After a little I glanced over. Mrs. Dallas was talking to McKnight, but She was looking straight at me. She was flushed, but more calm than I, and she did not bow. I fumbled for my hat, but the next moment I saw that they were going, and I sat still. When McKnight came back he was triumphant.
“I’ve made an engagement for you,” he said. “Mrs. Dallas asked me to bring you to dinner tonight, and I said I knew you would fall all over yourself to go. You are requested to bring along the broken arm, and any other souvenirs of the wreck that you may possess.”
“I’ll do nothing of the sort,” I declared, struggling against my inclination. “I can’t even tie my necktie, and I have to have my food cut for me.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said easily. “I’ll send Stogie over to fix you up, and Mrs. Dal knows all about the arm. I told her.”
(Stogie is his Japanese factotum, so called because he is lean, a yellowish brown in color, and because he claims to have been shipped into this country in a box.)
The Cinematograph was finishing the program. The house was dark and the music had stopped, as it does in the circus just before somebody risks his neck at so much a neck in the Dip of Death, or the hundred-foot dive. Then, with a sort of shock, I saw on the white curtain the announcement:
The Next Picture
is the doomed Washington Flier, taken a short distance from the scene of the wreck on the fatal morning of September tenth. Two miles farther on it met with almost complete annihilation.
I confess to a return of some of the sickening sensations of the wreck; people around me were leaning forward with tense faces. Then the letters were gone, and I saw a long level stretch of track, even the broken stone between the ties standing out distinctly. Far off under a cloud of smoke a small object was rushing toward us and growing larger as it came.
Now it was on us, a mammoth in size, with huge drivers and a colossal tender. The engine leaped aside, as if just in time to save us from destruction, with a glimpse of a stooping fireman and a grimy engineer. The long train of sleepers followed. From a forward vestibule a porter in a white coat waved his hand. The rest of the cars seemed still wrapped in slumber. With mixed sensations I saw my own car, Ontario, fly past, and then I rose to my feet and gripped McKnight’s shoulder.
On the lowest step at the last car, one foot hanging free, was a man. His black derby hat was pulled well down to keep it from blowing away, and his coat was flying open in the wind. He was swung well out from the car, his free hand gripping a small valise, every muscle tense for a jump.
“Good God, that’s my man!” I said hoarsely, as the audience broke into applause. McKnight half rose: in his seat ahead Johnson stifled a yawn and turned to eye me.
I dropped into my chair limply, and tried to control my excitement. “The man on the last platform of the train,” I said. “He was just about to leap; I’ll swear that was my bag.”
“Could you see his face?” McKnight asked in an undertone. “Would you know him again?”
“No. His hat was pulled down and his head was bent. I’m going back to find out where that picture was taken. They say two miles, but it may have been forty.”
The audience, busy with its wraps, had not noticed. Mrs. Dallas and Alison West had gone. In front of us Johnson had dropped his hat and was stooping for it.
“This way,” I motioned to McKnight, and we wheeled into the narrow passage beside us, back of the boxes. At the end there was a door leading into the wings, and as we went boldly through I turned the key.
The final set was being struck, and no one paid any attention to us. Luckily they were similarly indifferent to a banging at the door I had locked, a banging which, I judged, signified Johnson.
“I guess we’ve broken up his interference,” McKnight chuckled.
Stage hands were hurrying in every direction; pieces of the side wall of the last drawing-room menaced us; a switchboard behind us was singing like a teakettle. Everywhere we stepped we were in somebody’s way. At last we were across, confronting a man in his shirt sleeves, who by dots and dashes of profanity seemed to be directing the chaos.
“Well?” he said, wheeling on us. “What can I do for you?”
“I would like to ask,” I replied, “if you have any idea just where the last cinematograph picture was taken.”
“Broken board—picnickers—lake?”
“No. The Washington Flier.”
He glanced at my bandaged arm.
“The announcement says two miles,” McKnight put in, “but we should like to know whether it is railroad miles, automobile miles, or policeman miles.”
“I am sorry I can’t tell you,” he replied, more civilly. “We get those pictures by contract. We don’t take them ourselves.”
“Where are the company’s offices?”
“New York.” He stepped forward and grasped a super by the shoulder. “What in blazes are you doing with that gold chair in a kitchen set? Take that piece of pink plush there and throw it over a soap box, if you haven’t got a kitchen chair.”
I had not realized the extent of the shock, but now I dropped into a chair and wiped my forehead. The unexpected glimpse of Alison West, followed almost immediately by the revelation of the picture, had left me limp and unnerved. McKnight was looking at his watch.
“He says the moving picture people have an office downtown. We can make it if we go now.”
So he called a cab, and we started at a gallop. There was no sign of the detective. “Upon my word,” Richey said, “I feel lonely without him.”
The people at the downtown office
