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THE CASE 0/JENNIE BRICE









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THE
CASE/JENNIE BRICE
MARY ROBERTS RINEHART
I
THE MAN IN LOWER TEN. WHEN A MAN MARRIES
WHERETHERE'S A WILL. ETC
Illustrated byM. LEONE BRACKER
INDIANAPOLIS
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS


COPYRIGHT 1915
THE BOBBS-MERRIU. COUP.
THE ffEW YORK
PUBLIC LIB&1HT
21694B
ASTOS, LENOX AND
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MAUNWOKTH A OOb
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THE CASE ^JENNIE BRICE





THE
CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
CHAPTER I
WE HAVE just had another flood, bad
enough, but only a foot or two of
water on the first floor. Yesterday we got the
mud shoveled out of the cellar and found
Peter, the spaniel that Mr. Ladley left when
he "went away". The flood, and the fact that
it was Mr. Ladley's dog whose body was found
half buried in the basement fruit closet,
brought back to me the strange events of the
other flood five years ago, when the water
reached more than half-way to the second
story, and brought with it, to some, mystery
and sudden death, and to me the worst case of
"shingles" I have ever seen.
My name is Pitman—in this narrative. It
i


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
is not really Pitman, but that does well enough.
I belong to an old Pittsburgh family. I wa°.
born on Penn Avenue, when that was the
best part of town, and I lived, until I was fif-
teen, very close to what is now the Pittsburgh
Club. It was a dwelling then; I have forgot-
ten who lived there.
I was a girl in seventy-seven, during the
railroad riots, and I recall our driving in the
family carriage over to one of the Allegheny
hills, and seeing the yards burning, and a great
noise of shooting from across the river. It
was the next year that I ran away from school
to marry Mr. Pitman, and I have not known
my family since. We were never reconciled,
although I came back to Pittsburgh after
twenty years of wandering. Mr. Pitman was
dead; the old city called me, and I came. I
had a hundred dollars or so, and I took a house
in lower Allegheny, where, because they are
partly inundated every spring, rents are cheap,
and I kept boarders. My house was always
2


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
orderly and clean, and although the neighbor-
hood had a bad name, a good many theatrical
people stopped with me. Five minutes across
the bridge, and they were in the theater dis-
trict. Allegheny at that time, I believe, was
still an independent city. But since then it has
allied itself with Pittsburgh; it is now the
North Side.
I was glad to get back. I worked hard, but
I made my rent and my living, and a little over.
Now and then on summer evenings I went to
one of the parks, and sitting on a bench,
watched the children playing around, and
looked at my sister's house, closed for the
summer. It is a very large house: her butler
once had his wife boarding with me—a nice
little woman.
It is curious to recall that, at that time, five
years ago, I had never seen my niece, Lida
Harvey, and then to think that only the day
before yesterday she came in her automobile
as far as she dared, and then sat there, waving
3


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
to me, while the police patrol brought across in
a skiff a basket of provisions she had sent me.
I wonder what she would have thought had
she known that the elderly woman in a calico
wrapper with an old overcoat over it, and a
pair of rubber boots, was her full aunt!
The flood and the sight of Lida both brought
back the case of Jennie Brice. For even then,
Lida and Mr. Howell were interested in each
other.
This is April. The flood of 1907 was
earlier, in March. It had been a long hard
winter, with ice gorges in all the upper valley.
Then, in early March, there came a thaw.
The gorges broke up and began to come down,
filling the rivers with crushing grinding ice.
There are three rivers at Pittsburgh, the
Allegheny and the Monongahela uniting there
at the Point to form the Ohio. And all three
were covered with broken ice, logs, and all
sorts of debris from the upper valleys.
4


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
A warning was sent out from the weather
bureau, and I got my carpets ready to lift that
morning. That was on the fourth of March,
a Sunday. Mr. Ladley and his wife, Jen-
nie Brice, had the parlor bedroom and the
room behind it. Mrs. Ladley, or Miss Brice,
as she preferred to be known, had a small part
at a local theater that kept a permanent com-
pany. Her husband was in that business, too,
but he had nothing to do. It was the wife who
paid the bills, and a lot of quarreling they did
about it.
I knocked at the door at ten o'clock, and Mr.
Ladley opened it. He was a short man, rather
stout and getting bald, and he always had a
cigarette. Even yet, the parlor carpet smells
of them.
"What do you want?" he asked sharply,
holding the door open about an inch.
"The water's coming up very fast, Mr. Lad-
ley," I said. "It's up to the swinging-shelf in
5


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
the cellar now. I'd like to take up the carpet
and move the piano."
"Come back in an hour or so," he snapped,
and tried to close the door. But I had got my
toe in the crack.
"I'll have to have the piano moved, Mr.
Ladley," I said. "You'd better put off what
you are doing."
I thought he was probably writing. He
spent most of the day writing, using the wash-
stand as a desk, and it kept me busy with oxalic
acid taking ink-spots out of the splasher and
the towels. He was writing a play, and talked
a lot about the Shuberts having promised to
star him in it when it was finished.
"Hell!" he said, and turning, spoke to
somebody in the room.
"We can go into the back room," I heard
him say, and he closed the door. When he
opened it again, the room was empty. I called
in Terry, the Irishman who does odd jobs for
me now and then, and we both got to work at
6


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
the tacks in the carpet, Terry working by the
window, and I by the door into the back par-
lor, which the Ladleys used as a bedroom.
That was how I happened to hear what I
afterward told the police.
Some one—a man, but not Mr. Ladley—
was talking. Mrs. Ladley broke in: "I won't
do it!" she said flatly. "Why should I help
him? He doesn't help me. He loafs here all
day, smoking and sleeping, and sits up all
night, drinking and keeping me awake."
The voice went on again, as if in reply to
this, and I heard a rattle of glasses, as if they
were pouring drinks. They always had
whisky, even when they were behind with
their board.
"That's all very well," Mrs. Ladley said. I
could always hear her, she having a theatrical
sort of voice—one that carries. "But what
about the prying she-devil that runs the
house?"
"Hush, for God's sake!" broke in Mr. Lad-
7


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
ley, and after that they spoke in whispers.
Even with my ear against the panel, I could
not catch a word.
The men came just then to move the piano,
and by the time we had taken it and the furni-
ture up-stairs, the water was over the kitchen
floor, and creeping forward into the hall. I
had never seen the river come up so fast. By
noon the yard was full of floating ice, and at
three that afternoon the police skiff was on the
front street, and I was wading around in rub-
ber boots, taking the pictures off the walls.
I was too busy to see who the Ladleys' vis-
itor was, and he had gone when I remembered
him again. The Ladleys took the second-story
front, which was empty, and Mr. Reynolds,
who was in the silk department in a store
across the river, had the room just behind.
I put up a coal stove in a back room next the
bathroom, and managed to cook the dinner
there. I was washing up the dishes when Mr.
Reynolds came in. As it was Sunday, he was

8


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
in his slippers and had the colored supplement
of a morning paper in his hand.
"What's the matter with the Ladleys?" he
asked. "I can't read for their quarreling."
"Booze, probably," I said. "When you've
lived in the flood district as long as I have, Mr.
Reynolds, you'll know that the rising of the
river is a signal for every man in the vicinity
to stop work and get full. The fuller the river,
the fuller the male population."
"Then this flood will likely make 'em drink
themselves to death!" he said. "It's a lulu."
"It's the neighborhood's annual debauch.
The women are busy keeping the babies from
getting drowned in the cellars, or they'd get
full, too. I hope, since it's come this far, it will
come farther, so the landlord will have to pa-
per the parlor."
That was at three o'clock. At four Mr.
Ladley went down the stairs, and I heard him
getting into a skiff in the lower hall. There
were boats going back and forth all the time,
9


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
carrying crowds of curious people, and taking
the flood sufferers to the corner grocery, where
they were lowering groceries in a basket on a
rope from an upper window.
I had been making tea when I heard Mr.
Ladley go out . I fixed a tray with a cup of
it and some crackers, and took it to their door.
I had never liked Mrs. Ladley, but it was chilly
in the house with the gas shut off and the lower
floor full of ice-water. And it is hard enough
to keep boarders in the flood district.
She did not answer to my knock, so I opened
the door and went in. She was at the window,
looking after him, and the brown valise, that
figured in the case later, was opened on the
floor. Over the foot of the bed was the black
and white dress, with the red collar.
When I spoke to her, she turned around
quickly. She was a tall woman, about twenty-
eight, with very white teeth and yellow hair,
which she parted a little to one side and drew
ZO


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
down over her ears. She had a sullen face and
large well-shaped hands, with her nails long
and very pointed.
"The 'she-devil' has brought you some tea,"
I said. "Where shall she put it?"
"'She-devil'!" she repeated, raising her eye-
brows. "It's a very thoughtful she-devil. Who
called you that?"
But, with the sight of the valise and the fear
that they might be leaving, I thought it best
not to quarrel. She had left the window, and
going to her dressing-table, had picked up her
nail-file.
"Never mind," I said. "I hope you are not
going away. These floods don't last, and
they're a benefit. Plenty of the people around
here rely on 'em every year to wash out their
cellars."
"No, I'm not going away," she replied lazily.
"I'm taking that dress to Miss Hope at the
theater. She is going to wear it in Charlie's
IX


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Aunt next week. She hasn't half enough of
a wardrobe to play leads in stock. Look at
this thumb-nail, broken to the quick!"
If I had only looked to see which thumb it
was! But I was putting the tea-tray on the
wash-stand, and moving Mr. Ladley's papers
to find room for it. Peter, the spaniel, begged
for a lump of sugar, and I gave it to him.
"Where is Mr. Ladley?" I asked.
"Gone out to see the river."
"I hope he'll be careful. There's a drowning
or two every year in these floods."
"Then I hope he won't," she said calmly.
"Do you know what I was doing when you
came in? I was looking after his boat, and
hoping it had a hole in it."
"You won't feel that way to-morrow, Mrs.
Ladley," I protested, shocked. "You're just
nervous and put out. Most men have their
ugly times. Many a time I wished Mr. Pitman
was gone—until he went. Then I'd have given
a good bit to have him back again."
12



"No, I'm not going away."





THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
She was standing in front of the dresser,
fixing her hair over her ears. She turned and
looked at me over her shoulder.
"Probably Mr. Pitman was a man," she
said. "My husband is a fiend, a devil."
Well, a good many women have said that
to me at different times. But just let me say
such a thing to them, or repeat their own
words to them the next day, and they would
fly at me in a fury. So I said nothing, and
put the cream into her tea.
I never saw her again.


CHAPTER II
THERE is not much sleeping done in the
flood district during a spring flood.
The gas was shut off, and I gave Mr. Reynolds
and the Ladleys each a lamp. I sat in the back
room that I had made into a temporary kitch-
en, with a candle, and with a bedquilt around
my shoulders. The water rose fast in the low-
er hall, but by midnight, at the seventh step,
it stopped rising and stood still. I always have
a skiff during the flood season, and as the
water rose, I tied it to one spindle of the stair-
case after another.
I made myself a cup of tea, and at one
o'clock I stretched out on a sofa for a few
hours' sleep. I think I had been sleeping only
an hour or so, when some one touched me on
the shoulder and I started up. It was Mr.
Reynolds, partly dressed.
"Some one has been in the house, Mrs. Pit-
14


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
man," he said. "They went away just now in
the boat."
"Perhaps it was Peter," I suggested. "That
dog is always wandering around at night."
"Not unless Peter can row a boat," said Mr.
Reynolds dryly.
I got up, being already fully dressed, and
taking the candle, we went to the staircase.
I noticed that it was a minute or so after two
o'clock as we left the room. The boat was
gone, not untied, but cut loose. The end of
the rope was still fastened to the stair-rail. I
sat down on the stairs and looked at Mr.
Reynolds.
"It's gone!" I said. "If the house catches
fire, we'll have to drown."
"It's rather curious, when you consider it."
We both spoke softly, not to disturb the Lad-
leys. "I've been awake, and I heard no boat
come in. And yet, if no one came in a boat,
and came from the street, they would have had
to swim in."
'5


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
I felt queer and creepy. The street door
was open, of course, and the lights going be-
yond. It gave me a strange feeling to sit there
in the darkness on the stairs, with the arch of
the front door like the entrance to a cavern,
and see now and then a chunk of ice slide into
view, turn around in the eddy, and pass on. It
was bitter cold, too, and the wind was rising.
"I'll go through the house," said Mr.
Reynolds. "There's likely nothing worse the
matter than some drunken mill-hand on a va-
cation while the mills are under water. But I'd
better look."
He left me, and I sat there alone in the dark-
ness. I had a presentiment of something
wrong, but I tried to think it was only discom-
fort and the cold. The water, driven in by
the wind, swirled at my feet. And something
dark floated in and lodged on the step below.
I reached down and touched it. It was a dead
kitten. I had never known a dead cat to bring
16


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
me anything but bad luck, and here was one
washed in at my very feet.
Mr. Reynolds came back soon, and reported
the house quiet and in order.
"But I found Peter shut up in one of the
third-floor rooms," he said. "Did you put
him there?"
I had not, and said so; but as the dog went
everywhere, and the door might have blown
shut, we did not attach much importance to
that at the time.
Well, the skiff was gone, and there was no
use worrying about it until morning. I went
back to the sofa to keep warm, but I left my
candle lighted and my door open. I did not
sleep: the dead cat was on my mind, and, as
if it were not bad enough to have it washed in
at my feet, about four in the morning Peter,
prowling uneasily, discovered it and brought it
in and put it on my couch, wet and stiff, poor
little thing!
17


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
I looked at the clock. It was a quarter after
four, and except for the occasional crunch of
one ice-cake hitting another in the yard, every-
thing was quiet. And then I heard the stealthy
sound of oars in the lower hall.
I am not a brave woman. I lay there, hop-
ing Mr. Reynolds would hear and open his
door. But he was sleeping soundly. Peter
snarled and ran out into the hall, and the next
moment I heard Mr. Ladley speaking. "Down,
Peter," he said. "Down. Go and lie down."
I took my candle and went out into the hall.
Mr. Ladley was stooping over the boat, trying
to tie it to the staircase. The rope was short,
having been cut, and he was having trouble.
Perhaps it was the candle-light, but he looked
ghost-white and haggard.
"I borrowed your boat, Mrs. Pitman," he
said, civilly enough. "Mrs. Ladley was not
well, and I—I went to the drug store."
"You've been more than two hours going to
the drug store," I said.
18


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
He muttered something about not finding
any open at first, and went into his room. He
closed and locked the door behind him, and al-
though Peter whined and scratched, he did not
let him in.
He looked so agitated that I thought I had
been harsh, and that perhaps she was really ill.
I knocked at the door, and asked if I could do
anything. But he only called "No" curtly
through the door, and asked me to take that
infernal dog away.
I went back to bed and tried to sleep, for
the water had dropped an inch or so on the
stairs, and I knew the danger was over. Peter
came, shivering, at dawn, and got on to the
sofa with me. I put an end of the quilt over
him, and he stopped shivering after a time and
went to sleep.
The dog was company. I lay there, wide
awake, thinking about Mr. Pitman's death,
and how I had come, by degrees, to be keeping
a cheap boarding-house in the flood district,
19


