Page:Under three flags; a story of mystery (IA underthreeflagss00tayliala).pdf/62

 *ment was a logical sequence of such a companionship, and were it not for certain damning evidence that I extracted from this Brockway and discovered myself, I should dismiss Ames, temporarily at least, as having no connection with the bank case."

"Yet you say Brockway is a friend of Ames'," remarks Ashley.

"He is. But while a good-hearted chap and loyalty itself, he is not especially astute and by shrewd questioning and judicious bluffing I discovered that he was probably the last man who saw Ames before he disappeared from Raymond, Roger Hathaway excepted."

"You mean"

"I mean that Derrick Ames was seen to enter the Raymond National Bank about 8 o'clock on the evening of Memorial Day."

"H'm! That is serious. Yet his mission may have been an innocent one."

"True. But to continue. This forenoon I visited the station at Ashfield, where Ames and the girl—there can be no question that they were the pair—boarded the night express south. While I was lounging about the station, waiting for the train back to Raymond, my eye caught the glitter of an object lying between the inside rail of the track and the south end of the platform, and partly under the latter. It was a revolver, 32 caliber, and one chamber was empty. With that for a basis, I questioned the station agent on another tack, and he finally succeeded in remembering that just as the train pulled into the station that memorable night the girl handed Ames his coat, and as he threw it over his arm an object dropped from one of the pockets, which Ames quickly recovered and replaced in the coat as he and his companion clambered aboard the train. Might not this revolver have been the object dropped by Ames, and might he not when he put it back in his coat have slipped it into the sleeve, through which it dropped as he stepped upon the train?"

"Well, the theory is ingenious, even if wrong," muses Ashley.

"I clinched it a bit more," continues Barker. "Where