"Senator," announced the government agent, "a certain woman you know took that paper. She got in here with a false key, lifted the report and was out again in less than five minutes. The theft occurred shortly after midnight and--"

"If you know so much about it, why don't you arrest her?"

"I shall--before the hour is up. Only I thought you might like to know in advance how your friend the Countess Stefani worked. She was also responsible for the theft of the plans of the battleship _Pennsylvania_, you know."

And Williams was out of the room before the look of amazement had faded from the Senator's face.

Some thirty minutes later the Countess Sylvia was awakened by the sound of continued rapping on her door. In answer to her query, "Who's there?" a man's voice replied, "Open this door, or I'll break it in!"

Williams, however, knew that his threat was an idle one, for the doors at Brickley Court were built of solid oak that defied anything short of a battering ram. Which was the reason that he had to wait a full five minutes, during which time he distinctly heard the sound of paper rattling and then the rasp of a match as it was struck.

Finally the countess, attired in a bewitching negligee, threw open the door.

"Ah!" she exclaimed. "So it is you, Mr. Williams! What do you--"

"You know what I want," growled Owen. "That paper you stole from Lattimer's office to-night. Also the plans you lifted from the Navy Department. The ones you mailed in New York yesterday afternoon and which were waiting for you here!"

"Find them!" was the woman's mocking challenge as Williams's eyes roved over the room and finally rested on a pile of crumbled ashes beside an alcohol lamp on the table. A moment's examination told him that a blue print had been burned, but it was impossible to tell what it had been, and there was no trace of any other paper in the ashes.

"Search her!" he called to a woman in the corridor. "I'm going to rifle the mail-box downstairs. She can't get away with the same trick three times!"

And there, in an innocent-looking envelope addressed to a certain personage whose name stood high on the diplomatic list, Williams discovered the report for which a woman risked her liberty and gambled six months of her life!

"But the plans?" I asked as Quinn finished.

"Evidently that was what she had burned. She'd taken care to crumple the ashes so that it was an impossibility to get a shred of direct evidence, not that it would have made any difference if she hadn't. The government never prosecutes matters of this kind, except in time of war. They merely warn the culprit to leave the country and never return--which is the reason that, while you'll find a number of very interesting foreigners in Washington at the present moment, the Countess Sylvia Stefani is not among them. Neither is the personage to whom her letter was addressed. He was 'recalled' a few weeks later."

XXI

A MILLION-DOLLAR QUARTER

"What's in the phial?" I inquired one evening, as Bill Quinn, formerly of the United States Secret Service, picked up a small brown bottle from the table in his den and slipped it into his pocket.

"Saccharine," retorted Quinn, laconically. "Had to come to it in order to offset the sugar shortage. No telling how long it will continue, and, meanwhile, we're conserving what we have on hand. So I carry my 'lump sugar' in my vest pocket, and I'll keep on doing it until conditions improve. They say the trouble lies at the importing end. Can't secure enough sugar at the place where the ships are or enough ships at the place where the sugar is.

"This isn't the first time that sugar has caused trouble, either. See that twenty-five-cent piece up there on the wall? Apparently it's an ordinary everyday quarter. But it cost the government well over a million dollars, money which should have been paid in as import duty on tons upon tons of sugar.

"Yes, back of that quarter lies a case which is absolutely unique in the annals of governmental detective work--the biggest and most far-reaching smuggling plot ever discovered and the one which took the longest time to solve.

"Nine years seems like a mighty long time to work on a single a.s.signment, but when you consider that the Treasury collected more than two million dollars as a direct result of one man's labor during that time, you'll see that it was worth while."

The whole thing really started when d.i.c.k Carr went to work as a sugar sampler [continued Quinn, his eyes fixed meditatively upon the quarter on the wall].

Some one had tipped the department off to the fact that phony sampling of some sort was being indulged in and d.i.c.k managed to get a place as a.s.sistant on one of the docks where the big sugar ships unloaded. As you probably know, there's a big difference in the duty on the different grades of raw sugar; a difference based upon the tests made by expert chemists as soon as the cargo is landed. Sugar which is only ninety-two per cent pure, for example, comes in half-a-cent a pound cheaper than that which is ninety-six per cent pure, and the sampling is accomplished by inserting a thin gla.s.s tube through the wide meshes of the bag or basket which contains the sugar.

It didn't take Carr very long to find out that the majority of the samplers were slipping their tubes into the bags at an angle, instead of shoving them straight in, and that a number of them made a practice of moistening the outside of the container before they made their tests.

The idea, of course, was that the sugar which had absorbed moisture, either during the voyage or after reaching the dock--would not "a.s.say"

as pure as would the dry material in the center of the package. A few experiments, conducted under the cover of night, showed a difference of four to six per cent in the grade of the samples taken from the inside of the bag and that taken from a point close to the surface, particularly if even a small amount of water had been judiciously applied.

