by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood

“ I said a minute ago, you had brains—but now, by Judas, I doubt it! If anyone else wanted a chance at the Bat, I'd give it to them and gladly—I'm hard-boiled. But you're too valuable a man to be thrown away! ”

“ And if I weren't so damn old, I'd go after the slippery devil myself and let you sit here and watch me get brought in with an infernal paper bat pinned where my shield ought to be. The Bat's supernatural, Anderson—you haven't a chance in the world but it does me good all the same to shake hands with a man with brains and nerve," and he solemnly wrung Anderson's hand in an iron grip. ”

“ Of course you had luck, Anderson—but that isn't the point. It takes a man with brains to use a piece of luck as you used it. I've waited a long time here for a man with your sort of brains—and, by Judas, for a while I thought they were all as dead as Pinkerton. ”

“ Where official trailer and private sleuth had failed, the newspapers might succeed—or so thought the disillusioned young men of the Fourth Estate—the tireless foxes, nose-down on the trail of news—the trackers, who never gave up until that news was run to earth. ”

“ Oh, of course, we've panned the police for not getting him—that's always the game. But, personally, I won't pan them; they've done their damnedest. They're up against something new. Scotland Yard wouldn't do any better—or any other bunch of cops that I know about."
"But look here, Bill, you don't mean to tell me he'll keep on getting away with it indefinitely?"
The editor frowned. "Confidentially—I don't know," he said with a chuckle: "The situation's this: for the first time the super-crook—the super-crook of fiction—the kind that never makes a mistake—has come to life—real life. ”

“ Gunmen, thugs, hijackers, loft-robbers, murderers, they could get them all in time—but they could not get the man he wanted.
"Get him—to hell with expense—I'll give you carte blanche—but get him!" said a haggard millionaire in the sedate inner offices of the best private detective firm in the country. The man on the other side of the desk, man hunter extraordinary, old servant of Government and State, sleuth-hound without a peer, threw up his hands in a gesture of odd hopelessness. "It isn't the money, Mr. ”