“It was there day before yesterday,” she declared. “Mr. Gage showed it to me.”
There was an odd tension in the lieutenant’s manner. “Did the Phantom know about the secret drawer and how to open it?”
The woman, one hand clutching the edge of the desk, seemed to ponder. “I don’t know. He might have. The Phantom called on Mr. Gage several times after they started quarreling. But——”
“Well, it doesn’t matter.” There was a strain of suppressed disappointment in Culligore’s tones, and his face hinted that an illusion was slipping away from him. “It looks as though the thing was settled. The Gray Phantom is the only man I know who would pass up some fifty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds after taking the trouble to steal a gewgaw worth about two bits.”
With dragging gait he left the room, stepped behind the counter outside, and spoke into the telephone. In a few moments now the alarm would go out and a thousand eyes would be searching for the Gray Phantom. Culligore, tarrying for a little after he had hung up the receiver, looked as though he were in a mood to quarrel with his duty and with the facts staring him in the face. Then he shrugged, as if to banish regrets of which he was half ashamed, and his face bore a look of dogged determination when he stepped back into the bedroom.
“We’ll get him,” he announced with grim assurance. “Inside fifteen minutes there’ll be a net thrown around this old town so tight a mouse couldn’t wriggle through.”
He picked up his hat and kit, and just then his eyes fell on the housekeeper’s face. In vain he exercised his wits to interpret the sly gaze with which she was fixing Patrolman Pinto.
Did it mean fear, suspicion, horror, hate, or all four?
CHAPTER III—BLUE OR GRAY?
Cuthbert Vanardy was conscious of a disquieting tension in the air. The long shadows cast by the trees that stood in clusters on the lawn of Sea-Glimpse impressed him as sinister harbingers of coming events. The wind had a raw edge, and it produced a dolorous melody as it went moaning over the landscape. Vanardy recognized the vague sense of depression and foreboding he experienced as he walked down the path that wound in and out among flower beds and parterres of shrubbery. He had noticed it often in the past, and always on the eve of some tragic event.