Satisfied at last with his work, Craig had stood back from the weird apparatus and shouted my name. He had enjoyed my surprise to the fullest extent, then had asked me to join him.
Half an hour afterward I walked into the laboratory, feeling a little sheepish over the practical joke, but none the less curious to find out all about it.
"What is it?" I asked indicating the apparatus.
"A vocaphone," he replied, still laughing, "the loud speaking telephone, the little box that hears and talks. It talks right out in meeting, too—no transmitter to hold to the mouth, no receiver to hold to the ear. You see, this transmitter is so sensitive that it picks up even a whisper, and the receiver is placed back of those two megaphone-like pyramids."
He was standing at a table, carefully packing up one of the vocaphones and a lot of wire.
"I believe the Clutching Hand has been shadowing the Dodge house," he continued thoughtfully. "As long as we watch the place, too, he will do nothing. But if we should seem, ostentatiously, not to be watching, perhaps he may try something, and we may be able to get a clue to his identity over this vocaphone. See?"
I nodded. "We've got to run him down somehow," I agreed.
"Yes," he said, taking his coat and hat. "I am going to connect up one of these things in Miss Dodge's library and arrange with the telephone company for a clear wire so that we can listen in here, where that fellow will never suspect."
. . . . . . . .
At about the same time that Craig and I sallied forth on this new mission, Elaine was arranging some flowers on a stand near the corner of the Dodge library where the secret panel was in which her father had hidden the papers for the possession of which the Clutching Hand had murdered him. They did not disclose his identity, we knew, but they did give directions to at least one of his hang-outs and were therefore very important.