“Then you scrape the wire, just as you shave records to use it over again?” I suggested.

“No,” he replied.  “You pass a magnet over it and the magnet automatically erases the record.  Rust has no effect.  The record lasts as long as steel lasts.”

Craig continued to tinker tantalizingly with the machine which had been invented by a Dane, Valdemar Poulsen.

He had scarcely finished testing out the telegraphone, when the laboratory door opened and a clean-cut young man entered.

Kennedy, I knew, had found that the routine work of the Clutching Hand case was beyond his limited time and had retained this young man, Raymond Chase, to attend to that.

Chase was a young detective whom Craig had employed on shadowing jobs and as a stool pigeon on other cases, and we had all the confidence in the world in him.

Just now what worried Craig was the situation with Elaine, and I fancied that he had given Chase some commission in connection with that.

“I’ve got it, Mr. Kennedy,” greeted Chase with quiet modesty.

“Good,” responded Craig heartily.  “I knew you would.”

“Got what?” I asked a moment later.

Kennedy nodded for Chase to answer.

“I’ve located the new residence of Flirty Florrie,” he replied.

I saw what Kennedy was after at once.  Flirty Florrie and Dan the
Dude had caused the quarrel between himself and Elaine.  Dan the
Dude was dead.  But Flirty Florrie might be forced to explain it.

“That’s fine,” he added, exultingly.  “Now, I’ll clear that thing up.”

He took a hasty step to the telephone, put his hand on the receiver and was about to take it off the hook.  Then he paused, and I saw his face working.  The wound Elaine had given his feelings was deep.  It had not yet quite healed.

Finally, his pride, for Kennedy’s was a highly sensitive nature, got the better of him.

“No,” he said, half to himself, “not—­yet.”

Elaine had returned home.

Alone, her thoughts naturally went back to what had happened recently to interrupt a friendship which had been the sweetest in her life.

“There must be some mistake,” she murmured pensively to herself, thinking of the photograph Flirty had given her.  “Oh, why did I send him away?  Why didn’t I believe him?”

Then she thought of what had happened, of how she had been seized by Dan the Dude in the deserted house, of how the noxious gas had overcome her.

They had told her of how Craig had risked his life to save her, how she had been brought home, still only half alive, after his almost miraculous work with the new electric machine.

There was his picture.  She had not taken that away.  As she looked at it, a wave of feeling came over her.  Mechanically, she put out her hand to the telephone.

She was about to take off the receiver, when something seemed to stay her hand.  She wanted him to come to her.