service job."

"Don't you worry," Hobson replied. "Jocelyn Thew could hold his own at
any court in Europe with any of you embassy swaggerers. There's
nothing known about his family, but they say that his father was an
English aristocrat, and he looks like it, too."

"It was you yourself who called him a criminal, the first time you
spoke of him," Crawshay reminded his companion.

"And a criminal he is at heart, without a doubt," the American
declared impressively.

"Has he ever been in prison?"

"He has had the luck of Old Harry," Hobson grumbled. "In New York they
all believed that it was he who shot Graves, the Pittsburg
millionaire. The Treasury Department will have it that he was the head
of that Fourteenth Street gang of coiners, and I've a pal down at
Baltimore who is ready to take his oath that he planned the theft of
the Vanderloon jewels--and brought it off, too! But I tell you this,
sir. When the trouble comes, whoever gets nabbed it's never Jocelyn
Thew. He's the slickest thing that ever came down the pike."

"He is well off, then?"

"They say that he brought half a million from Mexico," Hobson
declared. "How he brought money out of that country, neither I nor
anybody else on the Force can imagine. But he did it. I know the
stockbroker down-town who handles his investments.--Here's our man