_Police have taken your friend out of our hands; look out for trouble. Wilson._ “Who is Wilson?” Trant demanded. “I am not sure it is the man, but the captain of the _Elizabethan Age_ is a friend of father’s named Wilson!” “I can’t help you then, after all,” said Trant, springing back to his powerful car. He whispered a word to the chauffeur which sent it driving ahead through the drifts at double its former speed, leaving the little electric coupé far behind. Ten minutes later Rentland stopped the motor a block short of a great lighted doorway which suddenly showed in a length of dark, lowering buildings which lay beside the American Commodities Company’s Brooklyn docks. “Now,” the secret agent volunteered, “it is up to me to find Dickey’s ladder!” He guided Trant down a narrow, dark court which brought them face to face with a blank wall; against this wall a light ladder had been recently placed. Ascending it, they came into the dock inclosure. Descending again by a dozen rickety, disused steps, they reached a darker, covered teamway and hurried along it to the docks. Just short of the end of the open dock houses, where a string of arc lamps threw their white and flickering light upon the huge, black side of a moored steamer, Rentland turned into a little shed, and the two came suddenly upon Customs Officer Dickey. “This one next to us,” the little man whispered, eagerly, to Trant, as he grasped his hand, “is the scale house where whatever is being done is done—No. 3.” In and out of the yawning gangways of the steamer before them struggling lines of sweating men were wheeling trucks loaded with bales of tobacco. Trant looked first to the left, where the bales disappeared into the tobacco warehouse; then to the right, where, close at hand, each truck-load stopped momentarily on a scale platform in front of the low shed which bore the number Dickey indicated in a large white figure. “Who’s that?” asked Trant as a small figure, hardly five feet tall, cadaverous, beetle-browed, with cold, malignant, red-lidded eyes passed directly under the arc light nearest them. “Rowan, the dock superintendent!” Dickey whispered. “I knew he was small,” Trent returned with surprise, “but I thought surely he must have some fist to be the terror of these dock laborers.” “Wait!” Rentland, behind them, motioned. A bloated, menacing figure had suddenly swung clear of the group of dock laborers—a roustabout, goaded to desperation, with a fist raised against his puny superior. But before the blow had fallen another fist, huge and black, struck the man over Rowan’s shoulder with a hammer. He fell, and the dock superintendent passed on without a backward glance, the giant negro who had struck the blow following in his footsteps like a dog. “The black,” Rentland explained, “is Rowan’s bodyguard. He needs him.” “I see,” Trant replied. “And for Miss Rowan’s sake I am glad it was that way,” he added, enigmatically.