used to stronger drinks!” He grinned derisively at the surrounding faces, kicked a chair up to the table, and sat down. Trant glanced toward Edwards, and Edwards moved silently back from the group and disappeared unnoticed through the partition door. Then the psychologist swiftly adjusted the sphygmograph upon the outstretched arm and watched intently an instant until the pencil point had caught up the strong and even pulse which set it rising and falling in perfect rhythm.

As he turned to the bar for the whisky, the rear door slammed and the voice Trant was expecting spoke: “Yes, it was at Warsaw the police took him. He was taken without warning from his friend’s house. What next? The prisons are full, but they keep on filling them; the graveyards will be full next!”

“Look! Look!” cried the Lithuanian beside Trant at the table, “he bragged about watered whisky, but just the sight of it makes his heart beat bigger and stronger!”

Trant bent eagerly over the smoked paper, watching the stronger, slower pulse beat which the record showed.

“Yes; before he takes the whisky his pulse is strengthened,” Trant answered; “for that is how the pulse acts when a man is pleased and exults!”

He waited now, almost inattentively, while Meyan drank the whisky and the others grew silent in defeat as the giant’s pulse, true to his boast, showed almost no variation under the fiery liquor.

“Fall, such child foolishness!” Meyan, with steady hand, set the glass back on the table. Then, as Trant unclasped the straps around his arm, he rose, yawned in their faces, and lounged out of the place.

The psychologist turned to meet young Edwards as he hurried in, and together they went out to join the father at the motor.

“We can do nothing sooner than tonight,” Trant said shortly, an expression of keen anxiety on his face. “I must learn more about this man, but my inquiries must be conducted alone. If you will meet me here again at seven o’clock to-night, say at the pawnbroker’s shop we passed upon the corner, I hope to be able to solve the mystery of the hammering man, and the influence he is undoubtedly exerting on Miss Silber. I may say,” he added, after a moment, “that I would not attach too much weight to the child’s statement that Miss Silber is Meyan’s wife. It is understood, then, that you will meet me here to-night, as I have suggested.”

He nodded to his clients, and ran to catch a 

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