veil. He felt that the world had gone on,
and in going on had forgotten him. Even the scraps of talk, the talk
of his own people, fell on his ear with a strange sound.

He found nothing companionable in that canon of life and movement known
as Broadway. He stopped to stare with haggard and wistful eyes at a
theater front buoyed with countless electric bulbs, remembering the
proud moment when he had been cheered in a box there, for in his
curtain-speech the author of the melodrama of crime being presented had
confessed that the inspiration and plot of his play had come from that
great detective, Never-Fail Blake.

He drifted on down past the cafes and restaurants where he had once
dined and supped so well, past the familiar haunts where the appetite
of the spirit for privilege had once been as amply fed as the appetite
of the body for food. He sought out the darker purlieus of the lower
city, where he had once walked as a king and dictated dead-lines and
distributed patronage. He drifted into the underworld haunts where his
name had at one time been a terror. But now, he could see, his
approach no longer resulted in that discreet scurry to cover, that
feverish scuttling away for safety, which marks the blacksnake's
progress through a gopher-village.

When he came to Center Street, at the corner of Broome, he stopped and
blinked up at the great gray building wherein he had once held sway.
He stood, stoop-shouldered and silent, staring at the green lamps, the
green lamps of vigilance that burned as a sign to the sleeping city.

He stood there for some time, unrecognized, unnoticed, watching the
platoons of broad-chested "flatties" as they swung out and off to their
midnight patrols, marking the plainly clad "elbows" as they passed
quietly up and down the great stone steps. He thought of Copeland, and
the Commissioner, and of his own last hour at Headquarters. And then
his thoughts went on to Binhart, and the trail that had been lost, and
the task that stood still ahead of him. And with that memory awakened
the old sullen fires, the old dogged and implacable determination.

In the midst of those reviving fires a new thought was fixed; the
thought that Binhart's career was in some way still involved with that
of Elsie Verriner. If any one knew of Binhart's whereabouts, he
remembered, it would surely be this woman, this woman on whom, he
contended, he could still hold the iron hand of incrimination. The
first