The difference, when translated into terms of a half-a-cent a pound import duty, didn't take long to run up into hundreds of thousands of dollars, and Carr's report, made after several months' investigating, cost a number of sugar samplers their jobs and brought the wrath of the government down upon the companies which had been responsible for the practice.

After such an exposure as this, you might think that the sugar people would have been content to take their legitimate profit and to pay the duty levied by law. But Carr had the idea that they would try to put into operation some other scheme for defrauding the Treasury and during years that followed he kept in close touch with the importing situation and the personnel of the men employed on the docks.

The active part he had played in the sugar-sampling exposure naturally prevented his active partic.i.p.ation in any attempt to uncover the fraud from the inside, but it was the direct cause of his being summoned to Washington when a discharged official of one of the sugar companies filed a charge that the government was losing five hundred thousand dollars a year by the illicit operations at a single plant.

"Frankly, I haven't the slightest idea of how it's being done,"

confessed the official in question. "But I am certain that some kind of a swindle is being perpetrated on a large scale. Here's the proof!"

With that he produced two doc.u.ments--one the bill of lading of the steamer _Murbar_, showing the amount of sugar on board when she cleared Java, and the other the official receipt, signed by a representative of the sugar company, for her cargo when she reached New York.

"As you will note," continued the informant, "the bill of lading clearly shows that the _Murbar_ carried eleven million seven hundred thirty-four thousand six hundred eighty-seven pounds of raw sugar. Yet, when weighed under the supervision of the customhouse officials a few weeks later, the cargo consisted of only eleven million thirty-two thousand and sixteen pounds--a 'shrinkage' of seven hundred two thousand six hundred seventy-one pounds, about six per cent of the material shipment."

"And at the present import duty that would amount to about--"

"In the neighborhood of twelve thousand dollars loss on this ship alone," stated the former sugar official. "Allowing for the arrival of anywhere from fifty to a hundred ships a year, you can figure the annual deficit for yourself."

Carr whistled. He had rather prided himself upon uncovering the sampling frauds a few years previously, but this bade fair to be a far bigger case--one which would tax every atom of his ingenuity to uncover.

"How long has this been going on?" inquired the acting Secretary of the Treasury.

"I can't say," admitted the informant. "Neither do I care to state how I came into possession of these doc.u.ments. But, as you will find when you look into the matter, they are entirely authoritative and do not refer to an isolated case. The _Murbar_ is the rule, not the exception. It's now up to you people to find out how the fraud was worked."

"He's right, at that," was the comment from the acting Secretary, when the former sugar official had departed. "The information is undoubtedly the result of a personal desire to 'get even'--for our friend recently lost his place with the company in question. However, that hasn't the slightest bearing upon the truth of his charges. Carr, it's up to you to find out what there is in 'em!"

"That's a man-sized order, Mr. Secretary," smiled d.i.c.k, "especially as the work I did some time ago on the sampling frauds made me about as popular as the plague with the sugar people. If I ever poked my nose on the docks at night you'd be out the price of a big bunch of white roses the next day!"

"Which means that you don't care to handle the case?"

"Not so that you could notice it!" snapped Carr. "I merely wanted you to realize the handicaps under which I'll be working, so that there won't be any demand for instant developments. This case is worth a million dollars if it's worth a cent. And, because it is so big, it will take a whole lot longer to round up the details than if we were working on a matter that concerned only a single individual. If you remember, it took Joe Gregory nearly six months to land Phyllis Dodge, and therefore--"

"Therefore it ought to take about sixty years to get to the bottom of this case, eh?"

"Hardly that long. But I would like an a.s.surance that I can dig into this in my own way and that there won't be any 'Hurry up!' message sent from this end every week or two."

"That's fair enough," agreed the a.s.sistant Secretary. "You know the ins and outs of the sugar game better than any man in the service. So hop to it and take your time. We'll content ourselves with sitting back and awaiting developments."

Armed with this a.s.surance, Carr went back to New York and began carefully and methodically to lay his plans for the biggest game ever hunted by a government detective--a ring protected by millions of dollars in capital and haunted by the fear that its operations might some day be discovered.

In spite of the fact that it was necessary to work entirely in the dark, d.i.c.k succeeded in securing the manifests and bills of lading of three other sugar ships which had recently been unloaded, together with copies of the receipts of their cargoes. Every one of these indicated the same mysterious shrinkage en route, amounting to about six per cent of the entire shipment, and, as Carr figured it, there were but two explanations which could cover the matter.

Either a certain percentage of the sugar had been removed from the hold and smuggled into the country before the ship reached New York, or there was a conspiracy of some kind which involved a number of the weighers on the docks.