That was, in fact, just what Norton wanted, as well as to make clear to us how he felt on the subject.

“Really, Kennedy,” he remarked, “it must be fine to feel that your chair in the University is endowed rather than subsidized.  You saw how Whitney acted, you say.  Why, he makes me feel as if I were his hired man, instead of head of the University’s expedition.  I’m glad it’s over.  Still, if you could find that dagger and have it returned it might look better for me.  You have no clue, I suppose?”

“I’m getting closer to one,” replied Craig confidently, though on what he could base any optimism I could not see.

The same idea seemed to be in Norton’s mind.  “You think you will have something tangible soon?” he asked eagerly.

“I’ve had more slender threads than these to work on,” reassured Kennedy.  “Besides, I’m getting very little help from any of you.  You yourself, Norton, at the start left me a good deal in the dark over the history of the dagger.”

“I couldn’t do otherwise,” he defended.  “You understand now, I guess, how I have always been tied, hand and foot, by the Whitney influence.  You’ll find that I can be of more service, now.”

“Just how did you get possession of the dagger?” asked Kennedy, and there flashed over me the recollection of the story told by the Senora, as well as the letter which we had purloined.

“Just picked it up from an Indian who had an abnormal dislike to work.  They said he was crazy, and I guess perhaps he was.  At any rate, he later drowned himself in the lake, I have heard.”

“Could he have been made insane, do you think?” ruminated Craig.  “It’s possible that he was the victim of somebody, I understand.  The insanity might have been real enough without the cause being natural.”

“That’s an interesting story,” returned Norton.  “Offhand, I can’t seem to recall much about the fellow, although some one else might have known him very well.”

Evidently he either did not know the tale as well as the Senora, or was not prepared to take us entirely into his confidence.

“Who is Haggerty?” asked Craig, thinking of the name signed to the letter we had read.

“An agent of Whitney and his associates, who manages things in Lima,” explained Norton.  “Why?”

“Nothing—­only I have heard the name and wondered what his connection might be.  I understand better now.”

Kennedy seemed to be anxious to get to work on something, and, after a few minutes, Norton left us.

No sooner had the door closed than he took the glass-bell jar off his microscope and drew from a table drawer several scraps of paper on which I recognized the marks left by the carbon sheets.  He set to work on another of those painstaking tasks of examination, and I retired to my typewriter, which I had moved into the next room, in order to leave Kennedy without anything that might distract attention from his work.