I quickly recovered from the amazement which had momentarily possessed me. I had no doubt, hearing the mysterious voice on the telephone, that at last I had hit on something of a clue to the mystery of the Martian hoax. The voice, faintly familiar, had stirred up my recollections, and had established at once in my mind a positive suspect. Why this individual had not entered into my suspicions before is just one of those things that can't be explained. There was every chance now that he was mixed up in this. If so, I was convinced we were reaching the climax of the case.
"Well," I said, finally, turning to McGinity, "I think the stage is being set for the last interesting act of this affair."
He smiled a little dubiously. "Don't make me laugh, Mr. Royce," he said.
Having made an important discovery, I thought McGinity ought to know, so I told him briefly what had been said on the telephone, and my suspicions. He was silent for a moment, then he said: "Why didn't you think of this person before?"
It was on the tip of my tongue to reply: "Too stupid;" but I refrained from showing up my asinine denseness. Instead, I said: "The first thing to think of now is to trace that phone call."
"That'll be dead easy if the speaker used one of those old-time manual phones," he said; "but if the call was made on a dial instrument, there's no way of tracing it. You're sunk!"
A few minutes' conversation with the information operator proved the reporter's contentions to be true; I was "sunk." But not entirely.
"McGinity!" I exclaimed, "I must go to this place at once, and you must go with me. I'll lay anything I'm on the right track. I have a feeling too that every minute may be of importance."
To my surprise, the reporter hesitated. "Are you sure you recognized the woman who phoned by her voice?" he asked. "You may be mistaken, and with break number five liable to come any minute now, we can't afford to go off on some wild goose chase."
"Dead certain," I affirmed. "I'll stake all I've got on it. However, if you're so sure of number five breaking, we can stop at the Sands Cliff Police Station on our way, and you can notify them where we can be found."