How could he rid himself of it and of the pistol and hat as well? Gruesome accounts recurred to his mind of dismembered bodies having been wrapped in clumsy packages and dropped overboard in midstream from ferryboats. But something had always gone wrong; some sharp-eyed passenger had observed the action and marked the luckless individual for future identification, or the package itself had been recovered and the murderer traced by some such trivial detail as the wrapping or string which enclosed it. Clearly that means was not to be considered; and yet something must be done, and Storm could conceive of nothing more difficult to destroy than a stout leather bag. If he could only pack the other damning evidence—the hat and pistol—into it and ship it somewhere far away or else check it at some parcel repository——
Why not! The audacity of the thought made him gasp, and yet its feasibility instantly took hold upon his mind. If he attempted to express or send it by parcel post he would be compelled to write an address, and handwriting could be traced; but if he went to one of the great railroad terminals at the morning rush hour and checked the bag at the parcel desk he would merely be handed a numbered paper tag which could be easily destroyed, and in the hurrying crowd his identity would surely be lost. Better still, he could employ a stolid porter to check the bag for him, and it would be held for ten days or more before investigated as unclaimed.
Of course, there was the danger of his being recognized by some acquaintance in the passing throng of travelers, but it would be a simple matter to provide himself with a plausible excuse for his presence there. The bag itself was inconspicuous in appearance—Horton had seen to that!—and it bore no signs to reveal the purpose for which it had been used. The more Storm pondered, the more favorable the idea impressed him. He would have to get out in the morning without Homachi’s observation and that of the elevator boy, but it could be managed. For the rest he must trust to luck until he had finally rid himself of it; it was the only possible solution.
He took the pistol from the table drawer and weighed it thoughtfully in his hand. It would not make the bag heavy enough to occasion remark, and yet it must be packed in carefully; the bag must have the outward appearance of being filled with the ordinary concomitants of travel. The hat would help, and for the rest paper would serve——
Then Storm remembered and blessed his valet’s saving propensity. On an unused upper shelf in the pantry were a pile of old newspapers, some of them left from the litter of Potter’s departure, but most of them painstakingly collected and preserved for some purpose known only to Homachi’s Asiatic mind.
Storm procured a sheaf of them, and was on the point of wrapping up the pistol to stow it into the bag when on the front page of the topmost newspaper he saw roughly scrawled in pencil the characters, “One-A”. It was the number of his apartment—the newsdealer’s or house superintendent’s guide for the delivery of the papers—a common practice, as he knew, all over the city, and yet it might furnish a clue.
Whipping off the outer sheets of each newspaper, he folded them and replaced them on the kitchen shelf, then crumpled the others and lined the bag with them, nesting the pistol secure from movement or jar in their depths. The hat, folded into a wad, came next, and then more paper until the bag was full. When closed it had a comfortably bulging appearance, and Storm snapped the secret spring into place and set it on the floor between the dressing table and wall where it would escape Homachi’s eyes when he came to call his master in the morning.
Morning? Already a dim gray effulgence was stealing in between the curtains of the window, and Storm smiled to himself. How different was the vigil from the one of a month ago when he had sat quaking and bathed in sweat upon the foot of his bed, longing for yet dreading the coming of the dawn, waiting through tortured ages for the cry to echo up from below which would tell him that the body of his first victim had been discovered!
Now he knew that he had nothing to fear. He was master of this situation as he had been of the other, had he but realized it fully then. He extinguished all the lights except the low wall bracket at the bed’s head and disrobed lazily, glorying in his steady nerve, his iron control of himself.
No compunction came to him at the thought of the night’s work. Jack Horton had played so small a part in his life in the all but forgotten college days that the reminiscences had awakened no responsive chord. Hungry as he had been for human companionship in his despondency, the commonplace, cocksure stranger who spoke with the easy familiarity of an old friend had bored and slightly repelled him until he displayed his treasure. Even then he had not become a personality, but merely a wall of flesh and blood which stood between Storm and that which became in a twinkling of an eye imperative to his whole future existence.