Francis was out of bed in a bound, staring one moment at the dagger, and next, drawing it out, reading the note over and over as if its simple meaning, contained in two simple words, were too abstruse for his comprehension.
"Adios forever," said the note.
What shocked him even more, was the dagger thrust between Leoncia's eyes, and, as he stared at the wound made in the thin cardboard, it came to him that he had seen this very thing before, and he remembered back to the lake-dwelling of the Queen when all had gazed into the golden bowl and seen variously, and when he had seen Leoncia's face on the strange liquid metal with the knife thrust between the eyes. He even put the dagger back into the cardboard wound and stared at it some more.
The explanation was obvious. The Queen had betrayed jealousy against Leoncia from the first, and here, in New York, finding her rival's photograph on her husband's dresser, had no more missed the true conclusion than had she missed the pictured features with her point of steel. But where was she? Where had she gone? she who was the veriest stranger that had ever entered the great city, who called the telephone the magic of the flying speech, who thought of Wall Street as a temp'le, and regarded Business as the New York man's god. For all the world she was as unsophisticated and innocent of a great city as had she been a traveler from Mars. Where and how had she passed the night? Where was she now? Was she even alive?
Visions of the Morgue with its unidentified dead, and of bodies drifting out to sea on the ebb, rushed into his brain. It was Parker who steadied him back to himself.
"Is there anything I can do, sir? Shall I call up the detective bureau? Your father always…"
"Yes, yes," Francis interrupted quickly. "There was one man he employed more than all others, a young man with the Pinkertons do you remember his name?"
"Birchman, sir," Parker answered promptly, moving away. "I shall send for him to come at once."
And thereupon, in the quest after his wife, Francis entered upon a series of adventures that were to him, a born New Yorker, a liberal education in conditions and phases of New York of which, up to that time, he had been profoundly ignorant. Not alone did Birchman search, but he had at work a score of detectives under him who fine-tooth-combed the city, while in Chicago and Boston, he directed the activities of similar men.
Between his battle with the unguessed enemy of Wall Street, and the frequent calls he received to go here and there and everywhere, on the spur of the moment, to identify what might possibly be his wife, Francis led anything but a boresome existence. He forgot what regular hours of sleep were, and grew accustomed to being dragged from luncheon or dinner, or of being routed out of his bed, to respond to hurry calls to come and look over new-found missing ladies,