The Captain’s face softened, and he said, with a swift return of his old genial manner:
“Twenty years can change a man, Mr. Storm. It is the same Jack Horton, I am afraid. We have his record and he attended college at Elmhaven at the time you mention. But it is not certain that he absconded, you know; if it were, the case would not be up to this department. He is merely officially ‘missing’ as yet.”
“With a hundred thousand in cash!” Millard smirked. “Not much danger of his having suffered an attack of aphasia, is there, Captain? By Jove, if I had that much money about me, I might forget my own name myself!”
The typewriters clicking behind the rail in the outer office ceased all at once as the door leading to the corridor opened slowly, and a girl appeared, hesitating on the threshold. She was an undeniably pretty little girl despite the fact that her eyes were reddened and swollen, but her light summer frock was oddly out of place in that grim setting. She peered slowly about until her eyes caught the Captain’s, and rested there.
“Is this,” she began in a high, strained voice, “is this the place where they find people who have disappeared?”
“We try to.” The Captain’s tone had mellowed and a persuasive, paternal note crept into it. “Tell me for whom you are looking.”
He seated himself at his desk, motioning her to a chair beside it, and drew a blank form toward him. Millard was staring in goggle-eyed interest, and Storm stared also, but from far different motives. Where had he seen that pretty, piquant, slightly sullen face before?
As for the girl, she stood undecidedly, twisting the chain of her platinum mesh bag between her hands.
At length she burst forth half-confidentially, half-shyly:
“For—for Mr. Horton! Oh, you must know who I mean! Mr. John Horton, the paymaster of the Mid-Eastern Consolidated Coal Corporation. The papers say this morning that he has disappeared, but it cannot be true! I was told that if I came here——”