Part 11 (1/2)

Across in the fog she strained her eyes. Was that the familiar figure of Gordon moving in the dim light?

There he was, now,--with Drummond, the police, and the Secret Service.

It was exactly as she had suspected to herself, and a smile played over her face.

All was excitement, shouts, muttered imprecations. Constance was the calmest in the crowd--deaf to even Drummond's ”third degree.”

They had begun to break open the boxes marked ”salt” and ”corn.”

A loud exclamation above the sharp crunching of the axes escaped Gordon. ”d.a.m.n them! They've put one across on us!”

The boxes of ”salt” and ”corn” contained--salt and corn.

Not a stock of a rifle, not a barrel, not a cartridge was in any of them as the axes crashed in one case after another.

A boy with a telegram emerged indiscreetly from the misty shadows.

Drummond seized it, tore it open, and read, ”Buy cotton.”

It was the code: ”I am off safely.”

The double cross had worked. Constance was thinking, as she smiled to herself, of the money, her share, which she had hidden. There was not a sc.r.a.p of tangible evidence against her, except what Santos had carried with him in the filibustering expedition already off from New Orleans.

Her word would stand against that of all of the victims combined before any jury that could be empaneled.

”You thought I needed a warning,” she cried, facing Drummond with eyes that flashed scorn at the skulking figure of Gordon behind him. ”But the next time you employ a stool-pigeon to make love,” she added, ”reckon in that thing you detectives scorn--a woman's intuition.”

CHAPTER IV

THE GAMBLERS

”Won't you come over to see me to-night? Just a friendly little game, my dear--our own crowd, you know.”

There was something in the purring tone of the invitation of the woman across the hall from Constance Dunlap's apartment that aroused her curiosity.

”Thank you. I believe I will,” answered Constance. ”It's lonely in a big city without friends.”

”Indeed it is,” agreed Bella LeMar. ”I've been watching you for some time and wondering how you stand it. Now be sure to come, won't you?”

”I shall be glad to do so,” a.s.sured Constance, as they reached their floor and parted at the elevator door.

She had been watching the other woman, too, although she had said nothing about it.

”A friendly little game,” repeated Constance to herself. ”That sounds as if it had the tang of an adventure in it. I'll go.”

The Mayfair Arms, in which she had taken a modest suite of rooms, was a rather recherche apartment, and one of her chief delights since she had been there had been in watching the other occupants.

There had been much to interest her in the menage across the hall. Mrs.

Bella LeMar, as she called herself, was of a type rather common in the city, an attractive widow on the safe side of forty, well-groomed, often daringly gowned. Her brown eyes snapped vivacity, and the pert little nose and racy expression of the mouth confirmed the general impression that Mrs. LeMar liked the good things of life.