. If
that is really the track of discovery, why haven't you followed it up at once,
either personally or by sending one of your men to that village?«
    »Do you think, sir, I have failed in my duty there?« the Chief Inspector
asked, in a tone which he sought to make simply reflective. Forced unexpectedly
to concentrate his faculties upon the task of preserving his balance, he had
seized upon that point, and exposed himself to a rebuke; for, the Assistant
Commissioner, frowning slightly, observed that this was a very improper remark
to make.
    »But since you've made it,« he continued, coldly, »I'll tell you that this
is not my meaning.«
    He paused, with a straight glance of his sunken eyes which was a full
equivalent of the unspoken termination and you know it. The head of the
so-called Special Crimes Department debarred by his position from going out of
doors personally in quest of secrets locked up in guilty breasts, had a
propensity to exercise his considerable gifts for the detection of incriminating
truth upon his own subordinates. That peculiar instinct could hardly be called a
weakness. It was natural. He was a born detective. It had unconsciously governed
his choice of a career, and if it ever failed him in life it was perhaps in the
one exceptional circumstance of his marriage - which was also natural. It fed,
since it could not roam abroad upon the human material which was brought to it
in its official seclusion. We can never cease to be ourselves.
    His elbow on the desk, his thin legs crossed and nursing his cheek in the
palm of his meagre hand, the Assistant Commissioner in charge of the Special
Crimes branch was getting hold of the case with growing interest. His Chief
Inspector, if not an absolutely worthy foeman of his penetration, was at any
rate the most worthy of all within his reach. A mistrust of established
reputations was strictly in character with the Assistant Commissioner's ability
as detector. His memory evoked a certain old fat and wealthy native chief in the
distant colony whom it was a tradition for the successive Colonial Governors to
trust and make much of as a firm friend and supporter of the order and legality
established by white men; whereas, when examined sceptically, he was found out
to be principally his own good friend, and nobody else's. Not precisely a
traitor, but still a man of many dangerous reservations in his fidelity, caused
by a due regard for his own advantage, comfort, and safety. A fellow of some
innocence
