Page:Edgar Wallace - The Green Rust.djvu/257

Rh "Its destinations," corrected Beale cheerfully. "I released thirty pigeons with the magic word. The agents have been arrested," he said; "we notified the Government authorities, and there was a sheriff or a policeman in every post office when the code word came through—van Heerden's agents saw some curious telegraph messengers yesterday."

Kitson nodded and turned away.

"What are you going to do now?" asked the girl, with a light in her eyes. "You must feel quite lost without this great quest of yours."

"There are others," said Stanford Beale.

"When do you return to America?" she asked.

He fenced the question, but she brought him back to it.

"I have a great deal of business to do in London before I go," he said.

"Like what?" she asked.

"Well," he hesitated, "I have some legal business."

"Are you suing somebody?" she asked, wilfully dense.

He rubbed his head in perplexity.

"To tell you the truth," he said, "I don't exactly know what I've got to do or what sort of figure I shall cut. I have never been in the Divorce Court before."

"Divorce Court?" she said, puzzled, "are you giving evidence? Of course I know detectives do that sort of thing. I have read about it in the newspapers. It must be rather horrid, but you are such a clever detective—oh, by the way you never told me how you found me."

"It was a very simple matter," he said, relieved to change the subject, "van Heerden, by one of those curious lapses which the best of criminals make, left a message at the pawnbroker's which was written on the back of an account for pigeon food, sent to him from a Horsham tradesman. I knew he would not try to dispatch his message by the ordinary courses and I suspected all along that he had established a pigeon-post. The bill gave me all the information I wanted. It took us a long time to find the tradesman, but once we had discovered him he directed us to the farm. We took along a couple of local policemen and arrested Bridgers in the garage."