And yet, when I thought it all over, the entire week and its events
were two sides of a triangle that was narrowing rapidly to an apex, a
point. And the said apex was at that moment in the drive below my
window, resting his long legs by sitting on a carriage block, and
smoking a pipe that made the night hideous. The sense of the ridiculous
is very close to the sense of tragedy. I opened my screen and whistled,
and Johnson looked up and grinned. We said nothing. I held up a handful
of cigars, he extended his hat, and when I finally went to sleep, it
was to a soothing breeze that wafted in salt air and a faint aroma of
good tobacco. I was thoroughly tired, but I slept restlessly, dreaming
of two detectives with Pittsburg warrants being held up by Hotchkiss at
the point of a splint, while Alison fastened their hands with a chain
that was broken and much too short. I was roused about dawn by a light
rap at the door, and, opening it, I found Forbes, in a pair of trousers
and a pajama coat. He was as pleasant as most fleshy people are when
they have to get up at night, and he said the telephone had been
ringing for an hour, and he didn’t know why somebody else in the
blankety-blank house couldn’t have heard it. _He_ wouldn’t get to sleep
until noon.
As he was palpably asleep on his feet, I left him grumbling and went to
the telephone. It proved to be Richey, who had found me by the simple
expedient of tracing Alison, and he was jubilant.
“You’ll have to come back,” he said. “Got a railroad schedule there?”
“I don’t sleep with one in my pocket,” I retorted, “but if you’ll hold
the line I’ll call out the window to Johnson. He’s probably got one.”
“Johnson!” I could hear the laugh with which McKnight comprehended the
situation. He was still chuckling when I came back.
“Train to Richmond at six-thirty A.M.,” I said. “What time is it now?”
“Four. Listen, Lollie. We’ve got him. Do you hear? Through the woman at
Baltimore. Then the other woman, the lady of the restaurant”—he was
obviously avoiding names—“she is playing our cards for us. No—I don’t
know why, and I don’t care. But you be at the Incubator to-night at
eight o’clock. If you can’t shake Johnson, bring him, bless him.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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