ed for
lack of sleep, their nerves raw and tingling as though rasped with
files, each busy with certain private plans, each fighting off
constantly the touch of the nasty scavenger flies that flickered and
flitted iridescently about them; outside, in the steamy, hot drizzle,
with his back to the locked and double-locked door, a leg-weary
policeman, believing that he guarded a house all empty except for such
evidences as yet remained of the Gilmorris murder.

* * * * *

It was one of those small, chancy things that so often disarrange the
best laid plots of murderers that had dished their hope of a clean
getaway and brought them back, at the last, to the starting point. If
the plumber's helper, who was sent to cure a bathtub of leaking in the
house next door, had not made a mistake and come to the wrong number;
and if they, in the haste of flight, had not left an area door
unfastened; and if this young plumbing apprentice, stumbling his way
upstairs on the hunt for the misbehaving drain, had not opened the white
enameled door and found inside there what he did find--if this small
sequence of incidents had not occurred as it did and when it did, or if
only it had been delayed another twenty-four hours, or even twelve,
everything might have turned out differently. But fate, to call it by
its fancy name--coincidence, to use its garden one--interfered, as it
usually does in cases such as this. And so here they were.

The man had been on his way to the steamship office to get the tickets
when an eruption of newsboys boiled out of Mail Street into Broadway,
with extras on their arms, all shouting out certain words that sent him
scurrying back in a panic to the small, obscure family hotel in the
lower thirties where the woman waited. From that moment it was she,
really, who took the initiative in all the efforts to break through the
doubled and tripled lines that the police machinery looped about the
five boroughs of the city.

At dark that evening "Mr. and Mrs. A. Thompson, of Jersey City," a quiet
couple who went closely muffled up, considering that it was August, and
carrying heavy valises, took quarters at a dingy furnished room house on
a miscalled avenue of Brooklyn not far from the Wall Street ferries and
overlooking the East River waterfront from its bleary back windows. Two
hours later a very different-looking pair issued quietly from a side
entrance of this place and vanished swiftly