Stanley, anxious, but waving a cigar, for at twenty an adventure is still an adventure, commented, "Say, old man, you want to relax! I could let things wear on me, too, if I wanted to!—What are those?"—For the detective having again fidgetted to the 'phone, Herrick had shaken out upon the table-cloth the handful of torn scraps from the waste-paper basket.
They were in the same handwriting as the interrupted note, but much more hurried and scrawled on cheap pad paper as if to a more intimate associate. Only six of them were of appreciable size and these came to Herrick's hand in this order—
| This time | get rid of her. |
| I say. She | but she can't g |
| real dau | mother |
| et rid | do the way |
| een any | |
| but | |
| She can | she's got to |
| mebbe | ain't ever b |
| of | ghter to me |
At the phrase "get rid of her" Stanley quailed. But what the words brought clearest to Herrick's mind was a small, spare face in its gray frame bent above its game of solitaire. Without help from the law could he make her speak? He heard Stanley saying, "How did Chris ever get mixed up with this lot? What kind of hold can they have on her?" "Sssh!'" he said, dropping his handkerchief over the scraps. The detective was returning.
Thompson sat down at their table, baulked and restive, and Herrick, a hundred times more so, was reduced to scowling at their surroundings. Near him sat a wrinkled, enameled, fluffy mite stubbing out her cigarette as she giggled at a masculine bulk whose face Herrick could not see. Dark and handsome as it vaguely promised to be this did not account for a curiosity which Herrick somehow at once felt to see it; but between them reared a gorged Amazon with a high bust and a coiffure of corrugated brass. The band struck up again, this time to a music-hall ditty, so that the customers kept their seats. But the hired singers were straining their poor voices above the tumult and some musicians blacked up as negroes joined in the chorus, performing shuffles as they walked up and down and slapping steps with a dreary, noisy simulation of irrepressible glee; infected by this whirl of gaiety the Amazon frisked back from the little dyed man to whom she had been bending and gave Herrick a clear view of a portly seigneur with a close beard. Instinct had not misled his curiosity; the portly seigneur was his old acquaintance, Signor Emile Gabrielli.
He could not have told why this struck him as portentous. The men smiled and bowed. Then Gabrielli bowed to Stanley. "Didn't you know?" Stanley asked. "He brought us letters—this is his first visit. He's going to do our Italian correspondence."
It was the more remarkable that there should be, in Signor Gabrielli's honeyed civility, a kind of chill. Then Herrick remembered that he, at least, was a marked man and that his old suspicion of shady corners in the lawyer's experience had been partly due to that gentleman's extreme dislike of being "mixed up" in things. Henrietta Deutch could also have borne witness to that characteristic! Far from advancing toward their old familiarity the signor began to round up his innocent flock and insinuate it mildly from Herrick's polluted neighborhood. And though this splendor retreated Herrick did not regret being left alone, as if beside the dear ghost with the rain upon its face!
But there was a singular beating at his heart, a feeling that he was plucking at a veil which he longed and feared to raise. Yet that at some other time he had raised it and lived through a shock upon the threshold of which he stood again. It was already time for another dance and the groups about the tables rose to their feet. Herrick had a moment's vision, fever keen, of the room's arrested motion. Even the Gabrielli party paused in the doorway; Herrick was moved by an uncontrollable impulse to follow and accost the Italian and oddly impelled by his excitement Stanley, too, rose to his feet; all round them the couples clasped each other; the musicians lifted their bows; after ten minutes' enforced repose the whole world seemed to hang in expectation of the maxixe. When, just ahead of the orchestra, from somewhere outside, beyond, above, into that instant's perfect silence there thrilled forth the voice of a single instrument; the full-tongued call of a piano, leaping, swelling, swaying into the march from Faust!
A gasp of amazement, a prickle, a shudder, ran over the skin of that susceptible assembly. It was a tune, just then, so well advertised! They recovered themselves with amused, scared smiles, awaiting some jest in the sequel. The piano stopped with a wild crash. Instantly, from the front courtyard where the motors waited, a bomb of oaths, cries and movement burst upon the night. The sound of men jumping and running, exclaiming, stumbling, swearing, of people bounding up the steps, of the hall filled with astonished, excited questioners merged with one phrase growing over, topping all the others—"The shadow! It's the shadow! The shadow on the blind!"
Amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, obstructed the story which Herrick traced to a knot of chauffeurs. "Yes—up there! The third window! Look, it's dark—they've turned out the lights!" As Stanley, Herrick and Thompson ran to the second story the legend still beat about their ears. "It had its back to the window—it threw out its right arm—"