The Council of Justice

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EDGAR WALLACE

THE COUNCIL OF JUSTICE

BOOK 2 IN THE JUST MEN SERIES
(UNABRIDGED EDITION)

Published by Ward Lock & Co., London, 1908

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Version date: 2025-09-12

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Foreword.
Chapter I. The Red Hundred
Chapter II. The Fourth Man
Chapter III. The Council of the Kings
Chapter IV. Jessen, Alias Long
Chapter V. The Red Bean
Chapter VI. The Council of Justice
Chapter VII. Princess Revolutionary
Chapter VIII. The Government and Mr. Jessen
Chapter IX. Two Incidents in the Fight
Chapter X. Don Emanuel Builds a House
Chapter XI. In the Calle Mayor
Chapter XII. The Judgment
Chapter XIII. The House in the Hill
Chapter XIV. The Terror and the Suburbs
Chapter XV. The "Ibex Queen"
Chapter XVI. The Trial
Chapter XVII. Manfred
Chapter XVIII. In Wandsworth Gaol
Chapter XIX. The "Rational Faithers"
Chapter XX. At The Old Bailey
Chapter XXI. Chelmsford
Chapter XXII. The Execution

FOREWORD

IT is not for you or me to judge Manfred and his works. I say "Manfred," though I might as well have said "Gonsalez," or for the matter of that "Poiccart," since they are equally guilty or great according to the light in which you view their acts. The most lawless of us would hesitate to defend them, but the greater humanitarian could scarcely condemn them.

From the standpoint of us, who live within the law, going about our business in conformity with the code, and unquestioningly keeping to the left or to the right as the police direct, their methods were terrible, indefensible, revolting.

It does not greatly affect the issue that, for want of a better word, we call them criminals. Such would be mankind's unanimous designation, but I think—indeed, I know—that they were indifferent to the opinions of the human race. I doubt very much whether they expected posterity to honour them.

Once they were engaged in an academical argument on heraldry—Manfred said that the motto of the English Royal House most nearly reflected his attitude to the world—"Were it 'For God and the Right' it would be flawless," he said.

It was, of course, a preposterous view for one to take whose hands were red with the blood of his fellows, but the sincerity of this mysterious man saved it from any suggestion of cant. I have already told the story of the Four Just Men and the Cabinet Minister. It was a story of murder, pure and simple. If I am to believe the thousands of people who have written to me concerning that episode, it was a fascinating story, and I am gratified beyond words by one significant fact, that no person has gone out of his way to describe it as a pernicious story.

In these days when the glorification of criminals forms the subject-matter of every other book, when the heroic thefts of Jones, the Gentleman Burglar, and the noble frauds of Brown, the Chivalrous Stockbroker, and the amusing memoirs of every mean sneak-thief and seducer runs into fat books of four hundred pages, one hesitates to flood the over-crowded mart of villains' biographies with the story of the Council of Justice.

Frankly—and here I reverse all platitudes with which I introduce the foreword—I say of the Council of Justice, of the three men who killed Sir Philip Ramon, and who slew ruthlessly in the name of justice, that my sympathies are with them. Were I clever enough, or bold enough, or free from responsibilities; were I, in fact, any of the things that man never is, I should be proud and happy to make a fourth in this remorseless Council. I am with Victor Cousins, who says. "The universal and absolute law is that natural justice which cannot be written down."

There are crimes for which there is no adequate punishment, and offences that the machinery of the written law cannot efface. Therein lies the justification for the Council of Justice—a council of great intellects, passionless.

I have already said that the men who composed the Council of Justice were indifferent to the opinions of the world, and it was well that they were, for by turns they earned execration and applause, and behind both lay a great uneasiness which only their arrest could dissolve. So that whilst newspapers described them in tum as "assassins" and "mysterious reformers," yet they never ceased to urge the police to discover the identity of the men who placed themselves above the code, and dealt death to the breakers of the unwritten laws.

It happens that the story I am now telling is one of an act or a series of acts that won not alone from the Government of Great Britain, but from the Governments of Europe, a sort of unofficial approval, and as such, it is easier to write since the public are acquainted with many of the circumstances, and can the more readily appreciate the lull significance of the Council's work.

For here they waged war against great world criminals; they pitted their strength, their cunning, and their wonderful intellects against the most powerful organization of the underworld; against past masters of villainous arts, and brains equally agile.

If you ask me, having read this record, whether I approve of their works; whether I justify their crimes and condone their offences I shall answer loudly and indignantly "No!"—I shall again indulge in vacant generalities on the sacredness of human life and the sole right of paid lawyers to administer the law, and much that I say will be prefaced by such a sentence as "There cannot, of course, be any excuse—"

CHAPTER I
The Red Hundred

IT was the day of days for the Red Hundred. The wonderful international congress was meeting in London, the first great congress of recognized Anarchism. This was no hole-and-corner gathering of hurried men speaking furtively, but one open and unafraid with three policemen specially retained for duty outside the hall, a commissionaire to take tickets at the outer lobby, and a shorthand writer with a knowledge of French and Yiddish to make notes of remarkable utterances.

The wonderful congress was a fact. When it had been broached there were people who laughed at the idea; Niloff of Vitebsk was one because he did not think such openness possible. But little Peter (his preposterous name was Konoplanikov, and he was a reporter on the staff of the foolish Russkoye Znamya), this little Peter who had thought out the whole thing, whose idea it was to gather a conference of the Red Hundred in London, who hired the hall and issued the bills (bearing in the top left-hand corner the inverted triangle of the Hundred) asking those Russians in London interested in the building of a Russian Sailors' Home to apply for tickets, who, too, secured a hall where interruption was impossible, was happy—yea, little brothers, it was a great day for Peter.

It was a great joke with the delegates of "The Hundred"—they numbered exactly 33,478 by the way—that such a meeting could be held under the nose of the English police without their being any the wiser.

The boat that runs from Copenhagen to Kiel carried men who thought it was the most extraordinary thing they had ever heard of, the Sud Express brought passengers that could hardly believe it true, and in the steerage of the Black Star liner Truric men whose names mostly began Cz—were amused in a sombre fashion that such stupidity could exist.

"You can always deceive the police," said little Peter enthusiastically; "call a meeting with a philanthropic object and—voilà!"

"Your respected communication to hand. The meeting to be held to-night at the Phoenix Hall. Middlesex Street, E.. with the object of raising funds for a Russian Sailors' Home is. of course, the first international congress of the Red Hundred. Shall not be able to get a man inside, but do not think that matters much, as meeting will be engaged throwing flowers at one another and serious business will not commence till the meeting of the inner committee.

"I enclose a list of men already arrived in London, and have the honour to request that you will send me portraits of under-mentioned men."

There were three delegates from Baden, Herr Schmidt from Freiburg, Herr Bleaumeau from Karlsruhe, and Herr Von Dunop from Mannheim. They were not considerable persons, even in the eyes of the world of Anarchism, they called for no particular notice, and therefore the strange thing that happened to them on the night of the congress is all the more remarkable.

Herr Schmidt had left his pension in Bloomsbury and was hurrying eastward. It was a late autumn evening and a chilly rain fell, and Herr Schmidt was debating in his mind whether he should go direct to the rendezvous where he had promised to meet his two other compatriots, or whether he should call a taxi and drive direct to the hall, when a hand grasped his arm.

He turned quickly and reached for his hip-pocket. Two men stood behind him and but for themselves the square through which he was passing was deserted.

Before he could grasp the Browning pistol, his other arm was seized and the taller of the two men spoke.

"I am Detective Simpson from Scotland Yard, and I shall take you into custody,' was the quiet reply.

A closed motor-car entered the square, and the shorter of the two whistled and the chauffeur drew up near the group.

"I warn you that you shall answer for this," he said wrathfully. "I have an important engagement that you have made me miss through your foolery and—"

He was alone and in darkness. The car moved on and then Schmidt discovered that there were no windows to the vehicle. A wild idea came to him that he might escape He tried the door of the car; it was immovable. He cautiously tapped it. It was lined with thin sheets of steel.

"A prison on wheels," he muttered with a curse, and sank back into the corner of the car.

He did not know London; he had not the slightest idea where he was going. For ten minutes the car moved along. He was puzzled. These policemen had taken nothing from him. He still retained his pistol. They had not even attempted to search him for compromising documents. Not that he had any except the pass for the conference and—the Inner Code!

Heavens! he must destroy that. He thrust his hand into the inner pocket of his coat. It was empty. The thin leather case was gone! His face went grey, for the Red Hundred is no fanciful secret society but a bloody-minded organization with less mercy for bungling brethren than for its sworn enemies. In the thick darkness of the car his nervous ringers groped through all his pockets. There was no doubt at all—the papers had gone.

In the midst of his search the car stopped. He slipped the flat pistol from his pocket. His position was desperate and he was not the kind of man to shirk a risk.

Once there was a brother of the Red Hundred who sold a password to the Secret Police. And the brother escaped from Russia. There was a woman in it, and the story is a mean little story that it is hardly worth the telling Only, the man and the woman escaped, and went to Baden, and Schmidt recognized them from the portraits he had received from headquarters, and one night. . . . You understand that there was nothing clever or neat about it. English newspapers would have described it as a "revolting murder," because the details of the crime were rather shocking The thing that stood to Schmidt's credit in the books of the Society was that the murderer was undiscovered.

The memory of this episode came back to the Anarchist as the car stopped—perhaps this was the thing the police had discovered? Out of the dark corners of his mind came the scene again, and the voice of the man ...

"Don't shoot," said a quiet voice in the gloom outside "here are some friends of yours."

"Von Dunop!" he cried in astonishment. "And Herr Bleaumeau," came the same voice. "Get in, you two."

Two men stumbled into the car, one dumbfounded and silent—save for the wheezing cough—the other blasphemous and voluble.

"Wait, my friend!" raved the bulk of Bleaumeau; "wait! I will make you sorry..."

The two men outside watched the vehicle with its unhappy passengers disappear round a corner and then walked slowly away.

"Extraordinary men," said the taller. "Most," replied the other, and then "Von Dunop—isn't he?"

The shorter man smiled in the darkness. "Given a conscience he is enduring his hour," he said. The pair walked on in silence and turned into Oxford Street as the clock of a church struck eight.

The tall man lifted his walking-stick and a sauntering taxi pulled up at the kerb.

Not until the taxi was spinning along Newgate Street did either of the men speak, and then the shorter asked:

"She is a problem and a difficulty, in a way—yet she is the most dangerous of the lot. And the curious thing about it is that if she were not beautiful and young she would not be a problem at all? Hey! we're very human, George. God made us illogical and the minor businesses of life should not interfere with the great scheme. And the great scheme is that animal men should select animal women for the mothers of their children."

"Venenum in auro bibitur," the other quoted, which shows that he was an extraordinary detective "and so far as I am concerned it matters little to me whether an irresponsible homicide is a beautiful woman or a misshapen negro."

The meeting-place of the great congress was a hall which was originally erected by an enthusiastic Christian gentleman with a weakness for the conversion of Jews to the New Presbyterian Church. With this laudable object it had been opened with great pomp and the singing of anthems and the enthusiastic proselytizer had spoken on that occasion two hours and forty minutes by the clock-After twelve months' labour the Christian gentleman discovered that the advantages of Christianity only appeal to very rich Jews indeed, to the Cohens who become Cowans, to the Isaacs who become Grahames, and to the curious low-down Jews who stand in the same relation to their brethren as White Kaffirs to an European community.

So the hall passed from hand to hand, and, failing to obtain a music and dancing licence, went back to the mission-hall stage.

Successive generations of small boys had destroyed its windows and beplastered its walls. Successive fly-posters had touched its blank face with colour. To-night there was nothing to suggest that there was any business of extraordinary importance being transacted within its walls. A Russian or a Yiddish or any kind of reunion does not greatly excite Middlesex Street, and had little Peter boldly announced that the congress of the Red Hundred were to meet in full session there would have been no local excitement and—if the truth be told—he might still have secured the services of his three policemen and commissionaire.

To this worthy, a neat, cleanly gentleman in uniform, wearing on his breast the medals for the relief of Chitral and the Soudan Campaigns, the two men delivered the perforated halves of their tickets and passed through the outer lobby into a small room. By a door at the other end stood a thin man with a straggling beard His eyes were red-rimmed and weak, he wore long, narrow buttoned boots, and he had a trick of pecking his head forward and sideways like an inquisitive hen.

"You have the word, brothers," he asked, speaking German like one unaccustomed to the language.

The taller of the two strangers shot a swift glance at the sentinel that absorbed the questioner from his cracked patent leather boots to his flamboyant watch chain. Then he answered in Italian:

The air of the crowded hall struck the two men in the face like the blast from a destructor. It was unclean; unhealthy—the scent of an early-morning doss-house.

The hall was packed, the windows were closed and curtained, and as a precautionary measure, little Peter had placed thick blankets before the ventilators.

At one end of the hall was a platform on which stood a semicircle of chairs and in the centre was a table draped with red. On the wall behind the chairs—every one of which was occupied—was a huge red flag bearing in the centre a great white "C." It had been tacked to the wall, but one corner had broken away revealing a part of the painted scroll of the mission workers:

The two intruders pushed their way through a group that were gathered at the door. Three aisles ran the length of the building, and they made their way along the central gangway and found seats near the platform.

A brother was speaking. He was a good and zealous worker but a bad orator. He spoke in German and enunciated commonplace with hoarse emphasis. He said all the things that other men had said and forgotten. "This is the time to strike" was his most notable sentence, and notable only because it evoked a faint buzz of applause. But for the greater length of his speech, the men and women who filled the hard-backed seats of the hall spoke among themselves, loudly and undisguisedly; all the air was heavy with guttural chatter.

Babble, babble, babble, went the talk and harshly through the drone, the banalities of the perspiring anarchist... "Let it be death to the tyrant; death to the capitalist; death to the—to the—the..."

The audience stirred impatiently. The good Bentvitch had spoken beyond his allotted time; and that there were other people to speak—and prosy at that. And it would be ten o'clock before the Woman of Gratz would rise.

The babble was greatest in the comer of the hall, where little Peter, all eyes and startled eyebrows, was talking to an audience of his own.

"It is impossible, it is absurd, it is most foolish!" his thin voice rose almost to a scream and in his agitation he rocked from side to side like a polar bear.

The gesticulating throng about him were all speaking at once, but Peter's voice, high and shrill, cut through the talk.

"I should laugh at it—we should all laugh, but the Woman of Gratz has taken the matter seriously, and she is afraid!"

There were other things said because everybody in the vicinity expressed an opinion. Peter was distressed, but not by the epithets. He was crushed, humiliated, beaten by his tremendous tidings. He was nearly crying at the horrible thought. The Woman of Gratz was afraid! The Woman of Gratz who ... It was unthinkable.

"Tell us about it, Peter," pleaded a dozen voices; but the little man with the tears twinkling on his fair eyelashes waved them off.

So far from his incoherent outburst they had learnt only this—that the Woman of Gratz was afraid.

For this woman—she was a girl really, a slip of a child who should have been finishing her education somewhere in Germany—this same woman had once risen and electrified the world.

And when the men had finished their denunciation of Austria, she rose and talked.

A short-skirted little girl with two long flaxen braids of hair. Thin-legged, flat-chested, angular, hipless That is what the men of Gratz noticed as they smiled behind their hands and wondered why her lather had brought her to the meeting.

But her speech... two hours she spoke and no man stirred. A little flat-chested girl full of sonorous phrases—mostly she had collected them from the talk of Old Joseph's kitchen. But with some power of her own she had spun them together, these inconsiderable truisms, and had endowed them with a wondrous vitality.

They were old, old platitudes if the truth be told, but at some time in the history of revolution, some long dead genius had coined them, and newly fashioned in the furnace of his soul they had shaped men's minds and directed their great and dreadful deeds.

And the phrases—caught up and used and re-used by lesser men who spoke without the soul of the dead author—were phrases and nothing more. Fibre without sap; guiding lamp in which burnt no bright flame; cold ashes of a dead fire.

But she... she had revivified these worn words. The spirit of a hundred shadowy propagandists entered into her, and so the men of Gratz had listened spellbound to the enunciation of a doctrine that they knew better than she, in words and phrases that they themselves had used a thousand times.

So the Woman of Gratz arrived, and they talked about her and circulated her speeches in every language. And she grew. The hollow face of this lank girl filled, and the flat bosom rounded and there came softer lines and curves to her angular figure, and, almost before they realized the fact, she was beautiful.

You may say, as her father said, and as men who were brought into contact with her said, that she did not realize how beautiful she was, but that of course was a he. There were other women in the movement, heroic fools seeking a frowsy martyrdom. As ruthless, as merciless, as wicked as the worst men of the Red Hundred. They were inhuman save in this respect, that they knew the Woman of Gratz was beautiful, and knew that she knew it.

So her fame had grown until her lather died and she went to Russia. Then came a series of outrages which may be categorically and briefly set forth:—

1. General Maloff shot dead by an unknown woman in his private room at the Police Bureau. Moscow.

2. Prince Hazallarkoft shot dead by an unknown woman in the streets of Petrograd.

And the Woman of Gratz leapt to a greater fame. She had been arrested halt a dozen times, and whipped twice, but they could prove nothing against her and elicit nothing from her—and she was very beautiful.

It is difficult for one who takes no critical account of features to describe the woman beautiful. Her eyes, grey and calm, impressed you most; and the thin pencil of eyebrow and the delicate nose, and the lull red lips, and the faultless neck, you looked at them all in turn, but you came back to the eyes. Calm though they were, there was in the tall of the eyelid that sometimes hid hall of them, a hint of a passion that dwelt in that trail body. For with all her development she was still slim and fragile to the eye, and the two men who had waited patiently through the tedium of bad oratory exchanged a word as, to the thundering applause of the waiting delegates, she stepped upon the platform and took the last speaker's place by the side of the red-covered table.

She raised her hand and absolute and complete silence fell on the hall, so much so that her first words sounded strident and shrill, for she had attuned her voice to the din. She recovered her pitch and dropped her voice to a conversational tone.

She stood easily with her hands clasped behind her and made no gesture. The emotion that was within her she conveyed through her wonderful voice. Indeed, the power of the speech lay rather in us delivery than in its substance, for only now and then did she depart from the unwritten text of Anarchism: the right of the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor; the divinity of violence; the sacredness of sacrifice and martyrdom in the cause of enlightenment. One phrase alone stood apart from the commonplaces of her oratory, he was speaking of the Theorists who counsel reform and condemn violence "These Christs who deputize their Calvaries," she called them, with fine scorn, and the hall roared its approval of the imagery.

It was the fury of the applause that disconcerted her; the taller of the two men who sat watching her realized that much. For when the shouting had died down and she strove to resume, she faltered and stammered and then was silent. Then abruptly and with surprising vehemence she began again. Hut she had changed the direction of her oratory, and it was upon another subject that she now spoke. A subject nearer to her at that moment than any other, for her pale cheeks flushed and a feverish light came to her eyes as she spoke.

"... and now, with all our perfect organization, with the world almost within our grasp—there comes somebody who says 'Stop! '—and we who by our acts have terrorized kings and dominated the councils of empires, are ourselves threatened!"

The audience grew deadly silent. They were silent before, but now the silence was painful.

The two men who watched her stirred a little uneasily, as though something in her speech had jarred. Indeed, the suggestion of braggadocio in her assertion of the Red Hundred's power had struck a discordant note.

"We have heard—you have heard—we know of these men who have written to us. They say "—her voice rose—"that we shall not do what we do. They threaten us—they threaten me—that we must change our methods, or they will punish as —as we—punish; kill as we kill ¦-"

There was a murmuring in the audience and men looked at one another in amazement. For terror unmistakable and undisguised was written on her pale face and shone from those wondrous eyes of hers.

Loud voices and the sound of scuffling in the little anteroom interrupted her, and a warning word shouted brought the audience to its feet.

A hundred stealthy hands reached for cunning pockets, but somebody jumped upon a bench, near the entrance, and held up an authoritative hand.

"Gentlemen, there is no occasion for alarm—I am Detective-Superintendent Falmouth from Scotland Yard, and I have no quarrel with the Red Hundred."

"I want two men who were seen to enter this hall: two members of an organization that is outside the Red Hundred. They—"

"Ha!" The woman who still stood upon the platform leant forward with blazing eyes.

"I know—I know!" she cried breathlessly: "the men who threatened us—who threatened me—The Four Just Men!"

CHAPTER II
The Fourth Man

When he had entered the hall he had thrown a swift glance round the place and taken in every detail. He had seen the beaded strip of unpainted wood which guarded the electric light cables, and had improved the opportunity whilst the prosy brother was speaking to make a further reconnaissance. There was a white porcelain switchboard with half a dozen switches at the left-hand side of the platform.

A crash of broken glass, a quick flash of blue flame from the shattered fuses—and the hall was in darkness.

It happened before the detective could spring from his form into the yelling, screaming crowd—before the police officer could get a glance at the man who fired the shots.

In an instant the place was a pandemonium, men shouted aloud, terror-stricken, pushing and elbowing their weaker fellows in their blind panic; the shrill screams of the women and the crash of tumbling furniture rendered the detective's voice inaudible.

"Silence!" he roared above the din; "silence, you fools—curse you! Keep quiet, you miserable cowards—show a light here, Brown. Curtis—Inspector, where are your men's lanterns?"

Then a bright young officer remembered that he had seen gas-brackets in the room, and struggled through the howling mob till he came to the wall and found the gas-fitting with his lantern. He struck a match and lit the gas, and the panic subsided as suddenly as it had begun.

The yells died down and only the normal babble remained. There were other gas-jets in the hall, and these, following the policeman's lead, the cooler members of the crowd lit.

"Guard the door," he said briefly; "the hall is surrounded and they cannot possibly escape." He strode swiftly along the central aisle, followed by two of his men, and with an agile leap, sprang on to the platform and laced the audience. The Woman of Gratz, with a white set face, stood motionless, one hand resting on the little table, the other at her throat. Falmouth raised his hand to enjoin silence, and the lawbreakers obeyed.

"I have no quarrel with the Red Hundred." he said. "By the law of this country it is permissible to hold opinions and propagate doctrines, however objectionable they be—I am here to arrest two men who have broken the laws of this country. Two persons who are part of the organization known as the Four Just Men."

All the time he was speaking his eyes searched the laces before him. He knew that one-half of the audience could not understand him and that the hum of talk that arose as he finished was his speech in course of translation.

The faces he sought he could not discern. To be exact, he hoped that his scrutiny would induce two men, of whose identity he was ignorant, to betray themselves. For Falmouth had never knowingly stood face to face with any member of this mysterious organization.

There are little events, unimportant in themselves, which occasionally lead lo tremendous issues A dynasty has been made complete and a crown succession changed before now by the fascinations trente-et-quarante possessed for a valet de chambre. Similarly, a skidding motor-bus that crashed into a private car in Piccadilly, led to the discovery that there were three vociferous foreign gentlemen imprisoned in the overturned vehicle. It led to the further discovery that the chauffeur had disappeared in the confusion of the collision. In the darkness, comparing notes, the three prisoners had arrived at a conclusion—to wit, that their abduction was a sequel to a mysterious letter each had received, which bore the signature "The Four Just Men."

So in the panic occasioned by the accident, they were sufficiently indiscreet to curse the Four Just Men by name, and the Four Just Men, being a sore topic with the police, they were questioned further, and the end of it was that Superintendent Falmouth motored eastward in great haste and was met in Middlesex Street by a reserve of police specially summoned.

He was at the same disadvantage he had always been—the Four Just Men were to him names only, symbols of a swift remorseless force that struck surely and to the minute—and nothing more.

Two or three of the leaders of the Red Hundred had singled themselves out and drew closer to the platform. There had been a whispered conference—fierce whispers and fiercer gesticulations—and a fine of conduct had been decided upon. It was a curious position for the anarchists, and their present action was mainly dictated by an argument which began "If the police are such fools—"

"We are not aware," said François, the Frenchman, speaking for his companions in faultless English "we are not aware of the identity of the men you seek, but on the understanding that they are not brethren of our Society, and moreover "—he was at a loss for words to put the fantastic situation—"and moreover since they have threatened us—threatened us!" he repeated in bewilderment "we will afford you every assistance."

The two men could not have escaped from the hall. There was a little door near the platform, he had seen that—as the two men he sought had seen it. Escape seemed possible through there: they had thought so, too. But Falmouth knew that the outer door leading from the little vestibule was guarded by two policemen. This was the sum of the discovery made also by the two men he sought. He spoke rapidly to François.

"I want every person in the hall to be vouched for," he said quickly. "Somebody must identify every man, and the identifier must himself be identified."

The arrangements were made with lightning rapidity. From the platform in French, German and Yiddish, the leaders of the Red Hundred explained the plan. Then the police formed a line, and one by one the people came forward, and shyly, suspiciously, or self-consciously, according to their several natures, they passed the police line.

There was a little titter, for Michael is the best-known man in the Order. Some there were who, having passed the line, waited to identify their kinsfolk and fellow-countrymen. Recovering their equanimity when they discovered that this was no deeply laid police plan, they lit cigarettes of peculiar rankness, and the acrid fumes of strange tobaccos rose in a blue vapour.

It was a tall man with the trim beard, who spoke in a guttural tone which was neither German nor Yiddish. He was watching with amused interest the examination.

"Separating the lambs from the goats with a vengeance," he said with a faint smile, and his taciturn companion nodded. Then he asked—

"Their eyes were on the police—and besides I am too quick a shot. Nobody saw me unless—"

They formed part of a struggling line that moved slowly toward the police barrier.

"I fear," said Manfred "that we shall be forced to make our escape in a perfectly obvious way—the bull-at-the-gate method is one that I object to on principle, and it is one that I have never been obliged to employ."

They were speaking all the time in the language of the harsh gutturals, and those who were in their vicinity looked at them in some perplexity, for it is a tongue unlike any that is heard in the Revolutionary Belt.

Closer and closer they grew to the inflexible inquisitor at the end of the police line. Ahead of them was a young man who turned from tune to time as if seeking a friend behind. His was a face that fascinated the shorter of the two men, ever a student of faces. It was a face of deadly pallor, that the dark close-cropped hair and the thick black eyebrows accentuated. Aesthetic in outline, refined in contour, it was the face of a visionary, and in the restless, troubled eyes there lay a hint of the fanatic. He reached the barrier and a dozen eager men stepped forward for the honour of sponsorship. Then he passed and Manfred stepped calmly forward.

"Heinrich Rossenburg of Raz," he mentioned the name of an obscure Transylvanian village.

"Who identifies this man?" asked Falmouth monotonously. Manfred held his breath and stood ready to spring.

It was the spirituel who had gone before him; the dreamer with the face of a priest.

Manfred, calm and smiling, sauntered through the police with a familiar nod to his saviour. Then he heard the challenge that met his companion.

Out of the corner of his eye Manfred saw the man who had vouched for him saunter toward them. He came abreast, then:

"If you care to meet me at Reggiori's at King's Cross, I shall be there in an hour," he said, and Manfred noticed without emotion that this young man spoke also in Arabic.

They passed through the crowd that had gathered about the hall—for the news of the police raid had spread like wildfire through the East End—and gained Aldgate Station before they spoke.

"This is a curious beginning to our enterprise," said Manfred. He seemed neither pleased nor sorry. "I have always thought that Arabic was the safest language in the world in which to talk secrets—one learns wisdom with the years," he added philosophically.

Poiccart examined his well-manicured finger nails as though the problem centred there. "There is no precedent," he said, speaking to himself.

"And he may be an embarrassment," added George; then, "let us wait and see what the hour brings."

The hour brought the man who had befriended them so strangely. It brought also a little in advance of him a fourth man who limped slightly but greeted the two with a rueful smile.

"Motor omnibuses have come since we were here last," he said, and rubbed his leg.

"Nothing worth speaking about," said the other carelessly "and now what is the meaning of your mysterious telephone message?"

Briefly Manfred sketched the events of the night, and the other listened gravely.

"It's a curious situation," he began, when a warning glance from Poiccart arrested him. The subject of their conversation had arrived.

He sat down at the table, and dismissed the fluttering waiter that hung about him.

"I call myself Bernard Courlander," he said simply, "and you are the organization known as the Four Just Men." They did not reply.

"I saw you shoot," he went on evenly "because I had been watching you from the moment when you entered the hall, and when the police adopted the method of identification, I resolved to risk my life and speak for you."

"Exactly," said the young man, nodding "a purely outside view would be that such a course would be a fiendish act of ingratitude, but I have a closer perception of principles, and I recognize that such a sequel to my interference is perfectly logical." He singled out Manfred leaning back on the red plush cushions. "You have so often shown that human life is the least considerable factor in your plan, and have given such evidence of your singleness of purpose, that I am fully satisfied that if my life—or the life of any one of you—stood before the fulfilment of your objects, that life would go, so!" He snapped his fingers.

He took from his pocket a leather case, and from that he extracted a newspaper cutting. Neither of the three men evinced the slightest interest in the paper he unfolded on the white cloth. Their eyes were on his face.

"Here is a list of people slain—for justice' sake," Courlander said, smoothing the creases from the paper "men who the law of the land passed by, sweaters and debauchers, robbers of public funds, corrupters of youth—men who bought justice as you and I buy bread." He folded the paper again. "I have prayed to God that I might one day meet you."

"I want to be with you, to be one of you, to share your campaign and, and—" he hesitated, then added soberly:

This Leon Gonsalez was a famous reader of faces, that much the young man knew, and he turned for the test and met the other's appraising eyes.

"Enthusiast, dreamer, and intellectual, of course," said Gonsalez slowly; "there is reliability which is good, and balance which is better—but—"

"It is a matter of training," answered the other quietly "My lot has been thrown with people who think in a frenzy and act in madness; it is the fault of all the organizations that seek to right wrong by indiscriminate crime, whose sense are senses, who have debased sentiment to sentimentality, and who muddle kings with kingship."

"Yes," said the novitiate "because the Red Hundred carries me a little way along the road I wish to travel."

"Who knows?" replied the other; "there are no straight roads, and you cannot judge where lies your destination by the direction the first line or path takes."

"I do not tell you how great a risk you take upon yourself," said Manfred "nor do I labour the extent of the responsibility you ask to undertake. You are a wealthy man?"

"I do not ask that question aimlessly, yet it would make no difference if you were poor," said Manfred.

"Are you prepared to sell your estates—Buda-Gratz I believe they are called—Highness?"

"I did not doubt but that you knew me," he said; "as to my estates I will sell them without hesitation."

"And," said Manfred slowly, "if we felt disposed to employ this money for what might seem our own personal benefit, would you take exception?"

"Enough," said Manfred "we do not want your money—yet money is the supreme test." He pondered awhile before he spoke again.

"There is the Woman of Gratz," he said abruptly; "at the worst she must be killed."

A too willing compliance, an over-eagerness to agree with the supreme sentence of the "Four," any one thing that might have betrayed the lack of that exact balance of mind, which their word demanded, would have irretrievably condemned him.

Once upon a time there was a fourth who fell riddled with bullets in a Bordeaux cafe, and him they pledged.

* * * * *

In Middlesex Street, in the almost deserted hall, Falmouth stood at bay before an army of reporters.

Every second brought a fresh batch of newspaper men, taxi after taxi came into the dingy street, and the string of vehicles lined up outside the hall was suggestive of a fashionable gathering The Telephone Tragedy was still fresh in the public mind, and it needed no more than the utterance of the magical words "Four Just Men" to fan the spark of interest to flame again. The delegates of the Red Hundred formed a privileged throng in the little wilderness of a forecourt, and through these the journalists circulated industriously.

Tyne of the Megaphone and his youthful assistant, Maynard. slipped through the crowd and found their taxi.

Tyne shouted a direction to the driver and sank back in the seat with a whistle of weariness.

"Did you hear those chaps talking about police protection?" he asked, "all the blessed anarchists from all over the world—and talking like a mothers' meeting! To hear em you would think they were the most responsible members of society that the world had ever seen. Our civilization is a wonderful thing," he added cryptically.

"One said Maynard asked me in very bad French if the conduct of the Four Just Men was actionable!"

At that moment, another question was being put to Falmouth by a leader of the Red Hundred, and Falmouth, a little ruffled in his temper, replied with all the urbanity that he could summon.

"You may have your meetings," he said with some asperity "so long as you do not utter anything calculated to bring about a breach of the peace, you may talk sedition and anarchy till you're blue in the face. Your English friends will tell you how tar you can go—and I might say you can go pretty far—you can advocate the assassination of kings, so long as you don't specify which king; you can plot against governments and denounce armies and grand dukes—in fact, you can do as you please—because that's the law."

"What is—a breach of the peace?" asked his interrogator, repeating the words with difficulty.

François and one Rudolph Starque escorted the Woman of Gratz to her Bloomsbury lodgings that night, and they discussed the detective's answer.

This Starque was a big man, strongly built, with a fleshy face and little pouches under his eyes. He was reputed to be well off, and to have a way with women.

"So it would appear," he said "that we may say 'Let the kings be slain.' but not 'Let the king be slain'; also that we may preach the downfall of governments, but if we say 'Let us go into this café'—how do you call it 'public house, and be rude to the propriétaire' we commit a—er—breach of the peace—ne c'est pas?"

They reached the door of the girl's pension. She had been very quiet during the walk, answering questions that were put to her in monosyllables. She had ample food for thought in the events of the night.

It had come to be regarded as Starque's privilege to stand nearest the girl. Now he took her slim hands in his and looked down at her.

Some one has said the East begins at Bukarest, but there is a touch of the Eastern in every Hungarian, and there is a crudeness in their whole attitude to womankind that shocks the more tender susceptibilities of the Western.

"Good night, little Marian," he said in a low voice. "Some day you will be kinder, and you will not leave me at the door."

CHAPTER III
The Council of the Kings

ON the fourteenth day of January (in the year of the Peace) there was another kind of meeting in London. That it all but coincided with the meeting of the Red Hundred was without significance.

When the Megaphone, bristling with black headlines, and a-riot with portraits and diagrams, was being "made up" on the night of the appearance of the Four Just Men, a little paragraph came flying up the pneumatic tube to the composing room. The printer looked despairingly at the inexorable hands of the clock, pointing to the half-hour after midnight, then he looked at the scribbled words on the paper and handed it without comment to the shirt-sleeved news-editor. The little paper bore on its left hand corner the magic inscription "Must," which being interpreted means "Whatever else comes out of the paper to make room for it, this must go in."

Already the galleys were crowded with matter that had been "killed" to make room for the story of the meeting in Middlesex Street, but "Must" in the editor's handwriting is an order beyond question, and so, at the foot of the column, was inserted the fairly uninteresting announcement that "The International Congress of Hydraulic Engineers" would meet the following day at the Cannon Street Hotel.

It is a fact that editors frequently know more than they care or dare to print. Sometimes it is a matter of policy, sometimes they are bound in honour to suppress news.

