“Quite so. And you are wondering why a good, steady, well-balanced young fellow like your chief clerk should get himself lost in the shuffle when his mission was so vitally important. What do you suppose has become of him?”
“I can’t begin to guess. That is what is driving me mad. Of course, the supposition is that he got mixed up in this body-snatching business in some way. But why should he? Why the devil should he, Calvin, when he had every possible reason for dodging and keeping out of it?”
“I don’t know,” rejoined the big man, with a head-wagging of doubt, real or simulated. “One of the most difficult things to prefigure—you might say the only one which refuses to come under the test-tube formulas—is just what a given man will do under certain suddenly sprung conditions. It is the only problematical element which ever enters into these puzzle-solvings of mine. I haven’t the pleasure of an intimate acquaintance with your chief clerk, but from the little I’ve seen of him I should say unhesitatingly that he is a young man for an emergency, quick to think, and fully as quick to act. I’m banking on that impression and hoping that he hasn’t disappointed me.”
“Then you know what has become of him?”
Sprague smiled impassively. “I shouldn’t be able to convince you that it is knowledge,” he admitted. “You’d call it nothing more than a wild guess. Isn’t that our auto that I hear?”
Maxwell stepped to a window and looked down upon the plaza.
“It’s somebody’s auto,” he said. “There are two men in it.” And a moment later—“They are coming up here.”
The demonstrator of scientific principles hooked his elbows on the counter railing and laughed gently. “Our two nervous friends from the Molly Baldwin,” he predicted. “They are still worrying about the loss of their corpse.” And even as he spoke the two young lessees of the mine came tramping in, their faces sufficiently advertising their anxiety.
Maxwell nodded to the file-leader of the pair.
“Hello, Calthrop,” he said. “What do you know?”