"What's the idea, Chief?" inquired Al.
"This young lady—at least her voice sounded young over the phone—says that she got home late from a party last night. She couldn't sleep because she was all jazzed up from dancing or something, so she sat near her window, which looks out upon a vacant lot on the corner. Along about two o'clock a taxicab came putt-putting up the street, stopped at the corner, and two men carrying black bags hopped out. The taxicab remained there until nearly four o'clock—three-forty-eight, Miss Norton's watch said—and then the two men came back, without the bags, jumped in, and rolled off. That's all she knows, or, at least, all she told.
"When she picked up the paper round eleven o'clock this mornin' the first thing that caught her eye was the attempt to blow up the powder plant 'bout two miles from the Norton home. One paragraph of the story stated that fragments of a black bag had been picked up near the scene of the explosion, which only wrecked one of the outhouses, and the young lady leaped to the conclusion that her two night-owls were mixed up in the affair. So she called up to tip us off and get her name in history. Better run over and talk to her. There might be something to the information, after all."
"Yes, there might," muttered Whitney, "but it's getting so nowadays that if you walk down the street with a purple tie on, when some one thinks you ought to be wearing a green one, they want you arrested as a spy. Confound these amateurs, anyhow! I'm a married man, Chief. Why don't you send Giles or one of the bachelors on this?"
"For just that reason," was the reply. "Giles or one of the others would probably be impressed by the Norton's girl's blond hair—it must be blond from the way she talked—and spend entirely too much time running the whole thing to earth. Go on over and get back as soon as you can. We can't afford to overlook anything these days—neither can we afford to waste too much time on harvesting crops of goat feathers. Beat it!"
And Whitney, still protesting, made his way to the tube and was lucky enough to catch a Trenton train just about to pull out of the station.
Miss Vera Norton, he found, was a blond—and an extremely pretty one, at that. Moreover, she appeared to have more sense than the chief had given her credit for. After Whitney had talked to her for a few minutes he admitted to himself that it was just as well that Giles hadn't tackled the case—he might never have come back to New York, and Trenton isn't a big enough place for a Secret Service man to hide in safety, even when lured by a pair of extremely attractive gray-blue eyes.
Apart from her physical charms, however, Whitney was forced to the conclusion that what she had seen was too sketchy to form anything that could be termed a real clue.
"No," she stated, in reply to a question as to whether she could identify the men in the taxi, "it was too dark and too far off for me to do that. The arc light on the corner, however, gave me the impression that they were of medium height and rather thick set. Both of them were dressed in dark suits of some kind and each carried a black leather bag. That's what made me think that maybe they were mixed up in that explosion last night."
"What kind of bags were they?"