I waited until the maid was lost in the gloom below-stairs and the house was quiet again. Then I calmly and quietly stepped out into the little hall, pushed open the door of the rear room, and slipped inside. I experienced, as I did so, a distinct and quite pleasurable quickening of the pulse.
I found myself in a mere cell of a room, with two dormer windows facing a disorderly vista of chimney-pots and brick walls. On the sill of one window stood an almost empty milk-bottle. Beside the other window was a trunk marked with the initials "H. W." and the pretty-nearly obliterated words "Medicine Hat."
About the little room brooded an almost forlorn air of neatness. On one wall was tacked a picture postcard inscribed "In the Devil's Pool at Banff." On another was a ranch scene, an unmounted photograph which showed a laughing and clear-browed girl on a white-dappled pinto. On the chintz-covered bureau stood a half-filled carton of soda-biscuits. Beside this, again, lay an empty candy-box. From the mirror of this bureau smiled down a face that was familiar to me. It was a magazine-print of Harriet Walter, the young Broadway star who had reached success with the production of Broken Ties, the same Harriet Walter who had been duly announced to marry Percy Adams, the son of the Traction Magnate. My own den, I remembered, held an autographed copy of the same picture.
Beyond this, however, the room held little of interest and nothing of surprise. Acting on a sudden and a possibly foolish impulse, after one final look at the room and its record of courageous struggles, I took a bank-note from my waistcoat pocket, folded it, opened the top drawer of the bureau and dropped the bill into it. Then I stood staring down into the still open drawer, for before me lay the revolver which the girl had carried away the night before from Madison Square.
In a few moments I went back to my own room and sat down in the broken-armed rocking-chair, and tried desperately to find some key to the mystery. But no light came to me.
I was still puzzled over it when I heard the sound of steps on the uncarpeted stairway. They were very slow and faltering steps. As I stood at the half-opened door listening, I felt sure I heard the sound of something that was half-way between a sob and a gasp. Then came the steps again, and then the sound of heavy breathing. I heard the rustle of paper as the door of the back room was pushed open, and then the quick slam of the door.
This was followed by a quiet and almost inarticulate cry. It was not a call, and it was not a moan. But what startled me into sudden action was the noise that followed. It was a sort of soft-pedaled thud, as though a body had fallen to the floor.
I no longer hesitated. It was clear that something was wrong. I ran to the closed door, knocked on it, and a moment later swung it open.
As I stepped into the room I could see the girl lying there, her upturned face as white as chalk, with bluish-gray shadows about the closed eyes. Beside her on the floor lay a newspaper, a flaring head-lined afternoon edition.
I stood staring stupidly down at the white face for a moment or two before it came to me that the girl had merely fallen in a faint. Then, seeing the slow beat of a pulse in the thin throat, I dropped on one knee and tore open the neck of her blouse. Then I got water from the stoneware jug on the wash-stand and sprinkled the placid and colorless brow. I could see, as I lifted her up on the narrow white bed, how bloodless and ill-nurtured her body was. The girl was half starved; of that there was no shadow of doubt.