“Therefore the telegram was his, not yours. I have pieces here, but some are missing. I am not discouraged, however.”
He spread out some bits of yellow paper, and we bent over them curiously. It was something like this:
Man with p— Get—
Br—
We spelled it out slowly.
“Now,” Hotchkiss announced, “I make it something like this: The ‘p.—’ is one of two things, pistol—you remember the little pearl-handled affair belonging to the murdered man—or it is pocket-book. I am inclined to the latter view, as the pocket-book had been disturbed and the pistol had not.”
I took the piece of paper from the table and scrawled four words on it.
“Now,” I said, rearranging them, “it happens, Mr. Hotchkiss, that I found one of these pieces of the telegram on the train. I thought it had been dropped by some one else, you see, but that’s immaterial. Arranged this way it almost makes sense. Fill out that ‘p.—’ with the rest of the word, as I imagine it, and it makes ‘papers,’ and add this scrap and you have:
“‘Man with papers (in) lower ten, car seven. Get (them).’”
McKnight slapped Hotchkiss on the back. “You’re a trump,” he said. “Br— is Bronson, of course. It’s almost too easy. You see, Mr. Blakeley here engaged lower ten, but found it occupied by the man who was later murdered there. The man who did the thing was a friend of Bronson’s, evidently, and in trying to get the papers we have the motive for the crime.”
“There are still some things to be explained.” Mr. Hotchkiss wiped his glasses and put them on. “For one thing, Mr. Blakeley, I am puzzled by that bit of chain.”