stance, for the word had filtered down from on high,
where the seats of the mighty are, that those mysterious forces aloft
would look complacently upon the eternal undoing of the Stretchy Gormans
and their titular leader, no matter how accomplished.

But this notion did not match in with the colour of Ginsburg's desires.
Single-handed, he meant to do the trick. Most probably then the credit
would be all his; assuredly the satisfaction would. When he considered
this prospect his mind ran back along old grooves to the humiliating
beating he had suffered in front of the Henry Street school so long
before and of a most painful strapping that followed; these being
coupled always with a later memory scar of a grievous insult endured in
the line of duty and all the more hateful because it had been endured.

Once Ginsburg had read a book out of a public library--a book which
mentally he called Less Miserables. Through the pages of that book there
had walked a detective whom Ginsburg in his mind knew by the name of
Jawbert. Now he recalled how this Jawbert spent his life tracking down
an offender who was the main hero of the book. He told himself that in
the matter of Stretchy Gorman he would be as another Jawbert.

By way of a beginning he took advantage of leisure hours to trace out
the criminal history of his destined victim. In the gallery he found
numbered and classified photographs; in the Bertillon bureau, finger
prints; and in the records, what else he lacked of information--as an
urchin, so many years spent in the protectory; as a youth, so many years
in the reformatory; as a man, a year on Blackwell's Island for a
misdemeanour and a three-year term at Sing Sing for a felony; also he
dug up the entry of an indictment yet standing on which trial had never
been held for lack of proof to convict; finally a long list of arrests
for this and that and the other thing, unproved. From under a succession
of aliases he uncovered Gorman's real name.

But a sequence of events delayed his fuller assumption of the role of
Jawbert. He was sent to Rio de Janeiro to bring back an absconder of
note. Six months he worked on the famous Gonzales child-stealing
mystery. He made two trips out to the Pacific Coast in connection with
the Chappy Morgan wire-tapping cases. Few of the routine jobs about the
detective bureau fell to him. He was too good for routine and his
superiors recognised the fact and were governed thereby.

By the rules o