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<h1>THE SHADOW</h1>
<p class="center"><span class="smaller">BY</span>
<br/>ARTHUR STRINGER</p>
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<p class="tbcenter"><span class="smaller">NEW YORK</span>
<br/><span class="small">THE CENTURY CO.</span>
<br/><span class="smaller">1913</span></p>
<p class="center"><span class="smaller">Copyright, 1913, by
<br/><span class="sc">The Century Co.</span>
<br/><i>Published, January, 1913</i></span></p>
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<div class="pb" id="Page_3">[3]</div>
<h1 title="">THE SHADOW</h1>
<h2 id="c1">I</h2>
<p>Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his
gloomy hound’s eyes as the door opened
and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped
them again.</p>
<p>“Hello, Elsie!” he said, without looking at
her.</p>
<p>The woman stood a moment staring at him.
Then she advanced thoughtfully toward his
table desk.</p>
<p>“Hello, Jim!” she answered, as she sank into
the empty chair at the desk end. The rustling
of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac
odor of ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner’s
office.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_4">[4]</div>
<p>The woman looped up her veil, festooning
it about the undulatory roll of her hat brim.
Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied
study of the desk top.</p>
<p>“You sent for me,” the woman finally said.
It was more a reminder than a question. And
the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense
of timidity. The woman’s pale face, where
the undulating hat brim left the shadowy eyes
still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a
calm sense of power. It was something more
than a dormant consciousness of beauty,
though the knowledge that men would turn
back to a face so wistful as hers, and their
judgment could be dulled by a smile so narcotizing,
had not a little to do with the woman’s
achieved serenity. There was nothing outwardly
sinister about her. This fact had always
left her doubly dangerous as a law-breaker.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_5">[5]</div>
<p>Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his
two hundred pounds of lethargic beefiness, felt
a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted
his head and looked at her. He looked into
the shadowy eyes under the level brows. He
could see, as he had seen before, that they were
exceptional eyes, with iris rings of deep gray
about the ever-widening and ever-narrowing
pupils which varied with varying thought, as
though set too close to the brain that controlled
them. So dominating was this pupil that
sometimes the whole eye looked violet, and
sometimes green, according to the light.</p>
<p>Then his glance strayed to the woman’s
mouth, where the upper lip curved outward,
from the base of the straight nose, giving her
at first glance the appearance of pouting.
Yet the heavier underlip, soft and wilful, contradicted
this impression of peevishness, deepened
it into one of Ishmael-like rebellion.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_6">[6]</div>
<p>Then Blake looked at the woman’s hair. It
was abundant and nut-brown, and artfully and
scrupulously interwoven and twisted together.
It seemed to stand the solitary pride of a life
claiming few things of which to be proud.
Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown
hair was daily plaited and treasured
and coiled and cared for, the meticulous attentiveness
with which morning by morning
its hip-reaching abundance was braided and
twisted and built up about the small head, an
intricate structure of soft wonder which midnight
must ever see again in ruins, just as the
next morning would find idly laborious fingers
rebuilding its ephemeral glories. This rebuilding
was done thoughtfully and calmly, as
though it were a religious rite, as though it
were a sacrificial devotion to an ideal in a life
tragically forlorn of beauty.</p>
<p>He remembered, too, the day when he had
first seen her. That was at the time of “The
Sick Millionaire” case, when he had first
learned of her association with Binhart. She
had posed at the Waldorf as a trained nurse,
in that case, and had met him and held him off
and outwitted him at every turn. Then he
had decided on his “plant.” To effect this he
had whisked a young Italian with a lacerated
thumb up from the City Hospital and sent
him in to her as an injured elevator-boy looking
for first-aid treatment. One glimpse of
her work on that thumb showed her to be betrayingly
ignorant of both figure-of-eight and
spica bandaging, and Blake, finally satisfied as
to the imposture, carried on his investigation,
showed “Doctor Callahan” to be Connie Binhart,
the con-man and bank thief, and sent the
two adventurers scurrying away to shelter.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_7">[7]</div>
<p>He remembered, too, how seven months after
that first meeting Stimson of the Central
Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh
from Paris, involved in some undecipherable
way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond robbery.
