“That would be queer!”
“Exactly. You watch. Go to lunch at twelve-thirty and be back at one. Remember! Watch closely, and if anything unusual happens look carefully and then come and tell me. Here's ten dollars for you.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“It's only a beginning,” smiled Mr. Robison, promisingly.
Manley, the clerk, put the money in his pocket and began to think he might be able to buy the motorboat next spring if this business kept up.
Between what Sweeney, the office-boy, suspected aloud and what Manley, the clerk, confirmed the office force of Richards & Tuttle discussed Mr. Robison with the zest of the deciding baseball game.
Richards had confided to his intimates some of his experiences, and Amos Kidder, the Evening Planet man, was as interested in the mystery as if he had not been the man who first let loose the flood of surmise by introducing Robison to the brokers.
Nothing happened on Tuesday more exciting than keeping tally on the telegrams and cables received by Mr. Robison, which amounted to thirty-seven in all. The object of so much conjecture—and hero of the office-boy's improvised dime novel—spent the day in an arm-chair looking at the blackboard, making elaborate calculations that convinced other customers he must be a “chart fiend.” At three o'clock sharp he went home.
He stopped long enough to send by messenger-boy a letter to the city editor of the Evening World and another to the city editor of the Evening Journal. They bore the same message and said:
Refer to my letter of yesterday. To-night W. H. Garrettson goes to the opera to see “The Jewels of the Madonna.” He will leave the Metropolitan in his automobile. In it will be his wife, his daughter, and his friend, Harry Willett. And he will not arrive at his house—Lexington Avenue and Thirty-eighth Street. Somewhere between the Opera House and his residence he will vanish! It will be the most mysterious kidnapping on record. Follow the Garrettson motor and have your reporters watch carefully.