The Project Gutenberg eBook, Never-Fail Blake, by Arthur Stringer

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Title: Never-Fail Blake

Author: Arthur Stringer

Release Date: June 23, 2006 [eBook #18671]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

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Transcriber's note:

The printed version of this book had two Chapter V's.
Rather than renumber all the subsequent chapters in the
book, I numbered the first "V" to "V (a)" and the second
one to "V (b)".

Supertales of Modern Mystery

NEVER-FAIL BLAKE

by

ARTHUR STRINGER

[Frontispiece: "Then why can't you marry me?"]

Mckinlay, Stone & Mackenzie
New York
Copyright, 1913, by
The Bobbs-Merrill Company

NEVER-FAIL BLAKE

I

Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound's eyes as the door
opened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.

"Hello, Elsie!" he said, without looking at her.

The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced
thoughtfully toward his table desk.

"Hello, Jim!" she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the
desk end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor
of ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office.

The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll
of her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the
desk top.

"You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than
a question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of
timidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim left
the shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense
of power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of
beauty, though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so
wistf