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Rh I wonder why Miller hasn't come back? It doesn't look good to me."

"Look!" Porter exclaimed, touching his superior's arm. "That man. He has walked twice past the mouth of that alley; there he goes in! Think we had better trail along?"

"No. Give Miller a chance. If he gets in any trouble he'll blow his whistle."

For a few minutes longer they waited in silence, and at length Miller appeared from the shadows of the alleyway and hastened across the avenue toward them.

"Did you see that man?" he asked. "I had a narrow squeak, I can tell you. That was Sims, Farley Drew's valet!"

"What have you been doing all this time?" Odell demanded. "Does that alley extend through the block?" "No. It ends in a blank wall midway, back of that butcher shop, I should say," Miller responded. "There are doors opening on it from all the shops as far as it reaches, and windows, too; but the back room of the tailor's is the only one lighted up. The door was locked and the window fastened and covered with a shade; but the glass in the lower sash of that window is broken by what looks like a bullet-hole, and the shade is ripped. I ought to have come back and reported at once, I suppose; but I put my eye to that hole and I thought you would want to know what was going on in there. A young, smoothed-faced, blond-haired man was sitting at a table—I guessed that was your bird—and facing him was an older man, nearly forty, I judge, who looked like a dissipated swell.

"He talked so low that I couldn't hear what he said but