"I admit that, Nick, of course."
"What good to have arrested her alone, if more can be accomplished?" Nick added. "It would have amounted to comparatively little. I would merely have put one dangerous female crook out of the running. I felt my way carefully, mind you, and I very soon found that she could not steal much from the Buckley residence."
"That of Gideon Buckley, the banker, you say?"
"Yes. She had entered through a rear basement window. She is expert in that game. She had learned from one of his clerks, whom she has artfully insnared with her wiles, that the banker took home a quantity of bonds[Pg 12] and securities yesterday afternoon, and that he has no safe in his residence. She reasoned that he would put them in his library desk for the night, and she went there to get them."
"But failed to find them?"
"Failed completely," said Nick. "Buckley may have taken them to his bedroom, or concealed them in some other part of the house. We could not find them, at all events, and we got away with only a quantity of solid silver from the dining-room table and sideboard. I would have protected his bonds and securities, all right, providing that we had stolen them, but I had other fish to fry in connection with doing so."
Patsy Garvan fell to laughing, and not for the first time during Nick’s recital.
"Gee! this certainly beats me, chief," he declared. "You in criminal partnership with Sadie Badger! That sure is going some. What came off after you left the house?"
"We got out by the way she had entered," Nick replied. "I then went with her to the door of a house in Lexington Avenue, where, she told me, she had occupied the ground-floor flat for nearly a month."
"Alone?"