front seat across the narrow space, and even before he recognized that
large bulk, he had registered something rigid and tense in its muscles;
strained in its attitude. When he raised his eyes to the face he found
himself looking at the right cheek instead of the left, and it was
pervaded by a sickly green tint quite unlike Madame Delano's florid
color. She was listening to a man who sat just behind her on the long
seat that ran the length of the dummy. Although the day was clear, there
was still a sharp wind and no one else sat outside.

Ruyler knew the man by sight. Before the fire he had owned some of the
most disreputable houses in the district the car would pass on its way to
the terminus. The buildings were uninsured, and he had made his living
since as a detective. Even his political breed had gone out of power in
the new San Francisco, but he was well equipped for a certain type of
detective work. He had a remarkable memory for faces and could pierce any
disguise, he was as persistent as a ferret, and his knowledge of the
underworld of San Francisco was illimitable. But his chief assets were
that he looked so little like a detective, and that, so secretive were
his methods, his calling was practically unknown. He had set up a cheap
restaurant with a gambling room behind at which the police winked,
although pretending to raid him now and again. He was a large soft man
with pendulous cheeks streaked with red, a predatory nose, and a black
overhanging mustache. His name was 'Gene Bisbee, and there was a
tradition that in his younger days he had been handsome, and irresistible
to the women who had made his fortune.

Ruyler was absently wondering what his haughty mother-in-law could have
to say to such a man when to his amazement Bisbee planted his elbow in
the pillow of flesh just below Madame Delano's neck, and said easily: