urned away from the window
and stared at the assistant-manager. "What did you find?" he snapped.

"I found enough, Chief! Frick says that Morphy is the whole thing up
there. They call him the 'Assistant-Warden,' in jest. The Welfare
League won't have anything to do with him. They got him down for a
squealing 'rat.'"

"You can't fool the Gray Brotherhood," said Drew. "Their rooms are too
close together. What about this telephoning? Who was it to?"

"A telephone booth in the Subway Station at Times Square!"

"Good God!"

"Frick says it was! He tried to listen but Morphy came out and looked
around twice."

The detective rose from his chair and grasped Harrigan's narrow
shoulders with fingers of steel.

"Get out there!" he ordered through line-drawn lips. "Get out there and
phone from the soundproof booth. Ask my friend--the vice-president of
the telephone company--to find out for us whether Morphy or anybody
else in the prison telephoned at four minutes past twelve this morning.
Get that?"

"That was when Stockbridge was shot, wasn't it, Chief?"

"It was!" exclaimed Triggy Drew.

CHAPTER TEN

"A WOMAN CALLS"

The business of a modern detective agency is managed in much the same
manner as a corporation or a large firm of corporation lawyers. Its
tentacles, or operatives, are spread over the globe. Its news and
assignments come in via wire. Its telephone and telegraph bills amount
to thousands of dollars every year. In no other way can satisfactory
results be secured.

Drew had started his agency on a shoestring and ran it into a
"tannery," in the parlance of the street. He had made many mistakes. He
had once, to his knowledge, sent the wrong man to prison. This mistake
had been so costly, he never spoke of it. It was soon after the
conviction of the innocent man, that Drew gave up circumstantial
evidence and got down to hard work, wherein the evidence accumulated
was tempered with some degree of fact and common sense.

The first Stockbridge case had been in connection with an absconder.
This man, Drew brought back in person from Adelaide. The work so
pleased the millionaire that when Morphy broke under the financial
strain and robbed everybody, right and left, Drew was called in to
bring the promoter to the bar of justice. It was a long fight, fraught
with danger and disappointment. The courts dragged. War broke over the
civilized world. Morphy fought fiercely--like a cornered hyena. He was
sent