we searched the house and found the diamonds gone."
"What else was taken?"
"Nothing else seems to have been touched,"
"How about your servants?"
"We've only one," she said, "Minnie Hershey, a negress. She doesn't sleep here, and I'm sure she had nothing to do with it. She has been with us for two years, and I'm sure of her honesty."
I said I'd like to talk to Minnie, and Mrs. Leggett called her in. The servant was a small, wiry mulatto of twenty-something, with the straight black hair and the brown features of an Indian. She was very polite and very insistent that she had nothing to do with the theft of the diamonds, and had known nothing about it until she arrived at the house at eight-thirty this morning. She gave me her home address, a Geary Street number.
"The police questioned her this morning," Mrs. Leggett told me after the girl had gone out. "They don't think she had anything to do with it. They think it was the man I saw—the one Gabrielle saw three nights ago."
I asked for more details.
"When I opened the bedroom windows last night, about midnight, just before going to bed, I saw a man standing up on the corner, I can't say, even now, that there was anything very suspicious-looking about him. He was simply standing there as if waiting for someone, and, though he was looking down this way, there was nothing about him to make me think he might have been watching this house or any other. He was a man past forty, I should say, rather short and broad, somewhat of your build. But he had a bristly brown mustache and was pale. And he wore a brown soft hat and a brown—or dark—overcoat."
"Somebody else had seen him three nights before?" I asked.
"Yes, Gabrielle, my daughter. Coming home late one night, he passed her a pavement or two up the street. She was in an automobile and he was walking. She thought she had seen him come from our steps, but she wasn't sure, and she thought nothing more of it until after the burglary."
"Is she home now? I'd like to talk to her."
Mrs. Leggett went out to get her. I asked Leggett:
"Were the diamonds loose?"
"They were unset, of course, and in small manila envelopes—Halstead & Beauchamp's—each in its own, with a number and the weight of the stone written on it in pencil. The envelopes were taken, too."
Mrs, Leggett returned with her daughter, a girl of twenty or less, in a sleeveless white silk dress; a girl of medium height who looked slenderer than she really was. I stood up to be introduced to her and then asked her about the man she had seen coming from the house the other night.
"I'm not positive that he came from the house," she replied, "or from the lawn." Her manner was a bit petulant, as if being questoned was distasteful. "I thought he might have, but I only saw him walking up the street."
"This was Saturday night?"
"Yes—that is, Sunday morning."
"What time?" I asked, studying her as we talked, Her hair was as curly as, and no longer than, her father's, but of a much lighter brown. Of her features, only her green-brown eyes were large, forehead, mouth and teeth were unusually small, There was a barely noticeable hollowness at cheeks and eyes. She had a pointed chin and extremely white, smooth skin, Her expression was sullen: I couldn't tell whether it was habitual or simply in resentment of my prying.
"Three o'clock or after" she said impatiently,
"Were you alone?"
"Hardly. Eric Collinson brought me home."
I asked her where I could find Eric Collinson. She frowned, hesitated, and
