Carmichael looked quickly in the direction in which Miller was staring. He saw a score of men and half as many women entering and leaving the hotel. Discarding those who were going out as unlikely to have attracted Miller’s attention, since he had had opportunity to see them before, the Ranger swiftly appraised the new arrivals. One or two were traveling men, just alighted from a depot street car, hustling with their bags toward the desk. The remainder were women in filmy dresses and their well-groomed escorts, who passed laughing and chattering toward the corridor that led to the big ballroom from which a crash of drums and saxophones some time since had signaled the opening of a dance. It was quite evidently to be a big dance, for a hundred or more festively dressed couples had already passed in to it and more were constantly arriving. Miller’s eyes followed a group of these newly arrived dance patrons. He might be observing any one of the twenty or more. Captain Carmichael studied the group. They were for the most part young people and Carmichael recognized several as sons and daughters of well-to-do business men of the city. Two of them were already successful in their own right--Morton Perry the real-estate operator and Wallace Locke the oil man. Each of these had inherited money and skillfully increased it, although there the comparison ended, because Perry’s initial stake had been not more than fifty thousand, while Locke’s father, an old cattleman, had left him close to half a million. Each of them although barely past thirty had at least doubled his original capital. A pretty girl moved beside each as he passed on into the ballroom. Perry’s companion was his wife, a slight, bobbed-haired bunch of vivacity. With Locke was Edith Alsbury, a merry girl of twenty-three with a creamy complexion and flaming hair, whom Captain Carmichael had known slightly all her life, being an acquaintance of her aunt who had reared her since she was orphaned in infancy. He recalled that he had heard she was engaged to Locke; that they were to be married in a month or two. The captain’s eyes, as the group disappeared and others coming from the entrance took their places, returned to the chair where the Argentinian had sat, to find it vacant. Miller now stood at the desk, talking to a clerk. Presently, nodding as though in thanks for some information, he left the desk and went to a chair, not the one he had vacated with its full view of the entrance, but another in a far corner. Seated in it he paid no more attention to the throng but fell into deep thought. Captain Carmichael frowned as he studied the situation that had suddenly developed. Certain facts which aligned themselves in his mind seemed to have a bearing on one another and on the very assignment from the governor on which he was engaged.