Jarvis bought a bad cigar, but he did not light it. On the contrary, he was absently crushing the little roll of alleged tobacco in his hand as he went out and up the street. And a little later, when he was crossing Larimer Street on his way to the rendezvous, he was still scattering the powdered cabbage leaves in a thin trail of brown dust behind him as he strode along. “It is a sheer miracle--nothing less!” he muttered. “Tom Deverney has told me that story more than a dozen times before, and he left out the whole heart of it every time until to-night. That knocks out one of the mysteries with a good clean body blow. It wasn’t young Langford who ransacked Brant’s room; it was ‘his Blacks,’ as Deverney calls him. And if he was drunk when he did it, he was sober enough when he sent the boy for the cast-off pepper-and-salts that might have betrayed him. Lord of love! if I only knew what he was after!” Like a flash of inspiration the answer tripped upon the heels of the question. Antrim had told the reporter about the packet of papers given him by Brant for safe-keeping, but not until this instant had Jarvis been able to put two and two together. “That’s it--that is the whole thing in a nutshell!” he ejaculated. “This fellow and Harding were partners and Harding put him up to steal those papers. Lord, Lord, what a flock of purblind bats we’ve been!” But the night of miracles was yet young. When the reporter had crossed the street, narrowly escaping the wire scoop net of a passing cable car in his abstraction, he stumbled upon one of the employees of the Osirian Club, the doorkeeper who had been on duty in the upper corridor on the night of the tragedy. Jarvis stopped to buttonhole the man from sheer force of reportorial habit. “Hello, Binkie! Going on watch?” he queried. The man nodded. “One demnition grind, isn’t it? Anything new?” “No. Business has been mighty quiet with us since that scrap in Number Seven.” “Go shy, do they? That will wear off in time. By the way, Binkie, there wasn’t anybody else in the big room that night when George Brant went in, was there?” “Not a soul.” The man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, and then added, as one who seeks to divide a harassing burden: “That’s what I told the police, and it’s what I say now. But for all that, there was a blamed queer thing happened that I haven’t told anybody, and I’ve sweat about it till I’m galded raw.” “What was it?” Jarvis forced himself to ask the question carelessly, but anxiety and eagerness were fairly suffocating him.