ffian
brandishing a club which, when we came to examine it later, proved to
have been sawn from the top of an old-fashioned mahogany bedstead. It
was simply rounded at one end and square and heavy at the other, and it
would infallibly have done the business of any person with whose head
it had come in contact. I was encumbered with a heavy ulster which was
buttoned down almost to my feet and I should certainly have been too
late to prevent mischief, but just as the pursuer came within
striking distance an agile figure darted round the corner and the
murderous-minded drunkard dropped like an ox in the shambles at a single
blow. The newcomer was a plain-clothes policeman and he had used a pair
of handcuffs as a knuckle-duster and had taken the ruffian clean on the
point of the chin. I accompanied him and his captor to the Moor Street
police station and got a paragraph out of the incident before the paper
went to bed.

I saw no more of my plain-clothes man for a month or two and then an odd
circumstance threw us together again. My father, who was still carrying
on business in West Bromwich, was a letterpress printer only, but he
received an occasional order for copperplate and lithographic work which
he handed over either to a Mr Storey in Livery Street, or to the firm of
W. & B. Hunt in New Street. I had been over to call on him one evening
and he had asked me to attend to some slight commission with either
of these firms. I called first on the Livery Street man, whose
establishment was just outside Snow Hill station, and found him looking
at a queer copperplate impression which lay on the counter before him.

"There's something uncommonly queer about this," he said, "and I don't
know that I ought to go on with it; it strikes me very forcibly that an
attempt is being made to forge a Russian note and that this is a part of
the process." The lines on the paper made a sort of hieroglyphic puzzle
which it was quite impossible to decipher. I asked him what he intended
to do with it and he answered that he would fulfil his order and set
the police upon the track of the people who had given it. I went on to
Messrs Hunt's printing works in New Street and there I found one of the
partners poring over what at first sight looked like a replica of the
impression I had just seen. I said nothing about the matter and nothing
was said to me, but when I had transacted my business and had got out
into the street again the first man I enco