"He certainly did! And he got pretty powerful help too. Here's where the part of it that ought to interest you really begins. Miss Mercer took the two girls home with her, and almost at once, in the middle of the night, Zara was spirited away. At first we thought she'd been kidnapped but later it turned out that she'd been deceived, and gone with them willingly."
"This is beginning to sound pretty exciting, Charlie."
"I got interested in the case, Billy, and I tried to do what I could for Zara's father. He didn't trust me much, and I had a dickens of a time persuading him to talk. And then, just as I was about on the point of succeeding, he shut up like a clam, fired me as his lawyer, and hired Isaac Brack!"
"That little shyster? Good Heavens!"
"Right! Well, she—Zara, I mean—seemed to have vanished into thin air. We couldn't get any trace of her at all, until Bessie here dug up a wild idea that it was in Morton Holmes's car she'd been taken off."
"Holmes, the big dry goods merchant?" said Trenwith, with a laugh. "How in the world did she ever get such a wild idea as that? He wouldn't be mixed up in anything shady!"
"Just what we told her," said Charlie, unsmilingly, "but she insisted she was right. And, a little while later, after Miss Mercer had taken the girls to her father's farm, Holmes came along, tricked her into getting in his car with another girl, and ran them over the state line. He met Weeks and this Jake Hoover—but Bessie was too smart for them, and got back over the state line safely. And the same day, putting two and two together, I found Zara, held a prisoner in an old house that Holmes had bought!"
"Good Lord!" said Trenwith, blankly. "So Holmes had been in it from the start?"
"I don't know how long he's been mixed up in it, but he was in it then, with both feet. He was hand in glove with old Weeks, and for some reason he was mighty anxious to get both the girls across the state line and into old Weeks's care as guardian appointed by one of their courts over there."
"But why, Charlie—why?"