start out again after seven o'clock and go over the same ground as in
the morning, looking with strained gaze, that vainly endeavored to
appear unconcerned, into the faces of the women that he passed. I not
unfrequently followed him at these times as much for my own amusement
as from any hope I had of coming upon anything that should aid me in
the work before me. But when he suddenly changed his route of travel
from a promenade in the fashionable thoroughfares of Broadway and
Fourteenth Street to a walk through Chatham Square and the dark,
narrow streets of the East side, I began to scent whom the prey might
be that he was seeking, and putting every other consideration aside,
regularly set myself to dog his steps, as only I, with my innumerable
disguises, knew how to do. For three separate days I kept at his
heels wherever he went, each day growing more and more astonished if
not to say hopeful, as I found myself treading the narrowest and most
disreputable streets of the city; halting at the shops of
pawnbrokers; peering into the back-rooms of liquor shops; mixing with
the crowds that infest the corner groceries at nightfall, and even
slinking with hand on the trigger of the pistol I carried in my
pocket, up dark alleys where every door that swung noiselessly to and
fro as we passed, shut upon haunts of such villainy as only is known
to us of the police, or to those good souls that for the sake of One
whose example they follow, lay aside their fears and sensitiveness to
carry light into the dim pits of this wretched world. At first I
thought Mr. Blake might have some such reason for the peculiar course
he took. But his indifference to all crowds where only men were
collected, his silence where a word would have been well received,
convinced me it was a woman he was seeking and that with an intentness
which blinded him to the commonest needs of the hour. I even saw him
once in his hurry and abstraction, step across the body of a child
who had fallen face downward on the stones, and that with an