“Yes,” he said.
“They’re coming home the first of the month.”
Spade’s eyes brightened. “Then we’ve two weeks,” he said.
“I didn’t know what she had done until her letter came. I was frantic.” Her lips trembled. Her hands mashed the dark handbag in her lap. “I was too afraid she had done something like this to go to the police, and the fear that something had happened to her kept urging me to go. There wasn’t anyone I could go to for advice. I didn’t know what to do. What could I do?”
“Nothing, of course,” Spade said, “but then her letter came?”
“Yes, and I sent her a telegram asking her to come home. I sent it to General Delivery here. That was the only address she gave me. I waited a whole week, but no answer came, not another word from her. And Mama and Papa’s return was drawing nearer and nearer. So I came to San Francisco to get her. I wrote her I was coming. I shouldn’t have done that, should I?”
“Maybe not. It’s not always easy to know what to do. You haven’t found her?”
“No, I haven’t. I wrote her that I would go to the St. Mark, and I begged her to come and let me talk to her even if she didn’t intend to go home with me. But she didn’t come. I waited three days, and she didn’t come, didn’t even send me a message of any sort.”
Spade nodded his blond satan’s head, frowned sympathetically, and tightened his lips together.
“It was horrible,” Miss Wonderly said, trying to smile. “I couldn’t sit there like that—waiting—not knowing what had happened to her, what might be happening to her.” She stopped trying to smile. She shuddered. “The only address I had was General Delivery. I wrote her another letter, and yesterday afternoon I went to the Post Office. I stayed there until after dark, but I didn’t see her. I went there again this morning, and still didn’t see Corinne, but I saw Floyd Thursby.”
Spade nodded again. His frown went away. In its place came a look of sharp attentiveness.
“He wouldn’t tell me where Corinne was,” she went on, hopelessly. “He wouldn’t tell me anything, except that she was well and happy. But how can I believe that? That is what he would tell me anyhow, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” Spade agreed. “But it might be true.”
“I hope it is. I do hope it is,” she exclaimed. “But I can’t go back home like this, without having seen her, without even having talked to her on the phone. He wouldn’t take me to her. He said she didn’t want to see me. I can’t believe that. He promised to tell her he had seen me, and to bring her to see me—if she would come—this evening at the hotel. He said he knew she wouldn’t. He promised to come himself if she wouldn’t. He—”
She broke off with a startled hand to her mouth as the door opened.
The man who had opened the door came in a step, said, “Oh, excuse me!” hastily took his brown hat from his head, and backed out.
“It’s all right, Miles,” Spade told him. “Come in. Miss Wonderly, this is Mr. Archer, my partner.”
Miles Archer came into the office again, shutting the door behind him, ducking his head and smiling at Miss Wonderly, making a vaguely polite gesture with the hat in his hand. He was of medium height, solidly built, wide in the shoulders, thick in the neck, with a jovial heavy-jawed red face and some grey in his close-trimmed hair. He was apparently as many years past forty as Spade was past thirty.
Spade said: “Miss Wonderly’s sister ran away from New York with a fellow named Floyd Thursby. They’re here. Miss Wonderly has seen Thursby and has a date with him tonight. Maybe he’ll bring the sister with him. The chances are he won’t. Miss Wonderly wants us to find the sister and get her away from him and back home.” He looked at Miss Wonderly. “Right?”
“Yes,” she said indistinctly. The embarrassment that had gradually been driven away by Spade’s ingratiating smiles and nods and assurances was pinkening her face again. She looked at the bag in her lap and picked nervously at it with a gloved finger.
Spade winked at his partner.
Miles Archer came forward to stand at a corner of the desk. While the girl looked at her bag he looked at her. His little brown eyes ran their bold appraising gaze from her lowered face to her feet and up to her face again. Then he looked at Spade and made a silent whistling mouth of appreciation.
Spade lifted two fingers from the arm of his chair in a brief warning gesture and said:
“We shouldn’t have any trouble with it. It’s simply a matter of having a man at the hotel this evening to shadow him away when he leaves, and shadow him until he leads us to your sister. If she comes with him, and you persuade her to return with you, so much the better. Otherwise—if she doesn’t want to leave him after we’ve found her—well, we’ll find a way of managing that.”
Archer said: “Yeh.” His voice was heavy, coarse.
Miss Wonderly looked up at Spade, quickly, puckering her forehead between her eyebrows.
“Oh, but you must be careful!” Her voice shook a little, and her lips shaped the words with nervous jerkiness. “I’m deathly afraid of him, of what he might do. She’s so young and his bringing her here from New York is such a serious—Mightn’t he—mightn’t he do—something to her?”
Spade smiled and patted the arms of his chair.
“Just leave that to us,” he said. “We’ll know how to handle him.”
“But mightn’t he?” she insisted.
“There’s always a chance.” Spade nodded judicially. “But you can trust us to take care of that.”
“I do trust you,” she said earnestly, “but I want you to
