roffin's happened upon a Wednesday, which, in its
calendar placing, chanced to be three weeks to a day after Griswold had
left Mereside to settle himself studiously in two quiet upper rooms in
the Widow Holcomb's house in upper Shawnee Street.

That it was also a day of other coincidences will appear in the casting
up of the items on the page of events.

For one thing, it marked the formal opening of the De Soto Inn for the
summer season; the De Soto being the resort hotel spoken of by the clerk
of the Hotel Chouteau in the little ante-dinner talk which had given
Griswold his first outline sketch of Wahaska. For another, the special
train from the far South arriving at noon and bearing the first
detachment of the Inn's guests, had for one of its Pullman passengers an
elderly gentleman with a strongly marked Scottish face; a gentleman with
the bushy white eyebrows of age, the long upper lip of caution, the
drooping eyelid of irascibility, and the bearing of a man of routine; in
other words, Mr. Andrew Galbraith, faring northward on his customary
summer vacation, which--the fates intervening--he had this time
determined to spend at the Wahaskan resort.

For a third item, it was at three o'clock of this same Wednesday that
Raymer came out of Jasper Grierson's bank with his head down and a cloud
on his brow; the cloud dating back to an interview just closed, a short
and rather brittle conference with the bank's president held in Jasper
Grierson's private room, with the president sitting at ease in his huge
arm-chair and his visitor standing, quite destitute of ease, at the
desk-end.

A little farther along, this third item dovetailed with a fourth and
fifth. Raymer, dropping into a friend's office to use the telephone,
chanced upon a crossed wire. He had called up Mrs. Holcomb, and while he
was waiting for the widow to summon Griswold from his up-stairs den,
there was a confused skirling of bells and Raymer, innocently
eavesdropping, overheard part of a conversation between two well-known
voices; namely, the voices of Miss Charlotte Farnham and her father. The
talk was neither confidential, nor of any special significance. Miss
Farnham was explaining that she had heard the bell, but could not answer
promptly because she had had a caller; and the doctor was telling her
that it was no matter--that he merely wanted to let her know that he was
going to bring a dinner guest, the guest prospective being his late
patient, Mr.