“I’ve the same feeling,” said Tully. “You’re sure you didn’t miss any place?”
“We looked in every closet and compartment aboard the Limited,” insisted Bob. “We’d have found even a fly if one had been aboard.”
Tully was visibly downcast for he felt the loss of his confidential instructions keenly.
“Hamsa is the only one who could have taken them,” he said, half to himself.
Bob felt like telling Tully that he should have known better than to have opened and read them in the presence of anyone else, but he checked the impulse, and was glad that he had had the foresight to protect his own papers by placing them in his Gladstone bag.
The train slowed to a stop at a lonely junction and Bob went to the vestibule where the porter opened the upper half of the door for him.
The federal agent, peering ahead through the rain, saw the train conductor make a dash for the station where a night operator was on duty. The conductor ran back to the train just before the engineer “whistled in” the flagman and Bob knew that already a message was humming over the wires telling of the disappearance of Joe Hamsa, the diamond salesman.
The porter closed the upper half of the door and Bob returned to the Pullman. The lights had been turned low and he looked in at Tully, who was dozing.
Bob was too wide awake to think of sleep just then, and he went ahead to the smoking compartment, where the porter had left an evening paper.
Bob picked up the paper and scanned the headlines on the first page, but there was nothing recorded in the news there that drew his attention and he turned to the sports page, where football dope stories could be found plentifully, for Bob liked nothing better in the sports world than a good football game.