The Bat | Page 7

brains - but now, by Judas, I doubt it! If anyone else wanted a chance at the Bat, I'd give it to them and gladly - I'm hard-boiled. But you're too valuable a man to be thrown away!"
"I'm no more valuable than Wentworth would have been."
"Maybe not - and look what happened to him! A bullet hole in his heart - and thirty years of work that he might have done thrown away! No, Anderson, I've found two first-class men since I've been at this desk - Wentworth and you. He asked for his chance; I gave it to him - turned him over to the Government - and lost him. Good detectives aren't so plentiful that I can afford to lose you both."
"Wentworth was a friend of mine," said Anderson softly. His knuckles were white dints in the hand that gripped the chair. "Ever since the Bat got him I've wanted my chance. Now my other work's cleaned up - and I still want it."
"But I tell you - " began the chief in tones of high exasperation. Then he stopped and looked at his protege. There was a silence for a time.
"Oh, well - " said the chief finally in a hopeless voice. "Go ahead - commit suicide - I'll send you a 'Gates Ajar' and a card, 'Here lies a damn fool who would have been a great detective if he hadn't been so pig-headed.' Go ahead!"
Anderson rose. "Thank you, sir," he said in a deep voice. His eyes had light in them now. "I can't thank you enough, sir."
"Don't try," grumbled the chief. "If I weren't as much of a damn fool as you are I wouldn't let you do it. And if I weren't so damn old, I'd go after the slippery devil myself and let you sit here and watch me get brought in with an infernal paper bat pinned where my shield ought to be. The Bat's supernatural, Anderson. You haven't a chance in the world but it does me good all the same to shake hands with a man with brains and nerve," and he solemnly wrung Anderson's hand in an iron grip. Anderson smiled. "The cagiest bat flies once too often," he said. "I'm not promising anything, chief, but - "
"Maybe," said the chief. "Now wait a minute, keep your shirt on, you're not going out bat hunting this minute, you know - "
"Sir? I thought I - "
"Well, you're not," said the chief decidedly. "I've still some little respect for my own intelligence and it tells me to get all the work out of you I can, before you start wild-goose chasing after this - this bat out of hell. The first time he's heard of again - and it shouldn't be long from the fast way he works - you're assigned to the case. That's understood. Till then, you do what I tell you - and it'll be work, believe me!"
"All right, sir," Anderson laughed and turned to the door. "And - thank you again."
He went out. The door closed. The chief remained for some minutes looking at the door and shaking his head. "The best man I've had in years - except Wentworth," he murmured to himself. "And throwing himself away - to be killed by a cold-blooded devil that nothing human can catch - you're getting old, John Grogan - but, by Judas, you can't blame him, can you? If you were a man in the prime like him, by Judas, you'd be doing it yourself. And yet it'll go hard - losing him - "
He turned back to his desk and his papers. But for some minutes he could not pay attention to the papers. There was a shadow on them - a shadow that blurred the typed letters - the shadow of bat's wings.
CHAPTER TWO
THE INDOMITABLE MISS VAN GORDER
Miss Cornelis Van Gorder, indomitable spinster, last bearer of a name which had been great in New York when New York was a red-roofed Nieuw Amsterdam and Peter Stuyvesant a parvenu, sat propped up in bed in the green room of her newly rented country house reading the morning newspaper. Thus seen, with an old soft Paisley shawl tucked in about her thin shoulders and without the stately gray transformation that adorned her on less intimate occasions, - she looked much less formidable and more innocently placid than those could ever have imagined who had only felt the bite of her tart wit at such functions as the state Van Gorder dinners. Patrician to her finger tips, independent to the roots of her hair, she preserved, at sixty-five, a humorous and quenchless curiosity in regard to every side of life, which even the full and crowded years that already lay behind her had not entirely satisfied. She