which
everybody has at some time in his life experienced.

The names of Felix Page and Alfred Fluette had been before me in one way
or another for days; I had followed the remarkable wheat deal with about
the same degree of interest that animated everybody else who was not
immediately concerned; but not until this moment had it impressed me that
I knew something respecting Page which had not appeared in the papers in
connection with the corner. What was it?

But I could not remember. This was the scurvy trick my mind was playing.
I stood there staring at the others, and they sat staring at me. A
question was halted provokingly upon the very tip of my tongue, which,
despite a most earnest whipping of memory, remained obstinately elusive.

Felix Page! What particular, unusual circumstance was associated in my
mind with that name? Why should it come to flout me at this juncture
without revealing itself?

My ineffectual effort to remember was cut short by my chief. He scowled,
manifestly in perplexity at the way the news had affected me.

"These gentlemen," he said, with a gesture indicating the funereal
quartet, "were more or less associated with Mr. Page; he don't seem to
have had any close friends; but they can tell me nothing. Whatever line
you pick up, you must find the end of it at the scene of the crime--the
house. The address is on that card.

"Here 's all I know about it: It must have happened sometime during the
night; the report came in from Sheridan Park station about daylight.
Three men from there, Patrolmen Callahan and O'Brien and a plain-clothes
man named Stodger, are at the house holding two suspects until somebody
shows up from the Central Office. Stodger 's in a stew; can't seem to
make head nor tail of what's happened.

"You hurry, Swift," he curtly concluded; "this is too important a matter
to waste time over."

So it was. I saluted and hastily left him.

My brain was still in a whirl; my musings and the blunt, surprising
announcement had come too close together for me to regard the supposed
crime with unshaken equanimity. Then, too, I was still vainly striving
to drag from memory's hiding-place the tantalizing circumstance which I
somehow felt was pregnant with possibilities in the light of the
financier's death. What on earth was it? I thought of everything else I
had ever heard or read about the man.

But I was young--not only in the service, but in years as well--and this
w