"I know I could write about it, and so I am going to prison. I shall go to prison for one year, perhaps two or possibly three years; and when I come out I shall write a novel about prison life that will make my name live after me, for I shall know my facts at first hand--I shall have the local colour of a prison in my grip as no other man has ever had it who had my powers as a writer. I am going to gamble with this thing--the prison. I will give it a slice out of my life for the sake of the great work I shall do afterward." Mind you, I am not saying he put his big idea--for surely it was an idea and a big one--in exactly those words; but that was his thought. And when he came to work out the plan he was astonished to find how easy it was to devise and to accomplish. Thanks to his mode of life, his practical isolation in the midst of five million other beings, he needed to confide in but one person; and in Hartigan he found that person. Hartigan, a veteran of the detective business, who knew and kept almost as many intimate secrets as a father confessor, showed surprise just twice--first when Looms confided to him his purpose and again when he learned how generously Looms was willing to pay for his co-operation. Besides, as Looms at their first meeting pointed out and as Hartigan saw for himself, there was no obligation upon him to do anything that was actually wrong. Aboard that crosstown car Looms did really take a watch from Hartigan's pocket. Whatever the motive behind the act, the act spoke for itself. All that Hartigan told under oath on the witness stand was straight enough. It was what he did not tell that mortised the fabric of their plot together and made the thing dovetail, whole truth with half truth. At the very worst they had merely conspired--he as accessory and Looms as principal--to cheat the state of New York out of sundry years of free board and freedomless lodgings at an establishment wherein probably no other man since it was built had ever schemed of his own free will to abide. So Hartigan, the private detective, having first got his fee, eventually got his watch back and now disappears from this narrative. So Felix Looms, the seeker after local colour, gave up his bachelor apartments in the Rubens Studio Building and went away, leaving no forwarding address behind him. So James Williams, the petty felon, with no known address except the size number in his hat, went up the river to serve an indeterminate sentence of not less than three years. * * * * *