He was through. Bina fluttered about him and Lanagan’s head was close to hers. She was a full-sexed creature but young; and I balked. I spoke to Lanagan sharply after a moment or two and we departed. She gave him a shy little glance as he left. He laughed. “What a Covenanter you are! A psalm singer gone wrong for fair!” “I don’t like it,” I said, stubbornly, but with the best of intentions. “She’s only a child.” I didn’t yet know all the sides of this man Lanagan. He whirled on me: and I got a swift sense of the power that could flash from those dark eyes, and I felt, with the intimacy of personal experience, how effective they must be when working upon a guilty mind. “Let me tell you, Howard,” he bit out, using my given name for the first time in our friendship, “Norrie” being his ordinary salutation, “that I’m working on the Ratto story. Get me? What do you take me for, anyhow? I’ve stood one welt from my own kind to-night and I don’t want another.” Lanagan received his second apology of the night; but he didn’t appear to want it at that. His uncanny faculty of reading men’s minds seemed to tell him that my remark was in good faith. “Forget it,” he laughed. “But just for that, Norrie, I’ll keep to myself for the present the interesting bit of information that Bina gave me; for Bresci is a Camorra agent after all, and Bina, who is all eyes and ears, knows precisely the truth about Ratto’s death in so far as it pertains to the Camorra. I guess that will hold you for a while? But what a lover of music she is! Let’s call it a day. Don’t look for me to-morrow. I’m off on a little lay of my own. Keep in general reach of a telephone so I can get you in a hurry and give that slavedriver of a Sampson my distinguished compliments and tell him I will show up when it pleases me to get d---- good and ready.” I hammered away at the routine of the story the next day--I was just a plain plodder, ordinarily dependable, but never particularly brilliant--and neither saw Lanagan nor heard from him. A lively angle was given to the story when Dinola and Alberti discovered, concealed in one of Ratto’s game refrigerators, six choice _salami_ sausages that his death had evidently prevented him disposing of in the proper way, for neatly rolled in a half-inch wad in the dead centre of each, was a roll of ten $100 gold bills of U. S. currency.