“Well, I don’t see that we can learn anything more here,” remarked Higgins when he had been in a number of chambers on the third floor.  “He evidently only used a few of these handsome apartments,” and he laughed as he looked around on the dilapidated rooms, with the plaster peeling from the walls, the windows half broken, and the doors falling from their hinges.

“Hark!” exclaimed Larry.  “Some one is coming!”

Footsteps sounded in the lower hall.

“That’s Storg, coming back!” cried Higgins.  “I hope he got his man.”

He leaned over the balustrade and called down: 

“Any luck, Storg?”

“No, he got away,” was the reply.  “He’s a good runner.  I couldn’t keep up to him.”

“Never mind,” consoled Higgins.  “Maybe it’s just as well.  We’d have trouble proving anything illegal against him, though I could have had him held on a charge of vagrancy until I investigated a bit.”

The officers, followed by Larry, left the ramshackle structure, with the wind whistling mournfully through the broken windows, and the shutters banging, while the doors creaked on the rusty and broken hinges.

“I wouldn’t want to stay there all alone at night,” thought the young reporter, as he started toward home.  “A man must have a strong motive to cause him to hide in there.  I’d like to find out what it is.  Perhaps I shall, some time.”

Larry spoke of the matter to Mr. Emberg the next day.  He said he thought it might be a good idea to devote some hours to working up the story, in an endeavor to learn who the queer man was.

“Still puzzling over your East Indian, eh?” asked the city editor.  “Well, there may be something in it, but just now I have something else for you to do.”

“Another flying-machine story?”

“Not exactly.  I’m going to give you a special assignment.”

Larry was all attention at once.  The best part of the newspaper life is being given a special assignment—­that is, put to work on a certain case, to the exclusion of everything else.  Every reporter dreams of the time when he shall become a special correspondent or given a special assignment.  It means that your time is your own, to a great extent; that you may go and come as you please; that your expense bills are seldom questioned, and that you may travel afar and see strange sights.  The only requirement, and it is not an easy one, is that you get the news, and get it in time for the paper.  Of course, it need not be said that you must let no other paper beat you, but this seldom occurs, as when a reporter is on a special assignment he works alone, and what he gets is his.  There are no other newspaper men to worry him.

So, when Mr. Emberg told Larry there was a special assignment for him, the young reporter’s heart beat high with hope.  He had often wished for one, but they had never come his way before, though to many on the Leader they were an old story.