"Physician's name, William Atwater, M.D. Mail and telegrams he gets at down-town office, your company's lawyers. And he spends all his time running around at nights with Atwater or locked up with old Stillwell in his den down town.
"It's a poor harvest, Dennis," gruffly said Ferris.
"That's all there's in it," stolidly said the man. "Shall I keep up the watch?"
"Yes, as usual," sadly replied Ferris, as he sped up Broadway to the Fifth Avenue. The policeman snorted his contempt, when Ferris had turned the corner.
"A beggarly fifty! By God! I'll hold the boy down. Somewhere in that funny little joint of a drug-store the secret lies. In a couple of weeks I can begin work on Timmins; but the office boy, Einstein, waited personally on Clayton! When his fear wears off, I'll trap him. He is spending money too freely. Where does that come from?"
As McNerney wandered on, he was as ignorant of Einstein's continued milking of Ferris' purse, as Ferris was of Jack Witherspoon's treasured clues and as all the knowing ones were of Arthur Ferris' crafty course in robbing Randall Clayton's desk of the tell-tale dispatches.
Einstein's greedy fingers were now always in Ferris' purse, for well the Jewish boy knew that Ferris feared to disclose the theft of the private papers. And so he filled the schemer's ears with unmeaning babble about Randall Clayton's night life in New York.
"In the dark! In the dark!" muttered Ferris, as he threw himself down on his bed. "Did Clayton ever start for Bay Ridge? Did he hide the money and flee to Europe? Did he go West to meet Worthington?"
A wild idea came to him that the bank employees might have stolen the money, lured Clayton into some Bowery or Fourth Avenue dive, some room on Eighth Street, and then stolen the tell-tale bank-book. "What would not any man do for a quarter of a million?" groaned Ferris in despair.
And all these long days, while the New York community was daily forgetting the flight of Clayton, the theft, and the dead millionaire to whom all the worshippers of the Golden Calf had bowed, the "Mesopotamia" was slowly nearing Stettin, now breasting the North Sea surges.