“I was just thinking of the surprise in store for our friend,” he whispered. “Why doesn’t he come?” But John Simpson seemed in no hurry to arrive, if he intended to do so at all. One o’clock came and passed, and the waiting men were still in their cramped positions beside the pile of lumber. It began to look as if Cray had been wrong in his theory, or else that, discouraged by Mrs. Simpson’s new hobby of sleeping at the rear of the house, the missing man had decided not to visit the place that night—for surely Simpson must have known that everybody had been in bed for hours. Even the ex-police detective, usually so stolid, began to fidget. Suddenly, however, his body grew rigid, and his left hand closed upon the arm of the man beside him. From the roadway at the rear, still some little distance off, had come faint but unmistakable sounds. A motor vehicle of some sort, well-nigh silent in operation, was approaching, and pebbles were being displaced by its rubber-tired wheels. “Our man!” Cray whispered. CHAPTER XXV. THOSE EXTRA-HEAVY SUIT CASES. Green Eye did not reply to the burly detective’s warning, but his hand took a firm grip on the revolver in his pocket. He was holding it by the barrel, however. The brief interval that followed seemed long and tedious, but in reality it could not have been of more than three or four minutes’ duration. Although tense and physically on the alert, Gordon found his mind wandering. He wondered idly where Simpson had been staying, and how he dared to travel about even at night in the same machine in which he had removed the gold from the Hattontown bank. “He probably counts on Griswold doing nothing,” he decided, then grimly called himself to account. “What difference does it make to me where he has been hiding?” he asked himself impatiently. “The important thing is that he seems to be here, that the gold also seems to be here, and that he’s going to be kind enough to show me where it is.” The unseen car approached very quietly, and came to a halt outside the gate. They heard the faint scrape of the man’s heel as Simpson dismounted, then footsteps approached the gate, the latch was cautiously lifted, and the gate swung inward. Obviously Simpson intended to drive into the yard, and that could mean only one thing—that he intended to remove a substantial part of the gold, if not all of it, and wished to bring the machine as close to his hiding place as possible, so that he need only carry the stuff a minimum distance. The fugitive was within a few feet of the two men when he pushed the gate back against the fence, but they made no attempt to tackle him. They felt pretty sure that the loot was hidden in the garage, but until there was no longer the slightest room for doubt, they meant to give Simpson all the rope he needed.