“Do you know the other reporters?”
“All of them.”
“But you don’t know the brown-haired young man?”
“No,” answered the “Sun” man. “I don’t believe he’s from a New York paper. He may belong to one of the Brooklyn dailies. Shall I ask him who he is and what paper he serves?”
“Oh, no, thank you,” Tom answered, carelessly. “It’s just the slightest curiosity on my part. He makes me think, a little, of a fellow I knew in my own town.”
But as the motor boat boy presently strolled away his mind was moving fast. He had already suspected that the brown-haired young man, with the well-tanned face, did not belong to the party of reporters, though he pretended to.
For Halstead, rarely mistaken in a voice, had heard the fellow speak twice. Though the tone was low, it had brought back a memory of the night before.
“If it’s the same fellow,” flashed through the boy’s mind, “then his hair, last night, was lighter, and his cheeks fairer. Since then he must have dyed his hair and stained his face. He wore a gray suit, then, and a yachting cap, but I’d wager a lot the fellow yonder is the one who directed the fellow calling himself Rexford, and one of the pair that chased me up a tree. The voice is the same, I’m sure, though now he’s talking lower and trying to disguise his voice.”
The more Halstead covertly studied the suspected one the more he became convinced of the whole truth of his guess.