MR. PAUL ZIMMERLEIN’S telephone rang shortly before midnight. He lived in a small, exclusive hotel on one of the crosstown streets, near Fifth Avenue. A brief conversation over the wire ensued. A few minutes later he appeared at the desk in the office downstairs, dressed for the street. He was very angry.

“Why was I not informed when I came in this evening that Mr. Prince had called up and was expecting me to join his party at the Helvetia for supper, Mr. Rogers? He rang me up at nine o’clock and instructed you to put the message in my box.”

“I have no recollection of—”

“Of course you haven’t. You never do have any recollection. None of you. I shall take the matter up with the manager in the morning, Rogers. It has happened before. The least you could have done was to stick the message in my box.”

“I will inquire of the telephone operator. The regular boy is off tonight. If there has been any carelessness, Mr. Zimmerlein, it has been with her,—not with us, sir,” said the clerk, with the servility that is sometimes mistaken for civility on the part of hotel clerks.

“I haven’t time to listen to her excuses. They have been waiting for me since eleven o’clock, and I have been in my room since ten.”

“I know, sir. It was a little before ten when you came in.”

“Well, be good enough to investigate. I warn you that I intend to complain in the morning.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” began the clerk, but Zimmerlein was already on his way to the street.

The night-clerk scowled after him, and then retired behind the key-rack to consult the operator.

“What’s the matter with you?” he demanded. “Zimmerlein’s sore as a crab about not getting a message that came in at nine,—he says,—and he ‘s going to raise hell about it.”

“Nobody called him up,—not till just a few minutes ago. It’s the old gag. I heard what the guy said to Zimmerlein,—about calling up at nine and giving directions and all that bunk,—and I had to hold my tongue between my teeth to keep from butting in and telling him he was a liar, and—”

“Tell that to Mr. Coxhorn in the morning,” broke in the clerk, and moved languidly away. That was the extent of his investigations.

The Helvetia was a brisk five minutes’ walk from Zimmerlein’s hotel. He did it in three.

“Is Mr. Prince entertaining in his rooms or in the café?” he inquired at the desk.

“In the café, Mr. Zimmerlein.”

“Thanks.”

Fifteen minutes later, he sauntered up to a table at which a party of seven or eight people were seated. Nodding and smiling in his most amiable manner to the ladies, he laid his hand on the shoulder of one of the men.

“Sorry, old man, but they didn’t give me your message. I should have been sitting on the doorstep waiting for you, if I’d known you really wanted me. Thanks for calling me up again. It was good of you, and I’ll try to make up for all the lost time and trouble by being as agreeable as I know how to be.” He added an encircling smile. The ladies appeared to cheer up measurably.

The man addressed, a huge individual with a tremendous expanse of white shirt front, betrayed not the slightest sign of surprise or confusion. With all the profound affability of a far-Westerner, he made the newcomer welcome. If his steel-grey eyes bored inquiringly into Zimmerlein’s for the briefest instant, no one else at the table was aware of the fact. Nor did any one observe the warning that shot back from the narrowing eyes of the belated guest.

A waiter produced a chair for Zimmerlein, and placed it between two of the ladies, who, with evident eagerness, made room for him. His smile deepened as he shook his head, affecting dismay.

“Not yet, but soon,” he pleaded. “I ran across an old friend of yours out in the lobby, Prince. Stillwell. I told him you’d be happy to have him join you, but as he’s just off the train, he says he’s filthy.”

“Where is he?” cried Prince, starting up. “I wouldn’t miss seeing him for anything in the world. An old pal of mine in Japan,” he explained to his guests.

“If you will excuse us both, we ‘ll—” began Zimmerlein apologetically.

“Come along,” interrupted Prince, grabbing the other’s arm. “Good old Still! We ‘ll bring him back with us if we have to drag him in. You ‘ll love him,” he added boisterously.

The two men hurried from the café. They did not speak until they reached a deserted corner of the hotel lobby.



0111

“What’s up?” demanded Prince.

“I’ve just bad some damnably disturbing news. It’s pretty bad, but I think I’ve got word to the right people in time to head off—trouble. I was just going to bed when I was called up on the ‘phone. By God, he’s cool-headed, I’ll say that for him. Said he was you, and wanted to know why the devil I hadn’t showed up over here. I was wise in a second. We met in the most casual manner at the corner. He will go a long way, that chap will, mark my words. He’s as keen as a fox and as resolute as the devil. I can’t explain here, Prince. We must get back to your party. My alibi lies there, you know, if I should happen to need it. You understand, don’t you?”

“Certainly. I knew something was in the wind. Is it serious? Tell me that.”

“It can be serious,—desperately serious. But we can’t do anything now. At one o’clock I shall ask you to excuse me, Prince. Engagement very early in the morning. Much-needed rest,—and so on. And, by the way, we were unable to locate Folwell. He—”

“Stillwell, wasn’t it?”

“So it was. ‘Grad, my nerves must be shot up worse than I thought. At any rate, he had vanished.”

“Have you managed to get in touch with any one else?”

“I’ve sent word to—Jehovah!” Zimmerlein permitted himself what was meant to be a smile, but was instead an ugly grin.

“About the only name that’s safe to utter in these days,” said Prince, looking over his shoulder.

“You’ve done your bit tonight, my friend, by simply being who and what and where you are. Nothing more is required of you.”

“I’m not asking questions,” said Prince, scowling.

“You have asked one,” snapped Zimmerlein. “Oh, Lord! Haven’t I a right to—”

“There is nothing more to be said on the subject,” said the other, fixing the big man with a look that caused him to quail. “You know as well as I just what our law is, Prince. I am not above it,—nor are you. Now, let us return.” Shortly after one o’clock, Zimmerlein said good night to the host and the guests upon whom he had deliberately imposed himself, and went forth into the night. A short distance down the street, he was hailed by a lone taxi-driver, who called out in the laconic, perfunctory manner of his kind:

“Taxi?”

