The Miller of Ostend
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Description: A collection of Melville Davisson Post short stories, gathered from newspaper files, original to this Library. 1: Ruined Eye 2: The Haunted Door 3: Lord Winton's Adventure 4: The Girl With The Ruby 5: The Man From America. 6: No Defense 7: The Baron Starkheim 8: The Great Symbol 9: The Diamond 10: The Miller Of Ostend The cover was created from 19th C postcard of a Belgian windmill similar to that which appears in the title story.

THE MILLER OF

OSTEND
and other stories

Melville Davisson Post

2019

Contents

1: Ruined Eye

2: The Haunted Door

3: Lord Winton's Adventure

4: The Girl With The Ruby

5: The Man From America.

6: No Defense

7: The Baron Starkheim

8: The Great Symbol

9: The Diamond

10: The Miller Of Ostend

______________

All of these stories are sourced from newspapers, as identified beneath their titles. The first two were collected in "Monsieur Jonquelle: Prefect of Paris Police" (1923); a rare collection. One, "The Diamond", was collected in a series of stories featuring Mr Walker, an American Secret Service agent. The others I have not been able to identify with any Collection.

1: Ruined Eye

Upper Murray and Mitta Herald, 4 June 1914

(Collected in: Monsieur Jonquelle: Prefect of Police of Paris, 1923)

MONSIEUR Jonquelle waited on the great terrace for the Viscount. Below were the endless wheat fields, crimson dotted with poppies, the white road stretching away towards Paris, and the ancient village nestling into the hill.. The chateau was almost sheer above. One could toss a stone from its terrace into the narrow street.

The brilliant morning sun lay on the world, a vagrant wind wandering inland from the sea rippled the wheat fields into waves, and on the horizon now and then a puff of grey dust would spring up, and a big French limousine would crawl out like a black beetle on the white ribbon road.

"Vraiment! It is wonderful— this picture!" he said. "But what is God about, to hang it before the door of the meanest man in Europe?"

He was dressed for the road liglit English tweed, a grey cap and motor goggles, of which the big green lenses gave him the huge eyes of some poisonous insect. He removed the goggles, folded them together into u leather case, and put them in his pocket; then he leaned over the balustrade and looked down a hundred feet to the door of the inn, where a boy in blue blouse wiped, the dust from his grey two-seater motor. "Ah, ma beaute!" he said. "It is a joy to travel with a lass like you!"

The words were a mere caress, however, as the eye passed on, for the prefect was searching the village carefully, door by door, until finally he came to a little shop, before which a gilded watch swung on an iron rod. lie marked that the door under the sign stood open; then a big voice thundered behind him on the terrace:

"Who the devil are you?"

The prefect turned about to see a tall old Englishman standing in the door tearing his card into bits with nervous jerks of his fingers. The man had tt thin, crooked nose, a sort of pale reptilian eye, and the livid color of irascible old men.

"My card would have told you, monsieur, replied the prefect.

"Curse your card!" cried the old man, tearing the pieces into still finer bits. "You can tell me yourself."

"With pleasure," returned the prefect; "I am Monsieur Jonquelle."

The old man flung away the remaining fragments of the card with a derisive gesture.

"Monsieur Jonquelle, eh?" he snapped.. "Well, Monsieur Jonquelle, who sent for you?"

"Alas!" replied the prefect with composure, "like death, I am hardly I ever sent for." He looked about for a chair, carried it to the balustrade, and sat down; then he lighted a cigarette. "Pardon, monsieur," he added; "there must be quite three hundred steps in your path from the village."

The old man exploded with anger.

"Eh! What?" he spluttered. "Confound your insolence! I'll have you kicked down every one of those three hundred steps."

The prefect blew little rings of white smoke up into' the soft air.

"Would it be wise," he said, "in view of the exigencies of chance? Somewhere on the. descent I might take an injury to my eye and claim damages in the sum of five hundred thousand francs."

"The devil!" cried the old man, a sudden calm descending on him.

"What do you know about that?"

"Why, this, monsieur," replied the prefect, leaning over the balustrade and pointing downward with his smoking cigarette: "Yonder, I believe, is the curve in the road where Mademoiselle Valzomova's car came , suddenly upon monsieur's horse; and yonder is the oak tree into which monsieur's horse sljied; and extending south at right angles is the limb that struck monsieur in the temple, resulting in a concussion, which monsieur advises Mademoiselle Valzomova has caused the total loss of sight in his left eye, whereby and by reason whereof"— the prefect consulted a letter from his pocket as though to: refresh his memory —"Monsieur le Vicomte will sue mademoiselle in the courts for five (hundred thousand francs."

"And I'll do it," interrupted the old man. "The devil take me if I don't!"

"Unless— " cord inued the prefect.

"Unless!' snarled the old man.  I'll sue out the aris! "There is no unless. I'll sue out the writ to-morrow in Paris."

"Unless this thing that the Vicomte himself has written," the prefect went on, "unless mademoiselle chooses to settle with the Vicomte immediately for the damage. Well, that is what mademoiselle chooses to do."

The Viscount wasjtaken by surprise.

"Eh! What?" he cried, and so the hussy going to settle, is she?"

"Ah, well," he said, "if you insist upon it, what can mademoiselle do but pay? She camot deny the accident— the resulting injury as claimed by monsieur she might, of course, deny; but how would she sustain that contention in any court? I hope the monsieur does not mean to ask five hundred thousand francs?"

"Not a sou less!"

The prefect reflected. "Well," he said, "you know how careless of money actresses are. To them it has no value. It is the need of it only that they measure. If they are down they will haggle over a franc; ir they are in funds you may fill your pockets.

"It is so with all temperaments that create." ;

"Did not Dumas Ikeep a bowl of gold coins on the mantelpiece from which anyone could help; himself? If monsieur were in Paris to-day he might find mademoiselle willing to consider a sum that a week later she would think out of the question."

The prefect threw away the fragment of his cigarette and rose.

"Pardon, monsieur," he said. "Can you tell me which turn of the high- I way yonder I must take in. order to enter Paris on the road from Rouen? There is .a sharp curve on that road about which the Department of Highways has been several times advised. It promised yesterday to ;put up a I proper warning,-and I wish to see how | that promise has been kept."

The old man followed him for a step or two on the terrace.

"It is the second turn to the right," he answered. "But a moment, sir, Why do you tell me that if I were in Paris to-day I might fmd this woman more— er— reasonable than later?

"Because, monsieur," replied the prefect, "it is today that mademoiselle receives the advance payment on her engagement at the opera. And today she will have a very large sum of money in bulk, but she will not keep it. Not one of them ever does... Ah, merci, monsieur. It is the second turn to the right, then."

"Wait!" And the old man. followed after him. There was the lust of money in his hard, irascible face. "Would you take me up in your auto mobile?"

Monsieur Jonquelle suppressed a gesture of annoyance.

"If monsieur does not object to half an hour's delay by reason of the Rouen-road, I shall be very glad to take him."

The old man snapped at the invitation. It was a chance to reach Paris at no cost, and he shuffled into the chateau for his coat. The prefect looked after him, making a gesture of contempt.

"Pardieu!'' he said. "When these creatures are intolerable in their own countries, they buy an estate in France! Under what curse of God are we?"

The Viscount presently returned in an old weather-beaten coat and the two men went down the steep path into the village. The great roadster was standing as the prefect had left it, before the door of the inn; the boy in the blue blouse had wiped it clean as a jewel.

Monsieur Jonquelle put on his goggles and gloves; then he went around the car to make sure that the petrol tank had been filled. To see clearly into the opening of the tank he removed the goggles and held them in his hand. He was impatient and in no gentle temper, and there was presently a tinkle of broken glass. He looked down with an exclamation of annoyance. One of the eye-pieces of the goggles had been shattered against the fender of the car.

"Diable!" he said. "It is the only pair I have!" And he began to break the cracked glass out of the rim with his thumb.

The Viscount came forward with expressions of regret. Now that he was using Monsieur Jonquelle for his own ends, he could afford to be good-humored. One would have said that the temperaments of the two men had changed about. The prefect was now irascible, and the Viscount suave.

"Too bad!" the latter continued to say. "Perhaps you can get a pair from the inn-keeper."

"No such luck," replied the prefect; "but if by chance there is a horologer in this village I might get a lens put in without delay.

"There is one at the end of the street,", said the Viscount. "I will show you." And he began to walk towards the sign of the gilded watch that the prefect had marked from the terrace of the chateau.

The prefect followed. He walked rapidly, like one dominated by ill temper.

"Monsieur," said the little workman, when the two were come into the shop, "a lens like this is not to be had outside of Paris." And he turned the goggles about, shaking his head.

"Well," snapped the prefect, "if you can put in a piece of window-glass then— it will keep the dust out of my eye."

"Oui, monsieur," replied the workman; "I can do that."

When he had finished, Monsieur Jonquelle threw a five-franc piece on the watch-case, and the two men returned to the inn.

The engine spun under the touch of the electric button, and the great grey car glided out of the village. Monsieur Jonquelle driving and the Viscount in the seat beside him. They had taken the second crossing into the Rouenvoad when Monsieur Jonquelle turned to his companion like one sharply seized with an important memory.

"Diable!" he said. "I think only of myself!" And putting up his free hand he unhooked his goggles and handed them to the Viscount. "Pardon, monsieur," he said, "I had forgotten your injured eye. These will at least keep out the dust." The Viscount began to refuse, saying there was little dust, and that he was in no discomfort; but the prefect would not hear him.

"I have always heard that when one eye is lost the other is more susceptible to strain," he continued, as he helped the Viscount to adjust the goggles; and it is this brilliant sun on the white road that plays the devil with one's sight... Viola! We have the green lens over monsieur's sound eye. That was a lucky accident to break the left glass. Monsieur le Vicomte will be protected in both eyes from the dust, and in his good eye from the glare of the road.... And now, ma beaute!" And he pressed his foot on the throttle. The car shot out like a racer under a lash, and the hedges along the roadside leaped backward.

The car travelled without any sound except a low hum as of a distant beehive. It gained speed like an arrow, and the dust trailed behind in a long rolling cloud. They travelled swiftly on the white road in the brilliant sun. It was at the beginning of a long descent towards Paris that Monsieur Jonquelle began to have trouble with his brakes, to see what trouble was. As he took a turning on the steep hill, with his head a moment among his nest of levers, he called suddenly to his companion: "Is there a signal 'before us?"

"Yes," replied the Viscount.

The prefect sat up, with a volley of Parisian oaths, turned the car into the hill, and, braking with a twist of the front wheel, stoppid against the sign-post by the road hundred metres from the curve.

"Nom d'un chien!" he cried. "Does the Department of highways believe itself to conduct a tram that it puts up a signal like that?"

"What's the matter with it?" said the Viscount. "The letter A stands for the word to stop in your language, and red is a danger warning."

"Precisely," cried the prefect; but what danger is there if one knows of the curve? And why stop when the road is open? Does one take on and discharge passengers at this point; as he travels into Paris, like a 'bus to the Gare du Nord? There should he here the usual sign indicating a sharp descent on a curve— and they put up a thing like that!... Well, they shall hear from me—  and soon."

He got out and tightened the brake and the two men continued their journey. The brakes held now, and the car swept down the long descent, sped away on the great road, and presently entered Paris. On his way to the Place de l'Opera the prefect stopped before the Department of Highways.

It was strange how completely the trivial incident of a road mark had dispossessed the great matter upon which the prefect had set out. His mind seemed emptied of it. Placarded on the walls of Paris were the beautiful lithographs of Mademoiselle Valzomova, this idol of the fepera, whose conspicuous generosity had so tremendously impressed him, and he passed them with no sign.

Moreover, by a curious, ironical chance, he carried into Paris this mean old man, in his dirty coat, that he might prey upon her. And yet this bitter ending to his pretentious endeavor was hidden from before his eyes— screened off by the petty error of an official of highways. By such inconsequential incidents are the minds of mortals dominated!

"A moment, monsieur," he said to the Viscount, bringing his car to the kerb. "I wish to lay a complaint before the Department of Highways. Win you verify my statement?"

"With pleasure," replied the old man, glad to be a gaddy on any withers; and the two men entered the building.

A grave man with a long, lean face sat at a desk in the private office of the Department of Highways; and behind him, nosing in a ledger, stood a big German, with bristling, close-cropped hair, like a convict's The prefect began at once with his complaint. He had hardly got it explained when the man at the desk stopped him."

"Monsieur," he said, "do you make this charge from your own knowledge or at the information of another?"

"I saw it myself," replied the prefect.

"And I saw it, too," said the Viscount, stepping up before the desk.

The official looked up.

''And who are you?" he asked.

"The Viscount Macdougal, my fine sir," snapped the old mail.

"Ah!" said the official, taking up his pen. He turned abruptly from the prefect as though he were a person of no concern, and addressed himself to the Englishman with grave courtesy.

"Monsieur," he said, "I shall be pleased to hear you."

He listened with the closest attention, as to a distinguished person whose every word was to be marked; and on a pad before him on the desk he wrote down precisely and with care the exact statement of the Viscount Macdougal.

The big German, who had been deep in his ledger, now rose and came round the official's desk. He stopped directly in front of the Viscount and wagged his round, closely-shingled head.

"So," he said, "you saw all this I through your goggles!"

"I did!" snapped the Viscount. "What of it?"

The German did not reply; but abruptly in the quiet and gravity of the room he laughed. The Viscount turned on him in a fury.

"Why do you laugh, my fine fellow?" he snarled, his face turning livid.

"I laugh," replied the German, "because if the Viscount Macdougal saw a red letter on a black background through the goggles he now wears, he saw it with his blind eye!"

"My blind eye!" cried the Viscount.

"Exactly," replied the German— your blind eye! You have a green lens over your good eye, and it is a principle of optics that red on a black field seen through a green lens is invisible!"

The Viscount opened his mouth as though he would utter some awful invective, but for a moment he did not speak; then he said, strangely, as though he addressed an invisible person :

"Will you tell me who these people are?"

"And the prefect Jonquelle replied to him:

"With pleasure, Monsieur le Vicomte— the one who writes is the Magistrate Lavelle, and the one who laughs is the oculist Von Liebnitz.

____________

2: The Haunted Door

(Collected in: Monsieur Jonquelle : Prefect of Police of Paris, 1923)

Adelaide Journal 31 October 1914

EARLY in April the Marquis Banutelli closed his villa at Bordighera, on the Mediterranean, and travelled up to Geneva. He was in frail health, enervated by the sun of the Riviera and displeased with life. He had intended to write a great opera at Bordighera, but be could not get the thing to go upon its legs.

The marquis blamed the commonplace times for this plague upon his opera. There was no longer anything mysterious or unknown in the world. A tram carried tourists to the Sphinx; the Americans had penetrated to the pole— or pretended to have done so— and the English had entered Thibet.

Moreover the whole race of men was tamed; the big, wild, passions that used to rend the world were now harnessed to the plough. Men no longer climbed to the stars for a woman or carried knife a lifetime for an enemy. The tragedies of love and vengeance were settled by the notary and the Law Court. Romance and; adventure had been ejected out of life.

The marquis was by no means certain he would find in Geneva what be had failed to find in Bordighera— that is to say, inspiration for his opera— though this city was the very realm of romance. It lay across the bluest lake in the world, beneath the sinister ridge of Saleve; behind it was the range of the Jura; and beyond it Mont Blanc emerged on clear mornings from the sky. But he was sure to find there a bracing climate when the wind, like a cure of God, did not blow from the north.

The marquis went to the very best hostelry and sat down in a sunny room where he could see that sight of the faerie— the great two-pointed, rose-coloured sails of the stone-boats descending Lake Leman.

It was early and there were but few guests— a Japanese, with a French wife; two or three English families, and a distinguished German. The German, alone interested the Marquis Banutelli. He was perhaps 65—a commanding military figure. It was clear from every aspect that the man was a person of importance. Italy and the German Empire were now in very close relations. The Kaiser had just spoken thrilling words of the Italian arms in Morocco. The Triple Alliance was thought to be mobilizing its armies. England and France seemed about to force Germany into the field. War was in the air; one saw soldiers on every hand, and all the fierce old hatreds had risen from the fields of Jena and Amerstadt, Metz, and Sedan, as an the daybreak of a resurrection.

The marquis enquired at the bureau, learned that the German was the Prince Ulrich von Gratz, and presented himself. The two sat over their coffee a long time that evening in the foyer of the hotel. The talk ran upon the necessities and barbarities of war.

Von Gratz was a soldier; he had gone through the Franco-German War; and his vivid and realistic experiences, the experiences of a man of action in the deadly struggle of two infuriated peoples, fascinated the Italian, who was essentially a dreamer.

The interest and appreciation of the marquis seemed to inspire von Gratz. and he entered into the details of that hideous barbarity by which the German armies crushed ithe provinces of France. The marquis had read the "la Debacle" of Zola and the tales of Maupassant, but be had never until this day realized the stern implacable savagery with which the Uhlan had forced the French peasant to remain a non-combatant while the German armies marched over his fields to Paris.

The acquaintance ripened into a fine intimacy.

During the day von Gratz was not usually to ne seen, and was understood to be concerned with one of those ponderous works of the science of war that engages the excess energy of the military German as a system of philosophy engages that of the scholastic. In the evening he smoked very black cigars from Homburg and talked with the marquis. The conversation was in French— a language the Italian invariably used in every country bunt his own. The German also spoke it with fluency and something approaching a proper accent. The Marquis Banutelli remarked upon this accomplishment, and von Gratz replied that it had served hin when he had occupied the valley of the Jura during the Franco-Gernan war. He added that his headquarters had been at Ferney, but a few milees from Geneva; and he mentioned the further confidence that one of his objects in coming to Geneva was to go over the scenes of his military occupancy there. But this thing he had hesitated to do. The war spirit in France had vitalized old memories. He had held the province with an iron hand. He would be remembered and not welcome.

The incidents of this district, lying so close to Geneva, interested the Italian; and, as he was accustomed to walk in the afternoon, he determined to walk there. Von Gratz envied him this privilege, and deplored the fact that the present temper of France prevented him from accompanying the marquis; but he got maps from the concierge and marked a route which he particularly wished the marquis to go over. The following afternoon the marquis took the tram out of Geneva, got down when he had crossed the hill towards Ferney, and, according to his map, set ont on a little road into the country.

This road, bordered part of the way by great trees, within half a mile entered France. The Marquis knew the border by the square stone, carved on the French side with a fleur-de-lis. He also knew it by the little hut of plaited twigs in which the gendarme who guards the roads out of France protects himself from the rain and the winds. This was an unkempt country road, and such are not usually under a sharp surveillance, but today it was sentineled like the main road into Geneva. The marquis was not molested, and continued on his way; but he felt that the military instincts of France were at this time particularly alert.

The road continued westward towards the Jura, but the Italian turned into the long wood that lies in the low valley between Geneva and Ferney. On all sides the flowers were beginning to come out. The path the marquis followed had once been an ancient road, but it was now overgrown and, in fact, no longer even a path. One had continually to clamber over logs and to put aside the branches of trees. Banutelli reflected that this had doubtless been a military road through the forest in the time of von Gratz's occupation, and he determined to follow it.

Presently it came out into a little meadow entirely enclosed by the wall of the forest. An abandoned farmhouse stood here where the road emerged. It was a big, old house with timbered gables and a farmyard enclosed by a stone wall. The house and premises, though heavy and of sound material, were ragged with age. And this deserted house, hidden in the wood and to be reached only by an abandoned road, inspired the Italian with a sense of remote and sinister loneliness. Thus in old tales were haunted bouses environed or the venue of revolting crimes.

He continued across the bit of meadow and through the fringe of forest, and found himself come almost immediately upon the main road from Ferney to Geneva. The marquis crossed the border towards the environs of Geneva, where several gendarmes lounged on a bench in the sun before the bureau of police. And again he felt that all France was under a searching military surveillance.

That night he described the ancient road; and the abandoned house to von Gratz. He had been quite right in his conjecture. The prince had occupied this very house when he held the province, and he had cut this road through the wood. He listened with interest to every detail. And when the marquis, having concluded his description, added the sinister impression he had received, von Gratz very gravely shook his head.

Some things had happened there.... It was no gentle work to hold a hostile district. He sat for some time silent, his fact stern with the memory, but he did not disclose the reminiscence. Again he expressed the desire to revisit this district, and again be regretted that the hostile attitude of France made it unsafe to do. He showed so keen an interest in all that the marquis had observed that the Italian continued to take his walks in that direction. And thus, through the medium of another, von Gratz was, in a manner, able to revisit the province which he had held under his heel. He was interested in everything, but especially in the old road and the abandoned farmhouse, as— the marquis sometimes thought— the criminal agent is interested in the place where he has accomplished a secret crime and would know how it has changed.

It happened, for this reason, that Banutelli frequently chose this route; he remarked the trees that had fallen across the ancient road, and the height and thickness of the bushes that had grown up in it. Von Gratz was especially interested in every change that had taken place in the abandoned farmhouse. Did the great nail-studded door still hang upon its hinges, and the like? He seemed to learn with relief that this door was closed; and one night, when the marquis reported that it was open, he exhibited a marked concern, as though every ravage of time upon this deserted house was in some sinister manner correlated to his own destiny.

The desire now to see this place for himself became a sort of obsession. He enquired precisely at what points on the route one was likely to meet the peasants. The marquis replied that he would meet no one in the wood, and that the only peasants he was likely to pass were two big old men, who had recently come to spade up a potato field in the corner of the meadow beyond the farmhouse toward Ferney.

The marquis thought that von Gratz was unduly concerned about entering this bit of French territory. He had only to go in civilian dress, follow the old road, and turn back before the farmhouse to avoid the peasants entirely. And when be went up to his rooms that night it was with a suspicion that there was something appalling and sinister lying back of the German's anxieties.

This impression was strengthened on the following day when he received a note from von Gratz, saying that he had determined to visit the scene of his former headquartens, and closing with the strange request that if he did not return to luncheon the marquis himself should come to search for him.  The note prayed Banutelli, under no circumstances, to speak of the matter and to come alone.

The marquis was not very much concerned for the safety of von Gratz, but when he did not find the German at luncheon, and learned that he had gone out of the hotel early and had not returned, he became uneasy, took the tram out of Geneva and crossed the French border.

The afternoon was perfect; the sun soft and caressing. The peasants were at work in the distant fields, and the gendarme dozed in his twig hut. The marquis entered the wood and followed the old road. The buds were swelling; little flowers were beginning to appear; and he wondered how anything harmful could have menaced von Gratz in the peace and serenity of this April afternoon. He began to impressed with the folly of his errand; but when he stopped on the edge of the wood to look over the abandoned farmhouse he thought he saw something move at a gabled window. He looked closely and presently beame certain that a hand beckoned him. The marquis crossed to the open door and entered the farmhouse.

The house was much larger than the marquis had imagined and very stoutly built, it had been long abandoned, but it remained sound and tight. The marquis's footsteps echoed on the stone stairs, and in spite of his courage he felt a sense of fear of what lie might be going to meet. As he neared the top of the stairs he beard his name called, and glancing up he saw von Gratz's face, as though it looked at him from the wall. The next moment he realized that the German was peering at him through a little opening cut in a door.

"Prince!" cried Banutelli. "What has happened to you? And why are you here ? "

"Marquis," replied von Gratz, I am a prisoner."

"A prisoner!" echoed the Italian. Who has made yon a prisoner? I will go at once for the gendarmes."

"No, my friend," replied von Gratz, "the gendarmes would only get me killed. My one hope lies in your courage and devotion. Please to look through the window behind you and see if the two old peasants are at work in their potato field."

The marquis turned to the little high window behind him on the stairs, and by standing on tiptoe was able to see out. On the edge of the forest fceyond the little meadow the two old peasants laboored with their spades, digging up the sod. The sun lay upon their stooped shoulders and their bent, backs, and a vagrant wind stirred their white hair. They reminded the marquis of the humble figures of the Angelus. He returned to the door.

"The peasents are there," be said. "What have these simple creatures to do with this outrage?"

"Simple creatures!" cried von Gratz. "God in heaven! The spirit of vengeance— tireless, patient, and inexorable— has never dwelt on this earth as it dwells within the bosoms of those two peasants! Prepare yourself, marquis, to hear the strangest thing that ever happened.

"When I entered this valley during the Franco-German war three brothers occupied this house. It was night when my advance reached the wood, and one of these brothers, coming to the door, fired a fowling piece. When we entered he gave up the gun and explained that he had not intended to resist soldiers, but had been alarmed by a noise he did not understand.

