Micky had recourse to his card case. "Allow me," he remarked politely. Shaughnessy glanced at it and thrust it in his vest pocket. "I've heard of you," he acknowledged. "Fine night, eh? Good evening." He moved leisurely away. O'Byrn hailed him and he turned. "I haven't one of your cards, Mr. Shaughnessy," suggested Micky, grinning wickedly. Shaughnessy vouchsafed him a slight, sneering smile. "I don't think you need it," he retorted, "but I'm glad, I'm sure, that you gave me yours." He passed on and turned the corner. Micky was a veteran newsgetter, which means that he was also a good detective. Wary as Shaughnessy was, he could not have known that he was being shadowed, though O'Byrn noticed him several times casting apprehensive glances to the rear. He smiled grimly at the implied tribute to his reputation and discreetly kept out of sight. In the meantime he had necessarily dropped some distance behind the boss, though carefully following him as he traversed successive streets. Suddenly, however, he turned sharply at a cross-alley, and when O'Byrn, hurrying his pace, reached there, Shaughnessy was nowhere to be seen. Micky stood perplexed, cursing softly. He hurried to the end of the alley to Lawrence Street and looked up and down it, without result. He walked aimlessly here and there about the section, but no glad sight of Shaughnessy rewarded his keen eyes. After some little time, however, O'Byrn saw a familiar figure crossing Lawrence Street, a block from the point where the alley intersected. The Irishman was instantly alert, for the man was former Alderman Goldberg. "Gad!" muttered Micky, "the woods seem to be full of 'retired' politicians." Gaining the opposite side of the street, Goldberg turned west and walked about two blocks, with O'Byrn discreetly behind, across the way. Suddenly Goldberg disappeared within a doorway. Micky chuckled softly. "Up over Hogan's, eh?" he muttered. "So that's the trysting place." He must investigate, surely, but not just now. Perhaps there were other birds of the sinister brood to arrive. O'Byrn, with the canny discretion born of long reportorial experience, lurked for the present in a shadowed doorway. In a little while his caution was justified, for there arrived simultaneously at the "trysting place" the lanky Dick Peterson and the rotund Willie Shute, known to Micky for the precious pair of political rascals they were. "That fake convention! Oh, what a bluff!" breathed the Irishman, with a definite admiration in his subdued tones. One could honestly admire a masterly _coup_ like that, nor could he withhold a certain tribute to the ability of the scoundrel responsible for it. Shaughnessy was a genius, burrowing in the dark places; where the searching sunlight would have been fatal.