“If Big Tim Sullivan could be killed and lie in the Morgue for days unrecognized, what chance do relatively unknown people like you great millionaires stand to be found, once dead? A dead capitalist, remember, is no more impressive than a dead streetcar conductor. If I got you into this house on the strength of Tom, as I got Tom to come in on the strength of you, what millionaire would refuse, for example, to go, in answer to a telephone message that his child had been run over and was now, let us say, at 128 East Seventy-ninth Street? Or that his wife, acting more or less as if she were intoxicated, was scattering money at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Twenty-ninth Street? And suppose the millionaire is bound and chloroformed, and taken to the top floor of a tenement hired by a humpback with red beard and one leg shorter than the other--same humpback not being really a humpback or red-bearded or a cripple, but a fake, to furnish false clues in advance--and this humpback has previously given fire-extinguishing hand-grenades to all the other tenants, as advertisements! Then we have a charge of dynamite inserted in the thoroughly prepared corpse of the millionaire--his face burned off in advance--and he is also soaked in inflammable material and set on fire. And the deed is done at 11 a.m.; so that all the children will be in school and all the adults awake and able to get out. Find you? Bits of flesh and sympathy for the poor humpback is all the police would find in that tenement. Oh! sir, you were wise to pay--very wise indeed!” Mr. Merriwether looked at the man a long time. He could not deny that to really desperate men such deeds offered no particular difficulty. The average crook is not dangerous to a millionaire; but a man like this is more than dangerous. He thought quickly and formed his conclusions accurately. “How are you going to make Tom marry one of the girls whose names you mentioned?” he asked, in the tone of voice one uses toward physicians. The man smiled slightly and said: “Oh, I am not going to do it. I don't care whether he marries or not. You must do that. But I'll tell you how, if you wish,--after McWayne gets here. Just think over the affair. It will put you in a more intelligently receptive frame of mind.” And with a pleasant smile the man took a little book bound in green leather and began to read.