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In jumbled phrases Bradshaw poured out his story. Charlie listened calmly.

“Shelah Fane,” the boy was saying. “You know what that means, Charlie. This news of mine will be cabled all over the world to-night. You're going to be in the limelight as you never were before. Better get down here as fast as you can.”

“I will arrive at once,” Charlie answered. Was that a sigh, Bradshaw wondered, that came over the wire? “Let nothing be touched until I touch it,” the detective added.

He hung up, then called the police station and gave certain directions. At last he came from the booth, mopping his perspiring brow with his handkerchief. For a moment he stood motionless, as though gathering his strength for the task that lay before him. Another case, another murder, and he knew that what the boy had said was true: this time he would work in a bright spotlight indeed. Shelah Fane! Not for nothing did he have numerous children who, as he often said, were movie crazed. He knew only too well the interest that had always centered about the woman who now lay dead a short distance down the beach.

“A thousand-mile journey begins with one step,” he sighed, and took it—in the direction of his hat.

When he returned to the door of the hotel, he encountered Tarneverro. The fortune-teller also carried a hat, and seemed on the point of going out. “Hello, Inspector,” he said. “You haven’t finished your dinner already?”

“I have not,” Charlie answered. “I am rudely wrenched away by important business. The most important I have encountered for some time.”