Explore "The Golden Horseshoe" by Dashiell Hammett on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"I haven't anything very exciting to offer you this time," Vance Richmond said as we shook hands. "I want you to find a man for me -- a man who is not a criminal."
There was an apology in his voice. The last couple of jobs this lean, grey-faced attorney had thrown my way had run to gunplay and other forms of rioting, and I suppose he thought anything less than that would put me to sleep. Was a time when he might have been right -- when I was a young sprout of twenty or so, newly attached to the Continental Detective Agency. But the fifteen years that had slid by since then had dulled my appetite for rough stuff. I don't mean that I shuddered whenever I considered the possibility of some bird taking a poke at me; but I didn't call that day a total loss in which nobody tried to puncture my short, fat carcass.