The Hunter and Other Stories E-Book

Dashiell Hammett

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 524

Beschreibung

**The Hunter Shortlisted for the 2015 CWA Short Story Dagger ** A new collection of crime stories from the legendary hard-boiled writer Dashiell Hammett. The author of classic novels The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon, Hammett has been called 'a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer' (The Boston Globe), while Raymond Chandler raved that Hammett 'wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.' Two previously unseen 'Thin Man' novellas were recently published together as Return of the Thin Man, which garnered strong praise: the New York Journal of Books called it a reason to 'rediscover why Dashiell Hammett was the peerless master of crime fiction in all its dark and bloody glory,' while The Wall Street Journal praised it as 'an occasion for delight.' This new collection, The Hunter and Other Stories, includes several more never-before-published short stories, and, like the screen stories from Return of the Thin Man, the pieces here read as novellas rich in both story and character that no Hammett fan should do without. The Hunter and Other Stories includes new Hammett stories gleaned from his personal archives along with screen treatments long buried in film-industry files, screen stories, unpublished and rarely published fiction, and intriguing unfinished narratives. Hammett is regarded as both a pioneer and master of hard-boiled detective fiction, but these dozen-and-a-half stories, which explore failed romance, courage in the face of conflict, hypocrisy, and crass opportunism, show him in a different light. Featuring the title story, about a dogged PI unwilling to let go of a seemingly trivial case, the collection also includes two full-length screen treatments. 'On the Make' is the basis for the rarely seen 1935 film Mister Dynamite, about a corrupt detective who never misses an opportunity to take advantage of his clients rather than help them. 'The Kiss-Off' is the basis for City Streets (1931), in which Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney are caught in a romance complicated by racketeering's obligations and temptations.

Leseprobe

DASHIELL HAMMETT

.

The Hunter

and

Other Stories

Edited by Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett

NO EXIT PRESS

ABOUT THE BOOK

A new collection of crime stories from the legendary hard-boiled writer Dashiell Hammett. The author of classic novels The Thin Man and The Maltese Falcon, Hammett has been called 'a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer' (The Boston Globe), while Raymond Chandler raved that Hammett 'wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.' Two previously unseen 'Thin Man' novellas were recently published together as Return of the Thin Man, which garnered strong praise: the New York Journal of Books called it a reason to 'rediscover why Dashiell Hammett was the peerless master of crime fiction in all its dark and bloody glory,' while The Wall Street Journal praised it as 'an occasion for delight.' This new collection, The Hunter and Other Stories, includes several more never-before-published short stories, and, like the screen stories from Return of the Thin Man, the pieces here read as novellas — rich in both story and character — that no Hammett fan should do without.

The Hunter and Other Stories includes new Hammett stories gleaned from his personal archives along with screen treatments long buried in film-industry files, screen stories, unpublished and rarely published fiction, and intriguing unfinished narratives. Hammett is regarded as both a pioneer and master of hard-boiled detective fiction, but these dozen-and-a-half stories, which explore failed romance, courage in the face of conflict, hypocrisy, and crass opportunism, show him in a different light.

Featuring the title story, about a dogged PI unwilling to let go of a seemingly trivial case, the collection also includes two full-length screen treatments. 'On the Make' is the basis for the rarely seen 1935 film Mister Dynamite, about a corrupt detective who never misses an opportunity to take advantage of his clients rather than help them. 'The Kiss-Off' is the basis for City Streets (1931), in which Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sydney are caught in a romance complicated by racketeering's obligations and temptations.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dashiell Hammett was an American author of hard-boiled detective novels and short stories, a screenplay writer, and a political activist. Among his enduring characters were Sam Spade (The Maltese Falcon), Nick and Nora Charles (The Thin Man), and the Continental Op (Red Harvest and The Dain Curse). He died in 1961 in New York City.

CONTENTS

About the Book

About Dashiell Hammett

Introduction

crime

Commentary

“The Hunter” (unpublished)

“The Sign of the Potent Pills” (unpublished)

“The Diamond Wager” (1929, uncollected)

“Action and the Quiz Kid” (unpublished)

men

Commentary

“Fragments of Justice” (unpublished)

“A Throne for the Worm” (unpublished)

“Magic” (unpublished)

“Faith” (2007)

“An Inch and a Half of Glory” (unpublished)

“Nelson Redline” (unpublished)

“Monk and Johnny Fox” (unpublished)

“The Cure” (2011, uncollected)

men and women

Commentary

“Seven Pages” (2005)

“The Breech-Born” (unpublished)

“The Lovely Strangers” (unpublished)

“Week--End” (unpublished)

“On the Way” (1932, uncollected)

screen stories

Commentary

“The Kiss-Off” (unpublished, story for City Streets, Paramount 1931)

“Devil’s Playground” (unpublished and unproduced)

“On the Make” (unpublished, story for Mr. Dynamite, Universal 1935)

appendix: the lost spade

Commentary

“A Knife Will Cut for Anybody” (unpublished)

Afterword

Ebook Bonus Materials: Fragments

INTRODUCTION

Call this volume Hammett Unplugged. It includes seventeen short stories and three screen stories, none previously collected and most previously unpublished, that stand in significant contrast to the work for which he is best known while exhibiting the best qualities of his literary genius. The earliest of the stories in this collection seem to date from near the beginning of Hammett’s writing career, and the latest might well mark the end of it. In the stories included in this volume Hammett was breaking boundaries. This collection includes no stories from Black Mask magazine, the detective pulp where Hammett made his reputation as a short-story writer; it includes no stories featuring the Continental Op, Hammett’s signature short-story character; and it includes only one story narrated by the main character, which was Hammett’s preferred approach in most of his best-known short fiction. Here he addresses subjects, expresses sentiments, and explores ideas that would have fit uneasily in the pages of Black Mask. In these stories Hammett displays his fine-tuned sense of irony and explores the complexities of romantic encounters. He confronts basic human fears and moral dilemmas. He is sometimes sensitive and more often stonily objective. He caricatures prideful men, draws sympathetic portraits of strong women, and parodies pulp-fiction plots. And violence takes a back seat to character development.

