Page:Arthur Stringer - The Hand of Peril.djvu/17

 time again, in Atlanta, but forged his own pardon and got away with it."

"What's the rest of the gang?"

"The only other person we've been able to spot is a Neapolitan named Morello. They call him Tony. He's as big as the old man there, and as smooth as they make 'em. They use him as their breaker and shover. He's been years in America and speaks English without an accent. He was a paying-teller in an Italian bank in New York, and later on an olive-oil importer there. He came under the police eye seven years ago for smuggling."

"Ever indicted?"

"Never in America. He fell in Europe, a year and a half ago. He got the blue-prints of the Heligoland Naval Fortifications and was selling a forged copy to a French secret agent in Brussels when the German government got wise. They got him back across the border and tied him up with a fifteen year sentence. Then the girl and the old man got busy, did the Atlanta trick over again, and got Morello liberated and on a steamer for Harwich before the officials knew the release-order was a forgery. I've every reason to imagine he thinks a lot of that girl. He follows her around like a dog."

"And that's all you know?" asked the unemotional Kestner.

"There's an American girl who calls herself Cherry Dreiser floating somewhere about the fringes of that gang, but we can't connect her with them. She was known in New York as Sadie Wimpel, and has a record