The moment Blake arrived in New Orleans he shut himself in a telephone
booth, called up six somewhat startled acquaintances, learned nothing
to his advantage, and went quickly but quietly to the St. Charles.
There he closeted himself with two dependable "elbows," started his
detectives on a round of the hotels, and himself repaired to the Levee
district, where he held off-handed and ponderously facetious
conversations with certain unsavory characters. Then came a visit to
certain equally unsavory wharf-rats and a call or two on South Rampart
Street. But still no inkling of Binhart or his intended movements came
to the detective's ears.

It was not until the next morning, as he stepped into Antoine's, on St.
Louis Street just off the Rue Royal, that anything of importance
occurred. The moment he entered that bare and cloistral restaurant
where Monsieur Jules could dish up such startling uncloistral dishes,
his eyes fell on Abe Sheiner, a drum snuffer with whom he had had
previous and somewhat painful encounters. Sheiner, it was plain to
see, was in clover, for he was breakfasting regally, on squares of
toast covered with shrimp and picked crab meat creamed, with a bisque
of cray-fish and _papa-bottes_ in ribbons of bacon, to say nothing of
fruit and _bruilleau_.

Blake insisted on joining his old friend Sheiner, much to the tatter's
secret discomfiture. It was obvious that the drum snuffer, having made
a recent haul, would be amenable to persuasion. And, like all yeggs,
he was an upholder of the "moccasin telegraph," a wanderer and a
carrier of stray tidings as to the movements of others along the
undergrooves of the world. So while Blake breakfasted on shrimp and
crab meat and French artichokes stuffed with caviar and anchovies, he
intimated to the uneasy-minded Sheiner certain knowledge as to a