IGNATION

ILLUSTRATIONS

Anderson Crow (Frontispiece)

"'Safe for a minute or two at least,' he whispered"

"A baby, alive and warm, lay packed in the blankets"

"September brought Elsie Banks"

"The teacher was amazingly pretty on this eventful night"

"'What is the meaning of all this?'"

The haunted house

Wicker Bonner

"Rosalie was no match for the huge woman"

"She shrank back from another blow which seemed impending"

"Left the young man to the care of an excellent nurse"

"'I think I understand, Rosalie'"

"'I beg your pardon,' he said humbly'"

"It was a wise, discreet old oak"

"The huge automobile had struck the washout"

CHAPTER I

Anderson Crow, Detective

He was imposing, even in his pensiveness. There was no denying the fact
that he was an important personage in Tinkletown, and to the residents
of Tinkletown that meant a great deal, for was not their village a
perpetual monument to the American Revolution? Even the most
generalising of historians were compelled to devote at least a paragraph
to the battle of Tinkletown, while some of the more enlightened gave a
whole page and a picture of the conflict that brought glory to the
sleepy inhabitants whose ancestors were enterprising enough to
annihilate a whole company of British redcoats, once on a time.

Notwithstanding all this, a particularly disagreeable visitor from the
city once remarked, in the presence of half a dozen descendants (after
waiting twenty minutes at the post-office for a dime's worth of stamps),
that Tinkletown was indeed a monument, but he could not understand why
the dead had been left unburied. There was excellent cause for
resentment, but the young man and his stamps were far away before the
full force of the slander penetrated the brains of the listeners.

Anderson Crow was as imposing and as rugged as the tallest shaft of
marble in the little cemetery on the edge of the town. No one questioned
his power and authority, no one misjudged his altitude, and no one
overlooked his dignity. For twenty-eight years he had served Tinkletown
and himself in the triple capacity of town marshal, fire chief and
street commissioner. He had a system of government peculiarly his own;
and no one possessed the heart or temerity to upset it, no matter what
may have been the political inducements. It would have been like trying
to improve the laws of nature to put a n