a more or less familiar
performance. They took it rather as a matter of course. It was the
Chinaman, coming in with the coffee tray, who seemed most strangely
affected by it. He stopped where he was in the doorway, rigid, staring
at our girl, though with a changeful light in his eye that seemed to me
to shift between an unreasonable admiration and an unreasonable fear.
Orientals are superstitious; but what could the fellow be afraid of in
the beautiful young thing, Buddha posed, blossoms in her hair? The girl
had gone into her stunt with a sort of angry energy. He seemed to clutch
himself to stillness for the brief time that it held. Only in the moment
that she relaxed, and we knew that Barbara had concentrated, Barbara was
Barbara again, did he move quietly forward, a decent, competent servant,
stepping around the table, placing our cups.

"Just two facts to go on," she said coldly. "My results will be pretty
general."

"Nothing to go on in the way of a description of Clayte," I tried to
help her out. "I'd call that one we had of him as near nothing as it
well could be."

"Yes, the nothingness of it was one of my facts," she said, and stopped.

"Let's hear what you did get, Bobs," Worth prompted; and Skeet giggled,
half under her breath,

"Speech! Speech!"

"At the Gold Nugget--whatever he called himself there--Edward Clayte
was ten years younger than he had seemed at the bank; he appeared to
weigh a dozen pounds more; threw out his chest, walked with his head up,
and therefore would have been estimated quite a bit taller. This
personality was an opposite of the other. Bank clerk Clayte was demure,
unobtrusive; this man wore loud patterns. The bank clerk was silent;
this man talked to every one around him, tilted his hat over one eye,
smoked cigars just as those men were doing that day in the lobby; acted
like them, was one of them. In the Gold Nugget, Clayte was a very
average Gold Nugget guest--don't you see? Commonplace there, just as the
other Clayte had been commonplace in a bank or an office."

Her voice ceased. On the silence it left, Worth spoke up quietly.

"Bull's eye as usual, Bobs. Every word you say is true. And at the Gold
Nugget, his name was Henry J. Brundage. He had room thirty on the top
floor."

Skeet clapped her hands, jumped up and came around the table to kiss
Barbara on the ear, and tell her she was the most wonderfullest girl in
the world.

"Heh!" I flared at Worth. "Find that all o