"Well, I'll be jiggered!" he muttered. "That was a girl, a young girl and a pretty one too, or I miss my guess. Anyway she has an interesting whisper. She's at that same hotel and seems to know Curlie. She must have broken in on my 1200 friend. So he's going north? Can't go any too soon for me. Mighty queer case. Have to turn it over to Curlie. It's all Greek to me."
"Hello, there! What—"
He wheeled about to snap a button. A message was being shouted out on 600.
"That's the chap Curlie's after. So he hasn't got him yet? Well, here's hoping he hurries." His pencil began rapidly writing the message.
Meanwhile Curlie in his woods retreat had moved silently over to the other side of the driveway.
"Probably will come back the other way," he concluded.
He did not remain behind the fence this time but threw himself into the shallow depths of a dry ravine. He remained keenly alert. His eyes were constantly on the road, which lay like a brown ribbon a full mile straight before him.
He was thinking of his various cases. Equal in interest to the one which he was now hunting down was that big hotel case. He was thinking of the girl. Why had she whispered those messages to him? Was she merely a tool of the man behind the powerful radio machine? Was she simply leading him on? He could not feel that she was. Somehow her whisper had an accent of genuine interest in it.
"Wonder what she's like," he asked himself. Then, with a smile playing about his lips, he tried to guess.
"Small, very active, has dark brown hair and snappy black eyes." After a moment's thought he chuckled: "Probably really a heavy blonde; something like two hundred pounds. You can't tell anything by a voice. You—"