“It was!” exclaimed Triggy Drew.
“A WOMAN CALLS”
The business of a modern detective agency is managed in much the same manner as a corporation or a large firm of corporation lawyers. Its tentacles, or operatives, are spread over the globe. Its news and assignments come in via wire. Its telephone and telegraph bills amount to thousands of dollars every year. In no other way can satisfactory results be secured.
Drew had started his agency on a shoestring and ran it into a “tannery,” in the parlance of the street. He had made many mistakes. He had once, to his knowledge, sent the wrong man to prison. This mistake had been so costly, he never spoke of it. It was soon after the conviction of the innocent man, that Drew gave up circumstantial evidence and got down to hard work, wherein the evidence accumulated was tempered with some degree of fact and common sense.
The first Stockbridge case had been in connection with an absconder. This man, Drew brought back in person from Adelaide. The work so pleased the millionaire that when Morphy broke under the financial strain and robbed everybody, right and left, Drew was called in to bring the promoter to the bar of justice. It was a long fight, fraught with danger and disappointment. The courts dragged. War broke over the civilized world. Morphy fought fiercely—like a cornered hyena. He was sent away, after dragging down his confederates. He had sworn at the time of conviction that he would get Stockbridge if it took to the longest day of his life. Drew remembered this oath and promise as he waited for Harrigan to appear from the booth.
He turned to the magpie and the cage. He studied both with keen eyes which had been trained in the school of hard facts piled upon each other until they pointed a way. Stockbridge had owned the pet for many years. It was the one domestic trait in his make-up, save Loris. It would be a strange thing, Drew concluded, swinging toward the window, if Morphy and Morphy’s confederates were to fall through a remembered couplet dropped by the magpie. It was in the order of events, however. It was the bright, particular finger which pointed toward the prisoner at Sing Sing. Nothing would be more logical than for the bird to remember the millionaire’s last words—or dying words. They would be shrieked aloud and unforgetable.
“More snow,” said Drew to himself. “This is a white day if ever there was one. I wonder if Delaney got to the house in time?”
He turned as a “Buurrrr! Burrrr!” sounded at the ringing-box below the desk.