The Argosy, Vol. 83 No. 1 — page 154: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

144 I came back in a half-hour. But it wasn’t to give him the information he wanted. For the simple reason that I’d gone through all the halls and to every room, whether occupied or not, without finding the party I’d been sent for. I was convinced by that time, whether the man Id left in 419 was it or not, that the absconding bookkeeper was no longer in the hotel. It gave me a creepy feeling to think how he could have gone out with all the exits watched. But that was nothing to the weirdness of the situation as it was pre- sented to me by the man in the brown cerby, who was standing in the middle of the room, when I came back into it. ‘Do you see the same thing that I do?” he blurted out, before I could tell him of my failure to find hide or hair of the man he’d sent me in search of. I turned and looked down at the carpet over by the door, where his finger was pointing and his eyes were wildly staring. The key with the leather number-tag on it, that I’d given to George when he’d taken the husky-looking stranger up to that room, was lying on the floor! “T must have pushed it out with the pass-key!’’ gasped the man who wore the detective’s badge. ‘The door was locked on the inside!” He looked at me, and I looked back at him. His jaw had fallen, and I guess mine hung slack, too—though I wasn’t conscious of it if it did. The man we were hunting for couldn’t have gone out of that room through the only door in it while that door was locked! There was the window. We both rushed over to it and found that it was locked on the inside, too. Once more the sharp- nosed man looked at me without a word, while I looked back at him in the same speechless amazement. If the man had left the room—but he had left it; there was no corner in it where he could have hidden that we hadn’t al- ready looked into. He was gone, and the stolen eight thousand dollars he’d carried into the hotel had gone with him. THE ARGOSY. But the question was no longer where he had gone. It was how he had got out of that room. That anybody could do so under the circumstances was an absolute impossibility. It was plain, though, that the impossible had happened. The lean man in the brown derby sat down again on the side of the bed, and dropped his hands on his knees in a ges- ture of surrender. ‘Well, this beats anything I’ve ever run up against before!” he remarked. I was growing excited in earnest. I had just as good a chance now as the man who wore that detective’s badge under his gray overcoat had to get that five hundred dol- lars. The man he told me he was after had given him the slip, somehow. If I could find out how he’d done it, and nab him, I could claim the reward myself. But how could that stout-looking man I’d sent up to 419, or anybody else, get out of a room leaving the one door and the one window in it locked from the in- side? And—admitting what the proof of my own eyes showed me was the case, that he had actually done so—where could he have gone? He wasn’t in the hotel. And yet nobody had seen him leave it, with the only two ways of getting out of the place closely watched. I looked around slowly at the man who was still sitting on the side of the bed, and found his eyes squinting and un- squinting at my face again. And then the solution of the whole thing burst on me. I don’t know how it hap- pened. But all at once the mystery be- came clear as day. I kicked myself for not having thought of it before. “T take it,” the man in the brown derby questioned me, ‘‘that you didn’t find him in any of the other corridors or rooms, or you'd have said so before?” I steadied my voice before I spoke. ‘““No, I didn’t find him there.” I met his gaze again. “What do you make of this?” I asked, with a sweep of my hand around the room. He rose, repeating his helpless gesture. CORMICGLOOOKS (C@