“Aw, that’s all right!  You g’wan out a’ here now an’ quit your foolin’!”

But criminals seemed to have conspired against Little Arcady, to cheat it of its rightful distinction.  In vain had Billy waited for a “case” to be sent him by the International Detective Agency.  In vain had he sought to develop one by his own ferreting genius.  Each week he searched the columns of the police paper in Harpin Gust’s barber-shop, fixing in his mind the lineaments of criminals there advertised as wanted in various corners of our land.  These were counterfeiters, murderers, embezzlers, horse-thieves, confidence men, what not—­criminals to satisfy a sleuth of the most catholic tastes; but they were all wanted elsewhere—­at Altoona, Pennsylvania, or Deming, New Mexico; at Portland, Maine, or Dodge City, Kansas.  In truth, the country elsewhere swarmed with Billy’s lawful prey, and only Little Arcady seemed good.

Billy also gloated over the portraits of well-known deputy sheriffs and other officers of the law printed in the same charming police paper.  It seemed not too much to hope that his own likeness might one day grace that radiant page—­himself in a long, fashionable overcoat, carelessly flung back to reveal the badge, with its never closing eye, and underneath, “William P. Durgin, the Dashing Young Detective, whose Coolness, Skill, and Daring have made his Name a Terror to Evil-Doers.”

Famished for adventure, thirsting for danger, yearning for the perilous midnight encounter, avid of secrecy and disguises, Billy had been forced to toil prosaically, barrenly, unprofitably, about the sinless corridors of the City Hotel.  All he had been able to do thus far was to regard every newcomer to the town with a steely eye of distrust; to watch each one furtively, to shadow him in his walks, and to believe during his sojourn that he might be “Red Mike, alias James K. Brown, wanted for safe-breaking at Muskegon, Michigan; reward, $1000,” or some like desperado.

As such did he view them all—­from the ornately garbed young man who came among us purveying windmills to the portly, broadclothed, gray-whiskered and forbiddingly respectable colporteur of the American Bible Society.  Some day would his keen gray eye penetrate the cunning disguise; some day would he step quietly up to his man and say in low but deadly tones:  “Come with me, now.  Make no trouble or it will be the worse for you.”  Whereupon the guilty wretch would blanch and say in shaking voice:  “My God, it’s Billy Durgin, the famous detective!  Don’t shoot—­I’ll come!”

Billy had faith that this dramatic episode would occur in the very office of the City Hotel, and he believed that some of those who had joked him about his life passion would thereafter treat him in a very different manner.

Though I had long won these facts from Billy, I had never known him to play his game so openly before.  But when I mentioned the thing to Solon, thinking to beguile him from his trouble, I found him more interested than I had thought he could be; for Solon knew Billy as well as I did,