“Are you sufficiently versed in such things to tell me of what make this is?” he asked.
“Russian,” she replied, without a moment’s hesitation. “The little countess we used to know in Washington, you remember, smoked cigarettes exactly like that.”
“Exactly,” he said, “and the man for whom we have got to look in this case is a Russian.”
A thoughtful look came into Meredith’s eyes. “Dad was in Russia once, on secret-service business himself,” she said; “and although they would never tell me about it, mother confessed to me on one occasion that for a long time she had been fearful of an attempt at revenge upon him, for something that happened while he was on the mission. You don’t suppose, do you, that this could in any way be an outcome of that old affair?”
“Absurd!” he answered. “Why, it was almost twenty years ago that your father was over there. If there was anything coming to him on that score, I fancy he would have been called to account long before this.”
Then, he deftly turned the subject to a discussion of the facts from which he had built up the hypothesis he was following.
“I had been on the lookout for a Russian spy, you see,” he explained, “for I had been tipped off by Sasaku, one of the dining-room boys, who is rather attached to me, that a fellow he had once seen chased out of Tokyo was here in Brantford, showing considerable interest in doings at the fort. Accordingly, I framed it up with Sasaku to get in with the chap, on the plea of being a ‘gumshoe man’ himself, desirous of working to mutual advantage, and gave him yesterday a bundle of fake papers to fool the other with, and get him to divulge his name and his business.
“That,” he added disdainfully, “is the sole basis for the ‘Japanese spy’ story you have heard. And, by the way”—he glanced with a frown at his watch—“I ought to have heard from Sasaku before this. He promised to send me a communication at the very first opportunity.”
“But where does the cigarette come in?” Meredith asked, a trifle impatiently.
“The cigarette? Oh, that was the connecting link. It is really the corner stone to my entire theory; for although I very quickly decided that the gumshoe artists were at the bottom of the job, I was, at first, rather inclined to suspect Otto Schilder as the moving spirit. It seemed pretty crude work for one of the kaiser’s men, I will admit; but there was no one else handy to lay it to, and as a German he was, of course, open to question. The discovery of the cigarette outside the office door, however, cleared things up amazingly. I recollected a glint of light I had seen flash across the doorway when the current was cut off, and, by putting two and two together, it didn’t take me long to figure out just about what had happened. The telltale spark I saw traversed the aperture of the doorway from top to bottom; consequently, the cigarette must have fallen or been dropped from above. Had the smoker been on the roof, then? And was it possible that the colonel, seized and muffled as he stood on the threshold, had been hauled up there by a rope? An electric crane, though, with its long arm sweeping silently over the yard, and lifting scrap iron across the fence to be loaded on cars outside, gave me a more plausible idea.”