"At least I know that our gunman friend, the Chief, is going to call up to-night," I reported to Garrick on his return.

"I think he'll be here, all right," commented Garrick. "I called up Dillon while I was out and he was convinced that the best way was, as I said, to seem to let up on them. They didn't get a word out of the fellow they call the Boss. He lives down here a couple of streets, I believe, in a pretty tough place, even worse than the Old Tavern. I let Dillon get a man in there, but I haven't much hope. He's only a tool of the other whom they call Chief. By the way, Forbes has disappeared. I can't find a trace of him since the raid on the gambling joint."

"Any word from Warrington?" I asked.

"Yes, he's getting along finely," answered Guy mechanically, as if his thoughts were far away from Warrington. "Queer about Forbes," he murmured, then cut himself short. "And, oh," he added, "I forgot to tell you that speaking about Forbes reminds me that Herman has been running out a clew on the Rena Taylor case. He has been all over the country up there, he reports to Dillon, and he says he thinks the car was seen making for Pennsylvania.

"They have a peculiar license law there, you know—at least he says so—that enables one to conceal a car pretty well. Much good that does us."

"Yes," I agreed, "you can always depend on a man like Herman to come along with something like that—-"

Just then the "master station" detectaphone connected with the telephone in the garage began to talk and I cut myself short. We seemed now at last about to learn something really important. It was a new voice that said, "Hello!"

"Evidently the Boss has come in without making any noise," remarked Guy. "I certainly heard no one through the other instrument. I fancy he was waiting for it to get dark before coming around. Listen."

It was a long distance call from the man they called Chief. Where he was we had no means of finding out, but we soon found out where he was going.

"Hello, Boss," we heard come out of the detectaphone box.

"Hello, Chief. You surely got us nearly pinched last night. What was the trouble?"

"Oh, nothing much. Somehow or other they must have got on to us. I guess it was when I called up the joint on Forty-eighth Street. Three men surprised me, but fortunately I was ready. If they hadn't stopped at the door before they opened it, they might have got me. I put 'em all out with that gun, though. Say, I want you to help me on a little job that I am planning.

"Yes? Is it a safe one? Don't you think we'd better keep quiet for a little while?"

"But this won't keep quiet. Listen. You know I told you about writing that letter regarding Warrington to Miss Winslow, when I was so sore over the report that he was going to close up the Forty-eighth Street joint, right on top of finding that Rena Taylor had the 'goods' on the Forty-seventh Street place? Well, I was a fool. You said so, and I was,"

"You were—that's right."

"I know it, but I was mad. I hadn't got all I wanted out of those places. Well, anyhow, I want that letter back—that's all. It's bad to have evidence like that lying around. Why, if they ever get a real handwriting expert they might get wise to something from that handwriting, I'm afraid. I must have been crazy to do it that way."

"What became of the letter?"

"She took it to that fellow Garrick and I happen to know that Warrington that night, after leaving Garrick, went to his apartment and put something into the safe he has there. Oh, Warrington has it, all right. What I want to do is to get that letter back while he is laid up near Tuxedo. It isn't much of a safe, I understand. I think a can opener would do the job. We can make the thing look like a regular robbery by a couple of yeggs. Are you on?"

"No, I don't get you, Chief."

"Why?"

"It's too risky."

"Too risky?"

"Yes. That fellow Garrick is just as likely as not to be nosing around up there. I'd go but for that."

"I know. But suppose we find that he isn't there, that he isn't in the house—has been there and left it. That would be safe enough. You're right. Nothing doing if he's there. We must can him in some way. But, say,—I know how to get in all right without being seen. I'll tell you later. Come on, be a sport. We won't try it if anybody's there. Besides, if we succeed it will help to throw a scare into Warrington."

The man on our end of the telephone appeared to hesitate.

"I'll tell you what I'll do, Chief," he said at length. "I'll meet you at the same place as we met the other day—you know where I mean—some time after twelve. We'll talk it over. You're sure about the letter?"

"As sure as if I'd seen it."

"All right. Now, be there. I won't promise about this Warrington business. We'll talk that over. But I have other things I want to tell you—about this situation here at the garage. I want to know how to act."

"All right. I'll be there. Good-bye."

"So long, Chief."

The conversation stopped. I looked anxiously at Garrick to see how he had taken it.

"And so," he remarked simply, as after a moment's waiting we made sure that the machine had stopped talking, "it appears that our friends, the enemy, are watching us as closely as we are watching them—with the advantage that they know us and we don't know them, except this garage fellow."

Garrick lapsed into silence. I was rapidly turning over in my mind what we had just overheard and trying to plan some way of checkmating their next move.

"Here's a plot hatching to rob Warrington's safe," I exclaimed helplessly.

"Yes," repeated Garrick slowly, "and if we are going to do anything about it, it must be done immediately, before we arouse suspicion and scare them off. Did you hear those footsteps over the detectaphone? That was the Boss going out of the garage. So, they expect me around there, nosing about Warrington's apartment. Well, if I do go there, and then ostentatiously go away again, that will lure them on."

He reached his decision quickly. Grabbing his hat, he led the way out of the Old Tavern and up the street until we came to a drug store with a telephone.

I heard him first talking with Warrington, getting from him the combination of the safe, over long distance. Then he called up his office and asked the boy to meet him at the Grand Central subway station with a package, the location of which he described minutely.

"We'll beat them to it," he remarked joyously, as we started leisurely uptown to meet the boy.



Chapter XIII

THE INCENDIARY

"The Warrington estate owns another large apartment house, besides the one where Warrington has his quarters, on the next street," remarked Garrick, half an hour later, after we had met the boy from his office. "I have arranged that we can get in there and use one of the empty suites."

Garrick had secured two rather good-sized boxes from the boy, and was carrying them rather carefully, as if they contained some very delicate mechanism.

Warrington, we found, occupied a suite in a large apartment on Seventy-second Street, and, as we entered, Garrick stopped and whispered a few words to the hall-boy.

The boy seemed to be more than usually intelligent and had evidently been told over the telephone by Warrington that we were coming. At least we had no trouble, so far.

Warrington's suite was very tastefully furnished for bachelor quarters. In the apartment, Garrick unwrapped one of the packages, and laid it open on the table, while he busied himself opening the safe, using the combination that Warrington had given him.

I waited nervously, for we could not be sure that no one had got ahead of us, already. There was no need for anxiety, however.

"Here's the letter, just as Warrington left it," reported Garrick in a few minutes, with some satisfaction, as he banged the safe door shut and restored things so that it would not look as though the little strong box had been touched.

Meanwhile, I had been looking curiously at the box on the table. It did not seem to be like anything we had ever used before. One end was open, and the lid lifted up on a pair of hinges. I lifted it and looked in. About half way down the box from the open end was a partition which looked almost as if some one had taken the end of the box and had just shoved it in, until it reached the middle.

The open half was empty, but in the other half I saw a sort of plate of some substance covering the outside of the shoved-in end. There was also a dry cell and several arrangements for adjustments which I did not understand. Back of the whole thing was a piece of mechanism, a clockwork interrupter, as I learned later. Wires led out from the closed end of the box.

Garrick shoved the precious letter into his pocket and then placed the box in a corner, where it was hidden by a pile of books, with the open end facing the room in the direction of the antiquated safe. The wires from the box were quickly disposed of and dropped out of the window to the yard, several stories below, where we could pick them up later as we had done with the detectaphone.

"What's that?" I asked curiously, when at last he had finished and I felt at liberty to question him.

"Well, you see," he explained, "there is no way of knowing yet just how the apartment will be entered. They apparently have some way, though, which they wouldn't discuss over the telephone. But it is certain that as long as they know that there is anyone up here, they will put off the attempt. They said that."

He was busily engaged restoring everything in the room as far as possible to its former position.

"My scheme," he went on, "is for us now to leave the apartment ostentatiously. I think that is calculated to insure the burglary, for they must have someone watching by this time. Then we can get back to that empty apartment in the house on the next street, and before they can get around to start anything, we shall be prepared for them."

Garrick stopped to speak to the hall-boy again as we left, carrying the other box. What he said I did not hear but the boy nodded intelligently.

After a turn down the street, a ride in a surface car for a few blocks and back again, he was satisfied that no one was following us and we made our way into the vacant apartment on Seventy-third Street, without being observed.

Picking up the wires from the back yard of Warrington's and running them across the back fence where he attached them to other wires dropped down from the vacant apartment was accomplished easily, but it all took time, and time was precious, just now.

In the darkness of the vacant room he uncovered and adjusted the other box, connected one set of wires to those we had led in and another set to an apparatus which looked precisely like the receiver of a wireless telegraph, fitting over the head with an earpiece. He placed the earpiece in position and began regulating the mechanism of the queer looking box.

"I didn't want to use the detectaphone again," he explained as he worked, "because we haven't any assurance that they'll talk, or, if they do, that it will be worth while to listen. Besides, there may be only one of them."

"Then what is this?" I asked.

"Well," he argued, "they certainly can't work without light of some kind, can they?"

I acquiesced.

"This is an instrument which literally makes light audible," he pursued.

"Hear light?" I repeated, in amazement.

"Exactly," he reiterated. "You've said it. It was invented to assist the blind, but I think I'll be able to show that it can be used to assist justice—which is blind sometimes, they say. It is the optophone."

He paused to adjust the thing more accurately and I looked at it with an added respect.

"It was invented," he resumed, "by Professor Fournier d'Albe, a lecturer on physics at the University of Birmingham, England, and has been shown before many learned societies over there."

"You mean it enables the blind to see by hearing?" I asked.

"That's it," he nodded. "It actually enables the blind to locate many things, purely by the light reflected by them. Its action is based on the peculiar property of selenium, which, you probably know, changes its electrical conductivity under the influence of light. Selenium in the dark is a poor conductor of electricity; in the light it, strange to say, becomes a good conductor. Variations of light can thus be transmuted into variations of sound. That pushed-in end of the box which we hid over in Warrington's had, as you might have noticed, a selenium plate on the inside partition, facing the open end of the box."

