The Surakarta Part 2

XII

THE HOUSE OF THE MAN WHO SHOT AT NOTHING

Max Schimmel descended quickly to the street and took a surface car back toward the center of the city. Half way back to the business district he left the car and turned up a side street.

The houses on both sides of this street were all alike—blank-windowed and cheerless, with soiled lace curtains. They all had narrow fronts, high front steps over high basements, which made the real height of the house amount to four stories, and all had the sign "Rooms to Rent" in the windows.

Max, having already visited this locality ​in the afternoon, had no need to inspect these houses one by one or to compare their numbers with the address given him by McAdams. He turned into one of them with an air of proprietorship.

This house was even more dismal than the rest, the sign in its window older, more faded, less hospitable in its invitation. On one side, only the difference in the color of its brick divided it from its neighbor; on the other a cement walk less than three feet wide led, tunnel-like, between the two brick walls back to the rear. Max had engaged and paid for a room there in the afternoon, arranging to return that evening with his luggage. He stopped now in the cheerless and stuffy-smelling parlor to announce to the landlady that his luggage was still delayed; and as he ​climbed the three flights of stairs, she followed.

The room where lived the man who, the evening before the emerald was stolen, had shot at nothing at all was upon the top floor. This room, as Max had ascertained in the afternoon, the stranger still occupied; but farther back was an empty room that Max, after some parleying as to the price, had engaged.

"Eferything iss very goot," Max replied to the landlady's question as to whether he needed anything more, "if only I am not disturbed by my neighbor in the second room."

"That can be only for a few days," the landlady hastened to assure him. "He has paid for a week and at the end of that week he shall go; for already others on this floor are complaining. It is my own fault for ​taking in a brown man; but I thought: He is only a lodger, not a boarder—so nobody will object."

"It iss because he iss brown that they object?" Max inquired; for he had been not at all surprised, on his visit in the afternoon, to learn of McAdams' confusion of "Japanese" with "Javanese" which he felt might well have occurred before the report had reached McAdams.

"They—yes. For me I object because first he puts on the door an extra lock, so that my key will not open it; and then he gets meals for himself in his room, I suspect—though that is against the rules—bringing in food secretly, I think, in his valise. All day he stays in the room, and because of that the room cannot be cleaned."

​"But going out, you said this afternoon, at night?"

"Each night he goes out, as I said, locking his door; and he returns at different times—sometimes earlier, sometimes later."

"Pretty soon, if I haf rightly understood the time, he ought to be going." Max looked at his watch.

At this instant they heard the lodger's door closed quietly down the hall. Max at once ran out into the hall, but all he was in time to see was the back of a small and agile man who was swiftly descending the stairs. He therefore rid of the landlady as soon as possible. When she had gone he took off his shoes, went quietly down the hall to the second door from his own and carefully examined it. He was convinced by a very brief examination of it that the new lock ​which had been put upon it was one that could not be opened without the key. He returned then to the room he himself occupied and, carefully locking himself in, opened the window.

This window, though it was on the top floor of the house, was still some ten feet below the top of the flat brick wall that formed the parapet of the roof, and Max saw that the roof could not be reached from it. He therefore looked across to the wall of the next house, which, being exactly like its neighbor, had here at the rear a wall of rough brick, straight and parallel with that of the house he was in. The second wall was barely three feet from him—not too far for even a small man, who had been accustomed to making his way up chimney crevasses in mountain-climbing, to reach with ​his feet and, bracing his back against the wall on the nearer side, carry himself along between the two walls with feet and hands.

Max now took off his coat. With his feet against one wall and his back braced against the other, he began to work himself along between the two with feet and hands and elbows. He discovered with satisfaction, by peeping through the window, that the occupant of the room next his own was out; and crossing this window, he soon came to the second one. An instant later his knife was between the sashes and had slipped back the simple lock, and Max slid softly into the room.

He saw at once, though dimly, that it was an ordinary boarding-house room, very like his own, with no sign of unusual occupancy. A small gas griddle connected with the fix​ture by a tube seemed to bear out the landlady's statement that the lodger prepared his own food. The only other unusual article in the room was a large trunk or box of Oriental appearance standing against the farther wall. Presently Max, still standing by the window, cleared his nostrils with a deep breath. Slowly, very slowly indeed, he now made out surely an odor—the softly pungent, entirely distinctive smell of sandalwood. It was concealed—that is, the sandalwood was covered—but it was there. Max crossed the room and slipped his hand about the bulky box-trunk from which this odor came.

He felt for the fastenings—straps, the buckles of which yielded easily. Below these was a lock; but it was not a lock like that on the door, which defied picking, and ​Max had come prepared for contingencies like this. Presently he softly lifted the lid of the trunk. On top it contained only clothing. Slipping his hand under this clothing, he felt an object—large and of cubical shape. Something softly clicked under his hand—and now again, as he moved his hand, something clicked. He hastily lifted the clothing without disarranging it and peered into the trunk. Then he gently reclosed the lid and fastened it.

Finally he stood up and looked carefully once more all around the room, and slowly shook his head with an air of bewilderment. Very plainly what Max had found in this room was not what he had expected. For he began now a systematic search, looking into all the corners, under and on top of everything, and in the closet—then again he went ​carefully over it all. At last he fixed the window-latch so that he could refasten it from the outside with his knife; and edging himself out, he reclosed and fastened the window and regained his own room.

The closing of the street door three floors below startled him. He listened inside his door. No other noises reached him from below, but he detected faint sounds upon the same floor with him. Coming out quickly from his room, he collided with the nervous little Javanese, speeding through the hall, and so jostled him that he nearly dropped the suitcase he was carrying and did let slip from under his coat the bottle of milk he was taking to his room. But in this corroboration of the identity and habits of his neighbor Max found no consolation. It was not remarkable that the Javanese had stayed. To ​leave—even with the excuse that he was afraid of another robber—would have been calling too much attention to himself perhaps. Yet what was the sandalwood doing in his room?

Max had approached the perplexing matter of the disappearance of the Surakarta exactly as he would have approached some phenomenon of nature which science had not yet classified and placed. He had begun by imagining a method by which the theft of the emerald might have been accomplished—exactly as, confronted by some biological problem, he would have constructed a theory to aid him in discovering and appreciating the facts. But he understood that this method can only be used when one stands ready to abandon his theory as soon as even ​a single fact is shown to be at variance with it.

"It was the dublicate box!" he exclaimed in his perplexity, when he had got back into his room and carefully reclosed the door. "It iss there! But by all reasoning it iss not there; for it to be there—that iss imbossible. But for it not to be there—that also is imbossible, since with my own hands I haf touched it."

He threw himself down upon the edge of the bed and clutched his head in both hands as though it was in danger of bursting. But after thinking it over, he finally went downstairs to the telephone booth upon the first floor of the boarding house and called Hereford's apartment.

Hereford, he found, was out; so Max merely left a message.

​"Chust tell Mr. Hereford when he comes in that Max called him up to say he had located"—he whispered this very low—"the dublicate box. That iss all. Chust say Max Schimmel hass located the dublicate box."

Whereupon he went back to his room. But about midnight he suddenly jumped up and started for the Hotel Tonty on the chance of finding McAdams.

 XIII

A FIRE AT THE TONTY

It appeared a strange thing that Max, who had experienced and observed so many remarkable occurrences in so many parts of the world, should find it necessary to ask help of detective McAdams; and the person to whom this appeared strange was McAdams himself, who had not forgotten that Max had called him a "dunderhead."

The detective had watched the lobby of the Tonty thin of its unusual crowd of curiosity seekers as the hour grew late; he had seen the bootblack stand closed for the night, and he was contemplating a visit to the bar, ​where society was still to be found, when he saw Max come in and stand looking around.

McAdams drew quickly back toward the elevators to watch him without being observed. He recollected that although the little German appeared to be in Hereford's confidence, Max, before the theft, had had more information than anybody else in Chicago about the Surakarta and the box in which it was kept. Max's visit, therefore, alone and at so late an hour, appeared a suspicious circumstance to McAdams. But Max, as soon as he saw the detective, went up to him and shook hands.

"I wass looking here for you, my friendt," Max announced affably, "to see if you know perhaps if the Javanese haf yet gone to bed. Because I think I now must again see that room."

​"Why?" McAdams demanded, staring at him suspiciously.

"Because I think I did not opserve eferyting there as attentively as I should haf done. But it iss certain they would not let me in again alone; but with you—with Detective McAdams," Max urged flatteringly—"then I can get in."

McAdams led the way to the elevators. He was not at all deceived by Max's conciliating smile, but he was curious to see for what real purpose Max wanted to be admitted again to the Javanese rooms.

But when they reached the tenth floor, and were admitted after a long parley with the Javanese, Max did nothing which seemed to account in any way for his eagerness to get there.

One of the two Javanese, who by Baraka's ​order kept close to them, switched on the light. The German stood silent. He seemed merely inspecting again the disorder of the place. He examined no more closely, so far as McAdams could tell, the strange box which still stood among its litter of torn paper than he did the bed; he did not go near to the tapestry or the bloodstains. Only at the conclusion of the examination he gave a satisfied smile.

"That is enough," he announced. "Now we can go."

"Well?" McAdams demanded when they were in the elevator again.

"Well what?" Max inquired blandly.

"Did you find anything new?"

But to this Max made no reply. He only nodded to McAdams, as they reached the first floor, and turned away.

​The detective made a step to follow Max, and suddenly halted. He looked back at the almost empty lobby, scratched his head, and then with equal suddenness and new determination hastened after the German to the entrance of the hotel.

Concealing himself behind one of the entrance pillars, he watched Max, under the blazing electric lights of the Tonty, disappear among the thinning crowd of taxicabs. But almost immediately the German re-appeared upon the darker opposite side of the street. McAdams allowed him two hundred feet start and then followed, assured that Max had not seen him. As often as Max turned a corner, the detective ran swiftly forward, halted, and allowed Max to regain the lead he had had in the beginning. But the theatre crowd had dispersed two hours ​before, and he found no difficulty in keeping his eye upon the German, as he plodded steadily along the almost empty walks. When they had traveled three-quarters of a mile in this way, Max turned into a two-story frame building which seemed curiously out of place among the towering structures around. His feet could be heard loudly going up to the second floor within.

But no light sprang up in the windows of this second floor, and after waiting, McAdams made his way around to the rear. A little garden here entangled the detective's feet, which in the darkness he felt sink to the ankles in soft earth. On the second floor, some strange huge bird flapped its wings and uttered a sleepy cry; some other animal moved and noisily yawned. Very slowly it ​became clear to Detective McAdams that this was where Max Schimmel lived.

The detective himself yawned, and struck a match and looked at his watch. He had found it produced a good impression on his clients for him to stay up all night, and that it caused no great inconvenience to himself as he was not one of those who find it difficult to sleep during the day. But when he saw that it was two o'clock he commenced to consider the advisability of going home to bed.

He walked slowly back in the direction he had come, waiting for a surface car. The few upon the sidewalks now had disappeared and this, as McAdams turned a corner, made more evident to him the crowd that had gathered before the Tonty. He saw, as he hurried up, the red motor truck of an insur​ance patrol. He found the corridor of the tenth floor filled with heavy smoke and crowded with the firemen and attendants of the hotel. Fighting and elbowing his way through the hall, he reached the entrance to the Javanese suite, and finally gained Baraka's room.

This—and even more plainly the inner room next, from which the Surakarta had so mysteriously disappeared—had been the scene of the fire. The doors stood open and the rooms were in confusion, and he could see through the doorway the strange Java box with the paper burned away from it, standing among the room's charred furnishings.

XIV

MR. HEREFORD MEETS FARREN OF THE POLICE

"The duplicate box!" Hereford read the note left for him by his man upon his dressing table when he returned; for after twelve his man need not wait up. "The duplicate box! What the devil does he mean by that? But that is all he said." For Hereford's man had taken the precaution to leave that notation with the message. It was of no use, therefore, to wake up his man, and Max Schimmel had not left him a telephone number for his new address.

So he put the whole matter out of his thoughts. In the morning he would see Max, if it seemed worth while.

​When he dropped asleep he slept soundly, so soundly that it was broad daylight and his man was knocking loudly upon his bedroom door, before he awoke.

"Mr. McAdams is on the 'phone, sir—at your office. He has been waiting there to see you."

"Tell him still to wait. I will see him when I get down."

Hereford started up, looking at his watch. It was nine o'clock. He breakfasted, glancing through the morning paper. He found, as he had anticipated, the account of the invasion and search through his rooms displayed over two columns in the most prominent position of the first page; but, bidding for at least equal attention beside it, he was confronted with another column having to do with the Surakarta. In the automobile ​on his way down town, he reread this column carefully but still with no more than curiosity:

"An incendiary followed the robber—or the thief of the night before returned as an incendiary—in the Javanese suite at the Hotel Tonty at an early hour this morning.

