initial commit of ebook 707HEADmain

1 files changed, 6541 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/old/707.txt b/old/707.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..cef8064
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/707.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,6541 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Raffles, by E. W. Hornung
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Raffles
+       Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman
+
+Author: E. W. Hornung
+
+Posting Date: September 27, 2008 [EBook #707]
+Release Date: November, 1996
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAFFLES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Judith Boss.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+RAFFLES
+
+FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE AMATEUR CRACKSMAN
+
+
+BY
+
+E. W. HORNUNG
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  NO SINECURE
+  A JUBILEE PRESENT
+  THE FATE OF FAUSTINA
+  THE LAST LAUGH
+  TO CATCH A THIEF
+  AN OLD FLAME
+  THE WRONG HOUSE
+  THE KNEES OF THE GODS
+
+
+
+
+RAFFLES
+
+
+
+NO SINECURE
+
+
+I
+
+I am still uncertain which surprised me more, the telegram calling my
+attention to the advertisement, or the advertisement itself.  The
+telegram is before me as I write.  It would appear to have been handed
+in at Vere Street at eight o'clock in the morning of May 11, 1897, and
+received before half-past at Holloway B.O.  And in that drab region it
+duly found me, unwashen but at work before the day grew hot and my
+attic insupportable.
+
+"See Mr. Maturin's advertisement Daily Mail might suit you earnestly
+beg try will speak if necessary ---- ----"
+
+I transcribe the thing as I see it before me, all in one breath that
+took away mine; but I leave out the  initials at the end, which
+completed the surprise.  They stood very obviously for the knighted
+specialist whose consulting-room is within a cab-whistle of Vere
+Street, and who once called me kinsman for his sins.  More recently he
+had called me other names.  I was a disgrace, qualified by an adjective
+which seemed to me another. I had made my bed, and I could go and lie
+and die in it.  If I ever again had the insolence to show my nose in
+that house,  I should go out quicker than I came in.  All this, and
+more, my least distant relative could tell a poor devil to his face;
+could ring for his man, and give him his brutal instructions on the
+spot; and then relent to the tune of this telegram!  I have no phrase
+for my amazement.  I literally could not believe my eyes.  Yet their
+evidence was more and more conclusive: a very epistle could not have
+been more characteristic of its sender. Meanly  elliptical, ludicrously
+precise, saving half-pence at the expense of sense, yet paying like a
+man for  "Mr." Maturin, that was my distinguished relative from his
+bald patch to his corns.  Nor was all  the rest unlike him, upon second
+thoughts. He  had a reputation for charity; he was going to live  up to
+it after all.  Either that, or it was the sudden impulse of which the
+most calculating are capable at times; the morning papers with the
+early cup of tea, this advertisement seen by chance, and the rest upon
+the spur of a guilty conscience.
+
+Well, I must see it for myself, and the sooner the better, though work
+pressed.  I was writing a series of articles upon prison life, and had
+my nib into the whole System; a literary and philanthropical daily was
+parading my "charges," the graver ones with the more gusto; and the
+terms, if unhandsome for creative work, were temporary wealth to me.
+It so happened that my first check  had just arrived by the eight
+o'clock post; and my position should be appreciated when I say that I
+had to cash it to obtain a Daily Mail.
+
+Of the advertisement itself, what is to be said?  It should speak for
+itself if I could find it, but I cannot, and only remember that it was
+a "male  nurse and constant attendant" that was "wanted  for an elderly
+gentleman in feeble health."  A  male nurse!  An absurd tag was
+appended, offering "liberal salary to University or public-school man";
+and of a sudden I saw that I should get this thing if I applied for it.
+What other "University or public-school man" would dream of  doing so?
+Was any other in such straits as I?  And then my relenting relative; he
+not only promised to speak for me, but was the very man to do so.
+Could any recommendation compete with his in the matter of a male
+nurse?  And need the duties of such be necessarily loathsome and
+repellent?  Certainly the surroundings would be better than those of my
+common lodging-house and own particular garret; and the food; and every
+other condition of life that I could think of on my way back to that
+unsavory asylum.  So I dived into a pawnbroker's shop, where I was a
+stranger only upon my present errand, and within the hour was  airing a
+decent if antiquated suit, but little corrupted by the pawnbroker's
+moth, and a new straw hat, on the top of a tram.
+
+The address given in the advertisement was that of a flat at Earl's
+Court, which cost me a cross-country journey, finishing with the
+District Railway and a seven minutes' walk.  It was now past mid-day,
+and the tarry wood-pavement was good to smell as I strode up the Earl's
+Court Road.  It was great to walk the civilized world again.  Here were
+men with coats on their backs, and ladies in gloves.  My only fear was
+lest I might run up against one or other whom I had known of old.  But
+it was my lucky day.  I felt it in my bones.  I was going to get this
+berth; and sometimes I should be able to smell the wood-pavement on the
+old boy's errands; perhaps he would insist on skimming over it in his
+bath-chair, with me behind.
+
+I felt quite nervous when I reached the flats.  They were a small pile
+in a side street, and I pitied the doctor whose plate I saw upon the
+palings before the ground-floor windows; he must be in a  very small
+way, I thought.  I rather pitied myself as well. I had indulged in
+visions of better flats than these.  There were no balconies.  The
+porter was out of livery.  There was no lift, and my invalid on the
+third floor!  I trudged up, wishing I  had never lived in Mount Street,
+and brushed against a dejected individual coming down.  A  full-blooded
+young fellow in a frock-coat flung the right door open at my summons.
+
+"Does Mr. Maturin live here?" I inquired.
+
+"That's right," said the full-blooded young man, grinning all over a
+convivial countenance.
+
+"I--I've come about his advertisement in the Daily Mail."
+
+"You're the thirty-ninth," cried the blood; "that was the thirty-eighth
+you met upon the stairs,  and the day's still young.  Excuse my staring
+at you.  Yes, you pass your prelim., and can come inside; you're one of
+the few.  We had most just after breakfast, but now the porter's
+heading off the worst cases, and that last chap was the first for
+twenty minutes. Come in here."
+
+And I was ushered into an empty room with a good bay-window, which
+enabled my full-blooded friend to inspect me yet more critically in a
+good light; this he did without the least false delicacy;  then his
+questions began.
+
+"'Varsity man?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Public school?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Which one?"
+
+I told him, and he sighed relief.
+
+"At last!  You're the very first I've not had to argue with as to what
+is and what is not a public school.  Expelled?"
+
+"No," I said, after a moment's hesitation; "no, I was not expelled.
+And I hope you won't expel me if I ask a question in my turn?"
+
+"Certainly not."
+
+"Are you Mr. Maturin's son?"
+
+"No, my name's Theobald.  You may have seen it down below."
+
+"The doctor?" I said.
+
+"His doctor," said Theobald, with a satisfied  eye.  "Mr. Maturin's
+doctor.  He is having a  male nurse and attendant by my advice, and he
+wants a gentleman if he can get one.  I rather think he'll see you,
+though he's only seen two or three all day. There are certain questions
+which  he prefers to ask himself, and it's no good going over the same
+ground twice.  So perhaps I had better tell him about you before we get
+any further."
+
+And he withdrew to a room still nearer the entrance, as I could hear,
+for it was a very small flat indeed.  But now two doors were shut
+between us, and I had to rest content with murmurs through the wall
+until the doctor returned to summon me.
+
+"I have persuaded my patient to see you," he whispered, "but I confess
+I am not sanguine of the result.  He is very difficult to please.  You
+must prepare yourself for a querulous invalid, and for no sinecure if
+you get the billet."
+
+"May I ask what's the matter with him?"
+
+"By all means--when you've got the billet."
+
+Dr. Theobald then led the way, his professional dignity so thoroughly
+intact that I could not but smile as I followed his swinging coat-tails
+to the sick-room.  I carried no smile across the  threshold of a
+darkened chamber which reeked of drugs and twinkled with medicine
+bottles, and in the middle of which a gaunt figure lay abed in the
+half-light.
+
+"Take him to the window, take him to the window," a thin voice snapped,
+"and let's have a look  at him.  Open the blind a bit. Not as much as
+that, damn you, not as much as that!"
+
+The doctor took the oath as though it had been a fee.  I no longer
+pitied him.  It was now very clear to me that he had one patient who
+was a little practice in himself.  I determined there and then that he
+should prove a little profession to me, if  we could but keep him alive
+between us.  Mr. Maturin, however, had the whitest face that I have
+ever seen, and his teeth gleamed out through the dusk as though the
+withered lips no longer met about them; nor did they except in speech;
+and anything ghastlier than the perpetual grin of his repose I defy you
+to imagine.  It was with this grin that he lay regarding me while the
+doctor held the blind.
+
+"So you think you could look after me, do you?"
+
+"I'm certain I could, sir."
+
+"Single-handed, mind!  I don't keep another soul.  You would have to
+cook your own grub and my slops.  Do you think you could do all that?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I think so."
+
+"Why do you?  Have you any experience of the kind?"
+
+"No, sir, none."
+
+"Then why do you pretend you have?"
+
+"I only meant that I would do my best."
+
+"Only meant, only meant!  Have you done your best at everything else,
+then?"
+
+I hung my head.  This was a facer.  And there was something in my
+invalid which thrust the unspoken lie down my throat.
+
+"No, sir, I have not," I told him plainly.
+
+"He, he, he!" the old wretch tittered; "and you do well to own it; you
+do well, sir, very well indeed.  If you hadn't owned up, out you would
+have gone, out neck-and-crop!  You've saved your bacon.  You may do
+more.  So you are a public-school boy, and a very good school yours is,
+but you weren't at either University. Is that correct?"
+
+"Absolutely."
+
+"What did you do when you left school?"
+
+"I came in for money."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"I spent my money."
+
+"And since then?"
+
+I stood like a mule.
+
+"And since then, I say!"
+
+"A relative of mine will tell you if you ask him.  He is an eminent
+man, and he has promised to  speak for me.  I would rather say no more
+myself."
+
+"But you shall, sir, but you shall!  Do you suppose that I suppose a
+public-school boy would apply for a berth like this if something or
+other hadn't happened?  What I want is a gentleman of sorts, and I
+don't much care what sort; but you've got to tell me what did happen,
+if you don't tell anybody else.  Dr. Theobald, sir, you can go to the
+devil if you won't take a hint. This man  may do or he may not.  You
+have no more to say to it till I send him down to tell you one thing or
+the other.  Clear out, sir, clear out; and if you think you've anything
+to complain of, you stick it down in the bill!"
+
+In the mild excitement of our interview the thin voice had gathered
+strength, and the last shrill insult was screamed after the devoted
+medico, as he retired in such order that I felt certain he was going to
+take this trying patient at his word. The  bedroom door closed, then
+the outer one, and the doctor's heels went drumming down the common
+stair.  I was alone in the flat with this highly singular and rather
+terrible old man.
+
+"And a damned good riddance!" croaked the invalid, raising himself on
+one elbow without  delay.  "I may not have much body left to boast
+about, but at least I've got a lost old soul to call my own.  That's
+why I want a gentleman of sorts  about me. I've been too dependent on
+that chap.  He won't even let me smoke, and he's been in the flat all
+day to see I didn't. You'll find the cigarettes behind the Madonna of
+the Chair."
+
+It was a steel engraving of the great Raffaelle, and the frame was
+tilted from the wall; at a touch a packet of cigarettes tumbled down
+from behind.
+
+"Thanks; and now a light."
+
+I struck the match and held it, while the invalid inhaled with normal
+lips; and suddenly I sighed.  I was irresistibly reminded of my poor
+dear old Raffles.  A smoke-ring worthy of the great A. J. was floating
+upward from the sick man's lips.
+
+"And now take one yourself.  I have smoked more poisonous cigarettes.
+But even these are not Sullivans!"
+
+I cannot repeat what I said.  I have no idea what I did.  I only
+know--I only knew--that it was A. J. Raffles in the flesh!
+
+
+II
+
+"Yes, Bunny, it was the very devil of a swim;  but I defy you to sink
+in the Mediterranean.  That  sunset saved me.  The sea was on fire.  I
+hardly  swam under water at all, but went all I knew for the sun
+itself; when it set I must have been a mile away; until it did I was
+the invisible man.  I  figured on that, and only hope it wasn't set
+down as a case of suicide.  I shall get outed quite soon enough, Bunny,
+but I'd rather be dropped by the hangman than throw my own wicket away."
+
+"Oh, my dear old chap, to think of having you by the hand again! I feel
+as though we were both aboard that German liner, and all that's
+happened since a nightmare.  I thought that time was  the last!"
+
+"It looked rather like it, Bunny.  It was taking all the risks, and
+hitting at everything.  But the game came off, and some day I'll tell
+you how."
+
+"Oh, I'm in no hurry to hear.  It's enough for me to see you lying
+there.  I don't want to know how you came there, or why, though I fear
+you must be pretty bad.  I must have a good look at you before I let
+you speak another word!"
+
+I raised one of the blinds, I sat upon the bed, and I had that look.
+It left me all unable to conjecture his true state of health, but quite
+certain  in my own mind that my dear Raffles was not and never would be
+the man that he had been.  He had aged twenty years; he looked fifty at
+the very least.  His hair was white; there was no trick  about that;
+and his face was another white.  The lines about the corners of the
+eyes and mouth were both many and deep.  On the other hand, the eyes
+themselves were alight and alert as ever; they were still keen and gray
+and gleaming, like finely tempered steel.  Even the mouth, with a
+cigarette to close it, was the mouth of Raffles and no other:  strong
+and unscrupulous as the man himself.  It was only the physical strength
+which appeared to  have departed; but that was quite sufficient to make
+my heart bleed for the dear rascal who had cost me every tie I valued
+but the tie between us two.
+
+"Think I look much older?" he asked at length.
