His mission accomplished, Dan was returning to the garage to put the car up and proceed on foot to his daily round of the hospitals and bureaus of inquiry, when half-way down the block a shrill voice piped at him.
"Hot tomales! Very fine hot tomales. Try one, Mister!"
Idly he glanced toward the curb. A diminutive, ragged vender crouched there beside a bright, new hand-cart which contained a huge pot simmering above a charcoal fire, and bore a sign with the legend "Hot Tomales, 5 cents," in obviously home-made lettering.
His mind intent on his errand of the morning, Dan gave it but passing heed and drove on into the garage, yet as he busied himself about the car, the incident kept recurring to his mind. Hot tomales were a queer commodity for a street-seller to deal in; Dan didn't know exactly what they were, but he believed them to be some sort of Spanish or Mexican concoction----
At this point in his cogitations he stopped work abruptly and stood staring into vacancy.
There had been something appealingly familiar even in that fleeting glimpse of the tattered crouched figure, and could it be that it had been hunchbacked?
With an excited cry he dropped the wrench from his hand and sprang out into the street. Cart and vender were gone, but in the gutter lay a crushed, greasy mess which had been a tomale. It was still smoking and as Dan stirred it with his foot, he saw that a wisp of sodden paper clung to it.
Seizing it, he smoothed it out and read the two jerkily penciled words:
"I say, hello there! Wait a minute, Kearn!" Winnie Mason called as he brought his roadster to a halt with a sudden grinding of brakes. It was two days later and a cutting east wind skirled about the driveway of the Park, rattling the naked branches of the trees like the fleshless arms of a legion of skeletons.
The tall figure on the path waited, but his face was averted and there was a listless, dispirited droop to his whole form which was not lost upon the quick, sympathetic gaze of his friend.
"I'll back her up. . . Now get in, old man, and we'll take a little spin. Jolly glad I ran across you, but what brings you out on a blustering rotten afternoon like this? You're not very fit yet, you know, after that bout of fever you had in Mexico, in spite of the lacing you managed to give Starr Wiley."