Many callers, mostly reporters, had
been turned away by Phillips already that day, but brother Ralph's
untimely visit had made the position peculiarly dangerous. Moreover,
the valet's protests had proved unavailing this time. The two heard his
approaching footsteps.

Meiklejohn's care-worn face turned almost green with fright, and even
his hardier companion yielded to a sense of peril. He leaped up, moving
catlike on his toes.

"Where does that door lead to?" he hissed, pointing.

"A bedroom. But I've given orders--"

"You dough-faced dub, don't you see you create suspicion by refusing to
meet people? And, listen! If this is a cop, bluff hard! I'll shoot up
the whole Bureau before they get me!"

He vanished, moving with a silence and celerity that were almost uncanny
in so huge a man. Phillips knocked and thrust his head in. He looked
scared yet profoundly relieved.

"Mr. Tower to see you, sir," he said breathlessly.

"What?" shrieked the Senator in a shrill falsetto.

"Yes, sir. It's Mr. Tower himself, sir."

"H'lo, Bill!" came a familiar voice. "Here I am! No spook yet, thank
goodness!"

Meiklejohn literally staggered to the door and nearly fell into Ronald
Tower's arms. Of the two men, the Senator seemed nearer death at that
moment. He blubbered something incoherent, and had to be assisted to a
chair. Even Tower was astonished at the evident depth of his friend's
emotion.

"Cheer up, old sport!" he cried affectionately. "I had no notion you
felt so badly about my untimely end, as the newspapers call it. I tried
to get you on the phone, but you were closed down, the exchange said, so
Helen packed me off here when she was able to sit up and take
nourishment. Gad! Even my wife seems to have missed me!"

Many minutes elapsed before Senator Meiklejohn's benumbed brain could
assimilate the facts of a truly extraordinary story. Tower, after being
whisked so unceremoniously into the Hudson, remembered nothing further
until he opened his eyes in numb semi-consciousness in the cubbyhole of
a tug plodding through the long Atlantic rollers off the New Jersey
coast.

When able to talk he learned that the captain of the tug _Cygnet_,
having received orders to tow three loaded barges from a Weehawken pier
to Barnegat City, picked up his "job" at nine-thirty the previous night,
and dropped down the river with the tide. In the early morning he was
amazed by the sight of a man crawling from under the heavy tarpaulin