d citizen who had business that was not to be interfered
with by street brawls, he turned away from the south, toward which he
had been looking, shrugged his shoulders, and moving briskly, but
without any seeming great haste, he made for the revolving door at the
Thirty-ninth Street entrance to Wallinger's Hotel, diagonally across
from the Jollity. With one hand on a panel of the door he stopped again
and looked back.

Already, so soon, a crowd was gathering over the way--a little
crowd--which at once inevitably would become a dense jostling crowd. A
policeman, not to be mistaken even at a distance of seventy feet or more
for anyone but a policeman, had turned the corner out of Broadway and
was running down the opposite pavement. The policeman's arrival was to
be expected; it would be his business to arrive at the earliest possible
moment, and having arrived to lead the man hunt that would follow. What
Trencher, peering over his shoulder, sought for, was the hundredth
man--the man who, ignoring the lesser fact of a dead body, would strive
first off to catch up the trail of whosoever had done this thing.

Trencher thought he made him out. There was to be seen an elderly man,
roughly dressed, possibly the same man whose proximity Trencher had felt
rather than observed just before Sonntag made the gun play, and this man
was half-squatted out on the asphalt with his back to where the rest
circled and swirled about the body. Moreover, this person was staring
directly in Trencher's direction. As Trencher passed within the
revolving door he saw the man pivot on his heels and start at an angle
toward the policeman just as the policeman was swallowed up in the rings
of figures converging into the theatre doorway.

If the policeman were of a common-enough type of policeman--that is to
say, if he were the sort of policeman who would waste time examining
Sonntag's body for signs of life and then waste more time asking
questions of those who had preceded him to the place, and yet more time
peering about for the weapon that had been used; or if, in the
excitement with everybody shouting together, the one man who possibly
had a real notion concerning the proper description of the vanished
slayer found difficulty in securing the policeman's attention--why then,
in any one of these cases, or better still, in all of them, Trencher had
a chance. With a definite and intelligently guided pursuit starting
forthwith he would be lost. But wi