Trotter crept down through the quiet house with all the
trepidation of a sneak-thief. His one dread was the apparition of
Mrs. Teetzel; she would naturally surmise he was making away with
the bedroom stoneware, or the door knobs, or even the lead
piping.
He felt freer when he had once gained the street. But no peace of
mind could be his, he knew, until he had utterly discarded those
carefully wrapped turkey bones. It would be easy enough to toss
them into an areaway, if the worst came to the worst.
He looked up and down the street for a garbage can. But there was
none in sight. So he walked toward the avenue corner, with his
parcel under his arm. There he turned south, and at the next
corner swung about west again. But the right chance to get rid of
his turkey bones had not come. He glanced uneasily about. He
suddenly remembered that the police had the habit of holding up
belated parcel carriers and inspecting what they carried. So he
quickened his steps. But all the while he was covertly on the
lookout for his dumping spot.
A moment later he saw a patrolman on the street corner ahead of
him. He dreaded the thought of passing those scrutinizing eyes.
He eventually decided it would be too risky. So he doubled on his
own tracks, rabbit-like, crossing the street and turning north at
the next corner. He had had enough of the whole thing. It was
getting to be more than a joke. He would shilly-shally no longer,
even though he had to toss the cursed thing up on a house step.
He let the parcel slip lower down on his arm, with one finger
crooked through the string that tied it together. He was about to
fling it into the gloom of a brownstone step shadow when the door
above opened and a housemaid in cap and apron thrust a
plaintively meowing cat from the portico into the street. Trotter
quickened his steps, tingling, abashed, shaken with an inordinate
and ridiculous sense of guilt. He felt that he wanted to keep out
of the light, that he ought to skulk in the shadows until he was
free of the weight on his arm. He hurried on until he became
desperate, determined to end the farce at any hazard. So, as he
passed a building where a house front was being converted into a
low-windowed shop face, he dropped the paper package into an
abandoned mortar box.
He was startled, a moment later, by a voice calling sharply after
him: "Hi, yuh! You've dropped y'ur bundle!"
Trotter turned guiltily about. It was a night watchman. He
stepped slowly out to the mortar box as he spoke, and picked up
the parcel.
There was nothing for Trotter to do but go back and take it. He
mumbled something--he scarcely remembered whether it was a word
of explanation or of thanks. But he felt the eye of the night
watchman boring through him like a gimlet, and he was glad to
edge off and be on his way again.
By this time Trotter could feel the sweat of embarrassment on his
tingling body. He began to dramatize ridiculous contingencies. He
pictured himself as haled into night court, as cross-examined by
domineering and incredulous magistrates, who would send him to
the Island as a suspicious person. He began to be haunted by the
impression that he was being followed. The parcel became a weight
to him, a disheartening and dragging weight. He was now sure he
was being followed. He squinted back over his shoulders, only to
catch sight of a nocturnal "bill-sniper" placarding vulnerable
areas with his lithographed laudations of a vaudeville dancing
woman. A child murderer burdened with the body of his victim
could not have been more ill at ease, more timorous, more
terrified.
A sudden idea came to him as he passed a Chinese laundry in which
lights still burned and irons still thumped on an ironing board.
It was an audacious one, but it pointed toward deliverance.
His plan was to enter the laundry and pass over his parcel, as
though it were his week's washing. He would be gone before they
had discovered its contents. He merely needed to be offhand and
nonchalant. More than once he had seen dilapidated actors
carrying a limited wardrobe to the laundry at equally small hours
of the night. And the sloe-eyed iron-thumpers would never again
get sight of him!
But it took a moment or two to key himself up to the right pitch.
He stepped in beside one of the granite column bases of the First
National Trust, to give an extra tug to his still lagging
courage. He leaned for a moment against the huge steel grillwork
that covered the wide bank window behind him, looking eastward
along the side street to where he could see the oblong of light
from the laundry front.
A wave of exasperation swept through him at the thought of his
own white-livered irresolution. He was about to step forward to
face the end of his dilemma when an unlooked-for movement
occurred between him and the illuminated laundry front.
