“I think, by all accounts, it must be tainted money,” said Mrs. Weeks, “but I don't know any better way of making dirty money clean than by doing a little good with it.” So she kept the donation intact against the coming of the Christmas, and then she devoted it to filling many Christmas dinner baskets and many Christmas stockings for the families of shanty-boaters, whose floating domiciles clustered like a flock of very disreputable water fowl down by the willows, below town, these shiftless river gypsies being included among Mrs. Weeks' favourite wards. Meanwhile, for upward of a week after the hold-up no steps of whatsoever nature were taken by the members of the police force. For the matter of that, no steps which might be called authoritative or in strict accordance with the statutes made and provided were ever taken by them or any one of them. But one evening the acting head of the department went forth upon a private mission. Our regular chief, Gabe Henley, was laid up that fall, bedfast with inflammatory rheumatism, and the fact of his being for the time an invalid may possibly help to explain a good deal, seeing that Gabe had the name for both honesty and earnestness in the discharge of his duties, even if he did fall some degrees short of the mental stature of an intellectual giant. So it was the acting chief--he resigned shortly thereafter, as I recall--who took it upon himself to pay a sort of domiciliary visit to the three-room cottage where the Widow Norfleet lived with her son Eddie and took in sewing. He bore no warrant qualifying him for violent entry, search of the premises or seizure of the person, and perhaps that was why he made no effort to force his way within the little house; or maybe he desired only to put a few pointed questions to the head of the house. So while he stood at the locked front door, knocking until his knuckles stung him and his patience had become quite utterly exhausted, a woman let herself out at the back of the house and ran bareheaded through an alley which opened into Clay Street, Clay Street being the next street to the west. When she returned home again at the end of perhaps half an hour a peep through a hooded and shuttered front window revealed to her that the brass-buttoned caller had departed. It was the next morning, to follow with chronological exactitude the sequence of this narrative, that our efficient young commonwealth's attorney, Jerome G. Flournoy, let himself into the chambers of the circuit judge. Mr. Flournoy wore between his brows a little V of perplexity. But Judge Priest, whom he found sitting by a grate fire stoking away at his cob pipe, appeared to have not a single care concealed anywhere about his person. Certainly his forehead was free of those wrinkles which are presumed to denote troublesomeness of thought on the inside.