Cap," and the cabby grinned. "There wasn't any man."

"Don't attempt to deny--"

"No man, Cap. It was a woman."

"A woman!" the detective repeated. "A woman!"

"Sure thing--a woman, a regular woman. And, Cap, she was a pippin,
a peachorino, a beauty bright," he added, gratuitously.

Mr. Birnes stared thoughtfully across the street for a little while.
So there was a woman in it! Mr. Wynne had transferred the contents
of the gripsack to her, in a cab, on a crowded thoroughfare, right
under his nose!

"I was a little farther down the line there," Johns went on to
explain. "About a quarter of four o'clock, I guess, she came along.
She got in, after telling me to drive slowly up Fifth Avenue so I
would pass Thirty-fourth Street five minutes or so after four
o'clock. If a young man with a gripsack hailed me at the corner I
was to stop and let him get in; then I was to go on up Fifth Avenue.
If I wasn't stopped I was to drive on to Thirty-fifth Street, cut
across to Madison Avenue, down to Thirty-third Street, then back to
Fifth Avenue and past Thirty-fourth Street again, going uptown. The
guy with the gripsack caught us first crack out of the box."

"And then?" demanded the detective eagerly.

"I went on up Fifth Avenue, according to sailing orders, and the guy
inside stopped me at Sixty-seventh Street. He got out and gimme a
five-spot, telling me to go a few blocks, then turn and bring the
lady back to the Sixth Avenue 'L' at Fifty-eighth Street. I done it.
That's all. She went up the steps, and that's the last I seen of
her."

"Did she carry a small gripsack?"

"Yep. It would hold about as much as a high hat."

Explicit as the information was it led nowhere, apparently. Mr.
Birnes readily understood this much, yet there was a chance--a bare
chance--that he might trace the girl on the 'L,' in which case--anyway,
it was worth trying.

"What did she look like? How was she dressed?" he asked.

"She had on one of them blue tailor-made things with a lid to match,
and a long feather in it," the cabby answered obligingly. "She was
pretty as a--as a--she was a beaut, Cap, sort of skinny, and had all
sorts of hair on her head--brownish, goldish sort of hair. She was
about twenty-two or three, maybe, and--and--Cap, she was the goods,
that's all."

In the course of a day a thousand women, more or less, answering that
description in a general sort of way, ride back and forth on the
elevated trains.