"I understand," I agreed, vaguely.

"Now," he went on, "this property of selenium is used for producing or rather allowing to be transmitted an electric current which is interrupted by a special clockwork interrupter, and so is made audible in this wireless telephone receiver which I have here connected with this second box. The eye is replaced by the ear as the detector of light—that is all."

It might have been all, but it was quite wonderful to me, even if he spoke of it so simply. He continued to adjust the thing as he talked.

"The clockwork has been wound up by means of a small handle, and I have moved that rod along a slit until I heard a purring sound. Then I moved it until the purring sound became as faint as possible. The instrument is at the present moment in its most sensitive state."

"What does it sound like?" I asked.

"Well, the passage of a hand or other object across the aperture is indicated by a sort of murmuring sound," he replied, "the loudest sound indicating the passage of the edges where the contrast is greatest. In a fairly bright light, even the swiftest shadow is discoverable. Prolonged exposure, however, blinds the optophone, just as it blinds the eye."

"Do you hear anything now?" I asked watching his face curiously.

"No. When I turned the current on at first I heard a ticking or rasping sound. I silenced that. But any change in the amount of light in that dark room over there would restore the sound, and its intensity would indicate the power of the light."

He continued to listen.

"When I first tried this, I found that a glimpse out of the window in daylight sounded like a cinematograph reeling off a film. The ticking sank almost into silence as the receiving apparatus was held in the shadow of the office table, and leaped into a lively rattle again when I brought it near an electric-light bulb. I blindfolded myself and moved a piece of blotting paper between the receiver and the light. I could actually hear the grating of the shadow, yes, I heard the shadow pass. At night, too, I have found that it is even affected by the light of the stars."

He glanced out of the window in the direction of Warrington's, which we could not see, however, since it was around an angle of the building.

"See," he went on, "the moon is rising, and in a few minutes, I calculate, it will shine right into that room over there on Seventy-second Street. By using this optophone, I could tell you the moment it does. Try the thing, yourself, Tom."

I did so. Though my ear was untrained to distinguish between sounds I could hear just the faintest noise.

Suddenly there came a weird racket. Hastily I looked up at Garrick in surprise.

"What is that?" I asked endeavouring to describe it. "Are they there now?"

"No," he laughed. "That was the moon shining in. I wanted you to hear what a difference it makes. When a ray of the sun, for instance, strikes that 'feeler' over there, a harmonious and majestic sound like the echo of a huge orchestra is heard. The light of the moon, on the other hand, produces a different sound— lamenting, almost like the groans of the wounded on a battlefield."

"So you can distinguish between various kinds of light?"

"Yes. Electric light, you would find if anyone came in and switched it on over there, produces a most unpleasant sound, sometimes like two pieces of glass rubbed against each other, sometimes like the tittering laugh of ghosts, and I have heard it like the piercing cry of an animal. Gaslight is sobbing and whispering, grating and ticking, according to its intensity. By far the most melodious and pleasing sound is produced by an ordinary wax candle. It sounds just like an aeolian harp on which the chords of a solemn tune are struck. I have even tried a glow- worm and it sounded like a bee buzzing. The light from a red-hot piece of iron gives the shrillest and most ear-splitting cry imaginable."

He took the receiver back from me and adjusted it to his own ear.

"Yes," he confirmed, "that was the moon, as I thought. It's a peculiar sound. Once you have heard it you're not likely to forget it. I must silence the machine to that."

We had waited patiently for a long time, and still there was no evidence that anyone had entered the room.

"I'm afraid they decided not to attempt it after all," I said, finally.

"I don't think so," replied Garrick. "I took particular pains to make it seem that the road was clear. You remember, I spoke to the hall-boy twice, and we lingered about long enough when we left. It isn't much after midnight. I wonder how it was that they expected to get in. Ah—there goes the moon. I can hear it getting fainter all the time."

Suddenly Garrick's face was all animation. "What is it?" I asked breathlessly.

"Someone has entered the room. There is a light which sounds just like an electric flashlight which is being moved about. They haven't switched on the electric light. Now, if I were sufficiently expert I think I could tell by the varying sounds at just what that fellow is flashing the light. There, something passed directly between the light and the box. Yes, there must be two of them—that was the shadow of a human being, all right. They are over in the corner by the safe, now. The fellow with the flashlight is bending down. I can tell, because the other fellow walked between the light and the box and the light must be held very low, for I heard the shadows of both of his legs."

Garrick was apparently waiting only until the intruders, whoever they were, were busily engaged in their search before he gave the alarm and hurried over in an attempt to head off their escape by their secret means of entrance.

"Tom," he cried, as he listened attentively, "call up the apartment over there and get that hall-boy. Tell him he must not run that elevator up until we get there. No one must leave or enter the building. Tell him to lock the front door and conceal himself in the door that leads down to the cellar. I will ring the night bell five times to let him know when to let us in."

I was telephoning excitedly Garrick's instructions and as he waited for me to finish he was taking a last turn at the optophone before we made our dash on Warrington's.

A suppressed exclamation escaped him. I turned toward him quickly from the telephone and hung up the receiver.

"What's the matter?" I asked anxiously.

For a moment he did not reply, but seemed to be listening with an intensity that I knew betokened something unexpected.

"Tom," he cried abruptly, stripping the receiver from his head with a jerk and clapping it over my own ears, "quick!—tell me what you hear. What does it sound like to you? What is it? I can't be mistaken."

I listened feverishly. Not having had a former acquaintance with the machine, I did not know just what to make of it. But from the receiver of the little optophone there seemed to issue the most peculiar noise I had ever heard a mechanical instrument make.

It was like a hoarse rumbling cry, now soft and almost plaintive, again louder and like a shriek of a damned soul in the fires of the nether world. Then it died down, only to spring up again, worse than before.

If I had been listening to real sounds instead of to light I should have been convinced that the thing was recording a murder.

I described it as best I could. The fact was that the thing almost frightened me by its weird novelty.

"Yes—yes," agreed Garrick, as the sensations I experienced seemed to coincide with his own. "Exactly what I heard myself. I felt sure that I could not be mistaken. Quick, Tom,—get central on that wire!"

A moment later he seized the telephone from me. I had expected him to summon the police to assist us in capturing two crooks who had, perhaps, devised some odd and scientific method of blowing up a safe.

"Hello, hello!" he shouted frantically over the wire. "The fire department! This is eight hundred Seventy-second—on the corner; yes, yes—northeast. I want to turn in an alarm. Yes—quick! There is a fire—a bad one—incendiary—top floor. No, no—I'm not there. I can see it. Hurry!"



CHAPTER XIV

THE ESCAPE

He had dropped the telephone receiver without waiting to replace it on the hook and was now dashing madly out of the empty apartment and down the street.

The hall-boy at Warrington's had done exactly as I had ordered him. There was the elevator waiting as Garrick gave the five short rings at the nightbell and the outside door was unlocked. No one had yet discovered the fire which we knew was now raging on the top floor of the apartment.

We were whirled up there swiftly, just as we heard echoing through the hall and the elevator shaft from someone who had an apartment on the same floor the shrill cry of, "Fire, fire!"

Tenants all the way up were now beginning to throw open their doors and run breathlessly about in various states of undress. The elevator bell was jangling insistently.

In the face of the crisis the elevator boy looked at Garrick appealingly.

"Run your car up and down until all are out who want to go," ordered Garrick. "Only tell them all that an alarm has already been turned in and that there is no danger except to the suite that is on fire. You may leave us here."

We had reached the top floor and stepped out. I realised fully now what had happened. Either the robbers had found out only too quickly that they had been duped or else they had reasoned that the letter they sought had been hidden in a place in the apartment for which they had no time to hunt.

It had probably been the latter idea which they had had and, instead of hunting further, they had taken a quicker and more unscrupulous method than Garrick had imagined and had set the room on fire. Fortunately that had been promptly and faithfully reported to us over the optophone in time to localize the damage.

"At least we were able to turn in an alarm only a few seconds after they started the fire," panted Garrick, as he strained to burst in the door.

Together we managed to push it in, and rushed into the stifle of Warrington's suite. The whole thing was in flames and it was impossible for us to remain there longer than to take in the situation.

Accordingly we retreated slowly before the fierce blaze. One of the other tenants came running with a fire extinguisher in either hand from wall rack down the hall on this floor. As well try to drown a blast furnace. They made no impression whatever.

Personally I had expected nothing like this. I had been prepared up to the time the optophone reported the fire to dash over and fight it out at close quarters with two as desperate and resourceful men as underworld conditions in New York at that time had created. Instead we saw no one at all.

The robbers had evidently worked in seconds instead of minutes, realizing that they must take no risks in a showdown with Garrick. Rooms that might perhaps have given some clew of their presence, perhaps finger-prints which might have settled their identity at once, were now being destroyed. We had defeated them. We had the precious letter. But they had again slipped away.

Firemen were now arriving. A hose had been run up, and a solid stream of water was now hissing on the fire. Smoke and steam were everywhere as the men hacked and cut their way at the very heart of the hungry red monster.

"We are only in the way here, Tom," remarked Garrick, retreating finally. "Our friends must have entered and escaped by the roof. There is no other way."

He had dashed up ahead of the firemen. I followed. Sure enough, the door out on the roof had been broken into. A rope tied around a chimney showed how they had pulled themselves up and later let themselves down to the roof of the next apartment some fifteen feet lower. We could see an open door leading to the roof there, which must also have been broken open. That had evidently been the secret method of which the Chief had spoken to the Boss, whoever they might be, who bore these epithets.

Pursuit was useless, now. All was excitement. From the street we could hear the clang of engines and trucks arriving and taking their positions, almost as if the fire department had laid out the campaign beforehand for this very fire.

