to give ladies a slender waist, broken perhaps
by the vigorous running, may have cut the string; it would only
require a little rubbing to do the thing. I tell you, Dave, it looks
as if we would have a full account to settle with this individual, and
I begin to feel the ground under my feet. I'd like to know who the men
were who threw the guard over the bridge, though.'

'Don't you think Greenback Bob capable of it?'

'Quite.'

'And--Delbras?'

'Capable enough, but--he was not in it.'

'Are you sure, Carl?'

'I mean to be, shortly,' I replied. 'Dave, old man, don't ask me any
questions yet as to how it's to be done, but I believe that before
this World's Fair closes you and I will have gotten Delbras and Bob
out of mischief's way, settled the brunette problem, and thrown light
on the diamond robbery.'

'And how about that lost young Englishman, Sir Carroll Rae, and
missing Gerald Trent?'

I turned and faced him. 'Old man,' I said, 'if you'll find one, I'll
find the other.'

CHAPTER XIX.

'STRANGE! MISTAKEN! HEARTLESS!'

I was not disappointed in my interview with the up-town jeweller, who,
being as real as the World's Fair itself, must not be named.

In order to identify the jewel offered by the strange woman, I took
Monsieur Lausch with me, and he at once declared the description of
the emerald to correspond precisely with the one stolen from him, and
when I had listened to the description of the woman who had offered
the gem, I was quite as confident that this person was the brunette
and no other.

True, she had assumed a foreign accent and had laid aside her rather
jaunty dress for a more sober and foreign-looking attire; she had made
herself up, in fact, as a German woman, well dressed after the fashion
of the German bourgeois; but she had added nothing to her face save a
pair of gold-framed spectacles; and while I kept my knowledge to
myself, I felt none the less sure that I had another link ready for
the chain I was trying to forge for this troublesome brunette, who was
so busy casting her shadows across my path and disarranging my plans.

The writer of the anonymous letter, for such it was, turned out to be
a practical jeweller in the employ of a certain jewel merchant, and I
never knew whether he had made his employer's purchase known to us for
the sake of the reward, or to gratify some personal spite or sense of
injury. Whichever it may have been, it concerned us little. We gave
him