More than two years after Mr. Spellman’s disappearance, Mr. Stephen Harker (not operating under that name at the time) became suddenly aware that the talons of the offensive bird recently spoken of had sunk themselves into him. But a remarkable thing occurred. “The Vulture” wanted to see him. A meeting was arranged by an agent. Pentecost had a few tried and tested assistants in his business whom he liked to refer to as “trusties,” and this man was one of them. A year later he had fifteen or twenty mostly planted in the large cities throughout the country. These men were occupied solely in assisting him about his own operations—he had no idea of getting control of others and becoming a big boss of criminality like those you read about. Nobody ever did that anyway. At the time he saw Harker he was beginning to have schemes for some of the most daring operations that had ever been conceived, and he’d got the idea that it would be a great advantage to work from the sound basis of a partnership and an office and a high-class rating. The thing was brought about, resulting in the firm of Harker & Pentecost, with a perfectly satisfactory standing in the business world. Harker was the senior partner, but Pentecost was the power plant, and as soon as Harker got a gleam of the extraordinary sort of person it was who’d picked him up, he didn’t want it any other way. The running of the promoting schemes was left in his hands, while Pentecost conducted operations that were sufficiently dangerous and unusual to interest him. These affairs took him to all parts of the country, and he quite frequently spotted something in the way of a novelty that was more or less in Harker’s department. He couldn’t so much as glance at a thing without having a complete and, more often than not, amazingly ingenious method of operating it flash automatically through his mind. They pegged along with a sort of team work for some time, Pentecost running to operations with a higher and higher percentage of danger to them, and Harker running to a higher and higher degree of anxiety on account of same, for owing to the partnership, he was in on them too. Once in a while he’d try to hook Pentecost back from something, but he never succeeded, and as one after another of these close-call enterprises got by—always, it turned out, protected by the most remarkable system of defensive lay-outs ever seen—he quit talking about it. That big risk and protection game appeared to be Pentecost’s delight. Often it would seem that he purposely played it as close as he could just to see them come up against his extraordinarily laid-out safety systems. * * * * *