Making for the Fremont House, I passed Dr. Bowman's stairway, and on impulse turned, ran up. I found the doctor packing, very snappish, very sorry for himself. He was leaving next day for a position in the state hospital for the insane at Sefton. His kind have to blow off to somebody; I was it, though he must have known I had no sympathy to offer. The hang-over of last night's drunk made emotional the tone in which he said,
"After all, a man's wife makes or breaks him. Mine's broken me. I could have had a fine position at the Mountain View Sanitarium, well paid, among cultured people, if she'd held up her damned divorce suit a little longer."
"And as it is, you have to put up with what Cummings can land you with such pull as he has."
"I'm not complaining of Cummings," sullenly. "He did the best he could for me, I suppose, on such short notice. But a man of my class is practically wasted in a place of the sort."
I had learned what I wanted; I carried more ammunition to the interview before me. I found Dykeman in his room, propped up in bed, wheezing with an attack of asthma. A sick man is either more merciful than usual, or more unmerciful. Apparently it took Dykeman the former way; he accepted me eagerly, and had me call Cummings from the adjoining room. The lawyer was half into that costume he had brought from San Francisco. He came quite modern as to the legs and feet, but thoroughly ancient in a shirt of mail around the arms and chest, and carrying a Roman helmet in his hand as though it had been an opera hat.
"Trying 'em on?" Dykeman whispered at him.
Cummings nodded with that self-conscious, half-tickled, half-sheepish air that men display when it comes to costume. His greeting to me was cool but not surly. What had happened might go as all in the day's work between detective and lawyer.
"Just seen Bowman," was my first pass at them. "I gather he's not very well pleased with the position you got him; seems to think it small pay for a dirty job."
"What's this? What's this?" croaked Dykeman. "You been getting a place for Bowman, Cummings?"
"Certainly," the lawyer dodged with swift, practical neatness. "I'd promised him my influence in the matter some little time ago."