"When you told me, Mr. Latham, that the gripsack had contained diamonds when Mr. Wynne left here I knew instantly how he got rid of them. He transferred them to some person in the cab, in accordance with a carefully prearranged plan. That person was a woman!"

"A woman!" Mr. Latham repeated, as if startled.

"Dere iss alvays wimmins in id," remarked Mr. Schultze philosophically. "Go on."

Mr. Birnes was not at all backward about detailing the persistence and skill it had required on his part to establish this fact; and he went on at length to acquaint them with the search that had been made by a dozen of his men to find a trace of the woman from the time she climbed the elevated stairs at Fifty-eighth Street. He admitted that the quest for her had thus far been fruitless, a.s.suring them at the same time that it would go steadily on, for the present at least.

"And now, Mr. Latham," he went on, and inadvertently he glanced at Mr. Czenki, "I have been hampered, of course, by the fact that you have not taken me completely into your confidence in this matter. I mean," he added hastily, "that beyond a mere hint of their value I know nothing whatever about the diamonds which Mr. Wynne had in the gripsack. I gathered, however, that they were worth a large sum of money--perhaps, even a million dollars?"

"Yah, a million dollars ad leasd," remarked Mr. Schultze grimly.

"Thank you," and the detective smiled shrewdly. "Your instructions were to find where he got them. If there had been a theft of a million dollars' worth of diamonds anywhere in this world, I would have known it; so I took steps to examine the Custom House records of this and other cities to see if there had been an unusual shipment to Mr. Wynne, or to any one else outside of the diamond dealers, thinking this might give me a clew."

"And what was the result?" demanded Mr. Latham quickly.

"My agents have covered all the Atlantic ports and they did not come in through the Custom House," replied Mr. Birnes. "I have not heard from the western agents as yet, but my opinion is--is that they were perhaps smuggled in. Smuggling, after all, is simple with the thousands of miles of unguarded coasts of this country. I don't know this, of course; I advance it merely as a possibility."

Mr. Latham turned to Mr. Schultze and Mr. Czenki with a triumphant smile. Diamonds in meteors! Tommyrot!

"Of course," the detective resumed, "the whole investigation centers about this man Wynne. He has been under the eyes of my agents as no other man ever was, and in spite of this has been able to keep in correspondence with his accomplices. And, gentlemen, he has done it not through the mails, not over the telephone, not by telegraph, and yet he has done it."

"By wireless, perhaps?" suggested Mr. Czenki. It was the first time he had spoken, and the detective took occasion then and there to stare at him frankly.

"And not by wireless," he said at last. "He sends and receives messages from the roof of his house in Thirty-seventh Street by homing pigeons!"

"Some more fandastics, eh, Laadham?" Mr. Schultze taunted. "Some more chimericals?"

"I demonstrate this much by the close watch I have kept of Mr. Wynne,"

the detective went on, there being no response to his questioning look at Mr. Schultze. "One of my agents, stationed on the roof of the house adjoining Mr. Wynne's" (it was the maid-servant next door) "has, on at least one occasion, seen him remove a tissue-paper strip from a carrier pigeon's leg and read what was written on it, after which he kissed it, gentlemen, kissed it; then he destroyed it. What did it mean? It means that that particular message was from the girl to whom he transferred the diamonds in the cab, and that he is madly in love with her."

"Oh, dese wimmins! I dell you!" commented Mr. Schultze.

There was a little pause, then Mr. Birnes continued impressively:

"This correspondence is of no consequence in itself, of course. But it gives us this: Carrier pigeons will only fly home, so if Mr.

Wynne received a message by pigeon it means that at some time, within a week say, he has shipped that pigeon and perhaps others from the house in Thirty-seventh Street to that person who sent him the message. If he sends messages to that person it means that he has received a pigeon or pigeons from that person within a week. And how were these pigeons shipped? In all probability, by express. So, gentlemen, you see there ought to be a record in the express offices, which would give us the home town, even the name and address, of the person who now has the diamonds in his or her keeping. Is that clear to all of you?"

"It is perfectly clear," commented Mr. Laadham admiringly, while the German nodded his head in approval.

