“It’s a fact. Didn’t I tell you that before?”
“No.” Jarvis grew suddenly cool and wary. “That is, I don’t remember it if you did. Now, cudgel your brain once more, Tom, and try to guess me at about what hour that was.”
“It just so happens that I can tell you to a dot. A minute or two after ‘his Blacks’ was in here a fellow came up from the faro game and wanted twenty-five cases on his watch. I let him have ’em, and when I went to put the ticker in the safe I noticed the time. It was half past eleven.”
Jarvis bought a bad cigar, but he did not light it. On the contrary, he was absently crushing the little roll of alleged tobacco in his hand as he went out and up the street. And a little later, when he was crossing Larimer Street on his way to the rendezvous, he was still scattering the powdered cabbage leaves in a thin trail of brown dust behind him as he strode along.
“It is a sheer miracle—nothing less!” he muttered. “Tom Deverney has told me that story more than a dozen times before, and he left out the whole heart of it every time until to-night. That knocks out one of the mysteries with a good clean body blow. It wasn’t young Langford who ransacked Brant’s room; it was ‘his Blacks,’ as Deverney calls him. And if he was drunk when he did it, he was sober enough when he sent the boy for the cast-off pepper-and-salts that might have betrayed him. Lord of love! if I only knew what he was after!”
Like a flash of inspiration the answer tripped upon the heels of the question. Antrim had told the reporter about the packet of papers given him by Brant for safe-keeping, but not until this instant had Jarvis been able to put two and two together.
“That’s it—that is the whole thing in a nutshell!” he ejaculated. “This fellow and Harding were partners and Harding put him up to steal those papers. Lord, Lord, what a flock of purblind bats we’ve been!”
But the night of miracles was yet young. When the reporter had crossed the street, narrowly escaping the wire scoop net of a passing cable car in his abstraction, he stumbled upon one of the employees of the Osirian Club, the doorkeeper who had been on duty in the upper corridor on the night of the tragedy. Jarvis stopped to buttonhole the man from sheer force of reportorial habit.
“Hello, Binkie! Going on watch?” he queried.
The man nodded.