"A few minutes before two o'clock cording to the account given the police—flames were discovered by Hafara, the secretary of the Javanese envoy, in the room now occupied by Baraka. This room is that adjoining the one from which the great Java emerald disappeared so mysteriously the night before. Hafara, crying an alarm to the other Javanese rushed in and awoke his superior, who had gone to bed only a short time before, and the two, with the assistance of the other Javanese, endeavored to put out ​the fire. They found then that there was fire also in the inner room—that from which the emerald was stolen—and that there the flames had gained much greater headway. This and the unfamiliarity of the Javanese with American methods of fire alarm, caused almost total destruction of the furnishings of both rooms. The alarm was finally given by one of the chambermaids of the hotel, who heard the cries of the Javanese, and the fire was extinguished by means of the fire protection system of the hotel and the fire department. Baraka and Hafara, as well as some others of the Javanese, were slightly burned in their efforts to put out the flames.

"An investigation which was at once started by the police revealed immediately the incendiary origin of the fire. Gasoline, or some other highly inflammable oil, had ​been used freely in both rooms, its odor perhaps having escaped attention because of the heavy oriental scents. Hafara now recalls that shortly before the discovery of the fire he heard several muffled explosions, to which however he paid no attention at the time, as the door of Baraka's room was closed and he did not then locate the explosions within the suite. The police expect to establish a direct connection between the fire and the robbery of the night before, but have not yet done so as this extra goes to press."

Hereford tossed the paper into a corner of the limousine, as the motor stopped in front of the office building. On reaching his floor, he entered his private office directly by the corridor entrance with a key, and pressed the desk button while he was taking off his overcoat.

​"Mr. McAdams, is in the outer office?" he inquired briskly of the boy.

"Mr. McAdams and another gentleman," the boy replied.

"They came together?"

"No, sir—separately."

"Then show McAdams in," Hereford directed; and he had swiftly thrown open his desk when the detective entered.

Wade Hereford, on this morning, did not know what his own mood was, but only that it was one which he could not remember ever to have experienced before. The self-control which enabled him usually to force his thoughts into any direction necessary apparently had abandoned him since his interview with his ward the night before. Hereford since then had been continually accusing, denouncing her in his own mind, then—in ​spite of every effort on his part—as hotly defending her against himself. The look which now twice he had seen upon her face seemed to have awakened in him some blind partisanship for her which his reason disavowed. He could make no satisfactory explanation to himself of her part in taking him away in order to enable the search of his rooms to be made. In spite of it, he found himself constantly arraying every possible cxcuse in her favor, each of which only dismissed itself as absurd to make way other explanation equally futile. His sound sleep had been the sleep of exhaustion, following infinite maddening pointless repetitions of this process, which had recommenced again as soon as he was awake. Usually exact and methodical—for he had early established over himself that personal and bus​iness routine which is the key to success—today he had begun by consciously varying even the habitual order in which he put on his garments when dressing, as though this defiance of the convention he had established over himself might bring him nearer to her in her defiance of all conventions and, perhaps, make it more easy for him to understand her. So now, as McAdams entered, Hereford appeared even more than ordinarily preoccupied by business and more than usually engrossed in the examination of his morning's mail.

"You have some report to make to me," he shot out at last. "About the fire at the Tonty, I suppose. Of course, I've already read the account in the paper. If that is correct, omit anything it covers."

"About the fire—yes," said McAdams, ​when he had found a seat. "But more particularly about Miss Regan, who came to the Tonty last night immediately after the fire."

Hereford let the mail fall upon his desk and swung to face the detective.

"Her visit was occasioned by the fire?" he demanded.

"It appeared so. At least she came to see Baraka."

"Of course you don't know what took place between them?"

"Yes; she made a very strange proposition to Baraka—something I don't at all understand; though it happened I was present at their interview. She wants Baraka to give up his search for the thief. But we'll get at this quicker, I think, Mr. Hereford—​for I've been up all night—if you let me tell it in my own way."

Hereford nodded his assent. He was not sure whether, of all the odd and capricious actions of his ward, this did not promise to appear the most capricious yet.

"Miss Regan reached the Tonty at twenty-five minutes past two," McAdams commenced, looking at his notes. "It appears that sometime yesterday afternoon she gave directions to the hotel management that she was to be notified at once by telephone of any unusual occurrence among the Javanese. I learn that she was so notified from the clerk's desk at ten minutes past two, which was the time the clerk on duty first learned of the fire."

"You were there when she got there?" Hereford asked.

​"I had just got back from following a possible clew; but we need not go into that—it amounted to nothing."

"Miss Regan seemed—how?"

"Nervous—quite agitated, Mr. Hereford; but only when she thought no one was looking. You must understand there was a good deal of disturbance just then. The firemen were still there, and the Javanese rooms were open and people passing through. Baraka and Hafara and the rest were having their burns dressed by a doctor. I heard Baraka talking in an unusually loud tone and I made my way into the room where he was to see what was going on. Miss Regan had just arrived and Baraka seemed to have been addressing her, but I didn't get that part of it. They were entirely occupied with one another and the other Jav​anese were occupied with them, and nobody seemed to notice my presence, so I didn't draw their attention to myself, hoping to stay there long enough to get an idea what was happening."

"I understand," Hereford urged, impatiently.

"Well, I did get something more than a mere idea. Miss Regan was thanking Baraka for having completed his mission."

"Now I do not understand," said Hereford, frowning.

"She was telling Baraka to pack up and go back to Java carrying her acknowledgment to the Soesoehoenan that she had received the emerald."

"She said she had it?" Hereford demanded in amazement.

"No; not in words. But it was very plain ​that she wanted Baraka to believe she had it."

"But she has not got it," Hereford declared, with certainty.

"No; and Baraka knew she didn't have it and told her so. These Orientals, I guess, know something about lying themselves. Baraka didn't tell her outright that she was not telling the truth, but he let her know plainly enough that he did not believe her."

"And was not going away?"

"Yes; that he certainly was not going until she—or somebody else—had shown him the emerald, and he had seen it, according to his instructions, safely in her hands."

Hereford got up and moved about the room, as though the movement might help his thought in the perplexity he felt. He turned suddenly back to McAdams.

​"What did she do then?"

"She told Baraka that she could not actually show him the emerald, but that she knew where it was—it was in a perfectly safe place—and she could not get possession of it herself until he had left town and gone back to Java."

"Baraka's answer to that?"

"It was exactly the same as he had answered before—that he did not believe her, and could do nothing but obey the instructions of the Soesoehoenan. He said he would leave only when he himself had regained the emerald and had presented it to her with the ceremonies which he had been instructed to carry out."

"Was that all?"

"Yes; she left then a good deal more agitated than when she had come. Now, Mr. ​Hereford, if you understand it, you do more than I do."

"I do not," said Hereford.

He dismissed McAdams through the private door, and fell to pacing his office—now slowly in absorption, now swiftly as though his bewilderment unconsciously spurred him to action. Hereford, who had thought that his ward had exhausted her possibilities of surprising him, found it easier to explain to himself her having first taken up this affair with the Soesoehoenan than it was to account for her seemingly unmeaning action in attempting now to call off the presentation of the stone. Did this mean that in her anger at the interference with her mad plan she was willing to proceed with the bargain and marry the Soesoehoenan without ​even receiving the great gem for which she had sold herself? Or, did it mean—?

Hereford had felt that he had detected in his ward two girls. One was the girl he had known from the first in his relationship with her—self-willed, daring, glorying in and pleased by the notoriety she gained in her obstinate following of her own caprice. The other he had divined only in his two interviews with her and so indefinitely that he had not been able to formulate a personality for her in his thought; yet he knew that he had seen something in her which, in the face of all proof, had enlisted him in blind partisanship upon her side by suggesting to him that there might be some reason beyond mere folly for her mad acts. Did her visit to Baraka mean that, besides these two girls, there was still a third—unsuspected until now by ​him, the mere vague possibility of whose existence sent the blood coursing through his veins in this spontaneous riot whose meaning he himself could not understand?

He recollected suddenly that there was a second visitor waiting in the office outside, summoned the boy, and found that the man had refused to give his name. He found relief in passing through the intervening rooms among his employees to inspect the man himself. He found a middle-aged, tall, well-built, alert and official-looking sort of person in a sack suit, who sat with his hat upon his knee in the attitude of one accustomed to using patience during long waits.

"You want to see me?" Hereford asked. "I am Mr. Hereford."

"Not to see you alone," the man replied, "but after Miss Regan comes."

​"Then you have an appointment here with Miss Regan?"

"I was instructed over the 'phone to come here and wait until she came."

The voice aroused Hereford's memory.

"You are Farren, of the police," he recognized all at once—"the man who located that swindler for me two years ago in Omaha. I recollect you now." And swiftly another recognition crowded upon the first. "Stand up, Farren," Hereford bid.

The man arose.

"Now walk away from me—dropping your shoulders naturally. That's it!" Hereford continued, "I merely wanted to be sure of you. You're against me now, eh? You were the one watching for me outside my apartment last night and you followed me here afterwards."

​The man, without replying directly, returned to his seat. Hereford left instructions in the outer office that Lorine was to be shown in to him as soon as she arrived, and returned to his room.

XV

THE GUNSHOT WOUND AGAIN

She was in furs when she came in the first time he had seen her so. Furs, which by contrast give a look of daintiness even to coarse women, increased with her the natural delicacy of her face. Hereford felt that, though she had just come in out of the sharp October air, she gave the impression of being paler and even more determined than when he had seen her the evening before. Whatever uneasiness or agitation McAdams thought he had observed in her manner now was gone.

Hereford had risen, surrendering the slight advantage over her it would have ​given him to receive her seated at his desk. He set for her the chair she had occupied the evening before near his round table in the center of the room; but he continued to stand.

If she was at all embarrassed by the knowledge that he must have fully realized the result of his expedition with her in the evening before, she did not show a trace of it.

"Mr. Farren, who is still waiting outside, tells me you have recognized him," she commenced in an even voice.

"Yes," he answered, "but as yet, I have not recognized the reason for his presence here more definitely than I was able to recognize it last evening."

"For the present," she returned in the same tone, "you may regard it as merely to lend emphasis to what I have to say."

​"Later, then," he smiled, "in some terrible contingency, Farren may be called in—as he might have been called in last night if I had wished to return before the search of my rooms was accomplished?"

She disregarded him. For some moments she sat with her gloved hands crossed on her lap, not as though she did not know how to begin, but as though taking care that what she said should be presented in the way to give it its greatest effect.

"The police have not locked you up," she went on at last, "because they consider it—or at least so they have told me—a superfluous proceeding to arrest prematurely anyone in a position like yours. Their theory is that a man of large affairs is always under bond. They can get you when they want you; meanwhile they prefer, before ​taking action, to accumulate their proofs. For that reason they yesterday dissuaded Baraka from swearing out a warrant against you and today they have given the same advice to me."

"I beg pardon. Am I to understand that you have done me the honor to apply to the police for an arrest warrant for me?"

"At my question, the police have made it very plain to me that it is in my power to take out a warrant for you if I wish."

"You mean for the theft of the emerald?"

"Yes. Or if I wish to avoid making a direct charge of that, I could point out that—in case you tried to escape consequences here and fled—an indefinite proportion of my collaterals would be at your mercy."

"So our visit here last evening was not entirely a blind?" he returned. "Thank you ​for comforting me with the information. You not only accomplished the object of drawing me away from home, but also made an examination of my books which could be fabricated into a basis for legal action at least temporarily inconvenient. Did your future countrymen suggest that to you? It was very clever, if you devised it without their advice."

"Devised it without—" She stopped, and he saw upon her face only a baffling expression—the same he had seen once and then again in their interview at his rooms the night before; and now, as then, suddenly it brought the hot blood unbidden to beating in his hands and temples.

"I am to understand then," he said when he had commanded himself, "that you propose accusing me?"

​"I have not said so."

"At least, you are threatening me with arrest."

"No; I am not threatening you at all. I am merely making sure, before I say what I have come to say, that all the circumstances and possibilities of the case are perfectly plain to you."

Again, for several moments, she sat silent—neither agitated nor embarrassed and looking at him steadily.

"Baraka does not want you arrested," she observed.

"No?" he questioned with a smile.

"It must be plain to you that your arrest would prevent his carrying out his threat of personal violence upon you."

"Well?"

"To Baraka, a campaign of personal vio​lence now appears the one probably successful means of getting back the emerald."

He inclined his head in acknowledgment. "Since even with your most effective cooperation he was unable to find it in his search of my effects."

"Let us not go into that again," she said. It was the first time she had in any way referred to their expedition to his office. "I learned from you last night that it was a mistake to ask you to avoid danger for your own sake. To repeat now such a request as I made to you at your apartment would simply make you more determined to undergo the danger—particularly as you refuse fully to recognize your risk."

"You, yourself, do not threaten me with Baraka, then?"

"Please do not forget that I am not threat​ening you at all—either with Baraka or with anything else."

"Then that is only another of the circumstances of the case which you wish to have plain to me."

"Yes; that is the second."

"Is there a third?"

"The third concerns the effect of your course of action upon myself."

"Upon yourself?"

"You understand that, in this consideration, it makes no difference what your motives were in regard to the emerald. Even if I assumed them to be the most ignoble possible—if I believed, like Baraka, that it was to keep the control of my property in your hands—still, you were one of my father's closest and most devoted agents; you have performed your duties toward myself faith​fully, as it seemed to you, though unpleasantly. Your death must therefore be a dismal, a distressing beginning of my betrothal. I must think of my wedding dress as stained with your blood."

