“When a man soaks he’s dangerous,” he said. “There isn’t any such thing as a harmless drunkard, any more than there is a harmless lunatic. Carver and I had a talk on the matter early this morning and he agreed. That man is certainly intelligent, which is more than you can say of the majority of detectives. Not that it is their faults, poor fellows; they are the victims of a system which calls for a sixty-nine inch brain.” “Eh?” “A sixty-nine inch brain,” explained Tab, and there was really no excuse for Babe Lander to be puzzled, for Tab was on his favorite topic, “is the brain of a man who is chosen for the subtle business of criminal investigation, not because he is clever, or shrewd or has a knowledge of the world, but because he stands sixty-nine inches in his stockings and has a chest expansion to thirty-eight. Funny, isn’t it? And yet detectives are chosen that way. They have to strip hard, very hard, but they need not think very hard. Do you ever realize that Napoleon and Julius Cæsar, to mention only two bright lads, could never have got into the police force?” “It hasn’t struck me before,” admitted Rex. “But I’ve never had any doubt as to the size of your brain, Tab.” There were exactly seventy inches of Tab, though he did not look so tall, having thickness and breadth to his shoulders. He had a habit of stooping, which made him seem round-shouldered. This trick came from pounding a typewriter or crouching over a desk which was just a little too low for him. He was fresh-coloured, but brown rather than pink. His face was finer drawn than is usual in a man of his build, his eyes deep-set and steadfastly grey. When he spoke he drawled a little. Those who knew him very well indeed detected one imperfection of speech. He could not say “very”--it was “verthy” but spoken so quickly that only the trained and acquainted ear could detect the lisp. He came to journalism from one of the Universities bringing no particular reputation for learning, but universally honoured as the best three-quarter back of his time. Without being rich he was comfortably placed and as he was one of those fortunates who had innumerable maiden-aunts he received on an average one legacy a year, though he had studiously neglected them because of their possessions. It would be more true to say that Tab leapt into journalism, and that particular department of journalism which he found most fascinating, when he dived off the end of a river pier and rescued Jasper Dorgon, the defaulting banker who had tried to commit suicide, and had extracted an exclusive story from the banker whilst both sat in a state of nudity before a night watchman’s fire watching their clothes dry.