CHAPTER SEVENTEEN—ALIAS MR. ANDERSON
D OCTOR Sydney Angus Crang looked at his watch, as he stepped from a taxi the next afternoon, and entered the Bayne-Miloy Hotel. It was fifteen minutes of two. He approached the desk and obtained a blank card. “From J. B.,” he wrote upon it. He handed it to the clerk.
“Please send this up to Mr. R. L. Peters,” he requested.
He leaned nonchalantly against the desk as a bellboy departed with the card. From where he stood the front windows gave him a view of the street, and he could see Birdie parking the taxi a little way up past the entrance. He smiled pleasantly as he waited.
Presently the bell-boy returned with the information that Mr. Peters would see him; and, following the boy upstairs, he was ushered into the sitting room of one of the Bayne-Miloy's luxurious suites. A tall man with a thin, swarthy face confronted him. Between his fingers the tall man held the card that he, Crang, had sent up; and between his lips the tall man sucked assiduously at a quill toothpick.
“Mr. Peters, of course?” Crang inquired easily, as the door closed behind the bell-boy.
Mr. Peters, alias Gilbert Larmon, nodded quietly. “I was rather expecting Mr. Bruce in person,” he said.
Crang looked cautiously around him.
“It still isn't safe,” he said in a lowered voice. “At least, not here; so I am going to take you to him. But perhaps you would prefer that I should explain my own connection with this affair first?”