When fifteen minutes later the perplexed Mullinix halted a taxi at the Deansworth Studio Building she was at the curbing, her left arm in a sling and her eyes ablaze with barely controlled emotions. Before he could move to get out and help her in she was already in.
"Bellevue Hospital, psychopathic ward," he told the driver as she climbed nimbly inside.
As the taxi started she turned to Mullinix, demanding: "Now tell it to me all over again. When you are through, then I'll explain to you why I am so interested."
"Well," he said, "there isn't so very much to tell. The address you gave me turned out to be a boarding house just as you suspected it might—a second-rate place but apparently highly respectable, kept by a Mrs. Sheehan. It's been under the same management at the same place for a good many years. It wasn't very much trouble for me to find out what you wanted to know, because the whole place was in turmoil after what had happened just an hour or so before I got there. And when it developed that I had come to inquire about the cause of all the excitement every old-lady boarder in the house wanted to tell me about it all at the same time.
"It seems that three days ago this Mrs. Vinsolving applied at the place for room and board. Mrs. Sheehan vaguely remembered her as having been her guest for a short time ten or twelve years ago. At that time she was with her husband, Colonel Vinsolving, who it appears has since died, and a daughter about ten years or twelve years of age—a little girl with red hair, as Mrs. Sheehan recalls. This time, though, she came alone, carrying only hand baggage. Except that she seemed to be nervous and rather harassed and unhappy looking, there was nothing noticeably unusual about her. Mrs. Sheehan took her in willingly enough.
"She went straight to her room on the third floor and stayed there, having her meals brought up to her. But this morning early she went to the landlady and begged for protection, saying she was in fear of her life. Mrs. Sheehan very naturally inquired to know what was up—and then Mrs. Vinsolving told her this story:
"She said she had discovered a conspiracy to murder her, headed by—guess who? The late Kaiser, no less! She said that the Kaiser in disguise had escaped from Holland, leaving behind him in his recent place of exile over there a double made up to look like him, and was now in hiding in this country for the sole purpose of having Mrs. Vinsolving assassinated in revenge, because her late husband, while an officer in the Army, had perfected a poison gas deadlier than any other known, which, being kept a secret by this Government and used against the German army in the war, had brought about the victory for our side and led to the overthrow of the Kaiser's outfit.
"She went on to say she had run away from some suburban town or other to hide in New York and that was why she had taken refuge at Mrs. Sheehan's, thinking she would be in safety. But now she knew the plotters had tracked her, because she had just detected that the maid who had been bringing up her meals to her was really a German agent, and acting under orders from the Kaiser had put poison into her food. All of which naturally surprised Mrs. Sheehan considerably, especially as the accused servant happened to be a perfectly reliable Finnish girl who has been working for Mrs. Sheehan for five years and who had two brothers in the Seventy-seventh Division overseas.
"It didn't take Mrs. Sheehan two minutes—she being a pretty level-headed person evidently—to see what ailed her new boarder. She managed to get Mrs. Vinsolving quieted down and get her back again into her room, and then she called in the policeman on the post and inside of an hour the woman had been smuggled out of the house and was on her way to Bellevue in an ambulance with a doctor and a policeman guarding her. But by that time, of course, the news had leaked out among the other boarders and the whole place was beginning to stew with excitement. It was still stewing when I got there.
"Well, as soon as you told me over the telephone that you were bent and determined on going to Bellevue, though I do not see why you should be in such a hurry about it and taking chances on setting up an inflammation in your injured arm, because even though you do know the poor crazed creature you can't be of any help—"