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Rh believe, at first, that probably he had seen the man meeting some passenger at the station.

"You are—" Connery ventured more casually.

"In private employ; yes, sir," the man cut off quickly. Then Connery knew him; it was when Gabriel Warden traveled on Connery's train that the conductor had seen this chauffeur; this was Patrick Corboy, who had driven Warden the night he was killed. But Connery, having won his point, knew better than to show it. "Waiting for a receipt from me?" he asked as if he had abandoned his curiosity.

The chauffeur nodded. Connery took a sheet of paper, wrote on it, sealed it in an envelope and handed it over; the chauffeur hastened back to his car and drove off. Connery, order in hand, stood at the door watching the car depart. He whistled softly to himself. Evidently his passenger was to be one of the great men in Eastern finance who had been brought West by Warden's death. As the car disappeared, Connery gazed off to the Sound.

The March morning was windy and wet, with a storm blowing in from the Pacific. East of the mountains—in Idaho and Montana—there was snow, and a heavy fall of it, as the conductor well knew from the long list of incoming trains yesterday stalled or badly overdue; but at Seattle, so far, only rain or a soft, sloppy sleet had appeared. Through this rose the smoke from tugs and a couple of freighters putting out in spite of the storm, and from further up Eliot Bay reverberated the roar of the steam-whistle of some large ship signaling its intention to pass another to the left. The incoming vessel loomed in sight and showed the graceful lines, the single funnel and the white- and red-barred flag of the