“You don’t suppose he was going to carry that stolen wool in plain sight on his boat, do you? He had to hide it somewhere, and he was pretty slick about it, too. He had some hogsheads in the rear end of his boat, with false tops in them. There was about a foot of coal and then came the false tops. Under that was the wool. Nobody would ever have guessed that there was anything but coal in the hogsheads.”
“Slick, wasn’t he?” said Willie.
“These longshoremen are no fools. You have to get up pretty early to be ahead of them.”
“How did you ever get track of this smuggling, anyway?”
“That was easy enough. The wool bales were inventoried at so many pounds each, when they left Australia. But when they reached the bonded warehouse, they weighed less. There had been a leak somewhere. All we had to do was to find it. We simply had to keep hunting until we found where that leak was. That was an easy matter, for the wool had been transported in certain boats and handled by certain crews. It was just a question of time until we’d run down the thief.”
“But what I’d like to know,” said Willie, “is how you knew these fellows were going to gather on that pier and arrange for this wool auction. I’ve been wondering about it ever since I met you yesterday.”
The Secret Service agent laughed. “That was a piece of luck,” he said. “I’ve been on this wool business for several days and the scent was getting pretty close to Larsen. I tried to get aboard his boat by applying for a job as a deckhand.”
“You did?”
“Sure. But there was nothing doing. He’s a fly guv, all right, and I didn’t dare fool around his boat. So I changed my clothes and hung around the neighborhood until I saw a chance to get out on the pier unnoticed. Then I wandered out and hid among the boxes. I was expecting to stay there most of the night, hoping I might overhear something that would give me a line on the thief.”
“Why did you hide in the box pile?”