Fortune favoured us to the extent that we did find Torreon at the address given. He made no effort to evade us, though I noted that he was an unprepossessing looking man—undersized and a trifle over-stout, with an eye that never met yours as you talked with him. Whether it was that he was concealing something, or whether he was merely fearful that we might after all be United States Secret Service men, or whether it was simply a lack of command of English, he was uncommonly uncommunicative at first. He repeated sullenly the details of the disappearance of Guerrero, just as we had already heard them.
“And you simply bade him good-bye as you got on a subway train and that is the last you ever saw of him?” repeated Kennedy.
“Yes,” he replied.
“Did he seem to be worried, to have anything on his mind, to act queerly in any way?” asked Kennedy keenly.
“No,” came the monosyllabic reply, and there was just that shade of hesitation about it that made me wish we had the apparatus we used in the Bond case for registering association time. Kennedy noticed it, and purposely dropped the line of inquiry in order not to excite Torreon's suspicion.
“I understand no word has been received from him at the headquarters on South Street to-day.”
“None,” replied Torreon sharply.
“And you have no idea where he could have gone after you left him last night?”
“No, senor, none.”
This answer was given, I thought, with suspicious quickness.