“You’ve found out what I wanted, eh?” Grail glanced up eagerly.
“I think I’ve got it all, sir.”
“Good!” The adjutant nodded toward a chair, and extended a cigar. “Sit down and make yourself comfortable, sergeant, and let’s have the story as quickly as possible. I would tell you to go and get something to eat first, but things have been happening since you’ve been away that make haste imperative.”
“Oh, I’m not hungry, sir,” Cato assured him. “This beats a meal any old time”—puffing luxuriously at the perfecto—“and, besides, I had a sandwich over at Sunset Bluffs.”
“Sunset Bluffs, eh? Then you did have time to look up the motor-boat business for me?”
“Sure, sir. It came in yesterday morning, just as you said, billed to Otto Schilder, and was taken out on his order late yesterday afternoon by Mike Flannery, a truckman over there on the other side of the river.”
“And you talked to Flannery, of course?”
“No.” Cato shook his head. “He was out with his wagon. But I did better, sir. I had a chin with Flannery’s kid, a boy about ten years old.”
“Ah!”
“Yes, sir. He and I took in a moving-picture show together”—the sergeant grinned—“and before it was over I guess he had told enough to earn him the licking of his life, if the old man should ever find it out. His father, it seems, intended to haul the boat out to the lake last night, but just as he was getting ready to start out a stranger came around to engage him for an immediate moving job. A big, dark-eyed man, the boy said he was, who gave the name of Dabney, and seemed to be in a great hurry.”