Anyone who had waited a moment or so in the other apartment down the street might have gone downstairs without attracting any attention. Then he might have disappeared in or mingled with the very crowd on the street which he had caused to gather. Late as it was, the crowd seemed to spring from nowhere, and to grow momentarily as it had done during the raid on the gambling joint. It was one of the many interesting night phenomena of New York.

What had been intended to be one of the worst fires and to injure a valuable property of the Warrington estate had, thanks to the prompt action of Garrick, been quickly turned into only a minor affair, at the worst. The fire had eaten its way into two other rooms of Warrington's own suite, but there it had been stopped. The building itself was nearly fireproof, and each suite was a unit so that, to all intents and purposes, it might burn out without injury to others.

Still, it was interesting to watch the skill and intuition of the smoke-eaters as they took in the situation and almost instantly seemed to be able to cope with it.

Sudden and well-planned though the incendiary assault had been, it was not many minutes before it was completely under control. Men in rubber coats and boots were soon tramping through the water- soaked rooms of Warrington. Windows were cracked open and the air in the rooms was clearing.

We followed in cautiously after one of the firemen. Everywhere was the penetrating smell of burnt wood and cloth. In the corner was the safe, still hot and steaming. It had stood the strain. But it showed marks of having been tampered with.

"Somebody used a 'can-opener' on it," commented Garrick, looking at it critically and then ruefully at the charred wreck of his optophone that had tumbled in the ashes of the pile of books under which it had been hidden, "Yes, that was the scheme they must have evolved after their midnight conference,—a robbery masked by a fire to cover the trail, and perhaps destroy it altogether."

"If we had only known that," I agreed, "we might have saved what little there was in that safe for Warrington. But I guess he didn't keep much there."

"No," answered Garrick, "I don't think he did. All I saw was some personal letters and a few things he apparently liked to have around here. I suppose all the really valuable stuff he has was in a safety-deposit vault somewhere. There was a packet of—it's gone! What do you think of that?" he exclaimed looking up from the safe to me in surprise.

"Packet of what?" I asked. "What is gone?"

"Why," replied Garrick, "I couldn't help noticing it when I opened the safe before, but Warrington had evidently saved every line and scrap of writing that Violet Winslow had ever given him and it was all in one of the compartments of the safe. The compartment is empty!"

Neither of us could say a word. What reason might there be why anyone should want Warrington's love letters? Was it to learn something that might be used to embarrass him? Might it be for the purpose of holding him up for money? Did the robber want them for himself or was he employed by another? These and a score of other questions flashed, unanswered, through my mind.

"I wonder who this fellow is that they call the Chief?" I ventured at last.

"I can't say—yet," admitted Garrick. "But he's the cleverest I have ever met. His pace is rapid, but I think we are getting up with it, at last. There's no use sticking around here any longer, though. The place for us, I think, is downtown, getting an earful at the other end of that detectaphone."

The engines and other apparatus were rolling away from the fire when we regained the street and things were settling themselves down to normal again.

We rode downtown on the subway, and I was surprised when Garrick, instead of going all the way down to the crosstown line that would take us to the Old Tavern, got off at Forty-second Street.

"What's the idea of this?" I asked.

"Do you think I'm going to travel around the city with that letter in my pocket?" he asked. "Not much, since they seem to set such a value on getting it back. Of course, they don't know that I have it. But they might suspect it. At any rate I'm not going to run any chances of losing it."

He had stopped at a well-known hotel where he knew the night clerk. There he made the letter into a little package, sealed it, and deposited it in the safe.

"Why do you leave it here?" I asked.

"If I go near the office, they might think I left it there, and I certainly won't leave it in my own apartment. They may or may not suspect that I have it. At any rate, I'd hate to risk meeting them down in their own region. But here we are not followed. I can leave it safely and to-morrow I'll get it and deposit it in a really safe place. Now, just to cover up my tracks, I'm going to call up Dillon, but I'm going up Broadway a bit before I do so, so that even he will not know I've been in this hotel. I think he ought to know what has happened to-day."

"What did he say?" I asked as Garrick rejoined me from the telephone booth, his face wearing a scowl of perplexity.

"Why, he knew about it already," replied Garrick. "I got him at his home. Herman, it seems, got back from some wild-goose chase over in New Jersey and saw the report in the records filed at police headquarters and telephoned him."

"Herman is one of the brightest detectives I ever met," I commented in disgust. "He always manages to get in just after everybody else. Has he any more news?"

"About the car?" asked Garrick absently. "Nothing except that he ran down the Pennsylvania report and found there was nothing in it. Now he says that he thinks the car may have returned to New York, perhaps by way of Staten Island, for he doubts whether it could have slipped in by New Jersey."

"Clever," I ejaculated. "I suppose that occurred to him as soon as he read about the fire. I have to hand it to him for being a deducer."

Garrick smiled.

"There's one thing, though, he does know," he added, "and that is the gossip of the underworld right here in New York."

"I should hope so," I replied. "That was his business to know. Why, has he found out anything really new?"

"Why—er—yes. Dillon tells me that it now appears that Forbes had been intimate with that Rena Taylor."

"Yes?" I repeated, not surprised.

"At least that's what Herman has told him."

"Well," I exclaimed in disgust, "Forbes is a fine one to run around with stool-pigeons and women of the Tenderloin, in addition to his other accomplishments, and then expect to associate with a girl like Violet Winslow."

"It is scandalous," he agreed. "Why, according to Dillon and Herman, she must have been getting a good deal of evidence through her intimacy with Forbes. They probably gambled together, drank together, and—-"

"Do you suppose Forbes ever found out that she was really using him?"

Garrick shook his head. "I can't say," he replied. "There isn't much value in this deductive, long distance detective work. You reason a thing out to your satisfaction and then one little fact knocks all your clever reasoning sky-high. The trouble here is that on this aspect of the case the truth seems to have been known by only two persons—and one of them is dead, while the other has disappeared."

"Strange what has become of Forbes," I ruminated.

"It is indeed," agreed Garrick. "But then he was such a night-hawk that anything might easily have happened and no one be the wiser. Since you saw him enter the gambling joint the night of the raid, I've been unable to get a line on him. He must have gone through the tunnel to the ladies' poolroom, but after he left that, presumably, I can't find a trace of him. Where he went no one seems to know. This bit of gossip that Herman has unearthed is the first thing I've heard of him, definitely, for two days."

"If Rena Taylor were alive," I speculated, "I don't think you'd have to look further for Forbes than to find her."

"But she isn't alive," concluded Garrick, "and there is nothing to show that there was anyone else at the poolroom for women who interested him—and—well, this isn't getting back to business."

He turned toward the street.

"Let's go down on a surface car," he said. "I think we ought to learn something down there at the Old Tavern, now. If these people have done nothing more, they'll think they have at least given an example of their resourcefulness and succeeded in throwing another scare into Warrington. But there's one thing I'd like to be able to tell Mr. Chief, however. He can't throw any scare into me, if that's his game."



CHAPTER XV

THE PLOT

We had been able to secure a key to the hotel entrance of the Old Tavern, so that we felt free to come and go at any hour of the day or night. We let ourselves in and mounted the stairs cautiously to our room.

"At least they haven't discovered anything, yet," Garrick congratulated himself, looking about, as I struck a light, and finding everything as we had left it.

Late as it was, he picked up the detective receiver of the mechanical eavesdropper and held it to his ears, listening intently several moments.

"There's someone in the garage, all right," he exclaimed. "I can hear sounds as if he were moving about among the cars. It must be the garage keeper himself—the one they call the Boss. I don't think our clever Chief would have the temerity to show up here yet, even at this hour."

We waited some time, but not the sound of a voice came from the instrument.

"It would be just like them to discover one of these detectaphones," remarked Garrick at length. "This is a good opportunity. I believe I'll just let myself down there in the yard again and separate those two wires, further. There's no use in risking all the eggs in one basket."

While I listened in, Garrick cautiously got out the rope ladder and descended. Through the detectaphone I could hear the noise of the man walking about the garage and was ready at the window to give Garrick the first alarm of danger if he approached the back of the shop, but nothing happened and he succeeded in accomplishing his purpose of further hiding the two wires and returning safely. Then we resumed listening in relays.

It was early in the morning when there came a telephone call to the garage and the garage keeper answered it.

"Where did you go afterward?" he asked of the man who was calling him.

Garrick had quickly shifted to the instrument by which we could overhear what was said over the telephone.

A voice which I recognised instantly as that of the man they called the Chief replied, "Oh, I had a little business to attend to—you understand. Say, they got that fire out pretty quickly, didn't they? How do you suppose the alarm could have been turned in so soon?"

"I don't know. But they tell me that Garrick and that other fellow with him showed up, double quick. He must have been wise to something."

"Yes. Do you know, I've been thinking about that ever since. Ever hear of a little thing called a detectaphone? No? Well, it's a little arrangement that can be concealed almost anywhere. I've been wondering whether there might not be one hidden about your garage. He might have put one in that night, you know. I'm sure he knows more about us than he has any right to know. Hunt around there, will you, and see if you can find anything?"

"Hold the wire."

We could hear the Boss poking around in corners, back of the piles of accessories, back of the gasoline tank, lifting things up and looking under them, apparently flashing his light everywhere so that nothing could escape him.

A hasty exclamation was recorded faithfully over our detectaphone, close to the transmitter, evidently.

"What the deuce is this?" growled a voice.

Then over the telephone we could hear the Boss talking.

"There's a round black thing back of a pile of tires, with a wire connected to it. One side of it is full of little round holes. Is that one of those things?"

"Yes," came back the voice, "that's it." Then excitedly, "Smash it! Cut the wires—no, wait—look and see where they run. I thought you'd find something. Curse me for a fool for not thinking of that before."

