“He has been too ill to read any mail for the last two days,” replied Eileen, “and, of course, I have not opened it.”
“Well, that explains why I haven’t heard from him!” the man exclaimed, with a sigh of relief. “Then I guess you will be interested to hear that Gaines is alive and well, but kept a close prisoner by some heathen Chinese in a house on a west side street in New York.”
“But how?—Why?—Did it happen the—the night he—came down here?” she ventured.
“I see you’re pretty well informed about the matter,” he remarked cautiously. “And if these others are equally so, I guess it’s safe for me to go on and give you a history of the thing.”
Eileen nodded, and he went on:
“Gaines and I used to know each other in England, years before he entered your grandfather’s service. In fact, we had been schoolmates together. Then I came over to this country and entered the detective service, and he went into another walk of life. But we kept in touch with each other by writing occasionally. A week or so ago I was astonished to receive a letter from him, written on all sorts of odds and ends of paper and in an envelope plainly manufactured by himself. It contained some very singular news.
“It gave me first the history of those letters and how anxious your grandfather was to keep hold of them. Then it told how he (Gaines) had taken the box down here that night and tried first to conceal it in the bungalow. But no place in the house seemed safe enough to him. He tried to dig up a brick in the fireplace and bury it there, but gave it up after he had broken his knife in the attempt. Then he had the inspiration to bury it in the sand somewhere outside, and he described where he did locate it, right by that log. If Gaines had known much about the tides here, he wouldn’t have thought that a very good scheme. He didn’t, though, and thought he’d found an excellent place. He then turned to walk back to the hotel, but hadn’t gone more than a mile (it was storming hard, if you remember) when a terrific blow on the back of the head knocked him senseless. He never knew another thing until he came to, after what must have been a number of days, to find himself a prisoner in a house he judged to be somewhere in New York. And from his description I’ve located it about west Sixty-first street.
“He appeared to be in the keeping of a Chinaman who dressed American fashion and spoke good English. He was told that he was a prisoner and that it was hopeless to try to communicate with any one until he had reported exactly where and how those letters had been concealed. He begged for a day or two to consider the matter and was granted it, but told that if he did not comply with their wishes he would disappear for good and no one would ever be the wiser.
“In the meantime, he managed to get together a few scraps of paper, and with the stub of a pencil he happened to have about him, he wrote this letter to me, describing the location of the letters and how he had hidden them in a bronze box wrapped in a burlap bag. He urged me to go and get them at once, and then, later, he could safely describe to his captors where he had hidden them. Perhaps you wonder how he expected to get this letter to me, since he was so carefully guarded. He said that he was on the third floor, front, of the house, near a corner where he could see a post-box. He happened to have a solitary stamp in his pocket, which he put on the letter. Then, at some hour when he thought his captors were busy elsewhere, he expected to attract the attention of some children playing in the street and offer to throw them some money if they would mail the letter in the nearby box. As I received the letter, no doubt his plan worked successfully. At any rate, I got it a week ago and started on the trail immediately.
“I landed out here one morning while it was still dark, and dug all around the spot mentioned, but couldn’t find a trace of the bag or box.”