know."

"How do you know there is any?"

"Must be something peculiar about the book or Enderby wouldn't put
in four months of work on the chance of stealing it. And it must be
obscure, otherwise the auctioneer would have spotted it."

"Sound enough!" approved the other. "What could it be? Some interpolated
page?"

"Hardly. I've a treatise in my pocket on seventeenth century
book-making, which I'm going to study to-night. Be ready for an early
start to meet Bertram."

That languid and elegant gentleman arrived by the first morning train.
He protested mightily when he was led to the humble shoe-shop. He
protested more mightily when invited to don a leather apron and smudge
his face appropriately to his trade. His protests, waxing vehement and
eventually profane, as he barked his daintily-kept fingers, in rehearsal
for giving a correct representation of an honest artisan cobbling a
boot, died away when Average Jones explained to him that on pretense of
having found a rare book, he was to worm out of a cautious and probably
suspicious criminal the nature of some unique and hidden feature of the
volume.

"Trust me for diplomacy," said Bertram airily.

"I will because I've got to," retorted Average Jones. "Well, get to
work. To you the outer shop: to Warren and me this rear room. And,
remember, if you hear me whetting a knife, that means come at once."

Uncomfortably twisted into a supposedly professional posture, Bertram
wrought with hammer and last, while putting off, with lame, blind and
halting, excuses, such as came to call for their promised footgear. By
a triumph of tact he had just disposed of a rancid-tongued female
who demanded her husband's boots, a satisfactory explanation, or the
arbitrament of the lists, when the bell tinkled and the two watchers in
the back room heard a nervous, cultivated voice say:

"Is Mr. Fichtel here?"

"That's me," said Bertram, landing an agonizing blow on his thumb-nail.

"You advertised that you had found an old book."

"Yes, sir. Somebody left it in the post-office."

"Ah; that must have been when I went to mail some letters to New York,"
said the other glibly. "From the advertised description, the book is
without doubt mine. Now as to the reward--"

"Excuse me, but you wouldn't expect me to give it up without any
identification, sir?"

"Certainly not. It was the De Meritis Libror--"

"I can't read Latin, sir."

"But you could make that much out," said the visito