“I bet they didn’t find a thing,” grinned Josie. “This doesn’t look like the leavings of a successful hunt.”
Nevertheless, she made a close examination of the garage, even going upstairs to the room intended for a chauffeur. She then felt it necessary to pay a visit to the chief. As usual, he was in his inner office knitting his brows over an intricate problem of how to catch wrongdoers.
“Well, General O’Gorman, how goes it?” was his playful greeting.
“Who had the watch last night at the Hathaway house?” Josie didn’t seem to want to play.
“Honest as the day is long and never goes to sleep when he is supposed to keep awake!”
“Well, he was asleep on his job last night, although he kept walking around the block all night.”
“I mean that whoever watched the Hathaway house was only watching with his legs and not using his head at all.”
“Some one got in the garage and ripped open the cushions in the Colonel’s old car. Of course, the lost money was not there but, if it had been, it would all have been got away with by now.”
“Because I myself had already closely examined the cushions, examined under the seats and in the pockets, every place where papers might have been hidden.”
“Tell Slater to come to me as soon as he comes in,” he told the man who came at his summons.
“Excuse me, Chief,” Josie said earnestly, after the man had left, “but please do not get me in bad with Slater. My father used to say that nothing was so hard to combat as an antagonistic local police force and I’m sure, if you let Slater know I have found out about the garage being entered, he will have it in for me. Isn’t he the man who let Felix Markle escape when we had him for sure? If it hadn’t been for that wonderful young newspaper chap, Bob Dulaney, Markle would have been a free man this day.”
“Strange to say he is a free man. I have just got a report that he has broken jail and is at large.”
Josie whistled, a form of astonishment she occasionally permitted herself.
“Well what’s the use?” she asked wearily. “What’s the use of nabbing these persons if you hand them over to a set of boobs who can’t keep them when once they get them? We can look out for the female of the species now, Chief. She is as certain to get back to her Felix as a homing pigeon. There is that one good thing about Hortense Markle. She is surely crazy about her old man. I wonder if they will begin operations around these parts. I shouldn’t be surprised if they did. Dorfield proved an easy mark up to a certain point.”