When his brokerage commission had been deducted, Durkin was still able to claim as his own some forty-eight thousand dollars. It had been a game, for once, worth the candle. He walked out into the afternoon sunlight, pausing a moment at the doorway to drink in the clear wintry air of the open street. After all, it was worth while to be alive in such a world, with all its stir, with all its— His line of thought was suddenly disrupted. A tingle of apprehension, minute but immediate, was speeding up and down his backbone. “That’s your man,” a voice had said from the shadow of the doorway. Durkin took the two stones steps as one, and, without turning, hurried on. His eyes were half-closed as he went, counting his own quick footfalls and wondering how many of them might safely be taken to mean escape. He walked blindly, with no sense of direction, each moment demanding of himself if it meant defeat or freedom. At the twentieth step he felt a hand catch at the slack in his coat sleeve. He jerked a startled and indignant arm forward, but the clutch was one of steel. “I guess we want you, Jimmie Durkin,” said a grim but genial and altogether commonplace voice to him over his averted shoulder. Then Durkin turned. It was Doogan’s plain-clothes man, O’Reilly. Beside him stood a second plain-clothes man showing a corner of his Detective Bureau badge. “Well?” said Durkin, vacuously. The men drew in closer, sandwiching him compactly between them. It was a commonplace enough movement, but it made suddenly and keenly tangible to his mind the fact that he had lost his freedom. “For God’s sake, boys, whatever it is, don’t make a scene here!” cried the prisoner, passionately. “I’ll go easy enough, but don’t make a show of me.” “Come on, then, quick!” said the Central Office plain-clothes man, wheeling him about, and heading for the Old Slip Station. “Quick as you like,” laughed Durkin, very easily but very warily, as he calculated the time and distance between him and the sergeant’s desk, and told himself a second time admonitively that he was indeed under arrest. CHAPTER XXV Durkin, with an officer at either elbow, tried to think far ahead and to think fast. Yet try as he might, his desperate mind could find no crevice in the blind wall of his predicament. Nothing, at any rate, was to be lost by talking. “What’s this for, boys, anyhow?” he asked them, with sadly forced amiability. “Different things,” said Doogan’s man O’Reilly, noncommittally. “But who made the charge—who laid the complaint, I mean?” “’Tis an old friend of yours!” chuckled O’Reilly, thinking of other things. Durkin looked at the man studiously. “Not Robinson?” “And who’s Robinson?—better try another guess!” “Nor the Postal-Union people?” “And what have you been doin’ to _them_?” retorted the officer, as he gnawed at the corner of his tobacco plug and tucked it away in his vest pocket again.