mission. Her former prejudice began to revive within her, his kindness
notwithstanding.

"I don't like the thought of it myself," she told him abruptly. "But, of
course, I'm only a 'new chum.'"

"What?" he said, pausing in the act of pouring himself out a drink. "That
sounds as if you want that scoundrel Bill to get away."

She coloured in some confusion under his look. How could she expect to
make a policeman understand? "No--no!" she said, with vehemence. "I'm not
quite so soft as that. I'd shoot him myself if he came my way. But I hate
to think of a dozen men all on the track of one. It really isn't fair."

He laughed, but without superiority. "And yet you'd swell the odds? Do
you call that fair?"

Dot paused to collect her arguments. It seemed that possibly even this
machine of justice carried a small fragment of sympathy in his soul.
Certainly he was not the judicial automaton she had expected him to be.

"It's like this," she said. "I'd shoot him if he came my way because
he has done us a lot of mischief, and I want to stop it. But I'd
do it squarely. I wouldn't do it when he wasn't looking. And I
wouldn't--ever--make it my profession to hunt down criminals and even
employ black men to help. I think that's hateful. I couldn't live that
way. I'd be above it."

"I see." He lifted his glass to her in a silent toast, and drank a deep
draught. "Then if you chanced to know where he was, I take it you'd just