The story of Hammett’s career as a writer is well-known. He published his first story in October 1922 at the age of twenty-eight, after his career as a Pinkerton’s detective had been cut short by tuberculosis. He wrote to survive. Severely disabled during most of the 1920s, he was unable to provide for his wife and family in any other way. After a brief attempt to break into the slick-paper (which is to say middle-class) short-story market, he found his home as a writer in the pages of the detective pulps, aimed at blue-collar, primarily male readers. He drew on his five years as a Pinkerton operative to write stories that had the authority of experience, and soon he became the most popular writer for the most popular of the detective-fiction pulps. He came to regard that distinction as a mixed blessing; he had broader interests. Of forty-nine stories Hammett published before June 1927, half neither feature a detective nor are about crime. Of the eleven new stories that appeared afterThe Maltese Falconwas published in 1930, five are about noncrime subjects.

With the April 1, 1924, issue, which carried Hammett’s fourteenth Black Mask story, the sixth featuring the Continental Op, a new editor took over at the magazine. Phil Cody had been circulation manager for Black Mask, and though he described himself as primarily a businessman, he took an aggressive stance as an editor. Cody insisted that the quality of the writing in his pages be elevated, championing Hammett as a model for his other writers and imposing what might be called the Black Mask editorial formula on his authors. Cody encouraged longer, more violent stories, and he insisted on action and adventure in the fiction he published rather than simply what the previous editor called “unusual subject matter.” The main characters of the stories Cody published were masters of their world, offering readers vicarious triumph over the threats and frustrations of modern urban life. Cody the businessman set about cultivating a dedicated readership who knew what to expect issue after issue. From Hammett, Black Mask readers expected the Continental Op.

Hammett flourished under Cody’s editorship. But as he began to take his editor’s compliments to heart, as he developed a surer confidence in his writing ability, and as his financial situation became more stressed when his wife became pregnant with their second daughter, he asked for more money and was denied. Hammett didn’t take “no” well. By the end of 1925, he decided that he had had enough of Cody and his magazine, and he said so before quitting. In November of that year he wrote a letter to Black Mask, apparently a response to Cody’s solicitation of his opinion about the most recent issue. Hammett warned him, “Remember, I’m hard to get along with where fiction’s concerned.” He then offered perceptive criticism of each story in the issue, concluding with the comment that three of the stories “simply . . . didn’t mean anything. People moved around doing things, but neither the people nor the things they did were interesting enough to work up a sweat over.” Hammett was busy by that time writing stories for other markets in which interesting people from various walks of life do interesting things. Those stories are in this volume.

In fall 1926, Cody became circulation manager and vice president of Black Mask parent company Pro-Distributors, and Joseph T. Shaw was named the new editor of the magazine. Shaw’s first move was to attempt to lure Hammett back into the fold. He offered more money and promised to support Hammett’s literary ambitions. Hammett, who needed the money to help support his growing family, capitulated. Over the next two years he focused on Black Mask with stories that were longer and more violent than ever before. When the editors at Knopf, Hammett’s hardback publisher, read his first two novels, Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929), both of which had first appeared serially in Black Mask, they responded in both instances that “the violence is piled on a bit thick.” With that, Hammett turned to tough-minded dramatic confrontation rather than violence as a means of advancing his plots. As he famously told Blanche Knopf in 1928, he was trying “to make literature” of his work. These stories document his efforts to that end.

He was also trying to make more money from his work. Perhaps because his health was improving a bit, clearly because of his pressing financial needs, Hammett began promoting his writing career with renewed energy in 1928. He sent his first novel to Knopf, unagented, and they accepted it for publication. The same year, he traveled south to Hollywood to try to sell his stories for adaption as movies. By that time the new sound movies were clearly about to transform the movie industry, and Hammett wanted in on the action. He began writing fiction in a form that could be easily filmed—paying attention to restrictions of time, place, and action. It is fair to say that by the end of 1929, Hammett’s fiction was shaped by an intent to make not just literature, but movies of his work. By 1930, he had sold Red Harvest (the unrecognizable basis for Roadhouse Nights [1930] featuring Helen Morgan, Charles Ruggles, and Jimmy Durante in his first movie role) and “The Kiss-Off,” which was the original story for City Streets (1931, starring Gary Cooper and Sylvia Sidney), to Paramount. Warner Bros. released the first of what would be three film versions of The Maltese Falcon in 1931. During the early 1930s he worked for Howard Hughes’s Caddo Productions, Universal Studios, and MGM, among others. “The Kiss-Off” and two other of Hammett’s original screen stories—“Devil’s Playground,” which was not produced, and “On the Make,” which became Mr. Dynamite (1935, starring Edmund Lowe)—are included in this volume.

After publication of his most successful novels, The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, and The Thin Man, when Black Mask couldn’t afford him any longer, Hammett turned again to the slick-paper market during his breaks from movie work. He published stories in Collier’s, Redbook, and Liberty—“On the Way,” which appeared in the March 1932 Harper’s Bazaar, is included here because it has not been collected previously—and he wrote others that were not placed, but his primary interest was the movies by that time. He was under contract to MGM, writing the original stories for their Thin Man series published in our Return of the Thin Man (2012).

To our minds, this volume includes some of Hammett’s finest short fiction, and there is strong evidence that he valued these stories. Hammett was not a hoarder. He disposed of books, magazines, and manuscripts as soon as he was done with them. But he saved the typescripts and working drafts of stories in this book for more than thirty years, moving from coast to coast, hotel to hotel, and among several apartments. They were important to him. While many of these stories were clearly prepared for submission, with a heading on the typescript giving Hammett’s address, the word count, and the rights offered, there are only two pieces of evidence that he actually sent any of them out. A sheet is attached to “Fragments of Justice” with a note in Hammett’s hand, “Sold to the Forum, but probably never published.” Forum magazine published three book reviews by Hammett between 1924 and 1927, but not “Fragments of Justice.” In a letter to his wife, Jose, Hammett remarks that one story sent to Blue Book in 1927 “came sailing back”; the story he referred to is unidentified, but a good guess is “The Diamond Wager,” published in Detective Fiction Weekly in 1929 under the pseudonym Samuel Dashiell. Blue Book, distinguished at the time for their publication of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot stories, was among the highest-paying detective-fiction pulps, the kind of market Hammett would have been trying in 1927, and “The Diamond Wager” seems tailor-made for them.

After publication of The Maltese Falcon established Hammett as one of the finest writers in America, he could easily place his fiction in most any market he chose, but before that he was typed as a genre writer, a hard tag to overcome. His primary readership was mystery fans interested in realistic fiction about crime. Before publication of The Maltese Falcon, a story submission to the slicks by Dashiell Hammett would have gone into the slush pile with hundreds—more likely thousands—of other submissions. It would have been a hard sell. With two exceptions, “The Hunter” and the light satire “The Sign of the Potent Pills,” the stories in this volume are not detective stories. They are Hammett’s attempts to resist and then to break out of the mold that came to define him as a writer.

