Many tourists claim to have money when they are away from home, of course, but the part about traveling for her health seemed to Jim Farland to be going a bit too far. Would such a woman be traveling for her health and leave behind her at home an old father who was an invalid?
"There's something behind that little trip of hers," Farland told himself. "It looks to me as if she had gone down to Honduras to look up Sid Prale for some reason. And Honduras isn't exactly on the health-trip list, either."
He began a close inspection of the apartment, leaving no trace of his search behind him, disarranging nothing that he did not replace. Jim Farland was an expert at such things.
He ransacked a small desk that stood in one corner of the living room and found a tablet of writing paper similar to that upon which had been written the anonymous messages Sidney Prale had received. He found scraps of writing in the wastebasket, too, and inspected them carefully.
"Somebody in this apartment wrote those notes, all right," Farland mused. "But why? That's the question I want answered, and I'll have to be careful how I start in to find out. You can't bluff that girl; one look is enough to tell me that. If I jump her about those notes, she'll probably get wise and cover her tracks, and then I'll be strictly up against it."
He found nothing else of importance in the apartment. There were some letters, but they seemed to be from relatives scattered throughout the country, ordinary letters dealing with family affairs of no particular consequence, and they told Jim Farland nothing that he wished to know.
But Kate Gilbert was only one angle of the case, he reminded himself, and so he decided that he was done for the present as far as she was concerned. It would be only a waste of valuable time, he thought, to remain longer in the Gilbert apartment; and there were plenty of other things for him to be doing.
Farland went all over the apartment once more, making sure that he was leaving everything in its proper place, that there would be nothing to show that anybody had been making an investigation there. Then he hurried out and locked the door, returned the keys to the old janitor, gave him another bill and instructed him to forget the visit, lighted a black cigar, and started walking rapidly southward.