"That was probably a part of the plot—to account for us in that way," Lucetta put in.
"No doubt it was," Grider went on. "But the elopement story didn't satisfy me. I knew there wasn't any reason in the wide world why Don shouldn't get married openly, if he could find any girl foolish enough to say 'yes,' so I simply discounted the gossip and wired for detectives. A very little sleuth work developed the fact that each of you had been seen last in company with one of the Bandishes. That gave us a sort of a clew, and we began to trail Mr. Horace Bandish and dig up his record."
"And while you were doing all this for us, we ... honestly, Mr. Grider, I am ashamed to tell you what we were saying of you," said the young woman in penitent self-abasement.
"Oh, that was all right. In times past I had given Don plenty of material of that sort to work on; only I wish I had known how you were looking at it—that you were charging it all up to me. It would have lightened the gloom immensely. But to get on: we trailed Bandish, as I say, and found that he had had an aeroplane shipped to him at Quebec a few days before your arrival there. That looked a bit suspicious, and a little more digging made it look more so. The 'plane had been unloaded and carted away, and a few days later had been brought back and shipped to Ottawa. That left a pretty plain trail, but still there was no evidence of criminality."
"Of course, you didn't know anything about the legacy, at that stage of it?" Prime threw in.
"Not a thing in the world. More than that, Bandish's record was decently good. We found that he had been a sort of general factotum for a rich old man, and had been left comfortably well off when his employer died. There was absolutely no motive in sight; no reason on earth why he should drug a couple of total strangers and blot them out. Just the same, I was confident that he had done it, and that I should eventually find you by keeping cases on him. So I dropped the detectives, who were beginning to give me the laugh for being so pig-headed about an ordinary elopement, gathered up your belongings on the chance that you'd need 'em if I should make good in the search for you, and came here to Ottawa to keep in touch with Bandish."
Prime's smile was grim. "You were taking a lot of trouble for two people who were just about that time calling you all the hard names in the category," he interposed.
"Wasn't I?" said the barbarian with a grin. "But never mind about that. I came here, as I said, and settled down to keep an eye on Horace. For quite some time I didn't learn anything new. I found that Bandish was a club man, well known and rather popular; also that he was an amateur aviator and had made a number of exhibition flights. Everybody knew him and everybody seemed to like him. In the course of time we met at one of the clubs, and I watched him carefully when we were introduced. If he had sent the forged telegram it was proof that he knew me by name, at least. But he never made a sign.
"It was about a week later than this when I stumbled upon Mr. Shellaby and got my first real clew in the story of the legacy muddle. Of course, that opened all the doors, and after that I laid for Horace like a cat watching a mouse. Before long I could see that he was growing mighty nervous about something, and the next thing I knew he turned up missing. Right there I lost my head and wasted two whole days trying to find out which railroad he had taken out of town. Late in the evening of the second day I learned, by the merest bit of bull-headed luck, that he had gone up the Rivière du Lièvres in a motor-launch. I had a quick hunch that that motor-launch was pointing in your direction and that it was up to me to chase him and find you and get you back here before the thirty-first. Three hours later I had borrowed the Sprite and was after him."
"He found us," said Prime, rather grittingly. "We had stopped to patch our canoe, and he came up in the night and cut another hole in it. I mistook him for you—which was the chief reason why I didn't take a pot-shot at him as he was running away."