He seemed to take great interest in this discovery. He whipped out a steel tape and rapidly but carefully took a number of measurements, as if to locate the positions of the two wounds. Then he stepped into the cab; and, striking match after match, he spent several minutes apparently in eager search for something which he could not find. "That is strange," he muttered to himself, as he came out at last. "What is it?" inquired Thurston, who alone had caught the words. But the reporter either did not hear or did not care to answer. He at once renewed his search on the brilliantly lighted pavement in the immediate vicinity of the cab; examining every stone, investigating every joint and every rut, prodding with his cane every lump of frozen mud, turning every stray scrap of paper. "Well, Doctor," he said, when at length he rejoined his companion, "if you have done all that you can we may as well go. It is one of the prettiest problems I have met; but there is nothing more for me to learn here for the present. By the way, as I was saying when I interrupted myself a little while ago; are you sure the cabman is drunk? I wish you would take another good look at him. The question may be more important than it seemed at first." A few minutes later, the physician and the reporter were hurrying along to make up for the time they had lost; the cab and the cabman had disappeared in the custody of the police, and the cabman's grewsome fare was jolting through Twenty-sixth Street, in the direction of a small building which stands near the East River, and in which the stranded waifs of the new-world metropolis can find rest at last, upon a stone slab, in the beginning of their eternal sleep. Broadway had resumed its holiday aspect; the wizened hag at the corner still patiently ground out her plaintive discords; the tearful newsboy, with his slowly diminishing armful of newspapers, continued to shiver in the cold wind, as he offered his stock to the hurrying pedestrians; the big policeman again piloted his fair charges through the mass of moving vehicles, and the clanging cable cars started once more on their rumbling course, as if the snapping of a thread in the fabric of the city's life were a thing of constant occurrence and of no moment. A few tiny dark red stains upon the pavement were all that remained to tell the story of the scene which had so recently been enacted in the busy thoroughfare. Presently even these were obliterated by the random stroke of a horse's hoof. The ripple had disappeared from the surface. The stream of life was flowing steadily once more through the arteries of the metropolis. CHAPTER II. THE WAGER.