The Bartlett Mystery Part 43

"Do you know what happened to a frog when he tried to emulate a bull?"

he said.

"I know what happened to a bull one night in East Orange," came the ready retort.

"The solitary slip in an otherwise unblemished career," sighed the chief. "Make the most of it, little man. If I allowed myself to dwell on your many blunders I'd lie down and die."

Winifred never really understood these two. She thought their bickering was genuine.

"Why," she cried, "you are wonderful, both of you! From the very beginning you peered into the souls of those evil men. You, Mr. Clancy, seemed to sense a great mystery the moment you heard Rachel Craik speak to the Senator outside the club that night. As for you, Mr. Steingall, do you know what the lawyers told Rex and me soon after our marriage?"

"No, ma'am," said Steingall.

"They said that if you hadn't sent Rex's mother to Atlantic City we might never have recovered a cent of the stolen money. Sheer bluff, they called it. We would have had the greatest difficulty in establis.h.i.+ng a legal case."

Steingall weighed the point for a moment.

"Sometimes I'm inclined to think that the police know more about human nature than any other set of men," he said, at last, evidently choosing his words with care. "Perhaps I might except doctors. They, too, see us as we are. But the dry legal mind does not allow sufficiently for what is called in every-day speech a guilty conscience. In this case these people knew they had done you and your father and mother a great wrong, and that knowledge was never absent from their thoughts. It colored every word they uttered, governed every action. That's a heavy handicap, ma'am. It's the deciding factor in the never-ending struggle between the police and the criminal cla.s.ses. The most callous crook walking Broadway in freedom to-night--a man who would scoff at the notion that he is bothered by any conscience at all--never pa.s.ses a policeman without an instinctive sense of danger. And that is what beats him in the long run.

Crime may be a form of lunacy--indeed, I look on it in that light myself--but, luckily for mankind, crime cannot stifle conscience."

The chief's tone had become serious; he appeared to awake to its gravity when he found the young wife's eyes fixed on his with a certain awe. He broke off the lecture suddenly.

"Why," he cried, smiling broadly, and jerking the cigar toward Clancy, "why, ma'am, if we cops hadn't some sort of a pull, what chance would a shrimp like him have against any one of real intelligence?"

"That's what he regards as handing me a lemon for my Orange," grinned Clancy.

Winifred laughed. The curtain can drop on the last act of her adventures to the mirthful music of her happiness.

THE END