He was meditating on his next step, when Birdsall was announced below. The detective looked as warm and as tired as the colonel had felt an hour before. Rupert was not eager to see him, but neither was he anxious for the tête-à-tête with Millicent which awaited him in the parlor. Between the two he chose Birdsall.
“Well,” he greeted him, “did you find any trace of the boy?”
“Of course I did,” growled Birdsall. “They didn’t try to hide ’im. They had him lodged in a dandy room with his own bath. Of course, he left his tooth-brush. They’d got him some automobile togs, too, and he’d left some leggings when he packed, and a letter begun on a pad to Miss Smith—‘Dear Miss Janet,’ it begins, ‘I am having a bully time. I can steer the machine, only I can’t back’—that’s all. Say, the young dog has been having it fat while we were in the frying-pan for fear somebody was bothering him.”
“But he is not in the house now?”
“No, nor nothing else.”
“Nobody hidden away? Where did the groans you heard come from?” queried the colonel politely.
Birdsall flushed. “I do believe that slick deceiver you call Mercer put up a game on us out of meanness—just to git me guessing.”
“That sort of thing looks more like the college boys.”
“Say, it might have been. This thing is giving me nervous prostration. Say, why didn’t you see the thing out with me?”
The colonel shamelessly told the truth to deceive. “I was called here. I was told that Mrs. Winter, my aunt, had seen Archie in the street.”