Westley Keyts’s suggestion that Potts be weighted with pig-iron and dumped into the healing waters, drunk or sober, was the mere playfulness of an excellent butcher unpractised in sarcasm.  His offer to supply, free of cost, a quantity of pig-iron ample for the purpose left this hypothesis unavoidable, for Westley winked flagrantly and leered when he voiced it.

But a retribution subtler than mere drowning awaited the superfluous Potts; a retribution so simple of mechanism, so swift, so potent, and wrought with a talent so masterly, that the right of its instigator to the title of Boss of Little Arcady seemed to be unassailable for all future time.

At the very zenith of his heavenward flight Potts was brought low.  At the very nethermost point of his downward swoop Solon Denney was raised to a height so dizzy that even the erstwhile sceptic spirit of Westley Keyts abased itself before him, frankly conceding that diplomacy’s innocent and mush-like surface might conceal springs of a terrible potency.

Though Solon’s public mien for a week or more had been hint enough of his secret to those who knew him well, I was, possibly, the first to whom he confided it in words.

He sent for me one crisp October morning, and I rushed over to the Argus office, knowing that he must have matters of importance to communicate.

I found him pacing the little sanctum, scanning a still damp sheet of proof.  His brow was furrowed, but the lines were those of conscious power.  In the broken chair by the littered desk sat Billy Durgin, his eyes ablaze with the lust of the chase.  As I pushed into the dingy little room Solon halted in his walk and, with a flourish that did not entirely lack the dramatic, he handed me the narrow strip of paper.  The item was brief.

“Mrs. J. Rodney Potts, the estimable wife of Colonel J. Rodney Potts of this town, will arrive here from the East next Thursday to make her home among us.”

I looked up, to find them eager for my comment.

“Is it true?” I asked.

“It is,” said Solon.  “I shall meet the lady on the arrival of the eleven-eight train next Thursday.”

“Well—­what of it?”

“We are now about to see ‘what of it.’  My trusty and fearless young lieutenant here”—­he indicated Billy, who coughed in his hand and looked modestly out the window—­“is now about to beard Potts in his den and find out ‘what of it.’  I may say that we hope there will be a good deal of it.  I gather as much from the correspondence of the last three weeks with the lady referred to in that simple galley proof, which I set up and pulled with my own hands.  In this opinion I am not alone.  It is shared by my able and dauntless young coadjutor, before whom I can see a future so brilliant that you need smoked glasses to look at it very long at a time.”

The gallant young detective turned from the window.

“The hour has come to strike our blow,” he remarked, his brow contracting to a scowl that boded no good to a certain upright citizen of this great republic.