"
Ashton-Kirk comfortably blew one smoke-ring through another before he
answered.
"Will you be surprised to hear that I have been following Miss Edyth
Vale on a little voyage to the neighborhood of Cordova?"
"Again!"
"But this time she did not pay a visit to Professor Locke. To-day the
favored one was Allan Morris."
"Morris! Then she knows where he is?"
"So it would seem."
"But she told you the other day that she did not."
Ashton-Kirk shrugged his shoulders.
"Things happen swiftly and unexpectedly," said he. "Perhaps she did
_not_ know it then."
"And perhaps she did not know Locke or his whereabouts, either," said
Pendleton, with bitter irony.
"Who knows?" replied Ashton-Kirk, composedly. "At any rate, it was
just a supposition that led to my labors of to-day."
"I don't think I understand," said Pendleton, after a moment.
"Last night," said the investigator, "you asked me if I had learned
anything from Professor Locke. And I replied to the effect that I
thought I had. Now," after a pause, devoted to the grateful smoke,
"when one sees a girl circumstanced as Miss Vale assuredly is in this
case, paying a secret visit to a man who is rather more than suspected
of the murder, what does one suppose?"
"That she is leagued with him, somehow," replied Pendleton,
reluctantly.
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