Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844–1914), nom de plume Lillie Thomas Meade, wrote numerous volumes of detective fiction, several of which are historically important. Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1894; second series 1896), written in collaboration with Dr. Edgar Beaumont (pseudonym Dr. Clifford Halifax), is the first series of medical mysteries published in England. Other memorable books by Meade include A Master of Mysteries (1898), The Gold Star Line (1899), and The Sanctuary Club (1900), the last featuring an unusual health club in which a series of murders is committed by apparently supernatural means; all three were written in collaboration with Dr. Eustace Robert Barton (18??–1943), writing as Robert Eustace. Another notable work was The Sorceress of the Strand (1903), in which Madame Sara, an utterly sinister villainess, specializes in murder.

The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899), also a collaborative effort with Eustace, is the first series of stories about a female crook. The thoroughly evil leader of an Italian criminal organization, the dazzlingly beautiful and brilliant Madame Koluchy matches wits with Norman Head, a reclusive philosopher who had once joined her gang. The volume was selected by Ellery Queen for Queen’s Quorum as one of the one hundred and six most important collections of mystery short stories. Curiously, only Meade’s name appears on the front cover and spine of the book, though Eustace is given credit as the cowriter on the title page.

Robert Eustace is known mainly for his collaborations with other writers. In addition to working with Meade, he cowrote several stories with Edgar Jepson; a novel with the once-popular mystery writer Gertrude Warden, The Stolen Pearl: A Romance of London (1903); and, most famously, a novel with Dorothy L. Sayers, The Documents in the Case (1930).

“At the Edge of the Crater” was first published in The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (London, Ward, Lock, 1899).

It was in the year 1894 that the first of the remarkable events which I am about to give to the world occurred. They found me something of a philosopher and a recluse, having, as I thought, lived my life and done with the active part of existence. It is true that I was young, not more than thirty-five years of age, but in the ghastly past I had committed a supreme error, and because of that paralyzing experience I had left the bustling world and found my solace in the scientist’s laboratory and the philosopher’s study.

Ten years before these stories begin, when in Naples studying biology, I fell a victim to the wiles and fascinations of a beautiful Italian. A scientist of no mean attainments herself, with beauty beyond that of ordinary mortals, she had appealed not only to my head, but also to my heart. Dazzled by her beauty and intellect, she led me where she would. Her aims and ambitions, which in the false glamour she threw over them I thought the loftiest in the world, became also mine. She introduced me to the men of her set — I was quickly in the toils, and on a night never to be forgotten, I took part in a grotesque and horrible ceremony, and became a member of her Brotherhood.

It was called the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings, and dated its origin from one of the secret societies of the Middle Ages. In my first enthusiasm it seemed to me to embrace all the principles of true liberty. Katherine was its chief and queen. Almost immediately after my initiation, however, I made an appalling discovery. Suspicion pointed to the beautiful Italian as the instigator, if not the author, of a most terrible crime. None of the details could be brought home to her, but there was little doubt that she was its moving spring. Loving her passionately as I then did, I tried to close my intellect against the all too conclusive evidence of her guilt. For a time I succeeded, but when I was ordered myself to take part in a transaction both dishonourable and treacherous, my eyes were opened. Horror seized me, and I fled to England to place myself under the protection of its laws.

Ten years went by, and the past was beginning to fade. It was destined to be recalled to me with startling vividness.

When a young man at Cambridge I had studied physiology, but never qualified myself as a doctor, having independent means; but in my laboratory in the vicinity of Regent’s Park I worked at biology and physiology for the pure love of these absorbing sciences.

I was busily engaged on the afternoon of the 3rd of August, 1894, when Mrs. Kenyon, an old friend, called to see me. She was shown into my study, and I went to her there. Mrs. Kenyon was a widow, but her son, a lad of about twelve years of age, had, owing to the unexpected death of a relative, just come in for a large fortune and a title. She took the seat I offered her.

“It is too bad of you, Norman,” she said; “it is months since you have been near me. Do you intend to forget your old friends?”

“I hope you will forgive me,” I answered; “you know how busy I always am.”

“You work too hard,” she replied. “Why a man with your brains and opportunities for enjoying life wishes to shut himself up in the way you do, I cannot imagine.”

“I am quite happy as I am, Mrs. Kenyon,” I replied; “why, therefore, should I change? By the way, how is Cecil?”

“I have come here to speak about him. You know, of course, the wonderful change in his fortunes?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“He has succeeded to the Kairn property, and is now Lord Kairn. There is a large rent-roll and considerable estates. You know, Norman, that Cecil has always been a most delicate boy.”

“I hoped you were about to tell me that he was stronger,” I replied.

“He is, and I will explain how in a moment. His life is a most important one. As Lord Kairn much is expected of him. He has not only, under the providence of God, to live, but by that one little life he has to keep a man of exceedingly bad character out of a great property. I allude to Hugh Doncaster. Were Cecil to die, Hugh would be Lord Kairn. You have already doubtless heard of his character?”

“I know the man well by repute,” I said.

“I thought you did. His disappointment and rage at Cecil succeeding to the title are almost beyond bounds. Rumours of his malevolent feelings towards the child have already reached me. I am told that he is now in London, but his life, like yours, is more or less mysterious. I thought it just possible, Norman, that you, as an old friend, might be able to get me some particulars with regard to his whereabouts.”

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“I feel a strange uneasiness about him; something which I cannot account for. Of course, in these enlightened days he would not attempt the child’s life, but I should be more comfortable if I were assured that he were nowhere in Cecil’s vicinity.”

“But the man can do nothing to your boy!” I said. “Of course, I will find out what I can, but—”

Mrs. Kenyon interrupted me.

“Thank you. It is a relief to know that you will help me. Of course, there is no real danger; but I am a widow, and Cecil is only a child. Now, I must tell you about his health. He is almost quite well. The most marvellous resurrection has taken place. For the last two months he has been under the care of that extraordinary woman, Mme. Koluchy. She has worked miracles in his case, and now to complete the cure she is sending him to the Mediterranean. He sails tomorrow night under the care of Dr. Fietta. I cannot bear parting with him, but it is for his good, and Mme. Koluchy insists that a sea voyage is indispensable.”

“But won’t you accompany him?” I asked.

“I am sorry to say that is impossible. My eldest girl, Ethel, is about to be married, and I cannot leave her on the eve of her wedding; but Cecil will be in good hands. Dr. Fietta is a capital fellow — I have every faith in him.”

“Where are they going?”

“To Cairo. They sail tomorrow night in the Hydaspes.”

“Cairo is a fearfully hot place at this time of year. Are you quite sure that it is wise to send a delicate lad like Cecil there in August?”

“Oh, he will not stay. He sails for the sake of the voyage, and will come back by the return boat. The voyage is, according to Mme. Koluchy, to complete the cure. That marvellous woman has succeeded where the medical profession gave little hope. You have heard of her, of course?”

“I am sick of her very name,” I replied; “one hears it everywhere. She has bewitched London with her impostures and quackery.”

“There is no quackery about her, Norman. I believe her to be the cleverest woman in England. There are authentic accounts of her wonderful cures which cannot be contradicted. There are even rumours that she is able to restore youth and beauty by her arts. The whole of society is at her feet, and it is whispered that even Royalty are among her patients. Of course, her fees are enormous, but look at the results! Have you ever met her?”

“Never. Where does she come from? Who is she?”

“She is an Italian, but she speaks English perfectly. She has taken a house which is a perfect palace in Welbeck Street.”

“And who is Dr. Fietta?”

“A medical man who assists Madame in her treatments. I have just seen him. He is charming, and devoted to Cecil. Five o’clock! I had no idea it was so late. I must be going. You will let me know when you hear any news of Mr. Doncaster? Come and see me soon.”

I accompanied my visitor to the door, and then, returning to my study, sat down to resume the work I had been engaged in when I was interrupted.

But Mrs. Kenyon’s visit had made me restless. I knew Hugh Doncaster’s character well. Reports of his evil ways now and then agitated society, but the man had hitherto escaped the stern arm of justice. Of course, there could be no real foundation for Mrs. Kenyon’s fears, but I felt that I could sympathize with her. The child was young and delicate; if Doncaster could injure him without discovery, he would not scruple to do so. As I thought over these things, a vague sensation of coming trouble possessed me. I hastily got into my evening dress, and having dined at my club, found myself at half-past ten in a drawing-room in Grosvenor Square. As I passed on into the reception-rooms, having exchanged a few words with my hostess, I came across Dufrayer, a lawyer, and a special friend of mine. We got into conversation. As we talked, and my eyes glanced idly round the groups of smartly dressed people, I noticed where a crowd of men were clustering round and paying homage to a stately woman at the farther end of the room. A diamond star flashed in her dusky hair. On her neck and arms diamonds also glittered. She had an upright bearing and a regal appearance. Her rosy lips were smiling. The marked intelligence and power of her face could not fail to arrest attention, even in the most casual observer. At the first glance I felt that I had seen her before, but could not tell when or where.

“Who is that woman?” I asked of my companion.

“My dear fellow,” he replied, with an amused smile, “don’t you know? That is the great Mme. Koluchy, the rage of the season, the great specialist, the great consultant. London is mad about her. She has only been here ten minutes, and look, she is going already. They say she has a dozen engagements every night.”

Mme. Koluchy began to move towards the door, and, anxious to get a nearer view, I also passed rapidly through the throng. I reached the head of the stairs before she did, and as she went by looked her full in the face. Her eyes met mine. Their dark depths seemed to read me through. She half smiled, half paused as if to speak, changed her mind, made a stately inclination of her queenly head, and went slowly downstairs. For a moment I stood still, there was a ringing in my ears, and my heart was beating to suffocation. Then I hastily followed her. When I reached the pavement Mme. Koluchy’s carriage stopped the way. She did not notice me, but I was able to observe her. She was bending out and talking eagerly to someone. The following words fell on my ear:

“It is all right. They sail tomorrow evening.”

The man to whom she spoke made a reply which I could not catch, but I had seen his face. He was Hugh Doncaster.

Mme. Koluchy’s carriage rolled away, and I hailed a hansom. In supreme moments we think rapidly. I thought quickly then.

“Where to?” asked the driver.

“No. 140, Earl’s Terrace, Kensington,” I called out. I sat back as I spoke. The horror of past memories was almost paralyzing me, but I quickly pulled myself together. I knew that I must act, and act quickly. I had just seen the Head of the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. Mme. Koluchy, changed in much since I last saw her, was the woman who had wrecked my heart and life ten years ago in Naples.

With my knowledge of the past, I was well aware that where this woman appeared victims fell. Her present victim was a child. I must save that child, even if my own life were the penalty. She had ordered the boy abroad. He was to sail tomorrow with an emissary of hers. She was in league with Doncaster. If she could get rid of the boy, Doncaster would doubtless pay her a fabulous sum. For the working of her she above all things wanted money. Yes, without doubt the lad’s life was in the gravest danger, and I had not a moment to lose. The first thing was to communicate with the mother, and if possible put a stop to the intended voyage.

I arrived at the house, flung open the doors of the hansom, and ran up the steps. Here unexpected news awaited me. The servant who answered my summons said that Mrs. Kenyon had started for Scotland by the night mail — she had received a telegram announcing the serious illness of her eldest girl. On getting it she had started for the north, but would not reach her destination until the following evening.

“Is Lord Kairn in?” I asked.

“No, sir,” was the reply. “My mistress did not like to leave him here alone, and he has been sent over to Mme. Koluchy’s, 100, Welbeck Street. Perhaps you are not aware, sir, that his lordship sails tomorrow evening for Cairo?”

“Yes, I know all about that,” I replied, “and now, if you will give me your mistress’s address, I shall be much obliged to you.”

The man supplied it. I entered my hansom again. For a moment it occurred to me that I would send a telegram to intercept Mrs. Kenyon on her rapid journey north, but I finally made up my mind not to do so. The boy was already in the enemy’s hands, and I felt sure that I could now only rescue him by guile. I returned home, having already made up my mind how to act. I would accompany Cecil and Dr. Fietta to Cairo.

At eleven o’clock on the following morning I had taken my berth in the Hydaspes, and at nine that evening was on board. I caught a momentary glimpse of young Lord Kairn and his attendant, but in order to avoid explanations kept out of their way. It was not until the following morning, when the steamer was well down Channel, that I made my appearance on deck, where I at once saw the boy sitting at the stern in a chair. Beside him was a lean, middle-aged man wearing a pair of pince-nez. He looked every inch a foreigner, with his pointed beard, waxed moustache, and deep-set, beady eyes. As I sauntered across the deck to where they were sitting, Lord Kairn looked up and instantly recognised me.

“Mr. Head!” he exclaimed, jumping from his chair. “You here? I am very glad to see you.”

“I am on my way to Cairo, on business,” I said, shaking the boy warmly by the hand.

“To Cairo? Why, that is where we are going; but you never told mother you were coming, and she saw you the day before yesterday. It was such a pity that mother had to rush off to Scotland so suddenly; but last night, just before we sailed, there came a telegram telling us that Ethel was better. As mother had to go away, I went to Mme. Koluchy’s for the night. I love going there. She has a lovely house, and she is so delightful herself. And this is Dr. Fietta, who has come with me.” As the boy added these words Dr. Fietta came forward and peered at me through his pince-nez. I bowed, and he returned my salutation.

“This is an extraordinary coincidence, Dr. Fietta!” I exclaimed. “Cecil Kenyon happens to be the son of one of my greatest friends. I am glad to see him looking so well. Whatever Mme. Koluchy’s treatment has been, it has had a marvellous effect. I am told that you are fortunate enough to be the participator in her wonderful secrets and cures.”

“I have the honour of assisting Mme. Koluchy,” he replied, with a strong foreign accent; “but may I take the liberty of inquiring who gave you the information about myself?”

“It was Mrs. Kenyon,” I answered. “She told me all about you the other day.”

“She knew, then, that you were going to be a fellow-passenger of her son’s?”

“No, for I did not know myself. An urgent telegram calling me to Egypt arrived that evening, and I only booked my passage yesterday. I am fortunate in having the honour of meeting so distinguished a savant as yourself. I have heard much about Mme. Koluchy’s marvellous occult powers, but I suppose the secrets of her success are very jealously guarded. The profession, of course, pooh-pooh her, I know, but if one may credit all one hears, she possesses remedies undreamt-of in their philosophy.”

“It is quite true, Mr. Head. As a medical man myself, I can vouch for her capacity, and, unfettered by English professional scrupulousness, I appreciate it. Mme. Koluchy and I are proud of our young friend here, and hope that the voyage will complete his cure, and fit him for the high position he is destined to occupy.”

The voyage flew by. Fietta was an intelligent man, and his scientific attainments were considerable. But for my knowledge of the terrible past my fears might have slumbered, but as it was they were always present with me, and the moment all too quickly arrived when suspicion was to be plunged into certainty.

On the day before we were due at Malta, the wind sprang up and we got into a choppy sea. When I had finished breakfast I went to Cecil’s cabin to see how he was. He was just getting up, and looked pale and unwell.

“There is a nasty sea on,” I said, “but the captain says we shall be out of it in an hour or so.”

“I hope we shall,” he answered, “for it makes me feel squeamish, but I daresay I shall be all right when I get on deck. Dr. Fietta has given me something to stop the sickness, but it has not had much effect.”

“I do not know anything that really stops sea-sickness,” I answered; “but what has he done?”

“Oh: a curious thing, Mr. Head. He pricked my arm with a needle on a syringe, and squirted something in. He says it is a certain cure for sea-sickness. Look,” said the child, baring his arm, “that is where he did it.”

I examined the mark closely. It had evidently been made with a hypodermic injection needle.

“Did Dr. Fietta tell you what he put into your arm?” I asked.

“Yes, he said it was morphia.”

“Where does he keep his needle?”

“In his trunk there under his bunk. I shall be dressed directly, and will come on deck.”

I left the cabin and went up the companion. The doctor was pacing to and fro on the hurricane-deck. I approached him.

“Your charge has not been well,” I said, “I have just seen him. He tells me you have given him a hypodermic of morphia.”

He turned round and gave me a quick glance of uneasy fear.

“Did Lord Kairn tell you so?”

“Yes.”

“Well, Mr. Head, it is the very best cure for sea-sickness. I have found it most efficacious.”

“Do you think it wise to give a child morphia?” I asked.

“I do not discuss my treatment with an unqualified man,” he replied brusquely, turning away as he spoke. I looked after him, and as he disappeared down the deck my fears became certainties. I determined, come what would, to find out what he had given the boy. I knew only too well the infinite possibilities of that dangerous little instrument, a hypodermic syringe.

As the day wore on the sea moderated, and at five o’clock it was quite calm again, a welcome change to the passengers, who, with the permission of the captain, had arranged to give a dance that evening on deck. The occasion was one when ordinary scruples must fade out of sight. Honour in such a mission as I had set myself must give place to the watchful zeal of the detective. I was determined to take advantage of the dance to explore Dr. Fietta’s cabin. The doctor was fond of dancing, and as soon as I saw that he and Lord Kairn were well engaged, I descended the companion, and went to their cabin. I switched on the electric light, and, dragging the trunk from beneath the bunk, hastily opened it. It was unlocked and only secured by straps. I ran my hand rapidly through the contents, which were chiefly clothes, but tucked in one corner I found a case, and, pulling it out, opened it. Inside lay the delicate little hypodermic syringe which I had come in search of.

I hurried up to the light and examined it. Smeared round the inside of the glass, and adhering to the bottom of the little plunger, was a whitish, gelatinous-looking substance. This was no ordinary hypodermic solution. It was half-liquefied gelatine such as I knew so well as the medium for the cultivation of micro-organisms. For a moment I felt half-stunned. What infernal culture might it not contain?

Time was flying, and at any moment I might be discovered. I hastily slipped the syringe into my pocket, and closing the trunk, replaced it, and, switching off the electric light, returned to the deck. My temples were throbbing, and it was with difficulty I could keep my self-control. I made up my mind quickly. Fietta would of course miss the syringe, but the chances were that he would not do so that night. As yet there was nothing apparently the matter with the boy, but might there not be flowing through his veins some poisonous germs of disease, which only required a period of incubation for their development?

At daybreak the boat would arrive at Malta. I would go on shore at once, call upon some medical man, and lay the case before him in confidence, in the hope of his having the things I should need in order to examine the contents of the syringe. If I found any organisms, I would take the law into my own hands, and carry the boy back to England by the next boat.

No sleep visited me that night, and I lay tossing to and fro in my bunk longing for daylight. At 6 A.M. I heard the engine-bell ring, and the screw suddenly slow down to half-speed. I leapt up and went on deck. I could see the outline of the rock-bound fortress and the lighthouse of St. Elmo looming more vividly every moment. As soon as we were at anchor and the gangway down, I hailed one of the little green boats and told the men to row me to the shore. I drove at once to the Grand Hotel in the Strada Reale, and asked the Italian guide the address of a medical man. He gave me the address of an English doctor who lived close by, and I went there at once to see him. It was now seven o’clock, and I found him up. I made my apologies for the early hour of my visit, put the whole matter before him, and produced the syringe. For a moment he was inclined to take my story with incredulity, but by degrees he became interested, and ended by inviting me to breakfast with him. After the meal we repaired to his consulting-room to make our investigations. He brought out his microscope, which I saw, to my delight, was of the latest design, and I set to work at once, while he watched me with evident interest. At last the crucial moment came, and I bent over the instrument and adjusted the focus on my preparation. My suspicions were only too well confirmed by which I had extracted what I saw. The substance from the syringe was a mass of micro-organisms, but of what nature I did not know. I had never seen any quite like them before. I drew back.

“I wish you would look at this,” I said. “You tell me you have devoted considerable attention to bacteriology. Please tell me what you see.”

Dr. Benson applied his eye to the instrument, regulating the focus for a few moments in silence, then he raised his head, and looked at me with a curious expression.

“Where did this culture come from?” he asked.

“From London, I presume,” I answered.

“It is extraordinary,” he said, with emphasis, “but there is no doubt whatever that these organisms are the specific germs of the very disease I have studied here so assiduously; they are the micrococci of Mediterranean fever, the minute round or oval bacteria. They are absolutely characteristic.”

I jumped to my feet.

“Is that so?” I cried. The diabolical nature of the plot was only too plain. These germs injected into a patient would produce a fever which only occurs in the Mediterranean. The fact that the boy had been in the Mediterranean even for a short time would be a complete blind as to the way in which they obtained access to the body, as every one would think the disease occurred from natural causes.

“How long is the period of incubation?” I asked.

“About ten days,” replied Dr. Benson.

I extended my hand.

“You have done me an invaluable service,” I said.

“I may possibly be able to do you a still further service,” was his reply. “I have made Mediterranean fever the study of my life, and have, I believe, discovered an antitoxin for it. I have tried my discovery on the patients of the naval hospital with excellent results. The local disturbance is slight, and I have never found bad symptoms follow the treatment. If you will bring the boy to me I will administer the antidote without delay.”

I considered for a moment, then I said: “My position is a terrible one, and I am inclined to accept your proposition. Under the circumstances it is the only chance.”

“It is,” repeated Dr. Benson. “I shall be at your service whenever you need me.”

I bade him good-bye and quickly left the house.

It was now ten o’clock. My first object was to find Dr. Fietta, to speak to him boldly, and take the boy away by main force if necessary. I rushed back to the Grand Hotel, where I learned that a boy and a man, answering to the description of Dr. Fietta and Cecil, had breakfasted there, but had gone out again immediately afterwards. The Hydaspes I knew was to coal, and would not leave Malta before one o’clock. My only chance, therefore, was to catch them as they came on board. Until then I could do nothing. At twelve o’clock I went down to the quay and took a boat to the Hydaspes. Seeing no sign of Fietta and the boy on deck, I made my way at once to Lord Kairn’s cabin. The door was open and the place in confusion — every vestige of baggage had disappeared. Absolutely at a loss to divine the cause of this unexpected discovery, I pressed the electric bell. In a moment a steward appeared.

“Has Lord Kairn left the ship?” I asked, my heart beating fast.

“I believe so, sir,” replied the man. “I had orders to pack the luggage and send it on shore. It went about an hour ago.”

I waited to hear no more. Rushing to my cabin, I began flinging my things pell-mell into my portmanteau. I was full of apprehension at this sudden move of Dr. Fietta’s. Calling a steward who was passing to help me, I got my things on deck, and in a few moments had them in a boat and was making rapidly for the shore. I drove back at once to the Grand Hotel in the Strada Reale.

“Did the gentleman who came here to-day from the Hydaspes, accompanied by a little boy, engage rooms for the night?” I asked of the proprietor in the bureau at the top of the stairs.

“No, sir,” answered the man; “they breakfasted here, but did not return. I think they said they were going to the gardens of San Antonio.”

For a minute or two I paced the hall in uncontrollable excitement. I was completely at a loss what step to take next. Then suddenly an idea struck me. I hurried down the steps and made my way to Cook’s office.

“A gentleman of that description took two tickets for Naples by the Spartivento, a Rupertino boat, two hours ago,” said the clerk, in answer to my inquiries. “She has started by now,” he continued, glancing up at the clock.

“To Naples?” I cried. A sickening fear seized me. The very name of the hated place struck me like a poisoned weapon.

“Is it too late to catch her?” I cried.

“Yes, sir, she has gone.”

“Then what is the quickest route by which I can reach Naples?”

“You can go by the Gingra, a P. & O. boat, tonight to Brindisi, and then overland. That is the quickest way now.”

I at once took my passage and left the office. There was not the least doubt what had occurred. Dr. Fietta had missed his syringe, and in consequence had immediately altered his plans. He was now taking the lad to the very fountain-head of the Brotherhood, where other means if necessary would be employed to put an end to his life.

It was nine o’clock in the evening, three days later, when, from the window of the railway carriage, I caught my first glimpse of the glow on the summit of Vesuvius. During the journey I had decided on my line of action. Leaving my luggage in the cloak-room I entered a carriage and began to visit hotel after hotel. For a long time I had no success. It was past eleven o’clock that night when, weary and heart-sick, I drew up at the Hotel Londres. I went to the concierge with my usual question, expecting the invariable reply, but a glow of relief swept over me when the man said:

“Dr. Fietta is out, sir, but the young man is in. He is in bed — will you call tomorrow? What name shall I say?”

“I shall stay here,” I answered; “let me have a room at once, and have my bag taken to it. What is the number of Lord Kairn’s room?”

“Number forty-six. But he will be asleep, sir; you cannot see him now.”

I made no answer, but going quickly upstairs, I found the boy’s room. I knocked; there was no reply, I turned the handle and entered. All was dark. Striking a match I looked round. In a white bed at the farther end lay the child. I went up and bent softly over him. He was lying with one hand beneath his cheek. He looked worn and tired, and now and then moaned as if in trouble. When I touched him lightly on the shoulder he started up and opened his eyes. A dazed expression of surprise swept over his face; then with an eager cry he stretched out both his hands and clasped one of mine.

“I am so glad to see you,” he said. “Dr. Fietta told me you were angry — that I had offended you. I very nearly cried when I missed you that morning at Malta, and Dr. Fietta said I should never see you anymore. I don’t like him — I am afraid of him. Have you come to take me home?” As he spoke he glanced eagerly round in the direction of the door, clutching my hand still tighter as he did so.

“Yes, I shall take you home, Cecil. I have come for the purpose,” I answered; “but are you quite well?”

“That’s just it; I am not. I have awful dreams at night. Oh, I am so glad you have come back and you are not angry. Did you say you were really going to take me home?”

“Tomorrow, if you like.”

“Please do. I am — stoop down, I want to whisper to you — I am dreadfully afraid of Dr. Fietta.”

“What is your reason?” I asked.

“There is no reason,” answered the child, “but somehow I dread him. I have done so ever since you left us at Malta. Once I woke in the middle of the night and he was bending over me — he had such a queer look on his face, and he used that syringe again. He was putting something into my arm — he told me it was morphia. I did not want him to do it, for I thought you would rather he didn’t. I wish mother had sent me away with you. I am afraid of him; yes, I am afraid of him.”

“Now that I have come, everything will be right,” I said.

“And you will take me home tomorrow?”

“Certainly.”

“But I should like to see Vesuvius first. Now that we are here it seems a pity that I should not see it. Can you take me to Vesuvius tomorrow morning, and home in the evening, and will you explain to Dr. Fietta?”

“I will explain everything. Now go to sleep. I am in the house, and you have nothing whatever to fear.”

“I am very glad you have come,” he said wearily. He flung himself back on his pillow; the exhausted look was very manifest on his small, childish face. I left the room, shutting the door softly.

To say that my blood boiled can express but little the emotions which ran through my frame — the child was in the hands of a monster. He was in the very clutch of the Brotherhood, whose intention was to destroy his life. I thought for a moment. There was nothing now for it but to see Fietta, tell him that I had discovered his machinations, claim the boy, and take him away by force. I knew that I was treading on dangerous ground. At any moment my own life might be the forfeit for my supposed treachery to the cause whose vows I had so madly taken. Still, if I saved the boy nothing else really mattered.

I went downstairs into the great central hall, interviewed the concierge, who told me that Fietta had returned, asked for the number of his private sitting-room, and, going there, opened the door without knocking. At a writing-table at the farther end sat the doctor. He turned as I entered, and, recognising me, started up with a sudden exclamation. I noticed that his face changed colour, and that his beady eyes flashed all ugly fire. Then, recovering himself, he advanced quietly towards me.

“This is another of your unexpected surprises, Mr. Head,” he said with politeness. “You have not, then, gone on to Cairo? You change your plans rapidly.”

“Not more so than you do, Dr. Fietta,” I replied, watching him as I spoke.

“I was obliged to change my mind,” he answered. “I heard in Malta that cholera had broken out in Cairo. I could not therefore take my patient there. May I inquire why I have the honour of this visit? You will excuse my saying so, but this action of yours forces me to suspect that you are following me. Have you a reason?”

He stood with his hands behind him, and a look of furtive vigilance crept into his small eyes.

“This is my reason,” I replied. I boldly drew the hypodermic syringe from my pocket as I spoke.

With an inconceivably rapid movement he hurried past me, locked the door, and placed the key in his pocket. As he turned towards me again I saw the glint of a long, bright stiletto which he had drawn and was holding in his right hand, which he kept behind him.

“I see you are armed,” I said quietly, “but do not be too hasty. I have a few words to say to you.” As I spoke I looked him full in the face, then I dropped my voice.

“I am one of the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings!”

When I uttered these magical words he started back and looked at me with dilated eyes.

“Your proofs instantly, or you are a dead man,” he cried hoarsely. Beads of sweat gleamed upon his forehead.

“Put that weapon on the table, give me your right hand, and you shall have the proofs you need,” I answered.

He hesitated, then changed the stiletto to his left hand, and gave me his right. I grasped it in the peculiar manner which I had never forgotten, and bent my head close to his. The next moment I had uttered the password of the Brotherhood.

“La Regina,” I whispered.

“E la regina,” he replied, flinging the stiletto on the carpet.

“Ah!” he continued, with an expression of the strongest relief, while he wiped the moisture from his forehead. “This is too wonderful. And now tell me, my friend, what your mission is? I knew you had stolen my syringe, but why did you do it? Why did you not reveal yourself to me before? You are, of course, under the Queen’s orders?”

“I am,” I answered, “and her orders to me now are to take Lord Kairn home to England overland tomorrow morning.”

“Very well. Everything is finished — he will die in one month.”

“From Mediterranean fever? But it is not necessarily fatal,” I continued.

“That is true. It is not always fatal acquired in the ordinary way, but by our methods it is so.”

“Then you have administered more of the micro-organisms since Malta?”

“Yes; I had another syringe in my case, and now nothing can save him. The fever will commence in six days from now.”

He paused for a moment or two.

“It is very odd,” he went on, “that I should have had no communication. I cannot understand it.” A sudden flash of suspicion shot across his dark face. My heart sank as I saw it. It passed, however, the next instant; the man’s words were courteous and quiet.

“I of course accede to your proposition,” he said: “everything is quite safe. This that I have done can never by any possibility be discovered. Madame is invincible. Have you yet seen Lord Kairn?”

“Yes, and I have told him to be prepared to accompany me home tomorrow.”

“Very well.”

Dr. Fietta walked across the room, unlocked the door and threw it open.

“Your plans will suit me admirably,” he continued. “I shall stay on here for a few days more, as I have some private business to transact. Tonight I shall sleep in peace. Your shadow has been haunting me for the last three days.”

I went from Fietta’s room to the boy’s. He was wide awake and started up when he saw me.

“I have arranged everything, Cecil,” I said, “and you are my charge now. I mean to take you to my room to sleep.”

“Oh,” he answered, “I am glad. Perhaps I shall sleep better in your room. I am not afraid of you — I love you.” His eyes, bright with affection, looked into mine. I lifted him into my arms, wrapped his dressing-gown over his shoulders, and conveyed him through the folding-doors, down the corridor, into the room I had secured for myself. There were two beds in the room, and I placed him in one.

“I am so happy,” he said, “I love you so much. Will you take me to Vesuvius in the morning, and then home in the evening?”

“I will see about that. Now go to sleep,” I answered.

He closed his eyes with a sigh of pleasure. In ten minutes he was sound asleep. I was standing by him when there came a knock at the door. I went to open it. A waiter stood without. He held a salver in his hand. It contained a letter, also a sheet of paper and an envelope stamped with the name of the hotel.

“From the doctor, to be delivered to the signor immediately,” was the laconic remark.

Still standing in the doorway, I took the letter from the tray, opened it, and read the following words:

“You have removed the boy and that action arouses my mistrust. I doubt your having received any Communication from Madame. If you wish me to believe that you are a bona fide member of the Brotherhood, return the boy to his own sleeping-room, immediately.”

I took a pencil out of my pocket and hastily wrote a few words on the sheet of paper, which had been sent for this purpose.

“I retain the boy. You are welcome to draw your own conclusions.”

Folding up the paper I slipped it into the envelope, and wetting the gum with my tongue, fastened it together, and handed it to the waiter who withdrew. I re-entered my room and locked the door. To keep the boy was imperative, but there was little doubt that Fietta would now telegraph to Mme. Koluchy (the telegraphic office being open day and night) and find out the trick I was playing upon him. I considered whether I might not remove the boy there and then to another hotel, but decided that such a step would be useless. Once the emissaries of the Brotherhood were put upon my track the case for the child and myself would be all but hopeless.

There was likely to be little sleep for me that night. I paced up and down my lofty room. My thoughts were keen and busy. After a time, however, a strange confusion seized me. One moment I thought of the child, the next of Mme. Koluchy, and then again I found myself pondering some abstruse and comparatively unimportant point in science, which I was perfecting at home. I shook myself free of these thoughts, to walk about again, to pause by the bedside of the child, to listen to his quiet breathing.

Perfect peace reigned over his little face. He had resigned himself to me, his terrors were things of the past, and he was absolutely happy. Then once again that queer confusion of brain returned. I wondered what I was doing, and why I was anxious about the boy. Finally I sank upon the bed at the farther end of the room, for my limbs were tired and weighted with a heavy oppression. I would rest for a moment, but nothing would induce me to close my eyes. So I thought, and flung myself back on my pillow. But the next instant all present things were forgotten in dreamless and heavy slumber.

I awoke long hours afterwards, to find the sunshine flooding the room, the window which led on to the balcony wide open, and Cecil’s bed empty. I sprang up with a cry; memory returned with a flash. What had happened? Had Fietta managed to get in by means of the window? I had noticed the balcony outside the window on the previous night. The balcony of the next room was but a few feet distant from mine. It would be easy for anyone to enter there, spring from one balcony to the other, and so obtain access to my room. Doubtless this had been done. Why had I slept? I had firmly resolved to stay awake all night. In an instant I had found the solution. Fietta’s letter had been a trap. The envelope which he sent me contained poison on the gum. I had licked it, and so received the fatal soporific. My heart beat wildly. I knew I had not an instant to lose. With hasty strides I went into Fietta’s sitting-room: there was no one there; into his bedroom, the door of which was open: it was also empty. I rushed into the hall.

“The gentleman and the little boy went out about half an hour ago,” said the concierge, in answer to my inquiries. “They have gone to Vesuvius — a fine day for the trip.” The man smiled as he spoke.

My heart almost stopped.

“How did they go?” I asked.

“A carriage, two horses — best way to go.”

In a second I was out in the Piazza del Municipio. Hastily selecting a pair-horse carriage out of the group of importunate drivers, I jumped in.

“Vesuvius,” I shouted, “as hard as you can go.”

The man began to bargain. I thrust a roll of paper-money into his hand. On receiving it he waited no longer, and we were soon dashing at a furious speed along the crowded, ill-paved streets, scattering the pedestrians as we went. Down the Via Roma, and out on to the Santa Lucia Quay, away and away through endless labyrinths of noisome, narrow streets, till at length we got out into the more open country at the base of the burning mountain. Should I be in time to prevent the catastrophe which I dreaded? For I had been up that mountain before, and knew well the horrible danger at the crater’s mouth — a slip, a push, and one would never be seen again.

The ascent began, and the exhausted horses were beginning to fail. I leapt out, and giving the driver a sum which I did not wait to count, ran up the winding road of cinders and pumice that curves round beneath the observatory. My breath had failed me, and my heart was beating so hard that I could scarcely speak when I reached the station where one takes ponies to go over the new, rough lava. In answer to my inquiries, Cook’s agent told me that Fietta and Cecil had gone on not a quarter of an hour ago.

I shouted my orders, and flinging money right and left, I soon obtained a fleet pony, and was galloping recklessly over the broken lava. Throwing the reins over the pony’s head I presently jumped off, and ran up the little, narrow path to the funicular wire-laid railway that takes passengers up the steep cone to the crater.

“Just gone on, sir,” said a Cook’s official, in answer to my question.

“But I must follow at once,” I said excitedly, hurrying towards the little shed.

The man stopped me.

“We don’t take single passengers,” he answered.

“I will, and must, go alone,” I said. “I’ll buy the car, and the railway, and you, and the mountain, if necessary, but go I will. How much do you want to take me alone?”

“One hundred francs,” he answered impertinently, little thinking that I would agree to the bargain.

“Done!” I replied.

In astonishment he counted out the notes which I handed to him, and hurried at once into the shed. Here he rang an electric bell to have the car at the top started back, and getting into the empty car, I began to ascend — up, and up, and up. Soon I passed the empty car returning. How slowly we moved! My mouth was parched and dry, and I was in a fever of excitement. The smoke from the crater was close above me in great wreaths. At last we reached the top. I leapt out, and without waiting for a guide, made my way past, and rushed up the active cone, slipping in the shifting, loose, gritty soil. When I reached the top a gale was blowing, and the scenery below, with the Bay and Naples and Sorrento, lay before me, the most magnificent panorama in the world. I had no time to glance at it, but hurried forward past crags of hot rock, from which steam and sulphur were escaping. The wind was taking the huge volumes of smoke over to the farther side of the crater, and I could just catch sight of two figures as the smoke cleared for a moment. The figures were those of Fietta and the boy. They were evidently making a détour of the crater, and had just entered the smoke. I heard a guide behind shout something to me in Italian, but I took no notice, and plunged at once into the blinding, suffocating smoke that came belching forth from the crater.

I was now close behind Fietta and the boy. They held their handkerchiefs up to their faces to keep off the choking sulphurous fumes, and had evidently not seen me. Their guide was ahead of them. Fietta was walking slowly; he was farthest away from the crater’s mouth. The boy’s hand was within his; the boy was nearest to the yawning gulf. A hot and choking blast of smoke blinded me for a moment, and hid the pair from view; the next instant it passed. I saw Fietta suddenly turn, seize the boy, and push him towards the edge. Through the rumbling thunder that came from below I heard a sharp cry of terror, and bounding forward I just caught the lad as he reeled, and hurled him away into safety.

With a yell of baffled rage Fietta dashed through the smoke and flung himself upon me. I moved nimbly aside, and the doctor, carried on by the impetus of his rush, missed his footing in the crumbling ashes and fell headlong down through the reeking smoke and steam into the fathomless, seething cauldron below.

What followed may be told in a few words. That evening I sailed for Malta with the boy. Dr. Benson administered the antitoxin in time, and the child’s life was saved. Within a fortnight I brought him back to his mother.

It was reported that Dr. Fietta had gone mad at the edge of the crater, and in an excess of maniacal fury had first tried to destroy the boy and then flung himself in. I kept my secret.

Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848–1899) was responsible for two literary breakthroughs. The first was his novel The Woman Who Did (1895), which created a sensation in Victorian England because of its candid discussion of sex, especially featuring the titular character — who did exactly what you think she did.

The second book guaranteed Allen a lasting place in the annals of crime fiction. In An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay (1897), Allen created the first important series of stories about a rogue, the adventures of Colonel Clay preceding the immortal Raffles by two years. The African millionaire of the title refers to Sir Charles Vandrift, the colonel’s personal and repeated victim, who might have taken solace in the fact that he is the only character in the history of mystery fiction who gave his identity to a short story series as the victim. Vandrift is a fabulously wealthy man who made his fortune in Africa but is cheated, duped, robbed, bilked, and fooled again and again by Clay. Although Vandrift is wary of Clay, the colonel is such a master of disguise that he can almost instantly transform himself from a Mexican seer to a Scottish parson — neither of whom even slightly resembles Clay, whose fresh, clean face is the embodiment of innocence and honesty.

Allen wrote numerous books in various fields, ranging from science, philosophy, travel, and nature, to fiction, including ghost stories, science fiction, mystery novels, and short stories — more than fifty books in all, even though he died at only fifty-one. On his deathbed, he wanted to be sure that his last book, an episodic novel titled Hilda Wade, would be published, so he asked his friend Arthur Conan Doyle to write the final chapter; it was published posthumously in 1900.

“The Episode of the Mexican Seer” was originally published in the June 1896 issue of The Strand Magazine; it was first collected in An African Millionaire: Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay (London, Grant Richards, 1897).

My name is Seymour Wilbraham Wentworth. I am brother-in-law and secretary to Sir Charles Vandrift, the South African millionaire and famous financier. Many years ago, when Charlie Vandrift was a small lawyer in Cape Town, I had the (qualified) good fortune to marry his sister. Much later, when the Vandrift estate and farm near Kimberley developed by degrees into the Cloetedorp Golcondas, Limited, my brother-in-law offered me the not unremunerative post of secretary; in which capacity I have ever since been his constant and attached companion.

He is not a man whom any common sharper can take in, is Charles Vandrift. Middle height, square build, firm mouth, keen eyes — the very picture of a sharp and successful business genius. I have only known one rogue impose upon Sir Charles, and that one rogue, as the Commissary of Police at Nice remarked, would doubtless have imposed upon a syndicate of Vidocq, Robert Houdin, and Cagliostro.

We had run across to the Riviera for a few weeks in the season. Our object being strictly rest and recreation from the arduous duties of financial combination, we did not think it necessary to take our wives out with us. Indeed, Lady Vandrift is absolutely wedded to the joys of London, and does not appreciate the rural delights of the Mediterranean littoral. But Sir Charles and I, though immersed in affairs when at home, both thoroughly enjoy the complete change from the City to the charming vegetation and pellucid air on the terrace at Monte Carlo. We are so fond of scenery. That delicious view over the rocks of Monaco, with the Maritime Alps in the rear, and the blue sea in front, not to mention the imposing Casino in the foreground, appeals to me as one of the most beautiful prospects in all Europe. Sir Charles has a sentimental attachment for the place. He finds it restores and freshens him, after the turmoil of London, to win a few hundreds at roulette in the course of an afternoon among the palms and cactuses and pure breezes of Monte Carlo. The country, say I, for a jaded intellect! However, we never on any account actually stop in the Principality itself. Sir Charles thinks Monte Carlo is not a sound address for a financier’s letters. He prefers a comfortable hotel on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice, where he recovers health and renovates his nervous system by taking daily excursions along the coast to the Casino.

This particular season we were snugly ensconced at the Hôtel des Anglais. We had capital quarters on the first floor — salon, study, and bedrooms — and found on the spot a most agreeable cosmopolitan society. All Nice, just then, was ringing with talk about a curious impostor, known to his followers as the Great Mexican Seer, and supposed to be gifted with second sight, as well as with endless other supernatural powers. Now, it is a peculiarity of my able brother-in-law’s that, when he meets with a quack, he burns to expose him; he is so keen a man of business himself that it gives him, so to speak, a disinterested pleasure to unmask and detect imposture in others. Many ladies at the hotel, some of whom had met and conversed with the Mexican Seer, were constantly telling us strange stories of his doings. He had disclosed to one the present whereabouts of a runaway husband; he had pointed out to another the numbers that would win at roulette next evening; he had shown a third the image on a screen of the man she had for years adored without his knowledge. Of course, Sir Charles didn’t believe a word of it; but his curiosity was roused; he wished to see and judge for himself of the wonderful thought-reader.

“What would be his terms, do you think, for a private séance?” he asked of Madame Picardet, the lady to whom the Seer had successfully predicted the winning numbers.

“He does not work for money,” Madame Picardet answered, “but for the good of humanity. I’m sure he would gladly come and exhibit for nothing his miraculous faculties.”

“Nonsense!” Sir Charles answered. “The man must live. I’d pay him five guineas, though, to see him alone. What hotel is he stopping at?”

“The Cosmopolitan, I think,” the lady answered. “Oh no; I remember now, the Westminster.”

Sir Charles turned to me quietly. “Look here, Seymour,” he whispered. “Go round to this fellow’s place immediately after dinner, and offer him five pounds to give a private séance at once in my rooms, without mentioning who I am to him; keep the name quite quiet. Bring him back with you, too, and come straight upstairs with him, so that there may be no collusion. We’ll see just how much the fellow can tell us.”

I went as directed. I found the Seer a very remarkable and interesting person. He stood about Sir Charles’s own height, but was slimmer and straighter, with an aquiline nose, strangely piercing eyes, very large black pupils, and a finely chiselled close-shaven face, like the bust of Antinous in our hall in Mayfair. What gave him his most characteristic touch, however, was his odd head of hair, curly and wavy like Paderewski’s, standing out in a halo round his high white forehead and his delicate profile. I could see at a glance why he succeeded so well in impressing women; he had the look of a poet, a singer, a prophet.

“I have come round,” I said, “to ask whether you will consent to give a séance at once in a friend’s rooms; and my principal wishes me to add that he is prepared to pay five pounds as the price of the entertainment.”

Señor Antonio Herrera — that was what he called himself — bowed to me with impressive Spanish politeness. His dusky olive cheeks were wrinkled with a smile of gentle contempt as he answered gravely—

“I do not sell my gifts; I bestow them freely. If your friend — your anonymous friend — desires to behold the cosmic wonders that are wrought through my hands, I am glad to show them to him. Fortunately, as often happens when it is necessary to convince and confound a sceptic (for that your friend is a sceptic I feel instinctively), I chance to have no engagements at all this evening.” He ran his hand through his fine, long hair reflectively. “Yes, I go,” he continued, as if addressing some unknown presence that hovered about the ceiling; “I go; come with me!” Then he put on his broad sombrero, with its crimson ribbon, wrapped a cloak round his shoulders, lighted a cigarette, and strode forth by my side towards the Hôtel des Anglais.

He talked little by the way, and that little in curt sentences. He seemed buried in deep thought; indeed, when we reached the door and I turned in, he walked a step or two farther on, as if not noticing to what place I had brought him. Then he drew himself up short, and gazed around him for a moment. “Ha, the Anglais,” he said — and I may mention in passing that his English, in spite of a slight southern accent, was idiomatic and excellent. “It is here, then; it is here!” He was addressing once more the unseen presence.

I smiled to think that these childish devices were intended to deceive Sir Charles Vandrift. Not quite the sort of man (as the City of London knows) to be taken in by hocus-pocus. And all this, I saw, was the cheapest and most commonplace conjurer’s patter.

We went upstairs to our rooms. Charles had gathered together a few friends to watch the performance. The Seer entered, wrapt in thought. He was in evening dress, but a red sash round his waist gave a touch of picturesqueness and a dash of colour. He paused for a moment in the middle of the salon, without letting his eyes rest on anybody or anything. Then he walked straight up to Charles, and held out his dark hand.

“Good-evening,” he said. “You are the host. My soul’s sight tells me so.”

“Good shot,” Sir Charles answered. “These fellows have to be quick-witted, you know, Mrs. Mackenzie, or they’d never get on at it.”

The Seer gazed about him, and smiled blankly at a person or two whose faces he seemed to recognise from a previous existence. Then Charles began to ask him a few simple questions, not about himself, but about me, just to test him. He answered most of them with surprising correctness. “His name? His name begins with an S I think — You call him Seymour.” He paused long between each clause, as if the facts were revealed to him slowly. “Seymour — Wilbraham — Earl of Strafford. No, not Earl of Strafford! Seymour Wilbraham Wentworth. There seems to be some connection in somebody’s mind now present between Wentworth and Strafford. I am not English. I do not know what it means. But they are somehow the same name, Wentworth and Strafford.”

He gazed around, apparently for confirmation. A lady came to his rescue.

“Wentworth was the surname of the great Earl of Strafford,” she murmured gently; “and I was wondering, as you spoke, whether Mr. Wentworth might possibly be descended from him.”

“He is,” the Seer replied instantly, with a flash of those dark eyes. And I thought this curious; for though my father always maintained the reality of the relationship, there was one link wanting to complete the pedigree. He could not make sure that the Hon. Thomas Wilbraham Wentworth was the father of Jonathan Wentworth, the Bristol horse-dealer, from whom we are descended.

“Where was I born?” Sir Charles interrupted, coming suddenly to his own case.

The Seer clapped his two hands to his forehead and held it between them, as if to prevent it from bursting. “Africa,” he said slowly, as the facts narrowed down, so to speak. “South Africa; Cape of Good Hope; Jansenville; De Witt Street. 1840.”

“By Jove, he’s correct,” Sir Charles muttered. “He seems really to do it. Still, he may have found me out. He may have known where he was coming.”

“I never gave a hint,” I answered; “till he reached the door, he didn’t even know to what hotel I was piloting him.”

The Seer stroked his chin softly. His eye appeared to me to have a furtive gleam in it. “Would you like me to tell you the number of a bank-note inclosed in an envelope?” he asked casually.

“Go out of the room,” Sir Charles said, “while I pass it round the company.”

Señor Herrera disappeared. Sir Charles passed it round cautiously, holding it all the time in his own hand, but letting his guests see the number. Then he placed it in an envelope and gummed it down firmly.

The Seer returned. His keen eyes swept the company with a comprehensive glance. He shook his shaggy mane. Then he took the envelope in his hands and gazed at it fixedly. “AF, 73549,” he answered, in a slow tone. “A Bank of England note for fifty pounds — exchanged at the Casino for gold won yesterday at Monte Carlo.”

“I see how he did that,” Sir Charles said triumphantly. “He must have changed it there himself; and then I changed it back again. In point of fact, I remember seeing a fellow with long hair loafing about. Still, it’s capital conjuring.”

“He can see through matter,” one of the ladies interposed. It was Madame Picardet. “He can see through a box.” She drew a little gold vinaigrette, such as our grandmothers used, from her dress-pocket. “What is in this?” she inquired, holding it up to him.

Señor Herrera gazed through it. “Three gold coins,” he replied, knitting his brows with the effort of seeing into the box: “one, an American five dollars; one, a French ten-franc piece; one, twenty marks, German, of the old Emperor William.”

She opened the box and passed it round. Sir Charles smiled a quiet smile.

“Confederacy!” he muttered, half to himself. “Confederacy!”

The Seer turned to him with a sullen air. “You want a better sign?” he said, in a very impressive voice. “A sign that will convince you! Very well: you have a letter in your left waistcoat pocket — a crumpled-up letter. Do you wish me to read it out? I will, if you desire it.”

It may seem to those who know Sir Charles incredible, but, I am bound to admit, my brother-in-law coloured. What that letter contained I cannot say; he only answered, very testily and evasively, “No, thank you; I won’t trouble you. The exhibition you have already given us of your skill in this kind more than amply suffices.” And his fingers strayed nervously to his waistcoat pocket, as if he was half afraid, even then, Señor Herrera would read it.

I fancied, too, he glanced somewhat anxiously towards Madame Picardet.

The Seer bowed courteously. “Your will, señor, is law,” he said. “I make it a principle, though I can see through all things, invariably to respect the secrecies and sanctities. If it were not so, I might dissolve society. For which of us is there who could bear the whole truth being told about him?” He gazed around the room. An unpleasant thrill supervened. Most of us felt this uncanny Spanish American knew really too much. And some of us were engaged in financial operations.

“For example,” the Seer continued blandly, “I happened a few weeks ago to travel down here from Paris by train with a very intelligent man, a company promoter. He had in his bag some documents — some confidential documents.” He glanced at Sir Charles. “You know the kind of thing, my dear sir: reports from experts — from mining engineers. You may have seen some such; marked strictly private.”

“They form an element in high finance,” Sir Charles admitted coldly.

“Pre-cisely,” the Seer murmured, his accent for a moment less Spanish than before. “And, as they were marked strictly private, I respect, of course, the seal of confidence. That’s all I wish to say. I hold it a duty, being intrusted with such powers, not to use them in a manner which may annoy or incommode my fellow-creatures.”

“Your feeling does you honour,” Sir Charles answered, with some acerbity. Then he whispered in my ear: “Confounded clever scoundrel, Sey; rather wish we hadn’t brought him here.”

Señor Herrera seemed intuitively to divine this wish, for he interposed, in a lighter and gayer tone—

“I will now show you a different and more interesting embodiment of occult power, for which we shall need a somewhat subdued arrangement of surrounding lights. Would you mind, señor host — for I have purposely abstained from reading your name on the brain of any one present — would you mind my turning down this lamp just a little?... So! That will do. Now, this one; and this one. Exactly! that’s right.” He poured a few grains of powder out of a packet into a saucer. “Next, a match, if you please. Thank you!” It burnt with a strange green light. He drew from his pocket a card, and produced a little ink-bottle. “Have you a pen?” he asked.

I instantly brought one. He handed it to Sir Charles. “Oblige me,” he said, “by writing your name there.” And he indicated a place in the centre of the card, which had an embossed edge, with a small middle square of a different colour.

Sir Charles has a natural disinclination to signing his name without knowing why. “What do you want with it?” he asked. (A millionaire’s signature has so many uses.)

“I want you to put the card in an envelope,” the Seer replied, “and then to burn it. After that, I shall show you your own name written in letters of blood on my arm, in your own handwriting.”

Sir Charles took the pen. If the signature was to be burned as soon as finished, he didn’t mind giving it. He wrote his name in his usual firm clear style — the writing of a man who knows his worth and is not afraid of drawing a cheque for five thousand.

“Look at it long,” the Seer said, from the other side of the room. He had not watched him write it.

Sir Charles stared at it fixedly. The Seer was really beginning to produce an impression.

“Now, put it in that envelope,” the Seer exclaimed.

Sir Charles, like a lamb, placed it as directed.

The Seer strode forward. “Give me the envelope,” he said. He took it in his hand, walked over towards the fireplace, and solemnly burnt it. “See — it crumbles into ashes,” he cried. Then he came back to the middle of the room, close to the green light, rolled up his sleeve, and held his arm before Sir Charles. There, in blood-red letters, my brother-in-law read the name, “Charles Vandrift,” in his own handwriting!

“I see how that’s done,” Sir Charles murmured, drawing back. “It’s a clever delusion; but still, I see through it. It’s like that ghost-book. Your ink was deep green; your light was green; you made me look at it long; and then I saw the same thing written on the skin of your arm in complementary colours.”

“You think so?” the Seer replied, with a curious curl of the lip.

“I’m sure of it,” Sir Charles answered.

Quick as lightning the Seer again rolled up his sleeve. “That’s your name,” he cried, in a very clear voice, “but not your whole name. What do you say, then, to my right? Is this one also a complementary colour?” He held his other arm out. There, in sea-green letters, I read the name, “Charles O’Sullivan Vandrift.” It is my brother-in-law’s full baptismal designation; but he has dropped the O’Sullivan for many years past, and, to say the truth, doesn’t like it. He is a little bit ashamed of his mother’s family.

Charles glanced at it hurriedly. “Quite right,” he said, “quite right!” But his voice was hollow. I could guess he didn’t care to continue the séance. He could see through the man, of course; but it was clear the fellow knew too much about us to be entirely pleasant.

“Turn up the lights,” I said, and a servant turned them. “Shall I say coffee and benedictine?” I whispered to Vandrift.

“By all means,” he answered. “Anything to keep this fellow from further impertinences! And, I say, don’t you think you’d better suggest at the same time that the men should smoke? Even these ladies are not above a cigarette — some of them.”

There was a sigh of relief. The lights burned brightly. The Seer for the moment retired from business, so to speak. He accepted a partaga with a very good grace, sipped his coffee in a corner, and chatted to the lady who had suggested Strafford with marked politeness. He was a polished gentleman.

Next morning, in the hall of the hotel, I saw Madame Picardet again, in a neat tailor-made travelling dress, evidently bound for the railway-station.

“What, off, Madame Picardet?” I cried.

She smiled, and held out her prettily-gloved hand. “Yes, I’m off,” she answered archly. “Florence, or Rome, or somewhere. I’ve drained Nice dry — like a sucked orange. Got all the fun I can out of it. Now I’m away again to my beloved Italy.”

But it struck me as odd that, if Italy was her game, she went by the omnibus which takes down to the train de luxe for Paris. However, a man of the world accepts what a lady tells him, no matter how improbable; and I confess, for ten days or so, I thought no more about her, or the Seer either.

At the end of that time our fortnightly pass-book came in from the bank in London. It is part of my duty, as the millionaire’s secretary, to make up this book once a fortnight, and to compare the cancelled cheques with Sir Charles’s counterfoils. On this particular occasion I happened to observe what I can only describe as a very grave discrepancy — in fact, a discrepancy of 5000 pounds. On the wrong side, too. Sir Charles was debited with 5000 pounds more than the total amount that was shown on the counterfoils.

I examined the book with care. The source of the error was obvious. It lay in a cheque to Self or Bearer, for 5000 pounds, signed by Sir Charles, and evidently paid across the counter in London, as it bore on its face no stamp or indication of any other office.

I called in my brother-in-law from the salon to the study. “Look here, Charles,” I said, “there’s a cheque in the book which you haven’t entered.” And I handed it to him without comment, for I thought it might have been drawn to settle some little loss on the turf or at cards, or to make up some other affair he didn’t desire to mention to me. These things will happen.

He looked at it and stared hard. Then he pursed up his mouth and gave a long low “Whew!” At last he turned it over and remarked, “I say, Sey, my boy, we’ve just been done jolly well brown, haven’t we?”

I glanced at the cheque. “How do you mean?” I inquired.

“Why, the Seer,” he replied, still staring at it ruefully. “I don’t mind the five thou., but to think the fellow should have gammoned the pair of us like that — ignominious, I call it!”

“How do you know it’s the Seer?” I asked.

“Look at the green ink,” he answered. “Besides, I recollect the very shape of the last flourish. I flourished a bit like that in the excitement of the moment, which I don’t always do with my regular signature.”

“He’s done us,” I answered, recognising it. “But how the dickens did he manage to transfer it to the cheque? This looks like your own handwriting, Charles, not a clever forgery.”

“It is,” he said. “I admit it — I can’t deny it. Only fancy his bamboozling me when I was most on my guard! I wasn’t to be taken in by any of his silly occult tricks and catch-words; but it never occurred to me he was going to victimise me financially in this way. I expected attempts at a loan or an extortion; but to collar my signature to a blank cheque — atrocious!”

“How did he manage it?” I asked.

“I haven’t the faintest conception. I only know those are the words I wrote. I could swear to them anywhere.”

“Then you can’t protest the cheque?”

“Unfortunately, no; it’s my own true signature.”

We went that afternoon without delay to see the Chief Commissary of Police at the office. He was a gentlemanly Frenchman, much less formal and red-tapey than usual, and he spoke excellent English with an American accent, having acted, in fact, as a detective in New York for about ten years in his early manhood.

“I guess,” he said slowly, after hearing our story, “you’ve been victimised right here by Colonel Clay, gentlemen.”

“Who is Colonel Clay?” Sir Charles asked.

“That’s just what I want to know,” the Commissary answered, in his curious American-French-English. “He is a Colonel, because he occasionally gives himself a commission; he is called Colonel Clay, because he appears to possess an india-rubber face, and he can mould it like clay in the hands of the potter. Real name, unknown. Nationality, equally French and English. Address, usually Europe. Profession, former maker of wax figures to the Musée Grévin. Age, what he chooses. Employs his knowledge to mould his own nose and cheeks, with wax additions, to the character he desires to personate. Aquiline this time, you say. Hein! Anything like these photographs?”

He rummaged in his desk and handed us two.

“Not in the least,” Sir Charles answered. “Except, perhaps, as to the neck, everything here is quite unlike him.”

“Then that’s the Colonel!” the Commissary answered, with decision, rubbing his hands in glee. “Look here,” and he took out a pencil and rapidly sketched the outline of one of the two faces — that of a bland-looking young man, with no expression worth mentioning. “There’s the Colonel in his simple disguise. Very good. Now watch me: figure to yourself that he adds here a tiny patch of wax to his nose — an aquiline bridge — just so; well, you have him right there; and the chin, ah, one touch: now, for hair, a wig: for complexion, nothing easier: that’s the profile of your rascal, isn’t it?”

“Exactly,” we both murmured. By two curves of the pencil, and a shock of false hair, the face was transmuted.

“He had very large eyes, with very big pupils, though,” I objected, looking close; “and the man in the photograph here has them small and boiled-fishy.”

“That’s so,” the Commissary answered. “A drop of belladonna expands — and produces the Seer; five grains of opium contract — and give a dead-alive, stupidly-innocent appearance. Well, you leave this affair to me, gentlemen. I’ll see the fun out. I don’t say I’ll catch him for you; nobody ever yet has caught Colonel Clay; but I’ll explain how he did the trick; and that ought to be consolation enough to a man of your means for a trifle of five thousand!”

“You are not the conventional French office-holder, M. le Commissaire,” I ventured to interpose.

“You bet!” the Commissary replied, and drew himself up like a captain of infantry. “Messieurs,” he continued, in French, with the utmost dignity, “I shall devote the resources of this office to tracing out the crime, and, if possible, to effectuating the arrest of the culpable.”

We telegraphed to London, of course, and we wrote to the bank, with a full description of the suspected person. But I need hardly add that nothing came of it.

Three days later the Commissary called at our hotel. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I am glad to say I have discovered everything!”

“What? Arrested the Seer?” Sir Charles cried.

The Commissary drew back, almost horrified at the suggestion.

“Arrested Colonel Clay?” he exclaimed. “Mais, monsieur, we are only human! Arrested him? No, not quite. But tracked out how he did it. That is already much — to unravel Colonel Clay, gentlemen!”

“Well, what do you make of it?” Sir Charles asked, crestfallen.

The Commissary sat down and gloated over his discovery. It was clear a well-planned crime amused him vastly. “In the first place, monsieur,” he said, “disabuse your mind of the idea that when monsieur your secretary went out to fetch Señor Herrera that night, Señor Herrera didn’t know to whose rooms he was coming. Quite otherwise, in point of fact. I do not doubt myself that Señor Herrera, or Colonel Clay (call him which you like), came to Nice this winter for no other purpose than just to rob you.”

“But I sent for him,” my brother-in-law interposed.

“Yes; he meant you to send for him. He forced a card, so to speak. If he couldn’t do that I guess he would be a pretty poor conjurer. He had a lady of his own — his wife, let us say, or his sister — stopping here at this hotel; a certain Madame Picardet. Through her he induced several ladies of your circle to attend his séances. She and they spoke to you about him, and aroused your curiosity. You may bet your bottom dollar that when he came to this room he came ready primed and prepared with endless facts about both of you.”

“What fools we have been, Sey,” my brother-in-law exclaimed. “I see it all now. That designing woman sent round before dinner to say I wanted to meet him; and by the time you got there he was ready for bamboozling me.”

“That’s so,” the Commissary answered. “He had your name ready painted on both his arms; and he had made other preparations of still greater importance.”

“You mean the cheque. Well, how did he get it?”

The Commissary opened the door. “Come in,” he said. And a young man entered whom we recognised at once as the chief clerk in the Foreign Department of the Crédit Marseillais, the principal bank all along the Riviera.

“State what you know of this cheque,” the Commissary said, showing it to him, for we had handed it over to the police as a piece of evidence.

“About four weeks since—” the clerk began.

“Say ten days before your séance,” the Commissary interposed.

“A gentleman with very long hair and an aquiline nose, dark, strange, and handsome, called in at my department and asked if I could tell him the name of Sir Charles Vandrift’s London banker. He said he had a sum to pay in to your credit, and asked if we would forward it for him. I told him it was irregular for us to receive the money, as you had no account with us, but that your London bankers were Darby, Drummond, and Rothenberg, Limited.”

“Quite right,” Sir Charles murmured.

“Two days later a lady, Madame Picardet, who was a customer of ours, brought in a good cheque for three hundred pounds, signed by a first-rate name, and asked us to pay it in on her behalf to Darby, Drummond, and Rothenberg’s, and to open a London account with them for her. We did so, and received in reply a cheque-book.”

“From which this cheque was taken, as I learn from the number, by telegram from London,” the Commissary put in. “Also, that on the same day on which your cheque was cashed, Madame Picardet, in London, withdrew her balance.”

“But how did the fellow get me to sign the cheque?” Sir Charles cried. “How did he manage the card trick?”

The Commissary produced a similar card from his pocket. “Was that the sort of thing?” he asked.

“Precisely! A facsimile.”

“I thought so. Well, our Colonel, I find, bought a packet of such cards, intended for admission to a religious function, at a shop in the Quai Massena. He cut out the centre, and, see here—” The Commissary turned it over, and showed a piece of paper pasted neatly over the back; this he tore off, and there, concealed behind it, lay a folded cheque, with only the place where the signature should be written showing through on the face which the Seer had presented to us. “I call that a neat trick,” the Commissary remarked, with professional enjoyment of a really good deception.

“But he burnt the envelope before my eyes,” Sir Charles exclaimed.

“Pooh!” the Commissary answered. “What would he be worth as a conjurer, anyway, if he couldn’t substitute one envelope for another between the table and the fireplace without your noticing it? And Colonel Clay, you must remember, is a prince among conjurers.”

“Well, it’s a comfort to know we’ve identified our man, and the woman who was with him,” Sir Charles said, with a slight sigh of relief. “The next thing will be, of course, you’ll follow them up on these clues in England and arrest them?”

The Commissary shrugged his shoulders. “Arrest them!” he exclaimed, much amused. “Ah, monsieur, but you are sanguine! No officer of justice has ever succeeded in arresting le Colonel Caoutchouc, as we call him in French. He is as slippery as an eel, that man. He wriggles through our fingers. Suppose even we caught him, what could we prove? I ask you. Nobody who has seen him once can ever swear to him again in his next impersonation. He is impayable, this good Colonel. On the day when I arrest him, I assure you, monsieur, I shall consider myself the smartest police-officer in Europe.”

“Well, I shall catch him yet,” Sir Charles answered, and relapsed into silence.

One can only contemplate how much great literature was doomed to never having been written because of the early death of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). In addition to being one of the greatest adventure story authors of all time with such classics as Treasure Island (1881), Prince Otto (1885), Kidnapped (1886), and The Black Arrow (1888) to his credit, he also wrote the beloved volume of poems for young readers A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885).

Stevenson frequently wrote of mystery and crime, most famously The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a macabre allegory once described as the only crime story in which the solution is more terrifying than the problem. He wrote such classic crime stories as “The Suicide Club,” “The Pavilion on the Links,” “Markheim,” and “The Dynamiter” (in collaboration with his wife, Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne), as well as the novel The Wrong Box (1889, in collaboration with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne) that inspired the 1966 star-studded black comedy with John Mills, Ralph Richardson, Michael Caine, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, and Peter Sellers.

Born in Edinburgh, Stevenson stopped studying engineering because of lack of interest and later passed his bar examination but never practiced law. He moved several times due to his chronic lung disease, winding up in Samoa in 1889, where he ended up living with his wife for the rest of his life.

The Body Snatcher was a successful RKO feature film when it was released in 1945, starring Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell, and Bela Lugosi. It was first published in the Pall Mall Christmas “Extra” for 1884, and again in the Pall Mall Gazette on January 31 and February 1, 1895. Its first book appearance was The Body Snatcher (New York, The Merriam Company, 1895).

Every night in the year, four of us sat in the small parlour of the George at Debenham — the undertaker, and the landlord, and Fettes, and myself. Sometimes there would be more; but blow high, blow low, come rain or snow or frost, we four would be each planted in his own particular arm-chair. Fettes was an old drunken Scotchman, a man of education obviously, and a man of some property, since he lived in idleness. He had come to Debenham years ago, while still young, and by a mere continuance of living had grown to be an adopted townsman. His blue camlet cloak was a local antiquity, like the church-spire. His place in the parlour at the George, his absence from church, his old, crapulous, disreputable vices, were all things of course in Debenham. He had some vague Radical opinions and some fleeting infidelities, which he would now and again set forth and emphasise with tottering slaps upon the table. He drank rum — five glasses regularly every evening; and for the greater portion of his nightly visit to the George sat, with his glass in his right hand, in a state of melancholy alcoholic saturation. We called him the Doctor, for he was supposed to have some special knowledge of medicine, and had been known, upon a pinch, to set a fracture or reduce a dislocation; but beyond these slight particulars, we had no knowledge of his character and antecedents.

One dark winter night — it had struck nine some time before the landlord joined us — there was a sick man in the George, a great neighbouring proprietor suddenly struck down with apoplexy on his way to Parliament; and the great man’s still greater London doctor had been telegraphed to his bedside. It was the first time that such a thing had happened in Debenham, for the railway was but newly open, and we were all proportionately moved by the occurrence.

“He’s come,” said the landlord, after he had filled and lighted his pipe.

“He?” said I. “Who? — not the doctor?”

“Himself,” replied our host.

“What is his name?”

“Doctor Macfarlane,” said the landlord.

Fettes was far through his third tumbler, stupidly fuddled, now nodding over, now staring mazily around him; but at the last word he seemed to awaken, and repeated the name “Macfarlane” twice, quietly enough the first time, but with sudden emotion at the second.

“Yes,” said the landlord, “that’s his name, Doctor Wolfe Macfarlane.”

Fettes became instantly sober; his eyes awoke, his voice became clear, loud, and steady, his language forcible and earnest. We were all startled by the transformation, as if a man had risen from the dead.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, “I am afraid I have not been paying much attention to your talk. Who is this Wolfe Macfarlane?” And then, when he had heard the landlord out, “It cannot be, it cannot be,” he added; “and yet I would like well to see him face to face.”

“Do you know him, Doctor?” asked the undertaker, with a gasp.

“God forbid!” was the reply. “And yet the name is a strange one; it were too much to fancy two. Tell me, landlord, is he old?”

“Well,” said the host, “he’s not a young man, to be sure, and his hair is white; but he looks younger than you.”

“He is older, though; years older. But,” with a slap upon the table, “it’s the rum you see in my face — rum and sin. This man, perhaps, may have an easy conscience and a good digestion. Conscience! Hear me speak. You would think I was some good, old, decent Christian, would you not? But no, not I; I never canted. Voltaire might have canted if he’d stood in my shoes; but the brains” — with a rattling fillip on his bald head — “the brains were clear and active, and I saw and made no deductions.”

“If you know this doctor,” I ventured to remark, after a somewhat awful pause, “I should gather that you do not share the landlord’s good opinion.”

Fettes paid no regard to me.

“Yes,” he said, with sudden decision, “I must see him face to face.”

There was another pause, and then a door was closed rather sharply on the first floor, and a step was heard upon the stair.

“That’s the doctor,” cried the landlord. “Look sharp, and you can catch him.”

It was but two steps from the small parlour to the door of the old George Inn; the wide oak staircase landed almost in the street; there was room for a Turkey rug and nothing more between the threshold and the last round of the descent; but this little space was every evening brilliantly lit up, not only by the light upon the stair and the great signal-lamp below the sign, but by the warm radiance of the bar-room window. The George thus brightly advertised itself to passers-by in the cold street. Fettes walked steadily to the spot, and we, who were hanging behind, beheld the two men meet, as one of them had phrased it, face to face. Dr. Macfarlane was alert and vigorous. His white hair set off his pale and placid, although energetic, countenance. He was richly dressed in the finest of broadcloth and the whitest of linen, with a great gold watch-chain, and studs and spectacles of the same precious material. He wore a broad- folded tie, white and speckled with lilac, and he carried on his arm a comfortable driving-coat of fur. There was no doubt but he became his years, breathing, as he did, of wealth and consideration; and it was a surprising contrast to see our parlour sot — bald, dirty, pimpled, and robed in his old camlet cloak — confront him at the bottom of the stairs.

“Macfarlane!” he said somewhat loudly, more like a herald than a friend.

The great doctor pulled up short on the fourth step, as though the familiarity of the address surprised and somewhat shocked his dignity.

“Toddy Macfarlane!” repeated Fettes.

The London man almost staggered. He stared for the swiftest of seconds at the man before him, glanced behind him with a sort of scare, and then in a startled whisper, “Fettes!” he said, “You!”

“Ay,” said the other, “me! Did you think I was dead too? We are not so easy shut of our acquaintance.”

“Hush, hush!” exclaimed the doctor. “Hush, hush! this meeting is so unexpected — I can see you are unmanned. I hardly knew you, I confess, at first; but I am overjoyed — overjoyed to have this opportunity. For the present it must be how-d’ye-do and good-bye in one, for my fly is waiting, and I must not fail the train; but you shall — let me see — yes — you shall give me your address, and you can count on early news of me. We must do something for you, Fettes. I fear you are out at elbows; but we must see to that for auld lang syne, as once we sang at suppers.”

“Money!” cried Fettes; “money from you! The money that I had from you is lying where I cast it in the rain.”

Dr. Macfarlane had talked himself into some measure of superiority and confidence, but the uncommon energy of this refusal cast him back into his first confusion.

A horrible, ugly look came and went across his almost venerable countenance. “My dear fellow,” he said, “be it as you please; my last thought is to offend you. I would intrude on none. I will leave you my address, however—”

“I do not wish it — I do not wish to know the roof that shelters you,” interrupted the other. “I heard your name; I feared it might be you; I wished to know if, after all, there were a God; I know now that there is none. Begone!”

He still stood in the middle of the rug, between the stair and doorway; and the great London physician, in order to escape, would be forced to step to one side. It was plain that he hesitated before the thought of this humiliation. White as he was, there was a dangerous glitter in his spectacles; but while he still paused uncertain, he became aware that the driver of his fly was peering in from the street at this unusual scene and caught a glimpse at the same time of our little body from the parlour, huddled by the corner of the bar. The presence of so many witnesses decided him at once to flee. He crouched together, brushing on the wainscot, and made a dart like a serpent, striking for the door. But his tribulation was not yet entirely at an end, for even as he was passing Fettes clutched him by the arm and these words came in a whisper, and yet painfully distinct, “Have you seen it again?”

The great rich London doctor cried out aloud with a sharp, throttling cry; he dashed his questioner across the open space, and, with his hands over his head, fled out of the door like a detected thief. Before it had occurred to one of us to make a movement the fly was already rattling toward the station. The scene was over like a dream, but the dream had left proofs and traces of its passage. Next day the servant found the fine gold spectacles broken on the threshold, and that very night we were all standing breathless by the bar-room window, and Fettes at our side, sober, pale, and resolute in look.

“God protect us, Mr. Fettes!” said the landlord, coming first into possession of his customary senses. “What in the universe is all this? These are strange things you have been saying.”

Fettes turned toward us; he looked us each in succession in the face. “See if you can hold your tongues,” said he. “That man Macfarlane is not safe to cross; those that have done so already have repented it too late.”

And then, without so much as finishing his third glass, far less waiting for the other two, he bade us good-bye and went forth, under the lamp of the hotel, into the black night.

We three turned to our places in the parlour, with the big red fire and four clear candles; and as we recapitulated what had passed, the first chill of our surprise soon changed into a glow of curiosity. We sat late; it was the latest session I have known in the old George. Each man, before we parted, had his theory that he was bound to prove; and none of us had any nearer business in this world than to track out the past of our condemned companion, and surprise the secret that he shared with the great London doctor. It is no great boast, but I believe I was a better hand at worming out a story than either of my fellows at the George; and perhaps there is now no other man alive who could narrate to you the following foul and unnatural events.

In his young days Fettes studied medicine in the schools of Edinburgh. He had talent of a kind, the talent that picks up swiftly what it hears and readily retails it for its own. He worked little at home; but he was civil, attentive, and intelligent in the presence of his masters. They soon picked him out as a lad who listened closely and remembered well; nay, strange as it seemed to me when I first heard it, he was in those days well favoured, and pleased by his exterior. There was, at that period, a certain extramural teacher of anatomy, whom I shall here designate by the letter K. His name was subsequently too well known. The man who bore it skulked through the streets of Edinburgh in disguise, while the mob that applauded at the execution of Burke called loudly for the blood of his employer. But Mr. K — was then at the top of his vogue; he enjoyed a popularity due partly to his own talent and address, partly to the incapacity of his rival, the university professor. The students, at least, swore by his name, and Fettes believed himself, and was believed by others, to have laid the foundations of success when he had acquired the favour of this meteorically famous man. Mr. K— was a bon vivant as well as an accomplished teacher; he liked a sly illusion no less than a careful preparation. In both capacities Fettes enjoyed and deserved his notice, and by the second year of his attendance he held the half-regular position of second demonstrator or sub-assistant in his class.

In this capacity the charge of the theatre and lecture-room devolved in particular upon his shoulders. He had to answer for the cleanliness of the premises and the conduct of the other students, and it was a part of his duty to supply, receive, and divide the various subjects. It was with a view to this last — at that time very delicate — affair that he was lodged by Mr. K— in the same wynd, and at last in the same building, with the dissecting-rooms. Here, after a night of turbulent pleasures, his hand still tottering, his sight still misty and confused, he would be called out of bed in the black hours before the winter dawn by the unclean and desperate interlopers who supplied the table. He would open the door to these men, since infamous throughout the land. He would help them with their tragic burden, pay them their sordid price, and remain alone, when they were gone, with the unfriendly relics of humanity. From such a scene he would return to snatch another hour or two of slumber, to repair the abuses of the night, and refresh himself for the labours of the day.

Few lads could have been more insensible to the impressions of a life thus passed among the ensigns of mortality. His mind was closed against all general considerations. He was incapable of interest in the fate and fortunes of another, the slave of his own desires and low ambitions. Cold, light, and selfish in the last resort, he had that modicum of prudence, miscalled morality, which keeps a man from inconvenient drunkenness or punishable theft. He coveted, besides, a measure of consideration from his masters and his fellow-pupils, and he had no desire to fail conspicuously in the external parts of life. Thus he made it his pleasure to gain some distinction in his studies, and day after day rendered unimpeachable eye-service to his employer, Mr. K—. For his day of work he indemnified himself by nights of roaring, blackguardly enjoyment; and when that balance had been struck, the organ that he called his conscience declared itself content.

The supply of subjects was a continual trouble to him as well as to his master. In that large and busy class, the raw material of the anatomists kept perpetually running out; and the business thus rendered necessary was not only unpleasant in itself, but threatened dangerous consequences to all who were concerned. It was the policy of Mr. K— to ask no questions in his dealings with the trade. “They bring the body, and we pay the price,” he used to say, dwelling on the alliteration — “quid pro quo.” And, again, and somewhat profanely, “Ask no questions,” he would tell his assistants, “for conscience’s sake.” There was no understanding that the subjects were provided by the crime of murder. Had that idea been broached to him in words, he would have recoiled in horror; but the lightness of his speech upon so grave a matter was, in itself, an offence against good manners, and a temptation to the men with whom he dealt. Fettes, for instance, had often remarked to himself upon the singular freshness of the bodies. He had been struck again and again by the hang-dog, abominable looks of the ruffians who came to him before the dawn; and putting things together clearly in his private thoughts, he perhaps attributed a meaning too immoral and too categorical to the unguarded counsels of his master. He understood his duty, in short, to have three branches: to take what was brought, to pay the price, and to avert the eye from any evidence of crime.

One November morning this policy of silence was put sharply to the test. He had been awake all night with a racking toothache — pacing his room like a caged beast or throwing himself in fury on his bed — and had fallen at last into that profound, uneasy slumber that so often follows on a night of pain, when he was awakened by the third or fourth angry repetition of the concerted signal. There was a thin, bright moonshine; it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened, but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager to be gone. Fettes, sick with sleep, lighted them upstairs. He heard their grumbling Irish voices through a dream; and as they stripped the sack from their sad merchandise he leaned dozing, with his shoulder propped against the wall; he had to shake himself to find the men their money. As he did so his eyes lighted on the dead face. He started; he took two steps nearer, with the candle raised.

“God Almighty!” he cried. “That is Jane Galbraith!”

The men answered nothing, but they shuffled nearer the door.

“I know her, I tell you,” he continued. “She was alive and hearty yesterday. It’s impossible she can be dead; it’s impossible you should have got this body fairly.”

“Sure, sir, you’re mistaken entirely,” said one of the men.

But the other looked Fettes darkly in the eyes, and demanded the money on the spot.

It was impossible to misconceive the threat or to exaggerate the danger. The lad’s heart failed him. He stammered some excuses, counted out the sum, and saw his hateful visitors depart. No sooner were they gone than he hastened to confirm his doubts. By a dozen unquestionable marks he identified the girl he had jested with the day before. He saw, with horror, marks upon her body that might well betoken violence. A panic seized him, and he took refuge in his room. There he reflected at length over the discovery that he had made; considered soberly the bearing of Mr. K—’s instructions and the danger to himself of interference in so serious a business, and at last, in sore perplexity, determined to wait for the advice of his immediate superior, the class assistant.

This was a young doctor, Wolfe Macfarlane, a high favourite among all the reckless students, clever, dissipated, and unscrupulous to the last degree. He had travelled and studied abroad. His manners were agreeable and a little forward. He was an authority on the stage, skilful on the ice or the links with skate or golf-club; he dressed with nice audacity, and, to put the finishing touch upon his glory, he kept a gig and a strong trotting-horse. With Fettes he was on terms of intimacy; indeed, their relative positions called for some community of life; and when subjects were scarce the pair would drive far into the country in Macfarlane’s gig, visit and desecrate some lonely graveyard, and return before dawn with their booty to the door of the dissecting-room.

On that particular morning Macfarlane arrived somewhat earlier than his wont. Fettes heard him, and met him on the stairs, told him his story, and showed him the cause of his alarm. Macfarlane examined the marks on her body.

“Yes,” he said with a nod, “it looks fishy.”

“Well, what should I do?” asked Fettes.

“Do?” repeated the other. “Do you want to do anything? Least said soonest mended, I should say.”

“Someone else might recognise her,” objected Fettes. “She was as well-known as the Castle Rock.”

“We’ll hope not,” said Macfarlane, “and if anybody does — well, you didn’t, don’t you see, and there’s an end. The fact is, this has been going on too long. Stir up the mud, and you’ll get K— into the most unholy trouble; you’ll be in a shocking box yourself. So will I, if you come to that. I should like to know how any one of us would look, or what the devil we should have to say for ourselves, in any Christian witness-box. For me, you know there’s one thing certain — that, practically speaking, all our subjects have been murdered.”

“Macfarlane!” cried Fettes.

“Come now!” sneered the other. “As if you hadn’t suspected it yourself!”

“Suspecting is one thing—”

“And proof another. Yes, I know; and I’m as sorry as you are this should have come here,” tapping the body with his cane. “The next best thing for me is not to recognise it; and,” he added coolly, “I don’t. You may, if you please. I don’t dictate, but I think a man of the world would do as I do; and I may add, I fancy that is what K— would look for at our hands. The question is, Why did he choose us two for his assistants? And I answer, because he didn’t want old wives.”

This was the tone of all others to affect the mind of a lad like Fettes. He agreed to imitate Macfarlane. The body of the unfortunate girl was duly dissected, and no one remarked or appeared to recognise her.

One afternoon, when his day’s work was over, Fettes dropped into a popular tavern and found Macfarlane sitting with a stranger. This was a small man, very pale and dark, with coal-black eyes. The cut of his features gave a promise of intellect and refinement which was but feebly realised in his manners, for he proved, upon a nearer acquaintance, coarse, vulgar, and stupid. He exercised, however, a very remarkable control over Macfarlane; issued orders like the Great Bashaw; became inflamed at the least discussion or delay, and commented rudely on the servility with which he was obeyed. This most offensive person took a fancy to Fettes on the spot, plied him with drinks, and honoured him with unusual confidences on his past career. If a tenth part of what he confessed were true, he was a very loathsome rogue; and the lad’s vanity was tickled by the attention of so experienced a man.

“I’m a pretty bad fellow myself,” the stranger remarked, “but Macfarlane is the boy — Toddy Macfarlane I call him. Toddy, order your friend another glass.” Or it might be, “Toddy, you jump up and shut the door.” “Toddy hates me,” he said again. “Oh yes, Toddy, you do!”

“Don’t you call me that confounded name,” growled Macfarlane.

“Hear him! Did you ever see the lads play knife? He would like to do that all over my body,” remarked the stranger.

“We medicals have a better way than that,” said Fettes. “When we dislike a dead friend of ours, we dissect him.”

Macfarlane looked up sharply, as though this jest were scarcely to his mind.

The afternoon passed. Gray, for that was the stranger’s name, invited Fettes to join them at dinner, ordered a feast so sumptuous that the tavern was thrown into commotion, and when all was done commanded Macfarlane to settle the bill. It was late before they separated; the man Gray was incapably drunk. Macfarlane, sobered by his fury, chewed the cud of the money he had been forced to squander and the slights he had been obliged to swallow. Fettes, with various liquors singing in his head, returned home with devious footsteps and a mind entirely in abeyance. Next day Macfarlane was absent from the class, and Fettes smiled to himself as he imagined him still squiring the intolerable Gray from tavern to tavern. As soon as the hour of liberty had struck he posted from place to place in quest of his last night’s companions. He could find them, however, nowhere; so returned early to his rooms, went early to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.

At four in the morning he was awakened by the well-known signal. Descending to the door, he was filled with astonishment to find Macfarlane with his gig, and in the gig one of those long and ghastly packages with which he was so well acquainted.

“What?” he cried. “Have you been out alone? How did you manage?”

But Macfarlane silenced him roughly, bidding him turn to business. When they had got the body upstairs and laid it on the table, Macfarlane made at first as if he were going away. Then he paused and seemed to hesitate; and then, “You had better look at the face,” said he, in tones of some constraint. “You had better,” he repeated, as Fettes only stared at him in wonder.

“But where, and how, and when did you come by it?” cried the other.

“Look at the face,” was the only answer.

Fettes was staggered; strange doubts assailed him. He looked from the young doctor to the body, and then back again. At last, with a start, he did as he was bidden. He had almost expected the sight that met his eyes, and yet the shock was cruel. To see, fixed in the rigidity of death and naked on that coarse layer of sackcloth, the man whom he had left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern, awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terrors of the conscience. It was a cras tibi which re-echoed in his soul, that two whom he had known should have come to lie upon these icy tables. Yet these were only secondary thoughts. His first concern regarded Wolfe. Unprepared for a challenge so momentous, he knew not how to look his comrade in the face. He durst not meet his eye, and he had neither words nor voice at his command.

It was Macfarlane himself who made the first advance. He came up quietly behind and laid his hand gently but firmly on the other’s shoulder.

“Richardson,” said he, “may have the head.”

Now Richardson was a student who had long been anxious for that portion of the human subject to dissect. There was no answer, and the murderer resumed: “Talking of business, you must pay me; your accounts, you see, must tally.”

Fettes found a voice, the ghost of his own: “Pay you!” he cried. “Pay you for that?”

“Why, yes, of course you must. By all means and on every possible account, you must,” returned the other. “I dare not give it for nothing, you dare not take it for nothing; it would compromise us both. This is another case like Jane Galbraith’s. The more things are wrong the more we must act as if all were right. Where does old K— keep his money?”

“There,” answered Fettes hoarsely, pointing to a cupboard in the corner.

“Give me the key, then,” said the other, calmly, holding out his hand.

There was an instant’s hesitation, and the die was cast. Macfarlane could not suppress a nervous twitch, the infinitesimal mark of an immense relief, as he felt the key between his fingers. He opened the cupboard, brought out pen and ink and a paper-book that stood in one compartment, and separated from the funds in a drawer a sum suitable to the occasion.