The despatches had given his office very little
to work on, and she had smiled at his thunderous
grillings and defied his noisy threats. But
as she sat there before him, chic and guarded,
with her girlishly frail body so arrogantly well
gowned, she had in some way touched his
lethargic imagination. She showed herself to
be of finer and keener fiber than the sordid
demireps with whom he had to do. Shimmering
and saucy and debonair as a polo pony,
she had seemed a departure from type, something
above the meretricious termagants round
whom he so often had to weave his accusatory
webs of evidence.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_8">[8]</div>
<p>Then, the following autumn, she was still
again mysteriously involved in the Sheldon
wire-tapping coup. This Montreal banker
named Sheldon, from whom nearly two hundred
thousand dollars had been wrested, put
a bullet through his head rather than go home
disgraced, and she had straightway been
brought down to Blake, for, until the autopsy
and the production of her dupe’s letters, Sheldon’s
death had been looked upon as a murder.</p>
<p>Blake had locked himself in with the white-faced
Miss Elsie Verriner, alias Chaddy Cravath,
alias Charlotte Carruthers, and for three
long hours he had pitted his dynamic brute
force against her flashing and snake-like evasiveness.
He had pounded her with the artillery
of his inhumanities. He had beleaguered
her with explosive brutishness. He had bulldozed
and harried her into frantic weariness.
He had third-degreed her into cowering and
trembling indignation, into hectic mental uncertainties.
Then, with the fatigue point well
passed, he had marshaled the last of his own
animal strength and essayed the final blasphemous
Vesuvian onslaught that brought about
the nervous breakdown, the ultimate collapse.
She had wept, then, the blubbering, loose-lipped,
abandoned weeping of hysteria. She
had stumbled forward and caught at his arm
and clung to it, as though it were her last
earthly pillar of support. Her huge plaited
ropes of hair had fallen down, thick brown
ropes longer than his own arms, and he,
breathing hard, had sat back and watched
them as she wept.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_9">[9]</div>
<p>But Blake was neither analytical nor introspective.
How it came about he never quite
knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate
fashion, that this scene of theirs, that this
official assault and surrender, was in some way
associated with the climacteric transports of
camp-meeting evangelism, that it involved
strange nerve-centers touched on in rhapsodic
religions, that it might even resemble the final
emotional surrender of reluctant love itself to
the first aggressive tides of passion. What it
was based on, what it arose from, he could not
say. But in the flood-tide of his own tumultuous
conquest he had watched her abandoned
weeping and her tumbled brown hair. And
as he watched, a vague and troubling tingle
sped like a fuse-sputter along his limbs, and
fired something dormant and dangerous in the
great hulk of a body which had never before
been stirred by its explosion of emotion. It
was not pity, he knew; for pity was something
quite foreign to his nature. Yet as she lay
back, limp and forlorn against his shoulder,
sobbing weakly out that she wanted to be a
good woman, that she could be honest if they
would only give her a chance, he felt that thus
to hold her, to shield her, was something desirable.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_10">[10]</div>
<p>She had stared, weary and wide-eyed, as his
head had bent closer down over hers. She had
drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as
his heavy lips had closed on hers that were still
wet and salty with tears. When she had left
the office, at the end of that strange hour, she
had gone with the promise of his protection.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_11">[11]</div>
<p>The sobering light of day, with its cynic relapse
to actualities, might have left that promise
a worthless one, had not the prompt evidence
of Sheldon’s suicide come to hand.
This made Blake’s task easier than he had expected.
The movement against Elsie Verriner
was “smothered” at Headquarters.
Two days later she met Blake by appointment.
That day, for the first time in his life,
he gave flowers to a woman.</p>
<p>Two weeks later he startled her with the
declaration that he wanted to marry her. He
didn’t care about her past. She’d been
dragged into the things she’d done without
understanding them, at first, and she’d kept
on because there’d been no one to help her
away from them. He knew he could do it.
