The guard who had finally heard Sewell yelling nodded his grizzled head. He had figured out a few things.
“Sewell’s briefcase was at the head of the steps. Aldershot lay at the foot of ’em. Beside Aldershot was a trash basket belonging up near the top of the stairs, and there’s no mark on Aldershot where the thing hit. So it was like this: Sewell saw some guy bean Aldershot. He threw the basket and drove him off. He took the wallet from the sheriff’s pocket and started yelling for me. The other guy got to him and brained him before I could stop it.”
The chief nodded.
“Looks like the guy was after the wallet both times. Let’s see what’s in it that is so important.”
He opened the thing and thumbed through it. There was about three hundred dollars in it. Most of the money was in the main compartment. But in a side flap there were three bills set aside from the rest. They were a two-dollar bill, a five-dollar bill and a ten-dollar bill.
“Mad money,” said a reporter who was in the office.
The chief looked at him, and the reporter cut out the facetiousness. He didn’t want to get kicked out.
The chief, meanwhile, had been looking through the compartment opposite the one in which the three bills were segregated. In here he found a folded bit of paper with several lines of numbers on it.
“Code,” said the reporter, whistling softly.
The chief nodded and stared at it. The numbers were: 7 7 6 39 4 7 3 2 7 7 9 0 0 0 7 7 9 82 46 38 10 1 9 47 6 7 7 84 0 1 1 50.
The chief tossed it to one of his men.
“Take this to Drake. He’s about the best code man in Washington. And now this other guy, Sewell. Got any answer yet from Senator Burnside?”
The Senator had been phoned twice, with no answer. At the chief’s words, one of the men tried a third time.
He gave the Senator’s number and waited. All in the office heard the phone ring in Burnside’s home.
“Did you try the Capitol Building?” asked the chief.
The man nodded. “I tried that, and also the Senate Office Building. They all thought Burnside had gone home. But if he’s home, he’s either dead or too sound asleep to hear the phone.”
Ring, ring, ring. But no answer.
“Better run out there and have a talk with him,” said the chief. “Two guys dead — and now Burnside don’t hear his phone! I don’t like it.”
CHAPTER II
Little Red Man
Out on Massachusetts Avenue there is a luxurious nine-room mansion built by a railroad magnate for his daughter and son-in-law. The daughter separated from the son-in-law almost before the house could be completed, so it had been rented to a succession of political figures ever since.
The present occupant of the house was Senator Burnside. Burnside was in the house at the moment. The telephone was ringing, yet he was not really hearing it. That was because his brain was too occupied with other things. Too horribly occupied!
The Senator from Montana was a tall, heavy-set man with a gray mustache and gray-brown eyes. He was dressed in a creased lounging robe and had felt slippers on his feet. He was ready for bed. But he had decided, before going to bed, to come down to the living room and look once more over a reforestation bill that was to be introduced in the Senate in the morning.
He was in the living room now, with that phone ringing within a yard of him, but not being heard. Senator Burnside was staring at the double door leading from the living room into the large den at the rear of the house.
In the doorway was the thing he was staring at. And it was no wonder that his gray-brown eyes were popping half out of his head and that his gray mustache was quivering on a trembling upper lip like the whiskers of a frightened cat.
In the big double doorway was a man with a dog.
The sight of a strange man leading a dog into your living room at half past twelve at night would give anyone a start. But there was more to it than that. Far, far more.
In the first place, the man was only a miniature human being. He was less than three feet high. In the second place, he was red.
The exposed parts of him — face and hands and wrists — were brilliant carmine. Or, rather, cerise. The brightest, shiniest red attainable by any substance.
The little crimson man was dressed impeccably. He had on striped morning trousers and frock coat and a silk topper. He carried gloves in his left hand; the right was occupied with the dog leash.
The leash was made, apparently, of daisies twined in a chain. On the end of it was the damnedest dog imaginable.
It was a dachshund, small, but looking bigger than it really was when compared with the watchcharm size of the little carmine man.
The dachshund was colored, too. It was bright green. Grass green. Pea green. And it was smiling a little.
Dogs can’t smile. They haven’t the little muscles which make that grimace possible. But this was one dog that smiled. It was a sly, furtive, Mona Lisa kind of smile — as if that dog knew something pretty funny, although pretty terrible, too, and was smiling over it.
A little red man leading a green, smiling dachshund on a leash of braided daisy stems.
Senator Burnside squawked a couple of times, finally got out words. “Who… are… you?”
The words were so cracked and incoherent that it seemed the little red man could not understand them. So the Senator tried again. “Who are you?”
There was no answer. But then, Burnside thought in a crazed way, he hadn’t really expected one. There hadn’t ever been any answers from the little red man. Neither man nor dog had ever uttered a sound.
Burnside knew that because he had seen them before, yelled at them before, in various, unexpected places.
This time he meant to have some kind of answer, however. He heaved himself to his feet.
Eyes wild, mustache quivering like a cat’s whiskers, robe sailing out behind him, he leaped to a table to the right of the doorway. The little red man and the smiling green dog just watched him. And made no sound.
Burnside ripped open the table drawer and took out a gun. He fired wildly at the apparition in the doorway.
The shots died. The man and the dog weren’t there. They were not lying on the floor, nor running away. They just weren’t there!
Burnside began to run toward the doorway to investigate further. He stopped in his tracks and glared at the other doorway to the room — the one which led out to the hall.
The little red man in the cutaway and striped trousers and ridiculous silk topper was in that doorway, now! He was there with his dog, which stood squat and elongated with its green body contentedly held by the daisy-chain leash, and with an impossible smile on its muzzle.
Burnside tried to leap toward that new apparition, but he couldn’t. His legs didn’t seem to work, somehow. They were traitors. They buckled at the knees and let him down on the floor.
At the same time, his eyelids snapped wider open, and the eyes behind them went blank and rigid. Burnside had fainted. The strain on his anguished mind had been too great.
He recovered to find his butler working over him, bathing his forehead with cold towels. The butler was eying him in a funny way.
“I heard shots, sir,” he said. “I ran in to see if you had been attacked by a burglar or something, and I found you on the floor.”
Burnside said nothing. He sat up and stared at the hall doorway, where he had last seen the little crimson man and the pea-green dog.