Ned could not see through the buildings on either hand. He could not know that the few passers along a side street were staring in mild surprise at a grave, genteel-looking man, dressed in black, who was running at full speed as if for his life. When this man reached a broad avenue parallel to the one which he had quitted he did not slacken his pace, but plunged down another side street, then through an alley, and out once more upon a thoroughfare. There he hailed a passing car and sprang upon it. He had calculated time and distance very narrowly, for as the car made a broad curve, turning down a street at right angles with the avenue it had just traversed, it came upon the track close behind a car with a blue light, the one which he had left not five minutes earlier, which was still rolling down the street in a straight line. As he looked through the window at the vehicle in advance his sharp eyes were quick to detect the slim little figure of the printer's devil still sitting close to the door, and he felt that whether it were instinct which had warned the boy or inadvertence on his own part in bringing his surveillance too close, it had been cleverly counteracted. CHAPTER VI The detective pondered seriously upon all these things as he sat there. He wondered that as yet the boy should have done nothing to indicate his partners in a crime so far beyond his own scope. More than all, he wondered how the little printer's devil should know or care anything about the insurance of the theatre, and what the question of the insurance had to do with his surreptitious entrance and the theft of the diamonds and other portable valuables. The fire had been at first supposed to be the result of accident or of carelessness on the part of the theatre's employees, until Peter Bateman's story had suggested to the police the possibility that theft had necessitated that sequence of pillage, which is incendiarism. Thus the detective had believed that the theatre had been robbed by some gang of thieves, of whom Ned was but the humble tool, and then fired to conceal the traces of the more profitable crime. Now this conclusion was shaken,--and again and again he asked himself in perplexity and doubt what the question of the insurance could have had to do with the crime.