r "two years" at the end, may form a very
different opinion of it!

Tom Leslie, as has been remarked, did not seem to have any fears of such
a result as an arrest, to his proposed spy-movements; but it cannot be
concealed that for a moment Walter Harding, who had before thought that
he knew him well, looked at him out of the corners of his eyes, with
some impression that he must unwittingly have been keeping company with
a genteel house-breaker. At all events, Harding did not fall in with the
spy-proposition, so far as his own action was concerned, alleging that
there might be such a thing as a business man having other occupations
than traversing the city in disguise as a volunteer detective; and so
that project, if any there had really been in the mind of Leslie, was
abandoned.

A resort to the police remained; for neither of the friends, after what
they had seen and heard, could think of the whole affair being allowed
to go by default. Superintendent Kennedy must be visited, after all; and
though Harding's business for the next day would interfere, it was more
than half agreed upon before they separated, that they would call
together upon that official on the next day but one and lay the whole
matter before him.

The agreement, though only half made, was better kept than many that are
made more conclusively; for at eleven o'clock on the day named Leslie
made his appearance at the place of business of Harding, and dragged him
away from a series of mercantile calculations over the desk, in which he
had more than half forgotten the existence of his friend as well as the
whole adventure of the chase and the mystery. He came up to the work
pretty readily, however--the presence of the rattling, go-ahead Leslie
always having the effect of carrying him a little off his feet; and half
an hour afterwards the two friends had entered that melancholy-looking
five-story brick building on the corner of Broome and Elm, then and till
lately known as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police,--and were
being shown by a policeman in attendance, with the blue of his suit
undimmed by exposure to the weather and the brass of his buttons
radiantly untarnished, into the presence of John A. Kennedy,
Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police District and for the time
Provost Marshal of the City of New York. They entered from the hall of
the building by a side door to the left, in the rear of what had been
the centre of the house when occ