“Sure thing, Toby, bar a slip-up of some kind,” Shannon paused to add. “You know what we are up against.”
“Rats! Trust his nibs to get the best of that bunch. No dicks can fool him. He’ll put something over on them that they never heard of.”
Shannon laughed grimly, picking his way around the touring car, and left the dingy, dimly lighted stable.
Patsy Garvan hesitated only for a moment. He remembered the previous night. He knew that he might find it utterly impossible to follow Toby Monk, who evidently was soon going to use his car, and Patsy immediately stole around the stable, taking advantage of the darkness to dart back of the rear dwelling, and in another moment he was stealthily following Shannon up the street.
“Going to tell his nibs, is he?” thought Patsy, with ever-increasing elation. “If I don’t learn who is back of this whole business, then there’ll be something wrong with the cards. Get the best of the chief, will he? I guess not!”
He found it easy to shadow his unsuspecting quarry. He trailed him to an outskirt of the business section, where Shannon paused briefly in a gloomy doorway and put on a disguise. Five minutes later, after looking sharply in each direction, he entered a court flanking one end of a large stone building.
“By gracious!” thought Patsy, gazing up at it. “This is the Waldmere Chambers, the building in which Todd was killed. Has the gang a headquarters here, or is it where only the chief himself hangs out? In either case, by Jove! I’m getting in right at last.”
Stealing nearer, he peered cautiously into the court. Shannon had disappeared in the deeper darkness. Following noiselessly, Patsy brought up at a solid wooden gate about six feet high, and he then heard a door closed and the snap of a lock. It told him plainly enough that Doctor David Devoll’s burly attendant had entered the building.
“Gee whiz! I must not lose track of him,” Patsy muttered under his breath. “I’ll take chances to guard against that. Locked, by thunder!”
Patsy had vainly tried to open the gate. He saw that it closed an alley about five feet wide between the rear of the Waldmere Chambers and the blank back wall of another lofty building. He drew himself up and looked over it. He could see a door some ten feet away, and directly above it a single-lighted window, the roller shade of which was drawn nearly to the sill.