ngton Square in New York."

The two talked for perhaps forty minutes--though it must be admitted
that a portion of that time was devoted to a discussion of the terms of
employment. Mr. Tollman had never undertaken having a man shadowed
before and he regarded the fees as needlessly large.

Back once more in his office in a building on Forty-second Street, Mr.
Hagan cut the end from a cigar and gazed out across the public library
and the park at its back. The frosted glass of his hall door bore the
legend, "The Searchlight Investigation Bureau. Private."

"Well, what did you find out about this job?" inquired a member of the
office force who had entered from a communicating room, and the chief
wrinkled his brow a little as he studied his _perfecto_.

"It's a dirty business, Schenk," he replied crisply. "It's the kind of
thing that gives knockers a license to put detectives in the same class
as blackmailers--and the old Whey-face himself is a tight-wad. He
wrangled over the price--but I made him come through."

"What does he want done?"

"He wants a guy framed. You remember what the bulls did for Big
Finnerty, when Finnerty was threatening to squeal to the District
Attorney's office about police graft?"

Schenk nodded. "They pulled the old stuff on him. Sent him to the
Island a year for gun-toting."

"Sure, and he didn't have a gat at that--that is, not until the bulls
planted it in his kick on the way to the station house." The dignity of
Mr. Hagan's consultation manner had dropped from him, and he had
relapsed into the gang argot with which police days had given him an
intimate familiarity.

"Sure he didn't. That's the way they frame a man. It's the way they
framed--"

"Can the reminiscence stuff," interrupted the head of the Searchlight
Investigation Bureau. "The point is that it's just about the deal we're
being hired to put over on this Farquaharson person. He wants to marry a
girl and we've got to frame him up with a dirty past--or present. Our
respected employer is a deacon and a pious hypocrite. He wants results
and he wants us to go the limit to get 'em. But he must never know
anything that soils the hem of his garment. He has no interest in the
petty doings of detectives. His smug face must be saved. He didn't tell
me this, but I wised myself to it right away. He's got his eye on that
girl, himself."

The winter came close on the heels of a short autumn that year and it
came with the bluster and roa