He studied her intently with tightening of his pulses.

"What do you mean?" he exclaimed, moving near.

"You are in danger!"

"Perhaps!"

"No; it is certain! You are in great, immediate danger!"

He stood over her. She looked down, avoiding his gaze.

"I brought it upon you!" she continued.

"Is it merely responsibility for it that you feel?"

​"I will tell you that I did not realize it would bring danger of this sort to you."

"That is all there is to this third circumstance?" he asked, gently.

"Yes; and there are only those three."

"Then you are ready, no doubt, to make the request of me which you said you had come here to make?"

"Yes." She sat still, paling and reddening in turn; then she looked swiftly up at him. "Yesterday I asked you to return the emerald to Baraka and you refused. So I have no intention of asking that again. But—Mr. Hereford, will you please give it to me?"

Her lip trembled and she stretched out her hands. He stiffened and drew back from her, shaking his head. She whitened suddenly; when she stood up she had regained ​in every way the look and bearing of the girl who planned to marry the Soesoehoenan.

"Then you will send for Farren," she commanded.

He moved toward the desk to do as she had asked, but halted with his finger on the button and turned back to her.

"Miss Regan," he said hesitatingly, "nearly every act of yours during the last two days has seemed to me to be open to two constructions. You have continually perplexed me, and you do so now."

"You mean as regards Farren?" she questioned.

"Yes, I recognized Farren a half hour ago not merely as a police officer with whom I had once had dealings but—as I indicated to you—also as the man I saw lurking in the shadows of the street opposite my rooms and ​

"Tell me," he burst out, "that you have not really meant to marry this—the Soesoehoenan!" Page 235

​who afterwards followed us here. I can well realize that, at your direction, he was keeping watch over me after our interview at my home. Is that correct?"

She reddened once more and nodded.

"Then of the two constructions that can be put upon that, which one shall I accept? Was he there merely to protect your interest in the emerald or—was it to protect me against the Javanese?"

She had risen, but stood silent, looking at him with level eyes.

"Tell me," he burst out, "that you have not really meant to marry this—the Soesoehoenan!"

"Will you send for Farren, Mr. Hereford?"

He pressed the button and summoned the police officer. The man came rather ner​vously into the room as though his position in the business at hand was not yet wholly clear to himself. He returned Hereford's silent nod and looked at the girl.

"Take him, Farren," she directed.

"You see," Hereford said to her, quietly now, "you were all the time threatening me with arrest. Now that that is made quite plain to us both, may I ask what connection this has with your visit to the Hotel Tonty late last night and the very peculiar conversation you had there with Baraka?"

She started and looked at him intently.

"Then you do appreciate something of your risk since you see that there is a connection between that and this!" she declared sharply. "You must understand that, if Baraka were threatening yesterday and prepared to break into your rooms, since last ​night he must be mad—mad—a deadly menace to you at every moment!"

"It was to remove this menace to me that you went there after the fire last night?" he demanded, his blood warmly throbbing.

But she paid no heed, but hurried on.

"He is in such state that he will stop at nothing now. He is at every instant a menace to you in person himself and also through his agents. Night before last, when the emerald was taken, at least there was no attempt made upon Baraka's life; but now you have made an attempt at his life; or at least he has interpreted the fire last night as such! He is certain that the fire in his rooms was started by you, or an agent of yours, either as retaliation for the breaking into your rooms or to injure or kill him in order to prevent his carrying out his threat against you. ​He will lose no time in retaliating on his own part; and here—anywhere where a man can get at you—you can not be safe!"

"Because of the fire?" Hereford questioned.

"Yes. You certainly know that the last outsider who entered Baraka's rooms last night—the only one possible to suspect who was there just before the fire started—was your friend Max Schimmel!"

Hereford turned quickly to the police officer for confirmation.

"True enough, Mr. Hereford," Farren corroborated. "Schimmel was there and Baraka seems to have put that construction on his visit. We—the police are of a different opinion. In the first place, Schimmel went there in company with your private detective McAdams. In the second place, the ​police are following a clue of their own which—so far—they have been able to keep from the reporters and the public. They arrested in the tenth floor corridor of the Tonty last night just after the fire and under what looks like very suspicious circumstances a man named Lund."

"They arrested—whom?" Hereford demanded, uneasily.

"Lund's the name. The man used to be a United States secret service operative, but he's been out of a job a long while and is suspected of having fallen into bad ways. His arrest probably makes it unnecessary for you to establish your innocence of the fire, whatever may be your implication in the disappearance of the emerald."

"It certainly makes it very necessary for ​me to go out from here at once," Hereford returned anxiously.

"Go—where?" Lorine demanded. "If it is in my interest my interest—or in what you conceive to be my interest—you can best serve that by staying here."

He did not answer, but looked in a troubled way from her to the police officer.

"Farren," he said to the man, disturbedly and glancing at his watch as though in alarm, "I find I must go out upon an urgent and private matter. If you are to be made responsible for my appearance I give you my word I will try to give myself up to you today or at the very latest tonight."

"Perhaps if I were to go with you—" the police officer suggested, appealing to the girl.

"I cannot take you with me where I am ​going. It is a matter of most urgent and immediate importance. It ought to be sufficient that I promise you, after I am through with it, to put myself at your disposal."

"Then arrest him, Farren," Lorine directed, flushed and determined. "I shall appear against him whenever wanted."

The officer glanced swiftly about the room. He appeared to weigh and to deny the chance of escape through the several rooms of Hereford's offices, whose outer entrance was in the corner furthest from the building elevators, and moved around to place himself in front of the private entrance. "I don't want to appear disagreeable, Mr. Hereford; but orders are orders," he appealed—"and I've had mine from the chief."

"From the chief," Hereford repeated. ​"You are not acting, then, under Miss Regan's directions except as they concur with the orders of your chief?"

He looked again from the officer back to the girl, and made a doubtful and hesitating pause. The officer made a movement of conciliation or apology, Hereford could not tell which; but Lorine, with head thrown back and flushed with victory met his look with a triumphant smile. He returned it disturbedly and unevenly; for Hereford knew now that he loved her.

He thought, as he stood fumbling with the envelope he had taken from his pocket, how strange it was that he had not known this before; for it was no new thing. It had not sprung up since her return and his learning of her strange, mad project to marry the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta. It had been so ​longer than he could easily remember. It had begun—before ever he himself had been responsible for the girl—in those long, sometimes unhappy talks about her with old Matthew Regan, who was so apt and capable in all business matters, so bewildered and incompetent in dealing with his daughter. He had grown then to share the old man's anxiety over her, and, ever since, she had been for him a woman apart from all other women. He knew now why none other had ever interested him. Plainly too he saw—now half in mockery at himself—how his own position as her trustee and her difference from the women to whom he was accustomed had disguised his feelings toward her from himself.

Hereford smiled again that queer uneven smile, as he took from its envelope the ​squarely-folded paper which he felt was going to make it wholly impossible for his ward ever to care for him. Then he turned again to Farren.

"Your orders, Farren, are from your chief," he said quietly, "and so, of course, you know that the only tangible proof of any sort the chief has against me—is this." He indicated his bandaged hand. "Of course also you know that the chief's family physician is Dr. Purvis Whitfield, though I myself did not know that until I inquired yesterday morning. So take this to the chief if you get into any trouble for losing track of me."

He watched while Farren read, and the officer's face showed his struggle with perplexity and amazement. Farren stood his ground, however, until he had handed the ​paper to the girl. Hereford, not expecting this, and too late to prevent it, tried to forbid her, as she started to read.

Her eyes glanced down the page and she disregarded him.

Lorine's hand, as she read, trembled tensely with the paper it held. She inclined her head so that her hat shaded and hid her face from him. She stood trembling and silent an instant, when she had finished, then suddenly she threw the paper on the table and raised her head. Her tense trembling was gone, her eyes blazed with indignation.

"So you did not take it!" She was pale now with what seemed contempt for him. "You—you had nothing to do with it! You—you— It has been all an assumption on my part that you risked anything to prevent me!"

​He met her angry look, the corners of his mouth set grimly.

"Of course you have no objection to my going now?" he questioned.

"Let him go where he wants!" she said to Farren.

Hereford got his hat and coat. At the door he hesitated, turned back, and without comment or even looking toward them, got from the closet a heavy walking-stick. Then he went out—still without looking back at them.

His ward stared down with hot tears of anger in her eyes at the paper, which read:

To whom it may concern: Mr. Wade Hereford, who has sufficiently identified himself to me, came to my offices in home at seven o'clock this morning of October 13, ​which he desires me to note herein is the morning following the night upon which the emerald known as the Surakarta was taken from the Hotel Tonty, as is reported in the morning papers of today. On my inquiring what need a man apparently in such perfect health could have of a physician, Mr. Hereford—first putting me under seal of professional secrecy—replied that he did not then need a physician's services, but would need them in a few minutes. He then requested me to examine his entire body for evidence of any wound; which I did, finding none—not even the slightest abrasion of the skin. Holding his left hand before the brick grate in my consultation room, Mr. Hereford then shot himself through the fleshy part of his left palm; after which I dressed the wound ​and, at his request, made for him this written statement of the circumstances.

Signed: Purvis Whitfield, M. D.

Below it was attested regularly, as sworn statement, under the seal of a notary public.

XVI

MR. HEREFORD INTERVIEWS MR. ANNIS

Around the corner from the entrance to the office building was a taxicab stand where usually some half-dozen cabs were waiting. The present moment was no exception. Hereford sprang into the first one, scarcely taking time to observe whether anyone was watching him or not. He gave an address at random, sat back and, waiting quietly until they had crossed the downtown district, paid the cabman and dismissed him. He walked swiftly for a block until he found another taxicab, engaged it, and confident now that this new driver did not know him, he gave a second address with care.

​This address, when the cab had traversed several streets, proved to be a hotel once luxurious, now fallen to second or third rate. Hereford instructed the driver to wait and, without stopping at the hotel desk, went directly to the carpeted third-floor hall. Here he noiselessly listened at the fourth door on the left and then knocked.

Receiving no response after knocking several times, he stopped and listened again, then peered through the keyhole. Still he heard nothing and his observation through the keyhole merely told him that the occupant evidently had risen, for the room was light and the shades were up, though the bed was not yet made.

Hereford impatiently withdrew down the hall and waited another few moments; but, no one appearing from the room, he made ​the rounds of the public rooms below, the saloons opposite, returned and went to a telephone booth, where he spent some time. Emerging, he went to the taxicab that had brought him, paid the man and hired him again by the hour, to wait on the corner half a block away.

He returned then—nervously and restlessly—to the door of the room on the third floor. Again he descended. Noon came, and, taking a seat in the dining room where he could watch those entering the hotel, he ordered lunch. This finished, he began again the same baffled round from room to saloons and telephone booths, but seldom out of sight of the entrance to the hotel. As dusk was coming, he finally was rewarded. Going to the room from the telephone booth, ​he sighed with relief when he heard some one moving within, and he knocked.

The occupant of the room came quickly to the inner side of the door and seemed to listen with his ear against it, then opened it.

"Ah, it is Mr. Hereford!" he exclaimed with surprise.

"Yes, Mr. Annis."

Hereford went in and closed the door behind him, looking carefully to see that it was completely shut.

"I was not expecting a visit from Miss Regan's trustee!" Annis peculiarly smiled.

"It is as trustee of the Regan estate that I have come."

He looked round for a seat uninvited by Annis, brought forward a chair which he set between Annis and the exit door and sat down, laying his cane on the floor beside him. ​Then he took from his pocket, as though he expected to need them for reference, a small packet of telegrams and other papers.

"On the morning of October twelfth, Mr. Annis," he commenced, "when you came to my office to inform me—so gratuitously as to rouse at once my suspicions regarding yourself—of the very peculiar situation between my ward and a native ruler of Java called the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, and concerning——"

"Concerning the emerald called the Surakarta—yes. I have noted in the papers, Mr. Hereford, that you, as trustee, have taken a singularly effective method of preventing its being presented."

Hereford looked fixedly at Annis before he went on.

"On that visit, Mr. Annis, you stated, ​first, that you had just come from Java on the same steamer with the emissaries of the Soesoehoenan; and this I found to be correct. Your embarking and disembarking have been vouched for to me by cable and telegram through the steamer agents both at Batavia and San Francisco. Your second statement was that you were an American gentleman who had been living in Java, presumably engaged in business there, for the last six years. Third, you stated you could not then leave any address with me, as you intended to take an afternoon train that day for New York. However, Mr. Annis, you did not take that train."

"That is true," said Annis. "I changed my plans."

Hereford again gave Annis a long and steady look.

​"I would rather, Mr. Annis," he said, "you did not use that tone with me. I have come here to put things very frankly and openly to you—not concealing anything in regard to yourself that I know or pretending to know anything regarding you that I do not know. It will expediate matters if you keep that in mind.

"You did not, I say, take the afternoon train. You had plainly wished me to think you had stopped in casually upon me while passing through Chicago; instead, you stayed, coming back to this hotel, where you had then, as you have continued to have, a room. Therefore I saw to it that you made the acquaintance, here in the buffet of this hotel, late in the afternoon of the same day, of a man named Lund."

