The other guard, Howard, scanned his companion's face with mock care. "That ain't sayin' so much for him," he observed. But at once he began to evince real interest. "I maintain you can't tell anything from their faces," he answered seriously. "There's nothin' in it. The man's a crook, isn't he? Wasn't he caught red-handed?" "Let me tell you about it. I was interested in the case and found out all I could concerning it. He apparently showed up in Seattle some time during the summer of 1919, a crook of the crooks, as you say. No one knows where he came from--and that's queer in itself. You know very well that his face and form are going to be remembered and noticed, yet he wasn't in any rogue's gallery, in any city. Desperate crook though he was, no one had ever heard of him before he showed up in Seattle. "The crooks down there called him 'Wild' Kinney, and were pretty well scared of him. Swanson, one of the lieutenants of the Seattle force, whom I know well as I know you, told me that he was a power, sort of a king in the underworld from the very first, largely because he was afraid of nothing, absolutely desperate, and willing to take any chance. He wasn't a hop-head, yet they all looked at him as sort of queer; though ready to follow him to the last ditch, yet some way they thought him off his head. And Swanson believes that his career of crime started _after_ he reached Seattle, not before--that he hadn't grown up to crime like most of the men in his gang. He didn't know anything about the 'profession'--as far as skill went he was a rank amateur, but he made it up with daring and cunning. Once or twice he got in a fight down there, and they all agree he fought like a mad man, the most terrible fighter in the whole district, and it took about a half dozen to stop him." "You don't have to tell me that. Anybody who can swing a pick like that--" "Now let me tell you how they happened to catch him. Maybe you heard--he and Dago Frank were in the act of breaking into the Western-Danish Bank. Part of this I'm giving you now came straight from Frank himself. He says that they were in the alley, in the act of jimmying a window, and all at once Kinney straightened up as if something had hit him and let the jimmy fall with a thump to the pavement. Frank said he thought that the man had 'gone off his nut,' but it's my private opinion that he had been somewhat deranged all the time he was in Seattle, and he just came to, more or less, that minute. The man hardly seemed to know what he was doing. 'Have you lost your guts, Kinney?' Frank asked him; and Kinney stood there, staring like he didn't know he was being spoken to. He put his hands to his head, then, like a man with a headache. And the next instant a cop came running from the mouth of the alley.