ement seemed to increase; he talked with
many gestures; now and then he laughed in a delighted sort of way and
slapped Hutchinson on the shoulder. The latter smoothed his waved hair
and looked vastly interested; now and then when an opportunity came in
Fenton's flood of talk he asked a question, and after each answer he
seemed to advance a key toward the high pitch of the other.

"In a second or two," remarked Bat, in a low voice, "he'll be rumpling
his hair; and if he ever does that, he'll never get over it."

For at least a half hour the talk went on between the two; at the finish
Hutchinson was quite as excited as Fenton.

"It's a pipe," Bat heard him declare in an exultant tone; "a regular
pipe. All we got to do is to----" Here the voice sank and he went on,
his hands clutching Fenton's arms in a strong grip. The intense
eagerness of the two, the excitement which one had imparted to the
other, interested Bat. So many curious and unaccountable things had
happened of late that he had gotten into the habit of looking for them,
and it was with difficulty that he separated even ordinary occurrences
from the matter which had been so growing in his mind. It might be, so
ran his thought, that this incident had its place in the chain he had
seen making--a tangled, hopeless chain to him, without beginning or end.

"But then again--and it's a thousand to one against--it might be nothing
at all," was Bat's next judgment. "I'm getting all mixed in my signals
and----"

Here he became aware that Big Slim was talking to him; the burglar had
run the game out and had put away his cue.

"As you've taken on this thing for me," he was saying, "I'm going across
the river to look up some prospects."

"All right," said Bat, nodding. "Go ahead. I'll stick around a while."

With a wink and a gesture of the thumb toward Fenton, Big Slim went
away. Bat carelessly stepped nearer to the two men and seemed greatly
interested in a racing chart posted upon the wall.

"I told you there was a chance," Fenton was saying. "Didn't I? I knew
the thing would pull up at Quigley's some time or another, didn't I?"

"I didn't think much of it," said Hutchinson, with the air of one who
was wrong, and is quite delighted with his bigness in acknowledging it.
"But I can see now that I didn't look at it right."

"Leave it to me," said Fenton, smiling expansively. "Little tricks like
this are right in my line. And now I'll tell you what we'll do;
we'll-