“There isn’t time now to go into the thing more deeply, but if it becomes necessary I can go back to it with the aid of the camera lucida and the microscopic enlarger, as well as this specially constructed document camera with lenses certified by the government.  If it comes to a show-down I suppose I shall have to prove my point with the micrometer measurements down to the fifty-thousandth part of an inch.

“There is certainly something very curious about these signatures,” he concluded.  “I don’t know what measurements would show, but they are really too good.  You know a forged signature may be of two kinds—­too bad or too good.  These are, I believe, tracings.  If they were your signature and mine, Walter, I shouldn’t hesitate to pronounce them tracings.  But there is always some slight room for doubt in these special cases where a man sits down and is in the habit of writing his signature over and over again on one stock or bond after another.  He may get so used to it that he does it automatically and his signatures may come pretty close to superimposing.  If I had time, though, I think I could demonstrate that there are altogether too many points of similarity for these to be genuine signatures.  But we’ve got to act quickly in this case or not at all, and I see that if I am to get to Atlantic City to-night I can’t waste much more time here.  I wish you would keep an eye on the Hotel Amsterdam while I am gone, Walter, and meet me here, to-morrow.  I’ll wire when I’ll be back.  Good-bye.”

It was well along in the afternoon when Kennedy took a train for the famous seaside resort, leaving me in New York with a roving commission to do nothing.  All that I was able to learn at the Hotel Amsterdam was that a man with a Van Dyke beard had stung the office with a bogus check, although he had seemed to come well recommended.  The description of the woman with him who seemed to be his wife might have fitted either Mrs. Dawson or Adele DeMott.  The only person who had called had been a man who said he represented the By-Products Company and was the treasurer.  He had questioned the hotel people rather closely about the whereabouts of the couple who had paid their expenses with the worthless slip of paper.  It was not difficult to infer that this man was Carroll who had been hot on the trail, especially as he said that he personally would see the check paid if the hotel people would keep a sharp watch for the return of the man who had swindled them.

Kennedy wired as he promised and returned by an early train the next day.

He seemed bursting with news.  “I think I’m on the trail,” he cried, throwing his grip into a corner and not waiting for me to ask him what success he had had.  “I went directly to the Lorraine and began frankly by telling them that I represented the By-Products Company in New York and was authorised to investigate the bad check which they had received.  They couldn’t describe Dawson very well—­at least their description would have fitted almost any one.  One thing I think I did learn and that was that his disguise must include a Van Dyke beard.  He would scarcely have had time to grow one of his own and I believe when he was last seen in Chicago he was clean-shaven.”