Garrick had quickly himself detached the wire from the receiving instrument in our room and, sticking his head cautiously out of the window, he swung the cut ends as far as he could in the direction of a big iron-shuttered warehouse down the street in the opposite direction from us.

Then he closed the window softly and pulled down the switch on the other detectaphone connected with the fake telephone receiver.

He smiled quietly at me. The thing worked still. We had one connection left with the garage, anyway.

There was a noise of something being shattered to bits. It was the black disc back of the pile of tires. We could hear the Boss muttering to himself.

"Say," he reported back over the telephone, "I've smashed the thing, all right, and cut the wires, too. They ran out of the back window to that mercantile warehouse, down the street, I think. I'll look after that in the morning. It's so dark over there now I can't see a thing."

"Good!" exclaimed the other voice with satisfaction. "Now we can talk. That fellow Garrick isn't such a wise guy, after all. I tell you, Boss, I'm going to throw a good scare into them this time— one that will stick."

"What is it?"

"Well, I got Warrington, didn't I?"

"Yes."

"You know I can't always be following that fellow, Garrick. He's too clever at dodging shadows. Besides, unless we give him something else to think about he may get a line on one of us,—on me. Don't you understand? Warrington's out of it for the present. I saw to that. Now, the thing is to fix up something to call them off, altogether, something that we can use to hold them up."

"Yes—go on—what?"

"Why—how about Violet Winslow?"

My heart actually skipped beating for a second or two as I realised the boldness and desperation of the plan.

"What do you mean—a robbery up there in Tuxedo?"

"No, no, no. What good would a robbery do? I mean to get her— kidnap her. I guess Warrington would call the whole thing off to release her—eh?"

"Say, Chief, that's going it pretty strong. I'd rather break in up there and leave a threat of some kind, something that would frighten them. But, this,—I'm afraid—"

"Afraid—nothing. I tell you, we've got to do it. They're getting too close to us. We've either got to get Garrick or do something that'll call him off for good. Why, man, the whole game is up if he keeps on the way he has been going—let alone the risk we have of getting caught."

The Boss seemed to be considering.

"How will you get a chance to do it?" he asked at length.

"Oh, I'll get a chance, all right. I'll make a chance," came back the self-confident reply.

It sent a shiver through me merely to contemplate what might happen if Violet Winslow fell into such hands. Mentally I blessed Garrick for his forethought in having the phony 'phone in the garage against possible discovery of the detective instrument.

"You know this poisoned needle stuff that's been in the papers?" pursued the Chief.

"Bunk—all bunk," came back the Boss promptly.

"Is that so?" returned the Chief. "Well, you're right about it as far as what has been in the papers is concerned. I don't know but I doubt about ninety-nine and ninety-nine hundredths per cent of it, too. But, I'll tell you,—it can be done. Take it from me—it can be done. I've got one of the best little sleepmakers you ever saw—right from Paris, too. There, what do you know about that?"

I glanced hastily, in alarm, at Garrick. His face was set in hard lines, as he listened.

"Sleepmaker—Paris," I heard him mutter under his breath, and just a flicker of a smile crossed the set lines of his fine face.

"Yes, sir," pursued the voice of the Chief, "I can pull one of those poisoned needle cases off and I'm going to do it, if I get half a chance."

"When would you do it?" asked the Boss, weakening.

"As soon as I can. I've a scheme. I'm not going to tell you over the wire, though. Leave it to me. I'm going up to our place, where I left the car. I'll study the situation out, up there. Maybe I'll run over and look over the ground, see how she spends her time and all that sort of thing. I've got to reckon in with that aunt, too. She's a Tartar. I'll let you know. In the meantime, I want you to watch that place on Forty-seventh Street. Tell me if they make any move against it. Don't waste any time, either. I can't be out of touch with things the way I was the last time I went away. You see, they almost put one across on us—in fact they did put one across with that detectaphone thing. Now, we can't let that happen again. Just keep me posted, see?"

They had finished talking and that was apparently all we were to get that night, or rather that morning, by way of warning of their plot for the worst move yet.

It was enough. If they would murder and burn, what would they stop at in order to strike at us through the innocent figure of Violet Winslow? What might not happen to such a delicate slip of a girl in the power of such men?

"At least," rapped out Garrick, himself smothering his alarm, "they can't do anything immediately. It gives us time to prepare and warn. Besides, before that we may have them rounded up. The time has come for something desperate. I won't be trifled with any longer. This last proposal goes just over the limit."

As for me, I was speechless. The events of the past two days, the almost sleepless nights had sapped my energy. Even Garrick, though he was a perfect glutton for work, felt the strain.

It was very late, or rather very early, and we determined to snatch a few moments of sleep at the Old Tavern before the rest of the world awoke to the new day. It was only a couple of hours that we could spare, but it was absolutely necessary.

In spite of our fatigue, we were up again early and after another try at the phony 'phone which told us that only the men were working in the garage, we were on our way up to Garrick's apartment.

We had scarcely entered when the telephone boy called up to say that there was a Mr. Warrington on long distance trying to get us. Garrick eagerly asked to have him put on our wire.

Warrington, it seemed, had been informed of the fire by one of his agents and was inquiring anxiously for details, especially about the letter. Garrick quickly apologised for not calling up himself, and relieved his anxiety by assuring him that the letter was safe.

"And how are you?" he asked of Warrington.

"Convalescing rapidly," laughed back the patient, to whom the loss of anything was a mere bagatelle beside the letter. Garrick had not told him yet of the stealing of the other letters. "Getting along fine,—thanks to a new tonic which Dr. Mead has prescribed for me."

"I can guess what it is."

Warrington laughed again. "Yes—I've been allowed to take short motor trips with Violet," he explained.

The natural manner in which "Violet" replaced "Miss Winslow" indicated that the trips had not been without result.

"Say, Warrington," burst out Garrick, seeing an opportunity of introducing the latest news, "I hate to butt in, but if you'll take my advice, you'll just cut out those trips a few days. I don't want to alarm you unnecessarily, but after to-day I want Miss Winslow never to be out of sight of friends—friends, I said; not one, but several."

"Why—what's the matter?" demanded Warrington in alarm.

"I can't explain it all over the telephone," replied Garrick, sketching out hastily something of what we had overheard. "I'll try to see you before long—perhaps to-day. Don't forget. I want you to warn Miss Winslow yourself. You can't put it too strongly. Use your judgment about Mrs. de Lancey. I don't want to get you in wrong with her. But, remember, it's a matter of life or death—or perhaps worse. Try to do it without unnecessarily alarming Miss Winslow, if you can. Just fix it up as quietly as possible. But be positive about it. No, I can't explain more over the wire now. But—no more outings for either of you, and particularly Miss Winslow, until I raise the ban."

Warrington had been inclined to argue the matter at first, but Garrick of course quickly prevailed, the more so because Warrington realised that in his condition he was anything but an adequate body-guard for her if something unexpected should happen.

"Oh—I had a call the other day," reported Warrington as an afterthought before hanging up the receiver. "It was from McBirney. He says one of his unofficial scouts has told him of seeing a car that might have been mine up this way lately."

Garrick acquiesced to the information which, to us, was not new. "Yes," he said, "there have been several such reports. And, by the way, that reminds me of something. You will have to put at our disposal one of your cars down here."

"Go as far as you like. What do you want—a racer?"

"Why—yes, if it's in perfect condition. You see, we may have to do some unexpected sleuthing in it."

"Go as far as you like," repeated Warrington, now thoroughly aroused by the latest development of the case. "Spare nothing, Garrick—nothing. Curse my luck for being laid up! Every dollar I have is at your disposal, Garrick, to protect her from those scoundrels—damn them!"

"Trust me, Warrington," called back Garrick. "I give you my word that it's my fight now."

"Garrick—you're a brick," came back Warrington as the conversation closed.

"Good heavens, Guy," I exclaimed when he hung up the receiver after calling up Warrington's garage and finding out what cars were available, "Are we going to have to extend operations over the whole State, after all?"

"We may have to do almost anything," he replied, "if our scientific murderer tries some of his smooth kidnapping tricks. It's possible that McBirney may be right about that car being up there. Certainly we know that it has been up there, whether it is now or not."

"And Herman wrong about its being in the city?" I suggested. "Well, one guess is as good as another in a case like this, I suppose."

It had been a great relief to get back to our rooms and live even for a few minutes like civilised beings. I suggested that we might have a real breakfast once more.

I could tell, however, that Garrick's mind was far away from the thought of eating, and that he realised that a keen, perhaps the keenest, test of his ability lay ahead of him, if he was to come out successfully and protect Violet Winslow in the final battle with the scientific gunman. I did not interrupt him.



CHAPTER XVI

THE POISONED NEEDLE

Over a still untasted grapefruit Garrick was considering what his next move should be. As for me, even this temporary return to a normal life caused me to view things in a different light.

There had been, as the Chief and the Boss had hinted at in their conversation, a wave of hysteria which had swept over the city only a short time before regarding what had come to be called the "poisoned needle" cases. Personally I had doubted them and I had known many doctors and scientists as well as vice and graft investigators who had scouted them, too.

"Garrick," I said at length, "do you really think that we have to deal with anything in this case but just plain attempted kidnapping of the old style?"

He shook his head doubtfully. I knew him to be anything but an alarmist and waited impatiently for him to speak.

"I wouldn't think so," he said at length slowly, "except for one thing."

"What's that?" I asked eagerly.

"His mention of the 'sleepmakers' and Paris," he replied briefly.

Garrick had risen and walked over to a cabinet in the corner of his room. When he returned it was with something gleaming in the morning sunshine as he rolled it back and forth on a piece of paper, just a shining particle. He picked it up carefully.

I bent over to look at it more closely and there, in Garrick's hand, was a tiny bit of steel, scarcely three-eighths of an inch long, a mere speck. It was like nothing of which I had ever heard or read. Yet Garrick himself seemed to regard the minute thing with a sort of awe. As for me, I knew not what to make of it. I wondered whether it might not be some new peril.

