“Yes.  Brodie and Steve Jarrold and Andy Parker and the rest of Brodie’s worthless crowd of illicit booze-runners.  They hang out in the old McQuarry shack, cheek by jowl with Honeycutt.  I saw them, thick as flies, while I was there last week.  Brodie, it seems, has even been cooking the old man’s meals for him.”

“There you are!” burst out King.  “What more do you want?  Imagine Swen Brodie turning over his hand for anybody on earth if there isn’t something in it all for Swen Brodie.  And I’ll go bond he’s giving Honeycutt the best, most nourishing meals that have come his way since his mother suckled him—­Swen Brodie bound on keeping him alive until he gets what he’s after.  When he’d kick old Honeycutt in the side and leave him to die like a dog with a broken back.”

“Well,” demanded Gaynor, “what’s to be done?  With all his jabberings, Honeycutt is sly and furtive and is obsessed with the idea that there is one thing he won’t tell.”

“Will you go and see him one more time?”

“What’s the good, Mark?  If he does know, he gets lockjaw at the first word.  I’ve tried——­”

“There’s one thing we haven’t tried.  Old Honeycutt is as greedy a miser as ever gloated over a pile of hoardings.  We’ll get a thousand dollars—­five thousand, if necessary—­in hard gold coin, if we have to rob the mint for it.  You’ll spread it on the table in his kitchen.  You’ll let it chink and you’ll let some of it drop and roll.  If that won’t buy the knowledge we want——­But it will!”

“I’ve known the time when five thousand wasn’t as much money as it is right now, Mark——­”

“I’ve got it, if I scrape deep.  And I’ll dig down to the bottom.”

“And if we draw a blank?”

But there was a step at the door, the knob was turning.  Mark King turned, utterly unconscious of the quick stiffening of his body as he awaited the introduction to Ben’s wife.

Chapter IV

At first, King was taken aback by Mrs. Ben’s youthfulness.  Or look of youth, as he understood presently.  He knew that she was within a few years of Ben’s age, and yet certainly she showed no signs of it to his eyes, which, though keen enough, were, after a male fashion, unsophisticated.  She was a very pretty woman, petite, alert, and decidedly winsome.  He understood in a flash why Ben should have been attracted to her; how she had held him to her own policies all these years, largely because they were hers.  She was dressed daintily; her glossy brown hair was becomingly arranged about the bright, smiling face.  She chose to be very gracious to her husband’s life-long friend, giving him a small, plump hand in a welcoming grip, establishing him in an instant, by some sleight of femininity which King did not plumb, as a hearthside intimate most affectionately regarded.  His first two impressions of her, arriving almost but not quite simultaneously, were of youthful prettiness and cleverness.