ness."

He went away that night, and I must admit I missed him. I rented the
parlor bedroom the next day to a school-teacher, and I found the
periscope affair very handy. I could see just how much gas she used;
and although the notice on each door forbids cooking and washing in
rooms, I found she was doing both: making coffee and boiling an egg
in the morning, and rubbing out stockings and handkerchiefs in her
wash-bowl. I'd much rather have men as boarders than women. The women
are always lighting alcohol lamps on the bureau, and wanting the bed
turned into a cozy corner so they can see their gentlemen friends in
their rooms.

Well, with Mr. Holcombe gone, and Mr. Reynolds busy all day and half
the night getting out the summer silks and preparing for remnant day,
and with Mr. Ladley in jail and Lida out of the city--for I saw in
the papers that she was not well, and her mother had taken her to
Bermuda--I had a good bit of time on my hands. And so I got in the
habit of thinking things over, and trying to draw conclusions, as I
had seen Mr. Holcombe do. I would sit down and write things out as
they had happened, and study them over, and especially I worried over
how we could have found a slip of paper in Mr. Ladley's room with a
list, almost exact, of the things we had discovered there. I used to
read it over, "rope, knife, shoe, towel, Horn--" and get more and more
bewildered. "Horn"--might have been a town, or it might not have been.
There _was_ such a town, according to Mr. Graves, but apparently he
had made nothing of it. _Was_ it a town that was meant?

The dictionary gave only a few words beginning with "horn"--hornet,
hornblende, hornpipe, and horny--none of which was of any assistance.
And then one morning I happened to see in the personal column of one
of the newspapers that a woman named Eliza Shaeffer, of Horner, had
day-old Buff Orpington and Plymouth Rock chicks for sale, and it
started me to puzzling again. Perhaps it had been Horner, and possibly
this very Eliza Shaeffer--

I suppose my lack of experience was in my favor, for, after all, Eliza
Shaeffer is a common enough name, and the "Horn" might have stood for
"hornswoggle," for all I knew. The story of the man who thought of
what he would do if he were a horse, came back to me, and for an hour
or so I tried to think I was Jennie Brice, trying to get away and hide
from my rascal of a husband. But I made no headway. I would never have
gone to Horner,