She took his arm blithely, happy at her release from work, and they crossed over, went up Grant Avenue to Post Street and there turned toward Union Square. A short distance ahead of them a tall man in a gray mackintosh was walking with somewhat painful carefulness up the street. His deviations seemed to testify to a rather jovial evening’s indulgence. The two rapidly approached him, and Admeh had scarcely time to notice his yellow beard and hair when the stranger turned into a doorway. The house he entered was gaudily painted in red and yellow with stars and crescents, and so fiercely lighted with electric lamps that no wayfarer, however dazed, could fail to notice the sign: “Hammam Baths—Gentlemen’s Entrance.” When Admeh turned to Maxie she was as pale as if she had seen a ghost. She looked up at him with a glitter in her eyes. “Here!” she exclaimed, opening her purse and thrusting a dollar into his hand. “Go in there and see if that man who just went in has the word ’Dotty’ tattooed on his right arm! Find out who he is, and come to the theatre and tell me.” With that she pushed him into the doorway and was gone. THE MYSTERY OF THE HAMMAM With the enthusiasm of an amateur detective, Admeh Drake paid his dollar for admission, and passed through two anterooms into an artificially tropical atmosphere. Turkish baths were a luxury outside the scheme of things; he knew nothing of the arrangements. He paused, uncertain how to proceed; uncertain, too, as to the best plan for catching the yellow-bearded man stripped. While he hesitated, an attendant showed him into a dressing-room. He saw naked men passing with towels twisted about their loins. For the first time in many days, he took off his wrinkled, creased clothes. Pausing on the balcony without the door, he surveyed the carpeted, gaudily decorated apartment below. It was midnight, the busiest hour of the twenty-four in the baths. Heavier than the atmosphere of steam and steamed humanity rose the fumes of liquor. Few there are sober in a Hammam at that elbow of the night. Not knowing that the sweating heat takes the edge and fervor from the wildest intoxication, Admeh wondered, as he watched, at the subdued murmur of their babblings. His eye ranged over a group sitting up in towel robes, chatting drowsily, over a drunken satyr thrusting his heavy limbs from under the covers and singing a sleepy tune, over two others sunk in stupor. Beyond them was a group of jockeys, who had come to reduce weight; all were young, small, keen-eyed, each was puffing a huge cigar. In that bower of transformation, where all men stood equal as at the judgment, their worldly goods shrunk to a single bath towel, he found it hard to pick his man, yet no one could he see with the clay-yellow hair and beard that marked the mysterious person for whom he was searching.