inclined to think--" he was speaking partly to himself--"to think
that he has got hold of a letter of mine, probably to Alison.
Bronson was a friend of her rapscallion of a father."

I took Mr. Gilmore's deposition and put it into my traveling-bag
with the forged notes. When I saw them again, almost three weeks
later, they were unrecognizable, a mass of charred paper on a copper
ashtray. In the interval other and bigger things had happened: the
Bronson forgery case had shrunk beside the greater and more imminent
mystery of the man in lower ten. And Alison West had come into the
story and into my life.



CHAPTER II

A TORN TELEGRAM


I lunched alone at the Gilmore house, and went back to the city at
once. The sun had lifted the mists, and a fresh summer wind had
cleared away the smoke pall. The boulevard was full of cars flying
countryward for the Saturday half-holiday, toward golf and tennis,
green fields and babbling girls. I gritted my teeth and thought of
McKnight at Richmond, visiting the lady with the geographical name.
And then, for the first time, I associated John Gilmore's granddaughter
with the "West" that McKnight had irritably flung at me.

I still carried my traveling-bag, for McKnight's vision at the window
of the empty house had not been without effect. I did not transfer