After 1934, when The Thin Man was published and Hammett began devoting his full energies as a writer to screen stories, he stopped publishing his work. For the next twenty-seven years remaining in his life he published no new fiction. For the first sixteen years of the period, until 1950, he didn’t need the money and had other interests; for the last ten he seemed to lack the energy and the spirit to write. After Hammett died, in January 1961, his literary properties fell under the complete control of Lillian Hellman, who set about carefully and expertly reviving his literary reputation—as a detective-fiction writer. There is evidence that she began editing some of the stories in this volume for publication—her light edits appear on a couple of typescripts—but she restricted her efforts to republishing what she regarded as his best detective fiction, because that was where the market lay. Hellman sold Hammett’s literary remains—or most of them, one assumes—to the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, from 1967 to 1975, and guarded access to the archive carefully. These stories were first discovered in the Ransom Center archive in the late 1970s, but publication was restricted. Over the last thirty-five years, Hammett’s unpublished stories have been regularly “rediscovered,” but for practical reasons, having to do primarily with licenses to publish and the indifference of the trustees who held sway until they were replaced at the end of the last century, these stories remained unpublished. Make no mistake: the stories in this book are not newly discovered; they are made newly available to a wide readership.

This book is arranged into four broadly defined sections—with a special appendix. Within each section stories are arranged into roughly chronological order, sometimes on the basis of guess and instinct, though the headings, paper, and typographical arrangement offer reliable clues in most cases. The texts are essentially as Hammett left them. We have resisted editing and modernizing his style: compound words, for example, are hyphenated as Hammett wrote them, and his old style of forming possessives is retained. In some cases punctuation has been judiciously standardized. In one instance an untitled story, which we call “The Cure,” has its title supplied, with the advice and consent of the people best positioned to judge what title Hammett might have chosen—his daughter and granddaughter.

The appendix deserves special attention. Provided courtesy of a generous private collector, it is the elegant beginning of a Sam Spade story or novel, perhaps. It alone among the several fragments Hammett left behind was chosen for inclusion in this print edition of The Hunter and Other Stories. Interesting though they may be, literary fragments are of primary interest to a limited audience. A selection of Hammett’s unfinished starts is included as a feature of the e-book edition of this collection.

R. L.

CRIME

COMMENTARY

The four stories in this section provide a prismatic view of Hammett’s experiments over a decade with the treatment of crime. These stories show Hammett trying different forms—from a standard Black Mask–type story, to parody, to Golden Age models, to the type of hard modernism associated with Hemingway—and varying types of narration. Three of the stories are narrated in the third person, though each in a different variety, and the other is told in the first-person voice of a wily and affected dilettante with a keen interest in fine jewels, suggesting a more famous Hammett villain.

“The Hunter” is a detective story in the mold of the Black Mask Continental Op stories, but with an important difference. Here the detective, named Vitt, is as hard-boiled as a detective gets. He has a job to do, and he does it with neither distraction nor emotional involvement, and then he turns ironically to his own mundane domestic concerns at the end. Judging from the return address on Eddy Street, where Hammett lived from 1921 to 1926, it was likely written about 1924 or 1925, when Hammett wrote six stories published in magazines other than Black Mask and introduced two new protagonists in stories told in the third person, as “The Hunter” is—Steve Threefall in “Nightmare Town” (Argosy All-Story Weekly, December 27, 1924) and Guy Tharp in “Ruffian’s Wife” (Sunset, October 1925).

“The Sign of the Potent Pills” is a farce that builds on the depiction of the detective as something less than a heroic crime fighter. The return address is 891 Post Street, where Hammett lived from 1927 to 1929. In January 1926, Hammett published “The Nails in Mr. Cayterer,” a satirical story about a writer-detective named Robin Thin similar in tone to “The Sign of Potent Pills.” (Another Robin Thin story, “A Man Named Thin,” was published shortly after Hammett’s death in 1961.) In this typescript someone crossed out the first two paragraphs of the story. They have been restored here, because they provide the only mention of the billboard that gives the story its name and identify Pentner, who calls the police at the end. Lillian Hellman edited the story, and the first paragraphs seem to have been cut by her. Hellman’s edits have been accepted only when they corrected clear typographical errors or undeniable infelicities.

“The Diamond Wager,” a clear imitation of the Golden Age mystery stories popular at the time, was, by our guess, written in 1926 and rejected by the pulp Blue Book, though not published until 1929 in another pulp, Detective Fiction Weekly. There is no known typescript. The story is told in the first person by a master criminal and was published while The Maltese Falcon was being serialized in Black Mask.

“Action and the Quiz Kid” is possibly the last story Hammett completed. It is set in New York and refers to Joe DiMaggio’s home run–hitting prowess. DiMaggio was a star for the minor-league San Francisco Seals in 1932 and 1933. He was bought by the New York Yankees in 1934, but sat out a season with a knee injury. When he played his first season for the Yankees in 1936, he hit twenty-nine home runs; in 1937, he had forty-six homers, the most in his career. A reasonable guess is that this story was written early in 1936, after Hammett was released from the hospital in January and then spent the rest of the year recuperating in and around New York City. A so-called slice-of-life story, “Action and the Quiz Kid” is typical of Hammett’s late interest in character as opposed to plot.

THE HUNTER

There are people who, coming for the first time in contact with one they know for a detective, look at his feet. These glances, at times mockingly frank, but more often furtive and somewhat scientific in purpose, are doubtless annoying to the detective whose feet are in the broad-toed tradition: Fred Vitt enjoyed them. His feet were small and he kept them neatly shod in the shiniest of blacks.

He was a pale plump man with friendly light eyes and a red mouth. The fortunes of job-hunting not guided by definite vocational training had taken him into the employ of a private detective agency some ten years ago. He had stayed there, becoming a rather skillful operative, although by disposition not especially fitted for the work, much of which was distasteful to him. But he liked its irregular variety, the assurances of his own cleverness that come frequently to any but the most uniformly successless of detectives, and the occasional full-tilt chase after a fleeing someone who was, until a court had decided otherwise, a scoundrel of one sort or another. Too, a detective has a certain prestige in some social divisions, a matter in no way equalized by his lack of any standing at all in others, since he usually may either avoid these latter divisions or conceal his profession from them.

