osley had been
leading a double life at such short range without my knowing it I must
be a chuckle-head. I knew Jim Hosley was honest; that easy as his
conscience was in trifling matters, he knew no guile. If a Mrs. Browning
had been living below us she was as much a stranger to him as her
relative's poetry--in fact it might have been hers for all Jim knew or
cared.

Smith answered a knock on the door and stepped into the hall for half a
minute.

"You don't begin to know this scoundrel," continued Mr. Tescheron,
eyeing me like a man with the facts. "Perhaps you will deny that this
fellow Hosley served two years in prison at Joliet, Illinois; that he
was indicted for forgery in Michigan and got into a mix-up in Arizona,
whence he skipped at the point of a pistol and made his way down into
Mexico. This fellow Hosley has passed under a dozen different names. He
is notorious in criminal annals. He is so clever that he can completely
fool you and deceive my daughter, who, I would have you understand, is
a smart woman--one not easily fooled. It is lucky I took this thing in
hand when I did, or, as you say, we would have all been shown up in the
papers."

Well, I let the old codger run along at this clip. It beat anything I
had ever heard, but it didn't disturb me, as I have stated, except to
create a pain that a good laugh would have cured. What could I say up
against a know-it-all combination? Hadn't the detectives been at work a
whole six hours? What kind of records did they keep in their office if
they couldn't bunch a choice bouquet of crime for a fellow willing to
pay for it? You can buy anything in New York. The detective bureau had
found good enough clues in Mr. Tescheron's desire for a discovery and in
his commercial rating which showed that he could pay top prices for the
disgrace of a would-be son-in-law in the estimation of his devoted
daughter. The detective bureaus, lawyers' offices and "society" papers
that deal in this blasting powder and take contracts to shatter good
names were common enough; everybody knew them. People like Tescheron,
though, only knew their names, not their reputations, and like many
honest folks went to one of these concerns because he had seen its name
frequently in print. Publicity draws trade sometimes without
reputation, especially first customers. Tescheron was a new hand at this
business of ruining character with the aid of a criminal detective
bureau and its lawyer allies and as