“No,” he said, as though he were answering a sensible question, “that never happened to me.”
“Then,” I continued, “perhaps you have found a prince of the church, pale as alabaster, sitting in his red robe, who put together the indicatory evidence of the crime that baffled you with such uncanny acumen that you stood aghast at his perspicacity?”
“No,” he said; and then his face lighted. “But I'll tell you what I did find. I found a drunken hobo at Atlantic City who was the best detective I ever saw.”
I sat down and tapped the manuscript with my fingers.
“It's not here,” I said. “Why did you leave it out?”
He took a big gold watch out of his pocket and turned it about in his hand. The case was covered with an inscription.
“Well, Sir Henry,” he said, “the boys in the department think a good deal of me. I shouldn't like them to know how a dirty tramp faked me at Atlantic City. I don't mind telling you, but I couldn't print it in a memoir.”
He went directly ahead with the story and I was careful not to interrupt him:
“I was sitting in a rolling chair out there on the Boardwalk before the Traymore. I was nearly all in, and I had taken a run to Atlantic for a day or two of the sea air. The fact is the whole department was down and out. You may remember what we were up against; it finally got into the newspapers.
“The government plates of the Third Liberty Bond issue had disappeared. We knew how they had gotten out, and we thought we knew the man at the head of the thing. It was a Mulehaus job, as we figured it.