Even more alive than was he must his escutcheon be. Just how dynamically alive, he’d be able soon to demonstrate, unless the West Shore Railroad’s fast freight from Chicago had met with delay. He’d ask no recourse to the weighty tomes of ancient history or the public library’s genealogical records. His showing must be more representative of the last of the line than that and up to the second. The flags of all the taxis he sighted were furled for earlier fares, but a flat-wheeled Fifty-ninth Street surface car bore him cross-town. The checker at the door of Polkadot’s palatial boarding-house further taxed his time. “Gent here asking for you, Mr. Pape, not more than half hour ago.... No, he wasn’t small or sharp-faced—not partic’aler so. No, he didn’t have no cauliflower ear. What I did notice was his wat’ry voice and what might pass for a mustache if you had magnifying eyes.... Said he’d just stick around.” So! His trailer of the moment was neither Welch nor Duffy, but the youth of the slightly adorned lip. The nature of that small matter of business which had brought him to the Astor last evening might better remain a mystery since mysteries were the order of the day and attempted solutions were likely to land one before a magistrate. Pape hurried into the stable and the whinnied greeting of his three-hued best friend. His change into riding clothes took no more time than was needed by the groom to put Polkadot into his leather. He was riding out the main “gate,” his mind upon the plan that had come with the speed of inspiration, when—— “Pardon my persistence, Mr. Pape, but that’s what I’m hired for.” He had “stuck around,” the thin-voiced, thin-mustached, thin-visaged weakling; was blocking the exit; now incensed Dot by a curbing hand on the bridle rein. Hurriedly Pape considered whether to jump the horse past the human barrier or to temporize. Fearing delay from more entanglement in the city’s red tape, he made an overture. “If persistence is what you’re hired for, how much to give up?” “To give up—just what?” “Whatever you’re hired to run me down for. At that it looks to me as if you were working on the wrong job.” The youth straightened with some show of self-respect. “Right or wrong it’s regular—a steady job for life if I do my part.” “For life?” Pape snorted. “You don’t mean to say you’re going to persist after me _for life?”_ “Until you come across, sir——” “You trying to pull a polite hold-up? I’ll ride over your remains, son, if you don’t drop that bridle and let me——” “Until you pay what you owe, I mean.” Pape tweaked a sunburned ear in puzzling the thickened plot. “Haven’t I said I was more than willing to pay you——” “Pay the company, not me, Mr. Pape.” “The com——What company?” “The New York Edison Company.” Indignantly the Westerner stared down into the vacuous face of this latest impediment to progress.