"But I had my suspicions of Cochrane when he was unable to open the vault door. That pointed to nervousness, and nervousness indicated a guilty conscience. I made the hanging of the grille door an excuse to get him to shed his coat--though I did want to see whether the door came all the way down to the floor--and I noted that his suspenders were very broad and his trousers abnormally wide around the waist. He didn't want to take any chances with that extra fourteen pounds of gold, you know. It would never do to drop it in the street. "The rest is merely corroborative. I found that bluish lights had been observed in the basement of Cochrane's house, and one of my men located the tailor who had enlarged his trousers. That's really all there was to it." With that Drummond started to the door, only to be stopped by Director Preston's inquiry as to where he was going. "On my vacation, which you interrupted this morning," replied the Secret Service man. "It's a good thing I did," Preston called after him. "If Cochrane had really gotten away with that gold we might never have caught him." * * * * * "Which," as Bill Quinn said, when he finished his narrative, "is the reason I claim that the telegraph boy who persisted in paging Drummond is the one who was really responsible for the saving of some hundred and thirty thousand dollars that belonged to Uncle Sam." "But, surely," I said, "that case was an exception. In rapidity of action, I mean. Don't governmental investigations usually take a long time?" "Frequently," admitted Quinn, "they drag on and on for months--sometimes years. But it's seldom that Uncle Sam fails to land his man--even though the trail leads into the realms of royalty, as in the Ypiranga case. That happened before the World War opened, but it gave the State Department a mighty good line on what to expect from Germany." III THE YPIRANGA CASE "Mexico," said Bill Quinn, who now holds a soft berth in the Treasury Department by virtue of an injury received in the line of duty--during a raid on counterfeiters a few years ago, to be precise--"is back on the first page of the papers again after being crowded off for some four years because of the World War. Funny coincidence, that, when you remember that it was this same Mexico that gave us our first indication of the way we might expect Germany to behave." "Huh?" I said, a bit startled. "What do you mean? The first spark of the war was kindled in Serbia, not Mexico. Outside of the rumblings of the Algeciras case and one or two other minor affairs, there wasn't the slightest indication of the conflict to come." "No?" and Quinn's eyebrows went up in interrogation. "How about the Ypiranga case?" "The which?" "The Ypiranga case--the one where Jack Stewart stumbled across a clue in a Mexico City cafe which led all the way to Berlin and back to Washington and threatened to precipitate a row before the Kaiser was quite ready for it?"