The eastern sky was now shot with faint streaks of light, which proclaimed the coming of dawn. Now, for the first time, it would be possible to make a thorough search of the premises.
As O’Hara came up, Brown glared at him as though seeing him for the first time since the arrival of the raiding party.
“So you’re the informer, are you?” he said, wrathfully. “A fine patriot you are! Your friends must be pretty bad off to get help from criminals.”
O’Hara was about to reply, when Mr. Southwick turned to the German, and said, acidly:
“You’ll have plenty of opportunity to talk later, Brown. Just now, what we want from you is information. I have evidence that your wife was here last night. Where is she now? Speak the truth. Where is she?”
A sneer passed over the cold face of the man.
“If it will do you any good to know,” he said, “she is in Mexico by this time. Perhaps you’d like to catch her, too, eh? Yes, and maybe the Mexicans will help you. Suppose you try?”
The stately woman whose beauty had so impressed O’Hara on his arrival at the ranch, was nowhere to be found. By this time the bungalow and its adjacent buildings had already been searched by the busy men.
O’Hara turned to Danny, who was standing at his side, and said in low voice:
“I can’t say that I am sorry for that, Danny. This is a terrible situation for a woman to be mixed up in, and somehow, I hate to see a woman in trouble even when she deserves it.”
“That’s right, Uncle Jim,” agreed the young man. “I know exactly how you feel. I think every real man feels the same way. Somehow, we hate to think that a beautiful woman could be mixed up in anything so disagreeable as this. Well, we’ve got this man Brown, anyway, and he’s the real power behind the throne. At least, I think so.”
Meantime, Mr. Southwick was receiving reports from the detectives who were searching every nook and corner of the ranch.
“The ranch is deserted, sir,” said one of the detectives who had come down in Burns’s car. “We’ve gone over every shack on the place with a fine-tooth comb, and everything is just about cleaned out.”
“By the way, you mentioned something in my library about being locked up in a subterranean cavern. You said something about a safe being there, filled with documents of all kinds. Do you know how to reach it?”