+
+"A bit," I admitted.  "But it is chiefly your hair."
+
+"Whereby hangs a tale for when we've talked ourselves out, though I
+have often thought it was that long swim that started it.  Still, the
+Island of Elba is a rummy show, I can assure you.  And  Naples is a
+rummier!"
+
+"You went there after all?"
+
+"Rather!  It's the European paradise for such as our noble selves.  But
+there's no place that's a patch on little London as a non-conductor of
+heat;  it never need get too hot for a fellow here;  if it does it's
+his own fault.  It's the kind of wicket you don't get out on, unless
+you get yourself out.  So here I am again, and have been for the last
+six weeks.  And I mean to have another knock."
+
+"But surely, old fellow, you're not awfully fit, are you?"
+
+"Fit?  My dear Bunny, I'm dead--I'm at the bottom of the sea--and don't
+you forget it for a  minute."
+
+"But are you all right, or are you not?"
+
+"No, I'm half-poisoned by Theobald's prescriptions and putrid
+cigarettes, and as weak as a cat from lying in bed."
+
+"Then why on earth lie in bed, Raffles?"
+
+"Because it's better than lying in gaol, as I am afraid YOU know, my
+poor dear fellow.  I tell you I am dead; and my one terror is of coming
+to life again by accident.  Can't you see? I simply dare not show my
+nose out of doors--by day.  You  have no idea of the number of
+perfectly innocent things a dead man daren't do.  I can't even smoke
+Sullivans, because no one man was ever so partial to them as I was in
+my lifetime, and you never know when you may start a clew."
+
+"What brought you to these mansions?"
+
+"I fancied a flat, and a man recommended these on the boat; such a good
+chap, Bunny; he was my reference when it came to signing the lease.
+You see I landed on a stretcher--most pathetic case--old Australian
+without a friend in old country--ordered Engadine as last chance--no
+go--not an earthly--sentimental wish to die in London--that's the
+history of Mr. Maturin.  If it doesn't  hit you hard, Bunny, you're the
+first.  But it hit friend Theobald hardest of all.  I'm an income to
+him.  I believe he's going to marry on me."
+
+"Does he guess there's nothing wrong?"
+
+"Knows, bless you!  But he doesn't know I know he knows, and there
+isn't a disease in the  dictionary that he hasn't treated me for since
+he's had me in hand.  To do him justice, I believe he thinks me a
+hypochondriac of the first water; but that young man will go far if he
+keeps on the wicket.  He has spent half his nights up here, at guineas
+apiece."
+
+"Guineas must be plentiful, old chap!"
+
+"They have been, Bunny.  I can't say more.  But I don't see why they
+shouldn't be again."
+
+I was not going to inquire where the guineas came from.  As if I cared!
+But I did ask old Raffles how in the world he had got upon my tracks;
+and thereby drew the sort of smile with which old gentlemen rub their
+hands, and old ladies nod their noses. Raffles merely produced a
+perfect  oval of blue smoke before replying.
+
+"I was waiting for you to ask that, Bunny; it's a long time since I did
+anything upon which I plume myself more.  Of course, in the first
+place, I spotted you at once by these prison articles; they were not
+signed, but the fist was the fist of my sitting rabbit!"
+
+"But who gave you my address?"
+
+"I wheedled it out of your excellent editor; called on him at dead of
+night, when I occasionally go afield like other ghosts, and wept it out
+of him in five minutes.  I was your only relative;  your name was not
+your own name; if he insisted  I would give him mine.  He didn't
+insist, Bunny,  and I danced down his stairs with your address in my
+pocket."
+
+"Last night?"
+
+"No, last week."
+
+"And so the advertisement was yours, as well as the telegram!"
+
+I had, of course, forgotten both in the high excitement of the hour, or
+I should scarcely have announced my belated discovery with such an air.
+As it was I made Raffles look at me as I had known  him look before,
+and the droop of his eyelids  began to sting.
+
+"Why all this subtlety?" I petulantly exclaimed.  "Why couldn't you
+come straight away to me in a cab?"
+
+He did not inform me that I was hopeless as ever.  He did not address
+me as his good rabbit.
+
+He was silent for a time, and then spoke in a tone which made me
+ashamed of mine.
+
+"You see, there are two or three of me now, Bunny: one's at the bottom
+of the Mediterranean,  and one's an old Australian desirous of dying in
+the old country, but in no immediate danger of  dying anywhere.  The
+old Australian doesn't know a soul in town; he's got to be consistent,
+or he's done.  This sitter Theobald is his only friend, and has seen
+rather too much of him; ordinary dust won't do for his eyes.  Begin to
+see?  To pick you out of a crowd, that was the game; to let old
+Theobald help to pick you, better still!  To start with, he was dead
+against my having anybody at all; wanted me all to himself, naturally;
+but anything rather than kill the goose!  So he is to have a fiver a
+week while he keeps me alive, and he's going to be married next month.
+That's a pity in some ways, but a good thing in others; he will want
+more money than he foresees, and he  may always be of use to us at a
+pinch.  Meanwhile he eats out of my hand."
+
+I complimented Raffles on the mere composition of his telegram, with
+half the characteristics  of my distinguished kinsman squeezed into a
+dozen odd words; and let him know how the old ruffian had really
+treated me.  Raffles was not surprised; we had dined together at my
+relative's in the old days, and filed for reference a professional
+valuation of his household gods.  I now learnt that the telegram had
+been posted, with the hour marked for its despatch, at the pillar
+nearest Vere Street, on the night before the advertisement was due to
+appear in the Daily Mail.  This also  had been carefully prearranged;
+and Raffles's only fear had been lest it might be held over despite his
+explicit instructions, and so drive me to the  doctor for an
+explanation of his telegram.  But the adverse chances had been weeded
+out and  weeded out to the irreducible minimum of  risk.
+
+His greatest risk, according to Raffles, lay nearest home: bedridden
+invalid that he was supposed to be, his nightly terror was of running
+into Theobald's arms in the immediate neighborhood of the flat.  But
+Raffles had characteristic methods of minimizing even that danger, of
+which something anon; meanwhile he recounted more than one of  his
+nocturnal adventures, all, however, of a singularly innocent type; and
+one thing I noticed while  he talked.  His room was the first as you
+entered  the flat.  The long inner wall divided the room  not merely
+from the passage but from the outer landing as well. Thus every step
+upon the bare stone stairs could be heard by Raffles where he lay;  and
+he would never speak while one was ascending, until it had passed his
+door.  The afternoon brought more than one applicant for the post which
+it was my duty to tell them that I had already obtained.  Between three
+and four, however, Raffles, suddenly looking at his watch, packed me
+off in a hurry to the other end of  London for my things.
+
+"I'm afraid you must be famishing, Bunny.  It's a fact that I eat very
+little, and that at odd hours, but I ought not to have forgotten you.
+Get yourself a snack outside, but not a square meal if you  can resist
+one.  We've got to celebrate this day this night!"
+
+"To-night?" I cried.
+
+"To-night at eleven, and Kellner's the place.  You may well open your
+eyes, but we didn't go there much, if you remember, and the staff seems
+changed.  Anyway we'll risk it for once.  I was in last night, talking
+like a stage American, and supper's ordered for eleven sharp."
+
+"You made as sure of me as all that!"
+
+"There was no harm in ordering supper.  We shall have it in a private
+room, but you may as well dress if you've got the duds."
+
+"They're at my only forgiving relative's."
+
+"How much will get them out, and square you up, and bring you back bag
+and baggage in good time?"
+
+I had to calculate.
+
+"A tenner, easily."
+
+"I had one ready for you.  Here it is, and I wouldn't lose any time if
+I were you.  On the way you might look up Theobald, tell him you've got
+it and how long you'll be gone, and that I can't be left alone all the
+time.  And, by Jove, yes!  You get me a stall for the Lyceum at the
+nearest agent's; there are two or three in High Street; and say it was
+given you when you come in. That young  man shall be out of the way
+to-night."
+
+I found our doctor in a minute consulting-room and his shirt-sleeves, a
+tall tumbler at his elbow; at least I caught sight of the tumbler on
+entering;  thereafter he stood in front of it, with a futility which
+had my sympathy.
+
+"So you've got the billet," said Dr. Theobald.  "Well, as I told you
+before, and as you have since probably discovered for yourself, you
+won't find it exactly a sinecure.  My own part of the business is by no
+means that; indeed, there are those who would throw up the case, after
+the kind of treatment that you have seen for yourself.  But
+professional considerations are not the only ones, and one cannot make
+too many allowances in such a case."
+
+"But what is the case?" I asked him.  "You said you would tell me if I
+was successful."
+
+Dr. Theobald's shrug was worthy of the profession he seemed destined to
+adorn; it was not incompatible with any construction which one chose to
+put upon it.  Next moment he had stiffened. I suppose I still spoke
+more or less like  a gentleman.  Yet, after all, I was only the  male
+nurse.  He seemed to remember this suddenly, and he took occasion to
+remind me of the fact.
+
+"Ah," said he, "that was before I knew you were altogether without
+experience; and I must  say that I was surprised even at Mr. Maturin's
+engaging you after that; but it will depend upon yourself how long I
+allow him to persist in so curious an experiment.  As for what is the
+matter with him, my good fellow, it is no use my giving you an answer
+which would be double Dutch to you; moreover, I have still to test your
+discretionary powers.  I may say, however, that that  poor gentleman
+presents at once the most complex and most troublesome case, which is
+responsibility enough without certain features which make it all but
+insupportable.  Beyond this I must refuse to discuss my patient for the
+present; but I shall certainly go up if I can find time."
+
+He went up within five minutes.  I found him there on my return at
+dusk.  But he did not refuse my stall for the Lyceum, which Raffles
+would not allow me to use myself, and presented to him off-hand without
+my leave.
+
+"And don't you bother any more about me till to-morrow," snapped the
+high thin voice as he was off.  "I can send for you now when I want
+you, and I'm hoping to have a decent night for once."
+
+
+III
+
+It was half-past ten when we left the flat, in an interval of silence
+on the noisy stairs.  The silence was unbroken by our wary feet.  Yet
+for me a surprise was in store upon the very landing.  Instead of going
+downstairs, Raffles led me up two flights, and so out upon a perfectly
+flat roof.
+
+"There are two entrances to these mansions," he explained between stars
+and chimney-stacks: "one to our staircase, and another round the
+corner.  But there's only one porter, and he lives on the  basement
+underneath us, and affects the door nearest home.  We miss him by using
+the wrong stairs, and we run less risk of old Theobald.  I got the tip
+from the postmen, who come up one way and down the other.  Now, follow
+me, and look out!"
+
+There was indeed some necessity for caution, for each half of the
+building had its L-shaped well dropping sheer to the base, the parapets
+so low that one might easily have tripped over them into  eternity.
+However, we were soon upon the second staircase, which opened on the
+roof like the first.  And twenty minutes of the next twenty-five we
+spent in an admirable hansom, skimming east.
+
+"Not much change in the old hole, Bunny.  More of these magic-lantern
+advertisements ... and absolutely the worst bit of taste in town,
+though it's saying something, in that equestrian statue with the gilt
+stirrups and fixings; why don't they black the buffer's boots and his
+horse's hoofs while they are about it? ...  More bicyclists, of course.
+That was just beginning, if you remember.  It might have been useful to
+us.... And there's the old club, getting put into a crate for the
+Jubilee; by Jove, Bunny, we ought to be there.  I wouldn't lean forward
+in Piccadilly, old chap.  If you're seen I'm thought of, and we shall
+have to be jolly careful at Kellner's....  Ah, there it is!  Did I tell
+you I was a low-down stage Yankee at Kellner's?  You'd better be
+another, while the waiter's in the room."
+
+We had the little room upstairs; and on the very threshold I, even I,
+who knew my Raffles of old, was taken horribly aback. The table was
+laid for three.  I called his attention to it in a whisper.
+
+"Why, yep!" came through his nose.  "Say, boy, the lady, she's not
+comin', but you leave that tackle where 'tis.  If I'm liable to pay, I
+guess I'll have all there is to it."
+
+I have never been in America, and the American public is the last on
+earth that I desire to insult;  but idiom and intonation alike would
+have imposed upon my inexperience.  I had to look at Raffles to make
+sure that it was he who spoke, and I had my own reasons for looking
+hard.
+
+"Who on earth was the lady?" I inquired aghast at the first opportunity.
+
+"She isn't on earth.  They don't like wasting this room on two, that's
+all.  Bunny--my Bunny--here's to us both!"
+
+And we clinked glasses swimming with the liquid gold of Steinberg,
+1868; but of the rare delights of that supper I can scarcely trust
+myself to write.  It was no mere meal, it was no coarse orgy, but a
+little feast for the fastidious gods, not unworthy of Lucullus at his
+worst.  And I who had bolted my skilly at Wormwood Scrubbs, and
+tightened my  belt in a Holloway attic, it was I who sat down to this
+ineffable repast!  Where the courses were few, but each a triumph of
+its kind, it would be invidious to single out any one dish; but the
+Jambon de Westphalie au Champagne tempts me sorely.  And then the
+champagne that we drank, not the quantity but the quality!  Well, it
+was Pol Roger, '84, and  quite good enough for me; but even so it was
+not  more dry, nor did it sparkle more, than the merry  rascal who had
+dragged me thus far to the devil, but should lead me dancing the rest
+of the way.  I was beginning to tell him so.  I had done my honest best
+since my reappearance in the world;  but the world had done its worst
+by me.  A further antithesis and my final intention were both upon  my
+tongue when the waiter with the Chateau Margaux cut me short; for he
+was the bearer of more than that great wine; bringing also a card upon
+a  silver tray.
+
+"Show him up," said Raffles, laconically.
