The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 41

"Your guests won't be sorry, I imagine," he replied, as he looked at his silver turnip of a watch. "And we're losing good time."

"Please go," said Alice Churchill, emboldened, apparently, by some instinctive conclusion which she could not, or did not care to, explain. And she was backed up, I noticed, by a nod from her brother.

I also noticed, as I rose to my feet, that I still held the necklace in my hand. I was a little puzzled as to just what to do with it.

"That," said the sagacious stranger, "you'd better leave here. Let the young lady keep it until we get back. And you, Fessant," he went on, turning to the belligerent-lipped jewel thief, "you stay right here and make yourself pleasant. And without bein' rude, you might see that the young lady and her brother stay right here with you."

Then he took me companionably by the arm and led me away.

"What's the exact meaning of all this?" I inquired as we threaded our course out to the cab-stand and went dodging westward along Forty-third Street in a taxi. The rain, I noticed, through the fogged window, was still falling.

"I want you to show me exactly where that man sat in that box," was his answer. "And two minutes in the theater will do it."

"And what good," I inquired, "is that going to do me?"

"It may do you a lot of good," he retorted, as he flung open the cab door.

"I feel rather sorry for you if it doesn't," was my answer as I followed him out. We had drawn up before a desolate-looking stage door over which burned an even more desolate-looking electric bulb. The man turned and looked at me with a short ghost of a grunt, more of disgust than contempt.

"You're pretty nifty, aren't you, for a New York edition of Jesse James?"

And without waiting for my answer he began kicking on the shabby-looking stage door with his foot. He was still kicking there when the door itself was opened by a man in a gray uniform, obviously the night watchman.

"h.e.l.lo, Tim!" said the one.

"h.e.l.lo, Bud!" said the other.

"Doorman gone?"

"'Bout an hour ago!"

Then ensued a moment of silence.

"Burnside say anything was turned in?"

"Didn't hear of it," was the watchman's answer.

"My friend here thinks he's left something in a box. Could you let us through?"

"Sure," was the easy response. "I'll throw on the house-lights for youse. Watch your way!"

He preceded us through a maze of painted canvas and what looked like the backs of gigantic picture-frames. He stepped aside for a moment to turn on a switch. Then he opened a narrow door covered with sheet-iron, and we found ourselves facing the box entrances.

My companion motioned me into the second box while he stepped briskly into that nearer the foot-lights.

"Now, the young lady sat there," he said, placing the gilt chair back against the bra.s.s railing. Then he sat down in it, facing the stage.

Having done so, he took off his hat and placed it on the box floor.

"Now you show me where that man sat."

I placed the chair against the plush-covered parapet and dropped into it.

"Here," I explained, "within two feet of where you are."

"All right!" was his sudden and quite unexpected rejoinder. "That's enough! That'll do!"

He reached down and groped about for his hat before rising from the chair. He brushed it with the sleeve of his coat absently, and then stepped out of the box.

"We'd better be getting back," he called to me from the sheet-iron covered doorway.

"Back to what?" I demanded, as I followed him out through the canvas-lined maze again, feeling that he was in some way tricking me, resenting the foolish mystery which he was flinging about the whole foolish maneuver.

"Back to those guests of yours and some good old-fas.h.i.+oned common sense," was his retort.

But during the ride back to Sherry's he had nothing further to say to me. His answers to the questions I put to him were either evasive or monosyllabic. He even yawned, yawned openly and audibly, as we drew up at the carriage entrance of that munificently lighted hostelry. He now seemed nothing more than a commonplace man tired out at the completion of a commonplace task. He even seemed a trifle impatient at my delay as I waited to check my hat and coat--a formality in which he did not join me.

"Now, I can give you people just two minutes," he said, as the five of us were once more seated at the same table and he once more consulted his turnip of a watch. "And I guess that's more'n we'll need."

He turned to the wan and tired-eyed girl, who, only too plainly, had not altogether enjoyed her wait.

"You've got the necklace?" he asked.

She held up a hand from which the string of graduated pearls dangled.

The man then turned to me.

"You took this string of pearls away from this man?" he asked, with a quick nod toward the jewel thief.

"I a.s.suredly did," was my answer.

"Knowing he had taken them from this young lady earlier in the evening?"

"Your a.s.sumption bears every mark of genius!" I a.s.sured him.

He turned back to the girl.

"Is that your necklace?" he curtly demanded.

The girl looked at me with clouded and troubled eyes. We all felt, in some foolish way, that the moment was a climactic one.

"No!" she answered, in little more than a whisper.

"You're positive?"

She nodded her head without speaking. The man turned to me.

"Yet you followed this man, a.s.saulted him, and forcibly took that necklace away from him?"

"Hold on!" I cried, angered by that calmly pedagogic manner of his. "I want you to un--"