scrap of paper.

Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still assailed by the vaguely
disturbing perfumes which she had left behind her, pondered her reasons
for taking back Binhart's scrap of paper. He wondered if she had at
any time actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if she was capable of
caring for anybody. And this problem took his thoughts back to the
time when so much might have depended on its answer.

The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass in its drawer and slammed
it shut. It made no difference, he assured himself, one way or the
other. And in the consolatory moments of a sudden new triumph
Never-Fail Blake let his thoughts wander pleasantly back over that long
life which (and of this he was now comfortably conscious) his next
official move was about to redeem.




II

It was as a Milwaukee newsboy, at the age of twelve, that "Jimmie"
Blake first found himself in any way associated with that arm of
constituted authority known as the police force. A plain-clothes man,
on that occasion, had given him a two-dollar bill to carry about an
armful of evening papers and at the same time "tail" an itinerant
pickpocket. The fortifying knowledge, two years later, that the Law
was behind him when he was pushed happy and tingling through a transom
to release the door-lock for a house-detective, was perhaps a
foreshadowing of that pride which later welled up in his bosom at the