"A good many parasangs."
"By Jove! I more than half believe you've got hold of something ded-definite at last!"
"I have, indeed. Hildreth, I have evidence—printable evidence—enough to dig a dozen political graves, one of them big enough to hold Jasper G. Bucks' six-feet-two."
"Let me see it!" said the night editor, eagerly; but Kent laughed and pushed him toward the door.
"Go home and go to bed. I wouldn't show it to you to-night if I had it here—as I have not. I don't go around with a stick of dynamite in my pocket."
"Where is it?" Hildreth asked.
"It is in a safety-deposit box in the vault of the Security Bank; where it is going to stay until I am ready to use it. Go home, I say, and let me go to bed. I'm ragged enough to sleep the clock around."
In spite of his weariness, which was real enough, Kent was up betimes the next morning. He had a wire appointment with Blashfield Hunnicott and two others in Gaston, and he took an early train to keep it. The ex-local attorney met him at the station with a two-seated rig; and on the way to the western suburbs they picked up Frazee, the county assessor, and Orton, the appraiser of the Apache Building and Loan Association.
"Hunnicott has told you what I am after," said Kent, when the surrey party was made up. "We all know the property well enough, but to have it all fair and above-board, we'll drive out and look it over, so that our knowledge may be said to be fully up to date."
Twenty minutes afterward the quartet was locating the corners of a square in Gaston's remotest suburb; an "addition" whose only improvements were the weathered and rotting street and lot stakings on the bare, brown plain.