Smith was jabbing his paper-knife absently into the desk-blotter. "And yet we go on calling this a civilized country!" he said meditatively. Then with a sudden change of front: "I'm in this fight to stay until I win out or die out, Billy; you know that. As I have said, Miss Verda can kill me off if she chooses to; but she won't choose to. Now let's get to work. It's pretty late to rout a justice of the peace out of bed to issue a warrant for us, but we'll do it. Then we'll go after Lanterby and make him turn state's evidence. Come on; let's get busy."
But Starbuck, reaching softly for a chair-righting handhold upon Smith's desk, made no reply. Instead, he snapped his lithe body out of the chair and launched it in a sudden tiger-spring at the door. To Smith's astonishment the door, which should have been latched, came in at Starbuck's wrenching jerk of the knob, bringing with it, hatless, and with the breath startled out of him, the new stenographer, Shaw.
"There's your state's evidence," said Starbuck grimly, pushing the half-dazed door-listener into a chair. "Just put the auger a couple of inches into this fellow and see what you can find."
Measured by any standard of human discomfort, Richard Shaw had an exceedingly bad quarter of an hour to worry through when Smith and Starbuck applied the thumbscrews and sought by every means known to modern inquisitorial methods to force a confession out of him.
Caring nothing for loyalty to the man who was paying him, Shaw had, nevertheless, a highly developed anxiety for his own welfare; and knowing the dangerous ground upon which he stood, he evaded and shuffled and prevaricated under the charges and questionings until it became apparent to both of his inquisitors that nothing short of bribery or physical torture would get the truth out of him. Smith was not willing to offer the bribe, and since the literal thumbscrews were out of the question, Shaw was locked into one of the vacant rooms across the corridor until his captors could determine what was to be done with him.
"That is one time when I fired and missed the whole side of the barn," Starbuck admitted, when Shaw had been remanded to the makeshift cell across the hall. "I know that fellow is on Stanton's pay-roll; and it's reasonably certain that he got his job with you so that he could keep cases on you. But we can't prove anything that we say, so long as he refuses to talk."
"No," Smith agreed. "I can discharge him, and that's about all that can be done with him. We can't even tax him with listening. You heard what he said—that he saw the light up here from the street, and came up to see if I didn't need him."
"He is a pretty smooth article," said Starbuck reflectively. "He used to be a clerk in Maxwell's railroad office, and he was mixed up in some kind of crookedness, I don't remember just what."
Smith caught quickly at the suggestion.
"Wait a minute, Billy," he broke in; and then: "There's no doubt in your mind that he's a spy?"