"I'm afraid not, sir," Prout admitted. "The only thing I have established so far is that my prisoner is the brother of the murdered man. Oddly enough, he has no idea that the writer of those letters is dead. And as he declines to disclose his own name, we cannot discover the identity of his murdered brother."Hetty laughed. It was past eleven, and Lawrence was going down to his club for an hour. The little girl had been a bit more fretful than usual.
THREE:"Splendid so far," he murmured. "She'll walk into the trap, in fact they both will. And now I think I have really earned a good night's rest."During the night only a few houses were burnt down; the general destruction followed the next morning, Sunday, August 16th, and just as I reached the little town the flames were raging all over the place in a fierce blaze.
THREE:"And I am afraid I betrayed the fact," Bruce admitted. "I might have thought of some other way of accounting for my presence here. Still, that rather piratical-looking young man seemed to think you had done right. What's this about some man picked up in the garden?"
Dick shook it warmly.But there was a woman on the bridge with the white uniformed captain and a navigating officer. She was in dark clothes! But she had been there all the time. He suddenly recalled the French maid Jeff had mentioned in the hotel. That answered his puzzled wonder. He knew who had thrown that life preserver, at any rate. It could not be the mistress. It left only the maid to suspect.CHAPTER XIII. GEARING AS A MEANS OF TRANSMITTING POWER.