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“The worst that can happen, of course, is that, instead of the usual fine, Mr. Chrostwaite will be sent to the city jail for thirty or sixty days. That is bad enough, however, and that is what we wish to —”

Chrostwaite spoke again, still regarding his knees.

“Damned nuisance!” he said.

“That is what we wish to avoid,” the attorney continued. “We are willing to pay a stiff fine, and expect to, for the accident on Van Ness Avenue was clearly Mr. Chrostwaite’s fault. But we —”

“Drunk as a lord!” Chrostwaite said.

“But we don’t want to have this other accident, with which we had nothing to do, given a false weight in connection with the slighter accident. What we want then, is to find the man or men who stole the car and ran down John Newhouse. If they are apprehended before we go to court, we won’t be in danger of suffering for their act. Think you can find them before Monday?”

“I’ll try,” I promised; “though it isn’t —”

The human balloon interrupted me by heaving himself to his feet, fumbling with his fat jewelled fingers for his watch.

“Three o’clock,” he said. “Got a game of golf for three-thirty.” He picked up his hat and gloves from the desk. “Find ’em, will you? Damned nuisance going to jail!”

And he waddled out.

II

From the attorney’s office, I went down to the Hall of Justice, and, after hunting around a few minutes, found a policeman who had arrived at the corner of Clay and Kearny Streets a few seconds after Newhonse had been knocked down.

“I was just leaving the Hall when I seen a bus scoot around the corner at Clay Street,” this patrolman — a big sandy-haired man named Coffee — told me. “Then I seen people gathering around, so I went up there and found this John Newhouse stretched out. He was already dead. Half a dozen people had seen him hit, and one of ’em had got the license number of the car that done it. We found the car standing empty just around the corner on Montgomery Street, pointing north. There was two fellows in the car when it hit Newhouse, but nobody saw what they looked like. Nobody was in it when we found it.”

“In what direction was Newhouse walking?”

“North along Kearny Street, and he was about three-quarters across Clay when he was knocked. The car was coming north on Kearny, too, and turned east on Clay. It mightn’t have been all the fault of the fellows in the car — according to them that seen the accident. Newhouse was walking across the street looking at a piece of paper in his hand. I found a piece of foreign money—paper money — in his hand, and I guess that’s what he was looking at. The lieutenant tells me it was Dutch money — a hundred-florin note, he says.”

“Found out anything about the men in the car?”

“Nothing! We lined up everybody we could find in the neighbourhood of California and Kearny Streets — where the car was stolen from — and around Clay and Montgomery Streets — where it was left at. But nobody remembered seeing the fellows getting in it or getting out of it. The man that owns the car wasn’t driving it — it was stole all right, I guess. At first I thought maybe there was something shady about the accident. This John Newhouse had a two—or three-day-old black eye on him. But we run that out and found that he had an attack of heart trouble or something a couple days ago, and fell, fetching his eye up against a chair. He’d been home sick for three days — just left his house half an hour or so before the accident.”