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
and to having to take impudence from every-
body who chose to rent a room from me, and
to being called a she-devil. From that I got
to thinking again about the Ladleys, and how
she had said he was a fiend, and to doubting
about his having gone out for medicine for
her. I dozed off again at daylight, and being
worn out, I slept heavily.
At seven o'clock Mr. Reynolds came to the
door, dressed for the store. He was a tall man
of about fifty, neat and orderly in his habits,
and he always remembered that I had seen bet-
ter days, and treated me as a lady.
"Never mind about breakfast for me this
morning, Mrs. Pitman," he said. "I'll get a
cup of coffee at the other end of the bridge.
I'll take the boat and send it back with Terry."
He turned and went along the hall and down
to the boat. I heard him push off from the
stairs with an oar and row out into the street.
Peter followed him to the stairs.
At a quarter after seven Mr. Ladley came
20


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE ,
out and called to me: "Just bring in a cup of
coffee and some toast," he said. "Enough for
one."
He went back and slammed his door, and
I made his coffee. I steeped a cup of tea for
Mrs. Ladley at the same time. He opened the
door just wide enough for the tray, and took
it without so much as a "thank you." He had
a cigarette in his mouth as usual, and I could
see a fire in the grate and smell something like
scorching cloth.
"I hope Mrs. Ladley is better," I said, get-
ting my foot in the crack of the door, so he
could not quite close it. It smelled to me as
if he had accidentally set fire to something with
his cigarette, and I tried to see into the room.
"What about Mrs. Ladley?" he snapped.
"You said she was ill last night."
"Oh, yes! Well, she wasn't very sick.
She's better."
"Shall I bring her some tea?"
"Take your foot away!" he ordered. "No.
21


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
She doesn't want tea. She's not here."
"Not here!"
"Good heavens!" he snarled. "Is her going
away anything to make such a fuss about?
The Lord knows I'd be glad to get out of this
infernal pig-wallow myself."
"If you mean my house—" I began.
But he had pulled himself together and was
more polite when he answered. "I mean the
neighborhood. Your house is all that could be
desired for the money. If we do not have
linen sheets and double cream, we are paying
muslin and milk prices."
Either my nose was growing accustomed to
the odor, or it was dying away: I took my
foot away from the door. "When did Mrs.
Ladley leave?" I asked.
"This morning, very early. I rowed her to
Federal Street."
"You couldn't have had much sleep," I said
dryly. For he looked horrible. There were
22


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
lines around his eyes, which were red, and his
lips looked dry and cracked.
"She's not in the piece this week at the
theater," he said, licking his lips and looking
past me, not at me. "She'll be back by Satur-
day."
I did not believe him. I do not think he
imagined that I did. He shut the door in my
face, and it caught poor Peter by the nose.
The dog ran off howling, but although Mr.
Ladley had been as fond of the animal as it was
in his nature to be fond of anything, he paid
no attention. As I started down the hall after
him, I saw what Peter had been carrying—a
slipper of Mrs. Ladley's. It was soaked with
water; evidently Peter had found it floating
at the foot of the stairs.
Although the idea of murder had not entered
my head at that time, the slipper gave me a
turn. I picked it up and looked at it—a black
one with a beaded toe, short in the vamp and


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
high-heeled, the sort most actresses wear.
Then I went back and knocked at the door of
the front room again.
"What the devil do you want now?" he
called from beyond the door.
"Here's a slipper of Mrs. Ladley's," I said.
"Peter found it floating in the lower hall."
He opened the door wide, and let me in.
The room was in tolerable order, much better
than when Mrs. Ladley was about . He looked
at the slipper, but he did not touch it . "I don't
think that is hers," he said.
"I've seen her wear it a hundred times."
"Well, she'll never wear it again." And
then, seeing me stare, he added: "It's ruined
with the water. Throw it out. And, by the
way, I'm sorry, but I set fire to one of the pil-
low-slips—dropped asleep, and my cigarette
did the rest. Just put it on the bill."
He pointed to the bed. One of the pillows
had no slip, and the ticking cover had a scorch
or two on it. I went over and looked at it
24


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"The pillow will have to be paid for, too,
Mr. Ladley," I said. "And there's a sign
nailed on the door that forbids smoking in
bed. If you are going to set fire to things, I
shall have to charge extra."
"Really!" he jeered, looking at me with his
cold fishy eyes. "Is there any sign on the door
saying that boarders are charged extra for
seven feet of filthy river in the bedrooms?"
I was never a match for him, and I make it
a principle never to bandy words with my
boarders. I took the pillow and the slipper
and went out. The telephone was ringing on
the stair landing. It was the theater, asking
for Miss Brice.
"She has gone away," I said.
"What do you mean? Moved away?"
"Gone for a few days' vacation," I replied.
"She isn't playing this week, is she?"
"Wait a moment," said the voice. There
was a hum of conversation from the other end,
and then another man came to the telephone.
25


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Can you find out where Miss Brice has
gone?"
"I'll see."
I went to Ladley's door and knocked. Mr.
Ladley answered from just beyond.
"The theater is asking where Mrs. Ladley
is."
"Tell them I don't know," he snarled, and
shut the door. I took his message to the tele-
phone.
Whoever it was swore and hung up the
receiver.
All the morning I was uneasy—I hardly
knew why. Peter felt it as I did. There was
no sound from the Ladleys' room, and the
house was quiet, except for the lapping water
on the stairs and the police patrol going back
and forth.
At eleven o'clock a boy in the neighborhood,
paddling on a raft, fell into the water and was
drowned. I watched the police boat go past,
26


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
carrying his little cold body, and after that I
was good for nothing. I went and sat with
Peter on the stairs. The dog's conduct had
been strange all morning. He had sat just
above the water, looking at it and whimpering.
Perhaps he was expecting another kitten or—
It is hard to say how ideas first enter one's
mind. But the notion that Mr. Ladley had
killed his wife and thrown her body into the
water came to me as I sat there. All at once I
seemed to see it all: the quarreling the day be-
fore, the night trip in the boat, the water-
soaked slipper, his haggard face that morning
—even the way the spaniel sat and stared at
the flood.
Terry brought the boat back at half past
eleven, towing it behind another.
"Well," I said, from the stairs, "I hope
you've had a pleasant morning."
"What doing?" he asked, not looking at
me.
27


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Rowing about the streets. You've had that
boat for hours."
He tied it up without a word to me, but he
spoke to the dog. "Good morning, Peter," he
said. "It's nice weather—for fishes, ain't it?"
He picked out a bit of floating wood from
the water, and showing it to the dog, flung it
into the parlor. Peter went after it with a
splash. He was pretty fat, and when he came
back I heard him wheezing. But what he
brought back was not the stick of wood. It
was the knife I use for cutting bread. It had
been on a shelf in the room where I had slept
the night before, and now Peter brought it out
of the flood where its wooden handle had kept
it afloat. The blade was broken off short.
It is not unusual to find one's household
goods floating around during flood-time. More
than once I've lost a chair or two, and seen it
after the water had gone down, new scrubbed
and painted, in Molly Maguire's kitchen next
door. And perhaps now and then a bit of luck
28


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
would come to me—a dog kennel or a chicken
house, or a kitchen table, or even, as happened
once, a month-old baby in a wooden cradle,
that lodged against my back fence, and had
come forty miles, as it turned out, with no
worse mishap than a cold in its head.
But the knife was different. I had put it on
the mantel over the stove I was using up-stairs
the night before, and hadn't touched it since.
As I sat staring at it, Terry took it from Peter
and handed it to me.
"Better give me a penny, Mrs. Pitman," he
said in his impudent Irish way. "I hate to
give you a knife. It may cut our friendship."
I reached over to hit him a clout on the head,
but I did not. The sunlight was coming in
through the window at the top of the stairs,
and shining on the rope that was tied to the
banister. The end of the rope was covered
with stains, brown, with a glint of red in them.
I got up shivering. "You can get the meat
at the butcher's, Terry," I said, "and come
29


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
back for me in a half-hour." Then I turned
and went up-stairs, weak in the knees, to put
on my hat and coat. I had made up my mind
that there had been murder done.


CHAPTER III
I looked at my clock as I went down-stairs.
It was just twelve-thirty. I thought of
telephoning for Mr. Reynolds to meet me, but
it was his lunch hour, and besides I was afraid
to telephone from the house while Mr. Ladley
was in it.
Peter had been whining again. When I
came down the stairs he had stopped whimper-
ing and was wagging his tail. A strange boat
had put into the hallway and was coming back.
"Now, old boy!" somebody was saying from
the boat. "Steady, old chap! I've got some-
thing for you."
A little man, elderly and alert, was standing
up in the boat, poling it along with an oar.
Peter gave vent to joyful yelps. The elderly
gentleman brought his boat to a stop at the
foot of the stairs, and reaching down into a
31


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
tub at his feet, held up a large piece of raw
liver. Peter almost went crazy, and I remem-
bered suddenly that I had forgotten to feed
the poor beast for more than a day.
"Would you like it?" asked the gentleman.
Peter sat up, as he had been taught to do, and
barked. The gentleman reached down again,
got a wooden platter from a stack of them at
%
his feet, and placing the liver on it, put it on
the step. The whole thing was so neat and
businesslike that I could only gaze.
"That's a well-trained dog, madam," said
the elderly gentleman, beaming at Peter over
his glasses. "You should not have neglected
him."
"The flood put him out of my mind," I ex-
plained, humbly enough, for I was ashamed.
"Exactly. Do you know how many starving
dogs and cats I have found this morning?"
He took a note-book out of his pocket and
glanced at it. "Forty-eight. Forty-eight,
madam! And ninety-three cats! I have found

32


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
them marooned in trees, clinging to fences,
floating on barrels, and I have found them in
comfortable houses where there was no excuse
for their neglect. Well, I must be moving on.
I have the report of a cat with a new litter in
the loft of a stable near here."
He wiped his hands carefully on a fresh
paper napkin, of which also a heap rested on
one of the seats of the boat, and picked up an
oar, smiling benevolently at Peter. Then, sud-
denly, he bent over and looked at the stained
rope end, tied to the stair-rail.
"What's that?" he said.
"That's what I'm going to find out," I re-
plied. I glanced up at the Ladleys' door, but
it was closed.
The little man dropped his oar, and fum-
bling in his pockets, pulled out a small magni-
fying-glass. He bent over, holding to the rail,
and inspected the stains with the glass. I had
taken a fancy to him at once, and in spite of
my excitement I had to smile a little.
33


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Humph!" he said, and looked up at me.
"That's blood. Why did you cut the boat
loose?"
"I didn't," I said. "If that is blood, I want
to know how it got there. That was a new
rope last night." I glanced at the Ladleys'
door again, and he followed my eyes.
"I wonder," he said, raising his voice a little,
"if I come into your kitchen, if you will allow
me to fry a little of that liver. There's a
wretched Maltese in a tree at the corner of
Fourth Street that won't touch it, raw."
I saw that he wanted to talk to me, so I
turned around and led the way to the tempo-
rary kitchen I had made.
"Now," he said briskly, when he had closed
the door, "there's something wrong here. Per-
haps if you tell me, I can help. If I can't, it
will do you good to talk about it. My
name's Holcombe, retired merchant. Apply to
First National Bank for references."
"I'm not sure there is anything wrong," I
34


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
began. "I guess I'm only nervous, and think-
ing little things are big ones. There's nothing
to tell."
"Nonsense. I come down the street in my
boat. A white-faced gentleman with a cigar-
ette looks out from a window when I stop at
the door, and ducks back when I glance up. I
come in and find a pet dog, obviously overfed
at ordinary times, whining with hunger on the
stairs. As I prepare to feed him, a pale woman
comes down, trying to put a right-hand glove
on her left hand, and with her jacket wrong
side out. What am I to think?"
I started and looked at my coat. He was
right. And when, as I tried to take it off, he
helped me, and even patted me on the shoulder
—what with his kindness, and the long morn-
ing alone, worrying, and the sleepless night, I
began to cry. He had a clean handkerchief in
my hand before I had time to think of one.
"That's it," he said. "It will do you good,
only don't make a noise about it. If it's a hus-
35


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
band on the annual flood spree, don't worry,
madam. They always come around in time to
whitewash the cellars."
"It isn't a husband," I sniffled.
"Tell me about it," he said. There was
something so kindly in his face, and it was so
long since I had had a bit of human sympathy,
that I almost broke down again.
I sat there, with a crowd of children pad-
dling on a raft outside the window, and Molly
Maguire, next door, hauling the morning's
milk up in a pail fastened to a rope, her door-
way being too narrow to admit the milkman's
boat, and I told him the whole story.
"Humph!" he exclaimed, when I had fin-
ished. "It's curious, but—you can't prove a
murder unless you can produce a body."
"When the river goes down, we'll find the
body," I said, shivering. "It's in the parlor."
"Then why doesn't he try to get away?"
"He is ready to go now. He only went back
when your boat came in."
36


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Mr. Holcombe ran to the door, and flinging
it open, peered into the lower hall. He was
too late. His boat was gone, tub of liver, pile
of wooden platters and all!
We hurried to the room the Ladleys had
occupied. It was empty. From the window,
as we looked out, we could see the boat, almost
a square away. It had stopped where, the
street being higher, a door-step rose above the
flood. On the step was sitting a forlorn yellow
puppy. As we stared, Mr. Ladley stopped the
boat, looked back at us, bent over, placed a
piece of liver on a platter, and reached it over
to the dog. Then, rising in the boat, he bowed,
with his hat over his heart, in our direction,
sat down calmly, and rowed around the corner
out of sight.
Mr. Holcombe was in a frenzy of rage. He
jumped up and down, shaking his fist out the
window after the retreating boat. He ran
down the staircase, only to come back and look
out the window again. The police boat was
37


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
not in sight, but the Maguire children had
worked their raft around to the street and were
under the window. He leaned out and called
to them.
"A quarter each, boys," he said, "if you'll
take me on that raft to the nearest pavement."
"Money first," said the oldest boy, holding
his cap.
But Mr. Holcombe did not wait. He swung
out over the window-sill, holding by his hands,
and lit fairly in the center of the raft.
"Don't touch anything in that room until I
come back," he called to me, and jerking the
pole from one of the boys, propelled the raft
with amazing speed down the street.
The liver on the stove was burning. There
was a smell of scorching through the rooms
and a sort of bluish haze of smoke. I hurried
back and took it off. By the time I had cleaned
the. pan, Mr. Holcombe was back again, in his
own boat. He had found it at the end of the
next street, where the flood ceased, but no
38


