“Suppose you take her?” was his first utterance. “She’s one handful.” Kitty, once in the hands of the officers, shrugged her shoulders and changed her tune. “What a lot of fools you are!” she exclaimed contemptuously. “You had the clew in your hands a dozen times over! It was only to-day that this fellow got onto it, though, and so”—again she shrugged her shoulders—“I had to finish him, if I could, hadn’t I?” CHAPTER XXXII THE LOST CLEW Ferrati was the selfsame man who had first induced Kitty to run away from her home, her father, and her sister. As she had progressed, she had grown away from him and his evil influences; but, as often happens in a situation of this sort, when she found herself in trouble of a criminal nature, she had gravitated most naturally back to the man who, she was sure, could help her out of her problem. Face to face with each other in the inspector’s own office, neither Kitty nor Ferrati had the nerve to hold out; between them, as a matter of fact, they cleared up sundry police mysteries which had worried the heads and irritated the underlings for months past. The trap set for Jim Barrison elucidated a good many mysteries and showed the way in which several rich men had disappeared from the face of the earth. The trapdoor was not in any sense a secret one; it had been seen by half a dozen policemen during the energetic investigations of Ferrati and his establishment which had gone on from time to time ever since it had become generally known that men who subsequently disappeared had been “last seen dining at Ferrati’s.” But the explanation had been so simple and there had been so little attempt, seemingly, at subterfuge or evasion, that the law had been put off the scent so far as that trapdoor was concerned. The room in which it was situated was a kind of pantry, and directly under it was a part of the cellar. Like many restaurant keepers, he had bought an old country house and made it over into a resort. Thrifty Italian that he was, he had made as few and as inexpensive alterations as possible in the actual structure of the building, and had found it cheaper to put in a trapdoor and a ladder than to build a complete staircase reaching to his cellar. This was the explanation that he gave the police, and it was probably true, and was assuredly logical.