Once upon a time with a war looming ahead, it was discovered that the big guns of the fleet—a new pattern gun which had recently been adopted—were totally wrong. That to go into battle with them would mean disaster. There was not an editor in London who did not know this fact—there was not a newspaper that printed it. After a while the error was reclined, the war cloud blew away, and the newspapers, which in the meantime had been talking in an unconcerned way about cyclonic depressions in the Atlantic, turned and delivered their belated attack upon the First Lords. A writer in one of the Service journals—you can always depend upon a Service writer to crowd more nonsense into a square inch of space than any other—let himself go, and denounced the Unpatriotic Press of Great Britain for their "Exposure of Our Weakness." He did not know, poor young man, that every day for three weary months, an anxious editor had been kept out of his bed till two o'clock in the morning to scan the first copies of the paper for a reference to "guns" which might accidently have crept in.

The editor of the Megaphone was a singularly well-informed man and the apparently unimportant eleventh hour "Must" paragraph was the result of anxious thought. Many sheets of copy paper had been spoilt before the simple announcement had been evolved, and then as it was sent forward to the composing-room, the editor rung his bell and asked for Mr. Garrett At that same moment Charles Garrett, the bright particular star of the Megaphone, was explaining to the chief sub-editor, with some volubility, his attitude on the question of work.

"Hullo, Charles," said the editor, glancing up as he entered "I've got a nice little job for you."

"There's a meeting of hydraulic engineers tomorrow at the Cannon Street Hotel," said the editor.

"Water," said Charles oracularly "is a subject in which I find the greatest difficulty in working up the slightest interest."

"There are no tickets and the Press will not be admitted. All that I want you to do is to watch them arrive and depart.

In the middle of playing a most unjustifiable "no trump" hand at the Lamb Club the next afternoon Charles remembered his engagement and left the table hurriedly.

A cab put him down outside the hotel, and looking at his watch he found he had five minutes to wait.

To make sure he asked the hotel porter, who informed him that none of the engineers had arrived.

"They had a meeting here once before," said the porter, "and they all seemed to arrive together on the stroke of the clock."

A remark which gave Charles food for reflection. For he was a man perfectly familiar with a variety of people and customs. He knew the peculiar ways of trade and professional congresses, and they were not like this. There was only one class of person in the world that arrived at an appointed rendezvous to the minute. So that when a smart brougham deposited the first of the "hydraulic engineers" at a minute before the hour, recognizing in the portly person who alighted none other than Baron Von Hedlitz, the confidential chamberlain of H.H. the Duke of Hamburg-Altona, Charles was not greatly surprised. Then with astonishing rapidity, motor-car, brougham and taxi came rattling into the cobbled yard, and one by one the thoughtful correspondent noted M. Palovitch (Secretary to the Presence), Count Mallintani (Confidential Courier to the King of the Savoy), the Marquis de Santo-Strato (Private Secretary to the Prince of the Escorials). He saw, too, the little man who played so important a part in the negotiations between the regicide King of Serbovia and the Powers, and the grave spectacled Greek who stands behind the Sultan, an invisible force, before whom one grand vizier after another had toppled to ruin and death.

"Hydraulic engineers!" said Charles in an undertone "sainted shades of Blowitz!"

It was when Sir Graham Lennoxlove made his appearance that Charles took a step. Sir Graham, alighting hurriedly left a secretary to settle with the driver. As he crossed the narrow strip of pavement that separates the sunken courtyard of the station from the hotel, he caught Charles' reproachful eye, and stopped.

"Hullo. Mr. Garrett," he said suavely "how are all the good people on the Megaphone?" Charles observed his rapid glance round for signs of the reportorial army, and his obvious relief when he discovered that Charles was the sole representative of Fleet Street.

"Hydraulic engineers. Sir Graham!" said Charles in an undertone. "Oh. what a wicked deception!"

"Look here. Garrett," he said, taking the arm of the journalist and walking into the vestibule of the hotel "there will be an awful row if this thing gets into the paper.

"Don't worry," said Charles cheerfully "I haven't the slightest doubt that you have taken every precaution to keep it out—but for the ease of my soul, Sir Graham—what is the game?"

"Well," said the handsome Equerry of the Household, elaborately confidential, "it's a little question of tariff and ship dues that we want to settle unobtrusively."

"Oh" responded the journalist in a relieved tone., "that explains—I'm sorry to have troubled you."

He watched the Equerry mount the carpeted stairs in conversation with the secretary, then he turned slowly and walked along Cannon Street.

Charles knew Europe as did few other men. The gossip and scandal of courts and chancellory were fairly familiar to him. Why Maura was offered the post of Minister of Telegraphs, and why he refused it, what part the Queen-Mother played in the recall of Cassarand why the sugar duty was taken off by Trecchi Incidentally he was sufficiently acquainted with the machinery of governments to know that, when the nations desired to adjust tariffs, they did not call a conference of courtiers.

He did not wait for the meeting to disperse, but returned to the office of the Megaphone. He found the editor alone.

"Why it's a Council of Kings," said the journalist, "just as much as a Council of Kings as though they themselves had driven up in state in their robes and ruby crowns I It's the quaintest, weirdest, confederation since the days when Philip of Burgundy—"

"That's all right," interrupted the editor easily; "all you need to do is to keep a friendly eye on it; the Kings may have their meeting undisturbed."

And Charles, walking through the echoing corridors of Megaphone House, whistled that popular and satirical song, the chorus of which runs—

By kind permission of the Megaphone,
Summer comes when Spring has gone.
And the world goes spinning on,
By permission of the Daily Megaphone.

* * * * *

In the noble hall dedicated to the use of the directors of the public company, that hall wherein the querulous shareholder and the blatant promoter had so often met and waged battle, the Council of the Kings sat in conference It was a big round table at which they sat, with the urbane Santo-Strato in the chair. Outside, before the three doors that led directly or through the little anteroom into the hall, a watchful secretary stood on guard.

"Your excellencies," said the Marquis, speaking in French, "it will be unnecessary for me to explain the object of this conference. We assembled without written charter of authority to examine certain social conditions in so far as they affect the ruling houses of Europe. I cannot too strongly emphasize the unofficial character of this meeting and I must most earnestly express the wish that there shall be no notes taken, and that there shall exist no written memoranda of this conference."

The president looked toward that section of the tail, where with his hands lightly clasped on the table before him, and his deep thoughtful eyes fixed steadfastly on the speaker's tace, sat a young man of extraordinary pallor.

"Whilst I have to thank your excellencies for the honour you have done me in selecting me to preside at this Council," the president went on "it would have been more fitting if His Highness "—he bowed to the young man—"had seen fit to preside, and I am all the more honoured by the election of myself by the knowledge that it was His Highness who proposed my assuming this position."

The president, having acquitted himself of the brief ceremonial portion of his duties, proceeded with the more serious business of the meeting.

"We are assembled," he resumed, speaking with great earnestness. "to consider in all its aspects the attitude of organized bodies which exist for the avowed object of exterminating those High Rulers whom God has called to the Honour and Responsibilities of Kingship."

"How great those responsibilities are, and how so tat the prosperity and commercial greatness of a country is allied with it's monarch's person, we know. He has ceased to be a mere leader of armed men in the held; he has wisely deputized his generalship in warfare to officers of state who have from their boyhood been trained and hardened to the profession of arms. His impetuous word no longer sends a nation at another's throat; no more is he the callous overlord to assuage whose private malice or ambition all Europe must run red with blood. Yet who shall say that his potentialities are diminished?

"His voice is first in the council of the nation. His policy is the policy of the council, his generals are his to make or break, and he stands for the large mind of his country—a whole people concentrated in a Man."

"He is the governing factor that regulates. To check misapplied and untimely enthusiasm, to infuse energy and zeal into sluggish indifference, to maintain one level of national integrity—and that a high one. He is the one patriot, because he is the Land, its servant, its lover, and its High Interpreter.

"This much have I said," the Marquis went on, "that I might make clear to your excellencies my conception of kingship and that I might the easier emphasize the danger from its enemies. For we have men who associate kingship with the iniquities of our social system, iniquities that are a natural result of conditions for which kingship has no remote responsibility, and to ameliorate which no king has the least power. So to revenge themselves upon society, these people aim at the fives of society's head. It kingship be baleful, and if the destruction of a king decided the fate of kingship, posterity, judging them, might find reason for applauding their act, but the death of a king is the birth of a king, and his slaying is a cruel wanton act, just as cruel, just as wanton, as though you or I went out into a crowded London street and killed the first inoffensive passer-by.

"Hut because lie is a king, and for no other reason, he must die. Not for humanity's sake nor in any cause, but as a sacrifice to the blind, insane desire for slaughter."

"And now, your excellencies, anarchy organizes—if the paradox be permitted—and a period of indiscriminate and haphazard murder is to be followed by a period of calculated outrage. We have received information from many sources which points to this, and it is for us to devise a scheme which may be set before our governments, whereby effective precaution may be given those whose trusted friends and servants we are."

"We asked your highness to attend," he went on slowly "because we know that you are more closely in touch with the sentiments and thoughts of these—people. Because your Highness is known to hold views that are not shared by the members of the reigning houses of Europe, and because we felt that of your knowledge you might suggest a remedy where no remedy seems possible."

All eyes were fixed on the young prince and there was a craning of necks when he began to speak.

"I am afraid your excellency credits me with powers, as you credit me with views, that I do not possess," he said easily.

"As to the men you speak of. I am entirely in agreement with you. They are criminals—they are worse, they are fools. If my opinions are advanced, or degenerate—from whichever aspect you regard them—it is the fault or the advantage of an inherited desire for Justice."

And, remembering his illustrious ancestor, the company looked their silent approval.

"Yet no law you can frame, no means you may of your wisdom devise, no wise plan that can be adopted or suggested by this august gathering, can arrest an errant bullet or stay the hand of irresponsible vengeance."

"God. Who alone knows the hearts of men, can foresee what deeds men contemplate—in their hearts. Laws, rigid and terrible, are ineffective barriers against the hate of a madman obsessed with one idea, and that, the slaughter of some one who stands for Abstract Injustice."

He glanced round as he spoke, looking from one face to the other. He was looking, too, for something else. He had seen one of the heavy curtains that hung before a window move ever so slightly. Outside was a low parapet along which a man might crawl without being observed from the darkening street below As he was speaking he looked again at the window and was satisfied.

"So that whatever resolution your excellencies may arrive at," he resumed "the matter will stand as it stood before: whilst fanatical men are prepared to give their lives for an imaginary principle, so long will my cousins, your masters, live an the shadow of the assassin."

It was Palovitch who sprang to his feet when the young man had finished. Palovitch with the square jaw, the deep-set eyes and close-cropped bristling hair. Twice had he stood before his beloved master when death stooped and passed by, twice he had heard the terrible stinging crash of the fulminate bomb under his very feet.

"By God, your excellencies!" he stormed, and thrashed the table with his tremendous hands "I am not here to talk ethics and philosophy. I am hungry for a code, for a punishment, for a reversion to barbarity as a means of checking the barbarians. Your Highness speaks and speaks and leaves us where we were! Must we sit with folded hands and philosophize, whilst anarchy changes dynasties? For a Czar Peter! For some one man to strike panic and fear into these beasts I For the iron and the gibbet and the wheel!"

It was like some terrible prayer he repeated, with his clenched fist raised and the veins in his temples standing out like cords.

In dead silence they received the outburst, and stirred uneasily in their seats when he had finished.

Once Santo-Strato raised a warning palm, but that was the only comment his speech received until the president spoke.

"Excellency," he said in a low voice, a little shaken, "your speech only reveals how great our difficulties are—we are bound by the circumference of humanity. Progress and enlightenment have come as we have restricted within ourselves the instincts of brutality. It is the price we have paid for intellectual advancement—we cannot go back to the Darkness. No! As we find life to-day, as we have inherited civilization, not all the villainies of anarchy could justify the torture chamber of Czar Peter!"

"Then anarchy must go unchecked, the world and the governments of the world must yield to the new government. Terror shall over-rule the rulers and chaos shall command order; there is no remedy in action?"

The voice was so carefully attuned that the members of the council looked from one to the other to see who it was that spoke.

Then they saw him, and such was the self-discipline of these men that not one moved.

A long, dark, tight-fitting coat covered him from his neck to his heels. A broad-brimmed hat of black felt covered his head, and his face from forehead to chin was concealed behind a black mask.

"Your excellency," said the masked figure with the slightest bow "as to whom I am, you best may know. Five years ago I had the honour to save your excellency from the blundering attentions of a political lunatic who desired your life."

"You remember? Your excellency will also remember that later I endeavoured to persuade you to pass—or influence those who could pass—a Political Amnesty Act."

"I am come to give," said the masked man calmly, "and my task will be a thankless one. I have come to give my services to the Council."

"I will destroy anarchy—that is all. It would be wise to forget that I am an outlaw. Wiser still to put aside conventional suspicion. My life is forfeit to a dozen states, for on my hands is the blood of many men."

"I have killed—for justice. The evil-doers the law passed by—I punished. There is not a man of you who doubts that

The eyes that gleamed through the slits in the mask were fixed on Palovitch, and he answered:

"I have killed for justice," he repeated "without hate of passion, and I speak for those who are with me."

"And now," said the mask, "there arises a demoniacal power greater than any. An evil force most evilly employed—and that we have set ourselves to shatter."

It seemed as though every one at the table had forgotten the extraordinary character of the man who spoke. That he was by his confession and to their knowledge, one who had taken life.

"We will fight terror with terror—outrage with outrage. The panic they sow in the hearts of their victims we also will sow. They are human men just as you are. They have the same sense of danger, the same fear of destruction." He stopped, then added simply. "That is all."

Impetuous, strong-willed, and regardless of other men's opinions, Palovitch jumped from his chair and stood before the masked man with his arms akimbo.

So tar he got when there was a blinding flash of light in the courtyard and a rending crash that shook the room and shattered every window.

The masked man was thrown forward by the force of the explosion and clutched the edge of the table.

Outside the shrill throaty shriek of a man in agony and the indescribable roar of a London crowd.

Santo-Strato, bleeding from a cut from a flying splinter of glass, stood pale and erect, a thin trickle of blood dyeing the grey hair at his temple.

"They have begun," he said coolly; "the secret of your meeting was not well kept, your excellencies."

Then the door was thrown open violently, and one of the secretaries, pale as death, rushed in.

"Your excellencies," he stammered "an outrage—a bomb intended for your excellencies—ah!" In his nervousness he wrung his hands.

Through the open door they could see a distracted throng of servants running aimlessly hither and thither along the corridor.

"Permit me to close the door," said the masked man, and as he walked toward the door they saw him putting his hand to his face as if removing the mask. Then he reached the door, and before they had realized the fact he was gone.

"Stop that man!" he cried; but the restraining hand of the young Hapsburg prince was on his arm.

"Your excellency," he said in tones of command and speaking rapidly. "let us accept the situation! There is no reason to imagine that he is responsible for this out-rage; let us rather adjourn and ascertain the extent of the damage."

"A fairly high explosive, sir," he said; "two poor people killed and a part of the hotel smashed up."

Before the inspector could reply there was a stir in the crowd and a party of policemen staggered through bearing a limp bundle. A sergeant with the party doubled forward.

"I think this is the man who did it," he said breathlessly "but I can't quite understand—yes he's dead, and here's his bag with another bomb in it; it was lying beside him."

"A Latin," murmured the Prince "Spanish or Italian. How did he die? I see no marks."

A fluttering little label caught the inspectors eye, and he went over and read it.

CHAPTER IV
Jessen, Alias Long

WHEN I allowed my imagination loose reign, I find mysell wandering in the spirit with Carlton Clark, knee-deep in the snows of the Khyber Passes. I hug my despatches closer, and am cheered, despite the tedious and dangerous journey ahead, with the reflection that the story of Russian intrigue in Afghanistan will set England ablaze when I reach the telegraph wire.

Or with little Angus Maher I pace the length of the platform at Sofia, waiting impatiently for the coming of the Orient Express that will carry me to Vienna with the story of a broken treaty. Or else with Willett, I gasp in the tropical heat, what time my sweating paddlers send the dug-out spinning on the black surface of the Sangar River.

My sympathies being largely journalistic, I can enter into their feelings when they discover that the Great Story of the Faithless Emir, and the Great Story of the Balkan danger, and the no less thrilling story of the Atrocities in Tomboland, will be relegated to page 3.

To the annoyance of the Press of Great Britain, the Megaphone had calmly assumed a proprietorial attitude toward this strange organization.

The Megaphone went to the length of seriously discussing the advisability of giving the Four a sort of official standing, introducing what is now known the world over as the "inter-bacilli" theory, which was, and is, that if the body-politic is suffering from scarlet fever, it is perfectly justifiable to inoculate the virus of measles on the assumption that one virus counter-effected the evils of the other.

"In other words," said the Telephone, with fine contempt, "our appalling contemporary suggests that a specialist in mental disorders who has to treat appendicitis—a disease with which he is unacquainted—has only to drive his patient mad, in order to secure his complete recovery."

Sarcasm, was of course, wasted on the Megaphone. Since it had never taken itself seriously, it could not be expected to pay an inordinate amount of attention to its more bulky rival.

"What I should like," said the editor wistfully, "is a sort of official propaganda from the Four—a sort of inspired manifesto that we could spread into six columns—that's the sort of thing that would give the Telephone a whack in the eye."

Charles Garrett, with his hat on the back of his head, and an apparently inattentive eye fixed on the electrolier, sniffed.

"It could be done—a good man could manage it. Look," he went on artfully "look what you did with His Serene Highness."

"When half the detectives in London and Paris were searching for him, and not a ghost of a clue as to his whereabouts, you put a few facts and few theories together and ran him to earth in Ealing."

"Of course, Balham," said the smooth editor; "now we have—" Charles dropped his eyes to his chief's face and regarded him sternly.

"Not-on-your-life," he said firmly; "this is different. Monkeying round after a German prince who married a chorus girl is a different thing to monkeying after gentlemen who are handing out seven kinds of death-by-misadventure with both hands."

"If it wasn't that I knew you," mused the editor "I should say you were afraid."

"I don't want to put a younger reporter on this job," said the editor sadly. "It would look bad for you; but I'm afraid I must."

"Do," said Charles with animation "do, and put me down ten shillings toward the wreath."

The correspondent left the office a few minutes later with the ghost of a smile at the corners of his mouth, and one fixed determination in the deepest and most secret recesses of his heart. It was rather like Charles that, having by an uncompromising firmness established his right to refuse work of a dangerous character, he should of his own will undertake the task against which he had officially set his face. Perhaps his chief knew him as well as he knew himself, for as Charles, with a last defiant snort, stalked from the office, the smile that came to his lips were reflected on the editor's face.

Charles found himself in Fleet Street, and standing on the edge of the kerb, he surveyed the surging stream of traffic that passed up and down the narrow thoroughfare.

Charles stood for a while thinking, and then he answered a taxi-driver's expectant look with a nod.

"Eh?" said Charles absently, and then "Stanmarino's," he said. But before the famous restaurant was reached he changed his mind. Through a window he shouted out a countermanding order.

"37, Presley Street, Walworth—round by the 'Blue Bob' and the second turning to the left."

Crossing Waterloo Bridge it occurred to him that the taxi might attract attention, so half-way down the Waterloo Road he gave another order, and dismissing the vehicle, he walked the remainder of the way.

Presley Street has pretensions to respectability which find expression in window boxes, all abloom in the summer time with geraniums and fuchsias. It had white curtains changed weekly—mostly on Saturday mornings—and hearthstoned doorsteps, and at least three brass plates, excluding the chimney sweep's at the corner, the object of which is purely of course commercial.

Charles knocked at number thirty-seven, and after a little wait a firm step echoed in the passage, and the door was half opened.

The passage was dark, but Charles could see dimly the thick-set figure of the man who stood waiting silently.

Charles laughed, and the man seemed to recognize the voice and opened the door a little wider.

His host stopped to fasten the door, and Charles heard the snap of the well-oiled lock and the scraping of a chain.

Then with an apology the man pushed past him and opening the door, ushered him into a well-lighted room.

It was not the sort of room one would have expected even in so eminently respectable a thoroughfare as Presley Street.

For the walls were covered plainly with a soft grey paper, and in place of the inevitable Christmas-number chromographs hanging with geometrical regularity, a thick beading ran round the room, and on these rested paintings and etchings which it did not need an expert eye to see that they had some artistic value.

A curious fabric which appeared to be, and was, a piece of native cloth, covered the bare wall, and a reliable-looking little carriage clock stood amidst a strange assortment of eastern idols, quaint scraps of pottery, and queer-shaped weapons. Underfoot a soft rug was all the floor-covering that the room could boast.

The man motioned Charles to a deep-seated chair, one of those chairs with laced leather seats that were the pride of old mission-haunted California.

Then he seated himself near the small table and pushed aside the silver reading-lamp, turned down the page of the book from which he had evidently been reading when the interruption came, and looked inquiringly at his visitor.

"Amusement," said the man, and held the book up so that the title could be seen.

This host of the journalist was in his shirt sleeves, and his dress was the dress of the working-man. He wore no collar, and his shirt was open at the throat. He was sturdily built, clean-shaven, with a strong broad jaw, and a droop to the corners of his mouth. He had a trick of staring with hard grey eyes, and a restlessness of hands that might have deceived you into believing that he was a foreigner.

His stare was one of inquiry, but there was friendliness, even humility, in his smile.

A lesser man than Mr. Long might have been grossly flippant, but this young man—he was thirty-five, but looked older—did not descend to such a level.

His language was the language of a man who addresses an equal, but there was something in his manner which suggested deference.

"You spoke to me about Milton," he went on, "but I find I can't read him. I think it is because he is not sufficiently material." He paused a little. "The only poetry I can read is the poetry of the Bible, and that is because materialism and mysticism are so ingeniously blended—"

Charles did not make the conventional disclaimer, but accepted the other's interpretation of the urgency of his business.

"You know everybody," said Charles "all the queer fish in the basket, and a proportion of them get to know you—in time."

"When other sources of information fail," continued the journalist. "I have never hesitated to come to you—Jessen."

It may be observed that "Mr. Long" at the threshold of the house became "Mr. Jessen" in the intimacy of the inner room.

"I owe more to you than ever you can owe to me," he said earnestly: "you put me on the track "; he waved his hand round the room as though the refinement of the room was the symbol of that track of which he spoke. "You remember that morning?—if you have forgotten, I haven't—when I told you that to forget—I must drink? And you said—"

"I haven't forgotten, Jessen," said the correspondent quietly; "and the fact that you have accomplished all that you have is a proof that there's good stuff in you."

"Now," Charles went on "I want to tell you what I started out to tell: I'm following a big story. It's the Four Just Men story; you know all about it r I see that you do: well, I've got to get into touch with them somehow. I do not for one moment imagine that you can help me, nor do I expect that these chaps have any accomplices amongst the people you know."

"They have not," said Jessen; "I haven't thought it worth while inquiring. Would you like to go to the Guild?" Charles pursed his lips in thought. "Yes," he said slowly "that's an idea; yes, when?"

He reappeared presently fully dressed, wearing a dark overcoat and about his throat a black silk muffler that emphasized the pallor of the strong square face.

Jessen shook his head. "No," he said with a little embarrassment "but—I have given up all my follies and fancies, but this one sticks."

They stood together in the dark street, whilst Jessen made sure of the fastening of the house.

"Now," he said, and in a few minutes they found themselves amidst the raucous confusion of a Walworth Road market-night.

They walked on in silence, then turning into East Street, they threaded a way between loitering shoppers, dodged between stalls overhung by flaring naphtha lamps, and turned sharply into a narrow street.

Both men seemed sure of their ground, for they walked quickly and unhesitatingly, and striking off through a tiny court that connected one malodorous thoroughfare with the other, they stopped simultaneously before the door of what appeared to be a disused factory.

A peaky-faced youth who sat by the door and acted as doorkeeper thrust his hand forward as they entered, but recognizing them drew back without a word.

They ascended the flight of ill-lit stairs that confronted them, and pushing open a door at the head of the stairs, Jessen ushered his friend into a large hall.

It was a curious scene that met the journalist's eye. Well acquainted with "The Guild" as he was, and with its extraordinary composition, he had never yet put his foot inside its portals. Basing his conception upon his knowledge of working men's clubs and philanthropic institutions for the regeneration of degraded youth, he missed the inevitable billiard-table, he missed, too, the table, strewn with month-old literature, but most of all he missed the smell of free coffee.

The floor was covered with sawdust, and about the fire that crackled and blazed at one end of the room there was a semicircle of chairs occupied by men of varying ages. Old-looking young men and young-looking old men, men in rags, men well dressed, men flashily attired in loud clothing and resplendent with shoddy jewellery. And they were drinking.

Two youths at one end of the crescent shared a quart pewter pot; the flashy man whose voice dominated the conversation held a glass of whisky in one beringed hand, and the white-haired man with the scarred face who sat with bowed head listening had a spirit glass half tilled with some colourless fluid.

The flashy man nodded genially, and one of the circle pushed his chair back to give place to Jessen.

"I was just a-sayin' to these lads," continued the flashy one "that takin' one thing with the other, there's worse places than 'stir.'"

"An what's the good of a man tryin' to go straight. The police will pull you all the same: not reportin' change of address, loiterin' with intent; it don't matter what you do if you've been in trouble once, you're sure to get in again."

"Look at me," said the speaker with pride. "I've never tried to go straight—been in twice an' it took six policemen to take me last time, and they had to use the 'slick.'"

Under the veneer of tawdry foppery, Charles detected the animal strength of the criminal.

"Why, when I'm fit, as I am now," the man went on "there ain't two policemen, nor four neither, that could handle me."

"Get away," he suggested, and the man swung round like lightning, but Jessen had his other arm in a grip of iron.

"Get away," he said again; but the man was helpless, and knew it, and after a pause Jessen released his hold.

"The governor's different," he explained easily; "he's got a knack of his own that the police haven't got."

Jessen drew up a chair, and whatever there was in the action that had significance, it was sufficient to procure an immediate silence.

He looked round the attentive' laces that were turned toward him. Charles, an interested spectator, saw the eager faces that bent in his friend's direction, and marvelled not a little at the reproductive qualities of the seed he had sown.

Jessen began to speak slowly, and Charles saw that what he said was in the nature of an address. That these addresses of Jessen were nothing unusual, and that they were welcome, was evident from the attention with which they were received.

"What Falk has been telling you," said Jessen, indicating the man with the rings, "is true—so far as it goes. There are worse places than 'stir,' and it's true that the police don't give an old lag a chance, but that's because a lag won't change his job. And a lag won't change his job because he doesn't know any other trade where he gets money so quickly. Wally"—he jerked his head toward a weedy-looking youth—"Wally there got a stretch for what? For stuff that fetched thirty pounds from a fence. Twelve months hard work for thirty pounds! It works out at about 10s. 6d. a week. And his lawyer and the mouthpiece cost him a fiver out of that. Old Man Garth "—he pointed to the white-headed man with the gin—"did five stretch for less than that, and he's out on brief. His wage works out at about a shilling a week."

"I know that Falk would say," he went on smoothly, "that what I'm saying is outside the bargain; when I fixed up the Guild. I gave my 'Davy that there wouldn't be any parson-talk or Come-All-Ye-Faithful singing. Everybody knows that being on the crook's a mug's game, and I don't want to rub it in. What I've always said and done is in the direction of making you fellows earn bigger money at your own trade."

"There's a man who writes about the army who's been trying to induce soldiers to learn trades, and he started right by making the Tommies dissatisfied with their own trade; and that is what I am trying to do. What did I do with young Isaacs; I didn't preach at him, and didn't pray for him. Ike was one of the finest snide merchants in London. He used to turn out hall-crowns made from pewter pots that defied detection. They rang true and they didn't bend. Ike got three years, and when he came out I found him a job. Did I try to make him a wood-chopper, or a Salvation Army plough boy? No. He'd have been back on the crook in a week if I had. I got a firm of medal makers in Birmingham to take him, and when Ike found himself amongst the plaster moulds and electric baths, and discovered he could work at his own trade honestly, he stuck to it."

"It's the same with all the branches." Jessen went on "only you chaps don't know it. Take tale-pitching—"

It would not be fan to follow Jessen through the elaborate disquisition by which he proved to the satisfaction of his audience that the "confidence" man was a born commercial traveller. Many of his arguments were as unsound as they could well be. He ignored first principles, and glossed over what seemed to such a clear-headed hearer as Charles to be insuperable obstacles in the scheme of regeneration. But his audience was convinced. The fringe of men round the fire was reinforced as he continued. Men came into the room singly, and in twos and threes, and added themselves to the group at the fire. The news had spread that Jessen was talking—they called him "Mr. Long," by the way—and some of the new comers arrived breathlessly, as though they had run in order that no part of the address should be missed.

That the advocate of discontent had succeeded in installing into the minds of his hearers that unrest and dissatisfaction which he held to be the basis of a new moral code, was certain. For every face bore the stamp of introspective doubt.

Interesting as it was. Charles Garrett had not lost sight of the object of his visit, and he fidgeted a little as the speaker proceeded.

Immediately on entering the room he had grasped the exact relationship in which Jessen stood to his pupils. Jessen he knew could put no direct question as to their knowledge of the Four Just Men without raising a feeling of suspicion which would have been fatal to the success of the mission, and indeed would have imperilled the very existence of the "Guild."

It was when Jessen had finished speaking, and had answered a dozen questions fired simultaneously from a dozen quarters, and had answered the questions that had arisen out of these queries, that an opening came from an unexpected quarter.

For, with the serious business of the meeting disposed of, the question took the inevitable facetious turn.

"What trade would you give the Four Just Men?" asked Falk flippantly, and there was a little rumble of laughter.

The journalist's eyes met the reformer's for one second, and through the minds of both men flashed the answer. Jessen's mouth twitched a little, and his restless hands were even more agitated as he replied slowly:

"If anybody can tell me exactly what the Four Just Men—what their particular line of business is, I could reply to that."

"Billy Marks is dead," he continued "deader than a doornail. He knew the Four Just Men: pinched the watch of one an' the notebook of another, an' nearly pinched them."

"Billy was a pup of mine, helped me a bit, an' he came to me one mornin' in a hell of a state of excitement. Said he'd got hold of the Four, and was getting a quid a day from Scotland Yard to watch 'em.

"'What!' said Billy, he was a rare one for meetin' trouble halfway. 'What!' he said, 'with a thousand pounds reward offered, and me with a six-to-four chance of pulling it in!'

"'Very well,' I said, 'it's your look out. I'd sooner try to burgle the Bank of England than take on your job'; but Billy only larfed. 'When you see me again,' he sez, 'you won't know me! 'No more I didn't," concluded the old man primly "for the next time I saw him was in the Pimlico mortuary waitin' identification."

There was a man who sat next to Falk who had been regarding Charles with furtive attention.

"Don't get any idea in your head that the likes of us will ever have anything to do with the Four," he said.

He was a thin man with hollow cheeks, and his clothes hung upon him as upon pegs. "The Four Just Men ain't likely to collaborate with us."

"Why, Mr. Long," the man went on, "the Four Just Men are as likely to come to you as to us; bein' as you are a government official, it's very likely indeed."

Again Jessen and Charles exchanged a swift glance, and in the eyes of the journalist was a strange light.

Once before, in pursuing their vengeance in a South American State, they had come to such a man as Jessen.

Turning the possibilities over in his mind Charles stood deep in thought as Jessen, still speaking, was helped into his overcoat by one of the men.

Then as they left the halt together, passing the custodian of the place at the loot of the stairs, the journalist turned to his companion.

Jessen shook his head. "That is unlikely," he said; "they hardly require outside help."

They walked the rest of the way in silence. Charles shook hands at the door of Jessen's house.

Then he entered his house, and Charles heard again the snap of the lock as the strange man closed the door behind him.

* * * * *

Within twenty-four hours the newspapers recorded the mysterious disappearance of a Mr. J. Long, of Presley Street. Such a disappearance would have been without interest, but for a note that was found on his table. It ran:

That the affair had connexion with the Four was sufficient to give it an extraordinary news value. That the Press was confounded goes without saying. For Mr. Long was a fairly unimportant man with some self-education and a craze for reforming the criminal classes. But the Home Office, which knew Mr. Long as "Mr. Jessen," was greatly perturbed, and the genius of Scotland Yard was employed to discover his whereabouts.

CHAPTER V
The Red Bean

THE Inner Council sent out an urgent call to the men who administer the affairs of the Red Hundred.

Starque came, François, the Frenchman, came, Hollom, the Italian, Paul Mirtisky, George Grabe, the American, and Lauder Bartholomew, the ex-captain of Irregular Cavalry, came also. Batholomew was the best dressed of the men who gathered about the green table in Greek Street, for he had held the King's Commission, which is of itself a sartorial education. People who met him vaguely remembered his name and frowned. They had a dim idea that there was "something against him," but were not quite sure what it was. It had to do with the South African War and a surrender—not an ordinary surrender, but an arrangement with the enemy on a cash basis, and the transference of stores. There was a court-martial, and a cashiering, and afterwards Bartholomew came to England and bombarded first the War Office and then the Press with a sheaf of typewritten grievances. Afterwards he went into the theatrical line of business and appeared in music-hall sketches as "Captain Lauder Bartholomew—the Hero of Dopfontein."

There were other chapters which made good reading, for he figured in a divorce case, ran a society newspaper, owned a few selling platers, and achieved the distinction of appearing in the Racing Calendar in a paragraph which solemnly and officially forbade his presence on Newmarket Heath.

That he should figure on the Inner Council of the Red Hundred is remarkable only in so far as it demonstrates how much out of touch with British sentiments and conditions is the average continental politician. For Bartholomew's secret application to be enrolled a member of the Red Hundred had been received with acclamation, and his promotion to the Inner Council had been rapid. Was he not an English officer—an aristocrat? A member of the most exclusive circle of English society? Thus argued the Red Hundred, to whom a subaltern in a scallywag corps did not differ perceptibly from a Commander of the Household Cavalry.

Bartholomew lied his way to the circle, because he found, as he had all along suspected, that there was a strong business end to Terrorism. There were grants for secret service work, and with his fertile imagination it was not difficult to find excuses and reasons for approaching the financial executive of the Red Hundred at frequent intervals.

He claimed intimacy with Royal personages. He not only stated as a fact that he was in their confidence, but he suggested family ties which reflected little credit upon his progenitors.

The Red Hundred was a paying speculation; membership of the Inner Council was handsomely profitable. He had drawn a bow at a venture when under distress—literally it was a distress warrant issued at the instance of an importunate landlord—he had indited a letter to a revolutionary offering to act as London agent for an organization which was then known as The Friends of the People, but which has since been absorbed into the body corporate of the Red Hundred. It is necessary to deal fully with the antecedents of this man because he played a part in the events that are chronicled in the Council of Justice that had effects further reaching than Bartholomew, the mercenary of anarchism, could in his wildest moments have imagined.

