“Denny! If I hadn’t thought you were on duty at the engine house—!”
No reply came to him, however. He rounded the stairs’ head and then paused in amazement on the threshold of his shabby, comfortable living-room. Dennis Riordan, engine driver from the nearest fire house and his particular crony since they had landed from the Old Country, was totally oblivious to his presence. He sprawled in the low Morris chair with a book in his hands, and his long legs writhed while his lantern-jawed face was contorted in the agony of mental concentration.
“Denny! Snap out of it!” his unheeded host commanded. “What in the name of all that’s—!”
Denny “snapped.” He dropped the book and sat up with a jerk, his eyes blinking.
“So you’re back,” he remarked dazedly. “’Tis small wonder I’ve seen little of you these days since you’ve taken to literature! Newspapers have been your limit up till now but here I use the latchkey you gave me, thinking to get in out of the rain whilst I’m waiting for you, and I find these books. Man, they’re fair wonderful!—But what do they mean?”
“I don’t know yet and I misdoubt the guys who wrote them do!” McCarty’s tone was almost savage as he deposited his dripping hat tenderly on the corner of the mantel and peeled off the sodden topcoat. “Which one had you there?”
“‘The Diagnostics of Penology.’” Denny picked up the volume once more and read the title laboriously. “I thought a ‘diagnostic’ was an unbeliever and you’d taken to religion in your declining years, but ’tis all about the different kinds of criminals. I never knew there was but one—a crook!”
“No more did I.” McCarty lighted a cigar reflectively. “There must be something in it, though, for that’s the stuff the commissioner is going to get through the heads of the boys at headquarters in this new school of his.”
“Is it, now!” Dennis’ tone held a touch of awe. “Do you mean that all they’ll have to do when a crime’s committed will be to sit down and figure out whether the lad who pulled it off was a lunatic, maybe, or ’twas born in him, or a matter of habit or the only time he’d try it, or else that he’d been brought up to it? And what would the crook be doing meanwhile? He’d still have to be caught.”
“It would all help, even though we don’t get the hang of it, or the commissioner would not be trying it on the boys,” declared McCarty loyally. “Some of them that have not yet been promoted to headquarters would not be hurt by anything that would teach them to use their heads now and then, I’m thinking!”