Duds

1920. The book begins: The raid was begun with such swift stealth, to be then carried on in so silent and vicious a manner that Captain Phineas Plunkett, passing the house at that moment, was shocked and startled. It was on that widest of fronts where the public peace is never permanent-the water front. This particular sector was a shabby-genteel street in South Brooklyn, where the grass sprouts between the paving stones, and the jungle of back yards borders on a No Man's Land enclosed in hoardings and containing everything under the sun that is not immediately required, a sort of manufacturing catch-all. The hour was one o'clock of a raw, late February morning and Captain Plunkett was returning from the bedside of a lonely friend who was convalescing poorly from the flu.