, and around its
edge stood five champagne glasses, two of them empty, two half full,
one full. Against the wall stood a row of four empty quart bottles. In
an ice pail, filled now with but tepid water, there reposed a fifth
bottle, neck downward. Five chairs were grouped unevenly about the
table, one of them overturned and the others left at random where they
had been pushed back. The lights here, also, were still burning.
Heaped on a chair in the corner were the coat and vest he sought, and
he went through their pockets methodically, reaching first for his
wallet. It was perfectly clean inside. In one of the vest-pockets he
found a soiled, very much crumpled two-dollar bill, and the first
stiff smile of his waking stretched his lips.

"I wonder how they overlooked this?" he questioned.

Again his eyes turned musingly to those five empty bottles, and again
the conviction was borne in upon him that the wine had been drugged.
Under no circumstances could his share, even an unequal share, of five
bottles of champagne among five persons have worked this havoc in him.

"Spiked," he concluded again in a tone of resignation. "At last they
got to me."

The silver-fizz was flat now, but every sip of it was nevertheless
full of reviving grace, and he sat in the big leather rocker to think
things over. As he did so his eye caught something that made him start
from his chair so suddenly that he had to put both hands to his head.
Under the table was a bit of light orange paper. A fifty-dollar bill!
In that moment--that is, after he had painfully stooped down to get it
and had smoothed it out to assure himself that it was real--this
beautifully printed government certificate looked to him about the
size of a piano cover. An instant before, disaster had stared him in
the face. This was but Thursday morning, and, having paid his hotel
bill on Monday, he had the balance of the week to go on; but for that
week he would have been chained to this hotel. Now he was foot-loose,
now he was free, and his first thought was of his only possible
resource, Blackie Daw, in Boston!

It took two hours of severe labor on the part of a valet, two
bell-boys and a barber to turn the Wallingford wreck into his usual
well-groomed self, but the hour of sailing saw him somnolently, but
safely ensconced on a Boston packet.

CHAPTER XV

THE BROADWAY QUARTET CONTINUES TO TAKE
WALLINGFORD'S MONEY

Blackie Daw's most recent Boston address ha