“No clue as to the gentleman who deposited them?”
“No, sir, not so much as a clue. We’ve tested them all for finger-prints, and we’ve got a few results; but as they have been handled by half a dozen attendants, I don’t think we shall get much out of it. Still, we can but try.”
“Elk, I would give a few years of my life to get to the inside of this Frog mystery. I’m having Lola shadowed, though I shouldn’t think she’d be in that lot. I know of nobody who looks less like a tramp than Lola Bassano! Lew has disappeared, and when I sent a man round this morning to discover what had happened to that young man about town, Mr. Raymond Bennett, he was not visible. He refused to see the caller on the plea that he was ill, and is staying in his room all day. Elk, who’s the Frog?”
Elk paced up and down the apartment, his hands in his pockets, his steel-rimmed spectacles sliding lower and lower down his long nose.
“There are only two possibilities,” he said. “One is Harry Lyme—an ex-convict who was supposed to have been drowned in the Channel Queen some years ago. I put him amongst them, because all the records we have of him show that he was a brilliant organizer, a super-crook, and one of the two men capable of opening Lord Farmley’s safe and slipping that patent catch on Johnson’s window. And believe me, Captain Gordon, it was an artist who burgled Johnson!”
“The other man?” said Dick.
“He’s also comfortably dead,” said Elk grimly. “Saul Morris, the cleverest of all. He’s got Lyme skinned to death—an expression I picked up in my recent travels, Captain. And Morris is American; and although I’m as patriotic as any man in this country, I hand it to the Americans when it comes to smashing safes. I’ve examined two thousand records of known criminals, and I’ve fined it down to these two fellows—and they’re both dead! They say that dead men leave no trails, and if Frog is Morris or Lyme, they’re about right. Lyme’s dead—drowned. Morris was killed in a railway accident in the United States. The question is, which of the ghosts we can charge.”
Dick Gordon pulled open the drawer of his desk and took out an envelope that bore the inscription of the Western Union. He threw it across the table.
“What’s this. Captain Gordon?”
“It’s an answer to a question. You mentioned Saul Morris before, and I have been making inquiries in New York. Here’s the reply.”