He already had his hat on, and I knew he was going to Josephson's
breakfastless. I followed reluctantly.

"Because," he answered, as we hustled along in the early morning
crowd, "it was only yesterday afternoon that I saw Minturn at his
office and he made an appointment with me for this very morning.
He was a very secretive man, but he did tell me this much, that he
feared his life was in danger and that it was in some way
connected with that Pearcy case up in Stratfield, Connecticut,
where he has an estate. You have read of the case?"

Indeed I had. It had seemed to me to be a particularly
inexplicable affair. Apparently a whole family had been poisoned
and a few days before old Mr. Randall Pearcy, a retired
manufacturer, had died after a brief but mysterious illness.

Pearcy had been married a year or so ago to Annette Oakleigh, a
Broadway comic opera singer, who was his second wife. By his first
marriage he had had two children, a son, Warner, and a daughter,
Isabel.

Warner Pearcy, I had heard, had blazed a vermilion trail along the
Great White Way, but his sister was of the opposite temperament,
interested in social work, and had attracted much attention by
organizing a settlement in the slums of Stratfield for the uplift
of the workers in the Pearcy and other mills.

Broadway, as well as Stratfield, had already woven a fantastic
background, for the mystery and hints had been broadly made that