“Good God, that’s my man!” I said hoarsely, as the audience broke into applause. McKnight half rose: in his seat ahead Johnson stifled a yawn and turned to eye me.
I dropped into my chair limply, and tried to control my excitement. “The man on the last platform of the train,” I said. “He was just about to leap; I’ll swear that was my bag.”
“Could you see his face?” McKnight asked in an undertone. “Would you know him again?”
“No. His hat was pulled down and his head was bent I’m going back to find out where that picture was taken. They say two miles, but it may have been forty.”
The audience, busy with its wraps, had not noticed. Mrs. Dallas and Alison West had gone. In front of us Johnson had dropped his hat and was stooping for it.
“This way,” I motioned to McKnight, and we wheeled into the narrow passage beside us, back of the boxes. At the end there was a door leading into the wings, and as we went boldly through I turned the key.
The final set was being struck, and no one paid any attention to us. Luckily they were similarly indifferent to a banging at the door I had locked, a banging which, I judged, signified Johnson.
“I guess we’ve broken up his interference,” McKnight chuckled.
Stage hands were hurrying in every direction; pieces of the side wall of the last drawing-room menaced us; a switchboard behind us was singing like a tea-kettle. Everywhere we stepped we were in somebody’s way. At last we were across, confronting a man in his shirt sleeves, who by dots and dashes of profanity seemed to be directing the chaos.
“Well?” he said, wheeling on us. “What can I do for you?”
“I would like to ask,” I replied, “if you have any idea just where the last cinematograph picture was taken.”
“Broken board - picnickers - lake?”
“No. The Washington Flier.”
He glanced at my bandaged arm.
“The announcement says two miles,” McKnight put in, “but we should like to know whether it is railroad miles, automobile miles, or policeman miles.”
“I am sorry I can’t tell you,” he replied, more civilly. “We get those pictures by contract. We don’t take them ourselves.”
“Where are the company’s offices?”
“New York.” He stepped forward and grasped a super by the shoulder. “What in blazes are you doing with that gold chair in a kitchen set? Take that piece of pink plush there and throw it over a soap box, if you haven’t got a kitchen chair.”
I had not realized the extent of the shock, but now I dropped into a chair and wiped my forehead. The unexpected glimpse of Alison West, followed almost immediately by the revelation of the picture, had left me limp and unnerved. McKnight was looking at his watch.
“He says the moving picture people have an office downtown. We can make it if we go now.”
So he called a cab, and we started at a gallop. There was no sign of the detective. “Upon my word,” Richey said, “I feel lonely without him.”
The people at the downtown office of the cinematograph company were very obliging. The picture had been taken, they said, at M-, just two miles beyond the scene of the wreck. It was not much, but it was something to work on. I decided not to go home, but to send McKnight’s Jap for my clothes, and to dress at the Incubator. I was determined, if possible, to make my next day’s investigations without Johnson. In the meantime, even if it was for the last time, I would see Her that night. I gave Stogie a note for Mrs. Klopton, and with my dinner clothes there came back the gold bag, wrapped in tissue paper.
CHAPTER XVI
THE SHADOW OF A GIRL
Certain things about the dinner at the Dallas house will always be obscure to me. Dallas was something in the Fish Commission, and I remember his reeling off fish eggs in billions while we ate our caviar. He had some particular stunt he had been urging the government to for years - something about forbidding the establishment of mills and factories on river-banks - it seems they kill the fish, either the smoke, or the noise, or something they pour into the water.
Mrs. Dallas was there, I think. Of course, I suppose she must have been; and there was a woman in yellow: I took her in to dinner, and I remember she loosened my clams for me so I could get them. But the only real person at the table was a girl across in white, a sublimated young woman who was as brilliant as I was stupid, who never by any chance looked directly at me, and who appeared and disappeared across the candles and orchids in a sort of halo of radiance.
When the dinner had progressed from salmon to roast, and the conversation had done the same thing - from fish to scandal - the yellow gown turned to me. “We have been awfully good, haven’t we, Mr. Blakeley?” she asked. “Although I am crazy to hear, I have not said ‘wreck’ once. I’m sure you must feel like the survivor of Waterloo, or something of the sort.”
“If you want me to tell you about the wreck,” I said, glancing across the table, “I’m sorry to be disappointing, but I don’t remember anything.”
“You are fortunate to be able to forget it.” It was the first word Miss West had spoken directly to me, and it went to my head.
“There are some things I have not forgotten,” I said, over the candles. “I recall coming to myself some time after, and that a girl, a beautiful girl - ”
“Ah!” said the lady in yellow, leaning forward breathlessly. Miss West was staring at me coldly, but, once started, I had to stumble on.
“That a girl was trying to rouse me, and that she told me I had been on fire twice already.” A shudder went around the table.
“But surely that isn’t the end of the story,” Mrs. Dallas put in aggrievedly. “Why, that’s the most tantalizing thing I ever heard.”
“I’m afraid that’s all,” I said. “She went her way and I went mine. If she recalls me at all, she probably thinks of me as a weak-kneed individual who faints like a woman when everything is over.
“What did I tell you?” Mrs. Dallas asserted triumphantly. “He fainted, did you hear? when everything was over! He hasn’t begun to tell it.”
I would have given a lot by that time if I had not mentioned the girl. But McKnight took it up there and carried it on.
“Blakeley is a regular geyser,” he said. “He never spouts until he reaches the boiling point. And by that same token, although he hasn’t said much about the Lady of the Wreck, I think he is crazy about her. In fact, I am sure of it. He thinks he has locked his secret in the caves of his soul, but I call you to witness that he has it nailed to his face. Look at him!”
I squirmed miserably and tried to avoid the startled eyes of the girl across the table. I wanted to choke McKnight and murder the rest of the party.
“It isn’t fair,” I said as coolly as I could. “I have my fingers crossed; you are five against one.”
“And to think that there was a murder on that very train,” broke in the lady in yellow. “It was a perfect crescendo of horrors, wasn’t it? And what became of the murdered man, Mr. Blakeley?”
McKnight had the sense to jump into the conversation and save my reply.
“They say good Pittsburgers go to Atlantic City when they die,” he said. “So - we are reasonably certain the gentleman did not go to the seashore.”
The meal was over at last, and once in the drawing-room it was clear we hung heavy on the hostess’ hands. “It is so hard to get people for bridge in September,” she wailed. “there is absolutely nobody in town. Six is a dreadful number.”
“It’s a good poker number,” her husband suggested.
The matter settled itself, however. I was hopeless, save as a dummy; Miss West said it was too hot for cards, and went out on a balcony that overlooked the Mall. With obvious relief Mrs. Dallas had the card-table brought, and I was face to face with the minute I had dreaded and hoped for for a week.