"He was a fine young peasant, concealed nothing, and answered even- question without evasion. It was impossible not to believe him. I would willingly have set him at liberty; but he had fired on the Uhlans and an example had to be made. I occupied the house and imprisoned him for five days in this very room in which I now stand until his offence should be thoroughly known throughout the whole province; and at the end of that time I had him stood up before the door of this house and shot, as a warning that any noncombatant firing on the soldiers would be thus shot against the door of his house. Each of the two older brothers came to me privately and begged me to shoot him instead of the boy; when I refused they looked at me for a long time, as one has seen an animal look at something it does not intend to forget."

Von Gratz paused: "Marquis," he said, "you perhaps observed in the environs of Ferney an ancient, chapel surmounted by a crucifix. When these peasants became convinced that I would not take their lives in exchange for that of the boy, they went to this chapel in Ferney to pray."

The German's voice descended into a whisper. "And they have continued to go there every day for forty years!"

The man's voice died out and he remained for some time silent, while the Italian endeavoured to realize the vast infinite faith that no period of time could weaken, and that returned day after day, in the unfailing belief that it would in the end receive what it asked. The voice began with an abrupt and unexpected question.

"Do you believe in God, marquis?"

The amazed and bewildered Italian shrugged his shoulders. "I don't know," he replied— "sometimes."

"I never did." continued von Gratz. "But listen! The war passed, and I returned to my estates in Baden. I was young then. I grew old. I forgot this incident. But one night in the castle at Waldshut I dreamed that I was standing on the edge of the wood before this house, looking ot the door. The door was closed. I seemed greatly relieved— and I woke.

"Time ran on and the dream returned. And always as the thing reappeared my anxiety about the door became greater, and my relief at finding it still closed increased, as though this closed door stood between me and some appalling doom. The dream never varied. I looked always at this door in a sweat of dread!"

Von Gratz paused. Then be went on like a disembodied voice— "One never escapes from the superstitions of his childhood. I had heard that if one touched a dead man on the forehead he would not dream of him, or if he went to the scene of a haunting obsession would disappear. I could no longer endure this hideous anxiety that recurred always in a shorter cycle. I determined to come here and revisit this house in the hope that this dream would cease.... But I found all France inflamed, and I hesitated until you told me that the door was open. Then I determined to go. I dared not think what this accursed dream might become, now that the closed door was open." The face of von Gratz, framed in the narrow aperture of the oak door in the dim light of this garret, appeared fantastic and ghostlike.

"I came here. When I reached the border of the wood I was seized by two men, the sleeve of a blouse stuffed into my mouth, and carried into this house and up the stairs to this room. I was thrust in and the door locked.... Yes, the men were the two old peasants out there.... They told me that from the day their brother was shot against the door they had never ceased to pray to God to bring me back here; and they had never ceased to watch for me.. They had abandoned the house as a sort of trap, they gave me precisely what I had given my own prisoner— a jug of water, black bread and a Bible. And they told me they would keep me a prisoner for five days, as I had kept the brother, and then shoot me against the door as I had shot him."

Banulelli was appalled. "Great God!" he murmured. "What a revenge! What a revenge!"

And he continued to repeat the word, as though the very sound of it projected before him all the faith and patience and barbarity of these two terrible old men. Then he turned as though to descend the stair "I will bring the gendarmes. The French officers, at least, are not savages."

Von Gratz stopped him. "No, my friend— that will not do. Yon would get me out, to be sure, but not alive, marquis. Do you think a Genman officer could be rescued by gendarmes today in France and not somehow lose his life in the engagement— especially if that officer were Ulrich von Gratz? Besides how should I be regarded by the Emperor if I were found on French soil under such conditions? What explanation could be given? What international complications would follow?... I have thought the whole thing out. I must depend solely on you, marquis. My brother Rudolph is now in Basel. Go to him there; tell him this thing in person, and he will come here with his servants and release me. There is time enough. You will reach Basel tomorrow: these peasants will not murder me until the five days are up, and Rudolph will act swiftly."

"But, prince," interrupted the marquis, "how will your brother know that I come from you? There is nothing here with which to write a message. Suppose  he should refuse to believe me— or take me for a madman?"

"I have also thought of that," replied von Gratz. He went away from the window and presently returned with the Bible of which he had spoken— a small, thick, old book with a leather cover. "During the Franco-German war," he continued, "the officers of the division to which Rudolph and myself belonged made use of this simple device. If a messenger bearing a despatch brought with him any sort of book, no matter what, marked with a fingerprint on any three of its successive pages ending in seven, the despatch of that messenger was to be taken as of the most urgent necessity. I have thus marked this Bible on its seventh, it seventeenth, and its twenty-seventh pages. Show it to my brother, and he will not only believe what you say, but he will also know by this sign that I am in the most desperate position."

And he handed the thick old book through the opening in the door. "You will find Rudolph von Gratz at the hotel of the Three Kings. And now farewell, my friend! My life will depend on your devotion! Go out of the house on the side you entered, so that the peasants cannot see you from their field, flank the woods round them, and return to Geneva, on the road from Ferney, as you have been accustomed to do."

The marquis put the book into his pocket and left the house. He entered the woods and made a detour round the little meadow, keeping well within the cover of the trees; but when he came opposite to where the peasants worked he stopped. The afternoon was entrancing; a warm vitalizing sun lay upon the earth; a breath of balmy air moved; the sounds of men and horses came to him from the distant fields; away in the blue sky the lark trilled. The mood of the world was a benediction.

And the Italian shuddered! It was the custom of poets in their tragedies to make the aspect af Nature symbolic of their motif, and it was thought that this relation struck the human mind with greater terror; but the exact reverse of that conception was true! Under the grey roof of the distant farmhouse, peaceful in the sun, a human soul, entrapped by a supernal fantasy, awaited a doom as tragic as any in the Book of Kings! And before him, to the eye, two gentle old men digged a field that they might cultivate the fruits of the earth— while, in fact, they pursued an appalling vengeance.

The marquis lifted his hat and wiped the sweat from his face. He looked at the two peasants, their bodies awkward and uncouth, their faces stolid; and he thought how he would have passed them by on his quest for the fierce old passions of the race. And yet these simple creatures had conceived and carried out a thing unequalled even in the Wars of Yahveh. And this big. vivid, hideous tragedy went on, invisibly and without a sign, at the heart of this perfect day!

The man could not escape from the dominion of this oppressive idea; he continued to consider it as he crossed the fields and on the road from Ferney to Geneva. But out here in the sun, as he approached the voices and activities of men, as he observed the children at play and listened to the peasants calling in goodwill to one another, he found it difficult to accept as one of the realities of life the thing he had just experienced. It seemed now— here— like the grotesque fancies of a nightmare. And unconsciously, as a sort of verification, the marquis took the Bible out of his pocket and began to look at the pages von Gratz had named. Yes, they were marked as the German had said, with a sort of smear, as though by a finger blackened on the hearth.

He was about to return the book to his pocket when he realized that the road before him was barred by a gendarme. He looked up. He had come to the line where the road crosses out of France. On a bench before the door of the bureau of police a thin, grey man, who looked like a man of leisure sat reading reading a journal.

The marquis stepped back and put the book in his pocket. At the same time a second gendarme came out into the road. "Monsieur," he said, "we are compelled to detain you."

"Detain me!" echoed the marquis. "For what reason?"

"Monsieur will doubtless learn that later on," replied the gendarme.

The marquis was indignant. "I protest against this outrage!" he said. "I am a subject of King Victor Emmanuel of Italy and I demand instant permission to proceed." The gendarmes did not reply, but they now advanced as though they would take the Italian into custody.

At this moment the man who sat on the bench before the door put down bis journal, rose, and came out into the road. As he approached the marquis he bowed.

"Pardon, monsieur," he said, "I have some trifling influence with the authorities here, and I shall be charmed to be of service to so distinguished a personage as the Marquis Banutelli."

The Italian was at a loss to understand bow his name and title should be known to this stranger; but he observed that the man was a gentleman, and be was grateful for any means that offered him an escape from the gendarmes.

"I thank you, monsieur!" he said. "I shall be obliged to you— or to any one— for permission to continue on my way to Geneva. I cannot understand why this indignity is put upon me."

The stranger made a slight conciliatory gesture. "Ah, monsieur, nations will have their little foibles." He looked at his watch. "And, now, if the Marquis Banutelli will do me the honour of drinking a cup of tea"— he indicated a neighbouring villa— "I think I can promise him safe conduct to Geneva within the hour and the end of his anxieties."

They entered a gate of the villa and ascended a long garden that gained the summit of a hill toward Lake Leman. Here was a view unexcelled in the environs of Geneva. In one direction lay the ranges of Haute-Savoie and the white mountain in the sky, and in the other the Jura and the incomparable valley beneath it.

At a table, on the summit of this garden, the stranger placed a chair for the marquis facing the panorama of the Alps, and himself sat down beyond him, where be could look into the French valley and the great road. Tea was brought, and while he poured it and added a bit of lemon the stranger addressed the maiguis.

"Monsieur," he began, "I esteem myself singularly fortunate in this honour. I have long wished to have your opinion upon the structure of the German opera."

He made a gracious gesture, as though in deference to so distinguished an authority. "It has always seemed to me that the machinery of German tragedy is unnecessarily ponderous, weighted down with the clumsiest devices and demanding at every turn heavy, lugubrious effects— as though the mystic German mind moved always in a dense, almost palpable atmosphere of romance. Or am I in this, monsieur, merely misled by prejudice?"

The tea was excellent, the stranger had an engaging manner, and the question was launched upon the very sea the marquis sailed. He was compelled to consider it; and be found his best following his words with so close an interest, such intelligent comment and so high a regard for the speaker's opinion that the marquis was charmed. A quarter of an hour—a. half— three-quartera of an hour— fled. The marquis was deep iu the subtleties of his critique when suddenly his host painted down to the road from Ferney.

"Pardon, monsieur," he said, "but is not the person yonder, at this moment crossing out of France, the Prussian general, Prince Ullrich von Gratz?"

The marquis sprang up and turned about so quickly that he almost overthrew the table. The gendarmes were standing stiffly at attention and the big military figure of the German was striding past them into Switzerland. The marquis caught his breath with a hissing murmur through the teeth.

"Thank God!" he cried. He is safe!"

"Safe!" echoed his companion as though in astonishment. "How could a distinguished stranger be other than safe on the soil of France?"

"But he is free! He has escaped!" continued the excited Banutelli. "He goes safely to Geneva! And I left him but now a prisoner awaiting death!"

Hurriedly and with gesticulation he recounted all the details of the sinister trap in which von Gratz had been taken, with the supernatural pressure that had forced him to enter it, the fatal patience that received him. and the diabolic vengeance that awaited him— together with the part he had played and the message that be now carried to Prince Rudolph, in Basel.

The tall, grey man standing before the amazed Italian stooped and lighted a cigarette, striking the match slowly and with deliberation. Then he held it up, watching the flame die out, with a gentle, whimsical simle.

"Ah, marquis," he said, "as you so aptly remarked but now in your discourse, the Germans are incurably romantic!"

He threw away the bit of match with a little fillip of the fingers. "Who but a Teuton, if his object was to get something taken out of France, something he feared to carry himself and which was to be placed by his agents in an abandoned house, with the signal that the door, usnally closed, should be open when the thing was ready... what intriguer, marquis, I ask it of you, but a German, to accomplish that simple end, would resort to all these involved and ponderous properties of the tragic poets, including dreams and visitations, an imaginary execution and a secret cipher, and involving an empty house tied up in a French lawsuit, and two simple old peasants who never harmed a creature in this world!"

"But, monsieur," cried the astonished marquis, "what thing could Prince Ulrich von Gratz wish carried out of France, and who are you to know all this?"

"If you will permit me to examine the Bible in your pocket," replied the stranger, "I think I can undertake to reply."

The marquis handed the man the book. He put it down on the table, and, flipping the blade of a pocket knife along the edges of the leather cover, ripped it open. Within, making the thick back, were two closely folded packets of glazed cambric, crowded with drawings.

"These," he said, are the plans of all the French forts along the range of the Vosges.... And I, monsieur, am Jonquelle, the Prefect of Police in Paris!"

______________

3: Lord Winton's Adventure

Melbourne Leader 24 November 1917

LORD WINTON sent away the horse and let himself in. It was midnight. After Northridge's dinner he had changed is clothes and gone for a last ride in the park. He loved horses and smart women. It was a narrow house in Park-lane. The servants had been packing all day; they were tired, and Lord Winton had sent them to bed when he went out. The house looked empty but for the heavy furniture and paintings. There was a wood fire in the library. Lord Winton stood with his back to the fire.

He had gone the usual course of young men in his class, somehow through the public school on the hill, the university, and then to a smart regiment with a year or so in the East; after that came his uncle's rise to power and his turn into the diplomatic service.  An assignment·to the English Embassy in America was not precisely the post which Lord Winton would have chosen. Now that he was about to leave London the appointment annoyed him. He stood before the fire in his riding clothes, his legs apart, his hands behind him.

He was a young, blond Englishman. He had blue eyes, brown hair that grew thick and close all over his head— brushed back sleek like the coat of a seal— and a bronze moustache. He shifted his position before the fire, bending his legs at the knee, and lifting his body with a sort of jerk. Washington would be dull. There would be hardly any decent sport in America. One might find some hunting country, here and there, but it would be a sort of club thing. And in certain fashionable colonies— Newport, for example— there would be smart women. Here was a bright spot in this reflection. Lord Winton had met smart women from these "colonies." He smiled at the memory, disclosing his fine, white, even teeth under the bronzed moustache. They were awfully smart, these American women, and devilishly clever.

He was in this reflection when a cab stopped before the house and someone came up the steps. He went. out and opened the door. A huge man entered. His opera hat and his loose top coat added to the outlines of his bulk. The visitor bowed and murmured an apology for disturbing Lord Winton at this hour.  The tones of his voice were low and soft, and his English sentences selected and precise. Lord Winton was very greatly surprised. His words were exclamations of amazement.

"'Mahadol! You in London! My word!"

The big man removed his hat, coat. a gloves. These, together with his stick he laid on the table. Then he smiled. One could not. say to what race the man belonged. HIis face had the profound introspection of a Yogi dreamer, but the eyes and broad, low forehead were Mongolian. The man was some sort of blend. He could not be identified with any precise race. He seemed to have the strong features of many peoples with their weaknesses left out. He vas very carefully dressed in the best evening clothes one couald buy in Bond-street. And in these English clothes he looked like the type of some strange, new, dominating race.

Lord Winton continued to regard the man with astonishment. "Mahadol!" he repeated, as though the appearance of the man were something beyond belief. "I haven't seen you since the old regimental days in Bombay. Come in. Sit down."

He led the way into the library, pulled out a big chair by the table, and: took up his old position before the fire. The big Oriental sat down, his bulk filling the chair. He did not speak for some moments. He looked perplexed and embarrassed. He seemed to watch Lord Winton, who stood bending his knees and lifting his body with a little bounce. The Englishman was surprised tIsee the man who had come in, and he wondered why he should come after midnight and at this time. But he was not disturbed about it. He was never disturbed about anything— except, perhaps, good horses and smart women. He knew Dang Mahadol. Everybody, everywhere, knew Dang Mahadol. He "roosted," as Lord Winton wvould have put it, "in Bombay, and flapped all over the rotten East— pecking about for twinklers."

In fact, the man was the greatest dealer in precious stones in the world. When one gave an order to Pool in Londlon, Hausmann in Paris, or Vanderdyk in Amsterdam, it went straighit to Dang Mahadol in Bombay— if the order were for Oriental jewels at over a thousand pounds. Dang Mahadol sat in the gate of the East like a joss before the treasures of a pagoda. One could not get by him. One tradted with Mahadol direct or paid another profit to Pool, Hausmann or Vanlderdyk.

Lord Winton slapped his hands and held the palms out to the fire. He bounced his body with the characteristic gesture. "I'm off tomorrow," he said. "Nice of you to pop in. What's up?"

The Oriental had a single eyeglass in an exquisite shell rim hanging to a broad silk ribbon. He touched it with his hand a though embarrassed.

"Lord Winton," he said, "I have something on my conscience."

He paused. Then he went on:"I learned that you were going out to America tomorrow, and I determined to lay the matter before you and request your, assistance."

He moved with a sort of undulation, as though to permit his huge body to flow out and fill the chair. Lord Winton slapped his riding breeches with his hand. "Certainly," he said, "Mahadol, anything I can do— charmed."

He was not charmed; he was puzzled. "What's the rum beggar driving at?" he thought.

The big Oriental made the shadow of a servile gesture.

"I am obliged by your courtesy," he said. "I became involved in this matter through no faiilt of my own. The thing has been long delayed, but America is six thousand miles from Bombay, and I am old and hate the sea."

He remained silent for several moments. Then he went on: "It was a strange adventure, Lord Winton."

The big Oriental stopped abtruptly. Lord Winton suddenly regarded him with profound interest. He coull understand adventures. Old Dang Mahadol flapping about the rotten East must have knocked into all sorts. If the thing he came in about was a strange adventure to him, it must be something extraordinary. He got a chair and sat down by the hearth, the toe of a riding boot thrust out towards the fire.

"Have a cigarette, Mahadol," he said. "In the metal tray. Sorry there is nothing to drink. Everbody's turned in but myself."

The Oiental got up with the swift, easy motion of a Japanese wrestler, and presented the tray to Lord Winton.

"Alcohol is death the East," he said. "I never touch it... but if you will pardon me, Lord Winton, I will smoke a native cigarette.  I grow old and attached to trifles."

Lord Winton took the tray and placed it on the hearth. The Oriental returned quickly to his chair. He seemed again to flow into it as though his body were soft and viscous. He got a brown cigarette out of a vellum box, lighted it, and became almost instantly unmoving, except for the hand that carried the cigarette to his lips.

For a good while he was like a figure in metal: one of those heavy deities that sit before the temples of the Far East. Then suddenly he began to speak.

"I WAS coming up from the Malay Peninsula. I was ill and I came by sea. I hate the sea. It was a boat of the English Trading Company. It put in at Rangoon: You know the coast of Burma; mud extending into the water, fringed toward the land with kaing grass. It was sunset when we got up the river to Rangoon. The monsoon rains were hardly over, and the whole place steamed. You know the grey, hot, abominable steam that the sun draws out of the mud of Burma."

He paused.

"It is no place for a white man. One must have immunity in his blood for a good many hundredd years to live in Burma. There are two poisonous places on the map of Asia. Rangoon's one of them. It's a city of crows. They are everywhere, like the dogs in Constantinople, and the flies in Port Said. And always at sunset they leave the city. Everybody was on deck just then, at suinset, watching the innumerable black creatures struggle up out of the grey steam and flap off into the jungle. The stream seemed full of them. They battled out of it by the thousand, like devil creatures. getting clear of the pit. Everybody was watching the crows strurgling under the steam.

"Just then an old Cingalese boatman approached the white men on deck. He was making the shikoh with his palms together, pointing toward the man he addressed, and he was whining in two or three dialects and some English words. Nobody paid any attention to him. But I caught what he said and beckoned him to mne.

"He was incredibly old. One never knows how old man can be in any other country but Asia. I got out of him that a white man was dying somewhere down under the steam that the crows were struggling out of, and he wanted to see a gentleman. That was the one English word that the Cingalese had correctly. He kept returning to it. I saw that the word had been forced on his attention. Somebody had taken a good deal of trouble about the word. The Cingalese cling to it as though it were the key to a formula."

Mahadol stopped abruptly. Lord Winton was listening with attention, he did not read books; for this reason, perhaps, he had the fresh, consuming interest of a child for a story. The fire glowed. The sounds in the city seemed remoe.

The big Oriental went on: "I saw no white man go with him so I went. I hate the sea. I was glad to get on the earth for an hour or two. The steamer did not go out till mormning. It was taking on a cargo from the godowns. Midnight might see it clear. I was free until then, and I was not afraid of the steam. Fever never gets me. I got into the boat and the Cingalese took me ashore. He was skilful and inconceivably strong for a mere dried wisp of a creature. The river is like ink, and rapid; not rapid like a western river. I mean rapid as though it boiled; as ihough it were a pot of ink with a fire under it. The steam would convince you. I actually touched the water to see if it were hot."

He paused and twisted the black silk ribbon to his single eyeglass.

"I always go to see broken men," he said, "if they're white. I have learned a great deal— a great deal of value— from men slipping into the pit. A white man is not a liar at the end; the truth comes out of him. I always go."

Lord Winton continued to listen, and the Oriental went on: "All at once it was dark. I could see nothing. I knew the Cingalese was beating along the edge of the river around the piling. Finally he stopped by a wall. The boat grated against the stones, and I got out. It was a paved court of some character. They are common in Rangoon. The Cingalese fastened his boat and went ahead into an abandoned pagoda. He had taken it over. He was in it with the rats"— the Oriental hesitated— "and the man I had come to see.

"A part of the old temple had been curtained off with some rotten sail cloth. We went in under a flap. There was a table in the middle of the room made of packing cases, and an old steamer chair stolen from an English ship. There was also a bench. There was a cheap German lamp on the table. That's all there was in the place— except the man."

He got another cigarette out of his vellum box and twisted it about in his fingers, but he did not immediately light it.

"I never saw anybody like the Englishman in the steamer chair on the other side of the packing box table. He looked like some dying creature that the crows had been after when the steam forced them out. Death was on him; a horror of death. His right arm was bandaged out to the ends of his fingers; there was a cloth around his throat coming up over the point of his chin and tied back; his helmet covered the top of his head at the eyes. I knew what was the matter with him. He had the Monks' Plague. It's one of the treasures of the Khan monasteries in the Gobi Desert. Western science never heard of it, and I doubt if any other white man ever had it. It's a ghastly, loathsome, creeping horror. They call it the Black Rot in Asia, and the name's right."

The Oriental went on: "There was one thing about the white man that impressed me. He was shaven and he was clean. Even in that den with the rats and the dirty Cingalese he had somehow managed it. I knew then why the old boatman clung so persistently to his English word.

"The man was profoundly disappointed when— he saw me. I sat down on the bench. He put out his uninjured hand and pushed the German lamp over to my side of the table. He wanted to get the light on my face.

"He peered at me a long time, then he leaned back. I knew what the man was trying to do. He was trying to decide whether or not I could be trusted. Dying men have a sort of uncanny judgment. I never knew one to be entirely wrong. There's something primordial and organic in the dread one has to measure under a dying man's estimate. Everybody feels it. I don't care of what race he is. I have seen a Malay pirate carry a Swiss watch two hundred miles to a missionary in the Peninsula because a dying man sent him with it. If that man had been on his feet, in health, the Malay would have cut his throat and put the watch in his pocket."

Mahadol stopped again. He lighted the cigarette; then he went on: "I'don't know what the man concluded; whether he could trust me, or whether it was simply the only chance he had. At any rate, he made up his mind about it.; " "Do you go to America?" he said. "I replied that America was five thousand miles from Bombay, and that I never went. "

"London, then?"

"Yes,' I replied, "sometimes to London; not often."

"The man drew the lamp back across the table... 'You can manage it from London,' he said.

"Then he began to speak in the guttural whisper that goes along with the plague. And all the time he kept peering at me; staring at me; searching my face like, a child trying to read a puzzle. It's not a pleasant experience, Lord Winton, to have a child or a man, with death on him, trying to find out if one is honest."

The huge Oriental had scarcely moved except to twist the eyeglass or to finger the brown cigarette. Now he put his hand suddenly into the pocket of his dinner-coat, took out something thick, bulky and loose, and put it on the table under the cover of his hand. He did it swiftly with the quick motion of a Japanese athlete. His big hand, bowed up with the fingers closed, covered the thing on the table. He kept his hand there, over it, and went on.

Lord Winton regarded him with astonishment, but he made no comment. What the man was saying had the fascination of a wonder-tale, and it held him. He got another cigarette out of the tray on the hearth, lighted it, and waited.

Mahadol went on: "Monks' Plague of the Khan monasteries is a loathsome horror. The whole of the rotten sail-cloth walls were covered with soft pudgy, repulsive creatures, gaudy moths, and butterflies of an evil, poisonous beauty. Dirty lizards darted about. They crawled over the packing box table and around the German lamp."

There is this gain in never having read a book— that one's imagination is not clouded. Its vigor and sharp outlines remain. Lord Winton could see the essentials of the pictures as clearly as a child. The black mud of Burma; the crows struggling in the steam; and below that, an abandoned human creature dying in a square of light and enclosed with a wail of rotten sail cloth creeping with vermin. He saw it as a child sees the outlines of a wonder story, directly, iike one looking on.

The big Oriental was in one of his periods of silence. The brown cigarette lay on the table near his hand; the big, unmoving hand bowed like a cup over the thing beneath it. His whole body had the immnobility of some heavy fluid at rest.

"It was a cruel effort for the dying Englishman to speak," he began, suddenly, as though there had been no break in his words. "But he finally got ouit what he wanted to tell— what he wanted to tell a man of honor? before the Monks' Plague rotted him into something for the crows."

