CHAPTER II

DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES

Standing there staring after him, I felt like a murderer of the deepest dye.  It is one thing to hand over to the police their natural prey, a thief taken red-handed, but quite another, and a much more harrowing one, to have him slip through your fingers, precipitate himself into mid-air, and drop four stories to the pavement, scattering his brains far and wide.  There was not a vestige of hope for the poor wretch.

Unnerved, I groped to the window and peered downward for his remains.  My first glance proved my regrets to be superfluous.  Beneath my window, which, owing to the crowded condition of the hotel, opened on a side street, a fire-escape descended jaggedly; and upon it, just out of arm’s reach, my recent guest clung and wobbled, struggling with an attack of natural vertigo before proceeding toward the earth.

By this time my rage was such that I would have followed that little thief almost anywhere.  It was not the dizziness of the yawning void that stayed me.  I should have climbed the Matterhorn with all cheerfulness to catch him at the top.  But sundry visions of the figure I would cut, the crowd that might gather, and the probable ragging in the morning papers, were too much for me, and I sorrowfully admitted that the game was not worth the price.

The little man’s nerves, meanwhile, seemed to be steadying.  Feeling each step, he began cautiously to work his way down.  To my wrath he even looked up at me and indulged in a grimace—­but his triumph was ill-timed, for at that very instant I beheld, strolling along the street below, humming and swinging his night-stick, as leisurely, complacent, and stalwart a representative of the law as one could wish to see.

“Hi, there!  Officer!” I shouted lustily.  My hail, if not my words, reached him; he glanced up, saw the figure on the ladder, and was seized instantaneously with the spirit of the chase.

Yelling something reassuring, the gist of which escaped me, he constituted himself a reception committee of one and started for the ladder’s foot.  But our doughty Teuton was a resourceful person.  Roused to the urgency of his plight, he looked wildly up at me, down at the officer, and, hastily pushing up the nearest window, hoisted himself across its sill, and again took refuge in the St. Ives Hotel.

With a bellow of rage, the policeman dashed toward the porte-cochere, while I ducked back into the room, rapidly revolving my chances of cutting off the man’s retreat below.  If the system of numbering was the same on every floor, my thief must, of course, emerge from Room 303.  But this similarity was problematical, and to invade apartments at random, disturbing women at their opera toilets and maybe even waking babies, was too desperate a shift to try.

It reminded me to wait with what patience I could summon for the house detective.  And where was he, by the way?  I had turned in my alarm a good five minutes before.