ed old simp with a flute is on
the cross, he's sure to be the limit. The surprise kind of crook always
is."

He walked the floor for a few moments, then he shot the bolt on the door
and stretched himself across the low iron cot, with the light turned
off. Bat Scanlon's mind was not a particularly imaginative one; but at
the same time it possessed one of the attributes of the imaginative
type: and that was the mental antennae which felt things while they were
still in the distance. As he lay there upon the hard bed in the
closet-like room, he kept sensing something, but could get no clear idea
of its shape.

"That's where Kirk pins on the medal," spoke Bat. "These things never
come to him done up in fogs; they are always pretty clear pictures and
have a definite meaning."

However, vague as the premonition was, Bat was confident of one thing;
that was: whatever shape the thing took, it would have something to do
with the affair at Stanwick.

"Maybe I believe it because I've got a mind full of the Stanwick thing,"
Scanlon told himself; "a fellow does fool himself that way sometimes.
But this time ain't one of them. Before I get out of this phony hotel
I'm going to get another little jolt."

Another jolt! Bat whistled between his teeth in dismay. Were there not
jolts enough in the thing already? One by one, as he lay there, he
marshaled his impressions in his mind, in the order in which they had
occurred. When Nora first called him on the telephone there had
unquestionably been a note of fear in her voice. In her dread of the
police, as afterward shown, he fancied he recalled something more than
the shrinking of a sensitive nature. And her eagerness to know what was
going forward at Stanwick was--well, it was curious.

And to Stanwick he had gone. He saw the ugly evidence of a brutal crime;
he saw a sick girl, very much attached to her brother, who quivered with
dread at what had happened, and who, so he fancied, was even in a deeper
state of fear at what might yet come to pass. Also he had watched and
listened to a harassed young man who seemed to be groping his way amidst
the bitter resentments of years, the frightful actualities of the
moment, and a disconcerting sense of impending disaster.

"And that same young fellow's in bad," said the big man, to the darkness
of the little room. "The cops always make it tough for the man they pick
out to bear the weight of a crime. They try and twist everything to
point hi