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
sign of Ladley anywhere. He had not seen
the police boat.
"Perhaps that is just as well," he said philo-
sophically. "We can't go to the police with a
wet slipper and a blood-stained rope and accuse
a man of murder. We have to have a body."
"He killed her," I said obstinately. "She
told me yesterday he was a fiend. He killed
her and threw the body in the water."
"Very likely. But he didn't throw it here."
But in spite of that, he went over all the
lower hall with his boat, feeling every foot of
the floor with an oar, and finally, at the back
end, he looked up at me as I stood on the stairs.
"There's something here," he said.
I went cold all over, and had to clutch the
railing. But when Terry had come, and the
two of them brought the thing to the surface,
it was only the dining-room rug, which I had
rolled up and forgotten to carry up-stairs!
At half past one Mr. Holcombe wrote a note,
and sent it off with Terry, and borrowing my
X39


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
boots, which had been Mr. Pitman's, investi-
gated the dining-room and kitchen from a
floating plank; the doors were too narrow to
admit the boat. But he found nothing more
important than a rolling-pin. He was not at
all depressed by his failure. He came back,
drenched to the skin, about three, and asked
permission to search the Ladleys' bedroom.
"I have a friend coming pretty soon, Mrs.
Pitman," he said, "a young newspaper man,
named Howell. He's a nice boy, and if there
is anything to this, I'd like him to have it for
his paper. He and I have been having some
arguments about circumstantial evidence, too,
and I know he'd like to work on this."
I gave him a pair of Mr. Pitman's socks, for
his own were saturated, and while he was
changing them the telephone rang. It was the
theater again, asking for Jennie Brice.
"You are certain she is out of the city?"
some one asked, the same voice as in the morn-
ing.
N
40


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Her husband says so."
"Ask him to come to the phone."
"He is not here."
"When do you expect him back?"
"I'm not sure he is coming back."
"Look here," said the voice angrily, "can't
you give me any satisfaction? Or don't you
care to?"
"I've told you all I know."
"You don't know where she is?"
"No, sir."
"She didn't say she was coming back to re-
hearse for next week's piece?"
"Her husband said she went away for a few
days' rest. He went away about noon and
hasn't come back. That's all I know, except
that they owe me three weeks' rent that I'd
like to get hold of."
The owner of the voice hung up the receiver
with a snap, and left me pondering. It seemed
to me that Mr. Ladley had been very reckless.
Did he expect any one to believe that Jennie
41


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Brice had gone for a vacation without notify-
ing the theater? Especially when she was to
rehearse that week? I thought it curious, to
say the least. I went back and told Mr. Hoi-
combe, who put it down in his note-book, and
together we went to the Ladleys' room.
The room was in better order than usual, as
I have said. The bed was made—which was
out of the ordinary, for Jennie Brice never
made a bed—but made the way a man makes
one, with the blankets wrinkled and crooked
beneath, and the white counterpane pulled
smoothly over the top, showing every hump
beneath. I showed Mr. Holcombe the splasher,
dotted with ink as usual.
"I'll take it off and soak it in milk," I said.
"It's his fountain pen; when the ink doesn't
run, he shakes it, and—"
"Where's the clock?" said Mr. Holcombe,
stopping in front of the mantel with his note-
book in his hand.
"The clock?"


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
I turned and looked. My onyx clock was
gone from the mantel-shelf.
Perhaps it seems strange, but from the
moment I missed that clock my rage at Mr.
Ladley increased to a fury. It was all I had
had left of my former gentility. When times
were hard and I got behind with the rent, as
happened now and then, more than once I'd
been tempted to sell the clock, or to pawn it.
But I had never done it. Its ticking had kept
me company on many a lonely night, and its
elegance had helped me to keep my pride and
to retain the respect of my neighbors. For in
the flood district onyx clocks are not plentiful.
Mrs. Bryan, the saloon-keeper's wife, had one,
and I had another. That is, I had had.
I stood staring at the mark in the dust of
the mantel-shelf, which Mr. Holcombe was
measuring with a pocket tape-measure.
"You are sure you didn't take it away your-
self, Mrs. Pitman?" he asked.
"Sure? Why, I could hardly lift it," I said.
43


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
He was looking carefully at the oblong of
dust where the clock had stood. "The key is
gone, too," he said, busily making entries in his
note-book. "What was the maker's name?"
"Why, I don't think I ever noticed."
He turned to me angrily. "Why didn't you
notice?" he snapped. "Good God, woman, do
you only use your eyes to cry with? How can
you wind a clock, time after time, and not
know the maker's name? It proves my conten-
tion: the average witness is totally unreliable."
"Not at all," I snapped, "I am ordinarily
both accurate and observing."
"Indeed!" he said, putting his hands behind
him. "Then perhaps you can tell me the color
of the pencil I have been writing with."
"Certainly. Red." Most pencils are red,
and I thought this was safe.
But he held his right hand out with a flour-
ish. "I've been writing with a fountain pen,"
he said in deep disgust, and turned his back
on me.
44


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
But the next moment he had run to the
wash-stand and pulled it out from the wall.
Behind it, where it had fallen, lay a towel, cov-
ered with stains, as if some one had wiped
bloody hands on it. He held it up, his face
working with excitement. I could only cover
my eyes.
"This looks better," he said, and began mak-
ing a quick search of the room, running from
one piece of furniture to another, pulling out
bureau drawers, drawing the bed out from the
wall, and crawling along the base-board with
a lighted match in his hand. He gave a shout
of triumph finally, and reappeared from behind
the bed with the broken end of my knife in his
hand.
"Very clumsy," he said. "Very clumsy.
Peter the dog could have done better."
I had been examining the wall-paper about
the wash-stand. Among the ink-spots were one
or two reddish ones that made me shiver. And
seeing a scrap of note-paper stuck between the
45


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
base-board and the wall, I dug it out with a
hairpin, and threw it into the grate, to be
burned later. It was by the merest chance
there was no fire there. The next moment Mr.
Holcombe was on his knees by the fireplace
reaching for the scrap.
"Never do that, under such circumstances,"
he snapped, fishing among the ashes. "You
might throw away valuable—Hello, Howell!"
I turned and saw a young man in the door-
way, smiling, his hat in his hand. Even at that
first glance, I liked Mr. Howell, and later,
when every one was against him, and many
curious things were developing, I stood by him
through everything, and even helped him to
the thing he wanted more than anything else in
the world. But that, of course, was later.
"What's the trouble, Holcombe?" he asked.
"Hitting the trail again?"
"A very curious thing that I just happened
on," said Mr. Holcombe. "Mrs. Pitman, this
46


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
is Mr. Howell, of whom I spoke. Sit down,
Howell, and let me read you something."
With the crumpled paper still unopened in
his hand, Mr. Holcombe took his note-book
and read aloud what he had written. I have
it before me now:
"'Dog meat, two dollars, boat hire'—that's
not it. Here. 'Yesterday, Sunday, March
the 4th, Mrs. Pitman, landlady at 42 Union
Street, heard two of her boarders quarreling,
a man and his wife. Man's name, Philip Lad-
ley. Wife's name, Jennie Ladley, known as
Jennie Brice at the Liberty Stock Company,
where she has been playing small parts.'"
Mr. Howell nodded. "I've heard of her,"
he said. "Not much of an actress, I believe."
"'The husband was also an actor, out of
work, and employing his leisure time in writ-
ing a play.'"
"Everybody's doing it," said Mr. Howell
idly.
47


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
was up and down until one o'clock, when she
dozed off. She heard no unusual sound.
"'At approximately two o'clock in the morn-
ing, however, this Reynolds came to the room,
and said he had heard some one in a boat
in the lower hall. He and Mrs. Pitman in-
vestigated. The boat which Mrs. Pitman
uses during a flood, and which she had tied to
the stair-rail, was gone, having been cut loose,
not untied. Everything else was quiet, ex-
cept that Mrs. Ladley's dog had been shut in
a third-story room.
"'At a quarter after four that morning Mrs.
Pitman, thoroughly awake, heard the boat re-
turning, and going to the stairs, met Ladley
coming in. He muttered something about hav-
ing gone for medicine for his wife and went
to his room, shutting the dog out. This is
worth attention, for the dog ordinarily slept in
their room.'"
"What sort of a dog?" asked Mr. Howell.
He had been listening attentively.
49


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"A water-spaniel. The rest of the night, or
early morning, was quiet. At a quarter after
seven, Ladley asked for coffee and toast for
one, and on Mrs. Pitman remarking this, said
that his wife was not playing this week, and
had gone for a few days' vacation, having left
early in the morning.' Remember, during the
night he had been out for medicine for her.
Now she was able to travel, and, in fact, had
started."
Mr. Howell was frowning at the floor. "If
he was doing anything wrong, he was doing it
very badly," he said.
"This is where I entered the case," said Mr.
Holcombe, "I rowed into the lower hall this
morning, to feed the dog, Peter, who was
whining on the staircase. Mrs. Pitman was
coming down, pale and agitated over the fact
that the dog, shortly before, had found floating
in the parlor down-stairs a slipper belonging to
Mrs. Ladley, and, later, a knife with a broken
blade. She maintains that she had the knife

50


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
last night up-stairs, that it was not broken, and
that it was taken from a shelf in her room
while she dozed. The question is, then: Why
was the knife taken? Who took it? And
why? Has this man made away with his wife,
or has he not?"
Mr. Howell looked at me and smiled. "Mr.
Holcombe and I are old enemies," he said.
"Mr. Holcombe believes that circumstantial
evidence may probably hang a man; I do not."
And to Mr. Holcombe: "So, having found a
wet slipper and a broken knife, you are pre-
pared for murder and sudden death!"
"I have more evidence," Mr. Holcombe said
eagerly, and proceeded to tell what we had
found in the room. Mr. Howell listened, smil-
ing to himself, but at the mention of the onyx
clock he got up and went to the mantel.
"By Jove!" he said, and stood looking at the
mark in the dust. "Are you sure the clock was
here yesterday?"
"I wound it night before last, and put the
51


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
key underneath. Yesterday, before they moved
up, I wound it again."
"The key is gone also. Well, what of it,
Holcombe? Did he brain her with the clock?
Or choke her with the key?"
Mr. Holcombe was looking at his note-book.
"To summarize," he said, "we have here as
clues indicating a crime, the rope, the broken
knife, the slipper, the towel, and the clock. Be-
sides, this scrap of paper may contain some in-
formation." He opened it and sat gazing at it
in his palm. Then, "Is this Ladley's writing?"
he asked me in a curious voice.
"Yes."
I glanced at the slip. Mr. Holcombe had
just read from his note-book: "Rope, knife,
slipper, towel, clock."
The slip I had found behind the wash-stand
said "Rope, knife, shoe, towel. Horn—" The
rest of the last word was torn off.
Mr. Howell was staring at the mantel.
"Clocks" he repeated.


CHAPTER IV
IT was after four when Mr. Holcombe had
finished going over the room. I offered
to make both the gentlemen some tea, for
Mr. Pitman had been an Englishman, and I
had got into the habit of having a cup in the
afternoon, with a cracker or a bit of bread.
But they refused. Mr. Howell said he had
promised to meet a lady, and to bring her
through the flooded district in a boat. He
shook hands with me, and smiled at Mr. Hol-
combe.
"You will have to restrain his enthusiasm,
Mrs. Pitman," he said. "He is a bloodhound
on the scent. If his baying gets on your nerves,
just send for me." He went down the stairs
and stepped into the boat. "Remember, Hol-
combe," he called, "every well-constituted mur-
der has two things: a motive and a corpse.
53


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
You haven't either, only a mass of piffling
details—"
"If everybody waited until he saw flames,
instead of relying on the testimony of the
smoke," Mr. Holcombe snapped, "what would
the fire loss be?"
Mr. Howell poled his boat to the front door,
and sitting down, prepared to row out.
"You are warned, Mrs. Pitman," he called
to me. "If he doesn't find a body to fit the
clues, he's quite capable of making one to fill
the demand."
"Horn—" said Mr. Holcombe, looking at
the slip again. "The tail of the V is torn off—
evidently only part of a word. Hornet, Horn-
ing, Horner—Mrs. Pitman, will you go with
me to the police station?"
I was more than anxious to go. In fact, I
could not bear the idea of staying alone in the
house, with heaven only knows what con-
cealed in the depths of that muddy flood. I
got on my wraps again, and Mr. Holcombe

54


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
rowed me out. Peter plunged into the water
to follow, and had to be sent back. He sat on
the lower step and whined. Mr. Holcombe
threw him another piece of liver, but he did
not touch it.
We rowed to the corner of Robinson Street
and Federal—it was before Federal Street was
raised above the flood level—and left the boat
in charge of a boy there. And we walked to
the police station. On the way Mr. Holcombe
questioned me closely about the events of the
morning, and I recalled the incident of the
burned pillow-slip. He made a note of it at
once, and grew very thoughtful.
He left me, however, at the police station.
"I'd rather not appear in this, Mrs. Pitman,"
he said apologetically, "and I think better along
my own lines. Not that I have anything
against the police; they've done some splendid
work. But this case takes imagination, and
the police department deals with facts. We
have no facts yet. What we need, of course,
55


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
is to have the man detained until we are sure
of our case." •
He lifted his hat and turned away, and I
went slowly up the steps to the police station.
Living, as I had, in a neighborhood where the
police, like the poor, are always with us, and
where the visits of the patrol wagon are one of
those familiar sights that no amount of repeti-
tion enabled any of us to treat with contempt,
I was uncomfortable until I remembered that
my grandfather had been one of the first may-
ors of the city, and that, if the patrol had been
at my house more than once, the entire neigh-
borhood would testify that my boarders were
usually orderly.
At the door some one touched me on the
arm. It was Mr. Holcombe again.
"I have been thinking it over," he said, "and
I believe you'd better not mention the piece of
paper that you found behind the wash-stand.
They might say the whole thing is a hoax."
"Very well," I agreed, and went in.
56


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
The police sergeant in charge knew me at
once, having stopped at my house more than
once in flood-time for a cup of hot coffee.
"Sit down, Mrs. Pitman," he said. "I sup-
pose you are still making the best coffee and
doughnuts in the city of Allegheny? Well,
what's the trouble in your district? Want an
injunction against the river for trespass?"
"The river has brought me a good bit of
trouble," I said. "I'm—I'm worried, Mr. Ser-
geant. I think a woman from my house has
been murdered, but I don't know."
"Murdered," he said, and drew up his chair.
"Tell me about it."
I told him everything, while he sat back with
his eyes half closed, and his fingers beating a
tattoo on the arm of his chair.
When I finished he got up and went into an
inner room. He came back in a moment.
"I want you to come in and tell that to the chief," he said, and led the way.
All told, I repeated my story three times that
57


