Find the Woman

by Arthur Somers Roche

So her pause before the lunch-room was only momentary. She entered it immediately. The Trevor was only two hundred yards away, but Clancy had only a pitiful amount of money in her pocket. That is, money that belonged to her. Grannis's ten thousand was not hers. To whom she would give it, she did not yet know, but she did know that she would starve before she used any of it. It might be that Sally Henderson would pay her a half-week's salary to-morrow. She must hope for that. But she must not rely on it. Hence she must live leanly.

This was only her fifth day in New York. It had been her fortune to eat at restaurants of the better class, at a private home. Now, for the first time since her arrival from Zenith, she had opportunity to find out what might have been, what might still be, her lot. Not that the food in the lunch-room was particularly bad. Of its kind, it was rather good. But there was the stain of egg upon the table-cloth; the waiter who served her was unshaven. The dishes in which the food was served were of the heaviest of china. And Clancy was of the sort that prefers indifferent food well served to good food execrably presented.

She paid her check—considering that she had had only corned-beef hash and tea and bread, she thought that sixty cents was an exorbitant charge—tipped the waiter a dime, and trudged out into the storm again.

The snow had ceased falling, but only one so weather-wise as the Maine-bred Clancy would have known that. For the flurries blown by the gale had all the appearance of a continuing blizzard. Bending forward, she made her way to Fifth Avenue, and thence south across Washington Square. Twice, feeling very much alone in the gloom, she made detours to avoid coming too near men whom she observed moving her way. She was yet to learn that, considering its enormous heterogeneous population, New York holds few dangers for the unescorted girl. And so she ran the last few yards, and breathed with relief when the latch-key that Mrs. Gerand had given her admitted her to the lodging-house on the south side of the square.

In her room, her outer clothing removed, she pulled a shabby rocking-chair to the window and looked out upon the dimly descried trees, ghostly in their snowy habiliments. Chin on elbow, she pondered.

The wraith of Florine Ladue was laid. So she believed. And she could find no reason to fear a resurrection. Beiner, who knew her, could recognize her as Florine Ladue, was dead. So was Fanchon DeLisle. Zenda, Grannis, Weber, and the others of the poker-party at Zenda's knew that she called herself "Florine." But it was quite a distance from knowing that a young woman had named herself Florine to proof that the same young woman's last name was Ladue, and that she had visited Morris Beiner's office. Of course—and Clancy's brows knitted at the thought—if there were any legal trouble over the Weber-Zenda-Grannis matter and she testified in court, and Vandervent or Spofford or some other of the district attorney's office heard or saw testimony which involved the fact that she'd used the name "Florine," that person would do some thinking, would wonder how much jesting had been behind her announcement of herself under the name of the woman wanted for the Beiner murder. In that case——

What about that case? Oddly enough—yet not so oddly, after all, when one considers that Clancy was only twenty years of age—up to now she had given a great deal of thought to her predicament and practically none to the real way out of it. She marveled at herself.

Why in that case, she'd be in desperate danger, as great danger as she had been in just before she picked up the paper in Vandervent's anteroom, and the only way out of that danger, without lasting disgrace at the least, would be the production of the real murderer of Morris Beiner.

The real murderer! She drew in her breath with a whistle.

Beiner had been killed; she was suspected. These were facts, and the only facts that she had reckoned with. But the greater fact, though up to now ignored by her, was that somebody had killed Beiner. Some one had entered the man's office and slain him, probably as he lay unconscious on the floor. That somebody was foot-loose now, perhaps in New York, free from suspicion.