me looking into the gloom of the alley; then it
occurred to him that nothing further could be done there, and that a
great deal might be done somewhere else. Instantly he started along the
street, heading for the same cab stand which Ashton-Kirk and himself had
patronized on the night of which he had just been thinking. Here he
secured a taxi, and in a short time drew up at the investigator's door.
Stumph admitted him, and as he mounted the stairs toward the study, he
heard the voice of Ashton-Kirk.

"Hello! Glad to see you." The investigator greeted him with a
hand-shake. "Do you know that your office staff is also here?"

"Danny?" said Bat. "No, is he? What's the idea?"

"Came to make a report, I suppose. Didn't you get my note saying I had
borrowed him for a while?"

"Oh, yes," said Bat. "That's so."

He followed the other into the study, and there they saw Danny, his red
hair glowing under the lights and deep in the pages of some illustrated
papers. But he got up and stood looking at his employer with a grin.

"Hello, Mr. Scanlon," said he. "I hope you ain't mad or nothin' for my
going away and leaving the office."

"I've explained all that, Danny," said Ashton-Kirk, and Bat nodded
good-humoredly. "And now let's hear what you have to tell."

"I tried to get you on the telephone an hour ago," said Danny, as they
all three sat down at the table. "Maybe it was longer than that. But Mr.
Stumph said you wasn't in, and then I told him I was coming around to
wait till you got here."

"Quite right," smiled the crime specialist, approvingly.

"When we left the office," Danny told Scanlon, "we took a taxi. And we
went to the Chandler Building. And up on the sixteenth floor we went
into an office which was empty. Mr. Ashton-Kirk told me I was to stay
there and was to watch things that happened in the place across the
hall."

"A sort of speculator in precious stones," said Ashton-Kirk, to Bat. "He
buys and sells; and his buying is not always aboveboard. He is also a
pawnbroker in a large way."

"I see," said Bat.

"There is a glass in the door of the place," proceeded Danny, eagerly,
"glass that you can see through. And I could look through the keyhole of
the office I was in right into Mr. Quigley's."

"Quigley's!" said Bat, anxiously, for this was the name he had caught in
the excited conversation between Fenton and Hutchinson.

"That's the name of the man who keeps the diamond place," Danny informed
him. "T