down toward the docks. The
thing was well devised and carried out well too; yet by morning the
detectives, already ranging and quartering the town as bird-dogs quarter
a brier-field, had caught up again and pieced together the broken ends
of the trail; and, thanks to them and the newspapers, a good many
thousand wide awake persons were on the lookout for a plump,
brown-skinned young woman with a cast in her right eye, wearing a boy's
disguise and accompanied by a slender little man carrying his head
slightly to one side, who when last seen wore smoked glasses and had his
face extensively bandaged, as though suffering from a toothache.

Then had followed days and nights of blind twisting and dodging and
hiding, with the hunt growing warmer behind them all the time. Through
this they were guided and at times aided by things printed in the very
papers that worked the hardest to run them down. Once they ventured as
far as the outer entrance of the great, new uptown terminal, and turned
away, too far gone and sick with fear to dare run the gauntlet of the
waiting room and the train-shed. Once--because they saw a made-up
Central Office man in every lounging long-shoreman, and were not so far
wrong either--they halted at the street end of one of the smaller piers
and from there watched a grimy little foreign boat that carried no
wireless masts and that might have taken them to any one of half a dozen
obscure banana ports of South America--watched her while she hiccoughed
out into midstream and straightened down the river for the open
bay--watched her out of sight and then fled again to their newest hiding
place in the lower East Side in a cold sweat, with the feeling that
every casual eye glance from every chance passer-by carried suspicion
and recognition in its flash, that every briskening footstep on the
pavement behind them meant pursuit.

Once in that tormented journey there was a sudden jingle of metal, like
rattling handcuffs, in the man's ear and a heavy hand fell detainingly
on his shoulder--and he squeaked like a caught shore-bird and shrunk
away from under the rough grips of a truckman who had yanked him clear
of a lurching truck horse tangled in its own traces. Then, finally, had
come a growing distrust for their latest landlord, a stolid Russian Jew
who read no papers and knew no English, and saw in his pale pair of
guests only an American lady and gentleman who kept much to their room
and paid well in advance f