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laughed bitterly. “Well, she didn’t act like a maid! It turned out that all the experience she talked about when she answered my ad in the New York paper for a traveling maid was a great big lie. She hadn’t the slightest idea of what a lady’s maid is supposed to do, not the slightest. Why, I found out—she actually admitted, mind you—that she’d been working in a soda fountain!”
    “Where?” broke in the inspector, jubilant.
    “Oh, Amsterdam and Seventy-second, or some terrible place on the West Side”—as if this were an especially sore point. “The fuss that girl made when I discharged her, after she ruined my hair! It seems that she had her little heart set on a trip to Mexico City, and the things she said!”
    “Well, you did fire her a little roughly,” put in Mabie. “And without any notice.”
    For an instant Adele’s eyes blazed. “Yes, Francis, stand up for a pretty girl! I suppose I’m just a cruel and unreasonable woman because I wouldn’t put up with being b-burned!”
    The alderman moved toward her, but she shook her shoulders discouragingly. “That insolent, hotheaded little fool!”
    “I’ll be going,” Piper said. “Got to question the boy who brought you that tea, though it’s not likely we’ll get anything out of him. You’d better take all the precautions you can from now on.”
    There was a strange, dazed look in Adele Mabie’s eyes. “But, Inspector, if somebody on this train wants to kill me, what can you or anybody do?”
    “I don’t know,” said Piper honestly. “But I’m going to do it.”
    He spent the next half-hour in trying to get something out of the porter and waiters, without any luck. Language difficulties aside, they seemed to view him as a meddlesome gringo to whom one should answer “¿ Quién sabe ?” and nothing else. But he did find out that Adele Mabie’s dressing case had been used to prop open the door of the drawing room as they pulled out of Laredo station. Where anybody passing could see it, Piper reminded himself.
    The train roared and rattled along its bumpy roadbed, climbing, dropping, winding on. The inspector, conscious of the fact that he had a lot of loose ends that needed tying or braiding or whatever it is that is done to loose ends, dropped into a chair at the rear of the combination club- and dining-car. Calling for a bottle of amber Moravia, he sipped it in silence.
    Up ahead, in one of the dining booths, Hansen and Rollo Lighten were playing checkers on a table which had not yet been set with linen and silver for dinner. Their voices now and then drifted back in snatches.
    They were still talking about the strike scheduled to darken the lights and stop the wheels of Mexico City on the morrow. And they seemed to be speaking as if that strike were distinctly an act of Providence. “It’s an ill wind that can’t blow something into the right pockets!” was a pet remark of Al Hansen’s. He repeated it two or three times.
    Hansen was looking at his watch. “Ought to be getting the message about now …” He mumbled something else indistinguishable.
    “Don’t worry about him,” Lighten said. “Mike is an old hand at this sort of thing. When corners need cutting, he’s the one to cut ’em. Been down there for ten years. I was with him when he promoted that Washington to Mexico City auto race a couple of years ago. Wrote the publicity. Mike Fitz made a good thing out of it too, believe me, even if the race never came off. His backer backed out on him.”
    Hansen said something about “more cash.”
    “Sure he will. He’s a dependable guy, and this sort of thing is right up his alley. If you want something promoted—business or red-hot telephone numbers—he’s the man. Ten to one he’ll come through with some of his own money—and he’s got plenty.”
    Far to the south, in the great city hung on a sky-high plateau, Mr. Michael Fitz was frying his supper, in the shape of a solitary egg and two strips of bacon, when