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Post, Melville Davisson, 1871?-1930

"The Sleuth of St. James's Square"

They
never do any of the things that the story writers tell us. They
never carry jewels about with them. Of course they know the
police departments of foreign cities. All jewel dealers make a
point of that. Hargrave's father was an old friend of Sir Henry
Marquis, chief of the C. I. D., and the young man always went to
see him when he happened in London. That explains the freedom of
his talk to Hargrave on this night in the Empire Club in
Piccadilly.
The young man went over and sat down by the fire. The big room
was empty. The sounds outside seemed muffled and distant. The
incident that had just passed impressed him. He wondered why
people should imagine that a purchasing agent of a jewel house
must be a sort of expert in the devices of mystery. As has been
said, the thing's a notion. Everything is shipped through
reliable transportation companies and insured. There was much
more mystery in a shipload of horses - the nine hundred horses
that were galloping through the head of Sir Henry Marquis - than
in all the five prosaic years during which young Hargrave had
succeeded his father as a jewel buyer.


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