Today Vitt was hunting a forger. The name of H. W. Twitchell—the Twitchell-Bocker Box Company—had been signed to a check for two hundred dollars, which had been endorsed Henry F. Weber and cashed at the bank. Vitt was in Twitchell’s office now, talking to Twitchell, who had failed to remember anyone named Weber.

“I’d like to see your cancelled checks for the last couple of months,” the detective said.

The manufacturer of boxes squirmed. He was a large man whose face ballooned redly out of a too-tight collar.

“What for?” he asked doubtfully.

“This is too good a forgery not to have been copied from one of ’em. The one of yours that’s most like this should lead me to the forger. It usually works out that way.”

Vitt looked first for the checks that had made Twitchell squirm. There were three of them, drawn to the order of “Cash,” endorsed by Clara Kroll, but, disappointingly, they were free from noteworthy peculiarities in common with the forgery. The detective put them aside and examined the others until he found one that satisfied him: a check for two hundred and fifty dollars to the order of Carl Rosewater.

“Who is this Rosewater?” he asked.

“My tailor.”

“I want to borrow this check.”

“You don’t think Rosewater—?”

“Not necessarily, but this looks like the check that was used as a model. See: theCain Carl are closer together than you usually put your letters, and so is theCain Cash on this phoney check. When you write two naughts together you connect them, but they’re not connected on the forgery, because whoever did it was going by this two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar check, where there is only one. Your signature on the Rosewater check takes up more space than usual, and slants more—written in a hurry, or standing up—and the forged one does the same. Then the forgery is dated two days after this check. This is the baby, I bet you!”

* * *

Only two men in the Rosewater establishment had handled Twitchell’s check: the proprietor and his bookkeeper. Rosewater was heavy with good eating. The bookkeeper was manifestly undernourished: Vitt settled on him. The detective questioned the bookkeeper casually, not accusing him, but alert for the earliest opportunity: he was so distinctly the sort of idiot who would commit a low-priced crime that could be traced straight to him, and, if further reason for suspecting him were needed, he was the most convenient suspect at hand.

This bookkeeper was tall and concave, with dry hair that lay on his scalp instead of growing out of it. Thick spectacles magnified the muddle in his eyes without enlarging anything else the eyes may have held or been. His clothing tapered off everywhere in fine frayed edges, so that you could not say definitely just where any garment ended: a gentle merging of cloth and air that made him not easily distinguished from his background. His name was James Close. He remembered the Twitchell check, he denied knowledge of the forgery, and his handwriting bore no determinable resemblance to the endorsed Henry F. Weber.

Rosewater said Close was scrupulously honest, had been in his employ for six years, and lived on Ellis Street.

“Married?”

“James?” Rosewater was surprised. “No!”

Posing, with the assistance of cards from the varied stock in his pockets, as the agent of a banking house that was about to offer the bookkeeper a glittering if vague position, Vitt interviewed Close’s landlady and several of his neighbors. The bookkeeper unquestionably was a man of most exemplary habits, but, peculiarly, he was married and the father of two children, one recently born. He had lived here—the third floor of a dull building—seven or eight months, coming from an address on Larkin Street, whither the detective presently went. Still a man thoroughly lacking in vices, Close had been unmarried on Larkin Street.

Vitt returned briskly to the Ellis Street building, intent on questioning Close’s wife, but, when he rang the bell, the bookkeeper, home for luncheon, opened the door. The detective had not expected this, but he accepted the situation.

“Got some more questions,” he said, and followed Close into the living- and dining-room (now that the bed was folded up into the wall) through whose opposite door he could see a woman putting, with thick pink arms, dishes on a kitchen table. A child stopped building something with blocks in the doorway and gaped at the visitor. Out of sight a baby cried without purpose. Close put the builder and his materials into the kitchen, closed the door, and the two men sat down.

“Close,” the detective said softly, “you forged that check.”

A woodenness came up and settled on the bookkeeper’s face. First his chin lengthened, pushing his mouth into a sullen lump, then his nose thinned and tiny wrinkles appeared beside it, paralleling its upper part and curving up to the inner corners of his eyes. His eyes became smaller, clouded behind their glasses. Thin white arcs showed under the irides, which turned the least bit outward. His brows lifted slightly, and the lines in his forehead became shallower. He said nothing, and did not gesture.

“Of course,” the detective went on, “it’s your funeral, and you can take any attitude you like. But if you want the advice of one who’s seen a lot of ’em, you’ll be sensible, and come clean about it. I don’t know, and I can’t promise anything, but two hundred dollars is not a lot of money, and maybe it can be patched up somehow.”

Though this was said with practiced smoothness—it being an established line of attack—Vitt meant it honestly enough: so far as his feelings were affected, he felt some pity for the man in front of him.

“I didn’t do it,” Close said miserably.

Vitt erased the denial with a four-inch motion of one plump white hand.

“Now listen: it won’t get you anything to put us to a lot of trouble digging up things on you—not that it’ll need much digging. For instance, when and where were you married?”

The bookkeeper blushed. The rosiness that so surely did not belong in his face gave him the appearance of a colored cartoon.

“What’s that got to—?”

“Let it go, then,” Vitt said generously. He had him there. His guess had been right: Close was not married. “Let it go. But what I’m trying to show you is that you’d better be wise and come through!”

“I didn’t do it.”

The repetition irritated Vitt. The woodenness of the bookkeeper’s face, unlivened by the color that had for a moment washed it, irritated him. He stood up, close to the bookkeeper, and spoke louder.

“You forged that check, Close! You copied it from Twitchell’s!”

“I didn’t do it.”

The kitchen door opened and the woman came into the room, the child who had been playing with the blocks holding a fold ofher skirt. She was a pink-fleshed woman of perhaps thirty years, attrac­-tive in a slovenly way: sloppy was the word that occurred to the detective.

“What is it, James?” Her voice was husky. “What is it?”

“I didn’t do it,” Close said. “He says I forged a check, but I didn’t do it.”

Vitt was warm under his clothes, and his hands perspired. The woman and child made him uncomfortable. He tried to ignore them, speaking to Close again, very slowly.

“You forged that check, Close, and I’m giving you your last chance to come through.”

“I didn’t do it.”

Vitt seized the irritation that the idiocy of this reiteration aroused in him, built it up, made a small anger of it, and his discomfort under the gazes of the woman and child grew less.

“Listen: you can take your choice,” he said. “Be bull-headed, or be reasonable. It’s nothing to me. This is all in my day’s work. But I don’t like to see a man hurt himself, especially when he’s not a crook by nature. I’d like to see you get off easy, but if you think you know what you’re doing—hop to it!”

