The police department of the city of New York did not earn the thousand dollars reward offered by Roderick Duncan. The mystery of the abandoned car, owned by Jack Gardner, was not explained. Patrick O'Toole did not return to his duties at Cedarcrest. The story of the wreck of the White Steamer on the rocks under the derrick remained untold. Patricia Langdon did not reappear among her friends and acquaintances in the city. The mysteries born of that party at Cedarcrest continued unsolved.
Roderick Duncan, having arrived at a conclusion about all those matters which was quite satisfactory to himself, declined to concern himself farther about them; he believed that he perfectly understood the situation, and he let it go at that--although he engaged the services of every clipping-bureau in the city, in an effort to find announcement somewhere of the marriage of Patricia Langdon to Richard Morton. But no such record was discovered, nor was any evidence found that suggested such a possibility. He withdrew very much into himself, shunned his clubs, avoided his friends, and could not himself tell why he did not go away somewhere, to the other side of the world, seeking to forget what he had lost. He went so far in his studied aloofness as to keep entirely away from Stephen Langdon, and was perhaps all the more surprised when, as time elapsed, Patricia's father did not send for him. The utter silence of Stephen Langdon, and his entire inactivity concerning the absence of his daughter convinced Duncan, as it did also Patricia's, friends, generally, that he knew perfectly well where she was. It was a logical conclusion, too, for, if Stephen Langdon had not known, it is safe to say that he would have moved heaven and earth to find his daughter.
Jack and Sally Gardner went to Europe and took Beatrice with them. Nesbit Farnham followed them, on the next steamer. The Misses Houston, also, disappeared. The newspapers had contained merely a mention of the wreck, nothing more of consequence. The destruction of the machine was told, and it was hinted that the chauffeur was slightly injured; nothing was said to suggest that Richard Morton had been hurt at all. The police, to whom Duncan had telephoned, made no bones of pooh-poohing the entire matter, and laughing in their sleeves about it. The police had their own ideas about the whole thing--and speedily forgot them all.
Stephen Langdon was strangely grim and silent, those days; he was also unusually dangerous to his rivals in "the street." Every energy that he possessed seemed bent upon ruining somebody, anybody. It did not occur to Duncan that the old man avoided him, because he was guilty of the like avoidance himself; but, had he been less concerned with his own sorrows, and given some thought to Stephen Langdon's, he would have been quick enough to discover that the old financier dodged him, studiously.