The first time that Colonel Rupert Winter saw Cary Mercer was under circumstances calculated to fix the incident firmly in his memory. In the year 1903, home from the Philippines on furlough, and preparing to return to a task big enough to attract him in spite of its exile and hardships, he had visited the son of a friend at Harvard. They were walking through the corridors of one of the private dormitories where the boy roomed. Rather grimly the soldier’s eyes were noting marble wainscoting and

No sooner was Mrs. Melville ushered into her section than the colonel went through the train. He was not so suspicious as he told himself he might have been, with such a dovetailing of circumstances into his accidentally captured information; he couldn’t yet read villainy on that college lad’s frank face. But no reason, therefore, to neglect precautions. “Hope the best of men and prepare for the worst,” was the old campaigner’s motto. A walk through the cars showed him no signs of the two men. I

When the colonel awoke next morning the train was running smoothly over the Iowa prairies, while low hills and brick factory chimneys announced Council Bluffs. The landscape was wide and monotonous; a sweep of illimitable cornfields in their winter disarray, or bleakly fresh from the plow, all painted with a palette holding only drabs and browns; here and there a dab of red in a barn or of white in windmill or house; but these livelier tints so scattered that they were no more than pin spots on

“In my opinion,” said Aunt Rebecca, critically eying her new drawing-room on the train to San Francisco; “the object of our legal methods seems to be to defend the criminal. And a very efficient means to this end is to make it so uncomfortable and costly and inconvenient for any witness of a crime that he runs away rather than endure it. Here we have had to stay over so long in Salt Lake we nearly lost our drawing-room. But never mind, you got your man committed. Did you find out anything about

“But this is preposterous,” cried Mrs. Melville, “you must have seen him had he come out of the room; you were directly in front of the doors all the time.” “I was,” admitted the colonel; “can—can the boy be hiding to scare us?” He spoke to Miss Smith. She had grown pale; he did not know that his own color had turned. Millicent stared from one to the other. “How ridiculous!” she exclaimed; “of course not; but he must be somewhere; let me look!” Look as they might through all the staring, empty r

“Well, Bertie?” Mrs. Winter had gone back to her parlor in the most docile manner in the world. Her submission struck Rupert on the heart; it was as if she were stunned, he felt. He was sitting opposite her, his slender, rather short figure looking shrunken in the huge, ugly, upholstered easy-chair; he kept an almost constrained attitude of military erectness, of which he was conscious, himself; and at which he smiled forlornly, recalling the same pose in Haley whenever the sergeant was disconce

A mud-splashed automobile runabout containing two men was turning off Van Ness Avenue down a narrower and shadier side street in the afternoon of the Sunday following the disappearance of Archie Winter. One of the occupants seemed to be an invalid whom the brilliant March sunshine had not tempted out of his heavy wrappings and cap; the other was a short, thick-set, corduroy-jacketed chauffeur. One marked the runabout at a glance as a hardly used livery motor-car; but a moment’s inspection might

When the two men got into the house the dim rooms made them stumble for a moment after the brilliant sunshine of the outer skies; but in a second Birdsall’s groping hand had found an electric push-button and the room was flooded with light. They were in a small office off the kitchen, apparently. Smoke of a peculiarly pungent odor and eye-smarting character blurred all the surroundings; but during the moment the Jap halted to explore its cause the others perceived two doors and made for them. On

The time was two hours later. Rupert Winter was sitting on one of the stone benches of the colonnade about the patio . The court was suffused with the golden glow presaging sunset. Warm afternoon shadows lay along the flags; wavering silhouettes of leafage or plant; blurred reflections from the bold has-reliefs of Spanish warriors and Spanish priests sculptured between the spandrels of the arches. Winter’s dull eyes hardly noted them: the exotic luxuriance of foliage, the Spanish armor and Spani

If Mercer’s avowal surprised the colonel, there was no trace of such emotion in his face or his manner. “I rather thought it might be,” he said. “And our young friend who is promoting Fireless Stoves with the solemn energy he learned doing Dicky stunts?” “Mr. Endicott Tracy.” Mercer had the manner of a ceremonious introduction. Tracy flavored the customary murmur of pleasure with his radiant smile. “Pleased, I am sure,” said the colonel in turn, bowing. “Your father, I suppose, is the president

