From Place to Place

by Irvin S. Cobb

He had the slip in his hands and his fingers were in the act of twisting it in halves when the thought that something had been overlooked—something vitally important—came to him; and he paused to cogitate. What had been forgotten? What had he overlooked? What had he left undone that should have been done? Then suddenly appreciation of the thing missing came to him and in a quick panic of apprehension he felt through all the pockets of Parker's suit and through the pockets of his own garments, where he had flung them down on the bed, alongside the rifled suit case.

His luck piece was gone—that was it! The old silver trade dollar, worn thin and smooth by years of handling and with the hole drilled through the centre of it—that was what was gone—his token, his talisman, his charm against evil fortune. He had carried it for years, ever since he had turned crook, and for nothing in this world would he have parted from it.

In a mounting flurry of superstitious terror he searched the pockets again, with fingers that shook—this man who had lost faith in human beings, who had no hope and no fear for the hereafter, who had felt no stabs of regret or repentance for having killed a man, whose thoughts had never known remorse for any misdeed of his. The second hunt and the third and the fourth were fruitless as his first one had been; Trencher's luck piece was gone.

Those wise men, the alienists, say that all of us are insane on certain subjects, however sane we may be upon other subjects. Certainly in the mental composition of every one of us is some quirk, some vagary, some dear senseless delusion, avowed or private. As for Trencher, the one crotchet in his cool brain centred about that worthless trade dollar. With it in his possession he had counted himself a winner, always. Without it he felt himself to be a creature predestined and foreordained to disaster.

To it he gave all the credit for the fact that he had never served a prison sentence. But once, and once only, had he parted company with it, even temporarily. That was the time when Murtha, that crafty old Central-Office hand, had picked him up on general principles, had taken him to headquarters, and first stripping him of all the belongings on his person, had carried him to the Bertillon Bureau, and then and there, without shadow of legal right, since Trencher was neither formally accused of nor formally indicted for any offence and had no previous record of convictions, had forced him to undergo the ordeals, ethically so repugnant to the instincts of the professional thief, of being measured and finger-printed and photographed, side face and full face. He had cursed and protested and pleaded when Murtha confiscated the luck piece; he had rejoiced when Murtha, seeing no harm in the thing, had restored it to him before lodging him in a cell under the all-embracing technical charge of being a suspicious person. Because he had so speedily got it back, Trencher had gone free again with the loss of but two days of liberty—or anyway, so Trencher firmly believed. But because it had left his custody for no more than an hour his pictures were now in the Gallery, and Murtha had learned the secret of Trencher's one temperamental weakness, one fetish.

And now—at this time, of all times—it was gone again. But where had it gone? Where could it have gone? Mentally he reconstructed all his acts, all his movements since he had risen that morning and dressed—and then the solution came to him, and with the solution complete remembrance. He had slipped it into the right-hand pocket of the new tan-coloured topcoat—to impregnate the garment with good luck and to enhance the prospects for a successful working-out of the scheme to despoil the Wyoming cattleman; and he had left it there. And now here he was up on the seventeenth floor of the Bellhaven Hotel and the fawn-coloured coat with the luck piece in one of its pockets dangled on a hook in the cloak booth of the Clarenden café, less than a block away from the spot where he had shot Sonntag.

He marvelled that without his talisman he had escaped arrest up to now; it was inconceivable that he had won his way thus far. But then the answer to that was, of course, that he had retained the pasteboard square that stood for possession of the coat itself. He gave thanks to the unclean spirits of his superstition that apprehension of his loss had come to him before he destroyed the slip. Had he gone ahead and torn it up he would now count himself as doomed. But he hadn't torn it up. There it lay on the white coverlet of the bed.

He must make a try to recover his luck piece; no other course occurred to him. Trying would be beset with hazards, accumulated and thickening. He must venture back into the dangerous territory; must dare deadfalls and pitfalls; must run the chance of possible traps and probable nets. By now the police might have definitely ascertained who it was that killed Sonntag; or lacking the name of the slayer they might have secured a reasonably complete description of him; might have spread the general alarm for a man of such and such a height and such and such a weight, with such a nose and such eyes and such hair and all the rest of it. It might be that the Clarenden was being watched, along with the other public resorts in the immediate vicinity of where the homicide had been committed. It might even be that back in the Clarenden he would encounter the real Parker face to face. Suppose Parker had finished his supper and had discovered his loss—losses rather—and had made a complaint to the management; and suppose as a result of Parker's indignation that members of the uniformed force had been called in to adjudicate the wrangle; suppose through sheer coincidence Parker should see Trencher and should recognise the garments that Trencher wore as his own. Suppose any one of a half dozen things. Nevertheless, he meant to go back. He would take certain precautions—for all the need of haste, he must take them—but he would go back.

He put the pink check into his waistcoat pocket, switched out the room light, locked the door of the room on the outside, took the key with him and went down in an elevator, taking care to avoid using the same elevator that shortly before brought him up to this floor level. Presently he was outside the hotel, hurrying afoot on his return to Broadway. On the way he pitched the key into an areaway.

Turning out of Forty-second Street into Broadway and thence going south to a point just below the intersection with Fortieth Street, he approached the Clarenden from the opposite side of Broadway. There was motive in this. One coming across from the opposite side and looking upward at a diagonal slant could see through the windows along the front side of the Clarenden with some prospect of making out the faces of such diners as sat at tables near the windows. Straining his eyes as he crossed over, Trencher thought he recognised his man. He was almost sure he made out the outlined head and shoulders of Parker sitting at a corner table alongside the last window in the row. He trusted he was right and trusted still more fervently that Parker would bide where he was for three or four minutes longer.