Honesty with myself soon told me that it wasn’t alone professional duty that was whirling me toward Portland.
But what of Pawlinson? It must be big game, or he wouldn’t be connected with it, let alone personally engaged in sleuth work.
Then, again, how was I going to figure with Pawlinson when he discovered that I, who now was engaged as his own hireling through Chief Garth, was the selfsame man who had just thwarted him by having him punched prettily over the side of a launch?
I was really not much to blame in this; for I had done the thing unwittingly enough; but such things aren’t easily brooked. In spite of myself, though, I couldn’t help chuckling at the memory of the incident.
I had never seen Pawlinson before; but I stood in as much awe as the rest of the cubs at his name; and it did me a bit of inward good to think of the merriment I could make in recounting the thing to them later.
I knew little of the history of the man; but the little I did know was out of the ordinary.
To begin with, nobody had ever heard that such a man existed until a short three years before; but then he had suddenly sprung into the most dazzling limelight.
At that time the entire country had been bewildered and infuriated by a succession of daring safe-crackings. To make it worse, these jobs were, in nearly every instance, characterized by what appeared to be the most useless bloodshed. The perpetrators had seemed to go out of their way to use pistol and dirk.
Watchmen were found viciously stabbed; clerks, working late, had been murdered; and all these crimes had been committed in small communities and upon small dealers.
From chagrin, the public had quickly turned to indignation and storm; for the detective force had proved themselves absolutely powerless and inefficient.