One Wonderful Night: A Romance of New York
spoke French to the man, too."
"You omitted both of those interesting facts from your summary,"
commented the reporter with a smile.
"Did I? That was a piece of sheer forgetfulness on my part."
"You didn't forget to rope us all in here as witnesses when the
Hungarian prince came on the boards. I knew you had something up your
sleeve the moment you began to fill in details. But, as to the crime
itself--have you found out the name of the man who was killed?"
"No. There were no papers in his clothes, but that may be accounted
for by the singular accident of the exchange of overcoats. His linen
was marked 'H. R. H.'"
"'H. R. H.,'" cried a bespectacled journalist who had been a silent
listener hitherto. "That's rather odd. Those are the initials of
Henry R. Hunter, a member of our staff. The news editor wanted him to
take hold in the first instance when the fact that a murder had been
committed was 'phoned to the office, but he could not be found
anywhere, so I am here in his stead."
"I don't recall anyone of that name," said Steingall sharply.
"No, you wouldn't. He was in our Chicago office till the beginning of
September. He did one or two bright things there that caught the
chief's eye, so he was brought to New York. . . . By Jove, Hunter is a
good French scholar. It was on that account he got on the track of a
gang of Chicago anarchists."
A curious stillness fell on the gathering. It was as though a spirit
of evil had suddenly made its presence felt; even the electric lamps
seemed to have grown dimmer.
"Describe Hunter."
Steingall's voice rang out incisively; the reporter took off his
spectacles, and began to burnish them, for his face was glistening with
perspiration.
"He is about five feet ten inches in height, and weighs somewhere in
the neighborhood of 150 pounds. He is straight and well-built, and his
face is finely molded, with big, luminous eyes, deeply recessed,
and----"
"Has he a white scar across the left eyebrow?"
"Yes."
For some reason, the journalist carried his description of Hunter's
personal appearance no farther. It was unnecessary. Before Steingall
uttered another word everyone in the room had a foreboding that they
were on the threshold of a discovery which lifted this tragedy into a
prominence far beyond aught they had yet dreamed of.
Except for that momentary touch of amazement in the detective's tone
they could gather nothing from his manner. But his invariable habit
was to speak to the point, and without the least suggestion of
ambiguity in his words.
"I am very much afraid, gentlemen, that the murdered man is Mr. Henry
B. Hunter," he said. "I must trouble you to come with me, and place
the question of identity beyond doubt. I hope that you, Mr. and Mrs.
Curtis, and you, Mr. Devar, will make it convenient to await my return.
There are matters on which you can give me valuable information."
In a few seconds the three found themselves alone. The clerk had
business to attend to, but he courteously invited them to remain in the
office until the detective came back.
"Did you ever hear such nonsense as this talk about Curtis being mixed
up in an abduction?" began Devar, eager to dispossess his friend's
relatives of any false impressions they might have formed. "Why, he
didn't know a soul in the States--except yourselves," he added
tactfully.
The uncle, who had been polishing his domed forehead with a large
handkerchief at intervals during the past quarter of an hour, cleared
his throat as a preliminary to some important announcement, but his
better half had only kept silent because of a real fear that her nephew
had been engaged in the commission of serious crime from the instant he
set foot in New York, and she entered the fray vigorously now.
"We don't know much about him, and that's the truth, Mr. Devar," she
cried. "There was some family disagreement years ago, and the brothers
lost track of each other, but Horace here never forgets a name, and why
should he, seeing that John was his father's name, and Delancy his
mother's, and our nephew has both, so the minute we saw that paragraph
in the Chicago papers about the eminent American engineer who had been
building railways in China being on board the _Lusitania_, I says to
Horace: 'Horace, it would be shame on us if we allowed your brother's
son and your own nephew to arrive in New York without some of his kith
and kin to bid him welcome,' and with that we hustled to catch the next
train east, but the steamer did the trip quicker'n we counted on, and
we just missed being at the docks, so if it hadn't been for our good
luck in finding the man who helped John with his baggage, and who
remembered the name of the hotel he gave the taxi-driver, we might have
been searching New York all this blessed night without dreaming of
coming to such a place as this, because the newspapers spoke so highly
of John that we made sure he would be stopping in one of the Fifth
Avenue hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria or Hoffman House, or perhaps
higher uptown, in the Ritz-Carlton or the Plaza."
Mrs. Curtis was stout, so she yielded perforce to lack of breath, and
Devar was able to explain smilingly that he, and none other, was
responsible for the item in the newspapers.
"The fact is that I took a great liking to John D.," he said. "He is
such a real good fellow, and so sublimely unconscious of his own
merits, that I wanted to surprise him by starting a modest boom in the
press, so I sent a wireless message about him to a journalistic friend
in New York. I wondered why the reporters did not get hold of him when
they came aboard at the quarantine station, but I remember now that, by
some curious trick of fate, he and I stowed ourselves away in a part of
the ship where no one was likely to find us, and I clean forgot to put
them on his track when I went below."
"I guess my nephew has attended to the booming proposition on his own
account," said Horace, getting under way at last.
Devar laughed, but Mrs. Curtis was shocked.