He was one of the seven that gathered in the dingy drawing-room of a Greek Street boarding-house, and it was worthy of note that five of his fellows greeted him with a deference amounting to humility. The exception was Starque, who, arriving late, found an admiring circle hanging upon the words of the young man with the shifty eyes, and he frowned his displeasure.

Starque took his place at the head of the table, and motioned impatiently to the others to be seated. One whose duty it was rose from his chair and locked the door. The windows were shuttered, but he inspected the fastenings: then, taking from his pocket two packs of cards, he scattered them in a confused heap upon the table. Every man produced a handful of money and placed it before him.

Starque was an ingenious man and had learnt many things in Russia. Men who gather round a green baize-covered table with locked doors are apt to be dealt with summarily if no adequate excuse for their presence is evident, and it is more satisfactory to be fined a hundred roubles for gambling than to be dragged off at a moment's notice to an indefinite period of labour in the mines on suspicion of being concerned in a revolutionary plot.

Starque now initiated the business of the evening. If the truth be told, there was little in the earlier proceedings that differed from the procedure of the typical committee.

There were monies to be voted. Bartholomew needed supplies for a trip to Paris where, as the guest of an Illustrious Personage, he hoped to secure information of vital importance to the Hundred.

"This is the fourth vote in two months, comrade," said Starque testily "last time it was for information from your Foreign Office, which proved to be inaccurate."

"If you doubt the wisdom of voting the money, let it pass," he said: "my men fly high—I am not bribing policemen or sous-officiers of diplomacy."

"It is not a question of money," said Starque sullenly "it is a question of results. Money we have in plenty, but the success of our glorious demonstration depends upon the reliability of our information."

"There are matters that need your immediate attention," he said. He took a paper from his pocket, and smoothed it open in front of him. "We have been so long inactive that the tyrants to whom the name of Red Hundred is full of terror, have come to regard themselves as immune from danger. Yet," his voice sank lower "yet we are on the eve of the greatest of our achievements, when the oppressors of t he people shall be moved at one blow! And we will strike such a blow at kingship that shall be remembered in the history of the world, aye, when the victories of Caesar and Alexander are forgotten, and when the scenes of our acts are overlaid with the dust and debris of a thousand years. But that great day is not yet—first we must remove the lesser men that the blow may fall surer; first the servant, then the master." He stabbed the list before him with a thick forefinger.

"A man of some initiative, comrades—he foiled our attempt on his master with some cunning—do I interpret your desire when I say—death?"

Bartholomew, renegade and adventurer, said it mechanically. It was nothing to him a brave gentleman should die for no other reason than that he had served his master faithfully.

"Santo-Strato," read Starque "he also was one who played a conspicuous part in the Council of London—that our martyred comrade endeavoured to destroy."

One by one, Starque read the names, stopping now and again to emphasize some enormity of the man under review.

"Here is Hendrik Houssmann," he said, tapping the paper "of the Berlin Secret Police: an interfering man and a dangerous one. He has already secured the arrest and punishment of one of our comrades.'

"By some means we have been betrayed," the chairman went on, and his voice lacked that confidence which characterized his earlier speech; "there is an organization—an organization of reaction—which has set itself to thwart us. That organization has discovered our identity." He paused a little.

"This morning I received a letter which named me president of the Inner Council and threatened me." Again he hesitated.

His statement was received in dead silence—a silence that perplexed him, for his compensation for the shock he had received had been the anticipation of the sensation his announcement would make.

Only Bartholomew did not speak, and he felt the unspoken accusation of the others.

"I have received no letter," he said with an easy laugh—"only these." He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket and produced two beans. There was nothing peculiar in these save one was a natural black and the other had been dyed red.

"I have not the slightest idea," said Bartholomew with a contemptuous smile; "they came in a little box, such as jewellery is sent in, and were unaccompanied either by letter or anything of the kind. These mysterious messages do not greatly alarm me."

"But what does it mean?" persisted Starque, and every neck was craned toward the seeds; "they must have some significance—think."

"So far as I know, they are beyond explanation," he said carelessly: "neither red nor black beans have played any conspicuous part in my life, so far as I—"

He stopped short and they saw a wave of colour rush to his face, then die away, leaving it deadly pale.

"Let me sec," faltered Bartholomew, and he took up the red bean with a hand that shook.

The explanation might have been possible had he realized earlier the purport of the message he had received, but now with six pairs of suspicious eyes turned upon him, and with his confusion duly noted, his hesitation would tell against him.

"Years ago," he began, holding his voice steady. "I was a member of such an organization as this: and—and there was a traitor." The story was plain to him now, and he recovered his balance. "The traitor was discovered and we balloted for his life. There was an equal number for death and immunity, and I as president had to give the casting vote. A red bean was for life and a black for death—and I cast my vote for the man's death."

He saw the impression his invention had created and elaborated the story. Starque, holding the red bean in his hand, examined it carefully.

"I have reason to think that by my action I made many enemies, one of whom probably sent this reminder." He breathed an inward sigh of relief as he saw the clouds of doubt lifting from the faces about him. Then—

Nobody saw Bartholomew bite his lip, because his hand was caressing his soft black moustache. What they all observed was the well simulated surprise expressed in the lift of his eyebrows.

"The thousand pounds?" he said puzzled, then he laughed. "Oh, I see you, too, have heard the story—we found the traitor had accepted that sum to betray us—and this we confiscated for the benefit of the Society—and rightly so," he added indignantly.

The murmur of approbation relieved him of any fear as to the result of his explanation.

"I did not know the story," he said, "but I did see the '£1.000' which had been scratched on the side of the red bean; but this brings us no nearer to the solution of the mystery. Who has betrayed us to the Four Just Men?"

There came, as he spoke, a gentle tapping on the door of the room. François, who sat at the president's right hand, rose stealthily and tiptoed to the door.

Somebody spoke in German, and the voice carried so that every man knew the speaker.

"The Woman of Gratz," said Bartholomew, and in his eagerness he rose to his feet.

If one sought for the cause of friction between Starque and the ex-captain of Irregular Cavalry, here was the end of the search. The flame that came to the eyes of these two men as she entered the room told the story.

Starque, heavily made, animal man to his finger-tips, rose to greet her, his face aglow.

She was dressed well enough, with a rich sable coat that fitted tightly to her sinuous figure, and a fur toque upon her beautiful head.

Bartholomew, like his rival, had a way with women; but it was a gentle way, overladen with Western conventions and hedged about with set proprieties. That he was a contemptible villain according to our conceptions is true, but he had received a rudimentary training in the world of gentlemen. He had moved amongst men who took their hats off to their women-kind, and who controlled their actions by a nebulous code. Yet he behaved with greater extravagance than did Starque, for he held her hand in his, looking into her eyes, whilst Starque fidgeted impatiently.

"Comrade," at last he said testily, "we will postpone our talk with our little Maria. It would be bad for her to think that she is holding us from our work—and there are the Four..."

Starque brought his fist with a crash down on the table. "You—you! They have dared threaten you? By Heaven—"

"Yes," she went on, and it seemed that her rich sweet voice grew a little husky; "they have threatened—me."

She loosened the furs at her throat as though the room had suddenly become hot and the atmosphere unbreathable.

The torrent of words that came tumbling to the lips of Starque was arrested by the look in her face.

"It isn't death that I fear," she went on slowly; "indeed, I scarcely know what I fear."

Bartholomew, superficial and untouched by the tragic mystery of her voice, broke in upon their silence. For silenced they were by the girl's distress.

"With such men as we about, why need you notice the theatrical play of these Four Just Men?" he asked, with a laugh; then he remembered the two little beans and became suddenly silent with the rest.

So complete and inexplicable was the chill that had come to them with the pronouncement of the name of their enemy, and so absolutely did the spectacle of the Woman of Gratz on the verge of tears move them, that they heard then what none had heard before—the ticking of a clock.

It was the habit of many years that carried Bartholomew's hand to his pocket, mechanically he drew out his watch, and automatically he cast his eyes about the room for the clock wherewith to check the time.

It was one of those incongruous pieces of commonplace that intrude upon tragedy, but it loosened the tongues of the council, and they all spoke together.

"Maria, Maria," he chided softly "this is folly. What! the Woman of Gratz who defied all Russia—who stood before Mirtowsky and bade him defiance—what is it?"

For the second time that night the Englishman's face was white, and he stood clutching the edge of the table with staring eyes and with his lower jaw drooping.

"God, man!" cried Starque, seizing him by the arm "what is it—speak—you are frightening her—"

Starque seized the cloth and lifted it. Underneath, in the shadow, he saw the black box and heard the ominous whir of clock-work.

Again and again he flung his huge bulk against the door, but the men who pressed round him, whimpering and slobbering in their pitiable fright, crowded about him and gave him no room.

With his strong arms he threw them aside left and right; then leapt at the door, bringing all his weight and strength to bear, and the door crashed open.

Alone of the party the Woman of Gratz preserved her calm. She stood by the table, her foot almost touching the accursed machine, and she felt the faint vibrations of its working. Then Starque caught her up in his arms and through the narrow passage he half led, half carried, her till they reached the street in safety.

The passing pedestrians saw the dishevelled group, and, scenting trouble, gathered about them.

"What was it? What was it?" whispered François, but Starque pushed him aside with a snarl.

A taxi was passing and he called it, and lifting the girl inside, he shouted directions and sprang in after her.

They had left the door of the house wide open and in the hall a flickering gas-jet gyrated wildly.

The records were such as could not be left lying about with impunity. For all he knew these madmen had implicated him in their infernal writings. He was not without courage, but it needed all he possessed to re-enter the room where a little machine in a black box ticked mysteriously.

"On the table," almost whispered the other. "Mon Dieu! what disaster!" The Englishman made up his mind.

He sprang up the three steps into the hall. Two paces brought him to the door, another stride to the table. He heard the "tick" of the machine, he gave one glance to the table and another to the floor, and was out again in the street before he had taken two long breaths.

* * * * *

"Manfred," said Poiccart suddenly—there had been a lull in the talk—"shall we need our friend?" Manfred smiled.

"I think so," said Manfred quietly; "I am not so sure that the cheap alarm clock we put in the biscuit box will be a sufficient warning to the Inner Council—here is Leon."

Then they saw that the sleeve of his dress coat was torn, and Manfred remarked the stained handkerchief that was lightly bound round one hand.

"Very well," replied the other; "they bolted like sheep, and I had nothing to do but to walk in and carry away the extremely interesting record of sentences they have passed."

"I think so," said Leon. "I noticed he left the black bean behind him in his flight—so I presume we shall see the red."

CHAPTER VI
The Council of Justice

LAUDER BARTHOLOMEW knew a man who was farming in Uganda. It was not remarkable that he should suddenly remember his friend's existence and call to mind a three years' old invitation to spend a winter in that part of Africa. Bartholomew had a club It was euphemistically styled in all the best directories as "Social, Literary and Dramatic," but knowing men about town called it by a shorter title. To them it was a "night club." Poorly as were the literary members catered for, there were certain weeklies. The Times, and a collection of complimentary time tables to be obtained for the asking, and Bartholomew sought and found particulars of sailings. He might leave London on the next morning and overtake (via Brindisi and Suez) the German boat that would land him in Uganda in a couple of weeks.

To tell the truth, the Red Hundred was becoming too much of a serious business: he had a feeling that he was suspect, and was more certain that the end of his unlimited financing was in sight. That much he had long since recognized, and had made his plans accordingly. As to the Four Just Men, they would come in with Menshikoff; it would mean only a duplication of treachery. Turning the pages of a Bradshaw, he mentally reviewed his position. He had in hand some seven hundred pounds, and his liabilities were of no account because the necessity for discharging them never occurred to him. Seven hundred pounds—and the red bean, and Menshikoff.

The obvious difficulty was to get into touch with the Four. Time was everything and one could not put an advertisement in the paper: "If the Four Just Men will communicate with L B they will hear of something to their advantage."

Nor was it expedient to make in the agony columns of the London Press even the most guarded reference to Red Beans after what had occurred at the Council Meeting. The matter of the Embassy was simple. Under his breath he cursed the Four Just Men for their unbusinesslike communication. If only they had mentioned or hinted at some rendezvous the thing might have been arranged.

A man in evening dress asked him if he had finished with the Bradshaw. He resigned it ungraciously, and calling a club waiter, ordered a whisky and soda and flung himself into a chair to think out a solution.

"So sorry to have interrupted, but I've been called abroad at a moment's notice," he said.

"One is always meeting and forgetting," he smiled. "I thought I knew you, but I cannot quite place you." Not only the face but the voice was strangely familiar.

"Not English," was Bartholomew's mental analysis "possibly French, more likely Slav—who the dickens can it be?"

In a way he was glad of the diversion, and found himself engaged in a pleasant discussion on fly fishing.

As the hands of the clock pointed to midnight, the stranger yawned and got up from his chair.

Bartholomew had no definite plans for spending the next hour, so he assented and the two men left the club together. They strolled across Piccadilly Circus and into Piccadilly, chatting pleasantly.

Through Half Moon Street into Berkeley Square, deserted and silent, the two men sauntered, then the stranger stopped.

Then they parted, and the ex-captain walked back by the way he had come, picking up again the threads of the problem that had filled his mind in the earlier part of the evening.

Halfway down Half Moon Street was a motor-car, and as he came abreast, a man who stood by the kerb—and whom he had mistaken for a waiting chauffeur—barred his further progress.

"If," went on his imperturbable examiner "if you have decided on the red—here is the car, if you will be pleased to enter."

"Under the circumstances," said the man without emotion "my master is of opinion that for his greater safety, he must take steps to ensure your neutrality."

There was no menace in the tone, but an icy matter-of-fact confidence that shocked this hardened adventurer.

In the dim light he saw something in the man's hand—a thin bright something that glittered.

* * * * *

Bartholomew had regained a little of his self-assurance by the time he stood before the men.

He was not unused to masked tribunals. There had been one such since his elevation to the Inner Council.

But these four men were in evening dress, and the stagey setting that had characterized the Red Hundreds Court of Justice was absent. There was no weird adjustment of lights, or tollings of bells, or parting of sombre draperies. None of the cheap trickery of the Inner Council.

The room was evidently a drawing-room, very much like a hundred other drawing-rooms he had seen.

The four men who sat at equal distance before him were sufficiently ordinary in appearance save for their masks. He thought one of them wore a beard, but he was not sure. This man did most of the speaking.

"Years ago," he said quietly "there was an officer who betrayed his country and his comrades."

"He was in charge of a post at which was stored a great supply of food-stuffs and ammunition," the went mask on. "There was a commandant of the enemy who wanted those stores, but had not sufficient men to rush the garrison."

"So the commandant hit upon the ingenious plan of offering a bribe. It was a risky thing, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, it would have been a futile business. Indeed, I am sure that I am understating the proportion—but the wily old commandant knew his man."

"No correspondence passed," Manfred went on; "our officer was too cunning for that, but it was arranged that the officer's answer should be conveyed thus."

He opened his hand and Bartholomew saw two beans, one red and the other black, reposing in the palm.

"The black was to be a refusal, the red an acceptance, the terms were to be scratched on the side of the red bean with a needle—and the sum agreed was £ 1,000."

"Exactly that sum we offer you to place us from time to time in possession of such information as we require concerning the movements of the Red Hundred."

"You will not refuse," replied the mask calmly: "you need the money, and you have even now under consideration a plan for cutting yourself adrift from your friends."

"I know a great deal. For instance, I know that you contemplate immediate flight—by the way, are you aware that the Lucus Woerhmann is in dock at Naples with a leaking boiler?"

Bartholomew started, as well he might, for nobody but himself knew that the Lucus Woerhmann was the ship he had hoped to overtake at Suez.

"I do not ask credit for supernatural powers," he said; "frankly, it was the merest guesswork, but you must abandon your trip. It is necessary for our greater success that you should remain."

Bartholomew bit his lips. This scheme did not completely fall in with his plans. He affected a sudden geniality.

"Well, if I must. I must," he said heartily, "and since I agree, may I ask whom I have the honour of addressing, and further, since I am now your confidential agent, that I may see the faces of my employers?"

"You need no introduction to us," said Manfred coldly "and you will understand we do not intend taking you into our confidence. Our agreement is that we share your confidence, not that you shall share ours."

"I must know something," said Bartholomew doggedly. "What am I to do? Where am I to report? How shall I be paid?"

"You will be paid when your work is completed." Manfred reached out his hand toward a little table that stood within his reach.

The traitor sprang back, fearing he knew not what. "Come—do not be afraid," said a voice. "What does this mean?" cried Bartholomew, and stepped forward.

He felt the floor beneath him yield and tried to spring backwards, but already he had lost his balance, and with a scream of terror he felt himself falling, falling...

* * * * *

Somebody was shaking his arm and he was conscious of an icy coldness and a gusty raw wind that buffeted his face.

First of all he saw an iron camel with a load on its back; then he realized dimly that it was the ornamental support of a garden seat; then he saw a dull grey parapet of grimy stone. He was sitting on a seat on the Thames Embankment, and a policeman was shaking him, not urgently to wakefulness.

He staggered to his feet unsteadily. He was wearing a fur coat that was not his.

"Ah, that's more than I can tell you—you weren't here ten minutes ago, that I'll swear."

He left the policeman perfectly satisfied with the result of his morning's work and drove home to his lodgings.

He remembered the Four, he remembered the suddenly darkened room, he remembered falling—

Perhaps he lost consciousness, yet he could not have been injured by his fall. He had a faint recollection of somebody telling him to breathe and of inhaling a sweet sickly vapour—and that was all.

The coat was not his. He thrust his hands into both pockets and found a letter. Did he but know it was of the peculiar texture that had made the grey paper of the Four Just Men famous throughout Europe.

"For faithful service, you will be rewarded; for treachery there will be no net to break your fall."

He shivered again. Then his impotence, his helplessness, enraged him, and he swore softly and weakly.

He was ignorant of the Locality in which the interview had taken place. On his way thither he had tried in vain to follow the direction the shuttered motor-car had taken.

By what method the Four would convey their instructions he had no idea. He was quite satisfied that they would find a way.

He reached his flat with his head swimming from the effects of the drug they had given him, and flung himself, dressed as he was, upon his bed and slept. He slept well into the afternoon, then rose stiff and irritable. A bath and a change refreshed him, and he walked out to keep an appointment he had made.

On his way he remembered impatiently that there was a call to the council at five o'clock. It reminded him of his old rehearsal days. Then he recollected that no place had been fixed for the council meeting. He would find the quiet François in Leicester Square, so he turned his steps in that direction.

François, patient, smiling, and as deferential as ever, awaited him. "The council was held at two o'clock," he said "and I am to tell you that we have decided on two projects." He looked left and right, with elaborate caution.

"There is at Gravesend—" he pronounced it "Gwayvse-end"—"a battleship that has put in for stores. It is the Grondovitch. It will be fresh in your mind that the captain is the nobleman Svardo—we have no reason to love him."

Again François went through the pantomime that had so annoyed his companion before.

"The Bank—the Bank of England I Why, you're mad—you have taken leave of your senses!"

"It is the order," François said again; then abruptly, "Au revoir," he said, and with his extravagant little bow, was gone.

If the need for cutting himself adrift from the Red Hundred existed before, the necessity was multiplied now a thousand times. Any lingering doubt he might have had, any remote twinge of conscience at the part he was playing, these vanished.

He glanced at his watch, and hurried to his destination. It was the Red Room of the Hôtel Larboune that he sought.

He stood by the solitary table at which Bartholomew sat, and chatted pleasantly and respectfully. This much the other patrons of the establishment noticed idly, and wondered whether it was racing or house property that the two had in common.

"... I am inclined to disbelieve the story of the Grondovitch, but the Embassy and the commander shall know—when do you leave?"

The waiter nodded and flicked some cigarette ash from the table with his napkin.

"Why not," said the waiter, looking thoughtfully out of the window "why not take her with you?"

There had been the germ of such a thought in Bartholomew's mind, but he had never given form to it—even to himself.

"She is very beautiful, and, it occurred to me, not altogether indifferent to your attractions—that kind of woman has a penchant for your type, and frankly we would gladly see her out of the way—or dead."

M. Menshikoff was by no means vindictive, but there was obvious sincerity in his voice when he pronounced the last two words. M. Menshikoff had been right-hand man of the Grand Master of the Secret Police for too many years to feel any qualms at the project of removing an enemy to the system.

"I thought we had her once," he said meditatively; "they would have flogged her in the fortress of St. Peter and Paul, but I stopped them. She was grateful I think, and almost human... but it passed off."

Bartholomew paid for his drink, and ostentatiously tipped the obsequious man before him. He remembered as he did so that Menshikoff was reputedly a millionaire.

"Your change, m'sieur," said Menshikoff gravely, and he handed back a few jingling coppers and two tightly folded bank-notes for a hundred pounds. He was a believer in the principle of "pay as you go." Bartholomew pocketed the money carelessly.

CHAPTER VII
Princess Revolutionary

THE Woman of Gratz was very human. This I have reason to know. But to Bartholomew she seemed a thing of ice, passionless. Just a beautiful woman who sat stiffly in a straight-backed chair, regarding him with calm, questioning eyes. All that is chronicled here happened in her hat in Bloomsbury on the evening of the day following the interview with Menshikoff. Her coolness chilled him, and strangled the very passion of his speech, and what he said came haltingly, and sounded lame and unconvincing.

"But why?" that was all she asked. Thrice he had paused appealingly, hoping for encouragement, but her answer had been the same.

He spoke incoherently, wildly. The fear of the Four on the one hand and the dread of the Reds on the other, were getting on his nerves.

He saw a chance of escape from both, freedom from the four-walled control of these organizations, and before him the wide expanse of a trackless wilderness, where the vengeance of neither could follow.

The very thought of the freedom ahead overcame the depression her coldness laid upon him.

"Maria—don't you see? You are wasting your life doing this man's work—this assassin's work. You were made for love and for me!" He caught her hand and she did not withdraw it, but the palm he pressed was unresponsive and the curious searching eyes did not leave his face.

"But why?" she asked again, "and how? I do not love you, I shall never love any man—and there is the work for you and the work for me. There is the cause and your oath. Your comrades. Rudolph—"

He started up and flung away her hand. For a moment he stood over her, glowering down at her upturned face.

"Work!—Comrades!" he grated with a laugh. "D'ye think I'm going to risk my precious neck any further?"

He did not hear the door open softly, nor the footfall of the two men who entered.

"Are you blind as well as mad?" he went on brutally. "Don't you see that the thing is finished? The Four Just Men have us all in the hollow of their hands. They've got us like that!" He snapped his fingers contemptuously.

"They know everything—even to the attempt that is to be made on the Prince of the Escorials! Ha f that startles you—yet it is true, every word I say—they know."

"There are traitors always—when the pay for treachery is good," he said easily; "but traitor or no traitor. London is too hot for you and me."

"And for you," he said savagely; he snatched up her hand again. "You've got to come—do you hear—you beautiful snow woman—you've got to come with me!"

He drew her to him, but a hand grasped his arm, and he turned to meet the face of Starque, livid and puckered, and creased with silent anger.

Starque was prepared for the knife or for the pistol, but not for the blow that caught him full in the face and sent him staggering back to the wall.

He recovered himself quickly, and motioned to François, who turned and locked the door.

Starque, breathing quickly, wiped the blood from his face with the back of his hand.

"Wait," he said in his guttural tone; "before you go there is a matter to be settled."

"It is not the blow," breathed Starque; "that is nothing; it is the matter of the Inner Council—traitor!"

Bartholomew had very little time to decide upon his course of action. He was unarmed; but he knew instinctively that there would be no shooting. It was the knife he had to fear and he grasped the back of a chair. If he could keep them at a distance he might reach the door and get safely away. He cursed his folly that he had delayed making the coup that would have so effectively laid Starque by the heels.

"You have betrayed us to the Four Just Men—but that we might never have known, for the Four have no servants to talk. But you sold us to the Embassy—and that was your undoing."

"We sent you a message telling you of our intention to destroy the Bank of England. The Bank was warned—by the Four. We told you of the attempt to be made on the Grondovitch—the captain was warned by the Embassy—you are doubly convicted. No such attempts were ever contemplated. They were invented for your particular benefit, and you fell into the trap."

Bartholomew took a fresh grip of the chair. He realized vaguely that he was face to face with death, and for one second he was seized with a wild panic.

"Last night," Starque went on deliberately, "the Council met secretly, and your name was read from the list."

"And the Council said with one voice..." Starque paused to look at the Woman of Gratz. Imperturbable she stood with folded hands, neither approving nor dissenting. Momentarily Bartholomew's eyes too sought her face—but he saw neither pity nor condemnation. It was the face of Fate, inexorable, unreasoning, inevitable.

"Death was the sentence," said Starque in so soft a voice that the man facing him could scarcely hear him. "Death..."

"Damn you..." whimpered the stricken man, and his helpless hands groped at his chest... then he slid to his knees and François struck precisely...

He was shaking a little, for this was new work for him. The forces of jealousy and fear for his personal safety had caused him to take upon himself the office that on other occasions he left to lesser men.

Starque flushed, for the voice sounded almost strident coming after the whispered conference between his companion and himself.

He stepped gingerly back to where the body was lying, made a circuit about it, and pulled down the blind. He could not have explained the instinct that made him do this. Then he came back to the door and gently turned the handle, beckoning the others. It seemed to him that the handle turned itself, or that somebody on the other side was turning at the same time.

That this was so he discovered: for the door suddenly jerked open, sending him staggering backward, and a man stood on the threshold.

With the drawn blind, the room was in semi-darkness, and the intruder, standing motionless in the doorway, could see nothing but the shadowy figures of the inmates.

As he waited he was joined by three others, and he spoke rapidly in a language that Starque, himself no mean linguist, could not understand. One of his companions opened the door of the student's room and brought out something that he handed to the watcher on the threshold.

Then the man entered the room alone and closed the door behind him. Not quite close, for he had trailed what looked like a thick cord behind him and this prevented the shutting of the door.

"I want Bartholomew, who came into this room half an hour ago," replied the intruder.

"He has left," said Starque, and in the darkness he felt at his feet for the dead man—he needed the knife.

"That is a he," said the stranger coolly; "neither he nor you, Rudolph Starque, nor the Woman of Gratz, nor the murderer François has left."

"Monsieur knows too much," said Starque evenly, and lurched forward, swinging his knife.

"Keep your distance," warned the stranger, and at that moment Starque and the silent François sprang forward and struck...

The exquisite agony of the shock that met them paralysed them for the moment. The sprayed threads of the "live" wire the man held before him like a shield jerked the knife from Starque's hands, and he heard François groan as he fell.

"You are foolish," said the voice again; "and you, madame, do not move, I beg—tell me what has become of Bartholomew."

"He was a traitor—so we killed him," she continued calmly enough. "What will you do—you, who stand as a self-constituted judge?"

"You are seeking the light—as we all seek it," she said, unmoved, and she switched on the light.

He saw her standing near the body of the man she had lured to his death, scornful, defiant, and strangely aloof from the sordidness of the tragedy she had all but instigated.

She saw a tanned man of thirty-five, with deep grave eyes, a broad forehead, and a trim pointed beard. A man of inches, with strength in every line of his fine figure, and strength in every feature of his face.

She stared at him insolently, uncaring, but before the mastery of his eyes, she lowered her lids.

It seemed the other actors in the drama were so inconsiderable as to be worthy of notice. The dead man in his grotesque posture, the unconscious murderer at his feet, and Starque, dazed and stunned, crouching by the wall.

"Here is the light you want," she went on "not so easily do we of the Red Hundred illuminate the gloom of despair and oppression—"

"Spare me your speech-making," said Manfred coldly, and the scorn in his voice struck her like the lash of a whip. For the first time the colour came to her face and her eyes lit with anger.

"You have bad counsellors," Manfred went on, "you, who talk of autocrats and corrupt kingship—what are you but a puppet living on flattery? Is it your whim that you should br regarded as a conspirator—a Corday. And when you are acclaimed Princess Revolutionary, it is satisfactory to your vanity—more satisfactory than your title to be hailed Princess Beautiful." He chose his words nicely.

"Yet men—such men as these," he indicated Starque "think only of the Princess Beautiful—not the lady of the inspiring Platitudes; not the frail, heroic Patriot of the Flaming Words, but the warm flesh and blood woman, lovable and adorable."

He spoke in German, and there were finer shades of meaning in his speech that cannot be exactly or literally translated. He spoke of a purpose, evenly and without emotion. He intended to wound, and wound deeply, and he knew he had succeeded.

He saw the rapid rise and fall of her bosom as she strove to regain control of herself, and he saw, too, the blood on her lips where her sharp white teeth bit.

"I shall know you again," she said with an intensity of passion that made her voice tremble. "I shall look for you and find you, and be it for the Princess Revolutionary or the Princess Beautiful who brings about your punishment, be sure I shall strike hard."

"That is as it may be," he said calmly; "for the moment you are powerless, if I willed it you would be powerless for ever—for the moment it is my wish that you should go."

"There is your road," he said when she hesitated. She was helpless: the humiliation was maddening.

She could have bitten her tongue at the slip she made. She as a woman had appealed to him as a man! This was the greatest humiliation of all.

She was scarcely a foot from him, and she turned and faced him, her lips parted and the black devil of hate in her eyes.

Then she turned quickly and disappeared through the door, and Manfred waited until her footsteps had died away before he stooped to the half-conscious Starque and jerked him to his feet.

CHAPTER VIII
The Government and Mr. Jessen

IN recording the events that followed almost immediately upon the Cannon Street outrage, I have confined myself to those which I know to have been the direct outcome of the Red Hundred propaganda and the counter activity of the Four Just Men.

Thus I make no reference to the explosion at Woolwich Arsenal, which was credited to the Red Hundred, knowing, as I do, that the calamity was due to the carelessness of a workman. Nor to the blowing up of the main in Oxford Street which was a much more simple explanation than the fantastic theories of the Megaphone would have you imagine. This was not the first time that a fused wire and a leaking gas main brought about the upheaval of a public thoroughfare, and the elaborate plot with which organized anarchy was credited was without existence.'

I think the most conscientiously accurate history of the Red Hundred movement is that set forth in the series of ten articles contributed to the Morning Leader by Harold Ashton under the title of "Forty Days of Terrorism," and, whilst I think the author frequently fails from lack of sympathy for the Four Just Men to thoroughly appreciate the single-mindedness of this extraordinary band of men, yet I shall always regard "Forty Days of Terrorism" as being the standard history of the movement, and its failure.

On one point in the history alone I find myself in opposition to Mr. Ashton, and that is the exact connexion between the discovery of the Carlby Mansion Tragedy, and the extraordinary return of Mr. Jessen of 37, Presley Street.

It is perhaps indiscreet of me to refer at so early a stage to this return of Jessen's, because whilst taking exception to the theories put forward in "Forty Days of Terrorism," I am not prepared to go into the evidence on which I base my theories.

The popular story is that one morning Mr. Jessen walked out of his house and demanded from the astonished milkman why he had omitted to leave his morning supply. Remembering that the disappearance of "Long "—perhaps it would be less confusing to call him the name by which he was known in Presley Street—had created an extraordinary sensation; that pictures of his house and the interior of his house had appeared in all the newspapers; that the newspaper crime experts had published columns upon columns of speculative theories, and that 37, Presley Street had for some weeks been the Mecca of the morbid-minded, who, standing outside, stared the unpretentious facade out of countenance for hours on end; you may imagine that the milkman legend had the exact journalistic touch that would appeal to a public whose minds had been trained by generations of magazine-story writers to just such a dénouement as this.

The truth is that Mr. Long, upon coming to life, went immediately to the Home Office, and told his story to the Under Secretary. He did not drive up in a taxi, nor was he lifted out in a state of exhaustion as one newspaper had erroneously had it, but he arrived on the top of a motor omnibus which passed the door, and was ushered into the Presence almost at once. When Mr. Long had told his story he was taken to the Home Secretary himself, and the Chief Commissioner was sent for. and came hurriedly from Scotland Yard, accompanied by Superintendent Falmouth. All this is made clear in Mr. Ashton's book.

"For some extraordinary reason," I quote the same authority. "Long, or Jessen, seems by means of documents in his possession to have explained to the satisfaction of the Home Secretary and the Police Authorities his own position in the matter, and moreover to have inspired the right hon. gentleman with these mysterious documents, that Mr. Ridge-way, so far from accepting the resignation that Jessen placed in his hands, reinstated him in his position."

As to how two of these documents came to Jessen or to the Four Just Men. Mr. Ashton is very wisely silent, not attempting to solve a mystery which puzzled both the Quai d'Orsay and Petrograd. For these two official forms, signed in the one case by the French President and in the other with the sprawling signature of Czar Nicholas, were supposed to be incorporated with other official memoranda in well-guarded national archives.

It was subsequent to Mr. Jessen's visit to the Home Office that the discovery of the Carlby Mansions Tragedy was made, and I cannot do better than quote The Times, since that journal, jealous of the appearance in its columns of any news of a sensational character, reduced the intelligence to its most constricted limits. Perhaps the Megaphone account might make better reading, but the space at my disposal will not allow of the inclusion in this book of the thirty-three columns of reading matter, headlines, portraits, and diagrammatic illustrations with which that enterprising journal served up particulars of the grisly horror to its readers. Thus. The Times:—

"Shortly after one o'clock yesterday afternoon and in consequence of information received, Superintendent Falmouth, of the Criminal Investigation Department, accompanied by Detective-Sergeants Boyle and Lawley, effected an entrance into No. 69, Carlby Mansions, occupied by the Countess Slienvitch, a young Russian lady of independent means. Lying on the floor were the bodies of three men who have since been identified as—

"Lauder Bartholomew, aged 33, late of the Koondorp Mounted Rifles;"
"Rudolph Starque, aged 40, believed to be an Austrian and a prominent revolutionary propagandist;
"Henri Delaye François, aged 36, a Frenchman, also believed to have been engaged in propaganda work.

"The cause of death in the case of Bartholomew seems to be evident, but with the other two men some doubt exists, and the police, who preserve an attitude of rigid reticence, will await the medical examination before making any statement.

"One unusual feature of the case is understood to be contained in a letter found in the room accepting, on behalf of an organization known as the Four Just Men, lull responsibility for the killing of the two foreigners, and another, writes a correspondent, is the extraordinary structural damage to the room itself. The tenant, the Countess Slienvitch, had not, up to a late hour last night, been traced."

Superintendent Falmouth, standing in the centre of the room, from which most traces of the tragedy had been removed, was mainly concerned with the "structural damage" that The Times so lightly passed over.

At his feet yawned a great square hole, and beneath, in the empty flat below, was a heap of plaster and laths, and the debris of destruction.

