“We had men on hand to meet the gent, and he was shadowed wherever he went. He didn’t make any try to cross the border, but took the Canadian Pacific direct to a farm he had about two hundred miles the other side of Winnipeg. It was a good seventy-five miles from the State line, and the fellows didn’t have much difficulty shadowing him. They had their trouble for their pains, though. The old duck didn’t stir away from his farm for six weeks, and then what do you suppose he did?”
Merriwell smiled at the fellow’s earnest manner.
“Give it up,” he answered. “What was it?”
“Took ship to the other side and went direct to Paris. This time the boys over there were ready for him. He stayed two days at one of the big hotels and then went to Amsterdam. While at Paris he was seen talking with a big, rough-looking fellow who looked like a Dutchman. After Carleton—that was the name of the Canadian guy—left Paris, this Dutchman was followed until he got aboard a steamer bound for South Africa. At Amsterdam, Carleton trots right off to his diamond cutter, leaves a lot of rough stones with him, and sails for home with another bunch of cut and polished sparklers. It was a cute game, and Heaven only knows how long they’d been playing it.
“Well, sir, that chap had the whole department guessing. Try as they would, they couldn’t catch him with the goods. Of course, they couldn’t touch him on British soil; he had a perfect right to have bushels of diamonds there if he wanted to. But there was a bunch of inspectors watching him and all his friends, that pretty near started a riot among the people thereabouts. Nothing doing, though. He never went near the line; and if he had, it wouldn’t have done him much good, with the country a wilderness for hundreds of miles.
“Finally I was put on the job, and after the fellow’s third trip across the pond—he must have brought back half a million in diamonds, all told—I got wise to their little game. It certainly was the slickest thing you ever heard of, though I’d been kind of expecting something of that sort ever since airships began doing stunts in the air.”
A look of intense interest leaped into Merriwell’s face.
“What!” he exclaimed. “You mean that they brought the diamonds across the line with an aëroplane?”
“That’s what,” nodded Holton. “Of course Carleton wouldn’t let us on his property, so we couldn’t look around much. He had a lot of fierce dogs, and the place was full of man traps and all sorts of riggings like that. But I found out afterward that the whole side of one of his barns was removable, so when the aëroplane came at night it landed in the upper part of the barn and nobody was the wiser. He’d load up with the sparklers and slide out the next dark night that came along. The only way I got onto the game was by keeping watch all night at the edge of the farm, and at last I saw the thing swoop down and land somewhere among the buildings.
“I beat it back home and had a talk with the chief, who decided that the only way to catch them with the goods was in another aëroplane. You see, nobody had the least idea where he went after he crossed the border. So he bought a good model on the quiet, and I took some lessons running it. In a couple of weeks I could handle it pretty fair, and it was shipped to Winnipeg and assembled there. I had the dickens of a job finding a place near Carleton’s to keep it, but finally located an out-of-the-way barn that I rented and fixed up. When the machine was installed there, I went back to watching again.