“I pretended I had not observed the little scene and did my best not to look in her direction. I got through as quickly as I I could and relieved her of the embarrassment of my presence. As I was paying my check the waiter asked me if I knew whether the other man was coming back. Before I could reply, the girl said, ‘No’; then bit her lip as if mad at herself for speaking.
“She returned to her section after a long time, over an hour. She sat staring out into the darkness for a half-hour more. Then she got up and stepped across the aisle to me. She said:
“ ‘I must ask you to do me a favor. You will think it’s queer, but I can’t help it. You saw the man leave the table when I sat down. I want you to find him and give him this note. I would ask the porter, but I am afraid he might give it to the wrong person. The man is probably in the club car. Just hand him the note. Then come back and tell me. Will you do it?’
“I found him in the club car, delivered the note she had entrusted to me, and returned and reported.
“She said: ‘I am very, very grateful.’
“And then I went forward to the club car again and sat down to be out of the way when he came to her, as I felt sure he would.
“He was at the desk writing, but soon he rose and left. I was in quite a fever of curiosity and it strained my willpower to stay where I was and not follow him and witness ‘Act Two.’ I tried to read and couldn’t. When I finally turned in, close to midnight, the girl’s berth was dark and the curtains drawn.
“I got up at Elkhart. The curtains were open across the aisle, but there was no sign of the girl. There was still no sign of her as we pulled into Englewood. I called the porter and asked whether he had seen her since the night before. He said why, yes, he had seen her around five o’clock, when he had helped her off the train at Toledo. ‘Toledo!’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought she was going through.’ The porter said he had thought so, too, but she must have changed her mind. I inquired if he had seen her talking with a handsome dark man. He said no; that the only real dark man he had seen on that car was himself, and he wasn’t so handsome.
“I stood on the platform in the La Salle Street Station till all the passengers were off. The girl was not among them; I’m sure of that. But the ‘Spaniard’ was, and escorting him were two men obviously detectives, if they have detectives in Chicago.
“In the two days I was there, I read every story in every paper, trying to find a solution to ‘my mystery,’ but without success. And that’s all there is to it, except that Cohan turned down my play.”
“Very interesting!” Mr. Osborne remarked. “I believe if I had been you, I’d have followed the man and his escort, just to satisfy my curiosity.”
“I’d have done that,” said Garner, “if I hadn’t thought there was still a chance that the girl would appear.”
Charley Speed was back from the committee meeting. He and his guest bade the young playwrights goodbye and went out. Blades and Garner discussed the man they had just met.
“He tells dialect stories well,” said Blades.
“If that’s possible,” said Garner. “To me, his own experiences are a lot more interesting.”
“But I think,” said Blades slowly, “I think somebody else told me that same stuff about Lindbergh and—”
“Yes,” interrupted Garner, “and I’m under the impression that the one about Fred Stone isn’t new to me. In fact, I’m pretty sure I heard it from Rex Beach and that Rex was with Stone when it happened.”
Two years later Blades and Garner, now credited with a couple of Broadway hits, were guests at a “small” dinner party given by Wallace Gore, the publisher. Their host presented them to Mr. Henry Wild Osborne, who acknowledged the introduction as if it were a novelty.
Osborne sat between two adoring women who managed to keep him to themselves through the soup. But he was everybody’s property and soon was regaling the whole table with up-to-the-minute episodes in the careers of O’Brien and Berlinsky. He ran out of them at last and his host said: “Harry, I wonder if you’d mind telling these people about your Chicago trip.”
“What Chicago trip?”
“About the girl and the foreigner.”
“Oh, that!” said Osborne. “Well, if you think they’d be interested.”
“Of course they would!”
“Please, Mr. Osborne!”
“All right, then,” said Osborne; “but I trust you folks not to spread it around. The Chicago police made a secret of the real facts and I promised them I wouldn’t divulge it to any of my friends of the Fourth Estate.”
He took a swallow of wine and began:
“It was a month ago I had a wire from Charles Dawes, asking me to come out there and advise him in a little matter—Well, we won’t go into that. I boarded the Broadway Limited and was settling down to a little session with de Maupassant when I noticed a beautiful girl, an authentic, perfect blonde, in the section across from me.
“I am past the age for train flirtations but this girl held my attention by the expression on her face, a look of ineffable sadness, of tragic longing for—I knew not what.
“I was
