Mr. Cheatham’s dinner was quite perfect, and Josie could not help wondering if the servants were some that poor Ursula had trained. A butler of extreme elegance and ebony hue served the repast with the airs of a Chesterfield. Cheatham seemed singularly out of place in this home of gentle refinement. His color was so high, his moustache almost blue black, the whites of his eyes so white and the blacks so black. The make-up of a villain was his and still his manner was genial and cordial and had not Josie been hunting the arch conspirator with a clue given her by Ursula she knew in her heart her instinct would never have directed her towards Cheatham. The table seated twenty and Josie was thankful to be lost in the crowd. She decided to make herself as inconspicuous as possible.
During dinner Josie managed so completely to efface herself that her host forgot entirely there was any such person as a Miss Josie Friend, an old schoolmate of Teddy Trask, at his table. Josie had a way of effacing herself without calling attention to her silence. She responded just enough to avoid having persons remark upon her seeming stupidity. Colorlessness was what she aimed at and what she obtained.
After dinner the radio concert began. It was a simple matter for one so unimportant as Josie to slip from the drawing room on a tour of inspection. On arrival the guests had been shown into a front room where they had left their wraps. Josie had noted that leading from this room was a small study. She could see through the half-open door a typewriter on a table with a reading light, and against the wall a small rosewood desk—a lady’s desk and hardly appropriate for a man’s study.
“That is the desk Ursula told me of; the one that had belonged to her mother and that her stepfather had so cruelly refused to give to her at her mother’s death,” murmured Josie.
The girl detective slid into the study, closed the door gently and deftly fitted a small skeleton key into the lock of the rosewood desk. It responded to her touch and opened easily. There were pigeonholes filled with letters, receipts and bills. With a quick hand and keen eye Josie rapidly ran through the piles of correspondence. Suddenly a foreign stamp arrested her attention. She pulled out a slim envelope, tucked in with others, and to her delight saw that it was addressed to Miss Ursula Ellett. She slipped out the letter and quickly put the empty envelope back in the pigeonhole where she had found it.
“No time to read it now, but how I’d like to know what it says! Anyhow, I am sure Ursula has never read it, because the date on the envelope is November of this year.”
Quickly the little sleuth ran through the other papers. In the drawer she found a bulky epistle, also directed to Miss Ursula Ellett. This too had a foreign stamp and was postmarked Kimberly, the date rubbed so that Josie could not make it out. The contents of this envelope she also confiscated and in its place stuffed some old time tables she found on the table. Quickly she closed the desk and locked it and was back downstairs listening to the radio concert before even Teddy had missed her. She patted her pocket to reassure herself that the papers were safe and then tried to compose herself to listen to the rather thin music miraculously furnished.
Josie felt the evening would never be over, so anxious was she to read the communications purloined from the rosewood desk. She was able to whisper to Teddy that she had something of possible importance and that young man’s eyes were also shining with anticipation.
“I am not crazy about snooping around a house or desk-breaking,” Josie told him, “but he had something that did not belong to him and I am merely carrying out Uncle Sam’s laws in delivering to the rightful person her own mail. When can we go?”
“I’ll scare up Mother and tell her the weather is liable to get colder or hotter or something and maybe we can leave in a few minutes,” replied the astute Teddy.