His broker
attended it, and also a clean-faced, bright-eyed individual whose name
of Cyrus Ryder might have been found upon the pay-roll of a rather
well-known detective agency. For upward of half an hour after the
conference began the detective spoke, the other two listening
attentively, gravely.
"Then, last of all," concluded Ryder, "I made out I was a hobo, and
began stealing rides on the Belt Line Railroad. Know the road? It just
circles Chicago. Truslow owns it. Yes? Well, then I began to catch on. I
noticed that cars of certain numbers--thirty-one nought thirty-four,
thirty-two one ninety--well, the numbers don't matter, but anyhow, these
cars were always switched onto the sidings by Mr. Truslow's main
elevator D soon as they came in. The wheat was shunted in, and they were
pulled out again. Well, I spotted one car and stole a ride on her. Say,
look here, _that car went right around the city on the Belt, and came
back to D again, and the same wheat in her all the time_. The grain was
reinspected--it was raw, I tell you--and the warehouse receipts made out
just as though the stuff had come in from Kansas or Iowa."
"The same wheat all the time!" interrupted Hornung.
"The same wheat--your wheat, that you sold to Truslow."
"Great snakes!" ejaculated Hornung's broker. "Truslow never took it
abroad at all."
"Took it abroad! Say, he's just been running it around Chicago, like the
supers in 'Shenandoah,' round an' round, so you'd think it was a new
lot, an' selling it back to you again.
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