room near a window, through whose small, square
panes I caught a glimpse of the coloured lights of a couple of
ferryboats, passing each other in midstream.

At a table near me sat two men, grumbling at each other over a game of
cards. They were large and powerful figures in the contracted space of
this long and narrow room, and my heart gave a bound of joy as I
recognised on them certain marks by which I was to know friend from foe
in this possible den of thieves and murderers.

Two sailors at the bar were bona fide habitues of the place and so were
the two other waterside characters I could faintly discern in one of the
dim corners. Meantime a man was approaching me.

Let me see if I can describe him. He was about thirty, and had the
complexion and figure of a consumptive, but his eye shone with the
yellow glare of a beast of prey, and in the cadaverous hollows of his
ashen cheeks and amid the lines about his thin drawn lips there lay, for
all his conciliatory smile, an expression so cold and yet so ferocious
that I spotted him at once as the man to whose genius we were indebted
for the new scheme of murder which I was jeopardising my life to
understand. But I allowed none of the repugnance with which he inspired
me to appear in my manner, and, greeting him with half a nod, waited for
him to speak. His voice had that smooth quality which betrays the
hypocrite.

"Has the gentleman any appointment here?" he asked, letting his glance
fall for the merest instant on the lapel of my coat.

I returned a decided affirmative. "Or rather," I went on, with a meaning
look he evidently comprehended, "my son has, and I have made up my mind
to know just what deviltry he is up to these days. I can make it worth
your while to give me the opportunity."

"Oh, I see," he assented with a glance at the pocketbook I had just
drawn out. "You want a private room from which you can watch the young
scapegrace. I understand, I understand. But the private rooms are above.
Gentlemen are not comfortable here."

"I should say not," I murmured, and drew from the pocketbook a bill
which I slid quietly into his hand. "Now take me where I shall be safe,"
I suggested, "and yet in full sight of the room where the young
gentlemen play. I wish to catch him at his tricks. Afterwards----"

"All will be well," he finished smoothly, with another glance at my blue
ribbon. "You see I do not ask you the young gentleman's name. I take
your money and leave