"Not unless the young woman gets careless and leaves up that south blind. For she sort o' has an idea tonight that the whole of this end of town has been watching her get ready to meet her beau."
The Vanished Mummy
In the detective headquarters in the Courthouse they have mistakenly built up a very high notion of my sleuth qualities. Personally I have always felt that such help as I have been able to render them in two or three different cases was most largely due to luck, and only in a small degree to the exercise of logic and common sense in making deductions of subsequently proven importance from apparently trivial facts. Nevertheless, the good fortune that attended me in those cases fixed my reputation with them as the Sherlock Holmes of Baltimore, while the generosity with which I permitted them to take all the glory of solving the mysteries made me solid and caused them to consult me the more frequently in hours of perplexity. At the same time, I confess it, the love of the game made me eager to be in it and I not only installed a 'phone in my apartment in the Arundel, but I was always careful, in absenting myself from my office or my flat, to leave word where I would most likely be found during the next few hours. In this way the puzzled Vidocqs were usually able to reach me when my help was needed.
I was whiling away a rainy Saturday afternoon at the Maryland a few weeks ago when I saw Dorland making signs to me from the passageway behind the boxes on the right of the theatre. Lieutenant Amers' redcoated British band, of which I had grown very fond, was rendering the final crashing bars of the overture to "Wilhelm Tell," and, with my passionate love for music, I was loth to leave until the programme was completed. But Dorland was a detective who never came for me unless there was an interesting mystery to offer and I left my seat at once and joined him in the lobby.
"Which way, Dorland?" I asked.
"Woman's College, sir," he answered, just as briefly.
I gave an exclamation of surprise. An institution attended by hundreds of girls from the best families of America was not the place one would expect a mystery of crime.
"Very curious case, sir. Mummy of an Egyptian princess stolen."
"Odd affair," I remarked. "Gives promise of being most unusual. Any clue?"