With a screaming of brakes the elevated train on which I happened to be jerked to a stop and
passengers intending to disembark were catapulted toward the doorways a convenience supplied
gratis by all elevated roads which I have observed is generally overlooked by their patrons.
I crammed the morning paper into my overcoat pocket fell in with the outrushing current of
humanity and was straightway swept upon the platform pinched through the revolving gates and
hustled down the covered iron stairway to the street. Here the current broke up and diffused
like the current of a river where it empties into the sea. This was the first wave of the daily
townward tide clerks shop-girls and stenographers for the most part intent upon bread and
butter in futuro. The jostling and crowding was like an old story to me I went through the
ordeal each morning with an indifference and abstraction born of long custom. The time of the
year was January the year itself 1892. A clear cold air with just enough frost in it to stir
sluggish blood induced one to walk briskly. It was still too early in the day for the usual
down-town crowd and I proceeded as fast as I wanted to allowing my thoughts to dwell
undisturbed on the big news topic of the day which I had just been reading. And so I did as I
strode along with the concern of one whose interest is remote yet in a way affected. [...]
Reprint of the detective novel originally published in 1910.
