Dextry returned to Wheaton’s office.  As he neared it, he passed a lounging figure in an adjacent doorway.

“The place is watched,” he announced as he entered.  “Have you got a back door?  Good!  Leave your light burning and we’ll go out that way.”  They slipped quietly into an inky, tortuous passage which led back towards Second Street.  Floundering through alleys and over garbage heaps, by circuitous routes, they reached the bridge, where, in the swift stream beneath, they saw the lights from Mac’s tug.

Steam was up, and when the Captain had let them aboard Dextry gave him instructions, to which he nodded acquiescence.  They bade the lawyer adieu, and the little craft slipped its moorings, danced down the current, across the bar, and was swallowed up in the darkness to seaward.  “I’ll put out Wheaton’s light so they’ll think he’s gone to bed.”

“Yes, and at daylight I’ll take your place in McNamara’s loft,” said Glenister.  “There will be doings to-morrow when they don’t find him.”

They returned by the way they had come to the lawyer’s room, extinguished his light, went to their own cabin and to bed.  At dawn Glenister arose and sought his place above McNamara’s office.

To lie stretched at length on a single plank with eye glued to a crack is not a comfortable position, and the watcher thought the hours of the next day would never end.  As they dragged wearily past, his bones began to ache beyond endurance, yet owing to the flimsy structure of the building he dared not move while the room below was tenanted.  In fact, he would not have stirred had he dared, so intense was his interest in the scenes being enacted beneath him.

First had come the marshal, who imported his failure to find Wheaton.

“He left his room some time last night.  My men followed him in and saw a light in his window until two o’clock this morning.  At seven o’clock we broke in and he was gone.”

“He must have got wind of our plan.  Send deputies aboard the Santa Maria; search her from keel to topmast, and have them watch the beach close or he’ll put off in a small boat.  You look over the passengers that go aboard yourself.  Don’t trust any of your men for that, because he may try to slip through disguised.  He’s liable to make up like a woman.  You understand—­there’s only one ship in port, and—­he mustn’t get away.”

“He won’t,” said Voorhees, with conviction, and the listener overhead smiled grimly to himself, for at that moment, twenty miles offshore, lay Mac’s little tug, hove to in the track of the outgoing steamship, and in her tiny cabin sat Bill Wheaton eating breakfast.

As the morning wore by with no news of the lawyer, McNamara’s uneasiness grew.  At noon the marshal returned with a report that the passengers were all aboard and the ship about to clear.

“By Heavens!  He’s slipped through you,” stormed the politician.