"You mean I ought to go?" said Wharton.

Rumson exclaimed incredulously:

"You _got_ to go!"

"It looks to me," objected Bissell, "like a plot to get you there alone
and rap you on the head."

"Not with that note inviting him there," protested Hewitt, "and signed
by Earle herself."

"You don't know she signed it?" objected the senator.

"I know _her_," returned the detective. "I know she's no fool. It's her
place, and she wouldn't let them pull off any rough stuff there--not
against the D.A., anyway."

The D.A. was rereading the note.

"Might this be it?" he asked. "Suppose it's a trick to mix me up in a
scandal? You say the place is disreputable. Suppose they're planning to
compromise me just before election. They've tried it already several
times."

"You've still got the note," persisted Hewitt. "It proves _why_ you went
there. And the senator, too. He can testify. And we won't be a hundred
yards away. And," he added grudgingly, "you have Nolan."

Nolan was the spoiled child of "the office." He was the district
attorney's pet. Although still young, he had scored as a detective and
as a driver of racing-cars. As Wharton's chauffeur he now doubled the
parts.

"What Nolan testified wouldn't be any help," said Wharton. "They would
say it was just a story he invented to save me."

"Then square yourself this way," urged Rumson. "Send a note now by hand
to Ham Cutler and one to your sister. Tell _them_ you're going to Ida
Earle's--and why--tell them you're afraid it's a frame-up, and for them
to keep your notes as evidence. And enclose the one from her."

Wharton nodded in approval, and, while he wrote, Rumson and the
detective planned how, without those inside the road-house being aware
of their presence, they might be near it.

Kessler's Cafe lay in the Seventy-ninth Police Precinct. In taxi-cabs
they arranged to start at once and proceed down White Plains Avenue,
which parallels the Boston Road, until they were on a line with
Kessler's, but from it hidden by the woods and the garages. A walk of a
quarter of a mile across lots and under cover of the trees would bring
them to within a hundred yards of the house.

Wharton was to give them a start of half an hour. That he might know
they were on watch, they agreed, after they dismissed the taxi-cabs, to
send one of them into the Boston Post Road past the road-house. When it
was directly in front of the cafe, the chauffeur would throw away into
the road