There was printed on it in pencil, “I am a prisoner. My life is in danger. A. E.”
The paper was of the thin and excellent quality used in engineers’ pocket tables and handbooks.
It appeared that Jack upon feeling the sudden desertion of his strength had stolen again to the doorway of the empty house opposite No. — and must have drowsed away there the rest of the night, urged apparently by his ineradicable hope of further disclosures. His persistency was rewarded by finding this puzzling and startling bit of evidence. He found it, most remarkably, on the floor of the abandoned limousine.
The car had remained undisturbed all night in the street, and this strange neglect on the part of its previous users could only be explained by the supposition that they feared some unpleasant complications, involving disagreeable explanations with its actual owners, unless they were the owners of it themselves. Jack crawled over to the car in the earliest hour of the morning before the dawn had yet grown strong enough to make its outlines visible, while night practically covered the street. No. — was dark from basement to attic, not a light shone in it anywhere. He remembered that very distinctly.
He had had an indefinite premonition or fancy that something left behind in the car might be found; clues like that figured in all the romances of detection. He explored with his hands the corners, the cushions, and the floor, when, passing his hand along the edge of the carpet mat covering the floor, it encountered a bit of paper rolled up into a pellet. After the discovery of the writing he went to an owl wagon restaurant, and then hastened to the newspaper office.
But two hours later, when the daylight swept through the city, he returned to Fifty-eighth Street, from a restless feeling of suspicion, and agonized too with the thought of the abused and helpless prisoner. The auto was gone, and the mysterious house revealed nothing, with its shades drawn down and its immobile identity with the other sandstone fronts hopelessly complete. If murder dwelt behind its expressionless stories, or some dastardly drama of persecution, extortion, torture, effrontery and crime had been enacted there, no telltale signal betrayed it. And yet to Jack’s inflamed imagination it confessed its guilt; somehow to his obsessed eye he saw the meanness of its degradation, as if it shrank away from its orderly and decent neighbors; as if indeed its neighbors frowned upon it. He returned to the office and told me his story.
A newspaper man has the keenest sort of scent for sensation—especially the yellow newspaper man, and I fail to recoil from making the confession of my personal yellowness in that respect. He is seldom bewildered by scruples, seldom daunted by danger; he doesn’t think of them. He starts the engines of exposure and arrest, and records the result. Half an hour after Jack’s story was told Captain B— of the — precinct was closeted with me, and I repeated Jack’s adventure.
Jack’s description of the three principals in this suspicious criminal alliance was insufficient or inadequate to enable Captain B. to recognize them among the notables of both the under and the upper worlds with whom he was acquainted. I had not then seen the paper Jack found.
“Mr. Link,” Captain B. finally said, after a short silence following my communication, “you feel pretty sure of this young fellow, Jack Riddles? The name suggests an equivocal character.”
“I feel a good deal surer of him, perhaps, than I do of myself—if you can understand.”