man they had to unravel the most intricate case that murder or forgery,
coining or fraud of any sort, could tangle into mysterious knots.
Coryndon had intuition and patience, and once he undertook a case he
followed it through to the ultimate conclusion; and so it was that
Coryndon stood alone, a department in himself, possibly aided by the
police and the shadower, but capable of discovering anything, once he
bent his mind to the business of elucidation.

Beyond the fact that he had been born somewhere in a jungle clearing in
Upper Burma, and that at ten years old he had gone to India to a school
in the Hills, then had vanished for years to reappear in the service of
the Government, his story was not known to anyone except himself. No one
doubted that he had "a touch of the country" in his blood. It displayed
itself in unmistakable physical traits, and his knowledge of its many
tongues and languages was the knowledge that first made him realize
that his future career lay in India.

Colonel Coryndon, his father, died just as the boy was leaving school,
and left him a little money; just enough to keep him from the iron yoke
of clerkship, and to allow of his waiting for what he wanted. Behind his
dark eyes lived a brain that could concentrate with the grip of a vise
upon any subject that interested him, and he puzzled his masters at his
school. Coryndon was a curious mixture of imagination and strong common
sense; few realize that it is only the imaginative mind that can see
behind the curtain that divides life from life, and discern motives.

He saw everything with an almost terrible clearness. Every detail of a
room, every line in a face, every shop in a street he walked through,
every man he spoke with, was registered in his indelible book of facts.
This, in itself, is not much. Men can learn the habit of observation as