"Suffering Sebastopol! Curtain in five minutes and I'm not half made up yet. Excuse me, Mr. Hardy, but I've got to get busy. In this business 'I'll be ready in a minute' doesn't go." He seized a stick of grease paint and feverishly resumed the task of altering his appearance to that of the character he was portraying at the matinee that day. Mr. Hardy, smiling at the actor's casual informality, withdrew from the dressing room and made his way out to the street. "A blind alley!" he muttered. "I was sure I could trace the fellow by means of the wig. Oh, well!" He shrugged his shoulders. "I still have the hat and coat. And if the worst comes to the worst I can try to trace the chap through the stuff he stole from Morley--for it was probably the same man. But it looks like a big job." It was a big job. Efforts to trace the purchaser of the hat and coat were fruitless. The search ended at a secondhand store where the owner vainly tried to sell Mr. Hardy a complete outfit of clothing at a bargain, but could not or would not remember who had bought the coat from him. He sold so many coats, and at such bargains, that he could not remember the customers who came into his store. Mr. Hardy was forced to retire, defeated. The predominating quality of the detective's character was patience. When he found that he could not trace the thief through the wig, the hat or the coat, he doggedly set to work trying to trace the man who had broken into the dressing room of the actor, Morley, and this, in spite of the fact that the police had already given up that case as hopeless. Then, in his spare time, Mr. Hardy spent hours at police headquarters, poring over records, searching for particulars of hundreds of red-headed criminals. It was over a week before he found what he wanted and it came from a chance note at the bottom of a police description of a thief who was at that time out on parole. But when Fenton Hardy saw the note he knew he had stumbled on the clue he needed. And he smiled grimly. "It won't be long now," he remarked, in the popular phrase of the day, as he went back to his hotel. CHAPTER XIII IN POOR QUARTERS In the meantime, the Hardy boys were finding the suspense almost unbearable. They had expected that their father would be away but a day at the most, but when two days dragged by, then three, and finally an entire week, without word from Mr. Hardy further than a brief note from New York stating that he was well and that the case was not as easy of solution as he had hoped, they became depressed. "If dad can't get the thief, no one can," declared Joe, with conviction, "and I'm beginning to think that even dad is falling down in this affair." "Better wait till he admits it himself," suggested Frank. "Although I don't mind telling you I'm not very hopeful myself."