“Now, look here,” he said, “there is the payment made — first proof of your good faith: first step to your security. You have now to clinch it by a second. Enter the payment in your book, and then you for your part may defy the devil.”

The next few seconds were for Fettes an agony of thought; but in balancing his terrors it was the most immediate that triumphed. Any future difficulty seemed almost welcome if he could avoid a present quarrel with Macfarlane. He set down the candle which he had been carrying all this time, and with a steady hand entered the date, the nature, and the amount of the transaction.

“And now,” said Macfarlane, “it’s only fair that you should pocket the lucre. I’ve had my share already. By the bye, when a man of the world falls into a bit of luck, has a few shillings extra in his pocket — I’m ashamed to speak of it, but there’s a rule of conduct in the case. No treating, no purchase of expensive class-books, no squaring of old debts; borrow, don’t lend.”

“Macfarlane,” began Fettes, still somewhat hoarsely, “I have put my neck in a halter to oblige you.”

“To oblige me?” cried Wolfe. “Oh, come! You did, as near as I can see the matter, what you downright had to do in self-defence. Suppose I got into trouble, where would you be? This second little matter flows clearly from the first. Mr. Gray is the continuation of Miss Galbraith. You can’t begin and then stop. If you begin, you must keep on beginning; that’s the truth. No rest for the wicked.”

A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student.

“My God!” he cried, “but what have I done? and when did I begin? To be made a class assistant — in the name of reason, where’s the harm in that? Service wanted the position; Service might have got it. Would he have been where I am now?”

“My dear fellow,” said Macfarlane, “what a boy you are! What harm has come to you? What harm can come to you if you hold your tongue? Why, man, do you know what this life is? There are two squads of us — the lions and the lambs. If you’re a lamb, you’ll come to lie upon these tables like Gray or Jane Galbraith; if you’re a lion, you’ll live and drive a horse like me, like K—, like all the world with any wit or courage. You’re staggered at the first. But look at K—! My dear fellow, you’re clever, you have pluck. I like you, and K— likes you. You were born to lead the hunt; and I tell you, on my honour and my experience of life, three days from now you’ll laugh at all these scarecrows like a High School boy at a farce.”

And with that Macfarlane took his departure and drove off up the wynd in his gig to get under cover before daylight. Fettes was thus left alone with his regrets. He saw the miserable peril in which he stood involved. He saw, with inexpressible dismay, that there was no limit to his weakness, and that, from concession to concession, he had fallen from the arbiter of Macfarlane’s destiny to his paid and helpless accomplice. He would have given the world to have been a little braver at the time, but it did not occur to him that he might still be brave. The secret of Jane Galbraith and the cursed entry in the day-book closed his mouth.

Hours passed; the class began to arrive; the members of the unhappy Gray were dealt out to one and to another, and received without remark. Richardson was made happy with the head; and before the hour of freedom rang Fettes trembled with exultation to perceive how far they had already gone toward safety.

For two days he continued to watch, with increasing joy, the dreadful process of disguise.

On the third day Macfarlane made his appearance. He had been ill, he said; but he made up for lost time by the energy with which he directed the students. To Richardson in particular he extended the most valuable assistance and advice, and that student, encouraged by the praise of the demonstrator, burned high with ambitious hopes, and saw the medal already in his grasp.

Before the week was out Macfarlane’s prophecy had been fulfilled. Fettes had outlived his terrors and had forgotten his baseness. He began to plume himself upon his courage, and had so arranged the story in his mind that he could look back on these events with an unhealthy pride. Of his accomplice he saw but little. They met, of course, in the business of the class; they received their orders together from Mr. K—. At times they had a word or two in private, and Macfarlane was from first to last particularly kind and jovial. But it was plain that he avoided any reference to their common secret; and even when Fettes whispered to him that he had cast in his lot with the lions and foresworn the lambs, he only signed to him smilingly to hold his peace.

At length an occasion arose which threw the pair once more into a closer union. Mr. K— was again short of subjects; pupils were eager, and it was a part of this teacher’s pretensions to be always well supplied. At the same time there came the news of a burial in the rustic graveyard of Glencorse. Time has little changed the place in question. It stood then, as now, upon a cross-road, out of call of human habitations, and buried fathom deep in the foliage of six cedar trees. The cries of the sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in seven days the voice of the bell and the old tunes of the precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural church. The Resurrection Man — to use a byname of the period — was not to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs, the paths worn by the feet of worshippers and mourners, and the offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-lit, terror-haunted resurrection of the spade and mattock. The coffin was forced, the cerements torn, and the melancholy relics, clad in sackcloth, after being rattled for hours on moonless byways, were at length exposed to uttermost indignities before a class of gaping boys.

Somewhat as two vultures may swoop upon a dying lamb, Fettes and Macfarlane were to be let loose upon a grave in that green and quiet resting-place. The wife of a farmer, a woman who had lived for sixty years, and been known for nothing but good butter and a godly conversation, was to be rooted from her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday’s best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.

Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks and furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without remission — a cold, dense, lashing rain. Now and again there blew a puff of wind, but these sheets of falling water kept it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and silent drive as far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening. They stopped once, to hide their implements in a thick bush not far from the churchyard, and once again at the Fisher’s Tryst, to have a toast before the kitchen fire and vary their nips of whisky with a glass of ale. When they reached their journey’s end the gig was housed, the horse was fed and comforted, and the two young doctors in a private room sat down to the best dinner and the best wine the house afforded. The lights, the fire, the beating rain upon the window, the cold, incongruous work that lay before them, added zest to their enjoyment of the meal. With every glass their cordiality increased. Soon Macfarlane handed a little pile of gold to his companion.

“A compliment,” he said. “Between friends these little d — d accommodations ought to fly like pipe-lights.”

Fettes pocketed the money, and applauded the sentiment to the echo. “You are a philosopher,” he cried. “I was an ass till I knew you. You and K— between you, by the Lord Harry! but you’ll make a man of me.”

“Of course we shall,” applauded Macfarlane. “A man? I tell you, it required a man to back me up the other morning. There are some big, brawling, forty-year-old cowards who would have turned sick at the look of the d — d thing; but not you — you kept your head. I watched you.”

“Well, and why not?” Fettes thus vaunted himself. “It was no affair of mine. There was nothing to gain on the one side but disturbance, and on the other I could count on your gratitude, don’t you see?” And he slapped his pocket till the gold pieces rang.

Macfarlane somehow felt a certain touch of alarm at these unpleasant words. He may have regretted that he had taught his young companion so successfully, but he had no time to interfere, for the other noisily continued in this boastful strain —

“The great thing is not to be afraid. Now, between you and me, I don’t want to hang — that’s practical; but for all cant, Macfarlane, I was born with a contempt. Hell, God, Devil, right, wrong, sin, crime, and all the old gallery of curiosities — they may frighten boys, but men of the world, like you and me, despise them. Here’s to the memory of Gray!”

It was by this time growing somewhat late. The gig, according to order, was brought round to the door with both lamps brightly shining, and the young men had to pay their bill and take the road. They announced that they were bound for Peebles, and drove in that direction till they were clear of the last houses of the town; then, extinguishing the lamps, returned upon their course, and followed a by-road toward Glencorse. There was no sound but that of their own passage, and the incessant, strident pouring of the rain. It was pitch dark; here and there a white gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost groping, that they picked their way through that resonant blackness to their solemn and isolated destination. In the sunken woods that traverse the neighbourhood of the burying-ground the last glimmer failed them, and it became necessary to kindle a match and re-illumine one of the lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping trees, and environed by huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed labours.

They were both experienced in such affairs, and powerful with the spade; and they had scarce been twenty minutes at their task before they were rewarded by a dull rattle on the coffin lid. At the same moment Macfarlane, having hurt his hand upon a stone, flung it carelessly above his head. The grave, in which they now stood almost to the shoulders, was close to the edge of the plateau of the graveyard; and the gig lamp had been propped, the better to illuminate their labours, against a tree, and on the immediate verge of the steep bank descending to the stream. Chance had taken a sure aim with the stone. Then came a clang of broken glass; night fell upon them; sounds alternately dull and ringing announced the bounding of the lantern down the bank, and its occasional collision with the trees. A stone or two, which it had dislodged in its descent, rattled behind it into the profundities of the glen; and then silence, like night, resumed its sway; and they might bend their hearing to its utmost pitch, but naught was to be heard except the rain, now marching to the wind, now steadily falling over miles of open country.

They were so nearly at an end of their abhorred task that they judged it wisest to complete it in the dark. The coffin was exhumed and broken open; the body inserted in the dripping sack and carried between them to the gig; one mounted to keep it in its place, and the other, taking the horse by the mouth, groped along by wall and bush until they reached the wider road by the Fisher’s Tryst. Here was a faint, diffused radiancy, which they hailed like daylight; by that they pushed the horse to a good pace and began to rattle along merrily in the direction of the town.

They had both been wetted to the skin during their operations, and now, as the gig jumped among the deep ruts, the thing that stood propped between them fell now upon one and now upon the other. At every repetition of the horrid contact each instinctively repelled it with the greater haste; and the process, natural although it was, began to tell upon the nerves of the companions. Macfarlane made some ill-favoured jest about the farmer’s wife, but it came hollowly from his lips, and was allowed to drop in silence. Still their unnatural burden bumped from side to side; and now the head would be laid, as if in confidence, upon their shoulders, and now the drenching sack-cloth would flap icily about their faces. A creeping chill began to possess the soul of Fettes. He peered at the bundle, and it seemed somehow larger than at first. All over the country-side, and from every degree of distance, the farm dogs accompanied their passage with tragic ululations; and it grew and grew upon his mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that some nameless change had befallen the dead body, and that it was in fear of their unholy burden that the dogs were howling.

“For God’s sake,” said he, making a great effort to arrive at speech, “for God’s sake, let’s have a light!”

Seemingly Macfarlane was affected in the same direction; for, though he made no reply, he stopped the horse, passed the reins to his companion, got down, and proceeded to kindle the remaining lamp. They had by that time got no farther than the cross-road down to Auchenclinny. The rain still poured as though the deluge were returning, and it was no easy matter to make a light in such a world of wet and darkness. When at last the flickering blue flame had been transferred to the wick and began to expand and clarify, and shed a wide circle of misty brightness round the gig, it became possible for the two young men to see each other and the thing they had along with them. The rain had moulded the rough sacking to the outlines of the body underneath; the head was distinct from the trunk, the shoulders plainly modelled; something at once spectral and human riveted their eyes upon the ghastly comrade of their drive.

For some time Macfarlane stood motionless, holding up the lamp. A nameless dread was swathed, like a wet sheet, about the body, and tightened the white skin upon the face of Fettes; a fear that was meaningless, a horror of what could not be, kept mounting to his brain. Another beat of the watch, and he had spoken. But his comrade forestalled him.

“That is not a woman,” said Macfarlane, in a hushed voice.

“It was a woman when we put her in,” whispered Fettes.

“Hold that lamp,” said the other. “I must see her face.”

And as Fettes took the lamp his companion untied the fastenings of the sack and drew down the cover from the head. The light fell very clear upon the dark, well-moulded features and smooth-shaven cheeks of a too familiar countenance, often beheld in dreams of both of these young men. A wild yell rang up into the night; each leaped from his own side into the roadway: the lamp fell, broke, and was extinguished; and the horse, terrified by this unusual commotion, bounded and went off toward Edinburgh at a gallop, bearing along with it, sole occupant of the gig, the body of the dead and long-dissected Gray.

Dracula (1897) is the most famous horror novel of the nineteenth century, both a critical and popular success, reprinted countless times, yet Abraham (Bram) Stoker (1847–1912) never wrote another book or short story about the titular character; “Dracula’s Guest” is a complete story originally written as a chapter of the novel but never used, finally seeing publication in a posthumous short story collection.

Stoker was born in a seaside suburb of Dublin. Extremely sickly as a child, his long bedridden hours were made bearable by his mother’s stories of horror: fiction, folklore, and real life, including grisly tales of the 1832 cholera epidemic in Sligo. His health improved when he went to school at seven; he later became a star athlete at Trinity College in Dublin. He began writing short fiction as well as theater reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail, which was partly owned by the famous writer of horror and supernatural fiction, Sheridan Le Fanu, then took the job of manager to Henry Irving, the most popular and acclaimed actor of his generation, a position Stoker held for twenty-seven years, reportedly with eighteen-hour workdays.

In spite of the debilitating schedule, Stoker was able to write more than a dozen novels and other works during the years with Irving, most notably Dracula, the only one of his books still widely read today. Freudian elements may have been at work in Stoker’s subconscious, as he named the tireless vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing, using his own first name, while Irving had the attributes of a “psychic” vampire, draining the life out of the author with the relentless workload.

“Dracula’s Guest” was originally published in Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories (London, Routledge, 1914).

When we started for our drive the sun was shining brightly on Munich, and the air was full of the joyousness of early summer. Just as we were about to depart, Herr Delbrück (the maître d’hôtel of the Quatre Saisons, where I was staying) came down, bareheaded, to the carriage and, after wishing me a pleasant drive, said to the coachman, still holding his hand on the handle of the carriage door:

“Remember you are back by nightfall. The sky looks bright but there is a shiver in the north wind that says there may be a sudden storm. But I am sure you will not be late.” Here he smiled, and added, “For you know what night it is.”

Johann answered with an emphatic, “Ja, mein Herr,” and, touching his hat, drove off quickly. When we had cleared the town, I said, after signalling to him to stop:

“Tell me, Johann, what is tonight?”

He crossed himself, as he answered laconically: “Walpurgisnacht.” Then he took out his watch, a great, old-fashioned German silver thing as big as a turnip, and looked at it, with his eyebrows gathered together and a little impatient shrug of his shoulders. I realized that this was his way of respectfully protesting against the unnecessary delay, and sank back in the carriage, merely motioning him to proceed. He started off rapidly, as if to make up for lost time. Every now and then the horses seemed to throw up their heads and sniffed the air suspiciously. On such occasions I often looked round in alarm. The road was pretty bleak, for we were traversing a sort of high, windswept plateau. As we drove, I saw a road that looked but little used, and which seemed to dip through a little, winding valley. It looked so inviting that, even at the risk of offending him, I called Johann to stop — and when he had pulled up, I told him I would like to drive down that road. He made all sorts of excuses, and frequently crossed himself as he spoke. This somewhat piqued my curiosity, so I asked him various questions. He answered fencingly, and repeatedly looked at his watch in protest. Finally I said:

“Well, Johann, I want to go down this road. I shall not ask you to come unless you like; but tell me why you do not like to go, that is all I ask.” For answer he seemed to throw himself off the box, so quickly did he reach the ground. Then he stretched out his hands appealingly to me, and implored me not to go. There was just enough of English mixed with the German for me to understand the drift of his talk. He seemed always just about to tell me something — the very idea of which evidently frightened him; but each time he pulled himself up, saying, as he crossed himself: “Walpurgisnacht!”

I tried to argue with him, but it was difficult to argue with a man when I did not know his language. The advantage certainly rested with him, for although he began to speak in English, of a very crude and broken kind, he always got excited and broke into his native tongue — and every time he did so, he looked at his watch. Then the horses became restless and sniffed the air. At this he grew very pale, and, looking around in a frightened way, he suddenly jumped forward, took them by the bridles, and led them on some twenty feet. I followed, and asked why he had done this. For answer he crossed himself, pointed to the spot we had left and drew his carriage in the direction of the other road, indicating a cross, and said, first in German, then in English: “Buried him — him what killed themselves.”

I remembered the old custom of burying suicides at cross-roads: “Ah! I see, a suicide. How interesting!” But for the life of me I could not make out why the horses were frightened.

While we were talking, we heard a sort of sound between a yelp and a bark. It was far away; but the horses got very restless, and it took Johann all his time to quiet them. He was pale, and said: “It sounds like a wolf — but yet there are no wolves here now.”

“No?” I said, questioning him. “Isn’t it long since the wolves were so near the city?”

“Long, long,” he answered, “in the spring and summer; but with the snow the wolves have been here not so long.”

While he was petting the horses and trying to quiet them, dark clouds drifted rapidly across the sky. The sunshine passed away, and a breath of cold wind seemed to drift past us. It was only a breath, however, and more in the nature of a warning than a fact, for the sun came out brightly again. Johann looked under his lifted hand at the horizon and said:

“The storm of snow, he comes before long time.” Then he looked at his watch again, and, straightway holding his reins firmly — for the horses were still pawing the ground restlessly and shaking their heads — he climbed to his box as though the time had come for proceeding on our journey.

I felt a little obstinate and did not at once get into the carriage.

“Tell me,” I said, “about this place where the road leads,” and I pointed down.

Again he crossed himself and mumbled a prayer, before he answered: “It is unholy.”

“What is unholy?” I enquired.

“The village.”

“Then there is a village?”

“No, no. No one lives there hundreds of years.”

My curiosity was piqued: “But you said there was a village.”

“There was.”

“Where is it now?”

Whereupon he burst out into a long story in German and English, so mixed up that I could not quite understand exactly what he said, but roughly I gathered that long ago, hundreds of years, men had died there and been buried in their graves; and sounds were heard under the clay, and when the graves were opened, men and women were found rosy with life, and their mouths red with blood. And so, in haste to save their lives (aye, and their souls! — and here he crossed himself) those who were left fled away to other places, where the living died, and the dead were dead and not — not something. He was evidently afraid to speak the last words. As he proceeded with his narration, he grew more and more excited. It seemed as if his imagination had got hold of him, and he ended in a perfect paroxysm of fear — white-faced, perspiring, trembling, and looking round him, as if expecting that some dreadful presence would manifest itself there in the bright sunshine on the open plain. Finally, in an agony of desperation, he cried:

“Walpurgisnacht!” and pointed to the carriage for me to get in. All my English blood rose at this, and, standing back, I said:

“You are afraid, Johann — you are afraid. Go home; I shall return alone; the walk will do me good.” The carriage door was open. I took from the seat my oak walking stick — which I always carry on my holiday excursions — and closed the door, pointing back to Munich, and said, “Go home, Johann — Walpurgisnacht doesn’t concern Englishmen.”

The horses were now more restive than ever, and Johann was trying to hold them in while excitedly imploring me not to do anything so foolish. I pitied the poor fellow, he was so deeply in earnest; but all the same I could not help laughing. His English was quite gone now. In his anxiety he had forgotten that his only means of making me understand was to talk my language, so he jabbered away in his native German. It began to be a little tedious. After giving the direction, “Home!” I turned to go down the cross-road into the valley.

With a despairing gesture, Johann turned his horses towards Munich. I leaned on my stick and looked after him. He went slowly along the road for a while; then there came over the crest of the hill a man tall and thin. I could see so much in the distance. When he drew near the horses, they began to jump and kick about, then to scream with terror. Johann could not hold them in; they bolted down the road, running away madly. I watched them out of sight, then looked for the stranger, but I found that he, too, was gone.

With a light heart I turned down the side road through the deepening valley to which Johann had objected. There was not the slightest reason, that I could see, for his objection; and I daresay I tramped for a couple of hours without thinking of time or distance, and certainly without seeing a person or a house. So far as the place was concerned, it was desolation itself. But I did not notice this particularly till, on turning a bend in the road, I came upon a scattered fringe of wood; then I recognized that I had been impressed unconsciously by the desolation of the region through which I had passed.

I sat down to rest myself, and began to look around. It struck me that it was considerably colder than it had been at the commencement of my walk — a sort of sighing sound seemed to be around me, with, now and then, high overhead, a sort of muffled roar. Looking upwards I noticed that great thick clouds were drifting rapidly across the sky from North to South at a great height. There were signs of a coming storm in some lofty stratum of the air. I was a little chilly, and, thinking that it was the sitting still after the exercise of walking, I resumed my journey.

The ground I passed over was now much more picturesque. There were no striking objects that the eye might single out; but in all there was a charm of beauty. I took little heed of time and it was only when the deepening twilight forced itself upon me that I began to think of how I should find my way home. The brightness of the day had gone. The air was cold, and the drifting of clouds high overhead was more marked. They were accompanied by a sort of far-away rushing sound, through which seemed to come at intervals that mysterious cry which the driver had said came from a wolf. For a while I hesitated. I had said I would see the deserted village, so on I went, and presently came on a wide stretch of open country, shut in by hills all around. Their sides were covered with trees which spread down to the plain, dotting, in clumps, the gentler slopes and hollows which showed here and there. I followed with my eye the winding of the road, and saw that it curved close to one of the densest of these clumps and was lost behind it.

As I looked there came a cold shiver in the air, and the snow began to fall. I thought of the miles and miles of bleak country I had passed, and then hurried on to seek the shelter of the wood in front. Darker and darker grew the sky, and faster and heavier fell the snow, till the earth before and around me was a glistening white carpet the further edge of which was lost in misty vagueness. The road was here but crude, and when on the level its boundaries were not so marked, as when it passed through the cuttings; and in a little while I found that I must have strayed from it, for I missed underfoot the hard surface, and my feet sank deeper in the grass and moss. Then the wind grew stronger and blew with ever increasing force, till I was fain to run before it. The air became icy cold, and in spite of my exercise I began to suffer. The snow was now falling so thickly and whirling around me in such rapid eddies that I could hardly keep my eyes open. Every now and then the heavens were torn asunder by vivid lightning, and in the flashes I could see ahead of me a great mass of trees, chiefly yew and cypress all heavily coated with snow.

I was soon amongst the shelter of the trees, and there in comparative silence, I could hear the rush of the wind high overhead. Presently the blackness of the storm had become merged in the darkness of the night. By-and-by the storm seemed to be passing away: it now only came in fierce puffs and blasts. At such moments the weird sound of the wolf appeared to be echoed by many similar sounds around me.

Now and again, through the black mass of drifting cloud, came a straggling ray of moonlight, which lit up the expanse, and showed me that I was at the edge of a dense mass of cypress and yew trees. As the snow had ceased to fall, I walked out from the shelter and began to investigate more closely. It appeared to me that, amongst so many old foundations as I had passed, there might be still standing a house in which, though in ruins, I could find some sort of shelter for a while. As I skirted the edge of the copse, I found that a low wall encircled it, and following this I presently found an opening. Here the cypresses formed an alley leading up to a square mass of some kind of building. Just as I caught sight of this, however, the drifting clouds obscured the moon, and I passed up the path in darkness. The wind must have grown colder, for I felt myself shiver as I walked; but there was hope of shelter, and I groped my way blindly on.

I stopped, for there was a sudden stillness. The storm had passed; and, perhaps in sympathy with nature’s silence, my heart seemed to cease to beat. But this was only momentarily; for suddenly the moonlight broke through the clouds, showing me that I was in a graveyard, and that the square object before me was a great massive tomb of marble, as white as the snow that lay on and all around it. With the moonlight there came a fierce sigh of the storm, which appeared to resume its course with a long, low howl, as of many dogs or wolves. I was awed and shocked, and felt the cold perceptibly grow upon me till it seemed to grip me by the heart. Then while the flood of moonlight still fell on the marble tomb, the storm gave further evidence of renewing, as though it was returning on its track. Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the sepulchre to see what it was, and why such a thing stood alone in such a place. I walked around it, and read, over the Doric door, in German—

On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble — for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone — was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in great Russian letters:

There was something so weird and uncanny about the whole thing that it gave me a turn and made me feel quite faint. I began to wish, for the first time, that I had taken Johann’s advice. Here a thought struck me, which came under almost mysterious circumstances and with a terrible shock. This was Walpurgis Night!

Walpurgis Night, when, according to the belief of millions of people, the devil was abroad — when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked. When all evil things of earth and air and water held revel. This very place the driver had specially shunned. This was the depopulated village of centuries ago. This was where the suicide lay; and this was the place where I was alone — unmanned, shivering with cold in a shroud of snow with a wild storm gathering again upon me! It took all my philosophy, all the religion I had been taught, all my courage, not to collapse in a paroxysm of fright.

And now a perfect tornado burst upon me. The ground shook as though thousands of horses thundered across it; and this time the storm bore on its icy wings, not snow, but great hailstones which drove with such violence that they might have come from the thongs of Balearic slingers — hailstones that beat down leaf and branch and made the shelter of the cypresses of no more avail than though their stems were standing corn. At the first I had rushed to the nearest tree; but I was soon fain to leave it and seek the only spot that seemed to afford refuge, the deep Doric doorway of the marble tomb. There, crouching against the massive bronze door, I gained a certain amount of protection from the beating of the hailstones, for now they only drove against me as they ricocheted from the ground and the side of the marble.

As I leaned against the door, it moved slightly and opened inwards. The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that pitiless tempest, and I was about to enter it when there came a flash of forked lightning that lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm. The whole thing was so sudden that, before I could realize the shock, moral as well as physical, I found the hailstones beating me down. At the same time I had a strange, dominating feeling that I was not alone. I looked towards the tomb. Just then there came another blinding flash, which seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted the tomb and to pour through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the giant grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me, and the air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail.

After the staggering success enjoyed by Arthur Conan Doyle with his Sherlock Holmes series, other authors, undoubtedly pressed by publishers who hoped to cash in on the new phenomenon of detective adventures, released a deluge of novels and short stories whose protagonists followed in the footsteps of Holmes. The most successful was Arthur Morrison’s (1863–1945) Martin Hewitt, who made his debut in Martin Hewitt: Investigator (1894), followed by two more short story collections and a novel, The Red Triangle (1903).

Like Doyle, Morrison had little interest in or affection for his detective, convinced that his atmospheric tales of the London slums were far more significant. He may have been right, as they sold well in their time, show greater vitality, and are said to have been instrumental in initiating many important social reforms, particularly with regard to housing.

In addition to his naturalistic novels of crime and poverty in London’s East End and the exploits of Hewitt, Morrison wrote other books connected to the mystery genre, including Cunning Murrell (1900), a fictionalized account of a witch doctor’s activities in early nineteenth-century rural Essex; The Hole in the Wall (1902), a story of murder in a London slum; and, most significant, The Dorrington Deed-Box (1897), a collection of stories about the unscrupulous Horace Dorrington, a con man and thief who occasionally earns his money honestly — by working as a private detective!

“The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby” was originally published in The Dorrington Deed-Box (London, Ward, Lock & Co., 1897).

I shall here set down in language as simple and straightforward as I can command, the events which followed my recent return to England; and I shall leave it to others to judge whether or not my conduct has been characterised by foolish fear and ill-considered credulity. At the same time I have my own opinion as to what would have been the behaviour of any other man of average intelligence and courage in the same circumstances; more especially a man of my exceptional upbringing and retired habits.

I was born in Australia, and I have lived there all my life till quite recently, save for a single trip to Europe as a boy, in company with my father and mother. It was then that I lost my father. I was less than nine years old at the time, but my memory of the events of that European trip is singularly vivid.

My father had emigrated to Australia at the time of his marriage, and had become a rich man by singularly fortunate speculations in land in and about Sydney. As a family we were most uncommonly self-centred and isolated. From my parents I never heard a word as to their relatives in England; indeed to this day I do not as much as know what was the Christian name of my grandfather. I have often supposed that some serious family quarrel or great misfortune must have preceded or accompanied my father’s marriage. Be that as it may, I was never able to learn anything of my relatives, either on my mother’s or my father’s side. Both parents, however, were educated people, and indeed I fancy that their habit of seclusion must first have arisen from this circumstance, since the colonists about them in the early days, excellent people as they were, were not as a class distinguished for extreme intellectual culture. My father had his library stocked from England, and added to by fresh arrivals from time to time; and among his books he would pass most of his days, taking, however, now and again an excursion with a gun in search of some new specimen to add to his museum of natural history, which occupied three long rooms in our house by the Lane Cove river.

I was, as I have said, eight years of age when I started with my parents on a European tour, and it was in the year 1873. We stayed but a short while in England at first arrival, intending to make a longer stay on our return from the Continent. We made our tour, taking Italy last, and it was here that my father encountered a dangerous adventure.

We were at Naples, and my father had taken an odd fancy for a picturesque-looking ruffian who had attracted his attention by a complexion unusually fair for an Italian, and in whom he professed to recognise a likeness to Tasso the poet. This man became his guide in excursions about the neighbourhood of Naples, though he was not one of the regular corps of guides, and indeed seemed to have no regular occupation of a definite sort. “Tasso,” as my father always called him, seemed a civil fellow enough, and was fairly intelligent; but my mother disliked him extremely from the first, without being able to offer any very distinct reason for her aversion. In the event her instinct was proved true.

“Tasso” — his correct name, by the way, was Tommaso Marino — persuaded my father that something interesting was to be seen at the Astroni crater, four miles west of the city, or thereabout; persuaded him, moreover, to make the journey on foot; and the two accordingly set out. All went well enough till the crater was reached, and then, in a lonely and broken part of the hill, the guide suddenly turned and attacked my father with a knife, his intention, without a doubt, being murder and the acquisition of the Englishman’s valuables. Fortunately my father had a hip-pocket with a revolver in it, for he had been warned of the danger a stranger might at that time run wandering in the country about Naples. He received a wound in the flesh of his left arm in an attempt to ward off a stab, and fired, at wrestling distance, with the result that his assailant fell dead on the spot. He left the place with all speed, tying up his arm as he went, sought the British consul at Naples, and informed him of the whole circumstances. From the authorities there was no great difficulty. An examination or two, a few signatures, some particular exertions on the part of the consul, and my father was free, so far as the officers of the law were concerned. But while these formalities were in progress no less than three attempts were made on his life — two by the knife and one by shooting — and in each his escape was little short of miraculous. For the dead ruffian, Marino, had been a member of the dreaded Camorra, and the Camorristi were eager to avenge his death. To anybody acquainted with the internal history of Italy — more particularly the history of the old kingdom of Naples — the name of the Camorra will be familiar enough. It was one of the worst and most powerful of the many powerful and evil secret societies of Italy, and had none of the excuses for existence which have been from time to time put forward on behalf of the others. It was a gigantic club for the commission of crime and the extortion of money. So powerful was it that it actually imposed a regular tax on all food material entering Naples — a tax collected and paid with far more regularity than were any of the taxes due to the lawful Government of the country. The carrying of smuggled goods was a monopoly of the Camorra, a perfect organisation existing for the purpose throughout the kingdom. The whole population was terrorised by this detestable society, which had no less than twelve centres in the city of Naples alone. It contracted for the commission of crime just as systematically and calmly as a railway company contracts for the carriage of merchandise. A murder was so much, according to circumstances, with extras for disposing of the body; arson was dealt in profitably; maimings and kidnappings were carried out with promptitude and despatch; and any diabolical outrage imaginable was a mere matter of price. One of the staple vocations of the concern was of course brigandage. After the coming of Victor Emmanuel and the fusion of Italy into one kingdom the Camorra lost some of its power, but for a long time gave considerable trouble. I have heard that in the year after the matters I am describing two hundred Camorristi were banished from Italy.

As soon as the legal forms were complied with, my father received the broadest possible official hint that the sooner and the more secretly he left the country the better it would be for himself and his family. The British consul, too, impressed it upon him that the law would be entirely unable to protect him against the machinations of the Camorra; and indeed it needed but little persuasion to induce us to leave, for my poor mother was in a state of constant terror lest we were murdered together in our hotel; so that we lost no time in returning to England and bringing our European trip to a close.

In London we stayed at a well-known private hotel near Bond Street. We had been but three days here when my father came in one evening with a firm conviction that he had been followed for something like two hours, and followed very skilfully too. More than once he had doubled suddenly with a view to confront the pursuers, who he felt were at his heels, but he had met nobody of a suspicious appearance. The next afternoon I heard my mother telling my governess (who was travelling with us) of an unpleasant-looking man, who had been hanging about opposite the hotel door, and who, she felt sure, had afterwards been following her and my father as they were walking. My mother grew nervous, and communicated her fears to my father. He, however, pooh-poohed the thing, and took little thought of its meaning. Nevertheless the dogging continued, and my father, who was never able to fix upon the persons who caused the annoyance — indeed he rather felt their presence by instinct, as one does in such cases, than otherwise — grew extremely angry, and had some idea of consulting the police. Then one morning my mother discovered a little paper label stuck on the outside of the door of the bedroom occupied by herself and my father. It was a small thing, circular, and about the size of a sixpenny-piece, or even smaller, but my mother was quite certain that it had not been there when she last entered the door the night before, and she was much terrified. For the label carried a tiny device, drawn awkwardly in ink — a pair of knives of curious shape, crossed: the sign of the Camorra.

Nobody knew anything of this label, or how it came where it had been found. My mother urged my father to place himself under the protection of the police at once, but he delayed. Indeed, I fancy he had a suspicion that the label might be the production of some practical joker staying at the hotel who had heard of his Neapolitan adventure (it was reported in many newspapers) and designed to give him a fright. But that very evening my poor father was found dead, stabbed in a dozen places, in a short, quiet street not forty yards from the hotel. He had merely gone out to buy a few cigars of a particular brand which he fancied, at a shop two streets away, and in less than half an hour of his departure the police were at the hotel door with the news of his death, having got his address from letters in his pockets.

It is no part of my present design to enlarge on my mother’s grief, or to describe in detail the incidents that followed my father’s death, for I am going back to this early period of my life merely to make more clear the bearings of what has recently happened to myself. It will be sufficient therefore to say that at the inquest the jury returned a verdict of wilful murder against some person or persons unknown; that it was several times reported that the police had obtained a most important clue, and that being so, very naturally there was never any arrest. We returned to Sydney, and there I grew up.

I should perhaps have mentioned ere this that my profession — or I should rather say my hobby — is that of an artist. Fortunately or unfortunately, as you may please to consider it, I have no need to follow any profession as a means of livelihood, but since I was sixteen years of age my whole time has been engrossed in drawing and painting. Were it not for my mother’s invincible objection to parting with me, even for the shortest space of time, I should long ago have come to Europe to work and to study in the regular schools. As it was I made shift to do my best in Australia, and wandered about pretty freely, struggling with the difficulties of moulding into artistic form the curious Australian landscape. There is an odd, desolate, uncanny note in characteristic Australian scenery, which most people are apt to regard as of little value for the purposes of the landscape painter, but with which I have always been convinced that an able painter could do great things. So I did my feeble best.

Two years ago my mother died. My age was then twenty-eight, and I was left without a friend in the world, and, so far as I know, without a relative. I soon found it impossible any longer to inhabit the large house by the Lane Cove river. It was beyond my simple needs, and the whole thing was an embarrassment, to say nothing of the associations of the house with my dead mother, which exercised a painful and depressing effect on me. So I sold the house, and cut myself adrift. For a year or more I pursued the life of a lonely vagabond in New South Wales, painting as well as I could its scattered forests of magnificent trees, with their curious upturned foliage. Then, miserably dissatisfied with my performance, and altogether filled with a restless spirit, I determined to quit the colony and live in England, or at any rate somewhere in Europe. I would paint at the Paris schools, I promised myself, and acquire that technical mastery of my material that I now felt the lack of.

The thing was no sooner resolved on than begun. I instructed my solicitors in Sydney to wind up my affairs and to communicate with their London correspondents in order that, on my arrival in England, I might deal with business matters through them. I had more than half resolved to transfer all my property to England, and to make the old country my permanent headquarters; and in three weeks from the date of my resolve I had started. I carried with me the necessary letters of introduction to the London solicitors, and the deeds appertaining to certain land in South Australia, which my father had bought just before his departure on the fatal European trip. There was workable copper in this land, it had since been ascertained, and I believed I might profitably dispose of the property to a company in London.

I found myself to some extent out of my element on board a great passenger steamer. It seemed no longer possible for me in the constant association of shipboard to maintain that reserve which had become with me a second nature. But so much had it become my nature that I shrank ridiculously from breaking it, for, grown man as I was, it must be confessed that I was absurdly shy, and indeed I fear little better than an overgrown schoolboy in my manner. But somehow I was scarce a day at sea before falling into a most pleasant acquaintanceship with another passenger, a man of thirty-eight or forty, whose name was Dorrington. He was a tall, well-built fellow, rather handsome, perhaps, except for a certain extreme roundness of face and fulness of feature; he had a dark military moustache, and carried himself erect, with a swing as of a cavalryman, and his eyes had, I think, the most penetrating quality I ever saw. His manners were extremely engaging, and he was the only good talker I had ever met. He knew everybody, and had been everywhere. His fund of illustration and anecdote was inexhaustible, and during all my acquaintance with him I never heard him tell the same story twice. Nothing could happen — not a bird could fly by the ship, not a dish could be put on the table, but Dorrington was ready with a pungent remark and the appropriate anecdote. And he never bored nor wearied one. With all his ready talk he never appeared unduly obtrusive nor in the least egotistic. Mr. Horace Dorrington was altogether the most charming person I had ever met. Moreover we discovered a community of taste in cigars.

“By the way,” said Dorrington to me one magnificent evening as we leaned on the rail and smoked, “Rigby isn’t a very common name in Australia, is it? I seem to remember a case, twenty years ago or more, of an Australian gentleman of that name being very badly treated in London — indeed, now I think of it, I’m not sure that he wasn’t murdered. Ever hear anything of it?”

“Yes,” I said, “I heard a great deal, unfortunately. He was my father, and he was murdered.”

“Your father? There — I’m awfully sorry. Perhaps I shouldn’t have mentioned it; but of course I didn’t know.”

“Oh,” I replied, “that’s all right. It’s so far back now that I don’t mind speaking about it. It was a very extraordinary thing altogether.” And then, feeling that I owed Dorrington a story of some sort, after listening to the many he had been telling me, I described to him the whole circumstances of my father’s death.

“Ah,” said Dorrington when I had finished, “I have heard of the Camorra before this — I know a thing or two about it, indeed. As a matter of fact it still exists; not quite the widespread and open thing it once was, of course, and much smaller; but pretty active in a quiet way, and pretty mischievous. They were a mighty bad lot, those Camorristi. Personally I’m rather surprised that you heard no more of them. They were the sort of people who would rather any day murder three people than one, and their usual idea of revenge went a good way beyond the mere murder of the offending party; they had a way of including his wife and family, and as many relatives as possible. But at any rate you seem to have got off all right, though I’m inclined to call it rather a piece of luck than otherwise.”

Then, as was his invariable habit, he launched into anecdote. He told me of the crimes of the Maffia, that Italian secret society, larger even and more powerful than the Camorra, and almost as criminal; tales of implacable revenge visited on father, son, and grandson in succession, till the race was extirpated. Then he talked of the methods; of the large funds at the disposal of the Camorra and the Maffia, and of the cunning patience with which their schemes were carried into execution; of the victims who had discovered too late that their most trusted servants were sworn to their destruction, and of those who had fled to remote parts of the earth and hoped to be lost and forgotten, but who had been shadowed and slain with barbarous ferocity in their most trusted hiding-places. Wherever Italians were, there was apt to be a branch of one of the societies, and one could never tell where they might or might not turn up. The two Italian forecastle hands on board at that moment might be members, and might or might not have some business in hand not included in their signed articles.

I asked if he had ever come into personal contact with either of these societies or their doings.

“With the Camorra, no, though I know things about them that would probably surprise some of them not a little. But I have had professional dealings with the Maffia — and that without coming off second best, too. But it was not so serious a case as your father’s; one of a robbery of documents and blackmail.”

“Professional dealings?” I queried.

Dorrington laughed. “Yes,” he answered. “I find I’ve come very near to letting the cat out of the bag. I don’t generally tell people who I am when I travel about, and indeed I don’t always use my own name, as I am doing now. Surely you’ve heard the name at some time or another?”

I had to confess that I did not remember it. But I excused myself by citing my secluded life, and the fact that I had never left Australia since I was a child.

“Ah,” he said, “of course we should be less heard of in Australia. But in England we’re really pretty well known, my partner and I. But, come now, look me all over and consider, and I’ll give you a dozen guesses and bet you a sovereign you can’t tell me my trade. And it’s not such an uncommon or unheard-of trade, neither.”

Guessing would have been hopeless, and I said so. He did not seem the sort of man who would trouble himself about a trade at all. I gave it up.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve no particular desire to have it known all over the ship, but I don’t mind telling you — you’d find it out probably before long if you settle in the old country — that we are what is called private inquiry agents — detectives — secret service men — whatever you like to call it.”

“Indeed!”

“Yes, indeed. And I think I may claim that we stand as high as any — if not a trifle higher. Of course I can’t tell you, but you’d be rather astonished if you heard the names of some of our clients. We have had dealings with certain royalties, European and Asiatic, that would startle you a bit if I could tell them. Dorrington & Hicks is the name of the firm, and we are both pretty busy men, though we keep going a regiment of assistants and correspondents. I have been in Australia three months over a rather awkward and complicated matter, but I fancy I’ve pulled it through pretty well, and I mean to reward myself with a little holiday when I get back. There — now you know the worst of me. And D. & H. present their respectful compliments, and trust that by unfailing punctuality and a strict attention to business they may hope to receive your esteemed commands whenever you may be so unfortunate as to require their services. Family secrets extracted, cleaned, scaled, or stopped with gold. Special attention given to wholesale orders.” He laughed and pulled out his cigar-case. “You haven’t another cigar in your pocket,” he said, “or you wouldn’t smoke that stump so low. Try one of these.”

I took the cigar and lit it at my remainder. “Ah, then,” I said, “I take it that it is the practice of your profession that has given you such a command of curious and out-of-the-way information and anecdote. Plainly you must have been in the midst of many curious affairs.”

“Yes, I believe you,” Dorrington replied. “But, as it happens, the most curious of my experiences I am unable to relate, since they are matters of professional confidence. Such as I can tell I usually tell with altered names, dates, and places. One learns discretion in such a trade as mine.”

“As to your adventure with the Maffia, now. Is there any secrecy about that?”

Dorrington shrugged his shoulders. “No,” he said, “none in particular. But the case was not particularly interesting. It was in Florence. The documents were the property of a wealthy American, and some of the Maffia rascals managed to steal them. It doesn’t matter what the documents were — that’s a private matter — but their owner would have parted with a great deal to get them back, and the Maffia held them for ransom. But they had such a fearful notion of the American’s wealth, and of what he ought to pay, that, badly as he wanted the papers back, he couldn’t stand their demands, and employed us to negotiate and to do our best for him. I think I might have managed to get the things stolen back again — indeed I spent some time thinking a plan over — but I decided in the end that it wouldn’t pay. If the Maffia were tricked in that way they might consider it appropriate to stick somebody with a knife, and that was not an easy thing to provide against. So I took a little time and went another way to work. The details don’t matter — they’re quite uninteresting, and to tell you them would be to talk mere professional ‘shop’; there’s a deal of dull and patient work to be done in my business. Anyhow, I contrived to find out exactly in whose hands the documents lay. He wasn’t altogether a blameless creature, and there were two or three little things that, properly handled, might have brought him into awkward complications with the law. So I delayed the negotiations while I got my nets effectually round this gentleman, who was the president of that particular branch of the Maffia, and when all was ready I had a friendly interview with him, and just showed him my hand of cards. They served as no other argument would have done, and in the end we concluded quite an amicable arrangement on easy terms for both parties, and my client got his property back, including all expenses, at about a fifth of the price he expected to have to pay. That’s all. I learnt a deal about the Maffia while the business lasted, and at that and other times I learnt a good deal about the Camorra too.”

Dorrington and I grew more intimate every day of the voyage, till he knew every detail of my uneventful little history, and I knew many of his own most curious experiences. In truth he was a man with an irresistible fascination for a dull home-bird like myself. With all his gaiety he never forgot business, and at most of our stopping places he sent off messages by cable to his partner. As the voyage drew near its end he grew anxious and impatient lest he should not arrive in time to enable him to get to Scotland for grouse-shooting on the twelfth of August. His one amusement, it seemed, was shooting, and the holiday he had promised himself was to be spent on a grouse-moor which he rented in Perthshire. It would be a great nuisance to miss the twelfth, he said, but it would apparently be a near shave. He thought, however, that in any case it might be done by leaving the ship at Plymouth, and rushing up to London by the first train.

“Yes,” he said, “I think I shall be able to do it that way, even if the boat is a couple of days late. By the way,” he added suddenly, “why not come along to Scotland with me? You haven’t any particular business in hand, and I can promise you a week or two of good fun.”

The invitation pleased me. “It’s very good of you,” I said, “and as a matter of fact I haven’t any very urgent business in London. I must see those solicitors I told you of, but that’s not a matter of hurry; indeed an hour or two on my way through London would be enough. But as I don’t know any of your party and—”

“Pooh, pooh, my dear fellow,” answered Dorrington, with a snap of his fingers, “that’s all right. I shan’t have a party. There won’t be time to get it together. One or two might come down a little later, but if they do they’ll be capital fellows, delighted to make your acquaintance, I’m sure. Indeed you’ll do me a great favour if you’ll come, else I shall be all alone, without a soul to say a word to. Anyway, I won’t miss the twelfth, if it’s to be done by any possibility. You’ll really have to come, you know — you’ve no excuse. I can lend you guns and anything you want, though I believe you’ve such things with you. Who is your London solicitor, by the way?”

“Mowbray, of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.”

“Oh, Mowbray? We know him well; his partner died last year. When I say we know him well, I mean as a firm. I have never met him personally, though my partner (who does the office work) has regular dealings with him. He’s an excellent man, but his managing clerk’s frightful; I wonder Mowbray keeps him. Don’t you let him do anything for you on his own hook; he makes the most disastrous messes, and I rather fancy he drinks. Deal with Mowbray himself; there’s nobody better in London. And by the way, now I think of it, it’s lucky you’ve nothing urgent for him, for he’s sure to be off out of town for the twelfth; he’s a rare old gunner, and never misses a season. So that now you haven’t a shade of an excuse for leaving me in the lurch, and we’ll consider the thing settled.”

Settled accordingly it was, and the voyage ended uneventfully. But the steamer was late, and we left it at Plymouth and rushed up to town on the tenth. We had three or four hours to prepare before leaving Euston by the night train. Dorrington’s moor was a long drive from Crieff station, and he calculated that at best we could not arrive there before the early evening of the following day, which would, however, give us comfortable time for a good long night’s rest before the morning’s sport opened. Fortunately I had plenty of loose cash with me, so that there was nothing to delay us in that regard. We made ready in Dorrington’s rooms (he was a bachelor) in Conduit Street, and got off comfortably by the ten o’clock train from Euston.

Then followed a most delightful eight days. The weather was fine, the birds were plentiful, and my first taste of grouse-shooting was a complete success. I resolved for the future to come out of my shell and mix in the world that contained such charming fellows as Dorrington, and such delightful sports as that I was then enjoying. But on the eighth day Dorrington received a telegram calling him instantly to London.

“It’s a shocking nuisance,” he said; “here’s my holiday either knocked on the head altogether or cut in two, and I fear it’s the first rather than the second. It’s just the way in such an uncertain profession as mine. There’s no possible help for it, however; I must go, as you’d understand at once if you knew the case. But what chiefly annoys me is leaving you all alone.”

I reassured him on this point, and pointed out that I had for a long time been used to a good deal of my own company. Though indeed, with Dorrington away, life at the shooting-lodge threatened to be less pleasant than it had been.

“But you’ll be bored to death here,” Dorrington said, his thoughts jumping with my own. “But on the other hand it won’t be much good going up to town yet. Everybody’s out of town, and Mowbray among them. There’s a little business of ours that’s waiting for him at this moment — my partner mentioned it in his letter yesterday. Why not put in the time with a little tour round? Or you might work up to London by irregular stages, and look about you. As an artist you’d like to see a few of the old towns — probably Edinburgh, Chester, Warwick, and so on. It isn’t a great programme, perhaps, but I hardly know what else to suggest. As for myself I must be off as I am by the first train I can get.”

I begged him not to trouble about me, but to attend to his business. As a matter of fact, I was disposed to get to London and take chambers, at any rate for a little while. But Chester was a place I much wanted to see — a real old town, with walls round it — and I was not indisposed to take a day at Warwick. So in the end I resolved to pack up and make for Chester the following day, and from there to take a train for Warwick. And in half an hour Dorrington was gone.

Chester was all delight to me. My recollections of the trip to Europe in my childhood were vivid enough as to the misfortunes that followed my father, but of the ancient buildings we visited I remembered little. Now in Chester I found the mediæval town I had so often read of. I wandered for hours together in the quaint old “Rows,” and walked on the city wall. The evening after my arrival was fine and moonlit, and I was tempted from my hotel. I took a stroll about the town and finished by a walk along the wall from the Watergate toward the cathedral. The moon, flecked over now and again by scraps of cloud, and at times obscured for half a minute together, lighted up all the Roodee in the intervals, and touched with silver the river beyond. But as I walked I presently grew aware of a quiet shuffling footstep some little way behind me. I took little heed of it at first, though I could see nobody near me from whom the sound might come. But soon I perceived that when I stopped, as I did from time to time to gaze over the parapet, the mysterious footsteps stopped also, and when I resumed my walk the quiet shuffling tread began again. At first I thought it might be an echo; but a moment’s reflection dispelled that idea. Mine was an even, distinct walk, and this which followed was a soft, quick, shuffling step — a mere scuffle. Moreover, when, by way of test, I took a few silent steps on tip-toe, the shuffle still persisted. I was being followed.

Now I do not know whether or not it may sound like a childish fancy, but I confess I thought of my father. When last I had been in England, as a child, my father’s violent death had been preceded by just such followings. And now after all these years, on my return, on the very first night I walked abroad alone, there were strange footsteps in my track. The walk was narrow, and nobody could possibly pass me unseen. I turned suddenly, therefore, and hastened back. At once I saw a dark figure rise from the shadow of the parapet and run. I ran too, but I could not gain on the figure, which receded farther and more indistinctly before me. One reason was that I felt doubtful of my footing on the unfamiliar track. I ceased my chase, and continued my stroll. It might easily have been some vagrant thief, I thought, who had a notion to rush, at a convenient opportunity, and snatch my watch. But ere I was far past the spot where I had turned there was the shuffling footstep behind me again. For a little while I feigned not to notice it; then, swinging round as swiftly as I could, I made a quick rush. Useless again, for there in the distance scuttled that same indistinct figure, more rapidly than I could run. What did it mean? I liked the affair so little that I left the walls and walked toward my hotel.

The streets were quiet. I had traversed two, and was about emerging into one of the two main streets, where the Rows are, when, from the farther part of the dark street behind me, there came once more the sound of the now unmistakable footstep. I stopped; the footsteps stopped also. I turned and walked back a few steps, and as I did it the sounds went scuffling away at the far end of the street.

It could not be fancy. It could not be chance. For a single incident perhaps such an explanation might serve, but not for this persistent recurrence. I hurried away to my hotel, resolved, since I could not come at my pursuer, to turn back no more. But before I reached the hotel there were the shuffling footsteps again, and not far behind.

It would not be true to say that I was alarmed at this stage of the adventure, but I was troubled to know what it all might mean, and altogether puzzled to account for it. I thought a great deal, but I went to bed and rose in the morning no wiser than ever.

Whether or not it was a mere fancy induced by the last night’s experience I cannot say, but I went about that day with a haunting feeling that I was watched, and to me the impression was very real indeed. I listened often, but in the bustle of the day, even in quiet old Chester, the individual characters of different footsteps were not easily recognisable. Once, however, as I descended a flight of steps from the Rows, I fancied I heard the quick shuffle in the curious old gallery I had just quitted. I turned up the steps again and looked. There was a shabby sort of man looking in one of the windows, and leaning so far as to hide his head behind the heavy oaken pilaster that supported the building above. It might have been his footstep, or it might have been my fancy. At any rate I would have a look at him. I mounted the top stair, but as I turned in his direction the man ran off, with his face averted and his head ducked, and vanished down another stair. I made all speed after him, but when I reached the street he was nowhere to be seen.

What could it all mean? The man was rather above the middle height, and he wore one of those soft felt hats familiar on the head of the London organ-grinder. Also his hair was black and bushy, and protruded over the back of his coat-collar. Surely this was no delusion; surely I was not imagining an Italian aspect for this man simply because of the recollection of my father’s fate?

Perhaps I was foolish, but I took no more pleasure in Chester. The embarrassment was a novel one for me, and I could not forget it. I went back to my hotel, paid my bill, sent my bag to the railway station, and took a train for Warwick by way of Crewe.

It was dark when I arrived, but the night was near as fine as last night had been at Chester. I took a very little late dinner at my hotel, and fell into a doubt what to do with myself. One rather fat and very sleepy commercial traveller was the only other customer visible, and the billiard room was empty. There seemed to be nothing to do but to light a cigar and take a walk.

I could just see enough of the old town to give me good hopes of tomorrow’s sight-seeing. There was nothing visible of quite such an interesting character as one might meet in Chester, but there were a good few fine old sixteenth-century houses, and there were the two gates with the chapels above them. But of course the castle was the great show-place, and that I should visit on the morrow, if there were no difficulties as to permission. There were some very fine pictures there, if I remembered aright what I had read. I was walking down the incline from one of the gates, trying to remember who the painters of these pictures were, besides Van Dyck and Holbein, when — that shuffling step was behind me again!

I admit that it cost me an effort, this time, to turn on my pursuer. There was something uncanny in that persistent, elusive footstep, and indeed there was something alarming in my circumstances, dogged thus from place to place, and unable to shake off my enemy, or to understand his movements or his motive. Turn I did, however, and straightway the shuffling step went off at a hastened pace in the shadow of the gate. This time I made no more than half-a-dozen steps back. I turned again, and pushed my way to the hotel. And as I went the shuffling step came after.

The thing was serious. There must be some object in this unceasing watching, and the object could bode no good to me. Plainly some unseen eye had been on me the whole of that day, had noted my goings and comings and my journey from Chester. Again, and irresistibly, the watchings that preceded my father’s death came to mind, and I could not forget them. I could have no doubt now that I had been closely watched from the moment I had set foot at Plymouth. But who could have been waiting to watch me at Plymouth, when indeed I had only decided to land at the last moment? Then I thought of the two Italian forecastle hands on the steamer — the very men whom Dorrington had used to illustrate in what unexpected quarters members of the terrible Italian secret societies might be found. And the Camorra was not satisfied with single revenge; it destroyed the son after the father, and it waited for many years, with infinite patience and cunning.

Dogged by the steps, I reached the hotel and went to bed. I slept but fitfully at first, though better rest came as the night wore on. In the early morning I woke with a sudden shock, and with an indefinite sense of being disturbed by somebody about me. The window was directly opposite the foot of the bed, and there, as I looked, was the face of a man, dark, evil, and grinning, with a bush of black hair about his uncovered head, and small rings in his ears.

It was but a flash, and the face vanished. I was struck by the terror that one so often feels on a sudden and violent awakening from sleep, and it was some seconds ere I could leave my bed and get to the window. My room was on the first floor, and the window looked down on a stable-yard. I had a momentary glimpse of a human figure leaving the gate of the yard, and it was the figure that had fled before me in the Rows, at Chester. A ladder belonging to the yard stood under the window, and that was all.

I rose and dressed; I could stand this sort of thing no longer. If it were only something tangible, if there were only somebody I could take hold of, and fight with if necessary, it would not have been so bad. But I was surrounded by some mysterious machination, persistent, unexplainable, that it was altogether impossible to tackle or to face. To complain to the police would have been absurd — they would take me for a lunatic. They are indeed just such complaints that lunatics so often make to the police — complaints of being followed by indefinite enemies, and of being besieged by faces that look in at windows. Even if they did not set me down a lunatic, what could the police of a provincial town do for me in a case like this? No, I must go and consult Dorrington.

I had my breakfast, and then decided that I would at any rate try the castle before leaving. Try it I did accordingly, and was allowed to go over it. But through the whole morning I was oppressed by the horrible sense of being watched by malignant eyes. Clearly there was no comfort for me while this lasted; so after lunch I caught a train which brought me to Euston soon after half-past six.

I took a cab straight to Dorrington’s rooms, but he was out, and was not expected home till late. So I drove to a large hotel near Charing Cross — I avoid mentioning its name for reasons which will presently be understood — sent in my bag, and dined.

I had not the smallest doubt but that I was still under the observation of the man or the men who had so far pursued me; I had, indeed, no hope of eluding them, except by the contrivance of Dorrington’s expert brain. So as I had no desire to hear that shuffling footstep again — indeed it had seemed, at Warwick, to have a physically painful effect on my nerves — I stayed within and got to bed early.

I had no fear of waking face to face with a grinning Italian here. My window was four floors up, out of reach of anything but a fire-escape. And, in fact, I woke comfortably and naturally, and saw nothing from my window but the bright sky, the buildings opposite, and the traffic below. But as I turned to close my door behind me as I emerged into the corridor, there, on the muntin of the frame, just below the bedroom number, was a little round paper label, perhaps a trifle smaller than a sixpence, and on the label, drawn awkwardly in ink, was a device of two crossed knives of curious, crooked shape. The sign of the Camorra!

I will not attempt to describe the effect of this sign upon me. It may best be imagined, in view of what I have said of the incidents preceding the murder of my father. It was the sign of an inexorable fate, creeping nearer step by step, implacable, inevitable, and mysterious. In little more than twelve hours after seeing that sign my father had been a mangled corpse. One of the hotel servants passed as I stood by the door, and I made shift to ask him if he knew anything of the label. He looked at the paper, and then, more curiously, at me, but he could offer no explanation. I spent little time over breakfast, and then went by cab to Conduit Street. I paid my bill and took my bag with me.

Dorrington had gone to his office, but he had left a message that if I called I was to follow him; and the office was in Bedford Street, Covent Garden. I turned the cab in that direction forthwith.

“Why,” said Dorrington as we shook hands, “I believe you look a bit out of sorts! Doesn’t England agree with you?”

“Well,” I answered, “it has proved rather trying so far.” And then I described, in exact detail, my adventures as I have set them down here.

Dorrington looked grave. “It’s really extraordinary,” he said, “most extraordinary; and it isn’t often that I call a thing extraordinary neither, with my experience. But it’s plain something must be done — something to gain time at any rate. We’re in the dark at present, of course, and I expect I shall have to fish about a little before I get at anything to go on. In the meantime I think you must disappear as artfully as we can manage it.” He sat silent for a little while, thoughtfully tapping his forehead with his finger-tips. “I wonder,” he said presently, “whether or not those Italian fellows on the steamer are in it or not. I suppose you haven’t made yourself known anywhere, have you?”

“Nowhere. As you know, you’ve been with me all the time till you left the moor, and since then I have been with nobody and called on nobody.”

“Now there’s no doubt it’s the Camorra,” Dorrington said — “that’s pretty plain. I think I told you on the steamer that it was rather wonderful that you had heard nothing of them after your father’s death. What has caused them all this delay there’s no telling — they know best themselves; it’s been lucky for you, anyway, so far. What I’d like to find out now is how they have identified you, and got on your track so promptly. There’s no guessing where these fellows get their information — it’s just wonderful; but if we can find out, then perhaps we can stop the supply, or turn on something that will lead them into a pit. If you had called anywhere on business and declared yourself — as you might have done, for instance, at Mowbray’s — I might be inclined to suspect that they got the tip in some crooked way from there. But you haven’t. Of course, if those Italian chaps on the steamer are in it, you’re probably identified pretty certainly; but if they’re not, they may only have made a guess. We two landed together, and kept together, till a day or two ago; as far as any outsider would know, I might be Rigby and you might be Dorrington. Come, we’ll work on those lines. I think I smell a plan. Are you staying anywhere?”

“No. I paid my bill at the hotel and came along here with my bag.”

“Very well. Now there’s a house at Highgate kept by a very trustworthy man, whom I know very well, where a man might be pretty comfortable for a few days, or even for a week, if he doesn’t mind staying indoors, and keeping himself out of sight. I expect your friends of the Camorra are watching in the street outside at this moment; but I think it will be fairly easy to get you away to Highgate without letting them into the secret, if you don’t mind secluding yourself for a bit. In the circumstances, I take it you won’t object at all?”

“Object? I should think not.”

“Very well, that’s settled. You can call yourself Dorrington or not, as you please, though perhaps it will be safest not to shout ‘Rigby’ too loud. But as for myself, for a day or two at least I’m going to be Mr. James Rigby. Have you your card-case handy?”

“Yes, here it is. But then, as to taking my name, won’t you run serious risk?”

Dorrington winked merrily. “I’ve run a risk or two before now,” he said, “in course of my business. And if I don’t mind the risk, you needn’t grumble, for I warn you I shall charge for risk when I send you my bill. And I think I can take care of myself fairly well, even with the Camorra about. I shall take you to this place at Highgate, and then you won’t see me for a few days. It won’t do for me, in the character of Mr. James Rigby, to go dragging a trail up and down between this place and your retreat. You’ve got some other identifying papers, haven’t you?”

“Yes, I have.” I produced the letter from my Sydney lawyers to Mowbray, and the deeds of the South Australian property from my bag.

“Ah,” said Dorrington, “I’ll just give you a formal receipt for these, since they’re valuable; it’s a matter of business, and we’ll do it in a business-like way. I may want something solid like this to support any bluff I may have to make. A mere case of cards won’t always act, you know. It’s a pity old Mowbray’s out of town, for there’s a way in which he might give a little help, I fancy. But never mind — leave it all to me. There’s your receipt. Keep it snug away somewhere, where inquisitive people can’t read it.”

He handed me the receipt, and then took me to his partner’s room and introduced me. Mr. Hicks was a small, wrinkled man, older than Dorrington, I should think, by fifteen or twenty years, and with all the aspect and manner of a quiet old professional man.

Dorrington left the room, and presently returned with his hat in his hand. “Yes,” he said, “there’s a charming dark gentleman with a head like a mop, and rings in his ears, skulking about at the next corner. If it was he who looked in at your window, I don’t wonder you were startled. His dress suggests the organ-grinding interest, but he looks as though cutting a throat would be more in his line than grinding a tune; and no doubt he has friends as engaging as himself close at call. If you’ll come with me now I think we shall give him the slip. I have a growler ready for you — a hansom’s a bit too glassy and public. Pull down the blinds and sit back when you get inside.”

He led me to a yard at the back of the building wherein the office stood, from which a short flight of steps led to a basement. We followed a passage in this basement till we reached another flight, and ascending these, we emerged into the corridor of another building. Out at the door at the end of this, and we passed a large block of model dwellings, and were in Bedfordbury. Here a four-wheeler was waiting, and I shut myself in it without delay.

I was to proceed as far as King’s Cross in this cab, Dorrington had arranged, and there he would overtake me in a swift hansom. It fell out as he had settled, and, dismissing the hansom, he came the rest of the journey with me in the four-wheeler.

We stopped at length before one of a row of houses, apparently recently built — houses of the over-ornamented, gabled, and tiled sort that abound in the suburbs.

“Crofting is the man’s name,” Dorrington said, as we alighted. “He’s rather an odd sort of customer, but quite decent in the main, and his wife makes coffee such as money won’t buy in most places.”

A woman answered Dorrington’s ring — a woman of most extreme thinness. Dorrington greeted her as Mrs. Crofting, and we entered.

“We’ve just lost our servant again, Mr. Dorrington,” the woman said in a shrill voice, “and Mr. Crofting ain’t at home. But I’m expecting him before long.”

“I don’t think I need wait to see him, Mrs. Crofting,” Dorrington answered. “I’m sure I can’t leave my friend in better hands than yours. I hope you’ve a vacant room?”

“Well, for a friend of yours, Mr. Dorrington, no doubt we can find room.”

“That’s right. My friend Mr.” — Dorrington gave me a meaning look — “Mr. Phelps, would like to stay here for a few days. He wants to be quite quiet for a little — do you understand?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Dorrington, I understand.”

“Very well, then, make him as comfortable as you can, and give him some of your very best coffee. I believe you’ve got quite a little library of books, and Mr. Phelps will be glad of them. Have you got any cigars?” Dorrington added, turning to me.

“Yes; there are some in my bag.”

“Then I think you’ll be pretty comfortable now. Goodbye. I expect you’ll see me in a few days — or at any rate you’ll get a message. Meantime be as happy as you can.”

Dorrington left, and the woman showed me to a room upstairs, where I placed my bag. In front, on the same floor, was a sitting-room, with, I suppose, some two or three hundred books, mostly novels, on shelves. The furniture of the place was of the sort one expects to find in an ordinary lodging-house — horsehair sofas, loo tables, lustres, and so forth. Mrs. Crofting explained to me that the customary dinner hour was two, but that I might dine when I liked. I elected, however, to follow the custom of the house, and sat down to a cigar and a book.

At two o’clock the dinner came, and I was agreeably surprised to find it a very good one, much above what the appointments of the house had led me to expect. Plainly Mrs. Crofting was a capital cook. There was no soup, but there was a very excellent sole, and some well-done cutlets with peas, and an omelet; also a bottle of Bass. Come, I felt that I should not do so badly in this place after all. I trusted that Dorrington would be as comfortable in his half of the transaction, bearing my responsibilities and troubles. I had heard a heavy, blundering tread on the floor below, and judged from this that Mr. Crofting had returned.

After dinner I lit a cigar, and Mrs. Crofting brought her coffee. Truly it was excellent coffee, and brewed as I like it — strong and black, and plenty of it. It had a flavour of its own too, novel, but not unpleasing. I took one cupful, and brought another to my side as I lay on the sofa with my book. I had not read six lines before I was asleep.

I woke with a sensation of numbing cold in my right side, a terrible stiffness in my limbs, and a sound of loud splashing in my ears. All was pitch dark, and — what was this? Water! Water all about me. I was lying in six inches of cold water, and more was pouring down upon me from above. My head was afflicted with a splitting ache. But where was I? Why was it dark? And whence all the water? I staggered to my feet, and instantly struck my head against a hard roof above me. I raised my hand; there was the roof or whatever place it was, hard, smooth, and cold, and little more than five feet from the floor, so that I bent as I stood. I spread my hand to the side; that was hard, smooth, and cold too. And then the conviction struck me like a blow — I was in a covered iron tank, and the water was pouring in to drown me!

I dashed my hands frantically against the lid, and strove to raise it. It would not move. I shouted at the top of my voice, and turned about to feel the extent of my prison. One way I could touch the opposite sides at once easily with my hands, the other way it was wider — perhaps a little more than six feet altogether. What was this? Was this to be my fearful end, cooped in this tank while the water rose by inches to choke me? Already the water was a foot deep. I flung myself at the sides, I beat the pitiless iron with fists, face, and head, I screamed and implored. Then it struck me that I might at least stop the inlet of water. I put out my hand and felt the falling stream, then found the inlet and stopped it with my fingers. But water still poured in with a resounding splash; there was another opening at the opposite end, which I could not reach without releasing the one I now held! I was but prolonging my agony. Oh, the devilish cunning that had devised those two inlets, so far apart! Again I beat the sides, broke my nails with tearing at the corners, screamed and entreated in my agony. I was mad, but with no dulling of the senses, for the horrors of my awful, helpless state, overwhelmed my brain, keen and perceptive to every ripple of the unceasing water.

In the height of my frenzy I held my breath, for I heard a sound from outside. I shouted again — implored some quicker death. Then there was a scraping on the lid above me, and it was raised at one edge, and let in the light of a candle. I sprang from my knees and forced the lid back, and the candle flame danced before me. The candle was held by a dusty man, a workman apparently, who stared at me with scared eyes, and said nothing but, “Goo’ lor’!”

Overhead were the rafters of a gabled roof, and tilted against them was the thick beam which, jammed across from one sloping rafter to another, had held the tank-lid fast. “Help me!” I gasped. “Help me out!”

The man took me by the armpits and hauled me, dripping and half dead, over the edge of the tank, into which the water still poured, making a noise in the hollow iron that half drowned our voices. The man had been at work on the cistern of a neighbouring house, and hearing an uncommon noise, he had climbed through the spaces left in the party walls to give passage along under the roofs to the builders’ men. Among the joists at our feet was the trap-door through which, drugged and insensible, I had been carried, to be flung into that horrible cistern.

With the help of my friend the workman I made shift to climb through by the way he had come. We got back to the house where he had been at work, and there the people gave me brandy and lent me dry clothes. I made haste to send for the police, but when they arrived Mrs. Crofting and her respectable spouse had gone. Some unusual noise in the roof must have warned them. And when the police, following my directions further, got to the offices of Dorrington and Hicks, those acute professional men had gone too, but in such haste that the contents of the office, papers and everything else, had been left just as they stood.

The plot was clear now. The followings, the footsteps, the face at the window, the label on the door — all were a mere humbug arranged by Dorrington for his own purpose, which was to drive me into his power and get my papers from me. Armed with these, and with his consummate address and knowledge of affairs, he could go to Mr. Mowbray in the character of Mr. James Rigby, sell my land in South Australia, and have the whole of my property transferred to himself from Sydney. The rest of my baggage was at his rooms; if any further proof were required it might be found there. He had taken good care that I should not meet Mr. Mowbray — who, by the way, I afterwards found had not left his office, and had never fired a gun in his life. At first I wondered that Dorrington had not made some murderous attempt on me at the shooting place in Scotland. But a little thought convinced me that that would have been bad policy for him. The disposal of the body would be difficult, and he would have to account somehow for my sudden disappearance. Whereas, by the use of his Italian assistant and his murder apparatus at Highgate I was made to efface my own trail, and could be got rid of in the end with little trouble; for my body, stripped of everything that might identify me, would be simply that of a drowned man unknown, whom nobody could identify. The whole plot was contrived upon the information I myself had afforded Dorrington during the voyage home. And it all sprang from his remembering the report of my father’s death. When the papers in the office came to be examined, there each step in the operations was plainly revealed. There was a code telegram from Suez directing Hicks to hire a grouse-moor. There were telegrams and letters from Scotland giving directions as to the later movements; indeed the thing was displayed completely. The business of Dorrington and Hicks had really been that of private inquiry agents, and they had done much bona fide business; but many of their operations had been of a more than questionable sort. And among their papers were found complete sets, neatly arranged in dockets, each containing in skeleton a complete history of a case. Many of these cases were of a most interesting character, and I have been enabled to piece together, out of the material thus supplied, the narratives which will follow this. As to my own case, it only remains to say that as yet neither Dorrington, Hicks, nor the Croftings have been caught. They played in the end for a high stake (they might have made six figures of me if they had killed me, and the first figure would not have been a one) and they lost by a mere accident. But I have often wondered how many of the bodies which the coroners’ juries of London have returned to be “Found Drowned” were drowned, not where they were picked up, but in that horrible tank at Highgate. What the drug was that gave Mrs. Crofting’s coffee its value in Dorrington’s eyes I do not know, but plainly it had not been sufficient in my case to keep me unconscious against the shock of cold water till I could be drowned altogether. Months have passed since my adventure, but even now I sweat at the sight of an iron tank.

Among the least likely suspects for writing a story about a terrible villain is Washington Irving (1783–1859), whose sketches and full-length books earned him the title of “Father of American Literature,” as he was the first author of significance to marry American literature with the literature of the world. His life abroad, spent mainly in Spain, Italy, and England, heavily influenced his own work in the formative years of nineteenth-century America.

The easy grace of his narratives and their gentle humor endeared him to the reading public and he enjoyed great success with such works as A History of New-York (under the byline Diedrich Knickerbocker, 1809), generally regarded as the first American work of humorous fiction, and, especially, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–1820), which contained the immortal tales, known by all American schoolchildren, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

In 1824 he wrote Tales of a Traveller under the Geoffrey Crayon byline, hoping to re-create the success of The Sketch Book. While his early stories were noted for their charm and sentimental, romantic views of life, many of the little sketches in Tales of a Traveller are downright shocking, especially “The Story of a Young Robber.” Whereas Irving’s many warm and kindly stories of love and marriage had portrayed charming young maidens and their suitors in syrupy, conventional terms of ethereal, pure devotion and bliss, the unfortunate heroine and the young man who loves her in this short tale appear to have been pulled from the pages of the most melodramatic examples of Gothic horror.

The titular character, one of the most horrific villains in American literature, narrates the story in the first person with a peculiar detachment that belies the violence and tragedy that it depicts. The chapter of Tales of a Traveller titled “The Story of a Young Robber” actually contains more than one tale, but this episode is complete as offered here. It is a crime story of such unusual brutality that it cannot be surprising to know that it, like so many of Irving’s stories, influenced many American writers of the nineteenth century.

“The Story of a Young Robber” was first published in Tales of a Traveller (London, John Murray, 1824, two volumes); the first American edition was published later in 1824 in Philadelphia by H. C. Carey & I. Lea.

I was born at the little town of Frosinone, which lies at the skirts of the Abruzzi. My father had made a little property in trade, and gave me some education, as he intended me for the church, but I had kept gay company too much to relish the cowl, so I grew up a loiterer about the place. I was a heedless fellow, a little quarrelsome on occasions, but good-humored in the main, so I made my way very well for a time, until I fell in love. There lived in our town a surveyor, or land bailiff, of the prince’s who had a young daughter, a beautiful girl of sixteen. She was looked upon as something better than the common run of our townsfolk, and kept almost entirely at home. I saw her occasionally, and became madly in love with her, she looked so fresh and tender, and so different to the sunburnt females to whom I had been accustomed.

As my father kept me in money, I always dressed well, and took all opportunities of showing myself to advantage in the eyes of the little beauty. I used to see her at church; and as I could play a little upon the guitar, I gave her a tune sometimes under her window of an evening; and I tried to have interviews with her in her father’s vineyard, not far from the town, where she sometimes walked. She was evidently pleased with me, but she was young and shy, and her father kept a strict eye upon her, and took alarm at my attentions, for he had a bad opinion of me, and looked for a better match for his daughter. I became furious at the difficulties thrown in my way, having been accustomed always to easy success among the women, being considered one of the smartest young fellows of the place.

Her father brought home a suitor for her; a rich farmer from a neighboring town. The wedding-day was appointed, and preparations were making. I got sight of her at her window, and I thought she looked sadly at me. I determined the match should not take place, cost what it might. I met her intended bridegroom in the market-place, and could not restrain the expression of my rage. A few hot words passed between us, when I drew my stiletto, and stabbed him to the heart. I fled to a neighboring church for refuge; and with a little money I obtained absolution; but I did not dare to venture from my asylum.

At that time our captain was forming his troop. He had known me from boyhood, and hearing of my situation, came to me in secret, and made such offers that I agreed to enlist myself among his followers. Indeed, I had more than once thought of taking to this mode of life, having known several brave fellows of the mountains, who used to spend their money freely among us youngsters of the town. I accordingly left my asylum late one night, repaired to the appointed place of meeting, took the oaths prescribed, and became one of the troop. We were for some time in a distant part of the mountains, and our wild adventurous kind of life hit my fancy wonderfully, and diverted my thoughts. At length they returned with all their violence to the recollection of Rosetta. The solitude in which I often found myself gave me time to brood over her image, and as I have kept watch at night over our sleeping camp in the mountains, my feelings have been roused almost to a fever.

At length we shifted our ground, and determined to make a descent upon the road between Terracina and Naples. In the course of our expedition, we passed a day or two in the woody mountains which rise above Frosinone. I cannot tell you how I felt when I looked down upon the place, and distinguished the residence of Rosetta. I determined to have an interview with her; but to what purpose? I could not expect that she would quit her home, and accompany me in my hazardous life among the mountains. She had been brought up too tenderly for that; and when I looked upon the women who were associated with some of our troop, I could not have borne the thoughts of her being their companion. All return to my former life was likewise hopeless; for a price was set upon my head. Still I determined to see her; the very hazard and fruitlessness of the thing made me furious to accomplish it.

It is about three weeks since I persuaded our captain to draw down to the vicinity of Frosinone, in hopes of entrapping some of its principal inhabitants, and compelling them to a ransom. We were lying in ambush towards evening, not far from the vineyard of Rosetta’s father. I stole quietly from my companions, and drew near to reconnoiter the place of her frequent walks.

How my heart beat when, among the vines, I beheld the gleaming of a white dress! I knew it must be Rosetta’s; it being rare for any female of the place to dress in white. I advanced secretly and without noise, until putting aside the vines, I stood suddenly before her. She uttered a piercing shriek, but I seized her in my arms, put my hand upon her mouth and conjured her to be silent. I poured out all the frenzy of my passion; offered to renounce my mode of life, to put my fate in her hands, to fly with her where we might live in safety together. All that I could say, or do, would not pacify her. Instead of love, horror and affright seemed to have taken possession of her breast. She struggled partly from my grasp, and filled the air with her cries. In an instant the captain and the rest of my companions were around us. I would have given anything at that moment had she been safe out of our hands, and in her father’s house. It was too late. The captain pronounced her a prize, and ordered that she should be borne to the mountains. I represented to him that she was my prize, that I had a previous claim to her; and I mentioned my former attachment. He sneered bitterly in reply; observed that brigands had no business with village intrigues, and that, according to the laws of the troop, all spoils of the kind were determined by lot. Love and jealousy were raging in my heart, but I had to choose between obedience and death. I surrendered her to the captain, and we made for the mountains.

She was overcome by affright, and her steps were so feeble and faltering, and it was necessary to support her. I could not endure the idea that my comrades should touch her, and assuming a forced tranquility, begged that she might be confided to me, as one to whom she was more accustomed. The captain regarded me for a moment with a searching look, but I bore it without flinching, and he consented, I took her in my arms: she was almost senseless. Her head rested on my shoulder, her mouth was near to mine. I felt her breath on my face, and it seemed to fan the flame which devoured me. Oh, God! to have this glowing treasure in my arms, and yet to think it was not mine!

We arrived at the foot of the mountain. I ascended it with difficulty, particularly where the woods were thick; but I would not relinquish my delicious burthen. I reflected with rage, however, that I must soon do so. The thoughts that so delicate a creature must be abandoned to my rude companions maddened me. I felt tempted, the stiletto in my hand, to cut my way through them all, and bear her off in triumph. I scarcely conceived the idea, before I saw its rashness; but my brain was fevered with the thought that any but myself should enjoy her charms. I endeavored to outstrip my companions by the quickness of my movements; and to get a little distance ahead, in case any favorable opportunity of escape should present. Vain effort! The voice of the captain suddenly ordered a halt. I trembled, but had to obey. The poor girl partly opened a languid eye, but was without strength or motion. I laid her upon the grass. The captain darted on me a terrible look of suspicion, and ordered me to scour the woods with my companions, in search of some shepherd who might be sent to her father’s to demand a ransom.

I saw at once the peril. To resist with violence was certain death; but to leave her alone, in the power of the captain! — I spoke out then with a fervor inspired by my passion and my despair. I reminded the captain that I was the first to seize her; that she was my prize, and that my previous attachment for her should make her sacred among my companions. I insisted, therefore, that he should pledge me his word to respect her; otherwise I should refuse obedience to his orders. His only reply was, to cock his carbine; and at the signal my comrades did the same. They laughed with cruelty at my impotent rage. What could I do? I felt the madness of resistance. I was menaced on all hands, and my companions obliged me to follow them. She remained alone with the chief — yes, alone and almost lifeless!—

Here the robber paused in his recital, overpowered by his emotions. Great drops of sweat stood on his forehead; he panted rather than breathed; his brawny bosom rose and fell like the waves of a troubled sea. When he had become a little calm, he continued his recital.

I was not long in finding a shepherd, said he. I ran with the rapidity of a deer, eager, if possible, to get back before what I dreaded might take place. I had left my companions far behind, and I rejoined them before they had reached one-half the distance I had made. I hurried them back to the place where we had left the captain. As we approached, I beheld him seated by the side of Rosetta. His triumphant look, and the desolate condition of the unfortunate girl, left me no doubt of her fate. I know not how I restrained my fury.

It was with extreme difficulty, and by guiding her hand, that she was made to trace a few characters, requesting her father to send three hundred dollars as her ransom. The letter was dispatched by the shepherd. When he was gone, the chief turned sternly to me: “You have set an example,” said he, “of mutiny and self-will, which if indulged would be ruinous to the troop. Had I treated you as our laws require, this bullet would have been driven through your brain. But you are an old friend; I have borne patiently with your fury and your folly; I have even protected you from a foolish passion that would have unmanned you. As to this girl, the laws of our association must have their course.” So saying, he gave his commands, lots were drawn, and the helpless girl was abandoned to the troop.

Here the robber paused again, panting with fury and it was some moments before he could resume his story.

Hell, said he, was raging in my heart. I beheld the impossibility of avenging myself, and I felt that, according to the articles in which we stood bound to one another, the captain was in the right. I rushed with frenzy from the place. I threw myself upon the earth; tore up the grass with my hands, and beat my head, and gnashed my teeth in agony and rage. When at length I returned, I beheld the wretched victim, pale, disheveled; her dress torn and disordered. An emotion of pity for a moment subdued my fiercer feelings. I bore her to the foot of a tree, and leaned her gently against it. I took my gourd, which was filled with wine, and applying it to her lips, endeavored to make her swallow a little. To what a condition was she recovered! She, whom I had once seen the pride of Frosinone, who but a short time before I had beheld sporting in her father’s vineyard, so fresh and beautiful and happy! Her teeth were clenched; her eyes fixed on the ground; her form without motion, and in a state of absolute insensibility. I hung over her in an agony of recollection of all that she had been, and of anguish at what I now beheld her. I darted round a look of horror at my companions, who seemed like so many fiends exulting in the downfall of an angel, and I felt a horror at myself for being their accomplice.

The captain, always suspicious, saw with his usual penetration what was passing within me, and ordered me to go upon the ridge of woods to keep a look-out upon the neighborhood and await the return of the shepherd. I obeyed, of course, stifling the fury that raged within me, though I felt for the moment that he was my most deadly foe.

On my way, however, a ray of reflection came across my mind. I perceived that the captain was but following with strictness the terrible laws to which we had sworn fidelity. That the passion by which I had been blinded might with justice have been fatal to me but for his forbearance; that he had penetrated my soul, and had taken precautions, by sending me out of the way, to prevent my committing any excess in my anger. From that instant I felt that I was capable of pardoning him.

Occupied with these thoughts, I arrived at the foot of the mountain. The country was solitary and secure; and in a short time I beheld the shepherd at a distance crossing the plain. I hastened to meet him. He had obtained nothing. He had found the father plunged in the deepest distress. He had read the letter with violent emotion, and then calming himself with a sudden exertion, he had replied coldly, “My daughter has been dishonored by those wretches; let her be returned without ransom, or let her die!”

I shuddered at this reply. I knew, according to the laws of our troop, her death was inevitable. Our oaths required it. I felt, nevertheless, that, not having been able to have her to myself, I could become her executioner!

The robber again paused with agitation. I sat musing upon his last frightful words, which proved to what excess the passions may be carried when escaped from all moral restraint. There was a horrible verity in this story that reminded me of some of the tragic fictions of Dante.

We now came to a fatal moment, resumed the bandit. After the report of the shepherd, I returned with him, and the chieftain received from his lips the refusal of the father. At a signal, which we all understood, we followed him some distance from the victim. He there pronounced her sentence of death. Every one stood ready to execute his order; but I interfered. I observed that there was something due to pity, as well as to justice. That I was as ready as anyone to approve the implacable law which was to serve as a warning to all those who hesitated to pay the ransoms demanded for our prisoners, but that, though the sacrifice was proper, it ought to be made without cruelty. The night is approaching, continued I; she will soon be wrapped in sleep; let her then be dispatched. All that I now claim on the score of former fondness for her is, let me strike the blow. I will do it as surely, but more tenderly, than another.

Several raised their voices against my proposition, but the captain imposed silence on them. He told me I might conduct her into a thicket at some distance, and he relied upon my promise.

I hastened to seize my prey. There was a forlorn kind of triumph at having at length become her exclusive possessor. I bore her off into the thickness of the forest. She remained in the same state of insensibility and stupor. I was thankful that she did not recollect me; for had she once murmured my name, I should have been overcome. She slept at length in the arms of him who was to poniard her. Many were the conflicts I underwent before I could bring myself to strike the blow. My heart had become sore by the recent conflicts it had undergone, and I dreaded lest, by procrastination, some other should become her executioner. When her repose had continued for some time, I separated myself gently from her, that I might not disturb her sleep, and seizing suddenly my poniard, plunged it into her bosom. A painful and concentrated murmur, but without any convulsive movement, accompanied her last sigh. So perished this unfortunate.

Born John Chaney, Jack London (1876–1916) was the illegitimate son of an itinerant astrologer. His mother married John London eight months after he was born. He grew up in poverty in California’s Bay area, went on the road as a hobo, riding freight trains, and was thrown in jail for a month of hard labor, helping to give him both understanding of and sympathy for the working-class poor as well as distaste for the drudgery of that life. After reading the Communist Manifesto, he became enamored with socialism but was so eager to be rich that he joined the gold rush to the Klondike region in Yukon, Canada, in 1891. He returned to Oakland without having mined an ounce of gold, but with the background for the American classic novel The Call of the Wild (1903), which became one of the bestselling novels of the early twentieth century with more than one and a half million copies sold in his lifetime. He began to sell stories to Overland Monthly, Black Cat, and Atlantic Monthly in the 1890s. Books soon followed, and he was hired by Hearst to report on the Russo-Japanese War, became an international bestseller, earned more than a million dollars, and by 1913 was regarded as the highest-paid, best-known, and most popular author in the world. Among the books that remain read to this day are such adventure classics as The Sea Wolf (1904) and White Fang (1906), and the autobiographical Martin Eden (1909). London had become a heavy drinker while still a teenager, and alcoholism, illness, financial woes, and overworking probably induced him to commit suicide at the age of forty, though the official cause of death was listed as uremic poisoning.

“Moon-Face” was originally published in The Argonaut in 1902; it was first collected in Moon-Face and Other Stories (New York, Macmillan, 1906).

John Claverhouse was a moon-faced man. You know the kind, cheek-bones wide apart, chin and forehead melting into the cheeks to complete the perfect round, and the nose, broad and pudgy, equidistant from the circumference, flattened against the very centre of the face like a dough-ball upon the ceiling. Perhaps that is why I hated him, for truly he had become an offense to my eyes, and I believed the earth to be cumbered with his presence. Perhaps my mother may have been superstitious of the moon and looked upon it over the wrong shoulder at the wrong time.

Be that as it may, I hated John Claverhouse. Not that he had done me what society would consider a wrong or an ill turn. Far from it. The evil was of a deeper, subtler sort; so elusive, so intangible, as to defy clear, definite analysis in words. We all experience such things at some period in our lives. For the first time we see a certain individual, one who the very instant before we did not dream existed; and yet, at the first moment of meeting, we say: “I do not like that man.” Why do we not like him? Ah, we do not know why; we know only that we do not. We have taken a dislike, that is all. And so I with John Claverhouse.

What right had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself — before I met John Claverhouse.

