aching, baking middle of a sizzling New York's summer, there
befell New York's regular "crime wave." When the city is a brazen
skillet, whereon mankind, assailed by the sun from above and by the
stored-up heat from below, fries on both sides like an egg; when nerves
are worn to frazzle-ends; when men and women, suffocating by tedious
degrees in the packed and steaming tenements, lie there and curse the
day they were born--then comes the annual "crime wave," as the papers
love to name it. In truth the papers make it first and then they name
it. Misdeeds of great and small degree are ranged together and displayed
in parallel columns as common symptoms of a high tide of violence, a
perfect ground swell of lawlessness. To a city editor the scope of a
crime wave is as elastic a thing as a hot weather "story," when under
the heading of Heat Prostrations are listed all who fall in the streets,
stricken by whatsoever cause. This is done as a sop to local pride,
proving New York to be a deadlier spot in summer than Chicago or St.
Louis.

True enough, in such a season, people do have shorter tempers than at
other times; they come to blows on small provocation and come to words
on still less. So maybe there was a real "crime wave," making men
bloody-minded and homicidal. Be that as it may, the thing reached its
apogee in the murder of old Steinway, the so-called millionnaire miser
of Murray Hill, he being called a millionnaire because he had money, and
a miser because he saved it.

It was in mid-August that the aged Steinway was choked to death in his
rubbishy old house in East Thirty-ninth Street, where by the current
rumour of the neighbourhood, he kept large sums in cash. Suspicion fell
upon the recluse's nephew, one Maxwell, who vanished with the discovery
of the murder.

The police compiled and widely circulated a description of the suspect,
his looks, manners, habits and peculiarities; and certain distant
relatives and presumptive heirs of the dead man came forward promptly,
offering a lump sum in cash for his capture, living; but all this labour
was without reward. The fugitive went uncaptured, while the summer
dragged on to its end, burning up in the fiery furnace of its own heat.

For one dweller of the city--and he, I may tell you, is the central
figure in this story--it dragged on with particular slowness. Judson
Green, the hero of our tale--if it has any hero--was a young man of some
wealth and more leisure. Also h