“I don’t know.” Drew’s tone betrayed no emotion. “But who could do less than try?”
“Who?” Johnny echoed.
At that moment the souls of Drew and Johnny were like those of David and Jonathan. They were as one.
“That man,” said Drew as he nodded at the slight form on the cot, “was one of New York’s finest. Many a member of the old Five Point Gang has felt a light touch on his arm, to turn and laugh up into those mild blue eyes. But they never laughed long. That touch became a chain of steel. The chain dragged them to a cell or to a grave.
“There are people still,” he rambled on, “who believe that a detective should be a man of muscle and brawn. In a fight, of course, it helps. But in these days when fighting is done, for the most part, with powder and steel, a slight man with brains gets the break. This Newton Mills surely did. For a long, long time he got all the breaks. But now look!”
“He told the judge he had been living on fifteen dollars a week, sent by his mother,” said Johnny. “What could have happened?”
“Many things perhaps. Herman McCarthey will know. I have heard him speak of Newton Mills. We will ask him, first thing to-morrow morning.”
And there, for a time, the matter rested.
That night as he went to work, walking by preference down the Avenue, then over the Drive that fronted the lake, as one will at times, Johnny received the impression that he was being watched, perhaps followed.
An uncomfortable feeling this, at any time. A late hour, a deserted street, do not lessen one’s mental disturbance.