The other guard, Howard, scanned his companion's face with mock care.
"That ain't sayin' so much for him," he observed. But at once he began
to evince real interest. "I maintain you can't tell anything from their
faces," he answered seriously. "There's nothin' in it. The man's a
crook, isn't he? Wasn't he caught red-handed?"

"Let me tell you about it. I was interested in the case and found out
all I could concerning it. He apparently showed up in Seattle some time
during the summer of 1919, a crook of the crooks, as you say. No one
knows where he came from--and that's queer in itself. You know very well
that his face and form are going to be remembered and noticed, yet he
wasn't in any rogue's gallery, in any city. Desperate crook though he
was, no one had ever heard of him before he showed up in Seattle.

"The crooks down there called him 'Wild' Kinney, and were pretty well
scared of him. Swanson, one of the lieutenants of the Seattle force,
whom I know well as I know you, told me that he was a power, sort of a
king in the underworld from the very first, largely because he was
afraid of nothing, absolutely desperate, and willing to take any chance.
He wasn't a hop-head, yet they all looked at him as sort of queer;
though ready to follow him to the last ditch, yet some way they thought
him off his head. And Swanson believes that his career of crime started
_after_ he reached Seattle, not before--that he hadn't grown up to crime
like most of the men in his gang. He didn't know anything about the
'profession'--as far as skill went he was a rank amateur, but he made it
up with daring and cunning. Once or twice he got in a fight down there,
and they all agree he fought like a mad man, the most terrible fighter
in the whole district, and it took about a half dozen to stop him."