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Updated: June 4, 2025
Jimmie Dale walked slowly across the room, halted before the wall near the door, stood for an instant hesitant there and then, as though in a sudden, final decision, dropped down on his knees, and, working swiftly, removed the section of the base-board from the wall for the second time that night.
Somewhere wherever they keep such things was the headless body of a woman with a hand missing, and with a curious scar across the left breast. The slip of paper, however, which I had found behind the base-board, was still in Mr. Holcombe's possession, nor had he mentioned it to the police. Mr. Holcombe had not come back.
An instant later, with the loose section of the base-board removed, he reached inside, and took out a curious assortment of garments, which he laid on the floor beside him. They were not Smarlinghue's clothes they were even more shoddy and disreputable.
The ragged outer garments he had been wearing lay discarded in a heap on the floor, close to that section of the wall near the door where the base-board, ingeniously movable, would, in another moment or so, afford them safe hiding until such time as "Smarlinghue" should reappear in person again; from the nostrils, from beneath the lips, from behind the ears, the tiny, cleverly-inserted pieces of wax, distorting the features, had vanished; and now, over the cracked basin on the rickety washstand, the masterly-created pallor was washed rapidly away and the thin, hollow-cheeked, emaciated face of Smarlinghue, the drug fiend, was gone, and in its place, clean-cut, clear-eyed, was the face of Jimmie Dale, clubman and millionaire.
Old as the house was, it was not old enough for its beams to have rolled. Yet the floor was certainly uneven, and, what was stranger yet, had, in sagging, failed to carry the base-board with it. This I could see by peering around the side of the cabinet. Was it an important enough fact to call for explanation?
It was down this transverse hall. Flushed with apparent success, I looked up at the walls on either side of me. They were gray with paint and presented one unbroken surface from base-board to ceiling, save where the two doorways opened, one into the library, the other into the dining-room. Had the flying presence escaped by either of these two rooms? I knew the dining-room well.
Only Grey was happy; Grey, grown from the blue-eyed baby boy, who used to dig his little heels so vigorously into the rotten base-board under the bench in the wood-shed of the farm house, into the tall, blue-eyed, open-faced lad of fourteen, of whom it could be truly said that never had his parents been called upon to blush for a mean or vicious act committed by him.
He found them, and, kneeling on the floor, printing the letters, he addressed the envelope to police headquarters, folded and placed the documents inside, and sealed the envelope. He replaced the base-board, and stood up but his hand caught at the wall to support himself.
Before I reached the sail-locker, the door to the deck, at the end of the alleyway, burst open, and the tradesman, Morton, pitched headlong over the base-board. He scrambled to his hands and knees and scuttled towards me. There was a whistling thud near my head. I leaped back into the cabin, out of range, so quickly I tripped and sat down hard upon the deck.
This gave me an idea. Carrying it back with me into the recess, I got down on my knees, and first taking the precaution to toss a little stick-pin of mine under the cabinet to be reached after in case I was detected there by Nixon, I insinuated the cutter between the base-board and the floor and found that I could not only push it in an inch or more before striking the brick, but run it quite freely around from one corner of the recess to the other.
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