. . . . . . .

It did not take me long to unpack the few things I had brought and I was soon back again in the living-room, where Aunt Josephine joined me in a few minutes.

Just as Elaine came hurriedly down the stairway and started toward me, Del Mar entered from the porch.  She stopped.  Del Mar watched her closely.  Had she found anything?  He was sure of it.

Her hesitation was only for a moment, however.  “Walter,” she said, “may I speak to you a moment?  Excuse us, please?”

Aunt Josephine went out toward the back of the house to see how the servants were getting on, while I followed Elaine up-stairs.  Del Mar with a bow seated himself and opened his magazine.  No sooner had we gone, however, than he laid it down and cautiously followed us.

Elaine was evidently very much excited as she entered her dainty little room and closed the door.  “Walter,” she cried, “I’ve found the torpedo!”

We looked about at the general disorder.  “Why,” she exclaimed nervously, “some one has been here—­and I locked the door, too.”

She almost ran over to her bureau drawer.  It had been jimmied open in the few minutes while she was down-stairs.  The torpedo was gone.  We looked at each other, aghast.

Behind us, however, we did not see the keen and watchful eyes of Del Mar, opening the door and peering in.  As he saw us, he closed the door softly, went down-stairs and out of the house.

. . . . . . .

Perhaps half a mile down the road, the farmer abandoned his hay rack and now, followed by his peculiar dog, walked back.  He stopped at a point in the road where he could see the Dodge house in the distance, sat on the rail fence and lighted a blackened corn-cob pipe.

There he sat for some time apparently engrossed in his own thoughts about the weather, the dog lying at his feet.  Now and then he looked fixedly toward Dodge Hall.

Suddenly his vagrant attention seemed to be riveted on the house.  He drew a field-glass from his pocket and levelled it.  Sure enough, there was a man coming out of a window, pulling himself up to the roof by a rope and going across the roof tree.  He lowered the glasses quickly and climbed off the fence with a hitherto unwonted energy.

“Come, Searchlight,” he called to the dog, as together they moved off quickly in the direction he had been looking.  Del Mar’s men were coming through the hedge that surrounded the Dodge estate just as the farmer and his dog stepped out in front of them from behind a thicket.

“Just a minute,” he called.  “I want to speak to you.”

He enforced his words with a vicious looking gun.  It was two to one and they closed with him.  Before he could shoot, they had knocked the gun out of his hand.  Then they tried to break away and run.

But the farmer seized one of them and held him.  Meanwhile the dog developed traits all his own.  He ran in and out between the legs of the other man until he threw him.  There he stood, over him.  The man attempted to rise.  Again the dog threw him and kept him down.  He was a trained Belgian sheep hound, a splendid police dog.