door after glancing
back and bowing to the librarian who smiled a good-by.

The street was dark save for the glow of the overhead arcs. He thrust
out his arm and tested the snow fall. It was not as heavy as when he
had entered the library. He went down the steps, turned toward the
north and plowed along the sidewalk.

Suddenly the thought came to him to glance at his watch. He had
forgotten time and place over the hours in the pursuit of knowledge
which might and might not be applied to the case at hand. It was almost
six o'clock.

"Lord," he said in surprise. "I'm going crazy. Two hours in a trance.
Now for work. I wonder what the operatives will have to report? They
ought to have something. I wonder," he added, peering under the fine
drizzle of snow, "I wonder where the nearest telephone is located?
Another block, I guess."

His brain gathered up the skeins of the case as he hurried along.
Fingerprints, plaster-casts, smooth bullets, locked rooms and a
raven-black magpie, trooped into their proper formation. He dwelt
longest on the telephone information he had gathered in the library.
The case seemed bound up in whispering wires and broken connections
which might be spliced together with patience and hard work.

The whole matter, from the call of the millionaire, down to the clew
discovered in comparing the finger prints at Detective Headquarters,
was a city-spread network of telephone connections which had to be
traced back to an elusive individual who flitted like a shadow or a
whirling dervish across the detective's vision.

He reached the drug-store, paused outside, glanced up and down the
white-robed street, then pressed the door open and stamped inside. He
found a nickel. Dropping this in the slot and closing the booth, he
asked Central for his office phone.

The connection was made with Harrigan on the other end. "What's new in
the Stockbridge case?" asked Drew in a whisper.

He listened. He grew rigid as the faithful operative summed up the
entire series of reports. There were six of them. The last was from
Delaney.

"Hang up!" the detective almost shouted in his eagerness. "Hang up,
Harrigan, and let me get him."

Finding a quarter instead of a nickel, Drew dropped it in the large
slot and jiggled the receiver's hook until Central answered.

"Get me Gramercy Hill 9764!" he exclaimed. "Quick! 9764 Gramercy Hill!"

"That's her number," he said aloud. "Loris Stockbridge's number. It
must be her n