h rubbed his upper lip with his pink finger and made an effort
to wrinkle his brows. "May I, please?" reaching for the whiskey.
"But have you," he asked, blinking as the soda flew at him, "have
you ever known, yourself, cases that were really inexplicable?"

"A few too many. I was in Washington just before Captain Jack Purden
was married and I saw a good deal of him. Popular army man, fine
record in the Philippines, married a charming girl with lots of
money; mutual devotion. It was the gayest wedding of the winter, and
they started for Japan. They stopped in San Francisco for a week and
missed their boat because, as the bride wrote back to Washington,
they were too happy to move. They took the next boat, were both good
sailors, had exceptional weather. After they had been out for two
weeks, Jack got up from his deck chair one afternoon, yawned, put
down his book, and stood before his wife. 'Stop reading for a moment
and look at me.' She laughed and asked him why. 'Because you happen
to be good to look at.' He nodded to her, went back to the stern and
was never seen again. Must have gone down to the lower deck and
slipped overboard, behind the machinery. It was the luncheon hour,
not many people about; steamer cutting through a soft green sea.
That's one of the most baffling cases I know. His friends raked up
his past, and it was as trim as a cottage garden. If he'd so much as
dropped an ink spot on his fatigue uniform, they'd have found it. He
wasn't emotional or moody; wasn't, indeed, very interesting; simply
a good soldier, fond of all the pompous little formalities that make
up a military man's life. What do you make of that, my boy?"

Cavenaugh stroked his chin. "It's very puzzling, I admit. Still, if
one knew everything----"

"But we do know everything. His friends wanted to find something to
help them out, to help the girl out, to help the case of the human
creature."

"Oh, I don't mean things that people could unearth," said Cavenaugh
uneasily. "But possibly there were things that couldn't be found
out."

Eastman shrugged his shoulders. "It's my experience that when there
are 'things' as you call them, they're very apt to be found. There
is no such thing as a secret. To make any move at all one has to
employ human agencies, employ at least one human agent. Even when
the pirates killed the men who buried their gold for them, the bones
told the story."

Cavenaugh rubbed his hands together and smiled his su