For a moment he paused, then added, "Put them back and tell no one of their discovery. I will tell Mr. Kennedy the moment I can get him."
A smile spread over his sinister face as Elaine confided in him her intention to go shopping.
"A rather expensive expedition for you, young lady," he muttered to himself as he returned the receiver to the hook.
Clutching Hand lost no further time at the laboratory. He had thus, luckily for him, found out what he wanted. The papers were not there after all, but at the Dodge house.
Suppose she should really be gone on only a short shopping trip and should return to find that she had been fooled over the wire? Quickly, he went to the telephone again.
"Hello, Dan," he called when he got his number.
"Miss Dodge is going shopping. I want you and the other Falsers to follow her—delay her all you can. Use your own judgment."
It was what had come to be known in his organization as the "Brotherhood of Falsers." There, in the back room of a low dive, were Dan the Dude, the emissary who had been loitering about the laboratory, a gunman, Dago Mike, a couple of women, slatterns, one known as Kitty the Hawk, and a boy of eight or ten, whom they called Billy. Before them stood large schooners of beer, while the precocious youngster grumbled over milk.
"All right, Chief," shouted back Dan, their leader as he hung up the telephone after noting carefully the hasty instructions. "We'll do it—trust us."
The others, knowing that a job was to lighten the monotony of existence, gathered about him.