“Your room is near ours.”
“Is it? I hadn’t noticed.”
Gerald knew better than this, for he had seen Standish standing in front of their door and scrutinizing it curiously.
The next morning he noticed something else. In the vicinity of the Southern Hotel he saw Samuel Standish and Bradley Wentworth walking together in close conference. It might have been their first meeting, so he found an opportunity some hours later of saying to Standish: “I thought I saw Mr. Wentworth in the street to-day.”
“Indeed! Where?”
Gerald returned an evasive answer.
“You may be right,” said Standish. “If he is here I shall be glad to meet him and thank him once more for the service he did me.”
“It is clear there is something between them,” decided Gerald, “and that something must relate to me and the papers Mr. Wentworth is so anxious to secure.”
But in that event it puzzled Gerald that Mr. Standish seemed to take no special pains to cultivate their acquaintance—as he might naturally have been expected to do. He was destined to find out that Standish was not idle.
One day—the fifth of his stay in St. Louis—Gerald was walking in one of the poorer districts of the city, when a boy of ten, with a thin, pallid face and shabby clothes, sidled up to him.