A MYSTERY FOR THE POLICE
53
commonplaceness of civilization as to read at breakfast.
Slowly and dispassionately, yet with interest and absorption increasing with every line, he read the leading columns on the morning after Hereford had consulted him about the emerald:
"Robbery under the most inexplicable circumstances; romance of a most extraordinary sort; these—and possible international complications—combined yesterday in the most dramatic mystery that has puzzled the Chicago police for years. The great emerald known as the Surakarta—a historic stone supposed by jewel experts to be safe in the castle of the Soesoehoenan of Surakarta, Java, where it had been kept for six hundred years—was abstracted from a locked steel box at the Hotel Tonty in a manner so bewil-
