have known, had called her the Mona Lisa of the underworld.
Fay wondered where she was living, as he tore his glance away from the river and turned with his back to the wall. He had last seen her on that eventful day when a cage had shot up in the court of Assizes, a judge had pronounced the sentence, and the cage, with him in it, had dropped down to the waiting van which had started for the prison with both horses on a gallop.
Her mouth had formed one word: “Courage!�
He recalled all this as he struck the wall with his right heel. There was little enough honor in the best of thieves. The stool-pigeons had made squealing a profitable vocation. Men who traveled with golf-bags filled with highly tempered tools of the safe-breaking profession, and who sported small black motor cars of marvelous speed, were proper marks. The pigeons or carelessness or something had dragged him down. Fay often wondered, in those Dartmoor years, if Saidee Isaacs had a hand in his conviction.
MacKeenon would not give him Saidee’s address. Sir Richard had told him to forget her. He decided, with a sudden start as Big Ben struck the quarters, that the day that had been ushered in would be devoted to finding Saidee Isaacs. She had some things to answer for—chief of which was her reason for not writing to Dartmoor.
He straightened, hung the coat over his arm, fished out a cigarette from the case, and struck a match upon the damp stone and hurried away from the river.
Suddenly, and specter-like, a form blocked his way. It was an American soldier clad in a well-fitting olive-drab uniform, upon the sleeves of which was a wound-stripe.
“Say, mister,� Fay heard. “Say, will you show me the way to my hotel? It’s the Huntington, I guess. You guys in this burg call it different. You call it the ’Untin’don, or something like that. D’ye know where it is, Chappie?�
“Surest thing you know, old pal,â€� said Fay, shifting the coat and linking his arm under the soldier’s. “Come along with me—I’m going right that way!â€�
It was at the square, where the red mass of the Huntington Temperance Hotel juts out into the Strand, that the soldier disengaged Fay’s arm and stared at him.