Our taximan, who was waiting on the other side of the street, and who had been peacefully smoking a cigarette, jumped down from his seat and watched the proceedings with an expression of stupefaction that was comic in its intensity. Everything was carried out in a most orderly manner. The members of the Group were arrested without unnecessary fuss. The whole thing might have been “produced” by David Belasco. A six-seater car appeared from somewhere or another, in which the gang was canned as neatly as tinned sardines. The police handled the job with such discretion that chance passers-by never dreamed that anything unusual was going forward. They do these raids much better on the screen. Macalister was the last to come down from above, his cigar still held firmly between his teeth. He was unperturbed. Deportation was the worst he had to fear, and he knew it quite well. He was smiling slyly. He paused, looking hard at O’Shea and at myself. “Listen,” he said, “you two boys have doubled on me pretty badly, but I don’t bear no malice.” His grammar at times revealed the influence of the Cubist school. “Zara is different, and he’s still loose. Take my tip and watch out for Zara. If he’s seeing red, don’t try to pet him. Good-night!” He entered the car, urged by two detectives. “Good-night,” murmured O’Shea thoughtfully, and turned to me. “You know, Decies,” he went on, “if that man had had our advantages, he would have made a damned good sportsman.” There were certain formalities to be attended to, and I suppose it was close upon two o’clock when O’Shea and I found ourselves outside my rooms. I suggested a doch-an’-dorris. “If I were superstitious,” O’Shea declared, “I should refuse.” He smiled, glancing up at the tall ladder beneath which we must walk to reach my door. “Oh!” said I, “they are mending the roof, or something.” “I suppose we might risk it,” he replied; and we went in. The incident stuck in my mind, not so much because of any superstitious significance that I attached to it as because of what actually happened later. O’Shea dropped on to the settee in my big room and sighed rather wearily as he watched me preparing drinks. “You know, Decies,” said he, “I am both glad and sorry that this job is over. I have blundered through by sheer good luck. Without your aid, and the aid of someone else, I should have crashed badly.” “Perhaps not,” I returned. “If you had not succeeded in one way, you might quite easily have found another.” “Or I might not,” said he. “No. I am a poor policeman, and peace-time soldiering is no sort of game.” “What do you mean, O’Shea?” “I mean,” he replied, holding up to the light a glass that I had handed to him, “that I am infernally restless.” I sighed as loudly as he had done and stooped over the syphon. Then: “Decies,” said O’Shea, “we live in a generation that grows up very early.” “We do,” I agreed.