Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name.
Herrick never knew what instinct took him back to the closet under the stairs. He could not bear to leave it; there was a little broken glass on the floor and a sudden wavering in his lamp suggested that this came from a break in one of the minute panes in a small window over head. He tried to reach this window to see if it were fastened and found it nailed down, with outside shutters that were closed. But in getting near enough for this he knocked over one of the flower-pots. "Find anything?" Stanley cried, bounding forward.
The smashed flower-pot lay at their feet. "No, only broken something!" Herrick instinctively picked it up and the loosened earth parted in his hand. "Yes, after all," he said, "I think I have." There had been buried, smooth and deep in the flower-pot, the diamond necklace.
CHAPTER VII
VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE
The countryside slept vigorously and an hour's exhaustive inquiry gleaned but the one circumstance—the search party itself discovered, pinned to the first door they came to, a note informing the neighbor he might have the livestock in lieu of certain debts. It had not been there when the man had closed his house at nine o'clock. This limitation of time was their sole reward, unless they counted the talk of an old farmer, after the sheriff, promising to drop the detectives at Riley's, had gone on to his post-office. The farmer said that hours ago, when he'd been ever so long in bed and asleep, he thought he heard somebody hollerin' an' bangin' on his door. Kind o' half dreamed it. Kind o' half fancied it was a woman's voice. Storm was so bad he warn't sure. It was with this pale fancy to keep them company that Herrick and Stanley let out their car along the road again, this time in a dryly nipping air and under a troubled, scudding moon.
From that desert purity and freedom of cold space Riley's accosted them like Babylon. It was one blare and glare of hot lights and jigging music; colored globes over the gates, colored lanterns in the garden; along the driveway the blazing headlights of continually arriving and departing motor cars that hissed and shrieked and shuddered; on the veranda, where the tables indeed were nearly deserted, fur-coated men stood smoking huge cigars and women with complexions artificially secure against the wind passed in and out; their solitaire earrings pushed forward beyond the streaming scarlet or purple of the veils that bound their heads. The change of atmosphere warmed Herrick with that unreasonable anger which the young feel against those who do not suffer when they suffer.
He followed Stanley Ingham morosely through the hubbub and felt no fitting gratitude for the table miraculously provided with a fortifying meal, since Thompson, the chief detective, had not yet been able to get Kane upon the 'phone. The cabman was upstairs under guard of the others, babbling some trash about having taken the lady to the Amsterdam hotel and left her there. The thick smoke, the smell of wine and food and abominable coffee, the clatter of cheap china, the banging of the music and the motions of the "trotting" dancers in street dress, the cries of acquaintances urging them to new contortions, disgusted Herrick and set an edge upon the iron of his self-contempt. The woman calling and knocking in the night confronted him like a ghost, in the rank profusion and fever of that place. He, to eat and drink and wile away the time; what was she doing? Was that she who had begged in vain for shelter, beaten by the wind and drenched by the storm, and with God knew what terrors in her heart! Out of her pale face, with the rain upon it, her eyes besought him.