“But you wouldn’t refuse a little something for yourself on the side, so to speak,” suggested Murray sarcastically. “No, I wouldn’t,” Harkness frankly admitted. “To carry out the plan it would be necessary for me to give up my job, change my name and make a fresh start somewhere else. The job was not such an all-fired good one, but it might be some time before I got another as good, and I would need something for expenses while I was losing myself. I was to get five hundred of the three thousand dollars insurance. The rest was to go to the widow.” “That wouldn’t last her very long,” remarked Murray. “It would help a little,” said Harkness, “and we thought we would stand a better chance if we didn’t ask for too big a sum.” “An insurance company,” said Murray, “has to be as particular with a small risk as with a large one, and it will follow up a suspicious case as closely in one instance as in the other. It’s a matter of principle.” “I think I understand that now,” remarked Harkness regretfully. “But I am curious to know,” persisted Murray, “how in the world you arranged such a mystifying record.” “It was easy,” replied Harkness. “I gave you my cousin’s place and date of birth, his parents, his marriage and his life up to the time he left Madison. Then I gave you my record up to the finish, with the exception of one year, when he was in the Chicago directory. We put that year in so you could get trace of the wife in case you made any investigation. I have no wife, and it was rather important, of course, that there should be a record of a wife somewhere.” “It was a wise provision,” admitted Murray. “We got trace of the wife at that flat.” “It was after leaving there,” Harkness continued, “that my cousin went to St. Louis. When he returned we met and a little later fixed up the job. As soon as I got the policy I rented the Sixty-fourth Street flat, and my cousin and his wife moved in. That’s all, I think, except that you ought to be a little easy on me, I think, for giving you such an entertaining story.” Murray turned to the doctor with a pardonable air of triumph. “Was I right, Doctor,” he asked, “in saying that it takes the novice to devise the really confusing scheme?” “You were right,” said the doctor. AN INCIDENTAL GRIEVANCE Jane Moffat, widow, was sore distressed. “Without Tom,” she said, “I don’t know what I’ll do. Tom was a good man, but unlucky. There was better providers than Tom, but he was better than none.”