“Atkins,” said the colonel concisely.
Tracy whistled and apologized. “It’s a blow,” he confessed. “That little wretch! He has brains to burn and not an ounce of conscience. You know he has been mousing round at the hotels after Keatcham’s mail—”
“He didn’t get it?”
“No, Cary had covered that point. Cary has thought this all out very carefully, but Atkins has got on to the fact that Cary was here in this hotel with Keatcham. But he doesn’t know where we come in; whether Keatcham’s gang is just lying low for some game of its own, or whether we’ve got him. At least, I don’t believe he knows.”
“You ought not to be talking so freely to me; I haven’t promised you anything, you know,” warned the colonel.
“But you’ve got your nephew back all right; we have been on the square with you; why should you butt in? I know you won’t.”
“I don’t seem to have a fair call to,” observed the colonel.
“And I think the old boy is going to give in; he has made signals of distress, to my thinking. Wanted his mail; and wanted to write; and informed Cary—he saw him for the first time to-day—that he had bigger things on deck than the Midland; and wanted to get at them. We’re going to win out all right.”
“Unless Atkins gets at him to-night,” the colonel suggested. “You oughtn’t to have come here, Gardiner. Don’t go home, now. Wait until later, and let me rig you up in another lot of togs and give you my own motor-car. Better.”
Tracy was more than impressed by the proposal; he was plainly grateful. He entered with enthusiasm into the soldier’s masquerade—Tracy had always had a weakness for theatricals and some of his Hasty Pudding Portraits of Unknown People We Know had won him fame at Cambridge. Ten minutes later, there sat opposite the colonel a florid-faced, mustached, western commercial traveler whose plaided tweeds, being an ill-advised venture of Haley’s which the colonel had taken off his hands and found no subject of charity quite obnoxious enough to deserve them, naturally did not fit the present wearer, but suited his inane complacence of bearing and might pass for a bad case of ready-made purchase.