+
+"And who is this?" I cried when the man was gone.  Raffles reached
+across the table and gripped  my arm in a vice.  His eyes were steel
+points fixed on mine.
+
+"Bunny, stand by me," said he in the old irresistible voice, a voice
+both stern and winning.  "Stand by me, Bunny--if there's a row!"
+
+And there was time for nothing more, the door flying open, and a dapper
+person entering with a bow; a frock-coat on his back, gold pince-nez on
+his nose; a shiny hat in one hand, and a black bag in the other.
+
+"Good-evening, gentlemen," said he, at home and smiling.
+
+"Sit down," drawled Raffles in casual response.  "Say, let me introduce
+you to Mr. Ezra B. Martin, of Shicawgo.  Mr. Martin is my future
+brother-in-law.  This is Mr. Robinson, Ezra, manager to Sparks &
+Company, the cellerbrated joolers on Re-gent Street."
+
+I pricked up my ears, but contented myself with a nod.  I altogether
+distrusted my ability to live up to my new name and address.
+
+"I figured on Miss Martin bein' right here, too," continued Raffles,
+"but I regret to say she's  not feelin' so good.  We light out for
+Parrus on the 9 A. M. train to-morrer mornin', and she  guessed she'd
+be too dead.  Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Robinson; but you'll see I'm
+advertisin' your wares."
+
+Raffles held his right hand under the electric light, and a diamond
+ring flashed upon his little finger.  I could have sworn it was not
+there five  minutes before.
+
+The tradesman had a disappointed face, but for a moment it brightened
+as he expatiated on the value of that ring and on the price his people
+had accepted for it.  I was invited to guess the figure, but I shook a
+discreet head.  I have seldom been more taciturn in my life.
+
+"Forty-five pounds," cried the jeweller; "and it would be cheap at
+fifty guineas."
+
+"That's right," assented Raffles.  "That'd be dead cheap, I allow.  But
+then, my boy, you gotten ready cash, and don't you forget it."
+
+I do not dwell upon my own mystification in all this.  I merely pause
+to state that I was keenly enjoying that very element. Nothing could
+have been more typical of Raffles and the past. It was only my own
+attitude that was changed.
+
+It appeared that the mythical lady, my sister, had just become engaged
+to Raffles, who seemed  all anxiety to pin her down with gifts of
+price.  I could not quite gather whose gift to whom was the diamond
+ring; but it had evidently been paid for; and I voyaged to the moon,
+wondering when and how.  I was recalled to this planet by a deluge of
+gems from the jeweller's bag.  They lay alight in their cases like the
+electric lamps above.  We all three put our heads together over them,
+myself  without the slightest clew as to what was coming, but not
+unprepared for violent crime.  One does not do eighteen months for
+nothing.
+
+"Right away," Raffles was saying.  "We'll choose for her, and you'll
+change anything she don't like.  Is that the idea?"
+
+"That was my suggestion, sir."
+
+"Then come on, Ezra.  I guess you know Sadie's taste.  You help me
+choose."
+
+And we chose--lord!  What did we not choose?  There was her ring, a
+diamond half-hoop.  It cost L95, and there was no attempt to get it for
+L90.  Then there was a diamond necklet--two  hundred guineas, but
+pounds accepted.  That was  to be the gift of the bridegroom.  The
+wedding  was evidently imminent.  It behooved me to play a  brotherly
+part.  I therefore rose to the occasion; calculated she would like a
+diamond star (L116), but reckoned it was more than I could afford; and
+sustained a vicious kick under the table for either verb.  I was afraid
+to open my mouth on finally  obtaining the star for the round hundred.
+And then the fat fell in the fire; for pay we could not; though a
+remittance (said Raffles) was "overdo from Noo York."
+
+"But I don't know you, gentlemen," the jeweller exclaimed.  "I haven't
+even the name of your hotel!"
+
+"I told you we was stoppin' with friends," said Raffles, who was not
+angry, though thwarted and crushed.  "But that's right, sir! Oh, that's
+dead  right, and I'm the last man to ask you to take Quixotic risks.
+I'm tryin' to figure a way out.  Yes, SIR, that's what I'm tryin' to
+do."
+
+"I wish you could, sir," the jeweller said, with feeling.  "It isn't as
+if we hadn't seen the color  of your money.  But certain rules I'm
+sworn to observe; it isn't as if I was in business for myself; and--you
+say you start for Paris in the morning!"
+
+"On the 9 A. M. train," mused Raffles; "and I've heard no-end yarns
+about the joolers' stores in Parrus.  But that ain't fair; don't you
+take no notice o' that.  I'm tryin' to figure a way out.  Yes, SIR!"
+
+He was smoking cigarettes out of a twenty-five box; the tradesman and I
+had cigars.  Raffles sat frowning with a pregnant eye, and it was only
+too clear to me that his plans had miscarried.  I could not help
+thinking, however, that they deserved to do so, if he had counted upon
+buying credit for all but L400 by a single payment of some ten per
+cent.  That again seemed unworthy of Raffles, and I, for my part, still
+sat prepared to spring any moment at our visitor's throat.
+
+"We could mail you the money from Parrus,"  drawled Raffles at length.
+"But how should we know you'd hold up your end of the string, and mail
+us the same articles we've selected to-night?"
+
+The visitor stiffened in his chair.  The name of his firm should be
+sufficient guarantee for that.
+
+"I guess I'm no better acquainted with their name than they are with
+mine," remarked Raffles, laughing.  "See here, though!  I got a scheme.
+You pack 'em in this!"
+
+He turned the cigarettes out of the tin box,  while the jeweller and I
+joined wondering eyes.
+
+"Pack 'em in this," repeated Raffles, "the three things we want, and
+never mind the boxes; you can pack 'em in cotton-wool.  Then we'll ring
+for string and sealing wax, seal up the lot right here,  and you can
+take 'em away in your grip.  Within three days we'll have our
+remittance, and mail you the money, and you'll mail us this darned box
+with my seal unbroken!  It's no use you lookin' so sick, Mr. Jooler;
+you won't trust us any, and yet  we're goin' to trust you some.  Ring
+the bell, Ezra, and we'll see if they've gotten any sealing-wax and
+string."
+
+They had; and the thing was done.  The tradesman did not like it; the
+precaution was absolutely unnecessary; but since he was taking all his
+goods away with him, the sold with the unsold, his sentimental
+objections soon fell to the ground.  He packed necklet, ring, and star,
+with his own hands, in cotton-wool; and the cigarette-box held them so
+easily that at the last moment, when the box was closed, and the string
+ready, Raffles very nearly added a diamond bee-brooch at L51 10s.  This
+temptation, however, he ultimately overcame, to the other's chagrin.
+The cigarette-box was tied up, and the string sealed, oddly enough,
+with the diamond of the ring that had been bought and paid for.
+
+"I'll chance you having another ring in the store the dead spit of
+mine," laughed Raffles, as he relinquished the box, and it disappeared
+into the tradesman's bag.  "And now, Mr. Robinson, I hope you'll
+appreciate my true hospitality in not offering you any thing to drink
+while business was in progress.  That's Chateau Margaux, sir, and I
+should judge it's what you'd call an eighteen-carat article."
+
+In the cab which we took to the vicinity of the flat, I was instantly
+snubbed for asking questions which the driver might easily overhear,
+and took the repulse just a little to heart.  I could make  neither
+head nor tail of Raffles's dealings with the man from Regent Street,
+and was naturally inquisitive as to the meaning of it all.  But I held
+my tongue until we had regained the flat in the cautious manner of our
+exit, and even there until Raffles rallied me with a hand on either
+shoulder and an old smile upon his face.
+
+"You rabbit!" said he.  "Why couldn't you wait till we got home?"
+
+"Why couldn't you tell me what you were going to do?" I retorted as of
+yore.
+
+"Because your dear old phiz is still worth its weight in innocence, and
+because you never could act for nuts!  You looked as puzzled as the
+other poor devil; but you wouldn't if you had known what my game really
+was."
+
+"And pray what was it?"
+
+"That," said Raffles, and he smacked the cigarette-box down upon the
+mantelpiece.  It was not tied.  It was not sealed.  It flew open from
+the force of the impact.  And the diamond ring that cost L95, the
+necklet for L200, and my flaming  star at another L100, all three lay
+safe and snug in the jeweller's own cotton-wool!
+
+"Duplicate boxes!" I cried.
+
+"Duplicate boxes, my brainy Bunny.  One was already packed and
+weighted, and in my pocket.  I don't know whether you noticed me
+weighing the three things together in my hand?  I know that neither of
+you saw me change the boxes, for I did it when I was nearest buying the
+bee-brooch at the end, and you were too puzzled, and the other  Johnny
+too keen.  It was the cheapest shot in the game; the dear ones were
+sending old Theobald  to Southampton on a fool's errand yesterday
+afternoon, and showing one's own nose down Regent Street in broad
+daylight while he was gone;  but some things are worth paying for, and
+certain  risks one must always take.  Nice boxes, aren't  they?  I only
+wished they contained a better cigarette; but a notorious brand was
+essential; a box  of Sullivans would have brought me to life to-morrow."
+
+"But they oughtn't to open it to-morrow."
+
+"Nor will they, as a matter of fact.  Meanwhile, Bunny, I may call upon
+you to dispose of the boodle."
+
+"I'm on for any mortal thing!"
+
+My voice rang true, I swear, but it was the way  of Raffles to take the
+evidence of as many senses  as possible.  I felt the cold steel of his
+eyes through  mine and through my brain.  But what he saw seemed to
+satisfy him no less than what he heard, for his hand found my hand, and
+pressed it with a  fervor foreign to the man.
+
+"I know you are, and I knew you would be.  Only remember, Bunny, it's
+my turn next to pay the shot!"
+
+You shall hear how he paid it when the time came.
+
+
+
+A JUBILEE PRESENT
+
+The Room of Gold, in the British Museum, is probably well enough known
+to the inquiring alien and the travelled American.  A true Londoner,
+however, I myself had never heard of it until Raffles casually proposed
+a raid.
+
+"The older I grow, Bunny, the less I think of your so-called precious
+stones.  When did they ever bring in half their market value in L.s.d.
+There was the first little crib we ever cracked together--you with
+your innocent eyes shut.  A  thousand pounds that stuff was worth; but
+how many hundreds did it actually fetch.  The Ardagh emeralds weren't
+much better; old Lady Melrose's necklace was far worse; but that little
+lot the other night has about finished me.  A cool hundred for goods
+priced well over four; and L35 to come off for bait, since we only got
+a tenner for the ring I bought and paid for like an ass.  I'll be shot
+if I  ever touch a diamond again!  Not if it was the  Koh-I-noor; those
+few whacking stones are too well known, and to cut them up is to
+decrease their value by arithmetical retrogression.  Besides, that
+brings you up against the Fence once more, and I'm done with the
+beggars for good and all.  You talk about your editors and publishers,
+you literary swine.  Barabbas was neither a robber nor a publisher, but
+a six-barred, barbed-wired, spike-topped Fence.  What we really want is
+an Incorporated Society of Thieves, with some public-spirited old
+forger to run it for us on business lines."
+
+Raffles uttered these blasphemies under his breath, not, I am afraid,
+out of any respect for my one redeeming profession, but because we were
+taking a midnight airing on the roof, after a whole day of June in the
+little flat below.  The stars  shone overhead, the lights of London
+underneath, and between the lips of Raffles a cigarette of the old and
+only brand.  I had sent in secret for a box of the best; the boon had
+arrived that night; and the foregoing speech was the first result.  I
+could afford to ignore the insolent asides, however, where the apparent
+contention was so manifestly unsound.
+
+"And how are you going to get rid of your gold?" said I, pertinently.
+
+"Nothing easier, my dear rabbit."
+
+"Is your Room of Gold a roomful of sovereigns?"
+
+Raffles laughed softly at my scorn.
+
+"No, Bunny, it's principally in the shape of archaic ornaments, whose
+value, I admit, is largely  extrinsic.  But gold is gold, from
+Phoenicia to  Klondike, and if we cleared the room we should eventually
+do very well."
+
+"How?"
+
+"I should melt it down into a nugget, and bring it home from the U.S.A.
+to-morrow."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Make them pay up in hard cash across the counter of the Bank of
+England.  And you CAN make them."
+
+That I knew, and so said nothing for a time, remaining a hostile though
+a silent critic, while we paced the cool black leads with our bare
+feet, softly as cats.
+
+"And how do you propose to get enough away," at length I asked, "to
+make it worth while?"
+
+"Ah, there you have it," said Raffles.  "I only propose to reconnoitre
+the ground, to see what we  can see.  We might find some hiding-place
+for a night; that, I am afraid, would be our only chance."
+
+"Have you ever been there before?"
+
+"Not since they got the one good, portable piece which I believe that
+they exhibit now.  It's a long time since I read of it--I can't
+remember where--but I know they have got a gold cup of sorts worth
+several thousands.  A number of the immorally  rich clubbed together
+and presented it to the nation; and two of the richly immoral intend to
+snaffle it for themselves.  At any rate we might go and have a look at
+it, Bunny, don't you think?"
+
+Think!  I seized his arm.
+
+"When?  When?  When?" I asked, like a quick-firing gun.
+
+"The sooner the better, while old Theobald's away on his honeymoon."
+
+Our medico had married the week before, nor was any fellow-practitioner
+taking his work--at least not that considerable branch of it which
+consisted of Raffles--during his brief absence from  town.  There were
+reasons, delightfully obvious to us, why such a plan would have been
+highly unwise in Dr. Theobald.  I, however, was sending him daily
+screeds, and both matutinal and nocturnal telegrams, the composition of
+which afforded Raffles not a little enjoyment.
+
+"Well, then, when--when?" I began to repeat.
+
+"To-morrow, if you like."
+
+"Only to look?"
