“Well!” I exclaimed, “why would a carriage check be soiled with age? They’re used the same day they’re given out. Why is it here, anyway?”

Hudson looked interested. “That’s so, Mr. Brice,” he admitted. “I take it that there check was given to Mr. Gately at some hotel, say. Well, he didn’t use it for some reason or other, and brought it home in his pocket. But as you say, why is it here? Why did he keep it? And, what did he do with it to give it that thumbed, used look?”

We all examined the check. A bit of white cardboard, about two by four inches in size, and pierced with seven circular holes in irregular order. Across the top was printed “Don’t fold this card,” and at one end was the number 743 in large red letters. Also, the right-hand upper corner was sliced off.

“Why,” I exclaimed, “here’s a narrow strip of paper pasted across the end, and—look,—it’s almost transparent! I can read through it—‘Hotel St. Charles!’ That’s where it came from!”

“Hold your horses!” and Hudson smiled condescendingly, “that’s where it didn’t come from! It came from any hotel except the St. Charles. You may not know it, but often a hotel will use electric call-checks of other hotels, with a slip of paper pasted over the name. That’s an item for you to remember. No, Mr. Brice, I can’t attach any importance to that check, but I’m free to confess I don’t see why it’s there. Unless Mr. Gately found it in his pocket after it had been there unnoticed for some time. And yet, it is very much thumbed, isn’t it? That’s queer. Maybe he used it for a bookmark, or something like that.”

“Maybe the lady left it here,” suggested Norah. “The same time she left her hatpin.”

“Now, maybe she did,” and Foxy Jim Hudson smiled benignly at her. “Any ways, you’ve made the thing seem curious, and I guess I’ll keep it for a while.”

He put the card away in his pocketbook, and Norah and I grinned at each other in satisfaction that we had given him a clew to ponder over.

“You know, Mr. Brice,” Hudson remarked, after another period of silent thought, “you missed it, when you didn’t fly in here quicker and catch the murderer redhanded.”

“If I’d known that the first door, Jenny’s door, was the only one I could open, of course I should have gone there first. But I’d never been in here at all,—I’ve only been in the building a week or so, and I did lose valuable time running from 

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