“I certainly went off at half-cock there,” said he amiably; “and just because she was so awful nice I felt obliged to suspect her; but I’ve got the real dog that killed the sheep this time; it’s sure the real Red Wull!” It appeared that he had, of a verity, been usefully busy. He had secured the mechanic who had given Atkins a plan of the secret passages of Casa Fuerte. He had found the policeman who had arrested Tracy (he swore because he was going too fast) and the magistrate who had fined him; and not only that, he had captured the policeman, a genuine officer, not a criminal in disguise, who had been Atkins’ instrument in kidnapping Archie. This man, whom Birdsall knew how to terrify completely, had confessed that it was purely by chance that Atkins had seen the boy, left outside in the motor-car. Atkins, so he said, had pretended that the boy was a tool of some enemies of Keatcham’s, whose secretary he was, trading, not for the only time, on his past position. In reality, Birdsall had come to believe Atkins knew that Keatcham was employing Mercer in his place.
“Why, he knew the old gentleman was just off quietly with Mr. Mercer and some friends; knew they were all friendly, just as well as you or me,” declared Birdsall. He had seen Archie on the train, for, as the colonel remembered, he had been in the Winters’ car on the night of the robbery. Somehow, also, Atkins had found out about Archie’s disappearance from the hotel.
“I can’t absolutely put my finger on his information,” said Birdsall; “but I suspect Mrs. Melville Winter; I know she was talking to him, for one of my men saw her. The lady meant no harm, but she’s one of the kind that is always slamming the detectives and being took in by the rascals.”
He argued that Mrs. Winter and Miss Smith knew where the boy was; for some reason they had let him go and were pretending not to know where he was. “Ain’t that so?” the detective appealed to Aunt Rebecca, who merely smiled, saying: “You’re a wonder, Mr. Birdsall!” According to Birdsall’s theory, Atkins was puzzled by Archie’s part in the affair. But he believed could he find the boy’s present hosts he would find Edwin Keatcham. It would not be the first time Keatcham had hidden himself, the better to spin his web for the trapping of his rivals. That Mercer was with his employer the ex-secretary had no manner of doubt, any more than he doubted that Mercer’s scheme had been to oust him and to build his own fortunes on Atkins’ ruin. He knew both Tracy and young Arnold very well by sight. When he couldn’t frighten Archie into telling anything, probably he went back to his first plan of shadowing the Winter party at the Palace. He must have seen Tracy here. He penetrated his disguise. (“He’s as sharp as the devil, I tell you, Colonel.”) He either followed him himself or had him followed; and he heard about the telephone. (“Somebody harking in the next room, most likely.”) Knowing Tracy’s intimacy with Arnold it was not hard for so clever and subtle a mind as Atkins’ to jump to the conclusion and test it in the nearest telephone book. (“At least that is how I figure it out, Colonel.”) Birdsall had traced the clever mechanic who was interrogated by the Eastern gentleman about to build; this man had given the lavish and inquisitive Easterner a plan of the secret passages—to use in his own future residence. Whether Atkins went alone or in company to the Casa Fuerte the detective could only surmise. He couldn’t tell whether his object would be mere blackmail, or robbery of the cipher, or assassination. Perhaps he found the insensible man in the patio and was tempted by the grisly opportunity; victim and weapon both absolutely to his hand; for it was established that the dagger had been shown Tracy by Mercer as a curio, and left on the stone bench.
Perhaps he had not found the dagger, but had his own means to make an end of his enemy and his own terror. Birdsall believed that he had accomplices, or at least one accomplice, with him. He conceived that they had lain in ambush watching until they saw Kito go away. Then an entry had been made. “Most like,” Birdsall concluded, “he jest flung that dagger away for you folks to find and suspect the domestics, say Kito, ’cause he was away.” But this was not all that Birdsall had to report. He had traced Atkins to the haunts of certain unsavory Italians; he had struck the trail, in fine. To be sure, it ran underground and was lost in the brick-walled and slimy-timbered cellars of Chinatown which harbored every sin and crime known to civilization or to savagery. What matter? By grace of his aunt’s powerful friend they could track the wolves even through those noisome burrows.
“Yes,” sighed the colonel, stretching out his arms, with a resonant breath of relief, “we’re out of the maze; all we have to do now is to keep from being killed. Which isn’t such a plain proposition in ’Frisco as in Massachusetts! But I reckon we can tackle it! And then—then, my darling, I shall dare be happy!”
He found himself leaning on his window-sill and staring like a boy on the landscape, lost in the lovely hallucinations of moonlight. It was no scene that he knew, it was a vision of old Spain; and by and by from yonder turret the princess, with violets in her loosened hair and her soft cheek like satin and snow, would lean and look.
Y si te mueve á lastima mi eterno padecer.
Como te amo, amame, bellissima mujer!
“Ah, no, little girl,” he muttered with a shake of the head, “I like it better to have you a plain, American gentlewoman, as Aunt Becky would say, who could send me to battle with a nice little quivery smile—sweetheart! Oh, I’m not good enough for you, my dear, my dear.” He felt an immense humility as he contrasted his own lot with the loneliness of Keatcham and Mercer and the multitude of solitaries in the world, who had lost, or sadder still, had never possessed, the divine dream that is the only reality of the soul. As such thoughts moved his heart, suddenly in the full tide of hope and thankfulness, it stood still, chilled, as if by the glimpse of an iceberg in summer seas. Yet how absurd; it was only that he had recalled his stoical aunt’s most unexpected touch of superstition. Quite in jest he had asked her if she felt any presentiments or queer things in her bones to-night. He expected to be answered that Janet had driven every other anxiety out of her mind; and how was she to break it to Millicent?—or with some such caustic repartee. Instead, she had replied testily: “Yes, I do, Bertie. I feel—horrid! I feel as if something out of the common awful were going to happen. It isn’t exactly Atkins, either. Do you reckon it could be the I Suey When, that bamboo-shoots mess we had for dinner?”