+
+The limitation was my one regret.
+
+"We must do so, Bunny, before we leap."
+
+"Very well," I sighed.  "But to-morrow it is!"
+
+And the morrow it really was.
+
+I saw the porter that night, and, I still think, bought his absolute
+allegiance for the second coin of the realm.  My story, however,
+invented by  Raffles, was sufficiently specious in itself.  That sick
+gentleman, Mr. Maturin (as I had to remember to call him), was really,
+or apparently, sickening for fresh air.  Dr. Theobald would allow him
+none; he was pestering me for just one day in the country while the
+glorious weather lasted. I was myself convinced that no possible harm
+could come of the experiment.  Would the porter help me in so innocent
+and meritorious an intrigue?  The  man hesitated.  I produced my
+half-sovereign.  The man was lost.  And at half-past eight next
+morning--before the heat of the day--Raffles and I drove to Kew Gardens
+in a hired landau which was to call for us at mid-day and wait until we
+came.  The porter had assisted me to carry my invalid downstairs, in a
+carrying-chair hired (like  the landau) from Harrod's Stores for the
+occasion.
+
+It was little after nine when we crawled together into the gardens; by
+half-past my invalid had had enough, and out he tottered on my arm; a
+cab, a  message to our coachman, a timely train to Baker Street,
+another cab, and we were at the British Museum--brisk pedestrians
+now--not very many  minutes after the opening hour of 10 A.M.
+
+It was one of those glowing days which will not be forgotten by many
+who were in town at the  time.  The Diamond Jubilee was upon us, and
+Queen's weather had already set in.  Raffles, indeed, declared it was
+as hot as Italy and Australia  put together; and certainly the short
+summer nights gave the channels of wood and asphalt and the continents
+of brick and mortar but little time to cool.  At the British Museum the
+pigeons were crooning among the shadows of the grimy colonnade, and the
+stalwart janitors looked less stalwart  than usual, as though their
+medals were too heavy for them.  I recognized some habitual Readers
+going to their labor underneath the dome; of mere visitors we seemed
+among the first.
+
+"That's the room," said Raffles, who had bought the two-penny guide, as
+we studied it openly on the nearest bench; "number 43, upstairs and
+sharp round to the right.  Come on, Bunny!"
+
+And he led the way in silence, but with a long methodical stride which
+I could not understand until we came to the corridor leading to the
+Room of Gold, when he turned to me for a moment.
+
+"A hundred and thirty-nine yards from this to  the open street," said
+Raffles, "not counting the stairs.  I suppose we COULD do it in twenty
+seconds, but if we did we should have to jump the gates.  No, you must
+remember to loaf out at slow march, Bunny, whether you like it or not."
+
+"But you talked about a hiding-place for a night?"
+
+"Quite so--for all night.  We should have to get back, go on lying low,
+and saunter out with the crowd next day--after doing the whole show
+thoroughly."
+
+"What!  With gold in our pockets--"
+
+"And gold in our boots, and gold up the sleeves and legs of our suits!
+You leave that to me, Bunny, and wait till you've tried two pairs of
+trousers sewn together at the foot!  This is only a preliminary
+reconnoitre.  And here we are."
+
+It is none of my business to describe the so-called Room of Gold, with
+which I, for one, was not a little disappointed.  The glass cases,
+which both fill and line it, may contain unique examples of the
+goldsmith's art in times and places of which one heard quite enough in
+the course of one's classical education; but, from a professional point
+of view, I would as lief have the ransacking of a single window in the
+West End as the pick of all those spoils of Etruria and of ancient
+Greece. The  gold may not be so soft as it appears, but it certainly
+looks as though you could bite off the business ends of the spoons, and
+stop your own teeth in doing so.  Nor should I care to be seen wearing
+one of the rings; but the greatest fraud of all  (from the aforesaid
+standpoint) is assuredly that very cup of which Raffles had spoken.
+Moreover, he felt this himself.
+
+"Why, it's as thin as paper," said he, "and enamelled like a
+middle-aged lady of quality!  But, by Jove, it's one of the most
+beautiful things I ever saw in my life, Bunny.  I should like to have
+it for its own sake, by all my gods!"
+
+The thing had a little square case of plate-glass all to itself at one
+end of the room.  It may have been the thing of beauty that Raffles
+affected to consider it, but I for my part was in no mood to look at it
+in that light.  Underneath were the names of the plutocrats who had
+subscribed for this national gewgaw, and I fell to wondering where
+their L8,000 came in, while Raffles devoured his  two-penny guide-book
+as greedily as a school-girl with a zeal for culture.
+
+"Those are scenes from the martyrdom of St. Agnes," said he ...
+"'translucent on relief ... one of the finest specimens of its  kind.'
+I should think it was!  Bunny, you Philistine, why can't you admire the
+thing for its own  sake?  It would be worth having only to live up to!
+There never was such rich enamelling on such thin gold; and what a good
+scheme to hang the lid up over it, so that you can see how thin it is.
+I wonder if we could lift it, Bunny, by hook or crook?"
+
+"You'd better try, sir," said a dry voice at his elbow.
+
+The madman seemed to think we had the room to ourselves.  I knew
+better, but, like another madman, had let him ramble on unchecked.  And
+here  was a stolid constable confronting us, in the short tunic that
+they wear in summer, his whistle on its chain, but no truncheon at his
+side.  Heavens!  how I see him now: a man of medium size, with a
+broad, good-humored, perspiring face, and a limp moustache.  He looked
+sternly at Raffles, and Raffles looked merrily at him.
+
+"Going to run me in, officer?" said he.  "That WOULD be a joke--my hat!"
+
+"I didn't say as I was, sir," replied the policeman.  "But that's queer
+talk for a gentleman like you, sir, in the British Museum!"  And he
+wagged  his helmet at my invalid, who had taken his airing in
+frock-coat and top-hat, the more readily to assume his present part.
+
+"What!" cried Raffles, "simply saying to my friend that I'd like to
+lift the gold cup?  Why, so I should, officer, so I should! I don't
+mind who hears me say so.  It's one of the most beautiful things I ever
+saw in all my life."
+
+The constable's face had already relaxed, and now a grin peeped under
+the limp moustache.  "I  daresay there's many as feels like that, sir,"
+said he.
+
+"Exactly; and I say what I feel, that's all," said Raffles airily.
+"But seriously, officer, is a valuable thing like this quite safe in a
+case like that?"
+
+"Safe enough as long as I'm here," replied the other, between grim jest
+and stout earnest.  Raffles studied his face; he was still watching
+Raffles; and I kept an eye on them both without putting in my word.
+
+"You appear to be single-handed," observed Raffles.  "Is that wise?"
+
+The note of anxiety was capitally caught; it was at once personal and
+public-spirited, that of the enthusiastic savant, afraid for a national
+treasure which few appreciated as he did himself.  And, to be sure, the
+three of us now had this treasury to ourselves; one or two others had
+been there when we entered; but now they were gone.
+
+"I'm not single-handed," said the officer, comfortably.  "See that seat
+by the door?  One of the attendants sits there all day long."
+
+"Then where is he now?"
+
+"Talking to another attendant just outside.  If you listen you'll hear
+them for yourself."
+
+We listened, and we did hear them, but not just outside.  In my own
+mind I even questioned  whether they were in the corridor through which
+we had come; to me it sounded as though they were just outside the
+corridor.
+
+"You mean the fellow with the billiard-cue who was here when we came
+in?" pursued Raffles.
+
+"That wasn't a billiard-cue!  It was a pointer," the intelligent
+officer explained.
+
+"It ought to be a javelin," said Raffles, nervously.  "It ought to be a
+poleaxe!  The public treasure ought to be better guarded than this.  I
+shall write to the Times about it--you see if I don't!"
+
+All at once, yet somehow not so suddenly as to excite suspicion,
+Raffles had become the elderly busybody with nerves; why, I could not
+for the life of me imagine; and the policeman seemed equally at sea.
+
+"Lor' bless you, sir," said he, "I'm all right; don't you bother your
+head about ME."
+
+"But you haven't even got a truncheon!"
+
+"Not likely to want one either.  You see, sir, it's early as yet; in a
+few minutes these here rooms will fill up; and there's safety in
+numbers, as they say."
+
+"Oh, it will fill up soon, will it?"
+
+"Any minute now, sir."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"It isn't often empty as long as this, sir.  It's the Jubilee, I
+suppose."
+
+"Meanwhile, what if my friend and I had been professional thieves?
+Why, we could have over-powered you in an instant, my good fellow!"
+
+"That you couldn't; leastways, not without bringing the whole place
+about your ears."
+
+"Well, I shall write to the Times, all the same.  I'm a connoisseur in
+all this sort of thing, and I won't have unnecessary risks run with the
+nation's property.  You said there was an attendant just  outside, but
+he sounds to me as though he were at the other end of the corridor.  I
+shall write to-day!"
+
+For an instant we all three listened; and Raffles was right. Then I saw
+two things in one glance.  Raffles had stepped a few inches backward,
+and stood poised upon the ball of each foot, his arms half raised, a
+light in his eyes.  And another kind  of light was breaking over the
+crass features of our friend the constable.
+
+"Then shall I tell you what I'LL do?" he cried, with a sudden clutch at
+the whistle-chain on his chest.  The whistle flew out, but it never
+reached his lips.  There were a couple of sharp smacks, like  double
+barrels discharged all but simultaneously, and the man reeled against
+me so that I could not help catching him as he fell.
+
+"Well done, Bunny!  I've knocked him out--I've knocked him out! Run you
+to the door and see if the attendants have heard anything, and take
+them on if they have."
+
+Mechanically I did as I was told.  There was no time for thought, still
+less for remonstrance or reproach, though my surprise must have been
+even more complete than that of the constable before Raffles knocked
+the sense out of him.  Even in my  utter bewilderment, however, the
+instinctive caution of the real criminal did not desert me.  I ran to
+the door, but I sauntered through it, to plant myself before a
+Pompeiian fresco in the corridor; and there were the two attendants
+still gossiping outside the further door; nor did they hear the dull
+crash which I heard even as I watched them out of the corner of each
+eye.
+
+It was hot weather, as I have said, but the perspiration on my body
+seemed already to have turned into a skin of ice.  Then I caught the
+faint  reflection of my own face in the casing of the fresco, and it
+frightened me into some semblance of myself as Raffles joined me with
+his hands in his pockets.  But my fear and indignation were redoubled
+at the sight of him, when a single glance  convinced me that his
+pockets were as empty as his hands, and his mad outrage the most wanton
+and  reckless of his whole career.
+
+"Ah, very interesting, very interesting, but nothing to what they have
+in the museum at Naples or in Pompeii itself.  You must go there some
+day, Bunny.  I've a good mind to take you myself.  Meanwhile--slow
+march!  The beggar hasn't moved an eyelid.  We may swing for him if you
+show indecent haste!"
+
+"We!" I whispered.  "We!"
+
+And my knees knocked together as we came up to the chatting attendants.
+But Raffles must needs interrupt them to ask the way to the Prehistoric
+Saloon.
+
+"At the top of the stairs."
+
+"Thank you.  Then we'll work round that way to the Egyptian part."
+
+And we left them resuming their providential chat.
+
+"I believe you're mad," I said bitterly as we went.
+
+"I believe I was," admitted Raffles; "but I'm not now, and I'll see you
+through.  A hundred and thirty-nine yards, wasn't it? Then it can't be
+more than a hundred and twenty now--not as much.  Steady, Bunny, for
+God's sake.  It's SLOW march--for our lives."
+
+There was this much management.  The rest was our colossal luck. A
+hansom was being paid off at the foot of the steps outside, and in we
+jumped, Raffles shouting "Charing Cross!" for all Bloomsbury to hear.
+
+We had turned into Bloomsbury Street without exchanging a syllable when
+he struck the trap-door with his fist.
+
+"Where the devil are you driving us?"
+
+"Charing Cross, sir."
+
+"I said King's Cross!  Round you spin, and drive like blazes, or we
+miss our train!  There's one to York at 10:35," added Raffles as the
+trap-door slammed; "we'll book there, Bunny, and then we'll slope
+through the subway to the Metropolitan, and so to ground via Baker
+Street and Earl's Court."
+
+And actually in half an hour he was seated once more in the hired
+carrying chair, while the porter and I staggered upstairs with my
+decrepit charge, for whose shattered strength even one hour in Kew
+Gardens had proved too much!  Then, and not until then, when we had got
+rid of the porter and  were alone at last, did I tell Raffles, in the
+most nervous English at my command, frankly and exactly what I thought
+of him and of his latest deed.  Once started, moreover, I spoke as I
+have seldom spoken to living man; and Raffles, of all men, stood my
+abuse without a murmur; or rather he sat it out, too astounded even to
+take off his hat, though I thought his eyebrows would have lifted it
+from his head.
+
+"But it always was your infernal way," I was  savagely concluding.
+"You make one plan, and yet you tell me another--"
+
+"Not to-day, Bunny, I swear!"
+
+"You mean to tell me you really did start with the bare idea of finding
+a place to hide in for a night?"
+
+"Of course I did."
+
+"It was to be the mere reconnoitre you pretended?"
+
+"There was no pretence about it, Bunny."
+
+"Then why on earth go and do what you did?"
+
+"The reason would be obvious to anyone but you," said Raffles, still
+with no unkindly scorn.  "It was the temptation of a minute--the final
+impulse of the fraction of a second, when Roberto saw that I was
+tempted, and let me see that he saw it. It's not a thing I care to do,
+and I sha'n't be happy till the papers tell me the poor devil is alive.
+But a knock-out shot was the only chance for us then."
+
+"Why?  You don't get run in for being tempted, nor yet for showing that
+you are!"
