“You must have taken leave of your senses entirely, Denny, and I’m no better, letting you drag me out again on a night like this to gawk through barred gates at a row of rich men’s houses! I’ve one satisfaction, though; ’twas you and not me, as you’ll kindly remember, that hired this robber taxi!”
Dennis grinned to himself in the darkness.
“You’re welcome to the ride, Mac!” Then his tone lowered seriously. “I’ve been thinking this thing over, and I must have been wrong on that blackmail notion; that the fellow was on the way to pay any, I mean, if he had only a matter of seventy dollars on him. I’m surprised at you, though, and even at Terry and Mike Taggart, that not one of the three of you thought to go back across and get the hat; it could not have sailed far, in spite of the hill there and the gutters running over. ’Tis not like you—”
“Damn the hat!” McCarty interrupted irascibly. “’Tis the man himself I’m thinking of; now if the cold, muddy rain-water in the gutter had anything to do with it—?”
He mumbled and lapsed into silence and after a discreet interval his companion observed in an aggrieved tone:
“Through more than muddy rain-water have I followed you on many a case you’ve dragged me into, but if the grand education you’ve been getting lately from those books has made you talk in riddles, you can keep the answers to yourself for all of me! By the same token, if that fellow was not running away from anybody or hurrying to meet them but was just chasing along like that through the storm, staggering and stopping and leaping forward again, he must have been out of his head entirely, and the asylum would have got him if the morgue hadn’t!”
“True for you, Denny; that’s what was in my mind just now,” McCarty replied with a contrite return to his habitual geniality. “Not about his being a lunatic, maybe, but delirious from sickness or suffering. When he fell, with his head hanging over the gutter and the cold water rushing over his face I was thinking it brought back his consciousness for that minute there at the end. You could see by the look in his eyes and the way he fought for breath that there was something he was trying his best to tell, something that filled him with more horror than the fear of death itself!”
“’Tis a lot to see in a man’s eye,” Dennis remarked in unusual skepticism. “Maybe he’d no notion of dying; he seems to have been a pretty healthy looking fellow, from what you tell me. If those books are getting you to read meanings in people’s faces that are not there you’d best be sticking to the newspapers!”
“’Tis small meaning anybody could read in yours, my lad!” the indignant student retorted. “Here we are and the gates are shut, just as I told you. What’s the next move? You started this, Denny, and it’s up to you!”
But it proved to be up to neither of them, for, as McCarty descended from the taxi before the great gates of wrought iron which spanned the side street, a tall figure emerged from the shadows and a well-known voice exclaimed in accents of satisfaction not untinged with amusement: