garden. He was squarely, brutally built, was clad in blue, wore a white felt hat, jauntily creased, and as he passed cut at a flower with his light rattan cane. As he drew close Collins saw his face, yellow-brown; and set in this yellow-brown face, two eyes, white-gray, opaque, without light; two eyes hard like metal. Furtively the garotter bent his head; he coughed behind his hand, which had risen to hide his face. The man stopped, glanced sharply down upon him, then seized the upraised hand, jerking it roughly from the face. His white-gray eyes set themselves stonily into those of the thug, which immediately escaped to the right, then to the left, then to the ground. The blue-clad man laughed silently.
“So you’re back, eh, Thurston?” he said. He spoke lightly, and his heavy sallow face showed no emotion; yet into it, bending downward on the bowed head of the other, there seemed to creep, somehow, a dull menace. “Back again,” he repeated musingly; “and you thought I wasn’t going to make you!” He chuckled with