"What is it?" I asked at length, seeing that Garrick might be disposed to talk, if I prompted him.

"Well," he answered laconically, holding it up to the light so that I could see that it was in reality a very minute, pointed hollow tube, "what would you say if I told you it was the point of a new—er—poisoned needle?"

He said it in such a simple tone that I reacted from it toward my own preconceived notions of the hysterical newspaper stories.

"I've heard about all the poisoned needle stories," I returned. "I've investigated some of them and written about them for my paper, Guy. And I must say still that I doubt them. Now in the first place, the mere insertion of a hypodermic needle—of course, you've had it done, Guy—is something so painful that anyone in his senses would cry aloud. Then to administer a drug that way requires a great deal of skill and knowledge of anatomy, if it is to be done with full and quick effect."

Garrick said nothing, but continued to regard the hollow point which he had obtained somewhere, perhaps on a previous case.

"Why, such an injection," I continued, recalling the result of my former careful investigations on the subject, "couldn't act instantaneously anyhow, as it must if they are to get away with it. After the needle is inserted, the plunger has to be pushed down, and the whole thing would take at least thirty seconds. And then, the action of the drug. That would take time, too. It seems to me that in no case could it be done without the person's being instantly aware of it and, before lapsing into unconsciousness, calling for help or—"

"On the contrary," interrupted Garrick quietly, "it is absurdly easy. Waiving the question whether they might not be able to get Violet Winslow in such a situation where even the old hypodermic method which you know would serve as well as any other, why, Marshall, just the hint that fellow dropped tells me that he could walk up to her on the street or anywhere else, and—"

He did not finish the sentence, but left it to my imagination. It was my turn, now, to remain silent.

"You are right, though, Tom, in one respect," he resumed a moment later. "It is not easy by the old methods that everyone now knows. For instance, take the use of chloral-knock-out drops, you know. That is crude, too. Hypodermics and knock-out drops may answer well enough, perhaps, for the criminals whose victims are found in cafes and dives of a low order. But for the operations of an aristocratic criminal of to-day—and our friend the Chief seems to belong to the aristocracy of the underworld—far more subtle methods are required. Let me show you something."

Carefully, from the back of a drawer in the cabinet, where it was concealed in a false partition, he pulled out a little case. He opened it, and in it displayed a number of tiny globes and tubes of thin glass, each with a liquid in it, some lozenges, some bonbons, and several cigars and cigarettes.

"I'm doing this," he remarked, "to show you, Tom, that I'm not unduly magnifying the danger that surrounds Violet Winslow, after hearing what I did over that detectaphone. Perhaps it didn't impress you, but I think I know something of what we're up against."

From another part of the case he drew a peculiar looking affair and handed to me without a word. It consisted of a glass syringe about two inches long, fitted with a glass plunger and an asbestos washer. On the other end of the tube was a hollow point, about three-eighths of an inch long—just a shiny little bit of steel such as he had already showed me.

I looked at it curiously and, in spite of my former assurance, began to wonder whether, after all, the possibility of a girl being struck down suddenly, without warning, in a public place and robbed—or worse—might not take on the guise of ghastly reality.

"What do you make of it?" asked Garrick, evidently now enjoying the puzzled look on my face.

I could merely shrug my shoulders.

"Well," he drawled, "that is a weapon they hinted at last night. The possibilities of it are terrifying. Why, it could easily be plunged through a fur coat, without breaking."

He took the needle and made an imaginary lunge at me.

"When people tell you that the hypodermic needle cannot be employed in a case like this that they are planning," he continued, "they are thinking of ordinary hypodermics. Those things wouldn't be very successful usually, anyhow, under such circumstances. But this is different. The very form of this needle makes it particularly effective for anyone who wishes to use it for crime. For instance—take it on a railroad or steamship or in a hotel. Draw back the plunger—so—one quick jab—then drop it on the floor and grind it under your heel. The glass is splintered into a thousand bits. All evidence of guilt is destroyed, unless someone is looking for it practically with a microscope."

"Yes," I persisted, "that is all right—but the pain and the moments before the drug begins to work?"

With one hand Garrick reached into the case, selecting a little thin glass tube, and with the other he pulled out his handkerchief.

"Smell that!" he exclaimed, bending over me so that I could see every move and be prepared for it.

Yet it was done so quickly that I could not protect myself.

"Ugh!" I ejaculated in surprise, as Garrick manipulated the thing with a legerdemain swiftness that quite baffled me, even though he had given me warning to expect something.

Everyone has seen freak moving picture films where the actor suddenly bobs up in another place, without visibly crossing the intervening space. The next thing I knew, Garrick was standing across the room, in just that way. The handkerchief was folded up and in his pocket.

It couldn't have been done possibly in less than a minute. What had happened? Where had that minute or so gone? I felt a sickening sensation.

"Smell it again?" Garrick laughed, taking a step toward me.

I put up my hand and shook my head negatively, slowly comprehending.

"You mean to tell me," I gasped, "that I was—out?"

"I could have jabbed a dozen needles into you and you would never have known it," asserted Garrick with a quiet smile playing over his face.

"What is the stuff?" I asked, quite taken aback.

"Kelene—ethyl chloride. Whiff!—and you are off almost in a second. It is an anaesthetic of nearly unbelievable volatility. It comes in little hermetically sealed tubes, with a tiny capillary orifice, to prevent its too rapid vaporising, even when opened for use. Such a tube may be held in the palm of the hand and the end crushed off. The warmth of the hand alone is sufficient to start a veritable spray. It acts violently on the senses, too. But kelene anaesthesia lasts only a minute or so. The fraction of time is long enough. Then comes the jab with the real needle—perhaps another whiff of kelene to give the injection a chance. In two or three minutes the injection itself is working and the victim is unconscious, without a murmur—perhaps, as in your case, without any clear idea of how it all happened—even without recollection of a handkerchief, unable to recall any sharp pain of a needle or anything else."

He was holding up a little bottle in which was a thick, colorless syrup.

"And what is that?" I asked, properly tamed and no longer disposed to be disputatious.

"Hyoscine."

"Is it powerful?"

"One one-hundredth of a grain of this strength, perhaps less, will render a person unconscious," replied Garrick. "The first symptom is faintness; the pupils of the eyes dilate; speech is lost; vitality seems to be floating away, and the victim lapses into unconsciousness. It is derived from henbane, among ether things, and is a rapid, energetic alkaloid, more rapid than chloral and morphine. And, preceded by a whiff of kelene, not even the sensations I have described are remembered."

I could only stare at the outfit before me, speechless.

"In Paris, where I got this," continued Garrick, "they call these people who use it, 'endormeurs'—sleepmakers. That must have been what the Chief meant when he used that word. I knew it."

"Sleepmakers," I repeated in horror at the very idea of such a thing being attempted on a young girl like Violet Winslow.

"Yes. The standard equipment of such a criminal consists of these little thin glass globes, a tiny glass hypodermic syringe with a sharp steel point, doped cigars and cigarettes. They use various derivatives of opium, like morphine and heroin, also codeine, dionin, narcein, ethyl chloride and bromide, nitrite of amyl, amylin,—and the skill that they have acquired in the manipulation of these powerful drugs stamps them as the most dangerous coterie of criminals in existence. Now," he concluded, "doubt it or not, we have to deal with a man who is a proficient student of these sleepmakers. Who is he, where is he, and when will he strike?"

Garrick was now pacing excitedly up and down the room.

"You see," he added, "the police of Europe by their new scientific methods are driving such criminals out of the various countries. Thank heaven, I am now prepared to meet them if they come to America."

"Then you think this is a foreigner?" I asked meekly.

"I didn't say so," Garrick replied. "No. I think this is a criminal exceptionally wide awake, one who studies and adopts what he sees whenever he wants it. If you recall, I warned you to have a wholesome respect for this man at the very start, when we were looking at that empty cartridge."

I could restrain my admiration of him no longer. "Guy," I exclaimed, heartily, astounded by what I had seen, "you—you are a wonder!"

"No," he laughed, "not wonderful, Tom,—only very ordinary. I've had a chance to learn some things abroad, fortunately. I've taken the time to show you all this because I want you to appreciate what it is we are up against in this case of Violet Winslow. You can understand now why I was so particular about instructing Warrington not to let her go anywhere unattended by friends. There's nothing inherently impossible in these poisoned needle stories—given the right conjunction of circumstances. What we have to guard against principally is letting her get into any situation where the circumstances make such a thing possible. I've almost a notion to let the New York end of this case go altogether for a while and take a run up to Tuxedo to warn her and Mrs. de Lancey personally. Still, I think I put it strongly enough with Warrington so that—"

Our telephone tinkled insistently.

"Hello," answered Garrick. "Yes, this is Garrick. Who is this? Warrington? In Tuxedo? Why, my dear boy, you needn't have gone personally. Are you sure you're strong enough for such exertion? What—what's that? Warrington—it—it isn't—not to New York?"

Garrick's face was actually pale as he fairly started back from the telephone and caught my eye.

"Tom," he exclaimed huskily to me, "Violet Winslow left for New York on the early train this morning!"

I felt my heart skip a beat, then pound away like a sledge-hammer at my ribs as the terrible possibilities of the situation were seared into my brain.

"Yes, Warrington—a letter to her? Read it—quick," I heard Garrick's tense voice repeating. "I see. Her maid Lucille was taken very ill a few days ago and she allowed her to go to her brother who lives on Ninth Street. I understand. Now—the letter."

I could not hear what was said over the telephone, but later Garrick repeated it to me and I afterwards saw the letter itself which I may as well reproduce here. It said:

"Since I left you, mademoiselle, I am very ill here at the home of my brother. I have a nice room in the back of the house on the first floor and now that I am getting better I can sit up and look out of the window.

