nd put it in his pocket. "Inspector, can you lend me one of
your men for a couple of days?" he asked, as we were preparing to leave.
"I shall want to send him out of town to-night, and shall probably need
his services when he gets back."

"Very well. Riley will be just the fellow. We'll go back to
headquarters, and I'll put him under your orders."

It was not until late in the following day that I saw Kennedy again.
It had been a busy day at the Star. We had gone to work that morning
expecting to see the very financial heavens fall. But just about five
minutes to ten, before the Stock Exchange opened, the news came in
over the wire from our financial man on Broad Street: "'The System' has
forced James Bruce, partner of Kerr Parker, the dead banker; to sell
his railroad, steamship, and rubber holdings to it. On this condition it
promises unlimited support to the market."

"Forced!" muttered the managing editor, as he waited on the office phone
to get the composing-room, so as to hurry up the few lines in red ink on
the first page and beat our rivals on the streets with the first extras.
"Why, he's been working to bring that about for the past two weeks. What
that System doesn't control isn't worth having--it edits the news before
our men get it, and as for grist for the divorce courts, and tragedies,
well--Hello, Jenkins, yes, a special extra. Change the big heads--copy
is on the way up--rush it."

"So you think this Parker case is a mess?" I asked.

"I know it. That's a pretty swift bunch of females that have
been speculating at Kerr Parker & Co.'s. I understand there's one
Titian-haired young lady--who, by the way, has at least one husband who
hasn't yet been divorced--who is a sort of ringleader, though she rarely
goes personally to her brokers' offices. She's one of those uptown
plungers, and the story is that she has a whole string of scalps of
alleged Sunday-school superintendents at her belt. She can make Bruce
do pretty nearly anything, they say. He's the latest conquest. I got the
story on pretty good authority, but until I verified the names, dates,
and places, of course I wouldn't dare print a line of it. The story
goes that her husband is a hanger-on of the System, and that she's been
working in their interest, too. That was why he was so complacent over
the whole affair. They put her up to capturing Bruce, and after she had
acquired an influence over him they worked it so that she made him make
love to