I took the opportunity again to run my eye over them. Nowhere in the crowd could I discover Winifred, or, in fact, any of the Maddox family. They seemed to be studiously avoiding appearance in public just now, and I could not blame them, for in a summer colony like that at Westport facts never troubled gossipers.
“What do you suppose Kennedy is afraid of?” whispered Hastings in my ear, nervously. “Your friend is positively uncanny, and I can almost feel that he fears something.”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” I confessed, “but I’ve seen enough of him to be sure that no one is going to catch him napping. Here’s Riley. Perhaps he has some news.”
The Secret Service operative had shouldered his way through the throng, looking for Burke, who was right behind me.
“What’s the matter,” demanded his chief.
“There’s another message, by telephone from the Seaville Station,” Riley reported. “They say they are having the same trouble again—only more of it.”
“That operator, Steel, came back again,” considered Burke. “Where is he?”
“As soon as I got the message, I hunted him up and took the liberty of sending him up to Mr. Kennedy’s room to look at that arrangement there. I couldn’t make anything out of it myself, I knew, and I thought that he could.”
“Did he?” inquired Burke.
“Yes. Of course he hadn’t seen it work before. But I told him as nearly as I could what you had told me, and it didn’t take him very long to catch on to the thing. After that he said that what was being recorded now must be just the same as it had been before when Mr. Kennedy was there—not messages, but just impulses.”