nent mystery of the man in
lower ten. And Alison West had come into the story and into my life.

CHAPTER II. A TORN TELEGRAM

I lunched alone at the Gilmore house, and went back to the city at once.
The sun had lifted the mists, and a fresh summer wind had cleared away
the smoke pall. The boulevard was full of cars flying countryward for
the Saturday half-holiday, toward golf and tennis, green fields and
babbling girls. I gritted my teeth and thought of McKnight at Richmond,
visiting the lady with the geographical name. And then, for the first
time, I associated John Gilmore's granddaughter with the "West" that
McKnight had irritably flung at me.

I still carried my traveling-bag, for McKnight's vision at the window
of the empty house had not been without effect. I did not transfer
the notes to my pocket, and, if I had, it would not have altered the
situation later. Only the other day McKnight put this very thing up to
me.

"I warned you," he reminded me. "I told you there were queer things
coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your revolver."

"It would have been of exactly as much use as a bucket of snow in
Africa," I retorted. "If I had never closed my eyes, or if I had kept
my finger on the trigger of a six-shooter (which is novelesque for
revolver), the result would have been the same. And the next time you
want a little excitement with every variety of thrill thrown in, I can
put you by way of it. You begin by getting the wrong berth in a Pullman
car, and end--"

"Oh, I know how it ends," he finished shortly. "Don't you suppose the
whole thing's written on my spinal marrow?"

But I am wandering again. That is the difficulty with the unprofessional
story-teller: he yaws back and forth and can't keep in the wind; he
drops his characters overboard when he hasn't any further use for them
and drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and the frying-pan and all
the other small essentials, and, if he carries a love affair, he
mutters a fervent "Allah be praised" when he lands them, drenched with
adventures, at the matrimonial dock at the end of the final chapter.

I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged eternally.
I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some ties at a
haberdasher's. I was bored but unexpectant; I had no premonition of what
was to come. Nothing unusual had ever happened to me; friends of mine
had sometimes sailed the high seas of adventure or ski