Returning to the porch again, he cleared away the fragments of glass, aided by Bertram. To one of these clung a shred of paper. For all his languid self-control the club dilettante shivered a little as he thrust at it with a stick.
“Look, Average, it’s the ‘Mercy’ sign again. What a hideous travesty!”
Average Jones shook his bead.
“It isn’t ‘Mercy,’ Bert. It’s the label that he attached, for precaution, to everything that had to do with his deadly stuff. The formula for cyanide of cacodyl is ‘Me-2CY.’ It was the scrawly handwriting that misled; that’s all.”
“So I was right when I suggested that his ‘Mercy’ had gone back on him,” said Mr. Thomas Colvin McIntyre, with a semi-hysterical giggle.
Average Jones looked from the peaceful face of the dead to the label, fluttering in the light breeze.
“No,” he said gravely. “You were wrong. It was his friend to the last.”
CHAPTER VI. BLUE FIRES
“Cabs for comfort; cars for company,” was an apothegm which Average Jones had evolved from experience. A professed student of life, he maintained, must keep in touch with life at every feasible angle. No experience should come amiss to a detective; he should be a pundit of all knowledge. A detective he now frankly considered himself; and the real drudgery of his unique profession of Ad-Visor was supportable only because of the compensating thrill of the occasional chase, the radiance of the Adventure of Life glinting from time to time across his path.
There were few places, Average Jones held, where human nature in the rough can be studied to better advantage than in the stifling tunnels of the subway or the close-packed sardine boxes of the metropolitan surface lines. It was in pursuance of this theory that he encountered the Westerner, on Third avenue car. By custom, Average Jones picked out the most interesting or unusual human being in any assembly where he found himself, for study and analysis. This man was peculiar in that he alone was not perspiring in the sodden August humidity. The clear-browned skin and the rangy strength of the figure gave him a certain distinction. He held in his sinewy hands a doubly folded newspaper. Presently it slipped from his hold to the seat beside him. He stared at the window opposite with harassed and unseeing eyes. Abruptly he rose and went out on the platform. Average Jones picked up the paper. In the middle of the column to which it was folded was a marked advertisement: