney tops. I caught his eye and grinned across the girl's head, suggesting,

"Besides, we weren't trying to find how some one could break into this room, but how they could break out. Even if the latches had not been locked, there wouldn't be an answer in these windows—unless Clayte could fly."

"Might have climbed from one window ledge to the next and so made his way to the fire-escape," Worth said, but I shook my head.

"He'd be seen from the windows by the tenants on six floors—and nobody saw him. Might as well take the elevator or the stairs—which he didn't."

But the girl wasn't listening to any of this. Her expression attentive, alert, she was passing her hand around the edge of the glass of either sash, as though she still dwelt on my suggestion of cutting the pane; and as we watched her, she murmured to herself,

"Yes, flying would be a good way." It made me laugh.

And then she turned away from the windows and had no more interest in any of them, going with me all over the rest of the room with rather the air of a person who thought of renting it than a high-brow criminal investigator hunting clews.

"He lived here—years, you say?" I nodded. She slid her hand over the plush cushions of a morris chair, threw back the covers of an iron bed in one corner and felt of the mattress, then went and stood before the bare little dresser. "Why, the place expresses no more personality than a room in a transient hotel!"

"He hadn't any personality," I growled, and got the flicker of a smile from her eye.

"What about those library books he carried in the suitcase?" Worth came in with an echo from the bank meeting.

"Some more bunk," I said morosely. "So far we've not been able to locate him as a patron of any public or private library, and the hotel clerk's sure his mail never contained a correspondence course—in fact, neither here nor at the bank can any one remember his getting any mail. If he ever carried books in that suitcase as Knapp believed, it was several years back."

"Several years back," Miss Wallace repeated low.

"Myself, I've given up the idea of his studying. This crime doesn't look to me like any sudden temptation of a model bank clerk, spending his spare hours over correspondence courses. I rather expect to find him just plain crook."

"Oh, no," the girl objected. "It's too big and too well done to have been planned by a dull, commonplace crook."

"Right you are," I agreed, with restored good humor. "A keen brain planned this, but not Clayte's. There had to be an instrument—and that was Clayte—also, likely, one or more to help in the getaway."

The getaway! That brought us back with a thump to the present moment. Our pretty girl had been all over the shop now, glanced into bathroom, closet and cupboard, noted abandoned hats, clothing and shoes, the electric plate where Clayte got his breakfast coffee and toast, asked without much interest where he ate his other meals, and nodded agreeingly when she found that he'd been only an occasional customer at the neighboring restaurants, never regular, apparently eating here and there down-town. She seemed to get something out of that; what I didn't know.

"You speak of this crime not being committed on impulse," she turned to me at length. "How long ahead should you say he planned it?"

"Or had it planned and prepared for him," I reminded her.

"Well, that, then," she conceded with slight impatience. "How long do you think it might have been planned or prepared for? Years?"

"Hardly that. Not more than a year probably. A gang like this wouldn't hold together on a proposition for many months."

The black brows over those clear, childlike eyes, puckered a bit. I saw she wasn't at all satisfied with what I had said.

"Made all the observations you want to, Bobs?" Worth asked.

"All here. I want to see the roof." She gave us rather a mechanical smile as she silently ticked her points off on her fingers, appealing to me with, "I'm depending upon you for such facts as I have been unable to observe for myself, so if you give me wrong facts—make mistakes—I'll make mistakes in deduction."

There was such confidence in her deductive abilities that a tinge of irony crept into my tones as I replied,

"I'll be very careful what opinions I hold."

"I don't mind the opinions," this astounding young woman took me up gaily. "I never have any of my own, so I don't pay attention to anybody else's. But do be careful of your facts!"

"I'll try to," was all I said. Worth cut in with,

"Do you consider the roof another fact, Bobs?"

"I hope to find facts there," she answered promptly.

"Remember," I said, "your theory means another man up there, and you haven't yet—"

"Please, Mr. Boyne, don't take two and two and make five of them at this stage of the game," she checked me hastily, and I left them together while I made a hurried survey of the hall ceilings, looking for the scuttle. There was no hatchway in view, so I started down to the clerk to make inquiry. As I passed Clayte's open door, Miss Wallace seemed to be adjusting her turban before the dresser mirror, while Worth waited impatiently.

"Just a minute," I called. "I'll be right back," and I ducked into the elevator.

CHAPTER VI

"I didn't. I said nothing of the sort." Where was the girl's fine memory that she couldn't recollect a man's words for the little time I'd been gone! "All I said was, 'Just a minute and I'll be back.'"

"Yes, that's all you said to Worth." She glanced at the boy serenely as he waited for her at the ladder's foot. "He's not a trained observer; he doesn't deduce even from what he does observe." There were twinkling lights in her black eyes. "But what your hurried trip to the office said to me was that you'd gone for the key of the room that led to the roof scuttle."

Well, that was reasonable—simple enough, too; but,

"This room? How did you find it?"

She stepped to the open door and placed the tip of a gloved finger on the nickeled naught that marked the panels.

"The significant zero again, Mr. Boyne," she laughed. "Here it means the room is not a tenanted one, and is therefore the way to the roof. Shall we go there?"

"Well, young lady," I said as I led her along the trail Worth had cleared, "it must be almost as bad to see everything that way—in minute detail—as to be blind."

