ve them. Mr.
Fleming took them away."

"Aren't you afraid for yourself?" I asked.

"Yes, I'm afraid--afraid he'll get me back yet. It would please him to
see me crawl back on my knees."

"But--he can not force you to go back to him."

"Yes, he can," she shivered. From which I knew she had told me only a
part of her story.

After all she had nothing more to tell. Fleming had been shot; Schwartz
had been in the city about the Borough Bank; he had threatened Fleming
before, but a political peace had been patched; Schwartz knew the White
Cat. That was all.

Before she left she told me something I had not known.

"I know a lot about inside politics," she said, as she got up. "I have
seen the state divided up with the roast at my table, and served around
with the dessert, and I can tell you something you don't know about
your White Cat. A back staircase leads to one of the up-stairs rooms,
and shuts off with a locked door. It opens below, out a side entrance,
not supposed to be used. Only a few know of it. Henry Butler was found
dead at the foot of that staircase."

"He shot himself, didn't he?"

"The police said so," she replied, with her grim smile. "There is such a
thing as murdering a man by driving him to suicide."

She wrote an address on a card and gave it to me.

"Just a minute," I said, as she was about to go. "Have you ever heard
Mr. Fleming speak of the Misses Maitland?"

"They were--his first wife's sisters. No, he never talked of them, but
I believe, just before he left Plattsburg, he tried to borrow some money
from them."

"And failed?"

"The oldest one telegraphed the refusal, collect," she said, smiling
faintly.

"There is something else," I said. "Did you ever hear of the number
eleven twenty-two?"

"No--or--why, yes--" she said. "It is the number of my house."

It seemed rather ridiculous, when she had gone, and I sat down to think
it over. It was anticlimax, to say the least. If the mysterious number
meant only the address of this very ordinary woman, then--it was
probable her story of Schwartz was true enough. But I could not
reconcile myself to it, nor could I imagine Schwartz, with his great
bulk, skulking around pinning scraps of paper to pillows.

It would have been more like the fearlessness and passion of the man to
have shot Fleming down in the state house corridor, or on the street,
and to have trusted to his influence to set him free. For the first time
it occurred to me t