“Who is she?” demanded Craig.

“I dunno, sah.  She come from next door.”

“I know she did.  She’s the girl in the office of the Montmartre.  Now, you know her.  What is her name?”

The negress seemed to consider a moment, then quickly answered, “Dey always calls her Miss Sybil here, sah, Sybil Seymour, sah.”

“Thank you.  I knew you had some name for her.  Come, Walter.  This is over for the present.  A raid without arrests, too!  It will be all over town in half an hour.  If we are going to do anything it must be done quickly.”

We called on Carton and lost no time in having the men he could spare placed in watching the railroads and steamship lines to prevent if we could any of the gang from getting out of the city that way.  It was a night of hard work with no results.  I began to wonder whether they might not have escaped finally after all.  There seemed to be no trace.  Harris had disappeared, there was no clue to Marie Margot, no trace of the new blonde woman, not a syllable yet about Betty Blackwell.

XVI

THE SANITARIUM

“It seems as if the forces of Dorgan are demoralized,” I remarked the afternoon after the raid on Margot’s.

“We have them on the run—­that’s true,” agreed Kennedy, “but there’s plenty of fight in them, yet.  We’re not through, by any means.”

Still, the lightning swiftness of Carton’s attack had taken their breath away, temporarily, at least.  Already he had started proceedings to disbar Kahn, as well as to prosecute him in the courts.  According to the reports that came to us Murtha himself seemed dazed at the blow that had fallen.  Some of our informants asserted that he was drinking heavily; others denied it.  Whatever it was, however, Murtha was changed.

As for Dorgan, he was never much in the limelight anyhow and was less so now than ever.  He preferred to work through others, while he himself kept in the background.  He had never held any but a minor office, and that in the beginning of his career.  Interviews and photographs he eschewed as if forbidden by his political religion.  Since the discovery of the detectaphone in his suite at Gastron’s he had had his rooms thoroughly overhauled, lest by any chance there might be another of the magic little instruments concealed in the very walls, and having satisfied himself that there was not, he instituted a watch of private detectives to prevent a repetition of the unfortunate incident.

Whoever it was who had obtained the Black Book was keeping very quiet about it, and I imagined that it was being held up as a sort of sword of Damocles, dangling over his head, until such time as its possessor chose to strike the final blow.  Of course, we did not and could not know what was going on behind the scenes with the Silent Boss, what drama was being enacted between Dorgan and the Wall Street group,