CHAPTER I
THE CITY OF PERIL
The fog groped and felt its way along the water-front. Then it crept up to the throat of the city, like a grey hand, and strangled Broadway into an ominous quietness.
It tightened its grip, as the day grew older, leaving the cross-streets from Union Square to the Battery clotted with congested traffic. It brought on an untimely protest of blinking street-lamps, as uncannily bewildering as the mid-day cock-crowing of a solar eclipse. It caused the vague and shadowy walls of skyscrapers to blossom into countless yellow window tiers, as close-packed as the scales of a snake. Bells sounded from gloom-wrapt shipping along the saw-tooth line of the river slips, tolling the watches and falling silent and tolling again, as they might have tolled in mid-ocean, or on some lonely waterway that led to the uttermost ends of the earth.
Now and then, out of the distance, a river-
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