after the mother had put on mourning--and found the
kid, ten pounds heavier than he had been before he was abducted, and
strutting around like a turkey cock, Rowe told us that he and the boy
took in the theater that night, and were there for the first act. How
did he do it? He offered to take the boy to the show if he would pretend
to go to bed, and then slide down a porch pillar and meet him. The boy
didn't want to go home when we found him."

"There can't be any mistake about the time in this case," I commented.
"I saw her myself after eleven, and said good night."

The _Eagle_ man consulted his note-book. "Oh, yes," he asked; "did she
have a diagonal cut across her cheek?"

"No," I said for the second time.

My next visitor was a cabman. On the night in question he had taken a
small and a very nervous old woman to the Omega ferry. She appeared
excited and almost forgot to pay him. She carried a small satchel, and
wore a black veil. What did she look like? She had gray hair, and she
seemed to have a scar on her face that drew the corner of her mouth.

At ten o'clock I telephoned Burton: "For Heaven's sake," I said, "if
anybody has lost a little old lady in a black dress, wearing a black
veil, carrying a satchel, and with a scar diagonally across her cheek
from her eye to her mouth, I can tell them all about her, and where she
is now."

"That's funny," he said. "We're stirring up the pool and bringing up
things we didn't expect. The police have been looking for that woman
quietly for a week: she's the widow of a coal baron, and her
son-in-law's under suspicion of making away with her."

"Well, he didn't," I affirmed. "She committed suicide from an Omega
ferry boat and she's at the morgue this morning."

"Bully," he returned. "Keep on; you'll get lots of clues, and remember
one will be right."

It was not until noon, however, that anything concrete developed. In the
two hours between, I had interviewed seven more people. I had followed
the depressing last hours of the coal baron's widow, and jumped with
her, mentally, into the black river that night. I had learned of a small
fairish-haired girl who had tried to buy cyanide of potassium at three
drug-stores on the same street, and of a tall light woman who had taken
a room for three days at a hotel and was apparently demented.

At twelve, however, my reward came. Two men walked in, almost at the
same time: one was a motorman, in his official clothes, brass but