CHAPTER II
MANAGER GROST called in a trusty newspaper reporter who favoured the Agency on occasion, and who was in turn favoured when a good story broke that was safe to print. This reporter was Charles Urleigh, a slim, tall, blue-eyed bundle of nerve and nerves. He was a free lance, with a string of papers that reached from Nashville and Knoxville to Chicago and St. Louis and New York—trade journals and occasional articles in noted weekly semi-newspapers supplying him with his pocket money, and helped him meet the demands of his brokers when wheat broke or certain favourite industrials had a "temporary relapse."
To Urleigh, Grost made a clean breast of the whole affair. The Agency was stumped. It did not know which way to turn. There was a certain tone to the double diamond robbery which had no ear marks familiar to the Agency's archives. They could not recall a single gem salesman specialist who would go to a salesman's private customer and sell him a line of the stolen diamonds and thus—perhaps—obtain information as to where the old fellow hid his hoard of gems.
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