"The curious thing is, and it shows how thorough these men are," explained the superintendent to his companion "that the first thing we found when we got there was a twenty-pound note pinned to the wall with a brief note in pencil saying that this was to pay the owner of the property for the damage."

It may be added that by the expressed desire of the young man at his side he dispensed with all ceremony of speech.

Once or twice in speaking, he found himself on the verge of saying "Your Highness," but the young man was so kindly, and so quickly put the detective at his ease, that he overcame the feeling of annoyance that the arrival of the distinguished visitor with the letter from the Commissioner had caused him, and became amiable.

"Of course, I have an interest in all this," said the young man quietly; "these people for some reason, have decided I am not fit to encumber the earth—"

"Nothing. On the contrary," he added with a whimsical smile "I have helped them."

The detective remembering that this hereditary Prince of the Escorial bore a reputation for eccentricity.

With a suddenness which was confusing, the Prince turned with a smile on his lips.

"Oh, yes—I've done lots of things," said the other with a little laugh; "it's in the blood—my illustrious cousin—"

"I assure your Highness," said Falmouth impressively, "my reflections were not—er—reflections on yourself—there is a story that you have dabbled in socialism—but that, of course—"

"Is perfectly true," concluded the Prince calmly. He turned his attention to the hole in the floor. "Have you any theory?" he asked. The detective nodded.

"It's more than a theory—it's knowledge—you see we've seen Jessen, and the threads of the story are all in hand."

"Nothing," said the detective stolidly; "hush up the inquest until we can lay the Four Just Men by the heels."

"That must be kept quiet," replied Falmouth emphatically. This conversation may furnish a clue as to the unprecedented conduct of the police at the subsequent inquest.

In the little coroner's court there was accommodation for three pressmen and some fifty of the general public. Without desiring in any way to cast suspicion upon the cleanest police force in the world, I can only state that the jury were remarkably well disciplined, that the general public found the body of the court so densely packed with broad-shouldered men that they were unable to obtain admission. As to the Press, the confidential circular had done its work, and the three shining lights of journalism that occupied the reporters' desk were careful to carry out instructions.

The proceedings lasted a very short time, a verdict. "... some person or persons unknown," was recorded, and another London mystery was added (I quote from the Evening News) to the already alarming and formidable list of unpunished crimes.

Charles Garrett was one of the three journalists admitted to the inquest, and after it was all over he confronted Falmouth.

Charles was in that querulous mood when his hat gravitated to the back of his head, and his speech was largely made up of such unfinished sentences as "Well, I'm—!" and "Now, what in?"

Falmouth having reason to know, and to an extent stand in awe of, the little man, waggled his head darkly.

"Oh, rot!" said Charles rudely, "don't be so disgustingly mysterious—why aren't we allowed to say these chaps died?"

"I have," said Charles bitterly "and after what I've done for that man; after I've put his big feet on the rungs of culture—"

"Hum!" the detective was considering. Sooner or later the connexion must occur to Charles, and he was the only man who would be likely to surprise Jessen's secret. Better that the journalist should know now.

"If I were you," said Falmouth quietly. "I shouldn't worry Jessen; you know what he is, and in what capacity he serves the Government. Come along with me."

He did not speak a word in reply to the questions Charles put until they passed through the showy portals of Carlby Mansions and a lift had deposited them at the door of the flat.

Falmouth opened the door with a key, and Charles went into the flat at his heels. He saw the hole in the floor.

"This wasn't mentioned at the inquest," he said; "but what's this to do with Jessen?"

He looked up at the detective in perplexity, then a light broke upon him and he whistled.

"Well, I'm—" he said, then he added softly—"But what does the Government say to this?"

"The Government," said Falmouth in his best official manner, smoothing the nap of his hat the while—"the Government regard the circumstances as unusual, but they have accepted the situation with great philosophy."

* * * * *

That night Mr. Long (or Jessen) reappeared at the Guild as though nothing whatever had happened, and addressed his audience for half an hour on the subject of "Do burglars make good caretakers?"

CHAPTER IX
Two Incidents in the Fight

FROM what secret place in the metropolis the Woman of Gratz reorganized her forces we shah never know; whence came her strength of purpose and her unbounded energy we can guess. With Starque's death she became virtually and actually the leader of the Red Hundred, and from every corner of Europe came reinforcements of men and money to strengthen her hand and to re-establish the shaking prestige of the most powerful association that Anarchism had ever known.

Great Britain had ever been immune from the active operations of the anarchist. It had been the sanctuary of the revolutionary for centuries, and Anarchism had hesitated to jeopardize the security of refugees by carrying on its propaganda on British soil. That the extremists of the movement had chafed under the restriction is well known, and when the Woman of Gratz openly declared war on England, she was acclaimed enthusiastically.

Then followed perhaps the most extraordinary duels that the world 'ad ever seen. Two powerful bodies, both outside the pale of the law. fought rapidly, mercilessly, asking no quarter and giving none. And the eerie thing about it all was that no man saw the agents of either of the combatants. It was as though two spirit forces were engaged in some titanic combat. The police were almost helpless The right against the Red Hundred was carried on, almost single-handedly, by the Four Just Men, or, to give them the title with which they signed their famous proclamation "The Council of Justice."

There were occasions when the Council delegated its work to the police, as for instance when Scotland Yard received intimation of the attempt that was to be made on the House of Commons. But mainly they fought without assistance.

Who can remember without a thrill of horror the blood-red posters, marked with the triangle of the Red Hundred, which appeared by magic one night on all the prominent hoardings of London, announcing the coming destruction of London.

"To-morrow," ran the poster, "from two airships controlled by our brethren, we will lay in ashes this hive of plutocracy and corruption..."

"I underestimated her power," confessed Manfred, and the three men who were with him in the Lewisham house looked grave.

This house in Lewisham was charmingly suburban, and had the prosperous appearance that the home of a bank manager usually bears. Years ago Manfred had purchased the house, and the old lady who acted as caretaker in his prolonged absences and cook and maid-of-all-works during his visits, satisfied the neighbours, as she satisfied herself, with the hint that Manfred was a foreign "gentleman" in the "music line."

Though the information is of no consequence so far as the story goes, it might be said that Manfred had houses in other parts of London, in Paris, Berlin, Petrograd, Madrid, Vienna, and at Oyster Bay; in addition to which, I have reason to believe that the lease of "Laing Kloof," that charming residence at Claremont, in Cape Colony, is also held by him.

The young man who called himself Courlander broke the silence that Manfred's speech caused.

The conversation took place the night before the bills had been posted. A poster, wet from the press, had come to Manfred through one of his mysterious agencies.

"It wasn't the thought of the balloons that induced the comment," he said. "As to these, I could destroy them tonight, or rather Leon could."

"We have a fancy for a theatrical display," said Leon. The book he was reading rested on his knees, and he held his pince-nez poised between his fingers.

He spoke half seriously, half jestingly; his thin scholarly face was a trifle paler, and there was more grey at his temples than in the days when he and Manfred and Poiccart and the man Thery had executed the cabinet minister. But the old lire still flamed in his eyes—that look of eager analysis that swept the face of every man he met until it seemed that every virtue, every weakness, every passion, that went to the moulding of that face had been valued and weighed and catalogued for future reference.

"The balloons are nothing," Manfred went on. "London will get a little panicky when it sees them overhead, and if, by chance, one of the bombs explode in the street there might be damage done; mainly I am concerned with the knowledge that the continental party is sending fresh supplies to England."

"The Pausique bomb," said Manfred, "a deadly form of explosive. They could never have been prepared here in England; as to the balloons, you shall see our new destroyer!"

* * * * *

The verger rather thought the gallery would be closed for the day. The Commissioner of Police had issued orders that the streets were to be cleared, and citizens had been warned to remain indoors until the danger was passed.

The verger, too, eyed the big box that Manfred carried, dubiously. Then Gonsalez showed him the permit, signed by the dean, that gave the party permission to photograph, and the "camera" was passed.

"Will you gentlemen be long?" he asked anxiously. "About two hours," said Manfred. The verger groaned in spirit.

They left the verger at the foot of the winding stairway, by no means satisfied in his mind as to the proper course of action. From the gallery of St. Paul's Cathedral, on a clear day, one may view a panorama like which there is nothing in the world. It was such a day as this, and London took on a new glory in the bright spring sunlight. The streets below were strangely deserted; here and there were little red groups of soldiers.

"Marksmen," said Poiccart; "your English soldier shoots rather well, does he not?"

"Three hundred feet one way or the other makes little difference," explained Gonsalez. "I should imagine they have all kinds of cumbersome apparatus for getting the range which would be impracticable in this restricted position—ah!"

High in the air appeared two tiny objects. Through his glasses Manfred made out their character.

"Cylinder-shaped, of course," he muttered, "on the Zeppelin plan, with the usual foolish motor and propellers; the wind's with them."

They stood watching in silence. Then Gonsalez, sweeping the horizon with his binoculars, pointed to the Monument, from the cage of which came a sudden flash and a flicker of light.

"The military people have seen it and are sending the warning round. Aren't they in telegraphic communication?"

The flashes ceased for a little while, then recommenced with greater vigour than before.

"Over Chislehurst, heading for London at the rate of twenty miles an hour," he read, and Manfred slid back a panel of the polished wooden box and surveyed the contents approvingly.

"If I know the Red Hundred," said Courlander, "there will first be a parade—a little cat-and-mouse play." Gonsalez smiled grimly.

"They will be sorry," he said simply. He saw Courlander's eyes wandering to the box with a look in which doubt and amusement were blended.

"That was George's idea," said Gonsalez regretfully; "I almost grudge him that. George has had them for years. He foresaw the possibility."

"This?" Courlander's hand waved inquiringly to where the two airships, growing larger every minute, sailed serenely in the sky.

"Oh, no," said Leon; "wars and things," he added vaguely. "George has the makings of a patriot—sentiment is his one failing."

"Here," smiled Manfred—"I won't insult you by asking you if you're afraid—then the Tower, then the Mint, after that the National Gallery, and en route any particular public building that takes their fancy."

He watched the nearing airships. They were so close now that the men in the skeleton car could be seen and the thud of the engines plainly heard.

"So much the better," said Manfred, and slipped on to his right hand a leathern gauntlet. "Look!"

From the car of one of the airships, a small round object—absurdly small it seemed—fell straight as a plummet into the tangle of roofs and gables below. A second's pause, then, with a crash like thunder, a warehouse on the south side of the river burst into flames, shivered and collapsed like a house of cards.

The propellers had ceased to revolve and the airships caught by the wind swung slowly round.

"Idle curiosity has destroyed many a wary conspirator," moralized Manfred, and slipped his gloved hand into the box. Twice he did this and each time he drew forth a bird.

Such a bird as few men see in these days, but which, in other times, the chivalry of England regarded with the pride and admiration that a later generation reserves for its racehorses.

"Falconry," said Manfred, as he deftly slipped the hoods from the great hawks' heads "is a decaying sport—these have been well trained—but not for the snaring of pigeons or pheasants or fowl—you shall see."

For a moment they circled aimlessly, then with one accord they soared upward with one clean sweep of wing.

"They are over the river. I trust," said Manfred calmly. "Did you notice the steel spurs?"

High over the balloons the two hawks poised, then, as though each had singled out its enemy, they dropped like stones...

At that distance one could not hear the sibilant swish of slashed silk or the whistle of escaping gas. Only suddenly one of the balloons swayed and listed, and there appeared in its rigid side a great dent; then it fell.

The collapse of the second was not so rapid. It too, sagged across its broad back and rolled so that the car swayed wildly.

They could see the men who formed its crew holding on to the cordage, but all the time the airship was beating toward them.

They saw one of the crew release ballast and the balloon rose higher, then the engine stopped and the wind took charge of the great gas bag, and it drifted slowly back riverward.

Then, as the airship, all crumpled and rolling, drifted backward, there was a bang: which echoed and reverberated through the London streets. Something went whining through the air, and over the airship appeared suddenly a puffy ball of white smoke, for the fraction of a second nothing happened.

Then a white jagged splash of flame sprang from the balloon and an ear-splitting explosion rent the air...

"Field artillery," said Manfred. "I saw a battery on the Embankment. I hope they haven't killed my bird."

* * * * *

It is difficult to single out for special description the events of the ceaseless campaign that raged through London during that forty days. The episode of the airships was certainly one of the most picturesque, but by no means as far-reaching in its effects as others. In this history I have tried to avoid any bald categorical account of the incidents of the fight.

Since the days of the Fenian scare, London had never lived under the terror that the Red Hundred inspired. Never a day passed but preparations for some outrage were discovered, the most appalling of which was the attempt on the Tube Railway. 11 I refer to them as "attempts," and if the repetition of that wearies the reader, it is because, thanks to the extraordinary vigilance of the Council of Justice, they were no more. Once only did the Red Hundred succeed, and the story of that success sent a thrill of horror through the civilized world.

It was three days after the events chronicled above that the Home Secretary called a meeting of the heads of the police.

"This sort of thing cannot go on," he said petulantly. "Here we have admittedly the finest police force in the world, and we must needs be under obligation to men for whom warrants exist on a charge of murder!"

The chief commissioner was sufficiently harassed, and was inclined to resent the criticism in the minister's voice.

"We've done everything that can be done, sir," he said shortly; "it you think my resignation would help you out of the difficulty—"

"Now for heaven's sake, don't be a tool," pleaded the Home Secretary, in his best unparliamentary manner. "Cannot you see—"

"I can see that no harm has been done so far," said the commissioner doggedly; then he burst forth:

"Look here, sir! our people have very often to employ characters a jolly sight worse than the Four Just Men—if we don't employ them we exploit them. Mean little sneak-thieves, 'narks' they call 'em, old lags, burglars—and once or twice something worse. We are here to protect the public; so long as the public is being protected, nobody can kick—"

"From the Council of Justice, that is so; but where it comes from doesn't matter. Now, listen to me, sir."

"Get the Prince of the Escorial out of the country," he said seriously. "I've got information that the Reds are after his blood. No, I haven't been warned by the Just Men, that's the queer part about it. I've got it straight from a man who's selling me information. I shall see him to-night if they haven't butchered him."

"He's been here too long," said the practical and unsentimental commissioner; "let him go back to Spain—he's to be married in a month; let him go home and buy his trousseau or whatever he buys."

"I could safeguard a child of six or a staid gentleman of sixty, but I cannot be responsible for a young man who insists on seeing London without a guide, who takes solitary motorcar drives, and refuses to give us any information beforehand as to his plans for the day—or if he does, breaks them!"

"As to the Prince of the Escorial," he said presently "advice has already been conveyed to His Highness—from the highest quarter—to make his departure at an early date. To-night, indeed, is his last night in London."

"He's going to the Auditorium to-night," he said, rising. He spoke a little pityingly, and, indeed, the Auditorium, although a very first-class music hall, had a slight reputation. "I shall have a dozen men in the house and we'll have his motor-car at the stage door at the end of the show."

* * * * *

That night His Highness arrived promptly at eight o'clock and stood chatting pleasantly with the bareheaded manager in the vestibule. Then he went alone to his box and sat down in the shadow of the red velvet curtain.

Punctually at eight there arrived two other gentlemen, also in evening dress. Antonio Selleni was one and Karl Ollmanns was the other. They were both young men, and before they left the motor-car they completed their arrangement.

"You will occupy the box on the opposite side, but I will endeavour to enter the box. If I succeed—it will be finished. The knife is best "; there was pride in the Italian's tone.

"If I cannot reach him the honour will be yours." He had the stilted manner of the young Latin. The other man grunted. He replied in halting French.

In the manager's office. Superintendent Falmouth relieved the tedium of waiting by reading the advertisements in an evening newspaper.

To him came the manager with a message that under no circumstances was His Highness in Box A to be disturbed until the conclusion of the performance.

In the meantime Signor Selleni made a cautious way to Box A. He found the road clear, turned the handle softly, and stepped quickly into the dark interior of the box.

Twenty minutes later Falmouth stood at the back of the dress circle issuing instructions to a subordinate.

Over the soft music, above the hum of voices, a shot rang out and a woman screamed. From the box opposite the Prince's a thin swirl of smoke floated.

Karl Ollmanns, tired of waiting, had fired at the motionless figure sifting in the shadow of the curtain. Then he walked calmly out of the box into the arms of two breathless detectives.

"A doctor!" shouted Falmouth as he ran. The door of the Box A was locked, but he broke it open.

There was already a crowd at the door of the box, and he heard an authoritative voice demand admittance.

"His Highness!" the commissioner's eyebrows rose in genuine astonishment. "Why. the Prince left Charing Cross for the Continent half an hour ago!"

CHAPTER X
Don Emanuel Builds a House

CARLOS FERDINAND BOURBON, Prince of the Escorial, Duke of Buda-Gratz, and heir to three thrones, was to be married, and his many august cousins scattered throughout Europe had a sense of heartfelt relief.

A Prince with admittedly advanced views, an idealist, with Utopian schemes for the regeneration of mankind, and, coming down to the mundane practical side of life, a reckless motorcar driver, an outrageously daring horseman, and possessed of the indifference to public opinion which is equally the equipment of your fool and your truly great man, his marriage was looked forward to throughout the courts of Europe in the light of an international achievement.

"Te Deums—you understand, von Hedlitz? In every church; full review order and court dress—we will go in state."

"It will be a great relief," said the chancellor, wagging his head thoughtfully.

"Relief!" the Emperor stretched himself as though the relief were physical "that young man owes me two years of life. You heard of the London essay?"

The chancellor had heard—indeed, he had heard three or four times—but he was a polite chancellor and listened attentively. His Majesty had the true story telling faculty, and elaborated the introduction.

"... if I am to believe His Highness, he was sitting quietly in his box when the Italian entered. He saw the knife in his hand and half rose to grapple with the intruder. Suddenly, from nowhere in particular, sprang three men, who had the assassin on the floor bound and gagged. You would have thought our Carlos Ferdinand would have made an outcry! But not he I He sat stock still, dividing his attention between the stage and the prostrate man and the leader of this mysterious band of rescuers."

"Three, so far as I can gather," corrected the imperial storyteller. "Well, it would appear that this leader, in quite a logical calm, matter-of-fact way, suggested that the Prince should leave quietly; that his motor-car was at the stage door, that a saloon had been reserved at Charing Cross, a cabin at Dover, and a special train at Calais."

His Majesty had a trick of rubbing his knee when anything amused him, and this he did now.

"Carl obeyed like a child—which seems the remarkably strange point about the whole proceedings—the captured anarchist was trussed and bound and sat on the chair, and left to his own unpleasant thoughts."

"No, not killed," corrected the Emperor. "Part of the story I tell you is his—he told it to the police at the hospital—no, no, not killed—his friend was not the marksman he thought."

* * * * *

Madrid was en fête for the wedding of the Prince. His illustrious kinsman, the King of Catalonia and of Aragon, had decreed it, and the people of Spain had a warm corner in then-hearts for Carlos of the Escorial.

Therefore armies of workmen emplanted gaily draped masts, and twined garlands of flowers, and built miles of rough unpainted tribunes from whence a friendly populace might view the procession.

It was three days before the royal wedding, and when from all parts of the world visitors were flocking into Madrid, that the Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard received certain information from a source that had served him so well before.

"Shut the door," he said quietly, as the detective entered; then. "There's to be a week's truce, and I think we can safely slacken down for that period."

"The royal wedding," replied the commissioner, twisting in his fingers a soiled slip of paper; "the Reds are furious at the trick played on them at the Auditorium; they are going to kill that young man."

The young Prince had made many friends during his stay in England, and not least this stern colonel of engineers turned policeman.

"We can do nothing, of course, sir," he considered, "if you would care to go to Madrid for—a holiday you might be able to pick up a few threads."

"Good," said the chief commissioner, brightening up "er —Falmouth," he called as the superintendent was making his departure, "you may—er—find your Four Just friends there, by the way."

Falmouth looked suspiciously at his chief, but the commissioner did not raise his eyes from the paper he was so diligently studying.

* * * * *

Gonsalez sat at a window writing. Outside, in the narrow Calle de Recoletos, electric cars went jangling by. and, but for these, Madrid was a city of the dead, for it was the hour of the siesta, when labour slept in the shade of the limes, and capital dozed in cool dark chambers.

In the high-ceilinged room, Gonsalez sat alone, and on the table before him, was a litter of papers and books which he consulted from time to time. Old registers, yellow plans, and surveyor's maps.

He wrote rapidly in the curious small cramped hand that usually denotes a life spent in the study of mathematics, and when he paused to consult an authority, it was a momentary pause.

There came a knock at the door and he rose and noiselessly unlocked it. "Would the señor see the illustrious Don Emanuel de Silva?" The señor gravely nodded his head. The fact that illustrious Emanuel was a prosperous builder, fat and important with the self-assurance of the moneyed peasant, did not appeal to Gonsalez as possessing a humorous side. Long ago he had philosophically crystallized his attitude to the world in the sentence "If I am to laugh at the absurdities of life, I must laugh always."

Don Emanuel found the grave, young-looking man with the face of a priest regarding him respectfully, and that was the attitude that Don Emanuel liked best.

They exchanged the conventional courtesies, and Gonsalez bowed his visitor to a seat.

"I have to inform your excellency," said Don Emanuel elaborately "that your gracious commission is accomplished."

"The difficulties," Emanuel went on impressively, "were stupendous, unparalleled, heart-breaking. Labour! with the wedding feasts a few days removed. Ah. you know our people! And then there was material, and the difficulty of carnage—you chose a lonely spot for your shooting house."

"But I myself, Don Emanuel de Silva—I have the order of Isabel the Catholic, did you know that?" he thumbed the lapel of his coat where the fat rosette of nobility flamed red and yellow—"I, who have erected palaces. I myself superintended the erection! Ah! those labourers of Avila! Señor, I raved. I stormed, I prayed and wept, but they would go their own pace. But night and day——" he shrugged his shoulders ecstatically, and ended abruptly "It is finished."

Again Gonsalez nodded. He opened a drawer at his hand and drew forth a thin sheet of paper.

"Even better than as specified," breathed the builder with that quality of awe in his voice that comes to the man recounting his own achievements.

Gonsalez unlocked another drawer and brought out a thick pad of notes. He slipped of! the rubber band that bound them together and deftly counted a number. These he laid on the table and recounted.

"Fifteen thousand pesetas," he said. "I am grateful to you, Don Emanuel," and pushed the notes toward the builder.

There were some flourishing phrases of mutual satisfaction, a flourishing signature written across the King of Catalonia's face, yet another flourish of genteel wishes, and the builder prepared to take his departure.

"... it has been a great happiness to serve your excellency, but... naturally my workmen asked why this strange hut was built... built into the side of the hill itself, and lined with thick logs of wood—I must warn you that it will be damp, for the rains are heavy and the soil is treacherous...." He was aching to ask questions.

"As death," answered the builder eagerly, if ambiguously. "No workman knows for whom this hut, cave, call it what you will, is built—I have thought a thousand reasons."

"That is so—it was your instruction; it would have been cheaper to have taken my own men."

"Then," said Gonsalez slowly "it will be well to take you into my confidence, Señor Don Emanuel—I am using this building for the same purpose as you used the little hut on the Sierras—you have forgotten, perhaps? You know the road that leads across the mountains of Tarifa?"

So far he got, noting the effect of his words. Then the stout prosaic builder sprang backward with a strangled cry, his eyes aglare with terror and his flabby face grey. "I—I—" he stammered.

Gonsalez waved his hands as though dismissing the subject. "I do not desire to remind you of the indiscretions of your youth—no man would recognize in Don Emanuel de Silva—why did you take the Jewish name?—the sometime—"

Gonsalez handed the packet of notes to the trembling man. "I may rely upon your discretion?" he asked calmly.

Gonsalez turned to his desk again with a quiet smile on his lips. Later he took a locked notebook from the desk and entered:

"Emanuel Mandurez, smuggler: murdered Civil Guard 1886 at Guella in the district of Malaga. Afterwards disappeared; believed to be dead, but known to have settled down in Estremadura, where he became a successful business man. Dark hair, little beard, nose, aquiline, cheek-bones high and large, strong jaw, eyes cold; projecting frontal eminence."

Gonsalez was adding to that interesting collection of criminal data which was afterwards to appear in the form of that widely discussed book Crime Facets.

This done he locked the book and methodically replaced it, then resumed his writing.

Some day I should like to devote time to the study of Leon Gonsalez, dilettante, scientist, and philosopher; that I am so constantly discovering him, in the process of making this book, engaged in work which is apart from the purpose of the story is disconcerting. Luckily his present occupation carries the story forward, but once when tracing the movements of the Four (it was in recording the story of the Silver God of M'Beta), I, arriving hot-foot at the heels of Leon, in a state of excitement natural to the biographer whose subject is in mortal danger, found myself chilled by the spectacle of a fugitive from death, pausing to gather material for his history of the Borgias.

Gonsalez wrote on steadily until a carriage clock before him pointed to the hour of two.

Then he cleared away the Utter of papers, locked his manuscripts into a box, lit a cigarette, and sauntered forth into the white-hot glare of day. He boarded a tram-car, and rode along the Alcala till he reached the Calle de Sevilla, then dropped off, and crossed the road to the Café Fornos.

He found Manfred and Poiccart sitting at one of the tables at the far end of the dining-room, and, sitting down, ordered his lunch.

Manfred stroked his pointed beard thoughtfully. "The others arc here," he said slowly; "but the work is to be done by local men—that is a difficulty." Leon frowned.

"That sounds dangerous—the local men are few, and so far as I know, on one pretext or another, they have been arrested as a precautionary measure—Marshal, and Sumarez, and—"

"You needn't enumerate them," said Poiccart shortly; "none of those are likely to be employed—the Red Hundred has gone to Catalonia for its tool."

"Tell me who will be the man," he said at length, with a shade of grimness in his voice "and I will show you the place."

"There is only one spot in the whole of Madrid where such an attempt could be made with any hope of success," Gonsalez went on. "I've spent the morning with official survey maps, measuring the width of streets. The Alcala is too broad. The Puerta del Sol too vast..." he took street by street to show their disabilities. "The Calle Mayor—is an ideal spot. Just beyond the Plaza del Mayor, where the street narrows, and high houses overhang the tiny thoroughfare and a man can drop a bomb on the Royal carriage as easily as I could toss a biscuit on the floor."

"Early this morning I promenaded—went to seek a place of vantage for the procession. There is a building on the identical spot, let off in flats. The first floor is irreproachable as to character. A countess and a marquess, and an official of the English Embassy—the second floor, bourgeois, but beyond suspicion. The top floor sub-let to well-known and easily identified local people, except one room, occupied in normal times by Genius in the shape of an artist."

"To him comes a beautiful lady who is staying at the Hôtel de la Paix. Imagine our artist, hat in hand to the glorious foreigner who desires accommodation for her brother, arriving to-night by the train from Barcelona. Accommodation for Monsieur le frère at the Hôtel de la Paix is unprocurable—could she rent his room for a week? She paid well, and the artist, with a fine contempt for the pageantry of royalty, surrenders his right to view the procession from his window for a consideration of a thousand francs." Manfred nodded.

"Slender and dark, with adorable eyes," quoted Leon: "beautiful as the shadow of a summer valley." Manfred smiled.

"The artist's description?" he paused and looked at Poiccart; then "The Woman of Gratz," he said soberly.

They sat in silence, each thinking out his solution after his own fashion. Leon, rolling a Spanish cigarette with deft fingers, looked vacantly out of the great window, but the passing procession of light-hearted people was not his object.

"I was thinking of something quite different—have you ever noticed. George, how frequently mentally unsound people have full heavy chins and fine hair? I think it was Lambroso who said—"

"If you are going to talk physiognomy, I'm going," said Poiccart with his heavy smile; "yesterday you refused me a hearing on the subject of protoxides—and you missed a good story."

"It is a queer little story," said Poiccart, resuming his seat. "but chemistry comes into it, and all the queer formula that Leon so dislikes. It is about a chemist—he was in the Argentine—who was shamefully betrayed by a woman."

Poiccart was never a great speaker and only in moments of rare excitement was he ever lucid.

"A woman betrayed this man for a few pieces of gold... somehow his rage was not directed against the woman, for she was terrified and confessed and threw the money at his feet, and he gathered the pieces up. It was the man who had betrayed the friendship against whom his rage was directed."

Here he came to the part of his story with which he was more at borne. He spoke of "terchlorides" and "protoxides," of chemical treatments, of a mysterious AuO₃ else, and the two men grew bewildered at the rapidity with which he handled the technical side of the subject.

Then, as the story neared its conclusion, as if by one accord, the eyes of Manfred and Gonsalez met.

As Poiccart finished Leon bent forward and looked curiously at the teller of the story.

This conversation, and particularly this story, had an important bearing upon the event which, more than any other, subsequently destroyed for ever the power of the Red Hundred—this and the little house that Don Emanuel built on the Sierras.

CHAPTER XI

In the Calle Mayor

THE irregular-shaped dining-room of the Hôtel de la Paix was thronged. It was the hour when the brilliant assembly of guests dined.

The greater portion of the hotel had been reserved by the Government for its illustrious guests, and the babel of talk that drowned the music of the orchestra was made up of a dozen different tongues. At the little white tables where silver and glass sparkled in the light of the shaded lamps, ministers of every nation, soldiers and attaches, austere court officials and secretaries to a score of special embassies, sat laughing and talking. Every table accommodated more than its usual quota, and scarcely a moment passed but there arrived some belated and apologetic attaché for whom, with a great pushing of chairs and to the accompaniment of laughter, place had to be found.

One table alone was set for a solitary occupant, and toward her every masculine eye in the room strayed and strayed again.

"My word! that's a pretty girl," The Major of the Lancers put up his eyeglass and gazed furtively.

"Who is the woman?" asked Prince Dalgouriski, of the Russian Mission, and stared.

"Very rich, your excellency—the Baroness von Zinnitt-Durnstadt; yes. I think she is married. It is said that she has large estates in Russia, but spends most of her time in Paris."

"Wise woman," growled the Russian. "Russia is a cursed country, a thrice accursedly dull hole."

I step aside from the set course of my story to offer the above dialogue as a very reasonable explanation for Dalgouriski's subsequent banishment from Court, for all was fish that came to Menshikoff's net. Menshikoff's enemies have said that he so frequently adopted the rôle of waiter in pursuing his investigations, because in that capacity he was in his element; that, in fact, he had risen from that humble position, but there is little doubt that such a disguise gave him greater opportunities than any other.

The presence of the Woman of Gratz in Madrid he had all along anticipated. When he found that she had established herself at the Hôtel de la Paix his excellent credentials enabled him, with little difficulty, to secure service under the same roof. To very few people in Russia was Menshikoff known personally. In the main he was a name—and not always the same name. His duty in Madrid was to protect the Grand Duke, to whose suite he was in a measure attached; the Grand Duke himself was not aware of the presence in his retinue of such a person as M. Menshikoff.

Not inclined to interfere in matters outside his immediate province, he was not greatly concerned for the safety of the Prince of the Escorial. So long as his own charge was secure, it mattered very little who else might surfer.

She was exquisitely dressed in a dress of soft black chiffon, unrelieved by ornament save a collar of pearls she wore about the tightly-fitting lace collar at her neck.

"The Red Hundred has spent money less advantageously," thought Menshikoff as he bent forward deferentially to hear her order.

"I am expecting a visitor," she said in French; "he is to be shown into my salon."

"Not to my recollection," he said with the apologetic smirk of his assumed profession.

He hastened to carry out her instructions, and came back to tell her that the order had been given.

He bore the scrutiny placidly, skilfully and noiselessly removing the covers before her.

She sat at her coffee for ten minutes, taking a complete survey of the room. Cold, impassive, unsmiling, she felt and showed no response to the frothy gaiety of the place. Perfectly harmonious as she appeared in the splendid setting of gay uniforms and glittering orders, she was apart and aloof from it all. Not that this peasant's daughter experienced discomfort or embarrassment from the magnificence of her surroundings. Uncrowned queen of a terrible empire she was by right of her rare intellect, no less than by that beauty of hers which fired men's hearts to dreadful deeds.

Conscious of her limitless power, she could well afford to regard this chattering throng as so much background against which the vision of her schemes passed in slow review.

Hat in hand came the obsequious hall porter to tell her that "M'sieur waited her excellency in her salon."

Her suite was on the next floor; she declined the diminutive lift-boy's invitation and mounted the broad stairs.

At the door of her room she stopped a moment to take a paper from her pocket, then she turned the handle and entered. There was only one dim light in the great cheerless reception-room, and the man who rose to meet her was between her and the single lamp.

She stopped irresolutely for it was not Von Dunop, whom she expected, but a taller man. She could not see his face.

"I wish you were," said the other easily; then she recognized the voice and the blood came to her pale cheeks. "You!" she said almost under her breath. The man bowed.

He had walked forward to meet her and now he was between her and the door, so that the light fell on him and she saw his face, and the sad eyes that had lived with her since the day she had first felt their power, held her again speechless.

"I wish you were afraid," he went on a little bitterly; "or that you had some human weakness or some soft womanly spot in your heart that could be reached."

"The happiness of my fellows, security for the weak, justice for the oppressed," he said simply.

"Not I," he said, "nor my friends. My life is forfeit to every state in the civilized world because I believe in these principles—and, believing, have acted."

"And now?" she asked calmly. She had recovered from the shock of the meeting, and was keenly alive to its possibilities. There would be no mistake this time. Once he had surprised her into a display which was wholly feminine; she was on her guard.

"I have no reason for asking this," he went on, "save a desire to avoid useless bloodshed—the taking of lives which God knows might be more usefully and profitably employed than in the dreadful destructive work your people have undertaken—the casualties have been one-sided."

"A score, indeed, madame!" he lowered his voice when she had expected him to raise it. It was a little thing, but it disconcerted her. He was always doing the unexpected.

"How many fives does the Red Hundred owe to civilization? Von Dunop, for instance, you expected him, did you not?"

Manfred smiled. After all, she was a woman, and it was the woman who observed the sweetness of that smile, and the little lines that came to the corners of his eyes. The woman thought that this must be the man who smiled often.

"No, he is not dead—did I not say a 'truce'—but Von Dunop, has he personally no life to offer to the state? If he were slain, would his death lie on the conscience of any man? And Fritz Meister of Altona, and Carronalli, and De Vitzy—I could name a host who have struck in the name of the Red Hundred—what score does humanity hold against them?"

Her mind was moving quickly. She had a thought that grew and shaped as he spoke. It was to her back that he addressed his last words, for with a shrug of her shoulder, she had turned from him and walked to an open bureau.

"Once only have we killed a good man," he said gravely "and that, for humanity's sake."

She was silent, then she turned and walked carelessly back to where she had stood when he began.

"There can be no truce," she said "we have set ourselves to remove the obstacles in the path of struggling mankind—the accidental obstructions that old dead systems have bequeathed us. The sons of fathers who were the sons of fathers who had some time ruled by might, and left the legacy of their dominion to their haphazard progeny."

