ceremony. He was a kind and affable dominie, sir, and I had no trouble in talking to him.”
“And you described the bride?”
“No, I led the conversation so that he described her.”
“Good; and what kind of a woman did he make her out to be? Delicate? Pale?”
“Sir, he had not read the service for so lovely a bride in years. Very slight, almost fragile, but beautiful, and with a delicate bloom which showed her to be in better health than one would judge from her dainty figure. It was a private wedding, sir, celebrated in a hotel parlor; but her father was with her——”
“Her father?” Mr. Gryce’s theory received its first shock. Then the old man who had laughed on leaving Mr. Adams’s house was not the father to whom those few lines in Mr. Adams’s handwriting were addressed. Or this young woman was not the person referred to in those lines.
“Is there anything wrong about that?” inquired Sweetwater.
Mr. Gryce became impassive again.
“No; I had not expected his attendance at the wedding; that is all.”
“Sorry, sir, but there is no doubt about his having been there. The bridegroom——”
“Yes, tell me about the bridegroom.”
“Was the very man you described to me as leaving Mr. Adams’s house with her. Tall, finely developed, with a grand air and gentlemanly manners. Even his clothes correspond with what you told me to expect: a checked suit, brown in color, and of the latest cut. Oh, he is the man!”
Mr. Gryce, with a suddenly developed interest in the lid of his inkstand, recalled the lines which Mr. Adams had written immediately before his death, and found himself wholly at sea. How reconcile facts so diametrically opposed? What allusion could there be in these lines to the new-made bride of another man? They read, rather, as if she were his own bride, as witness:
I return your daughter to you. She is here. Neither she nor you will ever see me again. Remember Evelyn!
Amos’s Son.
There must be something wrong. Sweetwater must have been led astray by a series of extraordinary coincidences. Dropping the lid of the inkstand in a way to make the young man smile, he looked up.
“I’m afraid it’s been a fool chase, Sweetwater. The facts you relate in regard to this couple, the fact of their having been married at all, tally so little with what we have been led to expect from certain other evidences which have come in——”
“Pardon me, sir, but will you hear me out? At the Imperial, where they were married, I learned that the father and daughter had registered as coming from a small place in Pennsylvania; but I could learn nothing in regard to the bridegroom. He had not appeared on the scene till the time for the ceremony, and after the marriage was seen to take his bride away in one carriage while the old gentleman departed in another. The latter concerned me little; it was the young couple I had been detailed to find. Employing the usual means of search, I tracked them to the Waldorf, where I learned what makes it certain that I have been following the right couple. On the afternoon of the very day of Mr. Adams’s death, this young husband and wife left the hotel on foot and did not come back. Their clothes, which had all been left behind, were taken away two days later by an elderly gentleman who said he was her father and whose appearance coincides with that of the person registering as such at the Imperial. All of which looks favorable to my theory, does it not, especially when you remember that the bridegroom’s name——”
“You have not told it.”
“Is Adams, Thomas Adams. Same family as the murdered man, you see. At least, he has the same name.”
Mr. Gryce surveyed the young man with admiration, but was not yet disposed to yield him entire credence.
“Humph! I do not wonder you thought it worth your while to follow up the pair, if one of them is named Adams and the other Eva. But, Sweetwater, the longer you serve on the force the more you will learn that coincidences as strange and unexpected as these do occur at times, and must be taken into account in the elucidation of a difficult problem. Much as I may regret to throw cold water on your hopes, there are reasons for believing that the young man and woman whom we are seeking are not the ones you have busied yourself about for the last two days. Certain facts which have come to light would seem to show that if she had a husband at all, his name would not be Thomas Adams, but Felix, and as the facts I have to bring forward are most direct and unimpeachable, I fear you will have to start again, and on a new tack.”
But Sweetwater remained unshaken, and eyed his superior with a vague smile playing about his lips.
“You have not asked me, sir, where I have spent all the time which has elapsed since I saw you last. The investigations I have mentioned did not absorb more than a day.”
“Very true. Where have you been, Sweetwater?”
“To Montgomery, sir, to that small town in Pennsylvania from which Mr. Poindexter and his daughter registered.”
“Ah, I see! And what did you learn there? Something directly to the point?”
“I learned this, that John Poindexter, father of Eva, had for a friend in early life one Amos Cadwalader.”
“Amos!” repeated Mr. Gryce, with an odd look.
“Yes, and that this Amos had a son, Felix.”
“Ah!”
“You see, sir, we must be on the right track; coincidences cannot extend through half a dozen names.”
“You are right. It is I who have made a mistake in drawing my conclusions too readily. Let us hear about this Amos. You gathered something of his history, no doubt.”
“All that was possible, sir. It is closely woven in with that of Poindexter, and presents one feature which may occasion you no surprise, but which, I own, came near nonplussing me. Though the father of Felix, his name was not Adams. I say was not, for he has been dead six months. It was Cadwalader. And Felix went by the name of Cadwalader, too, in the early days of which I have to tell, he and a sister whose name——”
“Well?”
“Was Evelyn.”
“Sweetwater, you are an admirable fellow. So the mystery is ours.”
“The history, not the mystery; that still holds. Shall I relate what I know of those two families?”
“At once: I am as anxious as if I were again twenty-three and had been in your shoes instead of my own for the last three days.”
“Very well, sir. John Poindexter and Amos Cadwalader were, in their early life, bosom friends. They had come from Scotland together and settled in Montgomery in the thirties. Both married there, but John Poindexter was a prosperous man from the first, while Cadwalader had little ability to support a family, and was on the verge of bankruptcy when the war of the rebellion broke out and he enlisted as a soldier. Poindexter remained at home, caring for his own family and for the two children of Cadwalader, whom he took into his own house. I say his own family, but he had no family, save a wife, up to the spring of ‘80. Then a daughter was born to him, the Eva who has just married Thomas Adams. Cadwalader, who was fitted for army life, rose to be a captain; but he was unfortunately taken prisoner at one of the late battles and confined in Libby Prison, where he suffered the tortures of the damned till he was released, in 1865, by a forced exchange of prisoners. Broken, old, and crushed, he returned home, and no one living in the town at that time will ever forget the day he alighted from the cars and took his way up the main street. For not having been fortunate enough, or unfortunate enough, perhaps, to receive any communication from home, he advanced with a cheerful haste, not knowing that his only daughter then lay dead in his friend’s house, and that it was for her funeral that the people were collecting in the green square at the end of the street. He was so pale, broken, and decrepit that few