he practical nature of the man tempted me to extravagance.

"Well," I said, "for example, were you never kissed in a lonely street
by a mysterious woman and the flash of your dark lantern reveal a face
of startling beauty?"

"No," he said, as though he were answering a sensible question, "that
never happened to me."

"Then," I continued, "perhaps you have found a prince of the church,
pale as alabaster, sitting in his red robe, who put together the
indicatory evidence of the crime that baffled you with such uncanny
acumen that you stood aghast at his perspicacity?"

"No," he said; and then his face lighted. "But I'll tell you what I did
find. I found a drunken hobo at Atlantic City who was the best detective
I ever saw."

I sat down and tapped the manuscript with my fingers.

"It's not here," I said. "Why did you leave it out?"

He took a big gold watch out of his pocket and turned it about in his
hand. The case was covered with an inscription.

"Well, Sir Henry," he said, "the boys in the department think a good
deal of me. I shouldn't like them to know how a dirty tramp faked me at
Atlantic City. I don't mind telling you, but I couldn't print it in a
memoir."

He went directly ahead with the story and I was careful not to interrupt
him:

"I was sitting in a rolling chair out there on the Boardwalk before the
Traymore. I was nearly all in, and I had taken a run to Atlantic for a
day or two of the sea air. The fact is the whole department was down and
out. You may remember what we were up against; it finally got into the
newspapers.

"The government plates of the Third Liberty Bond issue had disappeared.
We knew how they had gotten out, and we thought we knew the man at the
head of the thing. It was a Mulehaus job, as we figured it.

"It was too big a thing for a little crook. With the government plates
they could print Liberty Bonds just as the Treasury would. And they
could sow the world with them."

He paused and moved his gold-rimmed spectacles a little closer in on his
nose.

"You see these war bonds are scattered all over the country. They are
held by everybody. It's not what it used to be, a banker's business that
we could round up. Nobody could round up the holders of these bonds.

"A big crook like Mulehaus could slip a hundred million of them into the
country and never raise a ripple."

He paused and drew his fingers across his bony protruding chin.

"I'll say this for Mulehaus: He's the