I had made my promise to Miss Meredith with an apparent hopefulness which may have deceived her, but did not deceive myself. When the glow of my first enthusiasm passed, I sat down in the solitude of my own room to reconsider the events of the day, but one thing was clear to me, and that was the unpromising nature of the task I had set myself to perform. What excuse had I for the self-confidence I had shown? What means were at my command which were not also at the command of the police? She herself had asked this same question, and I had parried it. But I could not parry the demands of my own intelligence. They must be met and answered. But how? In vain I pondered ways and means; laid innumerable plans and relentlessly discarded them; projected interviews which I knew were fruitless, and worked myself through labyrinths of reasoning which ended in nothing and left me no farther advanced at the end than I was in the beginning.
Wearied at last in mind and body, I retired, and during my sleep had an inspiration upon which I proceeded to act early the next morning. Revisiting Sam Underhill's apartment, I told him my difficulty and opened up my scheme. Sam Underhill, with all his faults and numberless eccentricities, was a good fellow at bottom, and just the man to respect my confidence. He was, besides, the only person within the range of my acquaintances who could assist me in the plan I had formed; a plan which demanded the active cooperation of someone not so well known to the police as myself. Hampered as I was by my well-known connection with the Gillespie poisoning case, I could not personally make a move towards the ravelment of its mystery without subjecting myself to the curiosity of the people among whom my investigations might carry me, even if I escaped drawing upon myself the attention of the District Attorney's office and the suspicion of the men whose business I was in a measure attempting to usurp. But he was a free agent; he could come and go without arousing distrust or awakening professional jealousy. At all events he, and he alone, could put me into communication with the private detective whom I had decided to employ. As I had always been accustomed to visit Sam's rooms, my presence there at any hour of the day or night would raise no comment. I had only his laziness to fear, a laziness which with him was as marked a characteristic as it was with Alfred Gillespie, whom he so carelessly criticised.
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