“I had been on the lookout for a Russian spy, you see,” he explained, “for I had been tipped off by Sasaku, one of the dining-room boys, who is rather attached to me, that a fellow he had once seen chased out of Tokyo was here in Brantford, showing considerable interest in doings at the fort. Accordingly, I framed it up with Sasaku to get in with the chap, on the plea of being a ‘gumshoe man’ himself, desirous of working to mutual advantage, and gave him yesterday a bundle of fake papers to fool the other with, and get him to divulge his name and his business. “That,” he added disdainfully, “is the sole basis for the ‘Japanese spy’ story you have heard. And, by the way”--he glanced with a frown at his watch--“I ought to have heard from Sasaku before this. He promised to send me a communication at the very first opportunity.” “But where does the cigarette come in?” Meredith asked, a trifle impatiently. “The cigarette? Oh, that was the connecting link. It is really the corner stone to my entire theory; for although I very quickly decided that the gumshoe artists were at the bottom of the job, I was, at first, rather inclined to suspect Otto Schilder as the moving spirit. It seemed pretty crude work for one of the kaiser’s men, I will admit; but there was no one else handy to lay it to, and as a German he was, of course, open to question. The discovery of the cigarette outside the office door, however, cleared things up amazingly. I recollected a glint of light I had seen flash across the doorway when the current was cut off, and, by putting two and two together, it didn’t take me long to figure out just about what had happened. The telltale spark I saw traversed the aperture of the doorway from top to bottom; consequently, the cigarette must have fallen or been dropped from above. Had the smoker been on the roof, then? And was it possible that the colonel, seized and muffled as he stood on the threshold, had been hauled up there by a rope? An electric crane, though, with its long arm sweeping silently over the yard, and lifting scrap iron across the fence to be loaded on cars outside, gave me a more plausible idea.” “But if you knew so much,” Meredith interrupted, “why did you not at once denounce these men?” “With what proof?” asked Grail. “Remember, some little time had elapsed before I got this theory, and to identify the guilty men in that large force of laborers would then have been practically impossible. Besides, all the evidence I had to present was this cigarette butt; and, although it was perfectly plain to me that it had been tossed away by one of the men in the basket of the crane just before grabbing the colonel, I might have had difficulty in getting others to see it in the same light. No, no! To have shown my hand at that stage would have been simply to tip all the fat into the fire.” “But what of father?” exclaimed Miss Verdant sharply. “Is no effort being made to find him, or learn what has become of him?”