been given, either by Miss Farnham or by Miss Grierson--or
both.

"All the same, he'll make a miss-go, sooner or later," the pertinacious
one was saying to himself as he strolled past the Raymer plant with a
keen eye for the barred gates, the lounging guards in the yard, and the
sober-faced workmen coming and going at the pay-office. "If he can carry
a steady head through what's comin' to him here, he's a better man than
I've been stacking him up to be."

Coming even with the grouping around the office door, Broffin sat down
on a discarded cylinder casting, chewed his dry smoke, whittled a stick,
and kept an open ear for the sidewalk talk. It was angrily vindictive
for the greater part, with the new member of the Raymer company for a
target. Now and then it was threatening. If the company should attempt
to bring in foreign labor there would be blood on the moon.

Later, a big, red-faced man with his hat on the back of his head and a
paste diamond in his shirt bosom, came to join the shifting group on the
office sidewalk. Broffin marked him as one of the inflammatory speakers
he had seen and heard on the dry-goods-box rostrum in front of
McGuire's, and had since been trying to place. The nearer view turned
up the proper page in the mental note-book. The man's name was Clancy;
he was a Chicago ward-worker, sham labor leader, demagogue; a bad man
with a "pull." Broffin remembered the "pull" because it had once got in
his way when he was trying to bag Clancy for a violation of the revenue
laws.

Instantly the detective began to speculate upon the chance that had
brought the Chicago ward bully into a village labor fight, and since it
was his business to put two and two together, he was not long in finding
the answer to his own query. Clancy had come because he had been hired
to come. Assuming this much, the remainder was easy. The town gossips
had supplied all the major facts of the Raymer-Grierson checkmate, and
Broffin saw a great light. It was not labor and capital that were at
odds; it was competition and monopoly. And monopoly, invoking the aid of
the Clancys, stood to win in a canter.

Broffin dropped the stick he had been whittling and got up to move away.
Though some imaginative persons would have it otherwise, a detective may
still be a man of like passions--and generous prepossessions--with other
men. For the time Broffin's Anglo-Saxon heritage, the love of fair play,
made him forget the limitations of his tra