"Well, he knows he's marked, anyway."
Then came a lull, followed by the scratch of a match and the mumbling of voices again.
"How'd he get through the ropes up there?" inquired one of these voices.
"Same old way. Butlering. Turk McMeekin doped him up a half-dozen London recommends. That got him started out in Morristown, with the Whippeny Club. Then he did the Herresford job. But he's got a peach with this Van Tuyl gang. They let him lock up every night—silver and all—and carry the keys to bed with him!"
"It's up to Sir 'Enery to make 'em dream he's the real thing," murmured another of the voices.
"Sure!" answered still another voice that seemed a great distance away.
Then the mumble became a murmur and the murmur a drone. And the drone became a sighing of birch tops, and I was stalking Big-Horn across mountain peaks of café parfait, where a pompous English butler served pêches Melba on the edge of every second precipice.
When I woke up it was broad daylight, and my wall-eyed waiter was there waiting for his second bill. And I remembered that I ought to phone Benson so he could have the coffee ready by the time I walked home through the mellow November air.
It was two hours later that the first memory of those murmuring midnight voices came back to me. The words I had overheard seemed to have been buried in my mind like seeds in the ground. Then here and there a green shoot of suspicion emerged. The more I thought it over, the more disturbed I became. Yet I warned myself that I could be sure of nothing. The one tangibility was the repeated word, "Van Tuyl." And there at least was something on which I could focus my attention.
I went to the telephone and called up Beatrice Van Tuyl. Years before we had played water polo and catboated on the Sound together. I realized, as I heard that young matron's cheery voice over the telephone wire, that I would have to pick my steps with care.