Picture Play Magazine (Oct-Nov 1915)

12 PICTURE-PLAY WEEKLY head barber's smiling invitation. "Very neat." From the window of the barber shop beside which the thickset, Germanlooking man stood, an unobstructed view of the embassy and all who entered or departed from it could be obtained. "Your assistant's face seems familiar to me," Duvall remarked, in an undertone to the head barber, as the latter was lathering his cheeks. ■ "Has he been working for you long?" "Oh, only a week or so," the head barber answered. "He offered to come to work for me for almost nothing, and so I hired him. He is a very good barber." Duvall thought to himself: "Also, he is a very clever confederate of the gang he is working with. From this barber shop he can watch the embassy across the street continually. But I fancy he will be giving up his job here very shortly — now that he has the ambassador's snuffbox. H'm !" the young man mused to himself, as he watched the man who was working at the next chair out o' the corner of his eye while the head barber shaved him, "how the deuce am I going to get the box away from him? I want to get his accomplices in the plot to rob Monsieur de Grissac of the thing, as well. By George — I believe the fellow he's been shaving is one of them !" The "customer" of the head barber's assistant had left the chair and gone to the counter where toilet waters, hair tonics, and soaps were displayed for sale near the door. In the mirror, before him, Duvall saw the smooth-shaven, heavily built man in the barber's white jacket hand the other a package, accept a coin in exchange, and the latter take his departure from the shop. "There it goes," Duvall thought excitedly— "the ambassador's snuffbox !" He told the head barber he didn't want a hot towel, nor powder, nor bay rum on his hair. Speed in getting him out of the chair, he informed the man who had finished shaving him, was all he wanted. A moment after the stranger had gone from the shop, Duvall ran out of it, after him. "One moment !" He stopped the man halfway up the street. "I'll trouble you for that package you've got there!" And, with the words, Duvall snatched the thing out of the other's hand. The string came away and the paper unwrapped, as he did so. And Duvall found himself looking at an innocent cake of shaving soap — unmistakably that and nothing more. "I beg your pardon!" He faltered out an apology to the stranger he had mistaken for an accomplice of the -man who was masquerading as a barber back in the shop, out of which Duvall had just run. Leaving the purchaser of the shaving stick standing there, with the soap in its half-undone paper held loosely in his hand where Duvall had thrust it and his mouth open in speechless amazement at that young man's queer actions, Duvall turned and hastened back to the barber shop. The thickset man with the German features was gone when he arrived there. "Just stepped out to get his lunch," the head barber informed him. Duvall, fuming, turned back to the embassy. "He's gone from that shop for good !" he told himself regretfully. "And I let him go, taking the snuffbox with him — while I went chasing off on a false scent ! Now I'll have to begin a search of the whole city of London for him. It's all my own blockheaded fault for not having made sure of one bird before I started off after the other!" Duvall met Monsieur Lefevre just descending the steps of the embassy and told him what had happened. As they walked up the street together, Lefevre asked him if he still felt confident that the man was the murderer of the ambassador's valet. Duvall replied that he did. His chief had just offered to take him to the head of the London police force and request that the city of London be dragged for the man Duvall had last seen as a barber in that shop — when he stopped short, clutching the young man's arm. "Isn't that our man now?" inquired Monsieur Lefevre. They were standing in front of a restaurant, through the lace curtain in front of whose plate-glass window they could both see a man seated at a table with a newspaper propped up against a bottle of wine before him. It was the smooth-shaven, stockily built man with the German cast of countenance ! Watching through the window. Du vall and his chief saw him request the waiter to bring him a piece of wrapping paper, string, and pen and ink. Then, after a furtive look around him, they saw him take something out of his pocket. The man wrapped and tied it up and then addresed the package. Craning his neck, Duvall was able to see part of the first line of the address as the man wrote it: "Doctor Ha " He could not see the rest. But the second line he saw in full. It was "Brussels." Duvall turned to Monsieur Lefevre in triumph. "Are you convinced now that he murdered Monsieur de Grissac's valet," said he, "and that that is the ambassador's snuffbox we have just seen him do up to hand to some one of his accomplices ?" The head of the French secret-service bureau shared his excitement, i "I think we are on the right trail !" he nodded. "We will wait here until he comes out, and then take the package away from him by force!" It was Duvall's turn to catch his chief's arm. "No!" he objected. "That isn't the thing to do at all — if you'll pardon me for contradicting you, sir. We will follow him, instead, when he comes out, and see whom he tries to give the box to. Then we will have both him and his confederate or confederates, don't you see? It's no more important to get the box back than it is to round up the gang who were in the plot to steal it." Monsieur Lefevre nodded. "I do see," he commented. "And you are right. We will follow him when he leaves the restaurant, without giving him a hint that we suspect him." And follow him they did, ten minutes later. The man led them along the thoroughfare for perhaps a dozen blocks. Then Monsieur Lefevre and Duvall saw him turn in at the entrance of a public building. "The post office !" whispered Duvall. "Of course ! What more natural meeting place could he arrange with an accomplice? Quick, chief! You go in at this door, while I run around to the side entrance and walk through. We'll see whom he hands the package to and have them cornered between us ; then for an easy capture!" Alonsieur Lefevre entered the post