"I am very ill yet, but the worst is past and some time when you are in New York I wish I could see you. You have always been so good to me, mademoiselle, that I hope I may soon be back again, if you have not a maid better than your poor Lucille.

"Your faithful servant,

"LUCILLE DE VEAU."

"And she's already in the city?" asked Garrick of Warrington as he finished reading the letter. "Mrs. de Lancey has gone with her—to do some shopping. I see. That will take all day, she said? She is going to call on Lucille—to-night—that's what she told her new maid there? To-night? That's all right, my boy. I just wanted to be sure. Don't worry. We'll look out for her here, all right. Now, Warrington, you just keep perfectly quiet. No relapses, you know, old fellow. We can take care of everything. I'm glad you told me. Good-bye."

Garrick had finished up his conversation with Warrington in a confident and reassuring tone, quite the opposite to that with which he had started and even more in contrast with the expression on his face as he talked.

"I didn't want to alarm the boy unnecessarily," he explained to me, as he hung up the receiver. "I could tell that he was very weak yet and that the trip up to Tuxedo had almost done him up. It seems that she thought a good deal of Lucille—there's the address—99 Ninth. You can never tell about these maids, though. Lucille may be all right—or the other maid may be all bad, or vice versa. There's no telling. The worst of it is that she and her aunt are somewhere in the city, perhaps shopping. It only needs that they become separated for something, anything, to happen. There's been no time to warn her, either, and she's just as likely to visit that Lucille to-night alone as not. Gad—I'm glad I didn't fly off up there to Tuxedo, after all. She'll need someone here to protect her."

Garrick was considering hastily what was to be done. Quickly he mapped out his course of action.

"Come, Tom," he said hurriedly to me, as he wrapped up a little cedar box which he took from the cabinet where he kept the endormeur outfit. "Come—let's investigate that Ninth Street address while we have time."



CHAPTER XVII

THE NEWSPAPER FAKE

Within a few minutes we were sauntering with enforced leisure along Ninth Street, in a rather sordid part, inhabited largely, I made out, by a slightly better class of foreigners than some other sections of the West Side.

As we walked along, I felt Garrick tugging at my arm.

"Slow up a bit," he whispered under his breath. "There's the house which was mentioned in the maid's note."

It was an old three-story brownstone building with an entrance two or three steps up from the sidewalk level. Once, no doubt, it had housed people of some means, but the change in the character of the neighbourhood with shifting population had evidently brought it to the low estate where it now sheltered one family on each floor, if not more. At least that was the general impression one got from a glance at the cheapened air of the block.

Garrick passed the house so as not to attract any attention, and a little further on paused before an apartment house, not of the modern elevator construction, but still of quiet and decent appearance. At least there were no children spilling out from its steps into the street, in imminent danger of their young lives from every passing automobile, as there were in the tenements of the block below.

He entered the front door which happened to be unlatched and we had no trouble in mounting the stairs to the roof.

What he intended doing I had no idea yet, but he went ahead with assurance and I followed, equally confident, for he must have had adventures something like this before. On the roof, a clothesline, which he commandeered and tied about a chimney, served to let him down the few feet from the higher apartment roof to that of the dwelling house next to it, one of the row in which number 99 was situated.

Quickly he tiptoed over to the chimney of the brownstone house a few doors down and, as he did so, I saw him take from his pocket the cedar box. A string tied to a weight told him which of the flues reached down to the room on the first floor, back.

That determined, he let the little cedar box fastened to an entwined pair of wires down the flue. He then ran the wires back across the roof to the apartment, up, and into a little storm shed at the top of the last flight of stairs which led from the upper hall to the roof.

"There is nothing more that we can do here just yet," he remarked after he had hauled himself back to me on the higher roof. "We are lucky not to have been disturbed, but if we stay here we are likely to be observed."

Cautiously we retraced our steps and were again on the street without having alarmed any of the tenants of the flat through which we had gained access to the roofs.

It was now the forenoon and, although Garrick instituted a search in every place that he could think of where Mrs. de Laacey and Violet Winslow might go, including the homes of those of their friends whose names we could learn, it was without result. I don't think there can be many searches more hopeless than to try to find someone in New York when one has no idea where to look. Only chance could possibly have thrown them in our way and chance did not favour us.

There was nothing to do but wait for the time when Miss Winslow might, of her own accord, turn up to visit her former maid for whom she apparently had a high regard.

Inquiries as to the antecedents of Lucille De Veau were decidedly unsatisfactory, not that they gave her a bad character, but because there simply seemed to be nothing that we could find out. The maid seemed to be absolutely unknown. Her brother was a waiter, though where he worked we could not find out, for he seemed to be one of those who are constantly shifting their positions.

Garrick had notified Dillon of what he had discovered, in a general way, and had asked him to detail some men to conduct the search secretly for Miss Winslow and her aunt, but without any better results than we had obtained. Apparently the department stores had swallowed them up for the time being and we could only wait impatiently, trusting that all would turn out right in the end. Still, I could not help having some forebodings in the matter.

It was in the middle of the afternoon that we had gone downtown to Garrick's office, after stopping to secure the letter from the safe in the uptown hotel where it had been deposited for security during the night and placing it in a safety deposit vault where Garrick kept some of his own valuables. Garrick had selected his office as a vantage point to which any news of Miss Winslow and her aunt might be sent by those whom we had out searching. No word came, however, and the hours of suspense seemed to drag interminably.

"You're pretty well acquainted on the STAR?" Garrick asked me at last, after we had been sitting in a sort of mournful silence wondering whether those on the other side might not be stealing a march on us.

"Why, yes, I know several people there," I replied. "Why do you ask?"

"I was just thinking of a possible plan of campaign that might be mapped out to bring these people from under cover," he remarked thoughtfully. "Do you think you could carry part of it through?"

I said I would try and Garrick proceeded to unfold a scheme which he had been revolving all day. It consisted of as ingenious a "plant" as I could well imagine.

"You see," he outlined, "if you could go over to the Star office and get them to run off a few copies of the paper, after they are through with the regular editions, I believe we can get the Chief started and then all we should have to do would be to follow him up—or someone who would lead us to him."

The "plant," in short, consisted in writing a long and circumstantial story of the discovery of new evidence against the ladies' poolroom, which so far had been scarcely mentioned in the case. As Garrick laid it out, the story was to tell of a young gambler who was said to be in touch with the district attorney, in preference to saying the police.

In fact, his idea was to write up the whole gambling situation as we knew it on lines that he suggested. Then a "fake" edition of the paper was to be run off, bearing our story on the front page. Only a few copies were to be printed, and they were to be delivered to us. The thing had been done before by detectives, I knew, and in this case Warrington was to foot the bill, which might prove to be considerable.

At least it offered me some outlet for my energies during the rest of the afternoon when the failure to receive any reports about the two women whom we were seeking began to wear on my nerves.

It took some time to arrange the thing with those in authority on the Star, but at last that was done and I hastened back to Garrick at his office to tell him that all that remained to do was the actual writing of the story.

Garrick had just finished testing an arrangement in a large case, almost the size of a suitcase, and had stood it in a corner, ready to be picked up and carried off the instant there was any need for it. There was still no word of Miss Winslow and Mrs. de Lancey and it began to look as if we should not hear from them until Violet Winslow turned up on her visit to her former maid.

Together we plunged into the preparation of the story, the writing of which fell to me while Garrick now and then threw in a suggestion or a word of criticism to make it sound stronger for his purpose. Thus the rest of the afternoon passed in getting the thing down "pat."

I flatter myself that it was not such a bad piece of work when we got through with it. By dint of using such expressions as "It is said," "It is rumoured," "The report about the Criminal Courts Building is," "An informant high in the police department," and crediting much to a mythical "gambler who is operating quietly uptown," we managed to tell some amazing facts.

The fake story began:

"Since the raid by the police on the luxurious gambling house in Forty-eighth Street, a remarkable new phase of sporting life has been unfolded to the District Attorney, who is quietly gathering evidence against another place situated in the same district.

"A former gambler who frequented the raided place has put many incriminating facts about the second place in the hands of the authorities who are contemplating an exposure that will stir even New York, accustomed as it is to such startling revelations. It involves one of the cleverest and most astute criminals who ever operated in this city.

"This place, which is under observation, is one which has brought tragedy to many. Young women attracted by the treacherous lure of the spinning roulette wheel or the fascination of the shuffle of cards have squandered away their own and their husband's money with often tragic results, and many of them have gone even further into the moral quagmire in the hope of earning enough money to pay their losses and keep from their families the knowledge of their gambling.

"This situation, one of the high lights in the city of lights and shadows, has been evolved, according to the official informant, through the countless number of gambling resorts that have gained existence in the most fashionable parts of the city.

"The record of crime of the clever and astute individual already mentioned is being minutely investigated, and, it is said, shows some of the most astounding facts. It runs even to murder, which was accomplished in getting rid of an informer recently in the pay of the police.

"Against those conducting the crusade every engine of the underworld has been used. The fight has been carried on bitterly, and within less than twenty-four hours arrests are promised as a result of confessions already in the hands of the authorities and being secretly and widely investigated by them before the final blow is delivered simultaneously, both in the city and in a town up-state where the criminal believes himself unknown and secure."

There was more of the stuff, which I do not quote, describing the situation in detail and in general terms which could all have only one meaning to a person acquainted with the particular case with which we were dealing. It threw a scare, in type, as hard as could be done. I fancied that when it was read by the proper person he would be amazed that so much had, apparently, become known to the newspapers, and would begin to wonder how much more was known that was not printed.

"That ought to make someone sit up and take notice," remarked Garrick with some satisfaction, as he corrected the typewritten copy late in the afternoon. "The printing of that will take some time and I don't suppose we shall get copies until pretty late. You can take it over to the Star, Tom, and complete the arrangements. I have a little more work to do before we go up there on Ninth Street. Suppose you meet me at eight in Washington Square, near the Arch?"



