The Argosy, Vol. 84 No. 1 — page 60: what you’re looking at

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

50 half-formed plan of getting to New Jersey first of all and then telephoning back, probably to Dr. Whinnys for a beginning. Even that was done for now. And what—wzhat had it all been about? What had Harrison meant when he said that he was in it for the joke of the thing and implied that the others were involved, for reasons far from playful? What had been the answer to all that happened in the house on the heights? Why had he been lured to the St. Marks Avenue home, evidently Fenner’s? What was Polly Whinnys’s connection with the insane business, and what—just here Dr. Jim forgot the recent past and returned to the immediate minute with a distress- ing jar. : For, coming out of the black, early morning, a policeman had boarded the car and now, standing on the platform, he was looking at Dr. Bowen! The practitioner from Hallas, glancing up for a startled second or so, found the penetrating official eyes directly upon him and glanced away again as quickly. With- out ever having seen it before, he knew the significance of that penetrating stare quite well! His description had gone out to the po- lice by telephone by now; this man, with his brass buttons and his shining shield, had caught sight of him from the street and stepped aboard for a closer inspec- tion. He was making it now and—or, no, he wasn’t watching so keenly now, but that failed to fool. James Bowen, M.D. The officer, in fact, was looking away from him and into_the night with a studied in- difference even more ghastly than his stare. He had his man! There was no need of rushing in and grabbing him. He was waiting, doubtless, until the car came nearer to the next police station, and then he would tap Dr. Bowen and request his company to a cell. And he and his good quarter and his bad half-dollar would be locked up to- gether, and later in the day three rich THE ARGOSY. men, for reasons of their own, would try railroading him to the penitentiary and— automatically, without thought because he dared not think, Dr. Jim rose and stepped to the platform. Automatically, he dropped from the car to the street, staggered and spun around but still kept his feet, and reached the dark sidewalk! Again, he was somewhere in the suburbs! At the other end of the block the car was bowling along swiftly, but conductor and policeman were gazing back at him; the latter, indeed, was shading his eyes and peering over the side of the platform. And as the car stopped they conferred, and it seemed to Dr. Jim, just as he turned the corner into a blacker street than this one, that the policeman was on the point of following him. Dr. Bowen, innocent of everything but a nervous system rasped to a saw-tooth edge, swallowed a convulsive gasp and ran! He raced no more than twenty yards, however! He pulled himself back to a walk so suddenly that the slide of his feet echoed through the suburban solitude— because there was another police uniform just ahead of him. And what was more terrible, while he had fancied this latest officer to be going in the other direction, he was doing nothing of the kind! He was strolling straight for Dr. James Bowen! Very likely he needs no apology at all; Dr. Jim, as a rule, was the calmest mortal in the world—but he was almost anything else this morning. He did neither more nor less than lose his head completely! He shot one last look toward the police- man and stepped into the presumably im- penetrable gloom of somebody’s dry lawn; he crouched and raced directly across it, did Dr. Jim—and coming to the low fence at the far end, he laid a hand on the top- most iron rail and vaulted over, quickly and quietly, to the dry lawn of another unknown suburbanite. And, according to his reasoning of the moment, he had made no mistake! The (e() .TOO AMG Ss EO)