came you to discover that Mr. Dunn of this ramshackle
tenement in Hicks Street was identical with the elegantly equipped
admirer of Miss Challoner?"

"Just this way. The night before Miss Challoner's death I was brooding
very deeply over the Hicks Street case. It had so possessed me that I
had taken this street in on my way from Flatbush; as if staring at the
house and its swarming courtyard was going to settle any such question
as that! I walked by the place and I looked up at the windows. No
inspiration. Then I sauntered back and entered the house with the fool
intention of crossing the courtyard and wandering into the rear building
where the crime had occurred. But my attention was diverted and my mind
changed by seeing a man coming down the stairs before me, of so fine
a figure that I involuntarily stopped to look at him. Had he moved a
little less carelessly, had he worn his workman's clothes a little less
naturally, I should have thought him some college bred man out on a
slumming expedition. But he was entirely too much at home where he was,
and too unconscious of his jeans for any such conclusion on my part, and
when he had passed out I had enough curiosity to ask who he was.

"My interest, you may believe, was in no wise abated when I learned that
he was that highly respectable tenant whose window had been open at the
time when half the inmates of the two buildings had rushed up to his
door, only to find a paper on it displaying these words: Gone to New
York; will be back at 6:30. Had he returned at that hour? I don't think
anybody had ever asked; and what reason had I for such interference now?
But an idea once planted in my brain sticks tight, and I kept thinking
of this man all the way to the Bridge. Instinctively and quite against
my will, I found myself connecting him with some previous remembrance in
which I seemed to see his tall form and strong features under the stress
of some great excitement. But there my memory stopped, till suddenly as
I was entering the subway, it all came back to me. I had met him the
day I went with the boys to investigate the case in Hicks Street. He was
coming down the staircase of the rear tenement then, very much as I
had just seen him coming down the one in front. Only the Dunn of to-day
seemed to have all his wits about him, while the huge fellow who
brushed so rudely by me on that occasion had the peculiar look of a
man struggling with horror or some other grave agitatio