Chapter III

I

On the following day Ruyler, who had looked upon the whirlwind of passion that had swept him into a romantic and unworldly marriage, as likely to remain the one brief drama of his prosaic business man's life, began dimly to apprehend that he was hovering on the edge of a sinister and complicated drama whose end he could as little foresee as he could escape from the hand of Fate that was pushing him inexorably forward. When Fate suddenly begins to take a dramatic interest in a man whose course has run like a yacht before a strong breeze, she precipitates him toward one half crisis after another in order to confuse his mental powers and render him wholly a puppet for the final act. These little Earth histrionics are arranged no doubt for the weary gods, who hardly brook a mere mortal rising triumphantly above the malignant moods of the master playwright.

He lunched at the Pacific Union Club and caught the down-town California Street cable car as it passed, finding his favorite seat on the left side of the "dummy" unoccupied. He was thinking of Helene, a little disappointed, but on the whole vastly relieved, congratulating himself that, no longer haunted, he could give his mind wholly to the important question of the merger he contemplated with a rival house that had limped along since the disaster, but had at last manifested its willingness to accept the offer of Ruyler and Sons.

It was a moment before he realized that his mother-in-law occupied the front seat across the narrow space, and even before he recognized that large bulk, he had registered something rigid and tense in its muscles; strained in its attitude. When he raised his eyes to the face he found himself looking at the right cheek instead of the left, and it was pervaded by a sickly green tint quite unlike Madame Delano's florid color. She was listening to a man who sat just behind her on the long seat that ran the length of the dummy. Although the day was clear, there was still a sharp wind and no one else sat outside.

Ruyler knew the man by sight. Before the fire he had owned some of the most disreputable houses in the district the car would pass on its way to the terminus. The buildings were uninsured, and he had made his living since as a detective. Even his political breed had gone out of power in the new San Francisco, but he was well equipped for a certain type of detective work. He had a remarkable memory for faces and could pierce any disguise, he was as persistent as a ferret, and his knowledge of the underworld of San Francisco was illimitable. But his chief assets were that he looked so little like a detective, and that, so secretive were his methods, his calling was practically unknown. He had set up a cheap restaurant with a gambling room behind at which the police winked, although pretending to raid him now and again. He was a large soft man with pendulous cheeks streaked with red, a predatory nose, and a black