Page:Arthur Stringer - The Shadow.djvu/45

 club stewards and a word or two of approval from his head office.

That head office, seeing that they had a man to be reckoned with, transferred Blake to their Eastern division, with headquarters at New York, where new men and new faces were at the moment badly needed.

They worked him hard, in that new division, but he never objected. He was sober; he was dependable; and he was dogged with the doggedness of the unimaginative. He wanted to get on, to make good, to be more than a mere "operative." And if his initial assignments gave him little but "rough-neck" work to do, he did it without audible complaint. He did bodyguard service, he handled strike breakers, he rounded up freight-car thieves, he was given occasionally "spot" and "tailing" work to do. Once, after a week of upholstered hotel lounging on a divorce case he was sent out on night detail to fight river pirates stealing from the coal-road barges.

In the meantime, being eager and unsatisfied, he studied his city. Laboriously and