ight. Good-by."

This was the beginning. For the middle part Kent burst out of the
telephone-box and took the nearest short-cut through the capitol grounds
for the street-car corner. At a quarter of nine he was cross-questioning
the clerk face to face in the lobby of the Wellington. There was little
more to be learned about Ormsby. The club-man had left his key and gone
out. He was in evening dress, and had taken a cab at the hotel entrance.

Kent dashed across to his rooms and, in a feverish race against time, made
himself fit to chase a man in evening dress. There was no car in sight
when he came down, and he, too, took a cab with an explosive order to the
driver: "124 Tejon Avenue, and be quick about it!"

It was the housemaid that answered his ring at the door of the Brentwood
apartment. She was a Swede, a recent importation; hence Kent learned
nothing beyond the bare fact that the ladies had gone out. "With Mr.
Ormsby?" he asked.

"Yaas; Aye tank it vill pee dat yentlemans."

The pursuer took the road again, rather unhopefully. There were a dozen
places where Ormsby might have taken his charges. Among them there was the
legislative reception at Portia Van Brock's. Kent flipped a figurative
coin, and gave the order for Alameda Square. The reception was perhaps the
least unlikely place of the dozen.

He was no more than fashionably late at the Van Brock house, and
fortunately he was able to reckon himself among the chosen few for whom
Miss Portia's door swung on hospitable hinges at all hours. Loring had
known her in Washington, and he had stood sponsor for Kent in the first
week of the exile's residence at the capital. Thereafter she had taken
Kent up on his own account, and by now he was deep in her debt. For one
thing, she had set the fashion in the matter of legislative
receptions--her detractors, knowing nothing whatever about it, hinted that
she had been an amateur social lobbyist in Washington, playing the game
for the pure zest of it--and at these functions Kent had learned many
things pertinent to his purpose as watch-dog for the railroad company and
legal adviser to his chief--things not named openly on the floor of the
House or of the Senate chamber.

There was a crush in the ample mansion in Alameda Square, as there always
was at Miss Van Brock's "open evenings," and when Kent came down from the
cloakroom he had to inch his way by littles through the crowded
reception-parlors in the search for the