f tradition, Ginsburg--as a successful detective--should
have been either an Irishman or of Irish descent. But in the second
biggest police force in the world, wherein twenty per cent of the
personnel wear names that betoken Jewish, Slavic or Latin forebears,
tradition these times suffers many a body wallop.

On a night in early April, Ginsburg, coming across from New Jersey,
landed off a ferryboat at Christopher Street. He had gone across the
river to gather up a loose end of the evidence accumulating against
Chappy Morgan, king of the wireless wire-tappers. It was nearly midnight
when he emerged from the ferryhouse. In sight was no surface car; so he
set out afoot to walk across town to where he lived on the East Side.

Going through a side street in a district which mainly is given over to
the establishments of textile jobbers, he observed, half a block away, a
fire escape that bore strange fruit. The front line of a stretch of
tallish buildings stood out in relief against the background of a wet
moon and showed him, high up on the iron ladder which flighted down the
face of one house of the row, two dark clumps, one placed just above the
other.

Ginsburg slipped into a protecting ledge of shadow close up against the
buildings and edged along nearer. The clumps resolved into the figures
of men. One--the uppermost shape of a man--was receiving from some
unseen sources flat burdens that came down over the roof coping and
passing them along to the accomplice below. The latter in turn stacked
them upon the grilled floor of the fire balcony that projected out into
space at the level of the fourth floor, the building being five floors
in height. By chance Ginsburg had happened upon a loft-robbing
enterprise.

He shifted his revolver from his hip pocket to the side pocket of his
overcoat and crept closer, planning for the pair so intently engaged
overhead a surprise when they should descend with their loot. There was
no time now to seek out the patrolman on the post; the job must be all
his.

Two doors from the building that had been entered he crept noiselessly
down into a basement and squatted behind an ash barrel. It was inky
black in there; so inkily black he never suspected that the recess held
another tenant. Your well-organised loft-robbing mob carries along a
lookout who in case of discovery gives warning; in case of attack,
repels the attack, and in case of pursuit acts as rear guard. In
Stretchy Gorman's ope