“Now, how did the robber get in?  All the windows and doors were supposedly locked.  It is alleged that a pane was cut from this window at the side.  It was, and the pieces were there to show it.  But take a glance at this outside photograph.  To reach that window even a tall man must have stood on a ladder or something.  There are no marks of a ladder or of any person in the soft soil under the window.  What is more, that window was cut from the inside.  The marks of the diamond which cut it plainly show that.  Scientific common sense again.”

“Then it must have been some one in the house or at least some one familiar with it?” I exclaimed.

Kennedy nodded.  “One thing we have which the police greatly neglect,” he pursued, “a record.  We have made some progress in reconstructing the crime, as Bertillon calls it.  If we only had those Hanford pictures we should be all right.”

We were now on our way to see Miss Ashton at headquarters, and as we rode downtown I tried to reason out the case.  Had it really been a put-up job?  Was Travis himself faking, and was the robbery a “plant” by which he might forestall exposure of what had become public property in the hands of another, no longer disposed to conceal it?  Or was it after all the last desperate blow of the Boss?

The whole thing began to assume a suspicious look in my mind.  Although Kennedy seemed to have made little real progress, I felt that, far from aiding Travis, it made things darker.  There was nothing but his unsupported word that he had not visited the Boss subsequent to the nominating convention.  He admitted having done so before the Reform League came into existence.  Besides it seemed tacitly understood that both the Boss and Cadwalader Brown acquiesced in the sworn statement of the man who said he had made the pictures.  Added to that the mere existence of the actual pictures themselves was a graphic clincher to the story.  Personally, if I had been in Kennedy’s place I think I should have taken advantage of the proviso in the compact with Travis to back out gracefully.  Kennedy, however, now started on the case, hung to it tenaciously.

Miss Ashton was waiting for us at the press bureau.  Her desk was at the middle of one end of the room in which, if she could keep an eye on her office force, the office force also could keep an eye on her.

Kennedy had apparently taken in the arrangement during our morning visit, for he set to work immediately.  The side of the room toward the office of Travis and Bennett presented an expanse of blank wall.  With a mallet he quickly knocked a hole in the rough plaster, just above the baseboard about the room.  The hole did not penetrate quite through to the other side.  In it he placed a round disc of vulcanised rubber, with insulated wires leading down back of the baseboard, then out underneath it, and under the carpet.  Some plaster quickly closed up the cavity in the wall, and he left it to dry.