Page:McCulley--Black Star's camapign.djvu/178

178 be losing your cleverness, as the Black Star says. You enter a room as you entered this, and sit down and turn your back upon a closet without examining it first. It was very easy to overcome you after that. I didn't look for any brains in the sheriff, of course, but I did in you.

"The question now is what to do with you. We have been discussing it while you were unconscious. Had I my way, you'd be put where you'd bother us no longer, but the Black Star will not countenance that sort of violence. He is tender-hearted in some things, as you know.

"It appears that you have discovered our little retreat here, and so we cannot remain. These ladies will have to go out with me, without even taking their clothes and toilet articles, and not return. It is a nuisance to find another hiding place, but there are plenty of them in the city. We shall have to leave you here, of course. I promise to telephone the hotel later, and have you released.

"Thought you'd get some information, did you? Let me tell you, Roger Verbeck, that you'll never catch the Black Star this time. And he'll strip the city before he is through. He has planned something for to-morrow night that will not only startle the city, but the entire country as well. There is not a chance in the world of you or the police or the sheriff's force preventing it—or doing anything after it has been accomplished."

Landers motioned to the women, and they went to the closet for hats and cloaks.

"I don't see the sense of leaving everything," Mamie Blanchard said. "We can say at the office that I am going away for a few days, but that my