The blood commenced to glow darkly un​der Annis' sallow skin, and his sun-bleached, close-cut hair seemed to bristle. He slid into the chair nearest to Hereford.

"Really, now, you begin to interest me," he said. "Am I to suppose——"

"What?"

"That this man Lund was in your employ?"

"Lund was then, is now, and at times before, during the last thirty months, has been in my employ, though never openly. The Regan estate, Mr. Annis, is one which, for reasons that I think are plain, has been a continued bait for sharpers, impostors and international marriage bureaus. Miss Regan has made it very plain to me that she would not brook any open interference in such affairs. Once, before this matter of the Soesoehoenan took me by surprise, the pres​ence of some representative of mine—efficient and unknown to Miss Regan—was necessary in another part of the world to defeat people of this sort. Lund, who was at one time a secret-service operative, then proved himself as capable of passing as a nouveau-riche American traveling in Egypt as he proved himself to you the other afternoon capable of passing as an idle man-about-town—a rounder, with no other thought beyond the chance to pass a pleasant day or so in casual acquaintance with a traveler."

Annis shifted uneasily.

"I begin to understand."

"I thought you would."

Annis got up and began to move round the room. The heavy cane he had carried when he appeared in Hereford's office had been ​thrown, with his hat and coat, upon the bed. He touched it, as if carelessly, when he passed it. Hereford picked up his cane and laid it across his knees.

"No; on reflection, I understand even less clearly than before, Mr. Hereford," Annis replied at last.

"Perhaps you will understand better, then, as I go on. It was not merely for precaution that I put Lund upon you, Mr. Annis. I myself immediately undertook investigation of as many elements of your story as I could. Charge of the one element which I could not look after myself—that is, your own connection with the whole affair—I gave to Lund. Lund, having made your acquaintance, went to a vaudeville show with you that night and left you here at this ​hotel when you went to your room a little before eleven."

"Then——" Annis checked himself.

"You mean, then I do not know—know definitely, that is—anything of what you may have done between eleven o'clock that night and the next morning, when Lund met you again. That is so. Neither do I know definitely what you may have done last night between twelve o'clock midnight and now; for Lund in some way got himself arrested last night, and, as I myself have been under very natural suspicion by the police for complicity in the disappearance of the emerald, they refused my telephone request this morning for a conversation with him. You will find, however, that what I do know is sufficient to convince any one what has become of the Surakarta."

​"Convince them, you mean, that I took it?"

"Yes."

"Perhaps you will begin by convincing me that you could convince them."

"I shall be glad to; for that is why I came here. In the first place, you have had and paid for, since the evening of October eleventh, when you reached Chicago, rooms in two hotels. This room where we are now you have occupied days and the greater portion, though not all, of every night. The other room, which you have occupied only twice or at most three times—and then only for a few hours at night—is on the ninth floor of the Hotel Tonty on the same side of the building as the rooms occupied by the Javanese, though not directly under them. On the night of October twelfth, when the ​Surakarta was stolen, you occupied that room at the Hotel Tonty from a quarter past eleven in the evening until four o'clock in the morning—as Lund ascertained afterward from the hotel clerk. You went to your room in this hotel after bidding Lund good night; you waited in this room between twenty minutes and half an hour; you went from here to the Hotel Tonty and, after spending not quite five hours there, you were back here in this room before daylight. Doesn't it seem to you that a somewhat convincing inference might be drawn—say, by the police—from that?"

Annis had reseated himself, closely studying Hereford from under his bleached brows.

"Go on," he said. "I would rather you finished."

"Very well. Your statement to me—at ​least the inference to be drawn from your statement of your residence in Java—was that you were an American engaged in business there. That is in a measure true, as I have ascertained during an intermittent cable communication with Java during the last two days; but the businesses in which you have engaged there are, in some instances at least, not such as a man is willing ordinarily to parade—some rather shady matters, Mr. Annis, concerning ships, one or two of which relate to natives in the Oceanic Islands. In short, Mr. Annis, you appear to be one of those world-wanderers who might, on your own account or at the instigation of some one else, very willingly take up an attempt to possess such a jewel as the Surakarta; and who might subsequently find it ​embarrassing to have his career investigated by the police. Am I not right?"

Annis frowned.

"You may assume so if you like; the majority of people in the world would hardly like to have their careers investigated, as you say, by the police."

"It is not an assumption."

"Call it what you want; but go on."

"Again very well. The Surakarta, Mr. Annis, was kept in a very peculiar box, in which it had been kept for some six hundred years—a box of extremely complicated construction. Having seen the box opened once myself, I am quite sure that no one could have learned to open the box either by description or by seeing the box opened once, or even two or three times. When opened by the thief the box had been in America only ​four days, during which time it had been closely guarded. Is it not right to suppose that the knowledge by which the thief opened the box, came, like the box itself, from Java?"

Annis had risen and leaned against the mantel.

"It seems a natural supposition. Are you still going on or is that all?"

"There is still a little more if you care to hear it."

"It will give me pleasure."

"As regards the last point, the fact that the knowledge of how to open the box must have come from Java, there is additional evidence in the fact that you were visited last night and the night before at this hotel by a Javanese who is not a member of Baraka's suite, yet is apparently a stranger in the city. ​Last night Lund was going to have that Javanese followed; but I do not know whether that was done, as since midnight I have not seen Lund or been able to communicate with him. At most, anything discovered regarding him would be merely corroboration, Mr. Annis, in a case where corroboration—as you yourself must see—begins to be unnecessary."

"Indeed, it does appear so, Mr. Hereford. Have you finished?"

"Practically."

"Practically?"

"There is the circumstance of your first very suspicious visit to me to tell me of the affairs of the emerald, which can only have been for the purpose of delaying the presentation of the stone and its passing into the possession of Miss Regan and so possibly ​into a safe-deposit box before you could carry out your plan to get hold of it; and there is also the doubt—which in itself is somewhat suspicious—whether your real name is Annis or Du Brock."

Annis smiled.

"You have so much other information," he said blandly, "that I do not mind telling you that I have used the name Du Brock only once in Chicago. My object then, as I told Lund at the time, was merely to prevent my becoming involved in the matter of the Surakarta, with which I said I had no connection except my natural curiosity. This was in the bar of the Tonty, Mr. Hereford, at the time I interviewed your brilliant aide Mr. McAdams."

"Yes, to find out from him whether, under your name of Annis, you had yet been sus​pected in the case," Hereford interpolated. "But, as I said, this part is immaterial; for the other facts are quite enough, I think, to give you the conviction that you asked."

Annis surveyed him with narrowed eyes. "To convince me, you mean, that you could convince others?"

"Yes; and that if a single one of these circumstances was brought to the attention of the police it would cause your immediate arrest."

"Perhaps." Annis shrugged. "Still—" He took a turn or two up and down the room, covertly observing Hereford. "Still, Mr. Hereford, you, I know, do not intend to make any of these circumstances known to the police." He gave Hereford a slightly satirical smile.

​"I did not say I did intend to do so." Hereford frowned.

"For you, Mr. Hereford, as trustee, are more anxious than almost anybody else that the emerald should stay lost."

"If it has not struck you how easily I obtained these facts you are even duller than I have given you credit for being."

"I do not follow you," Annis said.

Suddenly Hereford got up, his annoyance preventing him from sitting still.

"Mr. Annis," he exclaimed, "no doubt the Javanese had seen you upon the steamer with them; Baraka or some other among them may even have known of you in Java; perhaps they saw you in San Francisco and again on the way from San Francisco to Chicago. Your chance of being noted and suspected by them, if they saw you still again at the ​Hotel Tonty, was very great; but when, to avoid that chance, you rented rooms in two different hotels, the expedient you adopted was so stupidly planned that you ought to have been arrested almost within an hour. A little study of the facts, a few hours of watching at this hotel, a single cablegram to Java, will still, at any time, put the police in possession of all the facts with which I have just startled you."

"No doubt."

"Lund, who has been as perplexed as myself at your still staying in Chicago, has stood ready for almost thirty-six hours to warn you if the police showed signs of connecting you with the theft. Last night Lund was arrested. Since the police are certain to trace his whereabouts for the last few days, his arrest will inevitably lead them to you. ​This morning, therefore, in order to see and warn you before it was too late, I was obliged against my will to destroy the single circumstance which has so far prevented your arrest by directing the almost conclusive suspicions of the police away from yourself. Mr. Annis, do I make this clear?"

Annis ran his fingers through his bleached hair; he paced back and forth, his lithe, slender body automatically avoiding the furniture of the room, which, in his absorption, he did not see. He halted finally in front of Hereford.

"Quite clear," he said. "You make it quite clear that to avoid embarrassment I ought to leave this hotel; but you do not make it so clear, since it is only embarrassment that I would avoid, that I should do ​all you say, Mr. Hereford—which is, I understand, to leave the city."

"No?"

"No, Mr. Hereford." Annis softly laughed. "I like Chicago. Six years with none but Asiatic amusements, Mr. Hereford—which debilitate rather than entertain—have made me eager, even without Mr. Lund's guidance to the city's sights, for the more diverse pleasures here. I do not see why I should give them up. Moreover, unless you are far more stupid than I have given you credit for being, a moment's reflection might make it occur to you that, if you wish the emerald not to be recovered at any moment, you will continue to be pleased with my presence here—and not locked up."

Hereford stared at him uncertainly.

​"I see!" he muttered slowly as he studied the other.

He rose, grasping his stick. Annis bowed exaggeratedly.

"I trust you are therefore advised to leave me well alone. My original intention, as you have observed, may have been to remove the emerald; but recently affairs have been shaping themselves so that it may be quite as profitable, and much less troublesome to collect the profits, to return the emerald to the place from which it seems to have disappeared. Do not, by your interference, urge upon me this second alternative!"

It had grown dark while they talked, but in their absorption neither had thought to turn on the electric light. Hereford, as he now backed toward the door, turned it on and attentively studied the other's face.

​To the trustee, accustomed to reading motives in many kinds of men, it seemed that Annis coolness and braggadocio were too pronounced. He felt that, in part at least, he comprehended now.

But nothing of this appeared in Hereford's look; for as if with reluctant resignation that no more was to be got from Annis, he turned and left.

XVII

MR. HEREFORD AND ANNIS SETTLE THEIR DISAGREEMENT

Hereford walked, while his footsteps might still be heard from Annis' room, like a man in doubt and without clear understanding of his next move. But when he had turned the corner of the corridor, he started quickly forward and bounded down the stairs without waiting for the elevator.

The early October night was bright with lights in front of the hotel, and the chauffeur of the taxicab was lighting his lamps, as Hereford sprang in and directed the man around the corner to a telephone booth. He saw, looking at his watch, that it was a ​quarter past six. His own office, therefore, would be closed; but there was a public stenographer in the same building whom Hereford often had employed when under press of work. This office, it appeared, was still open, for he got the girl without difficulty.

"I want you to find out," he directed—"using any name necessary to get the information, why it has been impossible to get access to Baraka's room today—the one at the Hotel Tonty where the fire started—you understand, the room next to that from which the great emerald was stolen. Also ascertain the first moment when anyone could enter there unobserved. I will call you again in fifteen minutes."

He went back to the taxicab; and riding in it for a quarter of an hour in a manner ​which took him no further from the Tonty, he got out at a drug store and again called the stenographer.

"The Javanese kept the same suite today," the girl reported. "Baraka used his secretary's room with him; and there was someone in the rooms constantly until six o'clock tonight. At six, the hotel management gave them another suite, which was vacated then."

"Had anything been disturbed in the rooms up to that time?"

"No, sir. They have been left for the insurance appraiser, who will be there tomorrow morning."

"That's all, then."

He leaped into the cab again and ordered the driver to take him to the bar entrance of the Tonty. The manner of the thief's en​trance into Baraka's locked room the second night before; the manner of his opening the box; the manner of his escape from the room, leaving all doors and windows secured behind him, need not concern Hereford, most particularly then. Everything subsequent which had been at least as puzzling to him as the method of the original robbery—now was cleared in his mind. The strange, unexpected delaying of Annis in the city after the robbery, his repeated returns to the Tonty, the starting of the fire in the suite of the Javanese the night before in order to force them to abandon it—all these circumstances pointed simply and inevitably to one almost certain conviction. The thief who had entered Baraka's room and been able to open the box at the foot of his bed and take the emerald from it and then himself escape ​from the room, somehow and for some non-understandable reason had not been able to take the emerald with him. Incredible as the supposition seemed, still it was the only one which covered the conditions. Annis knew that; for that Annis had run the risks he had since run; for that he had had the fire started in the Javanese rooms; for that, undoubtedly, Annis was to enter the rooms, himself, now that they were vacated—because he knew the Surakarta was left there!

Reaching the Tonty, Hereford paid the driver off without delay. He entered the hotel through the bar,where his face was unknown, and, without approaching the elevators, ascended the stairs to the tenth floor. On the stairs, deserted at this hour, he met no one; as he had apparently escaped observation since leaving his apartment that morn​ing, so no one seemed to be following him now.

