If only, Roger thought, as he made wide-angle and micro-lens exposures, if only Tip, excited, had not fumbled that switch!
Had he gotten the lights on a few seconds sooner, they might have seen what was going on, or could have seen the departing figure. If someone had been set to watch down cellar! If——!
No use bewailing the past. No use wishing the past could be altered. Doctor Ryder was evidently a prisoner. His gem—the Tibetan jewel, was gone. The Voice of Doom had spoken, but it had apparently turned out to be some person known to the doctor, whom he had recognized, and had identified for them.
Tip came dashing back. The car had been taken. Later a policeman returned the abandoned vehicle, and Tip had more photographs to make of its wheel, door-grips, seats, pedals.
Tracks in the soft smeared stuff with which Grover had made such clues possible, they found in plenty from coal pile upstairs and straight to the safe, and, less defined, returning cellarward.
Only one set! Great, over-size tracks. Defeat again, as Roger realized. Someone had worn huge boots! The shoe-size was unguessable from those elephantine clues.
Gloves, as well as boots, left them no usable evidences.
Roger, turning over to Tip the final stages of his work, went to Grover, who sat in the screening room, as dawn broke, and brooded. It seemed to Roger that his clever cousin, so often hoodwinked and made cheap by some seemingly more astute operator, was discouraged and certainly baffled.
“Don’t lose heart,” Roger urged, “we’ll get everything to come out right. All you need is one tiny hint of the truth.”
“I must have a dozen,” groaned his cousin. “What good are they? My wits seem to be fogged.” He looked disheartened. “I can’t get my old sense of proportion. Everything seems crazy and impossible. You can’t enter an electrically sealed room! You can’t open a safe protected by water-jets and high voltage streams. You can’t take camera pictures of animals jumping around where no animals are visible to the eye!”