without doing his best to learn the truth. Now one way of accomplishing this offered itself to his fertile and ardent imagination.
Directly across the street from the Trine residence a colossal apartment structure stood half-finished, the gaunt iron skeleton rearing a web of steel stencilled against the shining sky. After certain precautionary maneuvers, Alan approached the watchman's shelter of the unfinished tenement. To his infinite disgust, Alan found the guardian very wide awake. This in itself might have been deemed a suspicious circumstance; not for nothing does an honest night watchman so deny the laws of nature and the tenets of his craft. But Alan overcame with banknotes what seemed an uncommonly stubborn reluctance, and got his way.
He could not know that another skulked behind a barrier of lime barrels and overheard all that passed. All ignorant, the young man addressed himself to an uncommonly unpleasant climb. The ladders were crazily constructed and none too securely poised, but at length he gained the gridiron of girders on a plane with the lighted window across the way, and crept along one of these, gingerly on his hands and knees, until he came to its end, and might, if he cared to, look down a hundred feet to the sidewalks.
That view, however, did not tempt; he kept his eyes level, and was rewarded with a bare glimpse of a
