s actually sold and
delivered," said Indiman, half-defiantly. But he need not have defended
her to me.

It was getting to be a very pretty problem as it stood, the one obvious
probability being that it was the girl herself who stood in danger.
What could we do? To discover the nature of the impending peril and,
above all, the personnel of the conspirators. And then what? How were
we to communicate with or warn the girl?--for, of course, she had
called up Indiman from a public pay-station, leaving no clew to her
identity or address. Well, there was still the Personal column in the
HERALD; it had reached her once and might again.

"I am going down-town to the main office of the Western Union," said
Indiman, "and may be away all day. If I shouldn't return by
dinner-time, you will carry out the instructions in the message.
Exactly, remember--car No. 6, and the best butter--each detail may be
important. About nine o'clock should be a good hour."

"I understand," I said, and we parted.

At exactly half after nine that evening I stepped off car No. 6 at the
crossing of West Fourth and Eleventh streets. The grocery was on the
northwest corner, and I entered without hesitation.

Like many other big cities, New York (even excluding the transpontine
suburbs) is a collection of towns and villages rather than a
homogeneous municipality. Chelsea and Harlem and the upper West
Side--all these are distinct and separate centres of community life.
Greenwich Village knows naught of Yorkville, and the East Side Ghetto
has no dealings with the inhabitants of the French quarter.

Now the small area bounded by Waverley Place, Christopher, West Fourth,
and West Eleventh streets is also a law unto itself. The neighborhood
is respectable and severely old fashioned, the houses large and
comfortable, and the resident population almost entirely native
New-Yorkers in moderate circumstances. A village, then, with its shops
and school-houses and churches; it is as provincial in its way as the
Lonelyville of the comic weeklies. The grocery is the village club, at
least for the respectable part of the male population, the men who
would not be seen in a corner saloon. There were half a dozen of the
regulars now in the shop, seated on boxes and chairs around the stove,
for it was a raw and chilly day. They looked up as I entered, but no
one moved or spoke. Undoubtedly my man was in the group, but how to
pick him out. I walked to the counter and addr