Seventy-ninth and Eighty-sixth Streets blurred past without a sign. Then a little beyond the latter I caught sight of the local, and gradually we drew alongside. He was still there, drumming idly on the window-pane with his white fingers, and looking disinterestedly straight across at me. I had a momentary impulse to conceal my face, until I remembered that he had never seen me. So for a second we stared at each other, pursuer and pursued, the one utterly unconscious of the other. My train passed forward with increasing speed, while I counted the cars—one—two—three—he was in the fourth. Either he must come into Ninety-sixth Street or get off at Ninety-first; and the chances were in favor of my finding him still in the train at Ninety-sixth.
I got out there, crossed over to the local platform, and waited. When the train came in, I was opposite the fourth car. The center seat was empty, and I sought in vain among the passengers thronging to the doors. Then I hurried back ahead of the crowd, and from before the ticket window ran my eyes again over the platform to make sure. Well, he had left the train at the last station; it was a question of seconds. I was in the street above in less time than it takes to tell it, and swung myself recklessly aboard a passing south-bound surface car; but a stream of trucks and automobiles blocked the track; and before we passed the next corner I jumped off and ran. Three blocks I went at the top of my speed, my breath growing shorter at every stride. And then, nearly a block away to the westward, I caught sight of the silk hat against the reddening sky.
It was an easy matter enough to overtake the man. He walked along slowly and rather heavily, glancing upward at the numbers of the houses; and presently he paused to verify an address in a pocketbook. I might have spoken to him then, but I hesitated for a pretext. His name was what I wanted first; and in my ignorance of the circumstances it would be safer to settle one thing at a time. While I debated with myself, he went up the steps of a house near West End Avenue. Since it was evidently not his home, nothing could be lost by a little patient consideration; so lighting a cigarette, of which by now I felt considerable need, I strolled to and fro before the house, while I pondered my next move. Five or ten minutes went by, and I was on the point of ringing the bell and asking who it was that had just come in, when the electric brougham purred around the corner, with my friend Thomas sitting stolidly at the wheel. At the moment, I happened to be nearly at the other end of the block, and before I reached the spot where the brougham had drawn up my man had come out of the house. I could hardly question his servant before his face. And the next minute he had clambered in and driven decorously away.
I ran as far as the corner, looking about in all directions for a taxicab. None was in sight; and to follow afoot for any distance was, of course, impossible. I should have to be content with the number of the brougham and such information as inquiries at the two houses I knew the man to have visited might yield. Then a boy came by on a decrepit bicycle, and I caught at his handles.
"Let me take your wheel," I panted. He twisted his face into position for a howl. "Nonsense, kid, I'm not going to steal it. Look at me. Here," I thrust a bill into his hand. "That's more than your machine's worth, and I'll send it back to you in an hour. Where do you live?"
He told me in a dazed sort of tone, and I was wavering on my way almost before he had finished. The wheel ran abominably hard, and was so much too low for me that my knees barely cleared the handle-bars; still, it meant all the difference between losing the brougham altogether and being able to follow it easily. All the way down to the fifties it led me, and eastward beyond Madison Avenue, halting at last before a rigid-looking domicile whose lower window displayed a strip of ground glass with the legend: "Immanuel Paulus, M. D."
Somehow, the name was indefinitely familiar, as the face had been. I wasted no time in surmise, but went straight up to the door.
"Was that Doctor Paulus who just came in?" I asked the maid. She looked me over cautiously.
"Who was it wanted to see him, sir?"
"He wouldn't know me," I said, "it's only that I have something which I think he lost in the street."