we shall esteem it an honor to serve the fatherless and motherless orphans of your home, we must receive an adequate consideration from Monsieur Richards. We shall undertake the matter of ascertaining the whereabouts of your missing charges at five hundred dollars apiece. Do you agree?"
"But that would be three thousand dollars" the visitor began.
"Perfectly," de Grandin interupted. "The police will undertake the case for nothing."
"But we can not have the police, as I have just explained"
"You can not have us for less," the Frenchman cut in. "This Monsieur Richards, I know him of old. He desires not the publicity of a search by the gendarmes, and, though he loves me not, he has confidence in my ability, otherwise he would not have sent you. Go to him and say Jules de Grandin will act for him for no less fee than that I have mentioned. Meantime, will you smoke?"
He passed a box of my cigars to the caller, held a lighted match for him, and refused to listen to another word concerning the business which had brought Gervaise on the twenty-mile jaunt from Springville.
"Trowbridge, mon vieux," he informed me the following morning at breakfast, "I assure you it pays handsomely to be firm with these captains of industry, such as Monsieur Richards. Before you had arisen, my friend, that man of wealth was haggling with me over the telephone as though we were a pair of dealers in second-hand furniture. Morbleu, it was like an auction. Bid by bid he raised his offer for our services until he met my figure. Today his attorneys prepare a formal document, agreeing to pay us five hundred dollars for the explanation of the disappearance of each of those six little orphans. A good morning's business, n'est-ce-pas?”"
"De Grandin," I told him, "you're wasting your talents in this work. You should have gone into Wall Street."
"Eh bien," he twisted the tips of his little blond mustache complacently, "I think I do very well as it is. When I return to la belle France next month I shall take with me upward of fifty thousand dollars—more than a million francs—as a result of my work here. That sum is not to be sneezed upon, my friend. And what is of even more value to me, I take with me the gratitude of many of your countrymen whose burdens I have been able to lighten. Mordieu, yes, this trip has been of great use to me, my old one."
"And" I began.
"And tomorrow we shall visit this home of the orphans where Monsieur Gervaise nurses his totally inexplicable mystery. Par bleu, that mystery shall be explained, or Jules de Grandin is seven thousand francs poorer!
"All arrangements have been made," he confided as we drove over to Springville the following morning. "It would never do for us to announce ourselves as investigators, my friend, so what surer disguise can we assume than that of being ourselves? You and I, are we not physicians? But eertainly. Very well. As physicians we shall appear at the home, and as physicians we shall proceed to inspect all the little ones—separately and alone—for are we not to give them the Sehick test for diphtheria immunity? Most assuredly."
"And then?" I began, but he cut my question in two with a quick gesture and a smile.
"And then, my friend, we shall be guided by circumstances, and if there are no circumstances, cordieu, but we shall make them! Allons, there is much to do before we handle Monsieur Richards' check."
