“Then I take it you weren’t strolling on the barberry just for the fun of the thing,” said the federal chief.
“Well, it wasn’t exactly a stroll,” grinned Bob. “It was something like trying to do a hundred yard dash in nothing flat through half an acre of barberry. It was a good place to hide, but a poor place for running.”
Waldo Edgar’s eyebrows went up questioningly and he turned to Merritt Hughes.
“Does this tie in with what happened last night?” he asked.
“Apparently. Bob was trailed by a couple of hoodlums in a car. When he was alone on a side street they waylaid him, but he knocked one out and jumped over a fence and ran through a barberry patch to escape. He came here directly after that happened.”
“Anything else happened since last night?” The question was from the thin, straight lips of Waldo Edgar and Bob told in detail what had taken place during the early hours of the morning.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this, Bob?” exclaimed his uncle.
Bob flushed. “Well, it seemed like I’d been having enough excitement for the last twenty-four hours and this sounded sort of crazy.”
“I’ll say it sounds crazy,” snorted Condon Adams and Bob caught a supercilious sneer flit across the lips of Tully Ross. It was plain that neither Adams nor his nephew believed the story and Bob turned back to the federal chief.
“There’s nothing crazy about this story. It only confirms our realization that some tremendously powerful force is after these radio secrets. We know now that only a part of the secret papers were taken from the file last night. The others had not been sent over from the radio engineering division of the War Department.”