That was not an ordinary jab with an ordinary cane which Cleggett
had directed towards the toolhouse door. It was a thrust en
carte; the thrust of a brilliant swordsman; the thrust of a
master; a terrible thrust. It was meant for as pernicious a
bravo as ever infested the pages of romantic fiction. Cleggett
had been slaying these gentry a dozen times a day for years. He
had pinked four of them on the way across the bridge, before
McCarthy, with his stomach and his realism, stopped the lunge
intended for the fifth. But this is not exactly the sort of
thing one finds it easy to confide to a policeman, be he ever so
friendly a policeman.

Cleggett--Old Clegg, the copyreader--Clegg, the commonplace--C.
J. Cleggett, the Brooklynite-this person whom young reporters
conceived of as the staid, dry prophet of the dusty Fact--was
secretly a mighty reservoir of unwritten, unacted, unlived,
unspoken romance. He ate it, he drank it, he breathed it, he
dreamed it. The usual copyreader, when he closes his eyes and
smiles upon a pleasant inward vision, is thinking of starting a
chicken-farm in New Jersey. But Cleggett--with gray sprinkled in
his hair, sober of face and precise of manner, as the world knew
him--lived a hidden life which was one long, wild adventure.

Nobody had ever suspected it. But his room might have given to
the discerning a clue to the real man behind the mask which he
assumed--which he had been forced to assume in order to earn a
living. When he reached the apartment, a few minutes after his
encounter on the bridge, and switched the electric light on, the
gleams fell upon an astonishing clutter of books and arms. . . .