“I know—Grover—how dumb I’ve been.”
He scribbled a name on a slip from the office desk.
Grover nodded.
“You should have seen—heard the right answer long ago.”
“I left it for the Mystery Wizard, so he could keep up his reputation,” grinned Roger.
The Tibetans walked past, identifying their presence, but went on down the street. Grover, watchful, looking out of the window, made a signal that he had noticed them, and then suggested that they all go up to the stock room.
There, in the silence, with no light except that in the monitor-panel which Roger had set up to show which entrance was used when they could expect callers, they sat around, puzzling and trying to make Grover speak, although any one of them could have been suspicious of any other, the way they talked. A light announced the arrival of a visitor, but Grover did not move. Potts, he knew, was coming; and his inference was the right one.
Potts, with a bagful of shoes, came in and dropped his find beside Grover’s chair.
“Take this chair, old fellow,” Grover was very grave and had an air of trying to make up to his handy man for Roger’s mistrust; but Roger knew that the chair moved over so casually had been most carefully set on two small disks, not charged yet—but how easily so made active agents for trapping the sitter!
“Now we must be patient,” Grover stated, arranging the nitric-acid bath, paraffin heater and other apparatus on a table. “I shall test some shoes, presently, and I expect them to verify my judgment. In the dark, though, I shall give the miscreant one chance to secure his Eye of Om before I denounce him.”