Zimmerlein walked on a few paces, and then, apparently reconsidering, turned back.

“Take me to the Pennsylvania,” he said, and got into the cab.

When he took his seat, it was between two men who slunk down in the corners and kept their faces and bodies well out of sight from the occupants of passing cars and pedestrians on the sidewalk.

An unusual amount of clatter attended the getting under way of the car. The exhaust roared, the gears grated and snarled, and the loose links of tire-chains banged resoundingly against the mud-guards.

A quarter of an hour elapsed. Zimmerlein did most of the talking. Then, as the taxi drew up in front of the little hotel in the cross-town street, he got down and handed the driver a bank-note. His last words, before leaving the car, were:

“Remember, now. There must be no mistake, no slip-up. Be dead sure before you do a thing. He is to disappear,—that’s all. There must be no trace,—absolutely no trace.” As he sauntered into the hotel, the taxi rattled swiftly off in the direction of Broadway, its remaining occupants silent and white-faced, but with lips and jaws rigidly set.

“No complaint after all, Rogers,” said he to the night clerk, rather jauntily. “My friend confessed that he hadn’t called me up at all. It was his nice little way of stringing me. Assuage the poor girl’s grief if you know how, Rogers. Tell her it’s all right, and she can sleep soundly at the switch. Also, be good enough to say to her that I apologize for myself and for my friend.”

Rogers watched him enter the elevator, and once more strolled back to the switchboard.

“Hey! Wake up. Zimmerlein’s just come in. He’s stewed and says his friend’s a liar. There won’t be any court-martial.”

The girl yawned. “Say, has that darned old clock stopped, or is it still only ten minutes of two? It’s been that for an hour. Never again for me. Next time Pilcher wants to get off till half-past ‘leven, he needn’t leave a call for me. I’m through accommodating that mutt. My Gawd! Two o’clock, and he swore he’d be here by eleven. I ought to report him. Do a guy like that a favour and he—What was that you said about old Zim-zim? D’you say he was soused?”

“No. I said stewed. He’s carryin’ an egg on an oyster fork. I never saw him drunk before.”

At his usual hour for breakfasting, Mr. Zimmerlein briskly entered the dining-room the next morning and seated himself at his customary table near the window. Two morning newspapers lay beside his plate of sliced oranges. His eyes swept the headlines on the front page. A slight frown darkened his brow. He looked again, a little more closely. Then he took up the other paper. A certain eagerness that had been in his eyes when he sat down gave way to something bordering on astonishment. His interest passed quickly to the second, third and fourth pages.

There wasn’t a line,—not a solitary line about the sinking of the Elston!

He had encountered Elberon late in the afternoon of the preceding day. He was going into the club as the other came out.

“You will read something great in the morning papers,” Elberson had said guardedly. “Perhaps in the extras tonight.”

“I am always reading something great in the newspapers,” he had replied.

“They got the Elston. Report came about two o’clock. No details. I doubt whether it is known in Washington yet.”

But the morning papers had no account of the sinking. Not a word. What did it mean? Could it be possible that their news travelled so much faster than that obtained by the eager, avid Press? Were they even ahead of Washington? Elberon was in a position to know. He never went off half-cocked. There wasn’t the least doubt in Zimmerlein’s mind that the Elston had been sunk,—but why this amazing failure of the newspapers to—— He started suddenly. Comprehension flooded his brain. His eyes lighted up again. He understood in a flash. Suppressed! The news of the destruction of the Elston with all those vitally important men on board,—Why, of course! It had to be suppressed!

Nevertheless, he decided to drop in and see Elberon on his way down town.

As for last night’s business, if it came to a head at all, it was after the papers had gone to press. Still, he took the time to run through both papers with unusual thoroughness. It was barely possible that a paragraph,—one of those widely spaced paragraphs that always exact attention,—might have stopped the presses at the last minute.

He slid indifferently over the account of a disastrous fire along the water-front of an American port from which heavily laden ships departed almost daily for French and English destinations. He knew all about that.

Elberon was not at his place of business. This defection on the part of Elberon exasperated him. It was a new sensation. He could not account for the sudden and admittedly unreasonable sense of irritation that assailed him, for, after all, Elberon regulated his actions according to the demands of his own business. The merchant’s secretary announced that he doubted if his employer would be in the office before noon. He thought he had gone Christmas shopping with his wife.

“Damn Christmas!” muttered Zimmerlein as he closed the door behind him and stalked off into the counter-lined aisles that led by rectangular turns to the street.

The business of the night just ended had got on his nerves. His hand shook a little as he paused inside the doors to light a cigarette. It was a bad “business”; there was no use trying to make light of it.

Miss Mildred Agnew welcomed him with a cheery “Good morning,” and the alert office-boy went her one better by adding the information that it was “a fine day, sir.”

“Any messages, Miss Agnew?” inquired Zimmerlein.

“A telephone call, sir, from the steward of the Black Downs Country Club. He says there is a leak and wants to know if you, as chairman of the house committee, will do something about it right away.”

“A leak?” he demanded, stopping short.

“So he said, Mr. Zimmerlein.”

“Get him on the telephone and ask him to come in and see me at once.”

He was frowning darkly as the office-boy relieved him of his hat and coat and hung them up in the closet. His mail received scant attention. As a matter of fact, he swept the pile aside and touched a button on the corner of the desk.

Thorsensel came into the private office, carrying a roll of blue-prints.

“Any word?” asked Zimmerlein, as the other carefully and deliberately spread the prints on the desk and weighted one end of them down with a heavy steel ruler.

“No. Not a word.”

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