“Yes, I know. But there are times when rules have to be broken,” admitted Arden. “If George Washington and Thomas Jefferson or some historic personages like that hadn’t drafted a new constitution in Philadelphia when they had no right to do so, I wouldn’t be telling you all this.”
“All what? That you were over to the station? It’s a grand night to break rules but a better one for murders,” declared Terry, sniffing the fog with her head thrown back and her eyes half shut.
“If you’d stop interrupting I could tell you.” Arden was beginning to lose patience. “I was over at the station, as I said, and I saw someone there: the night ticket agent, who is the very image of the missing man whose picture we saw on the reward notice in the post office! There!” Arden paused to see what effect this statement had on her friends. They seemed to take it very calmly, and Terry said, most practically:
“Nonsense, Arden. If he was the man you think he is, someone else would have noticed him long ago and claimed the reward.”
“Besides,” added Sim, “no young man, or old one either, who wanted to keep his whereabouts secret would be so foolish as to appear in so public a place as a railroad ticket office, and near the place where there was hanging a poster offering a thousand dollars for information about him.”
“Not necessarily,” countered Arden calmly. “I have read somewhere that the cleverest criminals (not that Mr. Pangborn is one, though) always stay right in the place where they have committed a crime or are supposed to have vanished from. The trick is, that no one ever thinks of looking so near home for them. Poe has a story about a missing letter that was all the while right in the open, stuck in a rack with a lot of others.”
“Oh, yes, we had to read that in English lit,” admitted Terry.
“Well, what do you want to do, Sherlock—go over and identify the corpse?” asked Sim. “If you do, I’m afraid I can’t come. I have to go to Mary Todd for a notebook.”
“Please, Sim, it won’t take a minute, or only two or three, anyhow. You can come right back and be in time for supper. Think how thrilling it would be if——”
“It most likely won’t be,” finished Terry. “But I’m game. I like fog. It’s good for the complexion.”