CHIEF MERN’S interview with his two operatives the next forenoon did not yield the solid facts he was after. They disputed each other. Miss Elsham insisted that she had had Latisan on the run and claimed that his apparent involvement with Miss Kennard was merely a silly and fleeting flirtation with one whom he supposed was a table girl in a tavern.

“You gave me his character, all written out,” insisted Miss Elsham. “He’s that kind. He didn’t dare to presume with me as he would with a girl in a dining room; but I was getting along all right till Crowley butted in.” She turned spitefully on that monopolizer and meddler. “And now don’t stand there and say again that you claim the credit. I’ll slap your face!”

Miss Elsham lied so strenuously that she was convincing.

Crowley, trying hard to tell the truth for once, stammered and stumbled over the amazing details of the lovemaking between Latisan and Miss Kennard. The chief found the really veracious recital beyond belief.

“She wouldn’t offer to marry him, standing there in public,” stormed Mern. “I know Kennard. She isn’t that sort. I’ll go to the bottom of this thing, even if it means a trip for me to that God-forsaken tank town. I’d give a thousand dollars to see Lida Kennard walk in through that door. I was never so worried about anything in all my life,” he lamented. “Crowley, you deserted the most valuable person I have ever had in my office—and God knows what has happened to her.” He sent them away.

“What does it get anybody to tell the truth?” grumbled Crowley.

“Nothing, when it sounds so ridiculous as the truth in this case,” averred Miss Elsham. “Everybody seems to go crazy up in the tall timbers. Give me the tall buildings for mine after this.”

In high good humor Rufus Craig appeared to Mern that afternoon a little before three o’clock. He sat down, pulled out the slide leaf of Mern’s desk, and produced a check book. “No need my seeing Exhibit A before settling. Tell me the expense account. I’ll include everything in one check.”

With pen poised, waiting until the figures were brought in, the Comas man expressed his satisfaction. “There were three on the job, so I was told in Adonia when I came through. That’s all right, Mern. I expected you to use your own judgment. I didn’t have much time in Adonia—grabbed what information I could while waiting for the train to start—but it’s a sure bet that Latisan is off for good. From what I heard it was your Miss Jones who really put it over—gave Latisan what they call up there the Big Laugh. Now who the blazes is this Miss Jones?”

“An operative of ours,” the chief replied, with repression of enthusiasm decidedly in contrast with Craig’s indorsement of her. Mern did not dare to be other than vague, leaving Lida Kennard’s identity concealed until he could understand something about the inside affairs in his agency. The reflection that he was still in the dark—could not talk out to a client as a detective should—was stirring his sour indignation more and more.

“I’d like to meet her,” urged the director. “She must be a wonder. A great actress, I should judge, from what I was told in Adonia.”

“She’s having her vacation just now.”

“Look here, Mern! I’m going to stick a couple of hundred more onto this check. Send it along to her and tell her to have an extra week or a new dress at my expense. I’ve made a side-line clean-up on the Tomah this season and money is easy with me.” That was as explicit as Craig cared to be in regard to the deal with the Walpole heir. Still poising his pen, the director turned expectant gaze on the door when the knob was turned; a flurried, fat girl whose manner showed that she was new to the place had received Mern’s orders about the figures; now she came bringing them.

Craig frowned while he wrote the check after the girl had retired.

He was a bit pettish when he snapped his check book shut. “Say, Mern, I always like to see that Kennard girl when I come into your office. I like her looks. I like the way she puts out her hand to a man.”

“I’m sorry she isn’t here. But she’s—she’s out—sick.”

“Good gad! I hope it’s nothing serious.” Craig showed real concern.

“Oh no! Just a—a rather severe cold.” The chief was having hard work to conceal his mental state—being obliged to lie that way, like a fool, in order to hide the mystery in his own office!

“Give me her street number. I’ll send up a bunch of flowers.”

“She is out with some friends in the country to get clean air. I don’t know the address.”

