Chapter 2
OVER my solitary dinner in a Pearl Street lunch-room I puzzled over that question with knitted brows, but came no nearer to the answer. It was generally that way when I tried to follow the strange thoughtways of the police commissioner. In all the years that I had known him he had invariably baffled me, and yet I was closer to him than any other person.
More than anything else in the world, Thatcher Colt was afraid of being exposed in his true personality as a sentimentalist. He could sit at his desk and deride all human feelings as glandular and depraved, and at that very moment have in his pocket a just-composed sonnet to the red-headed girl who had ditched him for a duke while he was fighting in France. I had known him some years before that disastrous romance, having met hi
