The sinister mark

The woman stirred slightly, and with her strong, fine hand pushed her coffee cup away. She hesitated and looked down at the heavily shaded light which threw a rosy gleam upon th...

The days of indecision, when worldly considerations were weighed in the balance with his growing love for Mary Blake, seemed far away, and almost inconceivable, so overwhelming...

Mr. Peter Clancy, early of the Metropolitan Police, late of the United States Secret Service, and currently the active head of a small but brilliant private detective agency, sa...

"Then we'll keep it that way," said Peter, suiting the action to the word. "I can always think better with everything as it was when found. Now, let's see----" He glanced about...

"Good God," cried Donald Morris, sitting down suddenly and striking his hand on the arm of Clancy's chair. "Then I was right at first! Something terrible has happened, something...

Slowly, Donald Morris put his hand inside the breast of his coat and drew out several slightly crumpled sheets of paper. He spread them out and his eyes rested tenderly on these...

The door closed after Peter with a snap of the spring lock, and Donald Morris waited, striding nervously about. At every turn in the length of the room he paused beside the frai...

"I don't know how it escaped me before, except that the hall was so dark," muttered Peter, angrily, to himself, as he closed the door upon the Italian's hurried departure.

He motioned Morris to get into the cab, and spoke familiarly to the chauffeur: "Drive us over to the Square, old top, and line up along somewhere where it's quiet. We want to ha...

"But Mary!" groaned Donald Morris in agony, as the two men, their unsuccessful investigation over, stood for a moment in the vast loneliness of the great station. "I don't mind...

"Yes. Find Anne Blake," O'Malley repeated, slowly. "But, in the meantime, son, you'd have to establish a motive, and it'd have to be some little motive, at that! And after all,...

Peter looked at his watch as he ran down the stairs of the Westmoreland Theatre Building. It was nearly one o'clock, and he decided that he would have time enough to snatch a bi...

"Here he is," said Captain O'Malley, as Peter, having made a quick trip from the Scoville Bank, entered the door of his partner's private office. "You're just in time, Pete. Fox...

And this sort of thing was destined to be Peter's experience for many days to come. Every waking hour, and many when he should have been sleeping, was spent in following up clue...

It was a dark night, hot and close, with a feel of thunder in the air. The big arc lights near the arch in Washington Square made spots of copperas green on the close-trimmed gr...

A clear, bright day followed the heavy thunder shower which had occurred late in the night. Peter, as he boarded the train for Hobart Falls, hoped that it was an omen.

"Rosamond Curwood!" Peter's heart skipped a beat and then raced on again. Could he have been mistaken? But no! He had found the picture in her apartment, and it could be no othe...

Peter took the yellowed card in his hands and looked at it long and eagerly. For nearly a month past he would have been ready to pay almost any price for a portrait of Anne Blak...

"How much need I tell Morris?" he asked himself. "If Mary Blake never is found, why dig up the sad old sordid story? It must have happened ten years ago--and perhaps she'd redee...

And again, as Peter made his swift way to the station, the question which had been hammering in his brain took another form--"How much can I keep from telling Morris? How much c...

Peter found his client comfortably ensconced in a long, swinging couch on a wide porch on the second floor. He looked pale and worn and appeared nervously exhausted, but his tir...

"On Monday, the twenty-ninth of May, from the Vanderbilt Hotel," she repeated, slowly. "Yes, I did call--I did call her apartment, one day, about that time. Well"--a slight paus...

Donald Morris paced nervously back and forth, back and forth, upon the wide, ground-floor veranda of his sister's house. He could look out along the road up which Clancy had gon...

Then faintly, faintly he heard the outer door move on its hinges, heard a tiny click as it closed again, was aware of a little gleam of light stealing along the floor, and of st...

The doors of the great columned façade of the New York Public Library were scarcely opened, on the following day, when a young man with eager Irish blue eyes and very red hair m...

The hours which followed Peter's abrupt and unexpected departure from Fennimore Park passed long and heavily for Donald Morris. He waited for nearly twenty-four hours, hoping to...

Gertrude Shultze listened attentively while Donald instructed the cabman to go to number 111 West Forty ---- Street, but to stop on the way and pick up another passenger on the...

It chanced that O'Malley had little difficulty in following Peter's instructions in regard to Donald Morris, for they had but a few minutes' private conversation together during...

"It was your own fault, Don. Your own fault, boy," Doctor Stevens remarked, with partly assumed annoyance. "If you'd waited at home until I 'phoned, you never would have seen Mi...