Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 111, No. 4, June 12, 1937

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The man in the baggy tweeds turned in at the Post Office, his mien casual, affable.

A battered hat, reduced to limp and flapping comfort by years and inclement weather, was pushed well back on his head. His teeth, when he smiled — and he was always smiling — were strong, regular, clamped on the bit of a scarred and ancient pipe. Raw-boned, angular, there was a hint of the scarecrow in Phineas Spear as he bent his long frame over a lock-drawer in the bottom row. But nobody laughed — or even smiled! He opened it, scooped up the half dozen letters therein and straightened.

“Gentlemen,” he announced genially, “good morning!”

There was a sticky silence.

Unruffled, the only apparent cause for that silence glanced through his mail. His eyes — smoky grey, whimsical — acquired an added touch of mild, good-humored cynicism. He glanced up finally at the cluster of men who watched him, not with open hostility, but with a guarded, stony coldness. Phineas Spear was new to Liberty — but it was not his newness that marked him. It was his new ideas that Liberty was finding it hard to swallow. No one answered his greeting. Phineas Spear smiled more broadly.

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