The Man Who Fell Through The Earth. Carolyn Wells

were those great alabaster bowls, and, as they hung from the ceiling, they seemed to give out a ghostly radiance that emphasized the strange silence.

      For, in my increasingly nervous state, the silence was intensified and it seemed the silence of death,—not the mere quiet of an empty room.

      I pulled myself together, for I had not lost all sense of my duty. I must do something, I told myself, sternly,—but what?

      My hand crept toward the telephone that lay, turned over on its side, on Mr. Gately’s desk.

      But I drew back quickly, not so much because of a disinclination to touch the thing that had perhaps figured in a tragedy but because of a dim instinct of leaving everything untouched as a possible clew.

      Clew! The very word helped restore my equilibrium. There had been a crime of some sort,—at least, there had been a shooting, and I had been an eye-witness, even if my eyes had seen only shadows.

      My rôle, then, was an important one. My duty was to tell what I had seen and render any assistance I could. But I wouldn’t use that telephone. It must be out of order, anyway, or the operator downstairs would be looking after it. I would go back to my own office and call up somebody. As I crossed the hall, I was still debating whether that somebody would better be the police or the bank people downstairs. The latter, I decided, for it was their place to look after their president, not mine.

      I found Norah putting on her hat. The sight of her shrewd gray eyes and intelligent face caused an outburst of confidence, and I told her the whole story as fast as I could rattle it out.

      “Oh, Mr. Brice,” she exclaimed, her eyes wide with excitement, “let me go over there! May I?”

      “Wait a minute, Norah: I think I ought to speak to the bank people. I think I’ll telephone down and ask if Mr. Gately is down there. You know it may not have been Mr. Gately at all, whose shadow I saw——”

      “Ooh, yes, it was! You couldn’t mistake his head, and, too, who else would be in there? Please, Mr. Brice, wait just a minute before you telephone,—let me take one look round,—you don’t want to make a—to look foolish, you know.”

      She had so nearly warned me against making a fool of myself, that I took the hint, and I followed her across the hall.

      She went in quickly at the door of room number one. One glance around it and she said, “This is the first office, you see: callers come here, the secretary or stenographer takes their names and all that, and shows them into Mr. Gately’s office.”

      As Norah spoke she went on to the second room. Oblivious to its grandeur and luxury, she gave swift, darting glances here and there and said positively: “Of course, it was Mr. Gately who was shot, and by a woman too!”

      “The woman who screamed?”

      “No: more likely not. I expect the woman who screamed was his stenographer. I know her,—at least, I’ve seen her. A little doll-faced jig, who belongs about third from the end, in the chorus! Be sure she’d scream at the pistol shot, but the lady who fired the shot wouldn’t.”

      “But I saw the scrimmage and it was a man who shot.”

      “Are you sure? That thick, clouded glass blurs a shadow beyond recognition.”

      “What makes you think it was a woman, then?”

      “This,” and Norah pointed to a hatpin that lay on the big desk.

      It was a fine-looking pin, with a big head, but when I was about to pick it up Norah dissuaded me.

      “Don’t touch it,” she warned; “you know, Mr. Brice, we’ve really no right here and we simply must not touch anything.”

      “But, Norah,” I began, my common sense and good judgment having returned to me with the advent of human companionship, “I don’t want to do anything wrong. If we’ve no right here, for Heaven’s sake, let’s get out!”

      “Yes, in a minute, but let me think what you ought to do. And, oh, do let me take a minute to look round!”

      “No, girl; this is no time to satisfy your curiosity or, to enjoy a sight of these——”

      “Oh, I don’t mean that! But I want to see if there isn’t some clew or some bit of evidence to the whole thing. It is too weird! too impossible that three people should have disappeared into nothingness! Where are they?”

      Norah looked in the same closets I had explored; she drew aside window draperies and portières, she hastily glanced under desks and tables, not so much, I felt sure, in expectation of finding anyone, as with a general idea of searching the place thoroughly.

      She scrutinized the desk fittings of the stenographer.

      “Everything of the best,” she commented, “but very little real work done up here. I fancy these offices of Mr. Gately’s are more for private conferences and personal appointments than any real business matters.”

      “Which would account for the lady’s hatpin,” I observed.

      “Yes; but how did they get out? You looked out in the hall, at once, you say?”

      “Yes; I came quickly through these three rooms, and then looked out into the hall at once, and there was no elevator in sight nor could I see anyone on the stairs.”

      “Well, there’s not much to be seen here. I suppose you’d better call up the bank people. Though if they thought there was anything queer they’d be up here by this time.”

      I left Norah in Mr. Gately’s rooms while I went back to my own office and called up the Puritan Trust Company.

      A polite voice assured me that they knew nothing of Mr. Gately’s whereabouts at that moment, but if I would leave a message he would ultimately receive it.

      So, then, I told them, in part, what had happened, or, rather, what I believed had happened, and still a little unconcerned, the polite man agreed to send somebody up.

      “Stuffy people!” I said to Norah, as I returned to the room she was in. “They seemed to think me officious.”

      “I feared they would, Mr. Brice, but you had to do it. There’s no doubt Mr. Gately left this room in mad haste. See, here’s his personal checkbook on his desk, and he drew a check today.”

      “Nothing remarkable in his drawing a check,” I observed, “but decidedly peculiar to leave his checkbook around so carelessly. As you say, Norah, he left in a hurry.”

      “But how did he leave?”

      “That’s the mystery; and I, for one, give it up. I’m quite willing to wait until some greater brain than mine works out the problem.”

      “But it’s incomprehensible,” Norah went on; “where’s Jenny?”

      “For that matter,” I countered, “where’s Mr. Gately? Where’s his angry visitor, male or female? and, finally, where’s the pistol that made the sound and smoke of which I had positive evidence?”

      “We may find that,” suggested Norah, hopefully.

      But careful search failed to discover any firearms, as it had failed to reveal the actors of the drama.

      Nor did the representative from the bank come up at once. This seemed queer, I thought, and with a sudden impulse to find out something, I declared I was going down to the bank myself.

      “Go on,” said Norah, “I’ll stay here, for I must know what they find out when they do come.”

      I went out into the hall and pushed the “Down” button of the elevator.

      “Be careful,” Norah warned me, as the car was heard ascending, “say very little, Mr. Brice, except to the proper authorities. This may be a terrible thing, and you mustn’t get mixed up in it until you know more about it. You