+
+"But I should have deserved running in if I hadn't yielded to such a
+temptation as that,  Bunny.  It was a chance in a hundred thousand!  We
+might go there every day of our lives, and never again be the only
+outsiders in the room, with  the billiard-marking Johnnie practically
+out of ear-shot at one and the same time.  It was a gift from the gods;
+not to have taken it would have been flying in the face of Providence."
+
+"But you didn't take it," said I.  "You went and left it behind."
+
+I wish I had had a Kodak for the little smile with which Raffles shook
+his head, for it was one that he kept for those great moments of which
+our vocation is not devoid.  All this time he had been wearing his hat,
+tilted a little over eyebrows no longer raised.  And now at last I knew
+where the gold cup was.
+
+It stood for days upon his chimney-piece, this costly trophy whose
+ancient history and final fate filled newspaper columns even in these
+days of Jubilee, and for which the flower of Scotland Yard was said to
+be seeking high and low.  Our constable, we learnt, had been stunned
+only, and, from the moment that I brought him an evening paper with the
+news, Raffles's spirits rose to a height inconsistent with his equable
+temperament, and as unusual in him as the sudden impulse upon which he
+had acted with such effect.  The cup itself appealed to me no more than
+it had done  before.  Exquisite it might be, handsome it was,  but so
+light in the hand that the mere gold of it would scarcely have poured
+three figures out of melting-pot. And what said Raffles but that he
+would never melt it at all!
+
+"Taking it was an offence against the laws of the land, Bunny. That is
+nothing.  But destroying it would be a crime against God and Art, and
+may I be spitted on the vane of St. Mary Abbot's if I commit it!"
+
+Talk such as this was unanswerable; indeed, the whole affair had passed
+the pale of useful comment; and the one course left to a practical
+person was to shrug his shoulders and enjoy the joke. This was not a
+little enhanced by the newspaper reports, which described Raffles as a
+handsome youth, and his unwilling accomplice as an older man of
+blackguardly appearance and low type.
+
+"Hits us both off rather neatly, Bunny," said he.  "But what none of
+them do justice to is my dear cup.  Look at it; only look at it, man!
+Was ever anything so rich and yet so chaste? St. Agnes must have had a
+pretty bad time, but it would be almost worth it to go down to
+posterity in such enamel upon such gold.  And then  the history of the
+thing.  Do you realize that it's five hundred years old and has
+belonged to Henry  the Eighth and to Elizabeth among others?  Bunny,
+when you have me cremated, you can put my ashes in yonder cup, and lay
+us in the deep-delved earth together!"
+
+"And meanwhile?"
+
+"It is the joy of my heart, the light of my life, the delight of mine
+eye."
+
+"And suppose other eyes catch sight of it?"
+
+"They never must; they never shall."
+
+Raffles would have been too absurd had he not been thoroughly alive to
+his own absurdity; there was nevertheless an underlying sincerity in
+his appreciation of any and every  form of beauty, which all his
+nonsense could not conceal.  And his infatuation for the cup was, as he
+declared, a very pure passion, since the circumstances debarred him
+from the chief joy of the average collector, that of showing his
+treasure to his friends.  At last, however, and at the height  of his
+craze, Raffles and reason seemed to come together again as suddenly as
+they had parted company in the Room of Gold.
+
+"Bunny," he cried, flinging his newspaper across the room, "I've got an
+idea after your own heart.  I know where I can place it after all!"
+
+"Do you mean the cup?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"Then I congratulate you."
+
+"Thanks."
+
+"Upon the recovery of your senses."
+
+"Thanks galore.  But you've been confoundedly unsympathetic about this
+thing, Bunny, and I don't think I shall tell you my scheme till I've
+carried  it out."
+
+"Quite time enough," said I.
+
+"It will mean your letting me loose for an hour or two under cloud of
+this very night.  To-morrow's Sunday, the Jubilee's on Tuesday, and old
+Theobald's coming back for it."
+
+"It doesn't much matter whether he's back or not if you go late enough."
+
+"I mustn't be late.  They don't keep open.  No, it's no use your asking
+any questions.  Go out and buy me a big box of Huntley & Palmer's
+biscuits; any sort you like, only they must be theirs, and  absolutely
+the biggest box they sell."
+
+"My dear man!"
+
+"No questions, Bunny; you do your part and I'll do mine."
+
+Subtlety and success were in his face.  It was enough for me, and I had
+done his extraordinary bidding within a quarter of an hour.  In another
+minute Raffles had opened the box and tumbled all the biscuits into the
+nearest chair.
+
+"Now newspapers!"
+
+I fetched a pile.  He bid the cup of gold a ridiculous farewell,
+wrapped it up in newspaper after newspaper, and finally packed it in
+the empty  biscuit-box.
+
+"Now some brown paper.  I don't want to be taken for the grocer's young
+man."
+
+A neat enough parcel it made, when the string had been tied and the
+ends cut close; what was  more difficult was to wrap up Raffles himself
+in such a way that even the porter should not recognize him if they
+came face to face at the corner.  And the sun was still up.  But
+Raffles would go, and when he did I should not have known him  myself.
+
+He may have been an hour away.  It was barely dusk when he returned,
+and my first question referred to our dangerous ally, the porter.
+Raffles had passed him unsuspected in going, but had  managed to avoid
+him altogether on the return journey, which he had completed by way of
+the other entrance and the roof.  I breathed again.
+
+"And what have you done with the cup?"
+
+"Placed it!"
+
+"How much for?  How much for?"
+
+"Let me think.  I had a couple of cabs, and the postage was a tanner,
+with another twopence for registration.  Yes, it cost me exactly
+five-and-eight."
+
+"IT cost YOU!  But what did you GET for it, Raffles?"
+
+"Nothing, my boy."
+
+"Nothing!"
+
+"Not a crimson cent."
+
+"I am not surprised.  I never thought it had a market value.  I told
+you so in the beginning,"  I said, irritably.  "But what on earth have
+you  done with the thing?"
+
+"Sent it to the Queen."
+
+"You haven't!"
+
+Rogue is a word with various meanings, and Raffles had been one sort of
+rogue ever since I had known him; but now, for once, he was the
+innocent variety, a great gray-haired child, running over with
+merriment and mischief.
+
+"Well, I've sent it to Sir Arthur Bigge, to present to her Majesty,
+with the loyal respects of the thief, if that will do for you," said
+Raffles.  "I thought they might take too much stock of me at the G.P.O.
+if I addressed it to the Sovereign her-self.  Yes, I drove over to St.
+Martin's-le-Grand with it, and I registered the box into the bargain.
+Do a thing properly if you do it at all."
+
+"But why on earth," I groaned, "do such a thing at all?"
+
+"My dear Bunny, we have been reigned over for sixty years by infinitely
+the finest monarch the world has ever seen.  The world is taking the
+present opportunity of signifying the fact for all it is worth.  Every
+nation is laying of its best at her royal feet; every class in the
+community is doing its little level--except ours.  All I have done is
+to remove one reproach from our fraternity."
+
+At this I came round, was infected with his spirit, called him the
+sportsman he always was and would be, and shook his daredevil hand in
+mine; but, at the same time, I still had my qualms.
+
+"Supposing they trace it to us?" said I.
+
+"There's not much to catch hold of in a biscuit-box by Huntley &
+Palmer," replied Raffles; "that was why I sent you for one.  And I
+didn't write  a word upon a sheet of paper which could possibly be
+traced.  I simply printed two or three on a virginal post-card--another
+half-penny to the bad--which might have been bought at any post-office
+in the kingdom.  No, old chap, the G.P.O. was the one real danger;
+there was one detective  I spotted for myself; and the sight of him has
+left me with a thirst.  Whisky and Sullivans for two, Bunny, if you
+please."
+
+Raffles was soon clinking his glass against mine.
+
+"The Queen," said he.  "God bless her!"
+
+
+
+THE FATE OF FAUSTINA
+
+  "Mar--ga--ri,
+  e perzo a Salvatore!  Mar--ga--ri,
+  Ma l'ommo e cacciatore!  Mar--ga--ri,
+  Nun ce aje corpa tu!
+  Chello ch' e fatto, e fatto, un ne parlammo cchieu!"
+
+A piano-organ was pouring the metallic music through our open windows,
+while a voice of brass brayed the words, which I have since  obtained,
+and print above for identification by such  as know their Italy better
+than I.  They will not  thank me for reminding them of a tune so lately
+epidemic in that land of aloes and blue skies; but at least it is
+unlikely to run in their heads as the ribald accompaniment to a
+tragedy; and it does in mine.
+
+It was in the early heat of August, and the hour that of the lawful and
+necessary siesta for such as turn night into day.  I was therefore
+shutting my window in a rage, and wondering whether I should  not do
+the same for Raffles, when he appeared in the silk pajamas to which the
+chronic solicitude of Dr. Theobald confined him from morning to  night.
+
+"Don't do that, Bunny," said he.  "I rather like that thing, and want
+to listen.  What sort of fellows are they to look at, by the way?"
+
+I put my head out to see, it being a primary rule of our quaint
+establishment that Raffles must never show himself at any of the
+windows.  I remember now how hot the sill was to my elbows, as I leant
+upon it and looked down, in order to satisfy a curiosity in which I
+could see no point.
+
+"Dirty-looking beggars," said I over my shoulder: "dark as dark; blue
+chins, oleaginous curls, and ear-rings; ragged as they make them, but
+nothing picturesque in their rags."
+
+"Neapolitans all over," murmured Raffles behind me; "and that's a
+characteristic touch, the one fellow singing while the other grinds;
+they always have that out there."
+
+"He's rather a fine chap, the singer," said I, as the song ended.  "My
+hat, what teeth!  He's looking up here, and grinning all round his
+head; shall I chuck him anything?"
+
+"Well, I have no reason to love the Neapolitans; but it takes me
+back--it takes me back!  Yes, here you are, one each."
+
+It was a couple of half-crowns that Raffles put into my hand, but I had
+thrown them into the street for pennies before I saw what they were.
+Thereupon I left the Italians bowing to the mud, as well they might,
+and I turned to protest against  such wanton waste.  But Raffles was
+walking up and down, his head bent, his eyes troubled; and his one
+excuse disarmed remonstrance.
+
+"They took me back," he repeated.  "My God, how they took me back!"
+
+Suddenly he stopped in his stride.
+
+"You don't understand, Bunny, old chap; but if you like you shall.  I
+always meant to tell you  some day, but never felt worked up to it
+before,  and it's not the kind of thing one talks about for talking's
+sake.  It isn't a nursery story, Bunny, and there isn't a laugh in it
+from start to finish; on the contrary, you have often asked me what
+turned my hair gray, and now you are going to hear."
+
+This was promising, but Raffles's manner was something more.  It was
+unique in my memory of the man.  His fine face softened and set hard by
+turns.  I never knew it so hard.  I never knew it so soft.  And the
+same might be said of his voice, now tender as any woman's, now flying
+to the other extreme of equally unwonted ferocity.  But this was toward
+the end of his tale; the beginning he treated characteristically
+enough, though I could have wished for a less cavalier account of the
+island of Elba, where, upon his own showing, he had met with much
+humanity.
+
+"Deadly, my dear Bunny, is not the word for that glorified snag, or for
+the mollusks, its inhabitants.  But they started by wounding my vanity,
+so perhaps I am prejudiced, after all.  I sprung myself upon them as a
+shipwrecked sailor--a sole survivor--stripped in the sea and landed
+without a stitch--yet they took no more interest in me than you do in
+Italian organ-grinders.  They were decent enough.  I didn't have to
+pick and steal for a square meal and a pair of trousers; it would have
+been more exciting if I had.  But what a place!  Napoleon couldn't
+stand it, you remember, but he held on longer than I did.  I put in a
+few weeks in their infernal mines, simply to pick up a smattering of
+Italian; then got across to the mainland in a little wooden
+timber-tramp; and ungratefully glad I was to leave Elba blazing in just
+such another sunset as the one you won't forget.
+
+"The tramp was bound for Naples, but first it touched at Baiae, where I
+carefully deserted in the night.  There are too many English in Naples
+itself, though I thought it would make a first happy hunting-ground
+when I knew the language better and had altered myself a bit more.
+Meanwhile I got a billet of several sorts on one of the loveliest spots
+that ever I struck on all my travels.  The place was a vineyard, but it
+overhung the sea, and I got taken on as tame sailorman and emergency
+bottle-washer.  The wages were the noble figure of a lira and a half,
+which is just over a bob, a day, but there were lashings of sound wine
+for one and all, and better wine to bathe in.  And for eight whole
+months, my boy, I was an absolutely honest man.  The luxury of it,
+Bunny!  I out-heroded Herod, wouldn't touch a grape, and went in the
+most delicious danger of being knifed for my principles by the thieving
+crew I had joined.
+
+"It was the kind of place where every prospect pleases--and all the
+rest of it--especially all the rest.  But may I see it in my dreams
+till I die--as it was in the beginning--before anything began to
+happen.  It was a wedge of rock sticking out into the bay, thatched
+with vines, and with the rummiest old house on the very edge of all, a
+devil of a height above the sea: you might have sat at the windows and
+dropped your Sullivan-ends plumb into blue water a hundred and fifty
+feet below.
+
+"From the garden behind the house--such a garden, Bunny--oleanders and
+mimosa, myrtles, rosemarys and red tangles of fiery, untamed
+flowers--in a corner of this garden was the top of a subterranean stair
+down to the sea; at least there were nearly two hundred steps tunnelled
+through the solid rock; then an iron gate, and another eighty steps in
+the open air; and last of all a cave fit for pirates,
+a-penny-plain-and-two-pence-colored. This cave gave upon the sweetest
+little thing in coves, all deep blue water and honest rocks; and here I
+looked after the vineyard shipping, a pot-bellied tub with a brown
+sail, and a sort of dingy.  The tub took the wine to Naples, and the
+dingy was the tub's tender.
