nd as often
before when their heads had been close together, people looked across at
them, always with interest, often with some envy, and wondered.

"I'd like you both to understand," Weiss said, speaking with
unaccustomed emphasis as he leaned across the table, "that I don't like
the look of things. We tackled something pretty big when we tackled
Phineas Duge, and if he has the least idea that these Chicago brokers
have been operating on our behalf, it's my belief we shall find
ourselves up against it."

Higgins, who was the optimist of the party, a small man, with the
unlined, clear complexion and face of a boy, shrugged his shoulders a
little doubtfully.

"That's all very well, Weiss," he said, "but if Phineas had been going
to find us out at all, he'd have found us out three weeks ago, when the
thing started. He wouldn't have sat still and let us sell ten million
dollars' worth of stock without moving his little finger. I guess you've
got the jumps, Weiss, all because we were d-----d fools enough to sign
that rotten paper last night. All the same I don't quite see how he
could ever use that against us. His own name's there."

"I'm not so sure of that," Weiss said quietly. "I tell you it occurred
to me to look across just as he was blotting the page, and I saw that he
had his arm right round the paper, and it didn't seem to me that he was
blotting the place where his signature ought to have been."

"Why didn't you ask to read the thing through again?" Higgins demanded.

"I wish I had," Weiss answered gloomily.

Bardsley, a large man, with grey beard and moustache, and coarse, hard
face, spoke for the first time.

"Do any of you know," he asked, "whereabouts in that infernal little
room of his Duge keeps his papers?"

Weiss looked up.

"I am not sure," he said. "I know that he has a small iron strong-box
screwed into the inside of his roll-top desk, and of course there is a
safe in the outer office; but I don't see how we're going to find out
whether the paper we want is there."

"The girl seemed a fool," Higgins remarked. "Can't she be got at?"

"I have done my best," Weiss answered. "It strikes me she's just fool
enough to stick to what she's been told, and she's too scared of her
uncle to do more or less. She practically turned me out of his room this
morning, when I was just having a look round."

"If there is really anything," Higgins said in a soft voice, "in what
Weiss is hinting at, there's on