Shirley pushed away his empty glass impatiently.

“There, Monty, I didn’t mean to offend you.  But there’s such swells in this and such a foxey bunch of blacklegs, that I’m as nervous as a rookie cop on his first arrest.  Don’t hold a grudge against me.”

Shirley lit a cigarette and resumed his good nature:  “Go on, Captain.  I’m so stale with dolce far niente, after the Black Pearl affair last month, that I act like an amateur myself.  Make it short, though, for I’m going to the opera.”

The Captain leaned over the table, his face tense with suppressed emotion.  He was a grizzled veteran of the New York police force:  a man who sought his quarry with the ferocity of a bull-dog, when the line of search was definitely assured.  Lacking imagination and the subtler senses of criminology, Captain Cronin had built up a reputation for success and honesty in every assignment by bravery, persistence, and as in this case, the ability to cover his own deductive weakness by employing the brains of others.

Montague Shirley was as antithetical from the veteran detective as a man could well be.  A noted athlete in his university, he possessed a society rating in New York, at Newport and Tuxedo, and on the Continent which was the envy of many a gilded youth born to the purple.

On leaving college, despite an ample patrimony, he had curiously enough entered the lists as a newspaper man.  From the sporting page he was graduated to police news, then the city desk, at last closing his career as the genius who invented the weekly Sunday thriller, in many colors of illustration and vivacious Gallic style which interpreted into heart throbs and goose-flesh the real life romances and tragedies of the preceding six days!  He had conquered the paper-and-ink world—­then deep within there stirred the call for participation in the game itself.

So, dropping quietly into the apparently indolent routine of club existence, he had devoted his experience and genius to analytical criminology—­a line of endeavor known only to five men in the world.

He maintained no offices.  He wore no glittering badges:  a police card, a fire badge, and a revolver license, renewed year after year, were the only instruments of his trade ever in evidence.  Shirley took assignments only from the heads of certain agencies, by personal arrangement as informal as this from Captain Cronin.  His real clients never knew of his participation, and his prey never understood that he had been the real head-hunter!

His fees—­Montague Shirley, as a master craftsman deemed his artistry worthy of the hire.  His every case meant a modest fortune to the detective agency and Shirley’s bills were never rendered, but always paid!

So, here, the hero of the gridiron and the class re-union, the gallant of a hundred pre-matrimonial and non-maturing engagements, the veteran of a thousand drolleries and merry jousts in clubdom—­unspoiled by birth, breeding and wealth, untrammeled by the juggernaut of pot-boiling and the salary-grind, had drifted into the curious profession of confidential, consulting criminal chaser.