A few people, coming from the rooms about, passed toward the elevators, evidently on their way to dinner. A chambermaid appeared to straighten their rooms after they had left. Hereford walked down the corridor as though coming from an elevator and followed the maid into the room where she was working. Her pass-key had been left in the door. He took it out.

"I want to go back to my room a moment," he explained, as she looked up. "My wife seems to have carried my key downstairs with her."

"Very well, sir."

Hereford returned down the hall to the door of the Javanese suite, which he unlocked and returned the key to the maid.

​Entering the suite which had been occupied by the Javanese, he closed the door behind him. He listened, but heard no sound. Going, cautiously into the first rooms, he found them, as he had supposed, quite empty. He passed into the next to the last room—that occupied by Baraka at the time of the fire, in which the oil had been ignited, the one to which Baraka had moved after the theft of the emerald. It was totally dark—even darker than the others, for the shades had been drawn — and his nostrils were filled with a strong odor of charred wood. Striking a match, he went on into the last room of the suite. Here, where the fire had burned fiercest, he found that—owing to the excellent fireproofing of the rooms—the walls and floor were simply charred; the furniture, though attacked by the flames, had ​been saved half burned. But the great steel box, of course, had been moved out; the suitcase also and Baraka's personal effects.

He located the electric-light switch and let the match burn out. Reopening the door to the other room and listening cautiously before turning on the light, he heard a sound which seemed to come from the door of the room beyond—not at the door by which he himself had entered, but at the door of the room between: some one seemed to be operating the lock.

The hotel servants, when they left the rooms, had gone out by the door through which Hereford had entered. According to custom, therefore, the keys of the other doors communicating with the hall would be left on the inside, with the doors locked. Whether the doors happened to have been ​also bolted Hereford could not know. The man working at the lock evidently was turning the key in the lock by means of a wire. The lock clicked and a shaft of light from the hall told that the door immediately opened. From his position Hereford could see only that a tall shadow shut out the light; immediately the door was closed and locked on the inside.

Hereford realized that the man might be any one who, having followed the reports of the robbery in the papers and then read of the fire, had seen the interpretation of the second event as he himself now so clearly understood that.

So he retreated cautiously as the other advanced, lighting his way every few steps with a pocket electric lamp. Hereford, recalling the position of the bathroom, crossed ​to it carefully and reached it when the other entered the room.

The man stood still, throwing his light in every direction to get his bearings. Evidently either he had overlooked the use of the electric lights in the room or had decided not to use them, for he made no apparent search for the switch. He seemed instead—as well as Hereford could visualize to himself the manner of the vague movements behind the little white spot of light—to be looking about the room as one entirely strange to it, but familiar with it from the descriptions. Hereford saw the man turn his light upon this object and that, as if to identify them. So he located the place where the box had stood, stooped and seemed to examine whether the fire had left any of the drops of blood leading to the blank wall, ​and reaching the wall, instead of being puzzled, seemed to examine with satisfaction the place where the tapestry had hung. He returned then to the middle of the room for a chair. There was the sound of something he carried being put down; then he seemed to get up on the chair—the spot of light glowed against the wall where a tall man, standing upon a chair, would hold an electric lamp stretched toward the ceiling.

Hereford crept out from behind the bathroom door the better to watch him. The man, with one hand stretched up the wall toward the ceiling, was attempting to reach the top of the heavy molding at the very top of the wall next the ceiling. Hereford could hear him breathing heavily as he discovered that even standing on the chair he was still far from reaching it—the uneven breathing ​of one who knows that in a moment a great matter will be decided for him one way or the other. His agitation seemed to increase. He descended to the floor, and turned his light upon and seized from against the wall a stout walking stick, and stepped back upon the chair. He found now that with the end of the stick he could feel along the top of the moulding. As he evidently found nothing, his agitation seemed to increase. Stepping down he moved the chair as far to left of the tapestry as he had at first set it to the right, and got up again, carrying the stick.

He poked with it along the top of the moulding as far as he could reach, but found nothing. Now he moved the chair again to the left and tried again. Then again he moved the chair. Plainly he intended now to go all around the room in this fashion, un​less he found what he was looking for before the circuit was finished. He would go nearly all the way around before he came upon Hereford, who did not dare to move again for fear of being heard; or unless the light of his lamp fell upon Hereford. This last did not seem likely, for the man kept his light turned always toward the ceiling. He took a long time to each examination, but he paid no attention to the lower part of the wall, but only the upper part above where a man standing on the floor could reach with an upstretched hand. Especially he gave heed to the wide, projecting picture moulding set almost against the ceiling itself. A sixth and seventh time he moved the chair, and now he was very close to Hereford. Suddenly the cane struck something. With an exclamation, the man realized it and struck again. ​It fell to the floor with a firm, sharp sound. The man leaped down and swung his light toward it, but before the light discovered the object, Hereford had sprung forward. The other, hearing him, struck out savagely with his heavy cane, as Hereford rushed into the glow of the lamp.

"Ah! You!" Annis' voice gave the relief in his recognition as he struck.

But Hereford, certain now that what they both sought was between them, made no reply. Annis' blow caught him upon upraised arm. Annis, in countering the blow aimed at him in return, lifted his hand holding the lamp. Hereford's cane smashed it from him and it crashed to the floor. The two men met, striking with stick and fist in the total darkness.

Hereford's face was bruised; he felt the ​hot blood from a cut on his cheek. He had struck at least once with some effect—with how much, or what his own hurt might be, he had no instant to consider. Annis had struggled out of the clinch.

The man, Hereford knew, was certainly armed with a revolver. He himself was not. There was no chance for either to get out if a shot raised the alarm; but whether Annis would recognize this or would be reckless of it Hereford could not know. At all costs he must prevent Annis from drawing his revolver. This much he had thought in the clinch. He followed the other up, therefore, heedless of the blows he received, beating madly back with his own stick.

When he was a boy in college he had played with single-stick, as he had also boxed. It was altogether too close and ​rough for good work; but for every blow on the head that staggered him he gave at least another. Annis' breath was coming certainly as fast as his own; he seemed to stagger as Hereford forced him back.

"You know I will let you out of this if you want to go," Hereford managed to gasp as he pressed him.

Annis' answer was to counter merely for a moment—he made no attempt to strike back. As Hereford's cane struck Annis' again, it clashed with a different sound—so Hereford thought he had broken it; but, as he pressed recklessly forward to follow up the advantage, he felt a sudden, stinging, burning sensation in his left shoulder. He pressed forward, not understanding it, striking madly with his cane. Annis' guard went down and Hereford knew he struck with the ​full force of his heavy stick fair across the temples. Annis cursed loudly as he crumpled and relaxed. The same instant the hot, stinging sensation in Hereford's shoulder changed to a feeling of cold steel in warm flesh, the tear of a cut as the steel turned in it. Hereford felt for the long, slender rapier Annis had drawn from his cane and with which he had run him through.

Surprised at it and not at all realizing what it meant, as the pain yet told him nothing, he drew it out, still more astonished at the blood which followed. As he felt it flowing hot and wet over his underclothes and coming out over his coat, his dismay took the immediate form of a dazed realization that it would be impossible for him to go out through the hotel in that condition. The emerald, he thought, must be somewhere on ​the floor at his feet. He fumbled for it, dizzily; then, better collecting his thoughts, he felt his way in the darkness to the point where he had located the electric switch; he found it and turned on the light.

The glare showed him the full confusion of the room, with the limp and crumpled form of Annis, bruised and bloody, against the wall near the corner where they had fought. As Hereford bent over him, he knew the man was merely stunned, not dead; but his head was cut and bruised shockingly. Hereford realized that he, himself, was badly battered about the head also. His gaze, dizzily, swept the floor to find the emerald; but, though he now was sure of the place where he had heard it fall, he could not find it. He fell to hands and knees to better examine the floor. Directly in the place ​where he had heard what he thought was the emerald, an ordinary brass picture hook lay on the floor. Glancing up to the moulding along which Annis had been searching with his cane, Hereford saw the mate of the hook on the floor. Was that all that Annis had found? Was Annis deceived as well as he? Was that all there was in the room to have fought for? Or were they right and the emerald was still in the room, but not found?

Hereford struggled to his feet. As he staggered, it seemed to him it was the stun of the blows of the stick rather than the absurdly less painful cut through the shoulder which dizzied him. He got the chair, managed to climb upon it, and commencing where Annis had left off, began to poke along the picture mould.

​Loud beatings upon the door and cries outside made his movements uncertain. He and Annis must have made more noise than he had thought, cudgeling each other in there; for many men seemed to be outside. They were smashing down the door now—or seemed to be, for they were beating upon it hard—and calling loudly.

Hereford knew dizzily that it was useless to try to get out; they were at the door and would never let him pass with all that blood upon his coat. Drops of blood fell on the floor and blood was running down inside his sleeve as he tried to move the chair again. The chair had grown strangely heavy. He could not move it to that one section of wall still unexamined where he felt certain now the emerald was hidden. While he struggled with it, the door came down. Baraka ​and the Javanese in one wild, pushing, exclaiming mass hurled themselves upon him. Somewhere among the figures crowding into the room, it seemed to Hereford's dizzy senses, was his ward, Lorine. He heard her voice cry out, when first she caught sight of him.

Later, but after how much time had passed he could not tell, he came to himself and saw Max Schimmel close beside him. He drew the little German nearer.

"Max," he whispered, "it is in the room—the emerald is in the room from which they thought it was taken, the room where you found me!"

With effort he moved his hand to direct Max to slip away and get it.

But Max shook his head.

"My friendt, it iss an hour now since you ​and Mr. Annis had your liddle disagreement. The bolice, too, thought after that, that the emerald must be there; and they haf stripped the very picture moulding from the wall and the frames from aroundt the doors, and they found that the great Surakarta—wass not there!"

XVII

MISS REGAN WILL MARRY THE SOESOEHOENAN

The confused half consciousness, in which Hereford had been only dimly aware that others were moving about him and that he, himself, was being moved, gave place to a restless sleep. He awoke in Max Schimmel's house—in Max's own bed. Clean clothes of his own, saw, had been brought and laid upon a chair. He tried at first to piece together his recollections, confused by the blows upon his head. Then finally he got up, impeded by the pain of his shoulder and a splitting headache, and drew further back the heavy curtains with which Max, ​when he wished, made a solitude for himself even in the city's heart. When he attempted to dress, the noise he made brought to him the Chinese boy. The boy, deft and evidently appointed as his nurse, helped him to dress and brought him soup and some kind of hard but pleasant-tasting crackers which Hereford had never seen before. Max, he said, was out. Hereford, feeling stronger when he had eaten and now seeing the Chinese boy nowhere about, made his way through Max's little sitting room into the hall and to the front door. This door at the head of the long flight of stairs that led to the entrance door below, he found locked. The rear door was locked, as he discovered when he tried it, and there was no window opening out upon the little back porch.

In a room to one side, Hereford heard ​noises; but when he opened the door to this, he found only the Chinese boy again, who was now giving the ocelot some sort of dry bath. The boy and the great cat rolled together on the floor, as the boy rubbed what seemed sawdust mixed with a white powder into the ocelot's fur. He sat up at Hereford's question how he was to get out and answered with Oriental indifference.

"No glet out at all. No kley!"

Then he rose at Hereford's request for a drink and brought whiskey and a glass, the big cat as he went following him like a dog. Hereford took a swallow of the whiskey and went back to the bedroom and lay down upon the lounge.

Presently he heard someone ascend the stairs and knock. The Chinese boy unlocked and opened the door from within and locked ​it again. Angry now that he knew the boy had lied to him, Hereford got up and made his way once more into the sitting room. Here, with her wraps still on and evidently just come in, he found Lorine.

"Mr. Schimmel asked me to meet him here at this time," she explained without embarrassment. "I hardly expected to see you, as I did not think you could get up."

Hereford's realization that he loved his ward made him for the first time ill at ease in her presence. He flushed uncomfortably, as his look at her told him that she was perfectly self-possessed while he himself was not.

"You knew I was here then," he said nervously. "Perhaps you can also tell me why I am not allowed to go out—why I am locked in here?"

​"That is a partnership affair, Mr. Hereford. You can place the responsibility as you wish. I suggested it and Mr. Schimmel carried it out."

He flushed again.

"No doubt, in suggesting it, you had reasons that seemed sufficient to yourself?"

"Quite. You were equally in demand last night, Mr. Hereford, by Baraka and the police. Mr. Schimmel saw to it that the police did not get you, and Baraka—" she hesitated—"well, was prevented," she finished.

He turned unhappily away from her, and sat down in front of the fire which burned in Max's little grate.

"Where is Max now?" he asked at last.

"Mr. Schimmel—if I understand his somewhat indefinite message to me over the ​'phone—was very busy up till noon with the police. Since then, I do not know. I thought he would be here."

"And Annis?"

"Busy with the police likewise—in a less pleasant way, Mr. Hereford. Mr. Annis has been locked up at the police station ever since he recovered consciousness last night. He has made to the police what he claims is a full statement of his implication in the affair, including your participation with him in the attempt to get the emerald."

Hereford turned suddenly to face her.

"My participation with Annis?" he exclaimed.

"Yes. But that has not solved the mystery, of course. For he claims also that the plan you had made together to get possession of the stone failed."

