ive slackening of the
machine, and Little Pete asked,

"Where now, sir?"

"You can see it," Cummings pointed. "The tall building. Hit the
Embarcadero, then turn to your right; a block to Mason Street."

So close to the dock that ships lay broadside before its doors, moored
to the piles by steel cables, the Western Cereal Company plant scattered
its mills and warehouses over two city blocks. Freight trains ran
through arcades into the buildings to fetch and carry its products;
great trucks, some gas driven, some with four-and six-horse teams,
loaded sacks or containers that shot in endless streams through well
worn chutes, or emptied raw materials that would shortly be breakfast
foods into iron conveyors that sucked it up and whined for more. It was
a place of aggressive activity among placid surroundings, this plant of
Dykeman's, for its setting was the Italian fisherman's home district;
little frame shacks, before which they mended their long, brown nets, or
stretched them on the sidewalks to dry; Fisherman's Wharf and its lateen
rigged, gayly painted hulls, was under the factory windows.

We pulled up before the door of a building separate from any of the
mills or warehouses, and I followed Cummings through a corridor, past
many doors of private offices, to the large general office. Here a young
man at a desk against the rail lent Cummings respectful attention; the
lawyer asked something in a low tone, and was answered,

"Yes, sir. Waiting for you. Go right through."

Down the long room with its rattling typewriters, its buzz of clerks and
salesmen we went. Cummings was a little ahead of me, when he checked a
moment to bow to some one over at a desk. I followed his glance. The
girl he had spoken to turned her back almost instantly after she had
returned his greeting; but I couldn't be mistaken. There might be more
than one figure with that slim, half girlish grace about it, and other
hair as lustrously blue-black, but none could be wound around a small
head quite so shapely, carried with so blossomlike a toss. It was
Barbara Wallace.

So this was where her job was. Strange I had not known this fact of
grave importance. I went on past her unconscious back, left her working
at her loose-leaf ledgers, beside her adding machine, my mind a whirl of
ugly conjecture. Dykeman's employee; that would instantly and very
painfully clear up a score of perplexing questions. Dykeman would need
no detectives on my trail to te