"If in England you race a horse and it wins your Derby, must the stock of that horse be acclaimed winners of the race from birth? Must their sons be Derby winners, though they do not race for the prize? Are your doctors' sons born doctors, or your judges born in ermines?"

"Yes and no," he replied calmly; "for the son of the Derby horse will win the race—if he is fit and trained. And the doctor's son will be a doctor, if he follows the course, and the king's son, wise and strong, will rule his people and dominate his councillors—if he has the training."

"You talk to me as though I were a child," she raged on; "as if I were to be humoured and persuaded and cajoled, as if every ounce of blood in my body did not throb for freedom, and every instinct cry 'Death to kingship.'"

"Another king will come—or the councillors, which is worse—or the dictator, who is worse than all," he said sadly. "You are fighting inevitable laws which decree that one man shall always have power over his fellows and rule them for the common good."

"We're fighting ambition with terror," she said; "we are imposing our natural law upon another—the fear of death upon the hunger for power. One by one they shall go, these rulers of yours"—she came closer and spoke rapidly, and he saw how quickly she breathed.

"King and councillors and dictator, till the lower steps of the throne are so set about with dead men's bones that even a crown shall not be worth the risk. And the men who oppose us shall go with the ruck—little and great, chancellor and courtier—even such men as you!"

The razor-like edge of the knife caught his shoulder in passing, and before she could raise her hand again he had her in his arms; only for a second she felt herself crushed against him and his breath on her hair, then his hands slid down her arm, and her wrists were held.

The wave of passion that had swept her along had receded and left her white and trembling.

He stooped and picked up the dagger, looked at it curiously, and replaced it on the bureau.

He took two steps and reeled a little, steadying himself with his hand on the wall.

Manfred looked down at her from his height, and over his face came a strange shadow.

"Is there a truce?" he asked again. She drew back sharply, the fire rekindled in her eyes. "Never!" she cried and stamped her foot. Manfred bowed and left the room, walking slowly.

* * * * *

"Not a very serious wound," said Gonsalez, critically. "The Woman of Gratz, of course—what did you do?"

Which may or may not have been true—for who shall say what induced the tears that the Woman of Gratz shed that night?

* * * * *

Carlos of the Escorial had conducted his courtship in that hurricane manner that was peculiarly his. With every chancellory of Europe making agitated search for precedent, with the Vatican ominously antagonistic, with the Grand Duchess of Sofia moving heaven and earth in a disinterested endeavour to break off the engagement—her daughter, the Princess Marie Teresa, will be thirty in March—the path of true love was made anything but smooth. But the young Prince held on his way untroubled by the succession of autographed letters that came to hand by special envoys. Father Mathias, his confessor, unwisely overstepped the bounds of discretion in lending gratuitous counsel, and was promptly dismissed. He came back in triumph with the support of Supreme Authority and was refused admittance. Then came a mission from Rome headed by a Prince of the Church, and Carlos listened courteously, and replied in brief:

Because he was quite capable of carrying out this outrageous plan, they left him in peace. Then unexpected support came for him, from Central Europe, and most powerful of all, from the King of the Northern Islands. Such a combination was too tremendous for the quibblers, and they subsided, the Grand Duchess of Sofia talking to the last.

Of the high-born lady upon whom his choice fell, there is no need to tell here. That she was, and is, very beautiful, with wondrous blue eyes and hair of spun gold, all the world knows. That the young prince was head over heels in love with her goes without saying; for the rest, her life, her ancestral homes and illustrious progenitors, scenes of her early childhood, her dresses and such-like, I refer you to the picture postcards that sold by the million on the day of her marriage.

At three o'clock in the morning hawkers were crying their wares—pictures and favours, and bannerettes of the Royal colours. The streets were thronged when the first white rays of the sun flooded the Puerta del Sol—thronged with officers of every service, resplendent in gala dress, with their ladies, and peasantry from the outlying districts, their coats slung over their shoulders and their flat round caps a-tilt. The cafes were crowded, and as the sun rose higher, with brazen bugles waking the echoes, regiment after regiment passed to its station.

Almost barbaric was the splendour of the scene; such a feast of colour as Spain alone of the nations can spread for the eye grown weary of northern greys and drabs. The nobility vied one with the other to do honour to the Prince. From every balcony full lengths of priceless tapestry, from every window hung festoons of flowers, and the palaces of the nobility were all but hidden by a prodigality of decorations. As the morning wore on the heat became almost oppressive.

The two men who occupied the artist's room in the Calle Mayor felt it the more since it was necessary for their work to keep door and windows closed.

An open bottle of wine and a little fruit on the table, with a big bunch of flowers, lent them the appearance of holiday-makers, but the two polished steel cylinders and the loaded Browning pistols that stood amidst the flowers and fruit and wine gave a more sinister interpretation to their presence.

They had heard the blare of music that signified the passing of the Royal party on the way to the church, and half an hour had slipped past.

"There are three ways," he said lazily. "I have told you a dozen times. Manuel—are you nervous?"

The man grinned. He felt the broad belt about his waist, where, piece by piece, the gold had been carefully stored.

"The more excitement the greater chance of escape," said the first speaker, and lit a cigarette.

Manuel opened the window and looked down into the narrow street, then he came back into the room.

"The balconies below are crowded," he reported, "and the people are packed like oranges in a box in the street below—look!"

The other rose grumbling, and the two men stepped on to the balcony; then they turned back to the apartment...

A change had been effected in their few minutes of absence. Manuel, looking carelessly at the table, missed the pistols, and he observed, too, that the steel cylinders had been moved to the farther end of the table. He had not time to notice anything else.

Somebody's arm went round his neck—the thing was done in a flash, he was garrotted and helpless. He was luckier than his companion, because the practical Poiccart used a life-preserver.

The pressure on Manuel's throat relaxed, but with returning consciousness he realized the discomfort of his position. His hands were strapped, there was a stick in his mouth, and his legs were bound tightly to the chair. There was a strange roaring in his ears as he recovered consciousness, and after a little while he identified the noise with the people in the street. The Royal procession was passing, and he was sitting there helpless. The money had been paid and the work had not been accomplished. He looked round.

The three men who had captured him were in consultation. He could not understand what they said, for they were speaking English.

"We can get them out of here—now," said Manfred. He had his arm in a sling and looked tired.

"Then Leon must make them sleep—we can reach the yard below and the carnage," said Manfred. "When the streets are cleared we can take them away—but out of this room at once. Listen!"

In the meantime the Woman of Gratz sat at the window of her room in the Hôtel de la Paix rearing her lace handkerchief into little shreds and listening for the explosion that did not come.

CHAPTER XII
The Judgment

IT was a commonplace table at which the three men sat, and the room, so far as Manuel could see in the light the smoky lamp gave, was ordinary enough. Perhaps a disused schoolroom, for it looked as if maps had been taken from the wall, and recently.

He was fettered with an unfamiliar handcuff; it looked clumsy enough, he thought, but after a furtive attempt to take advantage of its imperfections, he came to hold it in respect. He had observed earlier that the leader of these men had been wounded, and that he carried his arm stiffly; this leader did most of the talking.

"You are from Barcelona, both of you, and you are notorious characters," Manfred went on, then turned to Gonsalez. "What is known of Zaragoza?"

All that Leon recited as to these men was bad enough. It was a sordid record of assassination and outrage, of terrorized judges, of petitions for reprieve, and so on, in a cycle.

"What other?" sneered the second man. "Do I look the sort of fool who would kill profitlessly? What have you done with that money?" he demanded suddenly. "Restore it and hand us to the judges."

"In good time," said Manfred calmly "the money shall come back to you—and we are your judges."

Then the door behind the table opened and a fourth man came in. He was masked and his form was hidden by a long Spanish cloak. The three men made no sign as he took his seat at the table.

"That I will tell the judge," said the dogged prisoner. It was the masked man who asked the next question. "What have you against the Prince of the Escorial that you should seek his life?" he asked quietly. The man shrugged his shoulders.

"I have no quarrel with the pig I kill for dinner," he said roughly; "prince or priest or water-seller, it is all one to me."

"Many times," said the man with cheerful insolence. "But this also was for murder—a bomb thrown at a religious procession."

"That Prince whose life you sought to-day pardoned you; he was a child then, but had power of life and death in your province."

"You betrayed your employers—yes. But that was not sufficient to save your neck from the iron collar. It was that boy's mistaken belief that you were men maddened by persecution—was not that your defence?—that gave you your life."

"Have done with this talk," he growled; "hand us to the judge, if you will—restore the money you took from us, señor, we shall have need of that."

"In good tune," said Manfred again; then to him who called himself Emanuel he said "You have some experience with bombs?"

"Why do you ask?" said the prisoner coolly. "My question," said Manfred, picking his words carefully, "had some significance. I have said you shall have your gold again. Since it has left your possession it has undergone a slight change. My friend here is a chemist also." He lilted from the table very carefully a glass phial half filled with a green powder.

"You see this?" he asked, and the man nodded pleasantly, as though all this was being done for his express amusement.

"Have you ever seen gold in this form?" asked Manfred, and the prisoner's brows contracted thoughtfully.

"Yet," Manfred went on "if you obtain the protoxide, which is known by the symbol AuO₃, and treat that with—"

"Exactly," said Manfred; "in that form we propose returning to yourself and to your friend the gold you accepted to wilfully slay in cold blood two young people against whom you had no grievance."

"I demand justice," cried the man Lomondo "trial by judge, and judgment according to evidence."

"Justice you shall have," said the masked man coldly. "What man will deny me the right to judge you, or question the evidence on which you stand convicted? How say you?" He turned abruptly to the three who sat at the board.

"Because you are what you are," he said "it fitting that you should die. Therefore I declare you outside the law and the protection of the law. The death you planned for others shall be yours, the brutal strength of the weapon you employ shall be turned upon you. The death that came swift from your hand to the helpless and the innocent shall come as surely to you."

"Señor, for God's sake, for the Blessed Virgin's sake, not that way!" he whimpered. "Give me a chance, let me appeal to His Highness; he will be merciful."

The man looked; then his eyes opened wide in terror, glared back at the three men seated at the table, and he fell whimpering to the floor. As for the man Lomondo, he looked down contemptuously at the grovelling figure and spat again.

But he was not so well educated as Emanuel Zaragoza, and his imaginative faculties were more restricted.

* * * * *

The party that rode out in the early morning of the next day, and passed beyond the city's bounds, taking the road to the mountains, had to regulate its pace according to the speed of the lumbering coach.

But they had some eight hours' start of the woman who followed alone on the big lathering bay; she came swiftly in their wake. A motor-car might have taken her best part of the road, and an hour's search would have secured her an escort strong enough to deal with all possible contingencies. But she could not spare that hour. A spy had brought to her room one who had much to say—yet with many reservations. You can picture her walking this dingy apartment of hers, baffled, aglow with smouldering rage, a prey to a thousand conflicting doubts, bewildered by her helplessness—she with such potentialities at her command.

Complete this picture with the coming of the stout man, half pompous, half fearful, terror of the consequences of his act, fear for the dignity slipping so quickly away, awe for the beautiful creature before him, and superimposed upon the fabric of these emotions, the furbishing up of a tarnished manner which in the year '72 had been so effective with the women of Andalusia.

"Yes, yes, yes," she interrupted impatiently. "You built a house in the hills, but what is this to me?"

"Excellency," said the flowery Don Emanuel, employing his more ornate diction, "life is given to us for—"

"Often it happens," said the little man with dignity "that in the summer of life we regret the indiscretions of spring. Sometimes an unworthy wretch, knowing of these follies, will remind us, taunt us, upbraid us—such a man was this Don Leon Gonsalez—a man with pitiless prying eyes."

She saw that she must let him tell his story his own way; that he had, for his vanity's sake, to gloss over a few of his own sins before he came to the object of his visit. She did not imagine that he had much to say that would interest her, but in a way he was a distraction, and her agent would not have sent him if the story was entirely without personal interest to her.

"Understanding, excellent señorita, that, by my discretion, my wealth of experience, by the patronage of the noble and discriminating aristocracy—induced by my very apparent qualities—I have raised myself so that to-day I am accounted rich, a member of the Ayuntimiento, a cavalier of Isabel the Catholic, and the Cortes before me: understanding all this, judge my sorrow, my despair, when there comes this man, this Señor Don Leon—may the devil eat salt with him this night. Amen!—to remind me of—a wild youth."

"'Build me a house,' says he, 'that shall be a hole in the solid hill, with such a thickness of plank, and such a foundation. With a hook there and an iron-cased door here. Let it be built by workmen who will not recognise the spot again, who will not talk or lead neighbours to see and speculate upon the purpose of this building.'"

"Later I came with the house in my hand! It was finished; to the time prompt; every instruction noted and heeded! That is my way. Thus have I established myself in the hearts of my fellow-citizens: because of such qualities as these I secured the building of the Credit España on a tender ten thousand pesetas higher than any other; thus I secured also—"

"The Señor Don Leon—if that is indeed his name—paid me. In the whole history of this devilish business that one fact alone stands to his credit. Then he asked:

"'As death!' said I. 'Then.' said he. 'I am building this house to kill a man.' just that and no more!"

Emanuel paused dramatically. Since his interpretation of the interview left something to the imagination, he hastened to fill it in.

"Here I return to the indiscretions of spring!" he said mournfully. "There would be no need but for the fact that he must needs remind me. You accuse me of remaining silent," he went on magnificently. "You ask me why I did not fly to the alcalde and denounce the monster. You cry shame upon me—but, excellency, remember who I am, what I am—Spain's greatest builder, a cavalier of Isabel the Catholic. I sank with shame at the thought of the exposure of my early childish error; it was a trifle," he added airily, and he really believed it was at the moment.

"Wait!" he said impressively, "I have yet to finish. This morning, riding, as is my practice, in the cool of the morning—an English thoroughbred, excellency, that cost two thousand pesetas, though I fear I was robbed in the transaction—I saw a cavalcade on the road that leads from the city. Something induced me to conceal my presence in a little wood, some instinct with which I am fortunately endowed. The cavalcade passed. A coach drawn by eight mules, a señor driving, two others riding on either side of the carriage. He who drove the coach was—Señor Don Leon!"

It was singularly disappointing, for she displayed no other emotion than a pardonable weariness.

"Listen!" he exclaimed, "within that coach were two men! The blinds were drawn, but the wind lifted them a little, and I, Don Emanuel de Silva, saw them—bound hand and foot!"

This time his recital was rewarded. She looked interested. Indeed, if he might judge from her narrowing eyes, and the long breaths she drew, his description had roused her to an extraordinary extent.

"They were going in the direction of the house in the hill—to kill, as Don Leon had said—though he told me nothing of two men. particularly specifying one only."

"Don Leon is a man without a heart," he began in his oracular vein; "he has the face like a priest—"

"He was on the other side of the coach I could not see, but I do not doubt but that he has the face of a villain. The man nearest me was bearded."

"Short and pointed, and he rode using only one hand, the other being thrust in his coat."

"You are used to the drawing of plans," she said quickly; "sketch me the position of this house in the hill, the road I must take, the villages I must pass, and where I may secure horses—I will return."

To do justice to the honest Don Emanuel, it may be said that, ignorant of the character of the Woman of Gratz, and crediting her as the secret agent of a government, he had approached her in the hope that a man, who alive must always be a source of danger, might be effectively and legally removed from all possibility of contact.

Astounded and flattered at the stir his narrative had made, he was none the less puzzled. But he resolved to ask no questions, an inquisitive mind had been his undoing. When she came back, dressed in a riding-habit, she found him still busy with the plan.

"But, señora," he said in astonishment, "you will not ride—it is fifty kilometres and the road is bad—and alone!"

"Come with me," she said a little maliciously, and smiled as he turned pale at the very suggestion.

"You may get horses here "—he pointed out the village of Granja de la Flores—"but it is doubtful; but, señora, these hill people are bad—suppose you arc attacked?"

"If you would deliver this, you will serve me," she said. Then, without a word of thanks, she was gone, and through the window he saw her, with Madrid looking on in astonishment, canter across the streaming asphalt of the Puerta del Sol and take the road that led to the hills.

* * * * *

The difficulties of the road were greater than she had expected. Sometimes it was little more than a track across a boulder-strewn hillside. What advantage she had in the chase lay in keeping to this track, for the carriage must go the longer way round, keeping to the road. She found food at wayside houses, food of the roughest and wine with a resinous bite to it, but it served. Every hour or so the short cuts brought her to the road again, and the marks of the coach wheels on the white dust of the road were recent.

The sun was going down when she reached Granja de la Flores. Its grandiloquent title served to designate a wretched little village in a fold of the hills, a collection of whitewashed hovels, cowering about a big dominating church. Before the dilapidated fonda she pulled up and called for the landlord. Two or three unshaven men, sitting in the shade of a tattered sunblind, rose and swept off their hats mechanically, regarding her with suspicion. The landlord came at his leisure, rolling a cigarette and pausing at the door to cry a string of instructions over his shoulder.

"Beautiful lady, there is nothing in the world I cannot supply you with at the fonda of Granja—but a horse, no."

"Find me a room," she said imperiously, and the man grinned again. There were two rooms beside the public room, and all three were unsavoury enough, but she found a dubious-looking sofa, and passed the hour dozing. She had no need to ask how long since the carriage had passed. Evidently her arrival had interrupted a discussion between the idlers before the fonda as to the exact hour the coach had left the village. This argument was now resumed. By their talk she gathered that she was less than two hours behind them, and they must halt as well as she. Her horse did not show signs of distress, the rest and food would help him.

At the end of the hour she rose and called for the horse. At their leisure the servants of the house brought it and she chafed under the delay. Also the landlord was unnecessarily familiar. It is not usual for beautiful young ladies to ride unattended in Spain.

"Better remain here, bella mia," he sighed heavily; "the roads are unsafe for such pretty birds as you."

Then when she would have mounted unassisted, he held her arm gently but firmly, and she took a grip of her steel-ribbed riding-whip, and lashed him twice across the face. He went back shrieking with his hands to his eyes, and she sprang into the saddle. Then, as she turned her horse to the mountain road, he recovered and came at her bellowing with a knife in his hand. Perhaps he did not intend using it; it may be he expected to frighten her. I advance this excuse for the innkeeper's indiscretion, as the merest speculation. The solution of this little problem does not lie with us.

The Woman of Gratz, galloping along the mountain path, came suddenly face to face with a brown-faced member of the Guardia Civile. He reined back his horse into the undergrowth to allow her to pass and greeted her respectfully.

"If you will permit me I will leave you," he said, and she heard the loose stones flying under the hoofs of his galloping charger.

The villagers gathered about the man, who lay full length in the white dust of the road, explained the circumstances, and the philosophical policeman looked grave.

"A reputation for Granja de la Flores!" he said with heavy sarcasm; "that a foreign lady cannot come to your village without undergoing insult. Is this swine dead?"

"Then take him into the house whilst I write a report," said the magnificent custodian of the peace.

He met the innkeeper's wife at the doorway, arms akimbo, and very voluble. She defamed the Woman of Gratz, beginning with the probability of her irregular morals and ending with forecasting the destination of her immortal soul.

"And," she added to clinch the matter "she has not paid for her room or for the fodder of the horse!"

CHAPTER XIII
The House in the Hill

IN the cool of the evening the five men came to the house in the hill. They had left the coach in a little wood that marked the Castilian road. Two breakdowns had delayed them, and they were later than they had thought to be. It was difficult to find the door of the house, for Don Emanuel had carried out his orders to the letter. But Leon, making a rough calculation, fumbled amidst the drooping vines that covered the face of a small bluff and found what he sought.

Into the dark interior the prisoners were pushed, and the door closed upon them.

The man called Zaragoza sniffed the newly planed pinewood and felt with his lingers the thickness of the lining of his strange prison.

Outside his captors lit a fire, and, from a "thermos" bottle. Manfred poured out boiling hot coffee. He looked at his watch; it was seven o'clock.

Leon rose and sent down the hill to the little wood. He came back shortly with what looked like a bundle of sticks. These he carefully deposited beyond the reach of the tire.

They sat talking in low tones until a few minutes before eight, then Poiccart, seeking a soft piece of ground, bored, with a thick steel rod, a hole two feet deep. Into this he inserted one of the sticks, twisting it to make sure that it had full play.

He stood waiting, whilst Manfred sat, watch in hand, by the fire; then he nodded, and Poiccart stooped and applied a light.

With a roar tike the roar of a mill-race the rocket swept up into the night. Higher and higher it soared, then slowly it described a curve and burst into a great mass of white stars, so brilliant that the plain beneath was for a few seconds illuminated, as with the light of a bright moon.

The people of the little village of Anmincio, seven miles away, saw it and wondered, crossing themselves reverently at the celestial token. Other people saw it also.

Von Dunop, on his fat mule, sweating in the darkness; Elbrecht, the German anarchist, jolting over the rough road in his one-horsed cart; Saromides, the Greek, riding down from the north, and Menshikoff, riding with the Judge of the First Court of Madrid. The Woman of Gratz saw it also, for she was nearest the hill, and tightened her rein.

Manfred heard the clatter of hoofs coming up the path, and smiled. She came into the circle of lights, and Gonsalez went toward her.

"Will you dismount?" he asked, and it seemed to her that her coming had been expected. She declined his help with a gesture and sprang lightly to the ground. The pistol she had used with effect in the village of Granja de la Flores was in her gloved hand; but they gave no sign that they had seen it.

"I prefer to stand," she said. It seemed ridiculous that she could think of no opening for her attack. That her presence had been anticipated seemed monstrously unfair somehow. Manfred, who had not spoken, read her thoughts.

"We expected you," he said, speaking across the fire "but not quite so soon—and there are others."

"I would rather think that you have invented your expectation on the spur of the moment," she replied, and let the pistol swing pendulum fashion from her finger.

"And there are others," he repeated coolly "else why did we fire the rocket save to guide our guests?"

He stirred the fire with his foot, and sent a shower of sparks flying. He looked reflectively into the red heart of it, and steadfastly refused to see the weapon in her hand.

"It was Leon who caused a message to be sent to the builder Don Emanuel," he went on. "The story he told you was carefully prepared for him. The bait was effective, and you are here."

"Later will come your friends," he finished complacently; "that also I know. They will find—er—obstacles." "So it was a trap?" she breathed.

"An open trap," he corrected. "I shall not prevent your going—when we have finished with your mercenaries."

"You will release them also," she said steadily, and gathered the black blunt pistol in her hand so that it covered him.

If he saw the action, he made no sign, nor did either of the men who were with him.

"Wait awhile," he continued, still looking into the fire as though there the centre of interest lay. "In a few minutes Von Dunop will be here, and Elbrecht—we have brought him a long journey from Hamburg—and Saromides, the Greek. He represents the Red Hundred effectively in the City of the Hills, docs he not?"

Then with groans and curses and the thud of a tailing stick, Von Dunop rode fearfully to the fireside.

First he saw the Woman of Gratz standing idly with her back to a young sapling, and he gave a satisfied grunt.

"Ach, so it is all well," he said, and his obvious terror evaporated rapidly. "I had feared that it was a trap, but the telegram gave the password, and I could not disobey."

"I do not know these comrades," he said ponderously affable, and looked inquiringly at the woman.

"These are they who call themselves the Four Just Men," she said, and Von Dunop reeled back like a man stricken with vertigo.

"Hey!" he said loudly and put his hand to his hip. Manfred did not move, nor the other men. "A trap!" bellowed Von Dunop, with a great display of firearms.

"Yes," Manfred permitted himself with sarcasm, "a splendid trap"; he looked at their weapons meaningly.

One by one, guided by the fire, came the others, the Greek and the German, and, coming, they stayed, weapon in hand, muttering threats, puzzled, the fives of the three in their hands, yet withal a terror that lay on them like a weight, crushing their initiative. They took council in whispers, but the Woman of Gratz said neither yea nor nay to the hurried proposals they put before her. Then came the sound of two men upon the path, and the three men bent their heads, listening, and each had his hand to his face. When they raised their hands, the Woman of Gratz saw that they were masked. She took a step forward.

"This comedy ends," she said sternly. "Have you brought my friends here, from distant parts of Europe, to see a play? Are you mad that you think we can be held with words?" She pointed at Manfred. A splendidly tragic figure she made in her sombre close-fitting habit. The hand that gathered her dress held the pistol, and her finger was curled about the trigger.

"You!" she said, raising her voice "you! to add the humiliation of this farce to the slight you have already put upon me! Did you think the Red Hundred was so impotent, its powers so shattered, that you could call its leaders together to laugh at their weakness?"

One of these, like the men at the fire, was masked and cloaked; the other was a man advanced in years, plainly dressed, but authority written in every line of his face.

He strode forward, bowing slightly to the woman and to the masked men by the fire.

Then something attracted the attention of the Woman of Gratz, and she involuntarily clutched Von Dunop's arm.

On the hills around and above, in the distant valley below, little fires were twinkling at regular intervals and through the trees that fringed the path she caught the glint of steel.

"Since we have promised you freedom—when we have finished—and since you have nothing to gain by resistance, for the hills above and the road below are held by the Pavia Hussars, you will listen and wait," he said, and the old man came forward to the light of the fire.

They were puzzled and alarmed, these shining lights of the Red Hundred. To their strained hearing came the far-away jingle of steel, and once a trumpet-call woke the echoes of the hills.

Except for the Woman of Gratz, I am willing to believe, that the men who condemned their fellows to cruel and merciless deaths, and that without compunction, had a wholesome regard for their own lives, upon which they placed a value out of all proportion to their real worth.

"I must see the prisoners," said the old man quietly, and Leon led them, blinking and frowning, into the light. The face of him who saw the Woman of Gratz first lit with hope, but the other, staring straight ahead at the grey-haired figure by the fire, shivered and dropped his eyes.

Then the old man called their names and they answered respectfully. Then he took a scroll from the hand of his masked companion, and read, with a curious old-world dignity, a document that began with a recital of the reader's style.

"Don Alberto de Mandeges y Carrilla y Ramundo, officer of the Order of Charles the Third..."—there were a string of subsidiary dignitaries to be read—"... a judge of the High Court, learned in the law ... by these presents and in the name of His Most Catholic Highness, the Prince of the Escorial, confirm the sentence passed upon... "—he read the names and aliases of each prisoner—"... therefore it is right and proper in the manner arranged that these men should die..."

He finished reading and rolled the paper—then remembered and stepped forward to the prisoners, showing them that portion of the document bearing the neat signature of the Prince.

Then he fell back again to the other side of the fire, and there moved up to his side from the darkness about him a solid phalanx of civil guardsmen in their dark cloaks and high collars.

The woman was stupefied; she tried to think, to place these happenings in logical sequence. The Four Just Men were the law—in Spain. Higher than the law, for they might condemn without trial and execute without hope of reprieve.

She stood motionless whilst Gonsalez and Poiccart led the men back to the cell in the hill. They were absent longer than she expected, and when they returned Manfred rose.

She did not question his right to give the order. She was for the moment wholly under his domination. She followed meekly enough the tramping soldiers as they slipped and stumbled down the steep slopes. Two of them had lighted torches, and the difficulties of the descent were greater than she had thought.

Not until the party had halted in a clearing that commanded a view of the bluff—or would have done in daylight—did she speak.

"Hush, hush!" Von Dunop implored in a whisper. He was shaking like a jelly and his companions were in little better case. "They have promised us we shall go—say nothing."

"Say nothing!" She could have struck the poltroon. "Say nothing! when men who took our salt are being left to die in the darkness!"

Manfred had learnt something of the Woman of Gratz; he knew to a second how long a weapon might with safety be left in her hand. Now, Leon, standing close at hand, caught her wrist, and wrenched the pistol from her grasp.

"I have called you together that you may see. And seeing, remember. We, who are together in this work, have set ourselves the task of breaking for ever the organized power of anarchism. That we can prevent the acts of individuals privately moved to assassination by grievances existing only in their poor disordered brains, we cannot hope. That we can destroy for ever the association which exploits and directs these madmen for their profit, I am certain."

"The Red Hundred lives," she interrupted, tremulous with passion: "though I die and the men with me, the Red Hundred will live—and avenge."

"But for the fact that the Red Hundred is still powerful, I would not have brought you here," he said calmly; "but for my knowledge that your plans are complete for the continuation of your scheme of destruction in London, and that even now shipload upon shipload of material and men for the fight are pouring into England, we might dispense with your presence at this—ceremony."

"There is no known faith or creed by which one may appeal to you. No better side or soft spot that ingenuity may reach. No concession with which to influence you. Blindly, insanely, uncannily, you move about your work, having no goal to pass or end to reach, filled with the lust of blood, slaying the innocent and sparing the guilty. God never provided for such aimless creatures as you—you are apart from His scheme. The fiercest hurricane brings rain to some pasture or other. The gales of the poles are breezes for the tropics; the deadly enemies of man who live in the African forests suppress other enemies—but you! Your hand is against all, your vengeance scattered broadcast, unintelligently—your very strength is a weakness pitiable and contemptible!

"Yonder in the darkness," he went on "are two men—tools of such people as you. Hired murderers, paid with gold to commit a crime so foul that the brain that planned it could only be that of an illogical unbalanced woman.

"Your money is with them "—he turned to the Woman of Gratz—"my friend has converted it by chemical processes to an element that scientists know as fulminate of gold.

"The terror they have inspired they now suffer, and I would not spare them a moment of their agony. The bomb they would have thrown now hangs suspended by a chain above them."

He lifted the terminal of a thin coil of wire that lay at her feet and she saw that the other end twisted into the bush.

"Give me a truce—hold back your people," he said earnestly —"in God's name give me your word that this bloody campaign of the Red Hundred shall end—and I will give you the lives of your servants."

She reached out her hand and took the tiny switchboard from him, and it lay in her palm.

And instantly the hillside a hundred yards away heaved up with a blinding flash and a roar like thunder, and the ground beneath their feet shook again.

CHAPTER XIV
The Terror and the Suburbs

"SO far as I can gather," wrote Superintendent Falmouth, that admirable officer, to the Chief Commissioner "the F. J. M. had prepared somewhere in the hills a sort of bombproof house. It will give you an idea of the extraordinary foresight of these men, that they took the trouble to prearrange every little detail—down so far as to the purchase of the coach and horses that were to take their prisoners to the hills. From the fact that all their subsequent actions bore the impression of being semi-officially sanctioned, I gather that they have a 'pull' in Spain. Madrid is quiet. Nobody knows anything at all about either the attempt or the execution—I need hardly say my information came from the F. J. M. themselves; they sent me particulars through the post... I found young Billy-Boy-Billy here with a few of the 'heads.' and sent him packing to Paris; but there were no English 'toughs' in Madrid so far as I could discover."

London was full of interest for the detective when he returned, for as his subordinate informed him, "it had begun again," and there was no need to ask what "it" was.

The outbreak of mysterious crime taxed the police to their utmost capacity; the importance and extent of the outrages may be judged from the fact that in one day alone the walls of Wandsworth Prison, wherein was incarcerated Jaurez, the firebrand socialist, was dynamited, a bomb was exploded in the Tate Gallery, and a determined attempt made to destroy London Bridge was only frustrated by the courage and watchfulness of the Thames Police. The outrages commenced two days after the Royal wedding in Madrid, or, to be exact, on the morning after the Woman of Gratz had made her decision in so dreadful a manner.

What connexion was there between this resumption of activities and the urgent telegram dispatched by the woman from Valladolid may be surmised. The most terrifying feature of the new campaign was the destruction of private houses in the suburbs. Not the houses or homes of the great law-makers, not the palaces of the aristocracy, but the humble dwellings of the "nearly poor," as somebody aptly described them. This new attempt was devilishly ingenious, for, from the Terrorist point of view, it possessed two advantages. It was unattended by the risk that lay waiting for the anarchist whose object was the public building, and it struck fear into the hearts of the people—those people lying down of nights in fear and trembling lest their house be chosen for demolition. There was the advantage, too, that few of these attempts were unattended by fatalities. That no more powerful enemies to anarchy died than women and little children and poor helpless nursemaids did not perturb the bloody-minded agents of the organization. Terror was their aim, and it mattered little how that terror came. For three days they raged unchecked, and London sank to an ignoble panic. You had the spectacle of depleted offices and closed stores in the city, for merchants and clerks were also husbands and fathers, and the staid broker sat at home in his drawing-room with a shot-gun across his knees, whilst his business went neglected.

You may be sure that the police did all that was humanly possible to cope with the situation. For the first time for many years free speech in public and through the columns of the Press was rigorously denied. Hyde Park was raided when Jean Froy, standing on his red rostrum, declaimed in broken English man's right to Revolution.

Greek Street, the little dens in Soho and Clerkenwell, where known and suspected anarchists were in residence, were cleared, and the county gaols of England filled with men "under remand," who could by any stretch of imagination be regarded as suspects. All this was done in the first two days, for Scotland Yard moved with amazing rapidity.

The morning of the third day witnesses the blowing up of the New River Water Main and the destruction of the railway bridges that span the Grand Surrey Canal, south of London Bridge, the New Kent Road, and the bridge that is just outside Battersea Road Station. Small matters, but sufficient to effectively disorganize the continental train service. At 11 o'clock in the morning, the fish-boat Mausor of Grimsby, was sunk at her berth and the river-front of Billingsgate Market demolished by an explosion of melinite on the wharf. At 11-30, a bomb, placed by the approach of the Tower Bridge, destroyed the machinery used to raise the huge drawbridge; at 12-17 the Hop Exchange was the scene of yet another melinite outrage.

"You can trace their progress," said the Commissioner bitterly. He was surveying the ruin at Billingsgate, when the roar of the Tower Bridge explosion deafened him, and it was from Tower Bridge that he heard the second explosion.

At I.35 a telephone message came through from New Cross that a bomb had been discovered under the seat of a council tramcar that had been run into the electric station during the slack time of the day, and it was followed by a message from Lewisham that a bank had been dynamited, a junior clerk and a book-keeper being killed.

At 5 o'clock that evening some workmen, returning home and taking a short cut through a field two miles from Cat ford, saw a man hanging from a tree.

They ran across and found a fashionably dressed gentleman of foreign appearance. One of the labourers cut the rope with his knife, but the man was dead when they cut him down. Beneath the tree was a black bag, to which somebody had affixed a label bearing the warning "Do not touch—this bag contains explosives: inform the police." More remarkable still was the luggage label tied to the lapel of the dead man's coat. It ran: "This is Franz Kitsinger, convicted at Prague in 1904, for throwing a bomb: escaped from prison March 17, 1905: was one of the three men responsible for the outrages to-day. Executed by order of The Council of Justice."

"It's a humiliating confession," said the Chief Commissioner when they brought the news to him, "but the presence of these men takes a load off my mind."

