Page:Miss Madelyn Mack Detective.pdf/20

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The Man with Nine Lives
9

reached me when I was in just the right receptive mood.

It was late on a Thursday afternoon of June, the climax of a racking five days for me under the blistering Broadway sun, that Madelyn's motor caught me at the Bugle office, and Madelyn insisted on bundling me into the tonneau without even a suitcase.

"We'll reach the Rosary in time for a fried chicken supper," she promised. "What you need is four or five days' rest where you can't smell the asphalt."

"You fairy godmother!" I breathed as I snuggled down on the cushions. Neither of us knew that already the crimson trail of crime was twisting toward us—that within twelve hours we were to be pitchforked from a quiet week-end's rest into the vortex of tragedy.

II

We had breakfasted late and leisurely. When at length we had finished, Madelyn had insisted on having her phonograph brought to the rose-garden, and we were listening to Sturveysant's matchless rendering of "The Jewel Song"—one of the three records for which Miss Mack had sent the harpist her check for two hundred dollars the day before.

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