straightened up and walked away. What she was, and what she was doing, and what she had got herself in for, these matters were now none of his affairs. For him Mary Regan was a closed incident.

[46]

[47]

CHAPTER V CLIFFORD HAS A NEW PURPOSE

Half an hour later Clifford entered the octagonal reception room at Police Headquarters and sent his name in to Commissioner Thorne. Word came back that Thorne was engaged and would be so for half an hour; but in the meantime wouldn’t Clifford visit about the building.

Half

Clifford descended to the great corridor on the main floor. Here he met captains and lieutenants and first-grade detectives—old friends, with whom, until the events that had sent him out of the Department, he had worked for close upon a decade. They treated him with a respect that, coming after his scene with Mary Regan, was soothing to his rasped spirit. The very surroundings, too, affected him—begot in him a formless longing; in a way it was like coming back to one’s home town.

Here, too, he ran into little Jimmie Kelly. With Jimmie he descended to the pistol range in the subcellar, and for half an hour they practiced with the regulation police revolvers, which recoil like ancient shotguns—their targets those little posters seen everywhere, headed “Wanted for Murder,” over the heart of the pictured fugitive an inch circle of white paper to serve as bull’s-eye. And then[48] they practiced with Jimmie’s pistol, a .25 automatic so tiny that it could lie in a closed hand and not be seen.

[48]

“Wish you were back here with us, Bob,” remarked Jimmie when Clifford announced that he was due up in the Chief’s office. “It would be great stuff—working with you again!”

There was hearty sincerity in Jimmie’s voice; and the vague longing begot by it was still upon Clifford when at length he was seated beside Commissioner Thorne’s desk.

“Clifford,” said the Commissioner briskly, his lean, Scotch-Irish face alive with purpose, “I’m going to lay all my cards, face up, on the table. I asked you to meet me down here, instead of uptown, for the sake of the effect on you. That’s why I made you wait, and asked you to visit about. I wanted you to feel the old tug of Headquarters.”

“I guess I’ve 

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