​"My participation with Annis!" Hereford cried again. "Do you believe that?"

She smiled rather tremulously. "No."

Hereford saw that their positions had been reversed. It had been he that had had the upper hand in their last interview; now that position was—or she was making it seem—hers. Events, whose nature and extent were unknown to him, had moved forward while he slept.

"At least," he said, after a long pause, "some explanation from me is due you now."

"I hardly think an explanation is necessary now, Mr. Hereford," she returned. "It is quite plain now, is it not, that you believed Mr. Annis had the stone? That because of that you protected him—through collusion, he says. He is not telling the truth in that, I think. But at any rate you ​did protect him by shooting yourself through the hand, so that suspicion could be directed only toward yourself. And after all you found he did not have the emerald. Quite plain, all of that—is it not, Mr. Hereford? Everything except how you and Mr. Annis came so strangely to be together last night in the room from which the emerald was stolen."

"Because we thought the stone there!" Hereford burst out. "We both thought it!"

"But it was not."

Hereford was silent.

"It must have been!" he said finally. "There is no other possible explanation the chain of evidence is too exact, too perfect. I went direct from my office yesterday, when I left you there, to Annis, though I ​did not find him until evening. I warned him then that it was time for him to leave Chicago. When he refused, I knew he did not have the stone. Then I thought of the fire—the incendiary fire! And Lund! I had warned Lund not to let himself be separated from Annis. If Lund was at the Tonty at the time of the fire, so was Annis. What strange, unbelievable thing went on in that room the night the emerald was stolen, I don't know. I don't know why, since in some unbelievable way Annis himself escaped, the stone had to be left. But I do know that he did not take it! Lorine, the emerald is in that room! If they have not found it, it is because they have not looked sufficiently!"

He had drawn near her while he spoke and bent over her. She looked up swiftly at him and disturbedly shook her head.

​"The police thought so too, Mr. Hereford, and last night and this morning they have sifted the contents of the room through their fingers. They have left only the four bare walls, and soaked the paper from those in the hope of finding some crevice in the plaster. If the Surakarta had been the size of a pinhead, it could not have escaped them. But they found it was not there!"

Hereford straightened dismally.

"Then all the way through this I have been—and acted like—a fool!" he said unhappily. He sat down again and put his face into his hands. Then he looked and saw her watching him; and he had the feeling that, as he raised his head, her expression changed. She got up, as though uneasy under his questioning look, and went to the mantel and picked up some strange dried sea-​creature from among Max's specimens; but he saw that she did not look at it.

"Why did you say that?" she demanded.

"Certainly," he said, "I must ask myself what your father would have thought, if he could have been here these last two days and watched the actions of the man he had chosen as your trustee."

"He would have been quite satisfied, I think," she said abruptly.

"And you? I mean I do not know exactly how you regard me now since, after my pretense of having the stone, you have found that I had nothing to do with its disappearance."

"You have never, Mr. Hereford—as my trustee—showed very plainly that it mattered to you what I thought."

But she moved around the room now, and ​he thought—but he could not be sure—that it was because she wished to hide the fact that she was trembling. Hereford for the first time suspected that all along she had not felt the self-possession that she showed—that it was assumed.

"I have sometimes thought," she observed, "that my father understood us both better than we have understood ourselves."

"What do you mean by that?" he cried.

She seemed more interested than before in Max's specimens, and he could not see her face.

"Exactly what I said. My father liked and I know respected you. I know he loved me greatly. So I have thought—sometimes of late—that he may have wished us to be better acquainted with one another and that ​that was the reason he made you my trustee."

He stared in amazement.

"At least," he burst out bitterly, as he thought how strange it was he should recognize that he loved her only after he had done everything that his position had made possible to offend and estrange her—"At least, he might have picked out someone who would not have done you all—all the injustice I have done you!"

"I do not understand you," she said, not looking at him.

"Yes, you do. I have misjudged you ever since I have had anything to do with you! Some of that you know—for it has been said and sent you—but more of it has been done. I got started wrong with you, I guess. You say your father may have meant to—to start us toward acquaintance. But it was ​because of your father, I think, that I got started wrong. I saw how anxious you made him, how you troubled him, and it made me think you were not—not worthy of his love, just foolish, reckless. Once I thought this, it made it easy to keep on such thinking—to see in everything you did or tried to do, or proposed doing, just the act of a notoriety-mad——"

His lips refused the word.

"Say it!" she commanded. "You mean you thought I was a fool."

"Yes—that is what I thought; and that is what I tried to think. Many times I have deliberately told myself that, when some other reason suggested itself to me for your acts. Often I wrote you as though you were only that. I was—I see now I tried to be—just like everybody else; I saw no more than ​they did; but it has been growing plain to me now that something drove you to all those things. You showed it in your face yesterday and the night before; I could see it now, if you did not turn your face away. I wonder that I never guessed it before; but perhaps no one ever guessed it before because all the world looked upon you very same way—and I was no different!"

"No!" The girl checked him quickly but gently. She did not raise her head; he could not see her face. "No! That is not true! You believed of me the same as all the rest of them, I know; but—but, though all the rest of them just drove me on, you—you at least tried to check me!"

"But how I did it—the I tried to do it! The assumption—the rotten, cruel assumption in every line I wrote you! The ​other things I did—the explanations I made for you when I considered that some must be made!"

"I did not mind that!"

"Lorine!" he breathed. "Lorine!"

He craned forward, and now at last he saw her face; and to his amazement it was like a face that he had never seen before—her own yet different. He knew that now finally he saw her as she was—as once, and again, and still again he had divined that she might be; for her face was still turned away from him and he understood she did not know he saw it.

When at last she turned to him, the look still lingered; but she trembled violently and he saw that she was deeply troubled.

"Thank you," she said simply. "You make it easier for me. I did not tell you the ​exact truth today. I made you think that Max Schimmel asked me to come here. That was not true. I asked him to arrange that I might see you here, because I had something that I knew now I must tell you. The emerald is gone, and no one knows where it can be; and because of that I am in terrible trouble. But first I wish you would sit down again, because you are weak and hurt; and I will sit here by you. But until I have finished, please do not look at me any more than you can help, and please—until I have quite finished—do not touch me."

He watched her in amazement as she set a chair near his own.

"It is something such as no girl ever should have to tell," she said, not looking at him, and her face deeply crimson. "I should not be able to tell it even now, except that the ​Surakarta has disappeared because of me, and except that you almost gave your life for me last night—and might have given it but for good fortune."

A little flush came to his face in spite of his pallor. "So you know it was for you?"

"If you wait until I am through you will understand how I knew it. To make you understand, I shall have to go back to the beginning. You better than anyone else, Mr. Hereford, know what sort of man my father was—everybody laughed at and feared him. He did not mind their laughing because he knew that they were afraid. But they were not afraid of me, and so at me they—only laughed. But I did not know then that they were laughing at me. Everybody talked about me and, from the time I was little, the newspapers printed the—the crazy things ​I did; and I thought it was—smart. Then when I found out they were only laughing at me, I—couldn't change. People wouldn't let me change. Wherever I went, I found that they already knew about me. Even when I tried to do nice things, no one would believe it. It was horrible! So then I tried to think I did not care. And after that father died, and it seemed he had made you my trustee.

"I had heard of you through him, but I did not know much about you; but very soon I saw that you knew a great deal about me—you knew all the dreadful things that I had done and you tried to check me; you were ashamed for me and with me! And at first it angered me; but afterward—afterward I began to see! It was in your letters, even your short letters that I had tried to force ​you to make only business; it was in everything you did! You alone of all the world had made what I did a matter of your own pride and shame!"

"I cared, Lorine! I must have cared! I know—now—that I must always have cared!"

"But you did not know you cared; you could not understand it then. Oh, I saw! Somehow it had happened that out of all the world there was one person, and only one, who really cared for me. And yet I was more shut off from you than from anyone else, because you better than other one knew all the crazy things I had done. You—you could not think yourself in love with such a girl as—as you were sure I was! So then I—I had to do something that would make you sure!"

​"You, Lorine?" he cried in wonder. "You make me sure?"

"Yes; but I did not know then what sort of thing that could be. And then I met those English people in India and went to Java with them and met the Soesoehoenan. He had been at Oxford, you know, and I suppose had learned to admire the English women; and when he saw and heard about me, I suppose he thought that here was a woman of white blood whom he could ask to marry him without her thinking it an insult. And when he did ask me, there came into my mind the maddest, craziest of all the mad and crazy things that I had ever done.

"I arranged for the Soesoehoenan to send the emerald here; I made my plans to be here. I was going to tell you of the Soesoehoenan when you found out from someone else; and ​when at first you only mentioned cutting off my income to prevent me—Oh, I cannot tell you how I felt! For if you did not realize that you cared more than that I—I did not know what I could do. But if you cared enough, or it made you care enough to stop me, I knew I could send the emerald back; it would do no harm; he would soon forget me. But it did begin to make you know you cared; for you swore to me that I should not receive the emerald—and I was happy! And the next day it was gone—and I was still happier, because I was certain that you had it! And after that I was only afraid for you because of Baraka. I set Farren to watch and guard you; and when I found that Baraka was determined to have your rooms broken into, I came to you in your rooms to ​beg you to send him back the emerald. But I could do nothing with you.

"I knew Baraka could not be held off long; I thought if he was allowed to break into your rooms, as he was determined, I might save you from personal danger. I knew he was to attempt it that evening; so, when I was waiting below in your building trying to decide what to do and when your man came down and left you alone, I made the excuse of going to your office to take you away from the danger!"

"Lorine! Lorine!" he cried.

"Then, when the fire was started in Baraka's rooms and the danger grew still greater, I even tried to make Baraka think that you had given me the emerald! And all the while you did not have it——"

​She got up and shrank back from him, as he moved toward her.

"You do not understand!" she cried miserably. "Oh, don't you see what I have done? It is because of me—I have been the means of losing the Surakarta, which means a kingdom! What can I do now, if he still wants me, but—even against my will—marry the Soesoehoenan!"

He took her in his arms.

"Not that, Lorine!" he breathed. "Not that!"

XIX

MAX HAS KEPT OUT OF JAIL

Hereford, when he had sent his ward away, waited anxiously for Max Schimmel to come home. Now, at last, Lorine had hidden nothing from him; he understood her finally; and, understanding her, he saw that the menace of the Surakarta—which it appeared had been before merely a fictitious menace—had become real. He understood that, if Lorine's love for him was not in itself a sufficient argument for her, he could offer no other to change her belief that she was bound in honor to marry the Soesoehoenan, unless the emerald could be recovered.

So Hereford, impatiently pacing Max's ​rooms and cursing the confusion of his head which made it so hard to think, for hours went over and over in his head the chain of evidence he possessed. He could find, however, even yet nothing to alter his conclusions that had seemed so correct and proved so futile. Only one fact he could not fit into its place. Max had left at Hereford's apartments some strange telephone message about a duplicate box. Therefore, time after time, Hereford went to the window or the door, hoping to see Max returning. But when Max, just at dusk, climbed the stairs like a man very leg-weary, the little German appeared only worried and would answer no questions about the box or anything else.

Max had been long from home—so first he must know, in spite of his evident uneasiness, how his animals were doing; also his ​flowers. Had there, by chance, a purple bloom appeared among the white sweet peas? Chang did not know. It was most important, and Max himself must visit the little greenhouse projecting from the southern wall. Lastly, Max assured himself that Chang was setting the dinner-table for two.

"We will have dinner here together, my friendt," he explained to Hereford; "because just now there is nothing that it iss more worth while to do. Whatefer else could be done I haf done already."

"Then what is it that you have done, Max?" Hereford insisted.

The German's look of anxiety changed for an instant to a slow smile. "I haf all day kept myself oudt of jail. That iss something."

Hereford frowned impatiently.

​"By what particular expedient, Max?"

"By saying nothing; as I must continue to do now. It iss enough that one of us runs that chance, and all day I haf felt the jail doors closing about me. Because, my friendt, I haf learned what iss dangerous information. I haf learned much about how the Surakarta wass stolen, which I am afraidt to tell, because it iss a thing which to the bolice would be unpelieveable. There are many men to whom I could tell it, and they would say it iss—gommonplace; because those men haf knowledge that it could be done that way. But the bolice haf not; no—they would lock me up. So I must say nothing until I can show the bolice—not tell it merely; for then they will pelieve. I haf arranchged to go to the Tonty tonight ​and do that; but first it must be dark as when the Surakarta wass stolen."

"At least, tell me where you have been," Hereford urged.

"I haf been walking in Lincoln Park. Often I go there to opserve the animals."

"Alone, Max?"

"Yes—alone; except that always in front of me today there wass a brown man walking. It seemed that he was going away somewhere, for he had his valise with him. But it seemed also he did not know where he wass going; for often he sat for a long time upon a bench; then I sat upon another bench not far from him. He could not go home, you comprehend, my friendt, because at his home Max had put the bolice to wait for him. But he would not haf been caught by the bolice—they are such dunderheads; ex​cept it wass for Max Schimmel perhaps he would not haf been caught at all."

He would not say more than this, though Hereford pressed him.

