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"Hello, Jameson, is Kennedy in?"
I glanced up from the evening papers to encounter the square-jawed,alert face of District Attorney Carton in the doorway of our apartment.
"How do you do, Judge?" I exclaimed. "No, but I expect him any secondnow. Won't you sit down?"
The District Attorney dropped, rather wearily I thought, into a chairand looked at his watch.
I had made Carton's acquaintance some years before as a cub reporter onthe Star while he was a judge of an inferior court. Our acquaintancehad grown through several political campaigns in which I had hadassignments that brought me into contact with him. More recently somespecial writing had led me across his trail again in telling the storyof his clean-up of graft in the city. At present his weariness waseasily accounted for. He was in the midst of the fight of his life forre-election against the so-called "System," headed by Boss Dorgan, inwhich he had gone far in exposing evils that ranged all the way fromvice and the drug traffic to bald election frauds.
"I expect a Mrs. Blackwell here in a few minutes," he remarked,glancing again at his watch. His eye caught the headline of the newsstory I had been reading and he added quickly, "What do the boys on theStar think of that Blackwell case, anyhow?"
It was, I may say, a case deeply shrouded in mystery—the disappearancewithout warning of a beautiful young girl, Betty Blackwell, barelyeighteen. Her family, the police, and now the District Attorney hadsought to solve it in vain. Some had thought it a kidnaping, others asuicide, and others had even hinted at murder. All sorts of theorieshad been advanced without in the least changing the original dominantnote of mystery. Photographs of the young woman had been publishedbroadcast, I knew, without eliciting a word in reply. Young men whomshe had known and girls with whom she had been intimate had beenquestioned without so much as a clue being obtained. Reports that shehad been see