"Dunder und blitzen! now mebbe you kills me, Mr. Hook. I swear it vos not my fault."
"Not your fault! Have you lost your prisoner—but that is impossible! Speak, you Dutch scoundrel! Where is the boy I gave into your charge?"
"Gone, Mr. Hook! Disappeared unter mein very nose. I take not mein eyes from him, und I looks for him und he ish not dere. I tink dere's some devil vork mit dis, by shiminy, I do!"
A moment later, and Detective Hook, with the frightened German by his side, stood beneath the high wall skirting Trinity church-yard on the New Church street side, at the spot where Frank Mansfield had so strangely disappeared.
Twice over had the wretched Schneider told his tale, without rendering matters in the least more clear.
If he told the truth—and he related the facts so circumstantially that there could be no doubt of that—there was absolutely no explanation to be had.
There was the dead wall upon one side broken only by the iron doors, leading to the vaults beneath the bank, which had not been opened, perhaps in a century, filled with the moldering bones of the long-forgotten dead, and the structure of the elevated railroad upon the other, with the dark outlines of the building upon the opposite side of the street rising just beyond.
That the boy could have crossed the street was a simple impossibility.
Not a trace of human foot was visible in the freshly fallen snow.
Upon the sidewalk beneath the wall the detective had no difficulty in tracing his footsteps.