MOLLY TELLS THE STORY
For the next few days my moling was stopped—Troop was down with grippe and a substitute in his place. There was nothing to do but sit in my little hole by the elevators, passing the time with a novel and the tray cloth I was embroidering. At night, when Himself and I'd meet up, I'd hear from him how O'Mally was getting on in his tunnel. Babbitts kept in close touch with him, for he had the promise of being along when they made the inspection of the offices.
It took some days to arrange for that and while O'Mally was laying his wires for a midnight search, his men were tracking back over Tony Ford's trail. It didn't take them long and there was nothing much brought to light when you considered the kind of a man Tony Ford must be.
For the last three years he'd held clerkships in New York and Albany and once, for six months in Detroit. From some he'd resigned, from others been fired, not for anything bad, but because he was slack and lazy, though bright enough. The only thing they turned up that was shady was over two years before in Syracuse, when he'd been in a small real estate business with a partner and was said to have absconded with some of the funds. Nobody knew much of this and the man he'd been in with couldn't be found. The detectives said it was so vague they didn't put much reliance in it, thought maybe it might be spite work.
Anyway, it wasn't the record of a desperado, and they'd have been sort of baffled to fit his past actions with his present, if it hadn't been for one thing that, according to their experience, was very significant. In the last two months he'd spent a lot more money than his salary. As Miss Whitehall's managing clerk he had been paid sixty-five dollars a week, and he had been living at the rate of a man who has hundreds. It wasn't in his place—that was simple enough—a back room in a lodging house—but he'd been a spender in the white lights of Broadway. At expensive restaurants and lobster palaces he'd become a familiar figure, the gambling houses knew him, and he'd ridden round in motors like a capitalist.
"By the swath he's been cutting," said Babbitts, "you'd suppose he had an income in five figures."
"O Soapy," I said horrified. "They don't think he was paid for it?"
Himself looked solemn at me and nodded:
"That's exactly what they do think, Morningdew. He was paid and evidently paid high. Whoever the 'Other Man' was he could afford to be extravagant in his accomplice. Their idea is that Ford was engaged for his superior strength, and demanded a big retainer in advance."
"What a terrible man," I murmured and thought of him standing in the doorway smiling at me like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. "He's a regular gunman."