railway
ticket, they had no trace of him.

Blake, at this news, had a moment when he saw red. He felt, during
that moment, like a drum-major who had "muffed" his baton on parade.
Then recovering himself, he promptly confirmed the Teal operative's
report by telephone, accepted its confirmation as authentic, consulted
a timetable, and made a dash for Windsor Station. There he caught the
Winnipeg express, took possession of a stateroom and indited carefully
worded telegrams to Trimble in Vancouver, that all out-going Pacific
steamers should be watched, and to Menzler in Chicago, that the
American city might be covered in case of Binhart's doubling southward
on him. Still another telegram he sent to New York, requesting the
Police Department to send on to him at once a photograph of Binhart.

In Winnipeg, two days later, Blake found himself on a blind trail.
When he had talked with a railway detective on whom he could rely, when
he had visited certain offices and interviewed certain officials, when
he had sought out two or three women acquaintances in the city's
sequestered area, he faced the bewildering discovery that he was still
without an actual clue of the man he was supposed to be shadowing.

It was then that something deep within his nature, something he could
never quite define, whispered its first faint doubt to him. This doubt
persisted even when late that night a Teal Agency operative wired him
from Calgary, stating that a man answering Binhart's description had
just left the Alberta Hotel for Banff. To this latter point Blake
promptly wired a fuller description of his man, had an officer posted
to inspect every alighting passenger, and early the next morning
received a telegram, asking for still more particulars.

He peered down at this message, vaguely depressed in spirit, discarding
theory after theory, tossing aside contingency after contingency. And
up from this gloomy shower slowly emerged one of his "hunches," one of
his vague impressions, coming blindly to the surface very much like an
earthworm crawling forth after a fall of rain. There was something
wrong. Of that he felt certain. He could not place it or define it.
To continue westward would be to depend too much on an uncertainty; it
would involve the risk of wandering too far from the center of things.
He suddenly decided to double on his tracks and swing down to Chicago.
Just why he felt as he did he could not fathom. But the feeling wa