"That'll take weeks!" complained Blanton.
The Supreme Intelligence turned on him fiercely.
"Well?" he demanded. He continued to stare for a moment, and Blanton wrinkled up in the baleful glow of his superior's scorn. "And," Detective Mallory added magnanimously, "I will do the rest."
Thus the campaign was planned against the Burglar and the Girl.
CHAPTER IV
Hutchinson Hatch was a newspaper reporter, a long, lean, hungry looking young man with an insatiable appetite for facts. This last was, perhaps, an astonishing trait in a reporter; and Hatch was positively finicky on the point. That's why his City Editor believed in him. If Hatch had come in and told his City Editor that he had seen a blue elephant with pink side-whiskers his City Editor would have known that that elephant was blue—mentally, morally, physically, spiritually and everlastingly—not any washed-out green or purple, but blue.
Hatch was remarkable in other ways, too. For instance, he believed in the use of a little human intelligence in his profession. As a matter of fact, on several occasions he had demonstrated that it was really an excellent thing—human intelligence. His mind was well poised, his methods thorough, his style direct.
Along with dozens of others Hatch was at work on the Randolph robbery, and knew what the others knew—no more. He had studied the case so closely that he was beginning to believe, strangely enough, that perhaps the police were right in their theory as to the identity of the Burglar and the Girl—that is, that they were professional crooks. He could do a thing like that sometimes—bring his mind around to admit the possibility of somebody else being right.
It was on Saturday afternoon—two days after the Randolph affair—that Hatch was sitting in Detective Mallory's private office at Police Headquarters laboriously extracting from the Supreme Intelligence the precise things he had not found out about the robbery. The telephone-bell rang. Hatch got one end of the conversation—he couldn't help it. It was something like this: