It had begun already. Luke knew who Stein was, though the two had never met. The man’s title had been earned by a political appointment to fill the unexpired term of a judge that died while on the bench. Stein had begun his career as a young lawyer who specialized in damage suits against the N. Y. & N. J. railway. He was once charged, before the Bar Association—though the charges were never proved—with being a "hospital runner": that is, with employing men to hurry to the hospital, or the scenes of accidents, and induce victims to retain Stein to press their claims for damages against the railroad on which they had been injured. By devoting his best efforts against the N. Y. & N. J., he tried to make the corporation realize that it would be cheaper to employ him than to fight him, and he was, indeed, at last given a place on the legal staff of the company’s claim department. There was an ugly story to the effect that, for a brief time before this charge was openly announced, he received a salary from the road while apparently acting for claimants against it and inducing them to compromise their claims for trivial sums. It was a subject of common rumor at the New York Bar. Stein soon worked his way to the head of the claim department and thoroughly reorganized it. He used old tactics for his new employers: he had the news of all accidents immediately communicated to him, whereupon he would despatch his agents, with no loss of time, to the hospital, there to persuade the wounded, half stupefied by pain or drugs, to sign releases in return for pittances in ready money. It was said he built up a secret service, composed of men and women from private detective agencies, whose duty it was to discover discreditable secrets in the lives of such claimants as refused to compromise, or, failing in discovery, to manufacture or invent such incidents. One married woman from Syracuse, who had been injured in a wreck in New York and came there to press her suit, was inveigled into a friendship with a woman detective commissioned to engage a neighboring room in the house where the plaintiff took temporary lodgings. The detective succeeded in getting the claimant drunk and brought her, in this condition, with two of the road’s employees, to a house in which, when the four were partially unclothed, another detective took a flashlight photograph of them. Then when the victim’s case was called for trial, she was told that, unless she dropped her suit, the picture would be shown to her husband. By methods of this sort, Stein was said to have reduced his road’s expenses for damages by two-thirds in three years.