Chapter II: The Clew That Failed

“There’s no need to keep you any longer, Miss Griffin,” Schilder said to the stenographer, as Grail came back toward him. “And--er--Miss Griffin, I guess it would be just as well if you didn’t mention this occurrence to any one on the outside. We want no unnecessary notoriety, eh, captain?”

The adjutant agreed with him. “If you don’t mind, though, Mr. Schilder,” he said, “and if Miss Griffin will oblige me, I’d like to have her take down a note for me to Major Appleby. This matter ought to be reported to him at once, and I don’t like to use the telephone. It will be very brief, Miss Griffin,” he continued, turning to the girl. “You can take it direct on the machine. Only I will ask you to give me a carbon copy; we have to be very particular in the army in regard to all communications, you know.”

Then, when she had slipped in her sheets of paper, and sat ready at her typewriter, he swung around so as to face Schilder, and crisply dictated:

“Please come at once, on receipt of this, to the office of the Dolliver Foundry, as I desire to confer with you on a matter of the greatest importance.”

His eyes never for a moment left Schilder’s face while the message was being transcribed, but if he had expected to see anything there, he was doomed to disappointment. The countenance of the manager remained as expressionless as a mask.

“What do you think of that?” Grail finally asked him.

“Well”--the other man was lighting a cigar--“it certainly seems urgent enough.”

“Yes,” said Grail dryly; “except for the address and signature, it is, word for word, the same as the note received by Colonel Vedant.

“Ah, thank you, Miss Griffin,” he added, as he took the two sheets of paper which she handed him, and, signing the original, slipped it into an envelope. “I’m going to ask you, too, if you don’t mind, to stop at the A. D. T. office on your way to the car, and have them rush this right out to the fort.”

After this, nothing more was said until the girl had donned her hat and jacket and taken her departure. Grail thoughtfully folded up and put into his pocket the carbon copy, which he had been studying meanwhile under the light at the desk.

“I observe, Mr. Schilder,” he said, “that the capital D on your typewriter blurs badly, and that the m is slightly chipped on one side. It will be interesting to compare this copy with the note received by the colonel, to see if both show the same defects.”

The manager, however, merely shrugged his shoulders. “You still cling to the idea that the note must have come from here, eh? Well, you’re on the wrong scent, captain--entirely on the wrong scent. A sheet of our letter paper would be no very difficult thing to get hold of, and when you come to look into the matter I think you’ll find that the original note was written at post headquarters.”

“At post headquarters! What do you mean by that?” demanded Grail.

“My dear captain,” Schilder answered, “hasn’t it struck you yet that the most likely person in the world to write that note to Colonel Vedant was--Colonel Vedant himself? Between ourselves, now--you are better acquainted with conditions than I--isn’t there something which might have induced the old fellow to drop quietly out of sight?”

“Ah!” Grail spoke slowly. “So that is your solution, is it?”

“A more plausible one, at any rate, than to imagine he was kidnaped, or something of that sort,” Schilder contended. “It wouldn’t have been much of a trick for him to have slipped off his coat so as to look like one of the workmen, and then to have dodged through the gate when old Dennis wasn’t looking. Men have done such things before, captain.”

“Not men like Colonel Vedant,” Grail insisted warmly. “He is the type that fights rather than runs away. Besides, in this case there is absolutely no ground for such a suspicion. His record is unassailable, and he is due for honorable retirement in a few months. He has no financial troubles. His health, for all his fifty odd years, is perfect, and no one who knows him could doubt his sanity for a moment. What possible reason could there be for such a man to chuck the game?”

“Perhaps a woman?” suggested Schilder.

“Rot! The only woman the colonel is interested in is his daughter, and he would never do anything to cause her the slightest distress or uneasiness. Why, man, on her account alone, if for no other reason, the theory you offer is simply ridiculous.”

There was some further discussion along the same line, but of little consequence. Shortly after, Major Appleby, with a couple of officers from the fort, arrived in a motor car.

“Bless my soul!” exclaimed the major, a short and rather apoplectic-looking warrior, when the situation had duly been made clear to him. “We must lose no time in getting to the bottom of this.”

“Mr. Schilder,” remarked Grail quietly, “is firmly convinced that the colonel took himself off voluntarily.”

“Nonsense!” protested Major Appleby, and his companions promptly echoed the opinion. “Vedant is the last man in the world to have done a thing of that sort.”

“All right,” conceded the manager; “you gentlemen are probably more competent to judge on that point than I. Just the same, I surely am curious to see what other explanation you can get to fit the facts.”

“Ah!” The major cocked his head importantly on one side. “That will no doubt come out in the investigation. The chief thing now is to learn just what the exact facts are.”

The inquiry he set on foot, however, elicited nothing new, and in the end the newcomers had to confess themselves as completely baffled as Grail and Schilder. Still, it did not escape the shrewd eyes of the foundry manager, as the fruitless investigation proceeded, that certain more or less vague suspicions were forming in the minds of Appleby and his associates; and he gathered, too, not so much from anything that was said or done as by a sort of coolness in the atmosphere, that these were in some way hostile to the adjutant.

