Argosy All-Story Weekly — "The Purple Limited" — page 145: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

HOW MANY CARDS? Nis head to make him help me, as he could have if he knew Mrs. Creveling and had any influence with her; the other was to get Mrs. Creveling and her uncle there to- gether as quick as I could and offer to hush things up if they’d set Ilsa free. I knew ‘that she’d stopped caring for her husband long ago—hated him, in fact—and I thought she would want to prevent scandal and notoriety before anything else, just as Mr. Alexander would. He would be glad enough that Creveling was out of the way so he could panidie the estate to suit him- self.” “You didn’t stop to think that it might have been suicide?” Hill laughed shortly. — “Not knowing Mr. Creveling the way I did! He wouldn’t have had the—the guts to do it, sir! It takes long to tell it, but I just thought it all out in a flash. I could only find out who had Been there that night by tracing the writing at the bottom of that note, and I knew Mr. Creveling kept a lot of private letters in that secret drawer in his desk. Of course I’d been through it often enough before, having watched when he didn’t “know it to see how he worked the spring; but some of the letters were from gentlemen whose names were strange to me, and I hadn’t taken notice of the “Then I.remembered that there would be a thorough search made for clues all over the house, and it came to me—what if Mrs. Jarvie had left a stray letter or Memorandum or something in. her desk that would show where Ilsa was hiding? She was an old lady, and though close-mouthed was given to scribbling notes and diaries arid such. I supposed, of course, that the policeman and the other two were the only living men in the house besides myself, and I started up-stairs, when all of a sudden you and the inspector came out of Mr. ‘Creveling’s room. I sprang back quick or you would have seen me. When you had gone on to the next floor I slipped mto Mr. -Creveling’s room, put on a pair of his gloves so that my fitlger-marks wouldn’t’- show, and opening the little drawer I took out the letters. “¥ hoped against hope that I could 711 sneak into the housekeeper’s room before - you got around to it in your search, but ‘you nearly caught me on the stairs a sec- ond time, and I had to wait until you had gone down again. I knew that she used to hide the spare key to her desk behind a loose brick up in the fireplace, and chanced that she had forgotten and left it there, which she had done. Her old household account books were in the desk, together with a stack of loose papers, and I had to take the bot, for I had no time to sort them out. I don’t know how I ever got out of the house without being seen, but I heard you-all talking in the room where Mr. Creveling’s body was lying, and I slipped out and made for home, where Iisa was. “She looked over the housekeeper’s books and papers, and sure enough, there were the receipts for some of the furniture of our little flat that I’d given Mrs. Jarvie the money to pay for, with the address scribbled on it to where the stuff was to be delivered, so Iisa burned the lot. I read over the notes I had taken from Mr. Crev- eling’s desk and compared them with those seven words written at the bottom of his letter. None of them were in the same hand, but I kept two or three for Mrs. Creveling to buy [Ilsa’s freedom; they showéd plain that Mr. Creveling had been threatening people to make them pay up card debts or lend him money, and if they ever got in the newspapers she wouldn’t have been able to hold up her head again. It seems rotten to fight a woman like that, ‘maybe, sir, but she hadn’t spared Ilsa! “When I’d destroyed the letters that didn’t mean anything to me, I put the rest in my pocket, together with that one I had taken from Mr. Creveling’s clothes in the morning, and went to the corner drug-store and called up Mr. Alexander; I altered my voice so he wouldn’t recognize it, and you know what I told him. Then I went straight back to the Creveling house and hid those letters. I heard Mr. Alexander come in, and then I knocked on the door of the breakfast-room.” “Who telephoned out to Broadmead? It was your wife, wasn’t it?” asked Mc- - Carty. “Yes. I told her to give the message to (C(O IMU S (C(O) 6)(0)O)