“I didn’t do it.”

A suspicion that all this was ridiculous came to the detective, but he put it out of his mind. After he got a confession out of his man he could remember things and laugh. Meanwhile, what had to be done to get that confession needed an altogether different mood. If he could achieve some sort of rage . . .

He turned sharply to the woman.

“When and where were you folks married?” he demanded.

“None of your business!”

That was better. Against antagonism he could make progress. He felt the blood in his temples, and, his autogenetic excitement lessening the field of his vision, everything except the woman’s moist pink face became blurred.

“Exactly!” he said. “But, just so you’ll know where you stand, I’ll tell you that you never were married—not to each other anyway!”

“What of it?” She stood between her man and the detective, hands on broad hips. “What of it?”

Vitt snorted derisively. He had reared by now a really considerable rage in himself, both weapon and anesthetic.

“In this state,” he said, nodding vigorously, “there’s a law to protect children’s morals. You can be arrested for contributing to the delinquency of minor children! Ever think of that?”

“Contributing to— Why, that’s foolish! I raise my children as decent as anybody. I—”

“I know! But in California if you’re living with a man not your husband, then you’re guilty of it—setting them a bad example, or something like that.”

The bookkeeper appeared from behind the woman.

“You stop that!” he ordered. “You hear me, you stop that! Amy hasn’t done anything!”

The child began to cry. The woman seized one of Vitt’s arms.

“Let me tell you!” Defiance was gone out of her. “My husband left me when he found I was going to have another baby. He went out on a Sunday night in the rain and didn’t ever come back. Not ever! I didn’t have anybody to help me but James. He took me in, and he’s been as good a man as there ever was! The children are better off with him than they ever were with Tom. He’s better to them. I—”

The detective pulled his arm away from her. A detective is a man employed to do certain defined things: he is not a judge, a god. Every thief has his justification, to hear him tell it. This hullabaloo just made his work that much harder, without doing anybody any real good.

“That’s tough!” He put into word and feature all the callousness for which he was fumbling inside. “But the way it stands is that if you’re going to fight me on this check business, I’m going to make the going as tough as I can for the pair of you.”

“You mean,” Close cried, “that if I don’t say I forged that check you’ll have Amy and me arrested for this—this delinquency thing?”

“I mean that if you’ll be reasonable I’ll not make any more trouble than I have to. But if you want to be hard-boiled, then I’ll go the limit.”

“And Amy’ll be arrested?”

“Yes.”

“You—you—” The bookkeeper clawed at Vitt with hands fashioned for grappling with pens and ledger-pages. Vitt could have handled him without especial difficulty, for, beneath his plumpness, the detective was strong enough. But the passion for which he had groped with affectation of face and voice had at last become actual.

He made a ball of one fist and drove it into the bookkeeper’s hollow belly. The bookkeeper folded over it and writhed on the floor. Screaming, the woman knelt beside him. The child who had come into the room with the woman and the baby Vitt had not seen yelled together. The doorbell began to ring. From the kitchen came the stench of scorched food.

Presently Close sat up, leaning against the kneeling woman, his spectacles dangling from one ear.

“I forged it,” he said into the clamor. “I didn’t have any money to pay the bills after the baby came. I told Amy I borrowed the money from Rosewater.” He laughed two sharp notes. “She didn’t know him, so she believed me. Anyway, the bills are paid.”

Vitt hurried his prisoner down to the city prison, had him booked and locked in, and then hastened up to the shopping district. The department stores closed at half past five, and his wife had asked him to bring home three spools of No. 60 black thread.

THE SIGN OF THE POTENT PILLS

The house was large and austerely symmetrical in the later Bourbon fashion. Its pilastered façade, factually of a light gray stone, was dully whitish in the morning sun. Level grassplots cut by sharp-edged paths spread around the house, holding it apart from its neighbors and from the street. The grassplots in turn were guarded from the outer world by a fence of iron pickets, unfriendly as so many tall black pikes. Just inside the fence’s eastern line the billboard stood. Its wide back was to the house. Its edge was to the street. It faced, with an outrageous red and green face advertising a forgotten cure-all—Pentner’s Potent Pills—a porticoed house of red brick behind tidy hedges some twenty yards away.

Hugh Trate, walking up from the car-line with that briskness which young twenty-two need not temper to moderate hills, stared at the billboard’s ugly discordance until he was nearly abreast it and its edge had become too meager to hold his attention. Then his attention passed on to the stone house, his destination.

In front of the house a high grilled gate interrupted the black fence. It was a gate designed for shutting out rather than admitting, a gate wrought in lines as uninviting as the upright sharp pickets, but it was not locked. The young man closed it behind him and went up the walk to the house.

The young man shut the gate behind him and went up the walk to the house. The door was opened in response to the bell by a stolid red-faced man of genial cast whose footman’s clothes did not fit him very well.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“I should like to see Miss Newbrith.”

“She ain’t home. Sorry.”

“Wait a moment,” the young man insisted as the door began to close. “I’ve an appointment. She phoned me. My name is Trate.”

“That’s different,” the stolid man said cheerfully, opening the door again and stepping to one side. “Why didn’t you say so? Come on in.” He closed the door behind the young man and started up a broad flight of stairs. “Up this way.”

On the second floor landing the stolid man halted to face Trate again.

“You don’t happen to be carrying a gun, now do you?” he asked pleasantly.

“Why no.”

“You see, we can’t take no chances,” the man explained, and, stepping close, ran swift hands over Trate’s hips, chest, and belly. “We got to be mighty careful in a spot like this.” He stepped back and moved toward a broad closed door on the right, throwing a friendly “Come along” over his shoulder.

Eyes wide in surprise, Trate followed obediently to the door, which the man opened with a flourish.

“A young fellow to see Miss Newbrith,” he shouted merrily, bowing low with an absurd outflinging of his arms. When he straightened up he added, “Ha-ha-ha!”

Hesitantly Trate advanced into the room wherein was nothing to set him immediately at ease. It was a drawing-room in gold and white, quite long, elaborate with the carved, inlaid, and stuccoed richness of the fourteenth Louis’ day. Opaque blinds and heavy curtains hid the windows. A glittering chandelier lighted the room. From the farther end a dozen faces looked at Trate with indefinite expectancy.

