Lyon's lively personal interest in Lawrence made him glance back at the house where his hero had evidently made an ineffective call, and wonder who it might be that lived there. Hemlock was an avenue that carried its air of sublimated respectability in every well-kept lawn and unfenced lot. Each house was set back from the street and was "detached," with trees and concrete walks and front lawn and back yard of its own. It was not a show street, but it was supremely well-bred. It struck Lyon, newly come from a busier city, as curious that, but for himself, Lawrence was the only person moving in the street. Not even a policeman was in sight.
This same seclusion and peace brooded over the scene when he retraced his way down that block on his early return from the concert an hour later. He was commenting upon the stillness to himself when he heard the sound of running feet approaching, and in a moment he saw the figure of a woman come running wildly toward him. About the middle of the block she cut diagonally across the street and ran into one of the houses opposite. Lyon had instinctively quickened his own pace, for her panic flight suggested that she was pursued, but he could see no one following her. Then he noticed that the house where she had run in was, curiously enough, the same house where Lawrence had called earlier that evening. She had not gone in at the front door but had run around to the side of the house.
"Some servant maid who has overstayed her leave," he thought. "She ran well, though,--uncommonly good form for a kitchen girl. Bet she's had gymnasium work, whoever she is."
Reaching the end of the block he stopped and looked up and down the cross-street, Sherman, from which the girl had seemed to come. There was no one in sight. The street, snowily white and bare in the light of the gas lamps, lay open before him for long blocks. The music from a skating rink in the neighborhood came gayly to him on the frosty air and an electric car clanged busily in the near distance. As he moved on, his eye was caught by something dark on the white snow at the edge of the pavement,--a black silk muffler it proved to be, when he picked it up. Had the girl dropped it or merely hurried past it? It was a man's muffler. He was about to toss it back into the street when some instinct--the professional instinct of the reporter to understand everything he sees--made him roll it up and tuck it instead into his overcoat pocket.
He hurried on, meaning to catch the next car a few blocks below, when the shrill and repeated call of a policeman's whistle cut across the night. Lyon stopped. That sharp and insistent call suggested a more exciting "story" than his church concert. He hurried back to Sherman Street, and half-way down the block, midway between Hemlock Avenue and Oak Street, he saw the officer standing. It was not until he came close up that Lyon saw the gray heap on the ground near the officer's feet.
"What's up?" he demanded.
"Man dead," the officer answered laconically.
Running feet were answering the signal of the whistle, and in less time than it takes to tell it, they were the center of an excited crowd. Donohue, the police officer, ordered the crowd sharply to stand back, while he sent the first watchman who had come up to telephone for the patrol wagon.
"If any one is hurt, I am a physician," one man said, pushing his way to the front.
"He's hurted too bad for you to do him any good," Donohue said.