That night a man, smoking a cigar, strolled aimlessly past the policeman on point duty at the corner of Kensington Park Gardens, and walked casually into Ladbroke Square. He strolled on, turned a corner and crossing a road, till he came to where one great garden served for a double row of middle-class houses. The backs of these houses opened on to the square. He looked round and, seeing the coast clear, he clambered over the iron railings and dropped into the big pleasure ground, holding very carefully an object that bulged in his pocket.

He took a leisurely view of the houses before he decided on the victim. The blinds of this particular house were up and the French windows of the dining-room were open, and he could see the laughing group of young people about the table. There was a birthday party or something of the sort in progress, for there was a great parade of Parthian caps and paper sun-bonnets.

The man was evidently satisfied with the possibilities for tragedy, and he took a pace nearer....

* * * * *

The sergeant on duty at Notting Hill Gate Station received a note at the hands of a grimy urchin, who for days afterwards maintained a position of enviable notoriety.

"A gentleman told me to bring this," he said hoarsely—little boys of his class invariably speak hoarsely.

The sergeant looked at the small boy sternly and asked him if he ever washed his face. Then he read the letter:

"The second man of the three concerned in the outrages at the Tower Bridge, the Borough and Lewisham, will be found in the garden of Maidham Crescent, under the laurel bushes, opposite No. 72."

The Commissioner was sitting over his coffee at the Ritz, when they brought him the news. Falmouth was a deferential guest, and the chief passed him the note without comment.

"This is going to settle the Red Hundred," said Falmouth. "These people are fighting them with their own weapons—assassination with assassination, terror with terror. Where do we come in?"

"We come in at the end," said the Commissioner, choosing his words with great niceness, "to clean up the mess, and take any scraps of credit, that are going "—he paused and shook his head. "I hope—I should be sorry—" he began.

"So should I," said the detective sincerely, for he knew that his chief was concerned for the ultimate safety of the men whose arrest it was his duty to effect. The Commissioner's brows were wrinkled thoughtfully.

"The biggest job of all," he said presently "is to prevent any more of this stuff arriving in the country. It is coming put up ready for use, that I'll swear."

"Yes; we've tried every questionable steamer that has entered the Thames this past week, and the river police have done splendidly. It is a ticklish business, particularly when the ship's under a foreign flag" He looked at the note again.

"Two," he said musingly: "now, how on earth do the Four Just Men know the number in this—and how did they track them down—and who is the third?—heavens! one could go on asking questions the whole of the night!"

On one point the Commissioner might have been informed earlier in the evening—he was not told until three o'clock the next morning.

The third man was our friend Von Dunop, newly arrived from Spain, smarting under the contempt of the Woman of Gratz, anxious to rehabilitate himself in her favour, and in deadly fear of this woman's caprice.

Von Dunop, equipped for the night's work, supremely satisfied with the result of the morning—he had returned to London a day ahead of the Four Just Men—and ignorant of the fate of his fellow-terrorists, sallied forth to complete the day notably.

The crowd at a theatre door started a train of thought, but he rejected that outlet to ambition. It was too public, and the chance of escape was nil. These British audiences did not lose their heads so quickly; they refused to be confounded by noise and smoke, and a writhing figure here and there. Von Dunop was no exponent of the Glory of Death school. He greatly desired glory, but the smaller the risk, the greater the glory. This was his code.

He stood for a moment outside the Hôtel Ritz. A party of diners were leaving, and motor-cars were being steered up to carry these accursed plutocrats to the theatre. One soldierly-looking gentleman, with a grey moustache, and attended by a quiet, observant, clean-shaven man. interested the anarchist.

"Who the dickens was that?" asked the Commissioner as he stepped into the taxi. "I seem to know his face."

"I have seen him before," said Falmouth. "I won't go with you. sit—-I've a little business to do in this part of the world."

Thereafter Von Dunop was not permitted to enjoy his walk in solitude, for, unknown to him, a man "picked him up" and followed him throughout the evening. And as the hour grew later, that one man became two, at eleven o'clock he became three, and at a quarter to twelve, when Von Dunop had finally fixed upon the scene and scope of his exploit, he turned from Park Lane into Brook Street to discover, to his annoyance, quite a number of people within call. Yet he suspected nothing. He did not suspect the night wanderer mouching along the kerb with downcast eyes, seeking the gutter for the stray cigar end; nor the two loudly talking men in suits of violet check who wrangled as they walked concerning the relative merits of the favourites for the Derby; nor the commissionaire trudging home with his bag in his hand and a pipe in his mouth, nor the clean-shaven man in evening dress.

The Home Secretary had a house in Berkeley Square. Von Dunop knew the number very well. He slackened pace to allow the man in evening dress to pass. The slow-moving taxi that was fifty yards away he must risk. This taxi had been his constant attendant during the last hour, but he did not know it.

He dipped his hand into his overcoat pocket and drew forth the machine. It was one of Culverui's masterpieces and, to an extent, experimental—that much the master had warned him in a letter that bore the date mark "Riga." He felt with his thumb for the tiny key that "set" the machine and pushed it.

Then he slipped into the doorway of No. 196 and placed the bomb. It was done in a second, and so far as he could tell no man had seen him leave the pathway and he was back again on the side-walk very quickly. But as he stepped back, he heard a shout and a man darted across the road, calling on him to surrender. From the left two men were running, and he saw the man in evening dress blowing a whistle.

He was caught; he knew it. There was a chance of escape—the other end of the street was clear—he turned and ran like the wind. He could hear his pursuers pattering along behind him. His ear. alert to every phase of the chase, heard one pair of feet check and spring up the steps of 196. He glanced round. They were gaining on him. and he turned suddenly and tired three times. Somebody fell; he saw that much. Then right ahead of him a tali policeman sprang from the shadows and clasped him round the waist.

"Hold that man!" shouted Falmouth, running up. Blowing hard, came the night wanderer, a ragged object but skilful, and he had Von Dunop handcuffed in a trice.

There were half a dozen policemen and the inevitable crowd on the spot by now, and the rays of the bull's-eye focused on the detective's hand. It was red with blood. Falmouth seized a lantern and flashed it on the man's face.

There was no need to look farther. He was dead. Dead with the inevitable label affixed to the handle of the knife that killed him.

"It is incredible; it is impossible! he was running till the constable caught him, and he has not been out of our hands! Where is the officer who held him?"

Nobody answered, certainly not the tall policeman, who was at that moment being driven eastward, making a rapid change into the conventional evening costume of an English gentleman.

CHAPTER XV
The "Ibex Queen"

"WE have said 'check' to the Terrorists; how effective that check will be depends very largely upon the good sense and patience of the citizens of this city," wrote Manfred in the course of his remarkable letter to The Times. Perhaps the most interesting letter that the famous newspaper has ever published, coming as it did from a man against whom a warrant existed on the capital charge, and who had rendered unique and dreadful service to a nation that would assuredly hang him, if Fate delivered him into her hands.

It would seem that the fires of the Red Hundred had been beaten down and finally extinguished by the catastrophes that overtook its most trusty lieutenants on the very day it had scored its greatest triumph. But those who knew the organization were not deceived. Not for a single second did Scotland Yard relax its vigilance, and the Four Just Men, from their unknown watch-tower, waited, without illusions. For the second check came from Scotland Yard. An uncanny prescience as to the presence of cargo not entered on the ship's papers brought the Yard into ill repute amongst certain skippers on the Baltic, and the Red Hundred needed weapons for their war.

"Keep them inactive for a month and they'll melt away," said an authority, and there was wisdom in the reasoning.

One night the Woman of Gratz received a letter that roused her from her brooding, and rekindled the fire in her sulky eyes. Such a letter it was, illiterate, written in curious Greek characters, that set the hive of anarchy throughout London humming; that brought delegates who, from reasons of prudence, had scattered themselves over England, back to the headquarters of the Red Hundred.

By that same post a letter was delivered at Hill Lodge, Lewisham, which begged to acknowledge receipt of favour of 18th, and in reply to state goods would be shipped, et cetera, et cetera.

The men in the watch-tower—it was only a figurative watch-tower—were interested more than a little by this communication.

* * * * *

With heavy seas breaking on her port quarter, the ramshackle tramp Ibex Queen, a most unqueenly craft, came shuddering and shaking through the North Sea, and her chief officer, pulling a dilapidated golf cap down over his ear, spat reflectively over the side of the bridge and expressed himself:

Old man, smoking contentedly in the lee of the crazy chart-room, grunted approvingly, for not only was he master, but he was owner of the Ibex Queen.

The cautious and offensive attitude of Lloyd's, who refused to insure his craft after the mysterious disappearance of two boats of his, had given him a new interest in the art of navigation. Luckily he had not been master either of the Miko or the Pride of Dawmish, when they sank, and his ticket, in consequence, remained unsullied. Not so the unfortunate skippers, one of whom, a notoriously careless man, had gone down with his ship and the other had been suspended for six months, during which period he drank heavily and frequently, and was in receipt of a handsome allowance from "friends."

Now he was chief officer of the Ibex Queen, speaking familiarly with its captain—a significant fact, but one upon which I wish to lay no undue emphasis.

Because of the driving sleet that fell, they picked up no light till the revolving flash of the Nore Lightship.

The little strip plunged on in silence, lifting, wallowing, shuddering, an uneven way till the light was abreast, and then something broke the silence, a strident voice that hailed from the blackness of the night-enshrouded sea:

The mate, holding on, leant over the side of the bridge, and reached his battered megaphone.

"It's them fellers they told us about at Riga," he grumbled, "but how in hell they expect to get aboard, I don't know."

It was indeed ticklish work getting aboard, for with the stopping of the vessel, the full force of the following gale struck her.

But out of the gloom overside a voice called for a rope, and an imperious demand came for steam in the donkey engine, and with some delay there arrived a sleepy donkey man who passed a steel hawser overboard.

Then in a comparative calm that followed a seventh wave, a voice ordered sharply:

Roaring and rattling, the drum of the engine spun round and overside came a drenched little motor-launch with two passengers in shining oilskins.

Whilst the half-dozen men who composed the crew of the Ibex Queen lashed the launch fast on deck, the taller of the two passengers made his way to the bridge. He saluted the mate with a nod.

"We've had rather a rough time," said the tall passenger coolly. "I didn't think we could live out the seas that were breaking."

"I'm the master of this boat," he said, and added "and owner—if you've got business, come below."

"You are, and you ain't," he said cautiously. "I'll send the second to relieve you in a bit."

In the dingy saloon where an oil lamp swung leisurely to the extent of its tethering chain, the skipper viewed his visitors.

"Very likely," said Manfred carelessly; "at any rate, I know you—I was once a passenger by the Pride of Dawmish when you were skipper."

"Very unfortunate business that," he recited. "If I'd had charge of her, nothing would have happened... valuable cargo... never got a penny from them swines of insurance people."

Manfred's keen eyes were fixed on the old man. "I thought the reverse," he said dryly. "Somebody told me—"

"Lies, all lies," said the skipper doggedly. He was, in the light, an uncleanly old man, with dirty white tufts of whisker placed at irregular intervals over his face. He shifted uneasily under Manfred's scrutiny.

Manfred produced a pocket-book and from this extracted a printed sheet. The old man fumbled for his pince-nez and looked through the sheet.

"That's regular," he said. "Hundred and twenty bales of skins to the order of Mereowski, Leather Brokers, St. Ann's Wharf—well?"

"An insignificant cargo," said Manfred quietly "for so high a freight." It was a shot at random, but it went home.

"A freight without inquiries," he said smugly, "me not meetin' the charter parties and asking no questions." "I see," said Manfred.

"And you're the consign—ee?" asked the skipper. Manfred made a motion of assent.

Again the old man grinned. "It'll be a pleasure to me—if the money's all right."

"Say to Gravesend," Manfred continued, "a straight trip to Gravesend, carrying passengers—shipwrecked passengers—tell the tale to the Trinity Masters."

"There's a tug standing out to us making signal," he said, and the old man looked perplexed.

"Ah!" he said thoughtfully "the signal—come to think of it. mister, you showed no light?"

"That is so," said the visitor carelessly; "you see, we under-estimated the bucketing we should get in our little boat, and the flare wouldn't burn—we shipped water in every locker."

The two ship's officers were regarding Manfred and his companion with growing suspicion.

"How do I know you're the parties the stuff's intended for?" asked the skipper; "them skins, I mean," he added hastily "what I took aboard at Riga, me and the mate being ashore at the time, and not seeing em stowed."

"Qui s'excuse, s'accuse," quoted Manfred with a smile. "I can make your mind easy on that point, because"—he arrested his speech purposely—"we're not!"

"We are not the people to whom your bombs and melinite are consigned," Manfred went on coolly "but we are prepared to take charge of the cargo, none the less—don't move," he warned.

"Don't run either," said Manfred, having in his hand sufficient argument to enforce his command, and the mate wisely stood his ground.

"This is piracy," stammered the old man, his face pinched and his jaw chattering. "This is a hangin' business, mister—me—friend."

"You surprise me," said the other ironically, and motioned the officers to the far end of the saloon.

"We must leave you for a little while, but we shall be within call," he said, and they went out, locking the door.

The Ibex Queen rolled and dipped before the following seas, and Manfred, swinging himself up the narrow gangway ladder, reached the bridge. A shivering young man in the canvas shelter at the end of the bridge looked round.

"Nothing much," replied Manfred "only this old tub is running contraband, bombs and high explosives for the Port of London."

The young mate had jumped to the conclusion that these two men were police officers, and obeyed, and in a few seconds the sea was illuminated with the flare's ghostly light.

Twenty minutes later Poiccart summoned the two officers from the cabin, and they went on deck to find the scratch crew paraded with their bags—stokers, engineers, seamen and boys.

A voice from the darkness of the bridge informed him "Stand by to abandon ship!" it said mockingly; "there's a tug alongside with a few of your friends. If you stay, you'll be shot—move!"

A revolver bullet struck the deck at the old man's feet and he jumped for the companion ladder. The sea had fallen a little, but the tiny mast of the tug alongside gyrated dizzily.

Telling the story of the end of the Ibex Queen it may be said in truth, that the captain was the first to leave the ship, but that the chief officer was a close second.

"Bon voyage!" he cried, then to the skipper of the tug: "Let go—whilst you are safe!"

He heard the fussy little engines of the smaller craft panting, and watched her starboard light dipping and rising in the seas as she circled round for the shore trip.

Poiccart, slipping off his oilskins, clattered down the grimy ladder that led to the engine-room, and as the Ibex Queen gathered way again, Manfred swung her head to sea.

When the Admiralty chart showed seventy fathoms Manfred rung the telegraph to "stop."

"Luckily," he said later "the sea has gone down considerably. This place will do remarkably well, and, besides, we want a little steam in hand for the donkey engine."

Whilst Poiccart was busy in the hold. Manfred gave a last look round the horizon for signs of approaching steamers. The North Sea is never deserted, and away to the north-east a little fight twinkled. The two men showed considerable seamanship in getting their boat overside.

"Good-bye, Ibex Queen," said Manfred grimly, and started the purring engines of the launch.

He had left the lights burning on the doomed ship, and the men watched her unsteady roll.

"Not desiring publicity," said Poiccart "I have arranged for a fairly unspectacular sinking."

"That was unavoidable," said Poiccart apologetically, as the bow of the ship rose up. Then she went down by the stern, quickly, silently, mysteriously. Thus passed the Ibex Queen, and Lloyd's list knew her name no more.

* * * * *

The sometime captain of the Ibex Queen had outgrown his awe of beautiful women. K he shed senile tears in the presence of the Woman of Gratz, they were inspired by the pecuniary loss he had suffered in the loss of one of the finest twin-screw steamers that ever left the Clyde yard. This description is his. To exaggerate virtues of the departed is characteristically human, and the Ibex Queen was an ocean liner, sumptuously fitted, extravagantly manned, and the envy and admiration of the seaborne world.

"And now!" he snivelled a little, wiping away the tears with a greasy cap—and now she lay in seventy fathoms of water, this Sea's Pride!

"And all through a bit of dirty business that I wouldn't have took on, but for the slack times!" he said slowly and added a practical request: What was she going to do about it?

"You were paid for the risk," she said impatiently. She spoke through an interpreter, for her knowledge of English was limited.

"Paid!" The old man glared furiously. "Paid a miserable thousand for a ship worth its weight in gold."

"Your ship was worth its weight—in old iron," she said coldly "it was such a wretched thing that no insurance company would risk a policy."

He stormed, threatened, thrusting his seamed, mottled face into hers. He would have the law; the police should know, and a great deal more of the same kind of talk.

"Captain," she said slowly "we, the brotherhood, the association, sympathize with you in your loss, we will even go so tar as to compensate you—reasonably, but if you talk foolishly, we have the way and the will to make you silent."

The old skipper tried to suppress a shudder, but without success. Wilfully blind to the character of the work he had undertaken, it came as a shock to see the veil of pretence torn from the "business" and the grim reality of his enterprise shown, naked and ugly.

Seeking for an object for the display of rage which was necessary to cloak his fear, he happily hit upon the man who had brought about his misfortune, and his denunciations of Manfred and his works found instant response.

"You have lost a ship!" she said; "seek the man who destroyed it and I will buy you a new one. Yes, I—I will buy you such a ship as you have never yet commanded. Give him into my hands, dead or alive. I ask for no greater service than that!"

"You will give this sailor a thousand pounds," she said; "you will also see that he is kept under observation. If he communicates with the police or endeavours in any way to betray us, you will kill him."

The captain, trading as he did in the Baltic, had picked up a little Russian—sufficient, at any rate, to understand what she said.

Therefore he left the house in Maida Vale—where Madame Deloraine gave lessons in French to a never-ceasing stream of queer-looking pupils from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.—with a dry mouth and—under the circumstances—a very natural unsteadiness of gait.

CHAPTER XVI
The Trial

TO fathom the mind of the Woman of Gratz is no easy task, and one not to be lightly undertaken. Remembering her obscure beginning, the bare-legged child drinking in revolutionary talk in the Transylvanian kitchen, and the development of her intellect along unconventional lines—remembering, also, that early in life she made acquaintance with the extreme problems of life and death in their least attractive forms, and that the proportion of things had been grossly distorted by her teachers, you may arrive at a point where your vacillating judgment hesitates between blame and pity.

I would believe that the power of introspection had no real place in her mental equipment, else how can we explain her attitude toward Manfred and reconcile those outbursts of hers, wherein she called for his death, for his terrible punishment, wherein, too, she allowed herself the rare luxury of unrestrained speech, how can we reconcile these tantrums with our certain knowledge that this man's sad eyes followed her every movement, till the image of him became an obsession?

It may be that I have no knowledge of women and their ways (there is no subtle smugness in the doubt I express) and that her inconsistency was general to her sex. But Manfred himself was never quite sure of her, and to Leon Gonsalez she had no material existence. To him she was a perverted intellect, and as such worthy of study. Poiccart crystallized her virtues and her weaknesses when he called her a "dangerous fool"; beyond that this unemotional man was not prepared to go.

But Manfred, with all his genius, was only a man, and liable to a man's mistakes. As to Gonsalez, he was seemingly beyond the reach of passion, and judged cold-bloodedly. Poiccart was more human, but lacked romance. As for the fourth man, Courlander, who has flitted at intervals through the pages of this story, his judgment is for the moment under suspicion, for the sentiment with which Gonsalez once charged him is very apparent in all his reasonings—for the moment.

With the knowledge of a market overstocked with stories, dealing intimately and with minute thoroughness, with the working of the human soul—with the example of the unparalleled case of the brother-author, who devoted a whole chapter to the psychology of a woman's smile, I feel how lame and incompetent is the bald statement that the Woman of Gratz hated George Manfred with an immeasurable hatred, and yet hungered for the sight of him. All the more remarkable was it, from the fact that for his companions she had neither hate nor thought. Yet she saw clearly enough that the other two were equal in wisdom and coolness and courage. To one of them at least she might well have owed a special debt of vengeance, for that night on the hills he had wrenched a pistol from her hand with unceremonious violence. As to the fourth, she had seen him twice. Once, masked by the fire on the Sierras, and once—it was a fleeting vision but clearly photographed in her mind—in the corridor on the day she first met Manfred.

It is curious that she should be thinking idly of the fourth man when they brought news of him to her. It must not be imagined that she had spared either trouble or money to secure the extermination of her enemies, and the enemies of the Red Hundred. She had described them after their first meeting, and portraits, sketched under her instruction, had been circulated by the officers of the Reds. Once or twice she had asked herself why. with the coming of the judge that night—she always went back in thought to the little house in the hill—the three had been masked. With the death of Von Dunop, the answer was clear enough. No man saw their faces and lived. Would they kill her? Would Manfred strike the blow, crushing her against him in his strong arms once more? That would be a death robbed of half its terrors.... Thus she mused, sitting near the window of her house, lulled by the ceaseless hum of traffic in the street below, and half dozing.

It was Smidt, the unspeakable Smidt, all perspiration and excitement. His round coarse face glowed with it, and he could scarcely bring his voice to tell the news.

"We have him! we have him!" he cried in glee, and snapped his fingers. "Oh. the good news!—I am the first I Nobody has been, Little Friend? I have run and have taken taxis—"

"You have—whom?" she asked steadily. The colour left her face and her hand strayed to her breast. As she waited she could feel the dull throbbing of her heart.

"Why, why?" she asked stormily "why only this man? Why not the others—why not the leader?—have they caught him and lost him?"

Chagrin and astonishment sat on Smidt's round face. His disappointment was almost comic.

"But, Little Mother!" he said, crestfallen and bewildered, "this is one—we did not hope even for one and—"

"Yes, yes," she said wearily, "one—even one is good. They shall learn that the Red Hundred can still strike—this leader shall know—"

"This man shall have a death," she said, looking at Smidt "worthy of his importance. Tell me how he was captured."

"It was the picture," said the eager Smidt "the picture you had drawn. One of our comrades recognized him and followed him to his house. To make sure he sent for me. I went and recognized him—"

"No, no, no!" he said quickly; "he lived alone, this man; that made it easier. Last night he went out—he walked quiet streets—soh!"

"He shall be tried—to-night," she said, and spent the day anticipating her triumph.

Conspirators do not always choose dark arches for their plot tings. The Red Hundred especially were notorious for the likeliness of their rendezvous. They went to nature for a precedent, and as she endows the tiger with stripes that are undistinguishable from the jungle grass, so the Red Hundred would choose for their meetings such a place where meetings were usually held.

It was in the Lodge Room of the Pride of Millwall. A.O.S.A.—which may be amplified as the Associated Order of the Sons of Abstinence—that the trial took place. The financial position of the Pride of Millwall was not strong. An unusual epidemic of temperate seafaring men had called the Lodge into being, the influx of capital from eccentric bequests had built the tiny hall, and since the fiasco attending the first meeting of the League in London, much of its public business had been skilfully conducted in these riverside premises. It had been raided by the police during the days of terror, but nothing of an incriminating character had been discovered. Because of the success with which the open policy had been pursued the Woman of Gratz preferred to take the risk of an open trial in a hall liable to police raid.

The man must be guarded so that escape was impossible. Messengers sped in every direction to carry out her instructions. There was a rapid summoning of leaders of the movement, the choice of the place of trial, the preparation for a ceremony which was governed by well-established precedent, and the arrangement of the properties which played so effective a part in the trials of the Hundred.

In the black-draped chamber of trial the Woman of Gratz found a full company. Maliscrivona, Tchezki, Vellantini, De Romans, to name a few who were there sitting together side by side on the low forms, and they buzzed a welcome as she walked into the room and took her seat at the higher place. She glanced round the faces, bestowing a nod here and a glance of recognition there. She remembered the last time she had made an appearance before the rank and file of the movement. She missed many faces that had turned to her in those days: Starque, François. Kitsinger—dead at the hands of the Four Just Men. It fitted her mood to remember that to-night she would judge one who had at least helped in the slaying of Starque.

Abruptly she rose. Lately she had had few opportunities for the display of that oratory which was once her sole title to consideration in the councils of the Red Hundred. Her powers of organization had come to be respected later. She felt the want of practice as she began speaking. She found herself hesitating for words, and once she felt her illustrations were crude. But she gathered confidence as she proceeded and she felt the responsive thrill of a fascinated audience.

It was the story of the campaign that she told. Much of it we know; the story from the point of view of the Reds may be guessed. She finished her speech by recounting the capture of the enemy.

"To-night we aim a blow at these enemies of progress; it they have been merciless, let us show them that the Red Hundred is not to be outdone in ferocity. As they struck, so let us strike—and, in striking, read a lesson to the men who killed our comrades, that they, nor the world, will ever forget."

There was no cheering as she finished—that had been the order—but a hum of words as they flung their tributes of words at her feet—a ruck of incoherent phrases of praise and adoration.

He was calm and interested, throwing out his square chin resolutely when the first words of the charge were called and twiddling the fingers of his bound hands absently.

He met the scowling faces turned to him serenely, but as they proceeded with the indictment, he grew attentive, bending his head to catch the words.

"I cannot quite understand that," he said in fluent Russian, "my knowledge of German is limited."

After this, the sum of his transgressions were pronounced in a language he understood. Once or twice as the reader proceeded—it was Ivan Oranvitch who read—the man smiled.

The Woman of Gratz was uneasy in her mind as she watched the man. She recognized him instantly as the fourth of the party that gathered about her door the day Bartholomew was murdered, but he was unmistakably one of the people, despite his knowledge of languages and his calmness. There was none of the breeding of Manfred or the aesthetic refinement of Gonsalez, or the subtle something that proclaimed Poiccart a gentleman. This man was altogether different, and she was not unprepared for what he said when the reading was finished. Formally she had asked him what he had to say before he was condemned.

"Do you deny that you have killed many of the Red Hundred?" He paused before he answered.

"As to the Red Hundred—I do not know; but I have killed many people." He spoke with the grave air of a man filled with a sense of responsibility, and again the exclamatory hum ran round the hall. Yet, the Woman of Gratz had a growing sense of unrest in spite of the success of the examination.

"You have said you were in Russia—did men fall to your hand there?" He nodded. "And in England?"

"What is your name?" she asked. By an oversight it was a question she had not put before. The man shrugged his shoulders.

"Does it matter?" he asked. A thought struck her. In the hall she had seen Magnus the Jew. He had lived for many years in England, and she beckoned him.

"Of the lower orders," he replied; "it is astounding—did you not notice when—no, you did not see his capture. But he spoke like a man of the streets, dropping his aspirates."

"It is a trick of the order—just as the Moujik says..." he treated her to a specimen of colloquial Russian.

The majority of those who were present were Russian, and at the word they sprang to their feet, shrinking back with ashen faces, as though they feared contact with the man who stood bound and helpless in the middle of the room.

The Woman of Gratz had risen with the rest. Her lips quivered and her wide open eyes spoke her momentary terror.

"I killed Starque," he went on, "by authority. François also. Some day—he looked leisurely about the room—"I shall also—"

"Stop!" she cried, and then: "Release him," she said, and, wonderingly, Smidt cut the bonds that bound him. He stretched himself.

"When you took me," he said "I had a book; you will understand that here in England I find—forgetfulness in books—and I, who have seen so much suffering and want caused through departure from the law, am striving as hard for the regeneration of mankind as you—but differently."

"In God's name!" said the Woman of Gratz, trembling "go in peace, Little Father."

And the man Jessen, sometime headsman to the Supreme Council, and latterly public executioner of England, walked out, no man barring his exit.

* * * * *

The power of the Red Hundred was broken. This much Falmouth knew. He kept an ever-vigilant band of men on duty at the great termini of London, and to these were attached the members of a dozen secret police forces of Europe. Day by day there was the same report to make. Such and such a man, whose very presence in London had been unsuspected, had left via Harwich. So and so, surprisingly sprung from nowhere, had gone by the eleven o'clock tram from Victoria; by the Hull and Stockholm route twenty had gone in one day, and there were others who made Liverpool, Glasgow, and Newcastle their port of embarkation.

I think that it was only then that Scotland Yard realized the strength of the force that had lain inert in the metropolis, or appreciated the possibilities for destruction that had been to hand in the days of the Terror.

Certainly every batch of names that appeared on the Commissioner's desk made him more thoughtful than ever.

"Arrest them!" he said in horror when the suggestion was made. "Arrest them! Look here, have you ever seen driver ants attack a house in Africa. Marching in, in endless battalions at midnight and clearing out everything living from chickens to beetles? Have you ever seen them re-form in the morning and go marching home again? You wouldn't think of arresting 'em, would you? No, you'd just sit down quietly out of their reach and be happy when the last little red leg has disappeared round the corner!"

Those who knew the Red Hundred best were heartily in accord with his philosophy.

"I've often wondered why the Four Just Men didn't do the business of Starque themselves," mused the Commissioner.

"It was rather rum," admitted Falmouth "but Starque was a man under sentence, as also was François. By some means they got hold of the original warrants, and it was on these that Jessen—did what he did."

"Do you suggest that we should catch them, sir?" he asked with thinly veiled sarcasm; "because if you do, sir, I have only to remind you that we've been trying to do that for years."

"It's a remarkable thing," he said, "that as soon as we get a situation such as—the Red Hundred scare and the Four Just Men scare, for instance, we're completely at sea, and that's what the papers will say. It doesn't sound creditable, but it's so."

"What the papers say," said Falmouth, "never keeps me awake at night. Nobody's quite got the hang of the police force in this country—certainly the writing people haven't."

"There are two ways of writing about the police, sir. One way is to deal with them in the newspaper fashion with the headline 'Another Police Blunder' or 'The Police and The Public,' and the other way is to deal with them in the magazine style, which is to show them as softies on the wrong scent, whilst an ornamental civilian is showing them their business, or as mysterious people, with false beards who pop up at the psychological moment, and say, in a loud voice, 'In the name of the Law, I arrest you!'

"Well, I don't mind admitting that I know neither kind. I've been a police officer for twenty-three years, and the only assistance I've had from a civilian was a man named Blackie, who helped me to find the body of a woman that had disappeared. I was rather prejudiced against him, but I don't mind admitting that he was pretty smart and followed his clues with remarkable ingenuity.

"' Mr. Blackie, you have given me a great deal of information about this woman's movements—in fact, you know a great deal more than you ought to know—so I shall take you into custody on the suspicion of having caused her death.'

"Before he died he made a full confession, and ever since then I have always been pleased to take as much advice and help from outside as I could get.

"When people sometimes ask me about the cleverness of Scotland Yard, I can't tell 'em tales such as you read about. I've had murderers, anarchists, burglars, and average low-down people to deal with, but they have mostly done their work in a commonplace way and bolted. And as soon as they have bolted, we've employed fairly commonplace methods and brought 'em back.

"If you ask me whether I've been in dreadful danger, when arresting desperate murderers and criminals. I say 'No.'

"When your average criminal finds himself cornered, he says. 'All right, Mr. Falmouth; it's a cop,' and goes quietly.

"Crime and criminals run in grooves. They're hardy annuals with perennial methods. Extraordinary circumstances baffle the police as they baffle other folks. You can't run a business on business lines and be absolutely prepared for anything that turns up. Whiteley's will supply you with a flea or an elephant, but if a woman asked a shop-girl to hold her baby whilst she went into the tinned meat department, the girl and the manager and the whole system would be floored, because there is no provision for holding babies. And if a Manchester goods merchant, unrolling his stuff, came upon a snake lying all snug in the bale, he'd be floored too, because natural history isn't part of their business training, and they wouldn't be quite sure whether it was a big worm or a boa constrictor."

"You've an altogether unexpected sense of humour," he said, "and the moral is—"

"That the unexpected always floors you, whether it's humour or crime," said Falmouth, and went away fairly pleased with himself.

CHAPTER XVII
Manfred

MANFRED sat alone in the Lewisham house, and in the subdued light of the shaded lamp, he looked tired. A book lay on the table near at hand, and a silver coffee-service and an empty coffee cup stood on the stool by his side. Reaction, he felt. This strange man had set himself to a task that was never ending. The destruction of the forces of the Red Hundred was the end of a fight that cleared the ground for the commencement of another—but physically he was weary.

Gonsalez had left that morning for Paris. Poiccart went by the afternoon train, and he was to join them to-morrow.

The strain of the fight had told on them, all three. Financially, the cost of the war had been heavy, but that strain they could stand better than any other. All the world had been searched before they had come together—Gonsalez, Poiccart, and the man who slept eternally in the flower-grown grave at Bordeaux.

As men, taking the oaths of priesthood, they lived down the passions and frets of life. Each man was an open book to the other, speaking his most secret thought in the faith of sympathy, one dominating thought controlling them all.

They had made the name of the Four Just Men famous or infamous (according to your point of reckoning) throughout the civilized world. They came as a new force into public and private life. There were men, free of the law, who worked misery on their fellows: dreadful human ghouls fattening on the bodies and souls of the innocent and helpless; great magnates calling the law to their aid, or pushing it aside as circumstances demanded. All these became amenable to a new law, a new tribunal. There had grown into being, systems which defied correction; corporations beyond chastisement; individuals protected by cunningly drawn legislation, and others who knew to an inch the scope of toleration. In the name of justice, these men struck swiftly, dispassionately, mercilessly. The great swindler, the procureur, the suborner of witnesses, the briber of juries—they died.

There was no graduation of punishment: a warning, a second warning—then death.

Thus their names became a symbol, at which the evil-doer went tremblingly about his work, dreading the warning and ready in most cases to heed it. Life became sweeter, a more wholesome thing for many men who found the thin grey envelope on their breakfast table in the morning; but others persisted on their way, loudly invoking the law, which in spirit, if not in letter, they had outraged. The end was very sure, and I do not know of one man who escaped the consequence.

Speculating on their identity, the police of the world decided unanimously upon two points. The first was that these men were enormously rich—as indeed they were, and the second that one or two of them were no mean scientists—that also was true. Of the fourth man who had joined them recently, speculation took a wider tum. Manfred smiled as he thought of this fourth member, of his honesty, his splendid qualities of heart and brain, his enthusiasm, and his proneness to "lapse from the balance "—Gonsalez coined the phrase. It was an affectionate smile. The fourth man was no longer of the brotherhood; he had gone, the work being completed, and there were other reasons.

So Manfred was musing, till the little clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten, then he lit the spirit-kettle and brewed another cup of coffee. Thus engaged, he heard the far-away tinkle of a bell and the opening of a door. Then a murmur of voices and two steps on the stairs. He did not expect visitors, but he was always prepared for them at any hour of the day and night.

"Come in," he said, in answer to the knock; he recognized the apologetic rap of his housekeeper.

He was busy with the kettle when she came in. He did not look up, nor did he ask who it was. His housekeeper stood a moment uncertain on the threshold, then went out, leaving them together.

He poured out the coffee with a steady hand, walked to his desk, sorted a number of letters, tossed them into the grate, and stood for a moment watching them burn, then looked at her.

