It was here, too, that his slyness, his natural circuitiveness,
operated to save him. When the inevitable protest came he was able to
prove that he had said nothing and had indignantly refused a
photograph. He completely cleared himself. But the hint of an
interesting personality had been betrayed to the public, the name of a
new sleuth had gone on record, and the infection of curiosity spread
like a mulberry rash from newspaper office to newspaper office. A
representative of the press, every now and then, would drop in on
Blake, or chance to occupy the same smoking compartment with him on a
run between Washington and New York, to ply his suavest and subtlest
arts for the extraction of some final fact with which to cap an
unfinished "story." Blake, in turn, became equally subtle and suave.
His lips were sealed, but even silence, he found, could be made
illuminative. Even reticence, on occasion, could be made to serve his
personal ends. He acquired the trick of surrendering data without any
shadow of actual statement.

These chickens, however, all came home to roost. Official recognition
was taken of Blake's tendencies, and he was assigned to those cases
where a "leak" would prove least embarrassing to the Department. He
saw this and resented it. But in the meantime he had been keeping his
eyes open and storing up in his cabinet of silence every unsavory rumor
and fact that might prove of use in the future. He found himself, in
due time, the master of an arsenal of political secrets. And when it
came to a display of power he could merit the attention if not the
respect of a startlingly wide circle of city officials. When a New
York municipal election brought a party turn over, he chose the moment
as the psychological one for a display of his power, cruising up and
down the coasts of officialdom with his grim facts in tow, for all the