Maihadol paused and looked at Lord Winton.

"The voice hardly ever got out of a whisper. The light was dim and I could see only a little of the man's face between the rim of his helmet and the cloth that came around the point of his chin. He movedl hardly at all, as though he were afraid his disintegrated body might fall to pieces."

Lord Winton was listening intently. The big Oriental went on:

"The man had been in command of a training submarine in the Engish navy. One day, off Portsmouth harbor, as the submarine was coming up, its tower was struck by the hull of a patrol boat. The submarine went down. They blew the tanks, put on all the power of the engines, and finally got to the surface. But they could not keep on the surface. The submarine began immediately to sink. And suddenly, overcome by the fear of death, this man opened the hatch to the tower and jumped into the sea. The boat filled through the open door and went under."

There was profound silence. The Oriental seemed to reflect; then he continued:

"The Englishman was picked up, tried by a court-martial and dismissed from the service. But the sea had not finished with him. He took passage for America, determined to disappear out of human knowledge. It was a huge liner crowded with people. One night, four hundred miles east of Newfoundland, on the North Atlantic track, an extraordinary thing happened. It was a brilliant night, the sea was as clear as glass. There was hardly a ripple. It was about ten o'clock. The passengers were ,all on the main deck in evening dress at the captain's ball. He said that the deck was crowded with women. It was a fashionable liner. The smartest women in America were aboard. They had stocked their wardrobes in Paris."

The man with the Monks' Plague dying, in the square of light, in the steaming hole in Rangoon, said that the Captain's ball that night was the most brilliant social affair that he had ever seen in the world. He said the deck was like a floor and the whole sea clear to the eye, when suddenly there was a jar and a creeping shudder ran aong the whole length of the iner. The passengers paid no particular attention. They thought it was some jar of the engines. But the officers knew— better; they knew that the liner had struck a field of submerged ice.

"The man said that he put on a stoker's jacket and overalls and followed the officers below He was amazed at the injury to the ship. The whole side of the liner from stem to stern on the starboard side was ripped just as a sheet of cast iron is ripped by a steel tool in a machine shop. The plates were cut; every bulkhead was opened; the sea was pouring in. He saw in an instant that the liner was doomed.

"He hurried back to the deck. Wireless calls were sent out. The boats were lowered and the officers began to take off the passengers. The Englishman, continuing to wear the stoker's jacket and overalls, helped the officers. At that time he had perfect control of himself. He saw that the boats would hardly hold the women and children. There was no chance for anybody else. But this thing did not impress him.

"Then he heard a woman screaming somewhere under the decks, and he went to bring her up. He was two decks down, he said, when suddenly all the lights on the liner went out, and it was wholly and inconceivably dark. The darkness. he said, seemed thick and palpable, and to envelop and press him like an invisible thing having dimensions and weight. And all at once the ship became a place of horror.

"He could bear the sea pouring in: the women far away under the deck below him screaming in mortal terror; wild, eerie, unearthly, insane screaming, tle man said; and then suddenly the ship listed heavily to the starboard side.

"It was at this moment that he went to pieces. The trap which death had set for him on the sulbmarine, and which he had escaped, seemed again to close on him. He could not go down into the deeps of the sea like a rat squealing in a hole. The thing, all at once, with a sudden, ghastly revulsion, became a horror beyond him. Terror suddenly flowed into the man and forced everything else out. He turned and ran, and the things from which he fled— the sea, the screaming, and the darkness— became embodied horrors that pursued him. The man said that he remembered every detail; how one side of the stairway was steeper than the other: and how he feared that the terrors at his bank would pull him down on the steepened turns. Once he shouted to frighten them off, and threw his cap back. Then he came out on the deck.

"He had now no care about anybody but himself. All at once everything else was nothing. His own life avas his only concern. And it was a concern that forced out everything. Nothing else seemed to approach it, to be worth a fraction of a second a thought, the effort of a motion.

"The deck on this side of the ship was lined with men. He darted back to the door and out on the other side. His foot struck something as he came out on the deck. He did not see what it was, but he stooped, picked it up, and held it in his hand while he took a moment to determine what he would do. The officers, on this side, were calmly putting women into the last boat. And he made up his mind to fight him way through the group of men into this boat at any cost. It was dark. He wore the stoker's jacket and overalls, and nobody would know him."

The Oriental paused. Then he went on:

"No one did know him, as it happened. One of the officers came toward him as he approached. The boat needed a sailor, and he inquired if the stoker could row. The man said that it was all he could do to say yes, without shouting it so that the stars could hear him! He pushed through, swung dovn into the boat, and took hold of the oars. It was then that he realised he had something in his hand, and he stuffed it into the jacket of his jacket without stopping to see what it was. He said that the whole hell-pit of the world seemed to clear suddenly as though the sun flood it. His heart made a great leap upward. Again he had saved his life!"

Mahadol stopped. His left hand, big, pudgy, and yellow, remained like a cup over the thing concealed on the table. With his other hand he took hold of the shell rim of his eyeglass and moved it on his shirt front as though unconsciously he traced some mysterious, comnplicated arabesque. He looked at the Englishman, motionless before the fire.

"You know what happened to the liner, Lord Winton. Everybody does. It was perhaps the awfullest ocean disaster of our time. Lord Winton nodded, but he did not speak. He remembered all about it. But the innumerable details of the thing scattered everywhere gave him no conception to equal the essential details that stood out in this recital. He could understand the sudden terror and violence of a human creature who, having escaped one trap by a desperate hazard, a step or two farther on finds himself imperilled by another. He could realise as a child can incredibly realise, the menace of the thick dark, the list of the ship as though a floor gave way, the screaming, the sense of suffocation, of being trapped and pressed down under the sea; and then the mad flight, the steepened stairway, the yell, the cap flung back, and the sudden, dominating, consuming, irresistible will to live.

Mahadol continued:

"The boat was picked up at daylight. Everything on the sea hurried into the North Atlantic track. In the confusion of the recue the man, when he got into a cabin, took off the clothes under the stoker's jacket and overalls and threw them intd the sea. He determined to remain the stoker that he had been taken for. Unshaven, and in these garments, no one suspected him, and he got away at the next port.

"He made his way across the American continent, and there he shipped East. He drifted into China and along the Malay Peninsula. over Asia, Mongolia, Tibet, finally Rangoon. But he could never get away from himself. And there was another thing that he could not get away from."

The Oriental suddenly removed the cup of his hand from the table, and under it Lord Winton saw a heap of jewels. Mahadol spread the heap delicately with his big fingers, and it became a double strand of great Oriental pearls, beautifully matched. It was the most magnificent rope of jewels that Lord Winton had ever seen anywhere. There was nothing in England to match it. Somebody had sorted the stock of the world for this incomparable necklace.

Lord Winton got on his feet. "Good gad!" he said. "Did the man have that?"

The Oriental took up his eyeglass, leaned over the table, and moved the pearls about. The touch of his fingers was a caress. Then he sat back with a siglh.

"Yes," he said. "That's what the man had picked up. He said that his impulse, in the first months of his new life, was to keep it, as one would keep a buried treasure that he might go to in extremity. Then he got curious to know if the person who owned this necklace had escaped alilve from the ship. The idea took hold on him. He could not get rid of it, and he made prodigious efforts to find out.

"Finally, in a wharf's den in Manila, in a heap of old American newspapers, he found an estimate of the treasure that had gone down with the ship. The list included the necklace that he now carried with him. It was described, and its immense value set out, together with the name and address of the American woman to whom it belonged. The name was familiar to the outcast sailor, the wife of one of the incredibly rich man of America— one of the ridhest men in the world with a fortune of over twenty millions of pounds sterling."

Lord Winton remained standing, and Mahadol awent on. He did not appear to notice that the Englishman had got up. His fingers moved about the jewels as one touches something for which one has a profound and tender affection.

"The dying man said that his first sensation was that of relief, since the loss of the jewels had fallen upon a person who could well afford to bear it, and he could now dispose of them, as his needs should require, without feeling that the owner suffered from the loss. This was his intention, but he never could do it.

"He had now a strange sentimental obsession that proved always stronger than any necessity. The necklace seemed a sort of distinctive symbol flung to him by the evil fatality that had ejected him out of honor. And he came somehow to feel that the symbol, if he clung to it, would in the end, by some equal fatality, restore him to his former estate. But this night in Rangoon he saw that the notion was fantastic. He was at the door of death. His only concern now was to return the necklace to its owner. He gave me the name which the had never ceased to remember— Mrs. Henry Randolph Norman, at Newport, which I take to be a village or district in the Province of Rhode Island, on the American coast."

The big Oriental got up, his thick, nimble hand still remaining about the jewels of the necklace.

"The thing has been on my conscience, Lord Winton," hlie said sinmply. "When I learned that you were going out to America I thought perhaps you might be willing to take the necklace to the owner, and so discharge an obligation that has been too long delayed. I shall be deeply grateful to you for the courtesy. America is three thousand miles West, and I am old and hate the sea."

He did not stop to listen to Lord. Winton's assent or his amazed comments. he stooped suddenly over the table with an abrupt, eager gesture, his monocle in his eye, his face clone to the jewels, his fingers slipping over them like a miser's over a hoard of gold pieces. And all at once Lord Winton realised how the strange Oriental loved these jewels, what treasures they seemed to him; and what a profound sacrifice of the heart it was to part with them. And vaguely, for he had little imagination, he saw the struggle of this man to carry out a hidden trust of which nobody had any knowledge, a soul-struggle of the outcast rotting to death with the Monks' Plague in the spot of light under the poisonous steam of Burma. This main lived with jewels and adored them. They were romance and mystery and passion to him; the shimmering bodies of the love-maidens in the pavilions of Paradise. To give them up was very nearly impossible. And something of the man's immense renunciation, began to uncover itself to Lord Winton in a sort of wonder. For a moment, hovering over the table in his act of final devotion, the Oriental was wholly oblivious of Lord Winton. His lips moved; his face was nearly touching the jewels; and he fingered them with a sense inconceivably delicate.

Then suddenly he rose and went out of the room; swiftly, like one who is uncertain of his will to go. He got quickly into his coat and took up his hat and cane. Lord Winton followed, and opened the door. On the threshold the Oriental turned back for an instant. His face in the dim light looked distorted as though powerful, invisible hands were pressing it together.

"You'll not forget the name?" he said. And immediately he went down the steps. Lord Winton saw him disappear into the night, his huge body bulking gigantic as it blended with the darkness.

LORD Winton went to Newport. At 11 o'clock he was in a drawing-room— a drawing-room that looks out over the sea and into which the morning sun enters. He had a knowledge of smart women. But the woman who appeared to receive him was something more than he had been accustomed to include under this term.

She was older than Lord Winton; perhaps ten years older. But there was permanent beauty in the bony structure of her face and in her firm, excellent figure. And the man was impressed that here was a person making common use of the best things in the world without any particular regard to the opinion of others; one who realised the use of human conventions and admired them without, however feeling herself obliged to order her life according to the precepts. The woman was superior to anything that Lord Winton had imagined, and he was a little confused to explain the errand upon which he had arrived.

With English directness he plunged at once into his story, putting the jewels into the woman's hands. She sat opposite Lord Winton listening intently. She did not move, but her face gradually changed. An expression, droll and charming, appeared as though it were the illumination of every feature. When Lord Winton finished she leaned back, the necklace twisted about her fingers, the droll expression animating her face, her eyes narrowed.

"How clever of Mahadol!" she said. "The bargain was to deliver this necklace to me in America for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars clear of duty. I didn't see how Mahadol was going to manage it." She paused. "But he did manage it, with a bit of fiction and a British envoy!"

Lord Winton started. "You mean," he stammered, "old Dang Mahadol made up the whole story— the plague, the trust, the dying Englishman, all, everything-to get a necklace, which he had sold you brought into America without paying the customs ?"

"Precisely that," she answered. "As an attaché of the Embassy your luggage would not be subject to search."

The man moved with the first impulse of a violent protest. But the woman's soft, low, impelling voice checked him.

"Why speak of it again?" she said. "Our Government wouldn't be pleased, and his Majesty's Government might not be encouraged to believe that Lord Winton was precisely adapted to a diplomatic career."

_____________

4: The Girl With The Ruby

Leader, 20 July 1918

THE CARRIAGE was now hidden by the wall. And without thinking, without stopping to consider how strange my words must appear, I spoke the thing— the thing that had seemed a profound, inexplicable puzzle to me.

"Why do you marry this Norwegian woman?"

Tea had been served on the terrace of the villa during the formal call of the Ambassador and his daughter. And while they remained, and now that the carriage in which they returned to the city was a mere sound of wheels on the hard Cimiez road, I was occupied by this disturbing query.

The old Ambassador did not concern me. He was not a factor in the problem. But why my host, at his age, after his experiences of life, with his taste refined and exacting, should at last determine to marry this big, flax-haired, silent creature of the White North was a problem that finally forced itself into words.

I sat beside one of the little iron tables on the terrace, a cigarette dying out in my fingers. The Prince Demetri was walking slowly along the whole length of the villa on the red tile that made a band of color against the white walls. The villa looked out over the sweep of the Mediterranean. Below, hidden by the vines and olive trees, was Nice. On the left, like a white ribbon, the Corniche road ascended into a gap of the mountain on its way to Mentone. And west of it, like a mirage— like an illusion— was the ruined, abandoned fairy city of Chateau Neuf.

I think he was the handsomest man in Europe. Middle age had merely served to refine the strength of his features. He was not poor. The upheaval of Russia had not wholly stripped him. Long before it came he had laid down a sort of partnership with Ravillon, the great jeweller on the Rue de Rivoli and the Place Messina. It was a trade that the war had not impaired. It left the Prince in command of his villa, his house in Paris, and an income.

He did not stop in his measured, reflective step at my inquiry. It was only when I added the four final words that he paused and turned about to regard me.

"Do you love her?" I said.

"Love?" He repeated the word slowly, softly, as though it were the potent element in some magic rune. "Ah, no, my friend," he said. "I do not love her."

From every standpoint of material interest this marriage was desirable and excellent. The Norwegian woman was a Royal Princess, and, like the young man in the Scriptures, she had great possessions; but these considerations did not seem sufficient.

"Then why did you arrange this marriage?" I said.

The man came back to where I sat, his hands linked behind him, his face reflective.

"Why does a man in peril," he said, "protect himself with a bolted door?"

I was profoundly astonished. "Peril?" I repeated. "You in peril?"

"In the very deadliest peril," he said.

He went into the salon of the villa and presently returned with the most extraordinary photograph that I have ever seen. It was long and narrow, about four inches in length, and perhaps an inch and a half in width. Three views of a woman's face appeared on this photograph, both of the side views and the full view. The side views were upon the ends of the photograph, and the full face in the centre. The photographic work was good— that is to say, it had been taken with an excellent lens by a skilled photographer; but it lacked every evidence of those artificialities with which smart photographers add illusions to the human face. The photographs were clear, hard and accurate, with no softening shadows. The board on which they were printed seemed ordinary and common, but the frame around this cheap board was a gold band studded with rubies. It was a wonderful frame, as beautiful as the best workmanship could make it.

But it was not these considerations which impressed me. It was the human face that appeared in these three contrasted positions. It was the picture of a young girl, her hair simply arranged as though she had not yet escaped from the discipline of a convent. It was a face of exceptional beauty. One never could wish to change a line or a feature of it. Its bony structure was perfect. But there was something more than this mere structural excellence. There was the lure of an indescribable charm in the face— a charm that one could not separate in the expression from a profound innocence of life. One felt that the lure of this human creature must be extraordinary to appear thus impressive in the hard, harsh outlines of this photograph.

The picture held my attention. I put it lown on the table, only to take it up again. And the man watched me as one might watch in another the effect of a drug which he had amazingly experienced in himself. I continued to examine the photograph, and the one profound conviction that possessed me was that here, preserved on the cheap surface of a photograph board, was a woman with every quality of alluring, eminine charm; every quality that the big, white, silent northern woman amazingly lacked. And I wondered whence this strange, harsh photograph had come, and why the man before me had enclosed it in a frame of jewels anid kept it as one preserves a treasure.

The Prince sat down beyond me at the table. For a time he was silent; then suddenly he began to speak.

"One morning," he said, "in the early spring time, I was idling in Ravillon's shop on the Rue de Rivoli. We had been considering the importation of jewels. Some shipment front Amsterdam had come in, and the shop was preparing for its usual sunmmer trade with America. I had come out from the managers a room when I saw a girl pass the door. She looked in as she passed and, after she had gone a few steps beyond, hesitated, turned about, and finally came timidly into the shop."

He paused and got a cigarette from a tray on the table, lighted it, and held it a moment in his fingers. "It was the girl you have just seen in the photograph. She was very plainly dressed. It was the sort of clothing that showed the evidences of gentilihty, I thought? and poverty. She wore a little piece of fur. It was old, and the seams of her dress had been cleaned and pressed until the fabric looked as though it would give way if an iron were again set on it.

"She asked to see a manufactured ruby of about two carats, The clerk was not impressed to consider her as a possible purchaser. He thought she was one of the class of poor shop girls in Paris who endeaver by this means to satisfy their curiosity about jewels. The women of Paris who buy manufactured jewels do not have the appearance of this girl."

The Prince paused and touched the cigarette to his lips. "But there was something about this woman," he said, "that profoundly disturbed me. I did not know what it was. I do not now know. But it was something independent of her appearance, although her appearance was remarkable enough. Her hair was the exquisite mahogany of a horsechestnut, with that incomparable gloss which the shell of the nut bears when it first escapes from the husk. Her complexion was pale, almost as pale as plaster, and her eyes were blue— the blue of a Delft plate.

"I found myself wondering what race the girl was of. She seemed a sort of blend. I thought it was French or Italian and some other blood? some blood not of a tame, conventional race.

"The clerk laid a piece of black velvet on the table, brought some manufactured rubies, and placed them before her. The girl sat down at the table, and I went over and stood beside her. She selected one of the stones and asked the price, which was more than 500 francs. She seemed very much disturbed at this. She inquired if the stone could not be purchased for 500 francs. She put her hand into the bosom of her blouse, took out a little purse, and emptied it on the table. It contained 500 francs in gold pieces.

"The clerk replied that the stone could not be purchased for a less sum. But I interrupted him. I said she might have it at the price. It was then, it seemed, that she became aware of my presence for the first time. She got up and began to express her appreciation of my kindness. She seemed embarrassed like a child who does not know exactly how to go about such a convention; and now that she spoke directly to me the charm of her personality was even more inconceivably impressive.

"Then she made what we considered an extraordinary request. She wished to know if we could identify this stone. It was not clear why she wished to identify it. We got the impression that she intended to bring it in again later, and she would like us to be certain to identify it. The clerk would have got rid of the matter in the easiest way he could, but I compelled him to consider it. It was a good deal of trouble to undertake to establish sufficient data for the identification of this manufactured stone. We had to make a very careful record of its exact measurements, the dimensions of its faces, and so forth.

"I explained this to the girl; she listened attentively. She then asked for a duplicate of our record of identification, and I had this given to her. She went out of the shop with the manufactured ruby wrapped up in the duplicate of the record which we had made out for its identification."

The Prince stopped and flicked the ash from his cigarette. He remained for a moment looking out over Nice, at the vast sweep of the Mediterranean wrinkled by the touches of the mistral.

"I should have followed her," he said; "It was stupid to permit her to escape out of my knowledge; but under the charm of the girl I seemed incapable of any practical measure. I think at the moment she did not seem precisely real. She was like a fairy woman? something one had longed for appearing unex pectedly by virtue of an incantation.

"A moment later, when I went to the door of the shop to look, she was nowhere to be seen. She had vanished, but the spell with which I was enveloped did not vanish. It remained. And I came ever. day to the shop in the Rue de Rivoli undeo the hope that she would return.

"I had a strong basis for the hope, ant I clung to it as a drowning man would cling to a life-line. The stone would come back for identification some time, and by that clue I should find her again, I ought to have gone to Amsterdam on the affair of the house, and I ought to have returned to my estates in Russia, but I would not have missed a day from the shop in the Rue de Rivoli for the redemption of the world."

He paused. The sun going down behind the black ridge of the mountains, gilded the fairy city of Chateau Neuf as though it were powdered over with gold dust. The wrinkles on the Mediterranean were breaking into little ridges whitened on their summits. The vague touches of the mistral seemed to approach.

"It is of no use to undertake to explain the thing," he said. "There is no explanation of it. Something like the odor of a blossom had reached deliciously to every fibre of my body. I was under the dominance of a sorcery that no sort of common sense could exorcise. I was written to in vain from Amsterdam and from Russia. I remained in the shop in the Rue de Rivoli.

"And I was rewarded for that vigilance.

"One evening, perhaps a month later, as we were closing the shop, the girl suddenly entered. She welcomed me with a smile. And it seemed that all at once, by virtue of that smile, the blackness of the pit in which I had miserably dwelt was flooded with sunlight. She put on the table the ruby and the crumpled paper which bore our duplicate of identification. And she asked us to look again at the stone.

"I did not look at the ruby.

"The girl alone occupied my attention exclusively. I wished to impress for ever on my memory every detail of her. The sheen of her hair, the deep, vivid blue of her eyes, and her incomparable mouth, innocent like a flower.

"It was some time then before I realised that the clerk was calling my attention to the jewel. He seemed to be very much astonished. What he was saying was?

"But this is not a manufactured ruby; it is a real ruby."

"The girl sprang up at the word.

"Oh," she said, 'is it true— is it real?"

"The clerk asked me to examine the stone, and I did examine it. Every expert in the shop examined it. It corresponded precisely to every item of out data for the identification of the manufactured ruby. We compared the measurements with the most delicate instruments in our possession. They were all precisely correct. It was in every detail the manufactured stone which we had sold to her for five hundred francs. But the amazing, astonishing, inexplicable thing was that the stone was no longer a manufactured ruby, it was a genuine ruby. We applied every test of which dealers in jewels have any knowledge. There was no doubt about it. The stone was real. By some means a manufactured ruby worth five hundred francs had changed into a genuine ruby worth twenty thousand francs.

"The girl seemed transported with delight when we told her the result of the test. But she made no explanation. She went at once out of the shop."

The cigarette had burned to his fingertips, and the Prince tossed it over the edge of the terrace into the vines.

"But this time," he said, " I did not propose that the girl should escape me; I followed her. She hurried down the Rue de Rivoli and turned into the Place de la Concorde. I continued to follow her. I don't think I was very discreet about it. I was too anxious to. be careful. Presently she seemed to be disturbed. She had seen me crossing the street, and knew that I followed her. She hesitated, uncertain what to do, then she went on swiftly for perhaps a dozen paces. She stopped, and I thought she intended to turn round and come back, but she went across the Rue de Rivoli through the gate into the garden of the Tuileries.

"I followed her through the gate.

"She walked rapidly under the horse chestnuts. I had lost all discretion about the matter now, and I went on hurriedly, fearful that I should lose sight of her for an instant. There is a bench, behind some shrubs, looking out toward the Seine. She went round the shrubs and sat down on the bench. I came up, parted the branches and looked through to see what had become of her. She was sitting huddled on the beach, her head on her arm, crying. I went round and sat down beside her. I did not say anything— I did not know what to say; there seemed nothing to say.

"She continued to cry softly for a good while, her face on her arm. And the undulation of lher shoulders and the tremor of her hand that lost itself under the wealth of hair affected me beyond any possibility of speech. I suppose I should have sat there until morning? until the world wore out turning on its axis? without a word, without a motion, enveloped with the sorcery of something in this woman.

"I don't know how to describe it; there doesn't seem to be any word in any language to describe it. It was as though every cell, every living, organic cell that made up the unit of my body starved; had a desperate, primeval, animal sensation of hunger. And it was the hunger of panic; it was the hunger of long deprivation; a hunger unfed from the beginning of the world."

The man stopped and got another cigarette.

"You will say that I was mad, of course. I was not mad. I was as sane and intelligent as I am now, as I shall be when I marry this Norwegian woman. The thing had nothing to do with any sort of madness. It was simply something that awakened; something that by the gracious beneficence of God is usually kept sleeping in us. I don't see how it could s be explained to anybody. If a man were a born blind, how could one explain color to him? If he were deaf from his mother, how would one explain music to him? It may be fortunate; it may be out of an inscrutable wisdom, that the thing is dormant in most of us. I don't know what I would happen to the world if that thing awoke in everybody as it awoke in me on that afternoon in the garden of the Tuileries.

"Of course, it did not awake there; it awoke the first time the girl came into the shop, and it was waiting when she returned. But it clamored now; it clamored like hungry cheetahs before the grating of a pit. And yet, with all that hell going on inside, I did not move and I did not say anything. Presently the girl sat up. She wiped the tears out of I her eyes. I remember it perfectly. She had a little handkerchief wadded up in her fingers, and she dabbed her eyes with it.