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
afternoon, to the sergeant, to the chief of po-
lice, and the third time to both the others and
two detectives.
The second time the chief made notes of
what I said.
"Know this man Ladley?" he asked the
others. None of them did, but they all knew
of Jennie Brice, and some of them had seen
her in the theater.
"Get the theater, Tom," the chief said to
one of the detectives.
Luckily, what he learned over the telephone
from the theater corroborated my story. Jen-
nie Brice was not in the cast that week, but
should have reported that morning (Monday)
to rehearse the next week's piece. No message
had been received from her, and a substitute
had been put in her place.
The chief hung up the receiver and turned
to me. "You are sure about the clock, Mrs.
Pitman?" he asked. "It was there when they
moved up-stairs to the room?"
58


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Yes, sir."
"You are certain you will not find it on the
parlor mantel when the water goes down?"
"The mantels are uncovered now. It is not
there."
"You think Ladley has gone for good?"
"Yes, sir."
"He'd be a fool to try to run away, unless
—Graves, you'd better get hold of the fellow,
and keep him until either the woman is found
or a body. The river is falling. In a couple
of days we will know if she is around the
premises anywhere."
Before I left, I described Jennie Brice for
them carefully. Asked what she probably
wore, if she had gone away as her husband
said, I had no idea; she had a lot of clothes,
and dressed a good bit. But I recalled that I
had seen, lying on the bed, the black and white
dress with the red collar, and they took that
down, as well as the brown valise.
The chief rose and opened the door for me
59


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
himself. "If she actually left town at the time
you mention," he said, "she ought not to be
hard to find. There are not many trains before
seven in the morning, and most of them are
locals."
"And—and if she did not, if he—do you
think she is in the house—or—or—the cellar?"
"Not unless Ladley is more of a fool than I
think he is," he said, smiling. "Personally, I
believe she has gone away, as he says she did.
But if she hasn't— He probably took the body
with him when he said he was getting medicine,
and dropped it in the current somewhere. But
we must go slow with all this. There's no use
shouting 'wolf yet."
"But—the towel?"
"He may have cut himself, shaving. It has
been done."
"And the knife?"
He shrugged his shoulders good-naturedly.
"I've seen a perfectly good knife spoiled
opening a bottle of pickles."
60


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
steps. I paid the boatman and let him go, and
turned to go up the stairs. Some one was
speaking in the hall above.
I have read somewhere that no two voices
are exactly alike, just as no two violins ever
produce precisely the same sound. I think it
is what they call the timbre that is different. I
have, for instance, never heard a voice like Mr.
Pitman's, although Mr. Harry Lauder's in a
phonograph resembles it. And voices have
always done for me what odors do for some
people, revived forgotten scenes and old mem-
ories. But the memory that the voice at the
head of the stairs brought back was not very
old, although I had forgotten it. I seemed to
hear again, all at once, the lapping of the
water Sunday morning as it began to come in
over the door-sill; the sound of Terry ripping
up the parlor carpet, and Mrs. Ladley calling
me a she-devil in the next room, in reply to
this very voice.
But when I got to the top of the stairs, it

62


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
was only Mr. Howell, who had brought his
visitor to the flood district, and on getting her
splashed with the muddy water, had taken her
to my house for a towel and a cake of soap.
I lighted the lamp in the hall, and Mr.
Howell introduced the girl. She was a pretty
girl, slim and young, and she had taken her
wetting good-naturedly.
"I know we are intruders, Mrs. Pitman,"
she said, holding out her hand. "Especially
now, when you are in trouble."
"I have told Miss Harvey a little," Mr.
Howell said, "and I promised to show her
Peter, but he is not here."
I think I had known it was my sister's child
from the moment I lighted the lamp. There
was something of Alma in her, not Alma's
hardness or haughtiness, but Alma's dark blue
eyes with black lashes, and Alma's nose. Alma
was always the beauty of the family. What
with the day's excitement, and seeing Alma's
child like this, in my house, I felt things going
63


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
I
round and clutched at the stair-rail. Mr.
Howell caught me.
"Why, Mrs. Pitman!" he said. "What's the
matter?"
I got myself in hand in a moment and
smiled at the girl.
"Nothing at all," I said. "Indigestion, most
likely. Too much tea the last day or two, and
not enough solid food. I've been too anxious
to eat."
Lida—for she was that to me at once, al-
though I had never seen her before—Lida was
all sympathy and sweetness. She actually
asked me to go with her to a restaurant and
have a real dinner. I could imagine Alma,
had she known! But I excused myself.
"I have to cook something for Mr. Rey-
nolds," I said, "and I'm better now, anyhow,
thank you. Mr. Howell, may I speak to you
for a moment?"
He followed me along the back hall, which
was dusk.
64


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"I have remembered something that I had
forgotten, Mr. Howell," I said. "On Sunday
morning, the Ladleys had a visitor."
"Yes?"
"They had very few visitors."
"I see."
"I did not see him, but—I heard his voice."
Mr. Howell did not move, but I fancied he
drew his breath in quickly. "It sounded—it
was not by any chance you?"
"I? A newspaper man, who goes to bed at
three A. M. on Sunday morning, up and about
at ten!"
"I didn't say what time it was," I said
sharply.
But at that moment Lida called from the
front hall.
"I think I hear Peter," she said. "He is
shut in somewhere, whining."
We went forward at once. She was right.
Peter was scratching at the door of Mr. Lad-
ley's room, although I had left the door closed
65


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
and Peter in the hall. I let him out, and he
crawled to me on three legs, whimpering. Mr.
Howell bent over him and felt the fourth.
"Poor little beast!" he said. "His leg is
broken!"
He made a splint for the dog, and with Lida
helping, they put him to bed in a clothes-basket
in my up-stairs kitchen. It was easy to see
how things lay with Mr. Howell. He was all
eyes for her: he made excuses to touch her
hand or her arm—little caressing touches that
made her color heighten. And with it all,
there was a sort of hopelessness in his manner,
as if he knew how far the girl was out of his
reach. Knowing Alma and her pride, I knew
better than they how hopeless it was.
I was not so sure about Lida. I wondered
if she was in love with the boy, or only in love
with love. She was very young, as I had been.
God help her, if, like me, she sacrificed every-
thing, to discover, too late, that she was only
in love with love!


CHAPTER V
MR. REYNOLDS did not come home to
dinner after all. The water had got
into the basement at the store, he telephoned,
one of the flood-gates in a sewer having leaked,
and they were moving some of the departments
to an upper floor. I had expected to have him
in the house that evening, and now I was left
alone again.
But, as it happened, I was not alone. Mr.
Graves, one of the city detectives, came at half
past six, and went carefully over the Ladleys'
room. I showed him the towel and the slipper
and the broken knife, and where we had found
the knife-blade. He was very non-committal,
and left in a half-hour, taking the articles with
him in a newspaper.
At seven the door-bell rang. I went down as
far as I could on the staircase, and I saw a
boat outside the door, with the boatman and
67


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
a woman in it. I called to them to bring the
boat back along the hall, and I had a queer
feeling that it might be Mrs. Ladley, and that
I'd been making a fool of myself all day for
nothing. But it was not Mrs. Ladley.
"Is this number forty-two?" asked the
woman, as the boat came back.
"Yes."
"Does Mr. Ladley live here?"
"Yes. But he is not here now."
"Are you Mrs. Pittock?"
"Pitman, yes."
The boat bumped against the stairs, and the
woman got out. She was as tall as Mrs. Lad-
ley, and when I saw her in the light from the
upper hall, I knew her instantly. It was Tem-
ple Hope, the leading woman from the Liberty
Theater.
"I would like to talk to you, Mrs. Pitman,"
she said. "Where can we go?"
I led the way back to my room, and when
she had followed me in, she turned and shut
the door.
68


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Now then," she said without any prelimi-
nary, "where is Jennie Brice?"
"I don't know, Miss Hope," I answered.
We looked at each other for a minute, and
each of us saw what the other suspected.
"He has killed her!" she exclaimed. "She
was afraid he would do it, and—he has."
"Killed her and thrown her into the river,"
I said. "That's what I think, and he'll go
free at that. It seems there isn't any murder
when there isn't any corpse."
"Nonsense! If he has done that, the river
will give her up, eventually."
"The river doesn't always give them up," I
retorted. "Not in flood-time, anyhow. Or
when they are found it is months later, and
you can't prove anything."
She had only a little time, being due at the
theater soon, but she sat down and told me the
story she told afterward on the stand:
She had known Jennie Brice for years, they
having been together in the chorus as long be-
fore as Nadjy.
69


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"She was married then to a fellow on the
vaudeville circuit," Miss Hope said. "He
left her about that time, and she took up with
Ladley. I don't think they were ever mar-
ried."
"What!" I said, jumping to my feet, "and
they came to a respectable house like this!
There's never been a breath of scandal about
this house, Miss Hope, and if this comes out
I'm ruined."
"Well, perhaps they were married," she
said. "Anyhow, they were always quarreling.
And when he wasn't playing, it was worse.
She used to come to my hotel, and cry her eyes
out."
"I knew you were friends," I said. "Almost
the last thing she said to me was about the
black and white dress of hers you were to bor-
row for the piece this week."
"Black and white dress! I borrow one of
Jennie Brice's dresses!" exclaimed Miss Hope.
70


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"I should think not. I have plenty of my
own."
That puzzled me; for she had said it, that
was sure. And then I remembered that I had
not seen the dress in the room that day, and I
went in to look for it. It was gone. I came
back and told Miss Hope.
"A black and white dress! Did it have a
red collar?" she asked.
"Yes."
"Then I remember it. She wore a small
black hat with a red quill with that dress. You
might look for the hat."
She followed me back to the room and stood
in the doorway while I searched. The hat was
gone, too.
"Perhaps, after all, he's telling the truth,"
she said thoughtfully. "Her fur coat isn't in
the closet, is it?"
It was gone. It is strange that, all day, I
had never thought of looking over her clothes
71


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
and seeing what was missing. I hadn't known
all she had, of course, but I had seen her all
winter in her fur coat and admired it. It was
a striped fur, brown and gray, and very un-
usual. But with the coat missing, and a dress
and hat gone, it began to look as if I had been
making a fool of myself, and stirring up a
tempest in a teacup. Miss Hope was as puz-
zled as I was.
"Anyhow, if he didn't kill her," she said, "it
isn't because he did not want to. Only last
week she had hysterics in my dressing-room,
and said he had threatened to poison her. It
was all Mr. Bronson, the business manager,
and I could do to quiet her."
She looked at her watch, and exclaimed that
she was late, and would have to hurry. I saw
her down to her boat. The river had been fall-
ing rapidly for the last hour or two, and I
heard the boat scrape as it went over the door-
sill. I did not know whether to be glad that
the water was going down and I could live like
72


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
a Christian again, or to be sorry, for fear of
what we might find in the mud that was always
left.
Peter was lying where I had put him, on a
folded blanket laid in a clothes-basket. I went
back to him, and sat down beside the basket.
"Peter!" I said. "Poor old Peter! Who
did this to you? Who hurt you?" He looked
at me and whined, as if he wanted to tell me,
if only he could.
"Was it Mr. Ladley?" I asked, and the poor
thing cowered close to his bed and shivered.
I wondered if it had been he, and, if it had,
why he had come back. Perhaps he had re-
membered the towel. Perhaps he would come
again and spend the night there. I was like
Peter: I cowered and shivered at the very
thought.
At nine o'clock I heard a boat at the door.
It had stuck there, and its occupant was scold-
ing furiously at the boatman. Soon after I
heard splashing, and I knew that whoever it
73


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
was was wading back to the stairs through the
foot and a half or so of water still in the hall.
I ran back to my room and locked myself in,
and then stood, armed with the stove-lid lifter,
in case it should be Ladley and he should
break the door in.
The steps came up the stairs, and Peter
barked furiously. It seemed to me that this
was to be my end, killed like a rat in a trap
and thrown out the window, to float, like my
kitchen chair, into Mollie Maguire's kitchen,
or to be found lying in the ooze of the yard
after the river had gone down.
The steps hesitated at the top of the stairs,
and turned back along the hall. Peter re-
doubled his noise; he never barked for Mr.
Reynolds or the Ladleys. I stood still, hardly
able to breathe. The door was thin, and the
lock loose: one good blow, and—
The door-knob turned, and I screamed. I
recall that the light turned black, and that is
all I do remember, until I came to, a half-hour
74


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
later, and saw Mr. Holcombe stooping over
me. The door, with the lock broken, was
standing open. I tried to move, and then I
saw that my feet were propped up on the edge
of Peter's basket.
"Better leave them up." Mr. Holcombe said.
"It sends the blood back to the head. Half
the damfool people in the world stick a pil-
low under a fainting woman's shoulders. How
are you now?"
"All right," I said feebly. "I thought you
were Mr. Ladley."
He helped me up, and I sat in a chair and
tried to keep my lips from shaking. And then
I saw that Mr. Holcombe had brought a suit
case with him, and had set it inside the door.
"Ladley is safe, until he gets bail, anyhow,"
he said. "They picked him up as he was board-
ing a Pennsylvania train bound east."
"For murder?" I asked.
"As a suspicious character," he replied grim-
ly. "That does as well as anything for a time,"
75


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
He sat down opposite me, and looked at me
intently.
"Mrs. Pitman," he said, "did you ever hear
the story of the horse that wandered out of a
village and could not be found?"
I shook my head.
"Well, the best wit of the village failed to
locate the horse. But one day the village idiot
walked into town, leading the missing animal
by the bridle. When they asked him how he
had done it, he said: 'Well, I just thought what
I'd do if I was a horse, and then I went and
did it.'"
"I see," I said, humoring him.
"You don't see. Now, what are we trying to
do?"
"We're trying to find a body. Do you in-
tend to become a corpse?"
He leaned over and tapped on the table be-
tween us. "We are trying to prove a crime
I intend for the time to be the criminal."
He looked so curious, bent forward and
76


THE CASE DE JENNIE BRICE
glaring at me from under his bushy eyebrows,
with his shoes on his knee—for he had taken
them off to wade to the stairs—and his trou-
sers rolled to his knees, that I wondered if he
was entirely sane. But Mr. Holcombe, eccen-
tric as he might be, was sane enough.
"Not really a criminal!"
"As really as lies in me. Listen, Mrs. Pit-
man. I want to put myself in Ladley's place
for a day or two, live as he lived, do what he
did, even think as he thought, if I can. I am
going to sleep in his room to-night, with your
permission."
I could not see any reason for objecting,
although I thought it silly and useless. I led
the way to the front room, Mr. Holcombe fol-
lowing with his shoes and suit case. I lighted
a lamp, and he stood looking around him.
"I see you have been here since we left this
afternoon," he said.
"Twice," I replied. "First with Mr. Graves,
and later—"
77


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
I said I quite understood, but that Mr. Lad-
ley could skip a night, if he so wished. But the
little gentleman would not hear to it, and
when I brought the soda, poured himself a
double portion. He stood looking at it, with
his face screwed up, as if the very odor re-
volted him.
"The chances are," he said, "that Ladley—
that I—having a nasty piece of work to do
during the night, would—will take a larger
drink than usual." He raised the glass, only
to put it down. "Don't forget," he said, "to
put a large knife where you left the one last
night. I'm sorry the water has gone down,
but I shall imagine it still at the seventh step.
Good night, Mrs. Pitman."
"Good night, Mr. Ladley," I said, smiling,
"and remember, you are three weeks in arrears
with your board."
His eyes twinkled through his spectacles. "I
shall imagine it paid," he said.
80


