“He says the moving picture people have an office
down-town. We can make it if we go now.”
So he called a cab, and we started at a gallop.
There was no sign of the detective. “Upon
my word,” Richey said, “I feel lonely
without him.”
The people at the down-town office of the cinematograph
company were very obliging. The picture had
been taken, they said, at M-, just two miles beyond
the scene of the wreck. It was not much, but
it was something to work on. I decided not to
go home, but to send McKnight’s Jap for my clothes,
and to dress at the Incubator. I was determined,
if possible, to make my next day’s investigations
without Johnson. In the meantime, even if it
was for the last time, I would see Her that night.
I gave Stogie a note for Mrs. Klopton, and with my
dinner clothes there came back the gold bag, wrapped
in tissue paper.
THE SHADOW OF A GIRL
Certain things about the dinner at the Dallas house
will always be obscure to me. Dallas was something
in the Fish Commission, and I remember his reeling
off fish eggs in billions while we ate our caviar.
He had some particular stunt he had been urging the
government to for years—something about
forbidding the establishment of mills and factories
on river-banks—it seems they kill the fish,
either the smoke, or the noise, or something they
pour into the water.
Mrs. Dallas was there, I think. Of course, I
suppose she must have been; and there was a woman
in yellow: I took her in to dinner, and I remember
she loosened my clams for me so I could get them.
But the only real person at the table was a girl
across in white, a sublimated young woman who was
as brilliant as I was stupid, who never by any chance
looked directly at me, and who appeared and disappeared
across the candles and orchids in a sort of halo of
radiance.
When the dinner had progressed from salmon to roast,
and the conversation had done the same thing—from
fish to scandal—the yellow gown turned
to me. “We have been awfully good, haven’t
we, Mr. Blakeley?” she asked. “Although
I am crazy to hear, I have not said ‘wreck’
once. I’m sure you must feel like the survivor
of Waterloo, or something of the sort.”
“If you want me to tell you about the wreck,”
I said, glancing across the table, “I’m
sorry to be disappointing, but I don’t remember
anything.”
“You are fortunate to be able to forget it.”
It was the first word Miss West had spoken directly
to me, and it went to my head.
“There are some things I have not forgotten,”
I said, over the candles. “I recall coming
to myself some time after, and that a girl, a beautiful
girl—”
“Ah!” said the lady in yellow, leaning
forward breathlessly. Miss West was staring
at me coldly, but, once started, I had to stumble
on.
“That a girl was trying to rouse me, and that
she told me I had been on fire twice already.”
A shudder went around the table.
