, again, who insisted that far more crime slipped through
his well "oiled" hands than ever was held by them. These were the
people who sneered at his reputation for stern discipline, and
declared it to be a mere pose to cover his tracks, while he patiently
piled up a fortune through the shady channels of "graft." A small
minority admitted his ability, but averred that his patience erred on
the side of slackness, which was one of the causes that the flood of
prohibited liquor in the country showed no abatement.

Nevertheless, one and all admitted his patience, whether it was in
bungling, in harvesting his graft, or whether it was a form of
slackness. Nor could they help doing so, for patience, a wonderful
purposeful patience, was his greatest characteristic. Every other
feature of his personality was subservient to it, and so it was that
the most hardened criminals began at once a nervous scrutiny of their
tracks the moment the news reached them that the lean nose of Stanley
Fyles had caught their scent.

Those who knew Fyles best ignored the patience which caught the public
mind so readily. They saw something more beneath it, something much
more to their liking. His patience only masked a keen, swift-moving,
scheming brain, packed to the uttermost with a wonderful instinct for
detection. He worked on no rule-of-thumb method as so many of his
comrades did. He was the fortunate possessor of an imagination, and,
long since, he had learned its value in his crusade against crime.

But this man was by no means a mere detection machine. He was full of
ambition. Police work was merely serving its purpose in his scheme of
things. He saw advancement in it--advancement in the right direction.
In five years he had raised himself from the lowest rung of the police
ladder to a commissioned rank, and from this rank he knew he could
reach out in any of the directions in which he required to proceed.

There were several directions in which his ambitious eyes gazed. There
were politics, with their multifarious opportunities for fortune and
place. There was the land, crying aloud of the fortunes lying hidden
within its bosom. There was official service upon higher planes, from
which so many names were drawn to fill the roll of fame to be handed
down to an adoring posterity. He was not yet thirty years of age, and
he felt that any one of these things lay well within the focus his
present position presented.

But the time for his next