Hastings opened his eyes in wonder at the news. As for me, I began to wonder if I had not been quite mistaken in my estimate of Irene Maddox. Was she the victim, the cat’s-paw of some one?
Riley was not finished, however. “Another thing before you leave, Mr. Burke,” he added. “The night watchman at the Harbor House tells me that he saw that Japanese servant of Shelby Maddox last night, or, rather, early this morning. He didn’t go down to the dock and the watchman thought that perhaps he had been left ashore by mistake and couldn’t get out on the Sybarite.”
“That’s impossible,” cut in Hastings, quickly. “He was on the yacht last night when we went to bed and he woke me up this morning.”
“I know it,” nodded Riley. “You see, I figure that he might have come off the yacht in a rowboat and landed down the shore on the beach. Then he might have got back. But what for?”
The question was unanswered, but not, we felt, unanswerable.
“Very well, Riley,” approved Burke. “Keep right after anything that turns up. And don’t let that Paquita out of sight of some of the men a minute. Good-by. We’ve just time to catch the train.”
Hastings was still unreconciled to the idea of leaving town, in spite of the urgency of the developments in New York.
“I think it’s all right,” reassured Kennedy. “You see, if I stayed I’d have to call on an agency, anyhow. Besides, I got all I could and the only thing left would be to watch them. Perhaps if I go away they may do something they wouldn’t dare otherwise. In that case we have planted a fine trap. You can depend on it that Burke’s men will do more for us, now, than any private agency.”
Hastings agreed reluctantly, and as we hurried back to New York on the train Kennedy quizzed Burke as he had Hastings on the journey out.
There was not much that Burke could add to what he had already told us. The robbery of the safe in the Maddox office had been so cleverly executed that I felt that it would rank along with the historic cases. No ordinary yeggs or petermen had performed this operation, and as the train neared the city we were all on edge to learn what possibly might have been uncovered during the hours that we had been working on the other end of the case out at Westport.