The Book with the Orange Leaves by Harry Stephen Keeler

Author:Harry Stephen Keeler [Keeler, Harry Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2018-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXI

On the Outskirts of Chelsington City

It was exactly 23 hours after he had parted with the Chief of Chelsington City’s police force—“handsomest police force in the world!”—that Stefan Czeszcziczki, rapid-calculator, was on his way, grim and desperate, by streetcar, to the city’s outskirts. With his left sleeve end tucked so neatly into his side coat pocket, he looked not unlike a half dozen other homegoing artisans on that same streetcar—men who were working odd and split shifts—particularly with his grey felt hat, his grey flannel shirt, and simple black cotton tie, but it is doubtful whether any man on that streetcar—or in all Chelsington City, so far as that went—faced, this mild afternoon in late October, what Stefan Czeszcziczki was facing, For Damaris—Damaris was worse!

Conclusively so!

Her condition had moved; during the night just passed, a definite notch further—towards death and worse!

Overnight alone, the pressure of the tumor within her brain had increased. Enough, even, to cause her vision to lessen markedly further—to cause some peculiar head pain to set in. And Stefan’s jaw was set desperately, fearfully. He knew he must not—must not—must not lose out on getting hold of this precious case—this precious case whose victim had offered $1000 for its solution; and he realized too that now, if ever—with his heart torn within him—he must be casual, genial, amiable, businesslike—anything but what he inwardly felt. His own emotions he must keep to himself. And, because of his very desperateness of soul, he realized that this was one time in his life when he was equal to that task.

Flower Street, where resided Maximilian Olcese, Shakespearean expert and author, was so far on the outskirts of the city that Stefan, trudging from the end of the streetcar line that had brought him only within 6 blocks of it, could have fancied it was entirely without the metropolitan boundaries—and therefore outside the lines of Chelsington City police protection—but no, as he turned in on it—and it proved to be a nicely macadamized strip of pavement, replete with new curbs and new sidewalks, running between vacant lots and open country, he saw a sign with a hand pointing even further out than where he was, and reading “City Limits: 2 blocks West.”

There was no difficulty whatsoever to find Number 2447, for the reason that Number 2447 was apparently the only house as yet built on the street—at least for a couple of blocks in either direction, and either side, and it loomed blackly against the afternoon sun which was now getting low in the west and beginning to turn markedly reddish in color. Number 2447 was built of modernistic green glazed brick, with, sticking out from one side of itself like an excrescence, a small garage of the same bricks, the entire structure lying in the middle of an extra wide lot which contained no weeds like the lots on either side of it, for the reason that it had been bricked entirely over with red cobblestones, turning it into the

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