III
The young man did not immediately retire in spite of his fatigue. Instead, he sat down by the stove, lit his pipe and tried mentally to propound something tangible out of the hodge-podge of mystery that had surrounded him since the night of September the twenty-third when he had allowed himself to be pitch-forked into a commission without definite instructions as to how he was to act or whom he was to accept as friends or enemies. Surely the whole world had not gone mad since that hour; there must be a sane method in the whole thing somewhere, but try as he could, cudgel his imagination as he might, he could build up no theory that was at all satisfying.
Then, after he retired, came memory of the fearsome visage of Acey Smith when he had flung him off over there at the door of his office. That was no “play-acting” as Smith had tried to pass it off. For the moment the man had been in deadly earnest, Hammond was sure of that.
But a pair of great startled, blue eyes under fine, high-arched eyebrows, came to drive all other haunts of the night away. Those eyes seemed to speak at him out of the shadows, and the fear in them took him back again to the night of the twenty-third when Fate had literally seized him by the scruff of the neck, yanked him out of a commonplace groove in life and tossed him into a vortex of baffling intrigue and mystery.