“Who is that?” asked Kennedy, in a low tone, of the pickpocket back of us.

“Coke Brodie,” was the laconic reply.

“A cocaine fiend?”

“Yes, and a lobbygow for the grapevine system of selling the dope under this new law.”

“Where does he get the supply to sell?” asked Kennedy, casually.

The pickpocket shrugged his shoulders.

“No one knows, I suppose,” Kennedy commented to me.  “But he gets it in spite of the added restrictions and peddles it in little packets, adulterated, and at a fabulous price for such cheap stuff.  The habit is spreading like wildfire.  It is a fertile means of recruiting the inmates in the vice-trust hotels.  A veritable epidemic it is, too.  Cocaine is one of the most harmful of all habit-forming drugs.  It used to be a habit of the underworld, but now it is creeping up, and gradually and surely reaching the higher strata of society.  One thing that causes its spread is the ease with which it can be taken.  It requires no smoking-dens, no syringe, no paraphernalia—­only the drug itself.”

Another singer had taken the place of the dancers.  Kennedy leaned over and whispered to the dip.

“Say, do you and your gun-moll want to pick up a piece of change to get that mouthpiece I heard you talking about?”

The pickpocket looked at Craig suspiciously.

“Oh, don’t worry; I’m all right,” laughed Craig.  “You see that fellow, Coke Brodie?  I want to get something on him.  If you will frame that sucker to get away with a whole front, there’s a fifty in it.”

The dip looked, rather than spoke, his amazement.  Apparently Kennedy satisfied his suspicions.

“I’m on,” he said quickly.  “When he goes, I’ll follow him.  You keep behind us, and we’ll deliver the goods.”

“What’s it all about?” I whispered.

“Why,” he answered, “I want to get Brodie, only I don’t want to figure in the thing so that he will know me or suspect anything but a plain hold-up.  They will get him; take everything he has.  There must be something on that man that will help us.”

Several performers had done their turns, and the supply of the drug seemed to have been exhausted.  Brodie rose and, with a nod to Loraine, went out, unsteadily, now that the effect of the cocaine had worn off.  One wondered how this shuffling person could ever have carried through the wild dance.  It was not Brodie who danced.  It was the drug.

The dip slipped out after him, followed by the woman.  We rose and followed also.  Across the city Brodie slouched his way, with an evident purpose, it seemed, of replenishing his supply and continuing his round of peddling the stuff.

He stopped under the brow of a thickly populated tenement row on the upper East Side, as though this was his destination.  There he stood at the gate that led down to a cellar, looking up and down as if wondering whether he was observed.  We had slunk into a doorway.