But his laugh! It irritated me, maddened me, as nothing else under the sun could irritate or madden me. It haunted me, gripped hold of me, and would not let me go. It was a huge, Gargantuan laugh. Waking or sleeping it was always with me, whirring and jarring across my heart-strings like an enormous rasp. At break of day it came whooping across the fields to spoil my pleasant morning revery. Under the aching noonday glare, when the green things drooped and the birds withdrew to the depths of the forest, and all nature drowsed, his great “Ha! ha!” and “Ho! ho!” rose up to the sky and challenged the sun. And at black midnight, from the lonely cross-roads where he turned from town into his own place, came his plaguey cachinnations to rouse me from my sleep and make me writhe and clench my nails into my palms.

I went forth privily in the night-time, and turned his cattle into his fields, and in the morning heard his whooping laugh as he drove them out again. “It is nothing,” he said; “the poor, dumb beasties are not to be blamed for straying into fatter pastures.”

He had a dog he called “Mars,” a big, splendid brute, part deer-hound and part blood-hound, and resembling both. Mars was a great delight to him, and they were always together. But I bided my time, and one day, when opportunity was ripe, lured the animal away and settled for him with strychnine and beefsteak. It made positively no impression on John Claverhouse. His laugh was as hearty and frequent as ever, and his face as much like the full moon as it always had been.

Then I set fire to his haystacks and his barn. But the next morning, being Sunday, he went forth blithe and cheerful.

“Where are you going?” I asked him, as he went by the cross-roads.

“Trout,” he said, and his face beamed like a full moon. “I just dote on trout.”

Was there ever such an impossible man! His whole harvest had gone up in his haystacks and barn. It was uninsured, I knew. And yet, in the face of famine and the rigorous winter, he went out gayly in quest of a mess of trout, forsooth, because he “doted” on them! Had gloom but rested, no matter how lightly, on his brow, or had his bovine countenance grown long and serious and less like the moon, or had he removed that smile but once from off his face, I am sure I could have forgiven him for existing. But no. He grew only more cheerful under misfortune.

I insulted him. He looked at me in slow and smiling surprise.

“I fight you? Why?” he asked slowly. And then he laughed. “You are so funny! Ho! ho! You’ll be the death of me! He! he! he! Oh! Ho! ho! ho!

What would you? It was past endurance. By the blood of Judas, how I hated him! Then there was that name — Claverhouse! What a name! Wasn’t it absurd? Claverhouse! Merciful heaven, WHY Claverhouse? Again and again I asked myself that question. I should not have minded Smith, or Brown, or Jones — but CLAVERHOUSE! I leave it to you. Repeat it to yourself — Claverhouse. Just listen to the ridiculous sound of it — Claverhouse! Should a man live with such a name? I ask of you. “No,” you say. And “No” said I.

But I bethought me of his mortgage. What of his crops and barn destroyed, I knew he would be unable to meet it. So I got a shrewd, close-mouthed, tight-fisted money-lender to get the mortgage transferred to him. I did not appear but through this agent I forced the foreclosure, and but few days (no more, believe me, than the law allowed) were given John Claverhouse to remove his goods and chattels from the premises. Then I strolled down to see how he took it, for he had lived there upward of twenty years. But he met me with his saucer-eyes twinkling, and the light glowing and spreading in his face till it was as a full-risen moon.

“Ha! ha! ha!” he laughed. “The funniest tike, that youngster of mine! Did you ever hear the like? Let me tell you. He was down playing by the edge of the river when a piece of the bank caved in and splashed him. ‘O papa!’ he cried; ‘a great big puddle flewed up and hit me.’ ”

He stopped and waited for me to join him in his infernal glee.

“I don’t see any laugh in it,” I said shortly, and I know my face went sour.

He regarded me with wonderment, and then came the damnable light, glowing and spreading, as I have described it, till his face shone soft and warm, like the summer moon, and then the laugh — “Ha! ha! That’s funny! You don’t see it, eh? He! he! Ho! ho! ho! He doesn’t see it! Why, look here. You know a puddle—”

But I turned on my heel and left him. That was the last. I could stand it no longer. The thing must end right there, I thought, curse him! The earth should be quit of him. And as I went over the hill, I could hear his monstrous laugh reverberating against the sky.

Now, I pride myself on doing things neatly, and when I resolved to kill John Claverhouse I had it in mind to do so in such fashion that I should not look back upon it and feel ashamed. I hate bungling, and I hate brutality. To me there is something repugnant in merely striking a man with one’s naked fist — faugh! it is sickening! So, to shoot, or stab, or club John Claverhouse (oh, that name!) did not appeal to me. And not only was I impelled to do it neatly and artistically, but also in such manner that not the slightest possible suspicion could be directed against me.

To this end I bent my intellect, and, after a week of profound incubation, I hatched the scheme. Then I set to work. I bought a water spaniel bitch, five months old, and devoted my whole attention to her training. Had any one spied upon me, they would have remarked that this training consisted entirely of one thing — retrieving. I taught the dog, which I called “Bellona,” to fetch sticks I threw into the water, and not only to fetch, but to fetch at once, without mouthing or playing with them. The point was that she was to stop for nothing, but to deliver the stick in all haste. I made a practice of running away and leaving her to chase me, with the stick in her mouth, till she caught me. She was a bright animal, and took to the game with such eagerness that I was soon content.

After that, at the first casual opportunity, I presented Bellona to John Claverhouse. I knew what I was about, for I was aware of a little weakness of his, and of a little private sinning of which he was regularly and inveterately guilty.

“No,” he said, when I placed the end of the rope in his hand. “No, you don’t mean it.” And his mouth opened wide and he grinned all over his damnable moon-face.

“I... I kind of thought, somehow, you didn’t like me,” he explained. “Wasn’t it funny for me to make such a mistake?” And at the thought he held his sides with laughter.

“What is her name?” he managed to ask between paroxysms.

“Bellona,” I said.

“He! he!” he tittered. “What a funny name.”

I gritted my teeth, for his mirth put them on edge, and snapped out between them, “She was the wife of Mars, you know.”

Then the light of the full moon began to suffuse his face, until he exploded with: “That was my other dog. Well, I guess she’s a widow now. Oh! Ho! ho! E! he! he! Ho!” he whooped after me, and I turned and fled swiftly over the hill.

The week passed by, and on Saturday evening I said to him, “You go away Monday, don’t you?”

He nodded his head and grinned.

“Then you won’t have another chance to get a mess of those trout you just ‘dote’ on.”

But he did not notice the sneer. “Oh, I don’t know,” he chuckled. “I’m going up tomorrow to try pretty hard.”

Thus was assurance made doubly sure, and I went back to my house hugging myself with rapture.

Early next morning I saw him go by with a dip-net and gunnysack, and Bellona trotting at his heels. I knew where he was bound, and cut out by the back pasture and climbed through the underbrush to the top of the mountain. Keeping carefully out of sight, I followed the crest along for a couple of miles to a natural amphitheatre in the hills, where the little river raced down out of a gorge and stopped for breath in a large and placid rock-bound pool. That was the spot! I sat down on the croup of the mountain, where I could see all that occurred, and lighted my pipe.

Ere many minutes had passed, John Claverhouse came plodding up the bed of the stream. Bellona was ambling about him, and they were in high feather, her short, snappy barks mingling with his deeper chest-notes. Arrived at the pool, he threw down the dip-net and sack, and drew from his hip-pocket what looked like a large, fat candle. But I knew it to be a stick of “giant”; for such was his method of catching trout. He dynamited them. He attached the fuse by wrapping the “giant” tightly in a piece of cotton. Then he ignited the fuse and tossed the explosive into the pool.

Like a flash, Bellona was into the pool after it. I could have shrieked aloud for joy. Claverhouse yelled at her, but without avail. He pelted her with clods and rocks, but she swam steadily on till she got the stick of “giant” in her mouth, when she whirled about and headed for shore. Then, for the first time, he realized his danger, and started to run. As foreseen and planned by me, she made the bank and took out after him. Oh, I tell you, it was great! As I have said, the pool lay in a sort of amphitheatre. Above and below, the stream could be crossed on stepping-stones. And around and around, up and down and across the stones, raced Claverhouse and Bellona. I could never have believed that such an ungainly man could run so fast. But run he did, Bellona hot-footed after him, and gaining. And then, just as she caught up, he in full stride, and she leaping with nose at his knee, there was a sudden flash, a burst of smoke, a terrific detonation, and where man and dog had been the instant before there was naught to be seen but a big hole in the ground.

“Death from accident while engaged in illegal fishing.” That was the verdict of the coroner’s jury; and that is why I pride myself on the neat and artistic way in which I finished off John Claverhouse. There was no bungling, no brutality; nothing of which to be ashamed in the whole transaction, as I am sure you will agree. No more does his infernal laugh go echoing among the hills, and no more does his fat moon-face rise up to vex me. My days are peaceful now, and my night’s sleep deep.

The early years of the mystery short story featured quite a few female criminals, most of whom shared the traits of youth, beauty, charm, and a devoted male friend or gang. They tended also to be clever rogues who enjoyed the excitement and great good fun of stealing jewels, money, or a precious antique or painting.

Madame Sara, the creation of the prolific Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (1844–1914), using the pseudonym L. T. Meade, and Dr. Robert Eustace Barton (1863–1948), using the pseudonym Robert Eustace, is a remarkably different sort of woman, carrying about her an air of mystery. Although she appears to be a beautiful young woman of no more than twenty-five years, the story notes that she attended a wedding thirty years earlier and looked exactly the same.

Madame Sara is also a ruthless murderer, counting both male and female victims among her triumphs. The six stories about her were collected in The Sorceress of the Strand (1903), one of more than sixty volumes of mystery, crime, and detection written by Meade; in all, she produced more than three hundred novels and short story collections in various genres.

Born in Ireland, Meade later moved to London, where she married, wrote prolifically, and became an active feminist and member of the Pioneer Club, a progressive women’s club founded in 1892; members were identified by number, rather than name, to emphasize the unimportance of social position. In her spare time, she worked as the editor of Atalanta, a popular girls’ magazine.

Robert Eustace collaborated with several authors, including Edgar Jepson, Gertrude Warden, and Dorothy L. Sayers, but most commonly with Meade. Although he worked with her on such significant books as Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (1894; second series, 1896), A Master of Mysteries (1898), The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1899), The Gold Star Line (1899), and The Sanctuary Club (1900), his name seldom appeared on the covers of the books, only on the title pages, so one wonders if it was due to the author’s diffidence or the publisher’s lack of respect.

“Madame Sara” was originally published in the October 1902 issue of The Strand Magazine; it was first collected in The Sorceress of the Strand (London, Ward, Lock, 1903).

Everyone in trade and a good many who are not have heard of Werner’s Agency, the Solvency Inquiry Agency for all British trade. Its business is to know the financial condition of all wholesale and retail firms, from Rothschild’s to the smallest sweetstuff shop in Whitechapel. I do not say that every firm figures on its books, but by methods of secret inquiry it can discover the status of any firm or individual. It is the great safeguard to British trade and prevents much fraudulent dealing.

Of this agency I, Dixon Druce, was appointed manager in 1890. Since then I have met queer people and seen strange sights, for men do curious things for money in this world.

It so happened that in June, 1899, my business took me to Madeira on an inquiry of some importance. I left the island on the 14th of the month by the Norham Castle for Southampton. I embarked after dinner. It was a lovely night, and the strains of the band in the public gardens of Funchal came floating across the star-powdered bay through the warm, balmy air. Then the engine bells rang to “Full speed ahead,” and, flinging a farewell to the fairest island on earth, I turned to the smoking-room in order to light my cheroot.

“Do you want a match, sir?”

The voice came from a slender, young-looking man who stood near the taffrail. Before I could reply he had struck one and held it out to me.

“Excuse me,” he said, as he tossed it overboard, “but surely I am addressing Mr. Dixon Druce?”

“You are, sir,” I said, glancing keenly back at him, “but you have the advantage of me.”

“Don’t you know me?” he responded, “Jack Selby, Hayward’s House, Harrow, 1879.”

“By Jove! so it is,” I cried.

Our hands met in a warm clasp, and a moment later I found myself sitting close to my old friend, who had fagged for me in the bygone days, and whom I had not seen from the moment when I said goodbye to the “Hill” in the grey mist of a December morning twenty years ago. He was a boy of fourteen then, but nevertheless I recognised him. His face was bronzed and good-looking, his features refined. As a boy Selby had been noted for his grace, his well-shaped head, his clean-cut features; these characteristics still were his, and although he was now slightly past his first youth he was decidedly handsome. He gave me a quick sketch of his history.

“My father left me plenty of money,” he said, “and The Meadows, our old family place, is now mine. I have a taste for natural history; that taste took me two years ago to South America. I have had my share of strange adventures, and have collected valuable specimens and trophies. I am now on my way home from Para, on the Amazon, having come by a Booth boat to Madeira and changed there to the Castle Line. But why all this talk about myself?” he added, bringing his deck chair a little nearer to mine. “What about your history, old chap? Are you settled down with a wife and kiddies of your own, or is that dream of your school days fulfilled, and are you the owner of the best private laboratory in London?”

“As to the laboratory,” I said, with a smile, “you must come and see it. For the rest I am unmarried. Are you?”

“I was married the day before I left Para, and my wife is on board with me.”

“Capital,” I answered. “Let me hear all about it.”

“You shall. Her maiden name was Dallas; Beatrice Dallas. She is just twenty now. Her father was an Englishman and her mother a Spaniard; neither parent is living. She has an elder sister, Edith, nearly thirty years of age, unmarried, who is on board with us. There is also a step-brother, considerably older than either Edith or Beatrice. I met my wife last year in Para, and at once fell in love. I am the happiest man on earth. It goes without saying that I think her beautiful, and she is also very well off. The story of her wealth is a curious one. Her uncle on the mother’s side was an extremely wealthy Spaniard, who made an enormous fortune in Brazil out of diamonds and minerals; he owned several mines. But it is supposed that his wealth turned his brain. At any rate, it seems to have done so as far as the disposal of his money went. He divided the yearly profits and interest between his nephew and his two nieces, but declared that the property itself should never be split up. He has left the whole of it to that one of the three who should survive the others. A perfectly insane arrangement, but not, I believe, unprecedented in Brazil.”

“Very insane,” I echoed. “What was he worth?”

“Over two million sterling.”

“By Jove!” I cried, “what a sum! But what about the step-brother?”

“He must be over forty years of age, and is evidently a bad lot. I have never seen him. His sisters won’t speak to him or have anything to do with him. I understand that he is a great gambler; I am further told that he is at present in England, and, as there are certain technicalities to be gone through before the girls can fully enjoy their incomes, one of the first things I must do when I get home is to find him out. He has to sign certain papers, for we shan’t be able to put things straight until we get his whereabouts. Some time ago my wife and Edith heard that he was ill, but dead or alive we must know all about him, and as quickly as possible.”

I made no answer, and he continued:

“I’ll introduce you to my wife and sister-in-law tomorrow. Beatrice is quite a child compared to Edith, who acts towards her almost like a mother. Bee is a little beauty, so fresh and round and young-looking. But Edith is handsome, too, although I sometimes think she is as vain as a peacock. By the way, Druce, this brings me to another part of my story. The sisters have an acquaintance on board, one of the most remarkable women I have ever met. She goes by the name of Madame Sara, and knows London well. In fact, she confesses to having a shop in the Strand. What she has been doing in Brazil I do not know, for she keeps all her affairs strictly private. But you will be amazed when I tell you what her calling is.”

“What?” I asked.

“A professional beautifier. She claims the privilege of restoring youth to those who consult her. She also declares that she can make quite ugly people handsome. There is no doubt that she is very clever. She knows a little bit of everything, and has wonderful recipes with regard to medicines, surgery, and dentistry. She is a most lovely woman herself, very fair, with blue eyes, an innocent, childlike manner, and quantities of rippling gold hair. She openly confesses that she is very much older than she appears. She looks about five-and-twenty. She seems to have travelled all over the world, and says that by birth she is a mixture of Indian and Italian, her father having been Italian and her mother Indian. Accompanying her is an Arab, a handsome, picturesque sort of fellow, who gives her the most absolute devotion, and she is also bringing back to England two Brazilians from Para. This woman deals in all sorts of curious secrets, but principally in cosmetics. Her shop in the Strand could, I fancy, tell many a strange history. Her clients go to her there, and she does what is necessary for them. It is a fact that she occasionally performs small surgical operations, and there is not a dentist in London who can vie with her. She confesses quite naively that she holds some secrets for making false teeth cling to the palate that no one knows of. Edith Dallas is devoted to her — in fact, her adoration amounts to idolatry.”

“You give a very brilliant account of this woman,” I said. “You must introduce me tomorrow.”

“I will,” answered Jack, with a smile. “I should like your opinion of her. I am right glad I have met you, Druce, it is like old times. When we get to London I mean to put up at my town house in Eaton Square for the remainder of the season. The Meadows shall be re-furnished, and Bee and I will take up our quarters some time in August; then you must come and see us. But I am afraid before I give myself up to mere pleasure I must find that precious brother-in-law, Henry Joachim Silva.”

“If you have any difficulty apply to me,” I said. “I can put at your disposal, in an unofficial way, of course, agents who would find almost any man in England, dead or alive.” I then proceeded to give Selby a short account of my own business.

“Thanks,” he said presently, “that is capital. You are the very man we want.”

The next morning after breakfast Jack introduced me to his wife and sister-in-law. They were both foreign-looking, but very handsome, and the wife in particular had a graceful and uncommon appearance. We had been chatting about five minutes when I saw coming down the deck a slight, rather small woman, wearing a big sun hat.

“Ah, Madame,” cried Selby, “here you are. I had the luck to meet an old friend on board — Mr. Dixon Druce — and I have been telling him all about you. I should like you to know each other. Druce, this lady is Madame Sara, of whom I have spoken to you. Mr. Dixon Druce — Madame Sara.”

She bowed gracefully and then looked at me earnestly. I had seldom seen a more lovely woman. By her side both Mrs. Selby and her sister seemed to fade into insignificance. Her complexion was almost dazzlingly fair, her face refined in expression, her eyes penetrating, clever, and yet with the innocent, frank gaze of a child. Her dress was very simple; she looked altogether like a young, fresh, and natural girl.

As we sat chatting lightly and about commonplace topics, I instinctively felt that she took an interest in me even greater than might be expected upon an ordinary introduction. By slow degrees she so turned the conversation as to leave Selby and his wife and sister out, and then as they moved away she came a little nearer, and said in a low voice:

“I am very glad we have met, and yet how odd this meeting is! Was it really accidental?”

“I do not understand you,” I answered.

“I know who you are,” she said, lightly. “You are the manager of Werner’s Agency; its business is to know the private affairs of those people who would rather keep their own secrets. Now, Mr. Druce, I am going to be absolutely frank with you. I own a small shop in the Strand — a perfumery shop — and behind those innocent-looking doors I conduct the business which brings me in gold of the realm. Have you, Mr. Druce, any objection to my continuing to make a livelihood in perfectly innocent ways?”

“None whatever,” I answered. “You puzzle me by alluding to the subject.”

“I want you to pay my shop a visit when you come to London. I have been away for three or four months. I do wonders for my clients, and they pay me largely for my services. I hold some perfectly innocent secrets which I cannot confide to anybody. I have obtained them partly from the Indians and partly from the natives of Brazil. I have lately been in Para to inquire into certain methods by which my trade can be improved.”

“And your trade is—?” I said, looking at her with amusement and some surprise.

“I am a beautifier,” she said, lightly. She looked at me with a smile. “You don’t want me yet, Mr. Druce, but the time may come when even you will wish to keep back the infirmities of years. In the meantime can you guess my age?”

“I will not hazard a guess,” I answered.

“And I will not tell you. Let it remain a secret. Meanwhile, understand that my calling is quite an open one, and I do hold secrets. I should advise you, Mr. Druce, even in your professional capacity, not to interfere with them.”

The childlike expression faded from her face as she uttered the last words. There seemed to ring a sort of challenge in her tone. She turned away after a few moments and I rejoined my friends.

“You have been making acquaintance with Madame Sara, Mr. Druce,” said Mrs. Selby. “Don’t you think she is lovely?”

“She is one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen,” I answered, “but there seems to be a mystery about her.”

“Oh, indeed there is,” said Edith Dallas, gravely.

“She asked me if I could guess her age,” I continued. “I did not try, but surely she cannot be more than five-and-twenty.”

“No one knows her age,” said Mrs. Selby, “but I will tell you a curious fact, which, perhaps, you will not believe. She was bridesmaid at my mother’s wedding thirty years ago. She declares that she never changes, and has no fear of old age.”

“You mean that seriously?” I cried. “But surely it is impossible?”

“Her name is on the register, and my mother knew her well. She was mysterious then, and I think my mother got into her power, but of that I am not certain. Anyhow, Edith and I adore her, don’t we, Edie?”

She laid her hand affectionately on her sister’s arm. Edith Dallas did not speak, but her face was careworn. After a time she said slowly: “Madame Sara is uncanny and terrible.”

There is, perhaps, no business imaginable — not even a lawyer’s — that engenders suspicions more than mine. I hate all mysteries — both in persons and things. Mysteries are my natural enemies; I felt now that this woman was a distinct mystery. That she was interested in me I did not doubt, perhaps because she was afraid of me.

The rest of the voyage passed pleasantly enough. The more I saw of Mrs. Selby and her sister the more I liked them. They were quiet, simple, and straightforward. I felt sure that they were both as good as gold.

We parted at Waterloo, Jack and his wife and her sister going to Jack’s house in Eaton Square, and I returning to my quarters in St. John’s Wood. I had a house there, with a long garden, at the bottom of which was my laboratory, the laboratory that was the pride of my life, it being, I fondly considered, the best private laboratory in London. There I spent all my spare time making experiments and trying this chemical combination and the other, living in hopes of doing great things some day, for Werner’s Agency was not to be the end of my career. Nevertheless, it interested me thoroughly, and I was not sorry to get back to my commercial conundrums.

The next day, just before I started to go to my place of business, Jack Selby was announced.

“I want you to help me,” he said. “I have been already trying in a sort of general way to get information about my brother-in-law, but all in vain. There is no such person in any of the directories. Can you put me on the road to discovery?”

I said I could and would if he would leave the matter in my hands.

“With pleasure,” he replied. “You see how we are fixed up. Neither Edith nor Bee can get money with any regularity until the man is found. I cannot imagine why he hides himself.”

“I will insert advertisements in the personal columns of the newspapers,” I said, “and request anyone who can give information to communicate with me at my office. I will also give instructions to all the branches of my firm, as well as to my head assistants in London, to keep their eyes open for any news. You may be quite certain that in a week or two we shall know all about him.”

Selby appeared cheered at this proposal, and, having begged of me to call upon his wife and her sister as soon as possible, took his leave.

On that very day advertisements were drawn up and sent to several newspapers and inquiry agents; but week after week passed without the slightest result. Selby got very fidgety at the delay. He was never happy except in my presence, and insisted on my coming, whenever I had time, to his house. I was glad to do so, for I took an interest both in him and his belongings, and as to Madame Sara I could not get her out of my head. One day Mrs. Selby said to me:

“Have you ever been to see Madame? I know she would like to show you her shop and general surroundings.”

“I did promise to call upon her,” I answered, “but have not had time to do so yet.”

“Will you come with me tomorrow morning?” asked Edith Dallas, suddenly.

She turned red as she spoke, and the worried, uneasy expression became more marked on her face. I had noticed for some time that she had been looking both nervous and depressed. I had first observed this peculiarity about her on board the Norham Castle, but, as time went on, instead of lessening it grew worse. Her face for so young a woman was haggard; she started at each sound, and Madame Sara’s name was never spoken in her presence without her evincing almost undue emotion.

“Will you come with me?” she said, with great eagerness.

I immediately promised, and the next day, about eleven o’clock, Edith Dallas and I found ourselves in a hansom driving to Madame Sara’s shop. We reached it in a few minutes, and found an unpretentious little place wedged in between a hosier’s on one side and a cheap print-seller’s on the other. In the windows of the shop were pyramids of perfume bottles, with scintillating facet stoppers tied with coloured ribbons. We stepped out of the hansom and went indoors. Inside the shop were a couple of steps, which led to a door of solid mahogany.

“This is the entrance to her private house,” said Edith, and she pointed to a small brass plate, on which was engraved the name — “Madame Sara, Parfumeuse.” Edith touched an electric bell and the door was immediately opened by a smartly-dressed page-boy. He looked at Miss Dallas as if he knew her very well, and said:

“Madame is within, and is expecting you, miss.”

He ushered us both into a quiet-looking room, soberly but handsomely furnished. He left us, closing the door. Edith turned to me.

“Do you know where we are?” she asked.

“We are standing at present in a small room just behind Madame Sara’s shop,” I answered. “Why are you so excited, Miss Dallas? What is the matter with you?”

“We are on the threshold of a magician’s cave,” she replied. “We shall soon be face to face with the most marvellous woman in the whole of London. There is no one like her.”

“And you — fear her?” I said, dropping my voice to a whisper.

She started, stepped back, and with great difficulty recovered her composure. At that moment the page-boy returned to conduct us through a series of small waiting-rooms, and we soon found ourselves in the presence of Madame herself.

“Ah!” she said, with a smile. “This is delightful. You have kept your word, Edith, and I am greatly obliged to you. I will now show Mr. Druce some of the mysteries of my trade. But understand, sir,” she added, “that I shall not tell you any of my real secrets, only as you would like to know something about me you shall.”

“How can you tell I should like to know about you?” I asked.

She gave me an earnest glance which somewhat astonished me, and then she said: “Knowledge is power; don’t refuse what I am willing to give. Edith, you will not object to waiting here while I show Mr. Druce through the rooms. First observe this room, Mr. Druce. It is lighted only from the roof. When the door shuts it automatically locks itself, so that any in-trusion from without is impossible. This is my sanctum sanctorum — a faint odour of perfume pervades the room. This is a hot day, but the room itself is cool. What do you think of it all?”

I made no answer. She walked to the other end and motioned to me to accompany her. There stood a polished oak square table, on which lay an array of extraordinary-looking articles and implements — stoppered bottles full of strange medicaments, mirrors, plane and concave, brushes, sprays, sponges, delicate needle-pointed instruments of bright steel, tiny lancets, and forceps. Facing this table was a chair, like those used by dentists. Above the chair hung electric lights in powerful reflectors, and lenses like bull’s-eye lanterns. Another chair, supported on a glass pedestal, was kept there, Madame Sara informed me, for administering static electricity. There were dry-cell batteries for the continuous currents and induction coils for Faradic currents. There were also platinum needles for burning out the roots of hairs.

Madame took me from this room into another, where a still more formidable array of instruments was to be found. Here were a wooden operating table and chloroform and ether apparatus. When I had looked at everything, she turned to me.

“Now you know,” she said. “I am a doctor — perhaps a quack. These are my secrets. By means of these I live and flourish.”

She turned her back on me and walked into the other room with the light, springy step of youth. Edith Dallas, white as a ghost, was waiting for us.

“You have done your duty, my child,” said Madame. “Mr. Druce has seen just what I want him to see. I am very much obliged to you both. We shall meet tonight at Lady Farringdon’s ‘At Home.’ Until then, farewell.”

When we got into the street and were driving back again to Eaton Square, I turned to Edith.

“Many things puzzle me about your friend,” I said, “but perhaps none more than this. By what possible means can a woman who owns to being the possessor of a shop obtain the entrée to some of the best houses in London? Why does Society open her doors to this woman, Miss Dallas?”

“I cannot quite tell you,” was her reply. “I only know the fact that wherever she goes she is welcomed and treated with consideration, and wherever she fails to appear there is a universally expressed feeling of regret.”

I had also been invited to Lady Farringdon’s reception that evening, and I went there in a state of great curiosity. There was no doubt that Madame interested me. I was not sure of her. Beyond doubt there was a mystery attached to her, and also, for some unaccountable reason, she wished both to propitiate and defy me. Why was this?

I arrived early, and was standing in the crush near the head of the staircase when Madame was announced. She wore the richest white satin and quantities of diamonds. I saw her hostess bend towards her and talk eagerly. I noticed Madame’s reply and the pleased expression that crossed Lady Farringdon’s face. A few minutes later a man with a foreign-looking face and long beard sat down before the grand piano. He played a light prelude and Madame Sara began to sing. Her voice was sweet and low, with an extraordinary pathos in it. It was the sort of voice that penetrates to the heart. There was an instant pause in the gay chatter. She sang amidst perfect silence, and when the song had come to an end there followed a furore of applause. I was just turning to say something to my nearest neighbour when I observed Edith Dallas, who was standing close by. Her eyes met mine; she laid her hand on my sleeve.

“The room is hot,” she said, half panting as she spoke. “Take me out on the balcony.”

I did so. The atmosphere of the reception-rooms was almost intolerable, but it was comparatively cool in the open air.

“I must not lose sight of her,” she said, suddenly.

“Of whom?” I asked, somewhat astonished at her words.

“Of Sara.”

“She is there,” I said. “You can see her from where you stand.”

We happened to be alone. I came a little closer.

“Why are you afraid of her?” I asked.

“Are you sure that we shall not be heard?” was her answer.

“She terrifies me,” were her next words.

“I will not betray your confidence, Miss Dallas. Will you not trust me? You ought to give me a reason for your fears.”

“I cannot — I dare not; I have said far too much already. Don’t keep me, Mr. Druce. She must not find us together.” As she spoke she pushed her way through the crowd, and before I could stop her was standing by Madame Sara’s side.

The reception in Portland Place was, I remember, on the 26th of July. Two days later the Selbys were to give their final “At Home” before leaving for the country. I was, of course, invited to be present, and Madame was also there. She had never been dressed more splendidly, nor had she ever before looked younger or more beautiful. Wherever she went all eyes followed her. As a rule her dress was simple, almost like what a girl would wear, but tonight she chose rich Oriental stuffs made of many colours, and absolutely glittering with gems. Her golden hair was studded with diamonds. Round her neck she wore turquoise and diamonds mixed. There were many younger women in the room, but not the youngest nor the fairest had a chance beside Madame. It was not mere beauty of appearance, it was charm — charm which carries all before it.

I saw Miss Dallas, looking slim and tall and pale, standing at a little distance. I made my way to her side. Before I had time to speak she bent towards me.

“Is she not divine?” she whispered. “She bewilders and delights everyone. She is taking London by storm.”

“Then you are not afraid of her tonight?” I said.

“I fear her more than ever. She has cast a spell over me. But listen, she is going to sing again.”

I had not forgotten the song that Madame had given us at the Farringdons’, and stood still to listen. There was a complete hush in the room. Her voice floated over the heads of the assembled guests in a dreamy Spanish song. Edith told me that it was a slumber song, and that Madame boasted of her power of putting almost anyone to sleep who listened to her rendering of it.

“She has many patients who suffer from insomnia,” whispered the girl, “and she generally cures them with that song, and that alone. Ah! we must not talk; she will hear us.”

Before I could reply Selby came hurrying up. He had not noticed Edith. He caught me by the arm.

“Come just for a minute into this window, Dixon,” he said. “I must speak to you. I suppose you have no news with regard to my brother-in-law?”

“Not a word,” I answered.

“To tell you the truth, I am getting terribly put out over the matter. We cannot settle any of our money affairs just because this man chooses to lose himself. My wife’s lawyers wired to Brazil yesterday, but even his bankers do not know anything about him.”

“The whole thing is a question of time,” was my answer. “When are you off to Hampshire?”

“On Saturday.”

As Selby said the last words he looked around him, then he dropped his voice.

“I want to say something else. The more I see” — he nodded towards Madame Sara — “the less I like her. Edith is getting into a very strange state. Have you not noticed it? And the worst of it is my wife is also infected. I suppose it is that dodge of the woman’s for patching people up and making them beautiful. Doubtless the temptation is overpowering in the case of a plain woman, but Beatrice is beautiful herself and young. What can she have to do with cosmetics and complexion pills?”

“You don’t mean to tell me that your wife has consulted Madame Sara as a doctor?”

“Not exactly, but she has gone to her about her teeth. She complained of toothache lately, and Madame’s dentistry is renowned. Edith is constantly going to her for one thing or another, but then Edith is infatuated.”

As Jack said the last words he went over to speak to someone else, and before I could leave the seclusion of the window I perceived Edith Dallas and Madame Sara in earnest conversation together. I could not help overhearing the following words:

“Don’t come to me tomorrow. Get into the country as soon as you can. It is far and away the best thing to do.”

As Madame spoke she turned swiftly and caught my eye. She bowed, and the peculiar look, the sort of challenge, she had given me before flashed over her face. It made me uncomfortable, and during the night that followed I could not get it out of my head. I remembered what Selby had said with regard to his wife and her money affairs. Beyond doubt he had married into a mystery — a mystery that Madame knew all about. There was a very big money interest, and strange things happen when millions are concerned.

The next morning I had just risen and was sitting at breakfast when a note was handed to me. It came by special messenger, and was marked “Urgent.” I tore it open. These were its contents:

I read the note twice before I could realize what it meant. Then I rushed out and, hailing the first hansom I met, said to the man: “Drive to No. 192, Victoria Street, as quickly as you can.”

Here lived a certain Mr. Eric Vandeleur, an old friend of mine and the police surgeon for the Westminster district, which included Eaton Square. No shrewder or sharper fellow existed than Vandeleur, and the present case was essentially in his province, both legally and professionally. He was not at his flat when I arrived, having already gone down to the court. Here I accordingly hurried, and was informed that he was in the mortuary.

For a man who, as it seemed to me, lived in a perpetual atmosphere of crime and violence, of death and coroners’ courts, his habitual cheerfulness and brightness of manner were remarkable. Perhaps it was only the reaction from his work, for he had the reputation of being one of the most astute experts of the day in medical jurisprudence, and the most skilled analyst in toxicological cases on the Metropolitan Police staff. Before I could send him word that I wanted to see him I heard a door bang, and Vandeleur came hurrying down the passage, putting on his coat as he rushed along.

“Halloa!” he cried. “I haven’t seen you for ages. Do you want me?”

“Yes, very urgently,” I answered. “Are you busy?”

“Head over ears, my dear chap. I cannot give you a moment now, but perhaps later on.”

“What is it? You look excited.”

“I have got to go to Eaton Square like the wind, but come along, if you like, and tell me on the way.”

“Capital,” I cried. “The thing has been reported then? You are going to Mr. Selby’s, No. 34a; then I am going with you.”

He looked at me in amazement.

“But the case has only just been reported. What can you possibly know about it?”

“Everything. Let us take this hansom, and I will tell you as we go along.”

As we drove to Eaton Square I quickly explained the situation, glancing now and then at Vandeleur’s bright, clean-shaven face. He was no longer Eric Vandeleur, the man with the latest club story and the merry twinkle in his blue eyes; he was Vandeleur the medical jurist, with a face like a mask, his lower jaw slightly protruding and features very fixed.

“The thing promises to be serious,” he replied, as I finished, “but I can do nothing until after the autopsy. Here we are, and there is my man waiting for me; he has been smart.”

On the steps stood an official-looking man in uniform, who saluted.

“Coroner’s officer,” explained Vandeleur.

We entered the silent, darkened house. Selby was standing in the hall. He came to meet us. I introduced him to Vandeleur, and he at once led us into the dining-room, where we found Dr. Osborne, whom Selby had called in when the alarm of Edith’s illness had been first given. Dr. Osborne was a pale, under-sized, very young man. His face expressed considerable alarm. Vandeleur, however, managed to put him completely at his ease.

“I will have a chat with you in a few minutes, Dr. Osborne,” he said; “but first I must get Mr. Selby’s report. Will you please tell me, sir, exactly what occurred?”

“Certainly,” he answered. “We had a reception here last night, and my sister-in-law did not go to bed until early morning; she was in bad spirits, but otherwise in her usual health. My wife went into her room after she was in bed, and told me later on that she had found Edith in hysterics, and could not get her to explain anything. We both talked about taking her to the country without delay. Indeed, our intention was to get off this afternoon.”

“Well?” said Vandeleur.

“We had breakfast about half-past nine, and Miss Dallas came down, looking quite in her usual health, and in apparently good spirits. She ate with appetite, and, as it happened, she and my wife were both helped from the same dish. The meal had nearly come to an end when she jumped up from the table, uttered a sharp cry, turned very pale, pressed her hand to her side, and ran out of the room. My wife immediately followed her. She came back again in a minute or two, and said that Edith was in violent pain, and begged of me to send for a doctor. Dr. Osborne lives just round the corner. He came at once, but she died almost immediately after his arrival.”

“You were in the room?” asked Vandeleur, turning to Osborne.

“Yes,” he replied. “She was conscious to the last moment, and died suddenly.”

“Did she tell you anything?”

“No, except to assure me that she had not eaten any food that day until she had come down to breakfast. After the death occurred I sent immediately to report the case, locked the door of the room where the poor girl’s body is, and saw also that nobody touched anything on this table.”

Vandeleur rang the bell and a servant appeared. He gave quick orders. The entire remains of the meal were collected and taken charge of, and then he and the coroner’s officer went upstairs.

When we were alone Selby sank into a chair. His face was quite drawn and haggard.

“It is the horrible suddenness of the thing which is so appalling,” he cried. “As to Beatrice, I don’t believe she will ever be the same again. She was deeply attached to Edith. Edith was nearly ten years her senior, and always acted the part of mother to her. This is a sad beginning to our life. I can scarcely think collectedly.”

I remained with him a little longer, and then, as Vandeleur did not return, went back to my own house. There I could settle to nothing, and when Vandeleur rang me up on the telephone about six o’clock I hurried off to his rooms. As soon as I arrived I saw that Selby was with him, and the expression on both their faces told me the truth.

“This is a bad business,” said Vandeleur. “Miss Dallas has died from swallowing poison. An exhaustive analysis and examination have been made, and a powerful poison, unknown to European toxicologists, has been found. This is strange enough, but how it has been administered is a puzzle. I confess, at the present moment, we are all nonplussed. It certainly was not in the remains of the breakfast, and we have her dying evidence that she took nothing else. Now, a poison with such appalling potency would take effect quickly. It is evident that she was quite well when she came to breakfast, and that the poison began to work towards the close of the meal. But how did she get it? This question, however, I shall deal with later on. The more immediate point is this. The situation is a serious one in view of the monetary issues and the value of the lady’s life. From the aspects of the case, her undoubted sanity and her affection for her sister, we may almost exclude the idea of suicide. We must, therefore, call it murder. This harmless, innocent lady is struck down by the hand of an assassin, and with such devilish cunning that no trace or clue is left behind. For such an act there must have been some very powerful motive, and the person who designed and executed it must be a criminal of the highest order of scientific ability. Mr. Selby has been telling me the exact financial position of the poor lady, and also of his own young wife. The absolute disappearance of the step-brother, in view of his previous character, is in the highest degree strange. Knowing, as we do, that between him and two million sterling there stood two lives — one is taken!”

A deadly sensation of cold seized me as Vandeleur uttered these last words. I glanced at Selby. His face was colourless and the pupils of his eyes were contracted, as though he saw something which terrified him.

“What happened once may happen again,” continued Vandeleur. “We are in the presence of a great mystery, and I counsel you, Mr. Selby, to guard your wife with the utmost care.”

These words, falling from a man of Vandeleur’s position and authority on such matters, were sufficiently shocking for me to hear, but for Selby to be given such a solemn warning about his young and beautiful and newly-married wife, who was all the world to him, was terrible indeed. He leant his head on his hands.

“Mercy on us!” he muttered. “Is this a civilized country when death can walk abroad like this, invisible, not to be avoided? Tell me, Mr. Vandeleur, what I must do.”

“You must be guided by me,” said Vandeleur, “and, believe me, there is no witchcraft in the world. I shall place a detective in your household immediately. Don’t be alarmed; he will come to you in plain clothes and will simply act as a servant. Nevertheless, nothing can be done to your wife without his knowledge. As to you, Druce,” he continued, turning to me, “the police are doing all they can to find this man Silva, and I ask you to help them with your big agency, and to begin at once. Leave your friend to me. Wire instantly if you hear news.”

“You may rely on me,” I said, and a moment later I had left the room. As I walked rapidly down the street the thought of Madame Sara, her shop and its mysterious background, its surgical instruments, its operating-table, its induction coils, came back to me. And yet what could Madame Sara have to do with the present strange, inexplicable mystery?

The thought had scarcely crossed my mind before I heard a clatter alongside the kerb, and turning round I saw a smart open carriage, drawn by a pair of horses, standing there. I also heard my own name. I turned. Bending out of the carriage was Madame Sara.

“I saw you going by, Mr. Druce. I have only just heard the news about poor Edith Dallas. I am terribly shocked and upset. I have been to the house, but they would not admit me. Have you heard what was the cause of her death?”

Madame’s blue eyes filled with tears as she spoke.

“I am not at liberty to disclose what I have heard, Madame,” I answered, “since I am officially connected with the affair.”

Her eyes narrowed. The brimming tears dried as though by magic. Her glance became scornful.

“Thank you,” she answered, “your reply tells me that she did not die naturally. How very appalling! But I must not keep you. Can I drive you anywhere?”

“No, thank you.”

“Goodbye, then.”

She made a sign to the coachman, and as the carriage rolled away turned to look at me. Her face wore the defiant expression I had seen there more than once. Could she be connected with the affair? The thought came upon me with a violence that seemed almost conviction. Yet I had no reason for it — none.

To find Henry Joachim Silva was now my principal thought. My staff had instructions to make every possible inquiry, with large money rewards as incitements. The collateral branches of other agencies throughout Brazil were communicated with by cable, and all the Scotland Yard channels were used. Still there was no result. The newspapers took up the case; there were paragraphs in most of them with regard to the missing step-brother and the mysterious death of Edith Dallas. Then someone got hold of the story of the will, and this was retailed with many additions for the benefit of the public. At the inquest the jury returned the following verdict:

“We find that Miss Edith Dallas died from taking poison of unknown name, but by whom or how administered there is no evidence to say.”

This unsatisfactory state of things was destined to change quite suddenly. On the 6th of August, as I was seated in my office, a note was brought me by a private messenger. It was as follows:

In uncontrollable excitement I hastily dispatched two telegrams, one to Selby and the other to Vandeleur, begging of them to be with me, without fail, as soon as possible. So the man had never been in England at all. The situation was more bewildering than ever. One thing, at least, was probable — Edith Dallas’s death was not due to her step-brother. Soon after half-past six Selby arrived, and Vandeleur walked in ten minutes later. I told them what had occurred and showed them the letter. In half an hour’s time we reached the hotel, and on stating who I was we were shown into a room on the first floor by Silva’s private servant. Resting in an armchair, as we entered, sat a man; his face was terribly thin. The eyes and cheeks were so sunken that the face had almost the appearance of a skull. He made no effort to rise when we entered, and glanced from one of us to the other with the utmost astonishment. I at once introduced myself and explained who we were. He then waved his hand for his man to retire.

“You have heard the news, of course, Mr. Silva?” I said.

“News! What?” He glanced up to me and seemed to read something in my face. He started back in his chair.

“Good heavens,” he replied. “Do you allude to my sisters? Tell me, quickly, are they alive?”

“Your elder sister died on the twenty-ninth of July, and there is every reason to believe that her death was caused by foul play.”

As I uttered these words the change that passed over his face was fearful to witness. He did not speak, but remained motionless. His claw-like hands clutched the arms of the chair, his eyes were fixed and staring, as though they would start from their hollow sockets, the colour of his skin was like clay. I heard Selby breathe quickly behind me, and Vandeleur stepped towards the man and laid his hand on his shoulder.

“Tell us what you know of this matter,” he said sharply.

Recovering himself with an effort, the invalid began in a tremulous voice: “Listen closely, for you must act quickly. I am indirectly responsible for this fearful thing. My life has been a wild and wasted one, and now I am dying. The doctors tell me I cannot live a month, for I have a large aneurism of the heart. Eighteen months ago I was in Rio. I was living fast and gambled heavily. Among my fellow gamblers was a man much older than myself. His name was José Aranjo. He was, if anything, a greater gambler than I. One night we played alone. The stakes ran high until they reached a big figure. By daylight I had lost to him nearly £200,000. Though I am a rich man in point of income under my uncle’s will, I could not pay a twentieth part of that sum. This man knew my financial position, and, in addition to a sum of £5,000 paid down, I gave him a document. I must have been mad to do so. The document was this — it was duly witnessed and attested by a lawyer — that, in the event of my surviving my two sisters and thus inheriting the whole of my uncle’s vast wealth, half a million should go to José Aranjo. I felt I was breaking up at the time, and the chances of my inheriting the money were small. Immediately after the completion of the document this man left Rio, and I then heard a great deal about him that I had not previously known. He was a man of the queerest antecedents, partly Indian, partly Italian. He had spent many years of his life amongst the Indians. I heard also that he was as cruel as he was clever, and possessed some wonderful secrets of poisoning unknown to the West. I thought a great deal about this, for I knew that by signing that document I had placed the lives of my two sisters between him and a fortune. I came to Para six weeks ago, only to learn that one of my sisters was married and that both had gone to England. Ill as I was, I determined to follow them in order to warn them. I also wanted to arrange matters with you, Mr. Selby.”

“One moment, sir,” I broke in, suddenly. “Do you happen to be aware if this man, José Aranjo, knew a woman calling herself Madame Sara?”

“Knew her?” cried Silva. “Very well indeed, and so, for that matter, did I. Aranjo and Madame Sara were the best friends, and constantly met. She called herself a professional beautifier — was very handsome, and had secrets for the pursuing of her trade unknown even to Aranjo.”

“Good heavens!” I cried, “and the woman is now in London. She returned here with Mrs. Selby and Miss Dallas. Edith was very much influenced by her, and was constantly with her. There is no doubt in my mind that she is guilty. I have suspected her for some time, but I could not find a motive. Now the motive appears. You surely can have her arrested?”

Vandeleur made no reply. He gave me a strange look, then he turned to Selby.

“Has your wife also consulted Madame Sara?” he asked, sharply.

“Yes, she went to her once about her teeth, but has not been to the shop since Edith’s death. I begged of her not to see the woman, and she promised me faithfully she would not do so.”

“Has she any medicines or lotions given to her by Madame Sara — does she follow any line of treatment advised by her?”

“No, I am certain on that point.”

“Very well. I will see your wife tonight in order to ask her some questions. You must both leave town at once. Go to your country house and settle there. I am quite serious when I say that Mrs. Selby is in the utmost possible danger until after the death of her brother. We must leave you now, Mr. Silva. All business affairs must wait for the present. It is absolutely necessary that Mrs. Selby should leave London at once. Good night, sir. I shall give myself the pleasure of calling on you tomorrow morning.”

We took leave of the sick man. As soon as we got into the street Vandeleur stopped.

“I must leave it to you, Selby,” he said, “to judge how much of this matter you tell to your wife. Were I you I would explain everything. The time for immediate action has arrived, and she is a brave and sensible woman. From this moment you must watch all the foods and liquids that she takes. She must never be out of your sight or out of the sight of some other trustworthy companion.”

“I shall, of course, watch my wife myself,” said Selby. “But the thing is enough to drive one mad.”

“I will go with you to the country, Selby,” I said, suddenly.

“Ah!” cried Vandeleur, “that is the best thing possible, and what I wanted to propose. Go, all of you, by an early train tomorrow.”

“Then I will be off home at once, to make arrangements,” I said. “I will meet you, Selby, at Waterloo for the first train to Cronsmoor tomorrow.”

As I was turning away Vandeleur caught my arm.

“I am glad you are going with them,” he said. “I shall write to you tonight re instructions. Never be without a loaded revolver. Good night.” By 6:15 the next morning Selby, his wife, and I were in a reserved, locked, first-class compartment, speeding rapidly west. The servants and Mrs. Selby’s own special maid were in a separate carriage. Selby’s face showed signs of a sleepless night, and presented a striking contrast to the fair, fresh face of the girl round whom this strange battle raged. Her husband had told her everything, and, though still suffering terribly from the shock and grief of her sister’s death, her face was calm and full of repose. A carriage was waiting for us at Cronsmoor, and by half-past nine we arrived at the old home of the Selbys, nestling amid its oaks and elms. Everything was done to make the home-coming of the bride as cheerful as circumstances would permit, but a gloom, impossible to lift, overshadowed Selby himself. He could scarcely rouse himself to take the slightest interest in anything.

The following morning I received a letter from Vandeleur. It was very short, and once more impressed on me the necessity of caution. He said that two eminent physicians had examined Silva, and the verdict was that he could not live a month. Until his death precautions must be strictly observed.

The day was cloudless, and after breakfast I was just starting out for a stroll when the butler brought me a telegram. I tore it open; it was from Vandeleur:

“Prohibit all food until I arrive. Am coming down,” were the words. I hurried into the study and gave it to Selby. He read it and looked up at me.

“Find out the first train and go and meet him, old chap,” he said. “Let us hope that this means an end of the hideous affair.”

I went into the hall and looked up the trains. The next arrived at Cronsmoor at 10:45. I then strolled round to the stables and ordered a carriage, after which I walked up and down on the drive. There was no doubt that something strange had happened. Vandeleur coming down so suddenly must mean a final clearing up of the mystery. I had just turned round at the lodge gates to wait for the carriage when the sound of wheels and of horses galloping struck on my ears. The gates were swung open, and Vandeleur in an open fly dashed through them. Before I could recover from my surprise he was out of the vehicle and at my side. He carried a small black bag in his hand.

“I came down by special train,” he said, speaking quickly. “There is not a moment to lose. Come at once. Is Mrs. Selby all right?”

“What do you mean?” I replied. “Of course she is. Do you suppose that she is in danger?”

“Deadly,” was his answer. “Come.”

We dashed up to the house together. Selby, who had heard our steps, came to meet us.

“Mr. Vandeleur,” he cried. “What is it? How did you come?”

“By special train, Mr. Selby. And I want to see your wife at once. It will be necessary to perform a very trifling operation.”

“Operation!” he exclaimed. “Yes; at once.”

We made our way through the hall and into the morning-room, where Mrs. Selby was busily engaged reading and answering letters. She started up when she saw Vandeleur and uttered an exclamation of surprise.

“What has happened?” she asked. Vandeleur went up to her and took her hand.

“Do not be alarmed,” he said, “for I have come to put all your fears to rest. Now, please, listen to me. When you visited Madame Sara with your sister, did you go for medical advice?”

The colour rushed into her face.

“One of my teeth ached,” she answered. “I went to her about that. She is, as I suppose you know, a most wonderful dentist. She examined the tooth, found that it required stopping, and got an assistant, a Brazilian, I think, to do it.”

“And your tooth has been comfortable ever since?”

“Yes, quite. She had one of Edith’s stopped at the same time.”

“Will you kindly sit down and show me which was the tooth into which the stopping was put?”

She did so.

“This was the one,” she said, pointing with her finger to one in the lower jaw. “What do you mean? Is there anything wrong?”

Vandeleur examined the tooth long and carefully. There was a sudden rapid movement of his hand, and a sharp cry from Mrs. Selby. With the deftness of long practice, and a powerful wrist, he had extracted the tooth with one wrench. The suddenness of the whole thing, startling as it was, was not so strange as his next movement.

“Send Mrs. Selby’s maid to her,” he said, turning to her husband; “then come, both of you, into the next room.”

The maid was summoned. Poor Mrs. Selby had sunk back in her chair, terrified and half fainting. A moment later Selby joined us in the dining-room.

“That’s right,” said Vandeleur; “close the door, will you?”

He opened his black bag and brought out several instruments. With one he removed the stopping from the tooth. It was quite soft and came away easily. Then from the bag he produced a small guinea-pig, which he requested me to hold. He pressed the sharp instrument into the tooth, and opening the mouth of the little animal placed the point on the tongue. The effect was instantaneous. The little head fell on to one of my hands — the guinea-pig was dead. Vandeleur was white as a sheet. He hurried up to Selby and wrung his hand.

“Thank heaven!” he said, “I’ve been in time, but only just. Your wife is safe. This stopping would hardly have held another hour. I have been thinking all night over the mystery of your sister-in-law’s death, and over every minute detail of evidence as to how the poison could have been administered. Suddenly the coincidence of both sisters having had their teeth stopped struck me as remarkable. Like a flash the solution came to me. The more I considered it the more I felt that I was right; but by what fiendish cunning such a scheme could have been conceived and executed is still beyond my power to explain. The poison is very like hyoscine, one of the worst toxic-alkaloids known, so violent in its deadly proportions that the amount that would go into a tooth would cause almost instant death. It has been kept in by a gutta-percha stopping, certain to come out within a month, probably earlier, and most probably during mastication of food. The person would die either immediately or after a very few minutes, and no one would connect a visit to the dentist with a death a month afterwards.”

What followed can be told in a very few words. Madame Sara was arrested on suspicion. She appeared before the magistrate, looking innocent and beautiful, and managed during her evidence completely to baffle that acute individual. She denied nothing, but declared that the poison must have been put into the tooth by one of the two Brazilians whom she had lately engaged to help her with her dentistry. She had her suspicions with regard to these men soon afterwards, and had dismissed them. She believed that they were in the pay of José Aranjo, but she could not tell anything for certain. Thus Madame escaped conviction. I was certain that she was guilty, but there was not a shadow of real proof. A month later Silva died, and Selby is now a double millionaire.

No character in the world of French mystery fiction is as beloved as the fun-loving criminal Arsène Lupin, created by Maurice Marie Émile Leblanc (1864–1941) for a new magazine in 1905; the stories were collected in book form two years later. They immediately became wildly popular, as successful in France as Sherlock Holmes stories were in England, and Leblanc achieved wealth and worldwide fame and was made a member of the French Legion of Honor. Although the tales are fast-paced, the amount and degree of action borders on the burlesque, with situations and coincidences often too far-fetched to be taken seriously.

Lupin, known as the Prince of Thieves, is a street urchin type who thumbs his nose — literally — at the police. He steals for the thrill of it more than for personal gain or noble motives. He is such a master of disguise that he was able to take the identity of the chief of the Sûreté and direct official investigations into his own activities. After several years as a successful criminal, Lupin decides to turn to the side of the law for personal reasons and assists the police, usually without their knowledge. He is not, however, a first-rate crime-fighter because he cannot resist jokes, women, and the derring-do of his freelance life as a crook.

“The Mysterious Railway Passenger” was first published in Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Cambrioleur in Paris in 1907. The first English-language edition was The Exploits of Arsène Lupin (New York, Harper, 1907); it was reissued as The Seven of Hearts (New York, Cassell, 1908) and as The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar (Chicago, Donohue, 1910). The book served as the basis for two silent films, Lupin the Gentleman Burglar (1914) and The Gentleman Burglar (1915).

I had sent my motor-car to Rouen by road on the previous day I was to meet it by train, and go on to some friends, who have a house on the Seine.

A few minutes before we left Paris my compartment was invaded by seven gentlemen, five of whom were smoking. Short though the journey by the fast train be, I did not relish the prospect of taking it in such company, the more so as the old-fashioned carriage had no corridor. I therefore collected my overcoat, my newspapers, and my railway guide, and sought refuge in one of the neighboring compartments.

It was occupied by a lady. At the sight of me, she made a movement of vexation which did not escape my notice, and leaned towards a gentleman standing on the foot-board — her husband, no doubt, who had come to see her off. The gentleman took stock of me, and the examination seemed to conclude to my advantage; for he whispered to his wife and smiled, giving her the look with which we reassure a frightened child. She smiled in her turn, and cast a friendly glance in my direction, as though she suddenly realized that I was one of those well-bred men with whom a woman can remain locked up for an hour or two in a little box six feet square without having anything to fear.

Her husband said to her:

“You must not mind, darling; but I have an important appointment, and I must not wait.”

He kissed her affectionately, and went away. His wife blew him some discreet little kisses through the window, and waved her handkerchief.

Then the guard’s whistle sounded, and the train started.

At that moment, and in spite of the warning shouts of the railway officials, the door opened, and a man burst into our carriage. My travelling companion, who was standing up and arranging her things in the rack, uttered a cry of terror, and dropped down upon the seat.

I am no coward — far from it; but I confess that these sudden incursions at the last minute are always annoying. They seem so ambiguous, so unnatural. There must be something behind them, else...

The appearance of the new-comer, however, and his bearing were such as to correct the bad impression produced by the manner of his entrance. He was neatly, almost smartly, dressed; his tie was in good taste, his gloves clean; he had a powerful face... But, speaking of his face, where on earth had I seen it before? For I had seen it: of that there was no possible doubt; or at least, to be accurate, I found within myself that sort of recollection which is left by the sight of an oft-seen portrait of which one has never beheld the original. And at the same time I felt the uselessness of any effort of memory that I might exert, so inconsistent and vague was that recollection.

But when my eyes reverted to the lady I sat astounded at the pallor and disorder of her features. She was staring at her neighbor — he was seated on the same side of the carriage — with an expression of genuine affright, and I saw one of her hands steal trembling towards a little travelling-bag that lay on the cushion a few inches from her lap. She ended by taking hold of it, and nervously drew it to her.

Our eyes met, and I read in hers so great an amount of uneasiness and anxiety that I could not help saying:

“I hope you are not unwell, madame... Would you like me to open the window?”

She made no reply, but, with a timid gesture, called my attention to the individual beside her. I smiled as her husband had done, shrugged my shoulders, and explained to her by signs that she had nothing to fear, that I was there, and that, besides, the gentleman in question seemed quite harmless.

Just then he turned towards us, contemplated us, one after the other, from head to foot, and then huddled himself into his corner, and made no further movement.

A silence ensued; but the lady, as though she had summoned up all her energies to perform an act of despair, said to me, in a hardly audible voice:

“You know he is in our train.”

“Who?”

“Why, he... he himself... I assure you.”

“Whom do you mean?”

“Arsène Lupin!”

She had not removed her eyes from the passenger, and it was at him rather than at me that she flung the syllables of that alarming name.

He pulled his hat down upon his nose. Was this to conceal his agitation, or was he merely preparing to go to sleep?

I objected.

“Arsène Lupin was sentenced yesterday, in his absence, to twenty years’ penal servitude. It is not likely that he would commit the imprudence of showing himself in public to-day. Besides, the newspapers have discovered that he has been spending the winter in Turkey ever since his famous escape from the Sante.”

“He is in this train,” repeated the lady, with the ever more marked intention of being overheard by our companion. “My husband is a deputy prison-governor, and the station-inspector himself told us that they were looking for Arsène Lupin.”

“That is no reason why...”

“He was seen at the booking-office. He took a ticket for Rouen.”

“It would have been easy to lay hands upon him.”

“He disappeared. The ticket-collector at the door of the waiting-room did not see him; but they thought that he must have gone round by the suburban platforms and stepped into the express that leaves ten minutes after us.”

“In that case, they will have caught him there.”

“And supposing that, at the last moment, he jumped out of that express and entered this, our own train... as he probably... as he most certainly did?”

“In that case they will catch him here; for the porters and the police cannot have failed to see him going from one train to the other, and, when we reach Rouen, they will net him finely.”

“Him? Never! He will find some means of escaping again.”

“In that case I wish him a good journey.”

“But think of all that he may do in the mean time!”

“What?”

“How can I tell? One must be prepared for anything.”

She was greatly agitated; and, in point of fact, the situation, to a certain degree, warranted her nervous state of excitement. Almost in spite of myself, I said:

“There are such things as curious coincidences, it is true... But calm yourself. Admitting that Arsène Lupin is in one of these carriages, he is sure to keep quiet, and, rather than bring fresh trouble upon himself, he will have no other idea than that of avoiding the danger that threatens him.”

My words failed to reassure her. However she said no more, fearing, no doubt, lest I should think her troublesome.

As for myself, I opened my newspapers and read the reports of Arsène Lupin’s trial. They contained nothing that was not already known, and they interested me but slightly. Moreover, I was tired, I had had a poor night, I felt my eye-lids growing heavy, and my head began to nod.

“But surely, sir, you are not going to sleep?”

The lady snatched my paper from my hands, and looked at me with indignation.

“Certainly not,” I replied. “I have no wish to.”

“It would be most imprudent,” she said.

“Most,” I repeated.

And I struggled hard, fixing my eyes on the landscape, on the clouds that streaked the sky. And soon all this became confused in space, the image of the excited lady and the drowsy man was obliterated in my mind, and I was filled with the great, deep silence of sleep.

It was soon made agreeable by light and incoherent dreams, in which a being who played the part and bore the name of Arsène Lupin occupied a certain place. He turned and shifted on the horizon, his back laden with valuables, clambering over walls and stripping country-houses of their contents.

But the outline of this being, who had ceased to be Arsène Lupin, grew more distinct. He came towards me, grew bigger and bigger, leaped into the carriage with incredible agility, and fell full upon my chest.

A sharp pain... a piercing scream... I awoke. The man, my fellow-traveller, with one knee on my chest, was clutching my throat.

I saw this very dimly, for my eyes were shot with blood. I also saw the lady in a corner writhing in a violent fit of hysterics. I did not even attempt to resist. I should not have had the strength for it had I wished to: my temples were throbbing, I choked... my throat rattled... Another minute... and I should have been suffocated.

The man must have felt this. He loosened his grip. Without leaving hold of me, with his right hand he stretched a rope, in which he had prepared a slipknot, and, with a quick turn, tied my wrists together. In a moment I was bound, gagged — rendered motionless and helpless.

And he performed this task in the most natural manner in the world, with an ease that revealed the knowledge of a master, of an expert in theft and crime. Not a word, not a fevered movement. Sheer coolness and audacity. And there lay I on the seat, roped up like a mummy — I, Arsène Lupin!

It was really ridiculous. And notwithstanding the seriousness of the circumstances I could not but appreciate and almost enjoy the irony of the situation. Arsène Lupin “done” like a novice, stripped like the first-comer! For of course the scoundrel relieved me of my pocket-book and purse! Arsène Lupin victimized in his turn — duped and beaten! What an adventure!

There remained the lady. He took no notice of her at all. He contented himself with picking up the wrist-bag that lay on the floor, and extracting the jewels, the purse, the gold and silver knicknacks which it contained. The lady opened her eyes, shuddered with fright, took off her rings and handed them to the man as though she wished to spare him any superfluous exertion. He took the rings, and looked at her: she fainted away.

Then, calm and silent as before, without troubling about us further, he resumed his seat, lit a cigarette, and abandoned himself to a careful scrutiny of the treasures which he had captured, the inspection of which seemed to satisfy him completely.

I was much less satisfied. I am not speaking of the twelve thousand francs of which I had been unduly plundered: this was a loss which I accepted only for the time; I had no doubt that those twelve thousand francs would return to my possession after a short interval, together with the exceedingly important papers which my pocket-book contained: plans, estimates, specifications, addresses, lists of correspondents, letters of a coin-promising character. But, for the moment, a more immediate and serious care was worrying me: what was to happen next?

As may be readily imagined, the excitement caused by my passing through the Gare Saint-Lazare had not escaped me. As I was going to stay with friends who knew me by the name of Guillaume Berlat, and to whom my resemblance to Arsène Lupin was the occasion of many a friendly jest, I had not been able to disguise myself after my wont, and my presence had been discovered. Moreover, a man, doubtless Arsène Lupin, had been seen to rush from the express into the fast train. Hence it was inevitable and fated that the commissary of police at Rouen, warned by telegram, would await the arrival of the train, assisted by a respectable number of constables, question any suspicious passengers, and proceed to make a minute inspection of the carriages.

All this I had foreseen, and had not felt greatly excited about it; for I was certain that the Rouen police would display no greater perspicacity than the Paris police, and that I should have been able to pass unperceived: was it not sufficient for me, at the wicket, carelessly to show my deputy’s card, collector at Saint-Lazare with every confidence? But how things had changed since then! I was no longer free. It was impossible to attempt one of my usual moves. In one of the carriages the commissary would discover the Sieur Arsène Lupin, whom a propitious fate was sending to him bound hand and foot, gentle as a lamb, packed up complete. He had only to accept delivery, just as you receive a parcel addressed to you at a railway station, a hamper of game, or a basket of vegetables and fruit.

And to avoid this annoying catastrophe, what could I do, entangled as I was in my bonds?

And the train was speeding towards Rouen, the next and the only stopping-place; it rushed through Vernon, through Saint-Pierre...

I was puzzled also by another problem in which I was not so directly interested, but the solution of which aroused my professional curiosity: What were my fellow-traveller’s intentions?

If I had been alone he would have had ample time to alight quite calmly at Rouen. But the lady? As soon as the carriage door was opened the lady, meek and quiet as she sat at present, would scream, and throw herself about, and cry for help!

Hence my astonishment. Why did he not reduce her to the same state of powerlessness as myself, which would have given him time to disappear before his twofold misdeed was discovered?

He was still smoking, his eyes fixed on the view outside, which a hesitating rain was beginning to streak with long, slanting lines. Once, however, he turned round, took up my railway guide, and consulted it.

As for the lady, she made every effort to continue fainting, so as to quiet her enemy. But a fit of coughing, produced by the smoke, gave the lie to her pretended swoon.

Myself, I was very uncomfortable, and had pains all over my body. And I thought... I planned.

Pont-de-l’Arche... Oissel... The train was hurrying on, glad, drunk with speed... Saint-Etienne...

At that moment the man rose and took two steps towards us, to which the lady hastened to reply with a new scream and a genuine fainting fit.

But what could his object be? He lowered the window on our side. The rain was now falling in torrents, and he made a movement of annoyance at having neither umbrella nor overcoat. He looked up at the rack: the lady’s en-tout-cas was there; he took it. He also took my overcoat and put it on.

We were crossing the Seine. He turned up his trousers, and then, leaning out of the window, raised the outer latch.

Did he mean to fling himself on the permanent way? At the rate at which we were going it would have been certain death. We plunged into the tunnel pierced under the Cote Sainte-Catherine. The man opened the door, and, with one foot, felt for the step. What madness! The darkness, the smoke, the din — all combined to give a fantastic appearance to any such attempt. But suddenly the train slowed up, the Westinghouse brakes counteracted the movement of the wheels. In a minute the pace from fast became normal, and decreased still more. Without a doubt there was a gang at work repairing this part of the tunnel; this would necessitate a slower passage of the trains for some days perhaps, and the man knew it.

He had only, therefore, to put his other foot on the step, climb down to the foot-board, and walk away quietly, not without first closing the door, and throwing back the latch.

He had scarcely disappeared when the smoke showed whiter in the daylight. We emerged into a valley. One more tunnel, and we should be at Rouen.

The lady at once recovered her wits, and her first care was to bewail the loss of her jewels. I gave her a beseeching glance. She understood, and relieved me of the gag which was stifling me. She wanted also to unfasten my bonds, but I stopped her.

“No, no; the police must see everything as it was. I want them to be fully informed as regards that blackguard’s actions.”

“Shall I pull the alarm-signal?”

“Too late. You should have thought of that while he was attacking me.”

“But he would have killed me! Ah, sir, didn’t I tell you that he was travelling by this train? I knew him at once, by his portrait. And now he’s taken my jewels!”

“They’ll catch him, have no fear.”

“Catch Arsène Lupin! Never.”

“It all depends on you, madam. Listen. When we arrive be at the window, call out, make a noise. The police and porters will come up. Tell them what you have seen in a few words: the assault of which I was the victim, and the flight of Arsène Lupin. Give his description: a soft hat, an umbrella — yours — a gray frock-overcoat...”

“Yours,” she said.

“Mine? No, his own. I didn’t have one.”

“I thought that he had none either when he got in.”

“He must have had... unless it was a coat which some one left behind in the rack. In any case, he had it when he got out, and that is the essential thing... A gray frock-overcoat, remember... Oh, I was forgetting... tell them your name to start with. Your husband’s functions will stimulate the zeal of all those men.”

We were arriving. She was already leaning out of the window. I resumed, in a louder, almost imperious voice, so that my words should sink into her brain:

“Give my name also, Guillaume Berlat. If necessary, say you know me... That will save time... we must hurry on the preliminary inquiries... the important thing is to catch Arsène Lupin... with your jewels... You quite understand, don’t you? Guillaume Berlat, a friend of your husband’s.”

“Quite... Guillaume Berlat.”

She was already calling out and gesticulating. Before the train had come to a standstill a gentleman climbed in, followed by a number of other men. The critical hour was at hand.

Breathlessly the lady exclaimed:

“Arsène Lupin... he attacked us... he has stolen my jewels... I am Madame Renaud... my husband is a deputy prison-governor... Ah, here’s my brother, Georges Andelle, manager of the Credit Rouennais... What I want to say is...”

She kissed a young man who had just come up, and who exchanged greetings with the commissary. She continued, weeping:

“Yes, Arsène Lupin... He flew at this gentleman’s throat in his sleep... Monsieur Berlat, a friend of my husband’s.”

“But where is Arsène Lupin?”

“He jumped out of the train in the tunnel, after we had crossed the Seine.”

“Are you sure it was he?”

“Certain. I recognized him at once. Besides, he was seen at the Gare Saint-Lazare. He was wearing a soft hat...”

“No; a hard felt hat, like this,” said the commissary, pointing to my hat.

“A soft hat, I assure you,” repeated Madame Renaud, “and a gray frock-overcoat.”

“Yes,” muttered the commissary; “the telegram mentions a gray frock-overcoat with a black velvet collar.”

“A black velvet collar, that’s it!” exclaimed Madame Renaud, triumphantly.

I breathed again. What a good, excellent friend I had found in her!

Meanwhile the policemen had released me from my bonds. I bit my lips violently till the blood flowed. Bent in two, with my handkerchief to my mouth, as seems proper to a man who has long been sitting in a constrained position, and who bears on his face the blood-stained marks of the gag, I said to the commissary, in a feeble voice:

“Sir, it was Arsène Lupin, there is no doubt of it... You can catch him if you hurry... I think I may be of some use to you...”

The coach, which was needed for the inspection by the police, was slipped. The remainder of the train went on towards Le Havre. We were taken to the station-master’s office through a crowd of on-lookers who filled the platform.

Just then I felt a hesitation. I must make some excuse to absent myself, find my motor-car, and be off. It was dangerous to wait. If anything happened, if a telegram came from Paris, I was lost.

Yes; but what about my robber? Left to my own resources, in a district with which I was not very well acquainted, I could never hope to come up with him.

“Bah!” I said to myself. “Let us risk it, and stay. It’s a difficult hand to win, but a very amusing one to play. And the stakes are worth the trouble.”

And as we were being asked provisionally to repeat our depositions, I exclaimed:

“Mr. Commissary, Arsène Lupin is getting a start of us. My motor is waiting for me in the yard. If you will do me the pleasure to accept a seat in it, we will try...”

The commissary gave a knowing smile.

“It’s not a bad idea... such a good idea, in fact, that it’s already being carried out.”

“Oh!”

“Yes; two of my officers started on bicycles... some time ago.”

“But where to?”

“To the entrance to the tunnel. There they will pick up the clews and the evidence, and follow the track of Arsène Lupin.”

I could not help shrugging my shoulders.

“Your two officers will pick up no clews and no evidence.”

“Really!”

“Arsène Lupin will have arranged that no one should see him leave the tunnel. He will have taken the nearest road, and from there...”

“From there made for Rouen, where we shall catch him.”

“He will not go to Rouen.”

“In that case, he will remain in the neighborhood, where we shall be even more certain...”

“He will not remain in the neighborhood.”

“Oh! Then where will he hide himself?”

I took out my watch.

“At this moment Arsène Lupin is hanging about the station at Darnetal. At ten-fifty — that is to say, in twenty-two minutes from now — he will take the train which leaves Rouen from the Gare du Nord for Amiens.”

“Do you think so? And how do you know?”

“Oh, it’s very simple. In the carriage Arsène Lupin consulted my railway guide. What for? To see if there was another line near the place where he disappeared, a station on that line, and a train which stopped at that station. I have just looked at the guide myself, and learned what I wanted to know.”

“Upon my word, sir,” said the commissary, “you possess marvellous powers of deduction. What an expert you must be!”

Dragged on by my certainty, I had blundered by displaying too much cleverness. He looked at me in astonishment, and I saw that a suspicion flickered through his mind. Only just, it is true; for the photographs despatched in every direction were so unlike, represented an Arsène Lupin so different from the one that stood before him, that he could not possibly recognize the original in me. Nevertheless, he was troubled, restless, perplexed.

There was a moment of silence. A certain ambiguity and doubt seemed to interrupt our words. A shudder of anxiety passed through me.

Was luck about to turn against me? Mastering myself, I began to laugh.

“Ah well, there’s nothing to sharpen one’s wits like the loss of a pocket-book and the desire to find it again. And it seems to me that, if you will give me two of your men, the three of us might, perhaps...”

“Oh, please, Mr. Commissary,” exclaimed Madame Renaud, “do what Monsieur Berlat suggests.”

My kind friend’s intervention turned the scale. Uttered by her, the wife of an influential person, the name of Berlat became mine in reality, and conferred upon me an identity which no suspicion could touch. The commissary rose.

“Believe me, Monsieur Berlat, I shall be only too pleased to see you succeed. I am as anxious as yourself to have Arsène Lupin arrested.”

He accompanied me to my car. He introduced two of his men to me: Honore Massol and Gaston Delivet. They took their seats. I placed myself at the wheel. My chauffeur started the engine. A few seconds later we had left the station. I was saved.

I confess that as we dashed in my powerful 35-h.p. Moreau-Lepton along the boulevards that skirt the old Norman city I was not without a certain sense of pride. The engine hummed harmoniously. The trees sped behind us to right and left. And now, free and out of danger, I had nothing to do but to settle my own little private affairs with the co-operation of two worthy representatives of the law. Arsène Lupin was going in search of Arsène Lupin!

Ye humble mainstays of the social order of things, Gaston Delivet and Honore Massol, how precious was your assistance to me! Where should I have been without you? But for you, at how many cross-roads should I have taken the wrong turning! But for you, Arsène Lupin would have gone astray and the other escaped!

But all was not over yet. Far from it. I had first to capture the fellow and next to take possession, myself, of the papers of which he had robbed me. At no cost must my two satellites be allowed to catch a sight of those documents, much less lay hands upon them. To make us of them and yet act independently of them was what I wanted to do; and it was no easy matter.

We reached Darnetal three minutes after the train had left. I had the consolation of learning that a man in a gray frock-overcoat with a black velvet collar had got into a second-class carriage with a ticket for Amiens. There was no doubt about it: my first appearance as a detective was a promising one.

Delivet said:

“The train is an express, and does not stop before Monterolier-Buchy, in nineteen minutes from now. If we are not there before Arsène Lupin he can go on towards Amiens, branch off to Cleres, and, from there, make for Dieppe or Paris.”

“How far is Monterolier?”

“Fourteen miles and a half.”

“Fourteen miles and a half in nineteen minutes... We shall be there before he is.”

It was a stirring race. Never had my trusty Moreau-Lepton responded to my impatience with greater ardor and regularity. It seemed to me as though I communicated my wishes to her directly, without the intermediary of levers or handles. She shared my desires. She approved of my determination. She understood my animosity against that blackguard Arsène Lupin. The scoundrel! The sneak! Should I get the best of him? Or would he once more baffle authority, that authority of which I was the incarnation?

“Right!” cried Delivet... “Left!... Straight ahead!..”

We skimmed the ground. The mile-stones looked like little timid animals that fled at our approach.

And suddenly at the turn of a road a cloud of smoke — the north express!

For half a mile it was a struggle side by side — an unequal struggle, of which the issue was certain — we beat the train by twenty lengths.

In three seconds we were on the platform in front of the second class. The doors were flung open. A few people stepped out. My thief was not among them. We examined the carriages. No Arsène Lupin.

“By Jove!” I exclaimed, “he must have recognized me in the motor while we were going alongside of him, and jumped!”

The guard of the train confirmed my supposition. He had seen a man scrambling down the embankment at two hundred yards from the station.

“There he is!... Look!... At the level crossing!”

I darted in pursuit, followed by my two satellites, or, rather, by one of them; for the other, Massol, turned out to be an uncommonly fast sprinter, gifted with both speed and staying power. In a few seconds the distance between him and the fugitive was greatly diminished. The man saw him, jumped a hedge, and scampered off towards a slope, which he climbed. We saw him, farther still, entering a little wood.

When we reached the wood we found Massol waiting for us. He had thought it no use to go on, lest he should lose us.

“You were quite right, my dear fellow,” I said. “After a run like this our friend must be exhausted. We’ve got him.”

I examined the skirts of the wood while thinking how I could best proceed alone to arrest the fugitive, in order myself to effect certain recoveries which the law, no doubt, would only have allowed after a number of disagreeable inquiries. Then I returned to my companions.

“Look here, it’s very easy. You, Massol, take up your position on the left. You, Delivet, on the right. From there you can watch the whole rear of the wood, and he can’t leave it unseen by you except by this hollow, where I shall stand. If he does not come out, I’ll go in and force him back towards one or the other of you. You have nothing to do, therefore, but wait. Oh, I was forgetting: in case of alarm, I’ll fire a shot.”

Massol and Delivet moved off, each to his own side. As soon as they were out of sight I made my way into the wood with infinite precautions, so as to be neither seen nor heard. It consisted of close thickets, contrived for the shooting, and intersected by very narrow paths, in which it was only possible to walk by stooping, as though in a leafy tunnel.

One of these ended in a glade, where the damp grass showed the marks of footsteps. I followed them, taking care to steal through the underwood. They led me to the bottom of a little mound, crowned by a tumble-down lath-and-plaster hovel.

“He must be there,” I thought. “He has selected a good post of observation.”

I crawled close up to the building. A slight sound warned me of his presence, and, in fact, I caught sight of him through an opening; with his back turned towards me.

Two bounds brought me upon him. He tried to point the revolver which he held in his hand. I did not give him time, but pulled him to the ground in such a way that his two arms were twisted and caught under him, while I held him pinned down with my knee upon his chest.

“Listen to me, old chap,” I whispered in his ear. “I am Arsène Lupin. You’ve got to give me back, this minute and without any fuss, my pocket-book and the lady’s wrist-bag... in return for which I’ll save you from the clutches of the police and enroll you among my friends. Which is it to be: yes or no?”

“Yes,” he muttered.

“That’s right. Your plan of this morning was cleverly thought out. We shall be good friends.”

I got up. He fumbled in his pocket, fetched out a great knife, and tried to strike me with it.

“You ass!” I cried.

With one hand I parried the attack. With the other I caught him a violent blow on the carotid artery, the blow which is known as “the carotid hook.” He fell back stunned.

In my pocket-book I found my papers and bank-notes. I took his own out of curiosity. On an envelope addressed to him I read his name: Pierre Onfrey.

I gave a start. Pierre Onfrey, the perpetrator of the murder in the Rue Lafontaine at Auteuil! Pierre Onfrey, the man who had cut the throats of Madame Delbois and her two daughters. I bent over him. Yes, that was the face which, in the railway-carriage, had aroused in me the memory of features which I had seen before.

But time was passing. I placed two hundred-franc notes in an envelope, with a visiting-card bearing these words:

“Arsène Lupin to his worthy assistants, Honore Massol and Gaston Delivet, with his best thanks.”

I laid this where it could be seen, in the middle of the room. Beside it I placed Madame Renaud’s wrist-bag. Why should it not be restored to the kind friend who had rescued me? I confess, however, that I took from it everything that seemed in any way interesting, leaving only a tortoise-shell comb, a stick of lip-salve, and an empty purse. Business is business, when all is said and done! And, besides, her husband followed such a disreputable occupation!..

There remained the man. He was beginning to move. What was I to do? I was not qualified either to save or to condemn him.

I took away his weapons, and fired my revolver in the air.

“That will bring the two others,” I thought. “He must find a way out of his own difficulties. Let fate take its course.”

And I went down the hollow road at a run.

Twenty minutes later a cross-road which I had noticed during our pursuit brought me back to my car.

At four o’clock I telegraphed to my friends from Rouen that an unexpected incident compelled me to put off my visit. Between ourselves, I greatly fear that, in view of what they must now have learned, I shall be obliged to postpone it indefinitely. It will be a cruel disappointment for them!

At six o’clock I returned to Paris by L’Isle-Adam, Enghien, and the Porte Bineau.

I gathered from the evening papers that the police had at last succeeded in capturing Pierre Onfrey.

The next morning — why should we despise the advantages of intelligent advertisement? — the Echo de France contained the following sensational paragraph:

This odd little story derives from an unlikely author: Newton McFaul MacTavish (1875–1941), a much-honored Canadian art critic and early art historian. Born in Staffa, Ontario, he began his career as a journalist at the age of twenty-one when he took a job as a reporter at The Toronto Globe and was assistant financial editor there until 1900. At that time he began to study English literature at McGill University while working as a correspondent and business representative of The Globe in Montreal. In 1906, MacTavish became the editor of The Canadian Magazine in Toronto, a position he held for twenty years. He acted as a trustee of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from 1922 to 1933. He received honorary degrees in 1924 (M.A.) and 1928 (D.Litt.) from Acadia University, Nova Scotia. He was a member of the Civil Service Commission of Canada from 1926 to 1932. A founder of the Arts and Letters Club (Toronto), he served on the editorial advisory board of the Encyclopedia of Canada (1932–1935), to which he also was a contributor. In addition to his articles, essays, and short stories, MacTavish authored Thrown In (1923), a collection of essays about rural life in nineteenth-century Ontario; The Fine Arts in Canada (1925), the first full-length history of Canadian art; and Ars Longa (1938), stories about Canadian art and artists, with anecdotal reminiscences by the author. A fourth work, Newton MacTavish’s Canada: Selected Essays (1963), was published posthumously.

“An Unposted Letter” was originally published in the February 1901 issue of The Canadian Magazine.

Outside, a hammer pounded mockingly; the gallows were under construction. Through the iron bars of the prison window shone a few straggling shafts of sunlight. My client rested on his elbows, his chin in his hands. The light glistened on his matted hair. He heard the hammering outside.

“I guess I may’s well write a line to Bill,” he said, not raising his head. “Kin you get a pencil and paper?”

I got them, and then waited until he had written:

“Dear Bill, — By the sound of things, I reckon I’ve got to swing this trip. I’ve had a hope all along that they might git scent on the right track; but I see that Six-Eye’ll be ’bliged to kick the bucket, with head up — the galleys is goin’ up mighty fast.

“I say, Bill, there ain’t no good in burglarin’. I swore once I’d quit it, and wish I had. But a feller can’t allus do just as he fancies; I guess he can’t allus do it, kin he, Bill? You never knew how I got into this scrape, did you?

“One day I was standin’ around, just standin’ around, nothin’ doin’, when I saw a pair of runaway horses a-comin’ down the street like mad. I jumped out and caught the nigh one by the bridle. I hauled ’em up mighty sudden, but somethin’ swung me round, and I struck my head agin the neck-yoke, kersmash.

“When I come to, I was sittin’ back in the carriage with the sweetest faced girl bendin’ over me, and wipin’ my face with cool water. She asked where she would drive me home; and, do you know, Bill, for the first time, I was ashamed to say where. But I told her, and, so help me, she came clear down in there with me, and made Emily put me to bed. She left money, and every day till I got well she come out and sat and read the Bible and all them things. Do you know, Bill, it wasn’t long afore things seemed different. I couldn’t look at her pure, sweet face and plan a job. The last day she came I made up my mind I’d try somethin’ else — quit burglarin’.

“I started out to get work. One man asked me what I’d served my time at. I said I’d served most of it in jail, and then he wouldn’t have anythin’ to do with me. A chap gave me a couple of days breakin’ stones in a cellar. He said I did it so good he guessed I must have been in jail. After that I couldn’t get nothin’ to do, because no one wouldn’t have nothin’ to do with a jail-bird, and I had made up my mind to tell the truth.

“At last Emily began to kick and little Bob to cry for grub. I got sick of huntin’ for work, and it seemed as if everybody was pushin’ me back to my old job. I got disgusted. I had to do somethin’, so I sat down and planned to do a big house in the suburbs. I’d sized it up before.

“The moon was high that night, so I waited till it went down, long after midnight. I found the back door already open, so it was a snap to git in.

“I went upstairs and picked on a side room near the front. I eased the door and looked in. A candle flickered low, and flames danced from a few coals in the fireplace.

“I entered noiselessly.

“A high-backed chair was in front of the hearth. I sneaked up and looked over the top. A young girl, all dressed in white, with low neck and bare arms, laid there asleep. Her hair hung over her shoulders; she looked like as if she’d come home from a dance, and just threw herself there tired out.

“Just as I was goin’ to turn away, the flames in the fireplace flickered, and I caught the glow of rubies at the girl’s throat. How they shone and gleamed and shot fire from their blood-red depths! The candle burned low and sputtered; but the coals on the hearth flickered, the rubies glowed, and the girl breathed soft in her sleep.

“ ‘It’s an easy trick,’ I said to myself, and I leaned over the back of the chair, my breath fanning the light hair that fell over marble shoulders. I took out my knife and reached over. Just then the fire burned up a bit. As I leaned over I saw her sweet, girlish face, and, so h’lp me, Bill, it was her, her whose face I couldn’t look into and plan a job.

“Hardly knowing it, I bared my head, and stood there knife in hand, the blood rushin’ to my face, and my feelin’s someway seemin’ to go agin me.

“I looked at her, and gradually closed my knife and straightened up from that sneakin’ shape a feller gets into. I remembered a verse that she used to read to me, ‘Ye shall not go forth empty-handed,’ so I said to myself I’d try again. But just as I was turning to go, I heard a shot in the next room; then a heavy thud. I stood stock-still for a jiffy, and then ran out in time to see someone dart down the stairs. At the bottom I heard a stumble. I hurried along the hall and ran straight into the arms of the butler.

“I guess someone else was doin’ that job that night. But they had me slicker’n a whistle. ’Twas no use; everythin’ went agin me. I had on my big revolver, the mate to the one you got. As it happened, one chamber was empty, and the ball they took from the old man’s head was the same size. I had a bad record; it was all up with me. The only thing they brought up in court to the contrary was the top of an ear they found in the hall, where someone must have hit agin somethin’ sharp. But they wouldn’t listen to my lawyer.

“Give up burglarin’, Bill; see what I’ve come to. But I hope you’ll do a turn for Emily if ever she’s in need, and don’t learn little Bob filchin’. Do this for an old pal’s sake, Bill.”

The doomed man stopped writing, as the last shaft of sunlight passed beyond the iron bars of the prison window. Outside the hammering had ceased; the scaffold was finished.

“You’ll find Emily, my wife, in the back room of the basement at 126, River Street,” said my client, handing me the letter. “She’ll tell you where to find Bill.”

I took the letter, but did not then know its contents. I started, but he called me back.

“You have a flower in your button-hole,” he said. “I’d like to wrap it up and send it to Emily.”

Next day, after the sentence of the law had been executed, I went to find Emily. I descended the musty old staircase at 126, River Street, where all was filth and squalor. At the back room I stopped and rapped. A towzy head was thrust out of the next door.

“They’re gone,” it said.

“Where?”

“Don’t know. The woman went with some man.”

“Did you know him?”

“I saw him here before sometimes, but the top of his ear wasn’t cut off then. They called him Bill — sort of pal.”

“And where’s the little boy?”

“He’s gone to the Shelter.”

I went out into the pure air, and, standing on the kerbstone, read the letter:

“...The only thing they brought up in court to the contrary was the top of an ear...”

When I had finished, I remembered the flower in my hand. I didn’t throw it away; I took it to my office and have it there still, wrapped in the paper as he gave it to me.

Most remembered, if remembered at all, for the creation of Smiler Bunn, a not-quite-gentleman-crook, Bertram Atkey (1880–1952) also invented a wide range of eccentric and original characters for his many works of fiction, notably Winnie O’Wynn, a charming gold-digger; Prosper Fair, an amateur detective who is really Duke of Devizes; Hercules, a sportsman; Nelson Chiddenham, a crippled boy detective who has an immense knowledge of dogs and the countryside; Captain Cormorant, a widely traveled mercenary adventurer; and Sebastian Hope, a henpecked husband with a peculiar gift for disarming his wife by feeding her alibis of great verisimilitude.

It is the scores of stories about Smiler Bunn that continue to have charm in the present day. Also known as Mr. Wilton Flood, Bunn is an ingenious crook, blessed with great courage, resourcefulness, and humor, who “makes his living off society in a manner always devious and sometimes dark, but never mean.” Bunn and his friend Lord Fortworth have lived in bachelor partnership for years, specializing in taking portable property (such as cash and jewels) from those who have no right to it, thereby avoiding encounters with the police.

Born in Wiltshire, Atkey moved to London as a teenager to write stories. He published his first book, Folk of the Wild, a collection of nature stories, in 1905. Two years later he created Smiler Bunn, later collecting the stories in The Amazing Mr. Bunn (1912), the first of nine books about the genial crook.

“The Adventure of ‘The Brain’ ” was first published in the January 1910 issue of The Grand Magazine, and first collected in The Amazing Mr. Bunn (London, Newnes, 1912).

“I shall now proceed to give my celebrated imitation of a gentleman pinching a blood-orange,” mused Mr. “Smiler” Bunn, the gifted pickpocket of Garraty Street, King’s Cross, to himself, as he stood thoughtfully before a fruiterer’s shop in a small street off Oxford Street. “A real gent hooking of the biggest blood-orange in the bunch!”

With this laudable intention he turned his gaze upon a fine pineapple that reposed aristocratically upon pink paper behind the plate-glass window, as the shopman came out and stood for a moment near the door, leaning against the shopfront extension, which was piled with fruit — chiefly oranges, “blood” and otherwise. This part of the shop was in front of the window, and was unprotected save by the watchful care of the shopman.

“Nice little pineapple, that,” said Mr. Bunn casually.

“Pretty fair for the time of year,” replied the shopman. “Will you take it?”

“Well, ’ow much is it?”

“Half a guinea,” said the shopman.

Mr. Bunn shook his head. His resources at the moment totalled sevenpence only.

“Too dear,” he decided, both hands plunged deep into his coat-pockets. “What’s the little black-looking thing that keeps on running round the pineapple? Not a mouse, is it?”

The shopman plunged inside suddenly, with a frightful threat against all mice, and — Mr. Bunn’s right hand flickered. Only flickered. Few people watching him would have cared to wager that his hand had left his pocket at all. Then he moved tranquilly away, and the biggest blood-orange on the shop-front went with him. The celebrated imitation was over, and the performer had strolled calmly round an adjacent corner before the shopman had given up his search for the mouse.

“Very well done, old man,” muttered Mr. Bunn. “I ain’t sure but what you ain’t improving. Your ’and has not lost its cunning, nor your heye its quickness.”

He turned into Oxford Street, feeling distinctly encouraged by this small success, and mingled unobtrusively with the crowd of women who were looking at the shop windows and wondering why their husbands did not earn as much as other women’s husbands.

Mr. Bunn had skilfully worked his way through the thickest of the crowd for over a hundred yards before he marked a lady who seemed sufficiently careless in the handling of her bag to call for his closer attention. He moved quickly to her. She was a handsome woman of middle age, with a determined face, and rather too strong a chin. She was exceedingly well-dressed, and carried her bag in the bend of two fingers. At first she did not appear to be interested in the shops, but a hat dashingly displayed in a corner window suddenly caught her attention, and she stopped to look at it. Mr. Bunn paused for the fraction of a second immediately behind her. Then he went quietly on — round the corner (corners were a speciality of Smiler Bunn’s). He did not look behind — he knew better. He simply lounged very slowly on, hoping the bag did not make too pronounced a bulge in his pocket. He looked quite the most unconcerned man in London, until he heard a sudden rustle of skirts behind him and felt a quick, firm grip on his arm.

“You are very unintelligent,” said a sharp voice, and he turned to see the well-dressed woman who had been carrying her bag carelessly.

“Give me what you have in your right-hand coat-pocket at once,” she requested him coldly.

“I dunno what you mean. I don’t know you. What d’you mean?” asked Smiler, rather nervously.

“Do not let us have any nonsense, please,” was her chilly comment. “Give it to me at once.”

Smiler put his hand in his pocket with desperate calmness and drew out — a remarkably fine blood-orange.

“It’s the only one I got, but you can have it—” he began; but she interrupted.

“Do you want me to call the police?” she said. “Give me the bag instantly.”

Smiler gave a sickly smile, put his hand into the other pocket, and, with a badly-feigned start of surprise, produced the bag.

“Why, what’s this? However did this get there? This ain’t mine — it don’t belong to me!” he began, making the best of a very bad job.

But she cut him short. She took the bag, her quick grey eyes playing over him in a singularly comprehensive glance. She saw a clean-shaven, rather stout, butlerish-looking man of about thirty-eight, with a good-humoured mouth and a solid chin. He was extremely shabby, but neat, and obviously was in a state of considerable embarrassment. She was about to speak, when Mr. Bunn pushed back his hat and passed his hand across his brow — a gesture evidently unconscious, and born of the mental stress of the moment. But her eyes brightened suddenly as they lighted upon his forehead, and her lips relaxed a little. For it was unquestionably a fine frontal development — a Brow among Brows. Assisted somewhat by a slight premature baldness, the forehead of Mr. Bunn was a feature of which its owner was acutely conscious. There was too much of it, in his opinion. It had never been of much use to him, and he was in the habit of considering its vast expanse a deformity rather than a sign of intellect. He was quite aware that it saved his features from being commonplace — he fancied it made them ridiculous instead. But evidently the lady of the bag did not think so. She was actually smiling to him.

“I should like to ask you a few questions,” she said, “if you have no objection.”

Mr. Bunn did not answer.

“Have you any objection?” she inquired sweetly, glancing across the road, where a dozen policemen were solemnly walking in Indian file towards their beats. Smiler regarded them for a moment — a most unpleasant sight, he considered.

Then, “No, no objection — not at all — not by no means,” he said.

“Be good enough to accompany me, then,” continued the woman, in a singularly businesslike way. She moved slowly on, and Mr. Bunn walked by her side.

“Why are you a pickpocket?” she said curtly.

Mr. Bunn muttered to the effect that he was not — strike him lucky if he was. But the woman ignored his denial.

“It is so foolish,” she said. “So obviously unsuitable a profession for a man with your intellect. Why, with your forehead you should be carving out a great future, a career, a reputation.”

Smiler stared suspiciously at her.

“You leave my forrid alone,” he requested her. “I can’t help having a thing more like a balloon than a ’eadpiece on my shoulders, can I?”

“But, my good person, don’t you see what a great thing it is to have such a brain, and what a terrible thing it is for such an intellect to lie dormant? If all men had such intellect as your forehead tells me plainly you possess, you do not think we women would ever have asked for votes? Certainly not. It is because not one man in a hundred thousand possesses such a brain as yours that we have decided to fight for our rights. And when I think of the possibilities of yours, when I think of the latent power in your glorious head, that only needs training and shaping to the Idea. When I think, here I have in its practically fallow state a Brain of Brains which belongs to me, and is my own to mould as I like — unless its owner wishes to be sent to prison for six months in the third division with hard labour — can you wonder that my whole spirit takes fire, and I cry aloud, yet again — ‘VOTES FOR WOMEN!’ ”

It was a truly lusty yell, and it gave Mr. Bunn an unpleasant shock. Everyone within hearing turned to stare at the woman, but she seemed blandly unconscious of their scrutiny. She gripped the unnerved Smiler’s arm and became business-like again.

“Understand me,” she said. “I consider you a Find, and I propose to keep you — unless, of course, you prefer to be handed over to the police. I can see that you are a man with immense possibilities, and those possibilities I intend to develop with the ultimate aim of devoting them to the Cause. Do you understand me? I propose to educate you. You shall become a lecturer, a champion of women’s rights, a pursuer of the Vote. You shall be paid while you are being taught — and paid well — and when, in the course of time, I have stirred that great Brain out of its present inaction, it shall be devoted to our service and rewarded in proportion. No — not a word. Come with me. I am Lilian Carroway.”

Mr. Bunn felt dazed. Lilian Carroway! He knew now with whom he had to deal. The Suffragette who knew more about jiu-jitsu than any European and most Japanese. The woman who a few months previously had wrestled her way into the House of Commons over the bodies of many half-stunned and wholly astonished policemen, and had threatened to put a strangulation lock on the Prime Minister himself if he did not promise to answer a plain question. Taken by surprise, he had promised, and Lilian, rather flurried, had put the following question to him:

“I must have notice of that question,” had been the suave, non-committal reply of the Prime Minister, and before the Suffragette had quite thought it out, the police had taken her by storm and removed her.

Smiler Bunn remembered the incident well and congratulated himself on not having annoyed her.

She called a taxicab, and commanded him to get in. She gave the driver the address of the headquarters of the particular branch of the movement to which she belonged, and sat down beside the dazed pickpocket.

“Your fortune is made,” she said briefly.

Mr. Bunn muttered “Certainly,” in a very uncertain voice, and relapsed into a gloomy silence.

“I have no doubt that you consider yourself to be in a singularly unfortunate position, Mr... er... what is your name?”

“Connaught,” said Smiler, absently reading the first name he saw over a shop window, “Louisy Connaught.”

“Louise Connaught! What an extraordinary name! How do you spell it? Louise is a woman’s name.”

“Well, some spell it one way and some another. I don’t mind much.”

“But it is a woman’s name.”

“Well, I was one of a twin,” lied Mr. Bunn uncomfortably, wishing he had taken a name from some other shop window. “We was mixed a little at the christenin’, and me sister’s name is Thomas.”

“I see. How unfortunate!” said the Suffragette. Then she spoke the name over to herself several times: “Louise Connaught — Louis Connaught. Why, it’s a splendid name — Louis Connaught. It has a royal sort of ring. Mr. Louis Connaught, I really congratulate you upon your name.”

“Louis” smiled uneasily and avoided meeting her eye.

Then the “taxi” turned suddenly into a courtyard at the side of a big block of flats near Whitehall, and pulled up.

“Here we are, Mr. Connaught,” said the Suffragette, and paying the driver she gently impelled her captive into the building. He was not quite so anxious to bolt as he had been. That mention of payment had interested him, and, in any case, there seemed to be an uncomfortably large number of police in the neighbourhood. Mr. Bunn had recognised two plain-clothes men at the entrance to the side court.

He passively followed Mrs. Carroway into the lift, and from the lift into a large room on the second floor. This apartment was furnished like the board-room of a big company, but its business appearance was made slightly less severe by one or two little feminine touches here and there — a few flowers, a mirror or so, and some rather tasteful pictures. There were a dozen women of different ages scattered about the room.

Mrs. Carroway greeted them impulsively.

“My dears, I have discovered a Brain!” she cried.

The Brain blushed as he removed his hat, for he knew what was coming.

“Look at his forehead,” said the enthusiastic Lilian. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Wall, it’s all right as regards quantity — there’s a good square foot of it — if the quality is there,” answered a rather obvious spinster of uncertain age, with a Scotch face and a New England accent. “What’s the Brain’s name?”

“Louis Connaught,” announced Mrs. Carroway importantly, and several of the younger and less angular of the Suffragettes looked interested. It was certainly a high-sounding name.

“Wall, Louis, I’m glad you’re here,” said the American lady, “and the vurry fact of your being here shows that there’s something behind that frontal freeboard of yours. Most men avoid this place as though it was a place of worship. You mustn’t mind my candour; this strenuous pursuit of the Vote makes a girl candid.”

The Brain bowed awkwardly. It was one of his few assets that he was not afraid of women. He was not even nervous with them, except when they were in a position, and looked likely to hand him over to the police. Some instinct deeply buried behind what the “girl” was pleased to term his “frontal freeboard” told him that Mrs. Carroway would not explain to the others the circumstances in which she had made his unwilling acquaintance.

A young and pretty girl came forward, smiling, offering her hand. It was hard to believe that such a lovely slip of feminine daintiness had done, to use a popular expression, “her two months in the second division,” with the best of them. She was Lady Mary de Vott.

“We are very glad to have you fighting in our Cause, Mr. Connaught,” she said charmingly.

Smiler shook hands as though he meant never to leave off.

“Glad — proud!” he said heavily. “Glad to oblige. Any little thing like that — any time.”

Mrs. Carroway broke in.

“There is a rather curious little story to tell about Mr. Connaught,” she said, “and in case anyone should notice and misconstrue any little mannerisms he may possess, I should like to tell his story, which explains them. Mr. Connaught probably will prefer not to be present. If so” — she turned to Smiler — “will you go to the waiting-room?”

She touched a bell, and a trim typist appeared.

“Show this gentleman into the waiting-room,” ordered Lilian, and Smiler went out, feeling that, on the whole, he was travelling in the direction of a rich streak of luck. He dropped into a big, luxurious lounge, and gracefully lying at full length, proceeded, with many sounds of enjoyment, to demolish the large blood-orange he had so deftly acquired an hour before. He then took a little nap, and woke, thoroughly refreshed, to find Mrs. Carroway by the side of the lounge, staring with a rapt and wondering expression at his towering forehead.

“Ah, this is splendid!” she said. “I see that in common with many other great brains you have the knack of snatching an hour’s rest at odd moments. Napoleon possessed it also, I believe.”

“Napoleon who?” inquired Mr. Bunn, who could have beaten any brain in the world at the gentle art of resting.

“Bonaparte, my dear man!” said Mrs. Carroway good-humouredly. “Haven’t you ever heard of Napoleon Bonaparte?”

Mr. Bunn thought.

“Heard the name somewhere or other. Hasn’t he got a shop down by the Holborn end of Shaftesbury Avenue — fried fish and chips? Little dark man?”

Mrs. Carroway stared.

“I do not think so,” she answered.

“Ah, some relation of his, I expect!” said Smiler airily, and dismissed the matter. He stood up. After his reception in the big committee-room he had lost much of his trepidation as to the result of his unfortunate little contretemps with the Suffragette leader’s hand-bag.

“Well, how about this little lot?” He tapped his forehead significantly. “Was any offer made?”

“Ah, that is quite settled. We have agreed unanimously that — after a cursory examination by a skilled phrenologist — you shall be entered at once as a Special Organiser. Why, are you disappointed, Mr. Connaught?”

She had noticed his face fall.

“No; only I don’t know a note of music. I can’t tell one tune from another. I admit it don’t want much thinking about, just turning a handle; but even a organ-grinder—”

Mrs. Carroway laughed.

“Oh, I see!” she smiled. “I said ‘Organiser.’ ”

“Oh!” said Smiler, with an air of intense relief, wondering what an organiser was.

“Of course,” the Suffragette continued, “I shall not expect big things from you at first. I think you had better begin by reading up the question of Women’s Suffrage. Every morning you shall report to me at, say, ten, and we will talk over the chapters you have read. You will be able to tell me what conclusions you have come to, and what opinions you have formed on the subject, and I shall be able to correct any false impressions made upon you, and, no doubt, your intellect, as it becomes familiar with the question, will soon be discovering new and valuable interpretations of the old ideas, and giving new ideas and plans for the advancement of the Cause. After a few weeks of careful reading you will have to begin practising public speaking, and we all expect that by that time your own great natural gifts will assert themselves, and from being a — novice, let us say — you will become a leader both in thought and in action. During the first few weeks your remuneration will be three pounds a week — the League has plenty of funds — if that is agreeable to you.”

She seemed to expect an answer, and Smiler managed to get his breath back in time to say that he thought three pounds a week would do “for a start.”

“Well, that being settled, let us go into the committee-room. We’ve sent for a phrenologist, and he is waiting there for you; and, by the way, I’ve explained to our comrades that you were of almost noble birth, but, owing to a series of misfortunes, your education — both socially and... er... scholastically, has been slightly neglected. And now, Mr. Connaught, before we join the others, let me say that I believe in you, and I think you will prove a tremendous acquisition to the Cause. I do not see how one with so noble a forehead as yours can prove otherwise.”

Mr. Bunn was almost touched.

“Lady,” he said, with a singular emphasis, “you do me proud, strike me pink all over, if you don’t. You’re a lady, that’s what you are, and I know when I’m dealing with a lady and I treat her as a lady. You’ll see. Don’t you worry about me. I shall be all right, once I get started. When I’m just joggin’ along in my own quiet way, kids can play with me; but once I get started, I’m a rum ’un, and don’t you forget it, lady. I only want to get started.” He extended his hand. “Put it there, Mrs. Carroway!”

The Suffragette leader put her hand in his, and they shook in silence.

There were about thirty Suffragettes in the committee-room when the two re-entered, and a lean man in a frock coat and a flannel shirt, who was delivering a sort of lecture on phrenology. Smiler, with the instinct of one “crook” for another, glanced at his sharp, famished eyes and summed him up instantly as a charlatan — only “charlatan” was not the exact word which occurred to the new Organiser.

Mrs. Carroway introduced the two men, and the phrenologist indicated a chair, which Smiler took. In five minutes’ talk with the ladies the phrenologist had gleaned precisely what they wanted for their money, and he proceeded to give it to them unstintingly.

He took Smiler’s head in his hungry-looking hands and pressed it. He said:

“This is indeed a brain — a most unusual, indeed, an amazing brain. I have not often ’andled a brain of this description. This head which I hold in my ’and is an astonishing head!” He slid a clammy palm across the gratified Mr. Bunn’s forehead. “I should term this head a phenomenal head. It is perplexing — it is what we call an Unexpected Head. It has every indication of being wholly undeveloped, while its natural force is stupendous. I consider it puzzling; it is a very difficult cranium!” He frowned, looked thoughtful, and finally dropped his hands suddenly. “Ladies,” he said glibly, “I really couldn’t afford to read this head for a guinea. This is as good a three-guinea head as ever I see under my ’and. This head should be charted properly; usually I charge a guinea extra for a No. 1 chart, but if you’ll take a three-guinea readin’ of this head, I’ll throw in the chart, marked out in two colours, and framed in black oak, with pale green mount, with signed certificate and seal at the back, complete, with half-hour’s verbal readin’, any questions answered, for three pounds ten, cash, usual charge five guineas. Crowned heads twenty guineas and expenses. And that’s a bargain.”

Naturally, it being a bargain, every lady in the room agreed on the “three-pounds-ten readin’,” and considered it cheap.

And then, to his intense astonishment and profound gratification, Mr. Bunn learnt among other things that he would, with a little practice, develop into an orator of a brilliance surpassing that of the late Mr. W. E. Gladstone, and rivalling that of Mark Antony, a statesman whose statecraft would be as iron-handed as that of Bismarck, as subtle as that of Abdul the Damned, as fearless as that of Nero, and as dazzling as that of the German Emperor; a lawgiver as unbiased and careful as Moses, a diplomat as finished as Talleyrand, a thinker as profound as Isaac Walton (the phrenologist probably meant Isaac Newton), a champion of rights as persuasive as Oliver Cromwell, and, finally, a politician “as honest as” — here the phrenologist faltered for a moment — “as honest a politician as... as... the best of them.” A great deal of useful and equally valuable information having been imparted, the phrenologist announced that the sitting was at an end, drew his cheque, promised to send on the chart and certificate, volunteered to read the palms of any ladies present for five shillings per palm, offered to throw himself into a trance and communicate with the spirit of any dead relative of anyone present for two guineas per spirit, dealt round a pack of his business cards with the air of a pretty good poker-player, and finally took his departure.

The curious thing was that every woman — and there were many intelligent women there — seemed to believe in this shabby, flannel-shirted liar, and to respect him. Their congratulations as they surrounded the Brain were unmistakably genuine. Then, suddenly, the telephone-bell rang shrilly, and a message was received to the effect that the Prime Minister had been seen motoring in the direction of Walton Heath with a bag of golf clubs in the car. Mrs. Carroway gave a few swift instructions, and the room emptied like magic. In ten minutes Mr. Bunn was alone with the Suffragette leader. Smiler was a little dazed.

“Where’ve they all gone?” he asked.

“To Walton Heath, in taxicabs.”

“Why?”

“To ask the Prime Minister when he’s going to give Votes for Women, of course.”

“Well, but that American woman took a darn great axe,” said Smiler. “Surely she ain’t going to ask with that!”

“One never knows,” replied Mrs. Carroway darkly.

Mr. Bunn looked grieved.

“Pore bloke!” he said, with extraordinary earnestness. “Pore, pore bloke! It ain’t all beer and skittles being Prime Minister, is it?”

“We do our best to see that it isn’t!” said Mrs. Carroway modestly. “And now about your books. I’ve looked out a few to begin with. Here they are.”

She indicated a pile of massive volumes on the floor at the foot of a big bookcase. Smiler’s jaw fell.

“Well,” he said, without enthusiasm, “brain or no brain, that little lot’ll give me a thundering headache before I’m through ’em. They’d better be sent by Carter Paterson or Pickford, hadn’t they?”

Mrs. Carroway thought a cab would be better, and sent for one. Then she produced her purse, and Smiler became more interested.

“You must not mind my mentioning it, Mr. Connaught, but it has just occurred to me that possibly you may be short of ready money. Are you?”

“Yes,” replied Smiler, with manly simplicity. “I am, somethink astonishin’.”

“In that case, then” — Mrs. Carroway opened the purse — “you may like to take two pounds of your first week’s salary in advance. Would you?”

“I would,” answered Smiler straightforwardly, and without false pride.

“Very well then” — she handed him two sovereigns. “Will you write your address on this envelope, and I will enter your name in the book of the League?”

Smiler did so.

“Garraty Street. What a quaint old name!” commented the lady as she read the address.

“Yes, ain’t it?” said Smiler. “And it’s a quaint, old-fashioned sort of street, too,” he went on, “where everybody lives on fried fish, and the landlord’s got to chain down the window sills to stop ’em from using ’em for firewood. I shall be leaving there pretty soon, directly I’ve developed me brain a little bit. And now I’ll sling me hook. What time will you be expecting me tomorrow?”

“I think at two o’clock. You had better begin on this book.” She handed him a somewhat massive volume entitled, The Vote: What It Means and Why We Want It, by Lilian Carroway. “You must make notes as you read, and we can discuss your notes tomorrow.”

Smiler took the book and weighed it in his hand.

“Ye... es,” he said, rather feebly, and turned to help the cabman carry the remaining books to the cab.

So Mr. Smiler Bunn, alias Louis Connaught, alias The Brain, became a Suffragette, and only the phrenologist seemed to know that he could never be more than a suffrajest at most.

He shook hands with Mrs. Carroway and went down to the cab. Waiting on the kerb near the entrance to the mansion was a man whose appearance seemed familiar to Mr. Bunn. This man stepped forward as Smiler entered the cab. It was the phrenologist.

“Excuse me, Brain,” he said jauntily. “I’ll give you a lift,” and followed Smiler into the cab, closing the door behind him.

Smiler stared, then recollected the illuminated address the man had given him half an hour before, and grinned.

“All right,” he said.

The phrenologist surveyed him with alert, black eyes that played over him like searchlights. He was a young man, painfully thin, hawk-nosed, and his movements were curiously deft and swift. He drew two long, thin, black, leathery-looking cigars from his breast-pocket, and handed one to Mr. Bunn.

“Hide behind that,” he said, “if you like flavour and bite to a cigar.”

Smiler did so, and waited for his companion to speak. The phrenologist lost no time.

“This has got to be worked properly, Mr. Connaught,” he said. “There’s lots of lovely money back there” — he jerked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the Suffragettes’ headquarters — “and you and me’s got to magnetise it before any of the other grafters in this town gets on to it. Now, I’m going to play fair with you, Mr. Connaught. You got a pull with that bunch somehow; thanks to me, they reckon you’ll be able to put King Solomon and all his wisdom in your ticket pocket after a week or two’s study. On account of the shape of your head, I make it. Well, you and me’s men of the world, and we can be frank where others fall out, and as a man of the world, I can tell you right away, Mr. Connaught, that the Brain idea is a dream. Why, say, the minute I feels your head under my ’and I found myself saying, ‘Well, this is a High Brow all right, but it’s hollow behind. There’s nothin’ to it — nix — vacant.’ I mean nothing special. Of course there’s brain there — about the average. Very near up to the average, say. But you ain’t no Homer, any more than me or them daffy-down-dillies back to the mansions. The old girl seems to fancy herself at physiognomy, but she’s trod on a banana-skin all right if she’s risking real money on your dial. Well, now, I want to be friendly with you, Mr. Connaught. This town owes us both a living, and the only rule in the game is that we got to collect it. Well, now, let’s put our cards on the table. I’m a palm-reader and phrenologist just now, but I’m going solid for bigger business bimeby. Now, what’s your lay?”

“Well, the old girl thought I been picking her pocket,” said Smiler, grinning, and the other scoundrel’s eyes glittered with satisfaction.

“Why, that’s great. Oh, you’re sure enough gun; you got a gun’s hand, all right. Say, shake. I knew you was a crook first glimp, and when I see your hands I wondered whether it was forgin’ or picking pockets. Well now, that’s settled. Now, I got a little place just off the Strand, here. You send this cab on with your books, and come to this office of mine, and we’ll have a talk.”

Smiler was willing; he was fascinated with his new acquaintance, and within five minutes the pair were closeted in the phrenologist’s den in a back street off the Strand.

It took the “palm-reader” precisely ten minutes to outline the idea of a coup which he and Smiler could work together as partners.

“Now, brother,” he began, “what you got to understand is that you ain’t going to last with that bunch of vote-sharps longer than about a fortnight — if that. They got a lot of brains among ’em, and the old girl, she’s got the brightest. But she’s just happened to get hung up on your forrid, and her own idea of her physiognomy skill. But by the time you’ve read one or two of them books she’ll have lost her interest. You’ll give yourself away, sure, and then it’ll be the street for yours, and the salary’ll fold its tent and silently steal away — see? You see that, don’t you?”

Smiler nodded. He had known that all along.

“Well, so what you get, you got to get quick. And now, listen to me—”

The palm-reader’s voice dropped to a dry and rapid whisper.

“Now, my name’s Mesmer La Touche, and my title’s Perfessor, and I’m a man you can trust,” he began, and straightway unfolded his scheme.

One of the most highly regarded practitioners of the pure detective story is Richard Austin Freeman (1862–1943), a giant of the Golden Age, though his early works preceded the era between the two World Wars, which loosely bracket that age; his first mystery was The Red Thumb Mark (1907), in which he introduced one of the most popular detective characters of all time, Dr. John Thorndyke. Freeman also invented the inverted detective story with the publication of The Singing Bone (1912), a short story collection in which the reader knows who the murderers are at an early stage of the tale. The suspense derives not from the chase, as in the traditional mystery, but from discovering how the detective will unravel the clues and capture the criminal.

Before his illustrious detective came on the scene, however, Freeman wrote under the pseudonym Clifford Ashdown, in collaboration with John James Pitcairn (1860–1936), an obscure prison medical officer, a series of connected stories about a gentleman crook named Romney Pringle.

Pringle is ostensibly a literary agent with an office in London, but that job is merely a front for his criminal activities. As a student of human nature and blessed with finely tuned observational powers, Pringle lives by his wits, never resorting to force or violence. When he notices curious behavior, he will pursue the individual to determine whether he will have the opportunity for self-enrichment. “The Kailyard Novel” presents Pringle with his greatest challenge: what to do when an actual manuscript shows up at his office.

“The Kailyard Novel” was originally published in the November 1902 issue of Cassell’s; it was first collected in The Adventures of Romney Pringle (London, Ward, Lock, 1902).

The postman with resounding knock insinuated half-a-dozen packages into the slit in the outer door. He breathed hard, for it was a climb to the second floor, and then with heavy foot clattered down the stone stairs into Furnival’s Inn. As the cataract descended between the two doors Mr. Pringle dropped his newspaper and stretched to his full length with a yawn; then, rolling out of his chair, he opened the inner door and gathered up the harvest of the mail. It was mostly composed of circulars; these he carelessly flung upon the table, and turned to the single letter among them. It was addressed with clerkly precision, Romney Pringle, Esq., Literary Agent, 33 Furnival’s Inn, London, E.C.

Such a mode of address was quite a novelty in Pringle’s experience. Was his inexistent literary agency about to be vivified? and wondering, he opened the envelope.

Although “Literary Agent” stared conspicuously from his door, Pringle’s title had never hitherto induced an author, of however aspiring a type, to disturb the privacy of his chambers, and it was with an amused sense of the perfection of his disguise that he lighted a cigarette and sat down to think over Mr. Honeyby’s proposal.

Wurzleford — Wurzleford? There seemed to be a familiar sound about the name. Surely he had read of it somewhere. He turned to the Society journal that he had been reading when the postman knocked.

Mr. Honeyby ought to have no difficulty in getting a locum tenens, thought Pringle, as he laid down the paper. He wondered how it would be to—? It was risky, but worth trying! Why let a good thing go a-begging? He had a good mind to take the berth himself! Wurzleford seemed an attractive little place. Well, its attractiveness would certainly not be lessened for him when the Maharajah arrived! At the very least it might prove an agreeable holiday, and in any case would lead to a new and probably amusing experience of human nature. Smiling at the ludicrous audacity of the idea, Pringle strolled up to the mantelpiece and interrogated himself in the Venetian mirror. Minus the delible port-wine mark, a pair of pince-nez, blackened hair, and a small strip of easily applied whisker would be sufficient disguise. He thoughtfully lighted another cigarette.

But the necessity of testimonials occurred to him. Why not say he had sent the originals with an application he was making for a permanent appointment, and merely show Honeyby the type-written copies? He seemed an innocent old ass, and Pringle would trust to audacity to carry him through. He could write to Wurzleford from any Bloomsbury address, and follow the letter before Honeyby had time to reply. He had little doubt that he could clinch matters when it came to a personal interview; especially as Honeyby seemed very anxious to be off. There remained the knotty point of doctrine. Well, the Farringdon Street barrows, the grave of theological literature, could furnish any number of volumes of sermons, and it would be strange if they could not supply in addition a very efficient battery of controversial shot and shell. In the meantime he could get up the foundation of his “Undenominational” opinions from the Encyclopædia. And taking a volume of the Britannica, he was soon absorbed in its perusal.

Mr. Honeyby’s advertisement duly appeared in the Banner, and was answered by a telegram announcing the application of the “Rev. Charles Courtley,” who followed close on the heels of his message. Although surprised at the wonderfully rapid effect of the advertisement, the pastor was disinclined to quarrel with his good luck, and was too eager to be released to waste much time over preliminary inquiries. Indeed, he could think of little but the collection of material for his novel, and fretted to commence it. “Mr. Courtley’s” manner and appearance, to say nothing of his very flattering testimonials, were all that could be desired; his acquaintance with controversial doctrine was profound, and the pastor, innocently wondering how such brilliance had failed to attain a more eminent place in the denomination, had eagerly ratified his engagement.

“Well, I must say, Mr. Courtley, you seem to know so well what will be expected of you, that I really don’t think I need wait over tonight,” remarked Mr. Honeyby towards the end of the interview.

“I presume there will be no objection to my riding the bicycle I have brought with me?” asked Pringle, in his new character.

“Not at all — by no means! I’ve often thought of taking to one myself. Some of the church-members live at such a distance, you see. Besides, there is nothing derogatory in it. Lord Wurzleford, for instance, is always riding about, and so are some of the party he has down for the shooting. There is some Indian prince or other with them, I believe.”

“The Maharajah of Satpura?” Pringle suggested.

“Yes, I think that is the name; do you know him?” asked Mr. Honeyby, impressed by the other’s air of refinement.

“No — I only saw it mentioned in the Park Lane Review,” said Pringle simply.

So Mr. Honeyby departed for London, en route for the north, by an even earlier train than he had hoped for.

About an hour afterwards Pringle was resting by the wayside, rather winded by cycling up one of the early undulations of the Downs which may be seen rising nearly everywhere on the Wurzleford horizon. He had followed the public road, here unfenced for some miles, through Eastlingbury Park, and now lay idle on the springy turf. The harebells stirred with a dry rustle in the imperceptible breeze, and all around him rose the music of the clumsy little iron-bells, clanking rhythmically to every movement of the wethers as they crisply mowed the herbage closer than any power of scythe. As Pringle drank in the beauty of the prospect, a cyclist made his appearance in the act of coasting down the hill beyond. Suddenly he swerved from side to side; his course grew more erratic, the zigzags wider: it was clear that he had lost control of the machine. As he shot with increasing momentum down the slope, a white figure mounted the crest behind, and pursued him with wild-waving arms, and shouts which were faintly carried onward by the wind.

In the valley beyond the two hills flowed the Wurzle, and the road, taking a sharp turn, crossed it by a little bridge with brick parapets; without careful steering, a cyclist with any way on, would surely strike one or other side of the bridge, with the prospect of a ducking, if not of a worse catastrophe. Quickly grasping the situation, Pringle mounted his machine, sprinted down to the bridge and over it, flinging himself off in time to seize the runaway by his handlebar. He was a portly, dark-complexioned gentleman in a Norfolk suit, and he clung desperately to Pringle as together they rolled into a ditch. By this time the white figure, a native servant, had overtaken his master, whom he helped to rise with a profusion of salaams, and then gathered up the shattered fragments of the bicycle.

“I must apologize for dragging you off your machine,” said Pringle, when he too had picked himself up. “But I think you were in for a bad accident.”

“No apology is necessary for saving my life, sir,” protested the stout gentleman in excellent English. “My tire was punctured on the hill, so the brake refused to act. But may I ask your name?”

As Pringle handed him a card inscribed, “REV. CHARLES COURTLEY,” the other continued, “I am the Maharajah of Satpura, and I hope to have the pleasure of thanking you more fully on a less exciting occasion.” He bowed politely, with a smile disclosing a lustrous set of white teeth, and leaning on the servant’s arm, moved towards a group of cyclists who were cautiously descending the scene of his disaster.

In the jog-trot routine of the sleepy little place, where one day was very much like another, and in the study of the queer people among whom Pringle found himself a sort of deity, the days rapidly passed. To some of the church-members his bicycle had appeared rather a startling innovation, but his tact had smoothed over all difficulties, while the feminine Undenominationalists would have forgiven much to such an engaging personality, for Pringle well knew how to ingratiate himself with the more influential half of humanity. It was believed that his eloquence had, in itself, been the means of recalling several seceders to the fold, and it was even whispered that on several occasions gold coins graced the collection-plates — an event unprecedented in the history of the connection!

September had been an exceptionally hot month, but one day was particularly oppressive. Sunset had brought the slightest relief, and at Eastlingbury that evening the heat was emphatically tropical. The wide-open windows availed nothing to cool the room. The very candles drooped crescent-wise, and singed their shades. Although the clouds were scudding high aloft, and cast transient shadows upon the lawn, no leaf stirred within the park. The hour was late, and the ladies had long withdrawn, but the men still sat listening. It was a story of the jungle — of a fight between a leopard and a sambur-deer, and every one’s pulse had quickened, and every one had wished the story longer.

“You are evidently an intrepid explorer, Mr. Courtley,” commented the Earl, as his guest finished.

“And a keen observer,” added the Maharajah. “I never heard a more realistic description of a fight. I have not had Mr. Courtley’s good fortune to see such a thing in the jungle, although I frequently have wild-beast fights — satmaris, we call them — for the amusement of my good people of Satpura.”

The Maharajah had found a little difficulty in inducing Lord Wurzleford to extend his hospitality to “Mr. Courtley.” To begin with, the latter was an Undenominationalist, and only a substitute one at that! Then, too, the Maharajah had made his acquaintance in such a very unconventional manner. All the same, to please his Highness—

Pringle had thus a good deal of lee-way to make up in the course of the evening, and it says much for his success, that the ladies were unanimous in regretting the necessity for leaving the dinner-table. Indeed, from the very first moment of his arrival, he had steadily advanced in favour. He had not only talked brilliantly himself, but had been the cause of brilliancy in others — or, at least, of what passes for brilliancy in smart circles. His stories appeared to be drawn from an inexhaustible fund. He had literally been everywhere and seen everything. As to the Maharajah, who had of late grown unutterably bored by the smart inanities of the house-party, the poor man hailed him with unutterable relief. Towards the end of dinner, a youth had remarked confidentially to the lady beside him, that “that dissentin’ fellow seemed a real good sort.” He voiced the general opinion.

While Pringle, with the aid of a finger-bowl and some dessert-knives, was demonstrating the problem of the Nile Barrage to an interested audience, an earnest consultation was proceeding at the head of the table. The Maharajah, Lord Wurzleford, and the butler were in solemn conclave, and presently the first was seen to rise abruptly and retire in unconcealed agitation. So obviously did the host share this emotion, that the conversation flagged and died out; and amid an awkward pause, numerous inquiring glances, which good breeding could not entirely repress, were directed towards the head of the table, where the butler, with a pallid face, still exchanged an occasional word with his master.

With a view to breaking the oppressive silence, Pringle was about to resume his demonstration, when Lord Wurzleford anticipated him.

“Before we leave the table,” said the peer in a constrained voice, “I want to tell you that a most unpleasant thing has happened under this roof. The apartments of the Maharajah of Satpura have been entered, and a quantity of jewellery is missing. I understand that some one was heard moving about the room only half-an-hour ago, and a strange man was met crossing the park towards Bleakdown not long after. I am sending into Eastlingbury for the police, and in the meantime the servants are scouring the park. Pray let the matter be kept secret from the ladies as long as possible.”

Consternation was visible on every face, and amid a loud buzz of comment, the table was promptly deserted.

“Will you excuse me?” said Pringle as he approached Lord Wurzleford, whose self-possession appeared to have temporarily deserted him. “I know the Bleakdown road well, and have cycled over it several times. I rode out here on my machine, and perhaps I might be able to overtake the burglar. Every moment is of importance, and the police may be some time before they arrive.”

“I am greatly obliged to you for the suggestion!” exclaimed the peer, adding with a dismal attempt at jocularity, “Perhaps you may succeed in doing his Highness a further service with your cycle.”

Between four and five miles from Eastlingbury the high road leaves the park, and crosses the Great Southern Canal. The bridge is of comparatively low span, and a sloping way leads down from the road to the towing-path. As the gradient rose towards the bridge, Pringle slowed up, and steering on to the path, dismounted on the grass, and leant the machine against the hedge. He had caught sight of a man’s figure, some eighty yards ahead, standing motionless on the hither side of the bridge; he appeared to be listening for sounds of pursuit. In the silence a distant clock was striking eleven, and the figure presently turned aside and disappeared. When Pringle reached the bridge, the grinding of feet upon the loose gravel echoed from beneath the arch, and stealing down the slope to the towing-path, he peered round the corner of the abutment.

The clouds had all disappeared by now, and the moon flashing from the water made twilight under the bridge. On his knees by the water’s edge a man was busily securing a bundle with a cord. To and fro he wound it in criss-cross fashion, and then threaded through the network what looked like an ebony ruler, which he drew from his pocket. A piece of cord dangled from the bundle, and holding it in one hand, he felt with the other along the board which edged the towing-path at this point. Presently he found something to which he tied the cord, and then lowered bundle and all into the canal.

For some time past a sound of footsteps approaching on the road above had been plainly audible to Pringle, although it was lost on the other, absorbed as he was in his task; now, as he rose from his cramped position, and was in the act of stretching himself, he paused and listened. At this moment Pringle slightly changed his position, and loosened a stone which plunged into the water. The man looked up, and catching sight of him, retreated with a muttered curse to the far side of the arch. For a second he scowled at the intruder, and then turned and began to run down the towing-path in the shadow of the bank.

“There he goes — See! On the towing-path!” shouted Pringle, as he scrambled up to the road and confronted two members of the county constabulary who were discussing the portent of the deserted bicycle. Seeing further concealment was useless, the fugitive now took to his heels in earnest, and ran hot-foot beside the canal with the two policemen and Pringle in pursuit.

But Pringle soon dropped behind; and when their footsteps were lost in the distance, he made his way back to the road, and hoisting the machine on his shoulder, carried it down the slope and rested it under the bridge. Groping along the wooden edging, his hand soon encountered the cord, and hauling on it with both hands, for the weight was not inconsiderable, he landed the bundle on the bank. What had appeared to be a ruler now proved to be a very neat jemmy folding in two. Admiring it with the interest of an expert, he dropped it into the water, and then ripped up the towel which formed the covering of the bundle. Although he anticipated the contents, he was scarcely prepared for the gorgeous spectacle which saluted him, and as he ran his hands through the confused heap of gold and jewels, they glittered like a milky way of stars even in the subdued pallor of the moonlight.

The striking of the half-hour warned him that time pressed, and taking a spanner from his cycle-wallet, he unshipped the handle-bar, and deftly packed it and the head-tube with the treasure. Some of the bulkier, and perhaps also less valuable articles had to be left; so rolling them up again in the towel, he sent them to join the folding-jemmy. Screwing the nuts home, he carried the cycle up to the road again, and pedalled briskly along the downgrade to Eastlingbury.

“Hi! Stop there!”

He had forgotten to light his lamp, and as a bull’s-eye glared upon him, and a burly police-man seized his handle-bar, Pringle mentally began to assess the possible cost of this outrage upon the county by-laws. But a semi-excited footman ran up, and turning another lamp upon him, at once saluted him respectfully.

“It’s all right, Mr. Parker,” said the footman. “This gentleman’s a friend of his lordship’s.”

The policeman released the machine, and saluted Pringle in his turn.

“Sorry you were stopped, sir,” apologized the footman, “but our orders is to watch all the roads for the burglar.”

“Haven’t they caught him yet?”

“No, sir! ’E doubled back into the park, and they lost ’im. One of the grooms, who was sent out on ’orseback, met the policemen who said they’d seen you, but didn’t know where you’d got to after they lost the burglar. They were afraid ’e’d get back on to the road and make off on your bicycle, as you’d left it there, and they told the groom to ride back and tell us all to look out for a man on a bicycle.”

“So you thought I was the burglar! But how did he get into the house?”

“Why, sir, the Indian king’s ’ead man went up about ten to get the king’s room ready. When ’e tried the door, ’e found ’e couldn’t open it. Then ’e called some of the other Indians up, and when they couldn’t open it either, and they found the door wasn’t locked at all, they said it was bewitched.”

Here the policeman guffawed, and then stared fixedly at the moon, as if wondering whether that was the source of the hilarity. The footman glanced reprovingly at him, and continued—

“They came down into the servants’ ’all, and the one who speaks English best told us about it. So I said, ‘Let’s get in through the window.’ So we went round to the tennis-lawn, underneath the king’s rooms. The windows were all open, just as they’d been left before dinner, because of the ’eat. There’s an old ivy-tree grows there, sir, with big branches all along the wall, thick enough for a man to stand on. So Mr. Strong, the butler, climbed up, and us after ’im. We couldn’t see much amiss at first, but the king’s ’ead man fell on ’is knees, and turned ’is eyes up, and thumped ’imself on the chest, and said ’e was a dead man! And when we said why? ’e said all the king’s jewels were gone. And sure enough, some cases that ’eld diamond and ruby brooches, and necklaces, and things, were all burst open and cleaned out, and a lot of others for rings and small things were lying about empty. And we found the burglar ’d screwed wedges against the doors, and that was why they couldn’t be opened. So we took them up and opened the doors, and Mr. Strong went down and reported it to ’is lordship, and ’e broke it to the king. But the ’ead man says the king took on about it terribly, and ’e’s afraid the king’ll take ’im and ’ave a wild elephant trample on ’is ’ead to execute ’im, when ’e gets back to India!”

Here the footman paused for breath, and the constable seized the opportunity to assert himself.

“So you’ll know the man again, if you should see him, sir,” he chimed in.

“That I shall,” Pringle asseverated.

“A pleasant-spoken gentleman as ever was!” observed the footman as Pringle rode away, and the policeman grunted emphatic assent.

Walking down North Street, the principal thoroughfare in the village, next morning, Pringle was accosted by a stranger. He was small but wiry in figure, dressed very neatly, and had the cut of a gentleman’s servant out of livery.

“Are you Mr. Courtley, sir?” respectfully touching his hat.

“Yes. Can I be of any service to you?”

“I should like to have a quiet talk with you, sir, if I may call upon you.”

“Shall we say six this evening, then?”

“If you please, sir.”

Opining that here was a possible recruit for the connection gained by his eloquence, Pringle went on his way. He had just received a letter from Mr. Honeyby announcing his return, and was not dissatisfied at the prospect of the evening seeing the end of his masquerade. Not that it had grown irksome, but having exhausted the predatory resources of Wurzleford, he began to sigh for the London pavement. The pastor wrote that having completed his philological studies in the Island of Skye, he had decided to return South at once. But the chief reason for thus curtailing his stay was the extreme monotony of the climate, in which, according to local opinion, snow is the only variant to the eternal rain. Besides, he feared that the prevalent atmosphere of herring-curing had seriously impaired his digestion! On the whole, therefore, he thought it best to return, and might be expected home about twelve hours after his letter. He trusted, however, that Mr. Pringle would remain his guest; at all events until the end of the month.

Mr. Honeyby’s study was an apartment on the ground-floor with an outlook, over a water-butt, to the garden. It partook somewhat of the nature of a stronghold, the door being a specially stout one, and the windows having the protection — so unusual in a country town — of iron bars. These precautions were due to Mr. Honeyby’s nervous apprehensions of burglary after “collection-days,” when specie had to repose there for the night. It was none the less a cheerful room, and Pringle spent most of his indoor-time there. He was occupied in sorting some papers in readiness for the pastor’s return, when, punctually as the clock struck six, the housekeeper knocked at his door.

“There’s a young man come, sir, who says you’re expecting him,” she announced.

“Oh, ah! Show him in,” said Pringle.

His chance acquaintance of the morning entered, and depositing his hat beneath a chair, touched his forehead and sat down. But no sooner had the door closed upon the woman than his manner underwent a complete change.

“I see you don’t remember me,” he said, leaning forward, and regarding Pringle steadily.

“No, I must confess you have rather the advantage of me,” said Pringle distantly.

“And yet we have met before. Not so long ago either!”

“I have not the slightest recollection of ever having seen you before this morning,” Pringle asserted tartly. He was nettled at the man’s persistence, and felt inclined to resent the rather familiar manner in which he spoke.

“I must assist your memory then. The first time I had the pleasure of seeing you was last night.”

“I should be glad to know where.”

“Certainly!” Then very slowly and distinctly, “It was under a bridge on the Grand Southern Canal.”

Pringle, in spite of his habitual composure, was unable to repress a slight start.

“I see you have not forgotten the circumstance. The time, I think, was about eleven P.M., wasn’t it? Well, never mind that; the moon enabled me to get a better look at you than you got of me.”

Pringle took refuge in a diplomatic silence, and the other walked across the room, and selecting the most comfortable chair, coolly produced a cigarette-case. Pringle observed, almost sub-consciously, that it was a very neat gold one, with a monogram in one corner worked in diamonds.

“Will you smoke?” asked the man. “No? Well, you’ll excuse me.” And he leisurely kindled a cigarette, taking very detailed stock of Pringle while doing so.

“Now it’s just as well we understood one another,” he continued, as he settled himself in the chair. “My name is of no consequence, though I’m known to my associates as ‘The Toff’; poor souls, they have such a profound respect for education! Now those who know me will tell you I’m not a man whom it pays to trifle with. Who you are, I don’t know exactly, and I don’t know that I very much care — it’s rather an amusing thing, by the way, that no one else seems to be any the wiser! But what I do know” — here he sat straight up, and extended a menacing fist in Pringle’s direction — “and what it’ll be a healthy thing for you to understand, is, that I’m not going to leave here tonight without that stuff!”

“My good man, what on earth are you talking about?” indulgently asked Pringle, who by this time had recovered his imperturbability.

“Now don’t waste time; you don’t look altogether a fool!” “The Toff” drew a revolver from his pocket, and carelessly counted the chambers which were all loaded. “One, two, three, four, five, six! I’ve got six reasons for what I’ve said. Let’s see now — First, you saw me hiding the stuff; second, no one else did; third, it’s not there now; fourth, the Maharajah hasn’t got it; fifth, there’s no news of its having been found by any one else; sixth, and last, therefore you’ve got it!” He checked the several heads of his reasoning, one by one, on the chambers of the revolver as one might tell them on the fingers.

“Very logically reasoned!” remarked Pringle calmly. “But may I inquire how it is you are so positive in all these statements?”

“I’m not the man to let the grass grow under my feet,” said “The Toff” vain-gloriously. “I’ve been making inquiries all the morning, and right up to now! I hear the poor old Maharajah has gone to Scotland Yard for help. But it strikes me the affair will remain a mystery ‘forever and always,’ as the people say hereabouts. And, as I said just now, you seem to be rather a mystery to most people. I spotted you right enough last night, but I wanted to find out all I could about you from your amiable flock before I tackled you in person. Well, I think I have very good grounds for believing you to be an impostor. That’s no concern of mine, of course, but I presume you have your own reasons for coming down here. Now, a word to your principal, and a hint or two judiciously dropped in a few quarters round the place, will soon make it too hot for you, and so your little game, whatever it may be, will be spoiled.”

“But supposing I am unable to help you?”

“I can’t suppose any such thing! I am going to stick to you like tar, my reverend sir, and if you think of doing a bolt” — he glanced at the revolver, and then put it in his pocket — “take my advice and only think of it!”

“Is that all you have to say?” asked Pringle.

“Not quite. Look here now! I’ve been planning this job for the last four months and more, and I’m not going to take all the risk, and let you or any one else collar all the profit. By George, you’ve mistaken your man if you think that! I am willing to even go the length of recognizing you as a partner, and giving you ten per cent. for your trouble in taking charge of the stuff, and bringing it to a place of safety and so on, but now you’ve got to shell out!”

“Very well,” said Pringle, rising. “Let me first get the housekeeper out of the way.”

“No larks now!” growled “The Toff”; adding peremptorily, “I give you a couple of minutes only — and leave the door open!”

Without replying, Pringle walked to the door, and slipping through, closed and double-locked it behind him before “The Toff” had time to even rise from his chair.

“You white-livered cur! You... you infernal sneak!” vociferated the latter as Pringle crossed the hall.

Being summer-time, the fire-irons were absent from the study. There was no other lethal weapon wherewith to operate. Escape by the window was negatived by the bars. For the time then “The Toff” was a negligible quantity. Pringle ran down the kitchen-stairs. At the bottom was a gas-bracket, and stretching out his hand he turned on the gas as he passed. Out in the little kitchen there was much clattering of pots and dishes. The housekeeper was engaged in urgent culinary operations against Mr. Honeyby’s return.

“Mrs. Johnson!” he bawled, as a furious knocking sounded from the study.

“Whatever’s the matter, sir?” cried the startled woman.

“Escape of gas! We’ve been looking for it up-stairs! Don’t you smell it out here? You must turn it off at the main!” He rattled off the alarming intelligence in well-simulated excitement.

“Gas it is!” she exclaimed nervously, as the familiar odour greeted her nostrils.

Now the meter, as is customary, resided in the coal-cellar, and as the faithful creature opened the door and stumbled forwards, she suddenly found herself stretched upon the floor, while all became darkness. It almost seemed as if she had received a push from behind, and her head whirling with the unexpected shock, she painfully arose from her rocky bed, and slowly groped towards the door. But for all her pulling and tugging it held fast and never gave an inch. Desisting, as the truth dawned upon her that in some mysterious way she had become a prisoner, she bleated plaintively for help, and began to hammer at the door with a lump of coal.

Up the stairs again. Pringle glanced at the hall-door, then shot the bolts top and bottom, and put the chain up. “The Toff” seemed to be using some of the furniture as a battering-ram. Thunderous blows and the sharp splintering of wood showed that, despite his lack of tools, he was (however clumsily) engaged in the active work of his profession, and the door shivered and rattled ominously beneath the onslaught.

Pringle raced up-stairs, and in breathless haste tore off his clerical garb. Bang, bang, crash! He wished the door were iron. How “The Toff” roused the echoes as he savagely laboured for freedom! And whenever he paused, a feeble diapason ascended from the basement. The study-door would soon give at this rate. Luckily the house stood at the end of the town, or the whole neighbourhood would have been roused by this time. He hunted for his cycling suit. Where could that wretched old woman have stowed it? Curse her officiousness! He almost thought of rushing down and releasing her that she might disclose its whereabouts. Every second was priceless. At last! Where had that button-hook hidden itself now? How stiff the box-cloth seemed — he had never noticed it before. Now the coat. Collar and tie? Yes, indeed, he had nearly forgotten he still wore the clerical tie. No matter, a muffler would hide it all. Cap — that was all! Gloves he could do without for once.

Bang, crash, crack!

With a last look round he turned to leave the room, and faced the window. A little way down the road a figure was approaching. Something about it looked familiar, he thought; seemed to be coming from the direction of the railway-station, too. He stared harder. So it was! There was no doubt about it! Swathed in a Scotch maud, his hand grasping a portmanteau, the Rev. Adolphus Honeyby advanced blithely in the autumn twilight.

Down the stairs Pringle bounded, three at a time. “The Toff” could hear, but not see him as yet. The study-door was already tottering; one hinge had gone. Even as he landed with a thud at the foot of the stairs, “The Toff’s” hand and arm appeared at the back of the door.

“I’d have blown the lock off if it wasn’t for giving the show away,” “The Toff” snarled through his clenched teeth, as loudly as his panting respiration would permit. “I’ll soon be through now, and then we’ll square accounts!” What he said was a trifle more full-flavoured, but this will suffice.

Crash! bang!! crack!!! from the study-door.

Rat-a-tat-a-tat! was the sudden response from the hall-door. It was Mr. Honeyby knocking! And, startled at the noise, “The Toff” took a momentary respite from his task.

Down to the basement once more. Mrs. Johnson’s pummelling sounded louder away from the more virile efforts of the others. Fiercely “The Toff” resumed his labours. What an uproar! Mr. Honeyby’s curiosity could not stand much more of that. He would be round at the back presently. The bicycle stood by the garden-door. Pringle shook it slightly, and something rattled; the precious contents of the head and handle-bar were safe enough. He opened the door, and wheeled the machine down the back-garden, and out into the little lane behind.

Loud and louder banged the knocker. But as a triumphant crash and clatter of wood-work resounded from the house, Pringle rode into the fast-gathering darkness.

Although Herbert George Wells (1866–1946) was one of the first and greatest of all writers of science fiction, for which he remains known today, he disliked being thought of as one, claiming that those works were merely a conduit for his social ideas. He had begun his adult life as a scientist and might, with a bit more encouragement, have made a successful career as a biologist, but instead was offered work as a journalist and quickly began to write fiction. His prolific writing career was loosely divided into three eras, but it is only the novels and short stories of the first, when he wrote fantastic and speculative fiction, that are much remembered today. Such early titles as The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), and The War of the Worlds (1898) are all milestones of the genre, though all feature Wells’s dim view of mankind and society, which led him to the socialistic Fabian Society. He turned to more realistic fiction after the turn of the century with such highly regarded (at the time) novels as Kipps (1905), Ann Veronica (1909), Tono-Bungay (1909), and Marriage (1912). The majority of his works over the last three decades of his life were both fiction and nonfiction books reflecting his political and social views, and are as dated, unreadable, and insignificant as they are misanthropic.

More than a hundred films have been based on Wells’s novels, with countless others using them as uncredited sources. Among the most famous are the classic The Invisible Man (1933), Things to Come (1936), The First Men in the Moon (1919 and 1964), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996 and 1977, more capably filmed as The Island of Lost Souls, released in 1932), The War of the Worlds (1953 and 2005), and The Time Machine (1960 and 2002), among many others.

“The Hammerpond Park Burglary” was originally published in the July 5, 1894, issue of Pall Mall Budget; it was first collected in The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (London, Benn, 1927).

It is a moot point whether burglary is to be considered as a sport, a trade, or an art. For a trade, the technique is scarcely rigid enough, and its claims to be considered an art are vitiated by the mercenary element that qualifies its triumphs. On the whole it seems to be most justly ranked as sport, a sport for which no rules are at present formulated, and of which the prizes are distributed in an extremely informal manner. It was this informality of burglary that led to the regrettable extinction of two promising beginners at Hammerpond Park.

The stakes offered in this affair consisted chiefly of diamonds and other personal bric-a-brac belonging to the newly married Lady Aveling. Lady Aveling, as the reader will remember, was the only daughter of Mrs. Montague Pangs, the well-known hostess. Her marriage to Lord Aveling was extensively advertised in the papers, the quantity and quality of her wedding presents, and the fact that the honeymoon was to be spent at Hammerpond. The announcement of these valuable prizes created a considerable sensation in the small circle in which Mr. Teddy Watkins was the undisputed leader, and it was decided that, accompanied by a duly qualified assistant, he should visit the village of Hammerpond in his professional capacity.

Being a man of naturally retiring and modest disposition, Mr. Watkins determined to make this visit incognito, and after due consideration of the conditions of his enterprise, he selected the role of a landscape artist and the unassuming surname of Smith. He preceded his assistant, who, it was decided, should join him only on the last afternoon of his stay at Hammerpond. Now the village of Hammerpond is perhaps one of the prettiest little corners in Sussex; many thatched houses still survive, the flint-built church with its tall spire nestling under the down is one of the finest and least restored in the county, and the beech-woods and bracken jungles through which the road runs to the great house are singularly rich in what the vulgar artist and photographer call “bits.” So that Mr. Watkins, on his arrival with two virgin canvases, a brand-new easel, a paint-box, portmanteau, an ingenious little ladder made in sections (after the pattern of the late lamented master Charles Peace), crowbar, and wire coils, found himself welcomed with effusion and some curiosity by half-a-dozen other brethren of the brush. It rendered the disguise he had chosen unexpectedly plausible, but it inflicted upon him a considerable amount of aesthetic conversation for which he was very imperfectly prepared.

“Have you exhibited very much?” said Young Person in the bar-parlour of the “Coach and Horses,” where Mr. Watkins was skilfully accumulating local information, on the night of his arrival.

“Very little,” said Mr. Watkins, “just a snack here and there.”

“Academy?”

“In course. And the Crystal Palace.”

“Did they hang you well?” said Porson.

“Don’t rot,” said Mr. Watkins; “I don’t like it.”

“I mean did they put you in a good place?”

“Whadyer mean?” said Mr. Watkins suspiciously. “One ’ud think you were trying to make out I’d been put away.”

Porson had been brought up by aunts, and was a gentlemanly young man even for an artist; he did not know what being “put away” meant, but he thought it best to explain that he intended nothing of the sort. As the question of hanging seemed a sore point with Mr. Watkins, he tried to divert the conversation a little.

“Do you do figure-work at all?”

“No, never had a head for figures,” said Mr. Watkins, “my miss — Mrs. Smith, I mean, does all that.”

“She paints too!” said Porson. “That’s rather jolly.”

“Very,” said Mr. Watkins, though he really did not think so, and feeling the conversation was drifting a little beyond his grasp added, “I came down here to paint Hammerpond House by moonlight.”

“Really!” said Porson. “That’s rather a novel idea.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Watkins, “I thought it rather a good notion when it occurred to me. I expect to begin tomorrow night.”

“What! You don’t mean to paint in the open, by night?”

“I do, though.”

“But how will you see your canvas?”

“Have a bloomin’ cop’s—” began Mr. Watkins, rising too quickly to the question, and then realising this, bawled to Miss Durgan for another glass of cheer. “I’m goin’ to have a thing called a dark lantern,” he said to Porson.

“But it’s about new moon now,” objected Porson. “There won’t be any moon.”

“There’ll be the house,” said Watkins, “at any rate. I’m goin’, you see, to paint the house first and the moon afterwards.”

“Oh!” said Porson, too staggered to continue the conversation.

“They doo say,” said old Durgan, the landlord, who had maintained a respectful silence during the technical conversation, “as there’s no less than three p’licemen from ’Azelworth on dewty every night in the house — ’count of this Lady Aveling ’n her jewellery. One’m won fower-and-six last night, off second footman — tossin’.”

Towards sunset next day Mr. Watkins, virgin canvas, easel, and a very considerable case of other appliances in hand, strolled up the pleasant pathway through the beech-woods to Hammerpond Park, and pitched his apparatus in a strategic position commanding the house. Here he was observed by Mr. Raphael Sant, who was returning across the park from a study of the chalk-pits. His curiosity having been fired by Porson’s account of the new arrival, he turned aside with the idea of discussing nocturnal art.

Mr. Watkins was apparently unaware of his approach. A friendly conversation with Lady Hammerpond’s butler had just terminated, and that individual, surrounded by the three pet dogs, which it was his duty to take for an airing after dinner had been served, was receding in the distance. Mr. Watkins was mixing colour with an air of great industry. Sant, approaching more nearly, was surprised to see the colour in question was as harsh and brilliant an emerald green as it is possible to imagine. Having cultivated an extreme sensibility to colour from his earliest years, he drew the air in sharply between his teeth at the very first glimpse of this brew. Mr. Watkins turned round. He looked annoyed.

“What on earth are you going to do with that beastly green?” said Sant.

Mr. Watkins realised that his zeal to appear busy in the eyes of the butler had evidently betrayed him into some technical error. He looked at Sant and hesitated.

“Pardon my rudeness,” said Sant; “but really, that green is altogether too amazing. It came as a shock. What do you mean to do with it?”

Mr. Watkins was collecting his resources. Nothing could save the situation but decision. “If you come here interrupting my work,” he said, “I’m a-goin’ to paint your face with it.”

Sant retired, for he was a humorist and a peaceful man. Going down the hill he met Porson and Wainwright. “Either that man is a genius or he is a dangerous lunatic,” said he. “Just go up and look at his green.” And he continued his way, his countenance brightened by a pleasant anticipation of a cheerful affray round an easel in the gloaming, and the shedding of much green paint.

But to Porson and Wainwright Mr. Watkins was less aggressive, and explained that the green was intended to be the first coating of his picture. It was, he admitted in response to a remark, an absolutely new method, invented by himself. But subsequently he became more reticent; he explained he was not going to tell every passer-by the secret of his own particular style, and added some scathing remarks upon the meanness of people “hanging about” to pick up such tricks of the masters as they could, which immediately relieved him of their company.

Twilight deepened, first one then another star appeared. The rooks amid the tall trees to the left of the house had long since lapsed into slumbrous silence, the house itself lost all the details of its architecture and became a dark grey outline, and then the windows of the salon shone out brilliantly, the conservatory was lighted up, and here and there a bedroom window burnt yellow. Had anyone approached the easel in the park it would have been found deserted. One brief uncivil word in brilliant green sullied the purity of its canvas. Mr. Watkins was busy in the shrubbery with his assistant, who had discreetly joined him from the carriage-drive.

Mr. Watkins was inclined to be self-congratulatory upon the ingenious device by which he had carried all his apparatus boldly, and in the sight of all men, right up to the scene of operations. “That’s the dressing-room,” he said to his assistant, “and, as soon as the maid takes the candle away and goes down to supper, we’ll call in. My! How nice the house do look, to be sure, against the starlight, and with all its windows and lights! Swopme, Jim, I almost wish I was a painter-chap. Have you fixed that there wire across the path from the laundry?”

He cautiously approached the house until he stood below the dressing-room window, and began to put together his folding ladder. He was much too experienced a practitioner to feel any unusual excitement. Jim was reconnoitring the smoking-room. Suddenly, close beside Mr. Watkins in the bushes, there was a violent crash and a stifled curse. Someone had tumbled over the wire which his assistant had just arranged. He heard feet running on the gravel pathway beyond. Mr. Watkins, like all true artists, was a singularly shy man, and he incontinently dropped his folding ladder and began running circumspectly through the shrubbery. He was indistinctly aware of two people hot upon his heels, and he fancied that he distinguished the outline of his assistant in front of him. In another moment he had vaulted the low stone wall bounding the shrubbery, and was in the open park. Two thuds on the turf followed his own leap.

It was a close chase in the darkness through the trees. Mr. Watkins was a loosely-built man and in good training, and he gained hand-over-hand upon the hoarsely panting figure in front. Neither spoke, but as Mr. Watkins pulled up alongside, a qualm of awful doubt came over him. The other man turned his head at the same moment and gave an exclamation of surprise. “It’s not Jim,” thought Mr. Watkins, and simultaneously the stranger flung himself, as it were, at Watkins’s knees, and they were forthwith grappling on the ground together. “Lend a hand, Bill,” cried the stranger as the third man came up. And Bill did — two hands in fact, and some accentuated feet. The fourth man, presumably Jim, had apparently turned aside and made off in a different direction. At any rate, he did not join the trio.

Mr. Watkins’s memory of the incidents of the next two minutes is extremely vague. He has a dim recollection of having his thumb in the corner of the mouth of the first man, and feeling anxious about its safety, and for some seconds at least he held the head of the gentleman answering to the name of Bill to the ground by the hair. He was also kicked in a great number of different places, apparently by a vast multitude of people. Then the gentleman who was not Bill got his knee below Mr. Watkins’s diaphragm, and tried to curl him up upon it.

When his sensations became less entangled he was sitting upon the turf, and eight or ten men — the night was dark, and he was rather too confused to count — standing round him, apparently waiting for him to recover. He mournfully assumed that he was captured, and would probably have made some philosophical reflections on the fickleness of fortune, had not his internal sensations disinclined him for speech.

He noticed very quickly that his wrists were not handcuffed, and then a flask of brandy was put in his hands. This touched him a little — it was such unexpected kindness.

“He’s a-comin’ round,” said a voice which he fancied he recognised as belonging to the Hammerpond second footman.

“We’ve got ’em, sir, both of ’em,” said the Hammerpond butler, the man who had handed him the flask. “Thanks to you.”

No one answered this remark. Yet he failed to see how it applied to him.

“He’s fair dazed,” said a strange voice; “the villains half-murdered him.”

Mr. Teddy Watkins decided to remain fair dazed until he had a better grasp of the situation. He perceived that two of the black figures round him stood side-by-side with a dejected air, and there was something in the carriage of their shoulders that suggested to his experienced eye hands that were bound together. Two! In a flash he rose to his position. He emptied the little flask and staggered — obsequious hands assisting him — to his feet. There was a sympathetic murmur.

“Shake hands, sir, shake hands,” said one of the figures near him. “Permit me to introduce myself. I am very greatly indebted to you. It was the jewels of my wife, Lady Aveling, which attracted these scoundrels to the house.”

“Very glad to make your lordship’s acquaintance,” said Teddy Watkins.

“I presume you saw the rascals making for the shrubbery, and dropped down on them?”

“That’s exactly how it happened,” said Mr. Watkins.

“You should have waited till they got in at the window,” said Lord Aveling; “they would get it hotter if they had actually committed the burglary. And it was lucky for you two of the policemen were out by the gates, and followed up the three of you. I doubt if you could have secured the two of them — though it was confoundedly plucky of you, all the same.”

“Yes, I ought to have thought of all that,” said Mr. Watkins; “but one can’t think of everything.”

“Certainly not,” said Lord Aveling. “I am afraid they have mauled you a little,” he added. The party was now moving towards the house. “You walk rather lame. May I offer you my arm?”

And instead of entering Hammerpond House by the dressing-room window, Mr. Watkins entered it — slightly intoxicated, and inclined now to cheerfulness again — on the arm of a real live peer, and by the front door. “This,” thought Mr. Watkins, “is burgling in style!” The “scoundrels,” seen by the gaslight, proved to be mere local amateurs unknown to Mr. Watkins, and they were taken down into the pantry and there watched over by the three policemen, two gamekeepers with loaded guns, the butler, an ostler, and a carman, until the dawn allowed of their removal to Hazelhurst police-station. Mr. Watkins was made much of in the salon. They devoted a sofa to him, and would not hear of a return to the village that night. Lady Aveling was sure he was brilliantly original, and said her idea of Turner was just such another rough, half-inebriated, deep-eyed, brave, and clever man. Some one brought up a remarkable little folding-ladder that had been picked up in the shrubbery, and showed him how it was put together. They also described how wires had been found in the shrubbery, evidently placed there to trip-up unwary pursuers. It was lucky he had escaped these snares. And they showed him the jewels.

Mr. Watkins had the sense not to talk too much, and in any conversational difficulty fell back on his internal pains. At last he was seized with stiffness in the back, and yawning. Everyone suddenly awoke to the fact that it was a shame to keep him talking after his affray, so he retired early to his room, the little red room next to Lord Aveling’s suite.

The dawn found a deserted easel bearing a canvas with a green inscription, in the Hammerpond Park, and it found Hammerpond House in commotion. But if the dawn found Mr. Teddy Watkins and the Aveling diamonds, it did not communicate the information to the police.

As has been described by Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (1883–1959), better known under his pseudonym of Sax Rohmer, a newspaper assignment sent him to Limehouse, London’s Chinatown, an area so forbidding at the time that few white people ventured into it, even in daylight. For months, he sought a mysterious “Mr. King,” who was said to rule all the criminal elements of the district, inspiring Rohmer to create the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. He mentioned King by name in Yellow Shadows (1925), which, along with Dope (1919), helped clean up Limehouse and bring about government action on the drug trade. The Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the century had aroused fears of a “Yellow Peril” and convinced Rohmer that an “Oriental” arch-villain would be successful, so he began writing stories about sinister Chinese, notably the Devil Doctor. The first of the fourteen novels about the sinister Fu Manchu was The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (1913; published in the United States as The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu). Rohmer deliberately gave his character an impossible name, both “Fu” and “Manchu” being Chinese surnames; it was hyphenated only in the first three books.

Rohmer wrote more than fifty books but is best known for his creation of Fu Manchu, one of the greatest villains in literature. His early interest in the occult and Egyptology influenced his writing and caused him to join such societies as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn along with other literary figures, including Arthur Machen, Aleister Crowley, and W. B. Yeats. Many of his books and stories are set in the mysterious East, including Brood of the Witch Queen (1918), Tales of Secret Egypt (1918), The Golden Scorpion (1919), and Tales of East and West (1932).

In their magazine appearances, the first adventures were simply titled Fu-Manchu, followed by the story title. For their book publication, they were disguised as a novel, lacking chapter titles.

“The Zayat Kiss,” the first Fu Manchu story, was originally published in the October 1912 issue of The Story-Teller; it was first collected in The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu (London, Methuen, 1913); the first American edition was titled The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (New York, McBride, Nast & Co., 1913).

I sank into an arm-chair in my rooms and gulped down a strong peg of brandy.

“We have been followed here,” I said. “Why did you make no attempt to throw the pursuers off the track, to have them intercepted?”

Smith laughed.

“Useless, in the first place. Wherever we went, he would find us. And of what use to arrest his creatures? We could prove nothing against them. Further, it is evident that an attempt is to be made upon my life tonight — and by the same means that proved so successful in the case of poor Sir Crichton.”

His square jaw grew truculently prominent, and he leapt stormily to his feet, shaking his clenched fists towards the window.

“The villain!” he cried. “The fiendishly clever villain! I suspected that Sir Crichton was next, and I was right. But I came too late, Petrie! That hits me hard, old man. To think that I knew and yet failed to save him.”

He resumed his seat, smoking vigorously.

“Fu-Manchu has made the blunder common to all men of unusual genius,” he said. “He has underrated his adversary. He has not given me credit for perceiving the meaning of the scented messages. He has thrown away one powerful weapon — to get such a message into my hands — and he thinks that, once safe within doors, I shall sleep, unsuspecting, and die as Sir Crichton died. But, without the indiscretion of your charming friend, I should have known what to expect when I received her ‘information’ — which, by the way, consists of a blank sheet of paper.”

“Smith,” I broke in, “who is she?”

“She is either Fu-Manchu’s daughter, his wife, or his slave. I am inclined to believe the latter, for she has no will but his will, except” — with a quizzical glance — “in a certain instance.”

“How can you jest with some awful thing — heaven knows what — hanging over your head? What is the meaning of these perfumed envelopes? How did Sir Crichton die?”

“He died of the Zayat Kiss. Ask me what that is, and I reply, ‘I do not know.’ The zayats are the Burmese caravanserais, or rest-houses. Along a certain route — upon which I set eyes, for the first and only time, upon Dr. Fu-Manchu — travellers who use them sometimes die as Sir Crichton died, with nothing to show the cause of death but a little mark upon the neck, face, or limb, which has earned, in those parts, the title of the ‘Zayat Kiss.’ The rest-houses along that route are shunned now. I have my theory, and I hope to prove it tonight, if I live. It will be one more broken weapon in his fiendish armoury, and it is thus, and thus only, that I can hope to crush him. This was my principal reason for not enlightening Dr. Cleeve. Even walls have ears where Fu-Manchu is concerned, so I feigned ignorance of the meaning of the mark, knowing that he would be almost certain to employ the same methods upon some other victim. I wanted an opportunity to study the Zayat Kiss in operation, and I shall have one.”

“But the scented envelopes?”

“In the swampy forest of the district I have referred to, a rare species of orchid, almost green, and with a peculiar scent, is sometimes met with. I recognized the heavy perfume at once. I take it that the thing which kills the travellers is attracted by this orchid. You will notice that the perfume clings to whatever it touches. I doubt if it can be washed off in the ordinary way. After at least one unsuccessful attempt to kill Sir Crichton — you recall that he thought there was something concealed in his study on a previous occasion? — Fu-Manchu hit upon the perfumed envelopes. He may have a supply of these green orchids in his possession — possibly to feed the creature.”

“What creature? How could any creature have got into Sir Crichton’s room tonight?”

“You have no doubt observed that I examined the grate of the study. I found a fair quantity of fallen soot. I at once assumed, since it appeared to be the only means of entrance, that something had been dropped down; and I took it for granted that the thing, whatever it was, must still be concealed either in the study or in the library. But when I had obtained the evidence of the groom, Wills, I perceived that the cry from the lane or from the park was a signal. I noted that the movements of anyone seated at the study-table were visible, in shadow, on the blind, and that the study occupied the corner of a two-storeyed wing, and therefore had a short chimney. What did the signal mean? That Sir Crichton had leapt up from his chair, and either had received the Zayat Kiss or had seen the thing which someone on the roof had lowered down the straight chimney. It was the signal to withdraw that deadly thing. By means of the iron stairway at the rear of Major-General Platt-Houston’s, I quite easily gained access to the roof above Sir Crichton’s study — and I found this.”

Out from his pocket Nayland Smith drew a tangled piece of silk, mixed up with which were a brass ring and a number of unusually large-sized split-shot, nipped on in the manner usual on a fishing-line.

“My theory proven,” he resumed. “Not anticipating a search on the roof, they had been careless. This was to weigh the line and to prevent the creature clinging to the walls of the chimney. Directly it had dropped in the grate, however, by means of this ring, I assume that the weighted line was withdrawn and the thing was only held by one slender thread, which sufficed, though, to draw it back again when it had done its work. It might have got tangled, of course, but they reckoned on its making straight up the carved leg of the writing-table for the prepared envelope. From there to the hand of Sir Crichton — which, from having touched the envelope, would also be scented with the perfume — was a certain move.”

“My God! How horrible!” I exclaimed, and glanced apprehensively into the dusky shadows of the room. “What is your theory respecting this creature — what shape, what colour—?”

“It is something that moves rapidly and silently. I will venture no more at present, but I think it works in the dark. The study was dark, remember, save for the bright patch beneath the reading-lamp. I have observed that the rear of this house is ivy-covered right up to, and above, your bedroom. Let us make ostentatious preparations to retire, and I think we may rely upon Fu-Manchu’s servants to attempt my removal, at any rate — if not yours.”

“But, my dear fellow, it is a climb of thirty-five feet at the very least.”

“You remember the cry in the back lane? It suggested something to me, and I tested my idea — successfully. It was the cry of a dacoit. Oh, dacoity, though quiescent, is by no means extinct. Fu-Manchu has dacoits in his train, and probably it is one who operates the Zayat Kiss, since it was a dacoit who watched the window of the study this evening. To such a man an ivy-covered wall is a grand staircase.”

The horrible events that followed are punctuated, in my mind, by the striking of a distant clock. It is singular how trivialities thus assert themselves in moments of high tension. I will proceed, then, by these punctuations, to the coming of the horror that it was written we should encounter.

The clock across the common struck two.

Having removed all traces of the scent of the orchid from our hands with a solution of ammonia, Smith and I had followed the programme laid down. It was an easy matter to reach the rear of the house, by simply climbing a fence, and we did not doubt that, seeing the light go out in the front, our unseen watcher would proceed to the back.

The room was a large one, and we had made up my camp-bed at one end, stuffing odds and ends under the clothes to lend the appearance of a sleeper, which device we also had adopted in the case of the larger bed. The perfumed envelope lay upon a little coffee-table in the centre of the floor, and Smith, with an electric pocket-lamp, a revolver and a brassy beside him, sat on cushions in the shadow of the wardrobe. I occupied a post between the windows.

No unusual sound, so far, had disturbed the stillness of the night. Save for the muffled throb of the rare all-night cars passing the front of the house, our vigil had been a silent one. The full moon had painted about the floor weird shadows of the clustering ivy, spreading the design gradually from the door, across the room, past the little table where the envelope lay, and finally to the foot of the bed.

The distant clock struck a quarter-past two.

A slight breeze stirred the ivy, and a new shadow added itself to the extreme edge of the moon’s design.

Something rose, inch by inch, above the sill of the westerly window. I could see only its shadow, but a sharp, sibilant breath from Smith told me that he, from his post, could see the cause of the shadow.

Every nerve in my body seemed to be strung tensely. I was icily cold, expectant, and prepared for whatever horror was upon us.

The shadow became stationary. The dacoit was studying the interior of the room.

Then it suddenly lengthened, and, craning my head to the left, I saw a lithe, black-clad form, surmounted by a yellow face, sketchy in the moonlight, pressed against the window-panes!

One thin, brown hand appeared over the edge of the lowered sash, which it grasped — and then another. The man made absolutely no sound whatever. The second hand disappeared — and reappeared. It held a small square box.

There was a very faint click.

The dacoit swung himself below the window with the agility of an ape, as, with a dull, sickening thud, something dropped upon the carpet!

“Stand still, for your life!” came Smith’s voice, high-pitched.

A beam of white light leapt out across the room and played fully upon the coffee-table in the centre.

Prepared as I was for something horrible, I know that I paled at sight of the thing that was running around the edge of the envelope.

It was an insect, full six inches long, and of a vivid, venomous red colour! It had something of the appearance of a great ant, with its long, quivering antennæ and its febrile, horrible vitality; but it was proportionately longer of body and smaller of head, and had numberless rapidly moving legs. In short, it was a giant centipede, apparently of the scolopendra group, but of a form quite new to me.

These things I realized in one breathless instant; in the next — Smith had dashed the thing’s poisonous life out with one straight, true blow of the golf club!

I leapt to the window and threw it widely open, feeling a silk thread brush my hand as I did so. A black shape was dropping, with incredible agility, from branch to branch of the ivy, and, without once offering a mark for a revolver-shot, it merged into the shadows beneath the trees of the garden.

As I turned and switched on the light Nayland Smith dropped limply into a chair, leaning his head upon his hands. Even that grim courage had been tried sorely.

“Never mind the dacoit, Petrie,” he said. “Nemesis will know where to find him. We know now what causes the mark of the Zayat Kiss. Therefore science is richer for our first brush with the enemy, and the enemy is poorer — unless he has any more unclassified centipedes. I understand now something that has been puzzling me since I heard of it — Sir Crichton’s stifled cry. When we remember that he was almost past speech, it is reasonable to suppose that his cry was not ‘The red hand!’ but ‘The red ant!’ Petrie, to think that I failed, by less than an hour, to save him from such an end!”

Just as the perfect murderer is someone who commits the crime without being suspected, perhaps even having the death seem accidental or natural, the Infallible Godahl has never even been suspected of a crime, much less been caught or convicted. He may well be the greatest criminal in the history of mystery fiction. Unlike such better-known thieves as A. J. Raffles, Arsène Lupin, and Simon Templar (the Saint), who rely on their wit, charm, intuition, and good luck to pull off a caper, Godahl has a purely scientific approach to jobs. His computer-like mind assesses every possibility in terms of logic and probabilities; his successes are triumphs of pure reason — the inevitable victory of superior intellect. His uninterrupted series of successes has made him wealthy enough to join the Pegasus Club, which has a membership restricted to fifty millionaires.

The New York Police Department is endlessly frustrated by the perfect crimes committed by Godahl, whose activities are known only to Oliver Armiston, a writer who has recorded some of his exploits. Godahl’s only fear is of those afflicted with blindness or deafness, as he believes that the loss of any sense heightens the sensitivity of those that remain.

The exploits of Godahl are the product of one of America’s most underrated mystery writers, Frederick Irving Anderson (1877–1947), who also created the only slightly better-known jewel thief Sophie Lang. Born in Aurora, Illinois, Anderson moved east and became a star reporter for the New York World from 1898 to 1908 and then became a successful and highly paid fiction writer for the top American and English magazines, notably The Saturday Evening Post, in which most of his mystery stories, and all six of his Godahl stories, were first published.

Anderson’s stories are written in a slow, circuitous style that may discourage the impatient reader but have a subtle richness that rewards the careful one who will appreciate the events that transpire between the lines.

“The Infallible Godahl” was first published in the February 15, 1913, issue of The Saturday Evening Post; it was first collected in The Adventures of the Infallible Godahl (New York, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1914).

Oliver Armiston never was much of a sportsman with a rod or gun — though he could do fancy work with a pistol in a shooting gallery. He had, however, one game from which he derived the utmost satisfaction. Whenever he went traveling, which was often, he invariably caught his trains by the tip of the tail, so to speak, and hung on till he could climb aboard. In other words, he believed in close connections. He had a theory that more valuable dollars-and-cents time and good animal heat are wasted warming seats in stations waiting for trains than by missing them. The sum of joy to his methodical mind was to halt the slamming gates at the last fraction of the last second with majestic upraised hand, and to stroll aboard his parlor-car with studied deliberation, while the train crew were gnashing their teeth in rage and swearing to get even with the gateman for letting him through.

Yet Mr. Armiston never missed a train. A good many of them tried to miss him, but none ever succeeded. He reckoned time and distance so nicely that it really seemed as if his trains had nothing else half so important as waiting until Mr. Oliver Armiston got aboard.

On this particular June day he was due in New Haven at two. If he failed to get there at two o’clock he could very easily arrive at three. But an hour is sixty minutes, and a minute is sixty seconds; and, further, Mr. Armiston, having passed his word that he would be there at two o’clock, surely would be.

On this particular day, by the time Armiston finally got to the Grand Central the train looked like an odds-on favorite. In the first place, he was still in his bed at an hour when another and less experienced traveler would have been watching the clock in the station waiting-room. In the second place, after kissing his wife in that absent-minded manner characteristic of true love, he became tangled in a Broadway traffic rush at the first corner. Scarcely was he extricated from this when he ran into a Socialist mass-meeting at Union Square. It was due only to the wits of his chauffeur that the taxicab was extricated with very little damage to the surrounding human scenery. But our man of method did not fret. Instead, he buried himself in his book, a treatise on Cause and Effect, which at that moment was lulling him with this soothing sentiment:

“There is no such thing as accident. The so-called accidents of every-day life are due to the preordained action of correlated causes, which is inevitable and over which man has no control.”

This was comforting, but not much to the point, when Oliver Armiston looked up and discovered he had reached Twenty-third Street and had come to a halt. A sixty-foot truck, with an underslung burden consisting of a sixty-ton steel girder, had at this point suddenly developed weakness in its off hindwheel and settled down on the pavement across the right of way like a tired elephant. This, of course, was not an accident. It was due to a weakness in the construction of that wheel — a weakness that had from the beginning been destined to block street-cars and taxicabs at this particular spot at this particular hour.

Mr. Armiston dismounted and walked a block. Here he hailed a second taxicab and soon was spinning north again at a fair speed, albeit the extensive building operations in Fourth Avenue had made the street well-nigh impassable.

The roughness of the pavement merely shook up his digestive apparatus and gave it zest for the fine luncheon he was promising himself the minute he stepped aboard his train. His new chauffeur got lost three times in the maze of traffic about the Grand Central Station. This, however, was only human, seeing that the railroad company changed the map of Forty-second Street every twenty-four hours during the course of the building of its new terminal.

Mr. Armiston at length stepped from his taxicab, gave his grip to a porter and paid the driver from a huge roll of bills. This same roll was no sooner transferred back to his pocket than a nimble-fingered pickpocket removed it. This, again, was not an accident. That pickpocket had been waiting there for the last hour for that roll of bills. It was preordained, inevitable. And Oliver Armiston had just thirty seconds to catch his train by the tail and climb aboard. He smiled contentedly to himself.

It was not until he called for his ticket that he discovered his loss. For a full precious second he gazed at the hand that came away empty from his money pocket, and then:

“I find I left my purse at home,” he said, with a grand air he knew how to assume on occasion. “My name is Mister Oliver Armiston.”

Now Oliver Armiston was a name to conjure with.

“I don’t doubt it,” said the ticket agent dryly. “Mister Andrew Carnegie was here yesterday begging carfare to One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, and Mister John D. Rockefeller quite frequently drops in and leaves his dollar watch in hock. Next!”

And the ticket-agent glared at the man blocking the impatient line and told him to move on.

