n hanging around here, that's all I know. I kept at
him." He made a little dab of his woodpecker beak. "But I couldn't find
out anything from him."

"Well find out from somebody else, then. And get judge Warren on the
'phone for me."

When the bell rang and the colonel heard the voice of the Consolidated's
corporation counsel greeting him on the wire he ordered the judge to
come over at once.

"Hell has just burned through here in three small patches," stated
the colonel, grimly. "The sooner we turn on the Consolidated hose, the
better."

In the early dusk of a summer evening Mr. Peter Briggs stood at the edge
of the sidewalk of one of the squalid avenues of the district of the
tenement-houses of Marion. His hands were behind him, propping out his
coat-tails. He kept peering at the gloomy stairway of a house near at
hand. Take the gloom, his attitude, and his sooty garb, and he gave a
very picturesque impression of a raven doing sentinel duty.

At last a tall young man came down the stairs which Mr. Briggs was
watching and strolled off leisurely up the avenue, stopping here and
there to chat, nodding to this man, flourishing a hand salute to that
man. The young man apparently had nothing whatever on his mind except to
enjoy a stroll in the summer evening.

Mr. Briggs watched him out of sight without moving from his tracks.
Then he withdrew both hands from under his coat-tails. In one hand was
a note-book, in the other hand was a pencil. Mr. Briggs made an entry,
closed the book with decision, and snapped an elastic band around the
covers. Then he made off toward his home. He lived up-town in a section
where there were fewer smells and better scenery. He determined that
this should be his last tour of surveillance. He had found his trips
into the nooks and crannies of the Eleventh Ward to be very distasteful
employment for a man who had served Colonel Dodd for so many years in
the sumptuous surroundings of that office in the First National block.

He asked himself what would be the use of hunting for any more
information regarding such an inconsequential individual as one Walker
Farr? He wondered why this crank had impressed Colonel Symonds Dodd
sufficiently to stir up all this trouble for himself, Peter Briggs. The
fellow had come from somewhere--nobody in Marion seemed to know. He
had been discharged from the employment of the Consolidated. Now he was
going about, warning all the people to boil the city water