Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/344

312 in front of which they had been asleep, made the same statement. None of these Hindoos resembled in the least the man I had seen, for I looked them over carefully one by one with this in mind. When I made a light in my room in order to examine it thoroughly, I found nothing had been touched except the writing desk, and even from that nothing had been taken, although the papers had been disturbed. The whole affair was as mysterious and inexplicable as the man's first appearance had been, or as his subsequent appearance proved; for though I carefully questioned the hotel employés in the morning I could not learn that any such man had entered or gone out from the hotel."

"That is very satisfactory indeed;" Trant's gratification was evident in his tone, as Axton finished. "It will quite take the place of the letter that was lost. There is only one thing more—so far as I know now—in which you may be of present help to me, Mr. Axton. Besides your friend Lawler, who was drowned in the wreck of the Gladstone, and the man Beasley—who, Miss Waldron tells me, is in a London hospital—there were only two men in Cape Town with you who had been in Cairo and Calcutta at the same time you were. You do not happen to know what has become of that German freight agent, Schultz?"

"I have not the least idea, Mr. Trant."

"Or Walcott, the American patent medicine man?"

"I know no more of him than of the other. Whether either of them is in Chicago now, is precisely what I would like to know myself, Mr. Trant; and I hope you will be able to find out for me."

"I will do my best to locate them. By the way, Mr. Axton, you have no objection to my setting a