The Black Mask — page 6: what you’re looking at

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

mustache and beard of the cut known shaped lenses, black tie, low tan shoes, blue serge suit with double-breasted coat, a soft black broad-brimmed hat, carried a light weight gray overcoat, a o black Gladstone bag and _ sole-leather : suitcdse. He walked with a slight but 4 noticeable limp of the left leg. Relinquishing coat and bags to a bell- boy, the mewcomer nodded pleasantly to the clerk and registered, in a dis- : tinctly legible hand, the name “Samuel — Smith,” without address. This done, he set his watch by that of the clerk— it was just 10:02 a. m—received his e rand followed the bell-boy to room 2a Tipping the boy generously but not lavishly, he asked that the hotel valet and public stenographer be sent to him. To the one he gave a suit of clothes for pressing; to the other dic- tated two short letters. Returning to the lobby, he bought a dollar’s worth of cigars, asked to be directed to the To- ‘ tem National Bank, glanced at his ey: 1 and commented audibly upon “th time, 10:48, and walked out into the crowded street. ~~ That makes it just a little more un- -usual—eh, what? But don’t be impa- ip tient or jump at conclusions. There is : more to come. On one of those fine Italian spring mornings that pass for summer in the Puget Sound country there entered the Rainier Grand Hotel, Seattle, a man who ordinarily— Well, there’s no use going through it _ all agai in the style of “One dark and stormy night in the Carpathian moun- -tains a robber band Be herd about aes chief—.” _ To clinch the matter, a man of ex- actly the same appearance as described The Man Who Was Seven as Vandyke, spectacles with large egg- left at the same- minute, not only the Savoy and Butlet, but also the Rainier Grand, Washington, Lincoln, Seattle and Frye Hotels. Hotel clerks are observing people, as men go, and each of them, of all seven hotels, not only stated the facts as here set down but swore to them, with many additional and confirmatory details you have not been bothered with. Talk about your alibis! Most men are content with proving that they were » at some one other place at a given time, but here was a man—if the singular pronoun be correct—who was in seven different places at the same time, with some thirty-odd reputable witnesses able to testify to the fact, if it was a fact. That sort of thing isn’t an alibi—it is the fourth dimension. CHAPTER II You never would have taken Jim Carranaugh for-a detective. He was too obvious. Entirely too big. Too big by a number of inches, both ways. To be sure, he could and had, by strenuous starvation, trained down to two hundred and eighty pounds; also, he had reached four hundred and one. Some place between these two ex- tremes might be called normal, if Jim could be called a normal human at any time. Four inches and a half above six feet and almost an equal distance around his equator makes a fairly siz- able man, so it is no wonder he at- tracted and held attention wherever he went. But for all his size, Carranaugh was nimble of hand and foot as well as of wit, and could catch a car or a culprit as readily as the point of a joke. His command of polyglot American was the marvel and joy of his friends, The English language could not be broken into too small or too irregular pieces