These further facts may be noted: Burgess was the best-dressed man in Indianapolis--he always wore a pink carnation; and on occasions when he motored home for luncheon he changed his necktie--a fact that did not go unremarked in the bank cages. He belonged to hunting and fishing clubs in Canada, Maine and North Carolina, and visited them at proper seasons. There was a drop of adventurous blood in him that made banking the least bit onerous at times; and when he felt the need of air he disappeared to catch salmon or tarpon, or to hunt grouse or moose. Before his father had unkindly died and left him the bank and other profitable embarrassments, he had been obsessed with a passion for mixing in a South American revolution; he had chafed when the Spanish War most deplorably synchronized with the year of his marriage, and he could think of no valid excuse for leaving the newly kindled fire on his domestic altar to pose for Spanish bullets. Twice since his marriage he had looked death in the eye: once when he tumbled off a crag of the Canadian Rockies--he was looking for a mountain sheep; and again when he had been whistled down the Virginia capes in a hurricane while yachting with a Boston friend. Every one admitted that he was a good banker. If he got stung occasionally he did not whimper; and every one knew that the White River National could stand a good deal of stinging without being obliged to hang crape on its front door. Burgess had always felt that some day something would happen to relieve the monotony of his existence as the chief pilot of an institution which panics always passed by on the other side. His wife cultivated bishops, men of letters and highbrows generally; and he was always stumbling over them in his home, sometimes to his discomfiture. With that perversity of human nature that makes us all pine for what is not, he grew restive under the iron grip of convention and felt that he would like to disappear--either into the wilderness to play at being a savage, or into the shadowy underworld to taste danger and share the experiences of men who fight on the farther side of the barricade. “You always seem to get ’em, Tom,” he remarked to the detective in a familiar tone, bred of long acquaintance. “Just knowing you has made a better man of me. I’m bound to be good as long as you’re on the job here; but don’t you ever get tired of the game?”