burglar we have here, Messieurs, a most remarkable burglar. He—or she—has a hand, but no body; he enter sick ladies’ bedrooms and frightens away their lives, then steal their jewelry; he break honest men’s windows with a hammer, then deprives them of their treasured heirlooms while they heat the milk for their babies. Cordieu, he will bear investigating, this one!"
"You don’t believe me," Kinnan declared, half truculently, half shamefacedly.
"Have I not said I do?" the Frenchman answered, almost angrily. "When you have seen what I have seen, Monsieur,—parbleu, when you have seen one-half as much!—you will learn to believe many things which fools declare impossible.
"This hammer"—he rose, almost glaring at Kinnan, so intent was his stare—"where is he? I would see him, if you please."
"It’s over at the house," our visitor answered, "lying right where it fell when the hand dropped it. Neither my wife nor I would touch it for a farm."
"Tremendous, gigantic, magnificent!" de Grandin ejaculated, nodding his head vigorously after each adjective. "Come, mes amis, let us hasten, let us fly. Trowbridge, my friend, you shall attend the so excellent Madame Kinnan. I, I shall go on the trail of this bodiless burglar, and it shall go hard, but I shall find him. Morbleu, Monsieur le Fantôme, when you kill that Madame Richards with fright, that is one thing; when you steal Monsieur Kinnan’s cup of le Marquis de Lafayette, that is also one thing, but when you think to thumb your invisible nose at Jules de Grandin,—parbleu, that is something else again! We shall see who will make one sacré singe out of whom, and that right quickly."
The hammer proved to be an ordinary one, with a nickeled head and imitation ebony handle, such as could be bought at any notion store for twenty-five cents; but de Grandin pounced on it like a hungry tom-cat on a mouse or a gold prospector on a two-pound nugget or a Kimberley miner on a twelve-carat diamond.
"But this is wonderful; this is superb!" he almost cooed as he swaddled the implement in several layers of paper and stowed it tenderly away in an inside pocket of his great coat.
"Trowbridge, my friend"—he threw me one of his quick, enigmatic smiles—"do you attend the good Madame Kinnan. I have important duties to perform elsewhere. If possible, I shall return for dinner, and if I do, I pray you will have your amiable cook prepare for me one of her so delicious apple pies. If I return not"— his little blue eyes twinkled a moment with frosty laughter—"I shall eat all that pie for breakfast, like a good Yon-kee."
Dinner was long since over, and the requested apple pie had been reposing untouched on the pantry shelf for several hours when de Grandin popped from a taxicab like a jack-in-the-box from its case and rushed up the front steps, the waxed ends of his little blond mustache twitching like the whiskers of an excited tom-cat, his arms filled with bundles—a look of triumphant exhilaration on his face. "Quick, quick,
Friend Trowbridge," he ordered as he deposited his packages on my office desk, "to the telephone! Call that Monsieur Richards, that rich man who so generously allowed me forty- eight hours to recover his lost treasures, and that Monsieur Kinnan, whose so precious cup of the Marquis de Lafayette was stolen—call them both and bid them come here, right away, at once, immediately!
