“So, that’s the wonderful Hawk, is it, partner?” he was saying, as if he found it difficult to grasp the fact. “No, I never did run acrost him so far’s I know. What in tarnation kin he be doin’ out this way—yeou don’t figger he’s goin’ to butt in on aour job, do yeou?”
“Hardly that, Perk, I should say; if he was we’d have been piped off to that effect. I reckon he had orders to run over to San Diego to catch us before we took off.”
“Does that mean he might be fetchin’ a last hour message, Jack?”
“I figured that way,” came the ready answer; “and following you across the room I managed to rub up against Harper, to have a small slip of paper pushed into my waiting hand. Here it is, and we’ll see what it carries—some last hour report, I fancy, that the Chief believes will come in handy, sooner or later.”
“Well, I swan!” gasped Perk, evidently considerably tickled over the clever work carried through by his companion, without any diner in the restaurant being the wiser, so far as they knew.
For several minutes Jack appeared to be studying the writing on the crumpled piece of rice paper he had drawn from his vest pocket and straightened out. No wonder, when the writing seemed just a crazy mess of words, and figures—undoubtedly a secret cipher used by the agents in their particular branch of the Government Service, when occasion arose to communicate with each other.
Jack was so proficient in the cipher writing that he could read it readily without applying the key; in this case he evidently was weighing each terse paragraph as he translated the same.
“Some important, I takes it, buddy?” observed Perk, who had watched the other nodding his head as he perused the message.
“Very, if we happen to be lucky enough to get close to the hideout of the gang. This little scrap of paper has a history, Perk. It was carried from the mountains where this crowd hold out, to Los Angeles by a feathered post.”
“I doan’t jest get yeou, partner—what’s a feathered post—I never yet seen anything like that—yeou got me sunk, Jack, boy.”