“Elsie found it the day after or a few days after his disappearance. She threw it away—”
“That doesn’t matter, the fact of its being there is the important thing! You see, the man who got in the room may have dropped it—”
“How could any man get in the room! You’re crazy!”
“’Deed I’m not! Some man did get in that room, and carry off Kimball Webb while Webb was unconscious! Now, you put that away in your mind, and keep it there, for it’s true!”
“How did he get in?”
“Mrs. Seaman, if any one ever asks me that question again, I’m going to run away! I don’t know how he got in,—but, he did get in,—and, if this interests you, I’m going to find out how he got in! But even more than that, I want to find the man! That’s the objective point. To find how he got in, would be fearfully interesting and would gratify my overweening curiosity,—I think overweening is the word for it! Anyhow, it’s the biggest order of curiosity I’ve ever experienced in my career! But, overweeninger yet, is my desire to get the man! It’s an obsession with me,—a craze! My fingers itch for him,—and I feel he’s so near—and yet so far! But this little old toothpick paper may be a clue! You know what flimsy little bits they are, how they cling in a pocket and are easily flirted out with a handkerchief or such matter!”
“Wouldn’t it be a good deal of a coincidence if your man, a frequenter of Sherman’s, left the paper,—as one might a visiting card?”
“Don’t be sarcastic, Mrs. Seaman!” Coe smiled good-naturedly. “And the coincidence wouldn’t be so extraordinarily strange! They say, a man can’t enter and leave a room, without making half a dozen at least ineffaceable marks of his presence there. Now, the only reason I doubted the entrance of my man, as you call him, was the fact that I hadn’t been able to find any trace,—not even the slightest, of his visit there. That made me think Webb might have been lured out,—stop! don’t you dare ask me how he got out. We know he did get out,—and as I told you I’m going to find out how. Well, this little paper changes the whole map of my cogitations. Now, do you know of anybody who does go to Sherman’s?”
“I do not. My friends don’t care for the place.”
“Probably not; but I’ll bet it’s the great little old rendezvous of Friend Gold-teeth, and his boss.”