“I’ll bet you do,” muttered the detective.
Here the colonel came to the boy’s relief a second time and drew Birdsall aside. “Best let me pump the chap a little. You get down-stairs and see how he got here, who brought him. They’ll get clean away. It is late for that as it is. You can report to-morrow.”
It was the colonel, also, who eliminated Mrs. Millicent by the masterly stratagem of suggesting that she pass the news to Mrs. Wigglesworth. He artfully added that it would require tact to let the lady from Boston understand that the lad had been found without in any way gratifying her natural curiosity in regard to the manner of finding or the cause of disappearance. “I’ll have to leave that to you,” he concluded. “Maybe you can see a way out; I confess my hands are in the air.”
Millicent thus relegated to the ambassador’s shelf, the colonel slipped comfortably into his pet arm-chair facing his nephew on the lounge between Aunt Rebecca and Miss Smith. Miss Smith looked frankly, charmingly happy. Aunt Rebecca looked rather tired.
“Of course,” remarked he, “I understand, old man, that you have promised secrecy to—well, to the Fireless Stove gang, as we’ll call them; but the other kidnappers, the crowd that held up your car and then switched you off on a side track while young Fireless was detained—they haven’t any hold on you?”
“No, sir,” said Archie; “but—you see, that strange gentleman and Aunt Millicent—I was scared lest I’d give something away.”
“They’re not here now. All friends here. Suppose you make a clean breast of your second kidnapping. It may be important you should.”
Nothing loath, Archie told his story. Left outside while Tracy went into the office with a policeman, to whom he gave his assumed name, he remained for hardly two minutes before a gentleman and a “cop” came up to him, and the latter ordered him to descend from the machine—but not until they had found it impossible to move the vehicle. When they did discover that the key was out and gone, the man in citizen’s clothes hailed a cab and the officer curtly informed Archie that Gardiner (Tracy’s traveling name) had been taken to another court and he was to follow. He didn’t suspect anything beyond a collision with the speed regulations of the city, but had he seen a chance to dive under his escort’s arm the boy would have taken it. Such chance was not afforded him, and all he was able to do was to lean out suddenly as they passed the Palace and to wave at Randall. “I wanted them to stop and let me get some one to pay my fine,” said Archie, “but they said I was only a witness. They wouldn’t let me stop; they run down the curtain—at least so far as it would run. It was like all those hack curtains, you know—all out of order.”
“Archie,” the colonel interjected here, “was one of the men a little fellow, clean-shaven, with a round black head, blue eyes—one of his eyes winks a little faster than the other?”
“Yes, sir. How did you know?”