Mern perceived that more questions were coming. Craig was frankly revealing his interest in Miss Kennard.

The chief pulled out his watch; he had a good excuse for changing an embarrassing subject. “Latisan is about due. Of course, you don’t want to be seen. I’ll post you in one of the side consulting rooms.”

“It seems rather silly, this spying,” remonstrated Craig. “I’m taking your word about Latisan. I’m getting ready to start north, and have a lot of matters to look after.”

“Humor my notion,” urged the chief. “He has been tamed down and I want you to see him. You’ll understand why I believe I can keep him hanging around here till you have nailed things to the cross up-country.”

Craig showed no alacrity, but he allowed Mern to lead him to a small room that was separated from the main office by a ground-glass partition; there was a peephole at one corner of a panel. The director promised to wait there until the interview with Latisan was over. The chief said he would make it short.

Latisan walked in exactly on the stroke of three; after he came up in the elevator he had waited in the corridor, humbly obedient to Mern’s directions as to the hour.

“Nothing doing in that matter to-day, Latisan,” stated the chief, affecting to be busily engaged with papers on his desk. “Try me to-morrow, same time.”

“Very well, sir,” agreed the young man, somberly. In prospect, another twenty-four hours filled with lagging minutes! He had grown to know the hideous torture of such hours in the case of a man who before-time had found the days too short for his needs.

“By the way,” said Mern, still hanging grimly to the desire to find out more about what the matter was with the office’s internal affairs, “did anybody tell you that Miss Jones had returned to New York?”

“I wired to Brophy a few days ago. He said she had come back here, according to what he knew of her movements.”

“You fell in love with her, didn’t you?” The chief’s tone was crisp with the vigor of third-degree abruptness.

“Yes,” admitted Latisan, showing no resentment; he had promulgated that fact widely enough in the north.

“Just why did she urge you so strongly to go back to the drive?” The young man’s meekness had drawn the overeager chief along to an incautious question.

“You ought to know better than I, sir. I take it that she was obeying your orders about how to work the trick on me, though it isn’t clear in my mind as yet; but I’m not a detective.”

“Did she promise to marry you as soon as the Flagg drive was down?” Still Mern was boldly taking advantage of the young man’s docility.“That’s true. I must admit it because it was said in public.”

Mern scratched his ear. The thing was clearing somewhat in Crowley’s direction; the blunderer had not lied on one point at least—the point that Mern found most blindly puzzling. What in the mischief had happened to the nature of Lida Kennard, as Mern knew that nature, so he thought!

“You remember Operative Crowley, do you?”

“Naturally.”

“Are you holding an especial grudge against him?”

“I don’t know why I should, sir. It’s a dirty business he’s in, but he gave me that letter which I turned over to you yesterday, and for some reason he exposed the trick that was being put upon me by the girl. If I can get at the bottom of the thing, for my own peace of mind, I’ll be glad.”

Chief Mern sympathized with that sentiment!

Then he took a little time for reflection. Perhaps a meeting between Latisan and Crowley might strike a few sparks to illuminate a situation that was very much in the dark.

“If Crowley is around the office I’m going to ask him to step in here. The talk will be all friendly, I take it?”

“I have nothing against Crowley, as matters stand.”

Latisan did not greet Crowley when the operative replied to the summons and walked into the private office; on the other hand, Latisan showed no animosity. He merely surveyed Crowley with an expression of mingled pity and wonderment, as if he were sorry for an able-bodied man who earned a living by the means which the operative employed.Crowley, at first, was not as serene as the man whom he had injured.

“Latisan tells me that he holds no grudge,” stated Mern, encouragingly.

“I’m glad of that, Latisan. We have to play the game in this business. And I’m not laying it up against you, how you made a monkey of me in that dining room and nigh twisted my head off. Both of us know now who it was that rubbed our ears and sicked us at each other.”

