“(Signed) Preston Jax, S-M.”
[CHAPTER XX—IN THE WHITE ROOM]
“Annalaka, July 15.
“To Hotel Eyrie, Martindale Center: Dust 571 and send up seven chairs. Chester Kent.”
“Now I wonder what that might mean?” mused the day-clerk of the Eyrie, as he read the telegram through for the second time. “Convention in the Room of Mystery, maybe?”
To satisfy his curiosity he went up to the room himself. Its white bareness confirmed a suspicion of long standing.
“Any man,” he remarked to the scrub woman, “who would pay five a day for a room just to put nothing at all in it, has sure got a kink in his cogs.”
Nor did the personnel of the visitors who, in course of the late afternoon, arrived with requests to be shown to 571, serve to efface this impression. First came the sheriff from Annalaka. He was followed by a man of unmistakably African derivation, who gave the name of Jim and declined to identify himself more specifically. While the clerk was endeavoring, with signal lack of success, to pump him, Lawyer Adam Bain arrived, and so emphatically vouched for his predecessor as to leave the desk-lord no further excuse for obstructive tactics. Shortly afterward Alexander Blair came in, with a woman heavily veiled, and was deferentially conducted aloft. Finally, Chester Kent himself appeared, accompanied by Sedgwick and a third man, unknown to the clerk, pompously arrayed in frock coat and silk hat, and characterized by a painfully twitching chin.
“Who have come?” Kent asked the clerk.
That functionary ran over the list. “Looks like something to do with the woman found in Lonesome Cove last week,” he essayed hopefully.
Kent glanced out of the window. “It looks like rain,” he observed, “and it looks like wind. And it looks like a number of things that are anybody’s business. Furthermore, I may mention that we shall not need, in 571, ice-water, stationery, casual messages, calling-cards, or any other form of espionage.” He favored the wilting clerk with a sunny smile and led his companions to the elevator.