The Dugdale Millions — page 261: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

COMPLICATIONS, ~ 251 tion necessary to direct action. He volunteered the statement, that so far as he had gone it was indicated that the four people under surveillance were all shady characters, and that he was making a very rigid ex- amination into their past with the hope of connecting them with something that would justify him in coming into closer quarters with them, and which he could use as a lever to force one, or all of them, to confess the parts they were playing. Dick went away from this interview much perplexed. It seemed to him that so far from light being shed upon the case it was growing darker and darker. All that seemed to him at all clear was that Harold Pier- son was not young Dugdale, and yet, if something more definite than had yet been secured which would enable them to make the charge that a conspiracy existed was not obtained, and if Pierson continued to pile up proofs of his being ason of Edmund Dugdale, the property might pass into his hands before the theory concocted by him, and adopted by Captain Lawton, could be turned into fact. Comicbook<s C@ 3