CHAPTER XVIII

THE VOCAPHONE

Promptly to the dot I met Garrick at the appointed place. Not a word so far had been heard, either from Violet Winslow or Mrs. de Lancey. There was one thing encouraging about it, however. If they had become separated while shopping, as sometimes happens, we should have been likely to hear of it, at least from her aunt.

Garrick was tugging the heavy suitcase which I had seen standing ready down in his office during the afternoon, as well as a small package wrapped up in paper.

"Let me carry that suitcase," I volunteered.

We trudged along across the park, my load getting heavier at every step.

"I'm not surprised at your being winded," I panted, soon finding myself in the same condition. "What's in this—lead?"

"Something that we may need or may not," Garrick answered enigmatically, as we stopped in the shadow to rest.

He carefully took an automatic revolver from an inside pocket and stowed it where it would be handy, in his coat.

We resumed our walk and at last had come nearly up to the house on the first floor of which the maid Lucille was. The suitcase was engaging all my attention, as I shifted it from one hand to the other. Not so Garrick, however. He was looking keenly about us.

"Gad, I must be seeing things to-night!" he exclaimed, his eyes fixed on a figure slouching along, his hat pulled down over his eyes, passing just about opposite us on the other side of the street. I looked also in the gathering dusk. The figure had something indefinably familiar about it, but a moment later it was gone, having turned the corner.

Garrick shook his head. "No," he said half to himself, "it couldn't have been. Don't stop, Tom. We mustn't do anything to rouse suspicion, now."

We came a moment later to the flat-house through the hall of which we had reached the roof that morning and in the excitement of the adventure I forgot, for the time, the mysterious figure across the street, which had attracted Garrick's attention.

Again, we managed to elude the tenants, though it was harder in the early evening than it had been in the daytime. However, we reached the roof apparently unobserved. There at least, now that it was dark, we felt comparatively safe. No one was likely to disturb us there, provided we made no noise.

Unwrapping the smaller, paper-covered package, Garrick quickly attached the wires, as he had left them, to another cedar box, like that which he had already let down the chimney up the street.

I now had a chance to examine it more closely under the light of Garrick's little electric bull's-eye. I was surprised to find that it resembled one of the instruments we had used down in the room in the Old Tavern.

It was oblong, with a sort of black disc fixed to the top. In the face of the box, just as in the other we had used, were two little square holes, with sides also of cedar, converging inward, making a pair of little quadrangular pyramidal holes which seemed to end in a small round black circle in the interior, small end.

I said nothing, but I could see that it was a new form, to all intents and purposes, of the detectaphone which we had already used.

The minutes that followed seemed like hours, as we waited, not daring to talk lest we should attract attention.

I wondered whether Miss Winslow would come after all, or, if she did, whether she would come alone.

"You're early," said a voice, softly, near us, of a sudden.

I leaped to my feet, prepared to meet anything, man or devil. Garrick seized me and pulled me down, a strong hint to be quiet. Too surprised to remonstrate, since nothing happened, I waited, breathless.

"Yes, but that is better than to be too late. Besides, we've got to watch that Garrick," said another voice. "He might be around."

Garrick chuckled.

I had noticed a peculiar metallic ring in the voices.

"Where are they?" I whispered, "On the landing below?"

Garrick laughed outright, not boisterously, but still in a way which to me was amazing in its bravado, if the tenants were really so near.

"What's this?" I asked.

"Don't you recognize it?" he answered.

"Yes," I said doubtfully. "I suppose it's like that thing we used down at the Old Tavern."

"Only more so," nodded Garrick, aloud, yet careful not to raise his voice, as before, so as not to disturb the flat dwellers below us. "A vocaphone."

"A vocaphone?" I repeated.

"Yes, the little box that hears and talks," he explained. "It does more than the detectaphone. It talks right out, you know, and it works both ways."

I began to understand his scheme.

"Those square holes in the face of it are just like the other instrument we used," Garrick went on. "They act like little megaphones to that receiver inside, you know,—magnify the sound and throw it out so that we can listen up here just as well, perhaps better than if we were down there in the room with them."

They were down there in the back room, Lucille and a man.

"Have you heard from her?" asked the man's voice, one that I did not recognise.

"Non,—but she will come. Voila, but she thought the world of her Lucille, she did. She will come."

"How do you know?"

"Because—I know."

"Oh, you women!"

"Oh, you men!"

It was evident that the two had a certain regard for each other, a sort of wild, animal affection, above, below, beyond, without the law. They seemed at least to understand each other.

Who the man was I could not guess. It was a voice that sounded familiar, yet I could not place it.

"She will come to see her Lucille," repeated the woman. "But you must not be seen."

"No—by no means."

The voice of the man was not that of a foreigner.

"Here, Lucille, take this. Only get her interested—I will do the rest—and the money is yours. See—you crush it in the handkerchief—so. Be careful—you WILL crush it before you want to use it. There. Under her nose, you know. I shall be there in a moment and finish the work. That is all you need do—with the handkerchief."

Garrick made a motion, as if to turn a switch in the little vocaphone, and rested his finger on it.

"I could make those two jump out of the window with fright and surprise," he said to me, still fingering the switch impatiently. "You see, it works the other way, too, as I told you, if I choose to throw this switch. Suppose I should shout out, and they should hear, apparently coming from the fireplace, 'You are discovered. Thank you for telling me all your plans, but I am prepared for them already.' What do you suppose they would—"

Garrick stopped short.

From the vocaphone had come a sound like the ringing of a bell.

"Sh!" whispered Lucille hoarsely. "Here she comes now. Didn't I tell you? Into the next room!"

A moment later came a knock at a door and Lucille's silken rustle as she hurried to open it.

"How do you do, Lucille?" we heard a sweetly tremulous voice repeated by the faithful little vocaphone.

"Comment vous portez-vous, Mademoiselle?"

"Tres bien."

"Mademoiselle honours her poor Lucille beyond her dreams. Will you not be seated here in this easy chair?"

"My God!" exclaimed Garrick, starting back from the vocaphone. "She is there alone. Mrs. de Lancey is not with her. Oh, if we could only have prevented this!"

I had recognized, too, even in the mechanical reproduction, the voice of Violet Winslow. It came as a shock. Even though I had been expecting some such thing for hours, still the reality meant just as much, perhaps more.

Independent, self-reliant, Violet Winslow had gone alone on an act of mercy and charity, and it had taken her into a situation full of danger with her faithless maid.

At once I was alive to the situation. All the stories of kidnappings and white slavery that I had ever read rioted through my head. I felt like calling out a warning. Garrick had his finger on the switch.

"Since I have been ill, Mademoiselle, I have been doing some embroidery—handkerchiefs—are they not pretty?"

It was coming. There was not time for an instant's delay now.

Garrick quickly depressed the switch.

Clear as a bell his voice rang out.

"Miss Winslow—this is Garrick. Don't let her get that handkerchief under your nose. Out of the door—quick. Run! Call for help! I shall be with you in a minute!"

A little cry came out of the machine.

There was a moment of startled surprise in the room below. Then followed a mocking laugh.

"Ha! Ha! I thought you'd pull something like that, Garrick. I don't know where you are, but it makes no difference. There are many ways of getting out of this place and at one of them I hare a high-powered car. Violet—will go—quietly—" there were sounds of a struggle—"after the needle—"

A scream had followed immediately after a sound of shivering glass through the vocaphone. It was not Violet Winslow's scream, either.

"Like hell, she'll go," shouted a wildly familiar voice.

There was a gruff oath.

We stayed to hear no more. Garrick had already picked up the heavy suitcase and was running down the steps two at a time, with myself hard after him.

Without waiting to ring the bell at 99, he dashed the suitcase through the plate glass of the front door, reached in and turned the lock. We hurried into the back room.

Violet was lying across a divan and bending over her was Warrington.

"She—she's unconscious," he gasped, weak with the exertion of his forcible entrance into the place and carrying from the floor to the divan the lovely burden which he had found in the room. "They- -they fled—two of them—the maid, Lucille—and a man I could not see."

Down the street we heard a car dashing away to the sound of its changing gears.

"She's—not—dying—is she, Garrick?" he panted bending closer over her.

Garrick bent over, too, felt the fluttering pulse, looked into her dilated eyes.

I saw him drop quickly on his knees beside the unconscious girl. He tore open the heavy suitcase and a moment later he had taken from it a sort of cap, at the end of a rubber tube, and had fastened it carefully over her beautiful, but now pale, face.

"Pump!" Garrick muttered to me, quickly showing me what to do.

I did, furiously.

"Where did you come from?" he asked of Warrington. "I thought I saw someone across the street who looked like you as we came along, but you didn't recognise us and in a moment you were gone. Keep on with that pulmotor, Tom. Thank heaven I came prepared with it!"

Eagerly I continued to supply oxygen to the girl on the divan before us.

Garrick had stooped down and picked up both the handkerchief with its crushed bits of the kelene tube and near it a shattered glass hypodermic.

"Oh, I got thinking about things, up there at Mead's," blurted out Warrington, "and I couldn't stand it. I should have gone crazy. While the doctor was out I managed to slip away and take a train to the city. I knew this address from the letter. I determined to stay around all night, if necessary. She got in before I could get to her, but I rang the bell and managed to get my foot in the door a minute later. I heard the struggle. Where were you? I heard your voice in here but you came through the front door."

Garrick did not take time to explain. He was too busy over Violet Winslow.

A feeble moan and a flutter of the eyelids told that she was coming out from the effects of the anaesthetic and the drug.

"Mortimer—Mortimer!" she moaned, half conscious. "Don't let them take me. Oh where is—"

Warrington leaned over, as Garrick removed the cap of the pulmotor, and gently raised her head on his arm.

"It's all right—Violet," he whispered, his face close to hers as his warm breath fanned her now flushed and fevered cheek.

