"This is no time to bandy words," roared Roque, "shut and bar the doors"--this last command directed at Zorn. The giant jumped at the bidding and sent the bolts rattling into their sockets. The savage energy of Roque ruled all to silence. Even the power under the cloak refrained from advising. The secret agent dismissed suspicion as to the active participants in the conference, and as to the loyalty of Spitznagle he had not the slightest doubt. The trial horses must needs be two pale-faced boys backed up against a window-sill. Roque, with his hands deep in his pockets, a habit he had when stalking a suspect, walked around the foot of the table and stood directly in front of the pair, fixing on them that gimlet gaze he used to terrorize. Billy and Henri, when at bay, were the most keenly alive; their nerve always served them most in the supreme test. They faced their inquisitor without an outward tremor; their previous anxiety was known only to themselves, and now admirably concealed. Roque realized that he had no fluttering birds in his hands, and also was aware that a search of their persons was only required to acquit or convict these youngsters of the actual theft. He knew that they had not left the room, though why he had not long ago sent them upstairs to bed was a slip of mind he could not account for. But it had occurred to Roque that the boys had been in a position to see the table all the time since the company adjourned to the fire, and whatever had happened in regard to the papers they, if not the light-fingered chaps themselves, must have witnessed the perpetration of the steal. So he changed his tactics. "Now, boys," he began with insinuating address, "there is a very ugly situation here, and as I have always heretofore found you dependable, cannot I now depend upon you to help me clear this up?" Henri shook his head, in denial for both. "Search us," he said. Roque, whose remarkable judgment of human nature has before been noted, felt in an instant that the suggested search would develop nothing. "Who took the papers then?" he fiercely demanded. "We were not on guard duty." Billy was inclined to resent this bullying, and showed it by his answer. "Strip them," urged the short airman, who thought he, as the loser, ought to have a word in the controversy. Roque waved the man away, and then abruptly moved to where Spitznagle was sitting, a picture of despair. "Who was in the house to-night besides those now present?" was the question fired at Mine Host. "Nobody but Conrad," assured Spitznagle. "Who the devil is Conrad?" Roque fairly jumped at this information. "Why, a poor crippled fellow, as queer in the head as he was in the legs, that I had helping in the kitchen. He lost his job as cook on the coast line steamer _Druid_ on account of rheumatism, and they sent him up here to me." "'They sent him up,' did 'they?' And now when did 'they' send him up?"