HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY * BOSTON The Riverside Press Cambridge COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK OR PARTS THEREOF IN ANY FORM PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. TO MAJOR-GENERAL SIR FRANCIS LLOYD, K.C.B. MY DEAR GENERAL: A recent tale of mine has, I am told, found favour in the dug-outs and billets of the British front, as being sufficiently short and sufficiently exciting for men who have little leisure to read. My friends in that un

It all started one afternoon, early in May, when I came out of the House of Commons with Tommy Deloraine. I had got in by an accident at a by-election, when I was supposed to be fighting a forlorn hope, and as I was just beginning to be busy at the Bar I found my hands pretty full. It was before Tommy succeeded, in the days when he sat for the family seat in Yorkshire, and that afternoon he was in a powerful bad temper. Out of doors it was jolly spring weather, there was greenery in Parliament S

A fortnight later—to be accurate, on the 21st of May—I did a thing I rarely do, and went down to South London on a County Court case. It was an ordinary taxi-cab accident, and, as the solicitors for the company were good clients of mine, and the regular county-court junior was ill in bed, I took the case to oblige them. There was the usual dull conflict of evidence. An empty taxi-cab, proceeding slowly on the right side of the road and hooting decorously at the corners, had been run into by a pr

Hitherto I had been the looker-on; now I was to become a person of the drama. That telegram was the beginning of my active part in this curious affair. They say that everybody turns up in time at the corner of Piccadilly Circus if you wait long enough. I was to find myself like a citizen of Bagdad in the days of the great Caliph, and yet never stir from my routine of flat, chambers, club, and flat. I am wrong; there was one episode out of London, and that perhaps was the true beginning of my sto

My first thought, as I journeyed towards London, was that I was horribly alone in this business. Whatever was to be done I must do it myself, for the truth was I had no evidence which any authority would recognise. Pitt-Heron was the friend of a strange being who collected objects of art, probably passed under an alias in South London, and had absurd visions of the end of civilisation. That, in cold black and white, was all my story came to. If I went to the police they would laugh at me, and th

That meeting with Lumley scared me badly, but it also clinched my resolution. The most pacific fellow on earth can be gingered into pugnacity. I had now more than my friendship for Tommy and my sympathy with Pitt-Heron to urge me on. A man had tried to bully me, and that roused all the worst stubbornness of my soul. I was determined to see the game through at any cost. But I must have an ally if my nerves were to hold out, and my mind turned at once to Tommy's friend Chapman. I thought with comf

I was working late at the Temple next day, and it was nearly seven before I got up to go home. Macgillivray had telephoned to me in the afternoon saying he wanted to see me, and suggesting dinner at the Club, and I had told him I should come straight there from my Chambers. But just after six he had rung me up again and proposed another meeting place. "I've got some very important news for you, and want to be quiet. There's a little place where I sometimes dine—Rapaccini's, in Antioch Street. I'

My nervousness and indecision dropped from me at the news. I had won the first round, and I would win the last, for it suddenly became clear to me that I had now evidence which would blast Lumley. I believed that it would not be hard to prove his identity with Pavia and his receipt of the telegram from Saronov; Tuke was his creature, and Tuke's murderous mission was his doing. No doubt I knew little and could prove nothing about the big thing, the Power-House, but conspiracy to murder is not the

I left Belgrave Square about a quarter to eight and retraced my steps along the route which for me that afternoon had been so full of tremors. I was still being watched—a little observation told me that—but I would not be interfered with, provided my way lay in a certain direction. So completely without nervousness was I that at the top of Constitution Hill I struck into the Green Park and kept to the grass till I emerged into Piccadilly, opposite Devonshire House. A light wind had risen and the

I do not think I was surprised at the news I read in The Times next morning. Mr. Andrew Lumley had died suddenly in the night of heart failure, and the newspapers woke up to the fact that we had been entertaining a great man unawares. There was an obituary in "leader" type of nearly two columns. He had been older than I thought—close on seventy—and The Times spoke of him as a man who might have done anything he pleased in public life, but had chosen to give to a small coterie of friends what was