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The rest would be simplicity. He had merely to slip out of the hotel, carrying the key to 1734 with him. Certainly it would be as late as noon the following day before chambermaid or clerk tried to rouse the supposed occupant of the empty room. In all likelihood it would be later than noon. He would have at least twelve hours’ start, even though the authorities were nimble-witted enough to join up the smaller mystery of an abandoned suit case belonging to one man and an abandoned outfit of clothing belonging to another, with the greater and seemingly unconnected mystery of the vanishment of the suspect in the Sonntag homicide case. Long before this potential eventuality could by any chance develop, he meant, under another name and in another disguise, to be hidden away at a quiet boarding house that he knew of in a certain obscure factory town on a certain trolley line leading out from Pittsburgh.

Now to clear out. He bestowed in various pockets his money, his knife, his pen and his railway guide, not one of these having upon it any identifying marks; he pouched his small change and his roll of bills. Nothing remained to be disposed of or accounted for save the pasteboard square that represented the coat and hat left behind at the Clarenden. When this had been torn into fine and indistinguishable bits and when as a final precaution the fragments had been tossed out of the window, the last possible evidence to link the pseudo Parker with the real Trencher in this night’s transactions would be gone.

He had the slip in his hands and his fingers were in the act of twisting it in halves when the thought that something had been overlooked–something vitally important–came to him; and he paused to cogitate. What had been forgotten? What had he overlooked? What had he left undone that should have been done? Then suddenly appreciation of the thing missing came to him and in a quick panic of apprehension he felt through all the pockets of Parker’s suit and through the pockets of his own garments, where he had flung them down on the bed, alongside the rifled suit case.

His luck piece was gone–that was it! The old silver trade dollar, worn thin and smooth by years of handling and with the hole drilled through the centre of it–that was what was gone–his token, his talisman, his charm against evil fortune. He had carried it for years, ever since he had turned crook, and for nothing in this world would he have parted from it.

In a mounting flurry of superstitious terror he searched the pockets again, with fingers that shook–this man who had lost faith in human beings, who had no hope and no fear for the hereafter, who had felt no stabs of regret or repentance for having killed a man, whose thoughts had never known remorse for any misdeed of his. The second hunt and the third and the fourth were fruitless as his first one had been; Trencher’s luck piece was gone.

Those wise men, the alienists, say that all of us are insane on certain subjects, however sane we may be upon other subjects. Certainly in the mental composition of every one of us is some quirk, some vagary, some dear senseless delusion, avowed or private. As for Trencher, the one crotchet in his cool brain centred about that worthless trade dollar. With it in his possession he had counted himself a winner, always. Without it he felt himself to be a creature predestined and foreordained to disaster.

To it he gave all the credit for the fact that he had never served a prison sentence. But once, and once only, had he parted company with it, even temporarily. That was the time when Murtha, that crafty old Central-Office hand, had picked him up on general principles, had taken him to headquarters, and first stripping him of all the belongings on his person, had carried him to the Bertillon Bureau, and then and there, without shadow of legal right, since Trencher was neither formally accused of nor formally indicted for any offence and had no previous record of convictions, had forced him to undergo the ordeals, ethically so repugnant to the instincts of the professional thief, of being measured and finger-printed and photographed, side face and full face. He had cursed and protested and pleaded when Murtha confiscated the luck piece; he had rejoiced when Murtha, seeing no harm in the thing, had restored it to him before lodging him in a cell under the all-embracing technical charge of being a suspicious person. Because he had so speedily got it back, Trencher had gone free again with the loss of but two days of liberty–or anyway, so Trencher firmly believed. But because it had left his custody for no more than an hour his pictures were now in the Gallery, and Murtha had learned the secret of Trencher’s one temperamental weakness, one fetish.