together a paltry
hundred thousand, which Wardrop gets at the capital, and brings on.
Wardrop is robbed, or says he is: the bank collapses and Clarkson,
driven to the wall, kills himself, just after Fleming is murdered. What
does that sound like?"

"Like Clarkson!" I exclaimed. "And Clarkson knew Fleming was hiding at
the White Cat!"

"Now, then, take the other theory," he said, pushing aside his cup.
"Wardrop goes in to Fleming with a story that he has been robbed:
Fleming gets crazy and attacks him. All that is in the morning--Friday.
Now, then--Wardrop goes back there that night. Within twenty minutes
after he enters the club he rushes out, and when Hunter follows him, he
says he is looking for a doctor, to get cocaine for a gentleman
up-stairs. He is white and trembling. They go back together, and find
you there, and Fleming dead. Wardrop tells two stories: first he says
Fleming committed suicide just before he left. Then he changes it and
says he was dead when he arrived there. He produces the weapon with
which Fleming is supposed to have killed himself, and which, by the way,
Miss Fleming identified yesterday as her father's. But there are two
discrepancies. Wardrop practically admitted that he had taken that
revolver from Fleming, not that night, but the morning before, during
the quarrel."

"And the other discrepancy?"

"The bullet. Nobody ever fired a thirty-two bullet out of a
thirty-eight caliber revolver--unless he was trying to shoot a
double-compound curve. Now, then, who does it look like?"

"Like Wardrop," I confessed. "By Jove, they didn't both do it."

"And he didn't do it himself for two good reasons: he had no revolver
that night, and there were no powder marks."

"And the eleven twenty-two, and Miss Maitland's disappearance?"

He looked at me with his quizzical smile.

"I'll have to have another steak, if I'm to settle that," he said. "I
can only solve one murder on one steak. But disappearances are my
specialty; perhaps, if I have a piece of pie and some cheese--"

But I got him away at last, and we walked together down the street.

"I can't quite see the old lady in it," he confessed. "She hadn't any
grudge against Fleming, had she? Wouldn't be likely to forget herself
temporarily and kill him?"

"Good Lord!" I said. "Why, she's sixty-five, and as timid and gentle a
little old lady as ever lived."

"Curls?" he asked, turning his bright blue eyes on me.

"Yes," I admitted.

"Wo