“You know this man?” asked the lieutenant.

“Yes,” she replied.  “His name is Torrance.  I have seen him a number of times in the past year.  He worked as a clerk in a store, in the hosiery department, and waited on me there.  Later I”—­she hesitated—­“I saw him in a place called Feinheimer’s.  He was a waiter.  Then he was a sparring partner, I think they call it, for a prizefighter.  Some of my friends took me to a gymnasium to see the fighter training, and I recognized this man.

“I saw him again when he was driving a milk-wagon.  He delivered milk at a friend’s house where I chanced to be.  The last time I saw him was at my father’s home.  He had obtained employment in my father’s plant as an efficiency expert.  He seemed to exercise some strange power over father, who believed implicitly in him, until recently, when he evidently commenced to have doubts; for the night that the man was at our house I was sitting in the music-room when they passed through the hallway, and I heard father discharge him.  But the fellow pleaded to be retained, and finally father promised to keep him for a while longer, as I recall it, at least until certain work was completed at the plant.  This work was completed yesterday.  That’s all I know.  I do not know whether father discharged him again or not.”

Harriet Holden had accompanied her friend to the police station, and was sitting close beside her during the examination, her eyes almost constantly upon the face of the prisoner.  She saw no fear there, only an expression of deep-seated sorrow for her friend.

The lieutenant was still asking questions when there came a knock at the door, which was immediately opened, revealing O’Donnell with a young woman, whom he brought inside.

“I guess we’re getting to the bottom of it,” announced the sergeant.  “Look who I found workin’ over there as Compton’s stenographer.”

“Well, who is she?” demanded the lieutenant.

“A jane who used to hang out at Feinheimer’s.  She has been runnin’ around with this bird.  They tell me over there that Compton hired her on this fellow’s recommendation.  Get hold of the Lizard now, and you’ll have the whole bunch.”

Thus did Sergeant Patrick O’Donnell solve the entire mystery with Sherlockian ease and despatch.

At Jimmy’s preliminary hearing he was held to the grand jury, and on the strength of the circumstantial evidence against him that body voted a true bill.  Edith Hudson, against whom there was no evidence of any nature, was held as a witness for the State, and a net was thrown out for the Lizard which dragged in nearly every pickpocket in town except the man they sought.

Jimmy had been in jail for about a week when he received a visitor.  A turnkey brought her to his cell.  It was Harriet Holden.  She greeted him seriously but pleasantly, and then she asked the turnkey if she might go inside.

“It’s against the rules, miss,” he said “but I guess it will be all right.”  He recalled that the sheriff had said that the girl’s father was a friend of his, and so assumed that it would be safe to relax the rules in her behalf.  He had been too long an employee of the county not to know that rules are often elastic to the proper pressure.