She opened her eyes and vaguely understood as the mist cleared from her brain.

Instinctively she clung to him as he pressed his lips lightly on her forehead, in a long passionate caress.

"Get a cab, Tom," said Garrick turning his back suddenly on them and placing his hand on my shoulder as he edged me toward the hall. "It's too late to pursue that fellow, now. He's slipped through our fingers again—confound him!"



CHAPTER XIX

THE EAVESDROPPER AGAIN

It took our combined efforts now to take care not only of Violet Winslow but Warrington himself, who was on the verge of collapse after his heroic rescue of her.

I found the cab and in perhaps half an hour Miss Winslow was so far recovered that she could be taken to the hotel where she and her aunt had engaged rooms for the night.

We drew up at an unfrequented side carriage entrance of the hotel in order to avoid the eyes of the curious and Warrington jumped out to assist Violet. The strain had told on him and in spite of his desire to take care of her, he was glad to let Garrick guide him to the elevator, while I took Miss Winslow's arm to assist her.

Our first object had been to get our two invalids where they could have quiet and so regain their strength and we rode up in the elevator, unannounced, to the suite of Violet and her aunt.

"For heaven's sake—Violet—what's all this?" exclaimed Mrs. de Lancey as we four entered the room.

It was the first time we had seen the redoubtable Aunt Emma. She was a large woman, well past middle age, and must have been handsome, rather than pretty, when she was younger. Everything about Mrs. de Lancey was correct, absolutely correct. Her dress looked like a form into which she had been poured, every line and curve being just as it should be, having "set" as if she had been made of reinforced concrete. In short, she was a woman of "force."

An incursion such as we made seemed to pain her correct soul acutely. And yet, I fancied that underneath the marble exterior there was a heart and that secretly she was both proud and jealous of her dainty niece.

Violet sank into a chair and Garrick deposited Warrington, thoroughly exhausted, on a couch.

Mrs. de Lancey looked sternly at Warrington, as though in some way he might be responsible. I could not help feeling that she had a peculiar sense of conscientiousness about him, that she was just a bit more strict in gauging him than she would have been if he had not been the wealthy young Mr. Warrington whom scores and hundreds of mothers and guardians in society would have welcomed for the sake of marriageable daughters no matter how black and glaring his faults. I was glad to see the way Warrington took it. He seemed to want to rest not on the merits of the Warrington blood nor the Warrington gold, but on plain Mortimer Warrington himself.

"What HAS happened, Violet?" repeated Mrs. de Lancey.

Violet had, woman-like, in spite of her condition caught the stern look that her aunt had shot at Warrington.

"Nothing, now," she replied with a note of defiance. "Lucille— seems to have been a—a bad woman—friendly with bad men. Mr. Garrick overheard a plot to carry me off and telephoned Mortimer. Fortunately when Mortimer went up home to warn us, he found the letter and knew where I was going to-night. Ill as he was, he came all the way to the city, followed me into that house, saved me— even before Mr. Garrick could get there."

Violet's duenna was considerably mollified, though she tried hard not to admit it. Garrick seized the opportunity and poured forth a brief but connected story of what had happened.

"Well," exclaimed Mrs. de Lancey as he finished, "you children ought to be very thankful it isn't worse. Violet, I think I'll call up the house physician. You certainly need a doctor. And as for you, Mortimer,—you can't go to your apartment. Violet tells me it is all burned out. There's an empty suite across the hall. I'll telephone the room clerk and engage it for you. And you need a doctor, too. Now—there's going to be no more foolishness. You're both going to stay right here in this hotel until you're all right. Your mother and I were great friends, Mortimer, when we were girls. I—you must let me PLAY mother—for her sake."

I had been right about Mrs. de Lancey. Her voice softened and I saw a catch in Warrington's throat, too, at the mention of the mother he remembered only hazily as a small boy.

Violet and Warrington exchanged glances. I fancied the wireless said, "We've won the old lady over, at last," for Warrington continued to look at her, while she blushed a bit, then dropped her eyes to hide a happy tear.

Mrs. de Lancey was bustling about and I felt sure that in another minute every available bellhop in the hotel would be at work. As Warrington might have said in his slang, "Action is her middle name."

Garrick rose and bade our two patients a hasty good-night, tactfully forgetting to be offended by their lack of interest now in anything except each other.

"I doubt if they get much chance to be alone—not with that woman mothering them," he smiled to me, drawing me toward the door. "Don't let's spoil this chance."

Mrs. de Lancey was busy in the next room, as we stopped to say good-bye to her.

"I—I can't talk to you—now, Mr. Garrick," she cried, with a sudden, unwonted show of emotion, taking both his hands in hers. "You—you've saved my girl—there—there's nothing in this world you could have done for me—greater."

"Mrs. de Lancey," replied Garrick, deftly changing the subject, "there's just one thing. I'm afraid you are—have been, I mean,—a little hard on Mr. Warrington. He isn't what you think—"

"Mr. Garrick," she returned, in a sudden burst of confidence, "I'm afraid you, too, misunderstand me. I am not hard on the boy. But, remember. I knew his mother and father—intimately. Think of it, sir—the responsibilities that rest on that young man. Do you wonder that I—I want him better than others? Don't you see—that is why I want to hold him up to the highest standard. If Violet— marries him," she seemed to choke over the word,—"they must meet tests that ordinary people never know. Don't you understand? I've seen other young men and other young women in our circle—they were our babies once—I've seen them—go down. But I—I am proud. The Winslows, yes, and the Warringtons, they,—they SHAN'T go down—not while I have an ounce of strength or a grain of sanity. Nothing—nothing but the best that is in us—counts."

I think Mrs. de Lancey and Garrick understood each other perfectly after that. He said nothing, in fact did not need to say anything, for he looked it.

"I feel that I can safely resign my job as guardian," was all he remarked, finally. "Neither of them could be in better hands. Only, keep that boy quiet a few days. You can do it better than I can—you and Miss Winslow. Trust me to do the rest."

A moment later we were passing out through the hotel lobby, as Garrick glanced at his watch.

"A wonderful woman, after all," he mused, in the manner of one who revises an estimate formed hastily on someone else's hearsay. "Well, it's too late to do anything more to-night. I suppose those papers are printed down at the Star. We'll stop and get them in the morning. Did you recognise the voice over the vocaphone?"

"I can't say I did," I confessed.

"Perhaps you aren't used to it and things sound too metallic to you. But I did. It was the Chief."

"I suspected as much," I replied. "Where do you suppose he went?"

Garrick shrugged his shoulders.

"I doubt whether we could find him in New York to-night," he answered, slowly. "I think he must feel by this time that the town is getting too hot for him."

There was nothing that I could say, and I played the part admirably.

"Come," he decided, as he turned from the hotel in the direction, now, of our apartment. "Let's snatch a little rest. We'll need it to-morrow for the final spurt."

Tired and exhausted though I was I cannot say that I slept. At least, it may have been physical rest that I got. Certainly my mind never stopped in its dream play, as the kaleidoscopic stream of events passed before me, now in their true form, now in the fantastic shapes that constitute one of the most interesting studies of the modern psychology.

I was glad when I heard Garrick stirring in his room in the early daylight and heard him call out, "Are you awake, Tom? There are some things I want to attend to, while you drop into the Star for those papers. I'm afraid you'll have to breakfast alone. Meet me at my office as soon as you can."

He was off a few minutes later, as fresh as though he had been on a vacation instead of plunged into the fight of his life. I followed him, more leisurely, and then rode down in the infernal jam in the subway to execute his commission.

Then for an hour or two I fidgeted impatiently in his office waiting for him, until finally he came downtown in the racing car which Warrington had placed at his disposal.

He said nothing, but it was all the same to me. I had reached that nervous state where I craved something doing, as a drug-fiend craves the dope that sets his brain on fire again.

I did not ask where he was going, for I knew it intuitively, and it was not long before we were again in the part of the city where the gangster's garage was located.

We stopped and Garrick beckoned to an urchin, a couple of blocks below the garage.

"Do you want to make a dollar, kid?" he asked, jingling four quarters enticingly.

The boy's eyes never left the fist that held the tempting bait. "Betcherlife," he answered.

"Well, then," instructed Garrick, "take these newspapers. I don't want you to sell any of them on the street. But when you come to that garage over there—see it?—I want you to yell, 'Extra— special extra! All about the great gambling exposure. Warrants out!' Just go in there. They'll buy, all right. And if you say a word about anyone giving you these papers to sell—I'll chase you and get back this dollar to the last cent. You'll go to the Gerry Society—get me?"

The boy did. The bait was as alluring as the threat terrible. After Garrick had given him final instructions not to start with the papers for at least five minutes, we slipped quietly around the next street and came out near the Old Tavern, but not in front of it.

Garrick left the car—I had been riding almost on the mud guard— in charge of Warrington's man, who was to appear to be tinkering with the engine as an excuse for waiting there, and to keep an eye on anything that happened down the street.

We made our way into our room at the Tavern with more than ordinary caution, for fear that something might have been discovered. Apparently, however, the discovery of one detectaphone had been enough to disarm further suspicion, and the garage keeper had not thought it necessary to examine the telephone wires to see whether they had been tampered with in any way. The wire which he had thought led to the warehouse had seemed quite sufficient to explain everything.

In the room which we had used so much, we found the other detectaphone working splendidly. Garrick picked it up.

By the sound, evidently, someone in the garage was overhauling a car. It may have been that they were fixing one up so that its rightful owner would never recognize it, or they may have been getting ready to take one out. There was no way of determining.

We could hear one of the workmen helping about the car, a man whom we had listened to when the instrument first introduced us to the place. The second machine, connected with the telephone, did not transmit quite as clearly as the broken detective device had done, but it served and, besides, we could both hear through this and could confirm anything that might be indistinct to either of us alone.