a drug, showed--to me, at any rate--that rare thing which experience of life proves greater than intellect, than success, than power, or brilliance may achieve--a heart. If reincarnation, with its karmic law, be true, either he owed me a heavy debt from some forgotten past, or I owe to him a debt some future life will enable, and enforce me, to repay.
It was at the end of the first ten days that, quite by chance, we stumbled upon the trail of Boyde. He had been seen in a "swell dive" on the West Side--with a woman. He was spending money like water. How had he come by it? Whom had he swindled now? We were in the East Side, following a false clue, when this information was given to us--under conditions impossible to describe--and we hurried across to the neighbourhood indicated. An hour later we were only a short thirty minutes behind his glittering path. He was visiting expensive joints. Champagne flowed. The woman wore furs. He wore a light coloured box-cloth overcoat. Both were "high fliers." And he was drinking hard.
The information, I confess, had the effect of stiffening me. It was impossible not to wonder, as we sat in the cross-town tram of East 23rd Street, whether in his gay career he gave a single thought to the room in East 19th Street, where he shared my bed, wore my suit, ate my food, such as it was, and where he had left me ill, alone and starving. The old doctor was grim and silent, but a repressed fury, I could see, bit into him. Was there, perhaps, vengeance, in the old, crumpled man? "No weakness, remember," he growled from time to time. "I hold him, while you telephone to Mulberry Street. Pflicht, pflicht! It is your duty to--to everybody...!"
The trail led us to Mouquin's, where he had undoubtedly been shortly before, then on to a place in 34th Street ... and there we lost it hopelessly. It was not a false alarm, but the trail ran up a tree and vanished. He had gone home with the woman, but who she was or where she lived, not even the ward man--whom I knew by chance, and,
equally by chance, met at the door--could tell us. I
