XI + 

As soon as I was alone with the dead man I stepped over him and knelt in front of the safe, pushing letters and papers away, hunting for photographs. None was in sight. One compartment of the safe was locked. + 

I frisked the corpse. No key. The locked compartment wasn’t very strong, but neither am I the best safe-burglar in the West. It took me a while to get into it. + 

What I wanted was there. A thick sheaf of negatives. A stack of prints⁠—half a hundred of them. + 

I started to run through them, hunting for the Banbrock girls’ pictures. I wanted to have them pocketed before Pat came back. I didn’t know how much farther he would let me go. + 

Luck was against me⁠—and the time I had wasted getting into the compartment. He was back before I had got past the sixth print in the stack. Those six had been⁠—pretty bad. + 

“Well, that’s done,” Pat growled at me as he came into the room. “Dick’s got her. Elwood is dead, and so is the only one of the Negroes I saw upstairs. Everybody else seems to have beat it. No bulls have shown⁠—so I put in a call for a wagonful.” + 

I stood up, holding the sheaf of negatives in one hand, the prints in the other. + 

“What’s all that?” he asked. + 

I went after him again. + 

“Photographs. You’ve just done me a big favor, Pat, and I’m not hoggish enough to ask another. But I’m going to put something in front of you, Pat. I’ll give you the lay, and you can name it. + 

“These”⁠—I waved the pictures at him⁠—“are Hador’s meal-tickets⁠—the photos he was either collecting on or planning to collect on. They’re photographs of people, Pat, mostly women and girls, and some of them are pretty rotten. + 

“If tomorrow’s papers say that a flock of photos were found in this house after the fireworks, there’s going to be a fat suicide-list in the next day’s papers, and a fatter list of disappearances. If the papers say nothing about the photos, the lists may be a little smaller, but not much. Some of the people whose pictures are here know they are here. They will expect the police to come hunting for them. We know this much about the photographs⁠—two women have killed themselves to get away from them. This is an armful of stuff that can dynamite a lot of people, Pat, and a lot of families⁠—no matter which of those two ways the papers read. + 

“But, suppose, Pat, the papers say that just before you shot Hador he succeeded in burning a lot of pictures and papers, burning them beyond recognition. Isn’t it likely, then, that there won’t be any suicides? That some of the disappearances of recent months may clear themselves up? There she is, Pat⁠—you name it.” + 

Looking back, it seems to me I had come a lot nearer being eloquent than ever before in my life. + 

But Pat didn’t applaud. + 

He cursed me. He cursed me thoroughly, bitterly, and with an amount of feeling that told me I had won another point in my little game. He called me more things than I ever listened to before from a man who was built of meat and bone, and who therefore could be smacked. + 

When he was through, we carried the papers and photographs and a small book of addresses we found in the safe into the next room, and fed them to the little round iron stove there. The last of them was ash before we heard the police overhead. + 

“That’s absolutely all!” Pat declared when we got up from our work. “Don’t ever ask me to do anything else for you if you live to be a thousand.” + 

“That’s absolutely all,” I echoed. + 

I like Pat. He is a right guy. The sixth photograph in the stack had been of his wife⁠—the coffee importer’s reckless, hot-eyed daughter. + 