Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/141

 want to get to interview that girl—Delia, did he call her? That's it—Delia."

He locked the door of the cabin and having stripped and donned his pajamas, he, too, turned in to sleep. The motion of the boat in the low river swells disturbed him for a time so that he could not immediately go to sleep. During this midway interval he smiled in the dark at the curious adventure. A dream of going down the river in a houseboat was coming true—and under ideal conditions, for he was on the track of a story as strange as any he had ever hoped to cover.

"I'll never get my expense money out of it," he told himself with practical recognition of the conditions. "But I'll have the fun of getting the story straightened out if it costs me a thousand dollars."

A thousand dollars was not too much to pay for the satisfaction of solving such a mystery as he now saw; the prestige he would have for covering such a yarn would add to his value as a free lance. The girl was a find. Not a whisper of a woman in the case had reached any one's ears. His hope was that Delia would prove intimately associated with the case; his fear was that she was just a blind-alley lead or trail. If he could only connect her up with the story in two or three places.

"Then I will have a story!" he told himself.