Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/25

 of the Ohio and there trails vanished—girls, women, children, and men were last seen going down Main, or John, or Cutter, or Woodburn, or State, or some other street or avenue "toward the river." It was this little phrase recurring so often that led Urleigh to write the news special headed "Toward the River" which attracted so much attention in newspaper circles a few weeks after Goles vanished.

Manager Grost told Urleigh that he had found no trace of Goles anywhere; neither had the diamonds nor rubies been recognized in any of the legitimate marts—but that meant nothing. The Diamond Trade had its Under World, through which wandered gems as precious and perhaps a thousand times more interesting than anything one could learn about the legitimate traffic of the surface trade, which by comparison is prosy and uneventful. The $200,000 worth of diamonds had sunk into this Under World, leaving hardly a trace.

"If you see a hundred thousand worth of diamonds above aboardboard [sic] and in the open," Grost explained, "there's a lost million somewhere!"

That exaggerated a condition, but sometimes it does seem as though gems drop from sight faster than any other form of wealth—and it is a fact that the Treasures of Solomon, of Inde, of the Spanish Main, of Rome, Carthage, Constantine—of countless kings