“No, I don’t get you, Chief.”

“Why?”

“It’s too risky.”

“Too risky?”

“Yes.  That fellow Garrick is just as likely as not to be nosing around up there.  I’d go but for that.”

“I know.  But suppose we find that he isn’t there, that he isn’t in the house—­has been there and left it.  That would be safe enough.  You’re right.  Nothing doing if he’s there.  We must can him in some way.  But, say,—­I know how to get in all right without being seen.  I’ll tell you later.  Come on, be a sport.  We won’t try it if anybody’s there.  Besides, if we succeed it will help to throw a scare into Warrington.”

The man on our end of the telephone appeared to hesitate.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Chief,” he said at length.  “I’ll meet you at the same place as we met the other day—­you know where I mean—­some time after twelve.  We’ll talk it over.  You’re sure about the letter?”

“As sure as if I’d seen it.”

“All right.  Now, be there.  I won’t promise about this Warrington business.  We’ll talk that over.  But I have other things I want to tell you—­about this situation here at the garage.  I want to know how to act.”

“All right.  I’ll be there.  Good-bye.”

“So long, Chief.”

The conversation stopped.  I looked anxiously at Garrick to see how he had taken it.

“And so,” he remarked simply, as after a moment’s waiting we made sure that the machine had stopped talking, “it appears that our friends, the enemy, are watching us as closely as we are watching them—­with the advantage that they know us and we don’t know them, except this garage fellow.”

Garrick lapsed into silence.  I was rapidly turning over in my mind what we had just overheard and trying to plan some way of checkmating their next move.

“Here’s a plot hatching to rob Warrington’s safe,” I exclaimed helplessly.

“Yes,” repeated Garrick slowly, “and if we are going to do anything about it, it must be done immediately, before we arouse suspicion and scare them off.  Did you hear those footsteps over the detectaphone?  That was the Boss going out of the garage.  So, they expect me around there, nosing about Warrington’s apartment.  Well, if I do go there, and then ostentatiously go away again, that will lure them on.”

He reached his decision quickly.  Grabbing his hat, he led the way out of the Old Tavern and up the street until we came to a drug store with a telephone.

I heard him first talking with Warrington, getting from him the combination of the safe, over long distance.  Then he called up his office and asked the boy to meet him at the Grand Central subway station with a package, the location of which he described minutely.

“We’ll beat them to it,” he remarked joyously, as we started leisurely uptown to meet the boy.

Chapter XIII