"All right, if yuh say so, Bill. Well, here's th' yarn." And when he had done, Vroon smoked quietly without speaking. "Don't yuh believe it?" demanded Bunkers, truculently. "But six hundred feet of water, in a coral bottom, and no way of telling just where it fell overboard. That's a tough proposition." "Oh, it is, is it? I'm a sailor. I can lay my hand right over th' spot. Do yuh think I'd be fool enough t' hunt for it without a perfect range?" Bunkers tapped his coat pocket suggestively. And Vroon knew that the one thing he wanted was there, a plan or a drawing of the range. So there was another man shanghaied that night, and his destination was Cape Town, twenty-two days' voyage by the calendar. Vroon carried his information to the organization that same night. They would start the expedition at once, and till this was accomplished, Hargreave's daughter was to be immune from attacks. Besides, it would give Hargreave (wherever he was) and the others the idea that the Black Hundred had concluded to give up the chase. Above, with his ear to a small hole, skilfully bored through the ceiling without permitting the plaster to fall, knelt a man with a bandaged arm. He could never see any faces; no one ever took off a mask in this sinister chamber. But there were voices, and he was going to forget some of them. After the meeting came to an end, he waited an hour, and then stole down into the street by the aid of the fire-escape. Later, he entered a telephone booth and called up Jones. Then, one leathern and steel box, dotted with bits of ivory and mother-of-pearl, became two; and the second one was soaked in mud and salt water for two weeks till you could not have told it from the original. And that is why Jones was able, some weeks later, to hide once more the original box. As for the substitute, just as Braine was about to use a mallet and chisel upon it, the lights went out. There was a wild scramble, a chair or two was overturned. "The door, the door!" shouted Braine, furious. It slammed the moment the words left his lips. And as suddenly as they had gone out the lights sprang up. The box was gone. There were evidently traitors among the Black Hundred. CHAPTER XIII The Black Hundred, not as individuals but as an organization, began to worry. Powerful, and often reckless and daring because it was powerful, it began to look about for some basic cause for all these failures against Hargreave's daughter and Hargreave's ghost. They had tried to put the inquisitive reporter out of the way; they had laid every trap they could think of to catch the mysterious visitor at the Hargreave home; they had thrown out a hundred lures to bring Hargreave out of his lair, and failed; and they had lost a dozen valuable men and several thousand dollars. This must end somewhere, and quickly.