laconically.

We had reached the university, which was only a few blocks away, and
Craig dashed into his laboratory while I settled with the driver. He
reappeared almost instantly with some bulky apparatus under his arm,
and we more than ran from the building to the near-by subway station.
Fortunately there was an express just pulling in, as we tumbled down the
steps.

To one who knows South Street as merely a river-front street whose glory
of other days has long since departed, where an antiquated horsecar
now ambles slowly uptown, and trucks and carts all day long are in a
perpetual jam, it is peculiarly uninteresting by day, and peculiarly
deserted and vicious by night. But there is another fascination about
South Street. Perhaps there has never been a revolution in Latin America
which has not in some way or other been connected with this street,
whence hundreds of filibustering expeditions have started. Whenever a
dictator is to be overthrown, or half a dozen chocolate-skinned generals
in the Caribbean become dissatisfied with their portions of gold lace,
the arms- and ammunition-dealers of South Street can give, if they
choose, an advance scenario of the whole tragedy or comic opera, as the
case may be. Real war or opera-bouffe, it is all grist for the mills of
these close-mouthed individuals.

Our quest took us to a ramshackle building reminiscent of the days when
the street bristled with bowsprits of ships from all over the world, an
age when the American merchantman flew our flag on the uttermost of the
seven-seas. On the ground floor was an apparently innocent junk dealer's
shop, in reality the meeting-place of the junta. By an outside stairway
the lofts above were reached, hiding their secrets behind windows opaque
with decades of dust.

At the door we were met by Torreon and the policeman. Both appeared to
be shocked beyond measure. Torreon was profuse in explanations which
did not explain. Out of the tangled mass of verbiage I did manage to
extract, however, the impression that, come what might to the other
members of the junta, Torreon was determined to clear his own name at
any cost. He and the policeman had discovered Senor Guerrero only a
short time before, up-stairs. For all he knew, Guerrero had been there
some time, perhaps all day, while the others were meeting down-stairs.
Except for the light he might have been there undiscovered still.
Torreon swore he had heard Guerrero fall; the policeman w