Although it was nearly three before Lyon went to sleep, he awoke the next morning earlier than usual and lay for some time figuring on the problem that possessed his mind before he thought of such a thing as dressing. He must see Howell and acquaint him with the strange developments of the night before as soon as possible, but Howell was old-fashioned, and he kept no telephone at his residence, for the express purpose of warding off the intrusion of business matters upon his hours at home. It was useless, therefore, to try to communicate with him before he reached his office, which would be at ten precisely.

While Lyon lay speculating on the situation, his eye fell upon the knotted handkerchief containing the booty which he had brought away from his raid upon Fullerton's room last night. The pressing incidents that had followed had put it for the time completely out of his mind. He sprang from the bed to examine it.

It was a curious record of a curious form of villainy that the little package revealed. The notes were all from women, who, by fault or fortune, had given him some hold upon their fears. Evidently the phase of Fullerton's nature revealed by the decadent literature and pictures in his room had had dark and complex ramifications in his career. The rule of terror which he had held over Edith Wolcott and Mrs. Broughton was, it would seem, only an instance of the methods by which, for the sake of money or malice or for pure delight in deviltry, he had made himself master of the secret history of women, and had used his knowledge to keep them trembling under his lash.

Lyon soon found to his relief that it was not necessary for him to read the whole of a letter to classify it, and he conscientiously averted his eyes from the signatures. What an oppression must have lifted from the face of nature when this man was dead! The man must have possessed the fascination and the venom of a cobra. Lyon used up a box of matches burning the telltale notes over his ash-receiver, and felt that if he should have failed in everything else, it would have been worth all to save this package of pitiful secrets from the cold official eye of Bede.

Two letters only he saved from the cleansing flame. They were from William Vanderburg and contained the information which had enabled Fullerton to terrorize Mrs. Broughton. These he kept to turn over to Broughton, and with them he placed the old note-book of Vanderburg's which he had taken from the pocket of the dying man. It was a curious fact that the two tangled threads of that story should have come into his hands and that chance should have brought his path and Mrs. Broughton's again together.

On his way downstairs, an impulse not wholly devoid of mischief sent him to the 'phone. If it was too early to talk to Howell, he could at any rate get Bede on the line,--and he did.

"Hello, Mr. Bede," he said, respectfully, "This is Lyon, of the News. Any new developments in the Lawrence case?"

"I think I'd better ask you that question," said Bede, somewhat drily.

"Oh, I mean authentic information, not newspaper imagination," protested Lyon.

"I'd like to know, Mr. Lyon, just how much of your innocence is authentic and how much is newspaper imagination."

"Oh, come, you're making fun of me. Really, haven't you any news items to give me?"

"Not a scrap. You are very well able to help yourself to what you want, young man." And Bede suspended the receiver and the conversation.

That cheered Lyon a little, but as he came out into the streets his footsteps lagged. His imagination had achieved little good in the present case. It had simply led him wandering far afield. He had imagined that the woman who fled from the scene of Fullerton's murder might be Mrs. Broughton instead of Miss Wolcott. It was not Mrs. Broughton,--and now Bede knew all about Mrs. Broughton's share in the evening's events. Whether it was Miss Wolcott or not seemed as debatable as at first. Lawrence undoubtedly believed it was. Whether Bede believed it or not, he certainly had unearthed the facts that she had visited the Wellington to see Fullerton earlier in the evening, and that she had been at the drug-store on Hemlock Avenue a few minutes before the time when Fullerton must have been struck down by Lawrence's cane. The cards were therefore practically all in his hands, and the defence could only hope to do what he might graciously permit. It was maddening.

That fatal cane! It was the one bit of evidence more than circumstantial. It must be explained.

In his dejection Lyon had walked along Hemlock Avenue to Sherman Street. The empty lot where the cane had been discovered was on his left, and he crossed the street and stopped to look down into the trampled hollow. That cursed cane! How was it possible that it had come here unless by Lawrence's hand? He scowled at the spot, with gloom on his brow and perplexity in his mind, till someone stopped beside him, and an eager old voice asked,

"What is happening? Anything?"

It was old Mr. Wolcott, eager-eyed and interested as ever. He tried to discover what it was that was attracting Lyon's attention, with a lively curiosity that made Lyon laugh, even in his depression.

