d obtain never a glimpse of
the borrowed uniform of Officer 666.

"But I must warn the chap," he thought fiercely, "or there will be the
very deuce and all to pay."

Whitney slowed down, came to a full stop and was meditatively chewing
the head of his cane when an automobile halted at the curb. A head
thrust itself out of a window of the limousine and a musical voice
asked:

"Why, Mr. Barnes, what are you doing here?"

Whitney Barnes guiltily jumped and barely missed swallowing his cane.

Volplaning to earth, he looked for the source of this dismaying
interruption. He recognized with a start one of the past season's
debutantes whose mamma had spread a maze of traps and labyrinths for
him--Miss Sybil Hawker-Sponge of New York, Newport, Tuxedo and Lenox.

Before he could even stutter a reply a motor footman had leaped down
from the box and opened the door of the limousine. Miss Hawker-Sponge
fluttered out, contrived her most winning smile and repeated:

"Why, Mr. Barnes, what are you doing here?"

Her big doll eyes rolled a double circuit of coquetry and slanted off
with a suggestive glance at the massive doorway of the Hawker-Sponge
mansion, one of the most aristocratically mortgaged dwellings in
America.

"It is rather late for a call," she gushed suddenly, "but I know
mamma"----

"Impossible!" cried Barnes. "That is--I beg your pardon--I should be
charmed, but the fact is I was looking for a friend--I mean a
policeman. Er--you haven't seen a good looking policeman going by,
have you, Miss Sybil?"

All the coquetry in Miss Hawker-Sponge's eyes went into stony
eclipse.

"You are looking for a policeman friend, Mr. Barnes?" she said icily,
gathering up her skirts and beginning to back away. "I hope you find
him."

She gave him her back with the abruptness of a slap in the face.

In another moment he was again a lone wayfarer in the bleak night
wilderness of out-of-doors Fifth avenue.

Indubitably he had committed a hideous breach of good manners and
could never expect forgiveness from Miss Hawker-Sponge. She had really
invited him into her home and he had preferred to hunt for a
"policeman friend." Yet the tragedy of it was so grotesquely funny
that Whitney Barnes laughed, and in laughing dismissed Miss
Hawker-Sponge from his mind.

He must find Travers Gladwin, and off he went at another burst of
speed.

He covered about three blocks without pause.

A second and far more sensational interruption