Burgess knew Vevay Street, for he owned a business block at its intersection with Senate Avenue. Beyond the avenue it deteriorated rapidly and was filled with tenements and cheap boarding houses. Several blocks west ran an old canal, lined with factories, elevators, lumber yards and the like, and on the nearer bank was a network of railroad switches.
He thought it best not to approach the Murdock house in his motor; so he left it at the drug-store corner, and, bidding the chauffeur wait for him, walked down Vevay Street looking for 787. It was a forbidding thoroughfare and the banker resolved to complain to the Civic League; it was an outrage that such Stygian blackness should exist in a civilized city, and he meant to do something about it. When he found the number it proved to be half of a ramshackle two-story double house. The other half was vacant and plastered with For Rent signs. He struck a match and read a dingy card that announced rooms and boarding. The window shades were pulled halfway down, showing lights in the front room. Burgess knocked and in a moment the door was opened guardedly by a stocky, bearded man.
“Mr. Murdock?”
“Well, what do you want?” growled the man, widening the opening a trifle to allow the hall light behind him to fall on the visitor’s face.
“Don’t be alarmed. A friend of Robert Drake’s in Chicago asked me to see him. My errand is friendly.”
A woman’s voice called from the rear of the hall:
“It’s all right, dad; let the gentleman in.”
Murdock slipped the bolt in the door and then scrutinized Burgess carefully with a pair of small, keen eyes. As he bent over the lock the banker noted his burly frame and the powerful arms below his rolled-up shirtsleeves.
“Just wait there,” he said, pointing to the front room. He closed the hall door and Burgess heard his step on the stairs.
An odor of stale cooking offended the banker’s sensitive nostrils. The furniture was the kind he saw daily in the windows of furniture stores that sell on the installment plan; on one side was an upright piano, with its top littered with music. Now that he was in the house, he wondered whether this Murdock was after all a crook, and whether the girl with the red feather, with her candid eyes, could possibly be his daughter. His wrath against Hill rose again as he recalled his cynical tone—and on the thought the girl appeared from a door at the farther end of the room.