She had a fine streak in her, and he wanted to
bring it out!</p>
<p>A little frightened, she tried to explain that
she was not the marrying kind. Then, brick-red
and bull-necked, he tried to tell her in his
groping Celtic way that he wanted children,
that she meant a lot to him, that he was going
to try to make her the happiest woman south
of Harlem.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_12">[12]</div>
<p>This had brought into her face a quick and
dangerous light which he found hard to explain.
He could see that she was flattered by
what he had said, that his words had made her
waywardly happy, that for a moment, in fact,
she had been swept off her feet.</p>
<p>Then dark afterthought interposed. It
crept like a cloud across her abandoned face.
It brought about a change so prompt that it
disturbed the Second Deputy.</p>
<p>“You’re—you’re not tied up already, are
you?” he had hesitatingly demanded. “You’re
not married?”</p>
<p>“No, I’m not tied up!” she had promptly
and fiercely responded. “My life’s my own—my
own!”</p>
<p>“Then why can’t you marry me?” the practical-minded
man had asked.</p>
<p>“I could!” she had retorted, with the same
fierceness as before. Then she had stood looking
at him out of wistful and unhappy eyes.
“I could—if you only understood, if you could
only help me the way I want to be helped!”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_13">[13]</div>
<p>She had clung to his arm with a tragic forlornness
that seemed to leave her very wan and
helpless. And he had found it ineffably
sweet to enfold that warm mass of wan helplessness
in his own virile strength.</p>
<p>She asked for time, and he was glad to consent
to the delay, so long as it did not keep
him from seeing her. In matters of the emotions
he was still as uninitiated as a child. He
found himself a little dazed by the seemingly
accidental tenderness, by the promises of devotion,
in which she proved so lavish. Morning
by jocund morning he built up his airy dreams,
as carefully as she built up her nut-brown
plaits. He grew heavily light-headed with
his plans for the future. When she pleaded
with him never to leave her, never to trust her
too much, he patted her thin cheek and asked
when she was going to name the day. From
that finality she still edged away, as though
her happiness itself were only experimental,
as though she expected the blue sky above
them to deliver itself of a bolt.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_14">[14]</div>
<p>But by this time she had become a habit with
him. He liked her even in her moodiest moments.
When, one day, she suggested that
they go away together, anywhere so long as it
was away, he merely laughed at her childishness.</p>
<p>It was, in fact, Blake himself who went
away. After nine weeks of alternating suspense
and happiness that seemed nine weeks of
inebriation to him, he was called out of the
city to complete the investigation on a series of
iron-workers’ dynamite outrages. Daily he
wrote or wired back to her. But he was kept
away longer than he had expected. When he
returned to New York she was no longer there.
She had disappeared as completely as though
an asphalted avenue had opened and swallowed
her up. It was not until the following winter
that he learned she was again with Connie Binhart,
in southern Europe.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_15">[15]</div>
<p>He had known his one belated love affair.
It had left no scar, he claimed, because it had
made no wound. Binhart, he consoled himself,
had held the woman in his power: there
had been no defeat because there had been no
actual conquest. And now he could face her
without an eye-blink of conscious embarrassment.
Yet it was good to remember that
Connie Binhart was going to be ground in the
wheels of the law, and ground fine, and ground
to a finish.</p>
<p>“What did you want me for, Jim?” the
woman was again asking him. She spoke with
an intimate directness, and yet in her attitude
were subtle reservations, a consciousness of the
thin ice on which they both stood. Each saw,
only too plainly, the need for great care, in
every step. In each lay the power to uncover,
at a hand’s turn, old mistakes that were best
unremembered. Yet there was a certain suave
audacity about the woman. She was not really
afraid of Blake, and the Second Deputy
had to recognize that fact. This self-assurance
of hers he attributed to the recollection that
she had once brought about his personal subjugation,
“got his goat,” as he had phrased it.