Armiston flushed crimson. He glanced at the clock. For once in his life he was about to experience that awful feeling of missing his train. For once in his life he was about to be robbed of that delicious sensation of hypnotizing the gatekeeper and walking majestically down that train platform that extends northward under the train-shed a considerable part of the distance toward Yonkers. Twenty seconds! Armiston turned round, still holding his ground, and glared concentrated malice at the man next in line. That man was in a hurry. In his hand he held a bundle of bills. For a second the thief-instinct that is latent in us all suggested itself to Armiston. There within reach of his hand was the money, the precious paltry dollar bills that stood between him and his train. It scared him to discover that he, an upright and honored citizen, was almost in the act of grabbing them like a common pickpocket.

Then a truly remarkable thing happened. The man thrust his handful of bills at Armiston.

“The only way I can raise this blockade is to bribe you,” he said, returning Armiston’s glare. “Here — take what you want — and give the rest of us a chance.”

With the alacrity of a blind beggar miraculously cured by the sight of much money Armiston grabbed the handful, extracted what he needed for his ticket, and thrust the rest back into the waiting hand of his unknown benefactor. He caught the gate by a hair. So did his unknown friend. Together they walked down the platform, each matching the other’s leisurely pace with his own. They might have been two potentates, so deliberately did they catch this train. Armiston would have liked very much to thank this person, but the other presented so forbidding an exterior that it was hard to find a point of attack. By force of habit Armiston boarded the parlor car, quite forgetting he did not have money for a seat. So did the other. The unknown thrust a bill at the porter. “Get me two chairs,” he said. “One is for this gentleman.”

Once inside and settled, Armiston renewed his efforts to thank this strange person. That person took a card from his pocket and handed it to Armiston.

“Don’t run away with the foolish idea,” he said tartly, “that I have done you a service willingly. You were making me miss my train, and I took this means of bribing you to get you out of my way. That is all, sir. At your leisure you may send me your check for the trifle.”

“A most extraordinary person!” said Armiston to himself. “Let me give you my card,” he said to the other. “As to the service rendered, you are welcome to your own ideas on that. For my part I am very grateful.”

The unknown took the proffered card and thrust it in his waistcoat pocket without glancing at it. He swung his chair round and opened a magazine, displaying a pair of broad unneighborly shoulders. This was rather disconcerting to Armiston, who was accustomed to have his card act as an open sesame.

“Damn his impudence!” he said to himself. “He takes me for a mendicant. I’ll make copy of him!”

This was the popular author’s way of getting even with those who offended his tender sensibilities.

Two things worried Armiston: One was his luncheon — or rather the absence of it; and the other was his neighbor. This neighbor, now that Armiston had a chance to study him, was a young man, well set up. He had a fine bronzed face that was not half so surly as his manner. He was now buried up to his ears in a magazine, oblivious of everything about him, even the dining-car porter, who strode down the aisle and announced the first call to lunch in the dining-car.

“I wonder what the fellow is reading,” said Armiston to himself. He peeped over the man’s shoulder and was interested at once, for the stranger was reading a copy of a magazine called by the vulgar The Whited Sepulcher. It was the pride of this magazine that no man on earth could read it without the aid of a dictionary. Yet this person seemed to be enthralled. And what was more to the point, and vastly pleasing to Armiston, the man was at that moment engrossed in one of Armiston’s own effusions. It was one of his crime stories that had won him praise and lucre. It concerned the Infallible Godahl.

These stories were pure reason incarnate in the person of a scientific thief. The plot was invariably so logical that it seemed more like the output of some machine than of a human mind. Of course the plots were impossible, because the fiction thief had to be an incredible genius to carry out the details. But nevertheless they were highly entertaining, fascinating, and dramatic at one and the same time.

And this individual read the story through without winking an eyelash — as though the mental effort cost him nothing — and then, to Armiston’s delight, turned back to the beginning and read it again. The author threw out his chest and shot his cuffs. It was not often that such unconscious tribute fell to his lot. He took the card of his unknown benefactor. It read:

“Humph!” snorted Armiston. “An aristocrat — and a snob too!”

At this moment the aristocrat turned in his chair and handed the magazine to his companion. All his bad humor was gone.

“Are you familiar,” he asked, “with this man Armiston’s work? I mean these scientific thief stories that are running now.”

“Ye... yes. Oh, yes,” sputtered Armiston, hastily putting the other’s card away. “I... in fact, you know — I take them every morning before breakfast.”

In a way this was the truth, for Armiston always began his day’s writing before breakfasting.

Mr. Benson smiled — a very fine smile at once boyish and sophisticated.

“Rather a heavy diet early in the morning, I should say,” he replied. “Have you read this last one then?”

“Oh, yes,” said the delighted author.

“What do you think of it?” asked Benson.

The author puckered his lips.

“It is on a par with the others,” he said.

“Yes,” said Benson thoughtfully. “I should say the same thing. And when we have said that there is nothing left to say. They are truly a remarkable product. Quite unique, you know. And yet,” he said, frowning at Armiston, “I believe that this man Armiston is to be ranked as the most dangerous man in the world to-day.”

“Oh, I say—” began Armiston. But he checked himself, chuckling. He was very glad Mr. Benson had not looked at his card.

“I mean it,” said the other decidedly. “And you think so yourself, I fully believe. No thinking man could do otherwise.”

“In just what way? I must confess I have never thought of his work as anything but pure invention.”

It was truly delicious. Armiston would certainly make copy of this person.

“I will grant,” said Benson, “that there is not a thief in the world to-day clever enough — brainy enough — to take advantage of the suggestions put forth in these stories. But some day there will arise a man to whom they will be as simple as an ordinary blueprint, and he will profit accordingly. This magazine, by printing these stories, is merely furnishing him with his tools, showing him how to work. And the worst of it is—”

“Just a minute,” said the author. “Agreeing for the moment that these stories will be the tools of Armiston’s hero in real life some day, how about the popular magazines? They print ten such stories to one of these by Armiston.”

“Ah, my friend,” said Benson, “you forget one thing: The popular magazines deal with real life — the possible, the usual. And in that very thing they protect the public against sharpers, by exposing the methods of those same sharpers. But with Armiston — no. Much as I enjoy him as an intellectual treat, I am afraid—”

He didn’t finish his sentence. Instead he fell to shaking his head, as though in amazement at the devilish ingenuity of the author under discussion.

“I am certainly delighted,” thought that author, “that my disagreeable benefactor did not have the good grace to look at my card. This is really most entertaining.” And then aloud, and treading on thin ice: “I should be very glad to tell Oliver what you say and see what he has to say about it.”

Benson’s face broke into a wreath of wrinkles:

“Do you know him? Well, I declare! That is a privilege. I heartily wish you would tell him.”

“Would you like to meet him? I am under obligations to you. I can arrange a little dinner for a few of us.”

“No,” said Benson, shaking his head; “I would rather go on reading him without knowing him. Authors are so disappointing in real life. He may be some puny, anemic little half-portion, with dirty fingernails and all the rest that goes with genius. No offense to your friend! Besides, I am afraid I might quarrel with him.”

“Last call for lunch in the dinin’ cy — yah — aa,” sang the porter. Armiston was looking at his fingernails as the porter passed. They were manicured once a day.

“Come lunch with me,” said Benson heartily. “I should be pleased to have you as my guest. I apologize for being rude to you at the ticket window, but I did want to catch this train mighty bad.”

Armiston laughed. “Well, you have paid my carfare,” he said, “and I won’t deny I am hungry enough to eat a hundred-and-ten-pound rail. I will let you buy me a meal, being penniless.”

Benson arose, and as he drew out his handkerchief the card Armiston had given him fluttered into that worthy’s lap. Armiston closed his hand over it, chuckling again. Fate had given him the chance of preserving his incognito with this person as long as he wished. It would be a rare treat to get him ranting again about the author Armiston.

But Armiston’s host did not rant against his favorite author. In fact he was so enthusiastic over that man’s genius that the same qualities which he decried as a danger to society in his opinion only added luster to the work. Benson asked his guest innumerable questions as to the personal qualities of his ideal, and Armiston shamelessly constructed a truly remarkable person. The other listened entranced.

“No, I don’t want to know him,” he said. “In the first place I haven’t the time, and in the second I’d be sure to start a row. And then there is another thing: If he is half the man I take him to be from what you say, he wouldn’t stand for people fawning on him and telling him what a wonder he is. That’s about what I should be doing, I am afraid.”

“Oh,” said Armiston, “he isn’t so bad as that. He is a... well, a sensible chap, with clean fingernails and all that, you know, and he gets a haircut once every three weeks, the same as the rest of us.”

“I am glad to hear you say so, Mister... er—”

Benson fell to chuckling.

“By gad,” he said, “here we have been talking with each other for an hour, and I haven’t so much as taken a squint at your card to see who you are!”

He searched for the card Armiston had given him.

“Call it Brown,” said Armiston, lying gorgeously and with a feeling of utmost righteousness. “Martin Brown, single, read-and-write, color white, laced shoes and derby hat, as the police say.”

“All right, Mr. Brown; glad to know you. We will have some cigars. You have no idea how much you interest me, Mr. Brown. How much does Armiston get for his stories?”

“Every word he writes brings him the price of a good cigar. I should say he makes forty thousand a year.”

“Humph! That is better than Godahl, his star creation, could bag as a thief, I imagine, let alone the danger of getting snipped with a pistol ball on a venture.”

Armiston puffed up his chest and shot his cuffs again.

“How does he get his plots?”

Armiston knitted his ponderous brows. “There’s the rub,” he said. “You can talk about so-and-so much a word until you are deaf, dumb, and blind. But, after all, it isn’t the number of words or how they are strung together that makes a story. It is the ideas. And ideas are scarce.”

“I have an idea that I have always wanted to have Armiston get hold of, just to see what he could do with it. If you will pardon me, to my way of thinking the really important thing isn’t the ideas, but how to work out the details.”

“What’s your idea?” asked Armiston hastily. He was not averse to appropriating anything he encountered in real life and dressing it up to suit his taste. “I’ll pass it on to Armiston, if you say so.”

“Will you? That’s capital. To begin with,” Mr. Benson said as he twirled his brandy glass with long, lean, silky fingers — a hand Armiston thought he would not like to have handle him in a rage — “To begin with, Godahl, this thief, is not an ordinary thief, he is a highbrow. He has made some big hauls. He must be a very rich man now — eh? You see that he is quite real to me. By this time, I should say, Godahl has acquired such a fortune that thieving for mere money is no longer an object. What does he do? Sit down and live on his income? Not much. He is a person of refined tastes with an eye for the esthetic. He desires art objects, rare porcelains, a gem of rare cut or color set by Benvenuto Cellini, a Leonardo da Vinci — did Godahl steal the Mona Lisa, by the way? He is the most likely person I can think of — or perhaps a Gutenberg Bible. Treasures, things of exquisite beauty to look at, to enjoy in secret, not to show to other people. That is the natural development of this man Godahl, eh?”

“Splendid!” exclaimed Armiston, his enthusiasm getting the better of him.

“Have you ever heard of Mrs. Billy Wentworth?” asked Benson.

“Indeed, I know her well,” said Armiston, his guard down.

“Then you must surely have seen her white ruby?”

“White ruby! I never heard of such a thing. A white ruby?”

“Exactly. That’s just the point. Neither have I. But if Godahl heard of a white ruby the chances are he would possess it — especially if it were the only one of its kind in the world.”

“Gad! I do believe he would, from what I know of him.”

“And especially,” went on Benson, “under the circumstances. You know the Wentworths have been round a good deal. They haven’t been overscrupulous in getting things they wanted. Now Mrs. Wentworth — but before I go on with this weird tale I want you to understand me. It is pure fiction — an idea for Armiston and his wonderful Godahl. I am merely suggesting the Wentworths as fictitious characters.”

“I understand,” said Armiston.

“Mrs. Wentworth might very well possess this white ruby. Let us say she stole it from some potentate’s household in the Straits Settlements. She gained admittance by means of the official position of her husband. They can’t accuse her of theft. All they can do is to steal the gem back from her. It is a sacred stone of course. They always are in fiction stories. And the usual tribe of jugglers, rug-peddlers, and so on — all disguised, you understand — have followed her to America, seeking a chance, not on her life, not to commit violence of any kind, but to steal that stone.

“She can’t wear it,” went on Benson. “All she can do is to hide it away in some safe place. What is a safe place? Not a bank. Godahl could crack a bank with his little finger. So might those East Indian fellows laboring under the call of religion. Not in a safe. That would be folly.”

“How then?” put in Armiston eagerly.

“Ah, there you are! That’s for Godahl to find out. He knows, let us say, that these foreigners in one way or another have turned Mrs. Wentworth’s apartments upside down. They haven’t found anything. He knows that she keeps that white ruby in that house. Where is it? Ask Godahl. Do you see the point? Has Godahl ever cracked a nut like that? No. Here he must be the cleverest detective in the world and the cleverest thief at the same time. Before he can begin thieving he must make his blueprints.

“When I read Armiston,” continued Benson, “that is the kind of problem that springs up in my mind. I am always trying to think of some knot this wonderful thief would have to employ his best powers to unravel. I think of some weird situation like this one. I say to myself: ‘Good! I will write that. I will be as famous as Armiston. I will create another Godahl.’ But,” he said with a wave of his hands, “what is the result? I tie the knot, but I can’t untie it. The trouble is, I am not a Godahl. And this man Armiston, as I read him, is Godahl. He must be, or else Godahl could not be made to do the wonderful things he does. Hello! New Haven already? Mighty sorry to have you go, old chap. Great pleasure. When you get to town let me know. Maybe I will consent to meet Armiston.”

Armiston’s first care on returning to New York was to remember the providential loan by which he had been able to keep clean his record of never missing a train. He counted out the sum in bills, wrote a polite note, signed it “Martin Brown,” and dispatched it by messenger boy to J. Borden Benson, The Towers. The Towers, the address Mr. Benson’s card bore, is an ultra-fashionable apartment hotel in lower Fifth Avenue. It maintains all the pomp and solemnity of an English ducal castle. Armiston remembered having on a remote occasion taken dinner there with a friend, and the recollection always gave him a chill. It was like dining among ghosts of kings, so grand and funereal was the air that pervaded everything.

Armiston, who could not forbear curiosity as to his queer benefactor, took occasion to look him up in the Blue Book and the Club Directory, and found that J. Borden Benson was quite some personage, several lines being devoted to him. This was extremely pleasing. Armiston had been thinking of that white-ruby yarn. It appealed to his sense of the dramatic. He would work it up in his best style, and on publication have a fine laugh on Benson by sending him an autographed copy and thus waking that gentleman up to the fact that it really had been the great Armiston in person he had befriended and entertained. What a joke it would be on Benson, thought the author; not without an intermixture of personal vanity, for even a genius such as he was not blind to flattery properly applied, and Benson unknowingly had laid it on thick.

“And, by gad!” thought the author, “I will use the Wentworths as the main characters, as the victims of Godahl. They are just the people to fit into such a romance. Benson put money in my pocket, though he didn’t suspect it. Lucky he didn’t know what shifts we popular authors are put to for plots.”

Suiting the action to the words, Armiston and his wife accepted the next invitation they received from the Wentworths.

Mrs. Wentworth, be it understood, was a lion hunter. She was forever trying to gather about her such celebrities as Armiston the author, Brackens the painter, Johanssen the explorer, and others. Armiston had always withstood her wiles. He always had some excuse to keep him away from her gorgeous table, where she exhibited her lions to her simpering friends.

There were many undesirables sitting at the table, idle-rich youths, girls of the fast hunting set, and so on, and they all gravely shook the great author by the hand and told him what a wonderful man he was. As for Mrs. Wentworth, she was too highly elated at her success in roping him for sane speech, and she fluttered about him like a hysterical bridesmaid. But, Armiston noted with relief, one of his pals was there — Johanssen. Over cigars and cognac he managed to buttonhole the explorer.

“Johanssen,” he said, “you have been everywhere.”

“You are mistaken there,” said Johanssen. “I have never before tonight been north of Fifty-ninth Street in New York.”

“Yes, but you have been in Java and Ceylon and the Settlements. Tell me, have you ever heard of such a thing as a white ruby?”

The explorer narrowed his eyes to a slit and looked queerly at his questioner. “That’s a queer question,” he said in a low voice, “to ask in this house.”

Armiston felt his pulse quicken. “Why?” he asked, assuming an air of surprised innocence.

“If you don’t know,” said the explorer shortly, “I certainly will not enlighten you.”

“All right; as you please. But you haven’t answered my question yet. Have you ever heard of a white ruby?”

“I don’t mind telling you that I have heard of such a thing — that is, I have heard there is a ruby in existence that is called the white ruby. It isn’t really white, you know; it has a purplish tinge. But the old heathen who rightly owns it likes to call it white, just as he likes to call his blue and gray elephants white.”

“Who owns it?” asked Armiston, trying his best to make his voice sound natural. To find in this manner that there was some parallel for the mystical white ruby of which Benson had told him appealed strongly to his super-developed dramatic sense. He was now as keen on the scent as a hound.

Johanssen took to drumming on the tablecloth. He smiled to himself and his eyes glowed. Then he turned and looked sharply at his questioner.

“I suppose,” he said, “that all things are grist to a man of your trade. If you are thinking of building a story round a white ruby I can think of nothing more fascinating. But, Armiston,” he said, suddenly altering his tone and almost whispering, “if you are on the track of the white ruby let me advise you now to call off your dogs and keep your throat whole. I think I am a brave man. I have shot tigers at ten paces — held my fire purposely to see how charmed a life I really did bear. I have been charged by mad rhinos and by wounded buffaloes. I have walked across a clearing where the air was being punctured with bullets as thick as holes in a mosquito screen. But,” he said, laying his hand on Armiston’s arm, “I have never had the nerve to hunt the white ruby.”

“Capital!” exclaimed the author.

“Capital, yes, for a man who earns his bread and gets his excitement by sitting at a typewriter and dreaming about these things. But take my word for it, it isn’t capital for a man who gets his excitement by doing this thing. Hands off, my friend!”

“It really does exist then?”

Johanssen puckered his lips. “So they say,” he said.

“What’s it worth?”

“Worth? What do you mean by worth? Dollars and cents? What is your child worth to you? A million, a billion — how much? Tell me. No, you can’t. Well, that’s just what this miserable stone is worth to the man who rightfully owns it. Now let’s quit talking nonsense. There’s Billy Wentworth shooing the men into the drawing-room. I suppose we shall be entertained this evening by some of the hundred-dollar-a-minute songbirds, as usual. It’s amazing what these people will spend for mere vulgar display when there are hundreds of families starving within a mile of this spot!”

Two famous singers sang that night. Armi — ston did not have much opportunity to look over the house. He was now fully determined to lay the scene of his story in this very house. At leave-taking the sugar-sweet Mrs. Billy Wentworth drew Armiston aside and said:

“It’s rather hard on you to ask you to sit through an evening with these people. I will make amends by asking you to come to me some night when we can be by ourselves. Are you interested in rare curios? Yes, we all are. I have some really wonderful things I want you to see. Let us make it next Tuesday, with a little informal dinner, just for ourselves.”

Armiston then and there made the lion hunter radiantly happy by accepting her invitation to sit at her board as a family friend instead of as a lion.

As he put his wife into their automobile he turned and looked at the house. It stood opposite Central Park. It was a copy of some French château in gray sandstone, with a barbican, and overhanging towers, and all the rest of it. The windows of the street floor peeped out through deep embrasures and were heavily guarded with iron latticework.

“Godahl will have the very devil of a time breaking in there,” he chuckled to himself. Late that night his wife awakened him to find out why he was tossing about so.

“That white ruby has got on my nerves,” he said cryptically, and she, thinking he was dreaming, persuaded him to try to sleep again.

Great authors must really live in the flesh, at times at least, the lives of their great characters. Otherwise these great characters would not be so real as they are. Here was Armiston, who had created a superman in the person of Godahl the thief. For ten years he had written nothing else. He had laid the life of Godahl out in squares, thought for him, dreamed about him, set him to new tasks, gone through all sorts of queer adventures with him. And this same Godahl had amply repaid him. He had raised the author from the ranks of struggling amateurs to a position among the most highly paid fiction writers in the United States. He had brought him ease and luxury. Armiston did not need the money any more. The serial rights telling of the exploits of this Godahl had paid him handsomely. The books of Godahl’s adventures had paid him even better, and had furnished him yearly with a never-failing income, like government bonds, but at a much higher rate of interest. Even though the crimes this Godahl had committed were all on paper and almost impossible, nevertheless Godahl was a living being to his creator. More — he was Armiston, and Armiston was Godahl.

It was not surprising, then, that when Tuesday came Armiston awaited the hour with feverish impatience. Here, as his strange friend had so thoughtlessly and casually told him was an opportunity for the great Godahl to outdo even himself. Here was an opportunity for Godahl to be the greatest detective in the world, in the first place, before he could carry out one of his sensational thefts.

So it was Godahl, not Armiston, who helped his wife out of their automobile that evening and mounted the splendid steps of the Wentworth mansion. He cast his eye aloft, took in every inch of the façade.

“No,” he said, “Godahl cannot break in from the street. I must have a look at the back of the house.”

He cast his eyes on the ironwork that guarded the deep windows giving on the street.

It was not iron after all, but chilled steel sunk into armored concrete. The outposts of this house were as safely guarded as the vault of the United States mint.

“It’s got to be from the inside,” he said, making mental note of this fact.

The butler was stone-deaf. This was rather singular. Why should a family of the standing of the Wentworths employ a man as head of their city establishment who was stone-deaf? Armiston looked at the man with curiosity. He was still in middle age. Surely, then, he was not retained because of years of service. No, there was something more than charity behind this. He addressed a casual word to the man as he handed him his hat and cane. His back was turned and the man did not reply. Armiston turned and repeated the sentence in the same tone. The man watched his lips in the bright light of the hall.

“A lip-reader, and a dandy,” thought Armiston, for the butler seemed to catch every word he said.

“Fact number two!” said the creator of Godahl the thief.

He felt no compunction at thus noting the most intimate details of the Wentworth establishment. An accident had put him on the track of a rare good story, and it was all copy. Besides, he told himself, when he came to write the story he would disguise it in such a way that no one reading it would know it was about the Wentworths. If their establishment happened to possess the requisite setting for a great story, surely there was no reason why he should not take advantage of that fact.

The great thief — he made no bones of the fact to himself that he had come here to help Godahl — accepted the flattering greeting of his hostess with the grand air that so well fitted him. Armiston was tall and thin, with slender fingers and a touch of gray in his wavy hair, for all his youthful years, and he knew how to wear his clothes. Mrs. Wentworth was proud of him as a social ornament, even aside from his glittering fame as an author. And Mrs. Armiston was well born, so there was no jar in their being received in the best house of the town.

The dinner was truly delightful. Here Armiston saw, or thought he saw, one of the reasons for the deaf butler. The hostess had him so trained that she was able to catch her servant’s eye and instruct him in this or that trifle by merely moving her lips. It was almost uncanny, thought the author, this silent conversation the deaf man and his mistress were able to carry on unnoticed by the others.

“By gad, it’s wonderful! Godahl, my friend, underscore that note of yours referring to the deaf butler. Don’t miss it. It will take a trick.”

Armiston gave his undivided attention to his hostess as soon as he found Wentworth entertaining Mrs. Armiston and thus properly dividing the party. He persuaded her to talk by a cleverly pointed question here and there; and as she talked, he studied her.

“We are going to rob you of your precious white ruby, my friend,” he thought humorously to himself; “and while we are laying our wires there is nothing about you too small to be worthy of our attention.”

Did she really possess the white ruby? Did this man Benson know anything about the white ruby? And what was the meaning of the strange actions of his friend Johanssen when approached on the subject in this house? His hostess came to have a wonderful fascination for him. He pictured this beautiful creature so avid in her lust for rare gems that she actually did penetrate the establishment of some heathen potentate in the Straits simply for the purpose of stealing the mystic stone. “Have you ever, by any chance, been in the Straits?” he asked indifferently.

“Wait,” Mrs. Wentworth said with a laugh as she touched his hand lightly; “I have some curios from the Straits, and I will venture to say you have never seen their like.”

Half an hour later they were all seated over coffee and cigarettes in Mrs. Wentworth’s boudoir. It was indeed a strange place. There was scarcely a single corner of the world that had not contributed something to its furnishing. Carvings of teak and ivory; hangings of sweet-scented vegetable fibers; lamps of jade; queer little gods, all sitting like Buddha with their legs drawn up under them, carved out of jade or sardonyx; scarfs of baroque pearls; Darjeeling turquoises — Armiston had never before seen such a collection. And each item had its story. He began to look on this frail little woman with different eyes. She had been and seen and done, and the tale of her life, what she had actually lived, outshone even that of the glittering rascal Godahl, who was standing beside him now and directing his ceaseless questions. “Have you any rubies?” he asked.

Mrs. Wentworth bent before a safe in the wall. With swift fingers she whirled the combination. The keen eyes of Armiston followed the bright knob like a cat.

“Fact number three!” said the Godahl in him as he mentally made note of the numbers. “Five — eight — seven — four — six. That’s the combination.”

Mrs. Wentworth showed him six pigeon-blood rubies. “This one is pale,” he said carelessly, holding a particularly large stone up to the light. “Is it true that occasionally they are found white?”

His hostess looked at him before answering. He was intent on a deep-red stone he held in the palm of his hand. It seemed a thousand miles deep.

“What a fantastic idea!” she said. She glanced at her husband, who had reached out and taken her hand in a naturally affectionate manner.

“Fact number four!” mentally noted Armiston. “Are not you in mortal fear of robbery with all of this wealth?”

Mrs. Wentworth laughed lightly.

“That is why we live in a fortress,” she said.

“Have you never, then, been visited by thieves?” asked the author boldly.

“Never!” she said.

“A lie,” thought Armiston. “Fact number five! We are getting on swimmingly.”

“I do not believe that even your Godahl the Infallible could get in here,” Mrs. Wentworth said. “Not even the servants enter this room. That door is not locked with a key; yet it locks. I am not much of a housekeeper,” she said lazily, “but such housekeeping as is done in this room is all done by these poor little hands of mine.”

“No! Most amazing! May I look at the door?”

“Yes, Mr. Godahl,” said this woman, who had lived more lives than Godahl himself.

Armiston examined the door, this strange device that locked without a key, apparently indeed without a lock, and came away disappointed.

“Well, Mr. Godahl?” his hostess said tauntingly. He shook his head in perplexity.

“Most ingenious,” he said; and then suddenly: “Yet I will venture that if I turned Godahl loose on this problem he would solve it.”

“What fun!” she cried clapping her hands.

“You challenge him?” asked Armiston.

“What nonsense is this!” cried Wentworth, coming forward.

“No nonsense at all,” said Mrs. Wentworth. “Mr. Armiston has just said that his Godahl could rob me. Let him try. If he can — if mortal man can gain the secret of ingress and egress of this room — I want to know it. I don’t believe mortal man can enter this room.”

Armiston noted a strange glitter in her eyes.

“Gad! She was born to the part! What a woman!” he thought. And then aloud:

“I will set him to work. I will lay the scene of his exploit in — say — Hungary, where this room might very well exist in some feudal castle. How many people have entered this room since it was made the storehouse of all this wealth?”

“Not six besides yourself,” replied Mrs. Wentworth.

“Then no one can recognize it if I describe it in a story — in fact, I will change the material details. We will say that it is not jewels Godahl is seeking. We will say that it is a—”

Mrs. Wentworth’s hand touched his own. The tips of her fingers were cold. “A white ruby,” she said.

“Gad! What a thoroughbred!” he exclaimed to himself — or to Godahl. And then aloud: “Capital! I will send you a copy of the story autographed.”

The next day he called at The Towers and sent up his card to Mr. Benson’s apartments. Surely a man of Benson’s standing could be trusted with such a secret. In fact it was evidently not a secret to Benson, who in all probability was one of the six Mrs. Wentworth said had entered that room. Armiston wanted to talk the matter over with Benson. He had given up his idea of having fun with him by sending him a marked copy of the magazine containing his tale. His story had taken complete possession of him, as always had been the case when he was at work dispatching Godahl on his adventures.

“If that ruby really exists,” Armiston said, “I don’t know whether I shall write the story or steal the ruby for myself. Benson is right. Godahl should not steal any more for mere money. He is after rare, unique things now. And I am Godahl. I feel the same way myself.”

A valet appeared, attired in a gorgeous livery. Armiston wondered why any self-respecting American would consent to don such raiment, even though it was the livery of the great Benson family.

“Mr. Armiston, sir,” said the valet, looking at the author’s card he held in his hand. “Mr. Benson sailed for Europe yesterday morning. He is spending the summer in Norway. I am to follow on the next steamer. Is there any message I can take to him, sir? I have heard him speak of you, sir.”

Armiston took the card and wrote on it in pencil:

“I called to apologize. I am Martin Brown. The chance was too good to miss. You will pardon me, won’t you?”

For the next two weeks Armiston gave himself over to his dissipation, which was accompanying Godahl on this adventure. It was a formidable task. The secret room he placed in a Hungarian castle, as he had promised. A beautiful countess was his heroine. She had seen the world, mostly in man’s attire, and her escapades had furnished vivacious reading for two continents. No one could possibly connect her with Mrs. Billy Wentworth. So far it was easy. But how was Godahl to get into this wonderful room where the countess had hidden this wonderful rare white ruby? The room was lined with chilled steel. Even the door — this he had noted when he was examining that peculiar portal — was lined with layers of steel. It could withstand any known tool.

However, Armiston was Armiston, and Godahl was Godahl. He got into that room. He got the white ruby!

The manuscript went to the printers, and the publishers said that Armiston had never done anything like it since he started Godahl on his astonishing career.

He banked the check for his tale, and as he did so he said: “Gad! I would a hundred times rather possess that white ruby. Confound the thing! I feel as if I had not heard the last of it.”

Armiston and his wife went to Maine for the summer without leaving their address. Along in the early fall he received by registered mail, forwarded by his trusted servant at the town house, a package containing the envelope he had addressed to J. Borden Benson, The Towers. Furthermore it contained the dollar bills he had dispatched to that individual, together with his note which he had signed “Martin Brown.” And across the note, in the most insulting manner, was written in coarse, greasy blue-pencil lines:

“Damnable impertinence. I’ll cane you the first time I see you.”

And no more. That was enough of course — quite sufficient.

In the same mail came a note from Armiston’s publishers, saying that his story, “The White Ruby,” was scheduled for publication in the October number, out September twenty-fifth. This cheered him up. He was anxious to see it in print. Late in September they started back to town.

“Aha!” he said as he sat reading his paper in the parlor car — he had caught this train by the veriest tip of its tail and upset the running schedule in the act — “Ah! I see my genial friend, J. Borden Benson, is in town, contrary to custom at this time of year. Life must be a great bore to that snob.”

A few days after arriving in town he received a package of advance copies of the magazine containing his story, and he read the tale of “The White Ruby” as if he had never seen it before. On the cover of one copy, which he was to dispatch to his grumpy benefactor, J. Borden Benson, he wrote:

Charmed to be caned. Call any time. See contents.

Oliver Armiston.

On another he wrote:

Dear Mrs. Wentworth: See how simple it is to pierce your fancied security!

He dispatched these two magazines with a feeling of glee. No sooner had he done so, however, than he learned that the Wentworths had not yet returned from Newport. The magazine would be forwarded to them no doubt. The Wentworths’ absence made the tale all the better, in fact, for in his story Armiston had insisted on Godahl’s breaking into the castle and solving the mystery of the keyless door during the season when the château was closed and strung with a perfect network of burglar alarms connecting with the gendarmerie in the near-by village.

That was the twenty-fifth day of September. The magazine was put on sale that morning.

On the twenty-sixth day of September Armiston bought a late edition of an afternoon paper from a leather-lunged boy who was hawking “Extra!” in the street. Across the first page the headlines met his eye:

ROBBERY AND MURDER IN THE WENTWORTH MANSION!

Private watchmen, summoned by burglar alarm at ten o’clock this morning, find servant with skull crushed on floor of mysterious steel-doored room. Murdered man’s pockets filled with rare jewels. Police believe he was murdered by confederate who escaped.

The Wentworth Butler, Stone Deaf, Had Just Returned From Newport to Open House at Time of Murder.

It was ten o’clock that night when an automobile drew up at Armiston’s door and a tall man with a square jaw, square shoes, and a square mustache alighted. This was Deputy Police Commissioner Byrnes, a professional detective whom the new administration had drafted into the city’s service from the government secret service.

Byrnes was admitted, and as he advanced to the middle of the drawing-room, without so much as a nod to the ghostlike Armiston who stood shivering before him, he drew a package of papers from his pocket.

“I presume you have seen all the evening papers,” he said, spitting his words through his half-closed teeth with so much show of personal malice that Armiston — never a brave man in spite of his Godahl — cowered before him.

Armiston shook his head dumbly at first, but at length he managed to say: “Not all; no.”

The deputy commissioner with much deliberation drew out the latest extra and handed it to Armiston without a word.

It was the Evening News. The first page was divided down its entire length by a black line. On one side and occupying four columns, was a word-for-word reprint of Armiston’s story, “The White Ruby.”

On the other, the facts in deadly parallel, was a graphic account of the robbery and murder at the home of Billy Wentworth. The parallel was glaring in the intensity of its dumb accusation. On the one side was the theoretical Godahl, working his masterly way of crime, step by step; and on the other was the plagiarism of Armiston’s story, following the intricacies of the master mind with copybook accuracy.

The editor, who must have been a genius in his way, did not accuse. He simply placed the fiction and the fact side by side and let the reader judge for himself. It was masterly. If, as the law says, the mind that conceives, the intelligence that directs, a crime is more guilty than the very hand that acts, then Armiston here was both thief and murderer. Thief, because the white ruby had actually been stolen. Mrs. Billy Wentworth, rushed to the city by special train, attended by doctors and nurses, now confirmed the story of the theft of the ruby. Murderer, because in the story Godahl had for once in his career stooped to murder as the means, and had triumphed over the dead body of his confederate, scorning, in his joy at possessing the white ruby, the paltry diamonds, pearls, and red rubies with which his confederate had crammed his pockets.

Armiston seized the police official by his lapels.

“The butler!” he screamed. “The butler! Yes, the butler. Quick, or he will have flown.”

Byrnes gently disengaged the hands that had grasped him.

“Too late,” he said. “He has already flown. Sit down and quiet your nerves. We need your help. You are the only man in the world who can help us now.”

When Armiston was himself again he told the whole tale, beginning with his strange meeting with J. Borden Benson on the train, and ending with his accepting Mrs. Wentworth’s challenge to have Godahl break into the room and steal the white ruby. Byrnes nodded over the last part. He had already heard that from Mrs. Wentworth, and there was the autographed copy of the magazine to show for it.

“You say that J. Borden Benson told you of this white ruby in the first place.”

Armiston again told, in great detail, the circumstances, all the humor now turned into grim tragedy.

“That is strange,” said the ex-secret-service chief. “Did you leave your purse at home or was your pocket picked?”

“I thought at first that I had absent-mindedly left it at home. Then I remembered having paid the chauffeur out of the roll of bills, so my pocket must have been picked.”

“What kind of a looking man was this Benson?”

“You must know him,” said Armiston.

“Yes, I know him; but I want to know what he looked like to you. I want to find out how he happened to be so handy when you were in need of money.”

Armiston described the man minutely.

The deputy sprang to his feet. “Come with me,” he said; and they hurried into the automobile and soon drew up in front of The Towers.

Five minutes later they were ushered into the magnificent apartment of J. Borden Benson. That worthy was in his bath preparing to retire for the night.

“I don’t catch the name,” Armiston and the deputy heard him cry through the bathroom door to his valet.

“Mr. Oliver Armiston, sir.”

“Ah, he has come for his caning, I expect. I’ll be there directly.”

He did not wait to complete his toilet, so eager was he to see the author. He strode out in a brilliant bathrobe and in one hand he carried an alpenstock. His eyes glowed in anger. But the sight of Byrnes surprised as well as halted him.

“Do you mean to say this is J. Borden Benson?” cried Armiston to Byrnes, rising to his feet and pointing at the man.

“The same,” said the deputy; “I swear to it. I know him well! I take it he is not the gentleman who paid your carfare to New Haven.”

“Not by a hundred pounds!” exclaimed Armiston as he surveyed the huge bulk of the elephantine clubman.

The forced realization that the stranger he had hitherto regarded as a benefactor was not J. Borden Benson at all, but some one who had merely assumed that worthy’s name while he was playing the conceited author as an easy dupe, did more to quiet Armiston’s nerves than all the sedatives his doctor had given him. It was a badly dashed popular author who sat down with the deputy commissioner in his library an hour later. He would gladly have consigned Godahl to the bottom of the sea; but it was too late. Godahl had taken the trick.

“How do you figure it?” Armiston asked, turning to the deputy.

“The beginning is simple enough. It is the end that bothers me,” said the official. “Your bogus J. Borden Benson is, of course, the brains of the whole combination. Your infernal Godahl has told us just exactly how this crime was committed. Now your infernal Godahl must bring the guilty parties to justice.”

It was plain to be seen that the police official hated Godahl worse than poison, and feared him too.

“Why not look in the Rogues’ Gallery for this man who befriended me on the train?”

The chief laughed.

“For the love of Heaven, Armiston, do you, who pretend to know all about scientific thievery, think for a moment that the man who took your measure so easily is of the class of crooks who get their pictures in the Rogues’ Gallery? Talk sense!”

“I can’t believe you when you say he picked my pocket.”

“I don’t care whether you believe me or not; he did, or one of his pals did. It all amounts to the same thing, don’t you see? First, he wanted to get acquainted with you. Now the best way to get into your good graces was to put you unsuspectingly under obligation to him. So he robs you of your money. From what I have seen of you in the last few hours it must have been like taking candy from a child. Then he gets next to you in line. He pretends that you are merely some troublesome toad in his path. He gives you money for your ticket, to get you out of his way so he won’t miss his train. His train! Of course his train is your train. He puts you in a position where you have to make advances to him. And then, grinning to himself all the time at your conceit and gullibility, he plays you through your pride, your Godahl. Think of the creator of the great Godahl falling for a trick like that!”

Byrnes’s last words were the acme of biting sarcasm.

“You admit yourself that he is too clever for you to put your hands on.”

“And then,” went on Byrnes, not heeding the interruption, “he invites you to lunch and tells you what he wants you to do for him. And you follow his lead like a sheep at the tail of the bellwether! Great Scott, Armiston! I would give a year’s salary for one hour’s conversation with that man.”

Armiston was beginning to see the part this queer character had played; but he was in a semi-hysterical state, and, like a woman in such a position, he wanted a calm mind to tell him the whole thing in words of one syllable, to verify his own dread.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “I don’t quite follow. You say he tells me what he wants me to do.”

Byrnes shrugged his shoulders in disgust; then, as if resigned to the task before him, he began his explanation:

“Here, man, I will draw a diagram for you. This gentleman friend of yours — we will call him John Smith for convenience — wants to get possession of this white ruby. He knows that it is in the keeping of Mrs. Billy Wentworth. He knows you know Mrs. Wentworth and have access to her house. He knows that she stole this bauble and is frightened to death all the time. Now John Smith is a pretty clever chap. He handled the great Armiston like hot putty. He had exhausted his resources. He is baffled and needs help. What does he do? He reads the stories about the great Godahl. Confidentially, Mr. Armiston, I will tell you that I think your great Godahl is mush. But that is neither here nor there. If you can sell him as a gold brick, all right. But Mr. John Smith is struck by the wonderful ingenuity of this Godahl. He says: ‘Ha! I will get Godahl to tell me how to get this gem!’

“So he gets hold of yourself, sir, and persuades you that you are playing a joke on him by getting him to rant and rave about the great Godahl. Then — and here the villain enters — he says: ‘Here is a thing the great Godahl cannot do. I dare him to do it.’ He tells you about the gem, whose very existence is quite fantastic enough to excite the imagination of the wonderful Armiston. And by clever suggestion he persuades you to lay the plot at the home of Mrs. Wentworth. And all the time you are chuckling to yourself, thinking what a rare joke you are going to have on J. Borden Benson when you send him an autographed copy and show him that he was talking to the distinguished genius all the time and didn’t know it. That’s the whole story, sir. Now wake up!”

Byrnes sat back in his chair and regarded Armiston with the smile a pedagogue bestows on a refractory boy whom he has just flogged soundly.

“I will explain further,” he continued. “You haven’t visited the house yet. You can’t. Mrs. Wentworth, for all she is in bed with four dozen hot-water bottles, would tear you limb from limb if you went there. And don’t you think for a minute she isn’t able to. That woman is a vixen.”

Armiston nodded gloomily. The very thought of her now sent him into a cold sweat.

“Mr. Godahl, the obliging,” continued the deputy, “notes one thing to begin with: The house cannot be entered from the outside. So it must be an inside job. How can this be accomplished? Well, there is the deaf butler. Why is he deaf? Godahl ponders. Ha! He has it! The Wentworths are so dependent on servants that they must have them round at all times. This butler is the one who is constantly about them. They are worried to death by their possession of this white ruby. Their house has been raided from the inside a dozen times. Nothing is taken, mind you. They suspect their servants. This thing haunts them, but the woman will not give up this foolish bauble. So she has as her major domo a man who cannot understand a word in any language unless he is looking at the speaker and is in a bright light. He can only understand the lips. Handy, isn’t it? In a dull light or with their backs turned they can talk about anything they want to. This is a jewel of a butler.

“But,” added Byrnes, “one day a man calls. He is a lawyer. He tells the butler he is heir to a fortune — fifty thousand dollars. He must go to Ireland to claim it. Your friend on the train — he is the man of course — sends your butler to Ireland. So this precious butler is lost. They must have another. Only a deaf one will do. And they find just the man they want — quite accidentally, you understand. Of course it is Godahl, with forged letters saying he has been in service in great houses. Presto! The great Godahl himself is now the butler. It is simple enough to play deaf. You say this is fiction. Let me tell you this: Six weeks ago the Wentworths actually changed butlers. That hasn’t come out in the papers yet.”

Armiston, who had listened to the deputy’s review of his story listlessly, now sat up with a start. He suddenly exclaimed gleefully:

“But my story didn’t come out till two days ago!”

“Ah, yes; but you forget that it has been in the hands of your publishers for three months. A man who was clever enough to dupe the great Armiston wouldn’t shirk the task of getting hold of a proof of that story.”

Armiston sank deeper into his chair.

“Once Godahl got inside the house the rest was simple. He corrupted one of the servants. He opened the steel-lined door with the flame of an oxyacetylene blast. As you say in your story that flame cuts steel like wax; he didn’t have to bother about the lock. He simply cut the door down. Then he put his confederate in good humor by telling him to fill his pockets with the diamonds and other junk in the safe, which he obligingly opens. One thing bothers me, Armiston. How did you find out about that infernal contraption that killed the confederate?”

Armiston buried his face in his hands. Byrnes rudely shook him.

“Come,” he said; “you murdered that man, though you are innocent. Tell me how.”

“Is this the third degree?” said Armiston.

“It looks like it,” said the deputy grimly as he gnawed at his stubby mustache. Armiston drew a long breath, like one who realizes how hopeless is his situation. He began to speak in a low tone. All the while the deputy glared at Godahl’s inventor with his accusing eye.

“When I was sitting in the treasure room with the Wentworths and my wife, playing auction bridge, I dismissed the puzzle of the door as easily solved by means of the brazing flame. The problem was not to get into the house or into this room, but to find the ruby. It was not in the safe.”

“No, of course not. I suppose your friend on the train was kind enough to tell you that. He had probably looked there himself.”

“Gad! He did tell me that, come to think of it. Well, I studied that room. I was sure the white ruby, if it really existed, was within ten feet of me. I examined the floor, the ceiling, the walls. No result. But,” he said, shivering as if in a draft of cold air, “there was a chest in that room made of Lombardy oak.” The harassed author buried his face in his hands. “Oh, this is terrible!” he moaned.

“Go on,” said the deputy in his colorless voice.

“I can’t. I tell it all in the story, Heaven help me!”

“I know you tell it all in the story,” came the rasping voice of Byrnes; “but I want you to tell it to me. I want to hear it from your own lips — as Armiston, you understand, whose deviltry has just killed a man; not as your damnable Godahl.”

“The chest was not solid oak,” went on Armiston. “It was solid steel covered with oak to disguise it.”

“How did you know that?”

“I had seen it before.”

“Where?”

“In Italy fifteen years ago, in a decayed castle, back through the Soldini pass from Lugano. It was the possession of an old nobleman, a friend of a friend of mine.”

“Humph!” grunted the deputy. And then: “Well, how did you know it was the same one?”

“By the inscription carved on the front. It was — but I have told all this in print already. Why need I go over it all again?”

“I want to hear it again from your own lips. Maybe there are some points you did not tell in print. Go on!”

“The inscription was ‘Sanctus Dominus.’ ”

The deputy smiled grimly.

“Very fitting, I should say. Praise the Lord with the most diabolical engine of destruction I have ever seen.”

“And then,” said Armiston, “there was the owner’s name — ‘Arno Petronii.’ Queer name that.”

“Yes,” said the deputy dryly. “How did you hit on this as the receptacle for the white ruby?”

“If it were the same one I saw in Lugano — and I felt sure it was — it was certain death to attempt to open it — that is, for one who did not know how. Such machines were common enough in the Middle Ages. There was an obvious way to open it. It was meant to be obvious. To open it that way was inevitable death. It released tremendous springs that crushed anything within a radius of five feet. You saw that?”

“I did,” said the deputy, and he shuddered as he spoke. Then, bringing his fierce face within an inch of the cowering Armiston, he said:

“You knew the secret spring by which that safe could be opened as simply as a shoebox, eh?”

Armiston nodded his head.

“But Godahl did not,” he said. “Having recognized this terrible chest,” went on the author, “I guessed it must be the hiding-place of the jewel — for two reasons: In the first place Mrs. Wentworth had avoided showing it to us. She passed it by as a mere bit of curious furniture. Second, it was too big to go through the door or any one of the windows. They must have gone to the trouble of taking down the wall to get that thing in there. Something of a task, too, considering it weighs about two tons.”

“You didn’t bring out that point in your story.”

“Didn’t I? I fully intended to.”

“Maybe,” said the deputy, watching his man sharply, “it so impressed your friend who paid your carfare to New Haven that he clipped it out of the manuscript when he borrowed it.”

“There is no humor in this affair, sir, if you will pardon me,” said Armiston.

“That is quite true. Go ahead.”

“The rest you know. Godahl, in my story — the thief in real life — had to sacrifice a life to open that chest. So he corrupted a small kitchen servant, filling his pockets with these other jewels, and told him to touch the spring.”

“You murdered that man in cold blood,” said the deputy, rising and pacing the floor. “The poor deluded devil, from the looks of what’s left of him, never let out a whimper, never knew what hit him. Here, take some more of this brandy. Your nerves are in a bad way.”

“What I can’t make out is this,” said Armiston after a time. “There was a million dollars’ worth of stuff in that room that could have been put into a quart measure. Why did not this thief, who was willing to go to all the trouble to get the white ruby, take some of the jewels? Nothing is missing besides the white ruby, as I understand it. Is there?”

“No,” said the deputy. “Not a thing. Here comes a messenger boy.”

“For Mr. Armiston? Yes,” he said to the entering maid. The boy handed him a package for which the deputy signed.

“This is for you,” he said, turning to Armiston as he closed the door. “Open it.”

When the package was opened the first object to greet their eyes was a roll of bills.

“This grows interesting,” said Byrnes. He counted the money. “Thirty-nine dollars. Your friend evidently is returning the money he stole from you at the station. What does he have to say for himself? I see there is a note.”

He reached over and took the paper out of Armiston’s hands. It was ordinary bond stationery, with no identifying marks of any consequence. The note was written in bronze ink, in a careful copperplate hand, very small and precise. It read:

“Most Excellency Sir: Herewith, most honored dollars I am dispatching complete. Regretful extremely of sad blood being not to be prevented. Accept trifle from true friend.”

That was all.

“There’s a jeweler’s box,” said Byrnes. “Open it.”

Inside the box was a lozenge-shaped diamond about the size of a little fingernail. It hung from a tiny bar of silver, highly polished and devoid of ornament. On the back under the clasp-pin were several microscopic characters.

There were several obvious clues to be followed — the messenger boy, the lawyers who induced the deaf butler to go to Ireland on what later proved to be a wild-goose chase, the employment agency through which the new butler had been secured, and so on. But all of these avenues proved too respectable to yield results. Deputy Byrnes had early arrived at his own conclusions, by virtue of the knowledge he had gained as government agent, yet to appease the popular indignation he kept up a desultory search for the criminal.

It was natural that Armiston should think of his friend Johanssen at this juncture. Johanssen possessed that wonderful oriental capacity of aloofness which we Westerners are so ready to term indifference or lack of curiosity.

“No, I thank you,” said Johanssen. “I’d rather not mix in.”

The pleadings of the author were in vain. His words fell on deaf ears.

“If you will not lift a hand because of your friendship for me,” said Armiston bitterly, “then think of the law. Surely there is something due justice, when both robbery and bloody murder have been committed!”

“Justice!” cried Johanssen in scorn. “Justice, you say! My friend, if you steal from me, and I reclaim by force that which is mine, is that injustice? If you cannot see the idea behind that, surely, then, I cannot explain it to you.”

“Answer one question,” said Armiston. “Have you any idea who the man was I met on the train?”

“For your own peace of mind — yes. As a clue leading to what you so glibly term justice — pshaw! Tonight’s sundown would be easier for you to catch than this man if I know him. Mind you, Armiston, I do not know. But I believe. Here is what I believe:

“In a dozen courts of kings and petty princelings that I know of in the East there are Westerners retained as advisers — fiscal agents they usually call them. Usually they are American or English, or occasionally German.

“Now I ask you a question. Say that you were in the hire of a heathen prince, and a grievous wrong were done that prince, say, by a thoughtless woman who had not the least conception of the beauty of an idea she had outraged. Merely for the possession of a bauble, valueless to her except to appease vanity, she ruthlessly rode down a superstition that was as holy to this prince as your own belief in Christ is to you. What would you do?”

Without waiting for Armiston to answer, Johanssen went on:

“I know a man— You say this man you met on the train had wonderful hands, did he not? Yes, I thought so. Armiston, I know a man who would not sit idly by and smile to himself over the ridiculous fuss occasioned by the loss of an imperfect stone — off color, badly cut, and everything else. Neither would he laugh at the superstition behind it. He would say to himself: ‘This superstition is older by several thousand years than I or my people.’ And this man, whom I know, is brave enough to right that wrong himself if his underlings failed.”

“I follow,” said Armiston dully.

“But,” said Johanssen, leaning forward and tapping the author on the knee — “but the task proves too big for him. What did he do? He asked the cleverest man in the world to help him. And Godahl helped him. That,” said Johanssen, interrupting Armiston with a raised finger, “is the story of the white ruby. ‘The Story of the White Ruby’ you see, is something infinitely finer than mere vulgar robbery and murder, as the author of the Infallible Godahl conceived it.”

Johanssen said a great deal more. In the end he took the lozenge-shaped diamond pendant and put the glass on the silver bar, that his friend might see the inscription on the back. He told him what the inscription signified — “Brother of a King,” and, furthermore, how few men alive possessed the capacity for brotherhood.

“I think,” said Armiston as he was about to take his leave, “that I will travel in the Straits this winter.”

“If you do,” said Johanssen, “I earnestly advise you to leave your Godahl and his decoration at home.”

In “The Caballero’s Way,” O. Henry, the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), created a character who went on to become a beloved figure in motion pictures, radio, television, comic books, and comic strips, undergoing a major change from his original incarnation. The Cisco Kid is not a heroic figure in this short story, but the exact opposite, a killer and multiple murderer who is transformed in the first film, In Old Arizona (1929), into a sartorial, dressed-all-in-black, turn-of-the-century Mexican hero who captures outlaws and rescues damsels in distress. Warner Baxter won the Best Actor Oscar, the second ever given, for his portrayal of the Cisco Kid. There were multiple films about him, plus 156 half-hour television programs (among the first to be shot in color) between 1950 and 1956. He was played by Duncan Renaldo; his sidekick, Pancho (a character not in the original story), was played for comic effect by Leo Carrillo.

As O. Henry, Porter wrote approximately six hundred short stories that once were as critically acclaimed as they were popular. Often undervalued today because of their sentimentality, many nonetheless remain iconic and familiar, notably such classics as “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Furnished Room,” “A Retrieved Reformation” (better known for its several stage and film versions as Alias Jimmy Valentine), and “The Ransom of Red Chief.” The O. Henry Prize Stories, a prestigious annual anthology of the year’s best short stories named in his honor, has been published since 1919.

“The Caballero’s Way” was originally published in the July 1907 issue of Everybody’s; it was first published in book form in O. Henry’s Heart of the West (New York, McClure, 1907).

The Cisco Kid had killed six men in more or less fair scrimmages, had murdered twice as many (mostly Mexicans), and had winged a larger number whom he modestly forbore to count. Therefore a woman loved him.

The Kid was twenty-five, looked twenty; and a careful insurance company would have estimated the probable time of his demise at, say, twenty-six. His habitat was anywhere between the Frio and the Rio Grande. He killed for the love of it — because he was quick-tempered — to avoid arrest — for his own amusement — any reason that came to his mind would suffice. He had escaped capture because he could shoot five-sixths of a second sooner than any sheriff or ranger in the service, and because he rode a speckled roan horse that knew every cow-path in the mesquite and pear thickets from San Antonio to Matamoras.

Tonia Perez, the girl who loved the Cisco Kid, was half Carmen, half Madonna, and the rest — oh, yes, a woman who is half Carmen and half Madonna can always be something more — the rest, let us say, was humming-bird. She lived in a grass-roofed jacal near a little Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. With her lived a father or grandfather, a lineal Aztec, somewhat less than a thousand years old, who herded a hundred goats and lived in a continuous drunken dream from drinking mescal. Back of the jacal a tremendous forest of bristling pear, twenty feet high at its worst, crowded almost to its door. It was along the bewildering maze of this spinous thicket that the speckled roan would bring the Kid to see his girl. And once, clinging like a lizard to the ridge-pole, high up under the peaked grass roof, he had heard Tonia, with her Madonna face and Carmen beauty and humming-bird soul, parley with the sheriff’s posse, denying knowledge of her man in her soft melange of Spanish and English.

One day the adjutant-general of the State, who is, ex officio, commander of the ranger forces, wrote some sarcastic lines to Captain Duval of Company X, stationed at Laredo, relative to the serene and undisturbed existence led by murderers and desperadoes in the said captain’s territory.

The captain turned the colour of brick dust under his tan, and forwarded the letter, after adding a few comments, per ranger Private Bill Adamson, to ranger Lieutenant Sandridge, camped at a water hole on the Nueces with a squad of five men in preservation of law and order.

Lieutenant Sandridge turned a beautiful couleur de rose through his ordinary strawberry complexion, tucked the letter in his hip pocket, and chewed off the ends of his gamboge moustache.

The next morning he saddled his horse and rode alone to the Mexican settlement at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, twenty miles away.

Six feet two, blond as a Viking, quiet as a deacon, dangerous as a machine gun, Sandridge moved among the jacales, patiently seeking news of the Cisco Kid.

Far more than the law, the Mexicans dreaded the cold and certain vengeance of the lone rider that the ranger sought. It had been one of the Kid’s pastimes to shoot Mexicans “to see them kick”: if he demanded from them moribund Terpsichorean feats, simply that he might be entertained, what terrible and extreme penalties would be certain to follow should they anger him! One and all they lounged with upturned palms and shrugging shoulders, filling the air with “quien sabes” and denials of the Kid’s acquaintance.

But there was a man named Fink who kept a store at the Crossing — a man of many nationalities, tongues, interests, and ways of thinking.

“No use to ask them Mexicans,” he said to Sandridge. “They’re afraid to tell. This hombre they call the Kid — Goodall is his name, ain’t it? — he’s been in my store once or twice. I have an idea you might run across him at — but I guess I don’t keer to say, myself. I’m two seconds later in pulling a gun than I used to be, and the difference is worth thinking about. But this Kid’s got a half-Mexican girl at the Crossing that he comes to see. She lives in that jacal a hundred yards down the arroyo at the edge of the pear. Maybe she — no, I don’t suppose she would, but that jacal would be a good place to watch, anyway.”

Sandridge rode down to the jacal of Perez. The sun was low, and the broad shade of the great pear thicket already covered the grass-thatched hut. The goats were enclosed for the night in a brush corral near by. A few kids walked the top of it, nibbling the chaparral leaves. The old Mexican lay upon a blanket on the grass, already in a stupor from his mescal, and dreaming, perhaps, of the nights when he and Pizarro touched glasses to their New World fortunes — so old his wrinkled face seemed to proclaim him to be. And in the door of the jacal stood Tonia. And Lieutenant Sandridge sat in his saddle staring at her like a gannet agape at a sailorman.

The Cisco Kid was a vain person, as all eminent and successful assassins are, and his bosom would have been ruffled had he known that at a simple exchange of glances two persons, in whose minds he had been looming large, suddenly abandoned (at least for the time) all thought of him.

Never before had Tonia seen such a man as this. He seemed to be made of sunshine and blood-red tissue and clear weather. He seemed to illuminate the shadow of the pear when he smiled, as though the sun were rising again. The men she had known had been small and dark. Even the Kid, in spite of his achievements, was a stripling no larger than herself, with black, straight hair and a cold, marble face that chilled the noonday.

As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the gitanas of the Basque province. As for the humming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.

The newly lighted sun-god asked for a drink of water. Tonia brought it from the red jar hanging under the brush shelter. Sandridge considered it necessary to dismount so as to lessen the trouble of her ministrations.

I play no spy; nor do I assume to master the thoughts of any human heart; but I assert, by the chronicler’s right, that before a quarter of an hour had sped, Sandridge was teaching her how to plait a six-strand rawhide stake-rope, and Tonia had explained to him that were it not for her little English book that the peripatetic padre had given her and the little crippled chivo, that she fed from a bottle, she would be very, very lonely indeed.

Which leads to a suspicion that the Kid’s fences needed repairing, and that the adjutant-general’s sarcasm had fallen upon unproductive soil.

In his camp by the water hole Lieutenant Sandridge announced and reiterated his intention of either causing the Cisco Kid to nibble the black loam of the Frio country prairies or of haling him before a judge and jury. That sounded business-like. Twice a week he rode over to the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio, and directed Tonia’s slim, slightly lemon-tinted fingers among the intricacies of the slowly growing lariata. A six-strand plait is hard to learn and easy to teach.

The ranger knew that he might find the Kid there at any visit. He kept his armament ready, and had a frequent eye for the pear thicket at the rear of the jacal. Thus he might bring down the kite and the humming-bird with one stone.

While the sunny-haired ornithologist was pursuing his studies the Cisco Kid was also attending to his professional duties. He moodily shot up a saloon in a small cow village on Quintana Creek, killed the town marshal (plugging him neatly in the centre of his tin badge), and then rode away, morose and unsatisfied. No true artist is uplifted by shooting an aged man carrying an old-style .38 bulldog.

On his way the Kid suddenly experienced the yearning that all men feel when wrong-doing loses its keen edge of delight. He yearned for the woman he loved to reassure him that she was his in spite of it. He wanted her to call his bloodthirstiness bravery and his cruelty devotion. He wanted Tonia to bring him water from the red jar under the brush shelter, and tell him how the chivo was thriving on the bottle.

The Kid turned the speckled roan’s head up the ten-mile pear flat that stretches along the Arroyo Hondo until it ends at the Lone Wolf Crossing of the Frio. The roan whickered; for he had a sense of locality and direction equal to that of a belt-line street-car horse; and he knew he would soon be nibbling the rich mesquite grass at the end of a forty-foot stake-rope while Ulysses rested his head in Circe’s straw-roofed hut.

More weird and lonesome than the journey of an Amazonian explorer is the ride of one through a Texas pear flat. With dismal monotony and startling variety the uncanny and multiform shapes of the cacti lift their twisted trunks, and fat, bristly hands to encumber the way. The demon plant, appearing to live without soil or rain, seems to taunt the parched traveller with its lush grey greenness. It warps itself a thousand times about what look to be open and inviting paths, only to lure the rider into blind and impassable spine-defended “bottoms of the bag,” leaving him to retreat, if he can, with the points of the compass whirling in his head.

To be lost in the pear is to die almost the death of the thief on the cross, pierced by nails and with grotesque shapes of all the fiends hovering about.

But it was so with the Kid and his mount. Winding, twisting, circling, tracing the most fantastic and bewildering trail ever picked out, the good roan lessened the distance to the Lone Wolf Crossing with every coil and turn that he made.

While they fared the Kid sang. He knew but one tune and sang it, as he knew but one code and lived it, and but one girl and loved her. He was a single-minded man of conventional ideas. He had a voice like a coyote with bronchitis, but whenever he chose to sing his song he sang it. It was a conventional song of the camps and trail, running at its beginning as near as may be to these words:

and so on. The roan was inured to it, and did not mind.

But even the poorest singer will, after a certain time, gain his own consent to refrain from contributing to the world’s noises. So the Kid, by the time he was within a mile or two of Tonia’s jacal, had reluctantly allowed his song to die away — not because his vocal performance had become less charming to his own ears, but because his laryngeal muscles were aweary.

As though he were in a circus ring the speckled roan wheeled and danced through the labyrinth of pear until at length his rider knew by certain landmarks that the Lone Wolf Crossing was close at hand. Then, where the pear was thinner, he caught sight of the grass roof of the jacal and the hackberry tree on the edge of the arroyo. A few yards farther the Kid stopped the roan and gazed intently through the prickly openings. Then he dismounted, dropped the roan’s reins, and proceeded on foot, stooping and silent, like an Indian. The roan, knowing his part, stood still, making no sound.

The Kid crept noiselessly to the very edge of the pear thicket and reconnoitred between the leaves of a clump of cactus.

Ten yards from his hiding-place, in the shade of the jacal, sat his Tonia calmly plaiting a rawhide lariat. So far she might surely escape condemnation; women have been known, from time to time, to engage in more mischievous occupations. But if all must be told, there is to be added that her head reposed against the broad and comfortable chest of a tall red-and-yellow man, and that his arm was about her, guiding her nimble fingers that required so many lessons at the intricate six-strand plait.

Sandridge glanced quickly at the dark mass of pear when he heard a slight squeaking sound that was not altogether unfamiliar. A gun-scabbard will make that sound when one grasps the handle of a six-shooter suddenly. But the sound was not repeated; and Tonia’s fingers needed close attention.

And then, in the shadow of death, they began to talk of their love; and in the still July afternoon every word they uttered reached the ears of the Kid.

“Remember, then,” said Tonia, “you must not come again until I send for you. Soon he will be here. A vaquero at the tienda said to-day he saw him on the Guadalupe three days ago. When he is that near he always comes. If he comes and finds you here he will kill you. So, for my sake, you must come no more until I send you the word.”

“All right,” said the stranger. “And then what?”

“And then,” said the girl, “you must bring your men here and kill him. If not, he will kill you.”

“He ain’t a man to surrender, that’s sure,” said Sandridge. “It’s kill or be killed for the officer that goes up against Mr. Cisco Kid.”

“He must die,” said the girl. “Otherwise there will not be any peace in the world for thee and me. He has killed many. Let him so die. Bring your men, and give him no chance to escape.”

“You used to think right much of him,” said Sandridge.

Tonia dropped the lariat, twisted herself around, and curved a lemon-tinted arm over the ranger’s shoulder.

“But then,” she murmured in liquid Spanish, “I had not beheld thee, thou great, red mountain of a man! And thou art kind and good, as well as strong. Could one choose him, knowing thee? Let him die; for then I will not be filled with fear by day and night lest he hurt thee or me.”

“How can I know when he comes?” asked Sandridge.

“When he comes,” said Tonia, “he remains two days, sometimes three. Gregorio, the small son of old Luisa, the lavendera, has a swift pony. I will write a letter to thee and send it by him, saying how it will be best to come upon him. By Gregorio will the letter come. And bring many men with thee, and have much care, oh, dear red one, for the rattlesnake is not quicker to strike than is ‘El Chivato,’ as they call him, to send a ball from his pistola.”

“The Kid’s handy with his gun, sure enough,” admitted Sandridge, “but when I come for him I shall come alone. I’ll get him by myself or not at all. The Cap wrote one or two things to me that make me want to do the trick without any help. You let me know when Mr. Kid arrives, and I’ll do the rest.”

“I will send you the message by the boy Gregorio,” said the girl. “I knew you were braver than that small slayer of men who never smiles. How could I ever have thought I cared for him?”

It was time for the ranger to ride back to his camp on the water hole. Before he mounted his horse he raised the slight form of Tonia with one arm high from the earth for a parting salute. The drowsy stillness of the torpid summer air still lay thick upon the dreaming afternoon. The smoke from the fire in the jacal, where the frijoles blubbered in the iron pot, rose straight as a plumb-line above the clay-daubed chimney. No sound or movement disturbed the serenity of the dense pear thicket ten yards away.

When the form of Sandridge had disappeared, loping his big dun down the steep banks of the Frio crossing, the Kid crept back to his own horse, mounted him, and rode back along the tortuous trail he had come.

But not far. He stopped and waited in the silent depths of the pear until half an hour had passed. And then Tonia heard the high, untrue notes of his unmusical singing coming nearer and nearer; and she ran to the edge of the pear to meet him.

The Kid seldom smiled; but he smiled and waved his hat when he saw her. He dismounted, and his girl sprang into his arms. The Kid looked at her fondly. His thick, black hair clung to his head like a wrinkled mat. The meeting brought a slight ripple of some undercurrent of feeling to his smooth, dark face that was usually as motionless as a clay mask.

“How’s my girl?” he asked, holding her close.

“Sick of waiting so long for you, dear one,” she answered. “My eyes are dim with always gazing into that devil’s pincushion through which you come. And I can see into it such a little way, too. But you are here, beloved one, and I will not scold. Que mal muchacho! not to come to see your alma more often. Go in and rest, and let me water your horse and stake him with the long rope. There is cool water in the jar for you.”

The Kid kissed her affectionately.

“Not if the court knows itself do I let a lady stake my horse for me,” said he. “But if you’ll run in, chica, and throw a pot of coffee together while I attend to the caballo, I’ll be a good deal obliged.”

Besides his marksmanship the Kid had another attribute for which he admired himself greatly. He was muy caballero, as the Mexicans express it, where the ladies were concerned. For them he had always gentle words and consideration. He could not have spoken a harsh word to a woman. He might ruthlessly slay their husbands and brothers, but he could not have laid the weight of a finger in anger upon a woman. Wherefore many of that interesting division of humanity who had come under the spell of his politeness declared their disbelief in the stories circulated about Mr. Kid. One shouldn’t believe everything one heard, they said. When confronted by their indignant men folk with proof of the caballero’s deeds of infamy, they said maybe he had been driven to it, and that he knew how to treat a lady, anyhow.

Considering this extremely courteous idiosyncrasy of the Kid and the pride he took in it, one can perceive that the solution of the problem that was presented to him by what he saw and heard from his hiding-place in the pear that afternoon (at least as to one of the actors) must have been obscured by difficulties. And yet one could not think of the Kid overlooking little matters of that kind.

At the end of the short twilight they gathered around a supper of frijoles, goat steaks, canned peaches, and coffee, by the light of a lantern in the jacal. Afterward, the ancestor, his flock corralled, smoked a cigarette and became a mummy in a grey blanket. Tonia washed the few dishes while the Kid dried them with the flour-sacking towel. Her eyes shone; she chatted volubly of the inconsequent happenings of her small world since the Kid’s last visit; it was as all his other home-comings had been.

Then outside Tonia swung in a grass hammock with her guitar and sang sad canciones de amor.

“Do you love me just the same, old girl?” asked the Kid, hunting for his cigarette papers.

“Always the same, little one,” said Tonia, her dark eyes lingering upon him.

“I must go over to Fink’s,” said the Kid, rising, “for some tobacco. I thought I had another sack in my coat. I’ll be back in a quarter of an hour.”

“Hasten,” said Tonia, “and tell me — how long shall I call you my own this time? Will you be gone again tomorrow, leaving me to grieve, or will you be longer with your Tonia?”

“Oh, I might stay two or three days this trip,” said the Kid, yawning. “I’ve been on the dodge for a month, and I’d like to rest up.”

He was gone half an hour for his tobacco. When he returned Tonia was still lying in the hammock.

“It’s funny,” said the Kid, “how I feel. I feel like there was somebody lying behind every bush and tree waiting to shoot me. I never had mullygrubs like them before. Maybe it’s one of them presumptions. I’ve got half a notion to light out in the morning before day. The Guadalupe country is burning up about that old Dutchman I plugged down there.”

“You are not afraid — no one could make my brave little one fear.”

“Well, I haven’t been usually regarded as a jack-rabbit when it comes to scrapping; but I don’t want a posse smoking me out when I’m in your jacal. Somebody might get hurt that oughtn’t to.”

“Remain with your Tonia; no one will find you here.”

The Kid looked keenly into the shadows up and down the arroyo and toward the dim lights of the Mexican village.

“I’ll see how it looks later on,” was his decision.

William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), under the pseudonym O. Henry, wrote approximately six hundred short stories and, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe, is the most beloved short story writer America has produced.

Arrested for embezzlement from a bank in Austin, Texas, he served three years in an Ohio State Penitentiary, where he was befriended by a guard named Orrin Henry, who in all likelihood inspired the famous pseudonym.

His stories have been criticized for being overly sentimental, but they remain staples of the American literary canon. The master of the surprise ending, O. Henry has written such classics as “The Gift of the Magi,” “The Last Leaf,” “The Ransom of Red Chief,” and “A Retrieved Reformation,” which became better known when it was staged and later filmed as Alias Jimmy Valentine.

His most significant contribution to the mystery and crime genre is The Gentle Grafter (1908), selected by Ellery Queen for Queen’s Quorum as one of the one hundred six greatest mystery story collections of all time. All the Grafter stories feature Jeff Peters and Andy Tucker, a couple of con artists who enjoy various levels of success. They are usually broke and struggle with the concept of being fair to their marks. They don’t generally steal, and if their hapless target is too simpleminded, they endeavor to give him a little something in return for the money they bilk from him. The Grafter tales are more humorous than most of O. Henry’s other stories, so many of which are poignant or dark.

“Conscience in Art” was originally published by the McClure Syndicate, appearing in numerous newspapers all around the United States at various dates; it was first collected in O. Henry’s The Gentle Grafter (New York, McClure, 1908).

“I never could hold my partner, Andy Tucker, down to legitimate ethics of pure swindling,” said Jeff Peters to me one day.

“Andy had too much imagination to be honest. He used to devise schemes of money-getting so fraudulent and high-financial that they wouldn’t have been allowed in the bylaws of a railroad rebate system.

“Myself, I never believed in taking any man’s dollars unless I gave him something for it — something in the way of rolled gold jewelry, garden seeds, lumbago lotion, stock certificates, stove polish, or a crack on the head to show for his money. I guess I must have had New England ancestors away back and inherited some of their stanch and rugged fear of the police.

“But Andy’s family tree was in different kind. I don’t think he could have traced his descent any further back than a corporation.

“One summer while we was in the middle West, working down the Ohio valley with a line of family albums, headache powders, and roach destroyer, Andy takes one of his notions of high and actionable financiering.

“ ‘Jeff,’ says he, ‘I’ve been thinking that we ought to drop these rutabaga fanciers and give our attention to something more nourishing and prolific. If we keep on snapshooting these hinds for their egg money we’ll be classed as nature fakers. How about plunging into the fastnesses of the skyscraper country and biting some big bull caribous in the chest?’

“ ‘Well,’ says I, ‘you know my idiosyncrasies. I prefer a square, non-illegal style of business such as we are carrying on now. When I take money I want to leave some tangible object in the other fellow’s hands for him to gaze at and to distract his attention from my spoor, even if it’s only a Komical Kuss Trick Finger Ring for Squirting Perfume in a Friend’s Eye. But if you’ve got a fresh idea, Andy,’ says I, ‘let’s have a look at it. I’m not so wedded to petty graft that I would refuse something better in the way of a subsidy.’

“ ‘I was thinking,’ says Andy, ‘of a little hunt without horn, hound, or camera among the great herd of the Midas Americanus, commonly known as the Pittsburg millionaires.’

“ ‘In New York?’ I asks.

“ ‘No, sir,’ says Andy, ‘in Pittsburg. That’s their habitat. They don’t like New York. They go there now and then just because it’s expected of ’em.’

“ ‘A Pittsburg millionaire in New York is like a fly in a cup of hot coffee — he attracts attention and comment, but he don’t enjoy it. New York ridicules him for “blowing” so much money in that town of sneaks and snobs, and sneers. The truth is, he don’t spend anything while he is there. I saw a memorandum of expenses for a ten days trip to Bunkum Town made by a Pittsburg man worth $15,000,000 once. Here’s the way he set it down:

“ ‘That’s the voice of New York,’ goes on Andy. ‘The town’s nothing but a head waiter. If you tip it too much it’ll go and stand by the door and make fun of you to the hat check boy. When a Pittsburger wants to spend money and have a good time he stays at home. That’s where we’ll go to catch him.’

“Well, to make a dense story more condensed, me and Andy cached our Paris Green and antipyrine powders and albums in a friend’s cellar, and took the trail to Pittsburg. Andy didn’t have any especial prospectus of chicanery and violence drawn up, but he always had plenty of confidence that his immoral nature would rise to any occasion that presented itself.

“As a concession to my ideas of self-preservation and rectitude he promised that if I should take an active and incriminating part in any little business venture that we might work up there should be something actual and cognizant to the senses of touch, sight, taste, or smell to transfer to the victim for the money so my conscience might rest easy. After that I felt better and entered more cheerfully into the foul play.

“ ‘Andy,’ says I, as we strayed through the smoke along the cinderpath they call Smithfield street, ‘had you figured out how we are going to get acquainted with these coke kings and pig iron squeezers? Not that I would decry my own worth or system of drawing room deportment, and work with the olive fork and pie knife,’ says I, ‘but isn’t the entree nous into the salons of the stogie smokers going to be harder than you imagined?’

“ ‘If there’s any handicap at all,’ says Andy, ‘it’s our own refinement and inherent culture. Pittsburg millionaires are a fine body of plain, wholehearted, unassuming, democratic men.

“ ‘They are rough but uncivil in their manners, and though their ways are boisterous and unpolished, under it all they have a great deal of impoliteness and discourtesy. Nearly every one of ’em rose from obscurity,’ says Andy, ‘and they’ll live in it till the town gets to using smoke consumers. If we act simple and unaffected and don’t go too far from the saloons and keep making a noise like an import duty on steel rails we won’t have any trouble in meeting some of ’em socially.’

“Well Andy and me drifted about town three or four days getting our bearings. We got to knowing several millionaires by sight.

“One used to stop his automobile in front of our hotel and have a quart of champagne brought out to him. When the waiter opened it he’d turn it up to his mouth and drink it out of the bottle. That showed he used to be a glassblower before he made his money.

“One evening Andy failed to come to the hotel for dinner. About 11 o’clock he came into my room.

“ ‘Landed one, Jeff,’ says he. ‘Twelve millions. Oil, rolling mills, real estate, and natural gas. He’s a fine man; no airs about him. Made all his money in the last five years. He’s got professors posting him up now in education — art and literature and haberdashery and such things.

“ ‘When I saw him he’d just won a bet of $10,000 with a Steel Corporation man that there’d be four suicides in the Allegheny rolling mills to-day. So everybody in sight had to walk up and have drinks on him. He took a fancy to me and asked me to dinner with him. We went to a restaurant in Diamond alley and sat on stools and had a sparkling Moselle and clam chowder and apple fritters.

“ ‘Then he wanted to show me his bachelor apartment on Liberty street. He’s got ten rooms over a fish market with privilege of the bath on the next floor above. He told me it cost him $18,000 to furnish his apartment, and I believe it.

“ ‘He’s got $40,000 worth of pictures in one room, and $20,000 worth of curios and antiques in another. His name’s Scudder, and he’s 45, and taking lessons on the piano and 15,000 barrels of oil a day out of his wells.’

“ ‘All right,’ says I. ‘Preliminary canter satisfactory. But, kay vooly, voo? What good is the art junk to us? And the oil?’

“ ‘Now, that man,’ says Andy, sitting thoughtfully on the bed, ‘ain’t what you would call an ordinary scutt. When he was showing me his cabinet of art curios his face lighted up like the door of a coke oven. He says that if some of his big deals go through he’ll make J. P. Morgan’s collection of sweatshop tapestry and Augusta, Me., beadwork look like the contents of an ostrich’s craw thrown on a screen by a magic lantern.

“ ‘And then he showed me a little carving,’ went on Andy, ‘that anybody could see was a wonderful thing. It was something like 2,000 years old, he said. It was a lotus flower with a woman’s face in it carved out of a solid piece of ivory.

“ ‘Scudder looks it up in a catalogue and describes it. An Egyptian carver named Khafra made two of ’em for King Rameses II about the year B.C. The other one can’t be found. The junkshops and antique bugs have rubbered all Europe for it, but it seems to be out of stock. Scudder paid $2,000 for the one he has.’

“ ‘Oh, well,’ says I, ‘this sounds like the purling of a rill to me. I thought we came here to teach the millionaires business, instead of learning art from ’em?’

“ ‘Be patient,’ says Andy, kindly. ‘Maybe we will see a rift in the smoke ere long.’

“All the next morning Andy was out. I didn’t see him until about noon. He came to the hotel and called me into his room across the hall. He pulled a roundish bundle about as big as a goose egg out of his pocket and unwrapped it. It was an ivory carving just as he had described the millionaire’s to me.

“ ‘I went in an old second hand store and pawnshop a while ago,’ says Andy, ‘and I see this half hidden under a lot of old daggers and truck. The pawnbroker said he’d had it several years and thinks it was soaked by some Arabs or Turks or some foreign dubs that used to live down by the river.

“ ‘I offered him $2 for it, and I must have looked like I wanted it, for he said it would be taking the pumpernickel out of his children’s mouths to hold any conversation that did not lead up to a price of $35. I finally got it for $25.

“ ‘Jeff,’ goes on Andy, ‘this is the exact counterpart of Scudder’s carving. It’s absolutely a dead ringer for it. He’ll pay $2,000 for it as quick as he’d tuck a napkin under his chin. And why shouldn’t it be the genuine other one, anyhow, that the old gypsy whittled out?’

“ ‘Why not, indeed?’ says I. ‘And how shall we go about compelling him to make a voluntary purchase of it?’

“Andy had his plan all ready, and I’ll tell you how we carried it out.

“I got a pair of blue spectacles, put on my black frock coat, rumpled my hair up and became Prof. Pickleman. I went to another hotel, registered, and sent a telegram to Scudder to come to see me at once on important art business. The elevator dumped him on me in less than an hour. He was a foggy man with a clarion voice, smelling of Connecticut wrappers and naphtha.

“ ‘Hello, Profess!’ he shouts. ‘How’s your conduct?’

“I rumpled my hair some more and gave him a blue glass stare.

“ ‘Sir,’ says I, ‘are you Cornelius T. Scudder? Of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania?’

“ ‘I am,’ says he. ‘Come out and have a drink.’

“ ‘I’ve neither the time nor the desire,’ says I, ‘for such harmful and deleterious amusements. I have come from New York,’ says I, ‘on a matter of busi — on a matter of art.

“ ‘I learned there that you are the owner of an Egyptian ivory carving of the time of Rameses II, representing the head of Queen Isis in a lotus flower. There were only two of such carvings made. One has been lost for many years. I recently discovered and purchased the other in a pawn — in an obscure museum in Vienna. I wish to purchase yours. Name your price.’

“ ‘Well, the great ice jams, Profess!’ says Scudder. ‘Have you found the other one? Me sell? No. I don’t guess Cornelius Scudder needs to sell anything that he wants to keep. Have you got the carving with you, Profess?’

“I shows it to Scudder. He examines it careful all over.

“ ‘It’s the article,’ says he. ‘It’s a duplicate of mine, every line and curve of it. Tell you what I’ll do,’ he says. ‘I won’t sell, but I’ll buy. Give you $2,500 for yours.’

“ ‘Since you won’t sell, I will,’ says I. ‘Large bills, please. I’m a man of few words. I must return to New York tonight. I lecture tomorrow at the aquarium.’

“Scudder sends a check down and the hotel cashes it. He goes off with his piece of antiquity and I hurry back to Andy’s hotel, according to arrangement.

“Andy is walking up and down the room looking at his watch.

“ ‘Well?’ he says.

“ ‘Twenty-five hundred,’ says I. ‘Cash.’

“ ‘We’ve got just eleven minutes,’ says Andy, ‘to catch the B. & O. westbound. Grab your baggage.’

“ ‘What’s the hurry,’ says I. ‘It was a square deal. And even if it was only an imitation of the original carving it’ll take him some time to find it out. He seemed to be sure it was the genuine article.’

“ ‘It was,’ says Andy. ‘It was his own. When I was looking at his curios yesterday he stepped out of the room for a moment and I pocketed it. Now, will you pick up your suit case and hurry?’

“ ‘Then,’ says I, ‘why was that story about finding another one in the pawn—’

“ ‘Oh,’ says Andy, ‘out of respect for that conscience of yours. Come on.’ ”

Perhaps the greatest rare-book dealer in the history of the United States was Abraham Simon Wolf Rosenbach (1876–1952), who also was a collector of rare books and manuscripts. As a bookseller he was noted for his exceptional scholarship and business acumen.

He received his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a teaching fellow for six years before joining with his brother to found the Rosenbach Company; he specialized in books and his brother in antiques. The firm soon became the most lucrative bookselling business in the world, boasting such clients as J. Pierpont Morgan and Henry Huntington. The Rosenbach Company acquired and sold an unimaginable eight Gutenberg Bibles and thirty Shakespeare first folios. During the course of his career, Rosenbach is said to have spent about seventy-five million dollars at auctions.

Among much else, he was particularly noted for his magnificent collection of children’s books, ultimately donated to the Philadelphia Free Library. His book on the subject, Early American Children’s Books (1933), is still regarded as a standard reference book. He was a frequent writer on bibliographical and literary subjects, producing numerous articles and books, including Books and Bidders (1927) and A Book Hunter’s Holiday (1936). His one effort in fiction, The Unpublishable Memoirs (1917), features a bibliophile who finds methods of adding books to his collection that he might otherwise not have found attainable.

“The Unpublishable Memoirs” was originally published in The Unpublishable Memoirs (New York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1917).

It was very cruel.

He was dickering for one of the things he had desired for a lifetime.

It was in New York at one of the famous book-stores of the metropolis. The proprietor had offered to him for one hundred and sixty dollars — exactly the amount he had in bank — the first and only edition of the “Unpublishable Memoirs” of Beau Brummel, a little volume issued in London in 1790, and one of two copies known, the other being in the famous “hidden library” of the British Museum.

It was a scandalous chronicle of fashionable life in the eighteenth century, and many brilliant names were implicated therein; distinguished and reputable families, that had long been honoured in the history of England, were ruthlessly depicted with a black and venomous pen. He had coveted this book for years, and here it was within his grasp! He had just told the proprietor that he would take it.

Robert Hooker was a book-collector. With not a great deal of money, he had acquired a few of the world’s most sought after treasures. He had laboriously saved his pennies, and had, with the magic of the bibliophile, turned them into rare volumes! He was about to put the evil little book into his pocket when he was interrupted.

A large, portly man, known to book-lovers the world over, had entered the shop and asked Mr. Rodd if he might examine the Beau Brummel Memoirs. He had looked at it before, he said, but on that occasion had merely remarked that he would call again. He saw the volume on the table in front of Hooker, picked it up without ceremony, and told the owner of the shop that he would purchase it.

“Excuse me,” exclaimed Hooker, “but I have just bought it.”

“What!” said the opulent John Fenn, “I came especially to get it.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fenn,” returned the proprietor, “Mr. Hooker, here, has just said that he would take it.”

“Now, look here, Rodd, I’ve always been a good customer of yours. I’ve spent thousands in this very shop during the last few years. I’ll give you two hundred dollars for it.”

“No,” said Rodd.

“Three hundred!” said Fenn.

“No.”

“Four hundred!”

“No.”

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars for it, and if you do not take it, I shall never enter this place again!”

Without another word Rodd nodded, and Fenn quickly grasped the little book, and placed it in the inside pocket of his coat. Hooker became angry and threatened to take it by bodily force. A scuffle ensued. Two clerks came to the rescue, and Fenn departed triumphantly with the secrets of the noble families of Great Britain securely in his possession.

Rodd, in an ingratiating manner, declared to Hooker that no money had passed between them, and consequently there had been no sale. Hooker, disappointed, angry, and beaten, could do nothing but retire.

At home, among his books, his anger increased. It was the old, old case of the rich collector gobbling up the small one. It was outrageous! He would get even — if it cost him everything. He dwelt long and bitterly upon his experience. A thought struck him. Why not prey upon the fancies of the wealthy! He would enter the lists with them; he would match his skill against their money, his knowledge against their purse.

Hooker was brought up in the mystic lore of books, for he was the son of a collector’s son. He had always been a student, and half his time had been spent in the bookseller’s shops, dreaming of the wonderful editions of Chaucer, of Shakespeare, of rare Ben Jonson, that some day he might call his own. He would now secure the priceless things dearest to the hearts of men, at no cost to himself!

He would not limit his choice to books, which were his first love, but he would help himself to the fair things that have always delighted the soul — pictures, like those of Raphael and da Vinci; jewels, like Cellini’s; little bronzes, like Donatello’s; etchings of Rembrandt; the porcelains (True Ming!) of old China; the rugs of Persia the magnificent!

The idea struck him at first as ludicrous and impossible. The more he thought of it, the more feasible it became. He had always been a good mimic, a fair amateur actor, a linguist, and a man of parts. He possessed scholarly attainments of a high order. He would use all of his resources in the game he was about to play. For nothing deceives like education!

And it had another side — a brighter, more fantastic side. Think of the fun he would get out of it! This appealed to him. Not only could he add to his collections the most beautiful treasures of the world, but he would now taste the keenest of joys — he would laugh and grow fat at the other man’s expense. It was always intensely humorous to observe the discomfiture of others.

With particular pleasure Hooker read that evening in the Post this insignificant paragraph:

“John Fenn, President of the Tenth National Bank of Chicago, departs for home tonight.”

He laid the paper down immediately, telephoned to the railroad office for a reservation in the sleeping-car leaving at midnight, and prepared for his first “banquet.” Hooker shaved off his moustache, changed his clothes and his accent, and took the train for Chicago.