The owners of these faces had divided themselves into two groups. The larger numbered eight. They, no matter how comfortably established on chairs in this gold and white room, were unmistakably servants. Across the floor from them the smaller group occupied more space. The eldest of these four sat upright in the middle of a sofa. He was small, slight, old, and well preserved except that his mustache, white as his hair, was ragged at one end with recent gnawing. To his right a full-bodied woman of forty-something in a magenta frock leaned forward on her gilded chair and held a champlevé vial near her thin nose. Beside her a middle-aged man sat in a similar chair. He resembled—in younger, plumper mould—the man on the sofa, but was paler, more tired than the elder.

The fourth member of the group stood up when Hugh came in. She derived from both the sitting men: a girl of less than twenty, small with a daintiness of bone-structure and fleshing which, however delicate, had nothing to do with fragility. Her face was saved from the flat prettiness of mathematically proportioned features by her mouth: it was red, too narrow, full and curiously creased. She took four steps toward Trate, stopped, looked past him at the door through which he had come, and at him again. “Oh, Mr. Trate, it was nice of you to come so quickly!” she said.

The young man, still a dozen paces away, approached smiling somewhat stiffly, a little pink, looking at her with brown eyes that seemed uneasily aware of the concerted stare of the eleven other persons watching him with ambiguous hopefulness. He made a guttural gargling sound, in no way intelligible, but manifestly polite in intention. The girl took his hand, then his hat and overcoat, and turned with him to face the others.

“Grandad,” she said to the old man on the sofa, “this is Mr. Trate. He—” She stopped, indicated something behind her by a swift sidewise jerk of her eyes, and nodded significantly.

“Say no more.” The old man’s glance darted for a fleeting instant past Trate. A dry whisper crept from behind his white mustache. “We are in your hands.”

Trate said something like, “Uh,” and shifted his feet uncertainly.

The girl told him that the tired man and the woman in magenta were her parents, and now the woman spoke, her voice nasally querulous. “The stout man is by far the most odious and I do wish you would secure him first.” She gestured with the champlevé vial toward the door.

Two men stood in that end of the room. One was the stolid man who had opened the door. He nodded and grinned amiably at Trate. His companion scowled. The companion was a short man in shabby brown, with arms too long hanging from shoulders too broad. Red-brown eyes peered malignantly from beneath the pulled-down visor of his cap. His face was dark, with a broad nose flat on his long and prominent upper lip above an outthrust chin.

Trate looked from one Newbrith to another. “I beg your pardon?” he asked.

“It’s nothing,” the old man assured him. “Your own way.”

Trate frowned questioning puzzlement at the girl.

She laughed, the creases in her red mouth multiplying its curves. “We must explain it to Mr. Trate. We can’t expect him to guess the situation.”

Old Newbrith’s ragged mustache blew out from his mouth in a great blast of air.

“Explain! Didn’t you—?”

“There was no time,” said the girl. “It took me nearly five minutes to get Mr. Trate on the wire, and by then they were hunting for me.”

The old man leaned forward with bulging eyes. “And you’ve no assistance? No men outside?”

“No, sir,” Trate said.

The elder Newbrith looked at the girl’s father and the girl’s father looked at him, each looking as if he found the sight of the other amazing. But the amazement with which they regarded one another was nothing to that with which they looked at the girl. The old man’s small fingers crushed invisible things on the sofa beside his legs.

“Precisely what did you tell Mr. Trate, Brenda?” he asked.

“Why, I simply told him who I was, reminded him I had met him at the Shermans’, and asked him if he could run up here immediately. That was all. There wasn’t time for anything else, Grandad. They were already hunting for me.”

“Yes, they would be,” said the old man, softer of voice, his face angrier. “So instead of giving the alarm to the first voice you heard, you wasted five minutes getting this—ah—young gentleman on the wire, and then hadn’t time to do more than—ah—casually invite him to join us?”

“Oh, but really,” his granddaughter protested, “Mr. Trate is very clever. And I thought this would be such a wonderful chance for him to make a reputation at the very beginning of his career.”

“Ah!” the old man cooed while wild lights twinkled in his eyes, “so our young friend is at the very beginning of his career, is he?”

“Yes. I met him at the Shermans’ reception. He was guarding the presents, and he told me that was his first case. He had only been a detective for three days then. Wasn’t that it, Mr. Trate?”

Mr. Trate said, “Uh—yes,” without taking his eyes from the old man’s face.

“So then our Mr. Trate has had by this time”—Newbrith was lisping with sweetness now—“no less than ten days experience?”

“Eleven,” Trate said, blushing a little.

Old Newbrith said, “Ah, eleven, to be sure!” and stood up. He smiled and his face was swollen and purple. He plucked two buttons from his coat and threw them away. He found a yellow scarf to tear into strips and a handful of cigars to crunch into brown flakes. He took the champlevé vial from his daughter-in-law’s hand and ground it under his heel. While thus engaged he screamed that his granddaughter was an idiot, a fool, a loon , a moron, a dolt, an ass, a lunatic, a goose, a simpleton, a booby, a numbskull, an imbecile, and a halfwit. Then he relapsed on the sofa, eyes closed, legs out, while daughter-in-law and granddaughter strove with loosening, fanning, chaffing hands to stop the bubbling in his upturned open mouth.

“What’s the old boy up to now?” a very thin squeaky voice asked. Its owner stood with the two men by the door. He was ridiculous. Well over six feet in height, he was a hill of flesh, a live sphere in loose gray clothes. His features were babyish—little round blue eyes, little lumpy nose, little soft mouth—all babyishly disposed, huddled together in the center of a great round face, between cheeks like melons, with smooth pink surfaces that seemed never have needed shaving. Out of this childish mountain more piping words came: “You oughtn’t to let him carry on like that, Tom. First thing you know he’ll be busting something and dying on us before we’re through with him.”

“The young fellow did it,” replied the cheerful man in the footman’s ill-fitting dress. “Seems like he’s a detective.”

“A detective!” The fat man’s features gathered closer together in a juvenile pout, blue eyes staring glassily at Trate. “Well, what does he come here for? We mustn’t have detectives!”

The long-armed brutish man in brown took a shuffling step forward. “I’ll bust him one,” he suggested.

“No, no, Bill!” the fat man squeaked impatiently, still staring at Trate. “That wouldn’t help. He’d still be a detective.”

“Oh, he ain’t so much a one that we got to worry about him,” the cheerful man said. “Seems like he ain’t been at it only for eleven days, and he comes in not knowing no what’s what than the man in the moon.”

But fat pink fingers continued to pluck at the puckered baby’s mouth, and the porcelain eyes neither blinked nor wavered from the young man’s face. “That’s all right,” the fat man squeaked, “but what’s he doing here? That’s what I want to know.”

