"It's more than funny," said Lyon, with an air of saying something worth listening to. He was automatically pulling out one drawer of the desk after another, sometimes merely glancing in, sometimes lightly turning over the contents with a careless hand. "We don't know much of the personal lives of the people about us. Things are not always what they seem." He probably could have kept up the platitudinizing longer if necessary, but he had opened all the drawers. None were locked. There was no scrap of the curious greenish gray paper anywhere, nor, indeed, anything but files of documents obviously legal, and mostly dust-covered. "But his personal belongings were rather gorgeous." He opened curiously a bronze stamp box which matched the other appointments of the desk, and examined the contents. There was a lot of red stamps, but no green. That was about all that he had hoped to discover. It had seemed probable from the first that Fullerton would have his peculiar personal belongings at his own room rather than at his office, but Lyon had wished to eliminate the other possibility.
As he came out of the room, a strange and yet familiar figure passed down the hall toward the elevator just ahead of him,--the heavy figure and white head of Mr. Olden. Lyon glanced back. Lawrence's office was farther down the hall, and Lawrence's law cleric, a young fellow named Freeman, whom Lyon knew slightly, stood in the open door looking after his departing visitor with a curious watchfulness. On the impulse, Lyon turned back.
"What scrape has my most respectable landlord been getting into, that he needs legal advice?" he asked.
"Come in," said Freeman, with evident pleasure. "I'm mighty glad to have you give the old gentleman a character. I began to wonder if there wasn't something suspicious about him."
"Why?"
"He came in a few days ago and asked for Lawrence. I explained why he couldn't see him. He fumed around a little, and finally said he wanted a will drawn up, and couldn't I do it? I thought I could all right, so I got him to give me the items. It involved a lot of little bequests,--he seems to be a retired merchant from somewhere down the state with an interminable family connection,--and I took a lot of notes and told him I would have the will drawn up in a few days. He has been in every day since to make changes and alterations, till I am all balled up. Either I got things badly mixed in my notes or he has forgotten just how his sisters and his cousins and his aunts are arranged. I'll swear he has mixed the babies."
"Well, if he pays you for your trouble," laughed Lyon.
"Yes, he made it clear that he wanted me to charge up my wasted time, but--he's queer all the same. I almost thought to-day that the whole business of the will was a blind, and that he was here for some purpose of his own."
"That sounds more serious. What made you think that?"
"I had gone into the inner room to hunt up my original notes, because he insisted that I had made a mistake, when I heard the roll top of Lawrence's desk pushed up. Lawrence never locks it, but the old man hadn't any business in there, all the same. I came out in a hurry, and there he was, hunting around in the desk. He wasn't a bit fazed by my coming back, either. Said he wanted some paper to write a letter and fretted and fumed over the pen and ink as though the whole outfit belonged to him. I cleared a place for him, and left him writing, while I shifted my own chair so that I could keep an eye on him. He wrote two or three short letters, and tossed something into the waste basket there. Then, when he was through, he picked up the waste basket and began hunting through it. I supposed he wanted to recover what he had thrown in, until I saw him pick out a square envelope and put it with his own papers."