He sought Max several times without success. When at length run to ground in the roulette room of a Forty-fourth Street gambling-house, the manager was grimly reticent. He professed complete ignorance of his star's welfare and whereabouts. He advised Whitaker to consult the newspapers, if his interest was so insatiable.
Warned by the manager's truculent and suspicious tone that his secret was, after all, buried no more than skin-deep, Whitaker dissembled artfully his anxiety, and abandoned Max to his pet vices.
The newspapers reported Sara Law as being in retirement in several widely separated sections of the country. She was also said to have gone abroad, sailing incognito by a second-class steamship from Philadelphia.
The nine-days' wonder disintegrated naturally. The sobriquet of "The Destroying Angel" disappeared from the newspaper scare-heads. So also the name of Drummond. Hugh Morten Whitaker, the dead man come to life, occupied public interest for a brief half-day. By the time that the executors of Carter Drummond and the attorneys representing his clients began to make sense of his estate and interests, their discoveries failed to command newspaper space.
This phenomenon was chiefly due to the fact that Whitaker didn't care to raise an outcry about his loss. Ember, it seemed, had guessed shrewdly: Drummond had appropriated to his own uses every dollar of the small fortune left in his care by his erstwhile partner. No other client of his had suffered, however. His peculations had been confined wholly to the one quarter whence he had had every reason to anticipate neither protest nor exposure. In Whitaker's too-magnanimous opinion, the man had not been so much a thief as one who yielded to the temptation to convert to his own needs and uses a property against which, it appeared, no other living being cared to enter a claim.
Whether or not he had ever learned or guessed that Sara Law was the wife of Whitaker, remained problematic. Whitaker inclined to believe that Drummond had known—that he had learned the truth from the lips of his betrothed wife. But this could not be determined save through her. And she kept close hidden.
The monetary loss was an inconsiderable thing to a man with an interest in mines in the Owen Stanley country. He said nothing. Drummond's name remained untarnished, save in the knowledge of a few.
Of these, Martin Ember was one. Whitaker made a point of hunting him up. The retired detective received confirmation of his surmise without any amazement.
"You still believe that he's alive?"
"Implicitly," Ember asserted with conviction.