Chapter VII · NEW DEVELOPMENTS.

Grail stared at the girl in bewilderment as she repeated: “Yes, the happiest girl in the world. For if I thought you were responsible for his disappearance, as they say, I should know that no harm could possibly have befallen him. It is because I am certain of your innocence that I am apprehensive; and it is because I know you must be moving heaven and earth in the effort to find him that I have come to ask you what you have discovered. What faith can I put in Major Appleby’s promises”—she gave a deprecating gesture—“when I see how he is bungling things? But, surely, you can tell me whether or not there is any real ground for hope?”

A great flash of joy and wonder lighted Grail’s face. “Meredith,” he cried huskily, “I never expected to feel so proud in all my life! You don’t know what your trust and confidence mean to me!”

Then, afraid that if he said more, he might say too much, he placed a chair for her and drew up one for himself.

“More than that,” he went on, “I am going to prove to you that your faith is not misplaced. Take my word for it, your father shall be restored to you within a very short time; before to-morrow morning, unless I am very much mistaken.”

Never yet, in their long acquaintance, had Grail failed to make good a promise to her, and his assurance now brought a sigh of genuine relief to her lips and a smile to her pale, anxious face.

“Ah!” she exclaimed. “You mean that the running down of these Japanese spies must result in disclosing father’s whereabouts?”

“Japanese spies!” His lips curled contemptuously. “They exist only in the imagination of Appleby and Hemingway.”

“Precisely what I thought, too, when the major told me,” she said. “I know, of course, that all the foreign nations keep secret agents hanging around our forts and army posts, just as we do around theirs; but that any of these men would go to such lengths struck me, on the face of it, as ridiculous.”

“There you are wrong,” Grail returned. “Ordinarily, I grant, you would be right; but the colonel’s present series of experiments being concerned with a new and surprising development in the use of the wireless in warfare, has stirred these fellows up to a pitch where they have been ready to dare almost anything. Besides, the chap who, I am convinced, engineered this deal——” He caught himself just as he was on the verge of revealing to her the point which had caused him most concern in the affair.

Dexterously he extricated himself from the situation by knocking a book from the desk with his elbow and stooping over to regain it.

“As I was about to say,” he resumed, “the chap who engineered this deal was not a Japanese, but of a nation which furnishes spies of an even more bold and subtle character.”

He drew from his pocket the half-smoked cigarette which formed his principal clew.

“Are you sufficiently versed in such things to tell me of what make this is?” he asked.

“Russian,” she replied, without a moment’s hesitation. “The little countess we used to know in Washington, you remember, smoked cigarettes exactly like that.”

“Exactly,” he said, “and the man for whom we have got to look in this case is a Russian.”

A thoughtful look came into Meredith’s eyes. “Dad was in Russia once, on secret-service business himself,” she said; “and although they would never tell me about it, mother confessed to me on one occasion that for a long time she had been fearful of an attempt at revenge upon him, for something that happened while he was on the mission. You don’t suppose, do you, that this could in any way be an outcome of that old affair?”

“Absurd!” he answered. “Why, it was almost twenty years ago that your father was over there. If there was anything coming to him on that score, I fancy he would have been called to account long before this.”

Then, he deftly turned the subject to a discussion of the facts from which he had built up the hypothesis he was following.

“I had been on the lookout for a Russian spy, you see,” he explained, “for I had been tipped off by Sasaku, one of the dining-room boys, who is rather attached to me, that a fellow he had once seen chased out of Tokyo was here in Brantford, showing considerable interest in doings at the fort. Accordingly, I framed it up with Sasaku to get in with the chap, on the plea of being a ‘gumshoe man’ himself, desirous of working to mutual advantage, and gave him yesterday a bundle of fake papers to fool the other with, and get him to divulge his name and his business.

“That,” he added disdainfully, “is the sole basis for the ‘Japanese spy’ story you have heard. And, by the way”—he glanced with a frown at his watch—“I ought to have heard from Sasaku before this. He promised to send me a communication at the very first opportunity.”

“But where does the cigarette come in?” Meredith asked, a trifle impatiently.

“The cigarette? Oh, that was the connecting link. It is really the corner stone to my entire theory; for although I very quickly decided that the gumshoe artists were at the bottom of the job, I was, at first, rather inclined to suspect Otto Schilder as the moving spirit. It seemed pretty crude work for one of the kaiser’s men, I will admit; but there was no one else handy to lay it to, and as a German he was, of course, open to question. The discovery of the cigarette outside the office door, however, cleared things up amazingly. I recollected a glint of light I had seen flash across the doorway when the current was cut off, and, by putting two and two together, it didn’t take me long to figure out just about what had happened. The telltale spark I saw traversed the aperture of the doorway from top to bottom; consequently, the cigarette must have fallen or been dropped from above. Had the smoker been on the roof, then? And was it possible that the colonel, seized and muffled as he stood on the threshold, had been hauled up there by a rope? An electric crane, though, with its long arm sweeping silently over the yard, and lifting scrap iron across the fence to be loaded on cars outside, gave me a more plausible idea.”

“But if you knew so much,” Meredith interrupted, “why did you not at once denounce these men?”

“With what proof?” asked Grail. “Remember, some little time had elapsed before I got this theory, and to identify the guilty men in that large force of laborers would then have been practically impossible. Besides, all the evidence I had to present was this cigarette butt; and, although it was perfectly plain to me that it had been tossed away by one of the men in the basket of the crane just before grabbing the colonel, I might have had difficulty in getting others to see it in the same light. No, no! To have shown my hand at that stage would have been simply to tip all the fat into the fire.”

“But what of father?” exclaimed Miss Verdant sharply. “Is no effort being made to find him, or learn what has become of him?”

“Assuredly,” Grail hastened to appease her. “That is, of course, the object to which everything else must be subservient. Trust me, Meredith. Take my word for it that your father is safe and sound, and will be with you by this time to-morrow night.”

“Is that ‘orders’?” she asked, in playful allusion to an old joke between them, although her lip quivered as she tried to smile.

“That’s ‘orders,’” assented Ormsby firmly, “and I want you to be enough of a soldier’s daughter to obey them. You are all broken up by this thing, and worn out by your trip, as well. What you’ve got to do now is to take some rest, and quit worrying. Come! I’ll take you over to Major Appleby’s house. I suppose you are stopping there?”

“No,” she explained. “I am to be with Mrs. Schilder, I believe.”

Grail looked up sharply, and seemed on the point of saying something, but reconsidered the impulse.

“You don’t need to tell me to trust you, captain.” She extended her hand. “Indeed, if it were not for my reliance on you, I don’t know what I should do.”

The adjutant, choking back words that rose tumultuously to his lips, escorted her to the door; then paused, with an involuntary exclamation, to stare at the group of officers gathered about Mrs. Schilder’s car, excitedly discussing an evening paper which one of them had just brought in.

Its flaring black headlines were plainly discernible to Grail, and in a flash he read that his little Japanese friend and ally, Sasaku, had been murdered in the city.

TO BE CONTINUED.