“My God!” cried Clement. “My God!” He felt physically sick. Gatineau had no time for sentiment. He was already running downstairs. He wanted to get to the man before the crowd.
V
Clement Seadon and Xavier Gatineau left Winnipeg by the next west-bound. Gatineau’s throat was a little sore, and Clement’s soul was more than sick at the death of the man who had played a part in his captivity in the gluemaker’s at Quebec; but apart from this they were little the worse for their experience—and little to the good either.
The lank man had fallen into a narrow yard between the houses, and his fall had not been noticed. Gatineau had got to him before anybody else. He had secured all the papers on the poor dead body, and had then seen to it that not only were the police informed, but that the matter was to be kept quiet for the present.
All they had found on the man was a number of letters making it plain that he was Louis Penible, a glue manufacturer of the Sault Algonquin, Quebec. There was also a single telegram signed A. N. bidding him travel at once to Winnipeg, where he would be met by “some one.” This telegram was sent off from North Bay. “Before we caught Joe,” said Gatineau. “It looks as though Neuburg was summoning all his forces to hand rather than anything else.”
The only other piece of paper—the piece that had cost the wretched man his life, the piece Siwash had handed him at the station—was merely a plain sheet containing the address of the rooming house where he had died, and an address, “A. N., c/o Mrs. Wandersun, Sicamous.”
“Beyond telling us that Neuburg has gone on to Sicamous—is not stopping on at Banff—it seems a small thing to have brought about a man’s death,” said Clement.
“It might have been a big thing,” said Gatineau. “It might prove to be a big thing now. Neuburg has one man less, that may be useful to us. It is useful, too, because, so far as we can see, we have the whole gang under our eyes now—two arrested, the steward and Joe, one dead and the rest at Sicamous or traveling to it. We know where we are.”
But they did not know very much. They knew nothing about the whereabouts of Heloise Reys and her evil companion; they had no inkling concerning the plot Neuburg, the master-mind, had devised—save that it was concerned with a great deal of money, and with the luring of the victim into the wilds—just as it had been in Roberts’s case.
They passed across the rolling monotony of the prairies thinking the matter out. They passed through Calgary, a vivid, gold-washed town amid foothills that seemed to cup the sunlight. They heard news of Neuburg and Gunning going on before them, but no other news.