"No, my friendt; I must say to you, as I said today to the bolice, 'Do not ask guestions of me—I am not a bolice officer andt shmart like a bolice officer; I am only a naturalist!' The bolice were pleased by my saying that, for the bolice are all dunderheads. Yes; all are dunderheads; and of all the dunderhead bolice the worst dunderhead iss McAdams. Very early I saw why you had picked out McAdams to infestigate the case; it wass because at that time you did not want the case infestigated. Am I not right?"

"Yes," Hereford nodded.

"McAdams iss writing a book, and the name of the book iss 'My Great Cases.' ​Imachgine; the great cases of detectife McAdams! Once McAdams followed me from the Hotel Tonty to my house. Now, when the book comes oudt you will see he will say in it, 'Of all bersons I, the great detectife, wass the only one that had sense enough to suspect Max Schimmel!" The great dunderhead! I am glad he iss a boliceman andt not a naturalist. If he wass a naturalist, there is not an animal alife that would know efen what species it belonged to—not if it read McAdams' book!

"Well, if it happens that we are nefer able to get back the Surakarta, at least we shall be able to show, I think, in spite of detectife McAdams, how it wass that the Surakarta wass stolen."

They dined together, Max many times looking at his watch. Finally he sent Chang ​for a cab; still he made no other preparations for his departure.

"The cab iss for you, my friendt," he explained. "I haf been so busy that I haf had no time to notify Miss Regan that I would like to haf her also tonight at the Hotel Tonty. So if you will go and get her, I will meet you at the Tonty at eight o'clock."

Hereford called for his ward, and they went together to the Tonty a little before eight. They found the tenth floor corridor of the hotel filled with uniformed police and secret service men. These, recognizing them, made way for them and directed them to the door of what had formerly been the suite occupied by the Javanese. In the first room of this, Baraka's attendants were gathered in a bewildered and suspicious group. The next room was half filled with plain clothes ​men of the police, among whom Hereford could see Baraka, who was apparently as suspicious and bewildered as his attendants.

This group was assembled, curious and exclaiming about two tables in the middle of the room. Upon one of these the strange Java steel box that had contained the emerald had been placed. On the other one, as Hereford and his ward now saw, stood another box of precisely the same design, the same appearance.

XX

IT HAS BEEN DONE AGAIN

Hereford, though Max's manner had in a measure prepared him for a surprise, halted astonished at the sight of the second box. There were, then, two such boxes in the world! Had that ancient artificer of Java, who made for the sultan the box in which to keep the emerald, made at the same time another just like it, perhaps in revenge? But as those about the table gave way to allow him to get nearer the illusion disappeared. The grotesque bodies of the figures on the four sides of the box were not of steel delicately hand-wrought, but of some rough composition which resembled but had more ​tenacity than clay—only the heads, the hands and the feet were, like the body of the box, of some wood that Hereford guessed was teak. These heads and hands and feet, as Hereford bent beside the box and touched them, moved with soft clickings of wooden levers within; while from under the lid of the box, which stood partly open, came a strong smell of sandalwood.

The captain of police, who seemed to be in charge of the situation, turned to Hereford.

"Your friend has been telling us some surprising things, Mr. Hereford," he said, "and has suggested some still more surprising. Already he has proved enough so that we are to permit him to demonstrate the rest."

Hereford nodded his understanding.

Presently Max came in, flushed and anxious. By his direction, two members of the ​police carried the heavy steel box into the room from which the emerald had been stolen. Max went with them, but almost immediately he reappeared, and now he invited the rest to follow him. They filed in slowly.

The room, Hereford now saw, had been restored as nearly as it could be to the same condition as on the night of the robbery. New furniture as much as possible like that destroyed by the fire, had been brought from other parts of the hotel and arranged here. The bed, the chairs—every article of furniture—were in the places the first had occupied; and the original box was in its former position at the foot of the bed.

Max first asked his audience to arrange themselves as near as possible to the entrance door, so as not to interfere with his opera​tions. Then accompanied by Baraka and the captain of police, he made an examination of the windows and the doors into the closet and bathroom to show that all were locked and that entrance to or exit from the room was impossible except through the one doorway before which his audience was gathered.

Finally he turned to the police captain.

"Gif me, please, your watch," Max requested of the officer. "The emerald we no longer haf; but we must haf something which you in particular will most surely know."

The officer handed the watch to him.

"Now please,"—Max turned to Baraka—"the box open again."

Baraka, with the assent of one whose mind already had been made up, concealed the operation of the levers and clicked them ​quickly. The top of the box sprang back. Max, in sight of all, took the captain's watch from the chain and placed it within the box, locking it by closing down the cover. He motioned to Baraka and the officer to join Hereford, his ward and the others in the doorway. He glanced round once more.

"Opserve now," said Max, "that all iss as it wass the night of the theft. Only besides, I pelieve, wass there a handbag by the wall. Well, I will put mine there to take the place." And he put down by the blank wall the suitcase he had with him.

He placed himself then behind Baraka and the police captain, who stood in front and quite filled the doorway, so that it was impossible for any one to pass them. They crouched so that Hereford and his ward and the others behind them might see into the ​room, though there was nothing to see. Max turned out the light as he took his place. Everything was absolutely black.

Every one stood silent. Hereford could hear only the breathing of those about him, and he felt the soft touch of Lorine's arm against his and a strand of her hair against his cheek as she shifted her position slightly. In the darkness his hearing became more acute, so that he would have known the position of every one even if he had not already known; also he became conscious suddenly of the heavy odor of sandalwood, which filled his nostrils and seemed to ingulf and make negligible all other sensations for the instant. With it awoke strange, dim images from the superstitiously imaginative East. He let himself seem to be upon that middle ground of the Oriental tales where the super​natural mingles with the natural at will. His hand touched Lorine's; and, as though she were unconscious of it, she permitted his touch. He started when Max's slow voice broke the silence.

"The sound of knocking now will be me against this wall," Max announced. "Remember, all are pledged only to observe—to interfere in no way with what will follow." And, waiting for his own voice to become silent, he knocked four times with a peculiar interval between, and then repeated the raps.

In the silence which followed—enduring a full half-minute—Hereford was conscious that the girl beside him seemed to be holding her breath. Then, at the end of a suspense during which he heard her draw her breath only as she panted for it, there came ​a sound—clear, distinct, perfectly unmistakable—a click within the room and toward its side where there was neither door nor window, only a solid brick wall. So like the click of a cocking pistol was it that Hereford felt the spontaneous checking of his pulses as the suggestion came to him. The tremble in the hand against his told him that Lorine was at least equally affected. What he heard next Hereford could not tell, or that any sound at all came to his ears—or by what sensations, beyond the prickling of the short hairs upon his skin, it was revealed to him, in the midst of the darkness and of the heavy, sandalwood smell, that something which lived was moving in the room before them. Yet some one was in the room—who or what? Some one ​had entered to whom a brick wall had made no bar!

And suddenly, without warning, began the soft clicking of the box.

He heard before him and behind him the aspirate ejaculations of the Javanese not entirely suppressed, the movement of surprise about him, the shudder of superstitious fear.

Hereford had no superstitions. He tried—he swiftly tried at this sound to take hold of his nerves. Involuntarily he turned his hand to grasp his ward's to calm her, but met her grasp firm upon the same purpose. He smiled as there rioted through his mind strange, half-remembered stories of the East; of treasures guarded in temples by malignant squat deities; of significant jewels like the emerald, which ghostly agents brought ​back to the rightful possessor as often as they were taken away.

The clicking of the box went steadily on; and Hereford's mind, which tried to picture the agent by which the levers moved, saw nothing, but only thought them moving of themselves.

Mechanically, he noted now, he had counted the clicks. One, two, three, four—they were rapid and without hesitation. And he heard Baraka, just in front of him, counting, too, in Javanese with intense, irrepressible aspiration. At ten Baraka involuntarily started forward. Apparently checked by the officer next him, he settled back. At fifteen Hereford felt him, fumbling in his pocket, withdraw his hand; and as the last lever clicked he struck a match against the wall. The match-head broke in ​two—half shot like a tiny meteor through the dark; half sputtered in a weak blue flame that finally caught the wood and showed no one.

The captain tried to check him, but Max now made no objection—he himself was reaching for the light. He switched it on. As they blinked in the blaze of light they saw that the box stood open; the watch, which had been locked inside, was gone! No one could have come in; no one could have gone out. Yet some one had been there, for it was done! It undeniably had been done!

In the hubbub of incredulity, questions and confusion Hereford stared about the room. He laughed nervously and looked to Lorine. She directed his eyes to the police captain. That officer, bewilderment but also determination in his manner, had ​changed his place to bring him nearer to Max Schimmel. He glanced now significantly toward his men, who, Hereford saw, returned his look with nods of understanding.

"You must explain this—fully and satisfactorily, Schimmel," the officer warned meaningly.

But whatever had been Max's previous reasons for uneasiness, they seemed now wholly to have disappeared.

"Efen when I haf been to so much trouble to find out how the Surakarta wass stolen," he said to Hereford, "and when I am ready to explain it, they would like to arrest me and make me gif my explanation from behind their bars. But I ask only, Mr. Bolice Office, that my friendts be allowed to hear me too."

​The police captain selected with his eyes two of his men, who at his nod remained just within the door, while the others filed out. He and Baraka then sat down upon the edge of the bed. Hereford and his ward dropped into the two chairs which were the only ones in the room; and Max perched himself upon the little stand for baggage beside which he had placed his suitcase.

XXI

MAX SCHIMMEL DOES SOME EXPLAINING

Max Schimmel bubbled suppressedly. It seemed, indeed, that his interest in the disappearance of the Surakarta had been a wholly impersonal and scientific interest, and that now he felt himself able to show how the emerald had been taken, he had quite forgotten the vital interest his hearers had in the actual recovery of the gem. He sobered himself after an instant, but it seemed only in deference to the questioning and suspicious gaze of the police officer.

"It iss not necessary to look at me, Mr. Boliceman," he commenced, "because the very first thing that I knew about this rob​bery wass when I read in the papers that the emerald had been stolen. It wass very wonderful—wass it not? At once eferybody—the bolice and others—wass inquiring: 'How did he who took the emerald go in and out where eferything wass locked?' Here where men are all and where men are fery much alike, they said, because they could not understand how it wass done: 'He wass clever—so clever!' And as my friendt, my landlord here, is so clever a man certainly, they said: 'May he not have done this thing?' But I, hafing the mind of the naturalist, I began to inquire of myself first: 'What, indeed, iss the order of intelligence that has done this thing?'

"The very first thing I saw wass that whoever had opened the box had been very, very stupid and had not been afraid. Loudly—​so loudly that he woke up Baraka, who wass sleeping in the room—he tore the baper off the box into many strips, roughly and boldly, all round. This wass certainly very, very stupid. Would my clever landlord, Mr. Hereford, be so stupid? Also, it wass very, very fearless. Could he be so fearless? My friendts, I haf lived the most of my life in dark continents and in islands where there are millions of peoples so unhuman that you and peoples here will nefer know the truth about them, because nobody who has seen those peoples dares to write or print openly what he has seen. I have seen men of intelligence so low that it iss not easy to tell if they are animals or men—stupid as to tear bapers loudly away from a box: but I have nefer seen any man of intel​ligence so low that he did not know enough to be afraidt.

"But this one iss so stupid or so bold, too, that he continues without disturbance to open the box efen when a pistol iss many times fired at him. But at the same time he iss so clever that efen in the dark he knows how—quickly and without hesitation—to open the box, and how to go in and out of a room which iss locked, and so guickly to move that when the light is turned on, he hass disappeared. Then I re-read in the newsbaper that it wass not customary for the baper to be wrapped round the box; but only lately it hass been that way—therefore, by whoever opened the box, baper round the box was not expected.

"So I said to myself: 'Max, this iss not one intelligence; it is two intelligences—it iss ​a clever intelligence which has planned how this wass to be done and a stupid intelligence which has carried it out. And I changed the questions I wass asking myself like this: 'Max, who iss it that could be put into a locked room, and haf been taught to open the box, and could do all that was done in the way it wass done, and could disappear so guickly as not to be seen?'

"What do you mean?" the police officer demanded impatiently.

"I mean only," Max replied imperturbably, "that you should imachgine now, as I wass then imachgining that there could be such a one who could disappear when he had opened the box. Suppose there iss such a one, so stupid and so bold; still, how would he know in the dark that the box iss under the paper, so that he will tear the baper off ​and find it? With such an intelligence as I suppose, smell would be very strong. If it should be that the box has a smell, therefore, I am made much more sure. So I search for a smell."

"I remember," Hereford nodded.

"And to be sure, when I come to the box, it hass a smell of sandalwood! But then I must look for more. This one who opened the box iss very stupid, yet he opened the box very guick, very sure. He had been taught, therefore, upon such another box; and once hafing been taught, he must haf constant practice efery day or—so many are the motions to be made—he might soon forget. Before the one who put him into the room, would put him into the room that night, surely he would make certain he could open the practice box. So now I know that ​recently there has been another box—a dublicate box—very near. Now that the emerald has been taken that dublicate box would be destroyed; but wherever that box had been kept there would be still the stupid, if not also the clever, one who had done this thing. How then to find them!

