My eyes blurred because I alone knew how hard he had fought that battle. Beneath his cynical exterior he had a soul as sensitive to slights as a girl. Boyishly I made a lunge at Bradley, but Lanagan, with a swift move, had my arm in that lean, powerful hand of his. “It don’t go,” he said, softly. “We are full grown men.” There was an awkward pause. Then Merriman, of few words, said sententiously: “It’s your move, Charley.” And Bradley put out his hand, which Lanagan took. “Jack,” said the _Herald_ man, “I’m a cad. There isn’t a righter man in the game than you.” “Forget it then,” said Lanagan. “I have.” But as we left the reporters’ room together I noticed that the whiteness that had come over Lanagan’s face remained there. “Don’t let it worry you, Jack,” I said anxiously. “Don’t you bother, laddie. He did me more good than liquor, and I never felt the dragging for the stuff worse than to-night. I’m going into this story now for fair, and I’m going in to smash the _Times_ and the _Herald_ flatter than a matrix.” The Ratto case was one that occupied considerable public attention several years ago, interest arising in the first instance through the peculiar manner in which the crime was disclosed. Ratto, a wealthy Italian commission merchant, had disappeared, no great commotion being raised for the first few days. The police made the customary desultory “search”--the “search” consisting mainly of the name and description of Ratto being read out at the watches in the various station-houses. The mystery in the disappearance might have remained unsolved for weeks had it not been for a lineman, Waters, who, perched on the cross-tree of a telegraph pole commanding a view of the windows of a room in the vacant house where Ratto’s dead body lay, made the discovery. No policeman being in the vicinity, Waters, with residents of the vicinity, entered the house. There had followed much newspaper speculation and police deduction. The Mafia and the Camorra came in for attention, the latter organisation being one that was at that time--long before the Viterbo trials--just coming to the attention of the American regular police and the secret service, as counterfeiting of American currency formed one of the Camorra accomplishments. The peculiar interest in the manner in which the Ratto killing was discovered was this: three months previously a crime had been discovered under almost identical circumstances by the same lineman, Waters. In that case Rosendorn, a Jewish tailor, was found after a several days’ disappearance by Waters, at work on the lines, who happened to see the body as he glanced through the window of a vacant house from his elevated perch. Following the discovery of the body by Waters the case had been speedily cleared up by the police and proved to be an affair arising from conjugal jealousy.