“She may be hard-boiled about her work,” Jimmie said to John a few minutes later. “But she’s a softie inside just the same, the right kind of a softie.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” said John.
On his way home that night Jimmie absentmindedly pulled a card from his pocket. On it he read, “Dr. Amos Andre.” “Now where did I get that?” he asked himself. Then he remembered, it was the card of the little, old man who wanted to know all about heavy water. He thrust it back into his pocket. He might want to ask this old man something. Why not make a collection of such cards? Paul Leach, one of the star reporters had a stack of them two inches high. He could direct you to most any person or any sort of place, just by consulting these cards.
As Jimmie sat in his big chair after dinner that night a disturbing sense of things half thought through and unfinished seemed to haunt him. The feeling that the part of the city surrounding the silver-fox storage plant came back to him more strangely than before. Closing his eyes he pictured the low, old-fashioned business structures. Then, of a sudden, he gave a great start. Could it be that this feeling was connected to that other taxi journey, the one he and Tom Howe had taken while following that truck owned and operated by men known to be gangsters? The thought was startling, yet, for the moment he could discover no ground for believing it true.
“I’ll find my way back there,” he told himself. “I surely will, and soon. Perhaps tomorrow.”
One other scene remained vividly pictured on the walls of his memory: three men sitting at a dimly lit table fingering gold nuggets, diamonds and—and “bubbles,” he said aloud. “Or perhaps they were rare eggs.”
Bubbles? The thought was queer. Whatever had put that in his head. One does not handle bubbles, much less carry them in his pocket.
One other feeling haunted him. This also seemed groundless, yet it remained with him. This was the feeling that he had seen that mysterious, more than half invisible man who had been seated in the shadows behind the light in the ancient mansion. There had been something vaguely familiar about the restless movement of his long fingers. It all seemed to be somehow connected up with some voice, a loud voice. But what voice? For the life of him he could not tell.
Of a sudden, all this was driven from his mind.
“The trap!” he thought, springing to his feet. “I was going to set that camera trap tonight.”