in a soft soprano, they kept their opinions to themselves. The seamen of Newport had been smuggling rum, tobacco, slaves, and opium for three hundred years. If a girl wanted to entertain her horses while delivering ice to a boat in the dark, that was her business.

The boat was a rugged, broad-beamed, thirty-foot catboat with a stubby mast ahead of a low coach roof. With its gaff-rigged sail that was nearly square, and a centerboard instead of a fixed keel, it was faster than it looked and equally at home in shallow bays and off the coast. A gang of men in slickers and wool watch caps climbed out of the cabin.

While the girl stood watch with her hands buried in her pockets, the men drew the canvas off the ice wagon’s cargo, inclined a ramp of planks between the wagon and dock, and gently slid four seventeen-foot-long, cigar-shaped metal tubes down the ramp one by one. They shifted the ramp and slid all four into the boat, and lashed them securely to a cushioned bed of canvas sails.

When they were done, the wide wooden hull squatted low in the water. All but one of the men climbed into the wagon and drove away. The man who stayed raised the sail and untied the mooring lines.

The girl took the tiller and sailed the boat skillfully off the dock and into the night.

THAT SAME NIGHT—the westbound Overland Limited’s first night out of Chicago—reports waiting for Bell at Rock Island, Illinois, confirmed that the gem merchant Riker had indeed boarded the California Limited to San Diego. Still disliking coincidences, Bell wired Horace Bronson, head of the San Francisco office, asking him to assign James Dashwood, a young operative who had proven himself on the Wrecker case, to intercept the California Limited at Los Angeles. Dashwood should see whether Riker actually continued on to San Diego to purchase pink tourmaline gems or changed trains to San Francisco. Regardless, the young detective would trail Riker and observe his subsequent actions. Bell warned Bronson that Riker was traveling with a bodyguard named Plimpton, who would be watching his back.

Then he wired Research back in New York, asking for more information on the death of Riker’s father in South Africa and urging Grady Forrer to step up the hunt for information about his ward.

Laurence Rosania’s disappearance upon arrival had set off a frantic manhunt. But when Bell reached Des Moines, Iowa, the information was waiting that the retired thief—after giving his Van Dorn shadows the slip out of habit or professional pride—had been written up in the Chicago Tribune marriage announcements and was scheduled to steam toward a San Francisco honeymoon in his bride’s private car. So much for admonishing youth that crime did not pay, noted the Chicago Van Dorn headquarters.