“He sure is human!” Muggs declared. “’Twas a human fist he smashed me with in back of the ear once—I know! But we’ll get him!”
“The fact of the matter is,” said Riley, “that we don’t know whether it was the Black Star talkin’. If he’s got a bunch of helpers, maybe one of them’s at police headquarters and just naturally tapped the chief’s private telephone line.”
“It was the Black Star—I know his voice,” Verbeck said. “There is no doubt about it. He speaks in a peculiar, halting way that I’ll defy any one to imitate correctly.” He turned to the sergeant. “You may post your men,” he said. “I presume the chief’s orders must be obeyed.”
After the sergeant and his men had gone, Verbeck closed the door and turned to face Muggs and the detective.
“This waiting makes me nervous,” he admitted. “I’d like to be doing something. But, as you said, Riley, we can do nothing except wait until the Black Star makes a move, and then attempt to get on his trail. If ever we do get on his trail——”
“We’ll get him!” Muggs announced.
“So we may as well make ourselves comfortable. You cook a good dinner, Muggs—we’ve got all sorts of supplies. Riley, take another cigar and get that sour look off your face. All we can do is wait.”
Muggs departed for the kitchen, and Riley stretched his length on a divan and blew clouds of smoke toward the ceiling. Verbeck walked to a window and observed that the police had been scattered around the block just inside the fence.
In the kitchen pots and pans rattled, and they heard Muggs mumbling to himself because the fire would not blaze to suit him. Riley, after a time, arose and paced the floor like a hound that wanted to be on the scent and had been retained in kennels. Verbeck called up Faustina Wendell and held a conversation of some ten minutes, during which his fiancée expressed a thousand fears for his welfare, and Verbeck stated half a hundred times that she was not to worry. His telephone conversation at an end, he began pacing the floor also. The monotony of waiting was tiresome.
“We’ve got to start a checker tournament or something lively like that,” Riley declared, “or we’ll go insane. Some time during the next four days, eh? Ain’t that what the Black Star said in his letter? I wish he’d make it to-night. And I’ll bet that the devil, just to be ornery, will wait until the last hour of the four days. Where do you suppose he’ll strike?”