The boy trembled as he spoke. Ferris laughed contemptuously. "Here, in New York!"
The stubborn boy answered: "Look a-here! I'm only a poor working boy! There's twenty squares within a half mile where a man's life isn't safe if he flashes a ten-dollar bill. Clayton was followed, and done up for fair. An' the gang an' the swag are hundreds of miles away! That's how!"
"But where would they hide him?" answered Ferris, shivering at the boy's matter-of-fact coldness.
"RIVER!" emphatically said Emil. "Five to six hundred floaters picked up every year. Nobody knows; nobody cares!
"Now," sagely concluded Emil, "if Clayton could have been led off, then it's dead easy; but he started straight for the bank, and never got there. The gang may have piped him off for months, and they worked on him, right here in the heart of town."
"Keep your mouth shut. Post me, on the quiet," said Ferris, as he remembered his telegrams. When Emil Einstein was left alone, he calmly counted his bills.
"Pretty good throw-off," he murmured. "I must lie low, for the mother's sake. And—give her a wide berth. It's getting pretty warm. This fellow's a chump; but the detectives, there's another breed of rats!" The boy shivered as he thought of the gleaming handcuffs.
Arthur Ferris had now recovered from the first shock of the tidings from the West enough to look ahead for the piloting of his own interests. He smiled grimly. "Business before pleasure!" as he sent off at the Twenty-third Street general office the tidings which enabled Senator Durham to turn a cool hundred thousand. "He'll be down here to-morrow to watch over his stocks! I must wait and see him before I go West. Besides, I must see Witherspoon and give him his cue. He knows nothing! He searched the Detroit title and never even made a kick. His firm passed on the whole matter. I need him to carry out my future plans."
It seemed to Ferris that his long dispatch to "Miss Alice Worthington" betrayed too much connubial tenderness. He recast it, and, after stating that he would leave for Pasco within twenty-four hours, added:
"Open and read all dispatches sent on to your father from Tacoma. The company's affairs are paralyzed here. I am in sole control. Randall Clayton has absconded with a quarter of a million. Missing since Saturday. Police at work. Telegraph your hotel address. I will report by wire to-morrow several times. Will be guided by your telegrams. Am acting under your father's letter of instructions. Secure all his private papers in case of grave results of injury."