Bob nodded, and turning to the Mexican lad he again dropped a warm word about radio, promising to return some time and examine the boy’s apparatus. The lad beamed, his earlier offended state forgotten. Then Bob and the flyer walked briskly toward the distant street intersection, a long block away.
“What do you make of this?” Bob asked. “This house owned by a Japanese—with lots of other Japanese there—people driving away at night—the secret passage—that scream last night?”
“I don’t know,” confessed the flyer. “I’m beginning to get the glimmerings of a vague suspicion. Not all we have learned, however, fits in with it.”
“What is it?” pressed Bob.
“Not worth mentioning yet,” said the flyer. “But here’s the corner. Now for a look—see.” And halting at the edge of a building on the corner, he peered around it and along the length of the thoroughfare down which they had jounced and jolted not long before.
Bob likewise stole a glance from shelter, chuckling as he did so.
“We must look like a couple of conspirators in a melodrama,” he said, “pussyfooting up to the corner and then poking our heads out this way. Good thing everybody’s gone to the bull fight or we’d rouse somebody’s suspicions and, maybe, have the place down about our ears. But there isn’t a soul to see us. The place is like a village of the dead.”
Little enough, however, was there to see. The long street was deserted as far as the eye could rove. It lay baking under the late afternoon sun, and the only object of interest anywhere apparent was what they had looked to find—the handsome car midway down the block.
“Calle Lebertad,” read a battered and defaced street sign on a post on the opposite side of the street. Doubtless, a similar sign appeared on the post ahead of them on their corner, but, as it faced outward, they could not note it. Bob called the flyer’s attention to the sign, remarking that at least they now knew what street the mysterious house stood on.
“A lotta good that does us,” said Captain Cornell, slangily, in disgust. “I’d like to get closer to that house, Bob. I have a hunch we might overhear something.”