It was the movement of a shadowy figure which seemed, at first
sight, to erupt from the earth itself. It was several moments, in
fact, before Trotter realized that the figure had come up from
the basement of the building which stood immediately at the rear
of the bank, the building which also contained the laundry. But
this was not the thing that held Trotter's attention. The
discovery which was causing his eyes to follow every step of the
stranger was the fact that this second man ALSO CARRIED A LARGE
PAPER PARCEL UNDER HIS ARM.
He turned eastward without looking back. Yet there was something
circumspect in his footfall, something suspicious in the very
casualness of his movements. Trotter leaned out and looked after
him, nonplused by the coincidence, wondering if this second man's
mission was the same as his own. He was almost glad to see
somebody in the same boat.
Then curiosity overcame him. He turned and followed the other
man. He walked eastward, keeping as well in to the house shadows
as he could. He saw the man cross the wider traffic-way that ran
north and south, look quickly up and down the deserted street and
then, as he gained the shadow of the next house wall, veer close
in to an iron paling. Then there was a movement which Trotter
could not quite make out.
It was not until he crossed the street that he saw what the
movement meant. It was not until he caught sight of a galvanized
ash barrel standing beside the basement step and the stranger
ahead of him walking empty-handed away, that Trotter realized the
completeness of the coincidence.
The other man, without so much as stopping for a second, had
quietly dropped his paper-wrapped parcel on the top of the
galvanized barrel.
At no time did Trotter feel that there was anything momentous in
the movement. But it aroused his curiosity. It challenged
investigation. It set off his inquisitive young soul into
spreading pyrotechnics of imagination. And he realized, as he
walked up to the barrel, that his earlier sense of timidity had
disappeared. He quite calmly lifted the parcel from the barrel
top. Then he quite calmly dropped the other parcel in its place.
He was a little astonished, as he started on again, at the
pregnant weight of this new parcel. But he did not stop to
investigate. He did not care to gulp and lose the mystery at one
swallow. He scurried off with it, chucklingly, like a barnyard
hen with a corncob, to peck at it in solitude. He swung south and
then west again, to his own street. He went up his own steps,
through his own door, and up to his own top-floor room with the
rakish back wall. There he cautiously lighted the gas, drew the
blinds, and locked himself in. Next, he dragged a chair over to
the bedside, sat down on it, and carefully untied the parcel
string. Then, with somewhat accelerated pulse, he unwrapped the
paper-screened enigma.
A little puff of ironic disappointment escaped his pursed-up
lips. For at one glance he could see that it held no mystery. The
only mystery about it all was that he had been theatrical enough
to imagine it could prove anything that was not sordid and
worthless.
For lying on the paper before him was nothing more than a litter
of mortar and wall plaster, interspersed with stone chips. It was
nothing more than the sweepings a brick-layer had left behind
him, a pile of worthless rubbish, a bundle of refuse, another
white elephant on his hands.
Trotter stirred the heap of dust and lime, impassively,
disdainfully. There was nothing more than an occasional brick
corner, an occasional piece of wall plaster. The only other thing
was one larger fragment of stone. Trotter looked at it
indolently. It was merely a piece of granite--an ounce or two of
stone with one highly polished end, a bit of refuse which a
hurrying mason might have used to "rubble" a wall crevice. And he
had been fool enough to cart it up four flights of stairs!
He turned the piece of stone over in his hands. It was of
porphyritic granite, with distinct crystals of feldspar embedded
in a fine grained matrix. Trotter's brow wrinkled in vague
thought as he peered down at it. He was trying to think what it
reminded him of, what possible link it made in a chain of lost
association.
Then he remembered. It was toward the pillars of the First
National Trust Building that his mind was trying to grope. They
were of the same stuff, highly polished porphyritic granite, the
pride and wonder of the avenue along which they made a burnished
and flashing peristyle.
Trotter rubbed his chin, meditatively, and once more examined the
stone. Then he took a sudden deeper breath, and, leaning
hurriedly forward, raked through the parcel with his fingers. He
found nothing of note.
But as he sat there, stupidly staring at the fragment of granite,
his crouching body, with his feet tucked in under the chair
rungs, was startlingly like that familiar figure known as an
interrogation mark.