By STACY AUMONIER

(From _The Strand Magazine_ and _The Saturday Evening Post_)

1921, 1922


In the public bar of the Wagtail, in Wapping, four men and a woman were
drinking beer and discussing diseases. It was not a pretty subject, and
the company was certainly not a handsome one. It was a dark November
evening, and the dingy lighting of the bar seemed but to emphasize the
bleak exterior. Drifts of fog and damp from without mingled with the
smoke of shag. The sanded floor was kicked into a muddy morass not
unlike the surface of the pavement. An old lady down the street had
died from pneumonia the previous evening, and the event supplied a
fruitful topic of conversation. The things that one could get!
Everywhere were germs eager to destroy one. At any minute the symptoms
might break out. And so--one foregathered in a cheerful spot amidst
friends, and drank forgetfulness.

Prominent in this little group was Baldwin Meadows, a sallow-faced
villain with battered features and prominent cheek-bones, his face cut
and scarred by a hundred fights. Ex-seaman, ex-boxer, ex-fish-porter
--indeed, to every one's knowledge, ex-everything. No one
knew how he lived. By his side lurched an enormous coloured man who
went by the name of Harry Jones. Grinning above a tankard sat a
pimply-faced young man who was known as The Agent. Silver rings adorned
his fingers. He had no other name, and most emphatically no address,
but he "arranged things" for people, and appeared to thrive upon it in
a scrambling, fugitive manner. The other two people were Mr. and Mrs.