kept locked. Once a month he would have a Jap in to clean up under his supervision. Well, she supposed he had a lot of scientific secrets, and maybe dangerous chemicals, that he didn't want people poking into, but just the same it a person uneasy.
She didn't know anything about her employer, and knew her place better than to ask him. In August, 1923―it was a rainy morning, she remembered―a woman and a girl of fifteen with a lot of suitcases arrived at the house. She let them in and the woman asked for Mr. Leggett. Mrs. Begg went up to the laboratory and told him, and he came down. Never in all her born days had she seen such a surprised man as he was when he saw them. He turned absolutely white and she thought he was going to fall down, he shook so bad.
She didn't know what Leggett said to the woman and girl, because they all jabbered in some foreign language, though the lot of them could talk as good English as anybody else, and better than most. She went about her work. Pretty soon Leggett came out to the kitchen and told her the visitors were a Mrs. Dain, his sister-in-law, and her daughter Gabrielle, neither of whom he had seen for ten years, and that they were going to stay with him. Mrs. Dain later told the housekeeper that they were English but had been living in New York for several years. Mrs. Begg said she liked Mrs. Dain, who was a sensible woman and a real housewife, but Gabrielle was a tartar.
With Mrs, Dain's arrival, and with her ability as a housekeeper, there was no longer any place in the household for Mrs. Begg. They had been very liberal with her, she said, helping her find a new place and giving her a generous bonus when she left. She had seen none of them since, but in the Examiner a week later―she was the sort of woman who keeps a careful watch on marriages, deaths and births―she saw that a marriage license had been issued to Edgar Leggett and Alice Dain.
IV
When I arrived at the Agency at nine the next morning, Eric Collinson was sitting in the outer office. His sunburned face was dingy without pinkness, and he had neglected to put stick-em on his hair.
"Do you know anything about Miss Leggett?" he asked, jumping up and striding toward me as soon as I appeared in the doorway. "She wasn't home last night, and she's not home yet. Her father wouldn't say he didn't know where she was, but I'm sure he didn't. He told me not to worry, but how can I help worrying? Do you know anything about it?"
I said I didn't, told him I had seen her leaving Minnie Hershey's, gave him the mulatto's address, and suggested that he see if he could learn anything from her. He jammed his hat on his head and hurried out of the office. Getting O'Gar on the phone, I asked if he had heard from New York.
"Uh-huh. Upton—that's his right—name was once a private detective, till '23, when him and a fellow named Harry Ruppert were sent over to Sing Sing for fixing a jury. They were sprung last month. How'd you make out with the dinges?"
"Her man—a big smoke called Rhino Tingley—is toting an eleven-hundred-buck roll. He says he won it in a crapgame. It's more than he could have got for the diamonds, but maybe the diamonds aren't the big item in this job. Suppose you have Rhino looked up."
O'Gar said he would and hung up.
I wired our New York branch for additional dope on Upton and Ruppert, and then trotted up to the County Clerk's office, in the City Hall, and dug into the August and September, 1923, marriage licenses. I found the applications I wanted, dated August 26. Edgar Leggett had stated that he was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on March 6, 1883,