As luck would have it, John Fenn was seated next to him in the smoking-car, reading the evening papers. Hooker took from his pocket a book catalogue, issued by one of the great English auction houses. He knew that was the best bait! No book-lover that ever lived could resist dipping into a sale catalogue.

Hooker waited an hour — it seemed like five. Fenn read every word in the papers, even the advertisements. He dwelt long and lovingly over the financial pages, running his eyes up and down the columns of “to-day’s transactions.” He at last finished the perusal, and glanced at Hooker. He said nothing for awhile, and appeared restless, like a man with money weighing on his mind. This, of course, is a very distracting and unpleasant feeling. Several times he seemed on the verge of addressing his fellow-traveller, but desisted from the attempt. Finally he said:

“I see, friend, that you’re reading one of Sotheby’s catalogues.”

“Yes,” answered Hooker, shortly.

“You must be interested in books,” pursued Fenn.

“Yes,” was the brief response.

“Do you collect them?”

“Yes.”

Fenn said nothing for five minutes. The stranger did not appear to be very communicative.

“Pardon me, Mr. — , I am also a book-collector. I have quite a fine library of my own.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I always visit the shops when I go to New York. Here is a rarity I picked up to-day.”

The stranger expressed little interest until Fenn took from his pocket the “Unpublishable Memoirs.” It was wrapped neatly in paper, and Fenn carefully removed the little volume from the wrappings. He handed it to the man who perused so assiduously the auction catalogue.

“How extraordinary!” he cried, “the lost book of old Brummel. My people were acquainted with the Beau. I suppose they are grilled right merrily in it! Of all places, how did you come to purchase it in the States?”

“That’s quite a story. A queer thing how I bought it. I saw it the other day at Rodd’s on Fifth Avenue. I did not buy it at first — the price was too high. Thought I would be able to buy it later for less. This morning, I went to see Rodd to make an offer on it, when I found that Rodd had just sold it to some young student. The confounded simpleton said it belonged to him! What did that trifler know about rare books? Now I know how to appreciate them.”

“Naturally!” said the stranger.

“I’ve the finest collection in the West. I had to pay a stiff advance before the proprietor would let me have it. It was a narrow squeak — by about a minute. The young jackass tried to make a scene, but I taught him a thing or two. He’ll not be so perky next time. How my friends will enjoy this story of the killing. I can’t wait until I get home.”

The stranger with the freshly-shaven face, the English clothes, and the austere eyes did not seem particularly pleased.

“How extraordinary!” he said, coldly, and returned to his reading.

Fenn placed the book in his pocket, a pleased expression on his face, as if he were still gloating over his conquest. He was well satisfied with his day, so intellectually spent among the banks and book-shops of New York!

“By the way, I am acquainted with this Rodd,” said the Englishman, after a pause. “He told me a rather interesting story the other day, but it was in a way a boomerang. I don’t like that man’s methods. I’ll never buy a book from him.”

“Why not?” asked the inquisitive Mr. Fenn.

“Well, you’d better hear the tale. It appears he has a wealthy client in Chicago and he occasionally goes out to sell him some of his plunder. He did not tell me the name of his customer, but, according to Rodd, he is an ignoramus and knows nothing at all about books. Thinks it improves his social position. You know the type. Last winter Rodd picked up for fifty dollars a beautifully illuminated copy of Magna Charta issued about a hundred years ago. It’s a fine volume, printed on vellum, the kind that Dibdin raved about, but always considered a ‘plug’ in England. Worth about forty guineas at the most. You know the book?”

Fenn nodded.

“Well, it worried Mr. Rodd how much he could ask his Western patron for it. He left for Chicago via Philadelphia and while he was waiting in the train there he thought he could ask two hundred dollars for it. The matter was on his mind until he arrived at Harrisburg, where he determined that three hundred would be about right. At Pittsburgh he raised the price to five hundred, and at Canton, Ohio, it was seven hundred and fifty! The more Rodd thought of the exquisite beauty of the volume, of its glowing colors and its lovely old binding, the more the price soared. At Fort Wayne, Indiana, it was a thousand dollars. When he arrived at Chicago the next morning, his imagination having had full swing, he resolved he would not under any circumstances part with it for less than two thousand dollars!”

“The old thief!” exclaimed Fenn, with feeling.

“It was a lucky thing,” continued the stranger, “that his client did not live in San Francisco!”

At this Fenn broke forth into profanity.

“I always said that Rodd was an unprincipled, unholy, unmitigated—”

“Wait until you hear the end, sir,” said the Englishman.

“That afternoon he called on the Western collector. He had an appointment with him at two o’clock. He left Rodd waiting in an outside office for hours. Rodd told me he was simply boiling. Went all the way to Chicago by special request and the brute made him cool his heels until four o’clock before he condescended to see him. He would pay dearly for it. When Rodd showed him the blooming book he asked three thousand five hundred for it — would not take a penny less — and he told me, sir, that he actually sold it for that price!”

“Don’t you believe it,” said Fenn, hotly. “Old Rodd is an unqualified liar. He sold it for five thousand dollars. That’s what he did, the damn pirate!”

“How do you know, sir?”

“How do I know, know, know!” he repeated, excitedly. “I ought to know! I’m the fool that bought it!”

Without another word Fenn retired to his stateroom.

The next morning when Fenn arrived at his office in the Fenn Building, he called to one of his business associates, who, like his partner, was interested in the acquisition of rare and unusual books.

“I say, Ogden, I have something great to show you. Picked it up yesterday. In this package is the wickedest little book ever written!”

“Let me see it!” said Mr. Ogden, eagerly.

Fenn gingerly removed the paper in which it was wrapped, as he did not wish to injure the precious contents. He turned suddenly pale. Ogden glanced quickly at the title-page for fear he would be seen with the naughty little thing in his hands.

It was a very ordinary volume, entitled, “A Sermon on Covetousness, a Critical Exposition of the Tenth Commandment by the Rev. Charles Wesley.”

“The devil!” exclaimed John Fenn.

“How the old dodge works,” said Robert Hooker to himself on his way back to New York. “The duplicate package, known since the days of Adam! And how easy it was to substitute it under his very eyes! I shall call Beau Brummel’s ‘Unpublishable Memoirs’ number one in my new library.”

Jack Boyle (1881–1928) wrote only one book about Boston Blackie, but the character resonated enough to inspire around ten silent films about him, followed by fourteen “B” movies made by Columbia from 1941 to 1949, all starring Chester Morris, who played him as much a detective as a criminal employing his unique skills, just outside the law, to bring about justice. The success of the films led to two radio series, one starring Morris and the second Richard Kollmar (1944–1950), and a television series (1951–1953) starring Kent Taylor.

In his introduction to Boston Blackie (1919), the author wrote about the ex-convict and cracksman, “To the police and the world he is a professional crook, a skilled and daring safe cracker, an incorrigible criminal made doubly dangerous by intellect... But to me,... ‘Blackie’ is something more — a man with more than a spark of the Divine Spirit that lies hidden in the heart of even the worst of men. University graduate, scholar and gentleman, the ‘Blackie’ I know is a man of many inconsistencies and a strangely twisted code of morals.”

Blackie does not consider himself a criminal; he is a combatant who has declared war on society. He is married to a pretty girl named Mary, his “best loved pal and sole confidante,” who knows what he does and joins in his exploits.

Curiously, Blackie lives and works in San Francisco; Boston has nothing to do with the book and is never mentioned, just as it never served as a background in any of the films.

“Boston Blackie’s Code” was first published in Boston Blackie (New York, H. K. Fly, 1919).

Her throat tightened in an aching pain as her eye fell on the thin gold band that encircled a slender finger. Martin Wilmerding had stooped to kiss that hand and ring on the day it first was placed there.

“Dear little wife,” he had said, “that ring is the symbol of a bond that never will be broken by me. Throughout all the years before us, whenever I see it, this hour will return, bringing back all the love and devotion that is in my heart now.”

Recollection of the long-forgotten words swept her with a sudden revulsion of feeling, and she sprang to her feet. In that instant she realized for the first time why she had come to love Don Lavalle. It was because in his fresh, ardent, impulsive devotion he was so like the Martin Wilmerding who had kissed her hand and ring with a vow of lifetime fealty that had left her clinging to him in tearful ecstasy.

“Don,” she said, “if you really love me, go — now, now.”

Lavalle’s arms, eagerly outstretched toward her, dropped to his side. It was not the answer he had awaited so confidently. A vague resentment against her tinged his disappointment with new bitterness.

“That is final, is it, Marian?” he asked.

“Yes, yes. Don’t make it harder for me. Please go,” she cried almost hysterically.

He slipped into his overcoat.

“Perhaps you will tell me why,” he suggested with increasing asperity.

“Because of the boy and this,” the woman said brokenly, laying a finger on her wedding-ring.

“Nonsense,” he cried angrily. “What tie does that ring represent that Martin Wilmerding has not violated a hundred times? You have been faithful to it, we know, even though you admit you care for me. But has he? I have not the pleasure of your husband’s acquaintance, but no man ever neglected a wife like you without a reason.”

“Go, please, quickly,” she pleaded, shivering.

“I will,” he said, instinctively avoiding the blunder of combating her decision with argument.

He caught her in his arms, and stooping quickly, kissed her on the lips. She reeled away from him, sobbing.

“Our first and last kiss. Good-by, Marian,” he said gently, and left the room.

She followed, clutching at the walls for support as she watched him from the doorway. He adjusted his muffler and caught up his hat without a backward glance, and she pressed her two hands to her lips to choke back a cry. Then as he opened the outer door, the crushing misery of her loneliness swept over her, overpowering self-restraint and resolution.

“Don, oh, Don!” she pleaded, stumbling toward him with outstretched arms.

In a second he was at her side, and she was crying against his breast.

“I can’t let you go,” she sobbed. “I tried, but I can’t. Take me, Don. I will do as you wish.”

From his hiding-place Blackie saw them re-enter the room. The woman stopped by the fireplace, drew off her wedding-ring and after holding it a second between shaking fingers, dropped it into the ashes.

“Dead and gone!” she said. “Dead as the love of the man who put it on my finger.”

“My ring will replace it,” said Lavalle tenderly, but with triumph in his eyes. “Wilmerding will want a divorce. He shall have it, and then you’ll wear the wedding-ring of the man who loves you and whom you love — the only ring in the world that shouldn’t be broken.”

“Don, promise me that you will never leave me alone,” she pleaded falteringly. “I don’t ever want a chance to think, to reflect, to regret. I only want to be with you — and forget everything else in the world. Promise me.”

“Love like mine knows no such word as separation,” he answered. “From this hour we will never be apart. Don’t fear regrets, Marian. There will be none.”

“My boy,” she suggested, “he will go with us. Poor little Martin! I wouldn’t leave him behind fatherless and motherless.”

“Of course not,” he agreed. “And now you must get a few necessaries together quickly — just the things you will require on the steamer. You can get all you need when we reach Honolulu, but there is no time for anything now, for under the circumstances it is best that we go aboard the steamer before morning. Can you be ready in an hour?”

“In an hour!” she cried in surprise. “Yes, I can, but... but... how can we go aboard the steamer tonight? We can’t, Don. Your passage is booked, but not mine.”

“My passage is booked for Don Lavalle and wife,” he informed her smilingly.

She turned away her head to hide the flush that colored her face.

“You were so sure as that!” she murmured, with a strangely new sense of disappointment.

“Yes,” Lavalle answered, “for I knew love like mine could not fail to win yours. Will you pack a single trunk while I run back to my hotel and get my own things together? I can be back in an hour or less. Will you be ready?”

“Yes, I will be ready,” she promised wearily. “I will only take a few things. I want nothing that my — husband ever gave me. I shall only take a few of my own things and the jewels in the safe that were in Mother’s collection. They are my own, and they’re very valuable, Don. It will not be safe to risk packing them in my baggage. I’ll get them now and give them to you to keep until we can leave them in the purser’s safe tomorrow. Be very careful of them, Don. They couldn’t be replaced for a fortune.”

Boston Blackie saw her hurry to the wall — saw the sliding door roll back; with a quickly indrawn breath, he watched the woman fumble nervously with the combination-dial. The safe-door swung open, and she rapidly sorted out a half-dozen jewel-cases and re-closed the safe.

“Here they are, Don,” she said, handing the gems to Lavalle. “I have taken only those that came from my own people. And now you must leave me. I must pack, and I can’t call the servants under these circumstances. I must get the boy up and ready; and also,” — she hesitated a second and then added — “I must write a note to Mr. Wilmerding telling him what I have done and why.”

“Don’t mail it until we are at the dock,” warned the man. “Where is he — at his club or out of town?”

“He’s at the Del Monte Hotel near Monterey — or was,” she answered. “The letter won’t reach him till tomorrow night.”

“And tomorrow night we will be far out of sight of land,” Lavalle cried. “That is as it should be. I am glad I never met him, for now I need never do so.”

He stuffed the jewel-cases into his overcoat.

“I’ll be back in my car in an hour,” he warned. “Hurry, Marian, my love. Each minute until I am with you again will be a day.”

He caught up his hat and ran down the steps to the street, where his car stood at the curbstone.

As the door closed behind him, Marian Wilmerding sank into a chair and clutched her throat to stifle choking sobs. Intuitive womanly fear of what she was to do paralyzed her. For many minutes she lay shaking convulsively as she tried to overcome the dread that chilled her heart. Then the dismal atmosphere of the masterless home began to oppress her with a sense of wretched loneliness.

She rose and with hard, reckless eyes shining hotly from behind wet lashes, ran upstairs to pack.

As Donald Lavalle threw open the door of his empty car, a man who had slipped behind him around the corner of the Wilmerding residence stepped to his side.

“I’m sorry to have to trouble you for my wife’s jewels, Lavalle,” he said.

The triumphant smile on Lavalle’s face faded, and he shrank back in speechless consternation.

“Your wife’s jewels!” he ejaculated, trying to recover from the shock of the utterly unexpected interruption. “You are—”

“Yes, I am Martin Wilmerding; and the happy chance that brought me home tonight also gave me the pleasure of listening from the window-seat of the living-room to your interesting tete-a-tete with my wife.”

A gun flashed into Boston Blackie’s hand and was jabbed sharply into Lavalle’s ribs.

“Give me Marian’s jewels,” the pseudo-husband cried. “Hand them over before I blow your heart out. That’s what I ought to do — and I may, anyway.”

Lavalle handed over the cases that contained the Wilmerding collection of gems.

“Now,” continued his captor, “I want a word with you.”

A gun was thrust so savagely into Lavalle’s face that it left a long red bruise.

“I have heard all you said tonight. I know all your plans for stealing away my wife,” the inexorable voice continued, “and I’ve just a word of warning for you. You are dealing with a man, not a woman, from now on; and if you phone, write, telegraph, or ever again communicate in any way with Marian, I’ll blow your worthless brains out if I have to follow you round the world to do it. Do you get that, Mr. Don Lavalle?”

“I understand you,” said Lavalle helplessly.

Again the gun-muzzle bruised the flesh of his cheek.

“And as a last and kindly warning, Lavalle,” Blackie continued, “I suggest that you take extreme precautions to see that you do not miss the Manchuria when she sails in the morning; because if you are not on board, you won’t live to see another sunset if I have to kill you in your own club. Will you sail or die?”

“I’ll sail,” said Lavalle.

“Very well. That’s about all that requires words between us, I believe. Go, and remember your life is in your own hands. One word of any kind to Marian, and you forfeit it. I don’t know why I don’t kill you now. I would if it were not for the scandal all this would cause when it came out before the jury that would acquit me. Now go.”

Lavalle pressed the button that started the motor as Boston Blackie stepped back from his side.

“I’ve just one word I want to say to you, Wilmerding,” Lavalle began, his foot on the clutch. “It’s this: You have only yourself to blame. Don’t accuse Marian. You forced her into the situation you discovered this evening, by your neglect of the finest little woman I ever met. I was forced into it by a love I admit frankly. Don’t blame Marian for what you yourself have caused. I won’t ever see or communicate with her again.”

“That’s the most decent speech I’ve heard from your lips tonight,” said the man beside the car, dropping his gun back into an outside pocket. “I don’t blame her. I’ve learned many important facts tonight — one of which is that the right place for a man is in his own home with his own wife. I’m going to remember that; and the wedding-ring that was dropped into the ashes tonight is going back on the finger it fits. Good night.”

Lavalle without a word threw in the clutch, and his car sped away and was enveloped and hidden by the fog.

Halfway down the block, Boston Blackie came to another car standing at the curb with a well-muffled chauffeur sitting behind the wheel. As he climbed in, the driver, Mary, uttered a low, thankful cry.

“No trouble. I have the jewels here — feel the packages; and a whole lot happened,” said Blackie with deep satisfaction. “I’ve a new story to tell you when we get home, Mary. It’s the story of a big burglar named Blackie and a little boy named Martin Wilmerding and a still littler woolly dog named Rex, and a woman who guessed wrong. I think it will interest you. Let’s go. I have several things to do before we go home.”

When they reached the downtown district, Blackie had Mary drive him to the Palace Hotel. There he sought out the night stenographer.

“Will you take a telegram for me, please,” he said. Then he dictated:

Though there was a telegraph-office in the hotel, he summoned a messenger-boy from a saloon and sent the message.

Then he went to another hotel and found a second stenographer, to whom he dictated a second message.

Summoning another boy, he sent the second message from a different telegraph office.

“Those telegrams, and how they came to be sent, will be a mystery in the Wilmerding home to the end of time,” he thought, deeply contented.

“Let’s go home, Mary,” he said then, returning to his car and climbing in. “I think I’ve finished my night’s work, and I don’t believe I’ve done such a bad job either.”

He was silent for a moment.

“I’ve given a wife to a husband,” he said half to himself. “I’ve given a father to a child; I’ve given a mother the right to look her son in the face without shame; and I’ve played square with the gamest little pal I ever want to know, Martin Wilmerding, Jr., and his dog, Rex. And for my pay I’ve taken the Wilmerding jewel-collection. I wonder who’s the debtor.”

A popular writer of adventure fiction who was born in Canada of American parents, Frank Lucius Packard (1877–1942) made numerous trips to the Far East and elsewhere in search of adventure material, resulting in such popular works as Two Stolen Idols (1927), Shanghai Jim (1928), and The Dragon’s Jaws (1937). His greatest success, however, came with the Jimmie Dale series, which sold more than two million copies.

Dale, like his namesake, O. Henry’s Jimmy Valentine, is a safecracker who learned the skill from his father’s safe-manufacturing business. A wealthy member of one of New York’s most exclusive clubs, Dale leads a quadruple life. He is the Gray Seal, the mysterious thief who leaves his mark, a gray seal, at the scene of his crimes; Larry the Bat, a member of the city’s underworld; Smarlinghue, a fallen artist; and Jimmie Dale, part of New York’s social elite. In the Raffles tradition of so many other cracksmen in literature, Dale’s burglaries are illegal, of course, but they are benevolently committed in order to right wrongs and they involve no violence. There are five books in the series, beginning with The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917) and concluding with Jimmie Dale and the Missing Hour (1935). Seven films were made from Packard’s novels and short stories, most notably The Miracle Man (1932) starring Sylvia Sidney and Chester Morris; the story of another character, a con man, was released as a silent picture in 1919. Several two-reel silent films, starring E. K. Lincoln as Jimmie Dale, were based on short stories published in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1917).

“The Gray Seal” was originally published in People’s Ideal Fiction Magazine in 1914; it was first collected in The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (New York, George H. Doran, 1917).

Among New York’s fashionable and ultra-exclusive clubs, the St. James stood an acknowledged leader — more men, perhaps, cast an envious eye at its portals, of modest and unassuming taste, as they passed by on Fifth Avenue, than they did at any other club upon the long list that the city boasts. True, there were more expensive clubs upon whose membership roll scintillated more stars of New York’s social set, but the St. James was distinctive. It guaranteed a man, so to speak — that is, it guaranteed a man to be innately a gentleman. It required money, it is true, to keep up one’s membership, but there were many members who were not wealthy, as wealth is measured nowadays — there were many, even, who were pressed sometimes to meet their dues and their house accounts, but the accounts were invariably promptly paid. No man, once in, could ever afford, or ever had the desire, to resign from the St. James Club. Its membership was cosmopolitan; men of every walk in life passed in and out of its doors, professional men and business men, physicians, artists, merchants, authors, engineers, each stamped with the “hall mark” of the St. James, an innate gentleman. To receive a two weeks’ out-of-town visitor’s card to the St. James was something to speak about, and men from Chicago, St. Louis, or San Francisco spoke of it with a sort of holier-than-thou air to fellow members of their own exclusive clubs, at home again.

Is there any doubt that Jimmie Dale was a gentleman — an innate gentleman? Jimmie Dale’s father had been a member of the St. James Club, and one of the largest safe manufacturers of the United States, a prosperous, wealthy man, and at Jimmie Dale’s birth he had proposed his son’s name for membership. It took some time to get into the St. James; there was a long waiting list that neither money, influence, nor pull could alter by so much as one iota. Men proposed their sons’ names for membership when they were born as religiously as they entered them upon the city’s birth register. At twenty-one Jimmie Dale was elected to membership; and, incidentally, that same year, graduated from Harvard. It was Mr. Dale’s desire that his son should enter the business and learn it from the ground up, and Jimmie Dale, for four years thereafter, had followed his father’s wishes. Then his father died. Jimmie Dale had leanings toward more artistic pursuits than business. He was credited with sketching a little, writing a little; and he was credited with having received a very snug amount from the combine to which he sold out his safe-manufacturing interests. He lived a bachelor life — his mother had been dead many years — in the house that his father had left him on Riverside Drive, kept a car or two and enough servants to run his menage smoothly, and serve a dinner exquisitely when he felt hospitably inclined.

Could there be any doubt that Jimmie Dale was innately a gentleman?

It was evening, and Jimmie Dale sat at a small table in the corner of the St. James Club dining room. Opposite him sat Herman Carruthers, a young man of his own age, about twenty-six, a leading figure in the newspaper world, whose rise from reporter to managing editor of the morning News-Argus within the short space of a few years had been almost meteoric.

They were at coffee and cigars, and Jimmie Dale was leaning back in his chair, his dark eyes fixed interestedly on his guest.

Carruthers, intently engaged in trimming his cigar ash on the edge of the Limoges china saucer of his coffee set, looked up with an abrupt laugh.

“No; I wouldn’t care to go on record as being an advocate of crime,” he said whimsically; “that would never do. But I don’t mind admitting quite privately that it’s been a positive regret to me that he has gone.”

“Made too good ‘copy’ to lose, I suppose?” suggested Jimmie Dale quizzically. “Too bad, too, after working up a theatrical name like that for him — the Gray Seal — rather unique! Who stuck that on him — you?”

Carruthers laughed — then, grown serious, leaned toward Jimmie Dale.

“You don’t mean to say, Jimmie, that you don’t know about that, do you?” he asked incredulously. “Why, up to a year ago the papers were full of him.”

“I never read your beastly agony columns,” said Jimmie Dale, with a cheery grin.

“Well,” said Carruthers, “you must have skipped everything but the stock reports then.”

“Granted,” said Jimmie Dale. “So go on, Carruthers, and tell me about him — I dare say I may have heard of him, since you are so distressed about it, but my memory isn’t good enough to contradict anything you may have to say about the estimable gentleman, so you’re safe.”

Carruthers reverted to the Limoges saucer and the tip of his cigar.

“He was the most puzzling, bewildering, delightful crook in the annals of crime,” said Carruthers reminiscently, after a moment’s silence. “Jimmie, he was the king-pin of them all. Clever isn’t the word for him, or dare-devil isn’t either. I used to think sometimes his motive was more than half for the pure deviltry of it, to laugh at the police and pull the noses of the rest of us that were after him. I used to dream nights about those confounded gray seals of his — that’s where he got his name; he left every job he ever did with a little gray paper affair, fashioned diamond-shaped, stuck somewhere where it would be the first thing your eyes would light upon when you reached the scene, and—”

“Don’t go so fast,” smiled Jimmie Dale. “I don’t quite get the connection. What did you have to do with this... er... Gray Seal fellow? Where do you come in?”

“I? I had a good deal to do with him,” said Carruthers grimly. “I was a reporter when he first broke loose, and the ambition of my life, after I began really to appreciate what he was, was to get him — and I nearly did, half a dozen times, only—”

“Only you never quite did, eh?” cut in Jimmie Dale slyly. “How near did you get, old man? Come on, now, no bluffing; did the Gray Seal ever even recognise you as a factor in the hare-and-hound game?”

“You’re flicking on the raw, Jimmie,” Carruthers answered, with a wry grimace. “He knew me, all right, confound him! He favoured me with several sarcastic notes — I’ll show ’em to you some day — explaining how I’d fallen down and how I could have got him if I’d done something else.” Carruthers’s fist came suddenly down on the table. “And I would have got him, too, if he had lived.”

“Lived!” ejaculated Jimmie Dale. “He’s dead, then?”

“Yes,” averted Carruthers; “he’s dead.”

“H’m!” said Jimmie Dale facetiously. “I hope the size of the wreath you sent was an adequate tribute of your appreciation.”

“I never sent any wreath,” returned Carruthers, “for the very simple reason that I didn’t know where to send it, or when he died. I said he was dead because for over a year now he hasn’t lifted a finger.”

“Rotten poor evidence, even for a newspaper,” commented Jimmie Dale. “Why not give him credit for having, say — reformed?”

Carruthers shook his head. “You don’t get it at all, Jimmie,” he said earnestly. “The Gray Seal wasn’t an ordinary crook — he was a classic. He was an artist, and the art of the thing was in his blood. A man like that could no more stop than he could stop breathing — and live. He’s dead; there’s nothing to it but that — he’s dead. I’d bet a year’s salary on it.”

“Another good man gone wrong, then,” said Jimmie Dale capriciously. “I suppose, though, that at least you discovered the ‘woman in the case’?”

Carruthers looked up quickly, a little startled; then laughed shortly.

“What’s the matter?” inquired Jimmie Dale.

“Nothing,” said Carruthers. “You kind of got me for a moment, that’s all. That’s the way those infernal notes from the Gray Seal used to end up: ‘Find the lady, old chap; and you’ll get me.’ He had a damned patronising familiarity that would make you squirm.”

“Poor old Carruthers!” grinned Jimmie Dale. “You did take it to heart, didn’t you?”

“I’d have sold my soul to get him — and so would you, if you had been in my boots,” said Carruthers, biting nervously at the end of his cigar.

“And been sorry for it afterward,” supplied Jimmie Dale.

“Yes, by Jove, you’re right!” admitted Carruthers. “I suppose I should. I actually got to love the fellow — it was the game, really, that I wanted to beat.”

“Well, and how about this woman? Keep on the straight and narrow path, old man,” prodded Jimmie Dale.

“The woman?” Carruthers smiled. “Nothing doing! I don’t believe there was one — he wouldn’t have been likely to egg the police and reporters on to finding her if there had been, would he? It was a blind, of course. He worked alone, absolutely alone. That’s the secret of his success, according to my way of thinking. There was never so much as an indication that he had had an accomplice in anything he ever did.”

Jimmie Dale’s eyes travelled around the club’s homelike, perfectly appointed room. He nodded to a fellow member here and there, then his eyes rested musingly on his guest again.

Carruthers was staring thoughtfully at his coffee cup.

“He was the prince of crooks and the father of originality,” announced Carruthers abruptly, following the pause that had ensued. “Half the time there wasn’t any more getting at the motive for the curious things he did, than there was getting at the Gray Seal himself.”

“Carruthers,” said Jimmie Dale, with a quick little nod of approval, “you’re positively interesting tonight. But, so far, you’ve been kind of scouting around the outside edges without getting into the thick of it. Let’s have some of your experiences with the Gray Seal in detail; they ought to make ripping fine yarns.”

“Not tonight, Jimmie,” said Carruthers; “it would take too long.” He pulled out his watch mechanically as he spoke, glanced at it — and pushed back his chair. “Great Scott!” he exclaimed. “It’s nearly half-past nine. I’d no idea we had lingered so long over dinner. I’ll have to hurry; we’re a morning paper, you know, Jimmie.”

“What! Really! Is it as late as that.” Jimmie Dale rose from his chair as Carruthers stood up. “Well, if you must—”

“I must,” said Carruthers, with a laugh.

“All right, O slave.” Jimmie Dale laughed back — and slipped his hand, a trick of their old college days together, through Carruthers’s arm as they left the room.

He accompanied Carruthers downstairs to the door of the club, and saw his guest into a taxi; then he returned inside, sauntered through the billiard room, and from there into one of the cardrooms, where, pressed into a game, he played several rubbers of bridge before going home.

It was, therefore, well on toward midnight when Jimmie Dale arrived at his house on Riverside Drive, and was admitted by an elderly manservant.

“Hello, Jason,” said Jimmie Dale pleasantly. “You still up!”

“Yes, sir,” replied Jason, who had been valet to Jimmie Dale’s father before him. “I was going to bed, sir, at about ten o’clock, when a messenger came with a letter. Begging your pardon, sir, a young lady, and—”

“Jason” — Jimmie Dale flung out the interruption, sudden, quick, imperative — “what did she look like?”

“Why... why, I don’t exactly know as I could describe her, sir,” stammered Jason, taken aback. “Very ladylike, sir, in her dress and appearance, and what I would call, sir, a beautiful face.”

“Hair and eyes — what color?” demanded Jimmie Dale crisply. “Nose, lips, chin — what shape?”

“Why, sir,” gasped Jason, staring at his master, “I... I don’t rightly know. I wouldn’t call her fair or dark, something between. I didn’t take particular notice, and it wasn’t overlight outside the door.”

“It’s too bad you weren’t a younger man, Jason,” commented Jimmie Dale, with a curious tinge of bitterness in his voice. “I’d have given a year’s income for your opportunity tonight, Jason.”

“Yes, sir,” said Jason helplessly.

“Well, go on,” prompted Jimmie Dale. “You told her I wasn’t home, and she said she knew it, didn’t she? And she left the letter that I was on no account to miss receiving when I got back, though there was no need of telephoning me to the club — when I returned would do, but it was imperative that I should have it then — eh?”

“Good Lord, sir!” ejaculated Jason, his jaw dropped, “that’s exactly what she did say.”

“Jason,” said Jimmie Dale grimly, “listen to me. If ever she comes here again, inveigle her in. If you can’t inveigle her, use force; capture her, pull her in, do anything — do anything, do you hear? Only don’t let her get away from you until I’ve come.”

Jason gazed at his master as though the other had lost his reason.

“Use force, sir?” he repeated weakly — and shook his head. “You... you can’t mean that, sir.”

“Can’t I?” inquired Jimmie Dale, with a mirthless smile. “I mean every word of it, Jason — and if I thought there was the slightest chance of her giving you the opportunity, I’d be more imperative still. As it is — where’s the letter?”

“On the table in your studio, sir,” said Jason, mechanically.

Jimmie Dale started toward the stairs — then turned and came back to where Jason, still shaking his head heavily, had been gazing anxiously after his master. Jimmie Dale laid his hand on the old man’s shoulder.

“Jason,” he said kindly, with a swift change of mood, “you’ve been a long time in the family — first with father, and now with me. You’d do a good deal for me, wouldn’t you?”

“I’d do anything in the world for you, Master Jim,” said the old man earnestly.

“Well, then, remember this,” said Jimmie Dale slowly, looking into the other’s eyes, “remember this — keep your mouth shut and your eyes open. It’s my fault. I should have warned you long ago, but I never dreamed that she would ever come here herself. There have been times when it was practically a matter of life and death to me to know who that woman is that you saw tonight. That’s all, Jason. Now go to bed.”

“Master Jim,” said the old man simply, “thank you, sir, thank you for trusting me. I’ve dandled you on my knee when you were a baby, Master Jim. I don’t know what it’s about, and it isn’t for me to ask. I thought, sir, that maybe you were having a little fun with me. But I know now, and you can trust me, Master Jim, if she ever comes again.”

“Thank you, Jason,” said Jimmie Dale, his hand closing with an appreciative pressure on the other’s shoulder “Good-night, Jason.”

Upstairs on the first landing, Jimmie Dale opened a door, closed and locked it behind him — and the electric switch clicked under his fingers. A glow fell softly from a cluster of shaded ceiling lights. It was a large room, a very large room, running the entire depth of the house, and the effect of apparent disorder in the arrangement of its appointments seemed to breathe a sense of charm. There were great cozy, deep, leather-covered lounging chairs, a huge, leather-covered davenport, and an easel or two with half-finished sketches upon them; the walls were panelled, the panels of exquisite grain and matching; in the centre of the room stood a flat-topped rosewood desk; upon the floor was a dark, heavy velvet rug; and, perhaps most inviting of all, there was a great, old-fashioned fireplace at one side of the room.

For an instant Jimmie Dale remained quietly by the door, as though listening. Six feet he stood, muscular in every line of his body, like a well-trained athlete with no single ounce of superfluous fat about him — the grace and ease of power in his poise. His strong, clean-shaven face, as the light fell upon it now, was serious — a mood that became him well — the firm lips closed, the dark, reliant eyes a little narrowed, a frown on the broad forehead, the square jaw clamped.

Then abruptly he walked across the room to the desk, picked up an envelope that lay upon it, and, turning again, dropped into the nearest lounging chair.

There had been no doubt in his mind, none to dispel. It was precisely what he had expected from almost the first word Jason had spoken. It was the same handwriting, the same texture of paper, and there was the same old haunting, rare, indefinable fragrance about it. Jimmie Dale’s hands turned the envelope now this way, now that, as he looked at it. Wonderful hands were Jimmie Dale’s, with long, slim, tapering fingers whose sensitive tips seemed now as though they were striving to decipher the message within.

He laughed suddenly, a little harshly, and tore open the envelope. Five closely written sheets fell into his hand. He read them slowly, critically, read them over again; and then, his eyes on the rug at his feet, he began to tear the paper into minute pieces between his fingers, depositing the pieces, as he tore them, upon the arm of his chair. The five sheets demolished, his fingers dipped into the heap of shreds on the arm of the chair and tore them over and over again, tore them until they were scarcely larger than bits of confetti, tore at them absently and mechanically, his eyes never shifting from the rug at his feet.

Then with a shrug of his shoulders, as though rousing himself to present reality, a curious smile flickering on his lips, he brushed the pieces of paper into one hand, carried them to the empty fireplace, laid them down in a little pile, and set them afire. Lighting a cigarette, he watched them burn until the last glow had gone from the last charred scrap; then he crunched and scattered them with the brass-handled fender brush, and, retracing his steps across the room, flung back a portiere from where it hung before a little alcove, and dropped on his knees in front of a round, squat, barrel-shaped safe — one of his own design and planning in the years when he had been with his father.

His slim, sensitive fingers played for an instant among the knobs and dials that studded the door, guided, it seemed by the sense of touch alone — and the door swung open. Within was another door, with locks and bolts as intricate and massive as the outer one. This, too, he opened; and then from the interior took out a short, thick, rolled-up leather bundle tied together with thongs. He rose from his knees, closed the safe, and drew the portiere across the alcove again. With the bundle under his arm, he glanced sharply around the room, listened intently, then, unlocking the door that gave on the hall, he switched off the lights and went to his dressing room, that was on the same floor. Here, divesting himself quickly of his dinner clothes, he selected a dark tweed suit with loose-fitting sack coat from his wardrobe, and began to put it on.

Dressed, all but his coat and vest, he turned to the leather bundle that he had placed on a table, untied the thongs, and carefully opened it out to its full length — and again that curious, cryptic smile tinged his lips. Rolled the opposite away from that in which it had been tied up, the leather strip made a wide belt that went on somewhat after the fashion of a life preserver, the thongs being used for shoulder straps — a belt that, once on, the vest would hide completely, and, fitting close, left no telltale bulge in the outer garments. It was not an ordinary belt; it was full of stout-sewn, up-right little pockets all the way around, and in the pockets grimly lay an array of fine, blued-steel, highly tempered instruments — a compact, powerful burglar’s kit.

The slim, sensitive fingers passed with almost a caressing touch over the vicious little implements, and from one of the pockets extracted a thin, flat metal case. This Jimmie Dale opened, and glanced inside — between sheets of oil paper lay little rows of gray, adhesive, diamond-shaped seals.

Jimmie Dale snapped the case shut, returned it to its recess, and from another took out a black silk mask. He held it up to the light for examination.

“Pretty good shape after a year,” muttered Jimmie Dale, replacing it.

He put on the belt, then his vest and coat. From the drawer of his dresser he took an automatic revolver and an electric flashlight, slipped them into his pocket, and went softly downstairs. From the hat stand he chose a black slouch hat, pulled it well over his eyes — and left the house.

Jimmie Dale walked down a block, then hailed a bus and mounted to the top. It was late, and he found himself the only passenger. He inserted his dime in the conductor’s little resonant-belled cash receiver, and then settled back on the uncomfortable, bumping, cushionless seat.

On rattled the bus; it turned across town, passed the Circle, and headed for Fifth Avenue — but Jimmie Dale, to all appearances, was quite oblivious of its movements.

It was a year since she had written him. She! Jimmie Dale did not smile, his lips were pressed hard together. Not a very intimate or personal appellation, that — but he knew her by no other. It was a woman, surely — the hand-writing was feminine, the diction eminently so — and had she not come herself that night to Jason! He remembered the last letter, apart from the one tonight, that he had received from her. It was a year ago now — and the letter had been hardly more than a note. The police had worked themselves into a frenzy over the Gray Seal, the papers had grown absolutely maudlin — and she had written, in her characteristic way:

Things are a little too warm, aren’t they, Jimmie? Let’s let them cool for a year.

Since then until tonight he had heard nothing from her. It was a strange compact that he had entered into — so strange that it could never have known, could never know a parallel — unique, dangerous, bizarre, it was all that and more. It had begun really through his connection with his father’s business — the business of manufacturing safes that should defy the cleverest criminals — when his brains, turned into that channel, had been pitted against the underworld, against the methods of a thousand different crooks from Maine to California, the report of whose every operation had reached him in the natural course of business, and every one of which he had studied in minutest detail. It had begun through that — but at the bottom of it was his own restless, adventurous spirit.

He had meant to set the police by the ears, using his gray-seal device both as an added barb and that no innocent bystander of the underworld, innocent for once, might be involved — he had meant to laugh at them and puzzle them to the verge of madness, for in the last analysis they would find only an abortive attempt at crime — and he had succeeded. And then he had gone too far — and he had been caught — by her. That string of pearls, which, to study whose effect facetiously, he had so idiotically wrapped around his wrist, and which, so ironically, he had been unable to loosen in time and had been forced to carry with him in his sudden, desperate dash to escape from Marx’s the big jeweler’s, in Maiden Lane, whose strong room he had toyed with one night, had been the lever which, at first, she had held over him.

The bus was on Fifth Avenue now, and speeding rapidly down the deserted thoroughfare. Jimmie Dale looked up at the lighted windows of the St. James Club as they went by, smiled whimsically, and shifted in his seat, seeking a more comfortable position.

She had caught him — how he did not know — he had never seen her — did not know who she was, though time and again he had devoted all his energies for months at a stretch to a solution of the mystery. The morning following the Maiden Lane affair, indeed, before he had breakfasted, Jason had brought him the first letter from her. It had started by detailing his every move of the night before — and it had ended with an ultimatum: “The cleverness, the originality of the Gray Seal as a crook lacked but one thing,” she had naively written, “and that one thing was that his crookedness required a leading string to guide it into channels that were worthy of his genius.” In a word, she would plan the coups, and he would act at her dictation and execute them — or else how did twenty years in Sing Sing for that little Maiden Lane affair appeal to him? He was to answer by the next morning, a simple “yes” or “no” in the personal column of the morning News-Argus.

A threat to a man like Jimmie Dale was like flaunting a red rag at a bull, and a rage ungovernable had surged upon him. Then cold reason had come. He was caught — there was no question about that — she had taken pains to show him that he need make no mistake there. Innocent enough in his own conscience, as far as actual theft went, for the pearls would in due course be restored in some way to the possession of their owner, he would have been unable to make even his own father, who was alive then, believe in his innocence, let alone a jury of his peers. Dishonour, shame, ignominy, a long prison sentence, stared him in the face, and there was but one alternative — to link hands with this unseen, mysterious accomplice. Well, he could at least temporise, he could always “queer” a game in some specious manner, if he were pushed too far. And so, in the next morning’s News-Argus, Jimmie Dale had answered “yes.” And then had followed those years in which there had been no temporising, in which every plan was carried out to the last detail, those years of curious, unaccountable, bewildering affairs that Carruthers had spoken of, one on top of another, that had shaken the old headquarters on Mulberry Street to its foundations, until the Gray Seal had become a name to conjure with. And, yes, it was quite true, he had entered into it all, gone the limit, with an eagerness that was insatiable.

The bus had reached the lower end of Fifth Avenue, passed through Washington Square, and stopped at the end of its run. Jimmie Dale clambered down from the top, threw a pleasant “good-night” to the conductor, and headed briskly down the street before him. A little later he crossed into West Broadway, and his pace slowed to a leisurely stroll.

Here, at the upper end of the street, was a conglomerate business section of rather inferior class, catering doubtless to the poor, foreign element that congregated west of Broadway proper, and to the south of Washington Square. The street was, at first glance, deserted; it was dark and dreary, with stores and lofts on either side. An elevated train roared by overhead, with a thunderous, deafening clamour. Jimmie Dale, on the right-hand side of the street, glanced interestedly at the dark store windows as he went by. And then, a block ahead, on the other side, his eyes rested on an approaching form. As the other reached the corner and paused, and the light from the street lamp glinted on brass buttons, Jimmie Dale’s eyes narrowed a little under his slouch hat. The policeman, although nonchalantly swinging a nightstick, appeared to be watching him.

Jimmie Dale went on half a block farther, stooped to the sidewalk to tie his shoe, glanced back over his shoulder — the policeman was not in sight — and slipped like a shadow into the alleyway beside which he had stopped.

It was another Jimmie Dale now — the professional Jimmie Dale. Quick as a cat, active, lithe, he was over a six foot fence in the rear of a building in a flash, and crouched a black shape, against the back door of an unpretentious, unkempt, dirty, secondhand shop that fronted on West Broadway — the last place certainly in all New York that the managing editor of the News-Argus, or anyone else, for that matter, would have picked out as the setting for the second debut of the Gray Seal.

From the belt around his waist, Jimmie Dale took the black silk mask, and slipped it on; and from the belt, too, came a little instrument that his deft fingers manipulated in the lock. A curious snipping sound followed. Jimmie Dale put his weight gradually against the door. The door held fast.

“Bolted,” said Jimmie Dale to himself.

The sensitive fingers travelled slowly up and down the side of the door, seeming to press and feel for the position of the bolt through an inch of plank — then from the belt came a tiny saw, thin and pointed at the end, that fitted into the little handle drawn from another receptacle in the leather girdle beneath the unbuttoned vest.

Hardly a sound it made as it bit into the door. Half a minute passed — there was the faint fall of a small piece of wood — into the aperture crept the delicate, tapering fingers — came a slight rasping of metal — then the door swung back, the dark shadow that had been Jimmie Dale vanished, and the door closed again.

A round, white beam of light glowed for an instant — and disappeared. A miscellaneous, lumbering collection of junk and odds and ends blocked the entry, leaving no more space than was sufficient for a bare passageway. Jimmie Dale moved cautiously — and once more the flashlight in his hand showed the way for an instant — then darkness again.

The cluttered accumulation of secondhand stuff in the rear gave place to a little more orderly arrangement as he advanced toward the front of the store. Like a huge firefly, the flashlight twinkled, went out, twinkled again, and went out. He passed a sort of crude, partitioned-off apartment that did duty for the establishment’s office, a sort of little boxed-in place it was, about in the middle of the floor. Jimmie Dale’s light played on it for a moment, but he kept on toward the front door without any pause.

Every movement was quick, sure, accurate, with not a wasted second. It had been barely a minute since he had vaulted the back fence. It was hardly a quarter of a minute more before the cumbersome lock of the front door was unfastened, and the door itself pulled imperceptibly ajar.

He went swiftly back to the office now — and found it even more of a shaky, cheap affair than it had at first appeared; more like a box stall with windows around the top than anything else, the windows doubtless to permit the occupant to overlook the store from the vantage point of the high stool that stood before a long, battered, wobbly desk. There was a door to the place, too, but the door was open and the key was in the lock. The ray of Jimmie Dale’s flashlight swept once around the interior — and rested on an antique, ponderous safe.

Under the mask Jimmie Dale’s lips parted in a smile that seemed almost apologetic, as he viewed the helpless iron monstrosity that was little more than an insult to a trained cracksman. Then from the belt came the thin metal case and a pair of tweezers. He opened the case, and with the tweezers lifted out one of the gray-coloured, diamond-shaped seals. Holding the seal with the tweezers, he moistened the gummed side with his lips, then laid it on a handkerchief which he took from his pocket, and clapped the handkerchief against the front of the safe, sticking the seal conspicuously into place. Jimmie Dale’s insignia bore no finger prints. The microscopes and magnifying glasses at headquarters had many a time regretfully assured the police of that fact.

And now his hands and fingers seemed to work like lightning. Into the soft iron bit a drill — bit in and through — bit in and through again. It was dark, pitch black — and silent. Not a sound, save the quick, dull rasp of the ratchet — like the distant gnawing of a mouse! Jimmie Dale worked fast — another hole went through the face of the old-fashioned safe — and then suddenly he straightened up to listen, every faculty tense, alert, and strained, his body thrown a little forward. What was that!

From the alleyway leading from the street without, through which he himself had come, sounded the stealthy crunch of feet. Motionless in the utter darkness, Jimmie Dale listened — there was a scraping noise in the rear — someone was climbing the fence that he had climbed!

In an instant the tools in Jimmie Dale’s hands disappeared into their respective pockets beneath his vest — and the sensitive fingers shot to the dial on the safe.

“Too bad,” muttered Jimmie Dale plaintively to himself. “I could have made such an artistic job of it — I swear I could have cut Carruthers’ profile in the hole in less than no time — to open it like this is really taking the poor old thing at a disadvantage.”

He was on his knees now, one ear close to the dial, listening as the tumblers fell, while the delicate fingers spun the knob unerringly — the other ear strained toward the rear of the premises.

Came a footstep — a ray of light — a stumble — nearer — the newcomer was inside the place now, and must have found out that the back door had been tampered with. Nearer came the steps — still nearer — and then the safe door swung open under Jimmie Dale’s hand, and Jimmie Dale, that he might not be caught like a rat in a trap, darted from the office — but he had delayed a little too long.

From around the cluttered piles of junk and miscellany swept the light — full on Jimmie Dale. Hesitation for the smallest fraction of a second would have been fatal, but hesitation was something that in all his life Jimmie Dale had never known. Quick as a panther in its spring, he leaped full at the light and the man behind it. The rough voice, in surprised exclamation at the sudden discovery of the quarry, died in a gasp.

There was a crash as the two men met — and the other reeled back before the impact. Onto him Jimmie Dale sprang, and his hands flew for the other’s throat. It was an officer in uniform! Jimmie Dale had felt the brass buttons as they locked. In the darkness there was a queer smile on Jimmie Dale’s tight lips. It was no doubt the officer whom he had passed on the other side of the street.

The other was a smaller man than Jimmie Dale, but powerful for his build — and he fought now with all his strength. This way and that the two men reeled, staggered, swayed, panting and gasping; and then — they had lurched back close to the office door — with a sudden swing, every muscle brought into play for a supreme effort, Jimmie Dale hurled the other from him, sending the man sprawling back to the floor of the office, and in the winking of an eye had slammed shut the door and turned the key.

There was a bull-like roar, the shrill cheep-cheep-cheep of the patrolman’s whistle, and a shattering crash as the officer flung his body against the partition — then the bark of a revolver shot, the tinkle of breaking glass, as the man fired through the office window — and past Jimmie Dale, speeding now for the front door, a bullet hummed viciously.

Out on the street dashed Jimmie Dale, whipping the mask from his face — and glanced like a hawk around him. For all the racket, the neighbourhood had not yet been aroused — no one was in sight. From just overhead came the rattle of a downtown elevated train. In a hundred-yard sprint, Jimmie Dale raced it a half block to the station, tore up the steps — and a moment later dropped nonchalantly into a seat and pulled an evening newspaper from his pocket.

Jimmie Dale got off at the second station down, crossed the street, mounted the steps of the elevated again, and took the next train uptown. His movements appeared to be somewhat erratic — he alighted at the station next above the one by which he had made his escape. Looking down the street it was too dark to see much of anything, but a confused noise as of a gathering crowd reached him from what was about the location of the secondhand store. He listened appreciatively for a moment.

“Isn’t it a perfectly lovely night?” said Jimmie Dale amiably to himself. “And to think of that cop running away with the idea that I didn’t see him when he hid in a doorway after I passed the corner! Well, well, strange — isn’t it?”

With another glance down the street, a whimsical lift of his shoulders, he headed west into the dilapidated tenement quarter that huddled for a handful of blocks near by, just south of Washington Square. It was a little after one o’clock in the morning now and the pedestrians were casual. Jimmie Dale read the street signs on the corners as he went along, turned abruptly into an intersecting street, counted the tenements from the corner as he passed, and — for the eye of any one who might be watching — opened the street door of one of them quite as though he were accustomed and had a perfect right to do so, and went inside.

It was murky and dark within; hot, unhealthy, with lingering smells of garlic and stale cooking. He groped for the stairs and started up. He climbed one flight, then another — and one more to the top. Here, treading softly, he made an examination of the landing with a view, evidently, to obtaining an idea of the location and the number of doors that opened off from it.

His selection fell on the third door from the head of the stairs — there were four all told, two apartments of two rooms each. He paused for an instant to adjust the black silk mask, tried the door quietly, found it unlocked, opened it with a sudden, quick, brisk movement — and, stepping in side, leaned with his back against it.

“Good-morning,” said Jimmie Dale pleasantly.

It was a squalid place, a miserable hole, in which a single flickering, yellow gas jet gave light. It was almost bare of furniture; there was nothing but a couple of cheap chairs, a rickety table — unpawnable. A boy, he was hardly more than that, perhaps twenty-two, from a posture in which he was huddled across the table with head buried in out-flung arms, sprang with a startled cry to his feet.

“Good-morning,” said Jimmie Dale again. “Your name’s Hagan, Bert Hagan — isn’t it? And you work for Isaac Brolsky in the secondhand shop over on West Broadway — don’t you?”

The boy’s lips quivered, and the gaunt, hollow, half-starved face, white, ashen-white now, was pitiful.

“I... I guess you got me,” he faltered “I... I suppose you’re a plain-clothes man, though I never knew dicks wore masks.”

“They don’t generally,” said Jimmie Dale coolly. “It’s a fad of mine — Bert Hagan.”

The lad, hanging to the table, turned his head away for a moment — and there was silence.

Presently Hagan spoke again. “I’ll go,” he said numbly. “I won’t make any trouble. Would — would you mind not speaking loud? I... I wouldn’t like her to know.”

“Her?” said Jimmie Dale softly.

The boy tiptoed across the room, opened a connecting door a little, peered inside, opened it a little wider — and looked over his shoulder at Jimmie Dale.

Jimmie Dale crossed to the boy, looked inside the other room — and his lip twitched queerly, as the sight sent a quick, hurt throb through his heart. A young woman, younger than the boy, lay on a tumble-down bed, a rag of clothing over her — her face with a deathlike pallor upon it, as she lay in what appeared to be a stupor. She was ill, critically ill; it needed no trained eye to discern a fact all too apparent to the most casual observer. The squalor, the glaring poverty here, was even more pitifully in evidence than in the other room — only here upon a chair beside the bed was a cluster of medicine bottles and a little heap of fruit.

Jimmie Dale drew back silently as the boy closed the door.

Hagan walked to the table and picked up his hat.

“I’m... I’m ready,” he said brokenly. “Let’s go.”

“Just a minute,” said Jimmie Dale. “Tell us about it.”

“ ’Twon’t take long,” said Hagan, trying to smile. “She’s my wife. The sickness took all we had. I... I kinder got behind in the rent and things. They were going to fire us out of here — tomorrow. And there wasn’t any money for the medicine, and — and the things she had to have. Maybe you wouldn’t have done it — but I did. I couldn’t see her dying there for the want of something a little money’d buy — and... and I couldn’t” — he caught his voice in a little sob — “I couldn’t see her thrown out on the street like that.”

“And so,” said Jimmie Dale, “instead of putting old Isaac’s cash in the safe this evening when you locked up, you put it in your pocket instead — eh? Didn’t you know you’d get caught?”

“What did it matter?” said the boy. He was twirling his misshappen hat between his fingers. “I knew they’d know it was me in the morning when old Isaac found it gone, because there wasn’t anybody else to do it. But I paid the rent for four months ahead tonight, and I fixed it so’s she’d have medicine and things to eat. I was going to beat it before daylight myself — I” — he brushed his hand hurriedly across his cheek — “I didn’t want to go — to leave her till I had to.”

“Well, say” — there was wonderment in Jimmie Dale’s tones, and his English lapsed into ungrammatical, reassuring vernacular — “ain’t that queer! Say, I’m no detective. Gee, kid, did you think I was? Say, listen to this! I cracked old Isaac’s safe half an hour ago — and I guess there won’t be any idea going around that you got the money and I pulled a lemon. Say, I ain’t superstitious, but it looks like luck meant you to have another chance, don’t it?”

The hat dropped from Hagan’s hands to the floor, and he swayed a little.

“You... you ain’t a dick!” he stammered. “Then how’d you know about me and my name when you found the safe empty? Who told you?”

A wry grimace spread suddenly over Jimmie Dale’s face beneath the mask, and he swallowed hard. Jimmie Dale would have given a good deal to have been able to answer that question himself.

“Oh, that!” said Jimmie Dale. “That’s easy — I knew you worked there. Say, it’s the limit, ain’t it? Talk about your luck being in, why all you’ve got to do is to sit tight and keep your mouth shut, and you’re safe as a church. Only say, what are you going to do about the money, now you’ve got a four months’ start and are kind of landed on your feet?”

“Do?” said the boy. “I’ll pay it back, little by little. I meant to. I ain’t no—” He stopped abruptly.

“Crook,” supplied Jimmie Dale pleasantly. “Spit it right out, kid; you won’t hurt my feelings none. Well, I’ll tell you — you’re talking the way I like to hear you — you pay that back, slide it in without his knowing it, a bit at a time, whenever you can, and you’ll never hear a yip out of me; but if you don’t, why it kind of looks as though I have a right to come down your street and get my share or know the reason why — eh?”

“Then you never get any share,” said Hagan, with a catch in his voice. “I pay it back as fast as I can.”

“Sure,” said Jimmie Dale. “That’s right — that’s what I said. Well, so long — Hagan.” And Jimmie Dale had opened the door and slipped outside.

An hour later, in his dressing room in his house on Riverside Drive, Jimmie Dale was removing his coat as the telephone, a hand instrument on the table, rang. Jimmie Dale glanced at it — and leisurely proceeded to remove his vest. Again the telephone rang. Jimmie Dale took off his curious, pocketed leather belt — as the telephone repeated its summons. He picked out the little drill he had used a short while before, and inspected it critically — feeling its point with his thumb, as one might feel a razor’s blade. Again the telephone rang insistently. He reached languidly for the receiver, took it off its hook, and held it to his ear.

“Hello!” said Jimmie Dale, with a sleepy yawn. “Hello! Hello! Why the deuce don’t you yank a man out of bed at two o’clock in the morning and have done with it, and — eh? Oh, that you, Carruthers?”

“Yes,” came Carruthers’s voice excitedly. “Jimmie, listen — listen! The Gray Seal’s come to life! He’s just pulled a break on West Broadway!”

“Good Lord!” gasped Jimmie Dale. “You don’t say!”

Lingo Dan (1903), one of the rarest books in the mystery genre with no copy catalogued or auctioned in a half-century, is a collection of stories about an extremely unusual fictional character. Receiving his sobriquet because of the flowery language he uses, he is a hobo, thief, con man, and a shockingly cold-blooded murderer — extremely unusual for nineteenth-century crooks. Although Lingo Dan also proves himself to be a patriotic American with a deep streak of sentimentality, he remains an unpleasant fellow who nonetheless has a significant position in the history of the mystery story: the year of the first story and the subsequent book makes him the first serial criminal in American literature.

Joseph Percival Pollard (1869–1911) was an important literary critic in his day, befriended both by Ambrose Bierce and H. L. Mencken. He wrote twelve books before his early death at the age of forty-two, but Lingo Dan was his only mystery. He was best known for his works of literary criticism, most successfully with Their Day in Court (1909).

In his scholarly work The Detective Short Story: A Bibliography (1942), Ellery Queen (a collector and scholar of mystery fiction as well as a bestselling novelist) quotes from an inscribed copy of the book in which Pollard wrote: “I expect for [Lingo Dan] neither the success of Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, etc., nor yet the immunity from comparison with those gentlemen. Yet it is at least one thing the others are not: American.” Today, no one compares his character to those he cites, as Lingo Dan is an utterly forgotten figure in the literature of roguery.

“The Dignity of Honest Labor” was first published in book form in Lingo Dan (Washington, D.C., Neale Publishing Co., 1903).

To the sound of the rattling husks being pulled from the yellow maize came the voice of Lingo Dan.

“It is passing wonderful,” he said, “what a fascination your industry has for me, Billy! There is something so rare, so unusual, so bizarre, about it! Indeed, this past month or so — how quaint our lives have been. We have been engaged in honest toil—”

“You, eh?” Billy grunted, and stuffed some husks into a sack so viciously that the sharp edges of the dry leaves cut his hand like a knife. “Yes, you have — like Hell!” He wiped the scarred hand across his hair.

“My good Billy, you forget the ethic basis of the division of labor. It is true that yours has been of the hands — here is a handkerchief, Billy, to bind over that somewhat unsightly cut; a kerchief washed by Miss Mollie’s own fair hands, I dare say — while mine has been of the head. I have been planning our deliverance, Billy. Do you think these elaborations come to me of their own accord? You judge me too highly.” He stretched his legs out at full length, and, his hands clasped behind his head, stared out through a chink of the log-built crib. He sighed. From without came the monotonous buzzing of the cotton gin. “Why is it, Billy,” he went on, “that we can not find contentment in these peaceful ways of life? Think, Billy — to watch the white fluffs of cotton blossoming on one’s own land; to hear the wind whispering in the aisles of one’s own cornfield; to feel that just so much of fair fresh air and sunshine was one’s own — were it not pleasant? — I beg your pardon? Oh — really, Billy, your language is scarce academic. But you are right — we hardly seem the proper figures for that setting. We lack some atom of the elemental human; we are the victims of our versatilities.” For a time there was no sound save that of the savage ripping with which Billy denuded the ears of corn. Then the other spoke again, in a voice from which the abstract and the dreamy was suddenly absent. “You are sure we were not noticed that Sunday?”

“Sure!” said Billy.

“And that you have your part of the business well in mind?”

“Dead easy.”

“Then it becomes merely a question as to how soon that coquette, Opportunity, chooses to beckon to us. Hush a moment, Billy! Yes, our friend, the Deacon, approaches.”

Billy handed over a sack that was half full of the corn shucks. When the farmer whose hired men these two were opened the door of the crib and called them to dinner, Lingo Dan was husking the one ear of corn that had engaged his attention that day.

When his daughter Mollie was setting the table for supper that evening, Sam Travis, familiar to the fellow members of his church as Deacon Travis, came in from the kitchen chuckling to himself. “Been a’figuring things out,” he said, “and dinged if the two of ’em’s done a speck more’n one man’s work o’ shucking that there corn! One man’s work — and we feeds the two of ’em. But the fact is I sort er reckin listening to the tall cuss is as good as reading a magazine. Ever know sech a gift o’ gab, Mollie?”

“No. But he never learnt it on a farm!”

“That’s right, too, Moll; but I ain’t a’going to make no man’s past lead me to the sin of curiosity, Moll — leastwise not in Texas. Ah... h! Wish your mother was alive to smell that cornbread o’ yours, Moll!”

Molly smiled with pleasure. But as the others came in, and while she moved about serving the dishes, her face took on lines of pain. Presently her father noticed that she was making the merest pretence of eating. “Ain’t you well, Moll?” he asked.

“One o’ my headaches, dad,” was the girl’s answer.

“Too bad! An’ tomorrow Sunday! The first Sunday ’the month; an’ me not there to pass the plate!” Deacon Travis passed his cup for more tea, and sighed sadly.

“I’m sorry, dad. Can’t you go without me?”

“No — sir! Not much! Got to see to your having camphor on your forehead right along.”

There was a coughing noise from Lingo Dan. “If you really find yourself unable to go, would it be asking too much, might the buggy be allowed to take my companion and myself to holy worship? It is — not often,” he paused and smiled wistfully at the Deacon, “that we have a chance.”

Deacon Travis looked pleased. “Sure thing, you can have the team. Never thought you was given to churchgoing; might ’er asked you before. Sure you know the way?”

“Perfectly; it is very kind of you.”

When they were alone with each other once more, Deacon Travis remarked to his daughter that it was perhaps a sort of special Providence that had given her a headache, so that two thirsty souls might have an opportunity to drink of the spiritual waters of the Word. Which philosophic point of view, however, was not completely cheering to Miss Mollie herself.

The little frame church, where the farmers of that region are wont to congregate every Sunday, stands on a slight lift of the prairie, where a narrow cross road leaves the North Road for the mountains. Nowhere else in the world would these hills be termed mountains; but here, contrasting vividly enough with the monotonous level of the prairie, they seem somehow to merit the title easily enough. Cedar-clad, these mountains make the horizon, at one point of the compass at least, green and fresh and picturesque. In the hot days, that are the rule in Texas, the shade of these cedars becomes a veritable oasis for travelers whose road takes them in that direction.

And it may be possible that many of the good farm folk being driven churchward that bright, torrid Sunday morning, would have preferred, in their heart of hearts, the cool of the cedar mountains to the hot church benches. Still, if such thoughts came to them while the white dust skurried with and behind their wheels, they put them away again as speedily as possible. They felt that they had every right to be proud of having a church at all. There were communities, in the same county, and not such a vast distance away, either, that were as godless as they were unprosperous. To feel that their own congregation was one made up of well-to-do folk, and to drive through the fields that showed such bountiful harvests was to be glad, also, that they had had the grace, years ago, to call to them a clergyman from the East, to build a church, to support it in every fitting, and, frequently, many a magnificent way. Good fortune, or good judgment, had ordained that the Rev. Martin Dawson prove himself exactly the best pastor in the world for that community. He was an oldish man, not too much the doctrinarian, a pleasant companion personally, and popular not only with the members of his congregation, but with the Eastern folk he had left when coming to Texas. His popularity, and the pleasant manner of his life reacted happily upon his congregation in another direction. After his old college chum, the Rev. James Langan, had paid him a visit some years ago, such glowing reports had been taken back East that thereafter this little Texas farm community had constantly the advantage of hearing many really admirable preachers in their little church. When their good pastor arose as the services opened, and introduced to them his “brother in the Lord” from say Hartford, and there followed a sermon as eloquent as occurs in the towns only where the pew rents are based on such incomes as millionaires have, these good people were no longer surprised. They listened, with interest and gratitude, and thanked fortune once more for giving them such a pastor. As for the visiting clergymen, such visits to their old friend Dawson were by way of holiday. That none of these visitors were the kind that might attempt any discourse tinctured with indoor rather than outdoor theology, was a point rigorously watched by Mr. Dawson.

The Rev. Martin Dawson was a bachelor. Alone with an old servant, who now acted as sexton, verger, and church warden rolled into one, he lived in a small house some two miles from the church, on the road that eventually passed Sam Travis’s farm. Every Sunday morning these two old people betook themselves with surplice and sermon into the little road wagon, and allowed a lazy, easy-going grey mare to convey them leisurely to church. Then followed the duties of the day; the minister prayed and preached, his servant took up the collection. There were some moments in which the minister, his surplice laid aside, chatted cheerily with the members of his congregation, refusing, perhaps, many an invitation to dinner, and then home again, behind the grey mare to convey them leisurely to church. Frequently, to be sure, there was the clerical visitor also; and once or twice it had happened that the visitor had come alone with the old servant, the Rev. Dawson being heir to a gout that, at times, took him quite off his feet.

As the many vehicles of various shapes and capacities came bowling along the dusty roads that approached the church from the different points of the compass, one young farmer with sharper eyes than most people have, identified a buggy that was coming at right angles to his own.

“There’s the Travis rig,” he remarked to his wife.

“Mollie’s been promising me a recipe for putting up Alexandrias; I hope to goodness she ain’t forgot it today.”

“I reckon,” he went on, “you’ll have to wait for that recipe. It’s the Travis rig, but it ain’t the folks. Looks more like some of parson’s friends.”

“Shaw — I’m sorry! One of Moll’s headaches, I guess.” And they drove on, joggedly.

In the Travis buggy, Lingo Dan was discoursing on the curious inconsistencies in human nature.

“A dear old soul, that parson! Eh, Billy — a dear old soul! But only human, after all. No strength of spiritual warp can break the bonds imposed by such coarse creature things as — as ourselves. I hardly think it likely he can break that rope unaided. And as for the partner of the righteous household, I believe you corded him up pretty securely, didn’t you, Billy? Yes, I think we may be sure they are safely fettered for a while. Quite allegorical, this act of ours, Billy; do you not note the allegory? The fetters of the flesh — fetters of the flesh; if your education, Billy, had not been shamefully neglected, you would find many a Sunday school memory in that dear old phrase: The fetters of the flesh. In a measure I regret that force was necessary. A crude thing, after all, is force. If one had been able to obtain their promises, their holy oaths — how much finer, how much more of the age of Honor! But that... that was impossible. A dear old soul! But short in his breath — very short! And then the inconsistency of him — did you note that? While he thought we merely came for common robbery, he seemed to feel little, save, perhaps regret for our misguided ways; but the instant I laid hands on his sermon and his surplice — Olympus, that was a mighty rage, eh, Billy! I was glad I had him bound by that time; had he been free just then, his rage — there is no telling what the dear old soul might not have done. A wonderfully inconsistent thing, human nature! Faceted like the brilliant; as full of surprises as — the weather!”

During all this monologue, jerked out with sudden silences, and laughings, at intervals, Billy sat stolidly binding a handkerchief about one hand.

“Bit me,” he growled, “old beast!”

“Hush, Billy! A sexton — your late antagonist — a sexton, a man whose solemn office it is to aid materially the Last, the Great Divorce — the soul’s decree of separation from the body — to call such a man a... a beast — oh, Billy!”

As they neared the church their eyes caught gladly the sight of the numerous vehicles standing about the fence, and approaching on the different highways.

“It is a case of ‘Auspice Deo,’ ” Lingo Dan went on. “Eh, Billy? Nil desperandum, auspice Deo! Observe what a pleasant congregation we are to have. Glorious, glorious! You have the key to the vestry?”

“Right here,” Billy tapped his pocket.

“And for my part — how delightful are the ways and means of modern civilization sometimes — the dear old soul’s sermon is typewritten! Although,” and here the speaker lowered his voice, as if unwilling to parade whatever had the least glimmer of vanity about it, “I dare say I should not be so utterly bad at an impromptu. I have known the time — in days that are now dead—”

“And buried!” This came from Billy like a fierce reproach. It was evident that gropings into the past had no more charms for him.

Lingo Dan looked slightly hurt. “True — most true. How close to the mark you do shoot, Billy — never a divergence, never a stroll into the abstract — ah, sometimes I believe I envy you, Billy.”

But Billy only grunted. It was the grunt of unbelief.

In a few moments they had reached the vestry door. Billy hitched a rope from the bridle to the fence. Then he opened the vestry door, and the two of them stepped in. Billy noted with dull astonishment that his partner slipped into the surplice with apparent knowledge of its technique. Then the organ began the services of the day.

When the music ceased, a tall, pale figure arose beside the desk that faced the altar railings.

“Dearly beloved brethren,” said the strange clergyman, “my portion in these services was merely to have been the sermon, but sudden indisposition coming to your good pastor, Mr. Dawson, I am here to make what shift I can as substitute.”

There was a pause. The speaker’s eyes swept about the church. Every seat was taken. But in every face he saw nothing save kind encouragement. Far in the last row, deep in shadows, loomed the face of him that was called Billy. All this the clergyman saw in a flash. Then he began, in the conventional voice of the preacher:

“Dearly beloved brethren, the Scripture moveth us in sundry places—” and thereafter the services continued drowsily and perfunctorially. There was nothing to show that the official of the occasion was not versed and practiced in these devotional functions. At times the congregation caught a note of fervor, of loving emphasis placed on some phrase that was more than usually freighted with the poetry that informs the Prayer book; in the mere elocution of the man they scented a sermon that would make them forget even the stifling heat.

From outside came the occasional whinnying of a horse, and the pawing of impatient feet. Beyond that, only the heat, quivering against the fences in visible form.

On the back bench Billy was exerting the last vestiges of his self-control to keep from snoring.

When the general “Amen” had closed the rehearsal of the Creed, the preacher moved to the pulpit. With bowed head he stood silent for some seconds. Then he folded his sermon to his liking. As he read the text he flushed for a space, but his voice never faltered. It was from the gospel of St. Matthew, and it read:

“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing.”

It was a pity that the Rev. Dawson could not have heard the eloquent delivery his sermon was given by his locum tenens. Use blunts the faculties somewhat, and it is certain that had its actual author preached this sermon it had not seemed half so powerful. As it was, each word, each phrase had behind it all the nervous vigor of a musical voice, a mind at high tension.

As he turned to the final page of the sermon an agonizing suspicion crossed the ear and the mind of the preacher. Was that a snore from the back bench?

If even the faintest chance of such a thing existed, it was necessary to grasp measures of force. Into the mere reading of another man’s words it was possible to infuse but a limited amount of enthusiasm, after all.

Ostentatiously he closed the pamphlet from which he had been delivering his sermon. With eyes roving soulfully about the faces before him, he brought his voice to its most musical, gripping pitch.

“And so, my brethren,” he exhorted, “sixthly and lastly, we approach the lesson to be learned. What is so rampant in the world today, as this hypocrisy, this wearing of the mask, the borrowed plume that Matthew warned against in the words of the text. The face is given man oft-times but to hide the soul. New doctrines come and go; men prate of new religion and new science; the traders on the world’s trend-to-believe make bargains in the market place. And who, of us here, dare say that some time in his life he has not played the hypocrite? Have all of us worn naught save these same garments, material and spiritual, that we stand in now? It is the one besetting sin; the cancer that is eating wholesome candor from the world. Here, in the open air, under the clear sky, you think the wearing of the mask can be but rarely. You err; the mask is worn, in city or in country. Look to your hearts and find the answer there. Look—” His voice roared up against the rafters, so that there was a quick shuffling heard from the rear bench, and the preacher’s straining eyes caught the shine of Billy’s amazement, and to himself he actually thanked God! “Look — deep in to your hearts!”

With something like a sob in his breath, the preacher turned his face to the East. “And now to the Father” muttered his voice. With the suspense over, the ring of eloquence was no longer necessary.

Then he turned to the table, looking apparently heavenwards, actually at Billy. As the latter lumbered up the aisle, the preacher droned in his monotone, standing with his hands folded in front of him.

“Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works.”

With these well-known texts, he proceeded the while Billy passed the wooden plate nervously up and down the pews. The envelopes containing the contributions fell with a shuffling sound of paper upon paper. There were no casuals in this congregation; the actual sight of coin was hardly ever obtruded.

At last the collection was over. The plate, heaped up with white riches, stood beside the railing of the chancel. The preacher raced to the benediction.

After that, with a change in his voice, he came forward a step, and said:

“If the congregation will wait a few moments, I shall be glad to meet the individual members of it personally.”

Those who watched him closely always declared that he had the most winning smile they had ever seen.

Then, with a quick snatch of the collection plate he hurried into the vestry. Into a corner went the surplice.

“Thank the Lord,” he whispered to himself, “that this stuff’s all folded in paper. Makes less noise.” He slipped the money into a handkerchief and opened the outer door cautiously.

Another second or two and the Travis buggy was whirling over the highway to the mountains, a cloud of dust concealing it.

In the church the congregation awaited their meeting with one of the most eloquent preachers they had heard in many a day.

A name that rarely resonates for readers of mystery fiction is May Edginton, the nom de plume of May Helen Marion Edginton Bailey (1883–1957), though she was a prolific writer of romances and has a connection to the American musical theater of perhaps greater import.

As H. M. Edginton, she wrote a novel, Oh! James! (1914), which inspired the 1919 stage play My Lady Friends, which lives in infamy in Boston because the owner of the Boston Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees to finance it. The play in turn was the basis for the musical No, No, Nanette (1924), which, continuing to recycle the story, was adapted for film in 1930 and 1940 before again becoming a hit when it was revived on Broadway in 1971.

Among the many films based on her stories, novels, and plays were The Prude’s Fall (1924), a silent film written by Alfred Hitchcock, who also was the assistant director; Secrets (1933), starring Mary Pickford, based on Edginton’s play of the same title; and Adventure in Manhattan (1936), starring Jean Arthur, based on her story “Purple and Fine Linen.”

The central character in The Adventures of Napoleon Prince (1912) has help, in the best tradition of Raffles, with his sidekick, Bunny, and, on the other side of the legal fence, Sherlock Holmes with his Watson. Aiding Prince in his nefarious schemes are his beautiful and devoted Gerda, described as his sister, and Dapper, his discreet and faithful servant.

“The Eyes of the Countess Gerda” was originally published in The Adventures of Napoleon Prince (New York, Cassell, 1912).

Among the new tenants in the new block of very desirable flats not far from Victoria were a lady, young, charming and alone; a semi-paralytic man of any age from thirty to forty, accompanied by a pretty sister; and a tall, bronzed young man, who had apparently nothing more serious to do than to organise beautifully his bachelor housekeeping. The first named lady had been installed in Flat 24 for a month when the invalid and his sister moved into No. 20 of the flats below; the bronzed young man entered into possession of No. 23 a few days after the occupation of No. 20.

The young man, whose name, as testified by the indicator in the vestibule, was Mr. John Luck, had not been there many days before he made the acquaintance of the invalid and his sister. It was begun in quite an accidental fashion, as the hall porters saw — the trio most obviously never having met before — and it progressed casually and as politeness demanded, beneath the eyes of the same porters and a lift attendant of inquiring mind — just a “Good-morning, again!” or “Fine weather!” or “Beastly day!” and the like. A few days of these vestibule meetings resulted in the discussion of a camera which the invalid man was taking into the Green Park for the purpose of snapshotting winter scenes. It appeared Mr. John Luck knew a good deal of that make of camera; the invalid — Mr. Napoleon Prince, as testified by the indicator — had not used it before.

“You were just going out?” said the little paralytic pleasantly. “Only for a walk? Walk our way, won’t you, for a few minutes, and go on telling me about this machine?”

So that Mr. John Luck walked out by the chair of Mr. Napoleon Prince, which he wheeled himself, and by the side of the very pretty girl, his sister. All of which was seen and observed by the porters and the lift-man.

“If people of our profession only realised, Johnnie,” the little man in the chair observed as they passed out of the quadrangle, “what a deal depends on these seeming trivialities, there would be more genius rewarded, and fewer police triumphs.”

“We have nothing definite in view, Nap?” the young man hazarded.

“No, no!” Napoleon replied. “Why should we? We are gourmets, not gourmands. We have enough for the present, n’est-ce pas, mes enfants?”

“Let’s be good for a while, Nap,” said the girl.

“You hear that, Luck,” said Napoleon, smiling. “Mary tells us to be good. We will settle down for a few months, and be beneficent citizens, then. We’ll do the theatres, and you shall take Mary to the races, and we will make the acquaintance of our neighbours, and entertain them innocently.”

“Hurrah!” cried Mary. She wore a high-waisted coat of clinging lines, furs, and a wide hat, and she looked exquisite.

Johnnie Luck walked with freer step.

“Good!” he agreed. “Very good!”

“I believe,” said Napoleon, glancing at them, one on either side of him, as he wheeled along past Buckingham Palace, “that you are both wretchedly respectable at bottom.” They turned into the Green Park. “Leave me to run about and take my photographs, and philosophise on the profits of respectability, while you two take the brisk exercise that is good for you, and philosophise on — anything you like.”

There was the faintest trace of a smile — a little grim or wistful — on his large pale face as he steered away from them. They walked about the Park for an hour, seeing nobody but each other, hearing nothing but their own low-toned talk, and forgetting entirely the size of the world — theirs being populated by two — until running wheels beside them brought them back to realisation of Napoleon.

“I am sorry,” said he, “but I have used all my plates, and want my lunch. Johnnie, our acquaintance has ripened sufficiently, I imagine, for me to ask you to share the lunch.”

The trio went home, and lunched together in the Princes’ dining-room. After the meal:

“Mary is going to shop,” said Napoleon. “She is going to the Stores, because it is so respectable. But you, Johnnie—”

Johnnie Luck looked hopefully at Mary, who, in the sweetest of frocks à la Joséphine, was standing to warm one small slippered foot at the fire.

“Don’t take him with you, Mary,” said Napoleon whimsically. “I want someone to talk to.” Adding: “And you don’t know him well enough, either.”

She laughed, told Luck to stay, and left them.

“Get cigars, Johnnie,” said the little man, “draw up that chair, put your feet on the mantelpiece — because it must be such a fine thing to be able to do — and make yourself generally comfortable.”

They smoked at ease, each looking into the fire silently. Presently:

“Like your place, Johnnie? I’ve never asked.”

“All right, thanks.”

“I mentioned you should take number twenty-three or twenty-four. Better not to be on the same floor, you see.”

“I see. Oh! yes, these little cautions are worth observing, of course. Number twenty-four was taken before we came, you know.”

“So I suppose,” said Napoleon, looking into the fire. A quarter of an hour ticked by before he roused himself to say anything further. Then it was, gently:

“Johnnie, you’re seeing something in the fire, ain’t you, old man? Don’t be ashamed to be sentimental; be proud of it. I was seeing much the same sort of thing, I guess.”

John Luck had seen the Joséphine girl’s little face, of course, gleaming up at him, but—

“You!” he said, confounded, to Napoleon. “You, Nap!”

“Yes, I,” said Napoleon, with a snap, looking up. “I’ve got a man’s heart, I suppose, if I’ve only got half his body. And at that time, you see, I was whole. It was seven years ago, nearly.”

Luck nodded, and looked at him in a man’s silence of sympathy.

“It was the only time I’ve ever been done, Johnnie,” said the little man. “Done, and not got my own back. You see, it was a woman. Like to hear? I’d like to tell you. I was travelling in Italy for the Cosmopolitans’ gang I’ve told you about, and we’d got a great scoop on. I was their smartest man, and they gave the chief part to me. Well, I was in the Opera House in Florence one night, when I saw one woman among all the others. It was a crowded house — Royalty there — but after I’d looked at her I didn’t see much else — you know. She was young and dark, with marvellous eyes; dressed in white with a scarlet cloak. She was with a man, and they sat close to the orchestra. I managed to follow them out, and to see her close. My word, Johnnie, magnificent! But, I thought, not happy. She had no gloves on, and there was no wedding ring — so she was, that far, free. I went home and dressed. Next morning— Ever been in Italy, Johnnie?”

Luck shook his head.

“Such mornings as you get!” said Napoleon. “It was spring, I remember, about March— Ever read poetry, Johnnie?

The little man’s voice caressed the words melodiously. He went on:

“I met her in the square, riding down to the river. I kept her in sight all the morning, and followed her when she rode at a foot pace back to an hotel. So I learned her address. I forgot all about the Cosmopolitans, and all that sort of truck. There seemed only one thing that mattered... She was evidently staying at the hotel. I learned her name: the Countess Gerda di Veletto. I wrote to her, signing myself: ‘A very mad Englishman,’ and giving an address. Johnnie, boy, that same evening a page from the hotel brought me an answer. I have it here in my letter case. I’ve always carried it. Like to see it? Because I’d like to show it to you.”

The folded sheet that he pulled out was worn almost to tatters at the creases. Johnnie Luck, feeling rather foolish and rather intrusive, read:

Luck passed this back in silence, and Napoleon returned it to the letter case, and thence to his inside breast pocket. He went on evenly.

“Johnnie, by that time I was loving her as I never loved a woman before, and never shall again. Her ‘deep trouble and anxiety’ gave me thought. I wrote her, crazed. Could I do something? Might her mad Englishman meet her at any hour and any place? Any way, would she command him? She wrote back that she could not see me that evening, as a friend would be dining with her. A friend? Who was this ‘friend’? I got half mad with jealousy, and watched the hotel, as if I could pick out her visitor from the crowds. But when I saw the man who had been with her at the Opera go in, I knew that I had picked him out.

“I went home and wrote to her again. I begged her to make an appointment with me, let me do something for her if I could. She answered at once, as before, saying that I could call the next day, but she could see nobody till then. She was at her wits’ end to escape from some trouble. I read a good deal between the lines of that letter, as she meant me to do. She knew how to leave room between the lines — which is an art, my dear Johnnie, of the highest order. I saw despair and fear in it. She said recklessly at the end that it was only monetary, her trouble. Five hundred pounds, after all, would clear her, and she was going to ask her friend for it that night. I remember phrases such as: ‘I’m not that kind of woman, either, you very mad Englishman... It goes cruelly hard... but there! he will be only too eager to give, as it will be only too bitter for me to take.’ And then, with a sort of sudden return to formality, she added that she would be pleased to give me a few minutes’ interview the next day.

“Johnnie, Gerda knew her book, boy. She realised, as very few people of our profession realise, what an important study is your book of psychology. Women, as a rule, are better at that game than men. Criminologists trace crime to heredity, to suggestion, to physical phenomena, to environment. But women go one better than that. They use the emotions; they know the weight of an eyelash, the value of the turn of a head, of a word, and more, of an unsaid word. It was what she did not say in that letter that made me see red and shake with absolute bestial rage. I thought of the chap at the Opera — recalled his face — his tricks of gesture, his age, all about him. He was a nice-looking, young dark fellow, but I got a vision of Mephistopheles. I imagined him driving a bargain with her for the five hundred. I had plenty of money — the Cosmopolitans’ money — on me. I got notes for five hundred and put them into a letter, begging her to take them from the very mad Englishman, who would not even ask to see her in return, rather than from her ‘friend.’ But how I hoped for that meeting she’d promised! She sent an answer filled in between the lines — you know. I was to call and be thanked in person for ‘the loan.’ The next evening, at seven, I was to dine with her.”

“And?” Luck asked, after a longish pause had fallen.

Napoleon replied tersely.

“I went, blindfold as I had acted, and shaking with excitement, to her hotel at seven o’clock. I came out at seven ten, sane. She had left early in the morning with, presumably, several articles of jewellery missed by other visitors, and my — or rather the Cosmopolitans’ — five hundred pounds. Police inquiry — from the other victims, not me, Johnnie — elicited the fact that she had left Florence with her ‘friend,’ but they could not be traced. I cursed solid for some while — imagining her laughter.”

Luck nodded.

“It must have been the softest thing she’d ever been on,” said Napoleon, “and yet she was dealing with the cleverest man she had, in all probability, ever met with.”

He made the assertion ruminatively, and with no conscious arrogance.

“Since then,” he resumed, “I have relied less on science in my profession, less on logical sequence, and have recognised that chance, emotion, and adventure are very potent contingencies to be reckoned with. Her eyes had melted me. My science, my logic, my ingrained suspicion of the world, went by the board. It was, as I say, a very soft thing. She could not have expected to draw the money before she had granted me an interview, at least. And how she must have laughed when she did it! She and her friend! It must be the joke of their lives. And when you come to think of it, Johnnie, it is excruciatingly humorous that I... I... I... should have tumbled into that!”

There was nothing in the little man’s pale face to betray that he had ever felt the excruciating humour of the situation, so John Luck did not laugh either.

“Logic is a fool to love,” said Napoleon.

“It is an interesting story,” Luck remarked.

“What reminded me of it,” said Napoleon, turning his head, and fixing his auditor with his brief bright glance, “was seeing her eyes in the fire just now, as you were seeing someone else’s, eh, Johnnie? I’ve never, these seven years, forgotten Gerda.”

“Nor forgiven her?”

He evaded that. “And what called up those eyes, Johnnie, was seeing another pair very like them as I came out of the building this morning. She was a pretty woman named Muswell, the lift-man told me.”

“My neighbour, I expect, in number twenty-four.”

“That so? Do you know her? She looked wistful, worried, down on her luck, though Mary tells me her frock must have cost exactly ten pounds nineteen and eleven pence halfpenny.”

“No, I don’t know her. Often met her going up or down, of course. I’ve noticed the worried air. Perhaps she’s just lonely. Seems a sin for a pretty woman like that to be living all by herself.”

“She has eyes just like Gerda’s,” said Napoleon softly. He looked into the fire again, his chin sunk a little, his face merely a pale mask. Then he asked:

“Have you ever credited me with weakness, Johnnie?”

Luck smiled so broadly at this question that a spoken negative was unnecessary.

“Yet all men are weak,” said Napoleon, answering the smile, “and my weakness, my soft spot, my tenderness, is for eyes like Gerda’s. I loved her — and she hurt me. She had never set eyes on me — I just worshipped from my distance. Never mind. I loved her, and love is love, and, as I say, above all the logic in the world. I had a charwoman in Paris once with eyes a little like hers, and I did what I could to help that charwoman because of Gerda. Gerda wouldn’t have done it, but never mind. Now I meet Mrs. Muswell here in these flats, and she has eyes that are the very duplicate of Gerda’s. She looks lonely, unhappy, unlucky. Convention forbids Mary to call on her, and offer her some palliation of her loneliness, because it seems that she arrived here first. Apparently she will not call on us. And I want to do some good turn for a girl with Gerda’s eyes. Arrange the matter for us, Johnnie.”

“How?”

“Make her acquaintance, as she’s next door. Make her talk. Make her tell you she’s lonely. Then beg her to call on those nice people, the Princes, whose acquaintance you have made since coming here. And so on.”

“How do I make her acquaintance, Nap?”

“Oh! run along, Johnnie!” said Napoleon, vastly tickled at this helplessness. “You are a very pretty young man — don’t blush! You have the ordinary social gifts, and a pair of eyes to appreciate the blessings the gods grant you in the way of alluring neighbours. You have a charming flat next her own, and you are both solitary young people. The conditions are so favourable as to allow of positively no interesting obstacles to surmount at all.”

Mary here returned from the Stores, and voted her shopping dull.

