a West Side
faro-room and casually interviewing the "stools" of Custom House Place
and South dark Street, and then dropping in at the Cafe Acropolis, in
Halsted Street, and lodging houses in even less savory quarters. He
duly canvassed every likely dive, every "melina," every gambling house
and yegg hang out. He engaged in leisurely games of pool with
stone-getters and gopher men. He visited bucket-shops and barrooms,
and dingy little Ghetto cafes. He "buzzed" tipsters and floaters and
mouthpieces. He fraternized with till tappers and single-drillers. He
always made his inquiries after Binhart seem accidental, a case
apparently subsidiary to two or three others which he kept always to
the foreground.

He did not despair over the discovery that no one seemed to know of
Binhart or his movements. He merely waited his time, and extended new
ramifications into newer territory. His word still carried its weight
of official authority. There was still an army of obsequious
underlings compelled to respect his wishes. It was merely a matter of
time and mathematics. Then the law of averages would ordain its end;
the needed card would ultimately be turned up, the right dial-twist
would at last complete the right combination.

The first faint glimmer of life, in all those seemingly dead wires,
came from a gambler named Mattie Sherwin, who reported that he had met
Binhart, two weeks before, in the cafe of the Brown Palace in Denver.
He was traveling under the name of Bannerman, wore his hair in a
pomadour, and had grown a beard.

Blake took the first train out of Chicago for Denver. In this latter
city an Elks' Convention was supplying blue-bird weather for
underground "haymakers," busy with bunco-steering, "rushing"
street-cars and "lifting leathers." Before the stampede at the news of
his approach, he picked up Biff Edwards and Lefty Stivers, put on the
screws, and learned nothing. He went next to Glory McShane, a Market
Street acquaintance indebted for certain old favors, and from her, too,
learned nothing of moment. He continued the quest in other quarters,
and the results were equally discouraging.

Then began the real detective work about which, Blake knew, newspaper
stories were seldom written. This work involved a laborious and
monotonous examination of hotel registers, a canvassing of ticket
agencies and cab stands and transfer companies. It was anything but
story-book sleuthing. It was a dispiriting t