The Box with Broken Seals | Page 2

out of this?"
Their conversation was interrupted by the tinkle of the telephone which
stood upon the table between them, the instrument which both men had
been watching anxiously. Hobson snatched up the receiver.
"Police headquarters speaking? Right! Yes, this is Sam Hobson. I'm
here with Crawshay, of the English Secret Service. We got your
dispatch.--What's that?--Well?--Chief Downs is on the way, eh?--Just
started? Good! We're waiting for him."
Hobson replaced the receiver upon the instrument.
"Downs is coming right along," he announced. "I tell you what it is, Mr.
Crawshay," he went on, recommencing his walk up and down the
apartment, "I don't feel happy to be so far away from the coast. That's
what scares me. Chicago's just about the place they'd land us, if this is a
hanky-panky trick. We're twenty hours from New York, and the City of
Boston sails to-morrow at five o'clock."
The Englishman shook himself and rose from his recumbent position
upon the sofa. He was a man of youthful middle-age, colourless, with
pleasant face, a somewhat discontented mouth, but keen grey eyes. He
had been sent out from Scotland Yard at the beginning of the war to

assist in certain work at the English Embassy. So far his opportunities
had not been many, or marked with any brilliant success, and it seemed
to him that the gloom of failure was already settling down upon their
present expedition.
"You don't believe, then, any more than I do, that when a certain box
we know of is opened at the Foreign Office in London, it will contain
the papers we are after?"
"No, sir, I do not," was the vigorous reply. "I think they have been
playing a huge game of bluff on us. That's why I am so worried about
this trip. I wouldn't mind betting you the best dinner you ever ate at
Delmonico's or at your English Savoy that that box with the broken
seals they all got so excited about doesn't contain a single one of the
papers that we're after. Why, those blasted Teutons wanted us to
believe it! That's why some of the seals were broken, and why the old
man himself hung about like a hen that's lost one of its chickens. They
want us to believe that we've got the goods right in that box, and to
hold up the search for a time while they get the genuine stuff out of the
country. I admit right here, Mr. Crawshay, that it was you who put this
into my head at Halifax. I couldn't swallow it then, but when Downs
didn't meet us at the depot here, it came over me like a flash that you
were right that we were being flimflammed."
"We ought, perhaps, to have separated," the Englishman ruminated. "I
ought to have gone to New York and you come here. On the other hand,
you must remember that all the evidence which we have managed to
collect points to Chicago as having been the headquarters of the whole
organisation."
"Sure!" the American admitted. "And there's another point about it, too.
If this outsider who has taken on the job for them should really turn out
to be Jocelyn Thew, I'd have banked on his working the scheme from
Chicago. He knows the back ways of the city, or rather he used to, like
a rat. Gee, it would be a queer thing if after all these years one were to
get the bracelets on him!"
"I don't quite see," Crawshay remarked, "how such a person as this

Jocelyn Thew, of whom you have spoken several times, could have
become associated with an affair of this sort. Both the Germans and the
Austrians at Washington had the name of being exceedingly particular
with regard to the status of their agents, and he must be entirely a
newcomer in international matters. From the dossier you handed me,
Jocelyn Thew reads more like a kind of modern swashbuckler spoiling
for a fight than a person likely to make a success of a secret service
job."
"Don't you worry," Hobson replied. "Jocelyn Thew could hold his own
at any court in Europe with any of you embassy swaggerers. There's
nothing known about his family, but they say that his father was an
English aristocrat, and he looks like it, too."
"It was you yourself who called him a criminal, the first time you spoke
of him," Crawshay reminded his companion.
"And a criminal he is at heart, without a doubt," the American declared
impressively.
"Has he ever been in prison?"
"He has had the luck of Old Harry," Hobson grumbled. "In New York
they all believed that it was he who shot Graves, the Pittsburg
millionaire. The Treasury Department will have it that he was the head
of