"In that I am helped. Baraka has told how his pistol-shooting did not disturb him who opened the box. How could this be, only that the stupid one who had been taught to open the box had also been taught that nothing must disturb him? Not only has he been taught to open the box, but he has been made accustomed to open it whatefer iss done about him. Pistol-shooting iss, of course, the most likely thing to be done about him. At least, he has been trained not to mind pistol-shooting in any ways.

​So, when I am thinking of this and speaking of it, I find that on the efening before a man—a Japanese—has been pistol-shooting in his room without reason. It iss not much difference in sound—Japanese or Javanese. So I get that man's address and I go to the house; and when he iss not in his room, I find there the other box—the dublicate box—the practice box. And I find as I had expected that this box has been made in Java. It has all come from Java, then—the secret of the box, him that knows how to open it, and the disappearing one to whom it has been taught.

"There iss left only one question, then. How did the disappearing one—the one able to make himself so small he cannot be seen—get into the room and get out? For, though I am sure such a one as iss not at all ​suspected has done this thing, still I am sure he must have a way in and out.

"So now I go back to my own room in that boarding house where I find that box, and I lie down upon my bed. I said to myself: 'Max, you are in Java, and you are the man hafing an almost disappearing one whom you may teach things. In the tower of the Soesoehoenan iss the Surakarta. Somehow you have come to know the manibulations of the box in which the emerald iss kept, and you haf made one like it so you can teach the disappearing one. Now, think what more you will do.'

"And I thought: 'There iss no window or opening of any kind into the room where the emerald iss except a door; and whenever that door iss opened there iss a strong guard whose eyes are sharp enough to see the dis​appearing one, for he cannot guite disappear. But sometimes things are put into that room—perhaps it iss a box; perhaps it iss a basket—which can be carried into the room; and I will teach the teachable one to stay inside that basket—guite still, so that nobody shall notice.

"'I will make it so that from the outside the box, or the basket, shall appear to be strongly locked; but on the inside it shall be made so that it will be quite easy for the disappearing one to make it fly open and fly shut as he wishes. And when he has been put into the room, and the door iss shut and locked again, he shall come out from his basket; and he shall open the box that has the emerald, and shall go back with the emerald into his basket. And then, when the door is open again, and there iss excitement over the ​loss of the emerald, the basket shall be carried out again—and the emerald will be in it.'"

Baraka exclaimed volubly. The police captain watched Max with narrowing eyes; Hereford and Lorine bent forward.

"Yes? But opserve now, my friendts. Before I can do this that I have planned I find that the emerald iss to be taken to America. Now I must go along until the chance comes to get the emerald; but if I carry my pupil in the basket then eferybody will say: 'What haf you got in the basket?' So now what shall I do? When I had got as far as that, mine friendts, I thought: 'What wass there in the room at the hotel in which one—even a disappearing one—could haf been?' There wass in the room the writing desk, and the bed, and the table, which belonged there; ​and there wass two suitcases, which a confederate among Baraka's suite could carry in and out.

"And when, at the boarding house, I saw the Javanese upon the stairs, he also had in his hand a suitcase.

"So I thought: 'That iss it; he shall be in a suitcase, which will not be noticed—only when I pass the customs officials shall there be clothes in that suitcase; for then I shall carry him wrapped in my cabaya—my coat, that iss."

"In the suitcase!" the police captain now demanded. "He—your pupil—the disappearing one! What do you mean?"

"Here, in this suitcase!" Max replied calmly. "Holding your watch now—has been taught him to take and hold whatefer iss in the box, efen when shot at with ​bullets so that he ran up the tapestry in his excitement before he remember to go back to the suitcase."

"A monkey!" Baraka exclaimed with excitement.

Max laughed. He knocked four times and the suitcase upon the floor beside him appeared to open of itself, revealing a simple arrangement of springs which controlled it and a little brown form which came forth.

"A monkey of Java!"

"So!" he confirmed, feeling in the suitcase until he found the watch and handing it back to the police captain. "Trained—as I made sure at the boarding-house—by the Javanese to come out from the suitcase when he hears knocks as I gafe them—so! Efery time he hear them he comes from the suitcase, he opens the box, takes what iss within, ​goes back to the suitcase and shuts himself in, and stays fery still—trained efen with shots, as I haf said; and so that efen when he wass hurt by the bullet"—Max pointed out the bandage upon one little brown forearm—"he returns to the suitcase and shuts himself in, and stays guiet.

"But do not think I haf done anything so wonderful in finding this; or that the monkey has done anything so wonderful in taking the Surakarta. For I am a naturalist, and so famous to naturalists are the monkeys of Java that it is enough only to mention the name of Java to a naturalist and he will think also of monkeys. And as for the monkey, his father and his father's fathers back as far as there haf been monkeys haf been so used to pulling off bark and lifting leaves to look for food that it hass been shown ​many times that a monkey, if gifen time enough, will learn without efen any instruction to open such a box as this—efen if it hass as high as thirty manibulations."

The police captain stared from the little German to his friend, and from him to the Javanese; but Baraka was still bent in curious examination of the monkey, an examination which seemed now suddenly to run to recognition. He started up.

"But it is Ukano!" he exclaimed.

"What is Ukano?" the captain demanded.

"The monkey is Ukano. It is his name. Oh, now everything is explain—I understand all!" Baraka cried in great excitement. "It is Ukano—the pet monkey of Alarna!"

Hereford looked quickly at Lorine; she, drawing herself erect, seemed—as he did—​now to understand. Max also seemed to understand. Only the police captain looked uncomprehendingly round at all of them.

Baraka had controlled himself and now he bowed to the officer.

"Alarna is the wife—the favorite—of our Soesoehoenan," he explained excitedly. "Oh, how plain—now that we know it is Ukano!

"Listen!" he said, seeing the police captain did not yet understand. "In the time of the Soesoehoenan, the father of this Soesoehoenan, Alarna was a young girl, wonderful in her beauty—so soft skin! It seem through it a light was shining; dark eyes, like when water is seen at night by light of star. So all young men would have her for wife; but she would have none of them. The Soesoehoenan begins, then, to be sick ​with his last sickness; so it is for his favorite son he sends, to give him the great emerald which is the sign of the sovereignty of Surakarta. It is to Oxford he sends for his son—a young man only a little over twenty, tall, straight; not only a prince, but in his eyes that look which comes from seeing the great world. It is no surprise that at sight of him the beautiful eyes of Alarna are filled with all such thoughts as young girls have, and that gladly she becomes his wife—the favorite—to whom alone with the Soesoehoenan is known the secret to open the box of the emerald. But now pass a few years."

Baraka made a broad gesture, as though dismissing the years into eternity.

"But now pass a few years," he repeated. "You know what happen. Miss Regan comes; perhaps already the Soesoehoenan ​has thought too often of such as her—of the fair-skin women with whom he play tennis at Oxford. At least, soon after she goes the Soesoehoenan put away all his wives—even, and most of all, Alarna. Alarna gives no complaint; she gives no cry, no protest like the others. She is so proud; but no doubt, like the others, she weeps often in the night with jealousy of loving. She has not lost desire to be love. But nothing shows—nothing; only now, I remember, the little Ukano, the little clever, quick monkey, he is said to have escape—he is gone. So, without doubt, she made this clever plan as has been said. Rather than be put away she will destroy all things—the power, the throne—even the Soesoehoenan! The Surakarta—the great emerald in its box—is guarded always by men who will lose life before they ​lose the emerald. But she knew the secret of the box. Beyond doubt, when we are sent away with the emerald she sends the monkey to follow, choosing this American—James Annis—who for wealth will take risk and charge of all. With such a man, indeed she was desperate. If he got it never might the stone be returned to her; but she does not care—she plan only ruin, revenge by this theft, of which I have accuse Mr. Hereford and would have kill him!"

Max Schimmel turned to the police captain.

"Is the explanation enough?" he demanded.

"Quite," the officer replied. "We have now only to locate whatever Javanese confederates this Annis had here, and by con​fronting them with Annis force them to disclose what has become of the emerald."

Max Schimmel made a gesture which seemed to express at the same time derision and commiseration.

"Haf I not said it, my friendt!" he cried to Hereford. "Haf I not said to you the bolice are dunderheads! Now you see it—you see their stupidity in action; yes, in full oberation!"

He seemed overcome by the revelation, while all stared at him in amazement.

XXII

MAX MAKES FURTHER EXPLAINING UNNECESSARY

The police captain glared at Max Schimmel belligerently, but after an instant he seemed to reflect.

"If you have anything else to say, I'll listen to it," he admitted grudgingly.

Max smiled. "You will delay for that efen search for the acgomplices? That iss very kind. There wass indeed one acgomplice—the Javanese from whose room the bolice brought here the dublicate box. It iss possible too there iss some adherent of the Princess Alarna among the suite of Mr. Baraka, because the suitcase could not haf ​been left long in the room of Baraka for fear he would try to open it. It must indeed haf been carried in when Baraka wass very nearly ready for bed, and it must haf been carried out at once in the confusion after the stealing of the emerald. But that acgomplice, whoever he wass, did not know very much of what was being done—I will show you that he did not efen know that he wass helping to steal the Surakarta. He wass no doubt acgustomed, like many orientals, to do whatefer he wass told, without reasoning what it wass he wass doing; and I wass not at all thinking of him just now. But I wass thinking of the very strange cirgumstances of the dublicate box."

"You have explained about the dublicate box, Schimmel," the police captain interfered.

​"Yes; but I haf not explained all—because at first I wass not able to explain it to myself. I haf said the dublicate box should haf been destroyed, but also I haf said that, in spite of that, I found the dublicate box."

The police captain appeared not to comprehend.

"My friendt," said Max to Hereford, "when I found that dublicate box, then indeed I wass perplexed. How wass it that there wass still this dublicate box? The monkey they would keep—a monkey iss not evidence. But the box—no; as soon as the emerald was stolen, they would destroy the dublicate box which was so incgriminating against themselves! Well, I could understand out of it only this—that the monkey must be in the suitcase which wass carried by the Javanese. So then a plan came into my ​head which afterward in Lincoln Park I carried out; and the plan wass to get a suitcase like the suitcase of the Javanese and steal the suitcase of the Javanese by putting that other in its place. So first I came here to the Tonty and, with the clever Mr. McAdams' help I saw what the suitcase in Baraka's room wass like—because I had not seen very plainly the suitcase of the Javanese which I knew this was like."

"I understand, Max," Hereford nodded to the little German's gesture of interrogation.

"Yes, my friendt; and that night there wass in Baraka's rooms a fire. All the time, my friendt, I had been thinking I was rather shmart; but now I proved that I wass not shmart but wass thinking too much about the monkey. It wass not until after many hours ​that I wass suddenly like one struck, and said to myself, 'Max, you are a fool! It iss because there had to be still a dublicate box that there had to be also a fire! That is why, my friendt, I said the acgomplice in Baraka's suite could not know much. He could be trusted to carry in a suitcase; he could be trusted to set a fire so that the room of Baraka would be left empty and someone else could get in; but he could not be trusted to know that the liddle monkey had failed!"

Hereford started to his feet in excitement, but the German stopped him with a gesture.

"But, Max—!" Hereford exclaimed.

"Yes; at once I came to the Hotel Tonty. But still I had to wait, the Javanese would not be out of their rooms till six. I had plenty of time, before I could get in, to think how the liddle wounded monkey had gone ​up the tapestry, how from there he must haf gone along the wide moulting close to the ceiling—"

"You were here in this room, Max, at six o'clock last night?" Hereford broke out.

The German gravely nodded. "Yes, my friendt; I wass in this room at six o'clock last night, as soon as it wass left empty by the Javanese. I wass here, and with a chair to stand upon I poked eferywhere along the wide mouldting which iss at the top by the wall, until I found that of which I wass in search—that same thing for which you and Mr. Annis one hour later fought, not knowing Max had come already and had got it. Haf I not been right to feel all day around me the walls of the jail when I had not yet got the monkey to show how it had been done and still had—this?"

​As he spoke, he had thrust his hand into his pocket. He brought it out now and displayed upon the palm a glistening, sparkling, flaming green stone—so large that his fingers, when closed, could not entirely conceal it, while it shot out its scintillating green fire—the great green stone of Java, the hereditary royal stone of Surakarta! But Max, now that he had freed himself of responsibility for it seemed to look at it with no other sort of interest than he would have shown toward one of his dried sea-urchins or an impaled beetle.

"You will see,"—he unnecessarily directed their attention to it—"that, as the man once told me, it has indeed a flaw in it—very shmall, it iss true, but opservable as I hold it to the light. That iss so with almost all these great stones." ​

Hereford looked to his ward, and found her look met his, filled with a happy light. Page 369

​For the first seconds, the sight had seemed to paralyze Baraka, as it amazed the others; but now suddenly he galvanized into action. His dark hand closed over Max Schimmel's, as, almost with a shriek, he clutched the stone and hugged it to him. His feet, as if of themselves, left the floor, and, while he hugged the emerald tighter and tighter against him, he half leaped, half danced up and down.

Hereford looked to his ward, and found her look met his, filled with a happy light.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.