“Well,” asked the young man, “who the deuce are you?”

By way of an answer the other burst into a laugh that showed his brilliant teeth; then he threw off his battered soft hat and gayly colored handkerchief, after which he sank into the chair which Pendleton had lately vacated.

“Pen,” said he, in an altered voice, “if you appreciate my friendship at all, give me one of the blackest cigars in the case over there.”

Pendleton stared for a moment; then a grin crept over his face and he said: 

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” He went to the cabinet and took out a box.  “Here’s a brand that looks like black Havana,” he said.  “And now, what the dickens are you doing in that rig?”

“I’ve been taking a long ride in the country—­on a motor cycle,” answered Ashton-Kirk, crossing his shabbily clothed legs and striking a match.  “Any time you feel disinclined to face your meals, Pen, I recommend you heartily to do the same.  It is a greater bracer.  At this moment I really believe I could do complete justice to even the very best culinary thoughts of our friend, Dr. Mercer.”

Pendleton sat down and regarded his friend with questioning eyes.

“It wasn’t to acquire an appetite that you made up this way.  You’ve been working.”

Ashton-Kirk comfortably blew one smoke-ring through another before he answered.

“Will you be surprised to hear that I have been following Miss Edyth Vale on a little voyage to the neighborhood of Cordova?”

“Again!”

“But this time she did not pay a visit to Professor Locke.  To-day the favored one was Allan Morris.”

“Morris!  Then she knows where he is?”

“So it would seem.”

“But she told you the other day that she did not.”

Ashton-Kirk shrugged his shoulders.

“Things happen swiftly and unexpectedly,” said he.  “Perhaps she did not know it then.”

“And perhaps she did not know Locke or his whereabouts, either,” said Pendleton, with bitter irony.

“Who knows?” replied Ashton-Kirk, composedly.  “At any rate, it was just a supposition that led to my labors of to-day.”

“I don’t think I understand,” said Pendleton, after a moment.

“Last night,” said the investigator, “you asked me if I had learned anything from Professor Locke.  And I replied to the effect that I thought I had.  Now,” after a pause, devoted to the grateful smoke, “when one sees a girl circumstanced as Miss Vale assuredly is in this case, paying a secret visit to a man who is rather more than suspected of the murder, what does one suppose?”

“That she is leagued with him, somehow,” replied Pendleton, reluctantly.

“Exactly.  But on the other hand, when the same girl, upon sight of us, rushes off and leaves the man to face us without giving him a hint as to who we are, what does one suppose?”

But Pendleton rose gloomily and strode over to the window.