intelligences grasped and weighed and
ticketed every detail.

While Cleggett narrates, and Wilton Barnstable and his men listen, a
word to the reader concerning this great detective.

CHAPTER XX

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DETECTIVE

Wilton Barnstable was the inventor of a new school of detection of
crime. The system came in with him, and it may go out with him for
lack of a man of his genius to perpetuate it. He insisted that there
was nothing spectacular or romantic in the pursuit of the criminal, or,
at least, that there should be nothing of the sort. And he was
especially disgusted when anyone referred to him as "a second Sherlock
Holmes."

"I am only a plain business man," he would insist, urbanely, with a
wave of his hand. "I have merely brought order, method, system,
business principles, logic, to the detection of crime. I know nothing
of romance. Romance is usually all nonsense in my estimation. The
real detective, who gets results in real life, is NOT a Sherlock
Holmes."

The enemies of Wilton Barnstable sometimes said of him that he was
jealous of Sherlock Holmes. When this was reported to Barnstable he
invariably remarked: "How preposterous! The idea of a man being
envious of a literary creation!"

Perhaps his denial of the existence of romance was merely one of those
poses which geniuses so often permit themselves. Perhaps he saw it and
was thrilled with it even while he denied it. At any rate, he lived in
the midst of it. The realism which was his metier was that sort of
realism into which are woven facts and incidents of the most bizarre
and startling nature.

And, certainly, behind the light blue eyes that could look with such
apparent ingenuousness out of his plump, bland face there was the
subtle mind of a psychologist. Barnstable, true to his attitude of the
plain business man, would have been the first to ridicule the idea
publicly if anyone had dubbed him "the psychological detective." That,
to his mind, would have savored of charlatanism. He would have said:
"I am nothing so strange and mystifying as that--I am a plain business
man." But in reality there was no new discovery of the investigating
psychologists of which he did not avail himself at once. His ability
to clothe himself with the thoughts of the criminal as an actor clothes
himself with a role, was marvelous; he knew the criminal soul. That is
to say, he knew the human soul. He refused to see anything
extraordinar