The victim of the operations nodded, no especial emotion visible in his countenance.

“Right here between us three I’ll come out all frank and free,” continued Crowley. “I’m making a claim to the chief in this thing, Latisan, and I believe you’ll back me up. She jumped in on me and Elsham—one day later from the agency than we were—and she wouldn’t talk to me, and I’ll admit I didn’t have her play sized from the start. But she wasn’t the one that turned the trick.” Mr. Crowley was venturing rather far with the victim, but he was encouraged by Latisan’s continued mildness and by a firm determination to set himself right with Mern, who had been doubting his efficiency.

“As I have been looking at it, she was the one who did it,” insisted the young man.

“Now see here! Wake up!” Crowley was blustering as he grew bolder. “You were letting the girl wind you around her finger. What woke you up? What made you sore on the whole proposition up there? It was my tip to you! You can’t deny it.”

“Yes, it might have been your tip,” admitted Latisan, knotting his brows, staring at the floor, confused in his memories and puzzling over the mystery. “I had promised to bring down the logs because she asked me to keep on and do it.”

“There you have it!” indorsed Crowley, swinging his arm and flattening his thick palm in front of the chief. “I claim the credit.”

Crowley had become defiantly intrepid, facing that manner of man who was so manifestly cowed and muddled. The operative was back in his encouraging environment of the city; he remembered the thrust of those prongs of fingers on his head when he was obliged to dissemble and was shamed in the north country. He was holding his grudge. And he was assiduously backing up the claims he had made to his chief. “The girl you’re talking about had nothing to do with pulling you off the job. She was double-crossing our agency.”

“Think so?” queried Latisan.

“I know it. But I don’t know what fool notion got into her up there. I have told Mr. Mern all about it. I’m the boy who woke you up!”

“Do you agree, Latisan?” asked Mern, brusquely.

“I’m not thinking clearly, sir. But if this man is right, I ought to apologize to her.”

“She is no longer employed by us, but we’ll try to locate her.” Mern was willing to come out in front of Crowley with that information; the situation did seem to have cleared up! “Hang around town. Come in again.”

Latisan dragged himself up from his chair.

Then Crowley of the single-track mind—bull-headed blunderer—went on to his undoing. “I’m sorry it has come about that you’ve got to fire her, Chief. I know what a lot she was worth to you here, as long as she kept to her own job.”

“We’ll let it rest,” said Mern, warningly. He remembered that he had not posted Crowley on the fact that the sobriquet “Miss Patsy Jones” still hid the identity of the girl where Latisan was concerned.

“All right! That suits me, Chief, so long as I get the credit. I’ll shut up, saying only that I’m sorry for Miss Lida Kennard.”

Latisan had been moving slowly toward the door, aware that the conversation between the two pertained to their own affairs and that he was excluded.

He halted and swung around when he heard the name of Lida Kennard. The torpor of idleness and woeful ponderings had numbed his wits. The name of Lida seemed to have been dragged into the affair by Crowley. Ward did not understand how she could be involved in the matter. He put that thought into a question which he stammered.

Mern, knowing nothing about his secretary’s lineage, resenting her secrecy and methods which he had not been able to penetrate, was not in a mood to shield her any longer. “It’s the same girl, Latisan. She called herself Jones up your way. Her right name is Lida Kennard.”

Latisan blinked like one who had emerged from darkness into blazing light. He swayed slowly, breasting that deluge of the truth which suddenly swept through him.

He walked to the window, turning his back on them, and gazed squarely into the quivering sun that was westering between lofty buildings. His eyes were enduring the unveiled sun with more fortitude than his soul endured the truth which had just been unveiled.

This—this was the heart of the mystery!

He was not meditating while he stood there; he was beholding!

He saw in the white light the spirit of her sacrifice—a sacrifice which embraced even her submission to him; in his desolate denial of any worthy attributes in himself he was not admitting that she loved him. He realized what she had sought to achieve in the north country, why she could not declare herself. And he had allowed a trick to make a fool of him, make him a traitor to her, send him off, sneaking in byways, idling in dark corners, in the time of her most desperate need!

