Montague caught his breath. “Papers out of my scrap basket!” he gasped.
“Yes, sir,” said the woman. “It is done now and then, sir,—we learn of such things, you know. And we are poor women,—they don't pay us very well. But you are a gentleman, sir, and I told him I would have nothing to do with it.”
“What sort of a looking man was he?” Montague demanded.
“He was a dark chap, sir,” said the other, “a sort of Jew like. He will maybe come back again.”
Montague took out his purse and gave the woman a bill; and she stammered her thanks and went off with her pail and broom.
He shut the door and went and sat down at his desk, and stared in front of him, gasping, “My God!”
Then suddenly he struck his knee with an exclamation of rage. “I told him everything that I knew! Everything! He hardly had to ask me a question!”
But then again, wonder drowned every other emotion in him. “What in the world can he have wanted to know? And who sent him? What can it mean?”
He went back over his talk with the old gentleman from Seattle, trying to recall exactly what he had told, and what use the other could have made of the information. But he could not think very steadily, for his mind kept jumping back to the thought of Jim Hegan.
There could be but one explanation of all this. Jim Hegan had set detectives upon him! Nobody else knew anything about the Northern Mississippi Railroad, or wanted to know about it.