Trent sipped his coffee gratefully.
“What’s strange about that?” he demanded.
“I don’t see,” Mrs. Kinney went on, “what a gentleman like this Mr. Williams seems to have been——”
Anthony Trent put down his cup.
“What’s his other name?” he inquired.
“Frederick,” said the interested Mrs. Kinney. “Frederick Williams, a Holland Dutch gentleman living in Ninety-third Street near the Drive. He aided the Red Cross and bought Liberty Bonds. What I want to know is why he went to a low place like the Shipwrights Hotel to see a man named O’Sheill from Liverpool, England?”
“A double murder?” he demanded.
“Here it is,” she returned, and showed him the paper. The two men had been found dead, the report ran, under mysterious circumstances, but the police thought a solution would quickly be found. Anthony Trent smiled as he read of official optimism. He was inclined to doubt it.
When Mrs. Kinney was out shopping he read through the documents he had taken from O’Sheill. They seemed to him to be of prime importance. There was a list of American Sinn Feiners implicating men in high positions, men against whom so far nothing detrimental was known. Outlines of plots were made bare to embroil and antagonize Britain and the United States—allies in the great cause—and all that subtle propaganda which had nothing to do with the betterment of prosperous Ireland but everything to do with Prussian aggrandizement. It was a poisonous collection of documents.
The chief of the Department of Justice in New York was called up from a public station and informed that a messenger was on his way with very important papers. The chief was warned to make immediate search of the premises at Ninety-third Street where a highly important German spy might be captured.