“Polly,” said her brother, “Luck, here, is going to bring his neighbour, Mrs. Muswell, to call on you tomorrow afternoon. It is an old love-story—”

Mary looked frostily from one to the other.

“Of mine, child, not Johnnie’s,” Napoleon continued, preparing to wheel from the room; “an old love-story of which her eyes remind me. So we are going to be exceedingly kind to Mrs. Muswell, child, please.”

Scores of plays, motion pictures, and radio and television programs have been based on stories written by O. Henry, the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter (1862–1910), but no tale has proved to be as fecund as “A Retrieved Reformation” for inspiring dramatic works.

Seven years after the story’s first publication in 1903, it began a successful Broadway run with the title that remains familiar more than a century later, Alias Jimmy Valentine. It was adapted by Paul Armstrong and starred H. B. Warner as the world’s greatest safecracker, now retired because of his love for a woman. The play, and the films that followed, all closely adhere to the story line that places Jimmy in a hopeless dilemma. A 1921 stage revival, also successful, featured Otto Kruger in the title role.

The first film version starred Robert Warwick in a 1915 silent. A bigger-budget 1920 silent version featured Bert Lytell. A close remake of the silents with William Haines as Jimmy and Lionel Barrymore as the detective on his trail was released on November 15, 1928 — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s first partially talking film. It was completed as a silent film; Irving Thalberg later sent Barrymore and Haines to repeat their performances for the last two reels, this time recording with sound. The first dramatic version with a title different from Alias Jimmy Valentine was The Return of Jimmy Valentine (1936) with Roger Pryor, in which a reporter writes a series of articles speculating about whether the legendary safecracker is still alive. He thinks he has tracked down the old criminal who now is a respected bank manager in a small town. The last film (though there were numerous later radio and television adaptations) was Affairs of Jimmy Valentine (1942), starring Dennis O’Keefe, in which the advertising agency for a radio program offers $10,000 to anyone who can find the real Valentine, now a middle-aged newspaper editor played by Roman Bohnen.

“A Retrieved Reformation” originally appeared in the April 1903 issue of Cosmopolitan under the title “A Retrieved Reform”; it was first collected in O. Henry’s Roads of Destiny (New York, Doubleday, Page, 1909).

In the prison shoe-shop, Jimmy Valentine was busily at work making shoes. A prison officer came into the shop, and led Jimmy to the prison office. There Jimmy was given an important paper. It said that he was free.

Jimmy took the paper without showing much pleasure or interest. He had been sent to prison to stay for four years. He had been there for ten months. But he had expected to stay only three months. Jimmy Valentine had many friends outside the prison. A man with so many friends does not expect to stay in prison long.

“Valentine,” said the chief prison officer, “you’ll go out tomorrow morning. This is your chance. Make a man of yourself. You’re not a bad fellow at heart. Stop breaking safes open, and live a better life.”

“Me?” said Jimmy in surprise. “I never broke open a safe in my life.”

“Oh, no,” the chief prison officer laughed. “Never. Let’s see. How did you happen to get sent to prison for opening that safe in Springfield? Was it because you didn’t want to tell where you really were? Perhaps because you were with some lady, and you didn’t want to tell her name? Or was it because the judge didn’t like you? You men always have a reason like that. You never go to prison because you broke open a safe.”

“Me?” Jimmy said. His face still showed surprise. “I was never in Springfield in my life.”

“Take him away,” said the chief prison officer. “Get him the clothes he needs for going outside. Bring him here again at seven in the morning. And think about what I said, Valentine.”

At a quarter past seven on the next morning, Jimmy stood again in the office. He had on some new clothes that did not fit him, and a pair of new shoes that hurt his feet. These are the usual clothes given to a prisoner when he leaves the prison.

Next they gave him money to pay for his trip on a train to the city near the prison. They gave him five dollars more. The five dollars were supposed to help him become a better man.

Then the chief prison officer put out his hand for a handshake. That was the end of Valentine, Prisoner 9762. Mr. James Valentine walked out into the sunshine.

He did not listen to the song of the birds or look at the green trees or smell the flowers. He went straight to a restaurant. There he tasted the first sweet joys of being free. He had a good dinner. After that he went to the train station. He gave some money to a blind man who sat there, asking for money, and then he got on the train.

Three hours later he got off the train in a small town. Here he went to the restaurant of Mike Dolan.

Mike Dolan was alone there. After shaking hands he said, “I’m sorry we couldn’t do it sooner, Jimmy my boy. But there was that safe in Springfield, too. It wasn’t easy. Feeling all right?”

“Fine,” said Jimmy. “Is my room waiting for me?”

He went up and opened the door of a room at the back of the house. Everything was as he had left it. It was here they had found Jimmy, when they took him to prison. There on the floor was a small piece of cloth. It had been torn from the coat of the cop, as Jimmy was fighting to escape.

There was a bed against the wall. Jimmy pulled the bed toward the middle of the room. The wall behind it looked like any wall, but now Jimmy found and opened a small door in it. From this opening he pulled out a dust-covered bag.

He opened this and looked lovingly at the tools for breaking open a safe. No finer tools could be found any place. They were complete; everything needed was here. They had been made of a special material, in the necessary sizes and shapes. Jimmy had planned them himself, and he was very proud of them.

It had cost him over nine hundred dollars to have these tools made at a place where they make such things for men who work at the job of safe-breaking.

In half an hour Jimmy went downstairs and through the restaurant. He was now dressed in good clothes that fitted him well. He carried his dusted and cleaned bag.

“Do you have anything planned?” asked Mike Dolan.

“Me?” asked Jimmy as if surprised. “I don’t understand. I work for the New York Famous Bread and Cake Makers Company. And I sell the best bread and cake in the country.”

Mike enjoyed these words so much that Jimmy had to take a drink with him. Jimmy had some milk. He never drank anything stronger.

A week after Valentine, 9762, left the prison, a safe was broken open in Richmond, Indiana. No one knew who did it. Eight hundred dollars were taken.

Two weeks after that, a safe in Logansport was opened. It was a new kind of safe; it had been made, they said, so strong that no one could break it open. But someone did, and took fifteen hundred dollars.

Then a safe in Jefferson City was opened. Five thousand dollars were taken. This loss was a big one. Ben Price was a cop who worked on such important matters, and now he began to work on this.

He went to Richmond, Indiana, and to Logansport, to see how the safe-breaking had been done in those places. He was heard to say: “I can see that Jim Valentine has been here. He is in business again. Look at the way he opened this one. Everything easy, everything clean. He is the only man who has the tools to do it. And he is the only man who knows how to use tools like this. Yes, I want Mr. Valentine. Next time he goes to prison, he’s going to stay there until his time is finished.”

Ben Price knew how Jimmy worked. Jimmy would go from one city to another far away. He always worked alone. He always left quickly when he was finished. He enjoyed being with nice people. For all these reasons, it was not easy to catch Mr. Valentine.

People with safes full of money were glad to hear that Ben Price was at work trying to catch Mr. Valentine.

One afternoon Jimmy Valentine and his bag arrived in a small town named Elmore. Jimmy, looking as young as a college boy, walked down the street toward the hotel.

A young lady walked across the street, passed him at the corner, and entered a door. Over the door was the sign, “The Elmore Bank.” Jimmy Valentine looked into her eyes, forgetting at once what he was. He became another man. She looked away, and brighter color came into her face. Young men like Jimmy did not appear often in Elmore.

Jimmy saw a boy near the bank door, and began to ask questions about the town. After a time the young lady came out and went on her way. She seemed not to see Jimmy as she passed him.

“Isn’t that young lady Polly Simpson?” asked Jimmy.

“No,” said the boy. “She’s Annabel Adams. Her father owns this bank.”

Jimmy went to the hotel, where he said his name was Ralph D. Spencer. He got a room there. He told the hotel man he had come to Elmore to go into business. How was the shoe business? Was there already a good shoe-shop?

The man thought that Jimmy’s clothes and manners were fine. He was happy to talk to him.

Yes, Elmore needed a good shoe-shop. There was no shop that sold just shoes. Shoes were sold in the big shops that sold everything. All business in Elmore was good. He hoped Mr. Spencer would decide to stay in Elmore. It was a pleasant town to live in and the people were friendly.

Mr. Spencer said he would stay in the town a few days and learn something about it. No, he said, he himself would carry his bag up to his room. He didn’t want a boy to take it. It was very heavy.

Mr. Ralph Spencer remained in Elmore. He started a shoe-shop. Business was good.

Also he made many friends. And he was successful with the wish of his heart. He met Annabel Adams. He liked her better every day.

At the end of a year everyone in Elmore liked Mr. Ralph Spencer. His shoe-shop was doing very good business. And he and Annabel were going to be married in two weeks. Mr. Adams, the small-town banker, liked Spencer. Annabel was very proud of him. He seemed already to belong to the Adams family.

One day Jimmy sat down in his room to write this letter, which he sent to one of his old friends:

On the Monday night after Jimmy sent this letter, Ben Price arrived quietly in Elmore. He moved slowly about the town in his quiet way, and he learned all that he wanted to know. Standing inside a shop, he watched Ralph D. Spencer walk by.

“You’re going to marry the banker’s daughter, are you, Jimmy?” said Ben to himself. “I don’t feel sure about that!”

The next morning Jimmy was at the Adams home. He was going to a nearby city that day to buy new clothes for the wedding. He was also going to buy a gift for Annabel. It would be his first trip out of Elmore. It was more than a year now since he had done any safe-breaking.

Most of the Adams family went to the bank together that morning. There were Mr. Adams, Annabel, Jimmy, and Annabel’s married sister with her two little girls, aged five and nine. They passed Jimmy’s hotel, and Jimmy ran up to his room and brought along his bag. Then they went to the bank.

All went inside — Jimmy, too, for he was one of the family. Everyone in the bank was glad to see the good-looking, nice young man who was going to marry Annabel. Jimmy put down his bag.

Annabel, laughing, put Jimmy’s hat on her head and picked up the bag. “How do I look?” she asked. “Ralph, how heavy this bag is! It feels full of gold.”

“It’s full of some things I don’t need in my shop,” Jimmy said. “I’m taking them to the city, to the place where they came from. That saves me the cost of sending them. I’m going to be a married man. I must learn to save money.”

The Elmore bank had a new safe. Mr. Adams was very proud of it, and he wanted everyone to see it. It was as large as a small room, and it had a very special door. The door was controlled by a clock. Using the clock, the banker planned the time when the door should open. At other times no one, not even the banker himself, could open it. He explained about it to Mr. Spencer. Mr. Spencer seemed interested but he did not seem to understand very easily. The two children, May and Agatha, enjoyed seeing the shining heavy door, with all its special parts.

While they were busy like this, Ben Price entered the bank and looked around. He told a young man who worked there that he had not come on business; he was waiting for a man.

Suddenly there was a cry from the women. They had not been watching the children. May, the nine-year-old girl, had playfully but firmly closed the door of the safe. And Agatha was inside.

The old banker tried to open the door. He pulled at it for a moment. “The door can’t be opened,” he cried. “And the clock — I hadn’t started it yet.”

Agatha’s mother cried out again.

“Quiet!” said Mr. Adams, raising a shaking hand. “All be quiet for a moment. Agatha!” he called as loudly as he could. “Listen to me.” They could hear, but not clearly, the sound of the child’s voice. In the darkness inside the safe, she was wild with fear.

“My baby!” her mother cried. “She will die of fear! Open the door! Break it open! Can’t you men do something?”

“There isn’t a man nearer than the city who can open that door,” said Mr. Adams, in a shaking voice. “My God! Spencer, what shall we do? That child — she can’t live long in there. There isn’t enough air. And the fear will kill her.”

Agatha’s mother, wild too now, beat on the door with her hands. Annabel turned to Jimmy, her large eyes full of pain, but with some hope, too. A woman thinks that the man she loves can somehow do anything.

“Can’t you do something, Ralph? Try, won’t you?”

He looked at her with a strange soft smile on his lips and in his eyes.

“Annabel,” he said, “give me that flower you are wearing, will you?”

She could not believe that she had really heard him. But she put the flower in his hand. Jimmy took it and put it where he could not lose it. Then he pulled off his coat. With that act, Ralph D. Spencer passed away and Jimmy Valentine took his place.

“Stand away from the door, all of you,” he commanded.

He put his bag on the table, and opened it flat. From that time on, he seemed not to know that anyone else was near. Quickly he laid the shining strange tools on the table. The others watched as if they had lost the power to move.

In a minute Jimmy was at work on the door. In ten minutes — faster than he had ever done it before — he had the door open.

Agatha was taken into her mother’s arms.

Jimmy Valentine put on his coat, picked up the flower and walked toward the front door. As he went he thought he heard a voice call, “Ralph!” He did not stop.

At the door a big man stood in his way.

“Hello, Ben!” said Jimmy, still with his strange smile. “You’re here at last, are you? Let’s go. I don’t care, now.”

And then Ben Price acted rather strangely.

“I guess you’re wrong about this, Mr. Spencer,” he said. “I don’t believe I know you, do I?”

And Ben Price turned and walked slowly down the street.

The popular short story writer, journalist, and screenwriter John Russell (1885–1956) is frequently confused with John Russell Fearn, a British writer of American pulp fiction often credited with some of Russell’s stories.

Russell, an American born in Davenport, Iowa, was a reporter for the New York City News Association and the New-York Tribune. He began writing crime and adventure short stories for top magazines and newspapers, then moved to California to work for the motion picture industry. He wrote numerous silent films, his best-known being Beau Geste (1926), which starred Ronald Colman as the titular adventurer; he also worked, uncredited, on the iconic Frankenstein (1931), starring Boris Karloff.

“The Lost God,” a short story originally published in Collier’s Weekly, served as the basis for The Sea God (1930), a Paramount film written and directed by George Abbott. A South Seas adventure, the type of fiction for which Russell was best known, it tells the not-unfamiliar story of an explorer, Phillip “Pink” Barker (Richard Arlen), who becomes a god while battling with Square Deal McCarthy (Eugene Pallette) for the affections of Daisy (Fay Wray). The now lost silent film, Where the Pavement Ends (1923), was based on “The Passion Vine,” a story from Russell’s South Seas story collection, Where the Pavement Ends (1921); it was written and directed by Rex Ingram and starred Alice Terry and Ramon Novarro. The Pagan (1929), a part-silent, part-talking film that also starred Novarro, was based on a similar Russell story.

Russell’s best stories were collected in The Red Mark and Other Stories (1919), Where the Pavement Ends (1921), In Dark Places (1923), and Cops ’n Robbers (1930).

“The Burglar,” originally published in magazine form in the October 1913 issue of New Story Magazine, was first collected in Cops ’n Robbers (New York, W. W. Norton, 1930).

Three steps short of the third floor, and he stopped and grinned to himself inside the blinding mask of the dark, feeling with careful finger tips.

He found the wire at one side, plucked it out in a loop, and severed it neatly, finishing off each end with a scrape of the knife from mechanical habit of thoroughness...

Then he lifted himself over, without even touching that step, as a wolf might break a snare and still shun it in sheer excess of wild caution. He crawled on to the landing. The house was dead as the tomb behind him as he slid along the passage to the rear room.

He was noiseless. He was sure. He was quick. His pulse kept a temperate beat in his throat. His muscles responded smoothly, slipping with silken, steely precision to do his will. His eyes were clear and steady as a cat’s. His eardrums were tuned to finest perception. Every sense of his spare, wiry body was alert, thin drawn.

His was the keen, gaunt perfection of training that the starving thing of prey attains.

In some twenty hours he had not eaten. In some three weeks he had not known a full meal. In some twenty-six years, all he could boast, he had never enjoyed the chance to blunt his fine animal appetites or to dull his fine animal equipment with satiety.

It was in him to live, to endure, to keep his strength where the weaker went to the wall. His nature was the tough, tenacious, elastic, close-compacted metal that does not snap...

Resistless poverty had ground him upon its whetting edge. Remorseless labor had shaped and hardened him. Relentless hunger had driven him forth at last, a cutting tool, finished and ready for crime.

And now he had found his work...

Thin bands of moonlight cut in at an angle through the windows of the rear room. They were big windows, reaching from floor to ceiling, and barred to waist height with graceful iron grilles. They were wide open upon the garden below.

He curled in the heavy shadow along the wall near the door and watched, listened...

Vagrant breaths of the summer night stirred the curtains. Vague rumors of the sleeping city stole mysteriously from the void. Nothing more.

Between winkings, almost without sensible movement, he was across the room to the far side, feeling out the shape and details of the wall cabinet, adjusting his sight to the ghostly reflection of moon glow.

The outer section of the cabinet was a writing desk. A blind, according to his tip. He slipped the bent end of the burnished implement he carried — his sole outfit — against the edge of the lock.

The smooth, lifting pressure gave him his first heave of effort, his first thrill of power. He had a ton at command in that leverage. And the lid came away like the top of a wet cardboard box.

He could make out the interior of the desk dimly. A model desk; there were pigeonholes, paper trays, two rows of shallow wooden drawers. At least, the veneer was of wood, and each inlaid panel was furnished with a neat little glass knob.

His tip saved him the trouble that would have been necessary to establish the incidental fact that behind the trays and the pigeonholes, behind the false fronts and the glass knobs, stood a solid foot of chrome steel plates...

Swiftly, still relying on that valuable tip, he began to unscrew the little glass knobs from the imitation-drawer panels. As he drew each knob off he pressed the tiny screw shaft that was left standing in the wood, and each time he paused, expectant. Even the wonderful tip could not tell him which was the vital knob.

It proved to be the fourth on the left-hand row.

When he pressed, the fourth screw gave like a tiny plunger. The operating current closed. Springs released with an oily snicking. And the whole interior of the cabinet moved outward from the wall in a solid, silent swing like the shift of a scenic illusion.

It was a dainty job. The steps of it fitted like the parts of a jigsaw picture. No hitch, no hurry, no gap, no confusion. He foresaw, he judged, he made the adequate gesture. He applied the exact necessary force. And the act was complete—

It took him three minutes to open the small inner compartment. Three minutes that passed without a jar, without an audible breath, without a hasty movement. Three minutes, until he caught the shock of the snapping steel with deft balance of body, with perfect release of joint and sinew...

He did not grab.

He searched the inner compartment lightly with one hand. When he drew it out, it brought a tiny, flat leather-bound casket. Kneeling there beside the open door of the safe at the edge of the moonlight band, he turned back the cover of the casket.

Okay, try to follow this, if you can. The Q. Patrick pseudonym is one of three pen names (the others being Patrick Quentin and Jonathan Stagge) used in a complicated collaboration that began with Richard Wilson Webb (1902–1970) and Martha (Patsy) Mott Kelly (1906–2005) producing Cottage Sinister (1931) and Murder at the Women’s City Club (1932). Webb then wrote Murder at Cambridge (1933) alone before collaborating with Mary Louise (White) Aswell (1902–1984) on S.S. Murder (1933) and The Grindle Nightmare (1935). He found a new collaborator, Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912–1987), for Death Goes to School (1936) and six additional Q. Patrick titles, the last of which was Danger Next Door (1951); all were largely traditional British detective stories. Wheeler and Webb moved to the United States in 1934 and eventually became U.S. citizens.

Wheeler and Webb created the Patrick Quentin byline with A Puzzle for Fools (1936), which introduced Peter Duluth, a theatrical producer who stumbles into detective work by accident. The highly successful Duluth series of nine novels inspired two motion pictures, Homicide for Three (1948), starring Warren Douglas as Peter and Audrey Long as his wife, Iris, and Black Widow (1954), with Van Heflin (Peter), Gene Tierney (Iris), Ginger Rogers, George Raft, and Peggy Ann Garner. Webb dropped out of the collaboration in the early 1950s, and Wheeler continued using the Quentin name but abandoned the Duluth series to produce stand-alone novels until 1965.

Wheeler and Webb also collaborated on nine Jonathan Stagge novels, beginning with Murder Gone to Earth (1936; published in the United States the following year as The Dogs Do Bark). The series featured Dr. Hugh Westlake, a general practitioner in a small Eastern town, and his precocious teenage daughter, Dawn.

Wheeler went on to have a successful career as a playwright, winning the Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical in 1973, 1974, and 1979 for A Little Night Music, Candide, and Sweeney Todd.

“Portrait of a Murderer,” written by Wheeler and Webb under the Q. Patrick byline, was originally published in the April 1942 issue of Harper’s Magazine; it was first collected in The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow under the Patrick Quentin byline (London, Gollancz, 1961).

This is the story of a murder. It was a murder committed so subtly, so smoothly that I, who was an unwitting accessory both before and after the fact, had no idea at the time that any crime had been committed.

Only gradually, with the years, did that series of incidents, so innocuous-seeming at the time, fall into a pattern in my mind and give me a clear picture of exactly what happened during my stay at Olinscourt with Martin Slater.

Martin and I were at an English school together during the latter half of the First World War. In his fourteenth year Martin was a nondescript boy with light, untidy hair, quick brown eyes, and that generic schoolboy odor of rubber and chalk. There was little to distinguish him from the rest of us except his father, Sir Olin Slater.

Sir Olin, however, was more than enough to make Martin painfully notorious. Whereas self-respecting parents embarrassed their children by appearing at the school only on state occasions such as Sports Day or Prize-Giving, Sir Olin haunted his son like a passion. Almost every week this evangelical baronet could be seen, a pink, plump hippopotamus, walking about the school grounds, his arm entwined indecently round Martin. In his free hand he would carry a large bag of chocolates which he offered to all the boys he met with pious adjurations to lead nobler, sweeter lives.

Martin squirmed under these paraded embraces. It was all the worse for him in that his father suffered from a terrible disease of the throat which made every syllable he uttered a pathetic mockery of the English language. This disease (which was probably throat cancer) had no reality for Sir Olin. He did not believe that other people were even conscious of his mispronunciations. At least once every term, to our irreverent delight and to Martin’s excruciating discomfort, he was invited to deliver before the whole school an informal address of a religious nature — or a pi-jaw as we called it. When I sat next to Martin in Big School, suppressing a disloyal desire to giggle, I used to watch my friend’s knuckles go white as his father, from the dais, urged us “laddies” to keep ourselves strong and pure and trust in the Mercy of God, or, as he pronounced it, the “Murky of Klock.”

Sir Olin’s pious solicitude for his own beloved “laddie” expressed itself also in the written word. Every morning, more regular than the rising of the English sun, there lay on Martin’s breakfast plate the blue envelope with the Slater coat-of-arms. Martin was a silent boy. He never spoke a word to hint that Sir Olin’s effusiveness was a torment to him, even when the derisive titter parodied down the table: “Another lecker for the lickle lackie.” But I noticed that he left these letters unopened unless his sensitive fingers, palpating the envelopes, could detect bank notes in them.

Most of the other boys tended to despise Martin for the solecism of such a parent. My own intimacy with him might well have been tainted with condescension had it not been for the hampers of “tuck” which Lady Slater sent from Olinscourt. Such tuck it was, too — coming at a period when German submarines were tightening all English belts. Being a scrawny and perpetually hungry boy, I was never more prepared to be chummy with Martin Slater than when my roommate and I sneaked off alone together to tackle those succulent tongues, those jellied chickens, those firm, luscious peaches, and those chocolate cakes stiffened with mouth-melting icing.

Martin shared my enthusiasm for these secret feasts, but he had another all-absorbing enthusiasm which I did not share. He was an inventor. He invented elaborate mechanical devices, usually from alarm clocks of which there were always five or six in his possession in different stages of disembowelment. He specialized at that period in burglar alarms. I can see now those seven or eight urchins that he used to lure into our room at night with sausage rolls and plum cake; I can almost hear my own heart beating as we waited in the darkness to witness in action Martin’s latest contrivance for foiling house-breakers.

These thrilling episodes ended summarily, however, when an unfeeling master caught us at it, confiscated all Martin’s clocks, and gave him a hundred lines for disturbing the peace.

Without these forbidden delights, the long, blacked-out nights of wartime seemed even darker and colder. It was Martin who evolved a system whereby we could dispel the dreary chill which settled every evening on the institution like a miasma, and warm up our cold beds and our undernourished bodies. He invented wrestling — or rather, he adapted and simplified the canons of the art to suit the existing contingency. His rules were simple almost to the point of being nonexistent. One took every possible advantage; one inflicted as much pain as one reasonably dared; one was utterly unscrupulous toward the single end of making one’s opponent admit defeat with the phrase: “I give in, man. You win.”

It didn’t seem to do us much harm thus to work out on one another the sadism that is inherent in all children. It warmed and toughened us; perhaps in some subtle way it established in us an intimacy, a mutual respect.

Though Martin had the advantage of me in age and weight, I was, luckily, more wiry and possibly craftier. As I gradually got on to Martin’s technic I began to develop successful counter measures. So successful were they, in fact, that I started to win almost nightly, ending up on top with monotonous regularity.

And that was the first, the greatest mistake I ever made in my dealings with Martin Slater. I should have known that it is unwise to win too often at any game. It is especially unwise when one is playing it with a potential murderer, who, I suspect, had already conceived for any subjugation, moral or physical, a hatred that was almost psychopathological and growing in violence.

I experienced its violence one night when, less scrupulous than Hamlet toward Claudius, he attacked me as I knelt shivering at my bedside going through the ritual of “saying my prayers.” The assault was decidedly unfair. It occurred before the specified safety hour and while the matron was still prowling. Also, though props and weapons were strictly inadmissible, he elected on this occasion to initiate his attack by throwing a wet towel over my head, twisting it round my neck as he pulled me backward. It was a very wet towel too, so wet that breathing through it was quite out of the question.

With his initial, almost strangling jerk backward, my legs had shot forward, underneath the bed, where they could only kick feebly at the mattress springs, useless as leverage to shake off Martin, who had seated his full weight on my face, having pinioned my arms beneath his knees. I was a helpless prisoner with a wet towel and some hundred pounds of boy between me and any chance of respiration.

Frantically I gurgled my complete submission. I beat my hands on the floor in token of surrender. But Martin sat relentlessly on. For a moment I knew the panic of near suffocation. I clawed, I scratched, I bit; but I might have been buried a hundred feet under the earth. Then everything began to go black, including, as I afterward learned, my own face.

I was saved mercifully by the approach of the peripatetic matron who bustled in a few moments later and blew out the candle without being aware that one of her charges had almost become Martin Slater’s first victim in homicide.

Martin apologized to me next morning but there was a strange expression on his face as he added: “You were getting too cocky, man, licking me every night.”

His more practical appeasement took the form of inviting me to Olinscourt for the holidays. I weighed the disadvantages of four weeks under Sir Olin’s pious tutelage against the prospect of tapping the source of those ambrosial hampers. Inevitably, my schoolboy stomach decided for me. I went.

To our delight, when we first arrived at Olinscourt we found Sir Olin away on an uplift tour of the reformatories and prisons of Western England. He might not have existed for us at all had it not been for the daily blue envelope on Martin’s breakfast plate.

Lady Slater made an admirably unobtrusive hostess — a meek figure who trailed vaguely round in low-heeled shoes and snuff-colored garments which associate themselves in my mind with the word “gabardine.” Apart from ordering substantial meals for us “growing boys” and dampening them slightly by an aroma of piety, she kept herself discreetly out of our way in some meditative boudoir of her own.

Left to our devices, Martin spent long days of feverish activity in his beautifully equipped workshop, releasing all the inventive impulses which had been frustrated at school and which, as he hinted apologetically, would be thwarted again on the return of Sir Olin. Being London-bred, there was nothing I enjoyed more than wandering alone round the extensive grounds and farm lands of Olinscourt, ploddingly followed by a dour Scotch terrier called Roddy.

The old rambling house was equally exciting, particularly since on the second day of my visit I discovered a chamber of mystery, a large locked room on the ground floor which turned out to be Sir Olin’s study. Martin was as intrigued as I by the closure of this room which was normally much used. Inquiries from the servants elicited only the fact that there had been alterations of an unknown nature and that the room had been ordered shut until Sir Olin’s return.

This romantic mystery, which only Sir Olin could solve, made us almost look forward to the Baronet’s return. He arrived unexpectedly some nights later and appeared in our room, oozing plump affection, while we were having our supper — Martin’s favorite meal and one he loved to spin out as long as possible. That evening, however, we were never to finish our luscious salmon mayonnaise. Ardent to resume his spiritual wrestling match with his beloved laddie, Sir Olin summarily dismissed our dishes and settled us down to a session known as “The Quiet Quarter,” which was to prove one of the most mortifying of our daily ordeals at Olinscourt.

It started with a reading by Sir Olin from a book written and privately published by himself, entitled: Five Minute Chats with a Growing Lad. When this one-sided “chat” was over Sir Olin sat back, hands folded over his ample stomach, and invited us with an intimate smile to tell him of our problems, our recent sins and temptations. We wriggled and squirmed a while trying to think up some suitable sin or temptation; then the Baronet relieved the situation by a long impromptu prayer, interrupted at last, thank heavens, by the downstairs booming of the dinner gong. Then, having laid benedictory hands on our heads, Sir Olin kissed us both — me on the forehead and Martin full on the mouth — and dismissed us to our beds.

There, for the first time since my arrival at Olinscourt, Martin leaped on me with a sudden savagery far surpassing anything he had shown at school. With his fingers pressed against my windpipe, I was helpless almost immediately and more than ready to surrender.

“Swear you won’t tell the chaps at school about him kissing us good night,” he demanded thickly.

“I swear, man,” I stuttered.

“Nor about those pi-jaws he’s going to give us every evening.”

It was not until I had given my solemn oath that he released me.

Next morning it became immediately apparent that with Sir Olin’s return the golden days were over. With his return too Lady Slater had departed on some missionary journeyings of her own, a fact which suggested that she enjoyed her husband’s presence no more than we did. In the place of her short but fervent grace, Sir Olin treated us and the entire staff of servants to ten minutes of family prayers — all within sight and scent of the lemon glory of scrambled eggs, the glistening mahogany of sausage and kippers, which sizzled temptingly on the side table.

But at least the Baronet solved the mystery of the locked study, solved it quite dramatically too. Immediately after breakfast on his first day at home, he summoned us into the long, booklined room and announced with a chuckle: “Lickle surprise for you, Martin, laddie. Just you both watch that center bookcase.”

We watched breathless as Sir Olin touched an invisible switch and smoothly, soundlessly, the bookcase swung out into the room, revealing behind it the dull metal of a heavy door. And in the center of this heavy door was a gleaming brass combination-dial.

“Oh, Father, it’s a secret safe!” Martin’s face lighted up with enthusiasm.

Sir Olin chuckled again and took out a heavy gold hunter watch. Opening the back of it as if to consult some combination number, he started to turn the brass knob to and fro. At length, as on oiled wheels, the heavy door rolled back, disclosing not a mere safe, but a square, vaultlike chamber with a small desk and innumerable drawers of different sizes, suggesting the more modern bank-deposit strong rooms. He invited us to enter and we obeyed, trembling with excitement. Sir Olin showed us some of the wonders, explaining as he did so that his object in withdrawing his more liquid assets from his London bank had been to protect his beloved laddie’s financial future from the destructive menace of German zeppelins. He twisted a knob and drew out a drawer glittering with golden sovereigns. He showed us other mysterious drawers containing all that was negotiable of the Slaters’ earthly treasure, labeled with such titles as MORTGAGES, INSURANCE, STOCKS AND SHARES, TREASURE NOTES, etc., etc.

Confronted by this elaborate manifestation of parental solicitude, Martin asked the question I had expected: “Has it got a burglar alarm, Father?”

“No. No.” Sir Olin’s plump fingers caressed his son’s hair indulgently. “Why don’t you try your hand at making one, laddie, in your spare time?”

I was soon to learn, however, that spare time was a very rare commodity with Sir Olin about. The Baronet, a passionate English country gentleman himself, was determined to instill a similar enthusiasm in his only son and heir. Every morning after breakfast Martin, yearning for his workshop, was obliged to make the rounds of the estate with his father, following through barn and stable, over pasture and plowland, listening to an interminable monologue on how Sir Olin, the Eleventh Baronet, with the aid of God, was disposing everything perfectly for the Twelfth Baronet, the future Sir Martin Slater. I usually tagged along behind them with Sir Olin’s only admirer, the dour Roddy, staring entrancedly at the sleek flanks of cows whose cream would enrich next term’s tuck hampers; at pigs whose very shape suggested sausage rolls of the future; at poultry whose plumpness I translated dreamily into terms of drumsticks, second joints, and slices of firm white breast.

Every day Sir Olin brought us back from our cross-country tramps at exactly five minutes to one, which left us barely time to wash our hands for lunch. And after lunch until tea, the Baronet, eager to share Martin’s playful as well as his weighty moments, took us riding or bowled googly lobs to us at the cricket nets, in a vain attempt to improve our batting style in a game that we both detested.

Tea at four-thirty was followed by our only real period of respite. For at five o’clock, punctual as Sir Olin’s gold hunter, his estate agent arrived from Bridgewater, and the two of them were closeted together in the library until seven o’clock when the dressing gong sounded and Sir Olin put documents and ledgers into his strong room and the agent took his leave.

Needless to say, Martin and I daily blessed the estate agent’s name, though it was, infelicitously enough, Ramsbotham. And, needless to say, his arrival was the signal for us to scoot off, me to my wanderings, Martin to his workshop, until suppertime.

Suppertime itself, once the most blissful moment of the day, lost its glory; for Sir Olin, unlike his wife, was quite indifferent to food. Eager for his “Quiet Quarter,” he allowed us a scant twelve minutes to feed the inner boy. His appearance, dressed in a claret-colored dinner jacket, meant the instant removal of our plates, and many a succulent morsel did I see snatched from me. Martin loved good food as much as I did, but being a truer epicure than I, was incapable of gobbling. He frequently had to endure “The Quiet Quarter” and his father’s good-night kiss on an almost empty stomach.

A few days later Sir Olin introduced yet another torture for Martin. The Baronet decided that his son was now old enough to learn something about the business side of an estate that would one day be his. Three times a week, therefore, Martin was required to be present from five to seven o’clock in the library with his father and Ramsbotham. This left him only two hours on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays for tinkering in his beloved workshop. It meant also that, at least three times a week, his supper period was even further curtailed.

I think it was about this time I began to notice a change in Martin. He became even more silent and his face was pale and set with dark lines under his eyes. These, I suspect, were caused partly by the fact that he made up for the lost time in his workshop by sneaking out to it in the middle of the night. I say I suspect this, for he never took me into his confidence; but on two occasions when I happened to wake after midnight his bed was empty and through the open window I could see a flickering light in the workshop.

Although the tireless Gerald Kersh (1911–1968) wrote more than a thousand magazine pieces and more than a thousand short stories, he is best known in the crime field for the few very short tales about Karmesin, a rogue who narrates his own adventures and has been described as “either the greatest criminal or the greatest liar of all time.” Typical of these stories is “Karmesin and the Crown Jewels,” in which the thief may have stolen the jewels from the Tower of London. For all his savoir faire and apparent elegance, there remains an undercurrent of smarminess; he could have been played by Sydney Greenstreet.

It is impossible to slot Kersh into any category of fiction, as his strange and powerful stories and novels cover the gamut from crime to fantasy to literary fiction, with many of the works straddling more than one genre. A somewhat bizarre young life — he was pronounced dead at four, only to sit up in his coffin at the funeral — continued through the early years of adulthood, in which he worked as a baker, nightclub bouncer, salesman, and professional wrestler. Although a successful writer, he moved to the United States after World War II to escape what he regarded as confiscatory taxation and became a naturalized citizen.

His most famous novel, Night and the City (1938), is set in the London underworld of professional wrestling and was the basis for the classic 1950 film noir directed by Jules Dassin and starring Richard Widmark; it was remade in 1992 with Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange. Most critics regard the 1957 novel Fowler’s End to be Kersh’s masterpiece and one of the great novels of the twentieth century, but it remains relatively unknown.

“Karmesin and the Big Flea” was originally published in the winter 1938/39 issue of Courier; it was first collected in Karmesin: The World’s Greatest Criminal — or Most Outrageous Liar (Norfolk, Virginia, Crippen & Landru, 2003).

A street photographer clicked his camera at us, and handed Karmesin a ticket. Karmesin simply said: — “Pfui!” and passed it to me. It was a slip of green paper, printed as follows —

“There is an opportunity for you,” said Karmesin. “Procure nine or ten dummy cameras. Give them to nine or ten men, with your printed tickets. Have an accommodation address. A reasonable number of your tickets will come back with shillings. It will be quite a time before anybody complains. If anybody does, explain: — ‘Pressure of business: millions of customers.’ In three or four weeks, you have made some money. Then you can start a mail-order business. By the time you are forty you may retire. Voila. I have set you up in life. I have done more for you than many fathers do for their sons. Give me a cigarette. Well, what are you laughing at?”

“Why don’t you try the scheme yourself?”

Karmesin ignored this question and went on, in an undertone: — “On second thoughts, have real cameras and real films. That relieves you of the necessity for accomplices. Always avoid accomplices. Don’t develop your film: just keep it. Then, if the police come, you say indignantly: ‘Look, here are the pictures. Give a man a chance to develop them!’ In this manner you can last for two or three months. Never trust any man. Work alone. And speaking of photography; keep out of the range of cameras. They are dangerous.”

“Why?”

“I once blackmailed a man by means of a camera.”

I was silent. Karmesin’s huge, plum-like eyeballs swiveled round as he looked at me. Under his moustache, his lips curved. He said: — “You disapprove. Good! Ha!” and he let out a laugh which sounded like the bursting of a boiler.

I said: “I hate blackmailers.”

“The man I blackmailed was a very bad man,” said Karmesin.

“How bad?”

“He was a blackmailer,” said Karmesin.

“Oh,” was all I could say.

“It was a good example of the manner in which little fleas bite big fleas. The man whom he proposed to blackmail was myself.”

“Make it a little clearer,” I said.

“Certainly. It is very simple. We were going to blackmail Captain Crapaud, of the French Police. He, in his turn, was blackmailing a certain Minister. The man with whom I was working was a certain villain named Cherubini, also of the French Police. He, not content with blackmailing Captain Crapaud, also wanted to blackmail me.”

“On what grounds?”

“He was going to blackmail me, because I was blackmailing Captain Crapaud; and blackmail is a criminal offence, even in France. All he had to do was obtain evidence that I was blackmailing Crapaud.”

“All this is very complicated.”

“Not at all. It is childishly simple,” said Karmesin; and, having borrowed a cigarette, he proceeded to explain —

Captain Crapaud (said Karmesin) was a man with whom it was impossible to feel sympathy. He was, if you will pardon the expression, a filthy pig. It is not usual to discover such men in high executive positions, in the police force of any great country, such as France. But as you know, such things happen. He had acquired a sort of hold upon a very great politician of the period. And he was using this man for all he was worth, which was plenty. This Crapaud was playing the devil. Like that other police officer, whose name, I think, was Mariani, he was using his office for purposes of personal profit. He organised burglaries, arranged the return of the loot, took rake-offs from this side and that; was responsible for many murders. He was a dangerous man to play with — a French equivalent of your own Jonathan Wild.

There is the basis of the situation: Captain Crapaud was holding a certain power, to the detriment of law and order; and his power was built upon a certain incriminating letter which he held.

You understand that? Good.

Now Crapaud had an underling, a species of stooge, a wicked little Corsican named Cherubini. This Cherubini was a bad man. He combined nearly all the vices, and, as is usual in such cases, was always short of money, although his income was far in excess of the normal. You know the type: his dependents starve, that he may bathe a couple of demi-mondaines in vintage champagne. Pfui on such wretches, I say! And pfui — and pfui! Tfoo! One spits at the very thought. Cherubini was little and rat-like. He had prominent front teeth, and no eyes worth mentioning. He would stop unhappy girls, and say “Be nice, or else...” But he had a weakness for the more elegant type of woman; and that kind of weakness costs money. Always beware, my friend, of the underling with luxurious tastes, for the time will come when he will nail you to the cross.

I met Cherubini in Cannes. He was going around like a Hungarian millionaire; with gardenias, and a gold-headed stick, and a diamond in his cravat, and an emerald like a walnut on his finger, and real Amber perfume on his moustache; smoking a Corona-Corona nearly as long as your arm... English clothes, English boots, silk shirts, polished nails — nothing was too good for this swine of a Cherubini.

I, needless to say, was a man of superlative elegance. I believe I have mentioned that my moustache was practically unrivalled in Europe. Yes, indeed, I am not exaggerating when I tell you that, while dressing, I used to keep my moustache out of the way by hanging it behind my ears. Nearly twenty-two inches, my friend, from tip to tip! However; it did not take me long to worm all the secrets out of the wretched little soul of this species of a Cherubini. He was second in command to the unspeakable Crapaud. Yes. That, in itself, was bad enough. But he was a traitor even to his master.

I will cut it short. Crapaud had a hold upon the Minister... let us call him Monsieur Lamoureux. Follow this carefully. Crapaud also had a hold upon Cherubini. Do you get that? Good. The Minister Lamoureux wanted very much to break away from the clutches of Crapaud, and was prepared to pay heavy money for the letter which Crapaud held.

Was this letter procurable? No. But there was an alternative to procuring it, and that was, to incriminate Crapaud in such a manner that he would be glad to part with the letter incriminating the Minister.

But how could one incriminate Crapaud?

Cherubini had a plan.

There was one thing which, in France, could never be forgiven or forgotten; and that was Treason. Out of any other charge, it was possible for a man with influence to wriggle; but not Treason. There was a spy scare at the time. (It was a little before the infamous Dreyfus affair.) If one could prove that Crapaud was receiving money from German agents, in return for information, then one had him.

“But is he?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Cherubini, “Crapaud is the outlet through which so many confidential matters concerning internal policy leak through to Germany. He receives, in his apartment, Von Eberhardt of the German Embassy; and receives, in exchange for certain information, a certain sum of money. If only one could prove this...”

I asked: — “Have you means of getting into Crapaud’s flat?”

“Yes.”

“Then the whole matter is simple,” I said. “Find out the exact moment when the money is likely to change hands, and take a photograph. A good photograph of Crapaud, taking money from Von Eberhardt, would be enough to hang him ten times over.”

“Yes,” said Cherubini.

“There is only one drawback,” I said, “A camera is too cumbersome.” This, you must remember, was before the days of the Candid Camera, and the lightning snapshot.

“Not at all,” said Cherubini. “The police in Paris are beginning to use the portable camera invented by Professor Hohler. This camera can be concealed under an ordinary overcoat, and has a lens good enough to take a clear picture by strong gaslight.”

“Can you get one?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Then what are you waiting for?”

“I am afraid,” said Cherubini.

I paused; then asked: — “How much would there be in this?”

“How much? Why, two or three hundred thousand francs,” said this rat of a man.

“Then have no fear. I will take the photograph, if you get me into Crapaud’s flat at the right time.”

Bon. It was agreed.

We arranged to go to Paris together, and settle the affair.

“I have entrée to the flat,” said Cherubini, “and I know it like the palm of my hand. It is simple.” And he added: — “But you must do the photography, mind.”

All right. I will skip the tiresome details concerning the house, and so forth. It was a huge place in the Avenue Victor Hugo, with rooms as large as three rooms such as are built nowadays. The salon was something like a football field — vast, I tell you, and most luxuriously carpeted. The furniture in that room alone must have been worth four or five thousand pounds. Rare stuff. This pig-dog of a Crapaud did himself well. Near the window, there was a deep alcove, with another little window, or air-vent, at the back of it.

It was from this place that I was supposed to work. Cherubini had keys, and everything necessary. He also supplied me with the camera; a nice little piece of work, not dissimilar to the Leica or Contax camera of the present-day. I believe, in fact, that the Hohler Camera was the father of the candid camera. I was smuggled into the alcove, and there I waited for four hours, not daring to move. It was not very comfortable, my friend. However, in due course Crapaud arrived, with his friend Von Eberhardt. They sat. I was admirably in line with them. They conversed. I photographed them. They drank. Again I photographed them. They patted each other on the shoulder. Click! Again. Crapaud took out an enormous gold cigar-case, and offered Von Eberhardt a cigar. Again, click! Then, at last, the German took from his pocket a large roll of banknotes, and held it between his thumb and forefinger. Crapaud grinned and produced a sheet of paper. Then, as the paper and the money changed hands — click! Perfect.

Another hour passed before Von Eberhardt left. Then, as Crapaud went to escort his visitor to the door, I was up and out of the window, and away. You would never believe, looking at me now, how very agile I used to be. I thought I saw another figure slinking away in the shadows, but the night was too dark. I got to the street, and walked quietly home, where I developed my plates.

They were beautiful. The glaring gaslight, amply reflected in a dozen mirrors, was perfect. The photographs were as clear as figures seen by strong sunlight.

The next day, Cherubini came to see me. There was something in the manner of the wretch which disturbed me a little. He looked me up and down with an insolent grin, and said —

“Captain Crapaud’s apartment was broken into, last night.”

“So?” I said.

“Watches, rings, trinkets, and money, to the value of fifty thousand francs were stolen,” said Cherubini.

“Yes?”

“You were in the apartment, Monsieur,” said Cherubini.

“Oh?”

“Yes. You see, Monsieur, I was behind you, also with a camera.”

“Indeed?” I said.

“Indeed. And I am afraid that it will be my duty to have you arrested for the crime.”

“Oh.”

“Unless, of course, you are prepared to...”

“Pay you off, I suppose?” I said.

“Fifty thousand francs,” said Cherubini.

“And otherwise?”

“Listen my friend,” said Cherubini, throwing himself into a chair, “We are men of the world. I will put the cards on the table. The plates in your camera were duds, useless. You have no pictures. I, on the contrary, have some excellent ones of yourself in Captain Crapaud’s flat.”

“Any decent counsel could kick that case full of holes,” I said.

“Oh no. Not by the time Crapaud and I have finished with it,” said Cherubini. “Oh, my friend, my friend, you have no idea what evidence our boys would find, if once they searched your rooms.”

“So I was caught, was I?” I asked.

“Like a fish in a net.”

“But Von Eberhardt...”

Cherubini laughed. “Do you imagine that we would let you into the place with a camera? I mean, with a workable camera? With a camera loaded with proper plates? Be reasonable, Monsieur, be reasonable. There is nothing but your word, concerning Von Eberhardt. Who would believe you? No, no. You had better pay, my friend; you really had.”

“And if I thought of all that, and took the precaution of changing the plates?” I asked.

“It would still have made no difference,” said Cherubini, “The shutter of your camera would not work.”

I rose, and seized him by the throat, slapped him in the face, and threw him to the floor.

“Listen,” I said, “I would not trust you as far as I could see you. I saw through your game from the first. I had the shutter adjusted, the lens arranged, and the plates replaced. The camera was in perfect order. I will show you some pictures,” I said; and showed him.

He was silent. Then I said: — “And now the ace of trumps. You remember how Crapaud offered Von Eberhardt a cigar?”

“Well?”

“Look,” I said, and threw down a print. It was an excellent photo. One could see Eberhardt, Crapaud, and the unmistakable luxury of the salon. “Take that magnifying glass, and look at the cigar-case,” I said. Cherubini took the large lens which I handed him, and looked; shrieked once, and looked at me.

Clearly defined in the polished lid of the case was an image of Cherubini, lurking behind the curtains, perfectly recognisable.

“Who wins?” I asked.

And Cherubini said: — “You win.”

“And now who goes to Devil’s Island?” I asked.

Cherubini simply said: — “How much for the plate?”

And I replied: — “Tell Crapaud this: — If he does not give me that letter of the Minister Lamoureux, then the day will come when one of his superior officers will hand him a revolver containing one cartridge.”

“You are mad,” said Cherubini. Nevertheless, three days later Crapaud’s nerve broke, and I got the letter, which I returned to the Minister.

I asked Karmesin: — “What, you returned it free of charge?”

“Certainly,” said Karmesin. “I simply asked him to pay my expenses.”

“How much?”

“Chicken-feed. Fifty thousand francs,” said Karmesin, “But am I a blackmailer? Bah.”

“And Crapaud?”

“He left the country very suddenly, and, I believe, came to an evil end in the Belgian Congo, in the time of the Congo Atrocities. Probably some cannibal ate him. Or a lion. Who knows? Perhaps an elephant trod on him. I hope so. He was a villain. He was also a fool. He overreached himself. I was not the first person whom he had tried to blackmail in that manner. Only he was a little too clever. It should be a lesson to you: never be too clever. Also, beware of cameras. And furthermore, remember the folly of Crapaud, and if ever you come into possession of an incriminating document, you will know what to do.”

“What?”

“Photograph it immediately,” said Karmesin.

Fair warning: In more than a half-century of reading mystery fiction, I can point to no author who has confused me as frequently and comprehensively as Harry Stephen Keeler (1890–1967), whose zany, complex intrigue-farces are almost a genre to themselves. The prolific author produced scores of short stories and more than fifty novels, several of which were more than one hundred thousand words in length. It was common for him to interweave previously published stories into what passed for plot.

His “plots” were achieved by fishing through a large file cabinet that he filled with newspaper clippings that interested him and pulling out a handful at random, interweaving them into a story, using such eccentric devices as wacky wills, hitherto unknown religious tenets, insane (and nonexistent) laws, and, most commonly, coincidences that defy credulity. For all their lack of rationality and cohesion, Keeler’s books had a wide and devoted following in the 1920s and ’30s, but, as the books became more and more bizarre, his readership eroded and then all but vanished entirely, his many later novels being published only in Spain and Portugal. Keeler’s wife of more than forty years, Hazel Goodwin, collaborated with him on dozens of books, often sharing a byline.

Thieves’ Nights, Keeler’s only short story collection, features Bayard DeLancey, King of Thieves, “whom lesser thieves feel honored to have known.”

“The Very Raffles-Like Episode of Castor and Pollux, Diamonds De Luxe” was originally published in Keeler’s Thieves’ Nights (New York, Dutton, 1929).

I first met DeLancey in London. The circumstances of that acquaintance hardly matter, except that I had about the best references that a crook could have. When he went over to Paris, I went back to New York with an understanding between us that I was to serve as the New York end of any big deal, and he had my address, and a code system by which we could communicate.

That he was mixed up in the Simon and Company robbery which he had broached to me at one time on Piccadilly, and that he had been successful, furthermore, was clearly proven by the interesting account I clipped from a New York paper on the second day of July. It read:

Clever old DeLancey! It looked indeed as though that well-worked-out scheme he had outlined on Piccadilly had come to a successful conclusion.

As for myself, I had, of course, promised to be of assistance to DeLancey merely in getting the two stones into the hands of old Ranseer at his farm near Morristown, New Jersey, after which the split would be forthcoming and would be divided up according to our respective risks in the proceeding. This was the method which we had outlined when DeLancey first heard that I was personally acquainted with old Ranseer, the wealthy recluse who bought stolen rare jewels at nearly their face value.

Had the clipping itself, however, been insufficient evidence that DeLancey had scored one on the French police, his letter, which reached me a week and a half later, made everything clear.

The communication, which was, of course, in cipher, when translated ran as follows:

So Von Berghem, I reflected curiously, seemed to be the only man in Europe who could get those two sparklers across the pond?

Surely, I thought troubledly, if he had to get them out of Europe before the eyes of the police, and get them into the States before the eyes of the customs authorities, he would have to be sharp indeed, especially in view of the fact that a hue and cry had already been raised.

Everything was in readiness, though. The pigeons were cheeping in their covered basket. On the mantel were two small leather leg bags ready for the loot. I looked at my watch and found that it was after nine o’clock.

Strange that Von Berghem had not arrived. I had called the steamship offices by telephone at six o’clock and had learned that the Princess Dorothy had docked an hour before.

Then I fell to wondering why he had encumbered himself with his son. Unquestionably, he must have realized that in dealings such as ours, every extra man, constituting a possible weak link, meant just so much more chance of failure.

The clock struck ten.

Where had DeLancey found this fellow — this Von Berghem? I found myself asking myself. Was he sure of him? Did he understand the game as we did?

Everything that DeLancey did was always more or less mystifying. He seemed to know the name of every crook between the equator and the poles, and to understand just what part of an undertaking should logically be assigned to anyone. Without doubt he must have known what he was doing this time.

So Von Berghem, I told myself, was the only man that DeLancey believed capable of—

The clock struck ten-thirty.

I heard the slam of a taxicab door down on the street below.

A second later the bell of my New York apartment tinkled sharply.

I hurried to the front door and opened it quietly. In the outer hall stood a tall man wearing glasses. He had gray hair — and a mole on his left cheek. At his side was a boy of about sixteen.

“This is Rat,” I whispered.

“Von Berghem,” he answered, and stepped inside with the boy, while I closed the door behind them.

I passed down the narrow inner hall and threw open the library door. “In here,” I said, and snapped on the lights. “How did you make out?”

Von Berghem seemed to be ill. The whiteness of his face and his halting gait, as he leaned heavily on the shoulder of his son, signified either sickness or—

Failure! Ah — that must be it, I told myself. My heart seemed to stop beating. Von Berghem must have been unsuccessful in his mission.

He sank heavily into a chair that the boy brought forth for him. The latter dropped down on a small footstool, nearby, and remained silent.

In the interval, I studied Von Berghem and perceived for the first time the horrible expression on his face. His eyes had the same haunting look that I had once seen on the face of a maniac in the state insane asylum in Wyoming, where I originally came from.

“Met with considerable trouble,” he stated laconically, after a pause.

“Tell me about it,” I said, half sympathetically and half suspiciously. His gaze, which had been roving aimlessly around the room, he directed toward me again. Then he commenced to talk.

“I called on DeLancey the morning after the robbery. He gave the two gems into my keeping at once. The lad was with me. He’s a coming thief, is the lad. We took a cab at once for the station. Three hours afterward, DeLancey was nabbed.

“The lad and I boarded a train that morning for Calais. We reached there at one o’clock in the afternoon and spent the rest of the day in a hostel. From the hostel we made the boat safely that evening and got into Dover at midnight. So far, everything ran without a hitch. We stayed at a hostel in Dover till morning.

“No use to bore you telling you of our crawling progress across England. Only three hundred miles, but we spent four days covering it. Of course, we were just a gentleman and his son traveling for pleasure.

“But things began to liven up for us. We had hoped by this time that we were not being looked for after all, but apparently we were wrong. As we got off the train in the station at Liverpool, on the evening of July 5th, the lad, little lynx that he is, spots a man in a brown suit, carelessly watching all the passengers. He nudges me quickly.

“Now comes luck itself. A crazy emigrant, farther down the platform, pulls out a gun and commences shooting through the roof. Hell and confusion break loose. During the big rush of people that takes place, the lad notices a little door leading out to a side street. ‘Quick, Daddy,’ he says, ‘we’ll slip out this way.’

“Outside, he flags a cabby in a jiffy and we drive to a little dirty hostel on a side street, where we spend the night wondering whether the man in the brown suit was looking for us or for someone else.

“However, we’re on our guard now. We don’t feel quite so easy. Next morning we make the pier and board the Princess Dorothy, which boat, I may add, is one of the few going out of Liverpool that do not touch at Queenstown or any other point but New York, once she casts off from the Liverpool landing stage. Yes, friend Rat, every detail was figured out long in advance by DeLancey himself.

“As soon as we get aboard, I lie down in the stateroom and let the lad remain on deck. I’m not a well man, friend Rat, and traveling under the conditions and handicaps that we traveled under is hard on me. The following is the boy’s account.

“As he says: No sooner had the ship pulled out from the landing stage and was headed about for the open water, than a motor car comes rushing pell-mell up to the wharf. Out jump four men — and one of ’em is our friend in the brown suit. The lad whips out the binoculars and watches their lips. ‘Damn — too late — radio—’ is what our brown-suited near-acquaintance appears to say.

“Well, in spite of the fact that, like all boats, we’re equipped with wireless, nothing happens to us on board. But at no time do I forget the existence of the Atlantic Cable. What I figure is that they’re trying to lull us into a false sense of security. At any rate, all the way across I take my meals in the stateroom and the lad prowls around deck trying to pick up some information. But, as I said before, everything’s as peaceful as the grave.

“It’s a mighty long nine days for us, friend Rat, but late in the afternoon of the fifteenth, we find we’re within one hour of the Battery — and we realize now that things are very doubtful for us.

“As we step from the gangplank together, each of us suddenly finds a hand on our shoulder. In front of us stand three men, two of ’em fly-bulls with stars — the third a customs inspector. ‘You’re Von Berghem,’ says one of ’em. ‘Want you both to step in this little house at the end of the pier for a couple of hours. When we get done there won’t be any further bother to you of a customs inspection, for the inspector himself here is going to help us out.’ He laughed unpleasantly. ‘Yep — we got a warrant,’ adds the other in answer to my unspoken question.

“Well, my friend, I, Von Berghem, know my limitations. I didn’t take the trouble to deny anything. Smilingly, I admitted that I was Von Berghem and that this was my son. Then I asked them what they intended to do. ‘Just want to look you and your boy and your two suit-cases over,’ admits one of them.

“In that little inspection house they locked the door. They drew down the shades and turned on the lights. They commanded us both to strip. When we had done this, they made us stand stark naked up against the wall. They began by examining our mouths, taking good care to look under our tongues. Then they combed out our hair with a fine-tooth comb. After a full fifteen minutes, in which they satisfied themselves that the jewels were not concealed on our bodies, they turned out the lights, and wheeled over some kind of a vertical metal standard that held a huge, powerful X-ray tube that could be moved up and down, and swung to left and right. The boy here is a little radio bug and can describe it and explain it far better than I. At any rate, standing us naked in turn in front of the tube, they slid it slowly up and down, from a point in our bodies about level with the esophagus and downward, literally peering through our very bodies with what I heard them refer to among themselves as a fluoroscope, which they handed back and forth from hand to hand. Of course I know enough about the X-rays and elementary physics to understand that they hoped to find a deep black opaque shadow that is always made, as I understand, by the crystalline carbon we call a diamond; they hoped to find such a shadow in our stomachs, or alimentary tracts, and had they done so, they could have watched its movement downward and corroborated matters for themselves. But, to cut a long story short, friend Rat, our alimentary tracts gave no opacities at all, outside of our bones which were fixed shadows and which they checked up on by moving the tube or the fluoroscope. For, you see, we made no errors of trying to swallow any big diamonds such as Castor or Pollux, if for no other reason than that your friend DeLancey had read all about this new customs instrument in the London Illustrated News, and had mentioned to us laughingly that if he ever tried to carry stolen jewels across the ocean himself, swallowing them was the last thing on earth he’d do.

“So as I say, after satisfying themselves unequivocally that the jewels were not in our hair or our mouths, on our bodies or in our bodies, they turned on the lights once more and started on our luggage. ‘This is an outrage,’ I grumbled.

“They dumped out the clothing in our suit-cases and placed it in one pile, together with that which we had been forced to discard. Then they commenced with our underclothing, which they examined seam by seam, button by button, square inch by square inch. Following that, our garters, our socks, our suspenders, were subjected to the same rigid examination.

“As fast as they finished with an article of clothing, they tossed it over to us and allowed whichever one of us was the owner to don it. In that way, we dressed, garment by garment, always protesting stoutly at the outrage.

“In the same manner they went through our neckties, most of which they ripped open; our shirts, collars, and vests followed next.

“When they came to our outer suits, not content with an exacting scrutiny, they brought out hammers and hammered every inch. Our shoes — look for yourself, friend Rat — are without heels; they tore them off, layer by layer. Our felt hats underwent similar treatment, for they removed the linings, replacing them later, loose.

“Our suit-cases were examined at buckle and seam, rivet and strap. At every place of possible concealment — every place which involved, say, a thickness greater than the diameter of Castor or Pollux — they pounded vigorously with their hammers, using enough force to smash steel balls, let alone brittle diamonds. And for every place that was thin, they gave a few vicious poundings for good measure.

“Friend Rat, we were in there three and a half hours, and had we had trunks, we might have been there yet. They left nothing unturned. Everything, though, has to come to an end. In disgust, they finally threw away their hammers. ‘That lead from Liverpool’s a phony one,’ said one of the three to the two others. ‘You’re free, Von Berghem and son,’ his companion added. ‘It’s a cinch you’ve not got the proceeds of the Simon Company’s burglary at Paris. You and your boy can go.’

“This was about two hours ago. We have had no supper, for we took a taxicab and, with the exception of a couple of breakdowns on the way, came straight here in order to tell you of the situation in which we found ourselves.”

I was crestfallen, disappointed, at the story I had heard. And I told Von Berghem so frankly.

“It’s a shame,” I commented bitterly. “DeLancey stakes his liberty on a bit of dangerous and clever work — and then sends a bungler across with the proceeds. Of course, man, they’ve got ’em by this time. It doesn’t matter where in the stateroom you hid ’em — the woodwork, the carpet, the mattress — they’ve found ’em now. Well... we’ll have to put it down as a failure — that’s all.”

He heard me through before he uttered a word. Then, dropping his glasses in his coat pocket, he answered me sharply.

“Failure? Who has said anything of failure? You do me a great injustice, friend Rat. Are your pigeons all in readiness? All right. Von Berghem never fails. Look!”

He pressed his hands to his face. For a moment I thought he was going to weep, for he made strange clawing motions with his fingers. Then he lowered his hands.

I sprang to my feet, suppressing a cry with difficulty. Where his eyes had been were now black, sightless sockets. On each of his palms lay a fragile, painted, porcelain shell — and in the hollow of each shell was a tiny cotton packet, tied with silk thread.

Although a successful and prolific short story writer who also enjoyed some success in Hollywood, Richard Edward Connell (1893–1949) is known today mainly for “The Most Dangerous Game,” one of the most anthologized stories ever written and the basis for numerous film versions, including the 1932 RKO film of the same title (called The Hounds of Zaroff in England), with Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, and Leslie Banks; A Game of Death (RKO, 1945, with John Loder, Edgar Barrier, and Audrey Long); and Run for the Sun (United Artists, 1956, with Richard Widmark, Jane Greer, and Trevor Howard). It has often served as the basis for slightly looser adaptations in other media (especially radio and television), sometimes credited and sometimes not.

At the age of eighteen, Connell became the city editor of The New York Times, then went to Harvard, where he was the editor of The Harvard Lampoon and The Harvard Crimson. Upon graduation, he returned to journalism but was soon offered a lucrative job writing advertising copy. After serving in World War I, he sold several short stories and became a full-time freelancer, becoming one of America’s most popular and prolific magazine writers; he also produced four novels. Many of his stories served as the basis for motion pictures, notably Brother Orchid (1940, starring Edward G. Robinson, Ann Sothern, and Humphrey Bogart, based on his 1938 short story of the same name). Connell wrote original stories for several films, including F-Man (1936, with Jack Haley) and Meet John Doe (1941, directed by Frank Capra, starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Story. He was nominated for another Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Two Girls and a Sailor (1944, with June Allyson, Gloria DeHaven, and Van Johnson). He also wrote the screenplay for Presenting Lily Mars (1943, starring Judy Garland and Van Heflin), based on Booth Tarkington’s novel.

“The Most Dangerous Game” was originally published in the January 19, 1924, issue of Collier’s magazine, winning the O. Henry Memorial Prize; it was first collected in Connell’s Variety (New York, Minton Balch, 1925).

“Off there to the right — somewhere — is a large island,” said Whitney. “It’s rather a mystery—”

“What island is it?” Rainsford asked.

“The old charts called it Ship-Trap Island,” Whitney replied. “A suggestive name, isn’t it? Sailors have a curious dread of the place. I don’t know why. Some superstition—”

“Can’t see it,” remarked Rainsford, trying to peer through the dank tropical night that pressed its thick warm blackness in upon the yacht.

“You’ve good eyes,” said Whitney with a laugh, “and I’ve seen you pick off a moose moving in the brown fall bush at four hundred yards, but even you can’t see four miles or so through a moonless Caribbean night.”

“Nor four yards,” admitted Rainsford. “Ugh! It’s like moist black velvet.”

“It will be light enough in Rio,” promised Whitney. “We should make it in a few days. I hope the jaguar guns have come from Purdey’s. We should have some good hunting up the Amazon. Great sport, hunting.”

“The best sport in the world,” agreed Rainsford.

“For the hunter,” amended Whitney. “Not for the jaguar.”

“Don’t talk rot, Whitney. You’re a big-game hunter, not a philosopher. Who cares how a jaguar feels?”

“Perhaps the jaguar does.”

“Bah! They’ve no understanding.”

“Even so, I rather think they understand one thing — fear. The fear of pain and the fear of death.”

“Nonsense,” laughed Rainsford. “This hot weather is making you soft, Whitney. Be a realist. The world is made up of two classes — the hunters and the huntees. Luckily you and I are hunters. Do you think we have passed that island yet?”

“I can’t tell in the dark. I hope so.”

“Why?”

“The place has a reputation — a bad one.”

“Cannibals?”

“Hardly. Even cannibals wouldn’t live in such a God-forsaken place. But it’s gotten into sailor lore, somehow. Didn’t you notice that the crew’s nerves seemed a bit jumpy today?”

“They were a bit strange, now you mention it. Even Captain Nielsen.”

“Yes, even that tough-minded old Swede, who’d go up to the devil himself and ask him for a light. Those fishy blue eyes held a look I never saw there before. All I could get out of him was: ‘This place has an evil name among seafaring men, sir.’ Then he said, gravely: ‘Don’t you feel anything?’ Now you mustn’t laugh but I did feel a sort of chill, and there wasn’t a breeze. What I felt was a... a mental chill, a sort of dread.”

“Pure imagination,” said Rainsford. “One superstitious sailor can taint a whole ship’s company with his fear.”

“Maybe. Sometimes I think sailors have an extra sense which tells them when they are in danger... anyhow I’m glad we are getting out of this zone. Well, I’ll turn in now, Rainsford.”

“I’m not sleepy. I’m going to smoke another pipe on the after deck.”

There was no sound in the night as Rainsford sat there but the muffled throb of the yacht’s engine and the swish and ripple of the propeller.

Rainsford, reclining in a steamer chair, puffed at his favourite briar. The sensuous drowsiness of the night was on him. “It’s so dark,” he thought, “that I could sleep without closing my eyes; the night would be my eyelids—”

An abrupt sound startled him. Off to the right he heard it, and his ears, expert in such matters, could not be mistaken. Again he heard the sound, and again. Somewhere, off in the blackness, someone had fired a gun three times.

Rainsford sprang up and moved quickly to the rail, mystified. He strained his eyes in the direction from which the reports had come, but it was like trying to see through a blanket. He leaped upon the rail and balanced himself there, to get greater elevation; his pipe, striking a rope, was knocked from his mouth. He lunged for it; a short, hoarse cry came from his lips as he realized he had reached too far and had lost his balance. The cry was pinched off short as the blood-warm waters of the Caribbean Sea closed over his head.

He struggled to the surface and cried out, but the wash from the speeding yacht slapped him in the face and the salt water in his open mouth made him gag and strangle. Desperately he struck out after the receding lights of the yacht, but he stopped before he had swum fifty feet. A certain cool-headedness had come to him, for this was not the first time he had been in a tight place. There was a chance that his cries could be heard by someone aboard the yacht, but that chance was slender and grew more slender as the yacht raced on. He wrestled himself out of his clothes and shouted with all his power. The lights of the boat became faint and vanishing fireflies; then they were blotted out by the night.

Rainsford remembered the shots. They had come from the right, and doggedly he swam in that direction, swimming slowly, conserving his strength. For a seemingly endless time he fought the sea. He began to count his strokes; he could do possibly a hundred more and then—

He heard a sound. It came out of the darkness, a high, screaming sound, the cry of an animal in an extremity of anguish and terror. He did not know what animal made the sound. With fresh vitality he swam towards it. He heard it again; then it was cut short by another noise, crisp, staccato.

“Pistol shot,” muttered Rainsford, swimming on.

Ten minutes of determined effort brought to his ears the most welcome sound he had ever heard, the breaking of the sea on a rocky shore. He was almost on the rocks before he saw them; on a night less calm he would have been shattered against them. With his remaining strength he dragged himself from the swirling waters. Jagged crags appeared to jut into the opaqueness; he forced himself up hand over hand. Gasping, his hands raw, he reached a flat place at the top. Dense jungle came down to the edge of the cliffs, and careless of everything but his weariness Rainsford flung himself down and tumbled into the deepest sleep of his life.

When he opened his eyes he knew from the position of the sun that it was late in the afternoon. Sleep had given him vigour; a sharp hunger was picking at him.

“Where there are pistol shots there are men. Where there are men there is food,” he thought; but he saw no sign of a trail through the closely knit web of weeds and trees; it was easier to go along the shore. Not far from where he had landed, he stopped.

Some wounded thing, by the evidence a large animal, had crashed about in the underwood. A small glittering object caught Rainsford’s eye and he picked it up. It was an empty cartridge.

“A twenty-two,” he remarked. “That’s odd. It must have been a fairly large animal, too. The hunter had his nerve with him to tackle it with a light gun. It is clear the brute put up a fight. I suppose the first three shots I heard were when the hunter flushed his quarry and wounded it. The last shot was when he trailed it here and finished it.”

He examined the ground closely and found what he had hoped to find — the print of hunting boots. They pointed along the cliff in the direction he had been going. Eagerly he hurried along, for night was beginning to settle down on the island.

Darkness was blacking out sea and jungle before Rainsford sighted the lights. He came upon them as he turned a crook in the coast line, and his first thought was that he had come upon a village, as there were so many lights. But as he forged along he saw that all the lights were in one building — a château on a high bluff.

“Mirage,” thought Rainsford. But the stone steps were real enough. He lifted the knocker and it creaked up stiffly as if it had never before been used.

The door, opening, let out a river of glaring light. A tall man, solidly built and black-bearded to the waist, stood facing Rainsford with a revolver in his hand.

“Don’t be alarmed,” said Rainsford, with a smile that he hoped was disarming. “I’m no robber. I fell off a yacht. My name is Sanger Rainsford of New York City.”

The man gave no sign that he understood the words or had even heard them. The menacing revolver pointed as rigidly as if the giant were a statue.

Another man was coming down the broad, marble steps, an erect slender man in evening clothes. He advanced and held out his hand.

In a cultivated voice marked by a slight accent which gave it added precision and deliberateness, he said: “It is a great pleasure and honour to welcome Mr. Sanger Rainsford, the celebrated hunter, to my home.”

Automatically Rainsford shook the man’s hand.

“I’ve read your book about hunting snow leopards in Tibet,” explained the man. “I am General Zaroff.”

Rainsford’s first impression was that the man was singularly handsome; his second, that there was a bizarre quality about the face. The general was a tall man past middle age, for his hair was white; but his eyebrows and moustache were black. His eyes, too, were black and very bright. He had the face of a man used to giving orders. Turning to the man in uniform, he made a sign. The fellow put away his pistol, saluted, withdrew.

“Ivan is an incredibly strong fellow,” remarked the general, “but he has the misfortune to be deaf and dumb. A simple fellow, but a bit of a savage.”

“Is he Russian?”

“A Cossack,” said the general, and his smile showed red lips and pointed teeth. “So am I.

“Come,” he said, “we shouldn’t be chatting here. You want clothes, food, rest. You shall have them. This is a most restful spot.”

Ivan had reappeared and the general spoke to him with lips that moved but gave forth no sound.

“Follow Ivan if you please, Mr. Rainsford. I was about to have my dinner, but will wait. I think my clothes will fit you.”

It was to a huge beam-ceilinged bedroom with a canopied bed large enough for six men that Rainsford followed the man. Ivan laid out an evening suit and Rainsford, as he put it on, noticed that it came from a London tailor.

“Perhaps you were surprised,” said the general as they sat down to dinner in a room which suggested a baronial hall of feudal times, “that I recognized your name; but I read all books on hunting published in English, French, and Russian. I have but one passion in life, and that is the hunt.”

“You have some wonderful heads here,” said Rainsford, glancing at the walls. “That Cape buffalo is the largest I ever saw.”

“Oh, that fellow? He charged me, hurled me against a tree, and fractured my skull. But I got the brute.”

“I’ve always thought,” said Rainsford, “that the Cape buffalo is the most dangerous of all big game.”

For a moment the general did not reply, then he said slowly: “No, the Cape buffalo is not the most dangerous.” He sipped his wine. “Here in my preserve on this island I hunt more dangerous game.”

“Is there big game on this island?”

The general nodded. “The biggest.”

“Really?”

“Oh, it isn’t here naturally. I have to stock the island.”

“What have you imported, General? Tigers?”

The general grinned. “No, hunting tigers ceased to interest me when I exhausted their possibilities. No thrill left in tigers, no real real danger. I live for danger, Mr. Rainsford.”

The general took from his pocket a gold cigarette case and offered his guest a long black cigarette with a silver tip; it was perfumed and gave off a smell like incense.

“We will have some capital hunting, you and I,” said the general.

“But what game—” began Rainsford.

“I’ll tell you. You will be amused, I know. I think I may say, in all modesty, that I have done a rare thing. I have invented a new sensation. May I pour you another glass of port?”

“Thank you, General.”

The general filled both glasses and said: “God makes some men poets. Some he makes kings, some beggars. Me he made a hunter. But after years of enjoyment I found that the hunt no longer fascinated me. You can perhaps guess why?”

“No — why?”

“Simply this: hunting had ceased to be what you call a ‘sporting proposition.’ I always got my quarry... always... and there is no greater bore than perfection.”

The general lit a fresh cigarette.

“The animal has nothing but his legs and his instinct. Instinct is no match for reason. When I realized this, it was a tragic moment for me.”

Rainsford leaned across the table, absorbed in what his host was saying.

“It came to me as an inspiration what I must do.”

“And that was?”

“I had to invent a new animal to hunt.”

“A new animal? You are joking.”

“I never joke about hunting. I needed a new animal. I found one. So I bought this island, built this house, and here I do my hunting. The island is perfect for my purpose — there are jungles with a maze of trails in them, hills, swamps—”

“But the animal, General Zaroff?”

“Oh,” said the general, “it supplies me with the most exciting hunting in the world. Every day I hunt, and I never grow bored now, for I have a quarry with which I can match my wits.”

Rainsford’s bewilderment showed in his face.

“I wanted the ideal animal to hunt, so I said, ‘What are the attributes of an ideal quarry?’ and the answer was, of course: ‘It must have courage, cunning, and, above all, it must be able to reason.’ ”

“But no animal can reason,” objected Rainsford.

“My dear fellow,” said the general, “there is one that can.”

“But you can’t mean—”

“And why not?”

“I can’t believe you are serious, General Zaroff. This is a grisly joke.”

“Why should I not be serious? I am speaking of hunting.”

“Hunting? Good God, General Zaroff, what you speak of is murder.”

The general regarded Rainsford quizzically. “Surely your experiences in the war—”

“Did not make me condone cold-blooded murder,” finished Rainsford stiffly.

Laughter shook the general. “I’ll wager you’ll forget your notions when you go hunting with me. You’ve a genuine new thrill in store for you, Mr. Rainsford.”

“Thank you, I am a hunter, not a murderer.”

“Dear me,” said the general, quite unruffled, “again that unpleasant word; but I hunt the scum of the earth — sailors from tramp ships — lascars, blacks, Chinese, whites, mongrels.”

“Where do you get them?”

The general’s left eyelid fluttered down in a wink. “This island is called Ship-Trap. Come to the window with me.”

Rainsford went to the window and looked out towards the sea.

“Watch! Out there!” exclaimed the general, as he pressed a button. Far out Rainsford saw a flash of lights. “They indicate a channel where there’s none. Rocks with razor edges crouch there like a sea-monster. They can crush a ship like a nut. Oh, yes, that is electricity. We try to be civilized.”

“Civilized? And you shoot down men?”

“But I treat my visitors with every consideration,” said the general in his most pleasant manner. “They get plenty of good food and exercise. They get into splendid physical condition. You shall see for yourself tomorrow.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ll visit my training school,” smiled the general. “It is in the cellar. I have about a dozen there now. They’re from the Spanish bark Sanlucar, which had the bad luck to go on the rocks out there. An inferior lot, I regret to say, and more accustomed to the deck than the jungle.”

He raised his hand and Ivan brought thick Turkish coffee. “It is a game, you see,” pursued the general blandly. “I suggest to one of them that we go hunting. I give him three hours’ start. I am to follow, armed only with a pistol of smallest calibre and range. If my quarry eludes me for three whole days, he wins the game. If I find him” — the general smiled — “he loses.”

“Suppose he refuses to be hunted?”

“I give him the option. If he does not wish to hunt I turn him over to Ivan. Ivan once served as official knouter to the Great White Tsar, and he has his own ideas of sport. Invariably they choose the hunt.”

“And if they win?”

The smile on the general’s face widened. “To date I have not lost.”

Then he added, hastily: “I don’t wish you to think me a braggart, Mr. Rainsford, and one did almost win. I eventually had to use the dogs.”

“The dogs?”

“This way, please. I’ll show you.”

The general led the way to another window. The lights sent a flickering illumination that made grotesque patterns on the courtyard below, and Rainsford could see a dozen or so huge black shapes moving about. As they turned towards him he caught the green glitter of eyes.

“They are let out at seven every night. If anyone should try to get into my house — or out of it — something regrettable would happen to him. And now I want to show you my new collection of heads. Will you come to the library?”

“I hope,” said Rainsford, “that you will excuse me tonight. I’m really not feeling at all well.”

“Ah, indeed? You need a good restful night’s sleep. Tomorrow you’ll feel like a new man. Then we’ll hunt, eh? I’ve one rather promising prospect—”

Rainsford was hurrying from the room.

“Sorry you can’t go with me tonight,” called the general. “I expect rather fair sport. A big, strong black. He looks resourceful—”

The bed was good and Rainsford was tired, but nevertheless he could not sleep, and had only achieved a doze when, as morning broke, he heard, far off in the jungle, the faint report of a pistol.

General Zaroff did not appear till luncheon. He was solicitous about Rainsford’s health. “As for me,” he said, “I do not feel so well. The hunting was not good last night. He made a straight trail that offered no problems at all.”

“General,” said Rainsford firmly, “I want to leave the island at once.”

He saw the dead black eyes of the general on him, studying him. The eyes suddenly brightened. “Tonight,” said he, “we will hunt — you and I.”

Rainsford shook his head. “No, General,” he said, “I will not hunt.”

The general shrugged his shoulders. “As you wish. The choice rests with you, but I would suggest that my idea of sport is more diverting than Ivan’s.”

“You don’t mean—” cried Rainsford.

“My dear fellow,” said the general, “have I not told you I always mean what I say about hunting? This is really an inspiration. I drink to a foeman worthy of my steel at last.”

The general raised his glass, but Rainsford sat staring at him. “You’ll find this game worth playing,” the general said, enthusiastically. “Your brain against mine. Your woodcraft against mine. Your strength and stamina against mine. Outdoor chess! And the stake is not without value, eh?”

“And if I win—” began Rainsford huskily.

“If I do not find you by midnight of the third day, I’ll cheerfully acknowledge myself defeated,” said General Zaroff. “My sloop will place you on the mainland near a town.”

The general read what Rainsford was thinking.

“Oh, you can trust me,” said the Cossack. “I will give you my word as a gentleman and a sportsman. Of course, you, in turn, must agree to say nothing of your visit here.”

“I’ll agree to nothing of the kind.”

“Oh, in that case — but why discuss that now? Three days hence we can discuss it over a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, unless—”

The general sipped his wine.

Then a business-like air animated him. “Ivan,” he said, “will supply you with hunting clothes, food, a knife. I suggest you wear moccasins; they leave a poorer trail. I suggest, too, that you avoid the big swamp in the southeast corner of the island. We call it Death Swamp. There’s quicksand there. One foolish fellow tried it. The deplorable part of it was that Lazarus followed him. You can’t imagine my feelings, Mr. Rainsford. I loved Lazarus; he was the finest hound in my pack. Well, I must beg you to excuse me now. I always take a siesta after lunch. You’ll hardly have time for a nap, I fear. You’ll want to start, no doubt. I shall not follow until dusk. Hunting at night is so much more exciting than by day, don’t you think? Au revoir, Mr. Rainsford, au revoir.”

As General Zaroff, with a courtly bow, strolled from the room, Ivan entered by another door. Under one arm he carried hunting clothes, a haversack of food, a leathern sheath containing a long-bladed hunting knife; his right hand rested on a cocked revolver thrust in the crimson sash about his waist...

In the “Editor’s Note” for the first edition of Four Square Jane (1929), the only book devoted to the young rogue’s exploits, the “heroine” is described as an “extremely ladylike crook, an uncannily clever criminal who exercises all her female cunning on her nefarious work, makes the mere male detectives and policemen who endeavor to be on her tracks look foolish.”

Jane is pretty, young, slim, and chaste, and leaves her calling card at the scene of her robberies: a printed label with four squares and the letter “J” in the middle. She makes sure to do this so that none of the servants will be accused of the theft. She has a coterie of loyal associates on whom she calls as they are needed.

During the height of his popularity in the 1920s as the most successful thriller writer who ever lived, Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) is reputed to have been the author of one of every four books sold in England. After dropping out of school at an early age, he joined the army and was sent to South Africa, where he wrote war poems and later worked as a journalist during the Boer War. Returning to England with a desire to write fiction, he self-published The Four Just Men (1905), a financial disaster, but went on to produce 173 books and 17 plays.

Wallace’s staggering popularity assured a market for anything he wrote and the top magazines competed for his work, paying him princely sums, but the stories in Four Square Jane appear to have been written directly for the book, with no prior periodical appearance. None of the stories has a title.

“Four Square Jane” was originally published in Four Square Jane (London, Readers Library, 1929).

Mr. Joe Lewinstein slouched to one of the long windows which gave light to his magnificent drawing-room and stared gloomily across the lawn.

The beds of geraniums and lobelias were half-obscured by a driving mist of rain, and the well-kept lawns that were the pride of his many gardeners were sodden and, in places, under water.

“Of course it had to rain to-day,” he said bitterly.

His large and comfortable wife looked up over her glasses.

“Why, Joe,” she said, “what’s the good of grousing? They haven’t come down for an al fresco fête; they’ve come down for the dance and the shooting, and anything else they can get out of us.”

“Oh, shut up, Miriam,” said Mr. Lewinstein irritably; “what does it matter what they’re coming for? It’s what I want them for myself. You don’t suppose I’ve risen from what I was to my present position without learning anything, do you?” Mr. Lewinstein was fond of referring to his almost meteoric rise in the world of high finance, if not in the corresponding world of society. And, to do him justice, it must be added that such companies as he had promoted, and they were many, had been run on the most straightforward lines, nor had he, to use his own words, risked the money of the “widows and orphans.” At least, not unnecessarily.

“It’s knowing the right kind of people,” he continued, “and doing them the right kind of turns that counts. It’s easier to make your second million than your first, and I’m going to make it, Miriam,” he added, with grim determination. “I’m going to make it, and I’m not sticking at a few thousands in the way of expenses!”

A housewifely fear lest their entertainment that night was going to cost them thousands floated through Mrs. Lewinstein’s mind, but she said nothing.

“I’ll bet they’ve never seen a ball like ours is tonight,” her husband continued with satisfaction, as he turned his back on the window and came slowly towards his partner, “and the company will be worth it, Miriam, you believe me. Everybody who’s anybody in the city is coming. There’ll be more jewels here tonight than even I could buy.”

His wife put down her paper with an impatient gesture.

“That’s what I’m thinking about,” she said. “I hope you know what you’re doing. It’s a big responsibility.”

“What do you mean by responsibility?” asked Joe Lewinstein.

“All this loose money lying about,” said his wife. “Don’t you read the paper? Don’t any of your friends tell you?”

Mr. Lewinstein burst into a peal of husky laughter.

“Oh, I know what’s biting you,” he said. “You’re thinking of Four Square Jane.”

“Four Square Jane!” said the acid Mrs. Lewinstein. “I’d give her Four Square Jane if I had her in this house!”

“She’s no common burglar,” said Mr. Lewinstein shaking his head, whether in admonition or admiration it was difficult to say. “My friend, Lord Belchester — my friend, Lord Belchester, told me it was an absolute mystery how his wife lost those emeralds of hers. He was very worried about it, was Belchester. He took about half the money he made out of Consolidated Grains to buy those emeralds, and they were lost about a month after he bought them. He thinks that the thief was one of his guests.”

“Why do they call her Four Square Jane?” asked Mrs. Lewinstein curiously.

Her husband shrugged his shoulders.

“She always leaves a certain mark behind her, a sort of printed label with four squares, and the letter J in the middle,” he said. “It was the police who called her Jane, and somehow the name has stuck.”

His wife picked up the paper and put it down again, looking thoughtfully into the fire.

“And you’re bringing all these people down here to stop the night, and you’re talking about them being loaded up with jewellery! You’ve got a nerve, Joe.”

Mr. Lewinstein chuckled.

“I’ve got a detective, too,” he said. “I’ve asked Ross, who has the biggest private detective agency in London, to send me his best woman.”

“Goodness gracious,” said the dismayed Mrs. Lewinstein, “you’re not having a woman here?”

“Yes, I am. She’s a lady, apparently one of the best girls Ross has got. He told me that in cases like this it’s much less noticeable to have a lady detective among the guests than a man. I told her to be here at seven.”

Undoubtedly the Lewinstein’s house-party was the most impressive affair that the county had seen. His guests were to arrive by a special train from London and were to be met at the station by a small fleet of motor cars, which he had pressed to his service from all available sources. His own car was waiting at the door ready to take him to the station to meet his “special” when a servant brought him a card.

“Miss Caroline Smith,” he read. On the corner was the name of the Ross Detective Agency.

“Tell the young lady I’ll see her in the library.”

He found her waiting for him. A personable, pretty girl, with remarkably shrewd and clever eyes that beamed behind rimless glasses and a veil, she met him with an elusive smile that came and went like sunshine on a wintry day.

“So you’re a lady detective, eh?” said Lewinstein with ponderous good humour; “you look young.”

“Why, yes,” said the girl, “even way home, where youth isn’t any handicap, I’m looked upon as being a trifle under the limit.”

“Oh, you’re from America, are you?” said Mr. Lewinstein, interested.

The girl nodded.

“This is my first work in England, and naturally I am rather nervous.”

She had a pleasant voice, a soft drawl, which suggested to Mr. Lewinstein, who had spent some years on the other side, that she came from one of the Southern States.

“Well, I suppose you pretty well know your duties in the game to suppress this Four Square woman.”

She nodded.

“That may be a pretty tough proposition. You’ll give me leave to go where I like, and do practically what I like, won’t you? That is essential.”

“Certainly,” said Mr. Lewinstein; “you will dine with us as our guest?”

