CHARLES URLEIGH, the free-lance reporter in Cincinnati, grew more and more interested in the Double Diamond Case, as he called it on his clipping file. He could not get over the feeling that he ought to find the inside story of the matter. Perhaps the nerve of the man who carried Goles's selection of diamonds to Judge C. Wrest and sold him upward of five thousand dollars' worth of the stolen stones struck Urleigh as the most interesting phase of the matter.

The reappearance of Goles, furtive and fleeting, with the diamonds stolen from Wrest, simply added to the impossibility of the story as he saw it from the news and detective standpoint. If Goles had not brought the stones to his own firm, and left them there, two alternatives were possible:

Goles had been killed; his list of customers found with the diamonds and Wrest worked for ready money. Or Goles himself had joined a conspiracy, and made a double raid on the gems within his reach.

Working on these theories, the case presented only normal aspects to the detectives and to the reporter ​who had full possession of the known facts. All the speculations were knocked in the head when Goles appeared with the stolen gems.

Naturally, it was possible that the salesman's conscience had troubled him, and he had returned the Wrest gems to his firm as a kind of atonement. But why had he returned the Wrest gems instead of the firm's own?

Speculation along these various and blind alley lanes more and more worked upon Urleigh's imagination. For years he had been hoping that some time he would stumble upon a ready-made plot for a story so that he could sell his string of newspapers and settle down to a comfortable living writing stories and living on his royalties. He, too, had his delusions.

He had a good deal to work on, and he was so good a newspaperman that he felt that if he could but pick up some certain clue or thread or fact—he could not guess what fact—he would be able to gather all the scattered vagaries of the case into a perfectly understandable story. It would be a good Sunday story, and he knew several newspapers which would pay him a hundred dollars for a broadside, perhaps a good deal more, for the Goles Diamond Case was now a standard mystery in Sunday edition archives.

In mid-November, one day when he had found but little news to send away, he was tired with writing ​a five-thousand-word special about the standard subject of Civic Reforms. He walked down Broadway into Ludlow Street and strolled out on the Central Bridge.

The bridges were a favourite resort of Urleigh. Standing against the rail of any of these bridges, the Ohio River, up or down, brought him many fleeting notions to store or forget. He had seen the river in great floods and in low water. The perpendicular difference between the two stages was five or six stories—and he could just remember that day in February, 1884, when the Ohio went to seventy-one feet above low-water mark.

Year after year, school boy, office boy, reporter, and free lance, he had gone down to the bridges to enjoy the strange sensations he had while on them. Looking down stream his mind's eye conjured up visions that would have done credit to any magician's crystal, but he felt that his most vivid efforts were as nothing compared to the realities.

"Some day," he had said for years and years, "I'll just go down clear to N'Orleans."

"N'Orleans." A strange port to the thought when one considers that it is at the trunk of a dozen empires.

He had in his pocket the latest editions of the evening newspapers, and as he walked with his quick, nervous stride down the streets, he seemed to glance ​through their columns hastily. As a matter of fact, he was reading every item with ample care, seizing the names and essential facts with that finest of sieves, the mind of a free-lance reporter.

And suddenly, as he walked out upon the bridges, and was about to fold his paper, there struck his eyes a single line of "full face lower case" type:

"Mumbled and groaned as he talked about diamonds," Urleigh shivered. "Where's that danged fool local correspondent's eyes, ears, wits—Lord! What did he say about diamonds and rubies?"

Urleigh turned and started up town again on the run, but he realized as he glanced at his watch that Manager Grost would not be in his office. He ceased his race and returned to the bridge. He strolled out ​on the great structure and looked down stream past the C. & O. bridge to the glimmering sunset in the bend.

The autumnal chill was in the air, and when he stopped walking he felt the drift of the cold in the gathering night. His lips felt dry, his backbone quivered, his mind raced and romped as he realized what strange thing he had fallen upon in the little paragraph from Hickman about White Collar Dan—of all men!