"Oh, monsieur,' she said, "I don't know what to do. You will follow me— you will find out everything? and you will take it for the use of your big shop.

"She repeated it, and the tears began again. I don't know what I said; I must have said a good deal, and I suppose it must have seemed impressive. I think it would have seemed convincing, for I was I desperately in earnest. No one could have been in more deadly earnest about anything. It seemed to me that the most important thing in the world, the most important thing that would ever be in the world, was to convince this girl that I she could trust me.

"I did not know what it was she would need to trust me about— I had no idea what, thing she feared would be taken away or what use the house, to which my name was attached, would'. make of any- i thing she knew or had control of. But I labored to convince her that anything in which she was in any way interested was safe— would be made safe.

"We must have appeared very curious to anyone walking through the garden of the Tuileries— a girl crying on a bench and a man in this earnest appeal."

The Prince paused and got another match for his cigarette.

"And yet," he said, "when one stops to think about it, that would be the one sort of scene in Paris having no element of strangeness. It would be simply a scene out of the oldest tragedy of the world, to be met with anywhere. There is no bench in the whole garden of the Tuileries upon which it has not been enacted."

He paused. "I don't remember precisely how the thing ended, but it was all somehow concerned with what seemed to be a surrender to me— a capitulation. Women do things like that. We shall never understand the mental process by which they arrive at a conclusion to do them. Perhaps there is no mental process. I suppose the thing is a sort of feeling, or it is a sort of relaxation, or it is a sort of abandonment. I don't know what to call it.

"She would conme to-morrow afternoon to the shop and she would put everything into my hands; she would trust me— that is what it all summed up to."

Night was beginning to arrive— a sort of blue deepening, as though the Italian sky descended over the Riviera and hardened into sapphire. I got the picture and began to look at it again. I had not been mistaken. Something of the extraordinary charm which the man before me felt himself unable to describe was unquestionably present even in this strained photograph.

The Prince went on. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the Mlediterranean rising to meet the descending Italian sky.

"I was in the manager's office of the jeweller's shop, on the Rue de Rivoli, the following afternoon. I was there from midday until the moment she came in. It was very late when she arrived. The afternoon was nearly gone. The clerks were putting up the iron shutters, but they were not permitted to close the door. I would have kept the door open all the night and all of every other night; it should have stood open for ever, like the doors to the churches of God, until she came in."

For a few moments he was silent. Then he continued, as though he had omitted a great chapter of description— of the physical description of a woman and the analysis of a consuming passion— a chapter that I would not understand, perhaps nobody would understand.

"She had a package under her arm wrapped up in an old newspaper. It was heavy and she carried it very gently. She put it down on the manager's table, and then she removed the newspaper and disclosed a copper box. When the lid was lifted the box was seen to have two compartments; one of these was of a whitish metal and the other some sort of composition. There was a glass plate between the two compartments, and above it what seemed to be a reflector. She moved something in the box and a ray, ruby colored, descended on the glass plate.

"She explained that her father was an Italian chemist. All his life he had been engaged in the study of the synthetic chemistry of jewels. He held that the manufactured ruby of commerce differed from the true ruby only in its atomic structure. And he believed tht this atomic structure could be made to rearrange itself under the influence of the true ruby and a kinetic agent.

"The device in the copper box was the result of this theory. If true rubies were heaped round a manufactured stone and subjected to the ray, the influence of the atoms in the true stones, under the light energy, would cause the atoms in the manufactured stone to arrange themselves in a similar order.

"This was the explanation of the change that had taken place in the manufactured ruby. Her father was dead. He had left her this invention. She had wished to test it, and she had taken the five hundred francs which she had received from the sale of his books and purchased the ruby. She had placed it on the glass plate under this device, surrounded it with the little fragments of genuine rubies which her father had been able to gather up, and the change which we had observed had taken place.

"There had been a rearrangement of the molecular structure of the stone.

"She explained that her father had said that the change in. the manufactured stone would be quicker if the true rubies round it were larger, but that he had had no money with which to buy large stones, and she could only work slowly with the fragments which he had got. She now put the invention into my hands. It was a part of this surrender— this abandonment.

"I called in the manager and the clerks. It seemed incredible to us. But all sorts of incredible inventions had come out of Italy. The discoveries of Marconi had put every man where he could no longer say that anything was impossible; and, besides, we, had the concrete evidence in the manufactured ruby which had been trans. foined. We put the device into the safe with a manufactured ruby dn the glass plate, surrounded with a heap of the best Oriental stones in our possession."

He paused. In the thick light his body had a distorted outline. For a long time there was no sound.

Then he went on. "I think, my friend," he said, "that we are never quite prepared for the utter inreserved surrender of a woman towus, even at the end of our most elaborate arguments. The girl's abandonment to my honor had not ended. " 'And now, monsieur,' she said, 'what are you going to do with me?' "

He paused again.

"I took her to the house of my aunt, the Countess Casseni, on the Bois de Boulogne." He hesitated, and his voice thickened:

"The third patriarch said that the days of his life had been few and evil; many and evil mine seem! But two moments of them outbalance the weight of the years; the moment in the carriage when she said 'I love you!' and the moment when my aunt, the Countess Casseni, took me, softly, into the bedchamber, with the balcony opening on to the Bois de Boulogne, and showed me the girl asleep in the great canopied bed— asleep like a worn-out child, her pale face gleaming like a flower."

Night had descended. It was suddenly dark. The man beyond me was only a voice speaking in the darkness.

"I never saw her again!"

"Never saw her again!" I cried. "Then where did you get this picture?"

"I got it from the rogues' gallery of the Service de la Sûreté," he said. "She belonged to the White Wolves, the most desperate association of criminals in Europe."

"But the invention?" I cried. "Was it a hoax?"

He answered slowly in the darkness: "It was by no means a hoax. It would not change a manufactured stone into a ruby— the genuine stone the girl brought in had been cut in Amsterdam to match the manufactured ruby which she had purchased. But the invention was effective for its purpose, all the same. At three o'clock on that night it blew open the vault of our shop in the Rue de Rivoli; we lost five hundred thousand francs in jewels."

Then suddenly his voice strengthened. It went out strong and forceful into the night: "But all this would not matter. Nothing would matter. If I should ever find her, and I were free, I would follow her through the slime of the world!"

"And so," I said; "you are arranging this marriage as protection against her."

His voice came softly like a whisper.

"Yes," he said; "that is it— to bolt the door."

________________

5: The Man From America.

The Leader, Dec 23 1916

"I SHALL NOT pretend that I knew the man in America or that he was a friend of my family or that some one had written to me about him. The plain truth is that I never laid eyes on him until Sir James M'Bain pointed him out to me the day after I went down from here to London. It was in Piccadilly Circus. 'There's your American,' said Sir James. The girl paused for a few moments. There was profound silence. "And that isn't all of it. Nobody presented him to me. I deliberately picked him up!"

Three persons were in the drawing-room. An old woman with high cheekbones, a bowed nose and a firm, thin-lipped mouth was the central figure. She sat very straight in her chair, her head up and her hands in her lap. An aged man, in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, stood at a window looking out, his hands behind his back, his chin lifted as though he were endeavouring to see something far away over the English country— something beyond the little groups of Highland cattle and the great oak trees. Beside the old woman, on a dark wood frame, there was a fire screen made of the pennant of a Highland regiment. Beyond her was a table with a glass top. Under this cover, in a sort of drawer lined with purple velvet, there were medals, trophies, and decorations visible below the sheet of glass. And on the table, in a heavy metal frame, was the portrait of a young man in the uniform of a captain of Highland infantry.

The girl who had been speaking sat in a big armchair by this table. One knew instantly that she was an American. The liberty of manner, the independence of expression, could not be mistaken in a country of established forms. She had abundant brown hair skilfully arranged under a smart French hat. Her eyes were blue; not the blue of any painted colour; it was the blue of remote spaces in the tropic sky. The old woman spoke without looking at the girl.

"Then," she said, "it's all quite as—" she hesitated for a word— "extraordinary as we have been led to believe."

There was the slow accent of Southern blood in the girl's voice as she went on. "Lady Mary," she said— "it's all far more extraordinary than you have been led to believe— than any one could ever have led you to believe. I deliberately picked the man up. I waited for him outside the Savoy, and pretended to be uncertain about an address. He volunteered to take me in his motor, and I went with him. I told him I was alone in London, at the Ritz. It was Blackwell's bank I pretended to be looking for. Then we had tea."

The girl paused. Presently she continued.

"That's how it began. You're mistaken to imagine that Sir James M'Bain presented me to this American. It was the other way about ; I presented Sir James. I had the run of the Ritz," she went on. "We all do if we scatter money. Sir James came in to tea the next afternoon. That's how he met Mr. Meadows. And that's the only place he ever did meet him. Mr. Meadows came every day, and Sir James formed the habit of dropping in. We got to be a very friendly party."

The motionless old woman, a figure in plaster until now, kneaded her fingers as under some moving pressure.

"At this time," she said, "you were engaged to Tony and expected to be his wife!" The girl's voice did not change. It was slow and even.

"Yes," she said.

"Tony, of course, knew nothing about this?"

"He knows nothing whatever about it unless you have written him."

Again the old woman moved slightly. "I have waited," she said, "for the benefit of your explanation. It seems as bad as I feared."

"Lady Mary," said the girl in her slow voice, "it's worse than you feared. I don't undertake to smooth it over. Everything that you have heard is quite true. I did go out with the man in his motor, in the evening. Sometimes it was quite dark before we returned. Mr. Meadows preferred to drive at night because he was not accustomed to the English rule of taking the left on the road, when one always takes the right in America. He was afraid he couldn't remember the rule, so it was safer at night, and there was less traffic.

"I shall not try to make the thing appear better than it was. We sometimes took long runs. Mr. Meadows liked the high roads along the east coast, where one got a view of the sea and the cold salt air. We ran prodigious distances. He had the finest motor in England, the very latest American model. I don't think so much about night coming on, the lights on the car were so wonderful. Mr. Meadows was an amazing driver. We made express train time. The roads were usually clear at night and the motor was a perfect wonder. The only trouble we ever had was with the lights. Sometimes one of them would go out. I think it was bad wiring. But there was always the sweep of the sea under the stars to look at while Mr. Meadows got the thing adjusted."

This long, detailed, shameless speech affected the aged soldier at the window. It seemed to him immodest bravado. And he suffered in his heart, as a man old and full of memories can suffer for the damaged honour of a son he loves.

Continuing, the girl said:

"Of course it isn't true that we spent the nights touring the east coast of England in a racer. It was dark sometimes when we got in— occasionally after trouble with the lights— quite dark. We did go thundering distances."

"With this person, alone ?"

The old woman spoke slowly, like one delicately probing at a wound.

"Yes," the girl admitted. "You see, the car was a roadster; only two could go; and, besides, there was no one else. Mr. Meadows said he was alone in London, and of course I was alone. When Sir James asked me to go down from here I went straight off to the Ritz."

The old woman made a slight shivering gesture. ''You should have gone to my sister in Grosvenor Square. Monte would have put you up— and looked after you."

"The Ritz put me up very well," the girl continued. "And l am accustomed to looking after myself. Sir James thought it was quite all right."

The old woman Spoke suddenly with energy and directness.

"I don't understand James in the least," she said, "I was quite willing for you to go to London when he asked me for permission. But I thought he would take you to Monte's, and certainly I had the right to believe that he would not have lent himself to—to this escapade."

"He seemed to be very nice about it," the girl went on. "He came in to tea with us— Mr. Meadows and me— almost every evening. And ha always had something amusing to relate, some blunder of Scotland Yard or some ripping mystery. I think he found it immense fun to be Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. I loved the talk. Mr Meadows was always interested and Sir James likes people to be interested."

The old woman continued to regard the girl as one hesitatingly touches an exquisite creature frightfully mangled.

"This person—was he a gentleman?"  she inquired. The girl answered immediately. "I thought about that a good deal," she said. "He had perfect manners, quite Continental manners; but, as you say over here, Americans are so imitative, one never can tell. He was not young— near fifty, I would say; very well dressed. He was from St. Paul; a London agent for some flouring mills in the North-west. I don't know precisely. He explained it all to Sir James. I think he would have been glad of a little influence— some way to meet the purchasing Agents for the government. He seemed to have the American notion that he could come to London and go ahead without knowing anybody. Anyway he was immensely interesting— and he had a ripping motor."

The old man at the window did not move. He remained looking out over the English country with his big, veined hands clasped behind his back. He had left this interview to Lady Mary, as he had left most of the crucial affairs of life to her dominant nature. But the thing touched him far deeper than it touched the aged dowager. He had a man's faith in the fidelity of a loved, woman.

He knew how his son, somewhere in France, trusted this girl, believed in her, as long ago in a like youth he had believed in another. He knew, also how the charm of the girl was in the young soldier's blood, and how potent were these inscrutable mysteries. Every man who loved a woman wished to believe that she came to him out of the garden of a convent— but of a roc's egg,  like the princess in the Arabian story.

All these things he had experienced in himself, in a shattered romance, in a disillusioned youth, when he was young like the lad somewhere in France. Lady Mary would see only broken conventions ; but he saw immortal things, infinitely beyond conventions, awfully broken. He did not move. He remained like a painted picture.

The girl went on in her soft, slow voice. "You would have disliked Mr. Meadows, Lady Mary," she said. "You would dislike any American who came without letters and could not be precisely placed."

The girl's voice grew suddenly firmer. "I don't mean to make it appear better," she said. "The worst would be nearer the truth. He was just an unknow American bagman, with a motor car, and a lot of time on his hands —and I picked him up. But Sir James M'Bain took a fancy to him."

"I cannot understand James," the old woman repeated. ''It's extraordinary."

"It doesn't seem extraordinary to me!" said the girl. "Mr. Meadows was immensely clever, and Sir James was like a man with a new toy. The Home Secretary had just put him in as Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. He was full of a lot of new ideas—dactyloscopic bureaus, photographic metrique, and scientific methods of crime detection. .He talked about it all the time. I didn't understand half the talk. But Mr. Meadows was very clever. Sir James said he was a charming person. Anybody who could discuss the whole of the Galton fingerprint tests was just then a charming person to Sir James."

The girl paused a moment, then she went on : "I suppose things had gone so for about a fortnight when your sister, Lady Monteith, wrote that she had seen Sir James with us— Mr. Meadows and me—in the motor. I have to shatter a pleasant fancy about that chaperonage. That was the only time Sir James was ever with us.

"It came about like this: It was Thursday morning about nine o'clock I think, when Sir James popped in at the Ritz. He was full of some amazing mystery that had turned up at Benton Court, a country house belonging to the Duke of Dorset, up the Thames beyond Richmond. He .wanted to go there at once. He was fuming because an under-secretary had his motor, and he couldn't catch up with him.

"I told him he could have 'our' motor. He laughed. And I telephoned Mr. Meadows to come over and take him up. Sir James asked me to go along. So that's how Lady Monteith happened to see the three of us crowded into the seat of the big roadster."

The girl went on in her deliberate, even voice: "Sir James was boiling full of the mystery. He got us all excited by the time we arrived at Benton Court. I think Mr. Meadows was as keen about the thing as Sir James. They were both immensely worked up. It was an amazing thing!

"You see, Benton Court is a little house of the Georgian period. It had been closed up for ages, and now, all at once, the most mysterious things began to happen in it.

"A local inspector, a very reliable man named Millson, passing that way on his bicycle, saw a man lying on the doorstep. He also saw someone running away. It was early in the morning just before daybreak.

"Millson saw only the man's back, but. he could distinguish the colour of his clothes. He was wearing a blue coat and reddish-brown trousers. Millson said he could hardly make out the blue coat in the darkness, but he could distinctly see the reddish-brown colour of the man's trousers. He was very positive about this. Mr. Meadows and Sir .James pressed, him pretty hard, but ho was firm about it. He could make out that the coat was blue and he could see very distinctly that the trousers were reddish-brown.

"But the extraordinary thing came a little later. Millson hurried to a telephone to get Scotland Yard, then he returned to Benton Court ; but when he got back the dead man had disappeared."

"He insists that, he was not away beyond five minutes, but within that time the dead man had vanished. Mason could find no trace of him. That's the mystery that sent us tearing up there with Mr. Meadows and Sir James transformed into eager sleuths.

"We found the approaches to the house under a patrol from Scotland Yard But nobody had gone in. The Inspector was waiting for Sir James."

The old man stood-like an image, and the aged woman sat in her chair like a figure of basalt. But the girl ran on with a sort of eager unconcern.

"Sir James and Mr. Meadows took the whole thing in charge. The door had been broken open. They examined the marks about the fractures very carefully; then they went inside. There were some naked footprints. They were small, as of a little, cramped foot, and they seemed to be tracked in blood on the hard oak floor. There was a wax candle partly burned on the table. And that's all there was.

"There were some tracks in the dust of the floor, but they were not very clearly outlined, and Sir James thought nothing could be made of them.

"It was awfully exciting. I went about behind the two men. Sir James talked all the time. Mr. Meadows was quite as much interested, but he didn't say anything. He seemed to say less as the thing went on.

"They went over everything— the ground outside and every inch of the house. Then they put everybody out and sat down by a table in the room where the footprints were.

"Sir James had been awfully careful. He had a big lens with which to examine the marks of the bloody footprints. He was like a man on the trail of a buried treasure. He shouted over everything, thrust his glass into Mr. Meadow's hand and bade him verify what he had seen. His ardour was infectious. I caught it myself.

"Mr. Meadows, in his quiet manner, was just as much concerned in unravelling the thing as Sir James. I never had so wild a time in all my life. Finally, when Sir James put everybody else out and closed the door, and the three of us sat down at the table to try to untangle the thing, I very nearly screamed with excitement. Mr. Meadows sat with his arms folded, not saying a word; but Sir James went ahead with his explanation."

The girl looked like a vivid portrait, the soft colours of her gown and all the cool, vivid extravagancies of youth distinguished in her. Her words indicated fervour and excited energy; but they were not evidenced in her face or manner. She was cool and lovely. One would have thought that she recounted the inanities of a curate's tea party. The aged man, in the khaki uniform of a major of yeomanry, remained in his position at the window. The old woman sat with her implacable face, unchanging like a thing insensible and inorganic. This unsympathetic aspect about the girl did not seem to disturb her. She went on:

"The thing was thrilling. It was better than any theatre— the three of us at the old mahogany table in the room, and the Scotland Yard, patrol outside.

"Sir James was bubbling over with his theory. 'I read this riddle like a printed page,' he said. 'It will be the work of a little band of expert cracksmen that the Continent has kindly sent us. We have had some samples of their work in Brompton-road. They are professional crooks of a high order— very cever at breaking in a door, and, like all the criminal groups that we get without an invitation from over the Channel, these crooks have absolutely no regard for human life.'

"That's the way Sir James led off with his explanation. Of course he had all that Scotland Yard knew about criminal groups to start him with. It was a good deal to have the identity of the criminal agents selected out; but I didn't see how he was going to manage to explain the mystery from the evidence. I was wild to hear him. Mr. Meadows was quite as interested, I thought, although he didn't say a word.

"Sir James nodded, as though he took the American's confirmation as a thing that followed. 'We are at the scene,' he said, 'of one of the most treacherous acts of all criminal drama. I mean the "doing in," as our criminals call it, of the unprofessional accomplice. It's a regulation piece of business with the hard-and-fast criminal organisations of the Continent, like the Nervi of Marseilles, or the Lecca of Paris.

" 'They take in a house servant, a shopkeeper's watchman, or a bank guard to help them in some big haul. Then they lure him into some abandoned house, under a pretence of dividing up the booty, and there— put him out of the way. That's what's happened here. It's a common plan with these criminal groups, and clever of them. The picked-up accomplice would be sure to let the thing out. For safety the professionals must "do him in" at once; straight away after the big job, as a part of what the barrister chaps call the res gestae.' "

"Sir James went on nodding at us and drumming the palm of his hand on the edge of the table.

" 'This thing happens all the time,' he said, 'all about, where professional criminals are at work. It accounts for a lot of mysteries that the police cannot make head or tail of, like this one, for example. Without our knowledge of this sinister custom, one could not begin or end with an affair like this.

" 'But it's simple when one has the cue— it's immensely simple. We know, exactly what happened and the sort of crooks that were about the business. The barefoot prints show the Continental group. That's the trick of Southern Europe— to go in barefoot behind a man to kill him."

"Sir James jarred the whole table with his big hand. The surface of the table was covered with powdered chalk that the baronet had dusted over it in the hope of developing criminal fingerprints. Now under the drumming of his palm tho particles of white dust whirled like microscopic elfin dancers.

" 'The thing's clear as daylight,' he went on: 'One of the professional group brought the accomplice down here to divide the booty. He broke the door in. They sat down here at this table with the lighted candle as you see it. And while the stuff was being sorted out, another of the band slipped in behind the man and killed him.

" 'They started to carry the body out. Millson chanced by. They got in a funk and rushed the thing. Of course they had a motor down the road, and equally of course it was no trick to whisk the body but of the neighbourhood.'

"Sir James got half up on his feet with his energy in the solution of the thing. He thrust his spread-out fingers down on the table like a man, by that gesture, pressing in an inevitable, conclusive summing up."

The girl paused.

"It was splendid, I thought. I applauded like an entranced pit!"

"But Mr. Meadows didn't say a word. He took up the big glass we had used about the inspection of the place, and passed it over the prints Sir James was unconsciously making in the dust on the polished surface of the table. Then he put the glass down and looked the excited baronet calmly in the face.

" 'There,' cried Sir James, 'the thing's no mystery.'

"For the first time Mr. Meadows opened his mouth. 'It's the profoundest mystery I ever heard of,' he said.

"Sir James was astonished. He sat down and looked across the table at the man. He wasn't able to speak for a moment, then he got it out: 'Why exactly do you say that?'

"Mr. Meadows put his elbows on the table. He twiddled the big reading glass in his fingers. His face got firm and decided.

" 'To begin with,' he said, 'the door to this house was never broken by a professional cracksman. It's the work of a bungling amateur. A professional never undertakes to break a door at the lock. Naturally that's the firmest place about a door. The implement he intends to use as a lever on the door he puts in at the top or bottom. By that means he has half of the door as a lever against the resistance of the lock. Besides, a professional of any criminal group is a skilled workman. He doesn't waste effort. He doesn't fracture a door around the lock. This door's all mangled, splintered and broken around the lock.'

"He stopped and looked about the room, and out through the window at the Scotland Yard patrol. The features of his face were contracted with the problem. One could imagine one saw the man's mind labouring at the mystery.

" 'And that's not all,' he said. 'Your man Millson is not telling the truth. He didn't see a dead body lying on the steps of this house; and he didn't see a man running away.'

"Sir James broke in at that. 'Impossible,' he said; 'Millson's a first class inspector, absolutely reliable. Why do you say that he didn't see the dead man on the steps or the assassin running away?'

"Mr. Meadows answered in the same even voice. 'Because there was never any dead man here,' he said, 'for anybody to see. And because Millson's description of the man he saw is scientifically an impossible feat of vision.'

" 'Impossible?' cried Sir James.

" 'Quite impossible,' Mr. Meadows insisted. "Millson tells us that the man he saw running away in the night wore a blue coat and reddish-brown trousers. He says he was barely able to distinguish the blue coat, but that he could see the reddish-brown trousers very clearly. Now, as a matter of fact; it has been accurately determined that red is the hardest colour to distinguish at night, and blue the very easiest. A blue coat would be clearly visible long after reddish-brown trousers had become indistinguishable in the darkness.'

"Sir James' under jaw sagged a little. 'Why, yes,' he said, 'that's true ; that's precisely true. Gross, at the University of Gratz, determined that by experiment in 1912, I never thought about it!'

" 'There are some other things here that you have not, perhaps, precisely thought about,' Mr. Meadows went on.

" 'For example, the things that happened in this room did not happen in the night. They happened in the day.'

"He pointed to the half-burned wax candle on the table.

" 'There's a headless joiner's nail driven into the table,' he said, 'and this candle is set down over the nail. That means that the person who placed it there wished it to remain there— to remain there firmly. He didn't put it down there for the brief requirements of a passing tragedy, he put it there to remain; that's one thing.

" 'Another thing is that this candle thus firmly fastened on the table was never alight there. If it had ever been burning in its position on the table, some of the drops of melted wax would have fallen about it.

" 'You will observe that, while the candle is firmly fixed, it does not set straight; it inclines at least ten degrees out of perpendicular. In that position it couldn't have burned for a moment without dripping melted wax on the table. And there's none on the table; there has never been any on it. Your glass shows not the slightest evidence of a wax stain.' He added: 'Therefore the candle is a blind; false evidence to give us the impression of a night affair.'

