Running an elevator in a department store is a dull task. Little enough adventure in that, you might say, except when your cable begins to slip with a full load on board. But Florence was destined to come under the spell of mystery and to experience thrilling adventure before her short service as an elevator girl came to an end.
Mystery came leaping at her right out of the morning. She left her car in the basement and went for a drink. She was gone but a second. When she came back the elevator door was closed and the cage cables in motion.
“Gone!” she whispered. “I never heard of such a thing. Who could have taken it?
“Might have been the engineer taking it for a testing trip,” she thought after a few seconds of deliberation. “But no, that doesn’t seem probable. He’d not be down this early. But who could it be? And why did they do it?”
If the disappearance of her car had been startling, the thing she witnessed three minutes later was many times more so.
With fast beating heart she saw the shadow of the car move down from fifth floor to fourth, from fourth to third, then saw the car itself cover the remaining distance to the basement.
Her knees trembled with excitement and fear as she watched the cage in its final drop. The excitement was born of curiosity; the fear was that this should mean the last of her position. She had never been discharged and this gave her an unwonted dread of it.
The car came to a stop at the bottom. Three passengers got off and one got on, and the car shot upward again. And Florence did nothing but stand there and stare in astonishment!
Had she seen a ghost, a ghost of herself? What had happened? Her head was in a whirl. The girl at the lever was herself. Broad shoulders, large hands, round cheeks, blue eyes, brown hair, even to freckles that yielded not to winters indoors. It was her own self, to the life.
“And yet,” she reasoned, “here I am down here. What shall I do?”