(“Only stay the Hell out of Headquarters!” begged the Commissioner.) His staff consisted, in its entirety, of Patrolman Ottolenghi, a hot lay-preacher for the Exmouth Brethren, an obscure and dehydrated evangelical sect believed at City Hall—quite erroneously—to exert an enormous influence in the boondocks of Staten Island. When Cozenage struck out, windmills for miles around quivered; for this reason—and because of fear being the ingrained better part of Red Fred’s valor—the snailery bolted to a halt beside Manhattan’s own Javert.

“Good morning, Captain,” Red Fred greeted him, rather nervously. With Cozenage you never knew what was coming next; he had once read through one of Fred’s impassioned printed appeals to the Workers and Peasants of the Bronx and found nothing more to complain of than two dangling participles and an improper use of the ethical dative; and then proceeded to summons him for entering into the verbal indentureship of a minor without consent of a magistrate; a reference to Fred’s casual hiring of a high school boy to help pass out the pamphlets, which puzzled the bejeezus out of sixteen judges before being finally tossed out of court.

“You people from out of town?” Captain Cozenage now inquired gloomily of the caravan’s three passengers.

“Like the most, Pops,” Big Patsy answered, striving monstrously to counterfeit the personality he had assumed, but feeling, vaguely, that he was somehow not succeeding. With some earnest hope of mending matters, he added, “Just now on our way back to Muncie, Indiana, home of the largest mason-jar factory in the civilized world.”

The Captain nodded. “‘Native of Cyther’s cloudless clime,’” he intoned. “‘In silent suffering you paid the price/And expiated ancient cults of vice/With generations of forbidden crime.’”