And he pulled the sheet tenderly across to hide the lifeless visage.
“But,” he added, “perhaps I’ve rendered myself liable because I didn’t call in a French doctor!”
Then, suddenly arousing himself, he walked softly across to the stove and, spreading his handkerchief on the floor, raked out all the tinder into it. To his satisfaction he saw, as he had anticipated, that some of the papers, closely folded as they were, had only been burned at the edges.
One of them he opened, and found it covered with typewriting.
“These will, no doubt, prove interesting,” he remarked to himself as he gathered every particle up into the handkerchief, and very carefully folded it over to protect it.
The lid of an old cardboard box which he found under the bed he broke up, and placing one piece above the handkerchief and the other below, he put the whole into the breast-pocket of his shabby frock-coat.
The stranger’s bag he next examined. It was old, and covered with labels of first-class hotels—many of them in cities in the Near East and the Levant. The contents were disappointing, only a couple of shirts marked with the initials “P.H.”, several dirty collars, a cravat or two, and a safety razor, together with a few unimportant odds and ends.
“The proprietor must have these, in lieu of his bill, I suppose,” Diamond said. “I wonder what ‘P.H.’ stands for? He was a well-read man without a doubt. By Jove! he took his blow as bravely as any fellow I’ve seen go under. With a heart like that, it’s a marvel that he lived so long. If I knew who his relatives were, I’d ‘wire’ to them—providing I had the money,” he added with a bitter smile.
Then he shrugged his shoulders, and after striking a match to reassure himself that nothing had been left inside the stove to betray the fact that papers had been burned there, he turned upon his heel and left the room.
Below, in his dingy little back room on the first floor, he saw the proprietor, and told him what had occurred.