RECKLESSLY Caruth plunged down the half-lighted steps. The elevator had stopped running, and, in any event, he had no time to wait for elevators. Down he sped, past tight-shut doors, whose occupants slept calmly despite his noisy rush; over marble steps, through tessellated halls, round slippery corners. Twice he nearly fell, but he saved himself and went on, bursting at last like a meteor on the scandalized watchman, whom the clatter of his coming had roused from a blameless nap.
“Now, now, now!” clamored that individual. “What in hell’s bells you think you’re doing, gallopin’ like this? Why, it’s Mr. Caruth!”
“Yes, it’s I.” The young man’s breath came in gasps. One does not race down eight flights of steps without showing the effects. “Yes, it’s I! Has my man, Wilkins, gone out in the last five minutes?”
“Wilkins? Naw! Say, Mr. Caruth, you’d better go to bed and sleep it off, or it’ll be you for the psychopathic ward the first thing you know.”
“Bosh! Wilkins has run away from my rooms with a valuable letter and eighteen hundred dollars in money. Are you sure he hasn’t passed you?”
“Eighteen hundred! Gee! ’Course I’m sure. Ain’t I been here right along?”
Caruth drew a long breath and glanced up the stairway down which he had just raced. So sure had he been that Wilkins had fled that he had not stopped to search in his own apartments. A suspicion that he had made himself ridiculous began to penetrate to his brain, and he glanced shamefacedly at the watchman.
That individual was regarding him suspiciously. He caught the look, interpreted it correctly, and smiled encouragingly. “It’s all right, Mr. Caruth,” he extenuated. “It’s all to the regular for a gent to have the nightmare when he goes to sleep in his chair. Just you go back to your rooms and take a dose of bromide and say your lay-me-downs, and neither of us’ll remember anything about this to-morrow. I’d start the elevator for you if I could, but I can’t, so it’s you for the glue-foot climb.”
Caruth scarcely heard the man. His first spasm of distrust in his own action had quickly passed, and by the time the other had finished he had gone back to his first idea.
“Nonsense, Jackson!” he burst out impatiently. “I haven’t been asleep. Wilkins has fled within five minutes. If he hasn’t passed you, he must have gone some other way. How else could he go? Quick, man! He must be caught.”