"But you never took them there?"
"Indeed I did," was the surprising answer. "Sanford and Jones' clerk went with me. We saw Mr. Freer, the firm's expert on pearls."
I whistled again. Freer, the man at Dunsany's to whom I had told my little fiction of the fiction-writer, and who had looked so queer when I mentioned blue pearls!
"Large gentleman, elegantly-dressed, with a face like a boiled dumpling?"
"Sure!" cried Roland. "Do you know him, too?"
"Go on with your story!" I said.
"Mr. Freer examined the pearls and told me they were genuine, and of good quality. He valued them at about twelve thousand dollars."
"The devil he did!" I cried. "This case is spreading wider and wider. Freer is in the gang, too. To think of their having a picket in Dunsany's!"
"How do you know?"
"Because he like everybody else in the trade had been informed that the only necklace of blue-black pearls in the world had been stolen. He knew, moreover, that it was worth——" But here prudence stopped my tongue.