Page:The Master of Mysteries (1912).djvu/314

 noon in the basement tenement of a house across the street, a place used as a cheap laundry. The laundress had noticed the child playing at the wood-pile; but had been too busy to send her home. When she had finished hanging her clothes in the back yard and had returned to the wash-room, the child had gone. The baby had been found by the policeman at a quarter to five. Where she had been in the interim it seemed impossible to discover.

The case was turned over to the detective force, and was eventually taken up by Lieutenant McGraw. He worked at it a day without success, and then, recalling the many services done him by his friend, Astro the Seer, he determined to seek his help. McGraw's earlier experience with the palmist had been at the time of the Macdougal Street dynamite outrages and the Hunchakist murder, mysteries that Astro had solved privately. Assuming the credit of this, McGraw had been promoted and had paid his debt of gratitude to Astro in several ways. He had often secured information for the palmist that no one outside the police force would have been able to obtain. The mutual relation having proved profitable, McGraw did not hesitate to apply to his gifted friend in this case, which had become prominent in the papers.

Astro, free at the time, and rather bored with his ordinary routine of chiromancy and astrologic work, readily undertook the commission. He questioned McGraw on the details of the affair, and dismissed him with a promise to go about the matter immediately.

"It will probably be easy and interesting," he re-