"Carry on!" Worth called from the top of the ladder, reaching down to aid the girl. She laughed back at me as she started the short climb.

"Not at all bad! You others seem to me only half awake to what is about you—only half living," and she placed her hand in the strong one held down to her. As Worth passed her through the scuttle to the roof, I saw her glance carelessly at the hooks and staples, the clumsy but adequate arrangement for locking the hatch, and, following her, gave them more careful attention, wondering what she had seen—plenty that I did not, no doubt. They had no tale to tell my eyes.

Once outside, she stopped a minute with Worth to adjust herself to the sharp wind which swept across from the north. Here was a rectangular space surrounded by walls which ran around its four sides to form the coping, unbroken in any spot; a gravel-and-tar roof, almost flat, with the scuttle and a few small, dust covered skylights its only openings, four chimney-tops its sole projections. It was bare of any hiding-place, almost as clear as a tennis court.

We made a solemn tour of inspection; I wasn't greatly interested—how could I be, knowing that between this roof and my fugitive there had been locked windows, and a locked door under reliable human eyes? Still, the lifelong training of the detective kept me estimating the possibilities of a getaway from the roof—if Clayte could have reached it. Worth crossed to where the St. Dunstan fire escape came up from the ground to end below us at a top floor window. I joined him, explaining as we looked down,

"Couldn't have made it that way; not by daylight. In open view all around."

"Think he stayed up here till dark?" Worth suggested, quite as though the possibility of Clayte's coming here at all was settled.

"My men were all over this building—roof to cellar—within the hour. They'd not have overlooked a crack big enough for him to hide in. Put yourself in Clayte's place. Time was the most valuable thing in the world with him right then. If ever he got up to this roof, he'd not waste a minute longer on it than he had to."

"Let's see what's beyond, then," and Worth led the way to the farther end.

The girl didn't come with us. Having been once around the roof coping, looking, it seemed to me, as much at the view as anything else, she now seemed content to settle herself on a little square of planking, a disused scuttle top or something of the sort, in against one of the chimneys where she was sheltered from the wind. Rather to my surprise, I saw her thoughtfully pulling off her gloves, removing her turban, all the time with a curiously disinterested air. I was reminded of what Worth had said the night before about the way her father trained her. Probably she regarded the facts I'd furnished her, or that she'd picked up for herself, much as she used to the problems in concentration her father spread in the high chair tray of her infancy. I turned and left her with them, for Worth was calling me to announce a fact I already knew, that the adjoining building had a roof some fifteen feet below where we stood, and that the man, admitting good gymnastic ability, might have reached it.

"Sure," I said. "But come on. We're wasting time here."

We turned to go, and then stopped, both of us checked instantly by what we saw. The girl was sitting in a strange pose, her feet drawn in to cross beneath her body, slender hands at the length of the arms meeting with interlaced finger-tips before her, the thumbs just touching; shoulders back, chin up, eyes—big enough at any time, now dilated to look twice their size—velvet circles in a white face. Like a Buddha; I'd seen her sit so, years before, an undersized girl doing stunts for her father in a public hall; and even then she'd been in a way impressive. But now, in the fullness of young beauty, her fine head relieved against the empty blue of the sky, the free winds whipping loose flying ends of her dark hair, she held the eye like a miracle.

Sitting here so immovably, she looked to me as though life had slid away from her for the moment, the mechanical action of lungs and heart temporarily suspended, so that mind might work unhindered in that beautiful shell. No, I was wrong. She was breathing; her bosom rose and fell in slow but deep, placid inhalations and exhalations. And the pale face might be from the slower heart-beat, or only because the surface blood had receded to give more of strength to the brain.

The position of head of a Bankers' Security Agency carries with it a certain amount of dignity—a dignity which, since Richardson's death, I have maintained better than I have handled other requirements of the business he left with me. I stood now feeling like a fool. I'd grown gray in the work, and here in my prosperous middle life, a boy's whim and a girl's pretty face had put me in the position of consulting a clairvoyant. Worse, for this was a wild-cat affair, without even the professional standing of establishments to which I knew some of the weak brothers in my line sometimes sneaked for ghostly counsel. If it should leak out, I was done for.

I suppose I sort of groaned, for I felt Worth put a restraining hand on my arm, and heard his soft,

"Psst!"

The two of us stood, how long I can't say, something besides the beauty of the young creature, even the dignity of her in this outré situation getting hold of me, so that I was almost reverent when at last the rigidity of her image-like figure began to relax, the pretty feet in their silk stockings and smart pumps appeared where they belonged, side by side on the edge of the planking, and she looked at us with eyes that slowly gathered their normal expression, and a smile of rare human sweetness.

"It is horrid to see—and I loathe doing it!" She shook her curly dark head like a punished child, and stayed a minute longer, eyes downcast, groping after gloves and hat. "I thought maybe I'd get the answer before you saw me—sitting up like a trained seal!"

"Like a mighty pretty little heathen idol, Bobs," Worth amended.

"Well, it's the only way I can really concentrate—effectively. But this is the first time I've done it since—since father died."

"And never again for me, if that's the way you feel about it." Worth crossed quickly and stood beside her, looking down. She reached a hand to him; her eyes thanked him; but as he helped her to her feet I was struck by a something poised and confident that she seemed to have brought with her out of that strange state in which she had just been.