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“What’s the matter with her,” said the clerk suspiciously, with a look which warned Jimmie to be at once a Bingham and a Sherlock Holmes.

“Why, Horace,” she answered tragically, “that girl has two of the most awful black eyes. The whites of them is red and then comes purple and green and yellow. I guess they was meant to be blue.”

This chromatic scale was too much for Jimmie. He reeled where he sat and then, the postman opportunely arriving, sent word to Mrs. Jimmie that duty would keep him from her all the night.

“Tell her,” he huskily charged his messenger, “that there is suspicious circumstances going on in this house.”

“You bet there is,” the clerk agreed. “It looks like a case of attempted murder to me.”

“Divorce, more likely,” was Jimmie’s professional opinion, but he had scant time to enlarge upon it before the waitress, outraged to the point of tears, broke out of her domain. She brought with her an atmosphere of long-dead beefsteak, chops and onions, and she shrilled for an answer to her question.

“What’s the matter with ’em anyway? Ain’t the dining-room good enough for ’em to eat in? It done all right for Judge Campbell’s funeral this afternoon, and I found a real sweet wreath on that there whatnot in the corner. The candles wasn’t all burnt up neither, an’ I set out four of ’em on the four corners. It looks elegant, an’ them tube-roses smells grand. An’ when I told that young lady what’s got the use of her eyes how glad I was they happened in when we was so well fixed for decorations, she looked awful funny. Most like she was cross-eyed.”

“They all seem to have eye-trouble,” Jimmie commented. “Do you suppose they’re running away from one of these here blind asylums.”

“Lunatic asylum, most likely,” the cheerful clerk contributed.

When the other two guests ceased from traveling in molasses and sarsaparilla and returned to their quiet hostelry, all these surmises had hardened into certainties, and were imparted to them with a new maze of suspicion, more dense, more deadly, and more strictly in accordance with the principles laid down in “Dandy Dick, the Boy Detective.”

Madeline, the waitress, reported further particulars as she ministered to the creature-comforts of the traveling gentlemen dining alone among the funeral-baked meats. So interested and excited did these gentlemen become that they determined to interview, or at least to see, their mysterious fellow guests.

When their elaborate supper had reached its apotheosis of stewed prunes and blue-boiled rice, Hawley and Mead had gone out for a meditative and tobacco-shrouded stroll. They passed through the hall and inspiration awoke in Jimmie.

“By gum,” said he, “I know them now. I suspicioned them from the first by what Horace told me. But now I’ve got them sure. You mind that time I was down to New York and was showed over Police Headquarters, by professional etiquette?”

“Sure,” they all agreed. It was indeed a reminiscence, the details of which had been playing havoc with Rapidan’s nerves for the past fifteen years. They felt that they could not bear it now.

“Well,” continued Jimmie, gathering his auditors close about him by the husky whisper he now adopted, “I see them two fellers then. Mebbe ’twas in the Rogue’s Gallery and mebbe it was in the cells. I ain’t worked it down that fine yet, but I’ll think and pray on it and let you know when I get light.”

When the staff and the commercial guests of the Empress Hotel were waiting to see illumination burst through the blue-shrouded protector, the bridal party was veering momentarily further from the normal. For the deserted bride, alone in the desolate best sitting-room, laid her head upon her arms and laughed and laughed. She had made one cautious descent to the ground floor in search of diversion, and meeting Jimmie, she found it. After a conversation strictly categorical upon his side and widely misleading upon hers, she had gone up stairs again and halted in the upper hall just long enough to hear Jimmie’s triumphant: