Perhaps the further thinking Maggie did did not result in cool, mature wisdom—­for her thoughts were the operations of a panicky mind.  Somehow she had to get warning to Larry of this imminent police hunt!  Without doubt Larry would return to Cedar Crest sometime that night.  Word should be sent to him there.  A letter was too uncertain in such a crisis.  Of course she had an invitation to go to Cedar Crest the following afternoon, and she might warn him then—­but that might be too late.  She dared not telephone or telegraph—­for that might somehow direct dangerous attention to the exact spot where Larry was hidden.  Also she had an instinct, operating unconsciously long before she had any thought of what she was eventually to do, not to let Barney or Old Jimmie find out, or even guess, that she had warned Larry—­not yet.

There seemed nothing that she herself could do.  Then she thought of the Duchess.  That was the way out!  The Duchess would know some way in which to get Larry word.

Five minutes later, in her plainest suit and hat, Maggie in a taxicab was rolling down toward the Duchess’s—­from where, only a few months back, she had started forth upon her great career.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Old Jimmie did not like meeting the police any oftener than a meeting was forced upon him, and so he slipped away and allowed Barney Palmer to undertake alone the business of settling Larry.  Barney found Gavegan exactly where he had counted:  lingering over his late dinner in the cafe of a famous Broadway restaurant—­a favorite with some of the detectives and higher officials of the Police Department—­in which cafe, in happier days now deeply mourned, Gavegan had had all the exhilaration he wanted to drink at the standing invitation of the proprietor, and where even yet on occasion a bit of the old exhilaration was brought to Gavegan’s table in a cup or served him in a room above to which he had had whispered instructions to retire.  The proprietor had in the old days liked to stand well with the police; and though his bar was now devoted to legal drinks—­or at least obliging Federal officers reported it to be—­he still liked to stand well with the police.

Gavegan was at a table with a minor producer of musical shows, to whom Barney had been of occasional service in securing the predominant essential of such music—­namely, shapely young women.  Barney nodded to Gavegan, chatted for a few minutes with his musical-comedy friend, during which he gave Gavegan a signal, then crossed to the once-crowded bar, now sunk to isolation and the lowly estate of soft drinks, and ordered a ginger ale.  Not until then did he notice Barlow, chief of the Detective Bureau, at a corner table.  Barney gave no sign of recognition, and Barlow, after a casual glance at him, returned to his food.

Barney, in solitude at one end of the bar, slowly sipped with a sort of indignation against his kickless purchase.  Presently Gavegan was beside him, having most convincing ill-luck in his attempts to light his cigar from a box of splintering safety matches which stood at that end of the bar.