“Then it was a very unlikely supposition. You do not believe in that accident, Miss Rowan?” Trant said, brusquely. The girl grew white as paper. “Oh, Mr. Trant, I don’t know! I did believe in it. But since Will—Mr. Morse—has disappeared in exactly the same way, under exactly the same circumstances, and everyone acts about it exactly the same way—” “You say the circumstances of Morse’s disappearance were the same?” Trant pressed quietly when she was able to proceed. “After Mr. Landers had been found dead,” said the girl, pulling herself together again, “Mr. Morse, who had been checker in one of the other scale houses, was made checker on scale No. 3. We were surprised at that, for it was a sort of promotion, and father did not like Will; he had been greatly displeased at our engagement. Will’s promotion made us very happy, for it seemed as though father must be changing his opinion. But after Will had been checker on scale No. 3 only a few days, the same queer, quiet little man with the scar on his cheek who had begun coming to see Mr. Landers before he was killed began coming to see Will, too! And after he began coming, Will was troubled, terribly troubled, I could see; but he would not tell me the reason. And he expected, after that man began coming, that something would happen to him. And I know, from the way he acted and spoke about Mr. Landers, that he thought he had not been accidentally killed. One evening, when I could see he had been more troubled than ever before, he said that if anything happened to him I was to go at once to his boarding house and take charge of everything in his room, and not to let anyone into the room to search it until I had removed everything in the bureau drawers; everything no matter how useless anything seemed. Then, the very next night, five days ago, just as while Mr. Landers was checker, everybody stayed overtime at the docks to finish unloading a vessel, the _Elizabethan Age_. And in the morning Will’s landlady called me on the phone to tell me that he had not come home. Five days ago, Mr. Trant! And since then no one has seen or heard from him; and the watchman did not see him come out of the warehouse that night just as he did not see Ed Landers.” “What did you find in Morse’s bureau?” asked Trant. “I found nothing.” “Nothing?” Trant repeated. “That is impossible, Miss Rowan! Think again! Remember he warned you that what you found might seem trivial and useless.” The girl, a little defiantly, studied for an instant Trant’s clear-cut features. Suddenly she arose and ran from the room, but returned quickly with a strange little implement in her hand. It was merely a bit of wire, straight for perhaps three inches, and then bent in a half circle of five or six inches, the bent portion of the wire being wound carefully with stout twine, thus: [Illustration: The mysterious string-wrapped piece of bent wire.]