itions were strong, and if he disliked a captive,
that captive was in some way guilty--and he saw to it that his man did
not escape. He was relentless, once his professional pride was
involved. Being without imagination, he was without pity. It was, at
best, a case of dog eat dog, and the Law, the Law for which he had such
reverence, happened to keep him the upper dog.

Yet he was a comparatively stupid man, an amazingly self-satisfied
toiler who had chanced to specialize on crime. And even as he became
more and more assured of his personal ability, more and more entrenched
in his tradition of greatness, he was becoming less and less elastic,
less receptive, less adaptive. Much as he tried to blink the fact, he
was compelled to depend more and more on the office behind him. His
personal gallery, the gallery under his hat, showed a tendency to
become both obsolete and inadequate. That endless catacomb of lost
souls grew too intricate for one human mind to compass. New faces, new
names, new tricks tended to bewilder him. He had to depend more and
more on the clerical staff and the finger-print bureau records. His
position became that of a villager with a department store on his
hands, of a country shopkeeper trying to operate an urban emporium. He
was averse to deputizing his official labors. He was ignorant of
system and science. He took on the pathos of a man who is out of his
time, touched with the added poignancy of a passionate incredulity as
to his predicament. He felt, at times, that there was something wrong,
that the rest of the Department did not look on life and work as he
did. But he could not decide just where the trouble lay. And in his
uncertainty he made it a point to entrench himself by means of
"politics." It became an open secret that he had a pull, that his
position was impregnable. This in turn tended to coarsen his methods.
It lifted him beyond the domain of competitive effort. It touched his
carelessness with arrogance. It also tinged his arrogance with
occasional cruelty.

He redoubled his efforts to sustain the myth which had grown up about
him, the myth of his vast cleverness and personal courage. He showed a
tendency for the more turbulent centers. He went among murderers
without a gun. He dropped into dives, protected by nothing more than
the tradition of his office. He pushed his way in through thugs,
picked out his man, and told him to come to Headquarters in an hour'