“Indeed there is,” agreed Kennedy, quickly.
“Personally, I think that Mito knows more than he should about the whole business,” I added. “The Jap is a mystery to me.”
“And Sanchez, too,” put in Hastings, evidently thinking of how he seemed always to be crossing our path.
“Yes, that’s the place to look into, all right,” concluded Craig, beckoning us to leave the room and the conversation.
“If that doesn’t sink into somebody’s mind,” he chuckled, when we were outside, “I shall be surprised. We must get back to Westport before it is too late.”
“Why didn’t you follow the wire down and find out where it ended?” I asked, as we left Hastings’s office. “You might have—”
“Surprised a stenographer at the other end taking notes,” he interrupted. “We can do that any time. What I wanted was to plant something that would make the real criminal act and throw him off his guard. We’ll have to stop again at the laboratory. There’s something there I must take out with me. That will give us just time to catch the late afternoon express if we hurry.”
While Hastings and I waited outside Kennedy went in and soon returned with the instrument he sought. Even yet, Hastings could not resist the impulse to gaze about nervously, recalling the shot that had been fired at him on the occasion of his first visit. Nothing happened this time, however, and we made the train by a matter of seconds.
Frances Maddox and her husband were the only persons on the express whom we knew. The others seemed to have returned already. I saw that we would have to rely on Riley and the Secret Service men to get anything that might have happened in the meanwhile. Once or twice I caught the eye of Mrs. Walcott furtively gazing in Kennedy’s direction, and I fancied she was a trifle nervous. Walcott himself read a magazine stolidly, as though declining to get excited, and I wondered, from his manner, whether the affair and the constant feud in the family into which he had married might not be getting on his nerves. They did not talk much, nor did we, and it was with a sense of relief that we all arrived finally at Westport.
“Well,” I remarked, aside to Kennedy, as we three piled into the little “flivver” that did public hack duty at the station, “I wonder what we shall run into now.”