Detective Inspector Carn of Scotland Yard, temporary medico, was not far from being typical of the modern C.I.D. man—the difference, in fact, being little more than an extra gramme or two of brain which lifted him a finger’s breadth above the common competent herd and which had led to his being detailed for the special work of tracking the Tiger. In other words, Carn was not obtrusively brilliant. He knew his job from A to Z, plus one or two other letters. He was a plodder, but an efficient plodder, having been taught in a school which prefers perseverance to genius and which trains men to rely on methodical painstaking investigation rather than on flashes of inspiration. Carn would never send an adoring gallery into rhapsodies with some dazzling feat of Holmesian deduction; he never whirled through a case in a kind of triumphant procession, with bouquets and confetti flying through the air, streamers blazing, and a brass band urging the awestricken populace to see the conquering hero come—but his superiors (a hard-headed and unromantic crowd) knew that he had a record of generally getting there, even if his progress and arrival were monotonous and unspectacular. This brief biographical note is made for the disillusionment of anyone who has imagined that Carn was a genial cypher in the affair of the Tiger. He was not. But his tactics were different from those of the Saint, who had a weakness for the limelight and no reason to deny himself the gratification of his vanity. The Saint was one man, nearly as far outside the law as the Tiger, and therefore the Tiger would not hesitate to accept the challenge. But Carn represented Authority, a vast and inexorable machinery backed up by arms and men, and if Carn showed up in his true colours they were the colours of Authority—and before that the Tiger would hesitate for a long time. Carn had no chance of accomplishing his mission unless he worked underground and in the dark, and that, in a way, was a handicap, though it suited his temperament. But Carn, the stolid manhunter, took one look at the handicap, shrugged, and went on with the job—in his own laborious fashion. The arrival of Mr. Templar, heralded by the Saint himself with the moral equivalent of a fanfare of terrific trumpets, illuminated with Klieg arcs, and fully equipped with one-man orchestra, noises off, self-starter, alarums, excursions, and all modern conveniences, lacking nothing but the camera men and Press agent, had eclipsed Carn’s modest efficiency, and perhaps had even put him off his plodding stroke for a while. But it would have taken more than a legion of Saints to derange our Mr. Carn permanently.