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
I went out, and I heard him close the door
behind me. Then, through the door, I heard
a great sputtering and coughing, and I knew
he had got the whisky down somehow. I put
the knife out, as he had asked me to, and went
to bed. I was ready to drop. Not even the
knowledge that an imaginary Mr. Ladley was
about to commit an imaginary crime in the
house that night could keep me awake.
Mr. Reynolds came in at eleven o'clock. I
was roused when he banged his door. That
was all I knew until morning. The sun on my
face wakened me. Peter, in his basket, lifted
his head as I moved, and thumped his tail
against his pillow in greeting. I put on a
wrapper, and called Mr. Reynolds by knocking
at his door. Then I went on to the front room.
The door was closed, and some one beyond
was groaning. My heart stood still, and then
raced on. I opened the door and looked in.
Mr. Holcombe was on the bed, fully dressed.
81


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
He had a wet towel tied around his head, and
his face looked swollen and puffy. He opened
one eye and looked at me.
"What a night!" he groaned.
"What happened! What did you find?"
He groaned again. "Find!" he said. "Noth-
ing, except that there was something wrong
with that whisky. It poisoned me. I haven't
been out of the house!"
So for that day, at least, Mr. Ladley became
Mr. Holcombe again, and as such accepted ice
in quantities, a mustard plaster over his stom-
ach, and considerable nursing. By evening he
was better, but although he clearly intended to
stay on, he said nothing about changing his
identity again, and I was glad enough. The
very name of Ladley was horrible to me.
The river went down almost entirely that
day, although there was still considerable water
in the cellars. It takes time to get rid of that.
The lower floors showed nothing suspicious.
The papers were ruined, of course, the doors
82


CHAPTER VI
THE newspapers were full of the Ladley
case, with its curious solution and many
surprises. It was considered unique in many
ways. Mr. Pitman had always read all the
murder trials, and used to talk about the corpus
delicti and writs of habeas corpus—corpus be-
ing the legal way, I believe, of spelling corpse.
But I came out of the Ladley trial—for it came
to trial ultimately—with only one point of law
that I was sure of: that was, that it is mighty
hard to prove a man a murderer unless you can
show what he killed.
And that was the weakness in the Ladley
case. There was a body, but it could not be
identified.
The police held Mr. Ladley for a day or
two, and then, nothing appearing, they let him
go. Mr. Holcombe, who was still occupying

84


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
the second floor front, almost wept with rage
and despair when he read the news in the pa-
pers. He was still working on the case, in his
curious way, wandering along the wharves at
night, and writing letters all over the country
to learn about Philip Ladley's previous life,
and his wife's. But he did not seem to get
anywhere.
The newspapers had been full of the Jennie
Brice disappearance. For disappearance it
proved to be. So far as could be learned, she
had not left the city that night, or since, and
as she was a striking-looking woman, very
blond, as I have said, with a full voice and a
languid manner, she could hardly have taken
refuge anywhere without being discovered.
The morning after her disappearance a young
woman, tall like Jennie Brice and fair, had
been seen in the Union Station. But as she
was accompanied by a young man, who bought
her magazines and papers, and bade her an ex-
cited farewell, sending his love to various
85


THE CASE OE JENNIE BRICE
ettes all day, ate and slept well, and looked
better since he had had nothing to drink. And
two or three days after the arrest, he sent for
the manuscript of his play.
Mr. Howell came for it on the Thursday of
that week.
I was on my knees scrubbing the parlor
floor, when he rang the bell. I let him in, and
it seemed to me that he looked tired and pale.
"Well, Mrs. Pitman," he said, smiling,
"what did you find in the cellar when the wa-
ter went down?"
"I'm glad to say that I didn't find what I
feared, Mr. Howell."
"Not even the onyx clock?"
"Not even the clock," I replied. "And I
feel as if I'd lost a friend. A clock is a lot of
company."
"Do you know what I think?" he said, look-
ing at me closely. "I think you put that clock
away yourself, in the excitement, and have
forgotten all about it."
87


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Ladley went out Sunday afternoon about
three, didn't he—and got back at five?"
I turned and looked at him. "Yes, Mr.
Howell," I said. "Perhaps you know some-
thing about that."
"I?" He changed color. Twenty years of
dunning boarders has made me pretty sharp
at reading faces, and he looked as uncomfort-
able as if he owed me money. "Hi!" I knew
then that I had been right about the voice. It
had been his.
"You!" I retorted. "You were here Sun-
day morning and spent some time with the
Ladleys. I am the old she-devil. I notice you
didn't tell your friend, Mr. Holcombe, about
having been here on Sunday."
He was quick to recover. "I'll tell you all
about it, Mrs. Pitman," he said smilingly.
"You see, all my life, I have wished for an
onyx clock. It has been my ambition, my
Great Desire. Leaving the house that Sunday
89


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
morning, and hearing the ticking of the clock
up-stairs, I recognized that it was an onyx clock,
clambered from my boat through an upper
window, and so reached it. The clock showed
fight, but after stunning it with a chair—"
"Exactly!" I said. "Then the thing Mrs.
Ladley said she would not do was probably
to wind the clock?"
He dropped his bantering manner at once.
"Mrs. Pitman," he said, "I don't know what
you heard or did not hear. But I want you to
give me a little time before you tell anybody
that I was here that Sunday morning. And, in
return, I'll find your clock."
I hesitated, but however put out he was, he
didn't look like a criminal. Besides, he was
a friend of my niece's, and blood is thicker
even than flood-water.
"There was nothing wrong about my being
here," he went on, "but—I don't want it
known. Don't spoil a good story, Mrs. Pit-
man."
90


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
He nodded and still stood looking in and
whistling. "Never heard her speak of a town
named Horner, did you?"
"Homer? No."
"I see." He turned and wandered out again
into the hall, still whistling. At the door, how-
ever, he stopped and turned. "Look anything
like this?" he asked, and held out one of his
hands, with a small kodak picture on the palm.
It was a snap-shot of a children's frolic in a
village street, with some onlookers in the back-
ground. Around one of the heads had been
drawn a circle in pencil. I took it to the gas-
jet and looked at it closely. It was a tall
woman with a hat on, not unlike Jennie Brice.
She was looking over the crowd, and I could
see only her face, and that in shadow. I shook
my head.
"I thought not," he said. "We have a lot
of stage pictures of her, but what with false
hair and their being retouched beyond recog-
nition, they don't amount to much." He
93


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
started out, and stopped on the door-step to
light a cigar.
"Take him on if he comes," he said. "And
keep your eyes open. Feed him well, and he
won't kill you!"
I had plenty to think of when I was cooking
Mr. Reynolds' supper: the chance that I might
have Mr. Ladley again, and the woman at
Horner. For it had come to me like a flash,
as Mr. Graves left, that the "Horn—" on the
paper slip might have been "Horner."


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
think of: had Terry put an extra bolt on every
door, and hid the rat poison and the carbolic
acid in the cellar.
Peter would not go near him. He hobbled
around on his three legs, with the splint beat-
ing a sort of tattoo on the floor, but he stayed
back in the kitchen with me, or in the yard.
It was Sunday night or early Monday morn-
ing that Jennie Brice disappeared. On Thurs-
day evening, her husband came back. On Fri-
day the body of a woman was washed ashore
at Beaver, but turned out to be that of a stew-
ardess who had fallen overboard from one of
the Cincinnati packets. Mr. Ladley himself
showed me the article in the morning paper,
when I took in his breakfast.
"Public hysteria has killed a man before
this," he said, when I had read it. "Suppose
that woman had been mangled, or the screw of
the steamer had cut her head off! How many
people do you suppose would have been willing
to swear that it was my—was Mrs. Ladley?"
97


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
The mirror affair, which Mr. Holcombe
called a periscope, was put in that day and
worked amazingly well. I went with him to
try it out, and I distinctly saw the paper-hanger
take a cigarette from Mr. Ladley's case and
put it in his pocket. Just after that, Mr. Lad-
ley sauntered into the room and looked at the
new paper. I could both see and hear him. It
was rather weird.
"God, what a wall-paper!" he said.


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
6:30—Eating hearty supper.
7 :00—Lights cigarette and paces floor. No-
tice that when Mrs. P. knocks, he goes to desk
and pretends to be writing.
8:00—Is examining book. Looks like a
railway guide.
8:30—It is a steamship guide.
8:45—Tailor's boy brings box. Gives boy
fifty cents. Query. Where does he get money,
now that J. B. is gone?
9 :00—Tries on new suit, brown.
9:30—Has been spending a quarter of an
hour on his knees looking behind furniture and
examining base-board.
10:00—He has the key to the onyx clock.
Has hidden it twice, once up the chimney flue,
once behind base-board.
10:15—He has just thrown key or similar
small article outside window into yard.
11 :00—Has gone to bed. Light burning.
Shall sleep here on floor.
104


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
4:00—Followed the visitor, a tall man with
a pointed beard. He went to the Liberty
Theater. Found it was Bronson, business man-
ager there. Who is Llewellyn, and who is Eliza
Shaeffer?
4:15—Had Mrs. P. bring telephone book:
six Llewellyns in the book; no Eliza Shaeffer.
Ladley appears more cheerful since Bronson's
visit. He has bought all the evening papers and
is searching for something. Has not found it.
7:00—Ate well. Have asked Mrs. P. to
take my place here, while I interview the six
Llewellyns.
11 :00—Mrs. P. reports a quiet evening. He
read and smoked. Has gone to bed. Light
burning. Saw five Llewellyns. None of them
knew Bronson or Ladley. Sixth—a lawyer—
out at revival meeting. Went to the church
and walked home with him. He knows some-
thing. Acknowledged he knew Bronson. Had
met Ladley. Did not believe Mrs. Ladley dead.
106


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Regretted I had not been to the meeting. Good
sermon. Asked me for a dollar for missions.
9:00 A. M.—Sunday. Ladley in bad shape.
Apparently been drinking all night. Can not
eat. Sent out early for papers, and has
searched them all. Found entry on second
page, stared at it, then flung the paper away.
Have sent out for same paper.
10 :00 A. M.—Paper says: "Body of woman
washed ashore yesterday at Sewickley. Much
mutilated by flood debris." Ladley in bed,
staring at ceiling. Wonder if he sees tube?
He is ghastly.
That is the last entry in the note-book for
that day. Mr. Holcombe called me in great ex-
citement shortly after ten and showed me the
item. Neither of us doubted for a moment
that it was Jennie Brice who had been found.
He started for Sewickley that same afternoon,
and he probably communicated with the police
before he left. For once or twice I saw Mr.
Graves, the detective, sauntering past the house.
107


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Mr. Ladley ate no dinner. He went out at
four, and I had Mr. Reynolds follow him. But
they were both back in a half-hour. Mr.
Reynolds reported that Mr. Ladley had bought
some headache tablets and some bromide pow-
ders to make him sleep.
Mr. Holcombe came back that evening. He
thought the body was that of Jennie Brice, but
the head was gone. He was much depressed,
and did not immediately go back to the peri-
scope. I asked if the head had been cut off or
taken off by a steamer; he was afraid the lat-
ter, as a hand was gone, too.
It was about eleven o'clock that night that
the door-bell rang. It was Mr. Graves, with
a small man behind him. I knew the man; he
lived in a shanty-boat not far from my house
—a curious affair with shelves full of dishes
and tinware. In the spring he would be towed
up the Monongahela a hundred miles or so and
float down, tying up at different landings and
108


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
selling his wares. Timothy Senft was his
name. We called him Tim.
Mr. Graves motioned me to be quiet. Both
of us knew that behind the parlor door Ladley
was probably listening.
"Sorry to get you up, Mrs. Pitman," said
Mr. Graves, "but this man says he has bought
beer here to-day. That won't do, Mrs. Pit-
man."
"Beer! I haven't such a thing in the house.
Come in and look," I snapped. And the two
of them went back to the kitchen.
"Now," said Mr. Graves, when I had shut
the door, "where's the dog's-meat man?"
"Up-stairs."
"Bring him quietly."
I called Mr. Holcombe, and he came eagerly,
note-book and all. "Ah!" he said, when he
saw Tim. "So you've turned up!"
"Yes, sir."
"It seems, Mr. Dog's—Mr. Holcombe," said

109


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Mr. Graves, "that you are right, partly, any-
how. Tim here did help a man with a boat
that night"
"Threw him a rope, sir," Tim broke in.
"He'd got out in the current, and what with
the ice, and his not knowing much about a boat,
he'd have kept on to New Orleans if I hadn't
caught him—or Kingdom Come."
"Exactly. And what time did you say this
was?"
"Between three and four last Sunday night
—or Monday morning. He said he couldn't
sleep and went out in a boat, meaning to keep
in close to shore. But he got drawn out in the
current."
"Where did you see him first?"
"By the Ninth Street bridge."
"Did you hail him?"
"He saw my light and hailed me. I was
making fast to a coal barge after one of my
ropes had busted."
"You threw the line to him there?"
no


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"No, sir. He tried to work in to shore. I
ran along River Avenue to below the Sixth
Street bridge. He got pretty close in there and
I threw him a rope. He was about done up."
"Would you know him again?"
"Yes, sir. He gave me five dollars, and said
to say nothing about it. He didn't want any-
body to know he had been such a fool."
They took him quietly up stairs then and
let him look through the periscope. He identi-
fied Mr. Ladley absolutely.
When Tim and Mr. Graves had gone, Mr.
Holcombe and I were left alone in the kitchen.
Mr. Holcombe leaned over and patted Peter
as he lay in his basket.
"We've got him, old boy," he said. "The
chain is just about complete. He'll never kick
you again."
But Mr. Holcombe was wrong, not about
kicking Peter,—although I don't believe Mr.
Ladley ever did that again,—but in thinking
we had him.
in


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Well, I hadn't wanted the coat, as far as
that goes; I'd managed well enough without
furs for twenty years or more. But it was a
satisfaction to know that it had not floated into
Mrs. Maguire's kitchen and spread itself at her
feet, as one may say. However, that was not
the question, after all. The real issue was that
if it was Jennie Brice's coat, and was found
across the river on a cake of ice, then one of
two things was certain: either Jennie Brice's
body wrapped in the coat had been thrown into
the water, out in the current, or she herself,
hoping to incriminate her husband, had flung
her coat into the river.
I told Mr. Holcombe, and he interviewed
Joe Maguire that afternoon. The upshot of
it was that Tommy had been correctly in-
formed. Joe had witnesses who had lined up
to see him rescue a dog, and had beheld his re-
turn in triumph with a wet and soggy fur coat.
At three o'clock Mrs. Maguire, instructed by