A sly smile flickered across his lips under the cover of his beard, and, with an air of impatience, he broke in on the aimless conjectures of the three officers.

“Come, come, gentlemen,” he said; “all this amounts to nothing. And, since you seem determined to make it a case of foul play, I guess I had better start to do something on my own hook.”

“You!” The major glared at him haughtily. “What have you got to do with it?”

Schilder laughed. “The Dolliver Foundry can hardly afford, my dear sir, to have a mystery of this sort taking place on its premises without at least a show of effort on my part to clear it up. Delay, moreover, merely makes the matter look worse for us; so, although I dislike needless notoriety as much as any of the rest of you, I----” Instead of completing the sentence, he reached out for the telephone on his desk.

“What are you going to do?” demanded Appleby sharply.

“Call up the chief of police, and place the matter in his hands.”

“The chief of police!” The major gave a violent start, and glanced uneasily at his companions. Only Grail seemed unperturbed, and the side glance he cast at Schilder was distinctly skeptical. It was almost as though he said: “I dare you to make good your bluff.”

The major lost no time, however, in entering a remonstrance.

“Oh, I beg of you, Mr. Schilder,” he urged, “let us not do anything rash! There are--er--certain matters which I am loath to mention here, but which, provided the officers at the fort have sufficient time to sift them out, will, I am sure, bring a speedy solution. You bear me out in this, do you not, gentlemen?” he appealed to his two companions.

They assented, and it was noticeable that in doing so both carefully avoided looking in the direction of the adjutant.

Schilder, a mocking twinkle in his eye, turned toward Grail.

“And you, captain?” he asked. “Can you give me the same assurance?”

The young officer met his gaze steadily. “Why not?” he said. “To my mind, the investigation simply resolves itself into a matter of determining the authorship of the note received by the colonel, and surely we at the fort are as competent to handle that as some blundering policeman.”

Major Appleby gave a grunt of recollection, and his manner toward Grail relaxed.

“Ah, yes,” he said, with evident relief. “I had forgotten for the moment the existence of that clew. The note is at headquarters, I presume, captain?”

Grail nodded. “I left it on my desk, when the colonel and I came away.”

“Then, come,” urged the major, moving toward the door; “let us lose no time in taking a look at it. We can trust you, I suppose, Mr. Schilder, to take no action until you hear from us?”

“Anything in reason, major,” the manager agreed. “And I certainly hope for all our sakes that you meet with quick success.”

After he had returned from seeing the party off in their automobile, however, and had closed his desk for the night, he lingered a moment in the office before taking his departure.

“I wonder,” he muttered thoughtfully, “if that man Grail is stringing me, or am I stringing him?”

Meanwhile, as the motor car swiftly left the factory chimneys and slumlike streets of the river front behind, and climbed the hilly streets back toward the fort, Major Appleby turned toward the adjutant, who sat beside him in the tonneau.

“What do you make of it all, captain?” he asked, in a conciliatory tone. “You were on the ground, and ought to be able to form a better judgment than any of the rest of us.”

“It’s gumshoe work,” Grail answered; “a trick of some of those foreign spies who have been hanging around ever since Colonel Vedant started on his present series of experiments. They thought, no doubt, that, with a hurry call of this sort, they might catch him with some of the papers on his person.”

“Then, you believe that Schilder is----”

Grail shook his head. “Too obvious,” he objected. “Whatever else Schilder may be, he is not a fool.”

“But whom else can we suspect, under the circumstances?” queried Appleby. “Have you any theory at all, captain, that will account for the mystery?”

The adjutant hesitated a moment. “I think I will wait to answer those questions, major, until after we have examined the colonel’s note.”

“Ah, true!” assented the other. “That must naturally be our starting point. And here we are!”

The automobile turned in from the tree-shaded street, and sped down the roadway past officers’ row. It halted in front of headquarters, and the four passengers piled hurriedly out. Grail, abstractedly acknowledging the salute of the soldier on guard, pressed forward in the lead, and, unlocking the door, swung it open. There was no need to switch on the lights, as the room was already sufficiently illuminated by a night bulb which hung in front of the safe.

The adjutant, closely followed by the others, advanced to the desk, then paused, with a little gasp of bewilderment.

“Why,” he exclaimed, “the note is gone! I am positive I left it here.”

He turned to the colonel’s “striker,” who lounged sleepily in the adjoining room, to inquire if any one had been there in his absence.

“Not a soul, sir,” was the answer.

“Then, have you yourself been in here, or touched any of the papers on the desk?”

“Haven’t stirred from my seat, sir, since you and the colonel went.”

That seemed to settle pretty well the question of outside interference, for, with the guard outside and this man seated where he could command the whole interior of the place, no person could have entered undetected. Yet the note was indubitably gone. The drawers of the desk were ransacked, the files gone over, even the floor thoroughly searched, without revealing the slightest trace of it. With all the doors and windows closed, there was no chance of it having been carried away by some frolicsome breeze.

Major Appleby regarded Grail with a portentous frown. “Captain,” he said stiffly, “this is very, very strange.”