Did it still repose in the bedroom?
Or had a housemaid found it, and restored it to a numbered hook in the office?
Had not that immaculately dressed clerk said he would find Number 605 "a comfortable, quiet room"?
Well, it might be all that, yet Curtis could hardly help dwelling on the thought that had he been put in any other cell of the human beehive called the Central Hotel it was highly probable he would not now be flying across New York on a self-imposed mission so nebulous, so ill-defined, that already his orderly brain was beginning to doubt the logic which inspired it.
Was it too late to draw back?
To this handy automobile city distances were negligible quantities, and he would rejoin the detectives before they could have any reason to suspect him even of carelessness in withholding from their ken the new and important fact revealed by the accidental change of overcoats.
And, yes--by Jove!--it would be assumed that _his_ overcoat was the dead man's, though, indeed, certain papers in the pockets would soon show that there was a blunder somewhere, because the John D.Curtis mentioned therein necessarily figured as the chief witness in the case now being worked up against three unknown malefactors.

Oddly enough, it was contemporaneous with this thought that the queer similarity of his own name to that of the unfortunate Frenchman first dawned on him.
John D.Curtis and Jean de Courtois were, as names, particularly as the names of two men of different nationalities, sufficiently alike to invite comment.

Well, that being so, there was all the more reason why the identity of poor Jean de Courtois should be established beyond doubt, and this reflection appealed so strongly that, when the cab stopped, Curtis was once more reconciled to the policy hurriedly arrived at while he was standing at the corner of Broadway and 27th Street.
He opened the door, alighted, glanced up at a rather imposing block of flats, and said to the driver: "Is this 1000 West 59th Street ?" "Yes, sir.

Quite a bunch of people live here," was the answer.
"I take it, then, that the lady I wish to see occupies one of the flats ?" The driver smiled broadly, for it seemed to him that the naive statement sounded rather funny.
"I guess that's about the size of it," he said.
Curtis smiled, too.

This needless blurting out of confidences to a cabman was the one folly essential to a complete restoration of his wits.
"Wait for me," he said.