"At the fire?" Bailey stared. "Are you sure?"
"I have a good pair of eyes." said Harrison Grant, "I saw her there—not fifty feet away. I chased her—but a train cut me off."
Bailey raised a hand to his hat.
"I'll see what I can find out," he said quietly and left the building. But Grant continued to stand there, staring at the floor—wondering—wondering what this woman whom circumstance again and again gave the accusation of being a German spy, could have played in this latest evidence of Imperial Germany's ghoulish cruelty!
"THE STRIKE BREEDERS"
It was late at night. In his private office, Harrison Grant was puzzling over a report by Tom Bailey, an operative, announcing a condition rather unpleasant for the president of the Criminology Club. For the letter simply announced:
"Harrison Grant,
Criminology Club.
Dear Sir:Beg to report that all I can learn about Miss Dixie Mason is that she is almost constantly in the company of the Germans, particularly Heinric von Lertz.
Yours truly,
Bailey,
Operative."
Thereby, for Harrison Grant, a mystery remained unsolved, a mystery which nettled him, angered him. It had been weeks—months—since he had first met Dixie Mason, months in which he had constantly seen her in suspicious surroundings—yet never in a position to betray her. Once he had even gone so far as to send a special report on her to Chief Flynn—a report which the Chief naturally received with a hidden smile and the announcement that he would have the affair investigated from his office, that Grant allow her activities to pass unnoticed in the chase for bigger game. But when a man is hovering between love and suspicion, he is not likely to allow every opportunity to slip. Hence the private investigation which Grant had ordered to be made by his operative, Bailey, with the resultant report. Half angrily Harrison Grant filed the report in his cabinet and returned to his desk, moody, silent——