The Man Who Fell Through the Earth

“No,” and Rivers took out a pocket-book, from which he extracted some flimsy paper. These proved to be tracings of snow crystals similar to those I had seen him drawing while he was still in the hospital.

“How lovely!” Zizi exclaimed, as she took the traced patterns. “You see,” and she showed them to Wise, “Miss Olive is making lace work, – and Mr. Rivers makes her these patterns. Aren’t they exquisite?”

They were. They were forms of snow crystals, than which there is nothing more beautiful, and Rivers had adapted and combined them into a delicate lace-like pattern, which Olive was to copy with linen threads, or whatever women use to make lace out of.

“I was going to take them round,” Rivers said; “I hope the delay hasn’t bothered Miss Raynor.”

“Oh, no,” Zizi assured him, “but she is impatient to see this new design and couldn’t wait. So I offered to run down for it. I knew you were here.”

“But I’m just going up to Miss Raynor’s,” Rivers spoke as if disappointed, “and the patterns are my only excuse for a call! So, if you please, Miss Zizi, I’ll take them to the impatient lady, and I’ll go at once.”

“I think she’s gone out, Mr. Rivers, she was about to go as I left. If you telephone you’ll likely catch her.”

Quite unembarrassed at our knowing smiles, Rivers took up my desk-telephone and called Olive’s number. While waiting for the response he picked up a pencil from my pen-tray, and idly drew a snow crystal on the big desk-blotter.

I watched him, for his skill fascinated me. He drew the dainty six-sided figure with the accuracy of a designer. The tiny fronds, all six alike, made a lovely hexagonal form as it grew beneath his fingers.

He was apparently unconscious of what he was doing, and drew without thinking, for he spoke to us several times while waiting for the desired connection.

At last Olive answered him, and he dropped the pencil and talked to her. In a wheedlesome mood, he persuaded her to defer her proposed errand until he could join her and he would accompany her. The kindly familiarity with which he carried on the conversation and the jaunty assurance he showed that she would accede to his request proved to us, listeners perforce, that there was good comradeship between them.

Rivers hung up the receiver, and turned to me with a boyish smile. “I’m going now,” he said, “Miss Raynor is waiting for me. I’ll see you again, tonight, Brice.” And with a general nod of farewell he went off.

Zizi sat staring at my desk.

The strange child was thinking of something, – more, she had made a discovery, or had sensed some new information.

She leaned over the desk, her outstretched hands resting on the big blotter and her black eyes wide with an expression of surprised fear.

“Look!” she cried; “look!”

But her slender finger pointed only to the snow crystal that Rivers had drawn. It was a graceful figure, not quite finished, but a delicate tracery of one of the myriad forms that snow crystals show. How often I had looked at the lovely things as they rested for a moment on my dark coat sleeve when I was out in a snowstorm. And after seeing Rivers draw them so skilfully, several times, they had taken on a new interest to me. But what had so moved Zizi I could not imagine. It was as if the little drawing were fraught with some dreadful significance of which I knew nothing.

Nor was Pennington Wise any more aware than I of the girl’s meaning.

He smiled quizzically, and said, “Well, Zizi, girl, what’s hypnotizing you? That drawing of Rivers’?”

“Yes,” and Zizi turned her big black eyes from my face to Wise’s, and gave a queer little sigh.

“Out with it, girlie,” urged Wise. “Tell your old Penny Wise what’s the matter.”

“Will you do what I want?” she asked, her voice tense and thrilled with strong feeling.

“Yes; to the limit.”

“Then look at that thing! That snow crystal!”

“Yes, I’ve looked,” and after a moment’s close scrutiny Wise turned his eyes again to the eerie face, so vividly emotional, so white with that unnamed fear.

“You look, too, Mr. Brice,” and I did.

“Note the design,” Zizi went on, “see just how the fronds are marked. Isn’t it funny how people always draw or scribble while they’re waiting to get a telephone call?”

“Oh, come now, Ziz,” and Penny Wise patted her arm, “you’re putting up a game on us. We know Rivers draws these things beautifully. Why act as if you never knew it before?”

“Come with me,” and Zizi rose and began to put her long black cloak round her, shivering with excitement as she did so. “You come, too, Mr. Brice.”

We obeyed the strange child, for I remembered how Pennington Wise respected what he called her “hunches,” and before going downstairs she directed that I call a taxicab.

In the cab she said nothing, having already bade us go to Amos Gately’s office, and arrange to get into the rooms.

And then, when we were there, when I had obtained the keys from the bank people and had entered the dim, quiet rooms, Zizi went straight to the middle room, straight to Amos Gately’s desk, and lifting the telephone from where it stood on the big desk-blotter, she disclosed the exact counterpart of the snow crystal we had seen drawn at my desk by Case Rivers!

CHAPTER XVI

The Snowflake

I looked at the design with interest, but without at first grasping its true significance.

Pennington Wise looked at it aghast. “Where did it come from?” he exclaimed.

“It’s always been there,” said Zizi. “I mean, I saw it there one day when I was in this room with Mr. Hudson, I – I – ”

“Didn’t know you’d ever been here, Ziz,” and Wise smiled at the earnest little face.

“Yep, I was; and I happened to move the telephone, and under it was that drawing. I didn’t think anything about it, as evidence, but I looked at it ’cause it was so pretty. And I put the telephone back over it again.”

“But I searched this room,” and Wise looked mystified.

“You probably didn’t lift the telephone, then,” Zizi returned, shaking her elfin head, while a deep sorrow showed in her black eyes.

“I don’t believe I did,” Wise mused, thinking back. “I did pick up most of the desk fittings to examine them but I suppose I didn’t take hold of the telephone at all.”

“’Course not!” Zizi was always ready to defend Wise’s actions. “How could you know there was a picture under it? But, oh, Penny, what does it mean?”

“Wait, – let’s get at it carefully. On the face of it, it would seem as if Case Rivers must have drawn this figure of a snow crystal. Everybody has some peculiar habit, and especially, lots of people have a habit of drawing some particular thing when waiting at a telephone.

“I’ve asked half a dozen men of late, and every one says he scribbles words or draws some crude combination of lines. But each one says he always does the same thing, whatever it may be. Now, I imagine, very few men draw snow crystals, – and fewer still, draw them with this degree of perfection. Again, granting they did, would any other individual draw this identical design, with this accuracy of drawing, that Case Rivers drew on the desk-blotter at your house, Brice?”

“I should say it would be impossible that anyone else could have done it,” I replied, honestly, though I began to see where our investigation was leading us.

“It is impossible,” declared Wise. “Two men might draw snow crystals, but they would not both choose this particular one.”

“It’s exactly the same,” Zizi murmured, “for I brought Mr. Brice’s with me: here it is.”

Calmly the girl took from her little hand-bag a piece torn from my desk-blotter. It held the drawing done by Rivers while he was waiting for his telephone call and it was the precise duplicate of the figure drawn on the blotter of Amos Gately’s mahogany desk.

“The same pencil – or, rather, the same hand drew those two,” Wise said, positively, and I could not contradict this.