“Well,” I queried eagerly, as the train started. “Why all this secrecy?”
“I had a caller this afternoon,” he began, running his eye over the other passengers to see if we were observed. “She is going back on this train. I am not to recognise her at the station, but you and I are to walk to the end of the platform and enter a limousine bearing that number.”
He produced a card on the back of which was written a number in six figures. Mechanically I glanced at the name as he handed the card to me. Craig was watching intently the expression on my face as I read, “Miss Yvonne Brixton.”
“Since when were you admitted into society?” I gasped, still staring at the name of the daughter of the millionaire banker, John Brixton.
“She came to tell me that her father is in a virtual state of siege, as it were, up there in his own house,” explained Kennedy in an undertone, “so much so that, apparently, she is the only person he felt he dared trust with a message to summon me. Practically everything he says or does is spied on; he can’t even telephone without what he says being known.”
“Siege?” I repeated incredulously. “Impossible. Why, only this morning I was reading about his negotiations with a foreign syndicate of bankers from southeastern Europe for a ten-million-dollar loan to relieve the money stringency there. Surely there must be some mistake in all this. In fact, as I recall it, one of the foreign bankers who is trying to interest him is that Count Wachtmann who, everybody says, is engaged to Miss Brixton, and is staying at the house at Woodrock. Craig, are you sure nobody is hoaxing you?”
“Read that,” he replied laconically, handing me a piece of thin letter-paper such as is often used for foreign correspondence. “Such letters have been coming to Mr. Brixton, I understand, every day.”
The letter was in a cramped foreign scrawl:
JOHN BRIXTON, Woodrock, New York.
American dollars must not endanger the peace of Europe. Be warned in time. In the name of liberty and progress we have raised the standard of conflict without truce or quarter against reaction. If you and the American bankers associated with you take up these bonds you will never live to receive the first payment of interest.