Taking no notice of his invitation, the girl stood waiting at ease, one hand on her hip, the other hanging loosely. "Won't you sit down?" he asked again. "I prefer to stand," she said shortly.

"Then you are not so tired as I am," he said, and sank back into the depths of his chair.

"Has the Woman of Gratz forgotten that she is an orator?" he said banteringly. It seemed to him that there was in those eyes of hers a great yearning, and he changed his tone.

"Sit down, Maria," he said gently. He saw the flush that rose to her cheek, and mistook its significance.

"No, no!" he hastened to rectify an impression. "I am serious now, I am not gibing—why have you not gone with the others?"

"Work, work, work!" he said with a bitter smile "isn't the work finished? Isn't there an end to this work of yours?"

"What are you?" she asked, with a note of irritation. "Who gave you authority?" He laughed.

"I have not asked myself—yet it seems natural that you and I should meet again—to part."

"What do they call you—your friends?" she asked suddenly. "Do they say 'The man with the beard,' or 'The tall man'—did any woman ever nurse you and call you by name?"

"Yes," he said quietly; "I have told you I am human; neither devil nor demi-god, no product of sea-foam or witches' cauldron," he smiled "but a son of earthly parents—and men call me George Manfred."

"George," she repeated, as though learning a lesson. "George Manfred," she looked at him long and earnestly and frowned.

"Nothing," she said quickly "only I am—I cannot understand—you are different—"

"To what you expected," she bent her head. "You expected me to air a triumph. To place myself in defence?" She nodded again.

"No, no," he went on "that is finished. I do not pursue a victory—I am satisfied that the power of your friends is shattered. I disassociate you from the humiliation of their defeat."

"You will be better when the madness passes," he said gravely "when you realize that your young life was not meant for the dreadful sacrifice of anarchy."

"Child, you must leave this work," he said softly, "forget the nightmare of your past—put it out of your mind, so that you will come to believe that the Red Hundred never existed."

She did not draw away her hand, nor did she attempt to check the tears that came to her eyes. Something had entered her soul—an influence that was beyond all description of definition. A wonderful element that had dissolved the thing of granite and steel, that she had fondly thought was her heart, and left her weak and shaking in the process.

"Maria, if you ever knew a mother's love"—how soft his voice was—"think of that: have you ever realized what your tiny life was to her—how she planned and thought and suffered for you—and to what end? That the hands she kissed should be set against men's lives! Did she pray to God that He might keep you strong in health and pure in soul—only that His gifts should prove a curse to His beautiful world?"

With the tenderness of a father he drew her to him, till she was on her knees before him and her weeping face was pressed closely against him.

"Hush," he said sadly; "do not let us take our conception of wickedness from our deeds, but from our intentions, however mistaken, however much they traverse the written law."

But her sobbing grew wilder, and she clutched him as though in fear that he would leave her.

He talked to her as though she were a frightened child, chiding her, laughing at her in gentle raillery, and she grew calmer and presently lifted her stained face to his.

"Listen," she said; "I—I—oh. I cannot, I cannot say it." And she buried her face on her breast.

"You have done many things—you have killed—yes—yes, let me say it—I know I am hurting you, but let me finish."

"Yet you would," she went on, and her distress moved him "you would if you thought that you could kill a body and save a soul."

"Yes, yes," she whispered, and tried to speak. Twice she attempted to frame the words, and twice she failed. Then she pushed herself slowly backward with her hands at his chest, and crouched before him with parted lips and heaving bosom.

Still he made no sign, sitting there all huddled in the big chair, as though every muscle of his body had relaxed.

"Do you hear?" she cried fiercely. "I have betrayed you because I love you—but I—I did not know it—I did not know it!"

"I have never said it to myself," she whispered; "I have never thought it in my most secret thoughts—yet it was there, there all the time, waiting for expression—and I am happier, though you die, and though every hour of my life be a lifetime of pain. I am happier that I have said it, happier than I thought I could ever be.

"I have wondered why I remembered you, and why I thought of you, and why you came into my every dream. I thought it was because I hated you, because I wanted to kill you, and to hold you at my mercy—but I know now. I know now.'"

She rocked from side to side, clasping her hands in the intensity of her passion.

"You do not speak?" she cried. "Do you not understand, beloved? I have handed you over to the police, because—O God! because I love you!"

"Maria, child,"' he murmured, and she saw how pale he was "we are strangely placed, you and I to talk of love. You must forget this, little girl; let this be the waking point of your bad dream; go forth into the new life—into a life where flowers are, and birds sing, and where rest and peace is."

She had no thought now save for his danger. "They are below," she moaned. "I brought them here—I guided them."

"Yes—when you came "—he pointed to the heap of burnt papers in the grate—"I knew."

He came back to where she still crouched on the floor and lifted her to her feet.

She stood unsteadily, but his arm supported her. He was listening, he heard the door open below.

"I shall take you into custody," said Falmouth "on suspicion of being a member of an organization known as the Four Just Men, and accordingly concerned in the following crimes—"

"I will excuse you the recital," said Manfred pleasantly, and held out his hands. For the first time in his life he felt the cold contact of steel at his wrists.

The man who snapped the handcuffs on was nervous and bungled, and Manfred, after an interested glance at the gyves, lifted his hands.

CHAPTER XVIII
In Wandsworth Gaol

CHARLES GARRETT, admirable journalist, had written the last line of a humorous description of a local concert at which a Cabinet Minister had sung pathetic ballads. Charles wrote with difficulty, for the situation had been of itself so funny, that extracting its hidden humours was a more than ordinary heart-breaking thing. But he had finished and the thick batch of copy lay on the chief sub-editor's desk—Charles wrote on an average six words to a folio, and a half a column story from his pen bulked like a three-volume novel.

Charles stopped to threaten an office-boy who had misdirected a letter, strolled into various quiet offices to "see who was there," and with his raincoat on his arm, and his stick in his hand, stopped at the end of his wanderings before the chattering tape machine. He looked through the glass box that shielded the mechanism, and was interested in a message from Teheran in the course of transmission.

"... at early date. Grand Vizier has informed Exchange correspondent that the construction of line will be pushed forward..."

The tape stopped its stuttering, and buzzed excitedly, then came a succession of quick jerks that cleared away the uncompleted message.

Then "... the leader of the Four Just Men was arrested in London to-night," said the tape, and Charles broke for the editor's room.

He flung open the door without ceremony, and repeated the story the Utile machine had told.

The grey chief received the news quietly, and the orders he gave in the next five minutes inconvenienced some twenty or thirty unoffending people.

The constructions of the "story" of the Four Just Men began at the lower rung of the intellectual ladder.

You boy! get half a dozen taxicabs here quick.... Poynter, "phone the reporters in... get the Lambs Club on the 'phone and see if O'Mahony or any other of our bright youths are there.... There are five columns about the Four Just Men standing in the gallery, get it pulled up, Mr. Short.... pictures—h'm... yet wire Massonni to get down to the police station and see if he can find a policeman who'll give him material for a sketch.... Off you go, Charles, and get the story."

There was no flurry, no rush; it was for all the world like the scene on a modern battleship when "clear lower deck for action" had sounded. Two hours to get the story into the paper was ample, and there was no need for the whip.

Later, with the remorseless hands of the clock moving on, taxi after taxi flew up to the great newspaper office, discharging alert young men who literally leapt into the building. Later, with waiting operators, sitting tensely before the key-boards of the Linotypes, came Charles Garrett doing notable things with a stump of pencil and a ream of thin copy paper.

It was the Megaphone that shone splendidly amidst its journalistic fellows, with pages—I quote the envenomed opinion of the news editor of the Mercury—that "shouted like the checks on a bookmaker's waistcoat."

It was the Megaphone that fed the fires of public interest, and was mainly responsible for the huge crowds that gathered outside Greenwich Police Court, and overflowed in dense masses to the loot of Blackheath Hill, whilst Manfred underwent his preliminary inquiries.

"George Manfred, aged 39, of no occupation, residing at Hill Crest Lodge, St. John's." In this prosaic manner he was introduced to the world.

He made a striking figure in the steel-railed dock. A chair was placed for him, and he was guarded as few prisoners had been guarded. A special cell had been prepared for his reception, and departing from established custom, extra warders were detailed to watch him. Falmouth took no risks.

The charge that had been framed had to do with no well-known case. Many years before, one Samuel Lipski, a notorious East End sweater, had been found dead with the stereotyped announcement that he had fallen to the justice of the Four. Upon this the Treasury founded its case for the prosecution—a case which had been very thoroughly and convincingly prepared, and pigeon-holed against such time as arrest should overtake one or the other of the Four Just Men.

Reading over the thousands of newspaper cuttings dealing with the preliminary examination and trial of Manfred, I am struck with the absence of any startling feature, such as one might expect to find in a great state trial of this description. Summarizing the evidence that was given at the police court, one might arrange the "parts" of the dozen or so commonplace witnesses so that they read:

An oily man with a slight squint and broken English: "This man Lipski, I known him, he vere a goot man and make the business wit the head, ker-vick."

Manfred refused to plead "guilty" or "not guilty." He spoke only once during the police court proceedings, and then only when the formal question had been put to him.

"I am prepared to abide by the result of my trial," he said clearly "and it cannot matter much one way or the other whether I plead 'guilty' or 'not guilty.'—"

On the seventh of June he was formally committed for trial. He had a short interview with Falmouth before he was removed from the police-court cells.

Falmouth would have found it difficult to analyse his feelings towards this man. He scarcely knew himself whether he was glad or sorry that fate had thrown the redoubtable leader into his hands.

His attitude to Manfred was that of a subordinate to a superior, and that attitude he would have found hardest to explain.

"Well. Mr. Falmouth," he said lightly "we enter upon the second and more serious act of the drama."

"You ought to be glad," said Manfred with his quizzical smile. "For you've vindicated—"

"Yes. I know all about that," said Falmouth dryly "but it's the other part I hate."

"I do—it's a hanging job, Mr. Manfred, and that is the hateful business after the wonderful work you've done for the country."

"Oh, its nothing to laugh about," said the plain-spoken detective "you are against a bad proposition—the Home Secretary is a cousin of Ramon's, and he hates the very name of the Four Just Men."

There was no boastfulness in the speech, but a quiet assurance that had the effect of nettling the other.

There was no escape for Manfred in the dozen yards or so between his cell door and the prison van. He was manacled to two warders, and a double line of policemen formed an avenue through which he was marched. Nor from the van itself that moved in a solid phalanx of mounted men with drawn swords.

Nor from the gloomy portals of Wandsworth Gaol where silent, uniformed men closed round him and took him to the triple-locked cell.

Once in the night, as he slept, he was awakened by the sound of the changing guard, and this amused him.

If one had the space to write, one could compile a whole book concerning Manfred's life during the weeks he lay in gaol awaiting trial. He had his visitors. Unusual laxity was allowed in this respect. Falmouth hoped to find the other two men. He generously confessed his hope to Manfred.

"You may make your mind easy on that point," said Manfred; "they will not come."

"If you were an ordinary criminal, Mr. Manfred," he said smilingly "I should hint the possibilities of King's evidence, but I won't insult you."

"Of course not," he said with an air of innocence; "if they were arrested, who on earth would arrange my escape?"

He had his daily visits from the governor, and found him charmingly agreeable. They talked of countries known to both, of people whom each knew equally well, and tacitly avoided forbidden subjects, only—

"I hear you are going to escape?" said the governor, as he concluded one of these visits. He was a largely built man, sometime Major of Marine Artillery, and he took life seriously. Therefore he did not share Falmouth's view of the projected escape as being an ill-timed jest.

"The details have not yet been arranged," he said with admirable gravity. The governor frowned.

"I don't believe you're trying to pull my leg—it's too devilishly serious a matter to joke about—but it would be an awkward thing for me if you got away." He was of the prisoner's own caste and he had supreme faith in the word of the man who discussed prison-breaking so lightheartedly.

"That I realize," said Manfred with a little show of deference "and I shall accordingly arrange my plans so that the blame shall be equally distributed."

The governor, still frowning thoughtfully, left the cell. He came back in a few minutes.

"By the way, Manfred," he said "I forgot to tell you that you'll get a visit from the chaplain. He's a very decent young fellow, and I know I needn't ask you to let him down lightly."

The chaplain was nervously anxious to secure an opening, and sought amidst the trivialities that led out of the conventional exchange of greetings a fissure for the insertion of a tactful inquiry.

Manfred, seeing his embarrassment, gave him the chance, and listened respectfully while the young man talked, earnestly, sincerely, manfully.

"N—no," said the prisoner after a while "I don't think, Mr. Summers, that you and I hold very different opinions, if they were all reduced to questions of faith and appreciation of God's goodness—but I have got to a stage where I shrink from labelling my inmost beliefs with this or that creed, or circumscribing the boundless limits of my faith with words. I know you will forgive me and believe that I do not say this from any desire to hurt you, but I have reached, too, a phase of conviction where I am adamant to outside influence. For good or ill, I must stand by the conceptions that I have built out of my own life and its teachings.

"There is another, and a more practical reason," he added "why I should not do you or any other chaplain the disservice of taking up your time—I have no intention of dying."

With this, the young minister, was forced to be content. He met Manfred frequently, talking of books and people and of strange religions.

To the warders and those about him. Manfred was a source of constant wonder. He never wearied them with the recital of his coming attempt. Yet all that he said and did seemed founded on that one basic article of faith: I shall escape.

The governor took every precaution to guard against rescue. He applied for and secured reinforcements of warders, and Manfred, one morning at exercise seeing strange faces amongst his guards, bantered him with over-nervousness.

"Yes," said the Major, "I've doubled the staff. I'm taking you at your word, that is all—one must cling tight to the last lingering shreds of faith one has in mankind. You say that you're going to escape, and I believe you." He thought a moment "I've studied you," he added. "Indeed?"

"Not here," said the governor, comprehending the prison in a sweep of his hand "but outside—read about you and thought about you and a little dimly understood you—that makes me certain that you've got something at the back of your mind when you talk so easily of escape."

Manfred nodded. He nodded many times thoughtfully, and felt a new interest in the bluff brusque man.

"And whilst I'm doubling the guard and that sort of thing. I know in my heart that that 'something' of yours isn't 'something' with dynamite in it, or 'something' with brute force behind it, but it's 'something' that devilishly deep—that's how I read it."

He jerked his head in farewell, and the cell door closed behind him with a great jangling and snapping of keys.

He might have been tried at the sessions following his committal, but the Crown applied for a postponement, and being informed and asked whether he would care to raise any objection to that course, he replied that so far from objecting, he was grateful, because his arrangements were not yet completed, and when they asked him, knowing that he had refused solicitor and counsel, what arrangements he referred to, he smiled enigmatically and they knew he was thinking of this wonderful plan of escape. That such persistent assurances of delivery should eventually reach the public through the public press was only to be expected, and although "Manfred says he will escape from Wandsworth" in the Megaphone headline, became "A prisoner's strange statement;" jn The Times, the substance of the story was the same, and you may be sure that it lost nothing in the telling. A Sunday journal, with a waning circulation, rallied on the discovery that Manfred was mad, and published a column-long account of this "poor lunatic gibbering of freedom."

Being allowed to read the newspapers. Manfred saw this, and it kept him amused for a whole day.

The warders in personal attendance on him were changed daily, he never had the same custodian twice till the governor saw a flaw in the method that allowed a warder with whom he was only slightly acquainted, and of whose integrity he was ignorant, to come into close contact with his prisoner. Particularly did this danger threaten from the new officers who had been dratted to Wandsworth to reinforce the staff, and the governor went to the other extreme, and two trusted men, who had grown old in the service, were chosen for permanent watch-dogs.

"You won't be able to have any more newspapers," said the governor one morning "I've had orders from headquarters—there have been some suspicious-looking 'agonies' in the Megaphone this last day or so."

"I suppose that isn't a fair question," said the governor cheerfully; "anyhow, no more papers. You can have books—any books you wish within limits."

So Manfred was denied the pleasure of reading the little paragraphs that described the movements and doings of the fashionable world. Just then these interested him more than the rest of the newspaper put together. Such news as he secured was of a negative kind and through the governor.

"You are now a member of a noble family, disappointed at an early age by a reigning princess," said the governor impressively.

The gravity of his years, that was beyond his years, fell away from him in that time of waiting. He became almost boyish again. He had a never-ending fund of humour that turned even the tremendous issues of his trial into subject-matter of amusement.

Armed with the authority of the Home Secretary came Luigi Fressini, the youthful director of the Anthropological Institute of Rome.

Manfred agreed to see him and made him as welcome as the circumstances permitted. Fressini was a little impressed with his own importance, and had the professional manner strongly developed. He had a perky way of dropping his head on one side when he made observations, and reminded Manfred of a horse-dealer blessed with a little knowledge, but anxious to discover at all hazards the "points" that fitted in with his preconceived theories.

"I'm afraid I cannot oblige you," said Manfred coolly; "partly because I object to the annoyance of it, and partly because head-measuring in anthropology is as much out of date as blood-letting in surgery."

"Oh, yes you can," said Manfred, "and you'd be a greater man if you did. As it is Antonio de Costa and Felix Hedeman are both beating you on your own ground—that monograph of yours on 'Cerebral Dynamics' was awful nonsense."

Whereupon Fressini went very red and spluttered and left the cell, afterwards in his indiscretion granting an interview to an evening newspaper, in the course of which he described Manfred as a typical homicide with those peculiarities of parietal development, that are invariably associated with cold-blooded murderers. For publishing what constituted a gross contempt of court, the newspaper was heavily lined, and at the instance of the British Government, Fressini was reprimanded, and eventually superseded by that very de Costa of whom Manfred spoke.

All these happenings formed the comedy of the long wait and as to the tragedy, there was none.

A week before the trial Manfred, in the course of conversation, expressed a desire for a further supply of books.

"Oh. anything," said Manfred lazily—"travel, biography, science, sport,—anything new that's going."

"I'll get you a list," said the governor who was not a booky man. "The only travel books I know are those two new things. Three Months in Morocco and Through the Ituri Forest. One of them's by a new man, Theodore Max—do you know him?"

"Isn't it about time you started to prepare your defence?" the governor asked gruffly.

"Isn't life sufficiently sweet to you—to urge you to make an effort to save it?" he asked roughly "or are you going to give it up without a struggle?"

"I shall escape—" said Manfred again; "aren't you tired of hearing me tell you why I make no effort to save myself?"

"When the newspapers start the 'mad' theory again," said the exasperated prison official "I shall feel most inclined to break the regulations and write a letter in support of the speculation."

"Do," said Manfred cheerfully "and tell them that I run round my cell on all fours biting visitors' legs."

The next day the books arrived. The mysteries of the Ituri Forest remained mysteries, but Three Months in Morocco (big print, wide margins. 12s. 6d.) he read with avidity from cover to cover, notwithstanding the fact that the reviewers to a man condemned it as being the dullest book of the season. Which was an unkindly reflection upon the literary merits of its author, Leon Gonsalez, who had worked early and late to prepare the book for the press, writing far into the night, whilst Poiccart, sitting at the other side of the table, corrected the damp proofs as they came from the printer.

CHAPTER XIX
The "Rational Faithers"

IN the handsomely furnished sitting-room of a West Kensington flat, Gonsalez and Poiccart sat over their post-prandial cigars, each busy with his own thoughts. Poiccart tossed his cigar into the fireplace and pulled out his polished briar and slowly charged it from a gigantic pouch. Leon watched him under half-closed lids, piecing together the scraps of information he had collected from his persistent observation.

"You were smoking one of George's cigars without realizing it. Halfway through the smoke you noticed the band had not been removed, so you go to tear it off. By the band you are informed that it is one of George's favourite cigars, and that starts a train of thought that makes the cigar distasteful to you, and you toss it away."

"Spoken like a cheap little magazine detective," he said frankly. "If you would know, I was aware that it was George's, and from excess of loyalty I was trying to smoke it; halfway through I reluctantly concluded that friendship had its limits; it is you who are sentimental."

Gonsalez closed his eyes and smiled. "There's another review of your book in the Evening Mirror to-night." Poiccart went on maliciously; "have you seen it?"

The recumbent figure shook its head. "It says," the merciless Poiccart continued, "that an author who can make Morocco as dull as you have done, would make—"

They sat for ten minutes, the tick-tick of the little clock on the mantelpiece and the regular puffs from Poiccart's pipe breaking the silence.

"It would seem to me," said Gonsalez, speaking with closed eyes "that George is in the position of a master who has set his two pupils a difficult problem to solve, quite confident that, difficult as it is, they will surmount all obstacles and supply the solution."

"I was never more awake," said Gonsalez calmly. "I am only marshalling details. Do you know Mr. Peter Sweeney?"

"He's a member of the Borough Council of Chelmsford. A great and a good man." Poiccart made no response.

"He is also the head and front of the 'Rational Faith' movement, of which you may have heard."

"The 'Rational Faithers,'" Gonsalez explained sleepily "are the offshoot of the New Unitarians, and the New Unitarians are a hotch-potch people with grievances."

"The 'Rational Faithers,'" Gonsalez went on, "have a mission in life, they have also a brass band, and a collection of drivelling songs, composed, printed and gratuitously distributed by Mr. Peter Sweeney, who is a man of substance."

He was silent after this for quite a minute. "A mission in life, and a nice loud brassy band—the members of which are paid monthly salaries—by Peter."

Poiccart turned his head and regarded his friend curiously. "What is all this about?" he asked.

"The 'Rational Faithers,'" the monotonous Gonsalez continued "are the sort of people who for all time have been in the eternal minority. They are against things, against public-houses, against music-halls, against meat eating, and vaccination—and capital punishment," he repeated softly.

"Years ago they were regarded as a nuisance—rowdies broke up their meetings; the police prosecuted them for obstruction, and some of them were sent to prison and came out again, being presented with newly furbished haloes at meat breakfasts—Peter presiding.

"Now they have lived down their persecutions—martyrdom is not to be so cheaply bought—they are an institution like the mechanical spinning jenny and fashionable socialism—which proves that if you go on doing things often enough and persistently, saying with a loud voice, 'Pro bono publico,' people will take you at your own valuation, and will tolerate you."

"These people demonstrate—Peter is really well off, with heaps of slum property, and he has lured other wealthy ladies and gentlemen into the movement. They demonstrate on all occasions. They have chants—Peter calls them 'chants,' and it is a nice distinction, stamping them as it does with the stamp of semi-secularity—for these festive moments, chants for the confusion of vaccinators and caters of beasts, and such. But of all their 'Services of Protest' none is more thorough, more beautifully complete, than that which is specially arranged to express their horror and abhorrence of capital punishment."

"I was trying to think of the chant," said Leon thoughtfully. "If I remember right one verse goes:

"Come fight the gallant fight.
This horror to undo:
Two blacks will never make a white.
Nor legal murder too."

"The last line," said Gonsalez tolerantly "is a trifle vague, but it conveys with delicate suggestion the underlying moral of the poem. There is another verse which has for the moment eluded me, but perhaps I shall think of it later."

"When we were talking of—our plan the other day you spoke of our greatest danger, the one thing we could not avoid. Does it not seem to you that the 'Rational Faithers' offer a solution with their querulous campaigns, their demonstrations, their brassy band, and their preposterous chants?"

Leon walked over to the cupboard, unlocked it, and drew out a big portfolio such as artists use to carry their drawings in. He untied the strings and turned over the loose pages. It was a collection that had cost the Four just Men much time and a great deal of money.

"What are you going to do?" asked Poiccart, as the other, slipping off his coat and fixing his pince-nez, sat down before a big plan he had extracted from the portfolio. Leon took up a fine drawing-pen from the table, examined the nib with the eye of a skilled craftsman, and carefully uncorked a bottle of architect's ink.

"Have you ever felt a desire to draw imaginary islands?" he asked "naming your own bays, christening your capes, creating towns with a scratch of your pen, and raising up great mountains with herring-bone strokes? Because I'm going to do something like that—I feel in that mood which in little boys is eloquently described as 'trying,' and I have the inclination to annoy Scotland Yard."

* * * * *

It was the day before the trial that Falmouth made the discovery. To be exact it was made for him. The keeper of a Gower Street boarding house reported that two mysterious men had engaged rooms. They came late at night with one portmanteau, bearing divers foreign labels; they studiously kept their faces in the shadow, and the beard of one was obviously false. In addition to which they paid for their lodgings in advance, and that was the most damning circumstance of all. Imagine mine host, showing them to their rooms, palpitating with his tremendous suspicion, calling to the full upon his powers of simulation, ostentatiously nonchalant, and impatient to convey the news to the police-station round the corner. For one called the other Leon, and they spoke despairingly in stage whispers of "poor Manfred."

They went out together, saying they would return soon after midnight, ordering a fire for their bedroom, for the night was wet and chilly.

Half an hour later the full story was being told to Falmouth over the telephone.

"It's too good to be true," was his comment, but gave orders. The hotel was well surrounded by midnight, but so skilfully that the casual passer-by would never have suspected it. At three in the morning, Falmouth decided that the men had been warned, and broke open their doors to search the rooms. The portmanteau was their sole find. A few articles of clothing, bearing the "tab" of a Parisian tailor, was all they found till Falmouth, examining the bottom of the portmanteau, found that it was false.

"Hullo!" he said, and in the light of his discovery the exclamation was modest in its strength, for, neatly folded, and cunningly hidden, he came upon the plans. He gave them a rapid survey and whistled. Then he folded them up and put them carefully in his pocket.

"Keep the house under observation," he ordered. "I don't expect they'll return, but if they do, take 'em."

Then he flew through the deserted streets as fast as a motor-car could carry him, and woke the Chief Commissioner from a sound sleep.

"Wandsworth, Pentonville and Reading," said the Commissioner. "Plans, and remarkably good plans, of all three prisons."

Falmouth indicated the writing in the cramped hand and the carefully ruled lines that had been drawn in red ink.

"Yes. I see them," said the Commissioner, and read 'Wall 3 feet thick—dynamited here, warder on duty here—can be shot from wall, distance to entrance to prison hall 25 feet; condemned cell here, walls 3 feet, one window, barred 10 feet 3 inches from ground.'

"It's the same with the others, sir," said Falmouth. "They've got distances, heights and posts worked out; they must have taken years to get this information."

"One thing is evident," said the Commissioner; "they'll do nothing until after the trial—all these plans have been drawn with the condemned cell as the point of objective."

"I have to tell you, Mr. Manfred," he said, "that we have in our possession full details of your contemplated rescue."

"Last night your two friends escaped by the skin of their teeth, leaving behind them elaborate plans—"

"In writing," said Falmouth solemnly. "I think it is my duty to tell you this, because it seems that you are building too much upon what is practically an impossibility, an escape from gaol."

"Yes, the whole thing was worked out "—he thought he had said quite enough, and turned the subject. "Don't you think you ought to change your mind and retain a lawyer?"

"I think you're right," said Manfred slowly. "Will you arrange for a member of some respectable firm of solicitors to see me?"

"Oh. it isn't my defence," said Manfred cheerfully; "only I think I ought to make a will."

CHAPTER XX
At The Old Bailey

THEY were privileged people who gained admission to the Old Bailey, people with tickets from sheriffs, reporters, great actors, and very successful authors. The early editions of the evening newspapers announced the arrival of these latter spectators. The crowd outside the court contented themselves with discussing the past and the probable future of the prisoner.

The Megaphone had scored heavily again, for it published in extenso the particulars of the prisoner's will. It referred to this in its editorial columns variously as "An Astounding Document" and "An Extraordinary Fragment." It was remarkable alike for the amount bequeathed, and for the generosity of its legacies.

Nearly half a million was the sum disposed of, and of this the astonishing sum of £60,000 was bequeathed to "the sect known as the 'Rational Faithers' for the furtherance of their campaign against capital punishment, " a staggering legacy remembering that the Four Just Men knew only one punishment for the people who came under its ban.

"You want this kept quiet, of course," said the lawyer when the will had been attested.

"Not a bit," said Manfred; "in fact I think you had better hand a copy to the Megaphone."

"Perfectly so," said the other. "Who knows," he smiled "it might influence public opinion in—er—my favour."

So the famous will became public property, and when Manfred, climbing the narrow wooden stairs that led to the dock of the Old Bailey, came before the crowded court, it was this latest freak of his that the humming court discussed.

He looked round the big dock curiously, and when a warder pointed out the seat, he nodded, and sat down. He got up when the indictment was read.

He was interested in the procedure. The scarlet-robed judge with his old wise face and his quaint detached air interested him mostly. The business-like sheriffs in furs, the clergyman who sat with crossed legs, the triple row of wigged barristers, the slaving bench of reporters with their fierce whispers of instructions as they passed their copy to the waiting boys, and the strong force of police that held the court: they had all a special interest for him.

The leader for the Crown was a little man with a keen, strong face and a convincing dramatic delivery. He seemed to be possessed all the time with a desire to deal fairly with the issues, fairly to the Crown and fairly to the prisoner. He was not prepared, he said, to labour certain points which had been brought forward at the police-court inquiry, or to urge the jury that the accused man was wholly without redeeming qualities.

He would not even say that the man who had been killed, and with whose killing Manfred was charged, was a worthy or a desirable citizen of the country. Witnesses who had come forward to attest their knowledge of the deceased, were ominously silent on the point of his moral character. He was quite prepared to accept the statement that he was a bad man, an evil influence on his associates, a corrupting influence on the young women whom he employed, a breaker of laws, a blackguard, a debauchee.

"But, gentlemen of the jury," said the counsel impressively "a civilized community such as ours has accepted a system—intricate and imperfect though it may be—by which the wicked and the evil-minded are punished. Generation upon generation of wise law-givers have moulded and amended a scale of punishment to meet every known delinquency. It has established its system laboriously, making great national sacrifices for the principles that system involved. It has wrested with its life-blood the charters of a great liberty—the liberty of a law administered by its chosen officers and applied in the spirit of untainted equity."

So he went on to speak of the Four Just Men who had founded a machinery for punishment, who had gone outside and had overridden the law; who had condemned and executed their judgment independent and in defiance of the established code.

"Again I say, that I will not commit myself to the statement that they punished unreasonably: that with the evidence against their victims, such as they possessed, the law officers of the Crown would have hesitated at initiating a prosecution. If ii had pleased them to have taken an abstract view of this or that offence, and they had said this of that man is deserving of punishment, we, the representatives of the established law, could not have questioned for one moment the justice of their reasoning. But we have come into conflict on the question of the adequacy of punishment, and upon the more serious question of the right of the individual to inflict that punishment, which results in the appearance of this man in the dock on a charge of murder."

Throughout the opening speech, Manfred leant forward, following the counsel's words.

Once or twice he nodded, as though he were in agreement with the speaker, and never once did he show sign of dissent.

The witnesses came in procession. The constable again, and the doctor, and the voluble man with the squint. As he finished with each, the counsel asked whether he had any question to put, but Manfred shook his head.

"No, sar, I haf not," said the witness emphatically "I haf not'ing to say against him."

"There are anoder three yet—I haf no desire to die," and amidst the laughter that followed this exhibition of caution, Manfred recalled him sharply.

"You have mentioned something about another three," he said. "Do you suggest that they have threatened you?"

"I cannot examine counsel," said Manfred, smiling; "but I put it to him that there has been no suggestion of intimidation of witnesses in this case."

"None whatever," counsel hastened to say "it is due to you to make the statement."

"Against this man"—the prisoner pointed to the witness-box—"we have nothing that would justify our action. He is a saccharine smuggler, and a dealer in stolen property—but the law will take care of him."

"It's a lie," said the little man in the box, white and shaking; "it is libellous!"

The judge might have reproved the prisoner for his irrelevant accusation, but allowed the incident to pass.

The case for the prosecution was drawing to a close when an official of the court came to the judge's side and, bending down, began a whispered conversation with him.

As the final witness withdrew, the judge announced an adjournment and the prosecuting counsel was summoned to his lordship's private room.

In the cells beneath the court, Manfred received a hint at what was coming and looked grave.

"In a case presenting the unusual features that characterize this," he said, "it is to be expected that there will occur incidents of an almost unprecedented nature. The circumstances under which the evidence that will be given now, are, however, not entirely without precedent." He opened a thick law book before him at a place marked by a slip of paper. "Here is the Queen against Forsythe, and earlier, the Queen against Berander, and earlier still and quoted in all these rulings, the King against Sir Thomas Mandory, we have parallel cases." He closed the book.

"Although the accused has given no intimation of his desire to call witnesses on his behalf, a gentleman has volunteered his evidence. He desires that his name shall be withheld, and there are peculiar circumstances that compel me to grant his request. You may be assured, gentlemen of the jury, that I am satisfied both as to the identity of the witness, and that he is in every way worthy of credence."

He nodded a signal to an officer, and through the judge's door to the witness box there walked a young man. He was dressed in a tightly fitting frock coat, and across the upper part of his face was a half mask.

He leant lightly over the rail, looking at Manfred with a little smile on his clean-cut mouth, and Manfred's eyes challenged him.

It was the next question that sent a gasp of surprise through the crowded court. "You claim equal responsibility for his actions?"

"You claim, too," said the judge, consulting a paper before him "to have participated in their councils?"

There were long pauses between the questions, for the judge was checking the replies and counsel was writing busily.

"And you state that their judgments were animated with a high sense of their duty and responsibility to mankind?"

"I state this from personal knowledge in two instances, and from the investigations of myself and the independent testimony of high legal authority."

"Which brings me to my next question," said the judge. "Did you ever appoint a commission to investigate all the circumstances of the known cases in which the Four Just Men have been implicated?"

"Was it composed of a Chief Justice of a certain European State, and four eminent criminal lawyers?"

"Before I ask you any question," he said "I can only express myself as being in complete agreement with his lordship on the policy of allowing your identity to remain hidden." The young man bowed.

"Now," said the counsel "let me ask you this. How long have you been in association with the Four Just Men?"

"So that really you are not in a position to give evidence regarding the merits of this case—which is five years old, remember."

"Let me ask you this—but I must tell you that you need not answer unless you wish—are you satisfied that the Four Just Men were responsible for that tragedy?"

"Yes," said the witness smiling "if Manfred denied it, I should not only doubt it, but be firmly assured of his innocence."

"Let us suppose you were the head of a great business firm controlling a thousand workmen, with rules and regulations for their guidance and a scale of fines and punishments for the preservation of discipline. And suppose you found one of those workmen had set himself up as an arbiter of conduct, and had superimposed upon your rules a code of his own."

"If the rules he initiated were wise and needful I would incorporate them in my code."

"Let me put another case. Suppose you governed a territory, administering the laws—"

"I know what you are going to say," interrupted the witness, "and my answer is that the laws of a country are as so many closely-set palings erected for the benefit of the community. Yet try as you will, the interstices exist, and some men will go and come at their pleasure, squeezing through this fissure, or walking boldly through the gap."

"And you would welcome an unofficial form of justice that acted as a kind of moral stop-gap?"

