m, a pathetic story appeared, telling of a once famous soldier of
fortune starving in a tenement on Rivington Street, a man who in his
day--so the papers said--had made rulers and unmade them, had helped to
alter the map of more than one continent. Green investigated personally.
The tale turned out to be nine-tenths reporter's imagination, and
one-tenth, a garrulous, unreliable old man.

In another paper was an advertisement richly laden with veiled pleadings
for immediate aid from a young woman who described herself as being in
great danger. He looked into this too, but stopped looking, when he ran
into an affable and accommodating press-agent. The imperilled young
lady was connected with the drama, it seemed, and she sought free
advertisement and was willing to go pretty far to get it.

Coming away from a roof garden show one steaming night, a
slinky-looking, slightly lame person asked Green for the time, and as
Green reached for his watch he endeavoured to pick Green's pocket. Being
thwarted in this, the slinky person made slowly off. A _Van Bibber_
would have hired vigilant aides to dog the footsteps of the disappointed
thief and by harrying him forth with threats from wherever he stopped,
would speedily have driven him desperate from lack of sleep and lack of
food. Green had read somewhere of this very thing having been done
successfully. He patterned after the plan. He trailed the gimpy one to
where he mainly abided and drove him out of one lunchroom, and
dispossessed him from one lodging house; and at that, giving his pursuer
malevolent looks, the "dip" went limping to the Grand Central and caught
the first train leaving for the West.

And then, at the fag end of the summer, when all his well-laid plans had
one by one gone agley, chance brought to Green an adventure--sheer
chance and a real adventure. The circumstance of a deranged automobile
was largely responsible--that and the added incident of a broken
shoe-string.

IV

It was in the first week in September and Judson Green, a tired, badly
sunburned young man, disappointed and fagged, looked forward ten days to
the expiration of the three months, when confessing himself beaten, and
what was worse, wrong, he must pay over one hundred dollars to the
jubilant Wainright. With him it wasn't the money--he had already spent
the amount of the wager several times over in the prosecution of his
vain campaigning after adventure--it was the upsetting of his pet
t