Calvin was dressed by the time the telephone rang again and he received a brief report from Denson, the substance of which was that the case against Ketlar was just about perfect and that Ketlar was being held along with a girl named Royle, who was "mixed up with him."
Denson strongly suggested that Ketlar had put his wife out of the way for the sake of the Royle girl; and this was likely enough, Calvin thought, as he drove off alone on his way to the city. Such an act was a common occurrence among the lawless nomads here to-day and gone to-morrow, lacking birth, lacking breeding, lacking education, training and self-control—the people who crowded the cities to-day.
Calvin repeated the name "Ketlar," guessing at its nationality. It bore to him no distinct association. It might be Swedish, or it might as well be German or Swiss or one of the names derived from the Magyar or from another alien race. Very likely no pure blood of any people flowed in Ketlar's veins; very likely there ran in him a turgid stream of traits descended to him out of a welter of indiscriminate matings of men and girls of many bloods who had reached America in recent years.
Calvin thought of the faces which he encountered on every Chicago street, characterless faces, weak, shallow, vain, distinguished by no true feature of any great race, the faces of the many-bloods who made for themselves a virtue of their minglings and boasted that, because they were most mixed, they were most American.
The idea further aroused Calvin and further offended him. How these men and women, these new Americans, defied the law! How they flouted the principles of right and order brought to this country and established and spread and defended by men of the old American stock, inheriting and handing down a habit of self-control and
