Keep him guessing!”
“I’ll run up to East Eightieth now,” suggested Clyde.
“Good idea,” agreed Ward. “Maybe you can trace back over the trail Caulkins followed. Then get in with the bunch that know. See how they’re taking this story we ran to-day.”
Clyde Burke sat down at an obscure desk in a corner of the news room. He drew a fountain pen from his pocket and wrote on a sheet of paper. Any one who might have observed him would have decided he was simply adding up his expense account. Clyde Burke looked the part of a police reporter.
But this firm-faced young man was engaged in a different task. He was inscribing a note of strange appearance. He was writing a series of coded letters, and the words which those letters formed told the vital facts which he had just heard from the lips of the city editor.
Clyde folded the sheet of paper and sealed it in an envelope. He sauntered from the newspaper office.
He turned his steps toward Broadway, then to Twenty-third Street. There he reached a dilapidated old building. He entered.
Inside he ascended a flight of rickety stairs. He stopped in front of a glass-paneled door, upon which appeared the name:
B. JONAS
The reporter dropped the envelope in a mail chute cut in the door. He departed immediately. No one had seen his action. In fact, no one had ever seen a person enter through that door with the grimy, cobwebbed glass. Yet notes dropped there by Clyde Burke always reached their destination.