"Don't go over all that!" he said. "It's a waste of time. The point is, that necklace is not your friend's. But I'm going to tell you what it is. It's a duplicate of it, stone for stone. The lady, I think, will agree with me on that. Am I right?"
The girl nodded.
"Then what the devil's this man doing with it?" demanded Benny Churchill, before any of us could speak.
"S'pose you wait and find out who this man is!"
"Well, who is he?" I inquired, resolved that no hand, however artful, was going to pull the wool over my eyes.
"This man," said my unperturbed and big-shouldered friend, "is the pearl-matcher for Cohen and Greenhut, the Maiden Lane importers. Wait, don't interrupt me. Miss Churchill's necklace, I understand, was one of the finest in this town. His house had an order to duplicate it. He took the first chance, when the pearls had been matched and strung, to see that he'd done his job right."
"And you mean to tell me," I cried, "that he hung over a box-rail and lifted a string of pearls from a lady's neck just to—"
"Hold on there, my friend," cut in the big-limbed man. "He found this lady was going to be in that box wearin' that necklace."
"And having reviewed its chaste beauty, he sneaked out of his own box and ran like a chased cur!"
"Hold your horses now! Can't you see that he thought you were the crook? If you had a bunch of stones like that on you and a stranger butted in and started trailin' you, wouldn't you do your best to melt away when you had the chance?" demanded the officer. Then he looked at me again with his wearily uplifted eyebrows. "Oh, I guess you were all right as far as you went, but, like most amateurs, you didn't go quite far enough!"