“On some corner,” said the other vaguely.
“Then he took you to the big house and left you there,” urged Jones.
“No; he left me on the street corner. ‘When the feet iss in the window,’ he says, ‘you play.’”
“It comes to this,” drawled Average Jones intently, looking the employee between his vacuous eyes. “Ransom shipped the chair to Plymouth Street and from there to Linder’s house. He figured out that Linder would put it in his study and do his sitting at the window in it. And you were to know when he was there by seeing his feet in the window, and give the signal when you saw him. It must have been a signal to somebody pretty far off, or he wouldn’t have chosen so loud an instrument as a B-flat trombone.”
“I can play the B-flat trombone louder as any man in the business,” asserted Schlichting with proud conviction.
“But what gets me,” pursued Average Jones, “is the purpose of the signal. Whom was it for?”
“I don’t know nothing,” said the other complacently. “I only know to play the B-flat trombone louder as any man in the world.”
Average Jones paid him a lump sum, dismissed him and returned to the Cosmic Club, there to ponder the problem. What next? To accuse Ransom, the mysterious hirer of a B-flat trombone virtuosity, without sufficient proof upon which to base even a claim of cross-examination, would be to block his own game then and there, for Ransom could, and very likely would, go away, leaving no trace. Who was Ransom, anyway? And what relation, if any, did he bear to Linder?
Absorbed in these considerations, he failed to notice that the club was filling up beyond its wont. A hand fell on his shoulder.
“Hello, Average. Haven’t seen you at a Saturday special night since you started your hobby.”