"The Sultan of Loot!"
"Why try to keep anything from you?"
"You forget, I too had a premonition concerning that creature. Who is he?"
"I can more easily tell you what he is. He styles himself Morphew and the Tenderloin calls him King of the Bootleggers—justly, one is told. In addition, he nurses a penchant for having a finger in every lawless pie. To discipline me, that night, he caused the loot of a burglary to be hidden in my pockets while I lay in a stupor, drugged by his direction, then saw to it that I was suspected of having committed the theft."
"Oh, no!" the woman interrupted involuntarily, revolted by the bare suggestion of such enormity.
"Or else—I must believe I stole the jewels myself, in instinctive reversion to old ways, drink having abolished the inhibitions of the new."
"Never!"
"I do not know," Lanyard confessed with a wry face. "There are circumstances which make me uneasy . . . I do not know!"
"How can you even suggest such a thing?"
"Let me tell you . . . Last night I visited—or revisited!—the house from which the jewels had been stolen, meaning secretly to restore them. This I managed. I was even more fortunate in being able to bring about the arrest of one of Morphew's lot as the burglar of fact—which the fellow may well have been. Finally, to confuse pursuit, I quitted the house by the way the burglar had taken the night before—let myself out of a window to the roof of an extension, dropped down to a backyard, scaled a board fence, and stole through an excavation for a new building to the street beyond. Eve . . ."