of ownership, and to help him into them.

Ten seconds later Trencher, a personality transformed, stood quite at
his ease on the top step of the flight outside the entrance to the
Clarenden looking into Broadway. The long dark overcoat which he now
wore, a commonplace roomy garment, fitted him as though it had been his
own. With its collar turned up about his cheeks it helped admirably to
disguise him. The soft black hat was a trifle large for his head. So
much the better--it came well down over his face.

The huge illuminated hands of a clock set in the middle of a winking,
blinking electric sign a few blocks north, at the triangular gore where
Seventh Avenue crosses Broadway, told him the time--six minutes of
eleven. To Trencher it seemed almost that hours must have passed since
he shot down Sonntag, and yet here was proof that not more than ten
minutes--or at the most, twelve--had elapsed. Well, he had worked fast
and with results gratifying. The spats that might have betrayed him
were safely hidden in one place--yonder between the seat cushions of
O'Gavin's car, which stood where he had left it, not thirty feet
distant. His telltale overcoat and his derby hat were safely bestowed in
the cafe check room behind him awaiting a claimant who meant never to
return. Even if they should be found and identified as having been worn
by the slayer of Sonntag, their presence there, he figured, would but
serve to confuse the man hunt. Broadway's living tides flowed by, its
component atoms seemingly ignorant of the fact that just round the
corner below a man had been done to death. Only at the intersection of
Thirty-ninth Street was there evidence, in the quick movement of
pedestrians out of Broadway into the cross street, that something
unusual served to draw foot passengers off their course.

In front of the clothing shop three doors south of him no special
congestion of traffic revealed itself; no scrouging knot of citizens was
to be seen, and by that Trencher reasoned that the negro had been taken
elsewhere by his captors--very probably to where the body would still be
lying, hunched up in the shadow before the Jollity's side doors. From
the original starting point the hunt doubtlessly was now reorganising.
One thing was certain--it had not eddied back this far. The men of the
law would be working on a confused basis yet awhile, anyhow. And
Trencher meant to twistify the clews still further, for all that he
felt safe enough