“No, that doesn’t work,” she replied. “The time I ought to be looking round and taking notice, my attention is wholly absorbed by the man who is taking me down to dinner and wants my views on prohibition.

“So, if you please, I’d like the whole run of your house. I can be your young cousin, Miranda, from the high mountains of New Jersey. What about your servants?”

“I can trust them with my life,” said Mr. Lewinstein.

She looked at him with a half-twinkle in her eyes.

“Can you tell me anything about this she-Raffles?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said her host, “except that she is one of these society swells who frequent such — well, such parties as I am giving tonight. There will be a lot of ladies here — some of the best in the land — that is what makes it so difficult. As likely as not she will be one of them.”

“Would you trust them all with your life?” she asked mischievously, and then going on: “I think I know your Four Square woman. Mind,” she raised her hand, “I’m not going to say that I shall discover her here.”

“I hope to goodness you don’t,” said Joe heartily.

“Or if I do find her I’m going to denounce her. Perhaps you can tell me something else about her.”

Mr. Lewinstein shook his head.

“The only thing I know is that when she’s made a haul, she usually leaves behind a mark.”

“That I know,” said the girl nodding. “She does that in order that suspicion shall not fall upon the servants.”

The girl thought a moment, tapping her teeth with a pencil, then she said:

“Whatever I do, Mr. Lewinstein, you must not regard as remarkable. I have set my mind on capturing Four Square Jane, and starting my career in England with a big flourish of silver trumpets.” She smiled so charmingly that Mrs. Lewinstein in the doorway raised her eyebrows.

“It is time you were going, Joseph,” she said severely. “What am I to do with this young woman?”

“Let somebody show her her room,” said the temporarily flustered Mr. Lewinstein, and hurried out to the waiting car.

Mrs. Lewinstein rang the bell. She had no interest in detectives, especially pretty detectives of twenty-three.

Adchester Manor House was a large establishment, but it was packed to its utmost capacity to accommodate the guests who arrived that night.

All Mrs. Lewinstein had said — that these pretty women and amusing men had been lured into Buckinghamshire with a lively hope of favours to come — might be true. Joe Lewinstein was not only a power in the City, with the control of four great corporations, but the Lewinstein interests stretched from Colorado to Vladivostock.

It was a particularly brilliant party which sat down to dinner that night, and if Mr. Lewinstein swelled a little with pride, that pride was certainly justified. On his right sat Lady Ovingham, a thin woman with the prettiness that consists chiefly in huge appealing eyes and an almost alarming pallor of skin. Her appearance greatly belied her character, for she was an unusually able business woman, and had partnered Mr. Lewinstein in some of his safer speculations. An arm covered from wrist to elbow with diamond bracelets testified to the success of these ventures in finance, for Lady Ovingham had a way of investing her money in diamonds, for she knew that these stones would not suddenly depreciate in value.

The conversation was animated and, in many cases, hilarious, for Mr. Lewinstein had mixed his guests as carefully as his butler had mixed the cocktails, and both things helped materially towards the success of the evening.

It was towards the end of the dinner that the first disagreeable incident occurred. His butler leant over him, ostensibly to pour out a glass of wine, and whispered:

“That young lady that came this afternoon, sir, has been taken ill.”

“Ill!” said Mr. Lewinstein in dismay. “What happened?”

“She complained of a bad headache, was seized with tremblings, and had to be taken up to her room,” said the butler in a low voice.

“Send into the village for the doctor.”

“I did, sir,” said the man, “but the doctor had been called away to London on an important consultation.”

Mr. Lewinstein frowned. Then a little gleam of relief came to him. The detective had asked him not to be alarmed at anything that might happen. Possibly this was a ruse for her own purpose. She ought to have told him though, he complained to himself.

“Very good, wait till dinner is over,” he said.

When that function was finished, and the guests had reached the coffee and cigarette stage before entering the big ballroom or retiring to their cards, Mr. Lewinstein climbed to the third floor to the tiny bedroom which had been allocated by his lady wife as being adequate for a lady detective.

He knocked at the door.

“Come in,” said a faint voice.

The girl was lying on the bed, covered with an eiderdown quilt, and she was shivering.

“Don’t touch me,” she said. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me even.”

“Good Lord!” said Mr. Lewinstein in dismay, “you’re not really ill, are you?”

“I’m afraid so; I’m awfully sorry. I don’t know what has happened to me, and I have a feeling that my illness is not wholly accidental. I was feeling well until I had a cup of tea, which was brought to my room, when suddenly I was taken with these shivers. Can you get me a doctor?”

“I’ll do my best,” said Mr. Lewinstein, for he had a kindly heart.

He went downstairs a somewhat anxious man. If, as the girl seemed to suggest, she had been doped, that presupposed the presence in the house either of Four Square Jane or one of her working partners. He reached the hall to find the butler waiting.

“Excuse me, sir,” said the butler, “but rather a fortunate thing has happened. A gentleman who has run short of petrol came up to the house to borrow a supply—”

“Well?” said Mr. Lewinstein.

“Well, sir, he happens to be a doctor,” said the butler. “I asked him to see you, sir.”

“Fine,” said Mr. Lewinstein enthusiastically, “that’s a good idea of yours. Bring him into the library.”

The stranded motorist, a tall young man, came in full of apologies.

“I say, it’s awfully good of you to let me have this juice,” he said. “The fact is, my silly ass of a man packed me two empty tins.”

“Delighted to help you, doctor,” said Mr. Lewinstein genially; “and now perhaps you can help me.”

The young man looked at the other suspiciously.

“You haven’t anybody ill, have you?” he asked, “I promised my partner I wouldn’t look at a patient for three months. You see,” he explained, “I’ve had rather a heavy time lately, and I’m a bit run down.”

“You’d be doing us a real kindness if you’d look at this young lady,” said Mr. Lewinstein earnestly. “I don’t know what to make of her, doctor.”

“Setheridge is my name,” said the doctor. “All right, I’ll look at your patient. It was ungracious of me to pull a face I suppose. Where is she? Is she one of your guests by the way? I seem to have butted in on a party.”

“Not exactly,” Mr. Lewinstein hesitated, “she is... er... a visitor.”

He led the way up to the room, and the young man walked in and looked at the shivering girl with the easy confident smile of the experienced practitioner.

“Hullo,” he said, “what’s the matter with you?”

He took her wrist in his hand and looked at his watch, and Mr. Lewinstein, standing in the open doorway, saw him frown. He bent down and examined the eyes, then pulled up the sleeve of his patient’s dress and whistled.

“Is it serious?” she asked anxiously.

“Not very, if you are taken care of; though you may lose some of that hair,” he said, with a smile at the brown mop on the pillow.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Scarlet fever, my young friend.”

“Scarlet fever!” It was Mr. Lewinstein who gasped the words. “You don’t mean that?”

The doctor walked out and joined him on the landing, closing the door behind him.

“It’s scarlet fever, all right. Have you any idea where she was infected?”

“Scarlet fever,” moaned Mr. Lewinstein; “and I’ve got the house full of aristocracy!”

“Well, the best thing you can do is to keep the aristocracy in ignorance of the fact. Get the girl out of the house.”

“But how? How?” wailed Mr. Lewinstein.

The doctor scratched his head.

“Of course, I don’t want to do it,” he said slowly; “but I can’t very well leave a girl in a mess like this. May I use your telephone?”

“Certainly, use anything you like; but, for goodness’ sake, get the girl away!”

Mr. Lewinstein showed him the library, where the young man called up a number and gave some instructions. Apparently his telephone interview was satisfactory, for he came back to the hall, where Mr. Lewinstein was nervously drumming his fingers on the polished surface of a table, with a smile.

“I can get an ambulance out here, but not before three in the morning,” he said; “anyway, that will suit us, because your guests will be abed and asleep by then, and most of the servants also, I suppose. And we can get her out without anybody being the wiser.”

“I’m awfully obliged to you, doctor,” said Mr. Lewinstein, “anything you like to charge me—”

The doctor waved fees out of consideration.

Then a thought occurred to Mr. Lewinstein.

“Doctor, could that disease be communicated to the girl by means of a drug, or anything?”

“Why do you ask?” said the other quickly.

“Well, because she was all right till she had a cup of tea. I must take you into my confidence,” he said, lowering his voice. “She is a detective, brought down here to look after my guests. There have been a number of robberies committed lately by a woman who calls herself ‘Four Square Jane,’ and, to be on the safe side, I had this girl down to protect the property of my friends. When I saw her before dinner she was as well as you or I; then a cup of tea was given to her, and immediately she had these shiverings.”

The doctor nodded thoughtfully.

“It is curious you should say that,” he said; “for though she has the symptoms of scarlet fever, she has others which are not usually to be found in scarlet fever cases. Do you suggest that this woman, this Four Square person, is in the house?”

“Either she or her agent,” said Mr. Lewinstein. “She has several people who work with her by all accounts.”

“And you believe that she has given this girl a drug to put her out of the way?”

“That’s my idea.”

“By jove!” said the young man, “that’s rather a scheme. Well, anyway, there will be plenty of people knocking about tonight, and your guests will be safe for tonight.”

The girl had been housed in the servants’ wing, but fortunately in a room isolated from all the others. Mr. Lewinstein made several trips upstairs during the course of the evening, saw through the open door the doctor sitting by the side of the bed, and was content. His guests retired towards one o’clock and this agitated Mrs. Lewinstein, to whom the news of the catastrophe had been imparted, having been successfully induced to go to bed, Mr. Lewinstein breathed more freely.

At half-past one he made his third visit to the door of the sick room, for he, himself, was not without dread of infection, and saw through the open door the doctor sitting reading a book near the head of the bed.

He stole quietly down, so quietly that he almost surprised a slim figure that was stealing along the darkened corridor whence opened the bedrooms of the principal guests.

She flattened herself into a recess, and he passed her so closely that she could have touched him. She waited until he had disappeared, and then crossed to one of the doors and felt gingerly at the key-hole. The occupant had made the mistake of locking the door and taking out the key, and in a second she had inserted one of her own, and softly turning it, had tip-toed into the room.

She stood listening; there was a steady breathing, and she made her way to the dressing-table, where her deft fingers began a rapid but silent search. Presently she found what she wanted, a smooth leather case, and shook it gently. She was not a minute in the room before she was out again, closing the door softly behind her.

She had half-opened the next door before she saw that there was a light in the room and she stood motionless in the shadow of the doorway. On the far side of the bed the little table-lamp was still burning, and it would, she reflected, have helped her a great deal, if only she could have been sure that the person who was lying among the frilled pillows of the bed was really asleep. She waited rigid, and with all her senses alert for five minutes, till the sound of regular breathing from the bed reassured her. Then she slipped forward to the dressing-table. Here, her task was easy. No less than a dozen little velvet and leather cases lay strewn on the silk cover. She opened them noiselessly one by one, and put their glittering contents into her pocket, leaving the cases as they had been.

As she was handling the last of the jewels a thought struck her, and she peered more closely at the sleeping figure. A thin pretty woman, it seemed in the half-light. So this was the businesslike Lady Ovingham. She left the room as noiselessly as she had entered it, and more quickly, and tried the next door in the passage.

This one had not been locked.

It was Mrs. Lewinstein’s own room, but she was not sleeping quietly. The door had been left open for her lord, who had made a promise to see his wife to make arrangements for the morrow. This promise he had quite forgotten in his perturbation. There was a little safe let into the wall, and the keys were hanging in the lock; for Mr. Lewinstein, who, being a prudent, careful man, was in the habit of depositing his diamond studs every night.

The girl’s fingers went into the interior of the safe, and presently she found what she wanted. Mrs. Lewinstein stopped breathing heavily, grunted, and turned, and the girl stood stock-still. Presently the snoring recommenced, and she stole out into the corridor.

As she closed each door she stopped only long enough to press a small label against the surface of the handle before she passed on to the next room.

Downstairs in the library, Mr. Lewinstein heard the soft purr of a motor car, and rose with a sigh of relief. Only his butler had been let into the secret, and that sleepy retainer, who was dozing in one of the hall chairs, heard the sound with as great relief as his employer. He opened the big front door.

Outside was a motor-ambulance from which two men had descended. They pulled out a stretcher and a bundle of blankets, and made their way into the hall.

“I will show you the way,” said Mr. Lewinstein. “You will make as little noise as possible, please.”

He led the procession up the carpeted stairs, and came at last to the girl’s room.

“Oh, here you are,” said the doctor, yawning. “Set the stretcher by the side of the bed. You had better stand away some distance, Mr. Lewinstein,” he said, and that gentleman obeyed with alacrity.

Presently the door opened and the stretcher came out, bearing the blanket-enveloped figure of the girl, her face just visible, and she favoured Mr. Lewinstein with a pathetic smile as she passed.

The stairs were negotiated without any difficulty by the attendants, and carefully the stretcher was pushed into the interior of the ambulance.

“That’s all right,” said the doctor; “if I were you I would have that bedroom locked up and fumigated tomorrow.”

“I’m awfully obliged to you, doctor. If you will give me your address I would like to send you a cheque.”

“Oh, rubbish,” said the other cheerfully, “I am only too happy to serve you. I will go into the village to pick up my car and get back to town myself.”

“Where will you take this young woman?” asked Mr. Lewinstein.

“To the County Fever Hospital,” replied the other carelessly. “That’s where you’re taking her, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” said one of the attendants.

Mr. Lewinstein waited on the steps until the red lights of the car had disappeared, then stepped inside with the sense of having managed a very difficult situation rather well.

“That will do for the night,” he said to the butler. “Thank you for waiting up.”

He found himself walking, with a little smile on his lips, along the corridor to his own room.

As he was passing his wife’s door he stumbled over something. Stooping, he picked up a case. There was an electric switch close by, and he flooded the corridor with light.

“Jumping Moses!” he gasped, for the thing he held in his hand was his wife’s jewel case.

He made a run for her door, and was just gripping the handle, when the label there caught his eye, and he stared in hopeless bewilderment at the sign of Four Square Jane.

The enormous success that Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) enjoyed in the 1920s and ’30s extended beyond the United Kingdom to the United States, but Elegant Edward (1928) was suffused with a kind of humor that evidently did not appeal to Americans, as the collection of short stories was never published on the other side of the Atlantic.

Unlike most of the many criminal characters created by Wallace, Edward Farthindale, known to one and all as Elegant Edward, was not a brilliant mastermind who arrogantly laughed at the police who tried to capture him. He is described thus by the editor:

As the most popular writer in the world in the 1920s and ’30s, Wallace earned a fortune — reportedly more than a quarter of a million dollars a year during the last decade of his life, but his extravagant lifestyle left his estate deeply in debt when he died.

“A Fortune in Tin” was originally published in Elegant Edward (London, Readers Library, 1928).

Elegant Edward dealt in a stable line of goods, and, in the true sense of the word, he was no thief. He was admittedly a chiseller, a macer, a twister, and a get-a-bit. His stock-in-trade consisted either of shares in derelict companies purchased for a song, or options on remote properties, or genuine gold claims, indubitable mineral rights, and oil propositions. Because of his elegance and refinement, he was able to specialize in this high-class trade and make a living where another man would have starved.

Mr. Farthindale had emerged from a welter of trouble with almost all the capital which had been his a week before. He had tracked down certain disloyal partners who had sold property of his, and had forced them to disgorge their ill-gotten gains, and from the fence who had illegally purchased his property, he had obtained the rest.

The police were seeking a certain Scotty Ferguson, the partner in question, and because Edward had no desire to give evidence against his some-time confederate, he had changed his lodgings, and was considering the next move in his adventurous game.

It came as a result of a chance meeting with an itinerant vendor of novelties, who stood on the kerb of a London street selling 100,000 mark notes for twopence. Insensibly Edward’s mind went to the business he understood best. In the city of London was a snide bucket-shop keeper with whom he was acquainted. This gentleman operated from a very small office in a very large building. A picture of the building was on his note-paper, and country clients were under the impression that the Anglo-Imperial Stock Trust occupied every floor and overflowed to the roof. To him, Edward repaired, and found him playing patience, for business was bad.

“How do, Mr. Farthindale. Come in and sit down.”

“How’s it going?” asked Edward conventionally.

The Anglo-Imperial Stock Trust made a painful face.

“Rotten,” he said. “I sent out three thousand circulars last week, offering the finest oil ground in Texas at a hundred pounds an acre. I got one reply — from an old lady who wanted to know if I’d met her son who lives in Texas City. The suckers are dying, Mr. Farthindale.”

Edward scratched his chin.

“Oil’s no good to me,” he said. “I’ve worked oil in Scotland. What about mines?”

“Gold or silver?” asked the Anglo-Imperial, rising with alacrity. “I’ve got a peach of a silver mine—”

“I’ve worked silver mines,” said the patient Edward, “in Wales. Silver never goes as well as gold.”

“What about tin?” asked The Trust anxiously. “The Trevenay Tin Mine Corporation? The mine’s been working since the days of the Pernicions, or Phinocians... prehistoric dagoes... you know?”

Elegant Edward had a dim idea that the Phœnicians were pretty old, and was mildly impressed.

“I’ve got a hundred and twenty thousand shares out of a hundred and fifty thousand. It’s a real mine, too — about forty years ago a thousand people used to work on it!” The Trust continued. “The other thirty thousand are owned by an old Scotsman — a professor or something — and he won’t part. I offered him twenty pounds for ’em, too. Not that they’re worth it, or rather at the time they weren’t,” added The Trust hastily, realizing that Edward stood in the light of a possible purchaser.

“But the land and machinery are worth money?” suggested Edward.

The Trust shook his head.

“The company only holds mining rights, and the royalty owner has got first claim on the buildings — such as they are. But the company looks good, and the new share certificates I had printed look better. You couldn’t have a finer proposition, Mr. Farthindale.”

There were hagglings and bargainings, scornful refusings and sardonic comments generally before Elegant Edward was able to take the trail again, the owner of a hundred and twenty thousand shares in a tin company, which was genuine in all respects, except that it contained no tin.

“If you’re going to Scotland, see that professor,” said The Trust at parting. “You ought to get the rest of the stock for a tenner.”

It was to Scotland, as a needle to a magnet, that Elegant Edward was attracted. A desire to get “his own back,” to recoup himself for his losses, in fact to “show ’em” brought him to a country he loathed.

He had come to sell to the simple people of Scotia, at ten shillings per share, stock which he had bought at a little less than a farthing. And, since cupidity and stupidity run side by side in the mental equipment of humanity, he succeeded.

It was in the quietude of an Edinburgh lodging that Edward ran to earth Professor Folloman.

The professor was usually very drunk and invariably very learned — a wisp of a man, with long, dirty-white hair and an expression of woe. Five minutes after the two boarders met in the dismal lodging-house “drawing-room,” the professor, a man without reticence, was retailing his troubles.

“The world,” said Professor Folloman, “neglects its geniuses. It allows men of my talent to starve, whilst it gives fortunes to the charlatan, the faker, and the crook. O mores, o tempores!”

“Oui, oui,” said Elegant Edward misguidedly.

The professor came naturally to his favourite subject, which was the hollowness and chicanery of patent medicines. It was his illusion that his life had been ruined, his career annihilated, and the future darkened by the popularity of certain patent drugs which are household words to the average Briton. That his misfortune might be traced to an early-acquired habit of making his breakfast on neat whisky — a practice which on one occasion had almost a tragical result — never occurred to him.

“Here am I, sir, one of the best physicians of the city of Edinburgh, a man holding degrees which I can only describe as unique, and moreover, the possessor of shares in one of the richest tin mines in Cornwall, obliged to borrow the price of a drink from a comparative stranger.”

Elegant Edward, recognizing this description of himself, made an heroic attempt to nail down the conversation to the question of tin mines, but the professor was a skilful man.

“What has ruined me?” he demanded, fixing his bright eyes on Edward with a hypnotic glare. “I’ll tell you, my man! Biggins’ Pills have ruined me, and Walkers’ Wee Wafers and Lambo’s Lightning Lung-tonic! Because of this pernicious invasion of the healing realm, I, John Walker Folloman, am compelled to live on the charity of relations — let us have a drink.”

Such a direct invitation, Elegant Edward could not refuse. They adjourned to a near-by bar, and here the professor took up the threads of the conversation.

“You, like myself, are a gentleman. The moment I saw you, my man, I said: ‘Here is a professional.’ None but a professional would have his trousers creased, and wear a tail-coat. None but a professional would pay the scrupulous attention to his attire and the glossiness of his hat — don’t drown it, my lass! whisky deserves a better fate — you’re a doctor, sir?”

Edward coughed. He had never before been mistaken for a doctor. It was not an unpleasing experience.

“Not exactly,” he said.

“Ah! A lawyer!”

“I’ve had a lot to do with the law,” said Elegant Edward truthfully, “but I’m not exactly a lawyer.”

“Something that makes money, I have no doubt,” said the old man gloomily. “I could have been a millionaire, had I descended to the manufacture of noxious quack medicines instead of following my profession. I should have been a millionaire had somebody with my unique knowledge of metallurgy been in control of the Trevenay Mines—”

“Tin mines?” asked Elegant Edward. “There’s no money in tin. I always tell my friends — I’m in the stock-broking business — ‘If you’ve got tin shares, sell ’em.’ ”

“I’ll no’ sell mine,” said the old man grimly. “No, sir! I’ll hold my shares. A dear friend of mine, Professor Macginnis, is in Cornwall and has promised to give me a report — Macginnis is the greatest authority on tin in this world, Sir. I have his letter,” he fumbled in his pocket unsuccessfully, “no, I have left it in my other jacket. But it doesn’t matter. He is taking a holiday in the south, and has promised to thoroughly examine the ground.”

“His... his report won’t be published in the papers, will it?” asked Edward anxiously.

“It will not,” said the professor, and pushed his glass across the counter. “Repeat the potion, Maggie, and let your hand be as generous as your heart, my lass!”

A few days later, and on a raw December morning, with leaden clouds overhead and the air thick with driving sleet, Elegant Edward came out of the station and gazed disconsolately upon so much of the town as was visible through the veil of the blizzard.

“So this is Dundee!” said Elegant Edward, unconsciously paraphrasing a better-known slogan. He had chosen Dundee for the scene of his operations, mainly because it was not Glasgow. Gathering up his rug and his bag, he beckoned the one cab in sight and gave his instructions.

At the little hotel where he was set down, he found a letter awaiting him. It was addressed to Angus Mackenzie (he had signed the register in that name) and its contents were satisfactory. The small furnished office which he had engaged by letter was waiting his pleasure, the key was enclosed, together with a receipt for the rent he had paid in advance.

To trace the progress of Mr. Farthindale through the months that followed his arrival on the Tay would be more or less profitless; to tell the story of his limited advertising campaign, his clever circularization and the pleasing volume of business which came his way, and divers other incidentals, would be to elongate the narrative to unpardonable length.

Margaret Elton came to him on the third day after his arrival. She was tall, good-looking and, moreover, she believed in miracles. But although she was, by the admission of one who loved her best, masterful, she could not master the cruel fate which had hitherto denied her sufficient money to support an ailing mother without having recourse to the limited income of a young man who found every day a new reason for marrying at once.

“It is no use, John,” she said firmly. “I’m not going to let you marry the family. When I can make mother independent I’ll marry.”

“Margaret,” he said, “that means waiting another fifty years — but I’ll wait. What is your new boss like?”

“He’s English and inoffensive,” she said tersely.

Which in a sense was true, though Elegant Edward had his own doubts about his inoffensiveness.

Edward would have fired her the day she came, only he couldn’t summon sufficient courage. Thereafter, he was lost. She took control of the office, the business, and Elegant Edward. It was she who had the idea for appointing the travellers to carry the joyous news about the Trevenay Tin Mine to the remotest parts of Scotland; she who discharged them when their expense accounts came in; she who saw the printers and corrected the proofs of the circular describing the history of the Trevenay Mine; she who bought the typewriter, and insisted upon Edward coming to the office at ten o’clock every morning. She liked Edward; she told him so. Usually such a declaration, coming from so charming a female, would have set Edward’s head wagging. But she had so many qualifications to her admiration that he was almost terrified at her praise.

“I don’t like that moustache. Why do you wax it, Mr. Mackenzie?” she demanded. “It looks so ridiculous! I wonder how you would look clean-shaven?”

Now Edward’s moustache was the pride of his life, and he made one great effort to preserve it intact.

“My personal appearance—” he began with tremulous hauteur.

“Take it off; I’d like to see you without it,” she said, “unless you’ve got a bad mouth. Most men wear moustaches because their mouths won’t stand inspection.”

The next morning Edward came clean-shaven, and she looked at him dubiously.

“I think you had better grow it again,” she said. It was her only comment.

Money was coming in in handsome quantities — Mr. Farthindale’s new profession was paying handsome dividends.

One day there floated into his office an acquaintance of other days, Lew Bennyfold — an adventurer at large. Happily the dominant Margaret was out at lunch.

“Thought it was you,” said Lew, seating himself uninvited. “I spotted you coming into the building yesterday; it took me all the morning to locate you. What’s the graft?”

Edward gazed upon the apparition in dismay. He had some slight acquaintance with this confidence man — he did not wish to improve upon it.

“This is no graft, Mr. Bennyfold,” he said gently, “but honest toil and labour — I’m running a mine.”

“Go on?” said the other incredulously. “You’re not the What-is-it Tin Mine, are you?”

Edward nodded.

“That explains everything,” said Mr. Lew Bennyfold gravely, and rose to his feet. “Well, I won’t stay — I don’t want to be in this.”

“What do you mean?” asked Edward.

Mr. Bennyfold smiled pityingly.

“From what I’ve heard of you, you’re a fly mug,” he said; “in fact, you’ve got a name for being clever but easy. But how any grafter could sit here in an office, working with a ‘nose’ and not be wise to it, beats me.”

“A nose!” said the startled Edward.

Mr. Bennyfold nodded again.

“I’ve been working Dundee, and ‘work’s’ a good word. It has been perishing hard work. And I’ve been here long enough to see things. How do you think I came to be watching this office?”

Edward had wondered that too.

“I’ve been tailing up Sergeant Walker and his girl,” said Lew. “I happen to lodge opposite the sergeant — he’s the smartest ‘busy’ in Dundee. And I’ve noticed that he’s always with a girl. Meets her after dark and they go long walks. So I got on the track of the girl. And she led me here.”

“Here?” gasped Edward turning pale. “You don’t mean to tell me—?”

“She’s Miss Margaret Elton,” said Bennyfold, “and if you’ve let her know anything about your business, you’re as good as jugged.”

Elegant Edward wiped his warm forehead.

His business was an honest one — only an insider who knew the office secrets could prove otherwise. Usually, Elegant Edward did not allow an insider to know much, but this bossy girl had taken the office workings into her own hands.

“He’s sweet on her — there’s no doubt about that,” said Bennyfold. “My landlady told me they’re going to be married. But that’s worse for you, because she’ll do anything for him and swear anything. Mr. Farthindale, I wouldn’t be in your shoes for a million!”

He left with this, and his anxiety to avoid complications added to Edward’s distress.

When the girl came back from lunch he regarded her with a new and a fearful interest. There was something very remorseless about her mouth; her eyes, he thought, were pitiless, her profile made him shudder.

“Our agent in Ayr isn’t doing much business,” she said brusquely. “I think we had better fire him and get another man.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but no words came. Now he understood her bossiness. She had behind her the power and authority of the law.

Late in the afternoon she interruped his gloomy meditations.

“Will you excuse me for a few minutes? A friend of mine wants to see me.”

“Certainly, Miss Elton,” he said, almost humbly.

When she had left the room, he went to the window and looked out.

A tall, stern-looking young man was pacing the sidewalk on the opposite side, from time to time looking up at the office window. With him was an older man — a typical chief constable in mufti.

Edward saw the girl join them, watched the earnest conversation between them, and once saw the girl look up to the window where he was standing. She saw him and said something and all three looked up.

Edward drew back quickly out of sight.

So Lew was right. He was trapped!

Now Edward was a quick thinker and a man to whom inspiration came very readily. He was inspired now. The scheme came to him in a flash — the greatest wangle that had ever entered his mind. He waited until the girl came back.

“I’m sorry I was so long. That young gentleman you saw me with — I noticed you were looking — is my fiancé, and the other gentleman is a house agent. Willie is buying a house, though I doubt if he’ll ever put it to the use he intends.”

“Indeed,” said Edward politely. “I’ll be going to my lawyers for a few minutes to get my will made. Will you witness it for me?”

She looked at him in surprise.

“Thinking of dying?” she asked suspiciously.

Edward had the feeling that to die without her permission would be regarded by her as an unfriendly act.

The little lawyer who had fixed up his tenancy was in.

“I want a short deed drawn up, transferring my business to a young lady,” said Edward. “I want it done right away so that I can get it signed.”

The lawyer was puzzled.

“A deed? I don’t think it is necessary. A receipt would be sufficient. I’ll draw it up for you. How much is being paid?”

“Half-a-crown,” said Edward. He didn’t think Margaret would part with more without explanation. “But it has got to have her signature.”

“I see — a nominal transfer,” said the lawyer, and drew up the document on the spot.

Edward carried the paper back to his office.

“You sign this here,” he said, as he wrote his name across the stamp, “and to make this document legal you’ve got to put your name under mine and give me half-a-crown.”

“Why? I’ve got no half-crowns to throw away!”

Eventually and on the promise that the money would be returned, she consented, signed the paper, paid, and was repaid the money.

Edward put the document into an envelope, sealed it, and placed it in his little safe.

“Now everything’s all right,” he said and smiled seraphically.

The next morning came fifty inquiries for Trevenay Shares. The afternoon post brought forty more. He went to his bank and drew six hundred pounds. He must be ready to move at a moment’s notice.

Edward had often lived on the edges of volcanoes and thrived in the atmosphere of sulphur, but he was more than usually nervous that day and the next; and on the evening of the second day the blow fell.

He was leaving his office when he saw the tall stern young man come quickly towards him. Elegant Edward stood stock still.

“I want you, Mr. Mackenzie,” said the officer.

“I don’t know what you want me for,” said Edward loudly, and at that moment Margaret Elton came out into the street.

“You may want this young lady, but you certainly don’t want me.”

The officer stared at him.

“I don’t understand you,” he said.

“You don’t? Well, I’ll tell you something — the business belongs to her. If you’ll step inside I’ll show you.”

Edward led the way back to his sanctum, opened the safe, took out and opened the envelope.

“Here you are,” he said, “read this.”

Sergeant Walker read in silent amazement the document that transferred to Margaret Elton, “the business known as the Trevenay Share Syndicate, together with all shares held by that company, exclusive of monies standing to the credit of the syndicate, furniture, leaseholds, and all properties whatsoever.”

“You mean... this is Miss Elton’s business?” gasped Walker.

Edward nodded gravely.

“I gave it to her as — as a wedding present,” he said, “there’s the key of the safe — bless you, my children!”

He was out of the office before they could stop him.

“What does it mean?” asked the amazed girl.

Sergeant Walker shook his head.

“I don’t know — it must be that miracle you’re always talking about,” he said. “I stopped him in the street to ask him if he could give you a fortnight’s holiday and come to the wedding and he sprung this on me. How did he know we were getting married?”

Largely forgotten today, Everett Rhodes Castle (1894–1968) was a hugely popular short story writer for decades, appearing with regularity in the pages of the best-paying magazines in America, including Redbook, Collier’s, and The Saturday Evening Post, to which he sold his first story in 1917.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, his goal had been to be a cartoonist, but he instead became a journalist before becoming an advertising copywriter while creating gently humorous stories that mostly featured business, romance, and crime on the side.

Castle is best known for his long series about Colonel Humphrey Flack, a con man who swindles other swindlers with the aid of his partner, Uthas P. (“Patsy”) Garvey. They serve a role akin to Robin Hood figures, turning over their ill-gotten gains to the deserving while retaining a percentage “for expenses.” The magazine stories inspired a humorous, family-oriented television series for the Dumont network titled Colonel Humphrey Flack that ran from October 7, 1953, to July 2, 1954; it was revived for a thirty-nine-episode syndicated series that aired from October 5, 1958, to July 5, 1959, with the title Colonel Flack.

“The Colonel Gives a Party” was first published in the May 8, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post.

The old gentleman with the crimson face and sweeping white mustaches picked up the telephone and asked, in an amiable bass, for the cashier. His watery blue eyes, pendent in bulging brassières of flesh, twinkled good-naturedly. His free hand, a massive paw speckled with brown spots, fondled a brandy and soda. A vintage cigar, also speckled with brown spots, rode jauntily above his huge, glistening, winged collar.

“This is Colonel Humphrey Flack in Suite Nine-o-two,” he said, after a moment. “Mr. Garvey and I are checking out in the morning. Ha... Exactly... Eh?... No, no. Everything has been eminently satisfactory. Quite. I... we are merely going South. To my place in Palm Beach. Will you see that my chit is ready immediately after breakfast? Ha... Good. Very good. Incidentally, there will be a few... hum... additions to the account this evening. I... ha... am giving a little farewell party.”

The younger man with his hands thrust deep into the trouser pockets of his blue flannel suit turned away from the window. His dark eyes smoldered with resentment.

“It ought to be a pleasure to hear you speak the truth for once,” he fumed. “But it isn’t! The Colonel gives the party! What else have you been doing twice a week for the past weeks? Poker, he calls it! Ever thought of what that gang of high-binders you’ve been having in here probably call it?” His thin, bitter laugh curdled the twilight.

The old gentleman by the telephone gestured meekly with his sweating glass. “But it’s been fun,” he protested mildly. “And at seventy-one a man must seize the few... hum... pleasures which come his way.”

Mr. Uthas Garvey’s nervous fingers flecked the ash from his cigarette. “That’s your trouble,” he snapped. “You’re living in the past. You’re a hangover from the good old days when suckers bought the Brooklyn Bridge, gold bricks, went for the wire racket, the tear-up, and all the other bewhiskered gyps of the Gay Nineties.”

The Colonel dipped his aristocratic puce beak into his glass, came up smiling. “I live by my wits,” he admitted benignly. “Ha. I admit it, frankly. But so do you, my dear chap. The pot libels the kettle, eh?”

“I’m fed up with wits!” Mr. Garvey assured him sourly. “What’s it got me in the two years we’ve been playing around together? Right now I’ve got three dollars and ten cents in cash and a case of stomach ulcers. And what have you laid by, fine-feathered friend? Two bucks and a bad case of dementia grandeur. Some balance sheet, eh?”

“It could be worse, my dear boy.”

“How?” Mr. Garvey dropped his voice to a mocking imitation of his associate’s rumble. “Get my bill ready, my good man! I’m leaving for the South, my good man.” His voice edged up. “Where does the lettuce come from to pay the bill? The railroad tickets? Where will you get the dough you’ll lose tonight trying to make a four-card flush stand up against three mop squeezers?”

“Maybe I’ll hold the three queens tonight, my dear chap. Ha. Exactly.”

“Against Billings?” Mr. Garvey’s laughter was abrupt, derisive. “That goon used to be a dealer in Moxey Manning’s gambling joint in Denver. Purdy? He just beat a rap for selling fake cemetery lots to the widow-and-orphan trade by an eyelash. And Spertz! A crooked stock rigger under indictment right now. And Dolan! A bottom-of-the-deck artist. A fine gang of playmates.”

“Don’t forget Captain Ferdinand Smythe-Calder,” the Colonel implored him meekly. “Of course, he isn’t a captain and Calder isn’t his real name. But he has a very quick brain. Ha. Indubitably.”

“As opposed to senile decay!” Mr. Garvey muttered wrathfully.

The Colonel rubbed his lower lip tenderly. “It’s heartening, the interest people take in the aged and mentally infirm,” he observed placidly. “At my last little poker party, Eddie, the bell captain, delivered some cigars. Yesterday he took the time and... hum... trouble to hint that my guests — particularly the Captain — were residents of Queer Street, as the English say. Ha. Exactly. I gathered the Captain had done the dirty, as they say, to some friend of the lad’s. A nice boy. Ha. Eddie, I mean. Did you know this was his last day at the hotel? He’s leaving in the morning. The Marines, I believe. A noble service. I must not forget to leave him a substantial remembrance.”

“And they lock up poor jerks who only imagine that they’re Nero or Napoleon or Lincoln,” Mr. Garvey mourned.

The Colonel was humming one of his favorite tunes now. A little number entitled A Violet Plucked from Mother’s Grave. It was more than flesh could take.

“For God’s sake, quit that dirge!” Mr. Garvey screamed.

“Dirge?” The watery orbs were mildly reproving. “Hardly, my dear fellow. A most interesting little lyric. By a chap named J. P. Skelly. He was known as the Bible House Plumber in his day. He wrote over four hundred songs. All on brown wrapping paper. Ha. Exactly. Most interesting, eh?”

“I’m enthralled,” Mr. Garvey snarled. “You’ve opened up an entirely new world to me.” He dropped down abruptly on a putty-colored settee that cornered the far side of the parlor. “My ulcers!” he moaned.

With quick solicitude the Colonel dug up the telephone and called for room service. He ordered bicarbonate, and then, almost as a casual afterthought, added two quarts of Scotch, a bottle of brandy, one of bourbon, charged water, ginger ale, cigarettes, and a box of cigars.

“And... hah... a large platter of turkey, ham and cheese sandwiches later, eh? About ten-thirty.”

Mr. Garvey’s stomach writhed in agony, but his mind was busy with a bitter sum in mental arithmetic. “How typical of our partnership,” he observed brightly. “Everything fifty-fifty! A dose of baking soda for Garvey and forty dollars’ worth of high living for Colonel Humphrey.”

The old gentleman ignored the crack. He gulped his drink and reached again for the telephone. “The desk,” he commanded.

When the connection was made, he requested the immediate installation of a radio. He hung up with a flourish.

“Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” Mr. Garvey quoted petulantly. Then his mind backtracked to the flourish. His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Or could I be wrong?”

“About a hangover from the old days when suckers went for the wire racket and all the other bewhiskered gyps of the Gay Nineties? My dear boy!”

“Spare me those trained dewlaps quivering with reproach.” The younger man stood up and started for the array of glasses and bottles on the side table near the older man. Then he sighed and twisted away. “You don’t like radio,” he pointed out accusingly over his shoulder. “You’ve said so a hundred times. The blatting—”

“But I do like the... hah... manly art of self-defense, my dear lad,” the Colonel pointed out glibly. “And so do my guests.” The massive gold chain attached to his stomach watch twitched with logic — or something. “Young Cooney is battling Stanley Peyskisk for the light-heavyweight championship tonight. Ha. Exactly. I... I was reading about it over luncheon today. Hum. On the sports page. Then I happened to notice that the bout would also be on a local station at eleven o’clock. What a marvelous age we are living in, my dear boy! It... it makes one think, doesn’t it?”

“Cooney will cut him to pieces,” Mr. Garvey predicted. “And don’t tell me all the wise money is going on the Polack. I know it is. But wise dough has been wrong before.”

The Colonel was making himself another drink. He held glass and bottle high, squinting tenderly at the golden liquid threading into the glass. “I wasn’t thinking of the two contestants,” he chirruped blithely. “My... my mind was traveling back. Years ago we had to... hum... depend on the telegraph for sporting results—”

“I’m not interested.”

But the old goat was off, teetering on his toes, one hand tugging reminiscently at his port mustache.

Mr. Garvey sighed, shrugged his shoulders wearily, and wished the bicarbonate would arrive.

“I was thinking of the old wire racket you mentioned,” the Colonel pattered on. “Remember how it worked? Contact was made with a... hum... gullible and... and avaricious gentleman with money. It was explained to this easy mark that the contactor was a close friend or relative of a telegraph operator. This operator had agreed to hold up the news of certain race results. Ha. Exactly. At the same time he would pass along the names of the winning horses to his friend. The friend would thus be able to place a bet on the winning horse with some bookie joint... hah... after the race was won. It... it was absolutely sure. The contactor explained that he was without the necessary funds to make a big killing, quick. Hence the opportunity for the easy mark. Of course, the whole thing was a plant. After letting the mark win a few small bets, they took him in... hah... a big way and... hum... fled.”

Mr. Garvey draped his feet over the end of the settee and lit a cigarette. The tableau was one of complete disinterest.

“I was just thinking—” the Colonel went on with a sly, ruminative grin, as his younger partner sent smoke rings twisting toward the ceiling — “ha... how the magic of modern science and invention has made such small stratagems... hum... quite obsolete. You agree?”

Mr. Garvey yawned, loudly and ostentatiously.

A waiter arrived, pushing a white-clothed cart covered with bottles before him. Mr. Garvey sat up with a quick sigh of relief. The Colonel signed the check with the dash and confidence of the Federal Reserve System. He added a tip to the bottom of the card. The smile on the waiter’s face made Mr. Garvey wince as he stirred his bicarbonate.

Then the old boar was at the telephone again. This time he wanted the bell captain. “Eddie? Ha... Oh, I see. This is Colonel Flack. Will you tell him I’d like to see him for a minute as soon as he returns? Tell him it is... hah... very important.”

Garvey eyed him thoughtfully over the cloudy glass. The Colonel grinned.

Something — either the bicarbonate or the grin — made the younger man feel better. “So I was wrong, eh?”

“What time have you, my dear fellow?”

Garvey stared at his wrist. “Five to eight.”

“Your watch is three minutes slow. I checked with the telephone company just before you returned from dinner. Please set it.”

“What difference does three minutes make when—”

The Colonel returned his huge gold hunter to his white linen vest. “Timing is one of the most important things in life, my dear Garvey. In business. In... hah... the drama. Even in paying one’s hotel bill. Ha. Exactly. Quite.”

Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett (1886–1974), one of the greatest bibliophiles in the history of the American book world, produced innumerable essays, biographical works, critical studies, and bibliographical pieces on a wide range of authors, all while managing the “Books Alive” column for the Chicago Tribune for many years. His autobiography, Born in a Bookshop (1965), should be required reading for bibliophiles of all ages.

He also wrote numerous mystery short stories and several detective novels, including Murder on “B” Deck (1929), Dead Man Inside (1931), and The End of Mr. Garment (1932). His 1934 short story, “Recipe for Murder,” was expanded to the full-length novel The Great Hotel Murder (1935), which was the basis for the film of the same title and released the same year; it starred Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen.

Few would argue that Starrett’s most outstanding achievements were his writings about Sherlock Holmes, most notably The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933) and “The Unique ‘Hamlet,’ ” described by Sherlockians for decades as the best pastiche ever written.

A charming story involves his young daughter, who offered the best tombstone inscription for anyone who is a Dofob — Eugene Field’s useful word for a “damned old fool over books” — as Starrett admitted to being. When a friend called at his home, Starrett’s daughter answered the door and told the visitor that her father was “upstairs, playing with his books.”

“Footsteps of Fear” was originally published in the April 1920 issue of Black Mask — the magazine’s first issue. It was first collected in Starrett’s The Quick and the Dead (Sauk City, Wisconsin, Arkham House, 1965).

Dr. B. Edward Loxley (jocularly called “Bedward” by the gossip columnists), the wife-murderer for whom hundreds of police had been scouring the city for three weeks, sat quietly at his desk in the great Merchandise Exchange reading his morning mail. The frosted glass door beyond his outer office read simply William Drayham, Rare Books. Hours by Appointment. After three weeks of security he was beginning to feel complacent. For three weeks he had not left his hiding place and he had no intention of leaving it immediately, except feet first.

It had all been thought out beforehand. The office had been rented a month before the murder of Lora Loxley, and he had quietly taken possession and begun his new personality buildup as William Drayham. He had been accepted by his neighbors in the sixth floor corridor. The elevator starter was getting to know him. He breakfasted, lunched, and dined at the several restaurants in the building, was shaved by a favorite barber, and was — he had every reason to believe — an accepted fixture. His neighbors were inoffensive, unimaginative workers who did not question his identity, and the words Rare Books on the door were formidable enough to frighten away casual visitors.

Lora Loxley, murdered by suffocation, had long been buried and even the newspapers were beginning to minimize the sensational story. The feeling was growing that Loxley, himself, also might have been murdered and a desultory search for his body continued when the police had nothing better to occupy them. As his window overlooked the river where, in addition to the normal traffic, police boats occasionally plied, he was enabled to watch their activities with amused appreciation of their effort. He had now spent two lonely Sundays watching the holiday traffic with a pair of binoculars, waiting for any active renewal of police attention. He was on excellent terms with the watchmen in his part of the building, who were accustomed to seeing him around at unlikely hours.

The Merchandise Exchange was a city within a city. It contained everything he needed — restaurants, laundries, barbershops, tobacconists, dentists, news stands, banking facilities, a gymnasium, even a postal station. He was known by name in the restaurants and barbershops. He bought all the newspapers. Occasionally he dictated a letter to a public stenographer, ordering or rejecting books. As William Drayham he had a sufficient banking account downstairs for his immediate needs. The rest of his wealth, in cash, was in Paris with Gloria.

His principal bogies had been watchmen and cleaning women. He had little fear, however, of the cleaning women, a friendly trio who liked candy and who readily agreed to visit his office while he was having a late dinner. His domestic arrangements were simple. He slept on a couch in his inner office, which held also a vault to which he could retire in an emergency. To date there had been no emergency.

Dr. Loxley pushed the mail aside impatiently. Too early perhaps to expect a response to the little ad he was running in a Sunday book supplement. But not too early for the coffee that Miss Marivole Boggs served at all hours. What luck to have found so admirable a creature in the same corridor, and even in the same line. Rare books and antiques went very well together. She had been responsible for a number of his infrequent customers. He glanced at his expensive wristwatch and left William Drayham’s rare books behind him without a pang.

M. Boggs, Antiques, as she described herself on the show window of her small shop at the end of the corridor, looked up at his entrance.

“Hello,” she said. “I was hoping you would come in.”

“I couldn’t miss,” he said. His brown eyes took in the familiar room, resting for a moment on the suit of antique armor that dominated one corner of the shop and the Spanish chest that was Miss Boggs’s pride and joy. “Well, I see nobody has bought either of them yet.” It was one of their standing jokes that some day, when the rare book business was better, he would write a check for them himself.

As she poured his coffee she said, “The newspaper stories about that doctor are getting shorter every day. I’m beginning to believe he really was murdered.”

They often discussed the missing Dr. Loxley, as indeed the whole city was doing. At first it had been Miss Boggs’s idea that the “society doctor” had murdered his wife over some glamorous patient who was now living in sin with him somewhere on the Riviera.

Dr. Loxley had thought not. “Too romantic, Boggs. I still think he’s in the river or somewhere on his way to the Gulf of Mexico. That scarf they found on the river banks looks like it.”

“Anyway, the police seem to have stopped looking,” said M. Boggs.

“Anyway, this is good coffee, Boggs. I hope you’ll leave me the recipe. Do you still plan to leave this month?”

“At once,” she said. “I’m flying to New York tomorrow, if I can get away. I want to be in London for the Exhibition; then on to Paris, Rome, Switzerland, and what have you. I’m enormously relieved that you’ll be here to keep an eye on things, Bill. Coffee at all hours, eh?”

“Morning, noon, and night,” he agreed, rising to leave. Her change of plan had startled him for a moment; but he was quick enough to see an advantage in it for himself. “Never fear, I’ll be here waiting for you when you return.”

Strolling back to his own shop, humming a jaunty air, he became aware of a man leaving the doorway of the office directly opposite his own. Something about the man’s carriage seemed familiar. He was turning toward the elevators and walking fast. In an instant they would meet.

And suddenly Dr. Loxley realized that the man was, indeed, familiar. He was his own brother-in-law, Laurence Bridewell.

His first instinct was to turn and flee, his second to turn back to M. Boggs, Antiques. His final decision, made in a split second, was to see the encounter through. His disguise had fooled better men than Larry Bridewell, although none who knew him better. With his neat little beard and moustache gone, and his blue eyes transformed by brown contact lenses, he was another man. After an appalling moment of indecision, he fumbled for a cigarette, realizing that after three weeks of complacent safety, he was about to face a supreme test.

He tried and failed to light the cigarette... Then they were face to face, looking at each other as men do in passing, and the test was over. Or was it? Bridewell continued on his way to the elevators, walking fast, and Loxley stumbled to his own door.

Dared he look back? Had Bridewell turned to look back at him? Moving casually, he stole a glance along the corridor. There was no doubt about it — Larry was looking back, too. Perhaps he had merely been troubled by a fancied resemblance...

Dr. Loxley made some difficulty about opening his own door, and just before he closed it, it occurred to him to look at the name on the door of the office from which his brother-in-law had emerged. Actually he knew very well what he would find there: Jackson & Fortworth, Attorneys at Law. And below, the significant word Investigations.

He tried to take himself in hand and was annoyed to find himself shaking. Experimentally he ventured a little drink to see what it would do for him. It helped considerably. But the whole incident haunted him and gave him a bad night. In the morning, however, his fears had vanished. He was his confident self again until, a few hours later, a second incident shook his nerve. Returning from the cigar stand in the lobby he had to pass the De Luxe Dog Salon in one of the street level corridors and paused, as he had often done before, to look in at the windows at the fashionable dogs in process of being barbered, an amusing spectacle. But as he turned away an appalling thing happened.

A well-dressed woman was approaching the salon with a sprightly French poodle on a leash. She looked familiar. God’s teeth! She was familiar, and so was the dog. She was Mrs. Montgomery Hyde, no less, an old patient. His heart seemed to stop beating. Would she recognize him?

It was the dog that recognized him. With a yelp of joy the poodle jerked the leash from the woman’s hand and flung himself rapturously against the doctor’s legs.

With an effort Loxley recovered his balance and somehow recovered his poise. It was his worst moment to date. Automatically he disengaged himself from the poodle’s embrace and pulled the black ears.

“There, there fellow,” he said to the excited animal in a voice that he hoped was not his own. “I beg your pardon, Madam. Your dog appears to have made a mistake.”

To his intense relief, Mrs. Montgomery Hyde agreed.

“Do forgive Toto’s impulsiveness,” she begged, snatching up the leash. “He loves everybody.”

Dr. Loxley left the scene in almost a hurry. She had not recognized him! It seemed to him a miracle, but again he was annoyed to find himself shaking. And yet, could it not be a good omen? If Mrs. Hyde and his own brother-in-law had failed to recognize him, what was there to fear? Immediately he began to feel better. But when he had returned to his office William Drayham again treated himself to a stiff drink.

In a moment of alert intelligence he realized that for three weeks he had been too complacent. His meeting with Mrs. Hyde had taught him something that was important to remember. He had almost spoken her name. In his first moment of panic he might well have betrayed himself. If it was important for him not to be recognized, it was equally important that he must not recognize someone by accident.

It was clear to him that this cat-and-mouse existence could not go on indefinitely. He must remain in hiding only until it was safe for him to emerge and get out of the country. Then William Drayham would ostentatiously pack his books and remove to New York. After that, the world was wide.

For several days the chastened doctor lived cautiously, visiting M. Boggs, Antiques at intervals for coffee and to admire the suit of armor and the Spanish chest, which continued to fascinate him. He had promised Boggs, now on her travels, not to cut the price on either.

Twice, returning from the antique shop, again he had caught a glimpse of his brother-in-law entering the law office of Jackson & Fortworth, and had hastened to lock himself in his own quarters before Larry could emerge. What the devil did the fellow want with a firm of investigators anyway?

The visit of Jackson, the lawyer, to the bookshop one morning took him by surprise or he might have locked the door.

“I’ve been intending to look in on you for some time, Mr. Drayham,” said the lawyer cordially. “I’m Jackson, just across from you. Rare books have always interested me. Mind if I look around?”

Loxley rose from his chair abruptly, knocking a book from his desk to the floor. An icy fear had entered his heart. Was this it, at last, he wondered.

He shook hands effusively. “Glad to know you, Mr. Jackson. Sure, look around. Is there anything I can show you?”

But Jackson was already looking around. When he had finished he strolled to the window. “Nice view of the river you have,” he said appreciatively. “My windows all look out on a court.” He strolled to the door. “Just wanted to meet you. I’ll come in again when I have more time.”

“Any time,” said Loxley with perfunctory courtesy.

Dr. Loxley sat down at his desk and reached for the lower drawer. Another little drink wouldn’t hurt him. What had the fellow really wanted? What had he hoped to find? Or was he really one of the many idiots who collected books?

One thing at last was clear. Any day now he might have to leave the building and the city. If he was suspected, the blow would fall swiftly. At any minute the door might open again, and perhaps Jackson would not be alone. Why not get the hell out of this trap immediately? What was there to stop him? His stock — three hundred volumes of junk bought at a storage house — could be left behind if necessary.

What stopped him was Gloria’s cable from Paris: “Trouble here. Phoning Friday night.”

This was Thursday. Whatever else, he had to wait for Gloria’s call. His hand moved toward the lower drawer, then was withdrawn. Coffee, not whiskey, was what he needed; and after luncheon he spent most of the afternoon with M. Boggs’s weird collection of antiques. There, he had a fair view of Jackson’s door, and was not himself conspicuous. If Larry Bridewell was among the lawyer’s visitors, Loxley did not see him.

Exploring the antique shop he paused, as always to admire its two star exhibits, the almost frightening suit of armor and the massive Spanish chest. In a pinch, either would do as a hiding place — if there were time to hide.

That evening he was startled to find his picture in the paper again. The familiar face of Dr. B. Edward Loxley as he had looked with the neat little beard and moustache before he murdered his wife. It appeared that he had been arrested by an alert Seattle policeman, but had denied his identity.

Dr. Loxley drew a long breath of relief. After all, perhaps he was still safe. But what could Gloria have to say to him that required a call from Paris? Bad news of some kind. Bad for somebody.

In spite of his new fears he hated to leave the building that had been his refuge. It had been his hope to live there indefinitely, undetected; never again to venture into the streets until Dr. Loxley was as forgotten as Dr. Crippen.

Again he slept off his fears and spent an uninterrupted morning with his view and newspapers. He was beginning to feel almost at ease again, indeed, when the insufferable Jackson knocked on his locked door and called a hearty greeting. There was somebody with him. Through the frosted pane the shadowy outline of another man was visible.

“May we come in?” asked the lawyer. “I’ve got a couple of friends here who want to meet you.”

Loxley rose uncertainly to his feet and moved to the door. So it had come at last! He had been right about his damned brother-in-law and this sneaking lawyer. This is it! And suddenly he knew what he had to do.

He unlocked and threw open the door. “Come in, gentlemen,” he said without emotion. “What can I do for you?”

Jackson was beaming. “These are my friends, Sergeants Coughlin and Ripkin, from Headquarters. They hope you will come quietly.” He laughed heartily at his own witticism.

“Come in, gentlemen, and sit down.” Loxley forced a smile. He seated himself at his desk, stamped and addressed an envelope, and stood up. “I was just going to the mail chute with an important letter. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

“Sure,” said the two cops genially. “Take your time.”

Dr. Loxley closed the outer door behind him and almost ran for M. Boggs, Antiques. As he locked the antique shop door he was relieved to see the corridor was still empty. They would follow him, of course. Every office in the building would be searched, probably this one first.

It had to be the chest!

It stood open as always, and he squeezed down inside — an uncomfortable fit — then lowered the heavy lid until only a thin crack remained for air. Faintly now he could hear footsteps in the corridor. He drew a deep breath and closed the lid.

There was a sharp click, then only intense darkness and suffocating silence...

The birth of the mystery/detective story is generally conceded to have occurred in 1841 with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” It is probably impossible to count the number of stories in the genre that were published in the ensuing century. A few years after that centenary, in 1949, a panel of twelve experts was called upon to name the greatest of them all, and the story given that extraordinary honor was “The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” by Sydney Thomas Burke (1886–1945), a tale inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders.

Burke was born in the London suburb of Clapham, but when he was only a few months old his father died, and he was sent to the East End to live with his uncle until the age of ten, when he was put into a home for respectable middle-class children without means. Burke sold his first story, “The Bellamy Diamonds,” when he was fifteen. His first book, Nights in Town: A London Autobiography, was published in 1915, soon followed by the landmark volume Limehouse Nights (1916), a collection of stories that had originally been published in the magazines The English Review, Colour, and The New Witness. This volume of romantic but violent stories of the Chinese district of London was enormously popular and, though largely praised by critics, there were objections to the depictions of interracial relationships, opium use, and other “depravities.”

“The Hands of Mr. Ottermole” was originally published in the author’s collection The Pleasantries of Old Quong (London, Constable, 1931); it was published in the United States as A Tea-Shop in Limehouse (Boston, Little, Brown, 1931).

At six o’clock of a January evening Mr. Whybrow was walking home through the cobweb alleys of London’s East End. He had left the golden clamour of the great High Street to which the tram had brought him from the river and his daily work, and was now in the chessboard of byways that is called Mallon End. None of the rush and gleam of the High Street trickled into these byways. A few paces south — a flood tide of life, foaming and beating. Here — only slow-shuffling figures and muffled pulses. He was in the sink of London, the last refuge of European vagrants.

As though in tune with the street’s spirit, he too walked slowly, with head down. It seemed that he was pondering some pressing trouble, but he was not. He had no trouble. He was walking slowly because he had been on his feet all day, and he was bent in abstraction because he was wondering whether the Missis would have herrings for his tea, or haddock; and he was trying to decide which would be the more tasty on a night like this. A wretched night it was, of damp and mist, and the mist wandered into his throat and his eyes, and the damp had settled on pavement and roadway, and where the sparse lamplight fell it sent up a greasy sparkle that chilled one to look at. By contrast it made his speculations more agreeable, and made him ready for that tea — whether herring or haddock. His eye turned from the glum bricks that made his horizon, and went forward half a mile. He saw a gas-lit kitchen, a flamy fire, and a spread tea table. There was toast in the hearth and a singing kettle on the side and a piquant effusion of herrings, or maybe of haddock, or perhaps sausages. The vision gave his aching feet a throb of energy. He shook imperceptible damp from his shoulders, and hastened towards its reality.

But Mr. Whybrow wasn’t going to get any tea that evening — or any other evening. Mr. Whybrow was going to die. Somewhere within a hundred yards of him another man was walking: a man much like Mr. Whybrow and much like any other man, but without the only quality that enables mankind to live peaceably together and not as madmen in a jungle. A man with a dead heart eating into itself and bringing forth the foul organisms that arise from death and corruption. And that thing in man’s shape, on a whim or a settled idea — one cannot know — had said within himself that Mr. Whybrow should never taste another herring. Not that Mr. Whybrow had injured him. Not that he had any dislike of Mr. Whybrow. Indeed, he knew nothing of him save as a familiar figure about the streets. But, moved by a force that had taken possession of his empty cells, he had picked on Mr. Whybrow with that blind choice that makes us pick one restaurant table that has nothing to mark it from four or five other tables, or one apple from a dish of half a dozen equal apples; or that drives Nature to send a cyclone upon one corner of this planet, and destroy five hundred lives in that corner, and leave another five hundred in the same corner unharmed. So this man had picked on Mr. Whybrow, as he might have picked on you or me, had we been within his daily observation; and even now he was creeping through the blue-toned streets, nursing his large white hands, moving ever closer to Mr. Whybrow’s tea table, and so closer to Mr. Whybrow himself.

He wasn’t, this man, a bad man. Indeed, he had many of the social and amiable qualities, and passed as a respectable man, as most successful criminals do. But the thought had come into his mouldering mind that he would like to murder somebody, and, as he held no fear of God or man, he was going to do it, and would then go home to his tea. I don’t say that flippantly, but as a statement of fact. Strange as it may seem to the humane, murderers must and do sit down to meals after a murder. There is no reason why they shouldn’t, and many reasons why they should. For one thing, they need to keep their physical and mental vitality at full beat for the business of covering their crime. For another, the strain of their effort makes them hungry, and satisfaction at the accomplishment of a desired thing brings a feeling of relaxation towards human pleasures. It is accepted among non-murderers that the murderer is always overcome by fear for his safety and horror at his act; but this type is rare. His own safety is, of course, his immediate concern, but vanity is a marked quality of most murderers, and that, together with the thrill of conquest, makes him confident that he can secure it, and when he has restored his strength with food he goes about securing it as a young hostess goes about the arranging of her first big dinner — a little anxious, but no more. Criminologists and detectives tell us that every murderer, however intelligent or cunning, always makes one slip in his tactics — one little slip that brings the affair home to him. But that is only half true. It is true only of the murderers who are caught. Scores of murderers are not caught: therefore scores of murderers do not make any mistake at all. This man didn’t.

As for horror or remorse, prison chaplains, doctors, and lawyers have told us that of murderers they have interviewed under condemnation and the shadow of death, only one here and there has expressed any contrition for his act, or shown any sign of mental misery. Most of them display only exasperation at having been caught when so many have gone undiscovered, or indignation at being condemned for a perfectly reasonable act. However normal and humane they may have been before the murder, they are utterly without conscience after it. For what is conscience? Simply a polite nickname for superstition, which is a polite nickname for fear. Those who associate remorse with murder are, no doubt, basing their ideas on the world legend of the remorse of Cain, or are projecting their own frail minds into the mind of the murderer, and getting false reactions. Peaceable folk cannot hope to make contact with this mind, for they are not merely different in mental type from the murderer: they are different in their personal chemistry and construction. Some men can and do kill, not one man, but two or three, and go calmly about their daily affairs. Other men could not, under the most agonising provocation, bring themselves even to wound. It is men of this sort who imagine the murderer in torments of remorse and fear of the law, whereas he is actually sitting down to his tea.

The man with the large white hands was as ready for his tea as Mr. Whybrow was, but he had something to do before he went to it. When he had done that something, and made no mistake about it, he would be even more ready for it, and would go to it as comfortably as he went to it the day before, when his hands were stainless.

Walk on, then, Mr. Whybrow, walk on; and as you walk, look your last upon the familiar features of your nightly journey. Follow your jack-o’-lantern tea table. Look well upon its warmth and colour and kindness; feed your eyes with it, and tease your nose with its gentle domestic odours; for you will never sit down to it. Within ten minutes’ pacing of you a pursuing phantom has spoken in his heart, and you are doomed. There you go — you and phantom — two nebulous dabs of mortality, moving through green air along pavements of powder blue, the one to kill, the other to be killed. Walk on. Don’t annoy your burning feet by hurrying, for the more slowly you walk, the longer you will breathe the green air of this January dusk, and see the dreamy lamplight and the little shops, and hear the agreeable commerce of the London crowd and the haunting pathos of the street organ. These things are dear to you, Mr. Whybrow. You don’t know it now, but in fifteen minutes you will have two seconds in which to realise how inexpressibly dear they are.

Walk on, then, across this crazy chessboard. You are in Lagos Street now, among the tents of the wanderers of Eastern Europe. A minute or so, and you are in Loyal Lane, among the lodging houses that shelter the useless and the beaten of London’s camp followers. The lane holds the smell of them, and its soft darkness seems heavy with the wail of the futile. But you are not sensitive to impalpable things, and you plod through it, unseeing, as you do every evening, and come to Blean Street, and plod through that. From basement to sky rise the tenements of an alien colony. Their windows slot the ebony of their walls with lemon. Behind those windows strange life is moving, dressed with forms that are not of London or of England, yet, in essence, the same agreeable life that you have been living, and tonight will live no more. From high above you comes a voice crooning “The Song of Katta.” Through a window you see a family keeping a religious rite. Through another you see a woman pouring out tea for her husband. You see a man mending a pair of boots; a mother bathing her baby. You have seen all these things before, and never noticed them. You do not notice them now, but if you knew that you were never going to see them again, you would notice them. You never will see them again, not because your life has run its natural course, but because a man whom you have often passed in the street has at his own solitary pleasure decided to usurp the awful authority of nature, and destroy you. So perhaps it’s as well that you don’t notice them, for your part in them is ended. No more for you these pretty moments of our earthly travail: only one moment of terror, and then a plunging darkness.

Closer to you this shadow of massacre moves, and now he is twenty yards behind you. You can hear his footfall, but you do not turn your head. You are familiar with footfalls. You are in London, in the easy security of your daily territory, and footfalls behind you, your instinct tells you, are no more than a message of human company.

But can’t you hear something in those footfalls — something that goes with a widdershins beat? Something that says: Look out, look out. Beware, beware. Can’t you hear the very syllables of mur-der-er, mur-der-er? No; there is nothing in footfalls. They are neutral. The foot of villainy falls with the same quiet note as the foot of honesty. But those footfalls, Mr. Whybrow, are bearing on to you a pair of hands, and there is something in hands. Behind you that pair of hands is even now stretching its muscles in preparation for your end. Every minute of your days you have been seeing human hands. Have you ever realised the sheer horror of hands — those appendages that are a symbol for our moments of trust and affection and salutation? Have you thought of the sickening potentialities that lie within the scope of that five-tentacled member? No, you never have; for all the human hands that you have seen have been stretched to you in kindness or fellowship. Yet, though the eyes can hate, and the lips can sting, it is only that dangling member that can gather the accumulated essence of evil, and electrify it into currents of destruction. Satan may enter into man by many doors, but in the hands alone can he find the servants of his will.

Another minute, Mr. Whybrow, and you will know all about the horror of human hands.

You are nearly home now. You have turned into your street — Caspar Street — and you are in the centre of the chessboard. You can see the front window of your little four-roomed house. The street is dark, and its three lamps give only a smut of light that is more confusing than darkness. It is dark — empty, too. Nobody about; no lights in the front parlours of the houses, for the families are at tea in their kitchens; and only a random glow in a few upper rooms occupied by lodgers. Nobody about but you and your following companion, and you don’t notice him. You see him so often that he is never seen. Even if you turned your head and saw him, you would only say “Good-evening” to him, and walk on. A suggestion that he was a possible murderer would not even make you laugh. It would be too silly.

And now you are at your gate. And now you have found your door key. And now you are in, and hanging up your hat and coat. The Missis has just called a greeting from the kitchen, whose smell is an echo of that greeting (herrings!) and you have answered it, when the door shakes under a sharp knock.

Go away, Mr. Whybrow. Go away from that door. Don’t touch it. Get right away from it. Get out of the house. Run with the Missis to the back garden, and over the fence. Or call the neighbours. But don’t touch that door. Don’t, Mr. Whybrow, don’t open...

Mr. Whybrow opened the door.

Graham Montague Jeffries (1900–1982), pseudonym Bruce Graeme, was working as a young literary agent and submitted his own novel to a publisher. When it was rejected, he tried writing a short story, a ten-thousand-word Blackshirt adventure, which was immediately accepted by a magazine, with a commission to write seven more. The British publishing house T. Fisher Unwin used the eight Blackshirt stories to launch a series of cheap “novels” in 1925 and sold more than a million copies of Blackshirt over the next fifteen years. The sequel, The Return of Blackshirt (1927), sold just as well.

Richard Verrell is known as Blackshirt because of the costume he affects when on a safecracking job, dressing entirely in black, including his mask. By day Verrell is a wealthy member of high society; at night he is an audacious burglar. A bestselling author, he continues his life of crime in the name of adventure.

Secure in his anonymity, his tranquility is shattered when his identity is discovered by a beautiful young woman who anonymously calls him on the telephone. Threatening to expose him, she forces him to change from a mere thief to a kind of Robin Hood. He soon thinks of her as his “Lady on the Phone.” By the second volume in the series, they are married with a son, who has similar adventures.

“ ‘His Lady’ to the Rescue” was originally published in New Magazine in 1925; it was first collected in Blackshirt (London, T. Fisher Unwin, 1925).

Richard Verrell, the author, suddenly realised that although at least two hours had elapsed since he had lain his head upon the pillow, he had not yet fallen asleep. He referred to his watch, and found that his imaginary two hours was in reality only a matter of forty to forty-five minutes. Nevertheless, this was unusual, because as a general rule he automatically dropped asleep as soon as he switched off the light of his reading-lamp. Up to the present time the fact that he, a well-known novelist, was at the same time Blackshirt, now of a sudden as equally notorious, had given him no undue qualms of conscience; but tonight he felt strangely stirred, moved by some new emotion which he found impossible to define.

Restless, sleepless, he lit a cigarette and gave his chaotic thoughts full play; analysed his individuality, dissected his personality. In this turmoil there comes to him flashes of his boyhood, memories of dismal surroundings, of cruel and hated foster-parents. He lives again the night when he became lost in a maze of streets, parted from parents of whom now he had no memory. He dares not ask the people who pass, who, to his terrified imagination, assume the stature of giants, whilst he runs helter-skelter from the one man who would have been his salvation — the man in blue, the policeman at the corner. This man to the childish imagination, instilled into it by a stupid seventeen-year-old nursemaid, is an ogre from whom all good boys who say their prayers properly every night should shrink, for is he not the punisher of sins?

He glimpses himself shrinking into the shadows, sick with fear; a hairy hand gripping his shoulder till he shrieks with pain, and a beery voice mumbling incoherently; then a whirlwind of motion, clattering horses, jostling people, yells and shouts, and countless ogres, from whom, too, the man of the hairy hand also shrinks.

Next, a broken-down hovel, a slatternly woman, high words, and, if he could have only understood it then, a dawning look of comprehension and admiration on the woman’s face as she whispers: “You aren’t ’alf a slick ’un, Alf, after all.”

Then a pseudo word of comfort to the trembling boy.

Follows then a faint, misty remembrance of brutal blows, of lessons in the art of picking pockets. With frequent practice his arms become quick and his fingers nimble. A turned back, a hasty dig from his tormentor, and the next moment an apple, a cake, a cheap piece of jewellery — anything upon which he can lay his hands — is transferred into his small pocket.

Through a hazy recollection of lessons and more lessons, of scaling walls, of slipping window-catches, he pictures himself growing taller and stronger. He remembers the pride with which he discovered one day that his head was actually level with the mantelpiece.

Then follows the period when his soul awakens from the emancipation of a shivering, nervous boy to a youth with a growing intuition of virile manliness, conscious also that his recent hatred of his unlawful escapades has turned to a joyful eagerness to embark more and more upon these nocturnal adventures, which inclination becomes emphasised as he grows older.

Even then, however, it was not for what he secured that he carried on, but for the thrill, the excitement, the risk in the obtaining thereof. Then the day that he is free of his tyrants, no more to witness with disgust the drunken orgies, to listen to their fights, their vile language. His finer feelings are urging him to escape his environment, to leave behind the sordid slums. He does so, and his finely keyed intelligence becomes aware that he is ignorant, uneducated, and uncouth.

Then years of study, with interludes of more thrills and more excitements, for which his soul craves, during which he becomes possessed of the wherewithal to live and carry on.

So the years pass until the transition is complete, and the slum-bred grub emerges into the polished, educated gentleman of the West End, perhaps, for all he knew, the ultimate position to which he had been predestined by virtue of his birth.

“Anthony Newton was a soldier at sixteen; at twenty-six he was a beggar of favors.” Thus Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1875–1932) introduces the young man who finds success as a con man and thief. After his military service, Newton makes every effort to gain honest employment but without luck. He does find that his quick wit and amusing tongue make him a successful scam artist, so he devotes his energies to that endeavor.

Newton is merely one of many rogues created by Wallace. As a populist writer, Wallace found that common people related to his rogues — criminals who were not violent or physically dangerous but whose talents and inclinations led them to the other side of the law. Others include Anthony Smith (The Mixer, 1927), “Elegant” Edward Farthindale (Elegant Edward, 1928), and Four Square Jane (Four Square Jane, 1929). Readers rooted for these and other of Wallace’s numerous literary criminals, who always stole from the wealthy and powerful.

The prolific Wallace reputedly wrote one hundred seventy novels, eighteen stage plays, nine hundred fifty-seven short stories, and elements of numerous screenplays and scenarios, including the first British sound version of The Hound of the Baskervilles; one hundred sixty films, both silent and sound, have been based on his books and stories.

“On Getting an Introduction” was first published in The Brigand (London, Hodder & Stoughton, 1927).

Polite brigandage has its novel aspects and its moments of fascination. Vulgar men, crudely furnished in the matter of ideas, may find profit in violence, but the more subtle and the more delicate nuances of the art of gentle robbery had an especial attraction for one who, in fulfilment of the poet’s ambition, could count the game before the prize.

So it came about that Mr. Newton found himself in an awkward situation. The two near wheels of his car were in a ditch; he with some difficulty had maintained himself at the steering wheel, though the branches of the overhanging hedge were so close to him that he had to twist his head on one side. Nevertheless, he maintained an attitude of supreme dignity as he climbed out of his car, and the eyes that met the girl’s alarmed gaze were full of gentle reproach.

She sat bolt upright at the wheel of her beautiful Daimler, and for a while was speechless.

“You were on the wrong side of the road,” said Tony gently.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she gasped. “I sounded my horn, but these wretched Sussex lanes are so blind...”

“Say no more about it,” said Anthony. He surveyed the ruins of his car gravely.

“I thought you would see me as you came down the hill,” she said in excuse. “I saw you and I sounded my horn.”

“I didn’t hear it,” said Anthony, “but that is beside the question. The fault is entirely mine, but I fear my poor car is completely ruined.”

She got out and stood beside him, the figure of penitence, her eyes fixed upon the drunken wreck.

“If I had not turned immediately into the ditch,” said Anthony, “there would have been a collision. And it is better that I should ruin my car than I should occasion you the slightest apprehension.”

She drew a quick sigh.

“Thank goodness it is only an old car,” she said. “Of course, Daddy will—”

Anthony could not allow the statement to pass unchallenged.

“It looks old now,” he said gently; “it looks even decrepit. It has all the appearance of ruin which old age, alas, brings, but it is not an old car.”

“It is an old model,” she insisted. “Why, that’s about twenty years old — I can tell from the shape of the wing.”

“The wings of my car,” said Anthony, “may be old fashioned. I am an old fashioned man, and I like old fashioned wings. In fact, I insisted upon having those old fashioned wings put on this perfectly new car. You have only to look at the beautiful coach work — the lacquer—”

“You lacquered it yourself,” she accused him. “Anybody can see that that has been newly done.” She touched the paint with her finger, and it left a little black stain. “There,” she said triumphantly, “It has been done with ‘Binko,’ you can see the advertisements in all the papers: ‘Binko dries in two hours.’ ” She touched the paint again and looked at the second stain on her finger. “That means you painted it a fortnight ago,” she said, “it always takes a month to dry.”

Anthony said nothing. He felt that her discovery called for silence. Moreover, he could not, for the moment, think of any appropriate rejoinder.

“Of course,” she went on more warmly, “it was very fine of you to take such a dreadful risk. My father, I know, will be very grateful.”

She looked at the car again.

“You don’t think you could get it up,” she said.

Anthony was very sure he could not restore the equilibrium of his car. He had bought it a week before for thirty pounds. The owner had stuck out for thirty-five, and Anthony had tossed him thirty pounds or forty, and had won. Anthony always won those tosses. He kept a halfpenny in his pocket which had a tail on each side, and since ninety-nine people out of a hundred say “heads” when you flip a coin in the air, it was money for nothing.

“Shall I drive you into Pilbury?” she said.

“Is there anywhere I can find a telephone?” asked Anthony.

“I’ll take you back to the house,” said Jane Mansar suddenly. “It’s quite near, you can telephone from there, and I’d like you to have a talk with father. Of course, we will not allow you to lose by your unselfish action, though I did sound my horn as I came round the corner.”

“I didn’t hear it,” said Anthony gravely.

He climbed in, and she backed the car into a gateway, turned and sped at a reckless pace back the way she had come. She turned violently from the road, missed one of the lodge gates by a fraction of an inch and accelerated up a broad drive to a big white house that showed sketchily between the encircling elms. She braked suddenly and Anthony got out with relief.

Mr. Gerald Mansar was a stout, bald man, whose fiery countenance was relieved by a pure white moustache and bristling white eyebrows. He listened with thunderous calm whilst his pretty daughter told the story of her narrow escape.

“You sounded your horn?” he insisted.

“Yes, father, I am sure I sounded the horn.”

“And you were going, of course, at a reasonable pace,” said Mr. Mansar.

In his early days he had had some practice at the law in the County Courts. Anthony Newton recognised the style and felt it was an appropriate moment to step in.

“You quite understand, Mr. Mansar, that I completely exonerate Miss Mansar from any responsibility,” he interjected. “I am perfectly sure she sounded the horn, though I did not hear it. I am completely satisfied and can vouch for the fact that she was proceeding at a very leisurely pace, and whatever fault there was, was mine.”

Anthony Newton was a very keen student of men, particularly of rich men. He had studied them from many angles, and one of the first lessons he learnt in presenting a claim, was to exonerate these gentlemen from any legal responsibility. The rich hate and loathe the onus of legal responsibility. They will spend extravagant sums in law costs to demonstrate to the satisfaction of themselves and the world that they are not legally responsible for the payment of a boot-black’s fee. The joy of wealth is generosity. There was never a millionaire born who would not prefer to give a thousand than to pay a disputed penny.

Mr. Mansar’s puckered face relaxed.

“I shall certainly not allow you to be the loser, Mr.—”

“Newton is my name.”

“Newton. You are not in the firm of Newton, Boyd, and Wilkins, are you, the rubber people?”

“No,” said Anthony. “I never touch rubber.”

“You are not the pottery Newton, are you?” asked Mr. Mansar hopefully.

“No,” said Anthony gravely, “we have always kept clear of pots.”

After Mr. Mansar had, by cross-examination, discovered that he wasn’t one of the Warwickshire Newtons, or Monmouth Newtons, or a MacNewton of Ayr, or one of those Irish Newtons, or a Newton of Newton Abbot, but was just an ordinary London Newton, his interest momentarily relaxed.

“Well, my dear,” he said, “what shall we do?”

The girl smiled.

“I think at least we ought to ask Mr. Newton to lunch,” she said and the old man, who seemed at a loss as to how the proceedings might reasonably be terminated or developed, brightened up at the suggestion.

“I noticed that you mentioned me by name. Of course, my daughter told you—” he said.

Anthony smiled.

“No, sir,” he replied, “but I know the city rather well and, of course, your residence in this part of the world is as well known as—”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Gerald Mansar. He had no false ideas as to his fame. The man who had engineered the Nigerian oil boom, the Irish linen boom, who floated the Milwaukee paper syndicate for two millions, could have no illusions about his obscurity.

“You are in the city yourself, Mr. Newton?”

“Yes,” admitted Anthony.

He was in the city to the extent of hiring an office on a first floor of a city building; and it was true he had his name painted on the door. It was an office not big enough to swing a cat, as one of his acquaintances had pointed out. Anthony however, did not keep cats. And if he had kept them, he would certainly have never been guilty of such cruelty.

The lunch was not an unpleasant function, for a quite unexpected factor had come into his great scheme. Nobody knew better than Anthony Newton that it was Mr. Mansar himself who every Saturday morning drove the Daimler into Pullington, and when Anthony had purchased his racketty car, spending many hours in the application of “Binko” to endow it with a more youthful complexion, he had not dreamt that the adventure would end so pleasantly. He knew that Mr. Millionaire Mansar had a daughter — he had a vague idea that somebody had told him she was pretty. He did not anticipate when he engineered his accident so carefully, that it would be at her expense.

For, whatever else he was, Anthony Newton was an honest adventurer. He had decided that there was money in honest adventure; he had reached this conclusion after he had made a careful study of the press. There were other adventurers whose names figured conspicuously in the police court reports. They were all ingenious and painstaking men, but their ingenuity and foresight were employed in ways which made no appeal to one who had strict, but not too strict, views on the sacredness of property.

Some of these adventurers had walked into isolated post offices, a mask over their faces and a revolver in their hands and had carried off the contents of the till, amidst the loud protests of postal officials who were on the spot. Others had walked into banks similarly disguised and had drawn out balances which were certainly not due to them.

And Anthony, thinking out the matter, decided that it was quite possible, by the exercise of his mental talent, to secure quite a lot of money without taking the slightest risks.

He wished to know Mr. Mansar. Mr. Mansar, in ordinary circumstances, was unapproachable. To step into his office and demand an interview was almost as futile as stepping up to the stamp counter in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, and asking to see the Postmaster-General. Mr. Mansar was surrounded by guards, inner and outer, by secretaries, by heads of departments, by general managers and managing directors, to say nothing of commissionaires, doorkeepers, messengers, and plain clerks.

There are two ways of getting acquainted with the great. One is to discover their hobbies, which is the weakest side of their defence, and the other is to drop in upon them on their holidays. The man you cannot meet in the City of London is very accessible in the Hotel de la Paix.

But apparently Mr. Mansar never took a holiday, and his only hobby was keeping alive an illusion of his profound genius.

Lunch over, and Anthony’s object achieved, there seemed no excuse for his lingering. He awaited, with some confidence, the grave intimation that a car was ready to take him to the station, and that Mr. Mansar would be glad if he would dine with him at his London house on Thursday. Maybe it would be Wednesday. Possibly, thought Anthony, the function might be deferred for a week or two. But the intimation did not come. He was treated as though he had arrived for a permanent stay.

Mr. Mansar showed him the library, and told him to make himself comfortable, pointing out certain books which had amused him (Mr. Mansar) in his moments of leisure.

Anthony Newton cooed and settled himself, not perhaps to read, but to think large and beautiful thoughts of great financial coups which he might engineer with this prince of financiers, of partnerships maybe, certainly of profits.

There was a big window looking out upon a marble terrace and as he read, or pretended to read, Mr. and Miss Mansar paced restlessly along the paved walk. They were talking in a low voice and Anthony, having surrendered all sense of decorum, crept nearer to the window and listened as they passed.

“He is much better looking than the last one,” murmured Jane, and he saw Mr. Mansar nod.

Much better looking than the last one? Anthony scratched his head.

Presently they came back.

“He has a very clever face,” said Jane, and Mr. Mansar grunted.

Anthony had not the slightest doubt as to whom they were talking about. When she said “clever face” he knew it was himself.

They did not return again, and Anthony waited on, a little impatient, a little curious; he had decided that he himself would make a move to go, when Mr. Mansar came into the library and carefully closed the door behind him.

“I want a little talk with you, Mr. Newton,” he said solemnly. “It has occurred to me that you might be of the very greatest service to my firm.”

Anthony cleared his throat. The same thought had occurred to him also.

“Do you know Brussels at all?”

“Intimately,” said Anthony promptly. He had never been to Brussels, but he knew that he could get a working knowledge of the city from any guide book.

Mr. Mansar stroked his chin, pursed his lips, frowned, and then:

“It is providential, your arriving,” he said. “I have a very confidential mission which I have been looking for somebody to undertake. In fact, I thought of going to town this afternoon to find a man for the purpose but, as I say, your arrival has been miraculously providential. I have been discussing it with my daughter, I hope you will forgive that little impertinence,” he said, courteously.

Anthony Newton forgave him there and then.

“My daughter, who is a judge of character, is rather impressed by you.”

It was clear to Anthony now that he had been the subject of the conversation he had overheard. He was tingling with curiosity to discover exactly the nature of the mission which was to be entrusted to him. Mr. Mansar did not keep him waiting long.

“I want you to go by tonight’s train to Brussels. You will arrive on Sunday morning, and remain there until Wednesday morning. Have you sufficient money for your journey?”

“Oh, yes,” said Anthony, airily.

“Good.” Mr. Mansar nodded gravely, as though he had never had any doubt upon the matter. “You will carry with you a sealed envelope, which you will open on Wednesday morning in the presence of my Brussels agent, Monsieur Lament, of the firm of Lament and Lament, the great financiers, of whom you must have heard.”

“Naturally,” said Anthony.

“I want you to keep your mission a secret, tell nobody, you understand?”

Anthony understood perfectly.

“I leave the method of travel to you. There is a train to London in half an hour; here is the letter.”

He took it from his inside pocket. It was addressed to Mr. Anthony Newton, and marked “To be opened in the presence of Monsieur Cecil Lament, 119, Rue Partriele, Brussels.”

“I do not promise you that you will be paid very well or even be paid at all, for undertaking this mission,” said the millionaire. “But I rather fancy this experience will be useful to you in more ways than one.”

Anthony detected a certain significance in this cautious promise and smiled happily.

“I think I’ll go along now, sir,” he said briskly. “When I carry out these missions — and as you may guess, this is not the first time that I have been — entrusted with important errands — I prefer that I should lose no time.”

“I think you’re wise,” said Mr. Mansar soberly.

Anthony hoped to see the girl before he went, but here he was disappointed. It was a very ordinary chauffeur who drove him to the station and, passing the wreckage of his car stranded in the ditch, Anthony did not regret one single penny of his expenditure. Anyway, the car would still sell for the price of old iron.

He reached Brussels in time for breakfast on Sunday morning, and on the Monday he made a call at Monsieur Lament’s office. Monsieur Lament was a short, stout man, with a large and bushy beard, and seemed surprised at the advent of this spruce and mysterious young Englishman.

“From M’sieur Mansar,” he said with respect, even veneration. “M’sieur Mansar did not tell me he was sending anybody. Is it in connection with the Rentes?”

“I am not at liberty to say,” said Anthony discreetly. “In fact, sir, I am, so to speak, under sealed orders.”

Monsieur Lament heard the explanation and nodded.

“I honour your discretion, M’sieur,” he said. “Now is there anything I can do for you while you are in Brussels? Perhaps you would dine with me tonight at my club.”

Anthony was very happy to dine with him at his club, because he had brought with him a grossly insufficient sum to pay his expenses.

Over the dinner that night, Monsieur Lament spoke reverently of the great English financier.

“What a wonderful man,” he said, with an expressive gesture. “You are a friend of his, M’sieur Newton?”

“Not exactly a friend,” said Anthony carefully, “how can one be a friend of a monument? One can only stand at a distance and admire.”

“True, true,” said the thoughtful Monsieur Lament. “He is indeed, a remarkable character. And his daughter—” he kissed the tips of his fingers, “what charm, what intelligence, what beauty!”

“Ah!” said Anthony, “what!”

So charming a companion was he, that Monsieur Lament asked him to lunch with him the next day, and this time the Belgian showed some curiosity as to the object of Anthony’s visit.

“Is it in connection with the Turkish loan?” he asked.

Anthony smiled.

“You will, I am sure, agree with me that I must maintain the utmost secrecy,” he said firmly.

“Naturally! Of course! Certainly!” said Monsieur Lament hastily. “I honour your discretion. But if it is in connection with the Turkish loan, or the Viennese Municipal loan—”

Anthony raised his hand with a gesture of gentle insistence.

Monsieur Lament dissolved into apologies.

Anthony was himself curious and he attended M. Lament’s office on Wednesday morning with a joyous sense of anticipation.

In that rosewood-panelled room standing with his back to the white marble fireplace, he tore the flap of the envelope with fingers that shook, for he realised that he might be at the very crisis of his career; and that his good plan to drop into financial society had succeeded beyond his wildest hope.

To his amazement, the letter was from Jane Mansar, and he read it, open-mouthed.