It was quite natural for Miss Leigh to speak of fingerprints. She was an employe in the Vose-Mern offices. "Vose-Mern Bureau of Investigation" was the designation on the street corridor directory board of a building in the purlieus of New York City Hall. On the same board other parties frankly advertised themselves as detectives. The Vose-Mern agency called its men and women by the name of operatives. The scope of its activities was unlimited. It broke strikes, put secret agents into manufacturing concerns to stimulate efficiency, or calculatingly and in cold blood put other agents in to wreck a concern in the interests of a rival. It was a matter of fees. Mern could defend the ethics of such procedure with interesting arguments; he had been an inspector of police and held ironic views of human nature; he had invented an anticipatory system, so he called it, by which he "hothoused" criminal proclivities in a person in order to show the person's latent possibilities up to an employer before damage had been wrought to the employer's business or funds. That is to say--and this for the proper understanding of Mr. Mern's code in his operations as he moved in the special matters of which this tale treats--his agency deliberately set women of the type well hit off by the name "vamps"; "sicked" those women onto bank clerks and others who could get a hand into a till, and if the women were able to cajole the victim to the point of stealing or of grabbing in order to make a get-away to foreign parts with the temptress, the trick was considered legitimate work of the "anticipatory" sort. The operative would order the treasure _cached_, would appoint the day and hour for the get-away--and a plain-clothes man would be waiting at the _cache_! The Vose-Mern system thus nabbed the culprit, who had revealed his lack of moral fiber by reason of the hothouse forcing of the situation; Mern insisted that if the germ were there it should be forced. By his plan the loot was pulled back and returned to the owner. Mern had broken the big paper-mill strike for the Comas Consolidated; he calmly assured his clients that he could furnish a thousand men as well as one. When he did a thing it was expensive--for he had bands of picked men always on call, and the men must be paid during their loafing intervals, waiting for other strikes.