"Does he strike you as the kind that would be gentle with his prisoners? We'll ransack the whole house from attic to cellar, despite Mason's assertions."
We ascended the broad staircase to the second floor. McKelvie then apportioned the back rooms to Jones, the front ones to me, and reserved for himself the whole third floor, which was mostly the attic. My part comprised the sleeping apartments of Ruth as well as Darwin's suite.
I entered Ruth's rooms first, but did not remain in them long, since every article spoke to me of the girl I loved and who was at this moment enduring the hardness of a narrow cot in a barred and grated cell instead of enjoying the comforts to which she had been always accustomed, and all this because she had been accused of a crime that she was utterly incapable of committing.
Darwin's suite of dressing-room, bedroom, and bath were also unproductive of any clues to Cora Manning's whereabouts, although once I thought I detected a faint odor of rose jacqueminot and wondered idly whether Darwin, too, had caught the epidemic.
Out in the hall I encountered Jones.
"Nothing doing," he said. "Besides, she wouldn't be lying around loose, or that old butler would have come across her, unless he was lying. For my own part, I think this is a wild goose chase."
Before I could reply McKelvie descended from the attic. "Would you mind talking in a lower key," he remarked in a whisper. "I could hear you distinctly upstairs, Jones, and if the criminal should come here, we would frighten him off for good."
"You don't mean to tell me he'd have the nerve to come here!" exclaimed Jones.
"He's come here more than once, as Mr. Davies and I can prove," he returned, drawing us into a room and closing the door. "Don't you suppose he comes here to see the girl? It's my opinion he is trying to break her into going away with him, though I can't see what is to stop him from drugging her and carrying her away."
He walked to the window and looked out into the night. "She's not in the attic. There's no secret room up there; yet I'm positive she's in the house. He wouldn't come back for anything less important, though I did think once that he had a hiding-place in the room behind the safe. You remember that I was looking for it the night we found Dick's ring," he continued, more to himself than to us. Then he turned away from the window, his eyes shining, "Lord, I'm growing dull! Do you recall, Mr. Davies, that we heard steps on the stone staircase and that when I opened the door and turned my flash on the stairs they were empty and the door below locked?"