The Amateur

MP3 Audio CD. The Amateur

I


It was February off the Banks, and so thick was the weather that, on
the upper decks, one could have driven a sleigh. Inside the smoking-room
Austin Ford, as securely sheltered from the blizzard as though he had
been sitting in front of a wood fire at his club, ordered hot gin for
himself and the ship’s doctor. The ship’s doctor had gone below on
another “hurry call” from the widow. At the first luncheon on board the
widow had sat on the right of Doctor Sparrow, with Austin Ford facing
her. But since then, except to the doctor, she had been invisible. So,
at frequent intervals, the ill health of the widow had deprived Ford of
the society of the doctor. That it deprived him, also, of the society
of the widow did not concern him. HER life had not been spent upon ocean
liners; she could not remember when state-rooms were named after the
States of the Union. She could not tell him of shipwrecks and salvage,
of smugglers and of the modern pirates who found their victims in the
smoking-room.

Ford was on his way to England to act as the London correspondent of the
New York Republic. For three years on that most sensational of the New
York dailies he had been the star man, the chief muckraker, the chief
sleuth. His interest was in crime. Not in crimes committed in passion or
inspired by drink, but in such offences against law and society as
are perpetrated with nice intelligence. The murderer, the burglar, the
strong-arm men who, in side streets, waylay respectable citizens did not
appeal to him. The man he studied, pursued, and exposed was the cashier
who evolved a new method of covering up his peculations, the dishonest
president of an insurance company, the confidence man who used no
concealed weapon other than his wit. Toward the criminals h