She, woman-like, would never forget it.</p>
<p>“There’s a man I want. And Schmittenberg
tells me you know where he is.” Blake,
as he spoke, continued to look heavily down at
his desk top.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_16">[16]</div>
<p>“Yes?” she answered cautiously, watching
herself as carefully as an actress with a rôle
to sustain, a rôle in which she could never be
quite letter-perfect.</p>
<p>“It’s Connie Binhart,” cut out the Second
Deputy.</p>
<p>He could see discretion drop like a curtain
across her watching face.</p>
<p>“Connie Binhart!” she temporized. Blake,
as his heavy side glance slewed about to her,
prided himself on the fact that he could see
through her pretenses. At any other time he
would have thrown open the flood-gates of
that ever-inundating anger of his and swept
away all such obliquities.</p>
<p>“I guess,” he went on with slow patience,
“we know him best round here as Charles
Blanchard.”</p>
<p>“Blanchard?” she echoed.</p>
<p>“Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we’ve been
looking for, for seven months now, the Blanchard
who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and
carried off a hundred and eighteen thousand
dollars.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_17">[17]</div>
<p>“Newcomb?” again meditated the woman.</p>
<p>“The Blanchard who shot down the bank
detective in Newcomb’s room when the rest of
the bank was listening to a German band playing
in the side street, a band hired for the
occasion.”</p>
<p>“When was that?” demanded the woman.</p>
<p>“That was last October,” he answered with
a sing-song weariness suggestive of impatience
at such supererogative explanations.</p>
<p>“I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn,” was
the woman’s quick retort.</p>
<p>Blake moved his heavy body, as though to
shoulder away any claim as to her complicity.</p>
<p>“I know that,” he acknowledged. “And
you went north to Paris on the twenty-ninth
of November. And on the third of December
you went to Cherbourg; and on the ninth you
landed in New York. I know all that.
That’s not what I’m after. I want to know
where Connie Binhart is, now, to-day.”</p>
<p>Their glances at last came together. No
move was made; no word was spoken. But a
contest took place.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_18">[18]</div>
<p>“Why ask <i>me</i>?” repeated the woman for
the second time. It was only too plain that
she was fencing.</p>
<p>“Because you <i>know</i>,” was Blake’s curt retort.
He let the gray-irised eyes drink in the
full cup of his determination. Some slowly
accumulating consciousness of his power
seemed to intimidate her. He could detect a
change in her bearing, in her speech itself.</p>
<p>“Jim, I can’t tell you,” she slowly asserted.
“I can’t do it!”</p>
<p>“But I’ve got ’o know,” he stubbornly maintained.
“And I’m going to.”</p>
<p>She sat studying him for a minute or two.
Her face had lost its earlier arrogance. It
seemed troubled; almost touched with fear.
She was not altogether ignorant, he reminded
himself, of the resources which he could command.</p>
<p>“I can’t tell you,” she repeated. “I’d
rather you let me go.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_19">[19]</div>
<p>The Second Deputy’s smile, scoffing and
melancholy, showed how utterly he ignored
her answer. He looked at his watch. Then
he looked back at the woman. A nervous tug-of-war
was taking place between her right and
left hand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru
gloves for the cable.</p>
<p>“You know me,” he began again in his deliberate
and abdominal bass. “And I know
you. I’ve got ’o get this man Binhart. I’ve
got ’o! He’s been out for seven months, now,
and they’re going to put it up to me, to <i>me</i>,
personally. Copeland tried to get him without
me. He fell down on it. They all fell
down on it. And now they’re going to
throw the case back on me. They think it’ll
be my Waterloo.”</p>
<p>He laughed. His laugh was as mirthless as
the cackle of a guinea hen. “But I’m going
to die hard, believe me! And if I go down, if
they think they can throw me on that, I’m going
to take a few of my friends along with me.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_20">[20]</div>
<p>“Is that a threat?” was the woman’s quick
inquiry. Her eyes narrowed again, for she
had long since learned, and learned it to her
sorrow, that every breath he drew was a breath
of self-interest.</p>
<p>“No; it’s just a plain statement.” He
slewed about in his swivel chair, throwing one
thick leg over the other as he did so. “I hate
to holler Auburn at a girl like you, Elsie; but
I’m going—”</p>
<p>“Auburn?” she repeated very quietly.