+
+"The house above was said to be on the identical site of a suburban
+retreat of the admirable Tiberius; there was the old sinner's private
+theatre with the tiers cut clean to this day, the well where he used to
+fatten his lampreys on his slaves, and a  ruined temple of those
+ripping old Roman bricks, shallow as dominoes and ruddier than the
+cherry.  I never was much of an antiquary, but I could have become one
+there if I'd had nothing else to  do; but I had lots.  When I wasn't
+busy with the  boats I had to trim the vines, or gather the grapes,  or
+even help make the wine itself in a cool, dark, musty vault underneath
+the temple, that I can see and smell as I jaw.  And can't I hear it and
+feel it too!  Squish, squash, bubble; squash, squish, guggle; and your
+feet as though you had been wading through slaughter to a throne.  Yes,
+Bunny, you mightn't think it, but this good right foot, that never was
+on the wrong side of the crease when the ball left my hand, has also
+been known to
+
+       'crush the lees of pleasure
+         From sanguine grapes of pain.'"
+
+He made a sudden pause, as though he had stumbled on the truth in jest.
+His face filled with lines.  We were sitting in the room that had been
+bare when first I saw it; there were basket-chairs and a table in it
+now, all meant ostensibly for me; and hence Raffles would slip to his
+bed, with schoolboy relish, at every tinkle of the bell.  This
+afternoon we felt fairly safe, for Theobald had called in the morning,
+and Mrs. Theobald still took up much of his time.  Through the open
+window we could hear the piano-organ and "Mar--gar--ri" a  few hundred
+yards further on.  I fancied Raffles was listening to it while he
+paused.  He shook his head abstractedly when I handed him the
+cigarettes; and his tone hereafter was never just what it had been.
+
+"I don't know, Bunny, whether you're a believer in transmigration of
+souls.  I have often thought it easier to believe than lots of other
+things, and I have been pretty near believing in it myself since I had
+my being on that villa of Tiberius.  The brute who had it in my day, if
+he isn't still running it with a whole skin, was or is as cold-blooded
+a blackguard as the worst of the emperors, but I have often thought he
+had a lot in common with Tiberius.  He had the great high sensual Roman
+nose, eyes that were sinks of iniquity in themselves, and that swelled
+with fatness, like the rest of him, so that he wheezed if he walked a
+yard; otherwise rather a fine beast to look at, with a huge gray
+moustache, like a flying gull, and the most courteous manners even  to
+his men; but one of the worst, Bunny, one of the worst that ever was.
+It was said that the vineyard was only his hobby; if so, he did his
+best to make his hobby pay.  He used to come out from Naples for the
+week-ends--in the tub when it wasn't too rough for his nerves--and he
+didn't always come alone.  His very name sounded unhealthy--Corbucci.
+I suppose I ought to add that he was a Count, though Counts are
+two-a-penny in  Naples, and in season all the year round.
+
+"He had a little English, and liked to air it upon me, much to my
+disgust; if I could not hope to conceal my nationality as yet, I at
+least did not want to have it advertised; and the swine had English
+friends.  When he heard that I was bathing in November, when the bay is
+still as warm  as new milk, he would shake his wicked old head and say,
+'You are very audashuss--you are very audashuss!' and put on no end of
+side before his Italians.  By God, he had pitched upon the right word
+unawares, and I let him know it in the end!
+
+"But that bathing, Bunny; it was absolutely the best I ever had
+anywhere.  I said just now the water was like wine; in my own mind I
+used to call it blue champagne, and was rather annoyed that I had no
+one to admire the phrase.  Otherwise I assure you that I missed my own
+particular kind very little indeed, though I often wished that YOU were
+there, old chap; particularly when I went for my lonesome swim; first
+thing in the morning, when the Bay was all rose-leaves, and last thing
+at night, when your body caught phosphorescent fire!  Ah, yes, it was a
+good enough life for a change; a perfect paradise to lie low in;
+another Eden until ...
+
+"My poor Eve!"
+
+And he fetched a sigh that took away his words; then his jaws snapped
+together, and his eyes spoke terribly while he conquered his emotion.
+I pen the last word advisedly.  I fancy it is one which  I have never
+used before in writing of A. J. Raffles,  for I cannot at the moment
+recall any other occasion upon which its use would have been justified.
+On resuming, however, he was not only calm, but cold; and this flying
+for safety to the other extreme is the single instance of self-distrust
+which the present Achates can record to the credit of his impious
+AEneas.
+
+"I called the girl Eve," said he.  "Her real name was Faustina, and she
+was one of a vast family who hung out in a hovel on the inland border
+of the vineyard.  And Aphrodite rising from the sea was less wonderful
+and not more beautiful than Aphrodite emerging from that hole!
+
+"It was the most exquisite face I ever saw or shall see in this life.
+Absolutely perfect features; a skin that reminded you of old gold, so
+delicate was its bronze; magnificent hair, not black but nearly; and
+such eyes and teeth as would have made the fortune of a face without
+another point.  I tell you, Bunny, London would go mad about a girl
+like that.  But I don't believe there's such  another in the world.
+And there she was wasting her sweetness upon that lovely but desolate
+little corner of it! Well, she did not waste it upon me.  I would have
+married her, and lived happily ever after in such a hovel as her
+people's--with her.  Only to look at her--only to look at her for the
+rest of my days--I could have lain low and remained dead even to you!
+And that's all I'm going to tell you about that, Bunny; cursed be he
+who tells more!  Yet don't run away with the idea that this poor
+Faustina was the only woman I ever cared about. I don't believe in all
+that 'only' rot; nevertheless I tell you that she was the one being who
+ever entirely satisfied my sense of beauty; and I honestly believe I
+could have chucked the world and been true to Faustina for that alone.
+
+"We met sometimes in the little temple I told you about, sometimes
+among the vines; now by honest accident, now by flagrant design; and
+found a ready-made rendezvous, romantic as one could wish, in the cave
+down all those subterranean steps. Then the sea would call us--my blue
+champagne--my sparkling cobalt--and there was the dingy  ready to our
+hand.  Oh, those nights!  I never knew which I liked best, the moonlit
+ones when you sculled through silver and could see for miles, or the
+dark nights when the fishermen's torches stood for the sea, and a red
+zig-zag in the sky for old Vesuvius.  We were happy.  I don't mind
+owning it.  We seemed not to have a care between us.  My mates took no
+interest in my affairs, and Faustina's family did not appear to bother
+about her.  The Count was in Naples five nights of the seven; the other
+two we sighed apart.
+
+"At first it was the oldest story in literature--Eden plus Eve. The
+place had been a heaven on earth before, but now it was heaven itself.
+So for a little; then one night, a Monday night, Faustina burst out
+crying in the boat; and sobbed her story as we drifted without mishap
+by the mercy of the Lord.  And that was almost as old a story as the
+other.
+
+"She was engaged--what!  Had I never heard of it?  Did I mean to upset
+the boat?  What was her engagement beside our love? 'Niente, niente,'
+crooned Faustina, sighing yet smiling through her tears.  No, but what
+did matter was that the man had threatened to stab her to the
+heart--and  would do it as soon as look at her--that I knew.
+
+"I knew it merely from my knowledge of the Neapolitans, for I had no
+idea who the man might  be.  I knew it, and yet I took this detail
+better than the fact of the engagement, though now I began to laugh at
+both.  As if I was going to let her marry anybody else!  As if a hair
+of her lovely head should be touched while I lived to protect her!  I
+had a great mind to row away to blazes with her that very night, and
+never go near the vineyard again, or let her either.  But we had not a
+lira between us at the time, and only the rags in which we sat barefoot
+in the boat.  Besides, I had to know the name of the animal who had
+threatened a woman, and such a woman as this.
+
+"For a long time she refused to tell me, with splendid obduracy; but I
+was as determined as she; so at last she made conditions. I was not to
+go and get put in prison for sticking a knife into him--he wasn't worth
+it--and I did promise not to stab him in the back.  Faustina seemed
+quite satisfied, though a little puzzled by my manner, having herself
+the racial tolerance for cold steel; and next moment she had taken away
+my breath.  'It is Stefano,' she whispered, and hung her head.
+
+"And well she might, poor thing!  Stefano, of all creatures on God's
+earth--for her!
+
+"Bunny, he was a miserable little undersized
+wretch--ill-favored--servile--surly--and second only to his master in
+bestial cunning and hypocrisy.  His face was enough for me; that was
+what I read in it, and I don't often make mistakes.  He was Corbucci's
+own confidential body-servant, and that alone was enough to damn him in
+decent eyes:  always came out first on the Saturday with the spese, to
+have all ready for his master and current mistress, and stayed behind
+on the Monday to clear and lock up.  Stefano!  That worm!  I  could
+well understand his threatening a woman  with a knife; what beat me was
+how any woman could ever have listened to him; above all, that Faustina
+should be the one!  It passed my comprehension.  But I questioned her
+as gently as I could; and her explanation was largely the thread-bare
+one you would expect.  Her parents were so poor. They were so many in
+family.  Some of  them begged--would I promise never to tell?  Then
+some of them stole--sometimes--and all knew the pains of actual want.
+She looked after the cows, but there were only two of them, and
+brought the milk to the vineyard and elsewhere; but that was not
+employment for more than one; and there were countless sisters waiting
+to take her place.  Then he was so rich, Stefano.
+
+"'Rich!' I echoed.  'Stefano?'
+
+"'Si, Arturo mio.'
+
+"Yes, I played the game on that vineyard, Bunny, even to going my own
+first name.
+
+"'And how comes he to be rich?' I asked, suspiciously.
+
+"She did not know; but he had given her such beautiful jewels; the
+family had lived on them for months, she pretending an avocat had taken
+charge of them for her against her marriage. But I cared nothing about
+all that.
+
+"'Jewels!  Stefano!' I could only mutter.
+
+"'Perhaps the Count has paid for some of them.  He is very kind.'
+
+"'To you, is he?'
+
+"'Oh, yes, very kind.'
+
+"'And you would live in his house afterwards?'
+
+"'Not now, mia cara--not now!'
+
+"'No, by God you don't!' said I in English.  'But you would have done
+so, eh?'
+
+"'Of course.  That was arranged.  The Count is really very kind.'
+
+"'Do you see anything of him when he comes here?'
+
+"Yes, he had sometimes brought her little presents, sweetmeats,
+ribbons, and the like; but the offering had always been made through
+this toad of a Stefano.  Knowing the men, I now knew all.  But
+Faustina, she had the pure and simple heart, and the white soul, by the
+God who made it, and for all her kindness to a tattered scapegrace who
+made love to her in broken Italian between the ripples and the stars.
+She was not to know what I was, remember; and beside Corbucci and his
+henchman I was the Archangel Gabriel come down  to earth.
+
+"Well, as I lay awake that night, two more lines of Swinburne came into
+my head, and came to  stay:
+
+       "God said 'Let him who wins her take
+         And keep Faustine.'
+
+"On that couplet I slept at last, and it was my text and watchword when
+I awoke in the morning.  I forget how well you know your Swinburne,
+Bunny; but don't you run away with the idea that there was anything
+else in common between his Faustine and mine.  For the last time let me
+tell you that poor Faustina was the whitest and the best I ever knew.
+
+"Well, I was strung up for trouble when the next Saturday came, and
+I'll tell you what I had done.  I had broken the pledge and burgled
+Corbucci's villa in my best manner during his absence in Naples.  Not
+that it gave me the slightest trouble; but no human being could have
+told that I had been in, when I came out. And I had stolen nothing,
+mark you, but only borrowed a revolver from a drawer in the Count's
+desk, with one or two trifling accessories; for by this time I had the
+measure of these damned Neapolitans.  They are spry enough with a
+knife, but you show them the  business end of a shooting-iron, and
+they'll streak like rabbits for the nearest hole.  But the revolver
+wasn't for my own use.  It was for Faustina, and I taught her how to
+use it in the cave down there by the sea, shooting at candles stuck
+upon the rock.  The noise in the cave was something frightful, but high
+up above it couldn't be heard at all, as  we proved to each other's
+satisfaction pretty early in the proceedings.  So now Faustina was
+armed with munitions of self-defence; and I knew enough of her
+character to entertain no doubt as to their spirited use upon occasion.
+Between the two of us, in fact, our friend Stefano seemed tolerably
+certain of a warm week-end.
+
+"But the Saturday brought word that the Count was not coming this week,
+being in Rome on business, and unable to return in time; so for a whole
+Sunday we were promised peace; and made bold  plans accordingly.  There
+was no further merit in hushing this thing up.  'Let him who wins her
+take and keep Faustine.' Yes, but let him win her openly, or lose her
+and be damned to him!  So on the Sunday I was going to have it out with
+her people--with the Count and Stefano as soon as they showed their
+noses.  I had no inducement, remember, ever to return to surreptitious
+life within a cab-fare of Wormwood Scrubbs. Faustina and the Bay of
+Naples were quite good enough for me. And the prehistoric man in me
+rather exulted in the idea of fighting for my desire.
+
+"On the Saturday, however, we were able to meet for the last time as
+heretofore--just once more in secret--down there in the cave--as soon
+as might be after dark.  Neither of us minded if we were kept for
+hours; each knew in the end that the other would come; and there was a
+charm of its own even in waiting with such knowledge.  But that night I
+did lose patience: not in the cave, but up above, where first on one
+pretext and then on another the direttore kept me going until I smelt a
+rat.  He was not given to exacting overtime, this direttore, whose only
+fault was his servile subjection to our common boss.  It seemed pretty
+obvious, therefore, that he was acting upon some secret instructions
+from Corbucci himself, and, the moment I suspected this, I asked him to
+his face if it was not the case.  And it was; he admitted it with many
+shrugs, being a conveniently weak person, whom one felt almost ashamed
+of bullying as the occasion demanded.
