y in quest of secrets locked up in guilty
breasts, had a propensity to exercise his considerable gifts for the
detection of incriminating truth upon his own subordinates. That
peculiar instinct could hardly be called a weakness. It was natural. He
was a born detective. It had unconsciously governed his choice of a
career, and if it ever failed him in life it was perhaps in the one
exceptional circumstance of his marriage--which was also natural. It
fed, since it could not roam abroad, upon the human material which was
brought to it in its official seclusion. We can never cease to be
ourselves.

His elbow on the desk, his thin legs crossed, and nursing his cheek in
the palm of his meagre hand, the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the
Special Crimes branch was getting hold of the case with growing interest.
His Chief Inspector, if not an absolutely worthy foeman of his
penetration, was at any rate the most worthy of all within his reach. A
mistrust of established reputations was strictly in character with the
Assistant Commissioner's ability as detector. His memory evoked a
certain old fat and wealthy native chief in the distant colony whom it
was a tradition for the successive Colonial Governors to trust and make
much of as a firm friend and supporter of the order and legality
established by white men; whereas, when examined sceptically, he was
found out to be principally his own good friend, and nobody else's. Not
precisely a traitor, but still a man of many dangerous reservations in
his fidelity, caused by a due regard for his own advantage, comfort, and
safety. A fellow of some innocence in his naive duplicity, but none the
less dangerous. He took some finding out. He was physically a big man,
too, and (allowing for the difference of colour, of course) Chief
Inspector Heat's appearance recalled him to the memory of his superior.
It was not the eyes nor yet the lips exactly. It was bizarre. But does
not Alfred Wallace relate in his famous book on the Malay Archipelago
how, amongst the Aru Islanders, he discovered in an old and naked savage
with a sooty skin a peculiar resemblance to a dear friend at home?

For the first time since he took up his appointment the Assistant
Commissioner felt as if he were going to do some real work for his
salary. And that was a pleasurable sensation. "I'll turn him inside out
like an old glove," thought the Assistant Commissioner, with his eyes
resting pensively upon