convicted, and served your stretch. Nothing on you? Well, well!" Again there was triumph in the officer's chuckle.

Aggie showed no least sign of perturbation in the face of this revelation of her unsavory record. Only an expression of half-incredulous wonder and delight beamed from her widely opened blue eyes and was emphasized in the rounding of the little mouth.

"Why," she cried, and now there was softness enough in the cooing notes, "my Gawd! It looks as though you had actually been workin'!"

The sarcasm was without effect on the dull sensibilities of the officer. He went on speaking with obvious enjoyment of the extent to which his knowledge reached.

"And the head of the gang is Mary Turner. Arrested four years ago for robbing the Emporium. Did her stretch of three years."

"Is that all you've got about her?" Garson demanded, with such abruptness that Cassidy forgot his dignity sufficiently to answer with an unqualified yes.

The forger continued speaking rapidly, and now there was an undercurrent of feeling in his voice.

"Nothing in your record of her about her coming out without a friend in the world, and trying to go straight? You ain't got nothing in that pretty little book of your'n about your going to the millinery store where she finally got a job, and tipping them off to where she came from?"

"Sure, they were tipped off," Cassidy answered, quite unmoved. And he added, swelling visibly with importance: "We got to protect the city."

"Got anything in that record of yours," Garson went on venomously, "about her getting another job, and you following her up again, and having her thrown out? Got it there about the letter you had old Gilder write, so that his influence would get her canned?"

"Oh, we had her right the first time," Cassidy admitted, complacently.

Then, the bitterness of Garson's soul was revealed by the fierceness in his voice as he replied.

"You did not! She was railroaded for a job she never did. She went in honest, and she came out honest."

The detective indulged himself in a cackle of sneering merriment.

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