My name is signed above. I am a staff reporter on one of the town papers. New York, I mean. Several times in the past three or four years when some special work in my line—which has come to be mostly interviewing—was required there, they have sent me over to Boston. This last time I went over—which is now, for I am there yet—I was particularly glad to get the assignment, as my friend Dudley Knapp had recently made a shift from a big Life Insurance Company in the West to a very much bigger one in Boston, and it was a great pleasure to see him. Duds (his schoolboy name still sticks with me and I forgot to state that we were boys together in a small town in northern Ohio) has got to be quite a “high up” in the Insurance line. I don’t know exactly what they call him, but he’s an expert of some kind, and is a sharp one on any fraud or tangle that has to be attended to. I don’t mean to say he’s a detective or anything like that, but in nine cases out of ten he saves them from having to get one. He has the gift of knowing a man pretty well when he gets a good look at him—with a little conversation thrown in—and they put him on cases that have the look of being a bit off color. There’s plenty of that kind in the Life business. That’s how he happened to be in Boston, and we got ahold of each other almost the minute I arrived there. We’d been having dinner together in the men’s café at a specially good hotel—one of the few cafés left where they hadn’t let women and dancing in and changed the name to the Wild Rose Room or something like that, and where—as Dudley put it—you could still get a feed without having girls’ legs flashed in your face with every mouthful. It was down to coffee and cigars—that is, cigars for Duds and cigarettes for me—and we were lolling back talking over our experiences, when I happened to think of an odd thing that occurred on my last trip over—which was before Duds had made the shift to the Boston Company; and I started in to give him an idea of it by asking if he knew anything about a suburb called Roxbury. “No,” he said, “but for God’s sake” (lowering his voice) “don’t let anyone hear you call it a suburb—you’d be mobbed.” “Well it looked like that to me,” I returned. “I struck a place where I thought I was out on a farm.” “When was this?” he asked. “About a year ago.” “What were you doing?” “Following a man.” “Who was it?” “Never found out.” Dudley looked at me a couple of seconds; then settling back in his chair struck a match and began to light a cigar. “Anything—er—out of the way?” he mumbled between puffs. “No,” I told him, “just odd, that’s all. Peculiar way a couple of people acted on the train coming over got me guessing to that degree that when we arrived here about eleven o’clock at night I trailed the man through the south station till he got into a taxi, and then jumped into one myself and followed him out into that Roxbury region looking for the answer—which I never got.” “Slipped you, did he?”