"Come along, then."
Owen mounted the motorcycle while Balthazar sprang to the seat and started the runabout. They sped briskly over the roads, turning at last into an old weed-grown wagon path fringed copse-like by the branches of ever-hanging trees. The machine swished through the barrier leaves and came out upon a small clearing where there stood a gaunt house, evidently long deserted.
Balthazar drove on along the road for almost a quarter of a mile before he stopped the machine, Owen following without question. They left the runabout and the motorcycle and walked back to the house.
"It is an excellent location," commented Owen, as Balthazar lead the way into a basement entrance. "Who did you say was the man in charge of the—concern?"
"Rupert Wallace. He is a world-traveler like yourself, though no match for you in mind, master."
Balthazar, as he spoke, was rapping lightly on a wall, which had no sign of a door. It was pitch dark where they stood. But suddenly with hardly a sound, two sliding doors opened to the Gypsy's signal and a faint light from a gas jet on the wall gleamed on an inner passage. Balthazar, closely followed by Owen, walked quickly down the secret hall, and, without signal this time, another set of silent doors opened upon a brightly lighted room.
A crabbed, withered woman admitted them.
The room was overheated because of the presence of a gas forge on which a cauldron of metal was being melted. On one side there was a stamping press, and on the other a set of molds.
Wallace noted Owen's curiosity, and stepping to the table in the middle of the room, picked up a handful of half-dollar pieces.
"You are interested in our work—the work of supplying the poor with sufficient funds to meet the increased cost of living," he said, smiling. "These are some of our product. We are proud of them. The weight is exactly that of the true fifty-cent piece. And only one man in fifty could tell the difference in the ring of the metal."