CHAPTER XLIII

In Room 416

The story was very brief. It read:

A man passenger, aged about 56, attempting to board the Toledo and Buffalo Through Flyer on Trunk Line 33, at Englewood Station last night shortly after 7 in the evening, fell between two of the rearmost coaches and both legs were severed above the knees. He had attempted to board the train after it had pulled out and was traveling at a deceptively high rate of speed, and missing his grasp at the last handle-iron on one of the rear vestibules, none of which had even yet been closed, slipped between vestibules. Quick work by the operator of one of the new fleet of yellow taxi-meter spotters, who saw the accident, or at least its result, from his test-meter sedan atop Queen Victoria Viaduct above the tracks, saved the victim’s life. This man, Charles Kroll, vaulted down the long stairs which lead to the present Englewood Station, followed by the driver of the taxi he had been spotting, and made hasty handkerchief tourniquets for each leg, preventing the victim from bleeding to death.

The victim was a man of obviously well-to-do circumstances, wearing a black mustache and pointed Vandyke beard, merged together and trimmed in the Continental style, and black hair, all tinged just a bit with gray. He was provided with $742 in cash, as well as a handbag which had been newly bought for him by his taxi chauffeur and packed with new garments procured solely for a rush journey. No letters or papers of identification whatever, nor badges, lodge pins or rings, were found on his person.

He had registered at the Hyde Park Arms Hotel about an hour previously, according to the taxi driver and hotel clerk, preferring to give the fictitious name of “Mr. C. Blairstone,” residence, Omaha. The name is unquestionably fabricated, according to Samuel Dobson, the railroad detective who investigated the case, because in writing it on the hotel register the victim had started to spell it “Blear—” but had then scrawled the newer spelling over it hastily. There is no Blairstone nor Blearstone residing in Omaha, Nebraska.

The victim, according to the taxi driver, had picked him up on Dearborn Street in Old Loop, and had intended to call on someone in Greenwood Manor, but had changed his mind unexpectedly the last minute and altered his destination.

The victim was removed to the Englewood Emergency Hospital, who, however, did not issue the accident bulletin until late this morning, after permission to publicize the accident had been granted by the railroad authorities, and it had been conclusively ascertained that the patient would live.

Newspaper in hand, Halsey moved away from the newsstand, his forehead creased up in a frown. Black mustache—pointed Vandyke beard—black hair—all touched with gray. A man of about 56. It seemed to conjure up in his memos, even as he read the very opening lines, a picture—a picture—what was that picture? Why Orski! Alexis Orski! Orski, of course, president of the Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Corporation, possessed just such a peculiarly Continentally bearded face as this one described by the scant few paragraphs of news. And he, Halsey, ought to know. He had seen that face in the tall pier glass of the man’s room when Orski’s blond Cerberus had taken in that brass medal. But all this, he concluded at that particular point of the story, was just a coincidence. It must be. But when he came lower down—and found that the man had been journeying to visit someone in Greenwood Manor—he gave a low expressive whistle. Everything fell together in his mind in some curious jigsaw puzzle. Face—Greenwood Manor—Hyde Park—flying journey out of town—Englewood, just to the west of Hyde Park—well-to-do—$742 in cash—

A coincidence at that yet, possibly, yet a damned striking one.

Now came back in fuller force than ever the abrupt and unexplainable departure of the electrical corporation president—with his brass medal. A flying trip, eh? Hm! No medal had been found on this fellow, though. Well, all this would bear looking into.

He turned into an “automat” drugstore in back of him, and in the big silent tomb-like store filled with its tonics and drugs all encased in curious little glass-walled sarcophagi, guarded by gaping money slots, he got a keyed telephone slug from a crafty machine which proclaimed, through a sign on itself, that it could not only throw out false money instantly but would ring a loud bell at the same time to discomfit the issuer thereof. Looking up the number of the Ajax Corporation, he dropped in his slug at the nearest phone, and rang that number. And, getting it a second later, he asked:

“Has Mr. Orski returned to the once yet today?”

“No,” the girl told him. “Mr. Orski is not yet back in Chicago.”

“Can he be reached by wire in some other city?”

“Not at this moment,” the girl said. “We have no forwarding address on him.”

He hung up and left the silent, clerkless drugstore, his mind in a whirl. Outside, he paused only a few minutes to come to a decision. This thing—this thing was more than a hunch, he concluded; it was a stertorian call—and nothing but. And he hurried east the brief few blocks that would bring him to the Van Buren Street station of the Illinois Central Suburban Lines—now Trunks 314 and 315—and boarded an express which was just sliding gently and noiselessly from the platform, its curious high-tension trellis-like trolley commencing to slither against the rigid overhanging copper cable. He was dismounting in less than 7 minutes in the semi-fashionable Hyde Park region, with its multiplicity of trig stone entranceways, each encased by its typical pointed green-potted treelet on either ride. A taxi taken here whisked him economically over westward into the more bustling, commercial atmosphere of prosaic Englewood, with its bakeries, $1.88 hataterias, and hand laundries, and under the first big railroad viaduct he dismounted. He dismissed his taxi driver who had no idea whatsoever where the Englewood Emergency Hospital was located, but found a crossing watchman with bandana neckpiece who directed him to it, not two blocks from where he stood.

Three minutes later he was stepping within the narrow 4-story mottled building of square orange and green bricks, with its wide arched doorway swinging with yellow pine doors and green leaded panes, and approaching the nurse behind the entrance desk, spoke:

“May I ask if the gentleman injured at the Englewood Depot of Trunk Line 33 last night has been identified yet?”

The nurse shook her head. “No, not yet.”

“May I see him? It’s possible that I may be able to identify him for you.”

The nurse pressed a button. A white-suited orderly appeared as by magic: “Will you take this gentleman up to that double-amputation case in Room 416. He thinks he may be able to tell who he is.”

The orderly motioned to a narrow escalator which, unlike most such, was quiescent so far as either upward or downward motion went. “Just follow me, please.”

At the base of each flight he pushed a lever, the steps began to rise, and they were carried to the top, where he pushed another, stopping that series of steps and no doubt conserving a watt or a watt and a half of electrical energy. Thus they worked their way, as by a sequence of portages, clear to the top story, a bright cheerful floor in which even the quiet, rubber-tiled corridor would have been pleasing had it not been for a marked odor of ether and iodoform in the air. A white-clad private nurse hovering in the corridor in front of Room 416 stopped them. It was plain that the unconscious victim’s $742 cash was buying the best for him! The orderly spoke. “This gentleman, Miss Wenzel, thinks he may be able to identify that case in there. How is he?”

The nurse fastened her gaze a moment, questioningly, upon Halsey. Perhaps she thought he was only a shyster lawyer, a so-called “damage suit chaser,” and then again, perhaps, she did not personally care. “The patient has emerged from his coma, but is getting a bit delirious. Shock and ether delirium only, however. What fever he has is likewise just a normal sequence to his operative shock. There is no infection setting in; he’ll live, for he hasn’t lost much blood and his heart is very strong.” She opened the door of Number 416. “Just this way, please, and you may have a look at him.”

She stepped in, Halsey following, the white-clad orderly bringing up the rear. A solitary narrow white bed stood near one white enameled wall. The sole other furnishings of the tiny room were a chair and a white enameled table, standing on the polished hardwood floor. Halsey looked down to the bed, and that one look was enough. The man who lay under the covers, one hawklike hand plucking away at the counterpane, his cheeks flushed a bit with fever, his jet-black hair, black beard and black mustache so rumpled that they resembled matted tufts of hair, was the polished Alexis Orski whom only the night before Halsey had glimpsed through the open door of the latter’s private sanctum in the Ajax Electrical Manufacturing Company’s offices.