A sudden idea came to him as he pa.s.sed a Chinese laundry in which lights still burned and irons still thumped on an ironing board.

It was an audacious one, but it pointed toward deliverance.

His plan was to enter the laundry and pa.s.s over his parcel, as though it were his week's washing. He would be gone before they had discovered its contents. He merely needed to be offhand and nonchalant. More than once he had seen dilapidated actors carrying a limited wardrobe to the laundry at equally small hours of the night. And the sloe-eyed iron-thumpers would never again get sight of him!

But it took a moment or two to key himself up to the right pitch.

He stepped in beside one of the granite column bases of the First National Trust, to give an extra tug to his still lagging courage. He leaned for a moment against the huge steel grillwork that covered the wide bank window behind him, looking eastward along the side street to where he could see the oblong of light from the laundry front.

A wave of exasperation swept through him at the thought of his own white-livered irresolution. He was about to step forward to face the end of his dilemma when an unlooked-for movement occurred between him and the illuminated laundry front.

It was the movement of a shadowy figure which seemed, at first sight, to erupt from the earth itself. It was several moments, in fact, before Trotter realized that the figure had come up from the bas.e.m.e.nt of the building which stood immediately at the rear of the bank, the building which also contained the laundry. But this was not the thing that held Trotter's attention. The discovery which was causing his eyes to follow every step of the stranger was the fact that this second man ALSO CARRIED A LARGE PAPER PARCEL UNDER HIS ARM.

He turned eastward without looking back. Yet there was something circ.u.mspect in his footfall, something suspicious in the very casualness of his movements. Trotter leaned out and looked after him, nonplused by the coincidence, wondering if this second man's mission was the same as his own. He was almost glad to see somebody in the same boat.

Then curiosity overcame him. He turned and followed the other man. He walked eastward, keeping as well in to the house shadows as he could. He saw the man cross the wider traffic-way that ran north and south, look quickly up and down the deserted street and then, as he gained the shadow of the next house wall, veer close in to an iron paling. Then there was a movement which Trotter could not quite make out.

It was not until he crossed the street that he saw what the movement meant. It was not until he caught sight of a galvanized ash barrel standing beside the bas.e.m.e.nt step and the stranger ahead of him walking empty-handed away, that Trotter realized the completeness of the coincidence.

The other man, without so much as stopping for a second, had quietly dropped his paper-wrapped parcel on the top of the galvanized barrel.

At no time did Trotter feel that there was anything momentous in the movement. But it aroused his curiosity. It challenged investigation. It set off his inquisitive young soul into spreading pyrotechnics of imagination. And he realized, as he walked up to the barrel, that his earlier sense of timidity had disappeared. He quite calmly lifted the parcel from the barrel top. Then he quite calmly dropped the other parcel in its place.

He was a little astonished, as he started on again, at the pregnant weight of this new parcel. But he did not stop to investigate. He did not care to gulp and lose the mystery at one swallow. He scurried off with it, chucklingly, like a barnyard hen with a corncob, to peck at it in solitude. He swung south and then west again, to his own street. He went up his own steps, through his own door, and up to his own top-floor room with the rakish back wall. There he cautiously lighted the gas, drew the blinds, and locked himself in. Next, he dragged a chair over to the bedside, sat down on it, and carefully untied the parcel string. Then, with somewhat accelerated pulse, he unwrapped the paper-screened enigma.

A little puff of ironic disappointment escaped his pursed-up lips. For at one glance he could see that it held no mystery. The only mystery about it all was that he had been theatrical enough to imagine it could prove anything that was not sordid and worthless.

For lying on the paper before him was nothing more than a litter of mortar and wall plaster, interspersed with stone chips. It was nothing more than the sweepings a brick-layer had left behind him, a pile of worthless rubbish, a bundle of refuse, another white elephant on his hands.

Trotter stirred the heap of dust and lime, impa.s.sively, disdainfully. There was nothing more than an occasional brick corner, an occasional piece of wall plaster. The only other thing was one larger fragment of stone. Trotter looked at it indolently. It was merely a piece of granite--an ounce or two of stone with one highly polished end, a bit of refuse which a hurrying mason might have used to "rubble" a wall crevice. And he had been fool enough to cart it up four flights of stairs!

He turned the piece of stone over in his hands. It was of porphyritic granite, with distinct crystals of feldspar embedded in a fine grained matrix. Trotter's brow wrinkled in vague thought as he peered down at it. He was trying to think what it reminded him of, what possible link it made in a chain of lost a.s.sociation.

Then he remembered. It was toward the pillars of the First National Trust Building that his mind was trying to grope. They were of the same stuff, highly polished porphyritic granite, the pride and wonder of the avenue along which they made a burnished and flashing peristyle.

Trotter rubbed his chin, meditatively, and once more examined the stone. Then he took a sudden deeper breath, and, leaning hurriedly forward, raked through the parcel with his fingers. He found nothing of note.

