The Affair of the Red Portefeuille

The red portefeuille in question was a certain red morocco note-case. How, in the Rue de Jerusalem, it became “an affair,” was the story its owner told us. And on this wise.

“It was safe enough,” Dick Langley said, “in my inner breast-pocket when I left Spa that morning; and it was safe there too when I reached the Nord terminus that evening. But I had not been five minutes in my customary quarters at the Grand before I discovered that my note-case was most indubitably—gone—looted quietly, you know. The how was that clean cut through the bottom seam of the pocket; the where must have been in the crowd at the station just now.

“I don’t profess to be much of a judge of this sort of thing; but it struck me at the time that the fellow who had operated on me must have been about the top of his profession—… Read More