The evidence that this plotting of the evening could not have been overheard by the use of the dictograph was so conclusive that they stayed in the musty smelling room but a few seconds and then returned to the more comfortable quarters of the club room they had left so hurriedly. With the portrait of the Kaiser once more restored to its accustomed place, Von Papen delivered the final instructions.
"Boy-Ed, you will accompany me to Washington so that we can be with Count Von Bernstorff as surety to him that we are taking no active part. Koenig you stick closely to your accustomed business. Von Lertz you will go to Buffalo and assume charge. For the sake of precautions take Baroness Verbecht, Madam Stephan and Miss Mason with you. I have suggested Miss Mason because of the impression she has made upon the lucky whelp Harrison Grant, president of the Criminology Club. If he should happen to appear anywhere on the scene, a thing which it not unlikely, due to his infernal luck in being wherever he can harm us most, Miss Mason must do anything to keep him away from the canal the night of the day after tomorrow. The Baroness and Madam can care for any other men who are too intrusive. Ten o'clock of the second night from tonight is the hour for the destruction of the canal. We will be awaiting word of your success at the Imperial German Embassy in Washington. Good-night."
Koenig and Von Lertz accepted their dismissal and left the club together, but parted at the door, Koenig to go to the Sixth Avenue elevated station for a train to take him to less refined but more familiar resorts in lower Manhattan, and Von Lertz to hurry to the telephone booths in the Hotel Plaza. From a telephone there he pleaded in vain with Dixie Mason for permission to see her but a few minutes at once. He finally accepted her dictum that luncheon the following day would be the earliest possible moment at which she could meet him. He could not know that his voice had betrayed the fact to her that another Imperial German plot was pending and that she wanted her meeting with the spy to be in some public place where it would be possible to get word to the Secret Service at once of any information she might acquire.
So it was not by accident that Harrison Grant, president of the Criminology Club, was seated in an automobile just outside an entrance to one of Broadway's biggest hotels when Dixie Mason emerged the following day. To the passerby it would have seemed a chance meeting, extremely pleasurable to both.
"When did you take the dictograph out of the Hohenzollen Club?" she asked as he leaned out of the car to grasp her hand.
"Last night," was his answer.
"Last night? Why Heinric just assured me that he knew for a fact that the dictograph that was discovered had not been used in months."
"The impression we want him and the other worthies to get," responded Grant, and then to appease her curiosity, "since the day we installed it I knew that it might be discovered at any time and prepared for it. It might have nullified a great deal of information if they suspected anyone knew of conversations held in the Club. I was listening last night when Koenig fell against the picture and exposed the receiver. Newspapers, six months old, were in the corners of the room prepared for this emergency and we carefully scattered bags of dust which we had there over everything. We were descending the fire escape when they broke into the room."
"Then you have all the information I have gathered from Von Lertz," said Dixie well concealing the disappointment she felt. "You know that another attempt is to be made to dynamite the Welland Canal, and there is nothing I can do to help."
"We still need plenty of help, just of the peculiar kind you can give us," said Grant. "We only know that an attempt is to be made and that the dynamite has been procured. The canal is nearly twenty-seven miles long and to learn the place where the attempt is to be made would help us. Also an idea as to when the attempt is to be made."