“Will you be quiet! I have no desire to hear the details of your repast.”
“Oh, sorry! I thought you had.”
“You have been away long enough to have eaten half-a-dozen dinners. However, as it happens, you are not too late. I have something to show you.”
“That’s good. Moral turpitude pretty strong on the wing, eh?”
“A few moments ago,” said Mrs. Waddington, leading the way to the roof, “I observed a young woman enter what appears to be some kind of outdoor sleeping-porch attached to George Finch’s apartment, and immediately afterwards I heard her voice in conversation with George Finch within.”
“Turpy,” said his lordship, shaking his head reprovingly. “Very turpy.”
“I came down to fetch Ferris, my butler, as a witness, but fortunately you have returned in time. Though why you were not back half an hour ago I cannot understand.”
“But I was telling you. I dallied with a mouthful of Julienne. …”
“Be quiet!”
Lord Hunstanton followed her, puzzled. He could not understand what seemed to him a morbid distaste on his companion’s part to touch on the topic of food. They came out on the roof, and Mrs. Waddington, raising a silent and beckoning finger, moved on tiptoe towards the sleeping-porch.
“Now what?” inquired his lordship, as they paused before the door.
Mrs. Waddington rapped upon the panel.
“George Finch!”
Complete silence followed the words.
“George Finch!”
“George Finch!” echoed his lordship, conscious of his responsibilities as a chorus.
“Finch!” said Mrs. Waddington.
“George!” cried Lord Hunstanton.
Mrs. Waddington flung open the door. All was darkness within. She switched on the light. The room was empty.
“Well!” said Mrs. Waddington.
“Perhaps they’re under the bed.”
“Go and look.”
“But suppose he bites at me.”
Nothing is truer than that the secret of all successful operations consists in the overlooking of no eventuality, but it was plain that Mrs. Waddington considered that in this instance her ally was carrying caution too far. She turned on him with a snort of annoyance: and, having turned, remained staring frozenly at something that had suddenly manifested itself in his lordship’s rear.
This something was a long, stringy policeman: and, though Mrs. Waddington had met this policeman only once in her life, the circumstances of that meeting had been such that the memory of him had lingered. She recognised him immediately: and, strong woman though she was, wilted like a snail that has just received a handful of salt between the eyes.
“What’s up?” inquired Lord Hunstanton. He, too, turned. “Oh, what ho! the constabulary!”
Officer Garroway was gazing at Mrs. Waddington with an eye from which one of New York’s Bohemian evenings had wiped every trace of its customary mildness. So intense, indeed, was the malevolence of its gleam that, if there had been two such eyes boring into hers, it is probable that Mrs. Waddington would have swooned. Fortunately, the other was covered with a piece of raw steak and a bandage, and so was out of action.
“Ah!” said Officer Garroway.
There is little in the word “Ah!” when you write it down and take a look at it to suggest that under certain conditions it can be one of the most sinister words in the language. But hear it spoken by a policeman in whose face you have recently thrown pepper, and you will be surprised. To Mrs. Waddington, as she shrank back into the sleeping-porch, it seemed a sort of combination of an Indian war-whoop, the Last Trump, and the howl of a pursuing wolf-pack. Her knees weakened beneath her, and she collapsed on the bed.
“Copped you, have I?” proceeded the policeman.
The question was plainly a rhetorical one, for he did not pause for a reply. He adjusted the bandage that held the steak, and continued his remarks.
“You’re pinched!”
It seemed to Lord Hunstanton that all this was very odd and irregular.
“I say, look here, you know, what I mean to say is. …”
“So are you,” said Officer Garroway. “You seem to be in it, too. You’re both pinched. And start any funny business,” concluded the constable, swinging his nightstick in a ham-like fist, “and I’ll bend this over your nut. Get me?”
There followed one of those pauses which so often punctuate the conversation of comparative strangers. Officer Garroway seemed to have said his say. Mrs. Waddington had no observations to make. And, though Lord Hunstanton would have liked to put a question or two, the spectacle of that oscillating nightstick had the effect of driving the words out of his head. It was the sort of nightstick that gave one a throbbing feeling about the temples merely to look at it. He swallowed feebly, but made no remark.
And then from somewhere below there sounded the voice of one who cried “Beamish! Hey, Beamish!” It was the voice of Sigsbee H. Waddington.
II
Nothing is more annoying to the reader of a chronicle like this than to have somebody suddenly popping up in some given spot and to find that the historian does not propose to offer any explanation as to how he got there. A conscientious recorder should explain the exits and the entrances of even so insignificant a specimen of the race as Sigsbee H. Waddington: and the present scribe must now take time off in order to do so.
Sigsbee H., it may be remembered, had started out to search through New York for a policeman named Gallagher: and New York had given him of its abundance. It had provided for Mr. Waddington’s inspection a perfect wealth of Gallaghers: but, owing to the fact that what he really wished to meet was not a Gallagher but a Garroway, nothing in the nature of solid success had rewarded his efforts. He had seen tall Gallaghers and small Gallaghers, thin Gallaghers and stout Gallaghers, a cross-eyed Gallagher, a pimpled Gallagher, a Gallagher with red hair, a Gallagher with a broken nose, two Gallaghers who looked like bad dreams, and a final supreme Gallagher who looked like nothing on earth. But he had not found the man to whom he had sold the stock of the Finer and Better Motion Picture
