Bobby turned to her abruptly and with a trace of a frown. It was a rather poorly trained office employee, he thought, who would intrude herself into conversation that it was her duty to forget, but Biff Bates caught that look and stepped into the breach. "This is Nellie, Bobby--that is, it used to be Nellie," he stated with a quick correction, and blushed violently. "It is Nellie still," laughed that young lady to Bobby, and the puzzled look upon his face was swiftly driven away by a smile, as he suddenly recognized in her traces of the long-legged girl who had been always present at the Applerod Addition, who had ridden in his automobile, and had confided to him most volubly, upon innumerable occasions, that her brother Jimmy was about the smartest man who ever sighted through a transit. In the hastily constructed frame office out at the waterworks site, Ed Scales, pale and emaciated and with black rings under his eyes, looked up nervously as Bobby's little army, reenforced from four to six by the addition of a "plain clothes man" and Dillingham, the _Bulletin's_ star reporter, invaded the place. Before a word was spoken, Feeney, the plain clothes man, presented Scales with a writ, which the latter attempted to read with unseeing eyes, his fingers trembling. "What does this mean?" "That I have come to take possession," said Bobby, "with power to make an examination of every scrap of paper in the place. Frankly, Scales, we expect to find something crooked about the waterworks contract. If we do you know the result. If we do not, the interruption will be only temporary, and you will have very pretty grounds for action; for I am taking a long shot, and if I don't find what I am after I have put myself and the mayor into a bad scrape." Scales thrice opened his mouth to speak, and thrice there came no sound from his lips. Then he laid a bunch of keys upon his desk, shoving them toward Feeney, and rose. He half-staggered into the large coat room behind him. He had scarcely more than disappeared when there was the startling roar of a shot, and the body of Scales, with a round hole in the temple, toppled, face downward, out of the door. It was Scales' tragic confession of guilt. They sprang instantly to him, but nothing could be done for him. He was dead when they reached him. "Poor devil," said Ferris brokenly. "It is probably the first crooked thing he ever did in his life, and he hadn't nerve enough to go through with it. I feel like a murderer for my share in the matter." Bobby, too, had turned sick; his senses swam and he felt numb and cold. He was aroused by a calm, dispassionate voice at the telephone. It was Dillingham, sending to the _Bulletin_ a carefully lurid account of the tragedy, and of the probable causes leading up to it.