Perhaps the death of Hopkins had been planned!
Some fiend was at work; that was certain. Why then had his own life been spared by the creature of the night? The answer came to him. The malefactor behind all this had not known of the envelope in Tremaine's office. The criminal believed that no one knew Harvey Duncan's secret. He, Bruce Duncan, had been drugged so that the paper could be stolen at night. Had he moved while the enemy was in the room, his life would have been taken.
He began to detect the mystery of the peppermints. Each night, Bruce had sat by the window reading, with the peppermints close at hand, as he smoked his cigarettes. He had rarely drawn the shades. Some one had observed him; a clever person had opened the package from the drug store as it lay on the steps. The doped peppermints had been substituted.
Some criminal mind was at work. It possessed the knowledge that belonged to Bruce Duncan as the heir of his uncle.
Duncan realized the difficulty of his position. He had no clue except the gaping space beneath the hearth.
He did not even know the time or place of the meeting. He did not know the names of the six men who could help him. He was sworn to secrecy by his uncle's message, and no provision had been made for this dilemma.
CHAPTER IV. VINCENT REMEMBERS A FACE
Three weeks had passed since Bruce Duncan's visit to his uncle's lawyer. Adventures had apparently ended, so far as Duncan was concerned. Unless new factors developed, episodes of the past would pass into oblivion.
New factors, however, were already entering the game. Oddly, strange incidents were beginning many miles from New York — incidents that chance, alone, was guiding. Budding events had begun aboard a train on the Pennsylvania Railroad, during its day trip east from Pittsburgh.
The Eastern Limited was swinging along the curving roadbed as it followed its course on the mountainside above the river. The scene from the window of the sleeping car was one of rugged grandeur, but it held no interest for a passenger named Harry Vincent.