"Horace!" she cried indignantly, "that's the only unkind thing I've
heard you say in years. Oh, yes,"--for her husband had spread his
hands in mild protest--"I know you didn't mean it, but barbed shafts of
humor often fall in places where they hurt, and it is terrible to think
of your nephew being mixed up in a murder, and an abduction, and----"
She broke off in mid-career, and fixed a stern eye on Devar.
"Are you quite sure he didn't get flirting with some giddy young thing
on board?" she demanded. "I've heard and read of some strange
goings-on among people crossing the Atlantic. I could tell you of two
marriages and no less than five divorces which----"
Devar was a polite young man, but he thought the situation called for
firmness.
"To the best of my belief, your nephew never so much as spoke to any
lady on the ship," he vowed. "He read a good deal, and played cards
occasionally, and walked the decks with me when the weather permitted,
but he did not even mention a woman's name except your own, madam."
"The marvel is that he mentioned us at all," said Horace.
Devar thought in his own mind, that the elder Curtis might be ponderous
in body and speech but he certainly revealed horse sense when he opened
his mouth.
"And whose fault was that, I should like to know?" cried Mrs. Curtis.
"Didn't your own brother quarrel with you because you said he ought to
have married a woman of some stability of character, and not a pretty,
feather-headed girl who spent her days reading poetry and her nights in
attending lectures, and who didn't begin to understand the A.B.C. of a
wife's domestic duties?"
"Maybe I was wrong and he was right," said her husband.
"Horace!"
Mrs. Curtis was marshaling her forces for a mighty effort when the door
opened, and Steingall entered, accompanied by a tall, well set-up man
in evening dress, and wearing an open overcoat and green Homburg hat.
"Well," cried Devar, springing forward with outstretched hand, "I'm
mighty glad to see you, John D.!"
The newcomer's face lit with pleasure, but before he could utter a
responsive word Mrs. Curtis gurgled:
"John D.! . . . Are you John Delancy Curtis? . . . Horace, is this
your nephew?"
"Judging from his looks, Louisa, he ought to be," said the stout man,
gazing at the stranger with wide-eyed astonishment.
The Christian names of the couple acted like a galvanic battery on
Curtis. At first, he could hardly believe his ears, but some
resemblance in the portly Curtis to his own father warned him that this
night of nights had not yet exhausted its store of stupefying surprises.
"Why!" he exclaimed, smiling cheerfully, "you must be my uncle and aunt
from Bloomington, Indiana!"
"If you're John Delancy Curtis, that's our correct description," said
Horace.
"Of course he is," chortled Mrs. Curtis. "He's as like you the day I
married you as two peas in a pod, and if our little Horace had been
spared he would have been his living image. Nephew, I'm proud to meet
you," and Mrs. Curtis folded her relation in an ample embrace.
Curtis carried off a difficult situation with ease. He kissed his
aunt, shook hands with his uncle, and was about to answer the lady's
torrent of questions with regard to himself and his own people when
Steingall interfered.
"Sorry to interrupt you," he said, "but the turn taken by to-night's
crime demands your immediate attention, Mr. Curtis. Do you know you
are wearing the dead man's overcoat?"
"Yes. I discovered that fact some time ago."
Curtis's prompt admission was more favorable to his cause than he could
possibly realize then, though he had seen that the detective's
extraordinarily brilliant eyes were fixed on the garment's
blood-stained sleeve.
"And have you learnt the owner's name?" went on Steingall quietly.
"Yes, that is, I believe so, owing to a document I found in one of the
pockets."
"Ah, what was that?"
"It concerned another person, but I am prepared to tell you its nature
if it is absolutely essential."
"Believe me, there must be no concealment--now."
Something in the detective's tone conveyed a hint of peril, of
suspicion, to the ears of one so accustomed to dealing with his
fellow-men as was Curtis. But he shook off the premonition of ill, and
decided, once and for all, to be candor itself where the authorities
were concerned.
"It was a marriage license," he said.
"And the names on it?"
"They were those of a Frenchman, Jean de Courtois, and of an English
lady, Hermione Beauregard Grandison."
"So you have imagined that the man who was killed was this Monsieur
Jean de Courtois?"
For the life of him, Curtis could not prevent the tumultuous pumping of
his heart from drawing some of the color from his face.
"Who else?" he inquired, never flinching from Steingall's searching
gaze.
"No matter who owned the coat, or whom the license was intended for,
the murdered man was no Frenchman, but a New York journalist named
Henry R. Hunter," said Steingall.
Then Curtis yielded to the swift conviction that he had unwittingly
trapped Lady Hermione into a marriage on grounds that were inadequate
and false.
"Good God!" he muttered, and, for the moment, it was impossible for his
hearers to resist the dreadful inference that, in some shape or form,
he was implicated in the outrage which bulked so large in their minds.
Mrs. Curtis wanted to scream aloud, but she dared not. Even Devar was
staggered by his friend's unaccountable attitude. The only outwardly
unmoved individual present was Horace P. Curtis. He turned and pressed
an electric bell; Steingall glared at him, so he explained his action.
"I feel like a highball," he said blandly. "I guess Mrs. Curtis could