At the time of the Hesketh mystery I’d only seen it once, one day in the summer when I was out in a hired car with Mrs. Galway and two gentlemen friends from New York. We’d been to Bloomington by train and were motoring back and stopped to get some beer. But we ladies, not liking the looks of the place, wouldn’t go in and had our beer brought out to us by the proprietor, Jake Hines, a tough-looking customer in a shirt without a collar and one of his suspenders broken. It’s very lonesome round there. The nearest house is Cresset’s, a half mile away across the fields. Back of it and all round is Cresset’s land, some of it planted in crops and then strips of woods, making the country in summer look lovely with the dark and the light green. Sunday evening there were only two people in the Wayside Arbor bar, Hines and his servant, Tecla Rabine, a Bohemian woman. Mrs. Hines was upstairs in the room above in bed with a cold. There was a fire burning in the stove, as a good many of Hines’s customers were the dagoes that work at Cresset’s and the other farms and they liked the place warm. Hines was reading the paper and Tecla Rabine was cleaning up the bar before she went upstairs, she having a toothache and wanting to get off to bed. At the inquest Hines swore that he heard no sound of a car or of wheels—which, he said, he would have noticed, as that generally meant business—when there was a step on the piazza, the door opened and a lady came in. He didn’t know who she was but saw right off she wasn’t the kind that you’d expect to see in his place. She had on a long dark fur coat, a close-fitting plush hat with a Shetland veil pushed up round the brim, and looked pale, and, he thought, scared. It was Sylvia Hesketh, but he didn’t know that till afterward. She asked him right off if she could use his telephone and he pointed to the booth in the corner. She went in and closed the door and Hines stepped to the window and looked out to see if there was a car or a carriage that he hadn’t heard, the mud making the road soft. But there was nothing there. Before he was through looking he heard the booth door open and turning back saw her come out. He said she wasn’t five minutes sending her message. That telephone message was the most mysterious one in the case. It was transmitted through the Corona Exchange to Firehill and there was no one in the world who heard it but Jack Reddy. I’m going to put it down here, copied from the newspaper reports of the inquest: