“Lemaire has not been hero at all,” replied the jailer.

“Was Mlle. Nadiboff here to see him yesterday?”

“No; she has been holding aloof.  With the exception of his lawyer, the only people who ye been here to see Gaston were two fellows who came yesterday, about noon.”

“Oho!” muttered Benson.  “Who were they?”

The jailer turned to reach for a memorandum book.

“I keep the names given by all who come here to see prisoners, so I shall be able to answer you.”

“Ah, here are the names.  One fellow called himself Leroux, the other Stephanoulis.”

“One name French, and the other Greek,” muttered the submarine boy, thinking hard.  “What did they look like?”

The jailer quickly and carefully described the pair.  Jack listened attentively.  Then rose, briskly.

“Did you hear any of the conversation they had with Gaston?”

“No.”

“If they come again to-day can you lock them up and hold them?”

“If I have proper authority.”

“If you get a telephone message from Mr. Trotter, would that be good enough authority?”

“Yes; on that I could hold them long enough to give Trotter a chance to come here and take them or else to get them committed on a regular warrant.”

“If you keep within sound of your telephone bell, then, I think you’ll have authority within a few minutes,” replied Jack, briskly.

“That’s a live, hustling boy,” muttered the jailer, looking after young Benson through a window, as the submarine boy hurried away.

Before he had gone far, Jack encountered one of the nondescript surreys, hauled by an antiquated nag and driven by a battered darkey, that often do duty as cab in Florida.  Poor as the rig was, it offered a chance of greater speed than Captain Benson could make at a walk, so he quickly engaged the rig and was driven to the place where the Secret Service men were stopping.

“You’ve brought us the only thing like a real clue that we have,” declared Mr. Trotter, very frankly, after he had heard Jack’s story.  “Wait a moment, and I’ll have Packwood get busy over the telephone.”

Within the next twenty minutes not only had the jail been telephoned to; Packwood also talked with all the nearby railway stations in that section of the country.

“If those rascals can be found,” declared Trotter, “I think we shall have gone a long way in clearing up the matter.  As you say, the fellow Gaston has more reason than any of the rest of the crowd to want a complete revenge against you.”

Then Mr Packwood left to walk through the little town around Spruce Beach, to see whether he could encounter any two worthies who answered to the description of Leroux and Stephanoulis.

Before half-past nine, however, word came that local constables at a little railway town a dozen miles away had arrested a couple of suspects and were bringing them to Spruce Beach.  The prisoners had been taken while waiting for a north bound train, and had tickets all the way through to New York.