s perhaps
thirty, or at most thirty-two or three. His beard was newly grown; it
was a young beard, through which his chin and chops still showed. He
smoked cigarettes constantly--the thumb and forefinger of his right hand
were stained almost black, and Miss Sadie, having the pride of her
craft, had several times tried unsuccessfully to bleach them of their
nicotine disfigurements.

He had a manner about him which the girl described as "kind of
suspicious and scary,"--by which Green took her to mean that he was shy
and perhaps furtive in his bearing. His teeth, his eyes, his expression,
his mode of dress--Mr. Green knew them all before Miss Sadie gave his
left hand a gentle pat as a sign that the job was concluded. He tipped
her generously and caught the next subway train going south.

V

Southbound subway trains run fast, especially when the rush of traffic
is northward. Within the hour Judson Green sat in the reading room of
his club, industriously turning the pages of the club's file of the
_World_ for the past month. Presently he found what he was seeking. He
read a while, and for a while then he took notes. Pocketing his notes,
he ate dinner alone and in due season thereafter he went home and to
bed. But before this, he sent off a night lettergram to the Byrnes
private detective agency down in Park Row. He wanted--so in effect the
message ran--the best man in the employ of that concern to call upon him
at his bachelor apartments in the Hotel Sedgwick, in the morning at ten
o'clock. The matter was urgent, important--and confidential.

If the man who knocked at Green's sitting-room door that next morning at
ten was not the best man of the Byrnes staff he looked the part. He was
square-jawed, with an appraising eye and a good pair of shoulders. He
had the right kind of a name for a detective, too. The name was
Cassidy--Michael J.

"Mr. Cassidy," said Judson Green, when the preliminaries of introduction
were over, "you remember, don't you, what the papers said at the time of
the Steinway murder about the suspect Maxwell, the old man's
nephew--the description they printed of him, and all?"

"I ought to," said Cassidy. "Our people had that case from the start--I
worked on it myself off and on, up until three days ago." From memory he
quoted: "Medium height, slender, dark-complected, smooth-faced and about
thirty-one years old; a good dresser and well educated; smokes
cigarettes constantly; has one upper front too