This call of the trail is something that is stronger than anything else in Muller’s mentality, and now and then it brings him into conflict with the department, ... or with his own better nature.  Sometimes his unerring instinct discovers secrets in high places, secrets which the Police Department is bidden to hush up and leave untouched.  Muller is then taken off the case, and left idle for a while if he persists in his opinion as to the true facts.  And at other times, Muller’s own warm heart gets him into trouble.  He will track down his victim, driven by the power in his soul which is stronger than all volition; but when he has this victim in the net, he will sometimes discover him to be a much finer, better man than the other individual, whose wrong at this particular criminal’s hand set in motion the machinery of justice.  Several times that has happened to Muller, and each time his heart got the better of his professional instincts, of his practical common-sense, too, perhaps, ... at least as far as his own advancement was concerned, and he warned the victim, defeating his own work.  This peculiarity of Muller’s character caused his undoing at last, his official undoing that is, and compelled his retirement from the force.  But his advice is often sought unofficially by the Department, and to those who know, Muller’s hand can be seen in the unravelling of many a famous case.

The following stories are but a few of the many interesting cases that have come within the experience of this great detective.  But they give a fair portrayal of Muller’s peculiar method of working, his looking on himself as merely an humble member of the Department, and the comedy of his acting under “official orders” when the Department is in reality following out his directions.

JOE MULLER:  DETECTIVE

THE CASE OF THE POOL OF BLOOD IN THE PASTOR’S STUDY

by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner

I

The sun rose slowly over the great bulk of the Carpathian mountains lying along the horizon, weird giant shapes in the early morning mist.  It was still very quiet in the village.  A cock crowed here and there, and swallows flew chirping close to the ground, darting swiftly about preparing for their higher flight.  Janci the shepherd, apparently the only human being already up, stood beside the brook at the point where the old bridge spans the streamlet, still turbulent from the mountain floods.  Janci was cutting willows to make his Margit a new basket.

Once the shepherd raised his head from his work, for he thought he heard a loud laugh somewhere in the near distance.  But all seemed silent and he turned back to his willows.  The beauty of the landscape about him was much too familiar a thing that he should have felt or seen its charm.  The violet hue of the distant woods, the red gleaming of the heather-strewn moor, with its patches of swamp from which the slow mist arose, the pretty little village with its handsome old church and attractive rectory—­Janci had known it so long that he never stopped to realise how very charming, in its gentle melancholy, it all was.