"Sir James's jaw sagged; now his mouth gaped. 'True,' he said, 'True, true.' He seemed to get some relief to his damaged deductions out of the repeated word.

"The irony in Mr. Meadows' voice increased a little. 'Nor is that all,' he said. 'The blood smear on the floor, and the stains in which the naked foot tracked, are not human blood. They're not any sort of blood. It was clearly evident when you had your lens over them. They show no coagulated fibre. They show only the evidences of dye, weak dye— watered red ink, I'd say.'

"I thought Sir James was going to crumple up in his chair. He seemed to get loose and baggy in some extraordinary fashion, and his gaping jaw worked.

" 'But the footprints,' he said, 'the naked footprints?' His voice was a sort of stutter— the sort of shaken stutter of a man who has come a tumbling cropper.

"The American actually laughed ; he laughed as we sometimes laugh at a mental defective."

" 'They're not footprints,' he said. 'Nobody ever had a foot cambered like that, or With a heel like it, or with toes like it. Somebody made those prints with his hand— the edge of his palm for the heel and the balls, of his fingers for the toes. The wide unstained distances between these heelprints and the prints of the ball of the toes show the impossible arch.'

'Sir James was like a man gone to pieces. 'But who— who made; them?' he faltered.

'The American leaned forward and put the big glass over the prints that Sir James had made with his fingers in the white dust on the mahogany table.

" 'I think you know the answer to your question,' he said. 'The whorls of these prints are identical with those of the toe tracks.' Then he laid the glass carefully, down, sat back in his chair, folded his arms and looked at Sir James.

" 'Now," he said, "will you kindly tell me why you have gone to the trouble of manufacturing all those false evidences of a crime?' "

The girl paused. There was intense silence in the drawing-room. The aged man at the window had turned and was looking at her. The face of the old woman seemed vague and uncertain.

The girl smiled. "Then," she said, "the real, amazing miracle happened. Sir James, got on his feet, his big body tense, his face like iron; his voice ringing.

" 'I went to that trouble,' he said, 'because I wished to demonstrate— I wished to demonstrate beyond that possibility of any error— that Mr Arthur Meadows, the pretended American from St. Paul, was in fact the celebrated criminologist, Karl Holweg Leibnich, of Bonn, giving us the favour of his learned presence while he signalled the German submarines off the east coast roads with his high-powered motor lights.' "

Now there was utter silence in the drawing-room but for the low of the Highland cattle and the winging of the birds outside. For the first time there came a little tremor in the girl's voice.

"When Sir James doubted this American and asked me to go down and make sure before he set a trap for him, I thought— l thought, if Tony could risk his life for England, I could do that much."

At this moment a maid appeared in the doorway, the trim, immaculate, typical English maid.

"Tea is served, my lady," she said.

The tall, fine old man crossed the room and offered his arm to the girl with the exquisite, gracious manner, with which once upon a time he had offered it to a girlish queen at Windsor. The ancient woman rose as if she would go out before them. Then suddenly, at the door, she stepped aside for the girl to pass, making, the long, stooping, backward curtsy of the passed Victorian era.

"After you, my dear," she said, "always!"

_______________

6: No Defense

Saturday Evening Post, December 31, 1910.

Fatality, which on the marble of ancient tragedies bears the name of a god, and on the tattooed brow of the galleys is called "No Luck."—De Goncourt.

THERE was no sun. The city sat like a ghost in a shroud of dirty yellow fog. This fog entered the courtroom. The gas jets were lighted. The air, heated by these jets, was tainted with the stench of the janitor's mop. It was early in the morning. The judge, a number of prisoners who had been brought over the arched bridge from the jail, the officials of the court and a little group of young attorneys, awaiting assignments to defend those without counsel, were alone in the courtroom.

There was an atmosphere of silence. The whispering of the attorneys, the scratching of the clerk's pen, the words of the judge, the responses of the prisoners, their breathing, the moving of their feet, the creaking of their chairs as they arose and as they reseated themselves, were all sounds detached and audible in this silence. There was here no one of those things that warm and color life. The heat of passion, moving men to violence; the love of adventure; the lust of gain; the lights, the sounds, the words, the gestures— the infinite stimuli that had urged these men against the law— were absent. There was here only the presence of penalty.

When the clerk called the State versus Johnson a young man arose from the line of seated prisoners. Judging by his dress, the man might have been a bank clerk. He got up slowly and stood with his chin lifted, looking at the judge. There was no interest in his face. There was in its stead a profound unconcern. His white, nimble hands, always moving, fingered his coat-pockets. It was a habit rather than a nervous gesture. The resignation in the man's face, in the lift of his head, in the pose of his figure, precluded anxiety. He knew exactly what was going to happen.

The judge did not look up. He inquired whether the prisoner was represented by counsel, and being told that he was not appointed one of the attorneys to defend him. He continued, addressing the attorney:

"If you wish to talk with the prisoner you can take him into the vacant jury room; I will have a page call you before I adjourn; be ready to plead to the indictment."

The attorney beckoned to the prisoner and the two of them went into the jury room. The attorney sat down and indicated a neighboring chair with his hand.

"Well," he said, "what is it— not guilty?" The prisoner did not at once reply; he went over to the window and stood a moment, looking idly through the dirty window-panes. Then he answered.

"I don't care," he said.

The attorney was astonished. "Do you want to go to the penitentiary?"

The man turned sharply on his heel.

"No," he said, "I don't want to go; nobody wants to go.... Do you know what it's like down there?... It's hell down there."

"Then we have got to get busy."

The prisoner shrugged his shoulders. The flash of energy, moving him when he spoke of the penitentiary, was past; he was again listless.

"Come," said the attorney, "we must tell the judge something."

"You can tell him the truth if you want to," replied the prisoner.

"Well," said the attorney, "cut along with the story. If there's anything in it that will do any good I'll put it up to the judge."

The prisoner again shrugged his shoulders.

"It's no use," he said.

The attorney was beginning to be annoyed.

"How do you know it's no use?"

The prisoner sat down in a chair; he put his nervous white hands firmly on his knees. He looked the attorney in the face; a bitter resolution entered his voice.

"I know it very well," he said; "when you hear the story you'll know it too. Listen: I'm what the police call a 'dip'— that is, a pickpocket; and I'm a good one— the cops never pick me up on a job. I know my business."

He suddenly flashed his white, nimble hands. "I can go into a jam at a railroad station and get a pocketbook whenever I want to, or I can go into a crowd any time and get a watch. There's no fly cop that can pinch me at it; they have all had a try. I pass them all up. Of course the police know I do it. You can't keep them from knowing that. But they never caught me at a job; they never could catch me."

"They seem to have caught you this time," said the attorney.

"They— the police!" The prisoner made a contemptuous gesture. "It was something bigger than the police. Did you ever hear of Scott, the man who invented the method of sawing through an iron bar with silk thread and emery dust? No? Well, when it came to brains he had us all trimmed. Scott understood it. He used to say: 'Boys, it's not the police. You always have a chance against the police, but when that other Thing gets in the game you haven't got a ghost of a chance.'"

The attorney was puzzled.

"I don't understand," he said.

"Never mind, " replied the prisoner; "you'll understand in a minute."

He stopped and sat a moment with the muscles of his mouth drawn, his teeth together; then he continued:

"I thought Scott was dopey; I thought he was talking rot. I laughed. 'All right, young man,' he said; 'you're too little yet for the Thing to notice you; but just you wait until you attract its attention! That Thing's on some big job; it has no time for you until you begin to annoy it. Then look out! Mind, it won't land you with a clean upper cut. That's not its method; its way is to do you with a lot of little, trivial, picayune tricks that you will mistake for a run of hard luck. It's like this: it's like an ant crawling over a man's hand when he's busy; for a good while he doesn't notice it, but when he does he knocks it off into the fire.... Only there's this difference: a man, when he finally did notice it, would brush that ant off into the fire at once; but this Thing takes its finger and heads the ant off here, and it heads it off there, and it steers it and turns it until it drops off into the fire of itself; and every one of those turns and twists and head-offs that ant thinks is an accident.'"

He paused a moment, his slender fingers tightening on his knees.

"I thought Scott was giving me a line of hot air. 'Everybody has luck,' I said. 'Sure they do,' said Scott, 'but this Thing's not luck—it's intention. Luck's a thing that comes by chance, but there's no chance about this Thing. Luck's an accident here and an accident there, without any connection; but this Thing's a system.'"

"What has all this got to do with your case?" asked the attorney.

"I'm coming to that," replied the prisoner. "Listen: It was in the afternoon; the sun had brought everybody out. The snow was melting and the gutters were running full of dirty slush, but the sidewalks were dry and warm. I was coming along the street. I wasn't out for business. I wasn't looking for anything. Finally I hit a crowd on the corner. A faker had a piece of black carpet laid along the sidewalk, and he was selling a mechanical toy— two little dummy figures. He'd make a speech about the wonders of science, then he'd put his mechanical toy down on this carpet, and the two little figures would begin to dance, and they'd keep on dancing— they'd dance forever. The crowd was wild. The faker was selling this toy for twenty-five cents, put up in a neat box with instructions, and they were going like gold dollars.

"It took me a minute to get on to his game. There was a tiny black thread stretched along this carpet, and out at the other end— on the edge of the crowd— a hobo with his hands in his pockets was working the thread. The faker just hooked his toy on to this thread, and of course it would dance until the hobo's elbow wore out.

"I was standing there watching this bunch of suckers take the hook when, out in the crowd, I noticed a big man with his hat on the back of his head, a cigar in his mouth, a diamond in his shirtfront, and a gold watch-chain, as thick as your little finger, stretched across his waistcoat. The thing was like an invitation. I didn't have a pair of nippers on me, so I didn't go after the diamond, but I moved out into the crowd and lifted the watch. I dropped it into my pocket, edged out of the crowd and sauntered on up the street toward home. The big man never missed the watch; he was standing there spread out, with the cigar in his mouth, when I passed out of sight.

"I went on. As I turned into the street on which I live I met a policeman. I knew him; he was a friend of mine.

" 'Hello, Johnson,' he said, 'I was looking for you.'

" 'What do you want with me?' I said.

" 'Well,' he said, 'I guess I've got to take you along to the station-house.'

"I was astonished, but I kept my nerve.

" 'Now, look here, Scally,' I said, 'you haven't got any charge against me.'

" 'I know it,' he said.

"I was more astonished now.

" 'Then what kind of a bluff are you running?' I said.

" 'I'm not running a bluff,' he said; 'the chief has just issued an order for us to round-up all the old suspects and bring them down to the station-house.'

"I understood it then. Whenever a new chief has nothing else to do he takes the census. I tried to get off.

" 'Now, look here, Scally,' I said, 'what's the use of taking me down there?'

" 'No use,' he said.

" 'Then pass me up, old man.'

" 'Can't do it, Johnson,' he said; 'you're on my list and I've got to account for you. If you didn't show up they'd say I tipped you off.'

"Then he tried to smooth it over.

" 'They've got nothing against you; they'll turn you loose in an hour.'

"'I know that,' I said, 'but I'm tired of the same old questions, and the same old Bertillon measurements, and all that rot— ain't there some way round?'

"He shook his head.

"'Not this time; you're located in my district. I've got to produce you.'

"I saw it was no use, so I tried to get him to permit me to go into my house before we started— so I could get rid of the watch in my pocket. It was only a few doors farther on. I gave him a good excuse and he would have done it, but just then a mounted sergeant came along. He knew us, and we had to start for the station-house.

"We went out to the corner and turned down the street that I had just come up. We walked along until we approached the faker and his bunch of suckers. Then, just as we were coming up to them, that big man out in the crowd suddenly missed his watch, grabbed the man who was standing next to him and began to holler. There was a general mix-up, and some one turned in the patrol alarm. The wagon came in a hurry. They hustled the big fellow and the man he had nailed into it just as we came up. And Scally said to me:

" 'It's a mile to the station-house; let's ride.'"

The prisoner stopped. He got up and went over to the window. The fog lying on the city had deepened. The million lights struggling in it seemed about to be extinguished.

There was a knocking on the door.

The attorney replied.

"All right," he said; "in a minute."

Then he turned toward the prisoner leaning on the sill, looking out over the submerged city.

"Well," he said.

The prisoner continued:

"We got in.... There's not much more.... I had to get rid of that watch. The dirty slush was running deep in the gutters. I determined on a plan. As I got out of the wagon I would make a misstep, put my right foot into the slush and let the watch slip down the leg of my trousers. I worked the watch out of my pocket into my hand, and when we stopped I stepped down, stumbled, lost my balance; my right foot went down into the slush, I caught the rail with my left hand, leaned back and let go of the watch.

"The next minute I knew that I was all in. In catching the band of my trousers between my thumb and finger I caught also the band of my undergarment, and the watch was in my shoe!"

Note—The germinal incident of this story is true. It occurred in a Western court and was related to the writer by one of the ablest criminal prosecutors in America.

____________________

7: The Baron Starkheim

Bunbury Herald and Blackwood Express 14 October 1927

"I'M NOT a sailor, your honour, and I can't tell you about this thing in sea terms. I don't know the words used on ships. But by all that has been explained here in this trial by witnesses for the prosecution, your honour will be able to understand what I mean. John Thursday died on the way in here. He's the only other person who knew about what happened to this man they call the Baron Starkheim."

It was an afternoon of summer. The court was sitting. The judge, an old man with a fine, chiselled face, was on the bench. In his black silk robe he might have been a member of some stately council of Florence sitting above the Arno. A jury was beyond, the clerk below and to the left of the bench. The lawyers were at their tables; a few spectators were scattered through the room. The court was evidently trying a criminal case arising from some Admiralty affair.

An unusual thing had happened. The counsel for the prosecution imagined that the prisoner would rely on his constitutional privilege to remain silent, and everybody was astonished when, after the noon recess, he rose and addressed the court. He was a big man with dull, heavy features. But the stolidity of the face was relieved by a firm mouth and clear, hazel eyes set deep under massive brows. He was tanneel by the sea and his brown hair sunburned. In spite of his size his big body seemed quick and supple like the body of a Japanese wrestler.

"I'll have to begin at Hong-Kong. The old steel freighter was loaded with rice. It didn't carry passengers, but it took me on and the man that's dead, John Thursday, and this person they call the Baron Starkheim. The American Consul got the captain to take me; I was pretty nearly broke. I think Thursday paid his way; I don't know. But an agent from a Hong-Kong bank got the passage for the Baron Starkheim. I was in the captain's cabin when he came in. He wanted to know if any of the crew had their families on the boat. The captain said 'No.' Then he tried to buy passage for a white man and a Chinese servant. The captain didn't want to take a passenger of that sort, one who had to have cabin quarters to himself. But the agent said the servant would cook for the man, and all he wanted was a cabin. Then he began to offer the captain ten pounds, twenty, then fifty in gold. Well, as the captain said, fifty pounds in gold looked mighty big to him, and he let the agent have the cabin. They scrubbed it out, and about an hour before we got under way this Baron Starkheim and his Chinese servant came on board. He had a lot of bags and boxes."

The man paused, and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

"The Chinaman, your honour, was just like any other Chinaman. But I never saw anybody like this Baron Starkheim. He was about forty, I'd say, and I put him down for some kind of high-class foreigner. He was in white duck with pipe-clayed shoes and a helmet, just as you see them around foreign clubs in the East, now that the European War is over. He didn't pay any attention to anybody. He was a big, tall man, with thick, close-cropped hair, and he walked with his head up. If anybody got about him, he had a way of wagging his chin and tilting it up just as though he was cock of the walk, and you had to side-step. But it was his face, your honour, that got us. It looked like it would ring if you tapped it— it was the most desperate human face I ever saw. It never changed. You would have thought a foundry had moulded it."

The prisoner put his big hand on the back of the chair near him.

"I've got to say a word about the other supercargo, too. I don't know his name and I don't know whether he was an opium smuggler as some of the witnesses said here, or a gambler as the consul thought he was in his affidavit, or just a wanderer. When he came on I said my name was Bennett, and asked his. He said: 'What day is this, Mr. Bennett?' I said, 'Thursday.'

"He said, 'All right that will be as good is any.' So I called him John Thursday.

"He was a little, thin man with a nervous habit of picking at his face. I suppose he was a drug fiend. He had a bad face. I don't deny it; shifty eyes and a mouth and nose that seemed like they were made out of soft rubber; I mean they moved about when he got nervous. He might have been a gambler. I don't know. You see, your honour, there wasn't much I could ask him after he played that John Thursday on me.

"We were sitting up forward against a coil of rope when this Baron Starkheim came on board. 'That's a rum Johnnie,' Thursday said.

"I thought he was strange myself; your honour, dodging domestic relations and laying down a hundred in gold for a passage on a crawling freighter."

The prosecuting counsel now rose and addressed the judge. "We must ask the defendant, your honour, to confine his statements to what he saw and heard himself. What other persons may have said cannot be admitted as evidence."

The big prisoner made an impatient gesture. "I want to tell all about this thing just the way it happened," he said, "and I don't want to be bothered."

The judge was a man with a large experience of human affairs. He knew how little was to be obtained from technical refinements. He was interested to get at the truth of this extra-ordinary case. "I shall not consider any objection at this time," he said. "I am determined to permit the defendant to make his statement in his own way."

The prosecuting counsel sat down, and the prisoner went on.

"I am much obliged to your honour," he said simply, like one who has re-ceived a service. "The court has got together a lot of circumstantial evidence. It makes things look pretty bad for me." He took a cotton handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his face. "Now, your honour," he went on, "there couldn't have been any 'conspiracy,' as they call it, between me and John Thursday on the way out from Hong-Kong. Because we didn't know what was going to happen. The sea was smooth as glass. Nobody ever saw such a voyage. The old freighter chugged along. There was no sign that the weather ever would change. We thought we would get clear through without a roll of the ship. So, you see, we couldn't have imagined any of the things that happened or made any plans to fit them. That's sense— just plain common sense, your honour.

"Of course I loafed about with John Thursday. There wasn't anything else to do. And, of course, we saw a good deal of this Baron Starkheim. Not that he ever spoke to us. He never paid any attention to us or anybody. He kept in his cabin all through the day; he only came out at night. Then he walked about — sometimes all night. I won't be sure about that. I didn't watch him; I was asleep. But Thursday was a bad sleeper. He was usually prowling round, and he told me. I think it must have been about a thousand miles out of Hong-Kong when Thursday mentioned it. We were sitting against a drum at the stern of the ship.

" 'Bennett,' he said, 'lay a quid on the saints for this weather to hold out. I heard the Governor'— we'd got to calling Starkheim that— 'in a talk with the captain last night. He said this old freighter's rotten— held together with paint. The first swell of a storm will break the hull in two.'

"Thursday was sitting there, with his back against the drum, picking at his face like a man who has a cobweb on him.  'And take it from me, Bennett,' he said, 'The Governor knows about ships. He's forgot more about 'em that this Yankee captain would ever learn in a thousand years.'

"Now, your honour," the prisoner went on, "I'm telling you what Thursday said that afternoon, because it helps to clear up another thing that happened. I didn't think very much about it at the time. The weather was so heavenly. Somehow you couldn't make yourself believe it would ever change. And it didn't change very soon; it went on like that.

"But one day, about three thousand miles out from Hong-Kong, it did change. The whole world got suddenly still. It was still before, you'd say; there wasn't any sound to notice except the chugging of the old freighter through the glassy sea. But this stillness wasn't like that. It felt like a weight, and it was hot. It began in the morning, and it got worse right straight along. The air felt like an explosive packed into some kind of a cartridge. It only needed a spark to explode it, and you felt it would tear the whole world up when the thing went off. About mid-afternoon Thursday called to me. He was lying under the shade of a lifeboat. And I went over to him. 'Bennett,' he said, 'the Governor's going to cut the ship.'

"I didn't understand, and I asked what he meant.

" 'I mean,' he said, 'that this old freighter is just a bundle of rust. It ain't a ship, it's a coffin! The Governor's had another talk with the captain, and he wants him to pull into the lee of some island that's about here and anchor up until this storm's over. I saw him. I can't sleep any more than he can. He brought in a big map and spread it out on the captain's table. I'm right about him knowing the sea business. The captain's mouth fell open when he saw the map. He'd never lamped anything like it. The Governor pointed out the island. He said there was a coral reef, but the freighter could get inside through a channel.  He had it all marked out, and he knew. He knew about it from A to Z.'

" 'My word, Bennett,' he said, 'the Governor put it up to the old man! He said we were in for a run of merry hell, and the old coffin, overloaded with rice, would break in two. He said twelve hours would see the storm on, and that the ship could be put into the lee of the island in an hour and a half if we changed the course at dark. He wrote out the directions with a pencil. But he couldn't do anything with the bullheaded Yankee skipper.

" 'Now, Bennett,' Thursday went on, 'listen to me: the Governor's going to cut and run with the lifeboat just as soon as it settles down dark.' 'You're guessing,' I said. 'Not altogether guessing,' he answered. 'The Chink's packing up his traps. I took a look through a crack of the door. Mind what I say, Bennett, he's going to hook out a boat, and it's this one I'm lying under. It's the only sound one in the outfit. The rest of 'em are all undertaker's stuff like the freighter. If you'll chance a look over the edge you'll see it's all shipshape.'

"His nose and mouth worked like soft rubber, and he went on, lying stretched out on the deck:  'The Chink's been busy with it ever since the Governor passed on the hull. They've done it slick. But I'm on; I don't sleep either.'

"I didn't look into the boat, but I sat down on the deck beside Thursday. It was ghastly hot. You could hardly get your breath.  'That's right, Bennett,' Thursday said, 'and you've got to decide what you're going to do. I've already made up my mind. When the Governor goes I'm going with him.'

The big man looked round the court room. He took the cotton handkerchief out of his pocket and again wiped his face. "It turned out just the way Thursday said it would. He was in the boat when Starkheim and the Chink cut it loose that night, and they had to take him along to keep him quiet. It's no use for me to go over what happened on the ship. When the storm came on I think the captain lost his head. He tried to make a run for the island when it was too late. You know what happened. The hull broke in two just as Starkheim said it would, and the wreck beached on the reef. I don't know how I got ashore. We were broken up and beached on the reef before the head of the storm struck us. We all tried to get off in boats when the ship broke in two. But Starkheim had taken the only good one, the others were just rotten wood covered with paint like the ship and they went to pieces. I clung to something. Thursday was on the beach when I washed in, and he emptied the water out of me. Now, your honour, that's the whole truth about how the four of us got ashore safely.

"The court has figured out a fine lot of deductions that are just nonsense. Me and Thursday couldn't have entered into any 'conspiracy,' as they call it. How could we have told that this storm was coming up, or that there was an island close to the course of the ship at this point, or that this Baron Starkheim would crop out the only sound lifeboat there was? Nobody could have known all that beforehand; only God Almighty knew all that."

The judge was listening to the man with the closest attention.

"The indictment does not charge you with conspiracy to wreck the ship," he said.

"I know that, your honour,' continued the prisoner. "But the lawyers pretend to believe that there was some sort of an understanding between me and John Thursday all along. They wanted to know how it happened that the lifeboat was found safely ashore, and all the other boats pounded up in the wreck. Now, your honour, that's the way the lifeboat got ashore. When the course of the freighter came within ten miles of the island that night this Baron Starkheim, the Chinaman and John Thursday lowered the boat and put it into the island before the storm broke.

"And here's another thing I want to tell your honour. There's nothing in this story put up by the foreign embassy about this person they call the Baron Starkheim being an explorer. I don't doubt what they say about the out-of-the-way places he's been in. I think it's all true. I don't doubt that he wandered around in northern Siberia, down into Manchuria and across into China. I think he did keep as far out of the human track as he could. I think the waste places of the earth were the only places he wanted to be in. And I think he was always on the look out for one that would be more inaccessible. But it wasn't because he was an explorer.

"The foreign embassy that's behind this prosecution isn't telling all it knows about this man it calls the Baron Starkheim. But at the time the freighter broke up, me and Thursday didn't know who he was. We didn't have any more idea who the man was than the prosecuting counsel has today. One thing we did know: he had the most deadly face we ever saw under the helmet of a white man in the whole rotten East, and he knew all about the sea from A to Z, as Thursday put it to me. 'There's another thing the lawyers wanted to know. They wanted to know why everything was taken out of the wreck. Now, your honour, it would be answer enough to say that shipwrecked men on a rock of an island like that would naturally take off everything that they thought they could use, because they wouldn't know how long they might have to stay there until they were rescued. That explanation would be all right, they say, if we had taken off only the ordinary stores of the ship. But the lawyer wanted to know, the other day, what we were going to do with a ship load of rice as well.

"Now, your honour, me and John Thursday were just as much in the dark about this thing as the lawyer is. This man Starkheim took control of everything on that island. He went about with a big automatic pistol strapped around him and we did what he said. He was a desperate human creature if God Almighty ever turned one loose, We took everything off the wreck and stored it up. In fact, there wasn't so much of the rice undamaged, only about a ton, I'd say.

