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Page 110
"It's all right," said Freddie without looking up. "He did get
out! He had a bomb on him, and he threatened to drop it and blow
the place to pieces unless the blighters let him go. So they
cheesed it. I knew he had something up his sleeve."
Like this! Aline drew a deep breath. It would be like
this--forever and ever and ever--until she died. She bent forward
and stared at him.
"Freddie," she said, "do you love me?" There was no reply.
"Freddie, do you love me? Am I a part of you? If you hadn't me
would it be like trying to go on living without breathing?"
The Honorable Freddie raised a flushed face and gazed at her with
an absent eye.
"Eh? What?" he said. "Do I--Oh; yes, rather! I say, one of the
blighters has just loosed a rattlesnake into Gridley Quayle's
bedroom through the transom!"
Aline rose from her seat and left the room softly. The Honorable
Freddie read on, unheeding.
* * *
Ashe Marson had not fallen far short of the truth in his estimate
of the probable effect on Mr. Peters of the information that his
precious scarab had once more been removed by alien hands and was
now farther from his grasp than ever. A drawback to success in
life is that failure, when it does come, acquires an exaggerated
importance. Success had made Mr. Peters, in certain aspects of
his character, a spoiled child.
At the moment when Ashe broke the news he would have parted with
half his fortune to recover the scarab. Its recovery had become a
point of honor. He saw it as the prize of a contest between his
will and that of whatever malignant powers there might be ranged
against him in the effort to show him that there were limits to
what he could achieve. He felt as he had felt in the old days
when people sneaked up on him in Wall Street and tried to loosen
his grip on a railroad or a pet stock. He was suffering from that
form of paranoia which makes men multimillionaires. Nobody would
be foolish enough to become a multimillionaire if it were not for
the desire to prove himself irresistible.
Mr. Peters obtained a small relief for his feelings by doubling
the existing reward, and Ashe went off in search of Joan, hoping
that this new stimulus, acting on their joint brains, might
develop inspiration.
"Have any fresh ideas been vouchsafed to you?" he asked. "You may
look on me as baffled."
Joan shook her head.
"Don't give up," she urged. "Think again. Try to realize what
this means, Mr. Marson. Between us we have lost ten thousand
dollars in a single night. I can't afford it. It is like losing a
legacy. I absolutely refuse to give in without an effort and go
back to writing duke-and-earl stories for Home Gossip."
"The prospect of tackling Gridley Quayle again--"
"Why, I was forgetting that you were a writer of detective
stories. You ought to be able to solve this mystery in a moment.
Ask yourself, 'What would Gridley Quayle have done?'"
"I can answer that. Gridley Quayle would have waited helplessly
for some coincidence to happen to help him out."
"Had he no methods?"
"He was full of methods; but they never led him anywhere without
the coincidence. However, we might try to figure it out. What
time did you get to the museum?"
"One o'clock."
"And you found the scarab gone. What does that suggest to you?"
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