Dennis coughed and McCarty remarked hastily:
“I guess none of them knows what’s become of the man who has been hiding next door, nor anything about the Goddard lad and that’s all that matters right now, isn’t it, sir? Did you get the keys to these houses?”
“Yes, and explained again to that fool of a watchman, Jennings. I had time to look around pretty thoroughly outside them while I waited for you and I couldn’t find a window or door that had been tampered with. Let’s see what’s inside.”
One o’clock had come and gone and another hour passed before they emerged from the second of the two houses after a fruitless search. Dust and mold were all they had encountered in the huge, echoing, partially dismantled rooms and the footprints they themselves left behind them were the only recent signs of human presence.
Dennis blinked and drew in the fresh air deeply when they stood once more in the sunlight.
“’Tis like coming out of a tomb!” he averred. “What’s it to be now, inspector?”
“I’m going to Goddard and make him talk!” that official responded with a certain grimness which was eloquent. “Until he comes across with his suspicions as to who kidnapped the boy our hands are tied and every hour counts. You two had better get a bite to eat and meet me at his house later.”
Nothing loth, they accepted the hint. It was mid-afternoon before they approached the east gate of the Mall again, to find Jennings energetically engaged in driving away a swarthy vendor of toy balloons, whose basket freighted with globes of bright, crude color bobbing on slender sticks, resembled an uprooted garden patch of strange, grotesque blooms.
“They’re a pest, those peddlers!” he declared as he admitted them. “They’re not so bad, though, as the reporters that have been trying to get in since you left! Say, did you know Horace Goddard is lost—?”
“Sure we know it!” McCarty interrupted. “Didn’t Trafford tell you so himself yesterday afternoon?—Hurry, Denny!”