gs if you're so
particular?"

With one of his quick changes of mood, he picked up his guitar.

"Listen to this," he said. "It is a Hawaiian song about a fat lady, oh,
ignorant one! and how she fell off her mule."

But for all the lightness of the words, the voice that followed me down
the stairs was anything but cheery.

"There was a Kanaka in Balu did dwell,
Who had for his daughter a monstrous fat girl--

he sang in his clear tenor. I paused on the lower floor and listened. He
had stopped singing as abruptly as he had begun.

CHAPTER XXII. AT THE BOARDING-HOUSE

I had not been home for thirty-six hours, since the morning of the
preceding day. Johnson was not in sight, and I let myself in quietly
with my latchkey. It was almost midnight, and I had hardly settled
myself in the library when the bell rang and I was surprised to find
Hotchkiss, much out of breath, in the vestibule.

"Why, come in, Mr. Hotchkiss," I said. "I thought you were going home to
go to bed."

"So I was, so I was." He dropped into a chair beside my reading lamp and
mopped his face. "And here it is almost midnight, and I'm wider awake
than ever. I've seen Sullivan, Mr. Blakeley."

"You have!"

"I have," he said impressively.

"You were following Bronson at eight o'clock. Was that when it
happened?"

"Something of the sort. When I left you at the door of the restaurant, I
turned and almost ran into a plain clothes man from the central office.
I know him pretty well; once or twice he has taken me with him on
interesting bits of work. He knows my hobby."

"You know him, too, probably. It was the man Arnold, the detective whom
the state's attorney has had watching Bronson."

Johnson being otherwise occupied, I had asked for Arnold myself.

I nodded.

"Well, he stopped me at once; said he'd been on the fellow's tracks
since early morning and had had no time for luncheon. Bronson, it seems,
isn't eating much these days. I at once jotted down the fact, because it
argued that he was being bothered by the man with the notes."

"It might point to other things," I suggested. "Indigestion, you know."

Hotchkiss ignored me. "Well, Arnold had some reason for thinking that
Bronson would try to give him the slip that night, so he asked me to
stay around the private entrance there while he ran across the Street
and got something to eat. It seemed a fair presumption that, as he had
gone there with a lady, they would dine leisur