Urleigh needed no stimulant now to bring out of his memory a flood tide of consequential details. White Collar Dan—the scoundrel. Shot, eh? Deserved it, if ever a man did.

"The authorities think, do they?"

Urleigh laughed.

He walked up town and stopped at the Winnower office, where he was lucky, finding Dill Wester just coming down to go out to have something to eat. Urleigh joined him, and they went around to the restaurant—the very one in which Obert Goles had vanished as though he had put on a cap of invisibility.

"Will you cover my string for me for a week or two?" Urleigh asked. "I'll post you——"

"Be glad to," Webster assented.

Then Urleigh gave him a scratch list of the newspapers who wanted telegraph and those that wanted mail items, and gave him a rapid description of the ​eccentricities of the auditors and which ones have to have strings of clippings before they would admit their papers had printed the items, and which ones kept track and mailed checks regularly.

"I'll be away a week or two," Urleigh declared, as they left the restaurant. "So long!"

With that another man was missing from his many haunts. Not a soul in the city knew where the free-lance reporter had gone and no one knew for certain whether he would ever return or not.

Urleigh, with his suitcase packed, stepped aboard a train down the Ohio. He changed cars at Paducah, and arrived in Hickman. Checking his suitcase in the baggage room, he went immediately to the hospital, and the superintendent admitted him to the cot-side of the wounded river man, Daniel Gost.

"Hello, Dan!" Urleigh greeted him. "Heard you were here—thought I'd drop in and say how-de-do!"

The wounded man looked up at Urleigh sharply, making no reply.

"I'm on my vacation," Urleigh explained. "I've always wanted to drop down the Ohio, so I took a train down, stopping off at the towns——"

"Dropped down on a train," Gost repeated. "That the way you trip the river?"

"Why not?" Urleigh asked.

​"Why didn't you get a shantyboat and drop down thataway? Then you'd get to know the river."

"Never thought of it—really; I don't know anything about the river, and I didn't want to try it. Besides, I didn't have time; I'm going to N'Orleans. How are you coming on?"

"All right." Gost shook his head. "I get my G. B. to-morrow—broke!"

"So! Then what?"

Dan shrugged his shoulders, and turned pale with pain.

"Some shantyboat'll take me on a while—lot's of friends on the river."

"Can't I help you?"

"You might," the wounded man studied, "you done me a good turn that time they had me, two-three years ago. If we had a boat——"

"How much would it cost?"

"We could get a good one for fifty, a hundred or along there—little shantyboat. There's some in West Hickman; I saw 'em when I went by. Could you do it? There's—there's more in it than you know, old sport!"

"Sure I can—I've a month if I want it."

"You saved my life," the patient sighed. "Just when I didn't give a damn, too; but I'll tell you about ​that. I'm going out this afternoon a little. We'll see about a boat, eh? You can stand it?"

"A hundred, yes—perhaps one-fifty."

"All right, old boy! You saved me, yes, sir."

That afternoon Urleigh and Gost rode down to the ferry in a jitney, and crossed on the ferry to the sandbar opposite. Luck was with them. Two youths who had started down the river in a new little shantyboat, to make their fortune trapping and feather hunting, had been caught killing game against the now resident law, and they were flat broke, discouraged, and anxious to go home to God's country. For sixty dollars Urleigh obtained a two-hundred-dollar boat and a hundred dollars' worth of furnishings and supplies.

"I never had a better bargain." Gost shook his head, when they had seen the river adventurers depart on the ferry. "I'm not going back to that danged hospital. I'll stay here. You got any baggage?"

"A suitcase is all."

"Get it. See if they'll let you have some of that dressing and dope at the hospital? We'll pull right down. I'm in a hurry to drop down."

Urleigh had no trouble obtaining medicine, and he paid twenty dollars to the hospital, just to cover expenses. He returned within three hours, and before three o'clock, under Gost's direction, Urleigh cast off ​the lines, pulled the sweeps, and they moved out into the Mississippi current.

