“Come. Let’s be moving. We will find Greasy Thumb in the city.”
“I wonder if we will,” Johnny murmured to himself, as he began a hasty pack-up of his personal effects preparatory to leaving his spindle wheel and many baskets of groceries to anyone who chose to take them over on the morrow.
“The city,” he murmured after a time, “the strangest, weirdest, most fascinating, most beautiful, most dangerous place man has ever known. In the jungle the tiger slinks away from man. There you may sleep in peace. On the polar waste the great white bear floats by on his palace of ice. He will not molest you. In the Rockies where the grizzly roams and the mountain lion inhabits the treetops you are safe. But the city? Oh, well, perhaps you are safe enough there. Who knows?
“Good-bye,” he whispered back as he left his booth, “good-bye, old carnival. Good-bye, big-noise-about-nothing. Good-bye, screaming women. Good-bye, laughing children. We’re here to-day and away to-morrow.” He choked a little over these last words. This strange life, the carnival spirit, had got under his skin. Gladly he would have remained. But duty called. “Good-bye, good-bye. We’re here to-day and away to-morrow. The city beckons. We must go.”
Settled on the cushions on the back seat of a high-powered police car driven by Drew Lane, Johnny Thompson had time for a few sober reflections.
As you know from reading The Arrow of Fire, Johnny’s latest venture was in the field of police detection. Many tales Johnny had read of shrewd private detectives who outwitted clever criminals and showed up the stupidity of the police. Johnny had found it difficult to believe that all police detectives were stupid. By contact with four men, Herman McCarthey, Newton Mills, Drew Lane and Tom Howe, he had come to know that men with keen minds and sturdy bodies were more and more offering their services to the police departments of their cities.
“No better detective ever lived than Drew Lane,” a reporter had once said to Johnny. And Johnny had found this to be true. He gave himself over with genuine abandon to the business of being Drew Lane’s understudy.
Yet, at this moment he found himself missing certain friends who had added joy and inspiration to his life. In a great city friends come and go quickly. Herman McCarthey had retired from active service.
“And Newton Mills,” he grumbled to himself. “Where is he?”
Where indeed? Johnny had once lifted this shadow of a great detective out from a living hell of remorse and drink and had set him doing marvelous things for the law again.