“If he came from Middlebury he knows all about Canada,” he says, “and he’ll be sure to steer north if he hasn’t gone already. If I was you I’d go up to the Grand Central Depot, and ask the man who sells the sleeping car berths if any one of his description has engaged a berth for to-night or last night. It’s most likely he’s gone.”
“But he was seen at one o’clock this morning in the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” I says.
“How do you know?” he says. “Because the papers say so? That’s no proof. Just like as not that was all a put up job. Go up to the depot first of all, Doyle, and tell the fellow in the office I sent you. He knows me.”
Well, I went.
I had a good description of the defaulter from the papers, but bless you! I didn’t need it.
The fellow in the sleeping-car office was fly and right up to business. He knew all about it before I got there, but the worst of it was he’d told what he knew to two other fellows before he told me.
“That man engaged lower 10 for to-night,” he says, “in the Montreal express. You won’t be able to do nothing about it though. There’s two ahead of you watching already. They think his taking the berth is only a blind, and that he’ll go up on one of the day trains.”
I was that disappointed that I could have cried when I left the office, for there stood Ed Duffy and old man Pease a-laughing at me. You see I’d been introduced to both of them by Mr. Brady, and they knew just who I was.
“Say, young feller,” says Duffy, “you just go back and tell Old King Brady that he’d better come himself instead of sending a kid like you. ’Twon’t make no difference, though. The fellow will be here in half an hour. He’s going to take the ten o’clock train.”