CHAPTER XI.
CRAY GETS HIS ORDERS.
“Unfortunately, that’s only too true,” admitted the millionaire newspaper proprietor. “Secrecy is the prime requisite in this case, and that precludes the possibility of arrest. I want you to catch John Simpson, though, scare him as much as you can, and force him to disgorge. He’ll be dropped from my staff, of course, but, beyond that, we can do nothing.”
“Compounding a felony—accessory after the fact!” Cray pronounced disapprovingly. “Bad business—very bad!”
“I can’t help that,” Griswold persisted, “and I’m willing to take full responsibility. If any trouble threatens, I think I have enough influence to fix things up.”
Green Eye’s face was grave and thoughtful, but inwardly he was fairly chuckling with glee.
He could have asked nothing better than this extraordinary case, and his only regret was that the amount involved was not much larger. Everything seemed to play into his hands in the most unbelievable way.
Here was a man, who, despite the surprising adroitness he had shown, was plainly a novice in crime—a novice with something like eighty thousand dollars in gold in his possession. And here, on the other hand, was a man to whom eighty thousand dollars was only a drop in the bucket, a trifle hardly worth mentioning.
The latter’s interest demanded secrecy, required that the whole thing should be conducted under cover, and unofficially. What an opportunity it was! If Simpson could be caught—and Green Eye had no doubt he could do it alone, or with Jack Cray’s unsuspecting assistance—it ought to be a very simple matter to relieve the thief of the coin in some way, and neglect to turn it over to Griswold. As for the latter, he could not take the matter into the courts without ventilating the whole affair from beginning to end.
Surely, the situation seemed to have been made expressly for Green-eye Gordon’s benefit.