“I suppose you know,” he said huskily, “that you’ve probably saved my life. I didn’t do as he wanted me to. I was prepared to denounce him to the police.”
“But they’d have got you, too,” she said.
“I know,” he returned. “I’d thought of that.”
“Oh, Mr. Trent!” she cried, “Oh, Mr. Trent!” Then for the second time in the years he had known her she fell into a fit of weeping.
When she was recovered and had taken a cup of strong tea she explained how it was she had tracked Kaufmann to his home. She had slipped away from Trent at the Grand Central when he was too much worried to notice it. Kaufmann walked the half dozen blocks to his rooms in the house occupied by a physician on Forty-eighth street, just west of Fifth avenue. Applying for work Mrs. Kinney was engaged instantly for two days a week. The need for respectable women was so great that no references were asked. She was thus free of the house and regarded without suspicion.
She worked there the whole day but learned nothing from the cook and waitress of Mr. Kaufmann. He rented the whole of the second floor and had a fad for keeping it in order himself. It saved them trouble. The maids said, vaguely, he was in the importing business and very wealthy.
It was while Kaufmann went down to sign for a registered letter that Mrs. Kinney slipped into the room. There was nothing in the way of papers or documents that she could see.
Because he could not bear investigation, Anthony Trent telephoned to the Department of Justice as he had done in the case of Frederick Williams. He felt certain that Kaufmann was a highly placed official. But there was no newspaper mention of the raid. Trent was not to know that no news was allowed to leak out for the reason that matters of enormous importance were discovered. He was right in assuming Kaufmann to be a personage. The mangled body was buried in the Potters’ Field and those lesser men depending on the monetary support and counsel of Kaufmann were thrown into confusion. His superiors in Germany, when later they found the Allies in possession of certain secrets, assumed their agent to be interned. Altogether Mrs. Kinney deserved her country’s thanks.
“And now shall we go back to Kennebago?”
“Not yet,” he said smiling a little gravely. “Not yet. It may be I shall never see Kennebago again.”