He bowed again and went out.

Briggs rose from his knees and his master snapped an angry stare from the door that the young man had closed softly behind himself.

“What kind of a resort is my office getting to be?  Do you know who that devilish fool is, Briggs?”

“No, sir.  He has been hanging around here, that’s all I know.  I kept at him.”  He made a little dab of his woodpecker beak.  “But I couldn’t find out anything from him.”

“Well find out from somebody else, then.  And get judge Warren on the ’phone for me.”

When the bell rang and the colonel heard the voice of the Consolidated’s corporation counsel greeting him on the wire he ordered the judge to come over at once.

“Hell has just burned through here in three small patches,” stated the colonel, grimly.  “The sooner we turn on the Consolidated hose, the better.”

In the early dusk of a summer evening Mr. Peter Briggs stood at the edge of the sidewalk of one of the squalid avenues of the district of the tenement-houses of Marion.  His hands were behind him, propping out his coat-tails.  He kept peering at the gloomy stairway of a house near at hand.  Take the gloom, his attitude, and his sooty garb, and he gave a very picturesque impression of a raven doing sentinel duty.

At last a tall young man came down the stairs which Mr. Briggs was watching and strolled off leisurely up the avenue, stopping here and there to chat, nodding to this man, flourishing a hand salute to that man.  The young man apparently had nothing whatever on his mind except to enjoy a stroll in the summer evening.

Mr. Briggs watched him out of sight without moving from his tracks.  Then he withdrew both hands from under his coat-tails.  In one hand was a note-book, in the other hand was a pencil.  Mr. Briggs made an entry, closed the book with decision, and snapped an elastic band around the covers.  Then he made off toward his home.  He lived up-town in a section where there were fewer smells and better scenery.  He determined that this should be his last tour of surveillance.  He had found his trips into the nooks and crannies of the Eleventh Ward to be very distasteful employment for a man who had served Colonel Dodd for so many years in the sumptuous surroundings of that office in the First National block.

He asked himself what would be the use of hunting for any more information regarding such an inconsequential individual as one Walker Farr?  He wondered why this crank had impressed Colonel Symonds Dodd sufficiently to stir up all this trouble for himself, Peter Briggs.  The fellow had come from somewhere—­nobody in Marion seemed to know.  He had been discharged from the employment of the Consolidated.  Now he was going about, warning all the people to boil the city water they drew from the faucets.  He seemed to be a crank on the water subject, so Peter Brigg’s note-book recorded.

The book also recorded that this queer Walker Farr strolled about the streets in the poorer quarters, “currying favor”:  so Peter Briggs expressed the young man’s evening activities in the note-book.  That seemed to be all there was to it.  At any rate, Peter Briggs decided that he had finished his quest.