"No, no! Can't you understand? I want twelve-thirty-four; one, two, three, four; the Hotel Wellington."
There was more skirling of bells, another nerve-trying wait, and at last the clerk of the hotel answered.
"What name did you say? Oh, it's you, is it, Mr. Kent? Ormsby? Mr. Brookes Ormsby? No, he isn't here; he went out about two minutes ago. What's that you say? Damn? Well, I'm sorry, too. No message that I can take? All right. Good-by."
This was the beginning. For the middle part Kent burst out of the telephone-box and took the nearest short-cut through the capitol grounds for the street-car corner. At a quarter of nine he was cross-questioning the clerk face to face in the lobby of the Wellington. There was little more to be learned about Ormsby. The club-man had left his key and gone out. He was in evening dress, and had taken a cab at the hotel entrance.
Kent dashed across to his rooms and, in a feverish race against time, made himself fit to chase a man in evening dress. There was no car in sight when he came down, and he, too, took a cab with an explosive order to the driver: "124 Tejon Avenue, and be quick about it!"
It was the housemaid that answered his ring at the door of the Brentwood apartment. She was a Swede, a recent importation; hence Kent learned nothing beyond the bare fact that the ladies had gone out. "With Mr. Ormsby?" he asked.
"Yaas; Aye tank it vill pee dat yentlemans."
The pursuer took the road again, rather unhopefully. There were a dozen places where Ormsby might have taken his charges. Among them there was the legislative reception at Portia Van Brock's. Kent flipped a figurative coin, and gave the order for Alameda Square. The reception was perhaps the least unlikely place of the dozen.
He was no more than fashionably late at the Van Brock house, and fortunately he was able to reckon himself among the chosen few for whom Miss Portia's door swung on hospitable hinges at all hours. Loring had known her in Washington, and he had stood sponsor for Kent in the first week of the exile's residence at the capital. Thereafter she had taken Kent up on his own account, and by now he was deep in her debt. For one thing, she had set the fashion in the matter of legislative receptions—her detractors, knowing nothing whatever about it, hinted that she had been an amateur social lobbyist in Washington, playing the game for the pure zest of it—and at these functions Kent had learned many things pertinent to his purpose as watch-dog for the railroad company and legal adviser to his chief—things not named openly on the floor of the House or of the Senate chamber.
There was a crush in the ample mansion in Alameda Square, as there always was at Miss Van Brock's "open evenings," and when Kent came down from the cloakroom he had to inch his way by littles through the crowded reception-parlors in the search for the Brentwood party. It was unsuccessful at first; but later, catching a glimpse of Elinor at the piano, and another of Penelope inducting an up-country legislator into the mysteries of social small-talk, he breathed freer. His haphazard guess had hit the mark, and the finding of Ormsby was now only a question of moments.