"What's that?" cried Roque, starting forward. "You've lost the papers, you say?"
"I didn't lose them," almost shouted the airman, "they were left on the table, and if they're gone, they've been stolen."
"Hey, my friend," remonstrated Spitznagle, "we have no thieves in this house, and no enemies to the cause."
"This is no time to bandy words," roared Roque, "shut and bar the doors"—this last command directed at Zorn. The giant jumped at the bidding and sent the bolts rattling into their sockets.
The savage energy of Roque ruled all to silence. Even the power under the cloak refrained from advising.
The secret agent dismissed suspicion as to the active participants in the conference, and as to the loyalty of Spitznagle he had not the slightest doubt. The trial horses must needs be two pale-faced boys backed up against a window-sill.
Roque, with his hands deep in his pockets, a habit he had when stalking a suspect, walked around the foot of the table and stood directly in front of the pair, fixing on them that gimlet gaze he used to terrorize.
Billy and Henri, when at bay, were the most keenly alive; their nerve always served them most in the supreme test.
They faced their inquisitor without an outward tremor; their previous anxiety was known only to themselves, and now admirably concealed.
Roque realized that he had no fluttering birds in his hands, and also was aware that a search of their persons was only required to acquit or convict these youngsters of the actual theft. He knew that they had not left the room, though why he had not long ago sent them upstairs to bed was a slip of mind he could not account for. But it had occurred to Roque that the boys had been in a position to see the table all the time since the company adjourned to the fire, and whatever had happened in regard to the papers they, if not the light-fingered chaps themselves, must have witnessed the perpetration of the steal. So he changed his tactics.