I said I had. We went down to the street. Bill Quint told me he was living in the Miners’ Hotel in Forest Street. His way home ran past my hotel, so we walked down together. In front of my hotel a beefy fellow with the look of a plainclothes man stood on the curb and talked to the occupant of a Stutz touring car.

“That’s Whisper in the car,” Bill Quint told me.

I looked past the beefy man and saw Thaler’s profile. It was young, dark and small, with pretty features as regular as if they had been cut by a die.

“He’s cute,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” the gray man agreed, “and so’s dynamite.”