But it was not so.  A signal was interchanged between the occupants of the car and some watcher in the doorway, and the car sped on.  Hambleton, watching steadily, wondered!

“If she is being kidnapped, why doesn’t she make somebody hear?  Plenty of chance.  They couldn’t have killed her—­that isn’t done.”

And yet his heart smote him as he remembered the terror and distress written on that countenance and the cry for help.

“Something was the matter,” memory insisted.  “There they go west; west Tenth, Alexander Street, Tenth Avenue—­”

The car lumbered on, the cab half a block, often more, in the rear, through endless regions of small shops and offices huddled together above narrow sidewalks, through narrow and winding streets paved with cobblestones and jammed with cars and trucks, squeezing past curbs where dirty children sat playing within a few inches of death-dealing wheels.  Hambleton wondered what kept them from being killed by hundreds daily, but the wonder was immediately forgotten in a new subject for thought.  The cab had stopped, although several yards of clear road lay ahead of it.  The driver was climbing down.  The motor-car was nosing its way along nearly a block ahead.  Hambleton leaped out.

“Of course, we’ve broken down?” he mildly inquired.  Deep in his heart he was superstitiously thinking that he would let fate determine his next move; if there were obstacles in the way of his further quest, well and good; he would follow the Face no longer.

“If you’ll wait just a minute—­” the driver was saying, “until I get my kit out—­”

But Hambleton, looking ahead, saw that the car had disappeared, and his mind suddenly veered.

“Not this time,” he announced.  “Here, the meter says four-twenty—­you take this, I’m off.”  He put a five-dollar bill into the hand of the driver and started on an easy run toward the west.

He had caught sight of smoke-stacks and masts in the near distance, telling him that the motor-car had almost, if not quite, reached the river.  Such a vehicle could not disappear and leave no trace; it ought to be easy to find.  Ahead of him flaring lights alternated with the steady, piercing brilliance of the incandescents, and both struggled against the lingering daylight.

A heavy policeman at the corner had seen the car.  He pointed west into the cavernous darkness of the wharves.

“If she ain’t down at the Imperial docks she’s gone plump into the river, for that’s the way she went,” he insisted.  The policeman had the bearing of a major-general and the accent of the city of Cork.  Hambleton went on past the curving street-car tracks, dodged a loaded dray emerging from the dock, and threaded his way under the shed.  He passed piles of trunks, and a couple of truckmen dumping assorted freight from an ocean liner.  No motor-car or veiled lady, nor sound of anything like a woman’s voice.  Hambleton came out into the street again, looked about for another probable avenue of escape for the car and was at the point of bafflement, when the major-general pounded slowly along his way.