Men disappear every day. The police records of any great city and of many smaller places bear almost interminable lists of fellows who have suddenly and curiously dropped out of their grooves and placements. Some are washed up as dead bodies--the slain and self-slain. Some return after long wanderings, to make needless excuses to their friends and families. And others pass from their regular haunts into new fields. These latter are usually poor and fameless gentry, weary of life’s routine. Ambrose Small, however, was a person of different kidney. He was rich, for one thing. Thirty-five years earlier, Sir Henry Irving, on one of his tours to Canada had found the youthful Small taking tickets in a Toronto theater. Attracted by some unusual quality in the youngster, Irving shrewdly advised him to quit the study of law and devote himself to the theatrical business. Following this counsel, Small had risen slowly and surely until he controlled theaters in all parts of the Dominion and was rated at several millions. On the afternoon before his disappearance he had consummated a deal with the Trans-Canada Theaters, Limited, by which he was to receive nearly two millions in money and a share of the profits, in return for his theatrical holdings. The million-dollar check he deposited had been the first payment. Again, Small was a familiar figure throughout Canada and almost as well acquainted in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities of the United States. Figuratively, at least, everybody knew him--thousands of actors, traveling press agents, managers, real estate men, promoters, newspaper folk, advance agents; indeed, all the Wandering Jews and Gentiles of the profession of make-believe, with which he had been connected so long and profitably. With such a list of acquaintances, whose rovings took them to the ends of the earth, how almost impossible it seemed for Small to drop completely out of sight. Finally, Amby Small was a man with a wife and most deeply interested relatives. Entirely aside from the questions of inheritance and the division of his estate, which netted about two millions, as was determined later on, Mrs. Small would certainly want to know whether she was a wife or widow, and the magnate’s sisters would certainly suspect everything and everybody, leaving nothing undone that would bring the man back to his home, or punish those who might have been responsible for any evil termination of his life. Thus the Small case presents very different factors from those governing the ordinary disappearance case. It is full of the elements which make for mystery and bafflement, and it may be set down at once as an enigma of the most arresting and irritating type, upon whose darknesses not the slightest light has ever been shed.