Unable for a moment to credit his senses, Garrison moved over against the wall of the building he was passing, and stood there, slowly, almost mechanically, searching his pockets once again, while his mind revolved about the lost cigar, in an effort to understand its disappearance.
He was wholly at a loss for a tenable theory till he thought of the frequency with which men are robbed of scarf-pins or similar trifles—and then a sickening possibility possessed him.
One of the commonest devices that a woman employs in such a petty theft is to faint on the breast of her victim. In such a pose she may readily extract some coveted article from either his tie or his pocket, with almost absolute certainty of avoiding detection.
It did not seem possible—and yet the fact remained that Dorothy had fainted thus against him, and the poisoned cigar was gone. She had known of his visit to Branchville; his line of questions might have roused her suspicions; the cigar had been plainly in sight. He had seen her enact her rôle so perfectly, in the presence of her relatives, that he could not doubt her ability in any required direction.
For a moment a powerful revulsion of feeling toward the girl, who was undeniably involved in some exceptionally deep-laid plan, crept throughout his being. Not only does a man detest being used as a tool and played upon like any common dunce, but he also feels an utter chagrin at being baffled in his labors. Apparently he had played the fool, and also he had lost the vital evidence of Hardy's poisoning.
Mortified and angry, he remained there, while the crowds surged by, his gaze dully fixed on the pavement. For a time he saw nothing, and then at last he was conscious that a rose—a crushed and wilted rose, thrown down by some careless pedestrian—was lying almost at his feet. Somehow, it brought him a sense of calm and sweetness; it seemed a symbol, vouchsafed him here in the hot, sordid thoroughfare, where crime and folly, virtue and despair, stalk arm in arm eternally.
He could not look upon the bit of trampled beauty, thus wasted on a heedless throng, and think of Dorothy as guilty. She had seemed just as crushed and wilted as the rose when he left her at her home—just as beautiful, also, and as far from her garden of peace and fragrances as this rejected handful of petals. She must be innocent. There must be some other explanation for the loss of that cigar—and some good reason for the things she had done and said.
He took up the rose, indifferent to anyone who might have observed the action with a smile or a sneer, and slowly proceeded down the street.
The cigar, he reflected, might easily have been stolen in the Subway. A hundred men had crushed against him. Any one of them so inclined could have taken the weed at his pleasure. The thought was wholly disquieting, since if any man attempted to bite the cigar-end through, to smoke, he would pay a tragic penalty for his petty theft.
This aspect of the affair, indeed, grew terrible, the more he thought upon it. He almost felt he must run to the station, try to search out that particular train, and cry for all to hear that the stolen cigar would be fatal—but the thought was a wild, unreasoning vagary; he was absolutely helpless in the case.