“Seems like the kid got to the phone that time she slipped away from us in the mixup before we brought ’em down here, and she gives this young fellow a rumble, but she’s too rattlebrained to smart him up. He don’t know nothing until he gets in.”

The mountainous man’s distress lessened to a degree permitting the removal of his stare from Trate, and he turned to the door. “Well, maybe it’s all right,” his treble came over one of the thick pillows that were his shoulders, “but you tell him that he’s got to behave himself.”

He lumbered out, leaving the cheerful man and the malevolent man standing side by side looking at Trate cheerfully and malevolently. The young man put his back to those parallel but unlike gazes and found himself facing old Newbrith, who was sitting up on his sofa again, his eyes open, waving away his ministering womenfolk.

Looking at Trate, the old man repeated the burden of his recently screamed complaint, but now in the milder tone of incomplete resignation: “If she had to pick out one detective and bring him here blindfolded, why must she pick an amateur?”

No one had a direct reply to that. Trate mumbled an obvious something about everybody’s having been a novice at one time. The old man readily, if somewhat nastily, conceded the truth of that, but God knew he had troubles enough without being made Lesson II in a How To Be A Detective course.

“Now, Grandad, don’t be unreasonable,” Brenda Newbrith remonstrated. “You’ve no idea how clever Mr. Trate really is! He—” She smiled up at the young man. “What was that awfully clever thing you said at the Shermans’ about democracy being government with the deuces wild?”

The young man cleared his throat and smiled uncomfortably, and beyond that said nothing.

The girl’s father opened his tired eyes and became barely audible. “Good Lord!” he murmured. “A detective who amuses the guests with epigrams to keep them from making off with the wedding presents!”

“You just wait!” the girl said. “You’ll see! Won’t they, Mr. Trate?”

Mr. Trate said, “Yes. That is— Well—”

Mrs. Newbrith, raising her eyes from the ruins of her vial on the floor, said, “I don’t understand what all this pother is about. If the young man is really a detective, he will arrest these criminals at once. If he isn’t, he isn’t, and that’s the end of it, though I grant that Brenda might have exercised greater judgment when she—”

“Go ahead, young fellow,” Tom called encouragingly from the other end of the room, “detect something for the lady!”

The man with the brutish muzzle also spoke. “I wish Joe would leave me take a poke at him,” he grumbled.

“You can save us, can’t you, Mr. Trate?” the girl asked pointblank, looking up at him with blue eyes in which doubt was becoming faintly discernible.

Trate flushed, cleared his throat. “I’m not a policeman, Miss Newbrith, and I have no reason to believe that Mr. Newbrith wishes to engage my services.”

“None at all,” the old man agreed.

The girl was not easily put aside.

“I engage you,” she told him.

“I’m sorry,” Trate said, “but it would have to be Mr. Newbrith.”

“That’s silly! And besides, if you succeeded in doing something, you know Grandad would reward you.”

Trate shook his head again.

“Ethical detectives do not operate on contingent fees,” said he as if reciting a recently studied lesson.

“Do you mean to do nothing? Are you trying to make me ridiculous? After I thought it would be such a wonderful opportunity for you, and gave you a chance any other man would jump at!”

Before Trate could reply to this, the fat man’s treble was quivering in the room again. “Didn’t I tell you you’d have to make him behave himself?” he asked his henchmen.

“He’s just arguing,” the stolid Tom defended Hugh. “There ain’t no harm in the boy.”

“Well, make him sit down and keep quiet.”

The brutish Bill shuffled forward. “He’ll sit down or I’ll slap him down,” he promised.

Hugh found a vacant gilt chair in a corner half behind the elder Newbrith’s sofa. Bill said, “Ar-r-r!” hesitated, looked back at the fat man and returned to his post by the door.

The mountain of flesh turned its child’s eyes on old Newbrith, raised a hand like an obese pink star, and beckoned with a finger that curved rather than crooked, so cased in flesh were its joints.

Old Newbrith caught the unchewed end of his mustache in his mouth, but he did not get up from his sofa.

“You’ve got everything,” he protested. “I haven’t another thing that—”

“You oughtn’t to lie to me like that,” the fat man reproved him. “How about that piece of property on Temple Street?”

“But you can’t sell that kind of real estate by phone like stocks and bonds,” Newbrith objected. “Not for immediate cash!”

“You can,” the fat man insisted, “especially if you’re willing to let it go for half of what it’s worth, like you are. Maybe nobody else could, but you can. Everybody knows you’re crazy, and anything you do won’t surprise them.”

Newbrith held his seat, stubbornly looking at the floor.

The fat man piped, “Bill!”

The brutish man shuffled toward the sofa.

Newbrith cursed into his mustache, got up, and followed the waddling mountain into the hall.

There was silence in the drawing-room. Bill and Tom held the door. The servants sat along their wall, variously regarding one another, the men at the door, and the four on the other side of the room. Mrs. Newbrith fidgeted in her chair, looking regretfully at the fragments of her vial, and picked at her magenta frock with round-tipped fingers that were pinkly striped with the marks of rings not long removed. Her husband rested wearily beside her, a cigar smoldering in his pale mouth. Their daughter sat a little away from them, looking stony defiance from face to face. Hugh Trate, back in his corner, had lighted a cigarette, and sat staring through smoke at his outstretched crossed legs. His face, every line of his pose, affected an introspective preoccupation with his own affairs that was flawed by an unmistakable air of sulkiness.

Twenty minutes later the elder Newbrith rejoined his family. His face was purple again. His hair was rumpled. The right corner of his mustache had vanished completely. The fat man, stopping beside his associates at the door, was forcing a thick black pistol into a tight pocket.

“You!” the old man barked at Trate before sitting on his sofa again. “You’re hired!”

“Very well, sir,” the young man said with so little enthusiasm that the words seemed almost an acceptance of defeat.

The fat man departed. The red-faced man grinned at Hugh and called to him with large friendliness, “I hope you ain’t going to be too hard on us, young fellow.”

The brutish man glowered and snarled, “I’m gonna smack that punk yet!”

After that there was silence again in the gold and white room, though the occasional sound of a closing door, of striding, waddling, dragging foot-falls, came from other parts of the house, and once a telephone bell rang thinly. Hugh Trate lit another cigarette, and did not restore the box of safety matches to his pocket.

Presently Mrs. Newbrith coughed. Old Newbrith cleared his throat. A vague stuffiness came into the room.