Cost, weakened by his sufferings, went to sleep on one of the two folding cots. Urleigh, looking down the bend ahead, wondered what mess he had gone into now. The least he suspected was that Gost had done something, and that he was now a fugitive from justice, and this made Urleigh particeps criminis. At first the thought was disagreeable, but as he left the town behind a bend and the old river loomed larger than anything he had ever dreamed or suspected, Urleigh's mind changed,

"I've needed a rest," Urleigh admitted to himself as he sat down in a chair, and drew on a sweater because there was a tang of chill in the air.

Gost slept nearly two hours, and then, taking a look at the river, had Urleigh row them into the east bank of the river, at the foot of a long sandbar. Urleigh made the two bow lines fast to a snag and a stake. It lacked then but a few minutes of sunset.

The wounded man looked up and down the eddy and at the bank. When he had finished his inspection he looked at Urleigh, grinning:

"Right here's where she got me!" he shook his head. "If I hadn't been dipping, I'd known better, but you know what snow does to a man. It was that made me crazy. I'd been all right if it hadn't hurt ​so, and if I hadn't taken more. I'd whiffed, though, and I whiffed again, when I crawled out on the bar. Wonder I didn't take enough to lay me cold. I didn't have only a little in my jag, I remember. So I didn't have only enough to set me off my head."

"This is where she shot you?" Urleigh repeated. "I was wondering about that."

"Yes, and she was a mighty pretty girl, too. If it hadn't been for the snow, I'd known better. You know what coke does to a man! I never hit it regular, you understand. Down here, after I've been working, I take on a little. I let it alone, though, for months, not touching a smell! Well, she done a good job, and made her getaway—but you wait, lad! You've done me a good turn, and I know a friend. We got to find that girl next. She's a slick one. You know what I think? I've been studying, and I understand now. I was a fool! She showed herself to me up the Ohio. I was afraid, then; something about her warned me. Then she showed herself again. She pretended she didn't notice me at all. But I see now she was tolling me along. She hasn't left the river—I heard that. She's slick, but we'll be slicker."

"You think she just wanted a chance to roll you?" Urleigh asked, understandingly.

"Exactly that, old boy. I've been trying to think out what she must have known. You see, you take a ​pink like her, and she had me muttoned before I knew it. Well, you wait. I don't know what your game is, but——"

"I'm on the level with you," Urleigh declared. "I'm a newspaperman. I'm just down the river, that's all."

"Yes? Oh, I know—say, there's things I'd like to know, too."

"What, for instance?"

"Was that straight, in the papers: did a man name of Goles go into his shop on Maiden Lane, in New York, with old Wrest's sparklers?"

"You mean that diamond salesman who turned up missing?"

"That's the one—travelled for Ofsten & Groner. Papers had a lot about it. I happened to notice—I was wondering. That was a big haul if he got away with a hundred thousand. I was wondering if he carried them back, the way they said. I mean Wrest's——"

"Yes, he went away with a hundred thousand in diamonds and some rubies. He carried back the diamonds Judge C. Wrest of Warsaw was robbed of. They couldn't dope it out."

"How the devil could anybody dope it out?" Gost exclaimed. "You know that made me feel d—d funny myself!"

​"It made everyone feel queer," Urleigh said. "He carried back five thousand in diamonds he got away with himself—they were sold to Wrest by a man who said he was B. L. Folded."

"Say, you know Grost, head of the National Agency, in Cincinnati?"

"Very well. He's tipped me off to a lot of stories," Urleigh admitted without hesitation.

"You one of his men?"

"No."

"Just a reporter, same as always?"

"The same as always—I'm resting now, though. I'm taking a vacation."

"It beats h—l!" the wounded man commented. "Let's have supper. I got some meat to fry. That's yours. I just want a little soup! Say, now, I don't want to ask anything you can't tell. I mean about your friends——"

"Go on."

"Was there a skirt anywhere in that Goles diamond job?"

"Never heard a hint of any woman in it."

"Well, we'll have supper, then." Gost shook his head, adding: "A woman always butts into a job sooner or later—same's one done into this. Don't it beat h—l?"