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Trencher followed leisurely to where a captain of waiters stood guard at the opening in the dividing partition between the lounge and the restaurant. Before him at his approach this functionary bowed.

“Alone, sir?” he inquired obsequiously.

“Yes and no,” replied Trencher; “I’m alone now but I’ll be back in half an hour with three others. I want to engage a table for four–not too close to the orchestra.” He slipped a dollar bill into the captain’s hand.

“Very good, sir. What name, sir?”

“Tracy is the name,” said Trencher.

“Quite so, sir.”

The captain turned to serve a party of men and women, and Trencher fell back. He idled back through the Chinese room, vigilant to note whether any of the persons scattered about it were regarding him with more than a casual interest or, more important still, whether any there present knew him personally.

Reassured on this point he stepped out of the room and along with a quarter for a tip tendered to one of the maids the check he had just pilfered, meanwhile studying her face closely for any signs that she recalled him as one who had dealt with her within the space of a minute or so. But nothing in her looks betrayed recognition or curiosity as she bestirred herself to reclaim the articles for which the check was a voucher of ownership, and to help him into them.

Ten seconds later Trencher, a personality transformed, stood quite at his ease on the top step of the flight outside the entrance to the Clarenden looking into Broadway. The long dark overcoat which he now wore, a commonplace roomy garment, fitted him as though it had been his own. With its collar turned up about his cheeks it helped admirably to disguise him. The soft black hat was a trifle large for his head. So much the better–it came well down over his face.

The huge illuminated hands of a clock set in the middle of a winking, blinking electric sign a few blocks north, at the triangular gore where Seventh Avenue crosses Broadway, told him the time–six minutes of eleven. To Trencher it seemed almost that hours must have passed since he shot down Sonntag, and yet here was proof that not more than ten minutes–or at the most, twelve–had elapsed. Well, he had worked fast and with results gratifying. The spats that might have betrayed him were safely hidden in one place–yonder between the seat cushions of O’Gavin’s car, which stood where he had left it, not thirty feet distant. His telltale overcoat and his derby hat were safely bestowed in the cafe check room behind him awaiting a claimant who meant never to return. Even if they should be found and identified as having been worn by the slayer of Sonntag, their presence there, he figured, would but serve to confuse the man hunt. Broadway’s living tides flowed by, its component atoms seemingly ignorant of the fact that just round the corner below a man had been done to death. Only at the intersection of Thirty-ninth Street was there evidence, in the quick movement of pedestrians out of Broadway into the cross street, that something unusual served to draw foot passengers off their course.

In front of the clothing shop three doors south of him no special congestion of traffic revealed itself; no scrouging knot of citizens was to be seen, and by that Trencher reasoned that the negro had been taken elsewhere by his captors–very probably to where the body would still be lying, hunched up in the shadow before the Jollity’s side doors. From the original starting point the hunt doubtlessly was now reorganising. One thing was certain–it had not eddied back this far. The men of the law would be working on a confused basis yet awhile, anyhow. And Trencher meant to twistify the clews still further, for all that he felt safe enough already. For the first time a sense of security exhilarated him. Almost it was a sense of exultation.