"I certainly have not. I hope you don't think—" Gillespie hesitated.
"It's not a matter for thinking or guessing; I've got to know."
"On my honor I have not seen him, and I have no idea where he is."
I had thrown myself into a chair beside the couch and lighted my pipe. My captive troubled me. It seemed odd that he had found the abiding-place of the two women; and if he had succeeded so quickly, why might not Henry Holbrook have equal luck?
"You probably know this troublesome brother well," I ventured.
"Yes; as well as a man of my age can know an older man. My father's place at Stamford adjoined the Holbrook estate. Henry and Arthur Holbrook married sisters; both women died long ago, I believe; but the brothers had a business row and went to smash. Arthur embezzled, forged, and so on, and took to the altitudinous timber, and Henry has been busy ever since trying to pluck his sister. He's wild on the subject of his wrongs—ruined by his own brother, deprived of his inheritance by his sister and abandoned by his only child. There wasn't much to Arthur Holbrook; Henry was the genius, but after the bank went to the bad he sought the consolations of rum. He and Henry married the Hartridge twins who were the reigning Baltimore belles in the early eighties—so runneth the chronicle. But I gossip, my dear sir; I gossip, which is against my principles. Even the humble button king of Strawberry Hill must draw the line."
When Ijima brought in a plate of sandwiches he took one gingerly in his swathed hand, regarded it with cool inquiry, and as he munched it, remarked upon sandwiches in general as though they were botanical specimens that were usually discussed and analyzed in a scientific spirit.
"The sandwich," he began, "not unhappily expresses one of the saddest traits of our American life. I need hardly refer to our deplorable national habit of hiding our shame under a blithe and misleading exterior. Now this article, provided by your generous hospitality for a poor prisoner of war, contains a bit of the breast of some fowl, presumably chicken—we will concede that it is chicken—taken from rather too near the bone to be wholly palatable. Chicken sandwiches in some parts of the world are rather coarsely marked, for purposes of identification, with pin-feathers. You may covet no nobler fame than that of creator of the Flying Sandwich of Annandale. Yet the feathered sandwich, though more picturesque, points rather too directly to the strutting lords of the barn-yard. A sandwich that is decorated like a fall bonnet, that suggests, we will say, the milliner's window—or the plumed knights of sounding war—"
With a little sigh, a slow relaxation of muscles, Mr. Gillespie slept. I locked the doors, put out the lights, and tumbled into my own bed as the chapel clock chimed two.
In the disturbed affairs of the night the blinds had not been drawn, and I woke at six to find the room flooded with light and my prisoner gone. The doors were locked as I had left them. Mr. Gillespie had departed by the window, dropping from a little balcony to the terrace beneath. I rang for Ijima and sent him to the pier; and before I had finished shaving, the boy was back, and reported Gillespie's boat still at the pier, but one of the canoes missing. It was clear that in the sorry plight of his arms Gillespie had preferred paddling to rowing. Beneath my watch on the writing-table I found a sheet of note-paper on which was scrawled: