“Well?”
“The gentleman’s linen duster and the neat brown gossamer which the lady had worn, lying folded under the two back cushions of my hack; a present for which I was very much obliged to them, but which I was not long allowed to enjoy, for yesterday the police—”
“Well, well, no matter about that. Here is a duster and here is a brown gossamer. Are these the articles you found under your cushions?”
“If you will examine the neck of the lady’s gossamer, you can soon tell, sir. There was a small hole in the one I found, as if something had been snipped out of it; the owner’s name, most likely.”
“Or the name of the place where it was bought,” suggested the Coroner, holding the garment up to view so as to reveal a square hole under the collar.
“That’s it!” cried the hackman. “That’s the very one. Shame, I say, to spoil a new garment that way.”
“Why do you call it new?” asked the Coroner.
“Because it hasn’t a mud spot or even a mark of dust upon it. We looked it all over, my wife and I, and decided it had not been long off the shelf. A pretty good haul for a poor man like me, and if the police—”
But here he was cut short again by an important question:
“There is a clock but a short distance from the place where you stopped. Did you notice what time it was when you drove away?”
“Yes, sir. I don’t know why I remember it, but I do. As I turned to go back to the hotel, I looked up at this clock. It was half-past eleven.”
CHAPTER XII
THE KEYS
We were all by this time greatly interested in the proceedings; and when another hackman was called we recognized at once that an effort was about to be made to connect this couple with the one who had alighted at Mr. Van Burnam’s door.
The witness, who was a melancholy chap, kept his stand on the east side of the Square. At about twenty minutes to twelve, he was awakened from a nap he had been taking on the top of his coach, by a sharp rap on his whip arm, and looking down, he saw a lady and gentleman standing at the door of his vehicle.
“We want to go to Gramercy Park,” said the lady. “Drive us there at once.”
“I nodded, for what is the use of wasting words when it can be avoided; and they stepped at once into the coach.”
“Can you describe them—tell us how they looked?”
“I never notice people; besides, it was dark; but he had a swell air, and she was pert and merry, for she laughed as she closed the door.”
“Can’t you remember how they were dressed?”
“No, sir; she had on something that flapped about her shoulders, and he had a dark hat on his head, but that was all I saw.”
“Didn’t you see his face?”
“Not a bit of it; he kept it turned away. He didn’t want nobody looking at him. She did all the business.”
“Then you saw her face?”