"The officers of the cruiser that took us off have told your honour all about that island. There was a fairly good house on it that some guano company had put up. It was a two-roomed frame house made of boards probably brought out from Portland on an Australian freighter. It had good windows and doors. And there was an inch water line running back to the other side of the island. The side that catches the north-east trade winds is mostly wet. The house was high up on the beach. It was as dry as a bone around it; hard sand everywhere. It was always dry as a desert clear around the house. The only moisture was on the other side— on the trade-wind side. I call your attention to this because it explains something else I'm coming to.

"Starkheim lived in the big room in the house. Me and Thursday bunked in the little one, and the Chink lived and cooked in a sort of kitchen. Starkheim kept his room locked. We didn't think so much about it at first; we were all so desperately busy getting the stuff ashore. Then, when we got the stuff off, and settled down, with one day after another nothing to do in the cursed place, the queer habits of the man began to get on our nerves. He never came out of his room in the daytime. The Chink cooked his food and took it in. But he walked about all night; sometimes he walked in his room, and we heard his heavy step that went on hour after hour, and sometimes he walked around outside. But he didn't go down towards the sea; he kept back in the rocky part of the island. We got to thinking about it.

" 'It's mighty strange," I said to Thursday one day, 'how this man's face never changes. It looks like God Almighty had stamped it in with a steel die and he couldn't change it.'  'I saw it change once,' Thursday said, 'just for a minute.' And he snapped his lean fingers that were flecking his throat. 'It was the morn-ing that I picked you up on the beach. I ran in to tell him that the drowned crew had washed ashore.

" 'Men?' he said, just like that, jerking his chin down!

"Thursday bobbed his head to show me. It was the gesture of a man taken off his guard.

" 'Now, Bennett,' Thursday went on, 'that was a cussed queer thing to say. What the devil did he expect to wash ashore from the wrecked freighter strangled elephants? I didn't bother about it at the time. I asked him to come ahead and help bury the dead men, but he didn't budge, his face went back like it was and he sent the Chinaman.'

"Well, your honour, when men have nothing to do they get to wondering about everything. Pretty soon we be-gan to think that something ought to be done to put a signal on the high point of the island so we could be taken off. We knocked on Starkheim's door one morning, and when he came out we told him. He didn't say anything for a good while. His chin began to wag and his head to go up. We looked pretty ragged, me and Thursday, but Starkheim might have come out of a foreign club in Hong Kong; white duck, pipe-clayed shoes, spick and span, just like he was on the ship. Finally, he looked down at us with his cold fish-belly eyes.

" 'You will take your directions from me,' he said, and his hand went down towards the automatic pistol strapped around his waist. That's all he said, and the next moment he shut the door in our faces.

"Now, your honour, that sounded pretty rotten to us, and a little later something else happened that set us to thinking. We were eating at noon in the kitchen with the Chinaman, when all at once we looked up and saw Starkheim. He was standing outside in the sun staring at us. He didn't move and he didn't say anything. But there was something in the way he stood there and watched us eat that made me uneasy. It got John Thursday the same way. We didn't say anything then, but that evening we talked it over. We went out on the beach and sat down. Thursday opened it up.

" 'Bennett,' he said, 'I don't like the way the Governor looked just now. Do you know what that look meant?' He put up his livid hand and began to fleck the invisible cobwebs off his face. I asked him what he meant, although I knew just as well as he did.

" 'Well,' he said, 'I figure it out this way. Two white men will eat twice as much as one white man and a Chink.' 'That's so, I said, 'but when you have got a ton of rice and bound to sight a steamer in a month or two at the worst, what's the difference?' 'Thursday got to picking about over his arms. The cobwebs seemed to spread. 'Correct,' he said, 'if you're looking for a steamer. But I figure it out that the Governor's plan is to stop here; and, in that event, my dear sir, the boarding of Mr. Bennett and Mr. Thursday has got to be considered.' 'He reached around and fingered the back of his neck. 'Dead men, Mr. Bennett,' he said, 'are cheap boarders. Eh, what?'

" 'Well,' I said, what's in your mind about it?' He was quiet for a little while, then he answered: 'It's like this, a shooting iron would be mighty handy on our side of the. house. It sticks in me that the Governor might have an extra one somewhere about. I'm going to take a look through that luggage of his.' 'But he keeps the door locked,' I said.

"Thursday moved the muscles of his face like soft rubber. 'A lock, Mr. Bennett, he said, 'is a device, with which I am familiar."

The man paused; then he went on: "Now, your honour, that's how we came to get a look at the room this man was living in. That night Starkheim didn't go out. The next night when the moon shone like day he left the house. The weather was like that, a night or two clear, and then an infernal fog. When he was out of sight Thursday turned the lock of the door with a bent nail. There wasn't any thing in the room that seemed extraordinary. There was a lot of leather bags and boxes and a tin bathtub— just what the officers found when they took us off. There was a bed in one corner of the room, and in the other corner near the door there was an old table. The Chink had put a lot of shaving things on this table— a heavy silver-backed mirror and some brushes. There was also a big square box on it covered with red leather and stamped in black with what looked like the figure of a split crow. 'I didn't see. Thursday go through the stuff. It was my business to look out for Starkheim and see that the sleeping Chinaman didn't wake up. I went outside where I could see the Chink bunking, through the kitchen window, and at the same time have an eye on the side of the island that Starkheim had gone into. I didn't hear a sound for a good while. There was a full moon, white all over the beach; the sand around the house was hard and dry as powder. The house made a heavy black shadow. But there was no sound except the sea always pounding on the reef. I was standing inside of the shadow waiting for Thursday to give me some signal, when suddenly a hand clutched my arm. I very nearly cried out. The thing was so soft and ghostly.

"It was Thursday. He was beyond me in the moonlight, and his features worked like fingers in a rubber glove. He didn't say a word, but he drew me along the wall of the house. There he began to run down the beach to-wards a pile of wreckage that had got ashore from the freighter. I followed him as fast as I could. I wondered what in the name of the devil was the matter with him. He ducked in behind the mass of rubbish and squatted down. 'Did you find a gun?' I said.  'Gun ! Gawd !' he panted. 'Then he told me what he had found.'

The big man stopped. There was a chair beside.him. He moved it around before him, put his hands firmly on the top of it, and looked up at the judge. He went on as though there had been no break in his words:

"After that we made up our minds about what to do. It was Thursday's plan. He figured it all out. I wasn't much taken with it when he began to explain it to me. I thought it was a wild notion. But he had Starkheim sized up, and what happened proved that he knew what he was talking about."

The judge interrupted. "You mean," he said, "that you were afraid for your lives."

The man suddenly replied with derisive firmness. "Why, no, your honour," he said. "I don't think we ever thought any more of that again."

"Then your plan,"said the judge, "did not contemplate self-defence."

The man seemed surprised. "No, your honour," he said; "that  wasn't the idea at all."

The judge nodded. Then he sat back in his big chair with the stiff folds of his silk robe lying about him like the metal drapery of a bronze. The man went on:

"The next morning me and Thursday called Starkheim out of his room. When he came to the door Thursday did the talking for us.

" 'Governor,' he said, 'asking your pardon, we'd like to know if there are any native people on this island?' Starkheim's eyes looked a little queer— as I said before, he had eyes about the colour of a shark's belly. 'No,' he said, 'the island's uninhabited.'

"Thursday worked his soft rubber features and shifted his feet— he was never quiet anyhow. 'Then, he said, 'they must have come in from some other island.'

"Starkheim began to wag his chin. 'There's no other island within a hundred miles,' he said.

"Thursday had on a pair of old trousers and a cotton shirt open on his chest. He began to finger around his ribs for the everlasting cobwebs.

" 'That's strange,' he said. 'Starkheim put out his hand and closed the door behind him. 'What did you see?' He said it softly like a man who opens up a hidden subject.

" 'It was like this, Governor,' Thursday went on, 'we chanced, on some tracks in the sand this morning. There were a lot of 'em down in the wet sand close to the water. They were little people, I'd say; no man's-size track among 'em. The whole bunch was barefooted.'

"Starkheim's eyes centred down into steel points. " 'Go on,' he said.

"Thursday kept fingering his itching skin under his cotton shirt.

" 'That's about all there was to it, Governor.The tracks came from the sea, and they were all headed up this way, but we couldn't see 'em after the sand dried.' "

The prisoner paused, then continued: "I never saw any human creature look like this man Starkheim. I thought his iron face was going to crack. The strain on it must have been desperate. He dropped his chin down on his white collar and began to run his hand over his automatic pistol. Then suddenly he went inside and we I heard him lock the door behind him.

"Now, your honour, the prosecution makes a strong point against me out of the fact that the officers from the cruiser that took us off found the door and windows of Starkheim's room barricaded. They saw that meant he had good reason to believe that me and Thursday were planning to kill him. Now, your honour, he did barricade the doors and windows, but it wasn't me and Thursday he was afraid of. He set about it that very night. He thought we were asleep, but we weren't asleep any more than he was. He carried in a lot of boards and timbers from the wreck. He rigged up the windows so no human creature could get through them, and he made a brace for the door."

"This story of the tracks," said the judge; "was it true?"

The prisoner seemed surprised. "Sure it wasn't true," he said. "Thursday made it up." He went on: "We laid low for two or three days, and Starkheim stayed in his room. He didn't come out at all. We would hear him moving things about and tramping the floor. Then one night— I suppose he couldn't stand it any longer— he came out and went off into the back of the island like he used to do. That was our chance again, and we were waiting up for him when he came in. It was clear as daylight, with every star out overhead; a couple of hours before dawn, I reckoned. Thursday made a run for the man when he got in sight.

" 'That bunch has been in here again, Governor,' he said.

"Starkheim stopped suddenly.

"Thursday got his breath and went ahead.

" 'There were a lot of 'em,' he said, 'and they came up from the beach. You can tell that because the place is all drabbled with water.'

"Starkheim didn't say a word, but all at once he began to run as hard as he could towards the house. We followed him. The sand all around the side of his room towards the sea was wet. The window-sills were dripping water just like a lot of wet people had come up there and tried to get in through the windows. Starkheim looked it all over. Then he stood up, his back against the wall, his hands fingering the boards behind him. His iron face began to flow. That's the only way I can make you understand it. He seemed to forget us. He unlocked this door and went inside."

"And this story," said the judge, "it was also false?"

"That's right, your honour,"replied the man. "We carried the water up from the sea in an old ship's bucket.

"We laid low then for a fog. That was Friday night, as we kept count. The fog came in Sunday. It got thick about midnight. It was towards two o'clock, I reckon, when the thing happened. I was lying down close to the house when Thursday began shifting about from one place to another in the fog. Even to me, who understood what he was doing, the thing sounded hellish. Thursday had a thin, played-out, nervous voice, anyhow, and the packed fog made it worse. If you let yourself go, you can imagine anything in a fog, and Thursday was doing his best to make it bad. You could hear a child whimper, and you could hear a woman start to scream and her throat fill up, and the thing end in a sort of awful gurgle. You could hear a lot of people cough and blubber, and, now and then, a cry break out. It wasn't very loud. I think that was one of the reasons that made it so awful. Thursday shifted about. The sounds were everywhere. They seemed to be moving up from the sea. Then I crawled along and threw a wet rice sack up against the window.

"That settled it. Hell broke loose. The man inside began to shoot. He opened on the windows. The Chink came tearing out of the kitchen. He got one of the bullets through him, and he rolled around blubbering and squealing and trying to get on his feet. That made the whole terrible business worse. It set the man inside raving crazy. Me and Thursday lay flat on the sand close up to the side of the house to keep out of the way of the bullets.

"The thing went on after Thursday crawled up with me along the side of the house. The fog was white and thick like cotton wool. The Chink, shot through the body, was squealing all the time. And we could hear Starkheim padding around and shooting the windows out. They were the points of attack as he figured it.

"The man was in a God-forsaken funk, your honour. But he kept his head about one thing; he saved the last bullet for himself. We heard him go down and the automatic pistol rattle on the floor. It was daylight before we could break the door open. He had it braced with a cleat nailed on the floor and the end of a beam set against it. The Chinaman was dead. The room was a wreck, and Starkheim had the top of his head shot off."

There was silence. The prisoner added his conclusion:

"That morning the cruiser came in. The officers wouldn't believe us when we said we hadn't killed the man. Everything looked too curious. And, of course, it looked worse after the things Thursday said when he was dying on the way in: that Starkheim had got what he deserved, and all that."

The big man made an abrupt gesture. "Of course, the officers on the cruiser didn't believe me, and the counsel for the prosecution don't believe me, and your honour don't. Nobody would unless he knew who this Baron Starkheim was."

The judge leaned forward in his chair.

"What do you mean?" he said.

"I mean," replied the prisoner, "that John Thursday found out who this man was when he went through his luggage."

His voice rose and became tense. "I know who he was," he said, "and the foreign embassy that's pushing this case against me knows who he was."

The judge stooped over and looked down at the prisoner. The same un-uttered question was in every mouth. The whole court-room waited for the answer. And suddenly the big man spoke with a great gust of vigour.

"Your honour," he said, "if you had opened the red letter box that the cruiser officers sealed, and the foreign embassy took over as soon as we got in here, you would have found out who he was.

"You would have found out that this person they call the Baron Starkheim was the submarine commander who torpedoed the big English liner off the Irish coast, leaving a shipload of helpless women and children to be drowned."

_____________________

8: The Great Symbol

The Evening Star, Washington DC, Dec 21, 1924

TO Marion Dillard there was  mockery in the symbolism of  the night.

She was alone. On the table before her was an open telegram? the grating fitting into the last opening of the trap.

She was a dark-haired, slender girl with that aspect ofcapacity and independence with which the great war endowed our women: the high courage that no assault of evil fortune could bludgeon into servility. She sat in her chair before the table, to the eye, unconquered. But it was to the eye only. In the magnificence about her the wreckage Impending was Incredible: the great house fitted with every luxury, the library in which she sat, its rug the treasure of a temple, its walls paneled!

To Marion Dillard, in her chair before the table, with the telegram open before her, the whole setting was grotesque. All over the city, white with newly fallen snow, were the symbols of this majestic celebration of the birth of the Savior. They were not absent in this room.  Holly wreaths hung in the windows, and the strange ivory image, representing the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, which her father had always so greatly prized, had been brought out, after the usual custom of this night, and placed on the table. It sat on a black silk cloth embroidered with a white cross. As a work of art it was not conspicuously excellent; but her father prized it for the memory of a great adventure.

Marion Dillard leaned back in the chair, reviewing the events that had moved against her as though with some sinister design. Her father was dead. A cross of white marble stood on a hilltop in France to his memory. It had been erected by every people in the great war, for her father, moved by a high, adventurous idealism, too old for longer service In the American Army, had taken his own fortune—and, alas, the fortune which he held in trust for another— and with it maintained a hospital base on the western front for the benefit of every injured man, friend or enemy.

Marion Dillard reflected; Of what avail was it that her father had not  realized that this trust money was going into his big conception? He  had drawn on his resources in America until every item of his great fortune was pledged, and by some error, this estate, in trust, had gone into the common fund. Appalled, when she came to examine the accounts, Marion had endeavored to cover the  matter, hoping that the decision of the United States Circuit Court of  Appeals in a suit to recover a tract  of coal lands in the South would be decided in favor of her father's estate, and thus furnish the money to  replace this trust. And so she had  somehow managed to go on.

This telegram on the table was the end. "Reversed and dismissed," were the sinister words of it. On this night commemorating the birth of that great founder of brotherhood, whose idealistic conceptions her father had always so magnificently  followed, she must decide what she would do.

THE THING WAS sharp and clear before her. She must either wreck the majestic legend of her father, or degrade herself! As she had carried the thing along by various shifts since her father's death, she could easily make it appear that she had herself embezzled this trust fund. That would leave the memory of her father clean; but it clearly meant that she herself could not escape the criminal courts. The heirs of her father's friend were insistent and hostile. They would have the pound of flesh, now that the fortune was gone.

For a time she sat motionless, her eyes vaguely on the carved ivory Image on the table before her. Then, she got up. and, with her hands clasped behind her back, stood looking down at the crucifix.

It was about ten inches high, rudely carved in the Chinese fashion out of the segment of an elephant's tusk four inches in diameter. The cross represented the trunk of a tree, the roots thrust out for the base. The figure, with arms extended, was nailed to the broken limbs of this tree trunk, forming the cross. The whole top of the treetrunk made the head of the figure, thrown back under a crown of thorns. And there in the quaint English letters cut around the base was the legend: "Inasmuch as you have turned your head to save us, may He turn His head to save you."

Well, the thing was an idle hope. There was no help in the world;  either her own life or the memory of her father was on the way to dreadful  wreckage!

Then desperation overcame her. She went out of the library through  the great hall to the door. A maid helped her into her coat. She gave  a direction that the servants should  be dismissed for the night, no one  should remain up, she would let herself in with her latchkey when she  returned. She went out.

At the bronze gates as she passed  into the street a man sauntering along the wall spoke to her. She  knew him at once; he was a detective from the Secret Service. So they were already beginning to keep her under surveillance! The explanation of this detective did not mislead her. He was looking for a dangerous criminal, he said, who had come Into the city and had made inquiries about this house.

Marlon Dillard replied with some polite appreciation of the thoughtfulness of the police for her security, and went on. At the end of the bronze fence, as she passed she observed another figure crouched against the wall as though it also kept guard on her house; but It moved away as she approached, as though to conceal Itself around the turn of the wall Inclosing the spacious grounds. She smiled grimly. The watch kept on her would be efficient; here was another. She went along the street to the great bridge.

She paused for a moment before the Immense stone lions on their great pedestals at the bridge head. They looked old, haggard, changing into monsters under a draping of snow! Then she set out to walk across the bridge into the country beyond, past the cathedral on the hill, lighted, and from which the melody of vague and distant- music descended. And the feeling in the girl as she moved dreadfully in the night became a sort of wonder. Was this a vast delusion, or was there in fact a Will in the universe, determined on righteousness, and moving events to the aid of those who devoted their lives to its service?

She went on, walking stiffly like a dead body hypnotized into a pretension of life.

THERE WAS NO SOUND on the sea. It was a vast, endless desert of water on which the sun lay as though fixed. Only the chugging of the rusted freighter broke the immobility of the silenca. The tramp looked like a bettered derelict, not battered by the stormy elements of the sea, but haggard by the creeping detritus of inactivities in crowded tropical ports.

The steel hull was covered with rust;  the stack leprous, and the metal devices of the deck newly covered with a cheap paint.

There was no breath of air in the world, either to disturb the immense  placidity of the sea or to vary the thin line of smoke vaguely blending  into the distant skyline.

Two men sat against a drum on the  rear of the ship. If one had been  searching the world for types of the worst human derelicts, the search would have ended at the drum on the rear of this tramp. The types were villainous, but they were distinct— in marked contrast. The little man was speaking.

"Cut along with it, colonel," he  said. "How much did the Chink give you?"

He was a thin, nervous creature, with a habit of fingering his face. It  was impossible to place the man, either in nationality or environment.  He might have been a Cockney, born under the Bow Bells, but it was more  probable that he was a New York gunman. He had picked up habits of  speech in every degraded port of the  East, as a traveling rat picks up a scurvy.

The man he addressed was big. with  a putty-colored face, dead-black hair  plastered down over an immense head beginning to grow bald. He was  dressed in a worn frock coat— the clothes of a clergyman— shiny and  threadbare, but clean. His shoes, even, showed evidence of an attempted polish. He wore  a clean, white, stiff- bosomed shirt and a low collar with  a black string tie. A half-smoked, black stogy hung in the corner of his mouth: and, as he sat slackly in a heap against the drum, he had placed a white cotton handkerchief over his shirt front, and tucked it into his collar, in order to protect his linen  from the ash. Nevertheless, while his body remained immobile his hands moved; he whittled a piece of pine hoard, the long sharp blade of his knife, polished to the edge of a razor, hovered about the piece of wood as in some grotesque manner of caress. He gave the appearance of one unutterably weary. An immence sagging body in which all the fibers were relaxed.

He was devitalized with opium.

His voice, when he spoke, presented  the same evidence of utter languor. His lips scarcely moved, and the sound seemed to creep out In a slow drawl.

"The Chink gave me two yellow boys. He had six in his hand. 'You bring Major Dillard of the American Division here tonight,' he said, 'and you get the other four.' Of course, he didn't speak English. He spoke the Manchu dialect. I know the Manchu dialect. That's where I had a flock;but I came in when the Boxers started. That's how I came to be on hand when the allied armies began their march under old von Waldersee....You understand, I had left the mission." He spoke with a nice discriminating care in the selection of his words, as though it were a thing in which he had a particular and consuming pride.

The gunman laughed. "You mean you had been kicked out of it, and were livin' on the country."

There was a faint protest in the colonel's drawl. "It's true I was not sent out by any of the great sectarian missions. I adopted the work, and I was not in favor with the regular organizations in China. They resisted my endeavors."

"I'd say they did," his companion interrupted. "You're the worst crook in the world barrin' one, not so far away." He laughed. "There's a circular posted up in every mission in Asia givin'your mug, and tellin' what a devil of an impostor you are. Some vitriol in the descriptions of you, colonel. I've seen 'em."

The man was not disturbed. The drawl continued:

"Yes, Mr.Bow Bell," he said; "quite true, quite true. I was not in favor with the regular organizations."

THE names which the two derelicts applied to one another they had themselves selected, inspired by the impression produced upon each other at the time of their meeting on the ship. The big man had called the gunman Mr. Bow Bell, and the gunman had named his companion Col.  Swank. They had made no further  inquiry. Men of this character are  not concerned about names.

"So you crawled out of your rat hole, when the column started, to see  what you could pinch. Good pickin', eh what?"

Col. Swank made a low, murmured exclamation.

"History tells us," he said, 'how the rich cities of antiquity were looted by the soldiery of invading armies; but there can hardly have been a parallel to this In any known case. The whole country for a considerable distance on either side of the line of march was denuded of every article of value, even the venerated images of Buddha in the holy Temple of Ten Thousand Ages were  broken to pieces with dynamite, under the impression that they concealed articles of value. Of course,  the Chinese population concealed everything they could; but they could not conceal the women, and they were not always able to conceal their articles of value, such as carved ivory, cloisonne, vases, silks, furs and the like."

"The lid was off," said Bow Bells, "about as it would be in India if the English went out. Cut along with your story. The Chink gave you two gold twenties to bring in Major Dillard, with four more in his hand if you put it over. Y'ou brought him in. didn't you? Is there anything you wouldn't do for a hundred dollars! Name it, colonel, let me hear what it sounds like."

Swank was unresponsive to the taunt. "Yes," he said, "I was so fortunate as to induce Major Dillard to visit the monastery under my guidance, though It required some diplomatic effort, and some insistence; but the major had confidence in my cloth, and he was making every effort to prevent a looting of the country along the line of march."

Bow Bells laughed In a hfgh staccato.

"Confidence in your cloth!... It was just a piece of your cursed luck that the American officer never heard of you. He thought you were a real missionary. Well, go on and tell me about it. You say the old viceroy, with the Boxers on one side and the foreign devils on the other, was cooped up in a monastery along the line of march, with the women of all the important families In the province, and everything of value that they hadn't time to bury. You'd nose it out, Johnny-on-the-spot. You couldn't get it yourself— some Chink would have put a knife in you— and it was no good to you, for the foreign devils to get it, so you took your little old hundred and eighty, and went into the American headquarters to see Major Dillard. Eh, what!"

He went on condensing the unessentials In the hope of getting Col. Swank forward with his narrative.

"The viceroy was sick,and too old to travel. It was all he could do to sit up. His only chance was to put himself under the protection of the American expeditionary force. The English were on ahead, and he knew what the Russians and Germanss would do to him!"

SWANK made a vague gesture. "It was evening," he continued.  "Night was coming on by the time I  had persuaded Major Dillard to come with me. I had a good deal of difficulty to get him to come with me alone, without a guard. Not that he was afraid. This American officer was not afraid. You could tell that by his face. There was no way to frighten him; but it was irregular, and he had practically to go incognito.  The viceroy had stipulated with me that I should bring the American officer alone. He did not wish the common soldiers to know what the monastery contained. I had some difficulty to convince Maj. Dillard; but as I have said, he had faith in my cloth."

"My word." said the gunman, "you were in luck!... Did they send a yellow chair?"

The placidity of Swank was unmoved. "No." he said. "As it happened, the chairs were red. It was some of the chairs in which the women had been brought in. You know, a bride in China is always sent to the house of her husband in a red chair. All the red chairs in the province had been commandeered to bring in the young daughters of the high Chinese residents to the protection of the viceroy."

Bow Bell interrupted with a sort of vehemence.