Then she raised her eyes to his. “Can you say
a thing like that to me, Jim?”</p>
<p>He shifted a little in his chair. But he met
her gaze without a wince.</p>
<p>“This is business, Elsie, and you can’t mix
business and—and other things,” he tailed off
at last, dropping his eyes.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry you put it that way,” she said.
“I hoped we’d be better friends than that!”</p>
<p>“I’m not counting on friendship in this!”
he retorted.</p>
<p>“But it might have been better, even in
this!” she said. And the artful look of pity
on her face angered him.</p>
<p>“Well, we’ll begin on something nearer
home!” he cried.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_21">[21]</div>
<p>He reached down into his pocket and produced
a small tinted oblong of paper. He
held it, face out, between his thumb and forefinger,
so that she could read it.</p>
<p>“This Steinert check’ll do the trick. Take
a closer look at the signature. Do you get
it?”</p>
<p>“What about it?” she asked, without a
tremor.</p>
<p>He restored the check to his wallet and the
wallet to his pocket. She would find it impossible
to outdo him in the matter of impassivity.</p>
<p>“I may or I may not know who forged that
check. I don’t <i>want</i> to know. And when
you tell me where Binhart is, I <i>won’t</i> know.”</p>
<p>“That check wasn’t forged,” contended the
quiet-eyed woman.</p>
<p>“Steinert will swear it was,” declared the
Second Deputy.</p>
<p>She sat without speaking, apparently in
deep study. Her intent face showed no fear,
no bewilderment, no actual emotion of any
kind.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_22">[22]</div>
<p>“You’ve got ’o face it,” said Blake, sitting
back and waiting for her to speak. His attitude
was that of a physician at a bedside,
awaiting the prescribed opiate to produce its
prescribed effect.</p>
<p>“Will I be dragged into this case, in any
way, if Binhart is rounded up?” the woman
finally asked.</p>
<p>“Not once,” he asserted.</p>
<p>“You promise me that?”</p>
<p>“Of course,” answered the Second Deputy.</p>
<p>“And you’ll let me alone on—on the other
things?” she calmly exacted.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he promptly acknowledged. “I’ll
see that you’re let alone.”</p>
<p>Again she looked at him with her veiled and
judicial eyes. Then she dropped her hands
into her lap. The gesture seemed one of
resignation.</p>
<p>“Binhart’s in Montreal,” she said.</p>
<p>Blake, keeping his face well under control,
waited for her to go on.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_23">[23]</div>
<p>“He’s been in Montreal for weeks now.
You’ll find him at 381 King Edward Avenue,
in Westmount. He’s there, posing as an expert
accountant.”</p>
<p>She saw the quick shadow of doubt, the eye-flash
of indecision. So she reached quietly
down and opened her pocket-book, rummaging
through its contents for a moment or two.
Then she handed Blake a folded envelope.</p>
<p>“You know his writing?” she asked.</p>
<p>“I’ve seen enough of it,” he retorted, as he
examined the typewritten envelope postmarked
“Montreal, Que.” Then he drew out
the inner sheet. On it, written by pen, he read
the message: “Come to 381 King Edward
when the coast is clear,” and below this the
initials “C. B.”</p>
<p>Blake, with the writing still before his eyes,
opened a desk drawer and took out a large
reading-glass. Through the lens of this he
again studied the inscription, word by word.
Then he turned to the office ’phone on his desk.</p>
<p>“Nolan,” he said into the receiver, “I want
to know if there’s a King Edward Avenue in
Montreal.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_24">[24]</div>
<p>He sat there waiting, still regarding the
handwriting with stolidly reproving eyes.
There was no doubt of its authenticity. He
would have known it at a glance.</p>
<p>“Yes, sir,” came the answer over the wire.
“It’s one of the newer avenues in Westmount.”</p>
<p>Blake, still wrapped in thought, hung up the
receiver. The woman facing him did not seem
to resent his possible imputation of dishonesty.
To be suspicious of all with whom he came in
contact was imposed on him by his profession.
