“Cheer up, Tom,” he encouraged.  “We are on the home stretch now.”

“Perhaps—­if they don’t beat us to the tape,” I answered disconsolately.  “What are you going to do next?”

“While you were snatching a little sleep, I was rummaging around and found a number of letters in a table drawer, up there.  One was a note, evidently to the garage keeper, and signed merely, ‘Chief.’  I’ll wager that the handwriting is the same as that in the blackmailing letter to Miss Winslow.”

“What of it?” I asked, refusing to be comforted.  “We haven’t got him and the prospects—­”

“No, we haven’t got him,” interrupted Garrick, “but the note was just a line to tell the Boss, who seemed to have been up there in the country at the time, to meet the Chief at ‘the Joint,’ on Second Avenue.”

I nodded, but before I could speak, he added, “It didn’t say any more, but I think I know the place.  It is the old International Cafe, a regular hang-out for crooks, where they come to gamble away the proceeds of their crimes in stuss, the great game of the East Side, now.  Anyhow, we’ll just drop into the place.  We may not find them, but we’ll have an interesting time.  Then, there is the possibility of getting a strangle hold on someone, anyhow.”

Garrick was evidently figuring on having driven our gunman back into the haunts of the underworld.

There seemed to be no other course that presented itself and therefore, rather than remain inactive until something new turned up, I consented to accompany him in his excursion.

Forbes, still uncommunicatively protesting that he would say nothing until he had an opportunity to consult a lawyer, had been taken down to New York by Dillon during the morning and was lodged in a West Side prison under a technical charge which was sufficient to hold him until Garrick could investigate his case and fix his real status.

We had taken a cross-town car, with the intention of looking over the dive where Garrick believed the crooks might drop in.  The ride itself was uninteresting, but not so by any means the objective point of our journey.

Over on the East Side, we found the International Cafe, and slouched into the back room.  It was not the room devoted to stuss, but the entrance to it, which Garrick informed me was through a heavy door concealed in a little hallway, so that its very existence would not be suspected except by the initiate.

We made no immediate attempt to get into the hang-out proper, which was a room perhaps thirty feet wide and seventy feet deep.  Instead, we sat down at one of the dirty, round tables, and ordered something from the waiter, a fat and oily Muscowitz in a greasy and worn dinner coat.

It seemed that in the room where we were had gathered nearly every variety of the populous underworld.  I studied the men and women at the tables curiously, without seeming to do so.  But there could be no concealment here.  Whatever we might be, they seemed to know that we were not of them, and they greeted us with black looks and now and then a furtive scowl.