But as he sat there, stupidly staring at the fragment of granite, his crouching body, with his feet tucked in under the chair rungs, was startlingly like that familiar figure known as an interrogation mark.

III

It was nine o'clock the next morning when Trotter, carrying a parcel of laundry, walked casually past the First National Trust Building and turned the corner. He also made note, as he stepped into the open-fronted Chinese laundry, of this incongruous side-street neighbor, its squalid meanness cheek by jowl with the lordly magnificence of the many-columned bank structure.

On a narrow-fronted ground floor was the crowded little laundry with its red-lettered sign, its uncurtained windows, its shelves of red-tagged parcels, and its ever-present odor of borax. Below this was a bas.e.m.e.nt, a cellar as narrow and dark as a cistern. A flight of perilously inclined steps led to the door of this bas.e.m.e.nt. This door, in turn, was gla.s.s-fronted, but protected by a heavy woven-wire grating. On it was a sign which read:

"J. HEENEY. PLUMBING, WIRING AND ELECTRIC SUPPLIES."

It was this bas.e.m.e.nt which so inordinately interested Trotter. He essayed several mild inquiries, in handing his frugal parcel of washing over the Chinaman's counter, as to the occupant of the cellar below. About "J. Heeney," however, he discovered nothing beyond the fact that he had occupied the cellar for several months. Trotter did not want to arouse unnecessary suspicion by overinterrogating "J. Heeney's" neighbors.

So he went mildly back to his top-floor room, and sat down and tried to study things out. As he sat there wrapped in thought, his idly wandering gaze rested on the electric bell above the door. He looked at it for several seconds. Then he stood on a chair and twisted away the bell's wiring. Using his pocket knife as a screwdriver, he released the bell from the door lintel. Then he cleaned and polished it. This done, he removed the clapper, wrapped the bell up in a piece of newspaper, and made his unhesitating way back to the cellar beneath the Chinese laundry.

He was very much awake as he went slowly down the narrow steps.

He wanted nothing to escape his notice.

He found the wire-screened door at the bottom locked. But he could get a clear enough view of the interior, even through the dirty gla.s.s. The entire s.p.a.ce within was not more than ten feet wide and eight feet deep. It held a litter of plumber's tools, a few lengths of gas piping, a row of batteries, a blowpipe, a small hand-forge, a couple of porcelain washbowls, a deal table and chair and what seemed to be an electric transformer in a sadly battered case.

Across the back of the shop ran a wooden part.i.tion, plainly shutting off the main part of the cellar. In this part.i.tion, Trotter's careful scrutiny discovered, stood a narrow door. He ached to know what lay behind that door and that part.i.tion. But he had to be content with the shallower shop front. So he was not hurried in his inspection of it. It was not until he had fixed the details of the entire place in his mind that he ventured to knock.

There was no answer to his knock. Yet it was plain that some one was inside, for he could see the key in the lock, through the dirty gla.s.s. Who that person was he intended to find out.

He was rattling the wire fretwork, impatiently, loudly, when the part.i.tion door swung open.

Through this door stepped a short and extremely broad-shouldered man. There was no trace of annoyance on his face. In fact, much to Trotter's vague disappointment, he was smiling, smiling easily and broadly. He wore a workman's jumper, stained with oil and iron rust, and in his hand he carried a large pair of pipe tongs.

But these did not interest Trotter. What caught his eye was the fact that the man's boots were white with lime dust.

"Hold on, sister; hold on!" said the man, with a laugh, for Trotter was still rattling the door. The owner stepped across his shop and turned the key in the lock.

"Hard to hear when I'm in doin' my lathe work," he explained, as he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. All the while, as he swung back the door, his eyes were closely studying the eyes of the other man. Trotter noticed the row of matches stuck in the soiled hatband, and the cotton bag of "Durham" that swung from his sweat-stained belt.

"What can I do for you, sister?" was his companionable greeting.

Trotter unwrapped his electric bell.

"Can you give me a clapper for this?" he asked.

The other man took the bell in his hand. Trotter could see powdered lime under his nails.

"I guess I can fix you out," said the shop owner. "Wait a minute."

He turned to the door in the part.i.tion, and disappeared from sight, closing the door after him.

Trotter's first decision had been to take the key from the outer door lock. But some sixth sense made him hesitate, prompted him to turn and look at the inner door.

His stare was rewarded by the discovery of a hole in this door, about five feet from the floor. It was a lookout; he felt sure he was being watched. So he thrust his hands into his pockets, gazed carelessly about the shop, and waited.

The man reappeared, shaking his head.

"Nothing doing," he said. He was not able to fit a clapper to the bell.

"But I thought you kept electric supplies here," objected Trotter.

The other man smiled. His good nature was impregnable.

"Oh, I can get it, if you've got to have it. Come back about ten to-morrow."

"All right," was Trotter's indifferent answer, as he turned languidly away. He went up the steps with equal languor, humming as he went.

IV