The greater the need of its services the less likely is the match-box to be in that particular place where any number of witnesses will testify upon oath they had seen it only a moment before.
What is the strikeology of it? Have match-boxes that perverted sense of humor that finds expression in practical jokes? No, it is nothing like that. Would that it were! It is something less easy to explain. It is something sinister—something rather frightening.
. . . .
I am a devout reader of detective stories and with much study of their methods have come to regard myself as something of a sleuth, in a purely theoretic way of course; nevertheless I have always hoped some day to put my theories to the test, and here was the chance. I would find out where the match-boxes go, I would follow their trail to the bitter end, even if it led to the door of the White House itself!
. . . .
First I made a careful blue-print plan of the flat in which I (and the match-boxes) live, marking plainly in red ink all the doors, windows, fire-escapes (fire-escapes are most important); dumbwaiters, closets, trapdoors (there weren’t any but I put them in to make it more professional); then—but why go into all the thousand and—there’s that unlucky number again—the thousand and two minute and uninteresting details? You would only skip them and turn to the last paragraph to end the horrible suspense and learn at once what I discovered. * * *
PART TWO
Synopsis of Previous Chapter. Having observed that Match-boxes, placed in every room of the house, invariably disappear in a few hours, the narrator resolves to solve the mystery even though the trail should lead straight to the White House in Washington. Accordingly he makes a plan of all the rooms, closets, etc., and searches every possible hiding-place, but no trace of the Match-boxes is found.
What can have become of them! I have searched every corner of every room in the house—Stay! There is one room I have overlooked—the Haunted Room in the West Corridor, haunted by the ghosts of dead cigarettes, unfinished poems and murdered ideas. It is my study (or studio, as the occasion may be). With trembling hand on the porcelain door-knob, I pause to recall the secret combination.
In vain I rack my brain to remember the secret combination of my study door. Then suddenly it flashes upon me that long ago I wrote it down in the address book I carried in my pocket.