"Yes, I'd just gone up to the seventeenth floor for him. Here, you want to get a firm holt on me or you'll be swep' away."
"I'm holding," I gasped, and believe me I was, for a line of people coming out like a bit of the Johnstown Flood was like to tear me loose from my moorings. "Then he must have been in the elevator when Harland jumped?"
"That's it. It was his ring brought me up to the seventeenth floor. He got in and it was while we was goin' down the body fell. Struck the street a few minutes before we reached the bottom."
We were whizzing through the blackness of the tunnel to Times Square. The overflow that had drained off at Forty-second Street had loosened things up a little. I unwrapped myself from around Troop, taking hold of the strap over his hand, and pigeonholing what he'd said. In that boiling pack of people I was cold and shivery down the spine.
"Did Mr. Ford run out in the street like the rest?"
"Did he? He done a Marathon! I couldn't make a dint on the crowd, but he shoved through, and when he come back he was all broke up. 'What do you make of that?' says he. 'There's a man committed suicide and they say it's Rollings Harland.'"
"Broke up! I shouldn't wonder. He was in the office late wasn't he—till half-past six?"
"He was that night, and he had been once or twice before this last month. Told me he was working overtime, though if you'd asked me I'd have said he wasn't the kind to do more than his salary called for."
"No," I said, thinking hard underneath. "Seems sort of loaferish."
"Well, I wouldn't say that, but easy, good-humored—you know the sort. But lately he's been on the job, busy, I guess, gettin' ready for the collapse. The night of the suicide he left early, soon after Miss Barry. And a little after six—ten or fifteen minutes maybe—he come bustling back sayin' he'd forgotten some papers and for me to shoot him up quick."