use. Pardon my mentioning it. If I hadn't been there, you'd
be carrying eight inches of cold steel, between your shoulders.
And--pardon me, again--if you'd had the sense to stay out of
the squabble a second or so longer, the man who tackled you
would be either in jail or in the morgue, by this time. I'm
not oversized. But neither is a stick of dynamite. An
automatic pistol isn't anywhere as big as an old-fashioned
blunderbuss. But it can outshoot and outkill the blunderbuss,
with very little bother. Think it over. And, while you're
thinking, stop to think, also, that a 'panhandler' doesn't do
his work with a knife. He doesn't try to stab a man to death,
for the sake of the few dollars the victim may happen to have
in his pockets. That sort of thing calls for pluck and iron
nerves and physical strength. If a panhandler had those, he
wouldn't be a panhandler. Any more than that chap, to-night,
was a panhandler. My idea of acting as a bodyguard for you
isn't bad. Think it over. You seem to need one."

"Why do you say that?" demanded Milo, in one of his recurrent
flashes of suspicion.

"Because," said Gavin, "we're living in the twentieth century
and in real life, not in the dark ages and in a dime novel.
Nowadays, a man doesn't risk capital punishment, lightly, for
the fun of springing on a total stranger, in the dark, with a
razor-edge knife. Mr. Standish, no man does a thing like that
to a stranger, or without some mighty motive. It is no
business of mine to ask that motive or to horn in on your
private affairs. And I don't care to. But, from your looks,
you're no fool. You know, as well as I do, that that was no