“You can’t find him?  Why?” asked Kennedy, considerably puzzled.

“No, we can’t find him.  He was married a few days ago, married a pretty prominent society girl in the city, Miss Sibyl Sanderson.  It seems they kept the itinerary of their honeymoon secret, more as a joke on their friends than anything else, they said, for Miss Sanderson was a well-known beauty and the newspapers bothered the couple a good deal with publicity that was distasteful.  At least that was his story.  No one knows where they are or whether they’ll ever turn up again.

“You see, this getting married had something to do with the exposure in the first place.  For the major part of the forgeries consists not so much in the checks, which interest my company, but in fraudulently issued stock certificates of the By-Products Company.  About a million of the common stock was held as treasury stock—­was never issued.

“Some one has issued a large amount of it, all properly signed and sealed.  Whoever it was had a little office in Chicago from which the stock was sold quietly by a confederate, probably a woman, for women seem to rope in the suckers best in these get-rich-quick schemes.  And, well, if it was Dawson the honeymoon has given him a splendid chance to make his get-away, though it also resulted in the exposure of the forgeries.  Carroll had to take up more or less active duty, with the result that a new man unearthed the—­but, say, are you really interested in this case?”

Williams was leaning forward, looking anxiously at Kennedy and it would not have taken a clairvoyant to guess what answer he wanted to his abrupt question.

“Indeed I am,” replied Craig, “especially as there seems to be a doubt about the guilty person on the inside.”

“There is doubt enough, all right,” rejoined Williams, “at least I think so, though our detectives in Chicago who have gone over the thing pretty thoroughly have been sure of fixing something on Bolton Brown, the cashier.  You see the blank stock certificates were kept in the company’s vault in the bank to which, of course, Brown had access.  But then, as Carroll argues, Dawson had access to them, too, which is very true—­more so for Dawson than for Brown, who was in the bank and not in the company.  I’m all at sea.  Perhaps if you’re interested you’d better see Carroll.  He’s here in the city and I’m sure I could get you a good fee out of the case if you cared to take it up.  Shall I see if I can get him on the wire?”

We had finished luncheon and, as Craig nodded, Williams dived into a telephone booth outside the dining-room and in a few moments emerged, perspiring from the closeness.  He announced that Carroll requested that we call on him at an office in Wall Street, a few blocks away, where he made his headquarters when he was in New York.  The whole thing was done with such despatch that I could not help feeling that Carroll had been waiting to hear from his friend in the insurance company.  The look of relief on Williams’s face when Kennedy said he would go immediately showed plainly that the insurance man considered the cost of the luncheon, which had been no slight affair, in the light of a good investment in the interest of his company, which was “in bad” for the largest forgery insurance loss since they had begun to write that sort of business.