Page:Under three flags; a story of mystery (IA underthreeflagss00tayliala).pdf/88

 had your case made out all there was to do was to clap a heavy hand upon his shoulder. But in this Hathaway drama about all of the leading characters have disappeared, and the man whom we regard as the key to the mystery, Ernest Stanley, is the very man we are least likely to find.

"But is Stanley the key?" continues Jack, stretching himself in his chair. "I don't think Barker and I have attached sufficient importance to that blotter found on Hathaway's desk. These fragments of sentences keep haunting me, even amid my daily duties. Something tells me that if we had the imprint of an entire page of that letter to Felton we could solve the mystery without finding our men. 'These things I charge you, Cyrus Felton, fail not at the peril of your good name.' 'These things'"

Ashley is slowly scratching a match to relight his pipe, when he suddenly stops and his thought-wrinkled forehead smooths.

"Hello! Here's an idea, perhaps a valuable one. It is possible that Barker and I have been all wrong in regarding that letter as an accusation. The English language is elastic. 'I charge you, Cyrus Felton,'—'I charge you, I charge you, I charge you.' Now, instead of 'I accuse you,' read 'I adjure you.' But 'I adjure you,' what? To 'fail not.' To 'fail not' in what? Ay, there's the rub. I am as much in the dark as before. Still the idea is worth considering, and I'll spring it on Barker."

Ashley finishes his smoke in silence and when the last flake of tobacco has yielded its solace he draws on his coat and boards an uptown car.

In that brilliantly lighted section of Broadway where stands the Hoffman House, Jack stops a moment to chat with an acquaintance.

"Say," remarks the latter, "there's a chap yonder staring hard at you. Know him?"

At his friend's suggestion Ashley turns suddenly and catches the searching gaze of a tall, handsome man with a dark-brown beard trimmed to a point. He is richly but simply attired, and his appearance is unmistakably