+
+"The fact was, however, that the Count had sent for him on finding he
+had to go to Rome, and had said he was very sorry to go just then, as
+among other things he intended to speak to me about Faustina.  Stefano
+had told him all about his row with her, and moreover that it was on my
+account, which Faustina had never told me, though I had guessed as much
+for myself.  Well, the Count was going to take his jackal's part for
+all he was worth, which was just exactly what I had expected him to do.
+He intended going for me on his return, but meanwhile I was not to make
+hay in his absence, and so this tool of a direttore had orders to keep
+me at it night and day.  I undertook not to give the poor beast away,
+but at the same time told him I had not the faintest intention of doing
+another stroke of work that night.
+
+"It was very dark, and I remember knocking my head against the oranges
+as I ran up the long, shallow steps which ended the journey between the
+direttore's lodge and the villa itself.  But at the  back of the villa
+was the garden I spoke about, and also a bare chunk of the cliff where
+it was bored by that subterranean stair.  So I saw the stars  close
+overhead, and the fishermen's torches far below, the coastwise lights
+and the crimson hieroglyph that spelt Vesuvius, before I plunged into
+the darkness of the shaft.  And that was the last time I appreciated
+the unique and peaceful charm of this outlandish spot.
+
+"The stair was in two long flights, with an air-hole or two at the top
+of the upper one, but not another pin-prick till you came to the iron
+gate at the bottom of the lower.  As you may read of an infinitely
+lighter place, in a finer work of fiction than you are ever likely to
+write, Bunny, it was 'gloomy at noon, dark as midnight at dusk, and
+black as the ninth plague of Egypt at midnight.'  I won't swear to my
+quotation, but I will to those  stairs.  They were as black that night
+as the inside  of the safest safe in the strongest strong-room in the
+Chancery Lane Deposit.  Yet I had not got far down them with my bare
+feet before I heard somebody else coming up in boots.  You may imagine
+what a turn that gave me!  It could not be Faustina, who went barefoot
+three seasons of the four, and yet there was Faustina waiting for me
+down below.  What a fright she must have had!  And all at once my own
+blood ran cold: for the man sang like a kettle as he plodded up and up.
+It was, it must be, the short-winded Count himself, whom we all
+supposed to be in Rome!
+
+"Higher he came and nearer, nearer, slowly yet hurriedly, now stopping
+to cough and gasp, now taking a few steps by elephantine assault.  I
+should have enjoyed the situation if it had not been  for poor Faustina
+in the cave; as it was I was filled with nameless fears.  But I could
+not resist giving that grampus Corbucci one bad moment on account.  A
+crazy hand-rail ran up one wall, so I  carefully flattened myself
+against the other, and  he passed within six inches of me, puffing and
+wheezing like a brass band.  I let him go a few steps higher, and then
+I let him have it with both lungs.
+
+"Buona sera, eccellenza, signori!' I roared  after him.  And a scream
+came down in answer--such a scream!  A dozen different terrors were in
+it; and the wheezing had stopped, with the old scoundrel's heart.
+
+"'Chi sta la?' he squeaked at last, gibbering and whimpering like a
+whipped monkey, so that I could not bear to miss his face, and got a
+match all ready to strike.
+
+"'Arturo, signori.'
+
+"He didn't repeat my name, nor did he damn me in heaps.  He did nothing
+but wheeze for a good minute, and when he spoke it was with insinuating
+civility, in his best English.
+
+"'Come nearer, Arturo.  You are in the lower regions down there. I want
+to speak with you.'
+
+"'No, thanks.  I'm in a hurry,' I said, and dropped that match back
+into my pocket.  He  might be armed, and I was not.
+
+"'So you are in a 'urry!' and he wheezed amusement.  'And you thought I
+was still in Rome, no doubt; and so I was until this afternoon, when I
+caught train at the eleventh moment, and then another train from Naples
+to Pozzuoli.  I have been rowed here now by a fisherman of Pozzuoli.  I
+had not time to stop anywhere in Naples, but only to drive from station
+to station.  So I am without Stefano, Arturo, I am without Stefano.'
+
+"His sly voice sounded preternaturally sly in the absolute darkness,
+but even through that impenetrable veil I knew it for a sham.  I had
+laid hold of the hand-rail.  It shook violently in my hand; he also was
+holding it where he stood.  And  these suppressed tremors, or rather
+their detection in this way, struck a strange chill to my heart, just
+as I was beginning to pluck it up.
+
+"'It is lucky for Stefano,' said I, grim as death.
+
+"'Ah, but you must not be too 'ard on 'im,' remonstrated the Count.
+'You have stole his girl, he speak with me about it, and I wish to
+speak with you.  It is very audashuss, Arturo, very audashuss!  Perhaps
+you are even going to meet her now, eh?'"
+
+I told him straight that I was.
+
+"'Then there is no 'urry, for she is not there.'
+
+"'You didn't see her in the cave?' I cried, too delighted at the
+thought to keep it to  myself.
+
+"'I had no such fortune,' the old devil said.
+
+"'She is there, all the same.'
+
+"'I only wish I 'ad known.'
+
+"'And I've kept her long enough!'
+
+"In fact I threw this over my shoulder as I turned and went running
+down.
+
+"'I 'ope you will find her!' his malicious voice came croaking after
+me.  'I 'ope you will--I 'ope so.'
+
+"And find her I did."
+
+Raffles had been on his feet some time, unable to sit still or to
+stand, moving excitedly about the room.  But now he stood still enough,
+his elbows on the cast-iron mantelpiece, his head between his  hands.
+
+"Dead?" I whispered.
+
+And he nodded to the wall.
+
+"There was not a sound in the cave.  There was no answer to my voice.
+Then I went in, and my foot touched hers, and it was colder than the
+rock ...  Bunny, they had stabbed her to the heart.  She had fought
+them, and they had stabbed her to the heart!"
+
+"You say 'they,'" I said gently, as he stood in heavy silence, his back
+still turned.  "I thought Stefano had been left behind?"
+
+Raffles was round in a flash, his face white-hot, his eyes dancing
+death.
+
+"He was in the cave!" he shouted.  "I saw him--I spotted him--it was
+broad twilight after those stairs--and I went for him with my bare
+hands.  Not fists, Bunny; not fists for a thing like that; I meant
+getting my fingers into his vile little heart and tearing it out by the
+roots.  I was stark mad.  But he had the revolver--hers.  He blazed it
+at arm's length, and missed.  And that steadied me.  I had smashed his
+funny-bone against the rock before he could blaze again; the revolver
+fell with  a rattle, but without going off; in an instant I had it
+tight, and the little swine at my mercy at last."
+
+"You didn't show him any?"
+
+"Mercy?  With Faustina dead at my feet? I should have deserved none in
+the next world if I had shown him any in this!  No, I just stood over
+him, with the revolver in both hands, feeling the chambers with my
+thumb; and as I stood he stabbed at me; but I stepped back to that one,
+and brought him down with a bullet in his guts.
+
+"'And I can spare you two or three more,' I said, for my poor girl
+could not have fired a shot.  'Take that one to hell with you--and
+that--and that!'
+
+"Then I started coughing and wheezing like the Count himself, for the
+place was full of smoke.  When it cleared my man was very dead, and I
+tipped him into the sea, to defile that rather than Faustina's cave.
+And then--and then--we were  alone for the last time, she and I, in our
+own pet  haunt; and I could scarcely see her, yet I would not strike a
+match, for I knew she would not have me see her as she was.  I could
+say good-by to her without that.  I said it; and I left her like a man,
+and up the first open-air steps with my head in the air and the stars
+all sharp in the sky; then suddenly they swam, and back I went like a
+lunatic, to see if she was really dead, to bring her back to life ...
+Bunny, I can't tell you any more."
+
+"Not of the Count?" I murmured at last.
+
+"Not even of the Count," said Raffles, turning round with a sigh.  "I
+left him pretty sorry for himself; but what was the good of that?  I
+had taken blood for blood, and it was not Corbucci who had killed
+Faustina.  No, the plan was his,  but that was not part of the plan.
+They had found out about our meetings in the cave: nothing simpler than
+to have me kept hard at it overhead and to carry off Faustina by brute
+force in the boat.  It was their only chance, for she had said more to
+Stefano than she had admitted to me, and more than I am going to repeat
+about myself.  No persuasion would have induced her to listen to him
+again; so they tried force; and she drew Corbucci's revolver on them,
+but they had taken her by surprise, and Stefano stabbed her before she
+could fire."
+
+"But how do you know all that?" I asked Raffles, for his tale was going
+to pieces in the telling, and the tragic end of poor Faustina was no
+ending for me.
+
+"Oh," said he, "I had it from Corbucci at his own revolver's point.  He
+was waiting at his window, and I could have potted him at my ease where
+he stood against the light listening hard enough  but not seeing a
+thing.  So he asked whether it was Stefano, and I whispered, 'Si,
+signore'; and then whether he had finished Arturo, and I brought the
+same shot off again.  He had let me in before he knew who was finished
+and who was not."
+
+"And did you finish him?"
+
+"No; that was too good for Corbucci.  But I bound and gagged him about
+as tight as man was ever gagged or bound, and I left him in his room
+with the shutters shut and the house locked up.  The shutters of that
+old place were six inches thick, and the walls nearly six feet; that
+was on the Saturday night, and the Count wasn't expected at the
+vineyard before the following Saturday. Meanwhile he was supposed to be
+in Rome.  But the dead would doubtless be discovered next day, and I am
+afraid this would lead to his own discovery with the life still in him.
+I believe he  figured on that himself, for he sat threatening me gamely
+till the last.  You never saw such a sight as he was, with his head
+split in two by a ruler tied at the back of it, and his great moustache
+pushed up into his bulging eyes.  But I locked him  up in the dark
+without a qualm, and I wished and still wish him every torment of the
+damned."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"The night was still young, and within ten miles there was the best of
+ports in a storm, and hundreds of holds for the humble stowaway to
+choose from.  But I didn't want to go further than Genoa, for by this
+time my Italian would wash, so I chose the old Norddeutscher Lloyd, and
+had an excellent voyage in one of the boats slung in-board over the
+bridge.  That's better than any hold, Bunny, and I did splendidly on
+oranges brought from the vineyard."
+
+"And at Genoa?"
+
+"At Genoa I took to my wits once more, and have been living on nothing
+else ever since.  But there I had to begin all over again, and at the
+very bottom of the ladder.  I slept in the streets.  I begged.  I did
+all manner of terrible things, rather hoping for a bad end, but never
+coming to one.  Then one day I saw a white-headed old chap looking at
+me through a shop-window--a window I had designs upon--and when I
+stared at him he stared at me--and we wore the same rags.  So I had
+come to that!  But one reflection makes many.  I had not recognized
+myself; who on earth would recognize me?  London called me--and here I
+am. Italy had broken my heart--and there it stays."
+
+Flippant as a schoolboy one moment, playful even in the bitterness of
+the next, and now no longer giving way to the feeling which had spoilt
+the climax of his tale, Raffles needed knowing as I alone knew him for
+a right appreciation of those last words.  That they were no mere words
+I know full well. That, but for the tragedy of his Italian life, that
+life would have sufficed him for years, if not for ever, I did and do
+still believe.  But I alone see him as I saw him then, the lines upon
+his face, and the pain behind the lines; how they came to disappear,
+and what removed them, you will never guess.  It was the one thing you
+would have expected to have the opposite effect, the thing indeed that
+had forced his confidence, the organ and the voice once more beneath
+our very windows:
+
+       "Margarita de Parete,
+         era a' sarta d' e' signore;
+         se pugneva sempe e ddete
+         pe penzare a Salvatore!
+       "Mar--ga--ri,
+         e perzo e Salvatore!
+      Mar--ga--ri,
+         Ma l'ommo e cacciatore!
+      Mar--ga--ri,
+         Nun ce aje corpa tu!
+      Chello ch' e fatto, e fatto, un ne parlammo cchieu!"
+
+I simply stared at Raffles.  Instead of deepening, his lines had
+vanished.  He looked years younger, mischievous and merry and alert as
+I remembered him of old in the breathless crisis of some madcap
+escapade.  He was holding up his finger; he was stealing to the window;
+he was peeping through the blind as though our side street were
+Scotland Yard itself; he was stealing back again, all revelry,
+excitement, and suspense.
+
+"I half thought they were after me before," said he.  "That was why I
+made you look.  I daren't take a proper look myself, but what a jest if
+they were!  What a jest!"
+
+"Do you mean the police?" said I.
+
+"The police!  Bunny, do you know them and me so little that you can
+look me in the face and ask  such a question?  My boy, I'm dead to
+them--off their books--a good deal deader than being off the hooks!
+Why, if I went to Scotland Yard this minute, to give myself up, they'd
+chuck me out for a harmless lunatic.  No, I fear an enemy nowadays, and
+I go in terror of the sometime friend, but I have the utmost confidence
+in the dear police."
+
+"Then whom do you mean?"
+
+"The Camorra!"
+
+I repeated the word with a different intonation.  Not that I had never
+heard of that most powerful and sinister of secret societies; but I
+failed to see on what grounds Raffles should jump to the conclusion
+that these everyday organ-grinders belonged to it.
+
+"It was one of Corbucci's threats," said he.  "If I killed him the
+Camorra would certainly kill me; he kept on telling me so; it was like
+his cunning not to say that he would put them on my tracks whether or
+no."
+
+"He is probably a member himself!"
+
+"Obviously, from what he said."
+
+"But why on earth should you think that these fellows are?" I demanded,
+as that brazen voice came rasping through a second verse.
