CHAPTER X
ASHTON-KIRK ASKS QUESTIONS
For some time after Miss Vale had gone, Ashton-Kirk stood at one of the windows and looked down at the sordid, surging, dirty crowd in the street. The worn horses went dispiritedly up and down; the throaty-voiced men clamored strangely through their beards; children played in the black ooze of the gutters; women bundled in immense knitted garments and with their heads wrapped in shawls, haggled over scatterings of faded, weak looking vegetables. The vendors grew frantic and eloquent in their combats with these experienced purchasers; their gestures were high, sharp and loaded with protest.
Then Pendleton came. He was burdened with newspapers and wore an excited look.
"I brought these, thinking that perhaps you had not seen them," he exclaimed, throwing the dailies among the others upon the floor. "But I note that your morning's reading has been very complete. Now tell me, Kirk, what the mischief do you think of all this?"
"I suppose, you refer to the published reports of the Hume case?"
"Of course! As far as I am concerned, there is not, just now, any other thing of consequence on earth." Then he struck the table with his fist. "And it's all the fault of that cur—Allan Morris! Every bit of it! There is not a space writer or amateur detective on a single paper in the city that hasn't his nose to the ground at this minute, hunting the trail. They are all at it. I stopped at the Vale's on my way here, but they told me she was not at home. From the top step to the curb, on my way out, I was stopped four times by stony-faced young men all anxious to make good with their city editors. 'Was I a friend of the family? Did Miss Vale seem at all upset by the matter? Where was Allan Morris? What brought him so frequently, as Brolatsky said, to see Hume?' I believe they'd have come over the back of my car even after I started, if I had given but an encouraging look."
"The evening papers will be a trial to Miss Vale for the next few days."
"Well, don't neglect the morning issues, if you are going to mention any. In to-morrow's Star there will be a portrait of Edyth four columns wide and eight inches high. I'll expect such expressions as 'beautiful society girl,' 'a recent debutante,' 'heiress to the vast fortune of the late structural steel king,' 'charming manner and brilliant mind.' And at those odd times when they are not praising her gowns, her wealth or her good looks, they'll be rather worse than insinuating that she knows all about the crime—if she didn't commit it herself!"