So long as I was holding on to the notion that the man outside was one of Clanahan's thugs, hanging around to do the boss a mischief, I thought I knew pretty well what I should do when it came to the pinch. Would I really have hauled off and shot a man in cold blood? That's a tough question, but I guess maybe I could have screwed myself up to the sticking point, as the fellow says, with a sure-enough gunman on the other side of that window—and the boss's life at stake. But when I saw that it was young Collingwood, that was a horse of another color.

What on earth was the President's nephew doing, prowling around Major Kendrick's house after eleven o'clock at night, lugging a pistol and peeking into windows? I could see him quite plainly now, in spite of the beaded bamboo thing in the intervening doorway. He had both hands on the sill and was trying to pull himself up so that he could see into the end of the room where the fireplace was.

Just for the moment, there wasn't any danger of a blow-up. Unless he should break the glass in the window, he couldn't get a line on either the boss or Mrs. Sheila—if that was what he was aiming to do. All the same, I kept him covered with the automatic, steadying it against the door-jamb. There had been enough said in that room to set anybody's nerves on edge; or, if it hadn't been said, it had been meant.

While the strain was at its worst, with the man outside flattening his cheek against the window-pane to get the sidewise slant, I heard the boss get out of his chair and say: "I'm keeping you out of bed, as usual; look at that clock! I'll go and wake Jimmie, and we'll vanish."

Just as he spoke, two things happened: a taxi chugged up to the gate and stopped, and the man's face disappeared from the window. I heard a quick padding of feet as of somebody running, and the next minute came the rattle of a latch-key and voices in the hall to tell me that the major and his folks were getting home. I had barely time to pocket the pistol and to drop into a chair where I could pretend to be asleep, when I felt the boss's hand on my shoulder.

"Come, Jimmie," he said. "It's time we were moving along," and in a minute or two, after he had said good-night to the major and Mrs. Kendrick, we got out.

At the gate we found the taxi driver doing something to his motor. With the scare from which I was still shaking to make my legs wobble, I grabbed at the chance which our good angel was apparently holding for us.

"Let's ride," I suggested; and when we got into the cab, I saw a man stroll up from the shadow of the sidewalk cottonwoods and say something to the driver; something that got him an invitation to ride to town on the front seat with the cabby when the car was finally cranked and started. I had a sight of our extra fare's face when he climbed up and put his back to us, and I knew it was Tarbell. But Mr. Norcross didn't.

When we reached the Bullard the boss went right up to his rooms, but I had a little investigation to make, and I stayed in the lobby to put it over. On the open page of the hotel register, in the group of names written just after the arrival of our train from the West at 7:30, I found the signature that I was looking for, "Howard Collingwood, N. Y." Putting this and that together, I concluded that our young rounder had come in from the West—which was a bit puzzling, since it left the inference that he wasn't direct from New York.

Waiting for a good chance at the night clerk, I ventured a few questions. They were answered promptly enough. Young Mr. Collingwood had come in on the 7:30. But he had been in Portal City a week earlier, too, stopping over for a single day. Yes, he was alone, now, but he hadn't been on the other occasion. There was a man with him on the earlier stop-over, and he, also, registered from New York. The clerk didn't remember the other man's name, but he obligingly looked it up for me in the older register. It was Bullock, Henry Bullock; and from the badness of the hand-writing the clerk said, jokingly, that he'd bet Mr. Bullock was a lawyer.

I suppose it was up to me to go to bed. It was late enough, in all conscience, and nobody knew better than I did the early-rising, early-office-opening habits of Mr. Graham Norcross, G.M. Just the same, after I had marked that Mr. Collingwood's room-key was still in its box, I went over to a corner of the lobby and sat down, determined to keep my eyes open, if such a thing were humanly possible, until our rounder should show up.

That determination let me in for a stubborn fight against the sleep habit which ran along to nearly one o'clock. But finally my patience, or whatever you care to call it, was rewarded. Just after the baggage porter had finished sing-songing his call for the night express westbound, my man came in on the run. He was still wearing the cap with two visors, and the long traveling coat was flapping about his legs.

When he rushed over to the counter and began to talk fast to the night clerk, I wasn't very far behind him. He was telling the clerk to get his grips down from the room, adjectively quick, and to hold the hotel auto so that he could catch the midnight westbound. While the boy was gone for the grips, my man made a straight shoot for the bar, and when I next got a sight of him—from behind one of the big onyx-plated pillars of the bar-room colonnade—he was pouring neat liquor down his throat as if it were water and he on fire inside.

That was about all there was to it. By the time Collingwood got back to the clerk's counter, the boy was down with the bags. The regular train auto had gone to the station with some other guests, but the clerk had found a stray taxi, and it was waiting. Collingwood looked up sort of nervously at the big clock, and paid his bill. And while the clerk was getting his change, he grabbed the pen out of the counter inkstand, and made out as if he was shading in a picture, or something, on the open register.

A half-minute later he was gone, striding out after the grip-carrying lobby boy as straight as if he had been walking a tight-rope, and never showing his recent bar visit by so much as the shudder of an eye-lash. When the taxi purred away I turned to the open register to see what our maniac had been drawing in it. What he had done was completely to obliterate his signature. He had scratched it over until the past master of all the hand-writing experts that ever lived couldn't have told what the name was.