Lanagan laughed. “No?” he drawled. “I wouldn’t put it past you to call it natural causes, though.” Phillips flushed to the base of his thick neck but held himself from answering. He knew Lanagan by reputation and did not care to match wits with him. Lanagan worked with most of the “upper office” men on intimate terms, but found it occasionally necessary to put a “crimp” in the arrogance, or ignorance, of the outside station officers, who do not come into contact with newspaper men as frequently as the down town men and at times elect to affect the same impartiality with which they treat ordinary persons. Such Lanagan took pride in bringing to a proper appreciation of the honourable place occupied by the brothers of the Tribe. Lanagan ignored the two detectives and gave his attention to the coroner’s deputies, the cottage and outskirts, and the contents of the wicker basket. Before the next train arrived, bringing a dozen reporters and camera men from the other papers, and myself, Lanagan had finished his investigations. I found him seated on a salt grass hummock, smoking and gazing absently up and down the ragged, rocky shore line. The surf was tumbling heavily although a few hundred yards out the sea was an undulating swell of greenish beauty. “Some fine day,” was his greeting. “Let’s take a stroll down.” We made our way down the cliff to the rocks at the water’s edge. “Imagination is oftentimes a great thing in solving crime,” he remarked, as he poised himself perilously on a slippery rock and relit his cigar. “That and the ‘take a chance’ instinct. Call it a hunch, bull-luck, accident, or as one great French detective said, ‘le grand hasard.’ Beautiful picture, is it not?” He pointed toward the Heads, where a Pacific Mail steamship was just putting her pilot down the side. She made a fine picture in truth, with her clean, lithe lines and her smoke blowing back like the wind-blown tresses of a girl. We strolled along the intermittent stretches of sandy beach or clambered over the rocks and it finally struck me that Lanagan’s ferret eyes were not at all absent-minded or entirely busied with the natural beauties of the scene, but that he was examining closely every square inch of the ground we travelled; and the waters as we passed. “Phillips is rather cagey,” he remarked. “He’ll have to be taught his place. He’s a good officer, though; and Leslie has his eye on him. We must look out for that chap. He not only has good legs, a prime requisite of a detective or a reporter, but he has a head that really works once in a while.” He sat down finally under the shelter of a great rock and motioned me to do likewise. Then he pulled from his pocket, carefully tucked away, a V-shaped piece of paper written over with Chinese characters. The corner that made the apex of the V was crinkled. “What do you make of it?” “It’s a piece of a Chinese newspaper,” I replied. “Really! You would do credit to Phillips. _Examine_ it this time.”