"Curses, man, get on. How far was it to the monastery?"

But the deliberation of Swank's narration was not to be hurried.

"The monastery was a few miles west of the advancing column. The American division had just come up; behind it was a smart regiment from Berlin, and behind that, farther down, were the Russians. Y'ou see, the whole expeditionary force in China had been put under the command of Count von Waldersee. The German emperor had intrigued for this supreme command; had, in fact, openly solicited it from the chancelleries of Europe. The German emperor thought he would make a great point in the world if the supreme command of the allied forces in China should be put under a German officer."

Swank paused as from the weariness of effort. "Von Waldersee was a big, purple-faced German, wearing a helmet with a black eagle on the top of it, and a white chin-strap, and he always rode a black charger. The theatrical conceptions of the emperor  must be carried out in detail.  And the officious von Waldersee was over-looking no occasion. An orderly had just arrived from the German high command as I entered to interview Major Dillard, and as it happened the American general put the message that this orderly carried into his pocket as he came out with me."

Bow Bell cursed under his breath. "I know all that,"he said.

UNDISTURBED, unmoved and deliberate, Col. Swank continued with his narrative.

"We set out in the red chairs. We traveled for about three miles west to the monastery. He passed first under that queer thing which is to be found in China? a sort of gateway and triumphal arch, but without any supporting wall about it.This arch had now a tarpaulin stretched across it on which was painted an immense white cross. Through this arch on a flag-paved road we approached the main structure of the monastery. Before us, as we entered the paved court, was a double-roofed square tower,with a door on either side.

"We got down from the chairs and went in. At the door stood the old Chinese official who had given me  the two yellow boys. He now handed me the remaining four, and we entered the monastery. Within there was an immense image of Buddha, covered with leaf. A circular stairway mounted around the inner walls of the temple, so that one might go up to the very face of the Buddha, sitting in his eternal calm.

"About us as we entered the temple were crowds of Buddhist priests, their heads shaved and wearing long yellow robes confined to the waist by a sash, and felt soled slippers. The Chinese official went on, and we followed behind him. He passed through a door to the rear of then shrine, and we were at once in an immense in an immense low room.

"One was not able to see what decorations the walls contained as they were heaped on all sides with bales of silks, furs, and embroideries; and about were chests and boxes, piled in some confusion as though they had just been a brought in. The whole chamber was a warehouse, and it was filled to the tcelining, except for a narrow passage through the middle. This we traversed, and coming to the end of it passed through a yellow door into another chamber. We entered here a room of lesser dimensions; but it was fitted up after the usual idea of Chinese luxury— great mirrors around the walls; rich rugs on the floor; a variety of clocks, all going at a different hour; and many screens and tapestries.

"In the middle of the room, in a chair padded with silk cushions, sat the viceroy. He was an ancient man, evidently at the end of life. His face was like wrinkled parchment. The white, straggling beard remained; but the whole dome of his skull was bald and yellow with age.

"But the most striking thing in the place was the women. The whole room was literally crowded with them— the daughters of the imortant men of the province. Sitting about on the priceless carpets, clothed in exquisite silks, they looked like quaint dolls. Their hair was knotted in the usual Chinese fashion with gum, and thrust through with ornaments of jade, and gold pins; their mouths painted.

"The viceroy was too ill to rise; but he made a salute with his hand when Major Dillard entered; and he began at once to address the American through the Chinese official who accompanied us, and whose English was as good as my own. He asked  for protection to the monastry, and a guard; and extending his hand to the great storeroom through which we had passed, he offered the American anything that he wished in payment for this protection. Major Dillard endeavored to explain that the allied armies were not on a quest of loot; but were merely endeavoring to relieve the legations at Pekin, and establish order in the country; that they could receive no compensation for this service; and that he would endeavor to protect the monastery.

"But he was disturbed about a  guard. The American Expeditionary Force was not large, and he was  easily able to see the International complications that might arise if he left here an American guard to clash, perhaps, with the German division behind him."

Swank moved slightly in his position against the drum of the freighter.

"At this moment," he said,  "while Major Dillard was engaged with the difficult problem before him,  an extraordinary event occurred. There was a clamor of voices outside. A Chinese guard hurtled through the door, and fell on the floor before the viceroy. There was a sound of heavy footsteps, the clang of side arms, the echo of guttural voices, and a dozen German officers entered the room.

"They were young Prussian under-officers frorm the portion of the German company behind the American division. They stopped inside the door, lost for a moment In wonder at the very miracle of the thing they were seeking. Then they noticed Major Dillard, standing beside the viceroy's chair. They brought their heels together and made him a formal military salute; but it was clear they regarded him as of no particular importance— as merely a soldier from the American Division to be accorded the usual amenities.

"There followed a brief, verbal passage at arms. Major Dillard explained that the monastery was under the protection of the American Division? that it must not be disturbed, and requested the German officers to withdraw. They replied with a courtesy in which there was a high contempt, that as the American Division had passed on, and the German company arrived on the ground, the monastery was under the protection of the German expeditionary force, and they must insist on their right of control.

"They were all under the Influence  of liquor; one or two of them were plainly drunk. It was evident that  Maj. Dillard could not control them, and It was clear that their contention of their right of control over the Chinese territory, adjacent to their division was in point of legal virtue superior to that of the American Division that had passed on and from which Maj. Dillard had returned here They spoke with an exaggerated courtesy to the American, but they; were clearly intending to seize the monastery, to ignore any claim of the Americans over it. and they made that intention insolently evident. The old Chinese viceroy understood it at once. Despair enveloped him. His chin dropped on his bosom, and he put out his hands like one resigned to the inevitable. It was at this moment that the dramatic sequel arrived."

Col.Swank paused; he made a slight gesture with the hand in which the long, sharp blade of his knife moved on the soft wood.

"I have mentioned," he said, "how in character were the acts of Wilhelm II in this international affair, and now one of these theatrical gestures intervened with a shattering denouement. Major. Dillard offered no further argument. He took out of his pocket the message which he had received from von Waldersee as we were setting out and read it. It was an order of the high command putting a portion of a German company under the command of that foreign general whose division it followed, and thus this order put the German advance guard, of which these Prussians were officers, under the command of the American general. It was the emperor's gracious return for the grant of the supreme command to von Waldersee. Major Dillard made no comment. He gave a curt order as though he were addressing a sergeant's squad.

"The Prussians were to remain and guard the monastery during the whole of the allied occupation; nothing should be disturbed; they would be held responsible for every life and every article and for the rigid preservation of order. It was a hard, clear, comprehensive direction. And they were to report to him in Peking.

"The amazement of the young Prussian officers was beyond any word to express. They recognized the black eagle and the signature of the German high command. Von Waldersee's was an ukase of the all highest. They formed in a line before the American, clicked their heels and saluted. And he set them about the outside of the monastery as a guard and went away in his chair."

Mr. Bow Bell threw himself forward with a great cackle of laughter.

"Ho, ho!" he cried, "And they couldn't touch a girlie or a cash piece. And what did you do, you fat old crook?"

COL. SWANK resumed his narrative as though there had been no interruption. "I remained," he said, "though not entirely at my own initiative. The old viceroy had drawn  the conclusion from some remarks of  Major Dillard that the white cross  which the monks had put up before  the gate of the monastery was a protecting symbol of the great Christian religion, and that in some manner its  effect on Major Dillard had produced  the result which followed. The viceroy began to inquire of me why the cross was a sacred symbol in our religion.

"I explained It to him— that Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah of the Christians, had been crucified on a tree, and that this cross was symbolical of that crucifixion, of that vicarious atonement for the sins of the world. He did not understand, but he understood its physical essentials— that  the God of the Christians had been crucified on a tree and that this concrete representation was therefore sacred, as the images of Buddha in his eternal calm, with the lotus flower in his hand; that the cross meant to all Western religions what the image of Buddha meant to Asia. He understood crucifixion. It was a torture of death known to the Chinese, but reserved for the lowest criminals.

"He interrogated me minutely upon the details of the crucifixion and I gave him an accurate picture of it. But in the translation I made use always of the Chinese word for tree, a lack of precision  in language which had presently a definite result.

"For a week I remained in the monastery as a guest of the viceroy.  I was treated like a prince, and then I was given a present for Major Dillard and sent on to the American division. I traveled in a chair like an envoy, parallel, but at some distance from the line of march, and I overtook him before he reached Peking."

"And what was the present?" said Bow Bell. "Twelve she-asses laden with gold?"

"No," replied the colonel in his weary drawl, "it was not. It was a carving in ivory, representing the  crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth as I had described it. wrapped in a piece  of black silk embroidered with a  white cross, not worth a pound and  6 pence. The carving, a mediocre work of art, might have been worth a hundred dollars in America.

"You will recall that I used the tree in my description to the and this carving represented an ivory tree made of the whole segment of an elephant tusk. It was about four inches in diameter and ten inches high. The base represented  the roots of the tree spread out, so that the thing would stand In balance. Broken limbs represented the crosspieces, to which the hands of  the figure were nailed. The feet were spiked together onthe trunk; thehead thrown back and encircled with a crown of thorns made the entire top of the carving, that is, the top of the tree."

"Well, for heaven's sake," said Bow-Bell. "A piece of carved elephant's tusk for a job like that!... Did you steal it?"

Col. Swank went on. "And it was carved in tiny English letters around  the base with a legend, not badly worded for a pagan imitation of the Scriptures: 'Inasmuch as you turned your head to save us, may He turn his head to save you.' ...No. I did not steal it. How could I steal it? There was a a Chinese runner on each side of the chair. I was never out of sight of them, and they each had a knife. I delivered it  to the Major."

"Well, he didn't get much for his trouble." said Bow Bell. "It's no good to be good!" His voice descended into a confidential note; he leaned a little toward his companion. "Now, you said you had a notion about this thing at the beginning of your talk. What was that notion, colonel? You say you had a notion about this thing at the beginning of your talk. What was your notion?"

For a moment Col. Swank did not reply. His hands moved; the long sharp blade of the knife peeling off ribbons of pine from the piece of soft wood. There was no one in sight on the rear of the deck of the freighter; but at the moment Swank began to speak, one of the Chinese crew appeared. The colonel lowered his voice, and what he said passed in a whisper to his companion. Bow Bell looked quickly about the deck. The individual of the Chinese crew had passed behind the leprous stack of the freighter. Mr. Bow Bell spoke softly, and leaned over toward his companion. "You're going to get a lot of ash on your shirt, colonel," he said; and taking hold of the hand in which his companion held the knife, he brought it up with a firm grasp, and drove the long blade Into the man's chest just under the heart.

For a moment the huge body of the man did not move. Then, his eyes widened, and his mouth extended in a sort of wonder. "Why, you dirty little beast!" he drawled. "You dirty little beast!" Then his head fell forward, the great slack body quivered, shudreded and was motionless.

A little later Mr. Bow Bell lifted the apparently opium-drunken body of Col. Swank to his feet, and helped him to the rail of the ship. There the two stood for a moment close together as in confidential talk, until, as the gunman turned away, the opium-drunken colonel, by some loss of balance, fell forward over the rail into the sea. With a cry Mr. Bow Bell ran forward to report the accident.

IT was midnight when Marlon Dillard returned to the silent house. The door to the library was gone. She turned from the hall into the room; but on the threshold she stopped. The figure of a man leaned over the library table, a cap pulled over his eyes, a dark handkerchief tied around the lower part of his face. He held the massive carved ivory crucifix in his hands, and he was intent on some undertaking with it.

The girl took a step forward, and. at the sound, the figure turned, and a weapon flashed in its hand. Immediately the silence in the room was shattered by the explosion of a shot. Marion Dillard imagined that the burglar had fired at her; but, if so, why did the creature come to sway, to put out a convulsive hand, to drop his weapon clattering on the rug, and to crumple in a heap?

The voice of  the detective whom she had found on guard at the gate as she went out gave the explanation. The man came forward from behind the curtain of a window.

"Bad gunman," he said, "wanted all over the world. I had to kill him." And he indicated the crumpled body of Mr. Bow Bell. "But what was he doing to that ivory crucifix. It looked like he was trying to twist it."

Marion Dillard went forward and took up the heavy piece of carved ivory. The head. crowned with thorns, had been twisted around until it faced backward. It was loose, and she lifted the head out of the carving. The whole interior of the ivory tree was hollow, and packed with rice powder. Hard pellets were embedded in the rice powder, and when she released them, great oriental pearls appeared— huge, magnificent. a double handful of them, matchless, priceless, worth the ransom of a province.

And at the moment, the clocks sounded above the city, commemorating the hour of the birth of the Savior of the world.

______________________

9: The Diamond

Sunday Star, Washingtgon DC, 7 January 1923

THE thing that keeps life keen is that you can never figure out what's ahead.

There's always a surprise around the corner. The thing changes on you. to use an expression of the vernacular. One begins in an English drawing room and winds up on the Gobi desert. You never know where the road's going. Take it in big things or take it in the trivialities of life— it's the same system.

But I am not going to lecture on philosophy: I am going to cite a case— a case that had an immense surprise in it to me, and a series of events that started out in one direction and concluded in another. I saw them start simply enough, but they "changed on me" to keep our colloquialism.

I had just come down from Bar Harbor. I had an artificial diamond, made in Germany, and I was looking for Walker, who knows more about artificial stones than any other man in America, unless it is Bartoldi.

Gems are a fad with Walker and a profession with Bartoldi.  I do not know which of these motive impulses moves a man to the higher efficiency The keen man with the fad gets to be an expert, and the necessities of trade make tlie other one. Anyway. I wanted to show my diamond to both of them.

I found Walker in the Forty-seventh National Bank, on lower Fifth avenue. He waved a recognition and went on with what he was saying to the cashier behind the grill:

"There was no robbery; that's what puzzles me. How did they get the thing? It's lucky the bank discovered that it was missing almost immediately and sent out the word. The package had just come in and was lying on a shelf under the bookkeeper's desk. But how did they get it?"

And so I found Walker.

Nobody would ever have taken Walker for a noted detective. In appearance he was the last person any one would have picked out for a secret agent. He looked like some sort of engineer. He had a lean, sunburned face. He wore spectacles with steel rims that went back behind his ears and he was angular.

He looked like a practical person, and that is precisely what he was. You never could think that the man had any imagination: and he didn't have any. At least, he didn't have any imagination in the sense that we usually understand it. I suppose he had the kind of imagination that the inventor has or the mathematician when he figures the orbit of stars, or the engineer when he has to make some calculation on the stresses of a bridge.

I asked him to look at my diamond when he came out. His face took on a decided expression of interest.

"Go up and see Bartoldi," he said. "I will be along in an hour."

He added with a sort of smile: "There is no leisure in my trade. Somebody's always either robbing a bank or trying to rob— boring from within or setting up some game on the outside."

Then he laughed.

Now, that is how I happened to find Walker— just when I wanted to find him. By accident I stepped into something, as you would say.

WELL, it was not explained to me. In fact, to say plain truth, behind a lot of courteous indirections he put me out of the bank and sent me up to Bartoldi's to await his coming in an hour. I do not mean that he ordered me out. He enticed me out; he edged me out, a good deal as one would do with a child that had wandered Into a rather tense conference.

I went up to Bartoldi's. Everybody knows where it is. He had a mammoth place on Fifth avenue, rather far up— the trade is going up. The big retailers saw that a dozen years ago. Bartoldi is not the greatest jewel dealer in the world, but he is one of the greatest. The greatest jewel dealer in the world is Mahado, in Bombay; then come Vanderick, in Amsterdam, and Hausemann, in Paris.

It is a big shop, as I have said. But you know it— there is no reason to describe it here. A huge place, with glass cases, like every American shop, and the jewels displayed, as is the almost universal custom in America. Not like some of the foreign places, where you see only a square of black velvet, and the Jewel, when you have named the kind you want, is brought out of a vault.

I was in this shop, before the long counter that contains the trays of diamonds, when Bartoldi appeared.

Appeared is precisely the word; I did not see him until suddenly he was before me on the other side of the glass case.

He does not look like a Jeweler. In fact, he does not look like anybody in active life. He is big and gaunt, and, in spite of the best effort, he gives one the impression of an Immense human body dried out in some desert. But he is alive, all right. I would like to see the man that could fool him about a Jewel.

I showed him my diamond. It was a big diamond, unset, and I had it folded up in a piece of tissue paper.

He squinted at it between his thumb and finger.

"Good specimen," he said; "first-class specimen. You can see the stratifications with your eye."

He paused; then he went on:

"I never believed chemists could build up a diamond. Of course, they build up rubles, and they do it cleverly, deuced cleverly, but you can always tell by the bubbles in them; they can't get the bubbles out."

He moved my diamond out a little farther from his eye.

"I suppose it is insufficient pressure. If they could get the angular cavities that are in corundum, they would be on the way; of course, they would never get the steady glow of the genuine ruby. But they would fool the old ladies in a drawing room."

Then his voice went Into a piping note.

"You would pass for the owner of rubies, if you were rich enough to back up the hypothesis."

He'twisted a table diamond as large as ray false one and set above a platinum band. I could not have told thedifference.

My diamond wae worth $400. Bartoldi said there was not a stone in the tray under $5,000.

I stepped back to look at them from a little distance, about the distance one would observe a diamond on a woman's hand at dinner, across the table. I could not see any difference between the two stones. They could have been interchanged and they would have fooled me at the distance. But they didn't fool Bartoldi.

"Not much alike," he said. "Your stone has a sleek look."

I DID not see that. I told him I didn't see it. I knew that aspect of artificial stones, that appearance as if they were preseed instead of cut. But it was the aspect of artificial stones of a lower order than the one I had shown to Bartoldi. This one was cut, and it looked crisp to me, very nearly as crisp as the best one. But there is where the trained eye comes in. Walker knew it was false, and Bartoldi knew it instantly. He could see the stratifications with his eye.

I could see them with a good lens, but I could not see the sleek look, and I moved toward the tray on the counter to grt a close view. I did not move directly ahead: I moved to one aide— and I discovered two persons who had come into the shop behind me.

I took up my diamond and stood out of the way at once. I had no wish to delay a customer. I was only idling with a laboratory diamond, and Bartoldi had to sell jewels to keep his shop going I could not take up his time unless he happened to be at leisure.

The two persons who had come in at once attracted my attention. They would have attracted the attention of anybody, even if there had been nothing to follow. If one had chanced to observe them, he would have stopped and considered them anywhere.

One would have been forced to think about them. They would have stimulated one's curiosity. No one could have passed those two persons without undertaking to formulate some explanation: and to me there was something more than their mere appearance In my mind there was a vague impression that I had seen them in some other place. I could not at the moment remember the place: it was what psychologists call subconscious, I suppose. At any rate, it did not crystallise into a memory. But It remained as a sort of atmosphere behind the vivid impression they made on me.

The two persons were an old man and a girl. The two words go together, but the two persons did not go together in any sense. The girl was not past sixteen, and the man was past seventy. That would be all right— an old man and his grand-daughter, you would say.

But it was not all right. That was just exactly the impression that was so cryingly conspicuous. It was not all right!

The man was very well dressed; everything about him was of the best quality, and distinguished— perhaps just a little too distinguished, a little too vivid. When one thought about it, one saw that he was dressed somewhat for a younger part. There was a bit of color, a suggestion of youth that the man did not have.

He was an old man, but he was a vigorous old man. and he had the air and manner of wealth about him. I can't precisely point out these indicatory signs, but they were easy to be marked and they are not often successfully assumed. I suppose a clever actor could do it. Walker used to say that the best actors were not on the stage; they were in Joliet.

Now, that is what the man looked like— one of the idle rich, grown old in an atmosphere of luxury. He ought to have had, as I figured him up, a town house, a country estate, a yacht, and very nearly every vice! His eyes, his bad mouth and his fat ears were good evidential signs. I thought I knew the type!

The girl filled me with a sort of wonder. She wore a little cheap hand-me-down dress that must have come from a village shop, and it looked as though, she had slept in it. She had slept in it!

The sort of crumpled-up appearance of that cheap material could not be mistaken. She wore a straw hat lined with vivid color and loaded with soiled artificial flowers. Her shoes were run down a bit. She was generally soiled, as she would have been if she had traveled in a day coach and slept in her clothes— and that is precisely what she had done.

But all this could not obscure the fact that she was pretty, in a sort of way. She had a pliant figure and the charms that go along with youth. Sleeping in one's clothes and the grime of a journey can't obscure that. She was young, and she had what youth has.

Now you understand why I said that the two together puzzled me. Either alone would not attract a glance, and certainly not a line of speculation. But the two together, as I have insisted, called upon you for an explanation.

They puzzled me, but they did not puzzle Bartoldi. I suppose he understood it more quickly than I did. I understood it pretty quickly. Just as you have, no doubt, understood It all along and as Bartoldi understood It at a glance.

THEY came up to the glass counter and the man asked to see a diamond ring. The girl did not look up. She did not say anything. She seemed to wish to get as far as possible under the soiled hat.

Bartoldi set out some trays beside the one already on the table. The old man moved a little to one side and the girl came quite dose to the glass counter. She bent her head down over the stones as though she wished to see the rings and at the same time keen under cover of the soiled hat.

She did not say a word. But she knew precisely what she wanted, for she suddenly put out her hand and picked up the table diamond that had lain beside my artificial stone on the glass case. She slipped the stone on her finger and stepped back as though to be hidden a little by the old man.

I got a surprise.

"Gad," I said to myself, "big wages! Will he stand for it?"

Well, he did stand for it. He was a royal old sport; I will say that for him. Bartoldi said the price was $5,000 and the old boy never turned an eyelash. He made a careless gesture.

I don't think he even O.K.'d. the thing with a word.

He took a flat, leather case out of his pooket, got out a draft, asked Bartoldi for a pen, or rather indicated the wish for a pen with a fiddling of his fingers, and, when he got it, indorsed the draft. Then he showed Bartoldi a letter that was In the envelope that had contained the draft.

I followed them to the door. There was a taxicab waiting; they got in and went up the Avenue.

That type of man ought have a house somewhere on the Avenue; it was August: the house would be closed; I began to put things together.

I was standing there when Walker came up. I hailed him.

"Walker," I said, "you got here a moment too late. You see that taxi-cab?"

He made a little whimsical gesture.

"I see everything," he said, "that the devil put out to annoy me; what's in the taxicab?"

"There's a case in it," I said, "for the district court of the United States, on the criminal side, or I'm a poor detective."

"All detectives are poor," said Walker. "If they were rich, they would have a town house, a country place and a string of hunters."

"Well," I said, "that's what the old boy in the taxicab has got; and he's got something else that the United States doesn't allow him to take across a state line."

Walker looked at me queerly. He put the tip of his finger to his forehead.

"Touch of the heat?"

"Look here," I said, "isn't this sort of thing just as much in your line of duty as trying to prevent the crooked cashier from boring from within? Isn't this the United States, by a fairly recent statute, helping virtue to evade the dragon?"

Walker's face wrinkled into a twisted smile.

"It's helping the clever fille de joie to levy a little blackmail on the side."

"Wrong dope, in this instance." I said.

I began to describe to him the incident and the two persons. cident and the two persons. I described them carefully, minutely, and he listened without a word and without a motion. He stood perfectly still, there in the hot street before Bartoldi's mammoth shop, and the perspiration trickled down in a thin thread from the bars of his spectacles.

But his manner had changed. He had now, I noted from the very impassive aspect of the man, a deep, a profound, a moving interest in this affair. He cursed softly, as though he chopped the words with his teeth.

"Ten minutes too late!" he said. "Where did they go?"

Walker was motionless for a moment. his head down, his eyes narrowed in a profound reflection.

I interrupted him with a repetition of his words.

"Ten minutes too late!" I said. "You are two minutes too late."

I pointed up the Avenue. Walker did not look up

"I was thinking of Bartoldi." he said. "I am ten minutes too late for Bartoldi."

"That's right." I said "Bartoldi could have told you who this man was. He must have known him."

"Oh, no." said Walker. "Bartoldi didn't know him."

I was astonished.

"Surely Bartoldi knew him." I said.

Walker's voice became a sort of drawl.

"Surely he did not know him. Bartoldi would not have been a party to this man's criminal adventures."

I laughed. "What does Bartoldi care about criminal adventures? He's a dealer in jewels."

"He will care about this criminal adventure," said Walker.

Then he looked suddenly at me. "Where do you think they went?"

I told him what I thought. This type of person would have a house on the Avenue; it would be closed in August.

WALKER shook his head. "I think I know where they have gone," he said.

Again I looked at him in astonishment.

"Then you know who this man is?"

Walker replied with an abrupt query:

"Did you see the inside of his hand— the right hand? That was the thing to see."

"How about the girl?" I replied, for Walker's indirections were putting me on my mettle. "Her hand will be the thing to see; it's got Bartoldi's diamond on it."