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Mr. Graves, brought the coat to me for identi-
fication, turning it about for my inspection,
but refusing to take her hands off it.
"If her husband says to me that he wants
it back, well and good," she said, "but I don't
give it up to nobody but him. Some folks I
know of would be glad enough to have it."
I was certain it was Jennie Brice's coat, but
the maker's name had been ripped out. With
Molly holding one arm and I the other, we
took it to Mr. Ladley's door and knocked. He
opened it, grumbling.
"I have asked you not to interrupt me," he
said, with his pen in his hand. His eyes fell
on the coat. "What's that?" he asked, chang-
ing color.
"I think it's Mrs. Ladley's fur coat," I said.
He stood there looking at it and thinking.
Then: "It can't be hers," he said. "She wore
hers when she went away."
"Perhaps she dropped it in the water."
He looked at me and smiled. "And why
114


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
would she do that?" he asked mockingly.
"Was it out of fashion?"
"That's Mrs. Ladley's coat," I persisted, but
Molly Maguire jerked it from me and started
away. He stood there looking at me and
smiling in his nasty way.
"This excitement is telling on you, Mrs. Pit-
man," he said coolly. "You're too emotional
for detective work." Then he went in and
shut the door.
When I went down-stairs, Molly Maguire
was waiting in the kitchen, and had the au-
dacity to ask me if I thought the coat needed
a new lining!
It was on Monday evening that the strang-
est event in years happened to me. I went to
my sister's house! And the fact that I was
admitted at a side entrance made it even stran-
ger. It happened in this way:
Supper was over, and I was cleaning up,
when an automobile came to the door. It was
Alma's car. The chauffeur gave me a note:


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"DEAR MRS. PITMAN—I am not at all well,
and very anxious. Will you come to see me at
once? My mother is out to dinner, and I am
alone. The car will bring you. Cordially,
"LINDA HARVEY."
I put on my best dress at once and got into
the limousine. Half the neighborhood was out
watching. I leaned back in the upholstered
seat, fairly quivering with excitement. This
was Alma's car; that was Alma's card-case;
the little clock had her monogram on it. Even
the flowers in the flower holder, yellow tulips,
reminded me of Alma—a trifle showy, but
good to look at! And I was going to her
house!
I was not taken to the main entrance, but
to a side door. The queer dream-like feeling
was still there. In this back hall, relegated
from the more conspicuous part of the house,
there were even pieces of furniture from the
old home, and my father's picture, in an oval
gilt frame, hung over my head. I had not seen
116


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
a rose-shaded lamp beside her, and a great bowl
of spring flowers on a little stand at her elbow.
She sat up when I went in, and had a maid
place a chair for me beside the bed. She looked
very childish, with her hair in a braid on the
pillow, and her slim young arms and throat
bare.
"I'm so glad you came!" she said, and would
not be satisfied until the light was just right
for my eyes, and my coat unfastened and
thrown open.
"I'm not really ill," she informed me. "I'm
—I'm just tired and nervous, and—and un-
happy, Mrs. Pitman."
"I am sorry," I said. I wanted to lean over
and pat her hand, to draw the covers around
her and mother her a little,—I had had no one
to mother for so long,—but I could not. She
would have thought it queer and presumptuous
—or no, not that. She was too sweet to have
thought that.
"Mrs. Pitman," she said suddenly, "who
was this Jennie Brice?"
118


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
That put me to thinking.
"He might have been a friend," I admitted.
"Although, as far as I know, he was never at
the house but once, and then he saw both of
them."
"When was that?"
"Sunday morning, the day before she disap-
peared. They were arguing something."
She was looking at me attentively. "You
know more than you are telling me, Mrs. Pit-
man," she said. "You—do you think Jennie
Brice is dead, and that Mr. Howell knows—
who did it?"
"I think she is dead, and I think possibly
Mr. Howell suspects who did it. He does not
know, or he would have told the police."
"You do not think he was—was in love with
Jennie Brice, do you?"
"I'm certain of that," I said. "He is very
much in love with a foolish girl, who ought
to have more faith in him than she has."
She colored a little, and smiled at that, but
I 20



She sat up in bed suddenly.





THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
boys, but they made fifteen dollars a week.
I'm afraid I smiled a little as I looked around
the room, with its gray grass-cloth walls, its
toilet-table spread with ivory and gold, and the
maid in attendance in her black dress and white
apron, collar and cuffs. Even the little night-
gown Lida was wearing would have taken a
week's salary or more. She saw my smile.
"It was to be his chance," she said. "If he
made good, he was to have something better.
My Uncle Jim owns the paper, and he promised
me to help him. But—"
So Jim was running a newspaper! That was
a curious career for Jim to choose. Jim, who
was twice expelled from school, and who could
never write a letter without a dictionary beside
him! I had a pang when I heard his name
again, after all the years. For I had written
to Jim from Oklahoma, after Mr. Pitman died,
asking for money to bury him, and had never
even had a reply.
"And you haven't seen him since?"
122


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
it; I leaned over and drew her nightgown up
over her bare white shoulder. "You won't
help anything or anybody by taking cold, my
dear," I said. "Call your maid and have her
put a dressing-gown around you."
I left soon after. There was little I could
do. But I comforted her as best I could, and
said good night. My heart was heavy as I
went down the stairs. For, twist things as I
might, it was clear that in some way the
Howell boy was mixed up in the Brice case.
Poor little troubled Lida! Poor distracted
boy!
I had a curious experience down-stairs. I
had reached the foot of the staircase and was
turning to go back and along the hall to the
side entrance, when I came face to face with
Isaac, the old colored man who had driven the
family carriage when I was a child, and whom
I had seen, at intervals since I came back, pot-
tering around Alma's house. The old man was
bent and feeble; he came slowly down the hall,
124


THE CASE OE JENNIE BRICE
with a bunch of keys in his hand. I had seen
him do the same thing many times.
He stopped when he saw me, and I shrank
back from the light, but he had seen me. "Miss
Bess!" he said. "Foh Gawd's sake, Miss Bess!"
"You are making a mistake, my friend," I
said, quivering. "I am not 'Miss Bess'!"
He came close to me and stared into my
face. And from that he looked at my cloth
gloves, at my coat, and he shook his white
head. "I sure thought you was Miss Bess,"
he said, and made no further effort to detain
me. He led the way back to the door where
the machine waited, his head shaking with the
palsy of age, muttering as he went. He opened
the door with his best manner, and stood aside.
"Good night, ma'am," he quavered.
I had tears in my eyes. I tried to keep them
back. "Good night," I said. "Good night,
Ikkie."
It had slipped out, my baby name for old
Isaac!
125


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Miss Bess!" he cried. "Oh, praise Gawd,
it's Miss Bess again!"
He caught my arm and pulled me back into
the hall, and there he held me, crying over me,
muttering praises for my return, begging me
to come back, recalling little tender things out
of the past that almost killed me to hear again.
But I had made my bed and must lie in it.
I forced him to swear silence about my visit;
I made him promise not to reveal my identity
to Lida; and I told him—Heaven forgive me!
—that I was well and prosperous and happy.
Dear old Isaac! I would not let him come
to see me, but the next day there came a basket,
with six bottles of wine, and an old daguerreo-
type of my mother, that had been his treasure.
Nor was that basket the last



"Miss Bess," he said, "Miss Bess!"





CHAPTER IX
THE coroner held an inquest over the
headless body the next day, Tuesday.
Mr. Graves telephoned me in the morning,
and I went to the morgue with him.
I do not like the morgue, although some of
my neighbors pay it weekly visits. It is by
way of excursion, like nickelodeons or watch-
ing the circus put up its tents. I have heard
them threaten the children that if they misbe-
haved they would not be taken to the morgue
that week!
I failed to identify the body. How could
I? It had been a tall woman, probably five
feet eight, and I thought the nails looked like
those of Jennie Brice. The thumb-nail of one
was broken short off. I told Mr. Graves about
her speaking of a broken nail, but he shrugged
his shoulders and said nothing.
127


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
There was a curious scar over the heart, and
he was making a sketch of it. It reached from
the center of the chest for about six inches
across the left breast, a narrow thin line that
one could hardly see. It was shaped like this:
1
I felt sure that Jennie Brice had had no such
scar, and Mr. Graves thought as I did. Tem-
ple Hope, called to the inquest, said she had
never heard of one, and Mr. Ladley himself,
at the inquest, swore that his wife had had
nothing of the sort. I was watching him, and
I did not think he was lying. And yet—the
hand was very like Jennie Brice's. It was all
bewildering.
Mr. Ladley's testimoney at the inquest was
disappointing. He was cool and collected:
said he had no reason to believe that his wife
was dead, and less reason to think she had
128


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
of the scar. All the way home in the street-
car he stared at the drawing, holding first one
eye shut and then the other. But, like the
coroner, he got nowhere. He folded the pa-
per and put it in his note-book.
"None the less, Mrs. Pitman," he said, "that
is the body of Jennie Brice; her husband killed
her, probably by strangling her; he took the
body out in the boat and dropped it into the
swollen river above the Ninth Street bridge."
"Why do you think he strangled her?"
"There was no mark on the body, and no
poison was found."
"Then if he strangled her, where did the
blood come from?"
"I didn't limit myself to strangulation," he
said irritably. "He may have cut her throat"
"Or brained her with my onyx clock," I
added with a sigh. For I missed the clock
more and more.
He went down in his pockets and brought
up a key. "I'd forgotten this," he said. "It
130


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
motive, which is different. They had oppor-
tunity, and they had a lot of straggling links
of clues, which in the total made a fair chain
of circumstantial evidence. But that was all.
That is the way the case stood on Tuesday
night, March the thirteenth.
Mr. Ladley was taken away at nine o'clock.
He was perfectly cool, asked me to help him
pack a suit case, and whistled while it was be-
ing done. He requested to be allowed to walk
to the jail, and went quietly, with a detective
on one side and I think a sheriff's officer on
the other.
Just before he left, he asked for a word or
two with me, and when he paid his bill up to
date, and gave me an extra dollar for taking
care of Peter, I was almost overcome. He
took the manuscript of his play with him, and
I remember his asking if he could have any
typing done in the jail. I had never seen a
man arrested for murder before, but I think
he was probably the coolest suspect the officers
133


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
had ever seen. They hardly knew what to
make of it
Mr. Reynolds and I had a cup of tea after
all the excitement, and were sitting at the din-
ing-room table drinking it, when the bell rang.
It was Mr. Howell! He half staggered into
the hall when I opened the door, and was for
going into the parlor bedroom without a word.
"Mr. Ladley's gone, if you want him," I
said. I thought his face cleared.
"Gone!" he said. "Where?"
"To jail."
He did not reply at once. He stood there,
tapping the palm of one hand with the fore-
finger of the other. He was dirty and un-
shaven. His clothes looked as if he had been
sleeping in them.
"So they've got him!" he muttered finally,
and turning, was about to go out the front
door without another word, but I caught his
arm.
134


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"You're sick, Mr. Howell," I said. "You'd
better not go out just yet."
"Oh, I'm all right." He took his handker-
chief out and wiped his face. I saw that his
hands were shaking.
"Come back and have a cup of tea, and a
slice of home-made bread."
He hesitated and looked at his watch. "I'll
do it, Mrs. Pitman," he said. "I suppose I'd
better throw a little fuel into this engine of
mine. It's been going hard for several days."
He ate like a wolf. I cut half a loaf into
slices for him, and he drank the rest of the tea.
Mr. Reynolds creaked up to bed and left him
still eating, and me still cutting and spreading.
Now that I had a chance to see him, I was
shocked. The rims of his eyes were red, his
collar was black, and his hair hung over his
forehead. But when he finally sat back and
looked at me, his color was better.
"So they've canned him!" he said.
135


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Time enough, too," said I.
He leaned forward and put both his elbows
on the table. "Mrs. Pitman," he said earnest-
ly, "I don't like him any more than you do.
But he never killed that woman."
"Somebody killed her."
"How do you know? How do you know
she is dead?"
Well, I didn't, of course—I only felt it
.
"The police haven't even proved a crime.
They can't hold a man for a supposititious
murder."
"Perhaps they can't but they're doing it,"
I retorted. "If the woman's alive, she won't
let him hang."
"I'm not so sure of that," he said heavily,
and got up. He looked in the little mirror over
the sideboard, and brushed back his hair. "I
look bad enough," he said, "but I feel worse.
Well, you've saved my life, Mrs. Pitman.
Thank you."
"How is my—how is Miss Harvey?" I
136


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Peter hobbled to the front door with him.
He had not gone so far as the parlor once while
Mr. Ladley was in the house.
They had had a sale of spring flowers at
the store that day, and Mr. Reynolds had
brought me a pot of white tulips. That night
I hung my mother's picture over the mantel
in the dining-room, and put the tulips beneath
it. It gave me a feeling of comfort; I had
never seen my mother's grave, or put flowers
on it.


