t card--an
order--for me. For the suitcase."

Cummings was ahead of me, and he turned back to listen, but I crowded
him along and was pretty hot when I faced him in the outer office to
demand,

"What kind of a deal do you call this--ripping in here to throw this
thing at the boy in such a way? What is your idea? What you trying to
put over?"

"Go easy, Boyne." Cummings chewed his words a little before he let them
out. "There's something queer in this business. I intend to know what it
is."

"Queer," I repeated his word. "If the lawyers and the detectives get to
running down all the queer things--that don't concern them a little
bit--the world won't have any more peace."

"All right, if you say it doesn't concern you," Cummings threw me
overboard with relief I thought. "It does concern me. When I couldn't
get--him"--a jerk of the head indicated that the pronoun stood for
Worth--"at the Palace, found he'd been out all day and left no word at
the desk when he expected to be in, I took my telegram to Knapp, and
then to Whipple. They were flabbergasted."

"The bank crowd," I said. "Now why did you run to them? On account of
Worth's engagement with them to-morrow morning? Wasn't that exceeding
your orders? You saw that he intends to meet it, in spite of this."

"Why not because of this?" Cummings demanded sharply. "He's in better
shape to meet it now his father's dead. He's the only heir. That's the
first thing Knapp and Whipple spoke of--and I saw them separately."

"Can that stuff. What do you think you're hinting at?"

"Something queer," he repeated his phrase. "Wake up, Boyne. Knapp and
Whipple both saw Thomas Gilbert a little before noon yesterday. He was
in the bank for the final transfer of the Hanford interests. They'd as
soon have thought of my committing suicide that night--or you doing it.
They swear there was nothing in his manner or bearing to suggest such a
state of mind, and everything in the business he was engaged on to
suggest that he expected to live out his days like any man."

I thought very little of this; it is common in cases of suicide for
family, friends or business associates to talk in exactly this way, to
believe it, and yet for the deep-seated moving cause to be easily
discovered by an unprejudiced outsider. I said as much to Cummings. And
while I spoke, we could hear a murmur of young voices from the inner
room.

"Damn it all," the lawyer's irritation spurted out suddenly, "With a