“I’ll be glad to go.  You know how much I like the town.  I wouldn’t care if I never saw one again.”

“It’s all right, then.  We’ll start in the morning.  I am more than anxious to go now, especially as Billings tells me he has invited several other people to be his guests.”

“Who are they?”

“You remember the girl who slipped the note into my pocket in the St. Louis station, and the young fellow with the pointed beard.  Well, I saw them both in town this morning.  The girl ran away from me on the street, jumped into a carriage, and drove away.”

“There’s nothing about you to cause a girl to run.”  Stella looked up at Ted in a teasing way.

“That’ll be all right,” said he.  “But a few minutes after I saw the fellow with the pointed beard coming out of the private office of Norcross, the president of the bank that was robbed of the forty thousand dollars.  He went by me like a rocket, as if he were afraid of me.”

“Sure it was he?”

“Positive.  But the strange part of it was my interview with the banker.  He acknowledged that the bank had been robbed of the money, and identified the bill dropped by Checkers in his flight, as one of the shipment, but when I announced that it was a counterfeit, he went all to pieces, and, after trying to bluff me into giving him the note, wanted to buy it, asking me to name my own price.”

“What does that mean, I wonder?”

“It means, that this case of the robbery and the murder of the express messenger is not the simple thing I thought.  There is a crime within a crime.”

“What in the world do you mean?”

“Just this, Norcross, the banker, is mixed in the crime, and Heaven only knows how many more men quite as prominent as he.  The express-robbing syndicate is a strong one, and hard to beat.”

“But you’ll beat it yet.  I know you.”

“Thank you for your faith and encouragement, Stella.  But it’s going to be a hard pull, and it will take all of us to do it.”

“What do you think of it now?”

“My idea is, that the alleged forty thousand dollars was not real money at all, and that Norcross was trying to double-cross the very men he was standing in with.”

“Still, I hardly understand.”

“Well, Norcross agreed with the members of the syndicate to ship forty thousand dollars to St. Louis, which was to be stolen en route by the syndicate’s own men.  They would then have their forty thousand back, and the forty thousand which they could make the express company pay them.  The original forty thousand would come back to Norcross, and he would get his share of the money which the express company would pay.”

“That was easy.”

“It would have been, but for the fact that Norcross insisted upon being insured for the use of his forty thousand in case anything else happened to it.  In this way he got another large sum.”