Then Jack hastened back to Messrs. Farnum and Pollard to report what was in the air.

“By Jupiter, Jack, I knew you had some thing strong in your mind when you left us,” gasped the shipbuilder.  “But I didn’t imagine you’d run down the wretches as swiftly as that.”

“We don’t yet know that we’ve got the right hair,” replied Captain Jack.

“I’m willing to wager money on it, if it comes to that,” retorted Mr. Farnum.

Before noon the two prisoners were brought into Spruce Beach.  Trotter and Packwood stopped, in a ’bus with the prisoners, to show them to Jack at the hotel.

“That pair look rascally enough to do any dirty trick,” declared Jacob Farnum, in high disgust, as he looked over Leroux and Stephanoulis.

The prisoners were, indeed, “hard hooking.”  Both were men below average size, with sullen, defiant eyes.  Both were dressed roughly, like laborers.  Yet, when taken, each had been found to have a considerable sum of money about him.

“We can’t make either of the fellows talk, but maybe they will later, when we begin to employ some of the third degree on them,” whispered Mr. Trotter to Jack.  “My boy, I think you’ve put us on the real trail.  If the jailer identifies them as Gaston’s callers of yesterday, we’ll know where we stand.”

Fifteen minutes later the Secret Service men returned.  The jailer had pronounced the pair to be Gaston’s callers of the day before.  Moreover, the jailer had obligingly locked up the pair until Trotter and Packwood could obtain proper authority for him to hold them.  Leroux and Stephanoulis had been placed in cells from which they could not possibly communicate with Gaston, whose cell lay in another wing of the jail.

“As soon as that pair found that, for some reason, their mine failed to explode under you last night,” Trotter hinted, “they knew that their game was up.  They hurried away and lay concealed in the distance.  Then they saw the party from the ‘Waverly’ hunting on shore, with lantern’s, and they took to the woods.  That pair of rascals knew how risky it would be for them to try to leave at the local railway station today, so they struck off through the woods on foot making for another town at a distance.  The constables who brought them down here say that Leroux and Stephanoulis were a surely astonished pair when they found themselves nabbed.  We are getting into a bigger nest of trouble down here than we expected when we left Washington.”

After, the Secret Service men had gone, Jacob Farnum turned as though to go inside the hotel.

“I’m wondering whether there are any letters for me,” he said.

“I’ll go to the office and inquire,” proposed Jack Benson.  At the desk he received two letters for his employer, and turned away with them in one hand when his steps were arrested by the sound of a sweet feminine voice at the further end of the desk.