He looked up rather vaguely.

"I am puzzled about the girl; I do not understand what the girl has to do with it."

I laughed. "Bartoldi understood," I said.

"Bartoldi!"

Walker seemed to bounce out of his reflection.

"The devil! We've got to get back his diamond."

He darted suddenly out to the traffic of the avenue, hailed a taxicab and beckoned me to get in with him.

I got in and we went up Fifth avenue. We were held in a jam of vehicles a block or two farther on.

"And so," I said. "you think the girl is a nice little country cousin, an esteemed relative— esteemed to the tune of a $5,000 diamond?"

Walker was fingering his face in reflection.

"Nonsense!" he said. "The girl's no relation to him."

"Then why the $5,000 diamond?"

"That's what I would like to know." said Walker.

I laughed. The thing was too absurd.

"If the wage of sin Is a $5,000 diamond. there's got to be the sin to earn it. That old sport was not taking any chance on getting the value of his money."

"O. K.," said Walker.

"Then you think he has been paid for it." I said.

"Surely," said Walker, "that man has been paid for it."

The taxicab turned out of the avenue presently w'hen the jam of vehicles Moles was released and stopped before the Grand Central station.

Walker paused a moment when we got down.

"If I put the thing together correctly," he said, "they will be here. The girl came in for her diamond. How she earned it puzzles me.... The man had to get through with it as quickly as he could."

He made a little gesture.

"From the station to Bartoldi's in a taxicab and back to the first train out— that would be his plan— to hurry."

He added: "It was a risk, a big risk. But he had to take it. He couldn't trust anybody; he had to do it himself."

I looked at Walker with what I imagined was an ironical smile.

"Then he would not be guilty under the statute," I said, "for he only brought the little baggage in to buy her a diamond."

Walker seemed in a sort of reflection.

"Oh, yes," he said, "he is guilty."

"Then you want him?" I asked.

Walker suddenly looked at me with his eyes wide.

"Surely," he said.

"Then why don't you hurry?" I demanded.

He looked at me with a leisuiely interest. "If he's here." he said, "he can't get out. I've got three of the best agents of the department in there— sent them up when I started to Bartoldi's to meet you."

"But how would they know him?" I asked.

"They would know him by a scar in his hand," replied Walker.

"They ought to know him by a girl on his arm," I said.

Walker's voice became reflective.

"I wonder if she could be his grand-daughter, after all!"

I laughed. That laugh was like the key to a memory. I at once remembered where I had seen this man and the girl.

It was at the end of the path that follows the sea south at Bar Harbor. There is a great house where the path ends. It was closed; the shutters were up, and the grounds only casually kept; I remembered it now. I had undertaken one afternoon to get through from this sea path to the village street and had wandered into an immense sunken garden. I was making no sound.

The grass and leaves had covered the paths; It was very still, and presently I heard the murmur of voices. I wondered who could be there, for, as I have said, the place was closed, and I was discovering that there was no way through to the village street. I went forward a few steps, and beyond me. standing in an angle of the garden, obscured by an immense flowering vine, were this old man and this girl.

I remembered the scene perfectly, now that I had the key to it.

THE old man was speaking in a low voice, as though he urged something, offered something, and the girl was listening in the attitude in which I had observed her this afternoon, her head down, her arms hanging. I had gone out quietly: I remember the explanation that presented itself. This old man must be the owner of the place and the girl a keeper's daughter, perhaps. The memory bore out my Impression, the impression which I received today and the impression which had evidently convinced Bartoldi.

I told it all to Walker, very carefully and in detail, as we went into the great lobby and down to the train exits. Walker caught my arm in his big hand.

"That explains it," he commented. Then he stopped abruptly.

"By the way," he said, as though it had just occurred to him and he had now leisure to think about it, "let me have a look at that artificial diamond."

I took the piece of tissue paper out of my waistcoat pocket and handed it to him. He unfolded the paper, took the diamond out and retained It in his hand. We crossed through the throngs of people everywhere grouped about in the great station, to the exit indicating the evening train to Bar Harbor. We entered the little group and I realized suddenly that we were close behind the old man and the girl. They were facing toward the gtte.

Suddenly Walker opened his hand and dropped my diamond to the floor. It clattered at the feet of the girl and Walker stooped swiftly and picked it up.

"Your daughter," he said, speaking to the old man, "has dropped the setting out of her ring; permit me to return it."

The man turned instantly like a trapped animal. For a moment both of his hands went into the pockets of his coat and for an instant his face was uncertain, vague, deadly; then he put out his hand for the diamond.

Walker gave it to him and turned to me.

"Perhaps," he said, "we had better see if the trunks got on. We have nearly ten minutes to wait."

And we walked away toward the great stair leading to the baggage room.

The girl did not move; she did not speak; she remained as she had stood in Bartoldi's shop, her head down, concealed, as far as she was able to conceal it under the drooping hat loaded with soiled roses.

Walker was crossing toward the great stair in his long stride and I hurrying in my astonishment to overtake him.

"The devil, man!" I cried when I came up. "Why did you give him my diamond?"

"I wanted to see if there was a scar in his hand." said Walker. "He had it."

"Then you know him?"

"Surely," said Walker.

"Aren't you going to arrest him?"

Walker had returned to his careless manner.

"No," he said: "I am not going to arrest him. You saw his hands go into his pockets. There would have been a lot of people killed if it hadn't been for your diamond. It's lucky I thought of it; besides I had to see the inside of his hand."

"But my diamond," I said, "when will I get it?"

Walker continued in his leisurely drawl;

"You will get your diamond when Bartoldi gets his."

"When will that be?" I insisted

"Right now," replied Walker.

Then he paused in his stride, took off his hat and extended it for a moment above his head like a tired person who would relax from the fatigue of travel.

Two men and a woman between them, carrying bags, coats and the usual articles of travel, came out from the crowd pouring into the station from the street and crossed hurriedly tnto the group waiting at the entrance for the Bar Harbor train.

Then a dramatic thing happened

I could see the old man clearly: he was watching Walker out of the tail of his eye and he kept his hand in his pockets, but he was not watching the three persons who came into the group as though seeking the tram for which he was bound, and as they passed, quicker than the eye, the man's hands were seized, dragged out of his pockets and snapped into handcuffs. The pistols gripped in his hands were swept out; they fell to the floor.

"The devil!" I cried "The old boy is the most dangerous Lothario I ever saw."

Walker replied in his leisured drawl:

"He's the most dangerous bank swindler you ever saw."

THE GIRL had been questioned and the thing was now clear. Walker explained it all on the way to Bartoldi's in a taxicab. I had my diamond in my pocket and Walker had Bartoldi's to exchange for the forged draft. The old man was Vronsky, the most notorious forger in the world. He had bribed this girl, the janitress of the Empire Bank at Bar Harbor, to steal a book of blank drafts and some sheets of stationery. It was easy to do; the book of blanks was lying on the bookkeeper's desk in the package as It had come from the printer, and the stationery had never been locked up.

With the blanks bearing the secret water-mark of the bank, Vronsky was able to forge drafts on New York and place them, establishing his Identity by a letter from the bank officials on this stationery, in which they said they were sending him the draft which he intended to pay out, and giving its amount and number '

"It was a clever scheme." Walker added. "The secret water-mark on the draft blanks would show that they were genuine— that's what convinced Bartoldi, and the forged letter would show the identity of the man who undertook to place it. The forgery gave Vronsky no trouble, the problem was how to get the blanks and letter paper."

"And he got them with a diamond." I said.

Walker's drawl lengthened.

"Precisely as we got him."

And so this adventure opened with a diamond and closed with the arrest of one of the worst criminals in the world. What was it I wrote in the opening paragraph of this case? Go back and read it.

______________________

10: The Miller Of Ostend

Adelaide Journal, 19 December 1914

AN OLD man pushing a two-wheeled cart, under which a short-eared grey dog pulled, stopped in the narrow street behind the Digue de Mer. The shops of Ostend were nearly deserted, few besides the baker and the tobacconist remained. And in those the women soId. Every man in Belgium had his breast against the Prussian column. The old miller, out yonder on the road toward Brussels, ground a little wheat and peddled it about slowly over the cobble stones, for the dog, like his master, was old.

The shop before which the miller stopped had a few cans of English pipe tobacco piled up in the window. The English marines had finally landed after the long days of deadly waiting. Ostend was changed as by some sorcery. This, the gayest city in Europe, was now the most deserted. The marines patrolled the Digne de Mer, the railway station, and the road. A great Red Cross flag floated over the Kursaal, the fantastic temple to Change that Leopold had built to turn the emigration toward Monaco northward. The kings of the earth were at a deadlier game than trente-et-quarante and the new queen had taken this house of Fortune in which to store the broken pawns.  The old man pounded as the door of the shop and called out in a sort of patois, a bastard kind of  Flemish French.

For some moments was no response. Then suddenly the door flew open. The old miller was caught in two young arms, hugged, and pushed out into the street.  The sunny thing that came like a butterfly out of the dingy shop scolded and kissed the miller, then stood back against the window and bade him admire her white cap and her English muslin skirt and the Red Cross on her arm. She was going to help the Queen in the great Kursaal. The materials had been sent by the rich English ladies overseas, but she had put in every stitch herself. Was it not all beautifully done? The Queen would not be shamed by her. Was he not proud of such a granddaughter?

He was proud, but emotion in him dwelt in the subterranean places from whence it did not issue. but in which its strength forever remained. His son Albert was dead at Leige, he knew, but he did not tell her. Her mother she had never known. She had no one in the world now but himself. He rubbed his stubble beard with his broad, flat fingers. He had given one to the King— well, the one to be given now to the Queen would at least be a no danger. Even the Prussians did not wage war on women.

"The Queen not apt to look at the grand daughter of a miller," he said.

"But she looked, grand-pere," cried the girl, "and she said I was La Belle Marie.  Who was La Belle Marie, grand-pere?"

"A woman in a song," said old man, and he looked down, for the woman in the song had wept for for the dead.

But the girl had not waited for his answer.  She thrust a big iron key in the lock of the door, gave it a twist with her supple hand and flung the key into the cart.

"Adieu, grand pere," she cried. "The gand daughter of a miller can at least be on the hour. Come to the Kursaal tomorrow!"

She paused and blew back kisses.

"And ask the Queen for La Belle Marie. "

Her laugh rippled like a silver banner in the sun.

The old man stood and watched her disappear up the narrow cobbled street toward the Digne de Mer. Her slender, supple body was full of the joy of life. The sun seemed entangled in her hair.  Thank God, the Prussian did not wage a war on women.

He spoke to the dog, and taking hold of the cart they went out toward the Brussels rood. As they passed the Cathedral, with its three holy figures indented in the ancient, wall, a priest came out and crossed before them. The miller stopped and spoke to the priest.

"Father," he said, "is the Pope dead as I have heard?"

The priest turned about. He, too, was an old man, his face worn almost ghastly with fatigue.

"My son," be said, "the hosts of Satan have seized the world, and the good God has withdrawn his ambassador... It is fate. The Holy Father is dead." And gathering up his skirts he set out toward the peasant houses in the environs of Ostend where the wounded sent back from the front needed his assistance.

The old man and the dog travelled out of Ostend and along the Brussels road. They travelled slowly. A peasant passed, driving a flock of geese into the city. He was a figure in every detail out of a picture in a fairy book. He wore a long smock, wooden shoes, and a curious hat. He had a round expressionless face, and he carried a crook for catching the geese about the neck when they endeavoured to leave the road. But for all his wooden expression the peasant was no Simple Simps.

"Hey, Peevel Beever," he said, "if you come with me you can learn the German goose-step— that gander in the front was born in Prussia." And be laughed.

"You ought to be with the king," said the old man. The peasant's face changed.

"I do the king a better service with the geese," he said.

And it was true. He went out, always to be robbed by the German camps and to count the guns. A troop of cavalry passed. The old man drew his cart out of the road.

Then he went on. Presently they came to a little ancient house surrounded by a wide empty ditch. They entered. The miller unharnessed the dog, fed him some pieces of bread, and sat down on the door step. Evening advanced. The wind from the sea died down, the whole world under the setting sun seemd a land of quiet and unending peacefulless. The serenity of heaven seemed to extend everywhere like a benediction.

Presently, far away toward Brussels, a thing like a wingless goose appeared in the sky. It travelled at great speed and soon took form and outline. It came on like a projectile toward Ostend, One could distinguish now its long aluminium cylinder and the strange equipment of the Zeppelin, painted gray like a warship. While one stood to count his fingers this grim engine of the air was over the city.

There was a long, dull roar, and the glass-enclosed terrace of the Kursaal that bowed out toward the promenade of Leopold south along the Digne de Mer flew into a cloud of dust and broken tiles. Meanwhile, as though signalled of the approach of the Zeppelin, an English submarine arose like some fabled sea-thing out of the slime of the harbour. A figure emerged from the turret, seized a lever, and a gun that was folded into the back of the monster swung up into place, other figures appeared, and the gun, lifting perpendicular opened fire on the dirigible. The gunner missed. The Zeppelin swung round in the great arc of a circle and started to return. The gun cackled, but the gunner, either from lack of skill or the oscillation of the submarine, continued to miss.

Finally, the Zeppelin, driving dead away toward Brussels was seen suddenly to list, it hung for a moment half balanced ever, then it glided slowly down. A shot travelling parallel with the cylinder had ripped open the gas compartments along the whole side, as the water-tight compartments of a liner one ripped open by the North Atlantic ice. It did not fall— the gas chambers on the other side of the long aluminium envelope were enough to prevent that; but not enough to hold it in the air, and listing heavily it descended slowly into the fields.

The detachment of Belgian cavalry riding the town raced toward it. At the dull boom of the first explosion the old miller, sitting on his door step, arose and started to return to Ostend. He swung forward with great strides, slouching his left shoulder, since he was accustomed to carry a sack of grain. He had the terrible stiffened celerity of the aged when they are in a desperate way. He knew the city, and the direction of the sound located for him where the deadly thing had struck.

His awful fear was justified. Under the. wrecked glass of the Kursaal, among the scattered cots and the wounded— now mangled— dead men, a little broken thing, with a red cross stitched to her sleeve and  the sun still nestling in her hair, lay motionless across the sill of a door.

Poor Belle Marie, unlike the woman in the song, would never weep for the dead.

In spite of the fact that the Zeppelin seemed to float down eassily to the earth, the landing wrecked, it. The great cylinder nosed into a ditch; the platforms were broken and the crew thrown out. They were not able to make any resistance to the Belgian cavalry. The uninjured ran about and were presently rounded up by the horsemen; one or two firing with small arms were shot.

When the Belgian officer came to look at the wounded he did not know what to do. Night was descending and he must get his detachment into Ostend. He had no surgeon in his troop and no way to carry wounded. He ordered a rough shelter put up out of the wreckage of the Zeppelin, and laid the wounded men and the dead on blankets under it.

For himself, he must get to saddle and into Ostend. The gooseherd travelling out of Brussels had brought news that could not wait. He had only a handful of troopers. When he came to mount the uninjured prisoners— each behind a cavalryman— he found that he could not spare a man to remain with the wounded. He stood a moment with his hand gathering up his bridle rein, when, by chance, the problem solved itself. The old priest, crossing the fields on his errand of mercy from cottage to cottage, appeared. The officer commandeered him.

"Father," he said, "remain here and take care of these men until the authorities at Ostend can bring them in." Then he got into the saddle and clattered away, riding at a gallop and taking the ditches as though he followed an English fox. The prisoners, strapped to the cavalrymen, bounded about like great loose lumps tied to the saddles.

Night was coming on.

The priest began at once to attend the wounded. The Belgian officer had given him a canteen— a flat metal bottle covered with canvas and filled with water. Near him lay the officer of the Zeppelin, unconscious. Now he began to groan. The priest put the bottle to his lips. After a little the man drank, then sighed deeply, like one returning to consciousness. He made one or two vague enquiries, then seemed all at once to understand what had happened. He asked the priest to look in the wreckage of the Zeppelin for a lantern and in the pocket of his coat for a box of matches The old man went away to look, and the German spoke to his companions, feebly asking their names and how badly they were injured. Only one or two of them replied, and he called out to the priest, telling him where to look for tne lantern and bidding him strike the matches and be guided by certain portions of the platform that he indicated. Presently the old man returned with the lantern.

The darkness was now dense and there was no wind. The lantern burned steadily. The German officer seemed again unconscious. He lay relaxed, and with the lantern in his hand the old man began to examine the wounded, from man to man. Three of the crew of the Zeppelin were dead, and of the other five one was dying. The priest attempted to arrange the blanket under the dying man's head, but ceased to breathe almost immediately.

The four men remaining were not mortally hurt, and the priest endeavoured to make them as comfortable as he could. It was impossible to realize that only an hour ago these persons were the active agents of a devastating madness. They were concerned now only with the little human things that occupy the energies of sick men. The German oflicer. who had a crushed thigh, asked tbe priest to help him write a note to his family in Breslau. He did not seem to realize that no letter could cross the frontier. He said there was a writing pad with paper and pencil in a pocket under aim. The priest explored the pocket, put tbe pencil into the man's finders, and steadying the writing pad with one hand held the lantern where the flame would light it. But the officer tried in vain to write. The shock of the injury made his hand shake and he scratched only unintelligible marks on the paper. The priest promised to carry his message to Breslau when the war was over, and asked the man what he wished to say. "Tell them I got hurt," the officer replied with the impressive brevity of sick men.

Another of the wounded— a youth from Hesse—had known an English student at Giessen. And with an utter disregard of probabilities the German thought this man might now be among the English marines at Ostend. He would be a surgeon, and, if the priest conuld find him, the boy was sure all the wounded would be put into a hospital and kindly treated. The Englishman would remember who had taken him to see the student duels, and had got him permission to make some experiments in a professor's laboratory. The boy went on to say what the experiments were, and how pleasant a person the Englishman was, and so forth.

Only one of the men acted like the soldier in the hero tales. His legs were broken. And after the priest had made him as comfortable as he could on the  the bedding from the Zeppelin began to tell of a little clock off a cruiser that the English Fleet had sunk in the North. The face of the clock had broken and one of the handles shot off, but it continued to run, ticking away with one hand going.  Among all of  the events of the war this thing alone impressed him.

"That was a good German clock," he said. "That's what it to be 'made in Germany.' " And he tried to inspire the priest with enthusiasm for the little shattered clock that continued to run.. But even the example of the brave clock or the sinking cruiser did not bring the wounded man any strength to go on like it. He suffered intensely, and he was wholly unable to emulate the example he cherished.

When the priest had done all he could he sat down by the German officer and opened a little old leather book printed in Latin. He began to read it by the lantern, now and then closing his eyes and repeating something—either of what he read or something which the printed words called up.

The night deepened. The temperature began to change. A slight mist arose and a breath of wind. The grass and the blankets became damp. The priest gut up now and then to visit the wounded men, to give them water, to smooth the blankets beneath them, and to change the posture of their injured bodies. Then he returned to his place besde the officer and to his book, the lantern held close to the the page.

At midnight a figure emerged from the darkness. The priest got up, keeping his place in his book with his finger.

"Peever Beever!" he said, when he was finally able to make out who it was. And the wounded German saw an old stupid peasant, wearing a blouse dirty with grain meal, come into the light.

The miller seemed embarrased and uncertain.

He uttered an expression in Flemish, inflected like an expletive, "Eh, Father. Bless my soul, it's you!"

"Did you come to search for me?" said the priest, his voice showing some anxiety. The peasant lied convincingly. "Maximilianus Storm," he said; "you know Maximilianus Storm. He sent me."

"Is he worse?" said the priest. "He was better this morning."

"Eh, yes..." replied the old man; "that it is. He's sick— bad sick." Then he added— "His woman sent me." The priest seemed for a moment to reflect. Then he spoke to the miller.

"Peever Beever," he said, "take this lantern and wait here until I come back." He advanced and put the lantern into the miller's hand. "Obey me!" he continued. "I will return in an hour."

The old man took the lantern and sat down.

"It's Maximilianus Storm," he repeated; "you know Maximilianus Storm.... His woman..."

"Yes," replied the priest, "I know; do as I have told you."

And he set out in a certain definite direction as precisely as though he travelled in the sun. In spite of his deliberate promise the priest was hardly gone before the old man got up and came steadily toward the prisoners. He came softly, stooped over. In his left hand he carried the lantern, and in his right, held against his blouse, something which could not be seen. The German officer knew the sort of treatment that the wounded were reported to receive at the hands of the peasants of Belgium, and he expected some outrage. But instead of any injury something was thrust into his face, and by the light of the lantern he saw a little cross of red muslin....

The ripped-out stitches he did not see, nor the dried bloodstain coloured like the cross. The German could not understand what the peasant said. His conversation with the priest had been in French, but this was too much alloyed with Flemish.

The wounded man was profoundly astonished, for he expected some brutality, and he spoke to his companions, explaining what the peasant carried in his hand. The old miller went from man to man, thrusting the candle and the bit of muslin into every face and repeating his incomrehensible words. Then be came back, fastened the lantern against the side of the rude shelter, and stooped over to lift up the German officer. This man asked him what he was about to do, but the miller did not reply; and the man concluded that the priest had gone to arrange some shelter to which this peasant was to remove them. The miller shouldered the wounded man as though he were a bag of grain and set out into the darkness. He travelled for some time over grass, for his wooden shoes made no sound; then he crossed a ditch and called out as to one waiting for his arrival. A dog whined, and the prisoner made out a cart standing by the side of the road. The miller put his load into the cart. He took hold of the little round bar behind it, and, speaking to the dog, the strange convoy began its journey.

It was intensely dark. But the aspect of the night was beginning to change. The wind was coming up from the sea—gently, but with, the promise of a steady breeze.

The wounded man in the cart was profoundly puzzled. Could the peasant be in the service of the emblem he carried? Could the authorities at Ostend have sent out a person like this and for transportation a cart drawn by a dog? It seemed not likely. And yet this was perhaps the only vehicle remaining from the war, and an army so hard pressed could have only men like this and women to care for the wounded. Besides, the priest had gone away at once, leaving this man is charge. Would the priest have abandoned his commission thus readily to one coming without authority? And the sick man laboured to recall the bastard words and phrases that the priest and the peasant had spoken, in a hope that he could puzzle out their meanmg. But be could not.

The cart jolted along the silent road. He couid hear only the soft padding of the dnz straining under him and the shuffle of the peasant's wooden shoes. He spoke, endeavouring by a nice enunciation of each word to make the old man understand him.

"Where do you go?" he said. The peasant stopped, and, speaking in a like manner, carefully repied in a sort of French. There were Flemish words in it, and all that the German could make out was that the crew of the Zeppelin was to be returned to the sky.

Presently the cart stopped. The peasant took up the prisoner, entering what seemed to be a swinging gate, crossed a bit of turf,  paused before a door, unlatched it, put his burden inside and, fastening the door behind him, returned to the cart.

With a profound relief the wounded man now understood what the pedant was about. The wind was coming up, and perhaps with it rain. The authorities of the Red Cross had sent this man with the cart to bring the wounded prisoners under the shelter of a roof.  The old peasant could bring but one at a time. He had gone back for another. And the pain-racked man, no longer making any mental effort, lay in a sort of coma...

The old peasant presently returned with another of the wounded. And so continued his journeys until the four living men had been brought into the house. The he did not disturb, nor did he bring a blanket or any article from the wreckage. The four men lay on the dirt floor— side by side in the darkness.  The door stood open. The night teemed thick and dense. The wind had come up steadily. The old peasant had gone out, and now the men on the floor heard noises as though heavy timbers were being slowly moved about. The sound went on for some time. Then all at once the old peasant appeared in the door, took up the last man whom he had brought in, and, slinging him on his shoulder as though he were a bag of wheat, carried him away.

The wounded officer was now alarmed. What thing was this inscrutable peasant about? Once before on this night he had been mistaken in the creature's intent. And the sense of disaster that had seized him when the peasant first approached now returned and possessed him. He strained his ears to listen. For a time there were only slight indistinguishable sounds. Then there was a great creak, and the jar and grind of straining timbers, as though something big and unwieldy arose with dignity into the air. The old peasant returned and carried away another of the prisoners and again another, until the room was empty. And after his departure, there was always the creak and grind and strain of timber.

In an old timber windmill of the earliest Belgian type, with a tiny muslin red  cross tacked on the door, a stooped peasant was grinding wheat; while lashed to the great arms in place of the canvas sails, four human bodies turned in a ghastly circle in the sky.

End

Table of Contents

- 1: Ruined Eye
- 2: The Haunted Door
- 3: Lord Winton's Adventure
- 4: The Girl With The Ruby
- 5: The Man From America.
- 6: No Defense
- 7: The Baron Starkheim
- 8: The Great Symbol
- 9: The Diamond
- 10: The Miller Of Ostend