of brown cigarette papers and a scattering of books. He lifted a keen
dark face, lit up by singularly brilliant eyes.

"Hello, Pen," greeted he. "You've come just in time to smoke up some
of this Greek tobacco. Throw those books off that chair and make
yourself easy."

One by one Pendleton lifted the books and glanced at the titles.

"Your morning's reading, if this is such," commented he, "is
strikingly catholic. Plutarch, Snarleyow, the Opium Eater, Martin
Chuzzlewit." Then came a host of tattered pamphlets, bound in
shrieking paper covers, which the speaker handled gingerly. "'The
Crimes of Anton Probst,'" he continued to read, "'The Deeds of the
Harper Family,' 'The Murder of ----'" here he paused, tossed the
pamphlets aside with contempt, sat down and drew the tobacco jar
toward him.

"Some of the results of your forays into the basements of old
booksellers, I suppose," he added, rolling a cigarette with delicate
ease. "But what value you see in such things is beyond me."

Ashton-Kirk smiled good-humoredly. He took up some of the pamphlets
and fluttered their illy-printed pages.

"They are not beautiful," he admitted; "the paper could not be worse
and the wood cuts are horrors. But they are records of actual
things--striking things, as a matter of fact--for a murder which so
lifts itself above the thousands of homicides that are yearly
occurring, as to gain a place outside the court records and