said kindly, "but I
will let you know."

He turned and walked back toward Helen's room. Just then the door was
opened and there appeared a sort of elongated baby-cab, without a top.
On this wheeling table was a still white bundle, from which a stifled
moan escaped now and then. Shaken with terror and nausea, I ran for
the stairs and did not stop until I got into my car and was racing away.

As I drove, my brain cleared and I remembered that there were others to
whom the tragedy was almost as vital as to myself and who ought to be
informed. I stopped at a corner drug store and called up Mary. Mother
should not be told until a physician could assure me she was strong
enough to stand the shock.

Mary was wonderfully sympathetic and tender, not voluble the way some
women would have been. She asked me if I had been to the scene of the
accident, and when I told her I was just going, she asked me if I
wanted her with me. As it was after ten o'clock and the rain had begun
again, I told her "No," and added that I'd come to see her in the
morning.

When I left the telephone-booth the drug clerk stared at me
inquisitively.

"You look all fagged out," he said frankly.

"I'm not feeling very well," I replied, struggling into my rain-coat.

"Better let me give you somethin' to fix you up," he suggested. I
acquiesced, and he went to the shelf and shook some white powder into a
glass. Then he put some water with it and it phizzed merrily. I drank
it at a gulp and, climbing into the car, started for the second bridge
on the Blandesville Road.

The drink braced me up and as I drove I began to recall the events of
the last few days, and for the first time to wonder if they had any
connection with the tragedy. Captain Wadsworth had told me it was an
accident. Could Frank Woods have been in any way responsible? No,
certainly not, for Helen had been in the car, and he surely would never
have done anything to put her life in jeopardy. _But Woods didn't know
that she was there_. He had told Jim to come out alone; had insisted
on it, in fact. It was _Jim's_ idea to bring Helen with him.

My heart was doing a hundred revolutions to the minute. Now that I had
hit on this idea, every fiber of my being cried out that Frank Woods
was in some way responsible. I tried to urge my car to more speed.
The wreck would surely tell me something. I determined to hunt every
inch of ground around the place for a clue. Woods would h