Right then there was in him the awful conviction that he could not go and face her, wherever she was, so utterly a renegade had he shown himself.

He was taking all the blame on himself. He had run away from a laugh—a fool obsessed by a silly notion of the north country—in this new light it seemed silly. He had not waited like a man to hear the truth from her! He had betrayed all the cause; he could not go back to the drive.

He had listened to a lying sneak from a detective agency and had rebuffed, insulted, abused horribly Lida Kennard! Lida Kennard! The name seemed to be hammering at his eardrums. The granddaughter of Echford Flagg! A lone girl trying to save a cause! In her anguished desperation she had been willing to give herself in the way of sacrifice even to such a recreant as Ward Latisan must have appeared in his boyish and selfish resentment! Oh, the sun was cool in comparison with the fires which raged in him.

The fatuous Crowley moved toward the window. “Well, what say, old boy?”

When the young man turned slowly the operative stuck out his hand. “I’m agreeing with you—no grudges! Let’s shake!”

“Yes, you did it,” said Latisan. He did not raise his voice. He was talking as much to himself as to Crowley. “A tip to me, you called it.”

“We have to do those things to get quick results,” Crowley agreed, patronizingly. “Give us your hand, boy!”

Crowley got what he asked for. He was not prepared for the amazing suddenness of the open-handed blow that fell on the side of his head and sent him staggering into a corner.

Mern grabbed up the telephone. Latisan leaped and tore the instrument from the chief’s grasp, ripped it loose from its fastenings, and hurled it through the ground-glass door.

Mern was a big man; he had been invincible as a police officer. But when he leaped and struck at Latisan, the latter countered with his toil-hardened fist and knocked Mern down. Crowley had also served with the police. But he was no match for the berserker rage which had transformed the man from the woods. Latisan whirled again to Crowley, beat him to his knees, set his foot against the antagonist’s breast and drove him violently backward, and he fell across Mern.

But Latisan was not through. Men who had viewed John Latisan in the old days when he came roaring down to town, had they been present in the Vose-Mern offices that day, would have recognized in the grandson the Latisan temperament operating in its old form and would not have been surprised. The avenger picked up Mern’s desk chair. He swung it about him, smashing everything in the room which could be smashed. He flung away the fragments of the chair and rushed into the outer office.

The fat girl was calling for central, for police.

“Hand it over!” he commanded. “And you’d all better step outside,” he suggested, after he had torn loose the wires. “I’m using the office right now.”

He picked up the chair from which she fled. It was heavy and he used it to smash other furniture. Then he began to beat out the glass which shut off the other private rooms which adjoined the main office. In that process he brought the terrified Craig into view. He dropped the chair, reached in, and dragged Craig over the sill of the compartment. “This has been coming to you on the Noda waters! I’m glad you’re here now to get it!” He held the Three C’s director helpless in utter dismay, at the full length of a left arm, and pummeled him senseless with a right fist. Then he dragged him to the door of the chief’s office and flung him across the two men who were stirring.

“It’s a fifty-fifty wreck—this office and me—pretty nigh total!”

He walked out. Youth, strength, and an incentive which did not animate the others, had enabled him to prevail.

Mern and Crowley struggled weakly from under the man who was pinning them down.“I’ll get word to the cops,” stuttered Crowley, holding his hand to his battered and bleeding lips.

“Wait till Craig comes to!” protested Mern. “He may want us to hush the thing. He has been hollering for soft pedal all the time. He seems bad! Get a doctor!”

The physician who came confirmed Mern’s opinion as to the condition of the field director; Craig himself was querulously emphatic on the point when he had been brought to consciousness. But he insisted on postponing consideration of the proper action to take in Latisan’s case until he had time to forget his aches and compose his thoughts.