smiled, throwing off the fur coat across a chair, "but, thanks to your refuge here, I think I've been able to shake them off the scent."

"Pretty nearly got you?" I exclaimed. "What do you mean? Who pretty nearly got you?" "That blasted Baggerly," curtly, “the detective."

For a second I thought he was joking; then the quick suspicion formed itself that this was another wile to lead me astray. But there was a bitter disgust to his tone, incapable of being simulated, stamping even so astounding a statement with the impress of truth.

"Baggerly?" I stammered weakly, clutching at the back of a chair. "Baggerly? A detective ?"

He stared at my amaze in puzzled wonder for a moment; then gave a short laugh of comprehension.

"Oh, I forgot. You sized him up for one of us, didn't you? Well, he isn't, worse luck," sobering suddenly to a sullen resentment. "If we'd had as smart a leader as he is to run us, we'd none of us ever be in the box that I am to-night. That Jew numbskull!" he railed disdainfully, "I might have known how it would be, when he

gave instructions to bring the swag to such a public place as this!”

"Baggerly, a detective," I reiterated, still unable to accept so complete a reversal of my opinions. "Surely, you are not in earnest? It cannot be true?"

"But it is true," he declared positively. "You can't wish it wasn't any harder than I do."

And with his words my carefully built house of cards toppled, swayed, and crashed to earth, leaving me temporarily buried beneath the ruins.

No wonder my deductions had ever failed to justify a connection between this man and the mystery I had been trying to unravel. No wonder I had been unable to prove his guilt before the bar of my own intelligence. He had possessed the strongest of all defences, a complete and unassailable innocence.

Still, dazed, bewildered, my vaunting pride bruised and battered,-I yet strove painfully to grope my way out of the tumbling wreck.

And then a ray of light flashed to my befogged brain. Inadvertently, Harry Glenn had given me a clue to the identity of the mysterious robber captain.

"That Jew numbskull!" was his epithet. "I

might have known how it would be when he gave instructions to bring the swag to such a public place as this!"

Almost with a gasp my lips framed the name, "Sonnenthal!"

CHAPTER V

THE KNOCK AT THE DOOR

"SONNENTHAL!" I repeated slowly; and with the very utterance of the name a hundred things became plain to me.

"It was he you came here to see to-night?” I cried, turning upon Glenn with swift conviction. "He is the one who has been inserting these various notices in the papers?"

He acquiesced with an indifferent shrug of the shoulders. So much for the vaunted loyalty of thieves, I thought, with a flash of cynical dis

cernment.

"So you tumbled to that, too, eh?" he said. "Well, he has no one but himself to blame. I warned him that it was a dangerous policy; but he was so dead frightened of ever being seen with one of us, that he preferred to take the risk. I was the only one he ever allowed a personal interview, and they were few and far between.

"Since you

had worked out the puzzle, though,"

he added questioningly, "you must have known that I was coming here to turn over the plant to him to-night?"

"Not exactly," I had to admit. "I read this morning's message merely as an order for the robbery of some one here in the house."

"No," with a shake of his head; "that was wrong. In such a case, it would have been stated as a request for a meeting. The words 'grant an interview' signified that I was to get the stones from where I had them planted out in the country and bring them here to him.—

"And, by the way," he interrupted himself abruptly, "was it you that beat me to the sapphires ?"

I nodded assent. "Yes; I had them about my neck all the time that I was with you this afternoon. You cannot get them," I cried, springing back warily as he raised his hand. "They are no longer in my keeping."

But I had misinterpreted his gesture. There was no call for me to guard myself against an explosion of wrath. It was instead an explosion of Homeric mirth with which Harry Glenn was struggling.

"Lord, Lord, I wish I dared laugh out loud,”