“Might if I hadn’t been very busy with something else. I’ve been prospecting for human gold. Struck the vein once, and lost it through a fluke.” He turned a rather shame-faced gaze on his friends. “What would you say if I told you that for years I’d been chasing a pipe-dream from pillar to post—always trying to catch up with it and see if I was right in my assay? Taking unlikely jobs which would carry me to unlikely places—never overlooking a dance hall this side of hell—with only one thing tangible enough to prove to me that it wasn’t actually a dream—a broken slipper heel that I’d picked up in the street on my way back from—from the vision, you might say!”
“So it’s a woman you’ve been sleuthing, you old son of a gun!” howled gleefully the unobservant Angier.
But Kirwin leaned forward and touched the cochero on the shoulder. “Mano!” he commanded. “And hurry that plug along!”
The calesa turned a corner on one of its two inadequate wheels. The three men were thrown against each other.
“What the devil, Kirwin——” began Angier. “Oh, I see!” He whistled softly.
“Sila!” Kirwin directed the cochero.
The calesa veered around a curve on its other wheel.
“Poco más!”
The calesa came to an abrupt halt in front of the dance hall that they had quitted a short time before. The men of the jazz band were coming out, their swathed instruments under their arms. The proprietor was fitting the key into the lock of the door.
Kirwin leaned from the calesa and looked anxiously up and down the narrow street. A solitary female figure, huddled under a dripping umbrella, was picking its way, with the delicate step of the dancer, between the pools of water that overflowed from the gutter on to the sidewalk.