Thanking his informant Grant called his men around him and issued quick, incisive orders. Leaving Cavanaugh and Stewart to oversee the raiding of the undertaking shop, he selected his men and loaded them into the waiting machines. Soon the streets of Exeter resounded with the roar of speeding automobiles, whirling through in a cloud of dust to the mountains beyond and the camp that lay in the gorge.
Time was too short for the Secret Service to catch up all the tangled threads of this plot. While the waiting automobiles whirled Grant's men to the camp in the gorge, the station master was telephoning frantically to Von Lertz. And a short half hour later their big automobile was grinding its way southward carrying Madam Stephan and her partner in intrigue away from the scene of the fiasco.
Up on the Canadian border, mounted troops, summoned from twenty barracks by the Chief and Grant, rushed to protect the passes, tunnels and bridges, and throw a line of soldiery along the frontier.
Out at the camp the headquarters were suddenly surrounded and under cover of guns in the hands of Grant's men the reservists were herded together and placed under arrest. Leaving them in the hands of his men, Grant started out to look about the camp. He found the powder house and supply depots hidden deep in the gorge, and as he stood and wondered at the hugeness of this plot which had been foiled just in time, his gaze wandered from one object to another. Suddenly it centered on a little figure lying just below him beside a boulder. It was a boy deep in the sleep of sheer exhaustion. He stepped down the hillside and stopped beside the boulder.
"Poor youngster," he muttered, "I'd better take him in, it's damp here."
As he stooped and lifted the sleeping form, the cap slipped from the boyish head and a mop of curly hair waved loose. Grant gasped. The sleepy dark eyes opened and looked into his. Suddenly a hand sought to pull the coat which had fallen open together. But it was too late. Grant had caught sight of the Secret Service star.
"Dixie Mason!" Grant breathed. "In the Service? Oh Dixie—" and his arms closed about her a little tighter than was necessary although Dixie Mason lay still.
While Harrison Grant stood holding Dixie Mason in his arms with the cares of the world, the troubles, the strain, slipping away from him, in the great relief of his discovery, many, many miles away the first seeds were being sown for a plot that equalled the one they had just quelled.
In the interior of a fortune telling emporium in Hopewell, Va., sat a woman in the garb of a gipsy fortune teller. Her features were cold and heavy, her eyes piercing, and her voice when she spoke, belied with guttural accents the garb of the southern people she had donned.
"Minna," she called, and as the tapestries that hung the room were pushed aside by a maid, she spoke quickly: