Page:Wadsworth Camp--the gray mask.djvu/165

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NORA DISAPPEARS
155

whole surviving drug traffic. When I found out from father that everybody else had failed I just had to try. My conscience kept at me. Success would turn so much misery into happiness, so much sickness into health, so much crime into usefulness. And to-night, I believe, if we're lucky—Jim! I want you to be there."

"She thinks she's spotted the house," the inspector said softly. "That's what she had to see me about. She wants a raid arranged for to-night."

Garth's voice was anxious.

"How are you working, Nora? I don't like it. I wish you were out of it."

But Nora would tell him nothing, and he realized instinctively that in her crusade she had taken desperate chances and would face more, probably the worst, to-night.

"You must tell us," she said, "how you found the Chinaman. I've no doubt he was one of them. In itself his death was a confession—a pitifully silent one."

Garth told his story of the man in the limousine, of the trailing Oriental, of what he had learned at the Bureau of Licenses. Nora offered no interpretation, but she smiled sympathetically at the inspector's rage. He saw in the affair more than Garth. To him it meant an underhanded attempt on the part of the society to trap a material witness.

"They put it up to me," he grumbled, "then they want to put it over me. Manford gets a line of his own and keeps it to himself. Out for a little glory