Target Practice

They advised Mr. Leg to advertise a reward of five thousand dollars for Patrick Cummings, since he had expressed his willingness to spend ten times that sum if necessary, and Mr. Leg himself favored the idea. But Dan, who had surprised the lawyer on his return from the commissioner’s office by not being surprised at what the commissioner had said, vetoed it, saying that it might be all right to offer a reward if the police were on their side, but utterly futile under the circumstances.

“Besides,” argued the youth, “the first time Cummings saw the reward posted he would fly to cover, if he isn’t there already. Public rewards are never any good, except to stimulate the police. And, besides that, I have a reason of my own.”

Dan was the busiest of all. He spent a whole day going inch by inch through the basement where Cummings had lived, though he had previously searched it; he interviewed the Scotchman next door several times; he found and talked with everyone in the neighborhood who had ever seen the missing man; he pursued vainly a thousand avenues of information. It seemed that Patrick Cummings had come from nowhere and gone back to the same place.

His first appearance in the discoverable world had been the day when, nearly three years back, he had called at the office of Levis & Levis to ask for a job as janitor; his last, the evening of the murder. It got so that one thing, one name, one person, occupied Dan’s mind like a mania; he thought, ate, slept, and breathed Patrick Cummings.

He forgot to open Miss Venner’s desk for her of mornings; he forgot to comb his hair; he forgot to look when he crossed the street.

He came near having cause to regret this latter neglect when one afternoon, hearing a warning honk, he jumped in the wrong direction and was knocked flat on his back by a touring car as it whizzed by. He scrambled to his feet in time to see the well-dressed figure of Judge Fraser Manton in the tonneau.

Finally, when there appeared to be nothing else to do, Dan would walk the streets for hours at a time, cudgeling his brain for a scheme to find a man that evidently didn’t want to be found, and meanwhile watching the passersby. He had followed many a gray-haired man with a scraggly mustache in the past three weeks; once he had found one named Cummings, but not Patrick.

The number of suspects rounded up by the detectives mounted into the hundreds, so eager were they, for Mr. Leg had let it be known that the successful man would get a good-sized check.

Late one afternoon, a week before the date set for Mount’s trial, Dan was walking down Eighth Avenue, tired, dejected, and ready to give up, but, nevertheless, with his eyes open. As he passed the tawdry front of a motion picture theater he stopped to glance over a group of men standing near, and then half unconsciously began to glance over the flaring posters displayed at the entrance to the theater. “The Scotchman said Cummings was a movie fan,” he was thinking. Suddenly he gave a start, stopped still, as if transfixed by a sudden thought, and uttered an ejaculation of discovery.