tation.
He spoke five languages fluently, and two more indifferently. Along the
banks of the thirty-five-mile stretch of river for which he was
responsible he had waged incessant warfare on thieves and receivers for
thirty years, till now practically all serious crime had disappeared.

He it was who, a dozen years before, had fought hand to hand with a
naked and greased river thief armed with a knife, in a swaying boat
under Blackfriars Bridge; he, too, solved the mystery of a man found
dead in the Thames who had been identified by a woman as her husband--a
dare-devil adventurer and unscrupulous blackmailer, who was declared by
a doctor and a coroner's jury to have been murdered. Step by step he had
traced it all out, from the moment when a seaman on a vessel moored at
one of the wharves had taken a fancy to bathe, and being unable to swim
had fastened a line round his waist and jumped overboard. He had
neglected to make the end on board properly fast and was swept away by
the current. The rope had twirled round him, and as the body swelled
became fixed. A blow on the head from the propeller of a tug completed a
maze of circumstantial evidence which might have served as an excuse to
most men for giving up the problem. Yet Wrington had solved it, and the
record, which had never seen the light of publicity, was hidden in the
archives of the service.

This was the man Foyle had now called in. He stood, with stooping
shoulders, nervously twisting his shabby hat, apparently ill at ease.
His nervousness dropped from him like a garment, however, when he
spoke. Foyle made clear to him the purport of the excursion they were to
embark on.

"Very good, sir," he said. "If you think the man you want is on the
river, we will find him. I guess, as you say, he's got a job as a
watchman. He's probably had to get somebody to buy a barge, for they
don't give these jobs without some kind of reference."

"A reference could easily have been forged. But that doesn't matter. How
soon can you get your men together?"

"An hour,--perhaps two. They're scattered all over the place. I sent out
to fetch 'em before I left Wapping."

"Three or four will be enough. With Green and yourself and myself we
should be able to tackle anything. Have a launch and a motor-boat at
Westminster Bridge Pier in a couple of hours' time. If you can borrow
them off some one, so that they don't look like police craft, so much
the better."

"I can do it, sir."