oward the Strand."

Mr. Coulson nodded.

"Well," he said, "I guess you don't want to be making conversation. You
want to know about Hamilton Fynes. I was just acquainted with him, and
that's a fact, but I reckon you'll have to find some one who knows a
good deal more than I do before you'll get the stuff you want for your
paper."

"The slightest particulars are of interest to us just now," the reporter
reminded him.

Mr. Coulson nodded.

"Hamilton Fynes," he said, "so far as I knew him, was a quiet,
inoffensive sort of creature, who has been drawing a regular salary from
the State for the last fifteen years and saving half of it. He has been
coming over to Europe now and then, and though he was a good, steady
chap enough, he liked his fling when he was over here, and between you
and me, he was the greatest crank I ever struck. I met him in London a
matter of three years ago, and he wanted to go to Paris. There were
two cars running at the regular time, meeting the boat at Dover. Do you
think he would have anything to do with them? Not he! He hired a special
train and went down like a prince."

"What did he do that for?" the reporter asked.

"Why, because he was a crank, sir," Mr. Coulson answered confidentially.
"There was no other reason at all. Take this last voyage on the
Lusitania, now. He spoke to me the first day out because he couldn't
help it, but for pretty well the rest of the journey he either kept
down in his stateroom or, when he came up on deck, he avoided me and
everybody else. When he did talk, his talk was foolish. He was a good
chap at his work, I believe, but he was a crank. Seemed to me sometimes
as though that humdrum life of his had about turned his brain. The
last day out he was fidgeting all the time; kept looking at his watch,
studying the chart, and asking the sailors questions. Said he wanted to
get up in time to take a girl to lunch on Thursday. It was just for that
reason that he scuttled off the boat without a word to any of us, and
rushed up to London."

"But he had letters, Mr. Coulson," the reporter reminded him, "from
some one in Washington, to the captain of the steamer and to the
station-master of the London and North Western Railway. It seems rather
odd that he should have provided himself with these, doesn't it?"

"They were easy enough to get," Mr. Coulson answered. "He wasn't a
worrying sort of chap, Fynes wasn't. He did his work, year in and year
out, and asked no fav