"Carson's my name," he said, offering me his hand and showing his concealed badge in one and the same motion. Then: "You'll excuse me for butting in, Mr. Bertrand, but there is something you ought to know. You've got a double kicking around here somewhere; a fellow who has swiped your name and looks just a little like you. He's a crook, all right, and we've got his thumb-print and his 'mug' in the headquarters records. I ran across his dope the other day in the blotter, and thought the next time I saw you I'd give you a tip. You never can tell what these slick 'aliases' 'll do. He might be following you up to get a graft out of you. That's done, every day, you know." Naturally, there was nothing to do but to thank the purblind city detective, to press a bank-note into his hand, and to beg him to be on the lookout for this dangerous "double" of mine. But the incident served to show what the bonanza-fed publicity campaign was doing for us. Gifford, grubbing in the various levels of the mine, had the most immunity; the newspaper reporters let him measurably alone. But neither Barrett nor I could dodge the spotlight. Every move we made was blazoned in type, and I lived in daily fear of the moment when some enterprising newspaper man would begin to make copy of the theater parties and road-house rides and midnight champagne suppers. I knew that the blow had fallen one morning when Phineas Everton came unannounced into my private office and asked me to send the stenographer away. The _debacle_ had arrived, and I was no more ready to meet it than any other spendthrift of good repute caught red-handed would have been. "I think you can guess pretty well what I have come to say, Bertrand," Everton said, after the door had closed behind the outgoing shorthand man. "I have been putting it off in the hope that your own sense of the fitness of things would come to the rescue. I may be old-fashioned and out of touch with the times and the manners of the new generation, but I can't forget that I am a father, or that common decency still has its demands." Out of the depths of my humiliation there emerged, full-grown, a huge respect for this quiet-eyed ex-schoolmaster who, for the few of us who knew him, lived the life of a studious recluse among his technical mechanisms in the laboratory. He was a salaried man, and I was one of his three employers. That he was able to ignore completely the business relation was a mark of the man. He waited for his reply but I had none to make. After a time he went on, without heat, but equally without regard for anything but the despicable fact.