He had stumbled against—the body of a man!
CHAPTER VI.
DOWN AND OUT.
Patsy Garvan, while Chick was engaged as described, was working out another string of the bow by which Nick Carter was hoping not only to save the Waldmere plate from the melting pot, but also to round up the crooks who had stolen it.
Patsy’s first move was to perfect a disguise that would have caused his own wife not only to turn him down, but even to have fired him out of the house, if he had dared venture into it.
No more tough and sinister-looking a chap ever stood in leather, than was Patsy Garvan when he appeared in a lower section of the Bowery about four o’clock that afternoon.
Patsy was not looking for Bug Bannon at that time. Though he knew the notorious young gangster by sight, and many of the haunts in which he might possibly be found, Patsy was bent upon working out a scheme of his own by which to accomplish his chief’s object.
The nature of it appeared soon after he entered an inferior saloon in one of the side streets, a haunt of the disreputable, and where he finally found the person he had been seeking.
This was an infamous character by the name of John Flynn, though he was much better known to his select circle of friends, and to the police, as Pilot Flynn. He had obtained this sobriquet from the fact that his chief vocation, if not his only one, was that of a steerer for stuss games and other gambling joints, or, in other words, a pilot for such strangers as could be artfully lured to their own undoing.
Patsy had had a case against this fellow a month before, one that would have sent him to Sing Sing. He had not pressed it, nor even arrested him, however, because of the fact that Flynn associated at times with two other crooks much wanted by Patsy and the police, and through whom he hoped to discover them.
It was about half past four when Patsy entered the saloon mentioned, and he discovered Flynn eating free lunch from a table in the rear of the long room. There were many others in the dive, and the entrance of Patsy was hardly noticed. He threaded his way through the smoke-filled place and brought up at Flynn’s elbow.