“I called up Griswold and learned that he had never lived in New England, and had spent most of his brief vacations here at home, or out in the Middle West. That helped to give me a start, and I sized Simpson up as a man with some clever ideas, but probably timid and unacquainted with the world in many respects. I reasoned that such a man might conceive the idea of outwitting his enemies by hiding his stealings in the last place which would be likely to be searched—his own—and once thought of, I felt sure he would decide on it for other reasons. Because he was essentially a home body, for instance. Also, because he was not in touch with crooks, and wouldn’t wish to trust any one with his secret.
“Of course,” he admitted, “it wasn’t all reasoning—some of it was intuition, or plain hunch. His use of an electric machine, though, went far to convince me that I had the right idea. Its only advantage seemed to be its silence, and I couldn’t imagine what good silence would do him, unless he expected to hide the gold somewhere, without those in the immediate neighborhood being aware of it. The bulk of the stuff, you see, made it necessary to use a vehicle of some sort to transport it. Well, it naturally occurred to me that the person he would least desire to know anything about it was his wife.”
All the time thinking, or seeming to do so, he was keeping one eye on Cray, and thus he was able to tell that he was not going astray.
“In short,” he concluded, “the more I thought about it, the more certain I became that the chap had hidden the stuff somewhere within earshot of his own house. Of course, though, I didn’t attempt to carry the theory any further. That would have been a waste of time. Let’s hear, though, what you have discovered.”
CHAPTER XXII.
PLANS FOR THE NIGHT.
The two men had some hours to kill, for they could not expect anything to happen before midnight, at least, although they realized that it would be well to be on the scene before that.
Mrs. Simpson would in all probability retire at ten or eleven o’clock, and as Simpson could—and probably did—approach the hill from the other direction without coming through the village, he might appear sooner than they expected.
Therefore, Jack Cray did not hurry himself when the time came for him to report his findings. They walked to the end of the street and turned, heading back toward the center of the village, while Cray expressed his amazement at his companion’s reasoning.