Trate leaned forward until his mouth was not far from the white head of the old man on the sofa. “Sit still, sir,” the young detective whispered through immobile lips. “I’ve just set fire to the sofa.”

Old Newbrith left the burning sofa with a promptness that caught his legs unprepared, scrambled out into the middle of the floor on hands and knees. His torn mustache quivered and fluttered and tossed in gusts of bellowed turmoil. “Help! Fire! Damn your idiocy! Michael! Battey! Water! Fire! You young idiot! Michael! Battey! It’s arson, that’s what it is!” were some of the things he could be understood to shout, and the things that were understood were but a fraction of the things he shouted.

Tumult—after a moment of paralysis at the spectacle of the master of the house of Newbrith yammering on all fours—took the drawing-room. Mrs. Newbrith screamed. The line between servants and served disappeared as the larger group came to the smaller’s assistance. Flames leaped into view, red tongues licking the arm of the sofa, quick red fingers catching at drapes, yellow smoke like blonde ghosts’ hair growing out of brocaded upholstery.

A thin youth in a chauffeur’s livery started for the door, crying, “Water! We’ve got to have water!”

Stolid Tom waved him back with a pair of automatic pistols produced expertly from the bosom of his ill-fitting garments. “Go back to your bonfire, my lad,” he ordered with friendly firmness, while the brute called Bill slid a limber dark blackjack from a hip pocket and moved toward the chauffeur. The chauffeur hurriedly retreated into the group fighting the fire.

The younger Newbrith and a servant had twisted a thick rug over the sofa’s arm and back, and were patting it sharply with their hands. Two servants had torn down the burning drape, trampling it into shredded black harmlessness under their feet. The elder Newbrith beat a smoldering cushion against the top of a table, sparks riding away on escaping feathers. While the old man beat he talked, but nothing could be made of his words. Mrs. Newbrith was laughing with noisy hysteria beside him. Around these principals the others were grouped: servants unable to find a place to serve, Brenda Newbrith looking at Hugh Trate as if undecided how she should look at him, and the young man himself frowning at the charred corpse of his fire with undisguised resentment.

“What in the world’s the matter now?” the fat man asked from the door.

“The young fellow’s been cutting up,” Tom explained. “He touched off a box of matches and stuck ’em under a pillow in a corner of the sofa. Seemed like a harmless kind of joke, so I left him alone.”

The brutish man raised a transformed face, almost without brutality in its eager hopefulness. “Now you’ll leave me sock him, Joe,” he pleaded.

But the fat man shook his head.

Mrs. Newbrith stopped laughing to cough. The elder Newbrith was coughing, his eyes red, tears on his wrinkled cheeks. A cushion case was limp and empty in his fingers: it had burst under his violent handling and its contents had puffed out to scatter in the air, thickening in an atmosphere already heavy with the smoke and stench of burnt hair and fabric.

“Can’t we open a window for a second?” the younger Newbrith called through this cloud. “Just enough to clear the air?”

“Now you oughtn’t to ask me a thing like that,” fat Joe complained petulantly. “You ought to have sense enough to know we can’t do a thing like that.”

Old Newbrith spread his empty cushion cover out with both hands and began to wave it in the air, fanning a relatively clear space in front of him. Servants seized rugs and followed his example. Smoke swirled away, thinning toward the ceiling. White curls of fleece eddied about, were wafted to distant parts of the room. The three men at the door watched without comment.

“I’m afraid this young man is going to make a nuisance of himself,” the fat man squeaked after a little while. “You’ll have to do something with him, Tom.”

“Aw, leave the young fellow alone,” said Tom. “He’s all—”

A white feather, fluttering lazily down, came to hang for a moment against the tip of Tom’s red nose. He dabbed at it with the back of one of the hands that held his pistols. The feather floated up in the air-current generated by the hand’s motion, but immediately returned to the nose-tip again. Tom’s hand dabbed at it once more and his face puffed out redly. The feather eluded his hand, nestling between nose and upper lip. His face became grotesquely inflated. He sneezed furiously. The gun in the dabbing hand roared. Old Newbrith’s empty cushion case was whisked out of his hands. A hole like a smooth dime appeared in the blind down across a window behind him.

“Tch! Tch!” exclaimed the fat man. “You ought to be carefuller, Tom. You might hurt somebody that way.”

Tom sneezed again, but with precautions now, holding his pistols down, holding his forefingers stiffly away from the triggers. He sneezed a third time, rubbed his nose with the back of a hand, put his weapons out of sight under his coat, and brought out a handkerchief.

“I might of for a fact,” he admitted good naturedly, blowing his nose and wiping his eyes. “Remember that time Snohomish Whitey gunned that bank messenger without meaning to, all on account of being ticklish and having a button bust off his undershirt and slide down on the inside?”

“Yes,” fat Joe remembered, “but Snohomish was always kind of flighty.”

“You can say what you want about Snohomish,” the brutish man said, rubbing his chin reflectively with the blackjack, “but he packs a good wallop in his left, and don’t think he don’t. That time me and him went round and round in the jungle at Sac he made me like it, even if I did take him, and don’t think he didn’t.”

“That’s right enough,” the fat man admitted, “but still and all, I never take much stock in a man that can’t take a draw on your cigarette without getting it all wet. Well, don’t let these folks do any more cutting up on you,” and he waddled away.

Hugh Trate, surrounded by disapproval, sat and stared at the floor for fifteen minutes. Then his face began to redden slowly. When it was quite red he lifted it and looked into the elder Newbrith’s bitter eyes.

“Do you think I started it because I was chilly?” he asked angrily. “Wouldn’t it have smoked these crooks out? Wouldn’t it have brought firemen, police?”

The old man glared at him. “Don’t you think it’s bad enough to be robbed without being cremated? Do you think the insurance company would have paid me a nickel for the house? Do you—?”

A downstairs crash rattled windows, shook the room, put weapons in the hands of men at the door. Feet thumped on distant steps, scurried overhead, stamped in the hall. The door opened far enough to admit a pale hatchet-face.

“Ben,” it addressed the cheerful man, “Big Fat wants you. We been ranked!”

Two shots close together sounded below. Ben, recently Tom, hurried out after the hatchet-face, leaving the brutish Bill alone to guard the prisoners. He glowered threateningly at them with his little red-brown eyes, crouching beside the door, blackjack in one hand, battered revolver in the other.

Another shot thundered. Something broke with a splintering sound in the rear of the house. A distant man yelled throatily, “Put the slug to him!” In another part of the building a man laughed. Heavy feet were on the stairs, in the hall.