Stork coughed slightly to attract Crewe’s attention.

“If you please, sir,” he said, “the boy has come.”

While Crewe was busy with his magnifying glass Stork returned with the boy who had accompanied Crewe on his visit to Riversbrook on the previous day.

The boy, a thin white-faced, sharp-eyed London street urchin, seemed curiously out of place in the handsomely furnished office, with his legs tucked up under the carved rail of a fine old oak chair, and his big dark eyes fixed intently on Crewe’s face.  The tie between him and the detective was an unusual one.  It dated back some twelve months, when Crewe, in the investigation of a peculiarly baffling crime, found it advisable to disguise himself and live temporarily in a crowded criminal quarter of Islington.  The rooms he took were above a secondhand clothing shop kept by a drunken female named Leaver; a supposed widow who lived at the back of the shop with her two children, Lizzie, a bold-eyed girl of 17, who worked at a Clerkenwell clothing factory, and Joe, a typical Cockney boy of fourteen, who sold papers in the streets during the day and was fast qualifying for a thief at night when Crewe went to the place to live.

Crewe soon discovered, through overhearing a loud quarrel between his landlady and her daughter, that Mrs. Leaver’s husband was alive, though dead to his wife for all practical purposes, inasmuch as he was serving a life’s imprisonment for manslaughter.  A fortnight after he had taken up his temporary quarters above the shop the woman was removed to the hospital suffering from the effects of a hard drinking bout, and died there.  The girl disappeared, and the boy would have been turned out on the streets but for Crewe, who had taken a liking to him.  Joe was self-reliant, alert, and precocious, like most London street boys, but in addition to these qualities he had a vein of imagination unusual in a lad of his upbringing and environment.  He devoured the exciting feuilleton stories in the evening papers he vended, and spent his spare pennies at the cinema theatres in the vicinity of his poor home.  His appreciation of the crude mysteries of the filmed detective drama amused the famous expert in the finer art of actual crime detection, until he discovered that the boy possessed natural gifts of intuition and observation, combined with penetration.  Crewe grew interested in developing the boy’s talent for detective work.  When the lad’s mother died Crewe decided to take him into his Holborn offices as messenger-boy.  Crewe soon discovered that Joe had a useful gift for “shadowing” work, and his street training as a newspaper runner enabled him not only to follow a person through the thickest of London traffic, but to escape observation where a man might have been noticed and suspected.

“Well, Joe,” said Crewe, as the boy entered on the heels of Stork, “I have a job for you this morning.  I want you to find the glove corresponding to this one.”