In other circumstances--chiefly those in which Merton Gill had now been the prominent figure in the film world he meant one day to become--he would on this night have undoubtedly won public attention for his mysterious disappearance. The modest room in the Patterson home, to which for three months he had unfailingly come after the first picture show, on this night went untenanted. The guardian at the Holden gate would have testified that he had not passed out that way, and the way through the offices had been closed at five, subsequent to which hour several witnesses could have sworn to seeing him still on the lot.
In the ensuing search even the tank at the lower end of the lot might have been dragged--without result.
Being little known to the public, however, and in the Patterson home it being supposed that you could never tell about motion-picture actors, his disappearance for the night caused absolutely no slightest ripple. Public attention as regarded the young man remained at a mirror-like calm, unflawed by even the mildest curiosity. He had been seen, perhaps, though certainly not noted with any interest, to be one of the group watching a night scene in front of one of the Fifth Avenue mansions.
Lights shone from the draped windows of this mansion and from its portals issued none other than Muriel Mercer, who, as Vera Vanderpool, freed at last from the blight of Broadway, was leaving her palatial home to cast her lot finally with the ardent young tenement worker with the high forehead. She descended the brown-stone steps, paused once to look back upon the old home where she had been taught to love pleasure above the worth-while things of life, then came on to the waiting limousine, being greeted here by the young man with the earnest forehead who had won her to the better way.
The missing youth might later have been observed, but probably was not, walking briskly in the chill night toward the gate that led to the outer world. But he wheeled abruptly before reaching this gate, and walked again briskly, this time debouching from the main thoroughfare into the black silence of the Western village. Here his pace slackened, and halfway down the street he paused irresolutely.
He was under the wooden porch of the Fashion Restaurant--Give our Tamales a Trial. He lingered here but a moment, however, then lurked on down the still thoroughfare, keeping well within the shadow of the low buildings. Just beyond the street was the log cabin of the big-hearted miners. A moment later he could not have been observed even by the keenest eye.
Nothing marked his disappearance, at least nothing that would have been noted by the casual minded. He had simply gone. He was now no more than the long-vanished cowboys and sheriffs and gamblers and petty tradesmen who had once peopled this street of silence and desolation.
A night watchman came walking presently, flashing an electric torch from side to side. He noticed nothing. He was, indeed, a rather imaginative man, and he hoped he would not notice anything. He did not like coming down this ghostly street, which his weak mind would persist in peopling with phantom crowds from long-played picture dramas. It gave him the creeps, as he had more than once confessed.
He hurried on, flashing his torch along the blind fronts of the shops in a perfunctory manner. He was especially nervous when he came to corners. And he was glad when he issued from the little street into the wider one that was well lighted.
How could he have been expected to notice a very trifling incongruous detail as he passed the log cabin? Indeed many a keener-eyed and entirely valorous night watchman might have neglected to observe that the leathern latch-string of the cabin's closed door was no longer hanging outside.
