Page:McCulley--Black Star's camapign.djvu/80

80 you, too. You'd better stay pretty close to this suite for a few days. They'll be looking for you now, you know."

"I might as well be in jail as be a prisoner here," Mamie Blanchard pouted.

"It's orders!" Landers told her. "You'll be needed again soon, and needed badly."

Landers left the hotel, engaged a taxicab, and drove out along the river road until he came to a resort. He paid the chauffeur there, and walked along the shore, watching the bathers, acting like a prosperous man on a little holiday.

But after a time he left the resort and walked on along the road. He turned into a lane, when he was sure that he was not being observed, and approached a ramshackle farmhouse that was hidden in a grove.

Landers entered the house, went down a flight of steps to the basement, and stopped in a little room. There he put on a long black robe and his black mask, and touched a button. In the distance a bell tinkled. Then a buzzer sounded, and Landers opened the door and stepped into the Black Star's headquarters.

The master rogue was sitting at one end of the table. He got up and stepped to the nearest blackboard. Landers went to the one at the other end of the room, and picked up the chalk.

"Number One," he wrote.

"Countersign?" wrote the Black Star.

"Amboy."

"Report!" the Black Star wrote.

Landers turned to the blackboard and wrote rapidly.

"Sheriff decoyed to fake headquarters. Decoy