He was compelled to watch even his associates,
his operatives and underlings, his friends as
well as his enemies. Life, with him, was a
<i>concerto</i> of skepticisms.</p>
<p>She was able to watch him, without emotion,
as he again bent forward, took up the ’phone
receiver, and this time spoke apparently to another
office.</p>
<p>“I want you to wire Teal to get a man out
to cover 381 King Edward Avenue, in Montreal.
Yes, Montreal. Tell him to get a man
out there inside of an hour, and put a night
watch on until I relieve ’em.”</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_25">[25]</div>
<p>Then, breathing heavily, he bent over his
desk, wrote a short message on a form pad and
pushed the buzzer-button with his thick finger.
He carefully folded up the piece of paper as
he waited.</p>
<p>“Get that off to Carpenter in Montreal
right away,” he said to the attendant who answered
his call. Then he swung about in his
chair, with a throaty grunt of content. He
sat for a moment, staring at the woman with
unseeing eyes. Then he stood up. With his
hands thrust deep in his pockets he slowly
moved his head back and forth, as though assenting
to some unuttered question.</p>
<p>“Elsie, you’re all right,” he acknowledged
with his solemn and unimaginative impassivity.
“You’re all right.”</p>
<p>Her quiet gaze, with all its reservations, was
a tacit question. He was still a little puzzled
by her surrender. He knew she did not regard
him as the great man that he was, that his
public career had made of him.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_26">[26]</div>
<p>“You’ve helped me out of a hole,” he
acknowledged as he faced her interrogating
eyes with his one-sided smile. “I’m mighty
glad you’ve done it, Elsie—for your sake as
well as mine.”</p>
<p>“What hole?” asked the woman, wearily
drawing on her gloves. There was neither
open contempt nor indifference on her face.
Yet something in her bearing nettled him.
The quietness of her question contrasted
strangely with the gruffness of the Second
Deputy’s voice as he answered her.</p>
<p>“Oh, they think I’m a has-been round here,”
he snorted. “They’ve got the idea I’m out
o’ date. And I’m going to show ’em a thing
or two to wake ’em up.”</p>
<p>“How?” asked the woman.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_27">[27]</div>
<p>“By doing what their whole kid-glove gang
haven’t been able to do,” he avowed. And
having delivered himself of that ultimatum,
he promptly relaxed into his old-time impassiveness,
like a dog snapping from his kennel
and shrinking back into its shadows. At the
same moment that Blake’s thick forefinger
again prodded the buzzer-button at his desk
end the watching woman could see the relapse
into official wariness. It was as though he had
put the shutters up in front of his soul. She
accepted the movement as a signal of dismissal.
She rose from her chair and quietly lowered
and adjusted her veil. Yet through that
lowered veil she stood looking down at Never-Fail
Blake for a moment or two. She looked
at him with grave yet casual curiosity, as tourists
look at a ruin that has been pointed out to
them as historic.</p>
<p>“You didn’t give me back Connie Binhart’s
note,” she reminded him as she paused with
her gloved finger-tips resting on the desk edge.</p>
<p>“D’you want it?” he queried with simulated
indifference, as he made a final and lingering
study of it.</p>
<p>“I’d like to keep it,” she acknowledged.
When, without meeting her eyes, he handed it
over to her, she folded it and restored it to her
pocket-book, carefully, as though vast things
depended on that small scrap of paper.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_28">[28]</div>
<p>Never-Fail Blake, alone in his office and still
assailed by the vaguely disturbing perfumes
which she had left behind her, pondered her
reasons for taking back Binhart’s scrap of
paper. He wondered if she had at any time
actually cared for Binhart. He wondered if
she was capable of caring for anybody. And
this problem took his thoughts back to the time
when so much might have depended on its
answer.</p>
<p>The Second Deputy dropped his reading-glass
in its drawer and slammed it shut. It
made no difference, he assured himself, one
way or the other. And in the consolatory moments
of a sudden new triumph Never-Fail
Blake let his thoughts wander pleasantly back
over that long life which (and of this he was
now comfortably conscious) his next official
move was about to redeem.</p>
<div class="pb" id="Page_29">[29]</div>
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