Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/202

 me, and wants to meet me again. She was afraid—and I'm scared."

He pulled the window curtains down closer, and locked the bow and stern doors. He brought out and examined his automatic pistol, with which he had played upon the feelings and nerves of the river rat, Storit. He recalled the ghastly scar on Storit's head revealed by the flash's white light.

In a moment the free, open, beautiful river had become a place of menace and tragedy and horror. He recalled White Collar Dan, alias Rubert Gost, something of whose career he had written on one of his police station story assignments—and he had come across that crook's name here on the river. Worst of all, now that he thought of it in connection with the diamonds, Gost and the girl were in some way connected. The girl had some of Gost's books—cheap detective fiction. He was a penny-weighter who substituted phony or paste for gold or gems. In some way they had come into possession of all these precious stones.

He packed the gems in the case, hastily, and hid them behind the cans of corn in the kitchen manhole. Then he returned to the writing desk and seized upon the newspapers. He read the accounts of the famous diamond mystery wherein a diamond salesman had sallied forth with more than one hundred thousand