ng at the station in San Francisco, and private
conversation on the crowded train had been impossible. When they had
walked a few yards along the wide avenue, as brilliant as day with its
thousands of colored lights concealed in the astonished pines, Ruyler sat
deliberately down upon a bench and motioned the detective to take the
seat beside him.

"It is time you gave me some sort of a hint," he said. "After all, it is
my affair--"

"I know, but as I said, you might not approve my methods, and if you
balk, all is up. We've got the chance of our lives. It's now or never."

"I do not at all like the idea that you may be forcing me into a position
where I may find myself doing something I shall be ashamed of for the
rest of my life."

Ruyler's tone was haughty. He did not relish being led round by the nose,
and his nerves were jumping.

"Now! Now!" said Spaulding soothingly, as he lit a cigar. "When you hire
a detective you hire him to do things you wouldn't do yourself; and if
you won't give him the little help he's got to have from you or quit,
what's the use of hiring him at all?

"I know perfectly well that nothing but your own eyes would convince you
of what it's up to me to prove--to say nothing of the fact that I count
on your entrance at the last minute to put an end to the whole bad
business. For it is a bad business--believe me. But not a word of that
now. You couldn't pry open my lips with a five dollar Havana."

"Well--you say you had a talk with Madame Delano to-day. Surely you can
tell me some of the things you have discovered."

"A whole lot. I've been waiting for the chance. Not that I got anything
out of her. She's one grand bluffer and no mistake. I take off my hat to
her. When I told her that I could lay hands on the proof that she was
Marie Garnett--although Jim had married her in his home town under his
own name--and that she'd gone home to France with the kid when it was
five, taking the cue from her friend, Mrs. Lawton, and sending word back
she was dead--"

"You were equally sure a few days ago that she was Mrs. Lawton--"

"That was just my constructive imagination on the loose. It was a lovely
theory, and I sort of hung on to it. But I had no real data to go on. Now
I've got the evidence that Jim Garnett died two months before the fire
burnt up pretty nearly all the records, and that his body was shipped
back to Holbrook Centre to be buried in the family plot. You see, he was
sick for s