CHAPTER X
I HAVE said before that I do not know
anything about the law. I believe that the
Ladley case was unusual in several ways. Mr.
Ladley had once been well known in New York
among the people who frequent the theaters,
and Jennie Brice was even better known. A
good many lawyers, I believe, said that the
police had not a leg to stand on, and I know the
case was watched with much interest by the
legal profession. People wrote letters to the
newspapers, protesting against Mr. Ladley be-
ing held. And I believe that the district attor-
ney, in taking him before the grand jury,
hardly hoped to make a case.
But he did, to his own surprise, I fancy, and
the trial was set for May. But in the mean-
time, many curious things happened.
In the first place, the week following Mr.
139


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Ladley's arrest my house was filled up with
eight or ten members of a company from the
Gaiety Theater, very cheerful and jolly, and
well behaved. Three men, I think, and the
rest girls. One of the men was named Bellows,
John Bellows, and it turned out that he had
known Jennie Brice very well.
From the moment he learned that, Mr. Hoi-
combe hardly left him. He walked to the the-
ater with him and waited to walk home again.
He took him out to restaurants and for long
street-car rides in the mornings, and on the
last night of their stay, Saturday, they got glo-
riously drunk together—Mr. Holcombe, no
doubt, in his character of Ladley—and came
reeling in at three in the morning, singing.
Mr. Holcombe was very sick the next day, but
by Monday he was all right, and he called me
into the room.
"We've got him, Mrs. Pitman," he said,
looking mottled but cheerful. "As sure as
God made little fishes, we've got him." That

140


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE was all he would say, however. It seemed he
was going to New York, and might be gone
for a month. "I've no family," he said, "and
enough money to keep me. If I find my relax-
ation in hunting down criminals, it's a harm-
less and cheap amusement, and—it's my own
business."
He went away that night, and I must admit
I missed him. I rented the parlor bedroom
the next day to a school-teacher, and I found
the periscope affair very handy. I could see
just how much gas she used; and although the
notice on each door forbids cooking and wash-
ing in rooms, I found she was doing both:
making coffee and boiling an egg in the morn-
ing, and rubbing out stockings and handker-
chiefs in her wash-bowl. I'd much rather have
men as boarders than women. The women are
always lighting alcohol lamps on the bureau,
and wanting the bed turned into a cozy corner
so they can see their gentlemen friends in their
rooms.
141


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
was Eliza Shaeffer. I led her back to the din-
ing-room, with Peter sniffing at the basket.
"My name is Shaeffer," she said. "I've seen
your name in the papers, and I believe I know
something about Jennie Brice."
Eliza Shaeffer's story was curious. She said
that she was postmistress at Horner, and lived
with her mother on a farm a mile out of the
town, driving in and out each day in a buggy.
On Monday afternoon, March the fifth, a
woman had alighted at the station from a train,
and had taken luncheon at the hotel. She told
the clerk she was on the road, selling corsets,
and was much disappointed to find no store of
any size in the town. The woman, who had
registered as Mrs. Jane Bellows, said she was
tired and would like to rest for a day or two
on a farm. She was told to see Eliza Shaeffer
at the post-office, and, as a result, drove out
with her to the farm after the last mail came
in that evening.
145


THE CASE OE JENNIE BRICE
about half past eight, the woman was gone.
She had paid for her room and had been driven
as far as Thornville, where all trace of her had
been lost. On account of the disappearance of
Jennie Brice being published shortly after that,
she and her mother had driven to Thornville,
but the station agent there was surly as well as
stupid. They had learned nothing about the
woman.
Since that time, three men had made inqui-
ries about the woman in question. One had
a pointed Vandyke beard; the second, from
the description, I fancied must have been Mr.
Graves. The third without doubt was Mr.
Howell. Eliza Shaeffer said that this last man
had seemed half frantic. I brought her a pho-
tograph of Jennie Brice as "Topsy" and an-
other one as "Junet". She said there was a
resemblance, but that it ended there. But of
course, as Mr. Graves had said, by the time an
actress gets her photograph retouched to suit
her, it doesn't particularly resemble her. And


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
unless I had known Jennie Brice myself, I
should hardly have recognized the pictures.
Well, in spite of all that, there seemed no
doubt that Jennie Brice had been living three
days after her disappearance, and that would
clear Mr. Ladley. But what had Mr. Howell
to do with it all? Why had he not told the po-
lice of the letter from Horner? Or about the
woman on the bridge? Why had Mr. Bronson,
who was likely the man with the pointed beard,
said nothing about having traced Jennie Brice
to Horner?
I did as I thought Mr. Holcombe would
have wished me to do. I wrote down on a
clean sheet of note-paper all that Eliza Shaef-
fer said: the description of the black and white
dress, the woman's height, and the rest, and
then I took her to the court-house, chicks and
all, and she told her story there to one of the
assistant district attorneys.
The young man was interested, but not con-
vinced. He had her story taken down, and
148


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
she signed it. He was smiling as he bowed us
out. I turned in the doorway.
"This will free Mr. Ladley, I suppose?" I
asked.
"Not just yet," he said pleasantly. "This
makes just eleven places where Jennie Brice
spent the first three days after her death."
"But I can positively identify the dress."
"My good woman, that dress has been de-
scribed, to the last stilted arch and Colonial
volute, in every newspaper in the United
States!"
That evening the newspapers announced that
during a conference at the jail between Mr.
Ladley and James Bronson, business manager
at the Liberty Theater, Mr. Ladley had at-
tacked Mr. Bronson with a chair, and almost
brained him.


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
once from New York and once from Chicago.
To the second letter he added a postscript:
"Have not found what I wanted, but am get-
ting warm. If any news, address me at Des
Moines, Iowa, General Delivery. H."
It was nearly the end of April when I saw
Lida again. I had seen by the newspapers that
she and her mother were coming home. I
wondered if she had heard from Mr. Howell,
for I had not, and I wondered, too, if she
would send for me again.
But she came herself, on foot, late one after-
noon, and the school-teacher being out, I took
her into the parlor bedroom. She looked thin-
ner than before, and rather white. My heart
ached for her.
"I have been away," she explained. "I
thought you might wonder why you did not
hear from me. But, you see, my mother—"
she stopped and flushed. "I would have writ-
ten you from Bermuda, but—my mother
watched my correspondence, so I could not."


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
she said. "He has not heard from me, and he
•—thinks I don't care any more. Just look at
me, Mrs. Pitman! Do I look as if I don't
care?"
She looked half killed, poor lamb.
"He may be out of town, searching for a
better position," I tried to comfort her. "He
wants to have something to offer more than
himself."
"I only want him," she said, looking at me
frankly. "I don't know why I tell you all this,
but you are so kind, and I must talk to some
one."
She sat there, in the cozy corner the school-
teacher had made with a portiere and some
cushions, and I saw she was about ready to
break down and cry. I went over to her and
took her hand, for she was my own niece, al-
though she didn't suspect it, and I had never
had a child of my own.
But after all, I could not help her much. I
could only assure her that he would come back
153


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
and explain everything, and that he was all
right, and that the last time I had seen him he
had spoken of her, and had said she was "the
best ever." My heart fairly yearned over the
girl, and I think she felt it. For she kissed me,
shyly, when she was leaving.
With the newspaper files before me, it is not
hard to give the details of that sensational trial.
It commenced on Monday, the seventh of May,
but it was late Wednesday when the jury was
finally selected. I was at the court-house early
on Thursday, and so was Mr. Reynolds.
The district attorney made a short speech.
"We propose, gentlemen, to prove that the
prisoner, Philip Ladley, murdered his wife,"
he said in part. "We will show first that a
crime was committed; then we will show a
motive for this crime, and, finally, we expect
to show that the body washed ashore at Se-
wickley is the body of the murdered woman,
and thus establish beyond doubt the prisoner's
guilt."
154


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"I went to the top of the stairs. My boat
was gone."
"Was the boat secured?"
"Yes, sir. Anyhow, there was no current in
the hall."
"What did you do then?"
"I waited a time and went back to my
room."
"What examination of the house did you
make—if any?"
"Mr. Reynolds looked around."
"What did he find?"
"He found Peter, the Ladleys' dog, shut in
a room on the third floor."
"Was there anything unusual about that?"
"I had never known it to happen before."
"State what happened later."
"I did not go to sleep again. At a quarter
after four, I heard the boat come back. I took
a candle and went to the stairs. It was Mr.
Ladley. He said he had been out getting
medicine for his wife."
157


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Did you see him tie up the boat?"
"Yes."
"Did you observe any stains on the rope?"
"I did not notice any."
"What was the prisoner's manner at that
time?"
"I thought he was surly."
"Now, Mrs. Pitman, tell us about the fol-
lowing morning."
"I saw Mr. Ladley at a quarter before seven.
He said to bring breakfast for one. His wife
had gone away. I asked if she was not ill, and
he said no; that she had gone away early; that
he had rowed her to Federal Street, and that
she would be back Saturday. It was shortly
after that that the dog Peter brought in one of
Mrs. Ladley's slippers, water-soaked."
"You recognized the slipper?"
"Positively. I had seen it often."
"What did you do with' it?"
"I took it to Mr. Ladley."
"What did he say?"
158


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Behind the bed in Mr. Ladley's room."
"What else did you find in the room?"
"A blood-stained towel behind the wash-
stand. Also, my onyx clock was missing."
"Where was the clock when the Ladleys
were moved up into this room?"
"On the mantel. I wound it just before they
came up-stairs."
"When you saw Mrs. Ladley on Sunday,
did she say she was going away?"
"No, sir."
"Did you see any preparation for a jour-
ney?"
"The black and white dress was laid out on
the bed, and a small bag. She said she was
taking the dress to the theater to lend to Miss
Hope."
"Is that all she said?"
"No. She said she'd been wishing her hus-
band would drown; that he was a fiend."
I could see that my testimony had made an
impression.


CHAPTER XII
THE slipper, the rope, the towel, and the
knife and blade were produced in court,
and I identified them all. They made a no-
ticeable impression on the jury. Then Mr.
Llewellyn, the lawyer for the defense, cross-
examined me.
"Is it not true, Mrs. Pitman," he said, "that
many articles, particularly shoes and slippers,
are found floating around during a flood?"
"Yes," I admitted.
"Now, you say the dog found this slipper
floating in the hall and brought it to you. Are
you sure this slipper belonged to Jennie
Brice?"
"She wore it. I presume it belonged to
her."
"Ahem. Now, Mrs. Pitman, after the Lad-
leys had been moved to the upper floor, did
161


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
you search their bedroom and the connecting
room down-stairs?"
"No, sir."
"Ah. Then, how do you know that this slip-
per was not left on the floor or in a closet?"
"It is possible, but not likely. Anyhow, it
was not the slipper alone. It was the other
things and the slipper. It was—"
"Exactly. Now, Mrs. Pitman, this knife.
Can you identify it positively?"
"I can."
"But isn't it true that this is a very common
sort of knife? One that nearly every house-
wife has in her possession?"
"Yes, sir. But that knife handle has three
notches in it. I put the notches there myself."
"Before this presumed crime?"
"Yes, sir."
"For what purpose?"
"My neighbors were constantly borrowing
things. It was a means of identification."
"Then this knife is yours?"
162


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
on his wrist, he put it there himself, to account
for the towel."
I was sorry the next moment that I had said
it, but it was too late. The counsel for the de-
fense moved to exclude the answer and I re-
ceived a caution that I deserved. Then:
"You saw Mr. Ladley when he brought your
boat back?"
"Yes."
"What time was that?"
"A quarter after four Monday morning."
"Did he come in quietly, like a man trying
to avoid attention?"
"Not particularly. It would have been of
no use. The dog was barking."
"What did he say?"
"That he had been out for medicine. That
his wife was sick."
"Do you know a pharmacist named Alex-
ander—Jonathan Alexander?"
"There is such a one, but I don't know him."
I was excused, and Mr. Reynolds was called.
164


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
He had heard no quarreling that Sunday
night; had even heard Mrs. Ladley laughing.
This was about nine o'clock. Yes, they had
fought in the afternoon. He had not over-
heard any words, but their voices were quar-
relsome, and once he heard a chair or some ar-
ticle of furniture overthrown. Was awakened
about two by footsteps on the stairs, followed
by the sound of oars in the lower hall. He
told his story plainly and simply. Under cross-
examination admitted that he was fond of de-
tective stories and had tried to write one him-
self ; that he had said at the store that he would
like to see that "conceited ass" swing, referring
to the prisoner; that he had sent flowers to
Jennie Brice at the theater, and had made a
few advances to her, without success.
My head was going round. I don't know
yet how the police learned it all, but by the
time poor Mr. Reynolds left the stand, half
the people there believed that he had been in
love with Jennie Brice, that she had spurned
165


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Did she give any reason for her husband's
attitude to her?"
"She said he wanted to marry another
woman."
There was a small sensation at this. If
proved, it established a motive.
"Did she know who the other woman was?"
"I believe not. She was away most of the
day, and he put in his time as he liked."
"Did Miss Brice ever mention the nature of
the threats he made against her?"
"No, I think not."
"Have you examined the body washed
ashore at Sewickley?"
"Yes—" in a low voice.
"Is it the body of Jennie Brice?"
"I can not say."
"Does the remaining hand look like the
hand of Jennie Brice?"
"Very much. The nails are filed to points,
as she wore hers."
"Did you ever know of Jennie Brice having
a scar on her breast?"
167


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"No, but that would be easily concealed."
"Just what do you mean?"
"Many actresses conceal defects. She could
have worn flesh-colored plaster and covered
it with powder. Also, such a scar would not
necessarily be seen."
"Explain that."
"Most of Jennie Brice's decollete gowns
were cut to a point. This would conceal such
a scar."
Miss Hope was excused, and Jennie Brice's
sister from Olean was called. She was a
smaller woman than Jennie Brice had been,
very lady-like in her manner. She said she
was married and living in Olean; she had not
seen her sister for several years, but had heard
from her often. The witness had discouraged
the marriage to the prisoner.
"Why?"
"She had had bad luck before."
"She had been married before?"
"Yes, to a man named John Bellows. They
168


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
were in vaudeville together, on the Keith Cir-
cuit. They were known as The Pair of Bel-
lows."
I sat up at this for John Bellows had
boarded at my house.
"Mr. Bellows is dead?"
"I think not. She divorced him."
"Did you know of any scar on your sister's
body?"
"I never heard of one."
"Have you seen the body found at Sewick-
ley?"
"Yes"—faintly.
"Can you identify it?"
"No, sir."
A flurry was caused during the afternoon by
Timothy Senft. He testified to what I already
knew—that between three and four on Monday
morning, during the height of the flood, he had
seen from his shanty-boat a small skiff caught
in the current near the Ninth Street bridge.
He had shouted encouragingly to the man in
169


THE CASE OE JENNIE BRICE
said. "The jury won't even go out of the
box."
But further than that he would not explain.
He said he had a witness locked in his room,
and he'd be glad of supper for him, as they'd
both come a long ways. And he went out and
bought some oysters and a bottle or two of
beer. But as far as I know, he kept him locked
up all that night in the second-story front
room. I don't think the man knew he was a
prisoner. I went in to turn down the bed, and
he was sitting by the window, reading the
evening paper's account of the trial—an elderly
gentleman, rather professional-looking.
Mr. Holcombe slept on the upper landing of
the hall that night, rolled in a blanket—not
that I think his witness even thought of escap-
ing, but the little man was taking no chances.
At eight o'clock that night the bell rang. It
was Mr. Ho well. I admitted him myself, and
he followed me back to the dining-room. I
177


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Yes. She came here, Mr. Howell, two
weeks ago. She looks badly—as if she is wor-
rying."
"Not—about me?" he asked eagerly.
"Yes, about you. What possessed you to go
away as you did? When my—bro—when
her uncle accused you of something, you ran
away, instead of facing things like a man."
"I was trying to find the one person who
could clear me, Mrs. Pitman." He sat back,
with his eyes closed; he looked ill enough to
be in bed.
"And you succeeded?"
"No."
I thought perhaps he had not been eating
and I offered him food, as I had once before.
But he refused it, with the ghost of his boyish
smile.
"I'm hungry, but it's not food I want. I
want to see her," he said.
I sat down across from him and tried to
179


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
mend a table-cloth, but I could not sew. I kept
seeing those two young things, each sick for
a sight of the other, and, from wishing they
could have a minute together, I got to planning
it for them.
"Perhaps," I said finally, "if you want it
very much—"
"Very much!"
"And if you will sit quiet, and stop tapping
your fingers together until you drive me crazy,
I might contrive it for you. For five minutes,"
I said. "Not a second longer."
He came right over and put his arms around
me.
"Who are you, anyhow?" he said. "You
who turn to the world the frozen mask of a
Union Street boarding-house landlady, who
are a gentlewoman by every instinct and train-
ing, and a girl at heart? Who are you?"
"I'll tell you what I am," I said. "I'm a ro-
mantic old fool, and you'd better let me do this
quickly, before I change my mind."
180


