That was a foolish question, I knew before I got it out. He disregarded it entirely. “Put your mind on Winton Scofield, Steve. Don’t let him ride home in his own car to-night; make him take a taxi.” “Why?” I cut in before taking time to think. Of course, Jerry could not tell me. It was perfectly plain from his voice that, wherever he was, he had only a few seconds in which to speak to me; and if anything was plainer, it was that his situation precluded explanations. “Make him!” Jerry repeated quickly. “And don’t let him know he’s being made. Don’t say a word of this to any one, whatever happens!” And the wire at the other end went dead; but I continued to hold the receiver until central’s voice briskly inquired, “Number, please?” So I hung up and sat staring down on the pile of correspondence about potatoes and beans and canned cherries; but my world was no waste of brown bean stalks and pickley delicatessen shops; nor was my world the usual dreary array of my own social sort,--those who have big homes on the Lake Shore Drive and on Astor Street and in Winnetka and Lake Forest; who have coveys of servants, of course, and put up a parade of cars and clubs and country places and everything else that looks impressive from outside but inside is duller than Deuteronomy. They’ve pretty sets of silver and gold things about, naturally; and they’ve a good deal of platinum, too, with diamonds and rubies and sapphires and those green stones--oh, emeralds--stuck in. They’ve big bank accounts and a lot of other venal environment too tiresome to give you a thrill until you hear, all of a sudden, it has unduly tempted a gentleman from a stratum quite different but yet extremely adjacent to your own and the gentleman is likely to use some exceedingly direct, not to say personal, methods of getting your environment--and you. For that was what Jerry’s call meant. Win Scofield’s name had crept to the top of somebody’s board in the free society of the gentlemen--and their lady friends--of the “gat” and the “soup job,” the “Hunk” and the “bump off”; in that region, where Jerry had gone, Winton Scofield’s number was “up”; he had been chalked for a “croaking.” And as I sat there staring and wondering why and how, suddenly I ceased to have difficulty in thinking red hair, instead of yellow, upon Christina, the riverside companion of Keeban. I “placed” her and knew her name and her association and where I had met her; for she was Winton Scofield’s wife. Of course she was; that was it! What an extension of the underworld into the polite world of my own!