Mrs. Lathrop nodded once more.
"Aren't—?" she questioned.
"I certainly am. I'm going to report the burglary at once. I've got a clue, and it ought to be easy enough to run down that burglar." She drew from her bosom a rather damp handkerchief. "That's what he left me to chew on for five hours," she said, as she spread it out. "And there's the clue right there in the corner."
Mrs. Lathrop took it to the window and inspected it through her glasses. The handkerchief was initialed with a "K."
The New Year came and January was passing and, so far as Susan Clegg cared to divulge at least, there was no news of her burglar. It was noted, however, not only by Mrs. Lathrop, but by Mrs. Macy and Gran'ma Mullins, and indeed by all the ladies of the Sewing Society, that Miss Clegg had adopted an air of secretiveness concerning the matter that was quite foreign to her usual frank, unreserved communicativeness. But the curiosity provoked by this strangely unfamiliar attitude was swallowed up in the sensational tidings which spread throughout the community shortly after. Without so much as a hint of warning, Susan Clegg had vanished between dark and dawn, leaving her house locked, bolted, and barred, the blinds drawn, and the shutters fast closed.
For once Mrs. Lathrop, thus deprived of her prop and her stay, evinced sufficient initiative to have the cellar door forced and a search of the premises made; a rumor having got abroad that the burglar had returned, this time more murderously inclined, and that Miss Clegg's mangled corpse would be found stiff and stark within her own darkened domicile. To every one's infinite relief the search proved the rumor utterly unfounded; and it proved something more, as well. It proved that Susan's departure was plainly premeditated—"with malice prepense," to quote Judge Fitch—since all her best clothes had gone with her. Whereupon sentiment switched to the opposite pole, and it was openly declared that Miss Clegg had gone after the burglar.
The wonder was of a magnitude calculated to extend far beyond the proverbial nine days, and it probably would have greatly exceeded that limit, had not the heroine of the affair chosen to cut it short of her own volition by reappearing quite as suddenly as she had vanished, at the end of a single week.
Mrs. Lathrop, looking across from her bedroom window as she arose from her night's sleep on the morning of the eighth day, was joyously startled to see the Clegg windows unshaded, and the house otherwise displaying signs of rehabitation. Nor did she have long to wait for the explanation of the mystery, which to the exclusion of everything else had filled her mind ever since her friend's going. With a shawl over her head and shoulders, she hastened through the pergola, and the next moment was facing her neighbor with glad eyes across four yards of kitchen floor space.
"Oh, Susan! Such a fri—" These were her four and a half words of greeting.
"I knew it would," Miss Clegg caught her up, beaming as Mrs. Lathrop couldn't remember ever to have seen her beam before. "I knew it would frighten you all half to death, but when a thing's to be done, it's to be done, and there ain't no use shirking. I had to go, and I had to go quick, and I was never so glad of anything in my life, past or present, as that I went. Of course, it was all along of that burglary, as any fool might have guessed if they took the trouble. In the first place, I don't mind telling you now, I went straight to Mr. Weskin the morning after it happened, and I took him the clue and showed it to him. The way he spun around in his spinning chair was fit to make even a level-headed person like me dizzy. He examined the linen, and he examined the way the K was worked, and then he says, no it couldn't possibly be Mr. Kimball's. Now, what do you think of that? Just as if I ever suspected it was. I guess I know Mr. Kimball well enough to know him, even if he has got his head wrapped up in one of my new roller towels, and I told Lawyer Weskin so. Mr. Kimball, indeed! But Lawyer Weskin said as he didn't never hear of a burglar whose name commenced with K, and he didn't know a soul in these parts either, burglar or no burglar, whose name did, except Mr. Kimball. There's only one way to ferret out the perpetrator of a crime, he says, and that's by deduction, and the first rule of deduction is to guess what the K stands for. I never thought much of Lawyer Weskin, I'm free to admit that, but if he don't know nothing else, it's as clear as shooting that he does know about education. For in the end it worked out just as he said, and the Lord be praised for it."