"That means that you know only half of it," Bainbridge asserted with cheerful dogmatism. "You're thinking of the crooks it turns out, 'which it is your nature to.' But Griswold wasn't looking for the crooks; he was eternally and everlastingly breaking his heart over the sodden miseries. One night he stumbled into a cellar somewhere down in the East Side lower levels, looking for a fellow he had been trying to find work for; a crippled 'longshoreman. When he got into the place he found the man stiff and cold, the woman with the death rattle in her throat, and a two-year-old baby creeping back and forth between the dead father and the dying mother--starvation, you know, straight from the shoulder. They say it doesn't happen; but it does." "Of course it does!" growled the listener. "_I_ know." "We all know; and most of us drop a little something into the hat and pass on. But Griswold isn't built that way. He jumped into the breach like a man and tried to save the mother. It was too late, and when the woman died he took the child to his own eight-by-ten attic and nursed and fed it until the missionary people took it off his hands. He did that, mind you, when he was living on two meals a day, himself; and I'm putting it up that he went shy on one of them to buy milk for that kid." "Holy Smoke!--and he calls himself an anarchist?" was the gruff comment. "It's a howling pity there ain't a lot more just like him--what?" "That is what I say," Bainbridge agreed. Then, with a sudden twinge of remorse for having told Griswold's story to a stranger, he changed the subject with an abrupt question. "Where are you headed for, Broffin?" The man who might have passed for a steamboat captain or a plantation overseer, and was neither, chuckled dryly. "You don't expect me to give it away to you, and you a newspaper man, do you? But I will--seeing you can't get it on the wires. I'm going down to Guatemala after Mortsen." "The Crescent Bank defaulter? By Jove! you've found him at last, have you?" The detective nodded. "It takes a good while, sometimes, but I don't fall down very often when there's enough money in it to make the game worth the candle. I've been two years, off and on, trying to locate Mortsen: and now that I've found him, he is where he can't be extradited. All the same, I'll bet you five to one he goes back with me in the next steamer--what? Have a new smoke. No? Then let's go and turn in; it's getting late in the night." III THE RIGHT OF MIGHT Two days after the supper at Chaudiere's and the clearing of the fruit steamer _Adelantado_ for the banana coast, or, more specifically, in the forenoon of the second day, the unimpetuous routine of the business quarter of New Orleans was rudely disturbed by the shock of a genuine sensation.