It was no false lure to distract pursuit, that hurried sentence of Randall’s which had met the colonel’s angry appeal for information. The woman was not only repeating Mrs. Winter’s message; the message itself described a fact. As she stood at her room telephone, Aunt Rebecca had happened to glance at Randall, supplementing the perfunctory dusting of the hotel maid with her own sanitary, dampened, clean cloth; Randall’s eyes suddenly glazed and bulged in such startling transformation that, inste

There was no one but Mrs. Winter to welcome the colonel when, jaded, warm and dusty, he tapped on Aunt Rebecca’s parlor door. Mrs. Millicent was bristling with a sense of injury; one couldn’t touch her conversationally without risk of a scratch. The colonel put up the shield of his unsuitable appearance, his fatigue and his deplorable need of a bath, and escaped into his own apartment. But he made his toilet with reckless haste. All the time he was questioning his recent experience, trying to so

“Get out your revolver,” ordered the colonel; “look sharp! there may be some one here.” But there was not a sign of life revealed by the search. Meanwhile, Winter was examining the body. His first thought was that Keatcham had tried to escape and had been struck down in his flight. Kito would not scruple at such a deed; nor for that matter, Mercer. But why leave the man thus? Why not dispose of the body—unless, indeed, the assassins had been interrupted. Anyhow, what a horrid mess this murder wo

The Palace Hotel, San Francisco, March 24, 1906. My dear Husband: Although I sent you a postal yesterday, I am writing again to-day to try to keep you in touch with our extraordinary series of events. Nothing has been heard from Archie except the letter— if he wrote it —which tells nothing except that his kidnappers use the same kind of writing paper as Miss Janet Smith. I grow more suspicious of her all the time. You ask (but of course you wrote before the recent mysterious and tragical occurre

The changes which Mrs. Melville had accepted so philosophically, the metamorphosis of the tragic and lonely house of mystery into a luxurious country villa, the flinging open of the shutters, the marshaling of servants, the turning, one may say, of the lime-light on a rich man’s ordinary life—all this had occurred as swiftly and with as little warning as a scene shifts on the stage. Mrs. Rebecca Winter may have the credit for this bouleversement of plans. By an astonishingly early hour, the next

One Sunday after Mrs. Melville Winter and Archie came to Casa Fuerte, Mr. Keatcham sent for the colonel. There was nothing unusual in such a summons. From the beginning of his illness he had shown a curious, inexpressive desire for the soldier’s company. He would have him sit in the room, although too weak to talk to him, supposing he wished to talk, which was not at all sure. “I like-to-see-him-just-sitting-there,” he faltered to his nurse, “can’t-he-read-or-play-solitaire-like-the-old-lady?” S

While the colonel was trying to decipher his tragical puzzle, while Edwin Keatcham was busied with plans that affected empires and incidentally were to save and to extinguish some human lives, while Janet Smith had her own troubles, while Mrs. Rebecca Winter enjoyed a game more exciting and deadly than Penelope’s Web, Mrs. Millicent Winter and the younger people found the days full of joyous business. The household had fallen into normal ways of living. Although the secret patrol watched every r

Winter would have said that he was too old a man to stay awake all night, when he had a normal temperature; yet he saw the stars come out and the stars fade on that fateful April night. He entered his room at the hour when midnight brushes the pale skirts of dawn and misguided cocks are vociferating their existence to an indifferent world. Before he came there had been a long council with Mercer and his aunt. Mercer, who had been successful in his mission, had barely seen his chief for a moment

From Mrs. Rebecca Winter to Mrs. John S. G. Winslow, Fairport, Iowa. And it was delightful to discover that you were so distressed about me. I must be getting a trifle maudlin in my old age, for I have had a lump in my throat every time I have thought of Johnny and you actually starting out to find me; I am thankful my telegram (Please, Peggy, do not call it a wire again—to me! I loathe these verbal indolences) reached you at Omaha in time to stop you. Really, we have not had hardships. Thanks t