Hastings and I read what he had written:
“KENNEDY MUST BE KEPT IN NEW YORK UNTIL WE FINISH HERE.”
XVIII
THE RADIO DETECTIVE
Here, it seemed, was a new danger. Was it to be taken as a proof of Burke’s theory that some one, perhaps a gang, was back of Paquita! I was almost inclined to Hastings’ opinion, for the moment. What was the reason that Shelby had been so interested in Kennedy as to seek him out even in the office of the lawyer of his brother who hated him?
I could evolve no answer in my own inner consciousness for the questions. As far as I could see we were still fighting in the dark, and fighting an unknown.
Kennedy quickly chose one horn of the dilemma that had been presented to him. Both the wording of the cipher and Burke’s enigmatic message regarding the wireless which came so close on its heels quite decided him to hurry back to Westport—that is, if one might so call traveling on midday trains that lounged along from station to station.
We left Hastings in a high state of excitement. Some pressing business prevented his immediate return to Westport, and Kennedy was evidently rather pleased than otherwise, for he did not urge him to go.
“There’s just one thing that I must stop for, and we shall have plenty of time, if we don’t waste it,” he planned. “I must go to the laboratory. There’s some stuff there I want to take out if, as I foresee, we are to have to deal with wireless in some way. Besides, I may need some expert assistance and I want to arrange with one of the graduate students at the university, if I can.”
In the laboratory he found what he wanted and began gathering it into bundles, packing up some head telephone receivers, coils of wire, and other apparatus, some of which was very cumbersome. The last he placed in a pile by itself.