So it was a queer freak of the demons of chance to perch on my unsusceptible thirty-year-old chest, tie me up with a crime, ticket me with a love affair, and start me on that sensational and not always respectable journey that ended so surprisingly less than three weeks later in the firm’s private office. It had been the most remarkable period of my life. I would neither give it up nor live it again under any inducement, and yet all that I lost was some twenty yards off my drive! It was really McKnight’s turn to make the next journey. I had a tournament at Chevy Chase for Saturday, and a short yacht cruise planned for Sunday, and when a man has been grinding at statute law for a week, he needs relaxation. But McKnight begged off. It was not the first time he had shirked that summer in order to run down to Richmond, and I was surly about it. But this time he had a new excuse. “I wouldn’t be able to look after the business if I did go,” he said. He has a sort of wide-eyed frankness that makes one ashamed to doubt him. “I’m always car sick crossing the mountains. It’s a fact, Lollie. See-sawing over the peaks does it. Why, crossing the Alleghany Mountains has the Gulf Stream to Bermuda beaten to a frazzle.” So I gave him up finally and went home to pack. He came later in the evening with his machine, the Cannonball, to take me to the station, and he brought the forged notes in the Bronson case. “Guard them with your life,” he warned me. “They are more precious than honor. Sew them in your chest protector, or wherever people keep valuables. I never keep any. I’ll not be happy until I see Gentleman Andy doing the lockstep.” He sat down on my clean collars, found my cigarettes and struck a match on the mahogany bed post with one movement. “Where’s the Pirate?” he demanded. The Pirate is my housekeeper, Mrs. Klopton, a very worthy woman, so labeled—and libeled—because of a ferocious pair of eyes and what McKnight called a bucaneering nose. I quietly closed the door into the hall. “Keep your voice down, Richey,” I said. “She is looking for the evening paper to see if it is going to rain. She has my raincoat and an umbrella waiting in the hall.” The collars being damaged beyond repair, he left them and went to the window. He stood there for some time, staring at the blackness that represented the wall of the house next door. “It’s raining now,” he said over his shoulder, and closed the window and the shutters. Something in his voice made me glance up, but he was watching me, his hands idly in his pockets. “Who lives next door?” he inquired in a perfunctory tone, after a pause. I was packing my razor. “House is empty,” I returned absently. “If the landlord would put it in some sort of shape—” “Did you put those notes in your pocket?” he broke in. “Yes.” I was impatient. “Along with my certificates of registration, baptism and vaccination. Whoever wants them will have to steal my coat to get them.”