CHAPTER XIV
THE next day was the sensational one of
the trial. We went through every phase
of conviction: Jennie Brice was living. Jen-
nie Brice was dead. The body found at Se-
wickley could not be Jennie Brice's. The body
found at, Sewickley was Jennie Brice's. And
so it went on.
The defense did an unexpected thing in put-
ting Mr. Ladley on the stand. That day, for
the first time, he showed the wear and tear of
the ordeal. He had no flower in his button-
hole, and the rims of his eyes were red. But
he was quite cool. His stage training had
taught him not only to endure the eyes of the
crowd, but to find in its gaze a sort of stimu-
lant. He made a good witness, I must admit.
He replied to the usual questions easily.
After five minutes or so Mr. Llewellyn got
down to work.
183


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"You did not use Mrs. Pitman's bread-
knife?"
"I did not."
"And in cutting it, you cut your wrist, did
you?"
"Yes. The knife slipped. I have the scar
still."
"What did you do then?"
"I went back to the room, and stanched the
blood with a towel."
"From whom did you get the medicine?"
"From Alexander's Pharmacy."
"At what time?"
"I am not certain. About three o'clock,
probably."
"You went directly back home?"
Mr. Ladley hesitated. "No," he said finally.
"My wife had had these attacks, but they were
not serious. I was curious to see how the river-
front looked and rowed out too far. I was
caught in the current and nearly carried away."
"You came home after that?"
185


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Yes, at once. Mrs. Ladley was better and
had dropped asleep. She wakened as I came
in. She was disagreeable about the length of
time I had been gone, and would not let me ex-
plain. We—quarreled, and she said she was
going to leave me. I said that as she had
threatened this before and had never done it, I
would see that she really started. At daylight
I rowed her to Federal Street."
"What had she with her?"
"A small brown valise."
"How was she dressed?"
"In a black and white dress and hat, with a
long black coat."
"What was the last you saw of her?"
"She was going across the Sixth Street
bridge."
"Alone?"
"No. She went with a young man we
knew."
There was a stir in the court room at this.
"Who was the young man?"
( 186


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"A Mr. Howell, a reporter on a newspaper
here."
"Have you seen Mr. Howell since your ar-
rest?"
"No, sir. He has been out of the city."
I was so excited by this time that I could
hardly hear. I missed some of the cross-ex-
amination. The district attorney pulled Mr.
Ladley's testimony to pieces.
"You cut the boat's painter with your pocket-
knife?"
"I did."
"Then how do you account for Mrs. Pit-
man's broken knife, with the blade in your
room?"
"I have no theory about it. She may have
broken it herself. She had used it the day be-
fore to lift tacks out of a carpet."
That was true; I had.
"That early Monday morning was cold, was
it not?"
"Yes. Very."
187


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
and proved to be my one-night tenant of the
second-story front. Holcombe's prisoner of the
night before took the stand. The doctor was
less impressive in full daylight; he was a trifle
shiny, a bit bulbous as to nose and indifferent
as to finger-nails. But his testimony was given
with due professional weight.
"You are a doctor of medicine, Doctor Lit-
tlefield?" asked the district attorney.
"Yes."
"In active practise?"
"I have a Cure for Inebriates in Des Moines,
Iowa. I was formerly in general practise in
New York City."
"You knew Jennie Ladley?"
"I had seen her at different theaters. And
she consulted me professionally at one time in
New York."
"You operated on her, I believe?"
"Yes. She came to me to have a name re-
moved. It had been tattooed over her heart."
"You removed it?"
"Not at once. I tried fading the marks with
195


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
goat's milk, but she was impatient. On the
third visit to my office she demanded that the
name be cut out."
"You did it?"
"Yes. She refused a general anesthetic and
I used cocaine. The name was John—I be-
lieve a former husband. She intended to
marry again."
A titter ran over the court room. People
strained to the utmost are always glad of an
excuse to smile. The laughter of a wrought-up
crowd always seems to me half hysterical.
"Have you seen photographs of the scar on
the body found at Sewickley? Or the body
itself?"
"No, I have not."
"Will you describe the operation?"
"I made a transverse incision for the body
pf the name, and two vertical ones—one longer
for the /, the other shorter, for the stem of the
h. There was a dot after the name. I made a
half-inch incision for it"
196


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Will you sketch the cicatrix as you recall
it?"
The doctor made a careful drawing on a pad
that was passed to him. The drawing was
much like this.
1
Line for line, dot for dot, it was the scar on
the body found at Sewickley.
"You are sure the woman was Jennie Brice?"
"She sent me tickets for the theater shortly
after. And I had an announcement of her
marriage to the prisoner, some weeks later."
"Were there any witnesses to the opera-
tion?"
"My assistant; I can produce him at any
time."
That was not all of the trial, but it was the
decisive moment. Shortly after, the jury with-
drew, and for twenty-four hours not a word
was heard from them.


CHAPTER XV
ATER twenty-four hours' deliberation,
the jury brought in a verdict of guilty.
It was a first-degree verdict. Mr. Howell's
unsupported word had lost out against a scar.
Contrary to my expectation, Mr. Holcombe
was not jubilant over the verdict. He came
into the dining-room that night and stood by
the window, looking out into the yard.
"It isn't logical," he said. "In view of
Howell's testimony, it's ridiculous! Heaven
help us under this jury system, anyhow! Look
at the facts! Howell knows the woman: he
sees her on Monday morning, and puts her on
a train out of town. The boy is telling the
truth. He has nothing to gain by coming for-
ward, and everything to lose. Very well: she
was alive on Monday. We know where she
was on Tuesday and Wednesday. Anyhow,
198


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Mr. Howell came soon after. He asked for
her, and going back to the dining-room, kissed
her quietly. He had an air of resolve, a sort
of grim determination, that was a relief from
the half-frantic look he had worn before. He
asked to have Mr. Holcombe brought down,
and so behold us all, four of us, sitting around
the table—Mr. Holcombe with his note-book,
I with my mending, and the boy with one of
Lida's hands frankly under his on the red table-
cloth.
"I want to tell all of you the whole story,"
he began. "To-morrow I shall go to the dis-
trict attorney and confess, but—I want you all
to have it first. I can't sleep again until I get
it off my chest. Mrs. Pitman has suffered
through me, and Mr. Holcombe here has spent
money and time—"
Lida did not speak, but she drew her chair
closer, and put her other hand over his.
"I want to get it straight, if I can. Let me
see. It was on Sunday, the fourth, that the
203


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
river came up, wasn't it? Yes. Well, on the
Thursday before that I met you, Mr. Hoi-
combe, in a restaurant in Pittsburgh. Do you
remember?"
Mr. Holcombe nodded.
"We were talking of crime, and I said no
man should be hanged on purely circumstantial
evidence. You affirmed that a well-linked chain
of circumstantial evidence could properly hang
a man. We had a long argument, in which I
was worsted. There was a third man at the
table—Bronson, the business manager of the
Liberty Theater."
"Who sided with you," put in Mr. Hol-
combe, "and whose views I refused to entertain
because, as publicity man for a theater, he
dealt in fiction rather than in fact."
"Precisely. You may recall, Mr. Holcombe,
that you offered to hang any man we would
name, given a proper chain of circumstantial
evidence against him?"
"Yes."


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"I laughed it off, and we separated. But at
two o'clock Branson called me up again. I
met him in his office at the theater, and he told
me that Jennie Brice, who was out of the cast
that week, had asked for a week's vacation.
She had heard of a farm at a town called Hor-
ner, and she wanted to go there to rest. .
"'Now the idea is this,' he said. 'She's liv-
ing with her husband, and he has threatened
her life more than once. It would be easy
enough to frame up something to look as if
he'd made away with her. We'd get a week
of excitement, more advertising than we'd or-
dinarily get in a year; you get a corking news"
story, and find Jennie Brice at the end, getting
the credit for that. Jennie gets a hundred dol-
lars and a rest, and Ladley, her husband, gets,
say, two hundred.'
"Mr. Branson offered to put up the money,
and I agreed. The flood came just then, and
was considerable help. It made a good setting.
I went to my city editor, and got an assignment
206


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"The towel?"
"Yes. I said no murder was complete with-
out blood, but he kicked on that—said he didn't
mind the rest, but he'd be hanged if he was
going to slash himself. But, as it happened,
he cut his wrist while cutting the boat loose,
and so we had the towel."
"Pillow-slip?" asked Mr. Holcombe.
"Well, no. There was nothing said about a
pillow-slip. Didn't he say he burned it acci-
dentally?"
"So he claimed." Mr. Holcombe made an-
other entry in his book.
"Then I said every murder had a weapon.
He was to have a pistol at first, but none of us
owned one. Mrs. Ladley undertook to get a
knife from Mrs. Pitman's kitchen, and to leave
it around, not in full view, but where it could
be found."
"A broken knife?"
"No. Just a knife."
"He was to throw the knife into the water?"
208


CHAPTER XVI
MR. HOLCOMBE was up very early
the next morning. I heard him mov-
ing around at five o'clock, and at six he banged
at my door and demanded to know at what
time the neighborhood rose: he had been up
for an hour and there were no signs of life.
He was more cheerful after he had had a cup
of coffee, commented on Lida's beauty, and
said that Howell was a lucky chap.
"That is what worries me, Mr. Holcombe,"
I said. "I am helping the affair along and—
what if it turns out badly?"
He looked at me over his glasses. "It isn't
likely to turn out badly," he said. "I have
never married, Mrs. Pitman, and I have missed
a great deal out of life."
"Perhaps you're better off: if you had mar-
ried and lost your wife—'" I was thinking of
Mr. Pitman.
213


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"Not at all," he said with emphasis. "It's
better to have married and lost than never to
have married at all. Every man needs a good
woman, and it doesn't matter how old he is.
The older he is, the more he needs her. I am
nearly sixty."
I was rather startled, and I almost dropped
the fried potatoes. But the next moment he
had got out his note-book and was going over
the items again. "Pillow- slip," he said, "knife
broken, onyx clock—wouldn't think so much
of the clock if he hadn't been so damnably
anxious to hide the key, the discrepancy in time
as revealed by the trial—yes, it is as clear as a
bell. Mrs. Pitman, does that Maguire woman
next door sleep all day?"
"She's up now," I said, looking out the win-
dow.
He was in the hall in a moment, only to
come to the door later, hat in hand. "Is she
the only other woman on the street who keeps
boarders?"
214


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
"She's the only woman who doesn't," I
snapped. "She'll keep anything that doesn't
belong to her—except boarders."
"Ah!"
He lighted his corn-cob pipe and stood puf-
fing at it and watching me. He made me un-
easy: I thought he was going to continue the
subject of every man needing a wife, and I'm
afraid I had already decided to take him if he
offered, and to put the school-teacher out and
have a real parlor again, but to keep Mr.
Reynolds, he being tidy and no bother.
But when he spoke, he was back to the crime
again: "Did you ever work a typewriter?" he
asked.
What with the surprise, I was a little sharp.
"I don't play any instrument except an egg-
beater," I replied shortly, and went on clear-
ing the table.
"I wonder—do you remember about the
village idiot and the horse? But of course you
do, Mrs. Pitman; you are a woman of imagina-
215


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
tion. Don't you think you could be Alice Mur-
ray for a few moments? Now think—you are
a stenographer with theatrical ambitions: you
meet an actor and you fall in love with him,
and he with you."
"That's hard to imagine, that last."
"Not so hard," he said gently. "Now the
actor is going to put you on the stage, perhaps
in this new play, and some day he is going to
marry you."
"Is that what he promised the girl?"
"According to some letters her mother
found, yes. The actor is married, but he tells
you he will divorce the wife; you are to wait
for him, and in the meantime he wants you
near him; away from the office, where other
men are apt to come in with letters to be typed,
and to chaff you. You are a pretty girl."
"It isn't necessary to overwork my imagina-
tion," I said, with a little bitterness. I had
been a pretty girl, but work and worry
"Now you are going to New York very soon,
216


THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
and in the meantime you have cut yourself off
from all your people. You have no one but
this man. What would you do? Where would
you go?"
"How old was the girl?"
"Nineteen."
"I think," I said slowly, "that if I were nine-
teen, and in love with a man, and hiding, I
would hide as near him as possible. I'd be
likely to get a window that could see his going
out and coming in, a place so near that he could
come often to see me."
"Bravo!" he exclaimed. "Of course, with
your present wisdom and experience, you
would do nothing so foolish. But this girl
was in her teens; she was not very far away,
for he probably saw her that Sunday afternoon,
when he was out for two hours. And as the
going was slow that day, and he had much to
tell and explain, I figure she was not far off.
Probably in this very neighborhood."
During the remainder of that morning I saw
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THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Well, that is five years ago. Five times
since then the Allegheny River, from being a
mild and inoffensive stream, carrying a few
boats and a great deal of sewage, has become
a raging destroyer, and has filled our hearts
with fear and our cellars with mud. Five
times since then Molly Maguire has appro-
priated all that the flood carried from my
premises to hers, and five times have I lifted
my carpets and moved Mr. Holcombe, who
occupies the parlor bedroom, to a second-floor
room.
A few days ago, as I said at the beginning,
we found Peter's body floating in the cellar,
and as soon as the yard was dry, I buried him.
He had grown fat and lazy, but I shall miss
him.
Yesterday a riverman fell off a barge along
the water-front and was drowned. They
dragged the river for his body, but they did not
find him. But they found something—an onyx
clock, with the tattered remnant of a muslin
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THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
pillow-slip wrapped around it. It only bore
out the story, as we had known it for five
years.
The Murray girl had lived long enough to
make a statement to the police, although Mr.
Holcombe only learned this later. On the state-
ment being shown to Ladley in the jail, and his
learning of the girl's death, he collapsed. He
confessed before he was hanged, and his con-
fession, briefly, was like this:
He had met the Murray girl in connection
with the typing of his play, and had fallen in
love with her. He had never cared for his
wife, and would have been glad to get rid of
her in any way possible. He had not intended
to kill her, however. He had planned to elope
with the Murray girl, and awaiting an oppor-
tunity, had persuaded her to leave home and
to take a room near my house.
Here he had visited her daily, while his wife
was at the theater.
They had planned to go to New York to
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THE CASE OF JENNIE BRICE
Horner that Monday morning, that she had
reached Horner, had there assumed an in-
cognito, as Mr. Pitman would say, and had
later disappeared from there, maliciously con-
cealing herself to work his undoing.
In all probability he would have gone free,
the richer by a hundred dollars for each week
of his imprisonment, but for two things: the
flood, which had brought opportunity to his
door, had brought Mr. Holcombe to feed Peter,
the dog. And the same flood, which should
have carried the headless body as far as Cairo,
or even farther on down the Mississippi, had
rejected it in an eddy below a clay bluff at
Sewickley, with its pitiful covering washed
from the scar.
Well, it is all over now. Mr. Ladley is dead,
and Alice Murray, and even Peter lies in the
yard. Mr. Reynolds made a small wooden
cross over Peter's grave, and carved "Till we
meet again" on it. I dare say the next flood
will find it in Molly Maguire's kitchen.
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