“Strange! A man with all your interests at stake in this puzzle—surely you must have reached some conclusion?”
“I tell you, I have not,” he replied sharply. “I know nothing, absolutely nothing.”
“You admit you have a theory—let’s call it that—a theory that fits the facts so far as you know them?”
“That’s your deduction,” sneered the other.
“But, I’m right?”
“Possibly,” Raoul answered, turning again to the papers that littered his writing table.
“That’s all I want,” declared Leighton with satisfaction. “Now, we will plan our campaign.”
Raoul, engrossed in a large, musty document which he had spread before him, greeted the proposal with a shrug of his shoulders. General Herran, impatient at the apparently futile and—to him—incomprehensible discussion, consumed innumerable cigarettes, while Leighton, with the air of one for whom waiting is an enjoyment, settled himself comfortably in a capacious rocking-chair.
The ensuing silence was rudely broken. There was a vigorous pounding upon the outer door, followed by the abrupt and noisy entrance into the house of some one from the street. Whoever it was, this late visitor stood little upon ceremony. But Leighton and General Herran had no difficulty in recognizing the nervous shuffle of feet along the stone corridor, the thump of the heavy walking-stick, accompanied by grunts of dissatisfaction and suppressed wrath. When Doctor Miranda finally bolted into the room, fanning himself as usual—although fans were a decidedly uncomfortable superfluity in the chilly night air of Bogota—they were, in a way, prepared for him.
“He is gone! He is lost—that leetle fellow! There is one more lost of them!” he shouted, repeating his disjointed English in staccato Spanish, as soon as he caught sight of his two friends.