"It is difficult to accommodate one's mind to the abstract, with such tangible evidence of the efficacy of the Four Just Men's system before one's eyes," he said.

The witness hesitated before leaving the box, looking at the prisoner, but Manfred shook his head smilingly, and the straight slim figure of the young man passed out of court by the way he had come.

The unrestrained buzz of conversation that followed his departure was allowed to go unchecked as judge and counsel consulted earnestly across the bench.

Garrett, down amongst the journalists, put into words the vague thought that had been present in every mind in court.

"Do you notice, Jimmy," he said to James Sinclair of the Review, "how blessed unreal this trial is? Don't you miss the very essence of a murder trial, the mournfulness of it and the horror of it? Here's a feller been killed and not once has the prosecution talked about 'this poor man struck down in the prime of life' or said anything that made you look at the prisoner to see how he takes it. It's a philosophical discussion with a hanging at the end of it."

"Because," said Garrett "if they find him guilty, he's got to die. There's no doubt about that: if they don't hang him, crack! goes the British Constitution, the Magna Charta, the Diet of Worms, and a few other things that Bill Seddon was gassing about."

Now Sir William Seddon was on his feet again, beginning his closing address to the jury. He applied himself to the evidence that had been given, to the prisoner's refusal to call that evidence into question, and conventionally traced step by step the points that told against the man in the dock. He touched on the appearance of the masked figure in the witness-box. For what it was worth it deserved their consideration, but it did not affect the issue before the court. The jury were there to formulate a verdict in accordance with the law as it existed, not as if it did not exist at all, to apply the law, not to create it—that was their duty. The prisoner would be offered an opportunity to speak in his own defence. Counsel for the Crown had waived his right to make the final address. They would, if he spoke, listen attentively to the prisoner, giving him the benefit of any doubt that might be present in their minds. But he could not see, he could not conceivably imagine, how the jury could return any but one verdict.

It seemed for a while that Manfred did not intend availing himself of the opportunity, for he made no sign, then he rose to his feet, and, resting his hands on the ink-stained ledge before him:

The court was so still that he could hear the scratchings of the reporters' pens, and unexpected noises came from the street outside.

"I doubt either the wisdom or the value of speaking," he said "not that I suggest that you have settled in your minds the question of my guilt without very excellent and convincing reasons.

"I am under an obligation to Counsel for the Treasury," he bowed to the watchful prosecutor "because he spared me those banalities of speech which I feared would mar this trial. He did not attempt to whitewash the man we killed, or to exonerate him from his gross and sordid crimes. Rather, he made plain the exact position of the law in relation to myself, and with all he said I am in complete agreement. The inequalities of the law are notorious, and I recognize the impossibility, as society is constituted, of amending the law so that crimes such as we have dealt with, shall be punished as they deserve. I do not rail against the fate that sent me here. When I undertook my mission, I undertook it with my eyes open, for I, too," he smiled at the upturned faces at the counsels' bench "I too am learned in the law—and other things.

"There are those who imagine that I am consumed with a burning desire to alter the laws of this country: that is not so. Set canons, inflexible in their construction, cannot be adapted according to the merits of a case, and particularly is this so when the very question of 'merit' is a contentious point. The laws of England are good laws, wise and just and equitable. What other commendation is necessary than this one tact, that I recognize that my life is forfeit by those laws, and assent to the justice which condemns me.

"None the less, when I am free again," he went on easily. "I shall continue to merit your judgment because there is that within me which shows clearly which way my path lies, and how best I may serve humanity. If you say that to choose a victim here and a victim there for condemnation, touching only the veriest fringe of the world of rascaldom. I am myself unjust—since I leave the many and punish the few—I answer that for every man we slew, a hundred turned at the terror of our name and walked straightly: that the example of one death saved thousands. And if you would seriously ask: Have you helped reform mankind. I answer as seriously—Yes."

"It would be madness to expect a civilized country to revert to the barbarism of an age in which death was the penalty for every other crime, and I will not insult your intelligence by denying that such a return to the bad days was ever suggested by me. But there has come into existence a spurious form of humanitarianism, the exponents of which have, it would appear, lost their sense of proportion, and have promoted the Fear of Pain to a religion: who have forgotten that the age of Reason is not yet, and that men who are animal in all but human semblance share the animal's obedience to corrective discipline, share too his blind fear of death—and are amenable to methods that threaten his comfort or his life."

"You, my lord," he cried "can you order the flogging of a brute who has half killed one of his fellows, without incurring the bleating wrath of men and women, who put everything before physical pain—honour, patriotism, justice? Can you sentence a man to death for a cruel murder without a thousand shrieking products of our time rushing hither and thither like ants, striving to secure his release? Without a chorus of pity—that was unexcited by the mangled victim of his ferocity? 'Killing deliberate, wolfish killing by man.' say they in effect,' is the act of God, but the legal punishment of death, is murder.' That is why I expect no sympathy for the methods the Four Just Men adopted. We represented a law—we executed expeditiously. We murdered if you like. In the spirit and the letter of the laws of England, we did murder. I acknowledge the justice of my condemnation. I do not desire to extenuate the circumstances of my crime. Yet none the less the act I cannot justify to your satisfaction I justify to my own."

The jury had to satisfy their minds that the prisoner committed the crime with which he was charged, and must not trouble themselves with any other aspect of the case but that part plainly before them. Was the man in the dock responsible for the killing of Lipski?

Those used to such scenes noticed that the judge in passing sentence of death omitted the striking and sombre words that usually accompany the last sentence of the law, and that he spoke, too, without emotion.

"Either he's going to get a reprieve or else the judge is certain he'll escape," said Garrett "and the last explanation seems ridiculous.."

"By the way," said his companion as they passed slowly with the crowd into the roadway, "who was that swell that came late and sat on the bench?"

"That was His Highness the Prince of the Escorial," said Charles "he's in London just now on his honeymoon."

"I know all about that," said Jimmy "but I heard him speaking to the sheriff just before we came out, and it struck me that I'd heard his voice before."

"It seems so to me," said the discreet Charles—so discreet indeed that he never even suggested to his editor that the mysterious mask who gave evidence on behalf of George Manfred was none other than His Royal Highness.

CHAPTER XXI
Chelmsford

THEY took Manfred back to Wandsworth Gaol on the night of the trial. The governor, standing in the gloomy courtyard as the van drove in with its clanking escort, received him gravely.

"A cigar," said Manfred, and the governor handed him the case. Manfred selected with care, the prison-master watching him wonderingly.

"And I need to be," was the reply, "for I have before me an ordeal which is only relieved of its gruesomeness by its uniqueness."

"Oh. I've killed that," laughed Manfred "killed it with the icy blast of satire—although I trust I haven't discouraged the 'Rational Faithers' for whom I have made such handsome posthumous provision."

"You are an extraordinary man," mused the governor again. "By the way, Manfred, what part does the lady play in your escape?"

"Yes, the woman who haunts the outside of this prison: a lady in black, and my chief warder tells me singularly beautiful."

"Ah, the woman," said Manfred, and his face clouded. "I had hoped she had gone." He sat thinking.

"If she is a friend of yours, an interview would not be difficult to obtain," said the governor.

"No, no, no," said Manfred hastily, "there must be no interview—at any rate here."

The governor thought that the interview "here" was very unlikely, for the Government had plans for the disposal of their prisoner which he did not feel his duty to the State allowed him to communicate. He need not, had he known, have made a mystery of the scheme.

Manfred kicked off the clumsy shoes the prison authorities had provided him with—he had changed into convict dress on his return to the gaol—and laid himself down dressed as he was, pulling a blanket over him.

They thought he was referring again to the escape, and marvelled a little at his madness. Three hours later when the governor came to the cell, they were dumbfounded at his knowledge.

"Sorry to disturb you," said the Major "but you're to be transferred to another prison—why, you aren't undressed!"

"No," said Manfred, lazily kicking off the cover "but I thought the transfer would be earlier.

"About the transfer—oh, a little bird told me," said the prisoner, stretching himself. "When is it to be—Pentonville?"

He nodded to the attendant warder as he left and took an informal but cheery farewell of the governor on the deserted railway station where a solitary engine with brake van attached stood waiting.

"I cannot take your hand," said Manfred "for two reasons. The first is that your excellent chief warder has handcuffed me, behind —"

"Never mind about the other reason," said the governor with a little laugh, and then as he squeezed the prisoner's arm, he added "I don't wish the other man any harm, but if by chance that wonderful escape of yours materializes, I know a respected officer in the Prison Service who will not be heartbroken."

"That is at your discretion," said Manfred as the train moved off. The warders drew down the blinds, and Manfred composed himself to sleep.

He woke with the chief warder's hand on his arm and stepped out on to the platform as the day was breaking. His quick eye searched the advertisement boards on the station. He would have done this ordinarily, because they would tell him where he was, supposing for some reason the authorities had wished to keep his destination a secret from him. But he had a particular interest in advertising just then. The station was smothered with the bills of a travelling cheap jack—an unusual class of advertisement for the austere notice boards of a railway station. Huge flaming posters that said "Everything is Right," and in smaller type underneath "Up-to-date." Little bills that said "Write to your cousin in London... and tell her that Gipsy Jack's bargain," etc. "Go by the book!" said another. Marching down the stairs he observed opposite the station yet further evidence of this extravagant cheap jack's caprice, for there were big illuminated signs in evidence, all to the same effect. In the shuttered darkness of the cab, Manfred smiled broadly. There was really no limit to the ingenuity of Leon Gonsalez. Next morning when the governor of Chelmsford Gaol visited him, Manfred expressed his intention of writing a letter to his cousin—in London.

* * * * *

"Just a glimpse," said Leon. He walked over to the window of the room and looked out. Right in front of him rose the grim facade of the gaol. He walked back to the table and poured himself out a cup of tea. It was not yet six o'clock, but he had been up the greater part of the night.

"The Home Secretary," he said, between gasps as he drank the scalding hot liquid "is indiscreet in his correspondence and is generally a most careless man."

"I have made two visits to the right honourable gentleman's house in this past fortnight, and I am bursting with startling intelligence. Do you know that Willington, the President of the Board of Trade, has had an 'affair,' and that a junior Lord of the Admiralty drinks like a sponge, and the Chancellor hales the War Secretary, who will talk all the time, and—"

"A diary full of thousands of pounds' worth of gossip, locked with a sixpenny-ha'penny lock. His house is fitted with the Magno-Sellie system of burglar alarms, and he keeps three servants."

"My dear Poiccart," said Leon resentfully "you have got a trick of accepting the most wonderful information from me without paying me the due of adopting the following flattering attitudes: primary, incredulous surprise; secondary, ecstatic wonder; tertiary, admiration blended with awe."

"I have ceased to wonder at your cleverness, illustrious," he said, speaking in Spanish, the language these two men invariably used when alone.

"All these things are beyond me." Poiccart went on, "yet no man can say for all my slow brain that I am a sluggard in action."

The work of the last few weeks had fallen heavily on them both. It was no light task, the preparation of Three Months in Morocco. The first word of every seventh paragraph formed the message that he had to convey to Manfred—and it was a long message. There was the task of printing it, arranging the immediate publication, the placing of the book in the list, and generally thrusting it under the noses of an unappreciative public. As sailors store Life-belts for possible contingencies, so, in every country had the Four Just Men stored the equipment of rescue against their need. Poiccart, paying many flying visits to the Midlands, brought back with him from time to time strange parts of machinery. The lighter he carried with his luggage, the heavier parts he smuggled into Chelmsford in a strongly-built motor-car.

The detached house facing the prison was fortunately for sale, and the agent who conducted the rapid negotiations that resulted in its transfer had let fall the information that the clients hoped to establish a garage on the Colchester Road that would secure a sensible proportion of the Essex motor traffic. The arrival of two rough painted chassis supported this view of the new owners' business. They were enterprising people, these new arrivals, and it was an open secret "on the road," that Gipsy Jack, whose caravan was under distress, and in the hands of the bailiff, had found financial support at their hands. Albeit Jack protested vigorously at the ridiculous suggestion that he should open in Chelmsford at an unpropitious season, and sniffed contemptuously at the extravagant billing of the town. Nor did he approve of the wording of the posters, which struck him as being milder than the hilarious character of his business-entertainment called for.

"Them Heckfords are going to make a failure," said Mr. Peter Sweeney in the bosom of his family. He occupied "Faith Home," an ornate villa on the Colchester Road.

Before his momentous conception of the "Rational Faithers," it had borne the more imposing title of "Palace Lodge," this by the way.

"They've got no business ability, and they're a bit gone on the sherbet." For a high-priest of a new cult. Peter's language was neither pure nor refined. "And they haven't got the common politeness of pigs," he added ambiguously. "I took the petition there to-day," Peter went on indignantly, "and the chap that came to the door! Oh. what a sight! Looked as if he'd been up all night, eyes red, face white, and all of a shake."

"' The petition for the poor creature now lyin' in Chelmsford,' says I, 'under sentence of death—which is legal murder.' I says.

"' Go to the devil!' he says; they were his exact words, 'Go to the devil.' I was that upset that I walked straight away from the door—he didn't even ask me in—an' just as I got to the bottom of the front garden, he shouts. 'What do you want him reprieved for—hasn't he left you a pot of money? '"

Mr. Peter Sweeney was very much agitated as he repeated this callous piece of cynicism.

"That idea," said Peter solemnly and impressively "Must Not be Allowed to Grow."

It was to give the lie to the wicked suggestion that Peter arranged his daily demonstration, from twelve to two. There had been such functions before. "Mass" meetings with brass bands at the very prison gates, but they were feeble mothers' meetings compared to these demonstrations on behalf of Manfred.

The memory of the daily "service" is too fresh in the minds of the public, and particularly the Chelmsford public, to need any description here. Crowds of three thousand people were the rule, and Peter's band blared incessantly, whilst Peter himself crew hoarse from the effect of railing his denunciation of the barbarous methods of a mediaeval system.

Heckford Brothers, the new motor-car firm, protested against the injury these daily paraders were inflicting on their business. That same dissipated man, looking more dissipated than ever, who had been so rude to him, called upon Peter and threatened him with injunctions. This merely had the effect of stiffening Peter Sweeney's back, and next day the meeting lasted three hours.

In the prison, the pandemonium that went on outside penetrated even to the seclusion of Manfred's cell, and he was satisfied.

The local police were loth to interfere and reopen the desperate quarrel that had centred around such demonstrations before.

So Peter triumphed, and the crowd of idlers that flocked to the midday gathering grew in proportion as the interest in the condemned man's fate rose.

And the augmented band blared and the big drum boomed the louder and Rational Faith gamed many new converts.

A sightseer, attracted by curiosity, was standing on the fringe of the crowd one day. He could not see the band from where he stood but he made a remarkable observation; it was nothing less than a gross reflection upon a valued member of the orchestra.

"That chap," said the unknown critic "is beating out of time—or else there's two drums going."

The crowd had swayed back to the railings before the premises of the motor manufacturers, and as it dispersed—Peter's party "processed" magnificently to the town before breaking up—one of the new tenants came to the door and stood, watching the melting crowd. He overheard this remark concerning the big drummer's time, and it vexed him. When he came back to the sitting-room, where a pallid Poiccart lay supinely on a couch, he said:

Until six o'clock these men rested—as men must rest who have been working under a monstrous pressure of air—then they went to clear away the results of their working.

"Luckily," said Poiccart, "we have many rooms to fill yet; the drawing-room can hold a little more, the dining-room we need, the morning-room is packed. We must start upstairs to-morrow."

As the work proceeded, the need for caution became more and more apparent; but no accident marred their progress, and three days before the date fixed for the execution, the two men, coming to their barely-furnished living-room, looked at each other across the uncovered table that separated them, and sighed thankfully, for the work was almost finished.

"Those fellows," said Mr. Peter Sweeney "are not so Bad as I thought they was. One of 'em come to me to-day and apologized. He was lookin' better too, and offered to sign the petition." Peter always gave you the impression in speaking that he was using words that began with capital letters.

"Pa," said his son, who had a mind that dealt in material issues "what are you going to do with Manfred's money?"

"These young men," he went on, "might do worse than they have done. They are more business-like than I thought. Clarker, the town electrician, tells me that they had got a power current in their works, they have got a little gas-engine too, and from the way one of them was handling a big car to-day on the London road, it strikes me they know something about the business of motor-car running."

Gonsalez, coming back from a trial trip on his noisy car, had to report a disquieting circumstance.

Poiccart looked up from his work—he was heating something in a crucible over an electric stove. "The Woman of Gratz?" he asked. Leon nodded.

"That she would betray no more—I believe that, and George asked us to be good to her, that is a command."

(There was a great deal more in Manfred's letter to "his cousin in London" than met the governor's eye.)

"She is an unhappy woman," said Gonsalez gravely; "it was pitiable to see her at Wandsworth, where she stood day after day with those tragic eyes of hers on the ugly gate of the prison; here, with the result of her work in sight, she must be suffering the tortures of the damned."

"The Red Hundred has repudiated her," Leon went on. "We were advised of that yesterday; I am not sure that she is not under sentence. You remember Herr Smidt, he of the round face? It was he who denounced her."

"Smidt—Smidt?" he puzzled. "Oh, yes—there is something against him, a cold-blooded murder, was it not?"

"Yes," said Leon very quietly, and they did not speak again of Herr Smidt of Prague. Poiccart was dipping thin glass rods into the seething, bubbling contents of the crucible, and Leon watched idly.

"She was not sure of me—but I made her the sign of the Red Hundred. I could not speak to her in the open street. Falmouth's people were in all probability watching her day and night. You know the old glove trick for giving the hour of assignation. Drawing on the glove slowly and stopping to admire the fit of one, two, or three fingers ... so I signalled to her to meet me in three hours' time."

"At Wivenhoe—that was fairly simple too... imagine me leaning over the side of the car to demand of the willing bystanders how long it would take me to reach Wivenhoe—the last word loudly—would it take me three hours? Whilst they volunteered their counsel, I saw her signal of assent."

After midnight. Poiccart, dozing in his chair, heard the splutter and the Gatling-gun explosions of the car as it turned into the extemporized garage.

"She's gone," said Gonsalez, with a sigh of relief. "It was a difficult business, and I had to lie to her—we cannot afford the risk of betrayal. Like the remainder of the Red Hundred, she clings to the idea that we have thousands of people in our organization; she accepted my story of storming the prison with sheer brute force. She wanted to stay, but I told her that she would spoil everything—she leaves for the Continent to-morrow."

"It was difficult to persuade her to take it; she was like a mad thing between her fear of George, her joy at the news I gave her—and remorse.

Day found them working. There was machinery to be dismantled, a heavy open door to be fixed, new lyres to be fitted to the big car. An hour before the midday demonstration came a knock at the outer door. Leon answered it and found a polite chauffeur. In the roadway stood a car with a solitary occupant.

The chauffeur wanted petrol; he had run himself dry. His master descended from the car and came forward to conduct the simple negotiation. He dismissed the mechanic with a word.

"There are one or two questions I would like to ask about my car," he said distinctly.

"I know," said the other easily "but I thought there might be something I could do—what is the plan?"

"You mean where shall we make for—the sea, of course. There is a good road between here and Clacton, and the boat lies snug between there and Walton."

"Excellent—but you?" said Leon. "I shall be all right?" said the cheerful visitor. "By the way, have you a telegraph map of this part of the world?"

Leon unlocked a drawer and took out a folded paper. "If you would arrange that," he said "I should be grateful."

"I have men who may be trusted to the very end," he said. "The wires shall be cut at eight o'clock, and Chelmsford shall be isolated from the world."

CHAPTER XXII
The Execution

IF you pass through the little door that leads to the porter's lodge (the door will be locked and bolted behind you) your conductor will pass you through yet another door into a yard that is guarded by the ponderous doors of the prison at the one end and by a big steel gate at the other. Through this gate you reach another courtyard, and bearing to the right, you come to a flight of stone steps that bring you to the governor's tiny office. I f you go straight along the narrow passage from which the office opens, descend a flight of stairs at the other end, through a well-guarded doorway, you come suddenly into the great hall of the prison. Here galleries run along both sides of the hall, and steel gangways and bridges span the width at intervals. Here, too, polished stairways criss-cross, and the white face of the two long walls of the hall are pitted with little black doors.

On the ground floor, the first cell on the right as you enter the hall from the governor's office is larger and more commodious than its fellows. There is, too, a suspicion of comfort in the strip of matting that covers the floor, in the naked gaslight which flares in its wire cage by day and night, in the table and chair, and the plain comfortable bed. This is the condemned cell. A dozen paces from its threshold is a door that leads to another part of the yard, and a dozen more paces along the flagged pathway brings you to a little unpretentious one-storeyed house without windows, and a doorway sufficiently wide to allow two men to pass abreast. There is a beam where a rope may be made fast, and a trapdoor, and a brick-lined pit, with a salmon-pink distemper.

From his cell Manfred was an interested listener, as day by day the uproar of the demonstration before the gates increased.

He found in the doctor who visited him daily a gentleman of some wit. In a sense, he replaced the governor of Wandsworth as an intellectual companion, for the master of Chelmsford was a reserved man, impregnated with the traditions of the system. To the doctor, Manfred confided his private opinion of the "Rational Faithers."

"But why on earth have you left them so much money?" asked the surprised medico.

"Because I dislike cranks and narrow, foolish people most intensely," was the cryptic reply.

"Oh. one hears," said Manfred carelessly. "Sweeney had an international reputation; besides," he added, not moving a muscle of his face "I know about everybody."

"You," repeated Manfred wisely. "From the day you left Clifton to the day you married the youngest Miss Arbuckle of Chertsey."

"It isn't surprising, is it, " explained Manfred "that for quite a long time I have taken an interest in the various staffs of the prisons within reach of London?"

Manfred's life in Chelmsford differed in a very little degree from his life in Wandsworth.

The routine of prison life remained the same: the daily exercises, the punctilious visits of governor, doctor and chaplain.

On one point Manfred was firm. He would receive no spiritual ministrations, he would attend no service. He made his position clear to the scandalized chaplain.

"You do not know to what sect I am attached," he said "because I have refused to give any information upon that point. I feel sure you have no desire to proselytise or convert me from my established beliefs."

"That," said Manfred, "is my own most secret knowledge, and which I do not intend sharing with any man."

"Point of view is everything," was the calm rejoinder, "and I am perfectly satisfied with the wholesomeness of my own: in addition to which," he added. "I am not going to die just yet, and being aware of this. I shrink from accepting from good men the sympathy and thought which I do not deserve."

To the doctor he was a constant source of wonder, letting fall surprising items of news mysteriously acquired.

"Where he gets his information from puzzles me, sir," he confessed to the governor. "The men who are guarding him—"

"No, only the books he requires. He expressed a desire the other day for Three Months in Morocco, said he had half finished it when he was at Wandsworth, and wanted to read it again to 'make sure'—so I got it."

Three days before the date fixed for the execution, the governor had informed Manfred that, despite the presentation of a petition, the Home Secretary saw no reason for advising the remission of the sentence.

He spent much of his time chatting with the two warders. Strict sense of duty forced them to reply in monosyllables, but he interested them keenly with his talk of the strange places of the world. As far as they could, they helped him pass the time, and he appreciated their restricted tightness.

"And you're Franklin," he said to the other, and the man replied in the affirmative. Manfred nodded.

"When I am at liberty," he said. "I will make you some recompense for your exemplary patience."

At exercise on the Monday—Tuesday was the fatal day fixed by the High Sheriff—he saw a civilian walking in the yard and recognized him, and on his return to his cell he requested to see the governor.

"I would like to meet Mr. Jessen," he said when the officer came, and the governor demurred.

"Will you be good enough to refer my request to the Home Secretary by telegraph?" asked Manfred, and the governor promised that he would.

Jessen stepped into the cell and nodded pleasantly to the man who sat on the edge of the couch.

"I wanted to speak to you. Jessen," Manfred said, and motioned him to a seat. "I wanted to put the business of Starque right, once and for all,."

"That was all right—it was an order signed by the Czar and addressed personally to me—I could do no less than hang him," he said.

"Yet you may think," Manfred went on "that we took you for this work because—"

"I know why I was taken," said the quiet Jessen. "Starque and François were within the law, condemned by the law, and you strike only at those the law has missed."

"The Guild is flourishing," he said cheerfully. "I am now converting the luggage thieves—you know, the men who haunt railway stations."

"The real thing—the porters they sometimes impersonate," said the enthusiast, and added dolefully "it's terribly uphill business though, getting characters for the men who want to go straight and have only a ticket of leave to identify them."

"Again, if you grow weary of that repetition—" Manfred smiled, "remember that the two words best describe his attitude in those dreadful days in Chelmsford."

There was no trace of flippancy in his treatment of the oppressing situation. His demeanour on the occasions when he met the chaplain was one to which the most sensitive could take no exception, but the firmness was insuperable.

"It is impossible to do anything with him," said the despairing minister. "I am the veriest child in his hands. He makes me feel like a lay preacher interviewing Socrates."

There was no precedent for the remarkable condition of affairs, and finally, at Manfred's request, it was decided to omit the ceremony of the religious service altogether.

In the afternoon, taking his exercise, he lifted his eves skyward, and the warders, following his gaze, saw in the air a great yellow kite, bearing a banner that advertised some brand Or other of motor tyres.

"Yellow kite, all right," he improvised, and hummed a tune as he marched round the stone circle.

That night, after he had returned to rest, they took away his prison clothes and returned the suit in which he had been arrested. He thought he heard the measured tramping of feet as he dozed, and wondered if the Government had increased the guard of the prison. Under his window the step of the sentry sounded brisker and heavier.

He was accurate in his surmise. At the eleventh hour had arisen a fear of rescue, and half a battalion of guards had arrived by train in the night and held the prison.

The chaplain made his last effort, and received an unexpected rebuff, unexpected because of the startling warmth with which it was delivered.

"I refuse to see you," stormed Manfred. It was the first exhibition of impatience he had shown.

"Have I not told you that I will not lend myself to the reduction of a sacred service to a farce. Can you not understand that I must have a very special reason for behaving as I do, or do you think I am a sullen boor rejecting your kindness out of pure perversity?"

"I did not know what to think," said the chaplain sadly, and Manfred's voice softened as he replied:

The published accounts of that memorable morning are to the effect that Manfred ate very little, but the truth is that he partook of a hearty breakfast, saying "I have a long journey before me, and need my strength!"

At five minutes to eight a knot of journalists and warders assembled outside the cell door, a double line of warders formed across the yard, and the extended line of soldiers that circled the prison building stood to attention. At a minute to eight came Jessen with the straps of office in his hand. Then with the clock striking the hour, the governor beckoning Jessen, entered the cell.

Simultaneously and in a dozen different parts of the country, the telegraph wires which connect Chelmsford with the rest of the world were cut.

It was a tragic procession, robbed a little of its horror by the absence of the priest, but sufficiently dreadful. Manfred, with strapped hands, followed the governor, a warder at each arm, and Jessen walking behind. They guided him to the little house without windows and stood him on a trap and drew back, leaving the rest to Jessen. Then, as Jessen put his hand to his pocket. Manfred spoke.

"Stand away for a moment," he said; "before the rope is on my neck I have something to say," and Jessen stood back. "It is," said Manfred slowly, "farewell!"

As he spoke he raised his voice, and Jessen stooped to pick up the coil of rope that dragged on the floor. Then without warning, before the rope was raised, or any man could touch him the trap fell with a crash and Manfred shot out of sight.

Out of sight indeed, for from the pit poured up a dense volume of black smoke that sent the men at the edge reeling and coughing backwards to the open air.

"What is it? What is it?" a frantic official struggled through the press at the door and shouted an order.

The clanging of a bell sent the men to their stations. "He is in the pit," somebody cried, but a man came with a smoke helmet and went down the side. He was a long time gone, and when he returned he told his story incoherently.

"The bottom of the pit's been dug out—there's a passage below and a door—the smoke—I stopped that, it's a smoke cartridge!"

It was dark, but he felt his way; he slipped down the sharp declivity where the tunnel dipped beneath the prison wall and the men behind him sprawled after him. Then without warning he ran into an obstacle and went down bruised and shaken.

One of the last men down had brought a lamp, and the light of it came flickering along the uneven passage. The chief warder shouted for the man to hurry.

By the light he saw that what confronted him was a massive door made of unpainted deal and clamped with iron. A paper attracted his attention. It was fastened to the door, and he lifted the lantern to read it:

"Get back to the prison," ordered the warder sharply. Mine or no mine, he would have gone on, but he saw that the door was well nigh impregnable.

"Gone!" he reported curtly; "if we can get the men out on the roads and surround the town—"

"That has been done," said the governor "but there's a crowd in front of the prison, and we've lost three minutes getting through."

He had a grim sense of humour, this fierce silent old man, and he turned to the troubled chaplain.

* * * * *

Manfred felt himself caught in a net, deft hands loosened the straps at his wrists and lilted him to his feet. The place was filled with the pungent fumes of smoke.

Poiccart, going ahead, flashed the rays of his electric lamp over the floor. They took the slope with one flying leap, and stumbled forward as they landed: reaching the open door, they paused whilst Leon crashed it close and slipped the steel bolts into their places.

Poiccart's lamp showed the smoothly cut sides of the tunnel, and at the other end they had to climb the debris of dismantled machinery.

"Not bad," said Manfred, viewing the work critically. "The 'Rational Faithers' were useful," he added. Leon nodded.

"But for their band you could have heard the drills working in the prison," he said breathlessly.

Up a ladder at the end they raced, into the earth-strewn "dining-room," through the passage, inches thick with trodden clay.

Leon held the thick coat for him and he slipped into it. Poiccart started the motor.

"Right!" They were on the move thumping and jolting through a back lane that joined the main road five hundred yards below the prison.

Leon, looking back, saw the specks of scarlet struggling through the black crowds at the gates. "Soldiers to hold the roads," he said; "we're just in time—let her rip, Poiccart."

It was not until they struck the open country that Poiccart obeyed, and then the great racer leapt forward, and the rush of wind buffeted the men's faces with great soft blows.

Once in the loneliest part of the road they came upon telegraph wires that trailed in the hedge.

"If they've cut the others, the chase is over," he said; "they'll have cars out in half an hour and be following us; we are pretty sure to attract attention, and they'll be able to trace us."

Attract attention they certainly did, for leaving Colchester behind, they ran into a police trap, and a gesticulating constable signalled them to stop.

They left him behind in a thick cloud of dust. Keeping to the Clacton road they had a clear run till they reached a deserted strip where a farm wagon had broken down and blocked all progress.

"You cairn't pass here, mister," he said gleefully "and there ain't another road for two miles back."

"Go back there with the car," he said, and signalled Poiccart to reverse the engines. "What for?"

Leon was out of the car, walking with quick steps to the lumbering wreck in the road.

He stooped down, made a swift examination, and thrust something beneath the huge hulk. He lit a match, steadied the flame, and ran backward, clutching the slow-moving yokel and dragging him with him.

"'Ere, wots this?" demanded the man, but before he could reply there was a deafening crash, like a clap of thunder, and the air was filled with wreckage.

"Tell your master that I have taken the liberty of dynamiting his cart," he said; and then, as the man made a movement as if to clutch his arm, Leon gave him a push which sent him flying, and the car jolted over the remainder of the wagon.

The car turned now in the direction of Walton, and after a short run, turned sharply toward the sea.

* * * * *

Twenty minutes later two cars thundered along the same road, stopping here and there for the chief warder to ask the question of the chance-met pedestrian.

They sprang out as they reached it—half a dozen warders from each car. They raced across the green turf till they came to the sheer edge of the cliff.

The serene blue sea was unbroken, save where, three miles away, a beautiful white steam yacht was putting out to sea.

"Yes," said a wondering fisherman "I seed 'em, three of 'em went out in one of they motor boats that go like lightnin'—they're out o' sight by now."

"What ship is that?" asked the chief warder quickly and pointed to the departing yacht.

"The Prince of the Escorials," said the fisherman impressively. The chief warder groaned. "Well, they can't be on her," he said.

THE END

EDGAR WALLACE

THE COUNCIL OF JUSTICE

BOOK 2 IN THE JUST MEN SERIES (UNABRIDGED EDITION)

Published by Ward Lock & Co., London, 1908 This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2025 Version date: 2025-09-12 Produced by Roy Glashan All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright. Click here for more books by this author

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

CHAPTER I The Red Hundred

CHAPTER II The Fourth Man

* * * * *

CHAPTER III The Council of the Kings

* * * * *

CHAPTER IV Jessen, Alias Long

* * * * *

CHAPTER V The Red Bean

* * * * *

CHAPTER VI The Council of Justice

* * * * *

* * * * *

CHAPTER VII Princess Revolutionary

CHAPTER VIII The Government and Mr. Jessen

* * * * *

CHAPTER IX Two Incidents in the Fight

* * * * *

* * * * *

* * * * *

CHAPTER X Don Emanuel Builds a House

* * * * *

* * * * *

CHAPTER XI In the Calle Mayor

* * * * *

* * * * *

CHAPTER XII The Judgment

* * * * *

* * * * *

CHAPTER XIII The House in the Hill

CHAPTER XIV The Terror and the Suburbs

* * * * *

CHAPTER XV The "Ibex Queen"

* * * * *

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVI The Trial

* * * * *

CHAPTER XVII Manfred

CHAPTER XVIII In Wandsworth Gaol

CHAPTER XIX The "Rational Faithers"

* * * * *

CHAPTER XX At The Old Bailey

CHAPTER XXI Chelmsford

* * * * *

CHAPTER XXII The Execution

* * * * *

* * * * *

THE END

BOOK 2 IN THE JUST MEN SERIES
(UNABRIDGED EDITION)

Published by Ward Lock & Co., London, 1908

This e-book edition: Roy Glashan's Library, 2025
Version date: 2025-09-12

Produced by Roy Glashan
All content added by RGL is proprietary and protected by copyright.

Click here for more books by this author

CHAPTER I
The Red Hundred

CHAPTER II
The Fourth Man

CHAPTER III
The Council of the Kings

CHAPTER IV
Jessen, Alias Long

CHAPTER V
The Red Bean

CHAPTER VI
The Council of Justice

CHAPTER VII
Princess Revolutionary

CHAPTER VIII
The Government and Mr. Jessen

CHAPTER IX
Two Incidents in the Fight

CHAPTER X
Don Emanuel Builds a House

CHAPTER XI

In the Calle Mayor

CHAPTER XII
The Judgment

CHAPTER XIII
The House in the Hill

CHAPTER XIV
The Terror and the Suburbs

CHAPTER XV
The "Ibex Queen"

CHAPTER XVI
The Trial

CHAPTER XVII
Manfred

CHAPTER XVIII
In Wandsworth Gaol

CHAPTER XIX
The "Rational Faithers"

CHAPTER XX
At The Old Bailey

CHAPTER XXI
Chelmsford

CHAPTER XXII
The Execution