"I was looking for an inspiration," he said, "but I can't see one. I'm afraid it's hopeless."

"Sometimes you see queer things when you don't expect to," the old gentleman said, cheerfully. "Once I saw a dog-fight down in that hollow."

"Did you?" responded Lyon, looking at his watch. "I must be going on. I've been killing time till I could see a man down town."

"It was a lively fight. There is a Boston terrier up in our neighborhood that is a fighter. I don't like fighting dogs myself,--and this one is a terror. He is always pitching on to some poor little fellow that isn't big enough to stand up to him, and doesn't have a chance to run. I broke my cane over him."

"Indeed?" murmured Lyon, with polite indifference. Then the echo of the words rang through the silence of his mind,--louder and louder, until he pulled up with a start, as though some one had been calling to him for a long time and he had just become conscious of it. "You broke your cane over him?" he repeated, and it seemed to him that everything about him suddenly stood still till he should get the answer. "Was that here,--in this hollow?"

"Yes. He's a big brute of a dog, and he had the little fellow by the throat--"

"Yes, yes. What did you do with the pieces?"

"The pieces of the cane?"

"Yes. What did you do with them?"

The old man laughed somewhat slyly. "Edith doesn't like to hear about things like that. She thinks that I am too old to go in and straighten out a dog-fight. I don't tell her when anything of that sort happens."

"I see," said Lyon eagerly. "So you hid the pieces?"

The old man nodded cannily. "She'd never miss the cane. I have a lot of other walking sticks. But if she saw the broken pieces, she'd get the whole story out of me."

"Where did you hide them?"

"Oh, I put them out of sight, all right."

"But where, man, where? Show me the place."

"But I don't want them," protested Mr. Wolcott. "It was an old cane, anyhow. I didn't mind breaking it."

"I just wanted to see if you had found a good hiding place. Do you suppose the pieces are still there?"

"They aren't any good."

"No, but let's look and see, anyhow. Was it hereabouts?"

"Just under the sidewalk here. There's a hole under the sidewalk that you see when you are down in the hollow."

"Come down and show me. Here, I'll help you down, and Miss Edith won't guess where you have been."

The old man chuckled. This added a thrill to the affair, and with some difficulty and hard breathing he climbed down into the low-lying lot and made his way over the snow-covered hummocks of last summer's weeds to the place which was more familiar to Lyon than it was to him.

"Right in there," he said, pointing to the famous spot where Lawrence's cane had been found. "Perhaps they are there now. I poked them quite far in. But I can't see anything in there."

"You remember the place? You are sure it was right there?"

"There isn't any other place where I could poke them in, is there?"

"No, I don't see that there is. Now, can you remember when it was that you put them in there? Was there anything that would fix the date in your mind?"

"You remember that day you came to the house to see Edith,--the first time you came?"

"Yes."

"Well, it was the last time I had been out for a walk before that. Not that day. It was on a Monday, because I remember that I didn't go out Sunday because it stormed. Monday I went, and that was when I saw the dogs fighting."

"What sort of a cane was it?" asked Lyon, as he helped the old gentleman to recover the upper levels of the street.

"Oh, it wasn't a cane I cared for specially. It was just an old one."

"But what was it like? Did it have a heavy knob or a little one? Can you describe it?"

"It had a pretty heavy knob. But the wood broke off right at my hand when I beat the dog off. It wasn't a very stout cane. I got it in New Orleans in 1842."

"I have noticed that you have a good collection of canes. I'd like to look at them, if you have time."

The old gentleman blossomed into a pathetic vivacity under this unexpected interest in his affairs.

"Oh, they are nothing to speak of. Not more than eight or nine. When I was younger, I was something of a dandy, and I liked to have whatever was going in that sort of thing. There weren't many that could show a better style in little things than I could. But nobody thinks an old man like me counts. No one cares for what I have."

"I should very much like to see your canes," said Lyon. "I have been interested in canes lately. I can think of nothing that would please me more than an opportunity to examine your collection. May I go home with you now and see them?"

"I shall have great pleasure in showing them to you," Mr. Wolcott answered, with dignified courtesy, turning homeward at once. "Though I fear that my modest collection is hardly worthy the attention of a connoisseur."

"I can hardly claim to be a connoi............