"And that is the clew we are working on at the moment," the detective added. "Three of my men are now searching the records of all the express companies in the city--and there are a great many--for the pigeon shipments. If, as seems probable, this clew develops, it may be that we can place our hands on the diamonds within a few days."

"I don'd d'ink I vould yust blace my hands on dem," Mr. Schultze advised. "Dey are his diamonds, you know, und your hands might ged in drouble."

"I mean figuratively, of course," the detective amended.

He stopped and drummed on his stiff hat with his fingers. Again he glanced at the impa.s.sive face of Mr. Czenki with keen, questioning eyes; and for one bare instant it seemed as if he were trying to bring his memory to his aid.

"I've found out all about this man Wynne," he supplemented after a moment, "but nothing in his record seems to have any bearing on this case. He is an orphan. His mother was a Van Cortlandt of old Dutch stock, and his father was a merchant downtown. He left a few thousands to the son, and the son is now in business for himself with an office in lower Broad Street. He is an importer of brown sugar."

"Brown sugar?" queried Mr. Czenki quickly, and the thin, scarred face reflected for a second some subtle emotion within him. "Brown sugar!" he repeated.

"Yes," drawled the detective, with an unpleasant stare, "brown sugar.

He imports it from Cuba and Porto Rico and Brazil by the shipload, I understand, and makes a good thing of it."

A quick pallor overspread Mr. Czenki's countenance, and he arose with his fingers working nervously. His beady eyes were glittering; his lips were pressed together until they were bloodless.

"_Vas iss?_" demanded Mr. Schultze curiously.

"My G.o.d, gentlemen, don't you see?" the expert burst out violently.

"Don't you see what this man has done? He has--he has--"

Suddenly, by a supreme effort, he regained control of himself, and resumed his seat.

"He has--what?" asked Mr. Latham.

For half a minute Czenki stared at his employer; then his face grew impa.s.sive again.

"I beg your pardon," he said quietly. "Mr. Wynne is a heavy importer of sugar from Brazil. Isn't it possible that those _are_ Brazilian diamonds? That new workings have been discovered somewhere in the interior? That he has smuggled them in concealed in the sugar-bags, right into New York, under the noses of the customs officials? I beg your pardon," he concluded.

Late in the afternoon of the following day a drunken man, unshaven, unkempt, unclean and clothed in rags, lurched into a small p.a.w.nshop in the lower Bowery and planked down on the dirty counter a handful of inert, colorless pebbles, ranging in size from a pea to a peanut.

"Say, Jew, is them real diamonds?" he demanded thickly.

The man in charge glanced at them and nearly fainted. Ten minutes later Red Haney, knight of the road, was placed under arrest as a suspicious character. Uncut diamonds, valued roughly at fifty thousand dollars, were found in his possession.

"Where did you get them?" demanded the amazed police.

"Found 'em."

"_Where_ did you find them?"

"None o' your business."

And that was all they were able to get out of him at the moment.

CHAPTER X

THE BIG GAME

When the police of Mulberry Street find themselves face to face with some problem other than the trivial, every-day theft, burglary or murder, as the case may be, they are wont to rise up and run around in a circle. The case of Red Haney and the diamonds, blared to the world at large in the newspapers of Sunday morning, immediately precipitated a circular parade, while Haney, the objective center, snored along peacefully in a drunken stupor.

The statement of the case in the public press was altogether negative. There had been no report of the theft of fifty thousand dollars' worth of uncut diamonds in any city of the United States; in fact, diamonds, as a commodity in crime, had not figured in police records for several weeks--not even an actress had mislaid a priceless necklace. The newspapers were unanimously certain that stones of such value could not rightfully belong to a man of Haney's type, therefore, to whom _did_ they belong?

Four men, at least, of the thousands who read the detailed account of the affair Sunday morning, immediately made it a matter of personal interest to themselves. One of these was Mr. Latham, another was Mr. Schultze, and a third was Mr. Birnes. The fourth was Mr. E. van Cortlandt Wynne. In the seclusion of his home in Thirty-seventh Street, Mr. Wynne read the story with puckered brows, then re-read it, after which he paced back and forth across his room in troubled thought for an hour or more. An oppressive sense of uneasiness was coming over him; and it was reflected in eyes grown somber.