r on the part of some unknown person.

"I was a young man in those days, and full of ambition. So, though I
said nothing, I did not let this matter drop when the others did, but
kept my mind persistently upon it and waited, with odd results as you
will hear, for another victim to be reported at police headquarters.

"Meantime I sought to discover some bond or connection between the
several men who had been found drowned, which would serve to explain
their similar fate. But all my efforts in this direction were fruitless.
There was no bond between them, and the matter remained for a while an
unsolved mystery.

"Suddenly one morning a clew was placed, not in my hands, but in those
of a superior official who at that time exerted a great influence over
the whole force. He was sitting in his private room, when there
was ushered into his presence a young man of a dissipated but not
unprepossessing appearance, who, after a pause of marked embarrassment,
entered upon the following story:

"I don't know whether or no, I should offer an excuse for the
communication I am about to make; but the matter I have to relate is
simply this: Being hard up last night (for though a rich man's son I
often lack money), I went to a certain pawn-shop in the Bowery where I
had been told I could raise money on my prospects. This place--you
may see it sometime, so I will not enlarge upon it--did not strike me
favorably; but, being very anxious for a certain definite sum of money,
I wrote my name in a book which was brought to me from some unknown
quarter, and proceeded to follow the young woman who attended me into
what she was pleased to call her good master's private office. He may
have been a good master, but he was anything but a good man, In short,
sir, when he found out who I was, and how much I needed money, he
suggested that I should make an appointment with my father at a place he
called Judah's in Grand Street, where, said he, 'your little affair will
be arranged, and you made a rich man within thirty days. That is,' he
slyly added, 'unless your father has already made a will, disinheriting
you.'

"I was shocked, sir, shocked beyond all my powers of concealment, not so
much at his words, which I hardly understood, as at his looks, which had
a world of evil suggestion in them; so I raised my fist and would have
knocked him down, only that I found two young fellows at my elbows, who
held me quiet for five minutes, while the old fellow