“No; the other names are all strange to me.”
Sprague took the list and pointed with a square-ended forefinger to one of the names.
“This man Dimmock; you don’t know him?” he queried.
“No.”
“Well, I don’t know him, either; but I happen to know something about him. Two years ago I was doing a little soil work down in Oklahoma. It was during the time they were having the scrap with the oil companies. Mr. Dimmock was there, ostensibly as an independent capitalist from the East looking for bargains in oil-wells, but really as a representative of the trust.”
“Is this the same man?”
The expert held his fork pointing diagonally across his plate. “Follow the line of this fork,” he directed in low tones, “and you’ll see him—at the farther table by the door.”
Maxwell looked and saw a generously built, smooth-shaven, cold-featured man who looked like big money, dining at a table alone. The big-money look was not obtrusive; but it was sufficiently apparent in the city cut of the Sunday broadcloth, in the spotless linen, and not less in the attitude of the obsequious waiter who hovered around the great man’s chair.
“I took the trouble to look up Mr. Dimmock in the Oklahoma period,” Sprague went on. “I found that he was pretty well known in New York as the right hand of a certain great money lord whose name we needn’t mention here. That being the case, it is hardly necessary to add that his presence in Brewster at this particular crisis is a bit ominous.”
“Have you told Kendall this about Dimmock?” asked the superintendent.