+
+"I don't think.  It was only an idea.  That thing is so thoroughly
+Neapolitan, and I never heard it on a London organ before.  Then again,
+what should bring them back here?"
+
+I peeped through the blind in my turn; and, to be sure, there was the
+fellow with the blue chin  and the white teeth watching our windows,
+and ours only, as he bawled.
+
+"And why?" cried Raffles, his eyes dancing when I told him.
+
+"Why should they come sneaking  back to us?  Doesn't that look
+suspicious, Bunny; doesn't that promise a lark?"
+
+"Not to me," I said, having the smile for once.  "How many people,
+should you imagine, toss them five shilling for as many minutes of
+their infernal row?  You seem to forget that's what you did an hour
+ago!"
+
+Raffles had forgotten.  His blank face confessed the fact.  Then
+suddenly he burst outlaughing at  himself.
+
+"Bunny," said he, "you've no imagination, and I never knew I had so
+much!  Of course you're right.  I only wish you were not, for there's
+nothing I should enjoy more than taking on another Neapolitan or two.
+You see, I owe them something still!  I didn't settle in full.  I owe
+them  more than ever I shall pay them on this side Styx!"
+
+He had hardened even as he spoke: the lines and the years had come
+again, and his eyes were flint and steel, with an honest grief behind
+the glitter.
+
+
+
+THE LAST LAUGH
+
+As I have had occasion to remark elsewhere, the pick of our exploits,
+from a frankly criminal point of view, are of least use for the
+comparatively pure purposes of these papers.  They might be appreciated
+in a trade journal (if only  that want could be supplied), by skilled
+manipulators of the jemmy and the large light bunch; but, as records of
+unbroken yet insignificant success, they would be found at once too
+trivial and too technical, if not sordid and unprofitable into the
+bargain.  The latter epithets, and worse, have indeed already been
+applied, if not to Raffles and all his works, at least to mine upon
+Raffles, by more than one worthy wielder of a virtuous pen.  I need not
+say how heartily I disagree with that truly  pious opinion.  So far
+from admitting a single word of it, I maintain it is the liveliest
+warning that I am giving to the world.  Raffles was a genius, and he
+could not make it pay!  Raffles had invention, resource, incomparable
+audacity, and a  nerve in ten thousand. He was both strategian and
+tactician, and we all now know the difference between the two.  Yet for
+months he had been hiding like a rat in a hole, unable to show even his
+altered face by night or day without risk, unless another risk were
+courted by three inches of conspicuous crepe.  Then thus far our
+rewards had oftener than not been no reward at all.  Altogether it was
+a very different story from the old festive, unsuspected, club and
+cricket days, with their noctes ambrosianae at the Albany.
+
+And now, in addition to the eternal peril of recognition, there was yet
+another menace of which I knew nothing.  I thought no more of our
+Neapolitan organ-grinders, though I did often think of the moving page
+that they had torn for me out of my friend's strange life in Italy.
+Raffles never alluded to the subject again, and for my part I had
+entirely forgotten his wild ideas connecting the organ-grinders with
+the Camorra, and imagining them upon his own tracks.  I heard no more
+of it, and thought as little, as I say.  Then one night in the
+autumn--I shrink from shocking the susceptible for nothing--but there
+was a certain house in Palace Gardens, and when we got there Raffles
+would pass on.  I could see no soul in sight, no glimmer in the
+windows.  But Raffles had my arm,  and on we went without talking about
+it.  Sharp to the left on the Notting Hill side, sharper still up
+Silver Street, a little tacking west and south, a plunge across High
+Street, and presently we were home.
+
+"Pyjamas first," said Raffles, with as much authority as though it
+mattered.  It was a warm night, however, though September, and I did
+not mind until I came in clad as he commanded to find the autocrat
+himself still booted and capped.  He was peeping through the blind, and
+the gas was still turned down.  But he said that I could turn it up, as
+he helped himself to a cigarette and nothing with it.
+
+"May I mix you one?" said I.
+
+"No, thanks."
+
+"What's the trouble?"
+
+"We were followed."
+
+"Never!"
+
+"You never saw it."
+
+"But YOU never looked round."
+
+"I have an eye at the back of each ear, Bunny."
+
+I helped myself and I fear with less moderation than might have been
+the case a minute before.
+
+"So that was why--"
+
+"That was why," said Raffles, nodding; but he did not smile, and I put
+down my glass untouched.
+
+"They were following us then!"
+
+"All up Palace Gardens."
+
+"I thought you wound about coming back over the hill."
+
+"Nevertheless, one of them's in the street below at this moment."
+
+No, he was not fooling me.  He was very grim.  And he had not taken off
+a thing; perhaps he did not think it worth while.
+
+"Plain clothes?" I sighed, following the sartorial train of thought,
+even to the loathly arrows  that had decorated my person once already
+for a little aeon.  Next time they would give me double.  The skilly
+was in my stomach when I saw Raffles's face.
+
+"Who said it was the police, Bunny?" said he.  "It's the Italians.
+They're only after me; they  won't hurt a hair of YOUR head, let alone
+cropping it!  Have a drink, and don't mind me. I shall score them off
+before I'm done."
+
+"And I'll help you!"
+
+"No, old chap, you won't.  This is my own little show.  I've known
+about it for weeks.  I  first tumbled to it the day those Neapolitans
+came back with their organs, though I didn't seriously  suspect things
+then; they never came again, those two, they had done their part.
+That's the Camorra  all over, from all accounts.  The Count I told you
+about is pretty high up in it, by the way he spoke, but there will be
+grades and grades between him  and the organ-grinders.  I shouldn't be
+surprised if he had every low-down Neapolitan ice-creamer in the town
+upon my tracks!  The organization's  incredible.  Then do you remember
+the superior foreigner who came to the door a few days afterwards?  You
+said he had velvet eyes."
+
+"I never connected him with those two!"
+
+"Of course you didn't, Bunny, so you threatened to kick the fellow
+downstairs, and only made them keener on the scent.  It was too late to
+say anything when you told me.  But the very next time I showed my nose
+outside I heard a camera click as I passed, and the fiend was a person
+with velvet eyes.  Then there was a lull--that happened weeks ago.
+They had sent me to Italy for identification by Count Corbucci."
+
+"But this is all theory," I exclaimed.  "How on earth can you know?"
+
+"I don't know," said Raffles, "but I should like to bet.  Our friend
+the bloodhound is hanging  about the corner near the pillar-box; look
+through my window, it's dark in there, and tell me who  he is."
+
+The man was too far away for me to swear to his face, but he wore a
+covert-coat of un-English length, and the lamp across the road played
+steadily on his boots; they were very yellow, and they  made no noise
+when he took a turn.  I strained my  eyes, and all at once I remembered
+the thin-soled, low-heeled, splay yellow boots of the insidious
+foreigner, with the soft eyes and the brown-paper face, whom I had
+turned from the door as a palpable fraud.  The ring at the bell was the
+first I had heard of him, there had been no warning step upon the
+stairs, and my suspicious eye had searched his feet for rubber soles.
+
+"It's the fellow," I said, returning to Raffles, and I described his
+boots.
+
+Raffles was delighted.
+
+"Well done, Bunny; you're coming on," said  he.  "Now I wonder if he's
+been over here all the time, or if they sent him over expressly?  You
+did better than you think in spotting those boots, for they can only
+have been made in Italy, and that looks like the special envoy.  But
+it's no use speculating.  I must find out."
+
+"How can you?"
+
+"He won't stay there all night."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"When he gets tired of it I shall return the compliment and follow HIM."
+
+"Not alone," said I, firmly.
+
+"Well, we'll see.  We'll see at once," said Raffles, rising. "Out with
+the gas, Bunny, while I take a look.  Thank you.  Now wait a bit ... yes!
+He's chucked it; he's off already; and so am I!"
+
+But I slipped to our outer door, and held the passage.
+
+"I don't let you go alone, you know."
+
+"You can't come with me in pyjamas."
+
+"Now I see why you made me put them on!"
+
+"Bunny, if you don't shift I shall have to shift you.  This is my very
+own private one-man show.  But I'll be back in an hour--there!"
+
+"You swear?"
+
+"By all my gods."
+
+I gave in.  How could I help giving in?  He did not look the man that
+he had been, but you never knew with Raffles, and I could not have him
+lay a hand on me.  I let him go with a shrug and my blessing, then ran
+into his room to see the last of him from the window.
+
+The creature in the coat and boots had reached the end of our little
+street, where he appeared to have hesitated, so that Raffles was just
+in time to see which way he turned.  And Raffles was after him at an
+easy pace, and had himself almost reached the corner when my attention
+was distracted from the alert nonchalance of his gait.  I was
+marvelling that it alone had not long ago betrayed him, for nothing
+about him was so unconsciously characteristic, when suddenly I realized
+that Raffles was not the only person in the little lonely street.
+Another pedestrian had entered from the other end, a man heavily built
+and clad, with an astrakhan collar to his coat on this warm  night, and
+a black slouch hat that hid his features  from my bird's-eye view.  His
+steps were the short and shuffling ones of a man advanced in years and
+in fatty degeneration, but of a sudden they stopped beneath my very
+eyes.  I could have dropped a  marble into the dinted crown of the
+black felt hat.  Then, at the same moment, Raffles turned the corner
+without looking round, and the big man below raised both his hands and
+his face. Of the  latter I saw only the huge white moustache, like a
+flying gull, as Raffles had described it; for at a  glance I divined
+that this was his arch-enemy, the Count Corbucci himself.
+
+I did not stop to consider the subtleties of the system by which the
+real hunter lagged behind while his subordinate pointed the quarry like
+a sporting dog.  I left the Count shuffling onward faster than before,
+and I jumped into some clothes as though the flats were on fire.  If
+the Count was going to follow Raffles in his turn, then I would follow
+the Count in mine, and there would be a midnight procession of us
+through the town.  But I found no sign of him in the empty street, and
+no sign in the Earl's Court Road, that looked as empty for all its
+length, save for a natural enemy standing like a waxwork figure with a
+glimmer at his belt.
+
+"Officer," I gasped, "have you seen anything of an old gentleman with a
+big white mustache?"
+
+The unlicked cub of a common constable seemed to eye me the more
+suspiciously for the flattering form of my address.
+
+"Took a hansom," said he at length.
+
+A hansom!  Then he was not following the others on foot; there was no
+guessing his game.  But something must be said or done.
+
+"He's a friend of mine," I explained, "and I want to overtake him.  Did
+you hear where he told the fellow to drive?"
+
+A curt negative was the policeman's reply to that; and if ever I take
+part in a night assault-at-arms, revolver versus baton, in the back
+kitchen, I know which member of the Metropolitan Police Force I should
+like for my opponent.
+
+If there was no overtaking the Count, however, it should be a
+comparatively simple matter in the case of the couple on foot, and I
+wildly hailed the first hansom that crawled into my ken. I must tell
+Raffles who it was that I had seen; the Earl's Court Road was long, and
+the time since he vanished in it but a few short minutes.  I drove down
+the length of that useful thoroughfare, with an  eye apiece on either
+pavement, sweeping each as with a brush, but never a Raffles came into
+the pan. Then I tried the Fulham Road, first to the west, then to the
+east, and in the end drove home to the flat as bold as brass.  I did
+not realize my indiscretion until I had paid the man and was on the
+stairs.  Raffles never dreamt of driving all the way back; but I was
+hoping now to find him waiting up above.  He had said an hour.  I had
+remembered it suddenly.  And now the hour was more than up.  But the
+flat was as empty as I had left it; the very light that had encouraged
+me, pale though it was, as I turned the corner in my hansom, was but
+the light that I myself had left burning in the desolate passage.
+
+I can give you no conception of the night that I  spent.  Most of it I
+hung across the sill, throwing  a wide net with my ears, catching every
+footstep  afar off, every hansom bell farther still, only to  gather in
+some alien whom I seldom even landed in our street.  Then I would
+listen at the door.
+
+He might come over the roof; and eventually some one did; but now it
+was broad daylight, and  I flung the door open in the milkman's face,
+which  whitened at the shock as though I had ducked him  in his own
+pail.
+
+"You're late," I thundered as the first excuse for my excitement.
+
+"Beg your pardon," said he, indignantly, "but I'm half an hour before
+my usual time."
+
+"Then I beg yours," said I; "but the fact is, Mr. Maturin has had one
+of his bad nights, and I seem to have been waiting hours for milk to
+make him a cup of tea."
+
+This little fib (ready enough for Raffles, though I say it) earned me
+not only forgiveness but that obliging sympathy which is a branch of
+the business of the man at the door.  The good fellow said that he
+could see I had been sitting up all night, and he left me pluming
+myself upon the accidental art with which I had told my very necessary
+tarra-diddle.  On reflection I gave the credit to instinct, not
+accident, and then sighed afresh as I realized how the influence of the
+master was sinking into  me, and he Heaven knew where!  But my
+punishment was swift to follow, for within the hour the bell rang
+imperiously twice, and there was Dr. Theobald on our mat; in a yellow
+Jaeger suit, with a chin as yellow jutting over the flaps that he had
+turned up to hide his pyjamas.
+
+"What's this about a bad night?" said he.
+
+"He couldn't sleep, and he wouldn't let me," I  whispered, never
+loosening my grasp of the door, and standing tight against the other
+wall.  "But he's sleeping like a baby now."
+
+"I must see him."
+
+"He gave strict orders that you should not."
+
+"I'm his medical man, and I--"
+
+"You know what he is," I said, shrugging; "the least thing wakes him,
+and you will if you insist on seeing him now.  It will be the last
+time, I  warn you!  I know what he said, and you don't."
+
+The doctor cursed me under his fiery moustache.
+
+"I shall come up during the course of the morning," he snarled.
+
+"And I shall tie up the bell," I said, "and if it doesn't ring he'll be
+sleeping still, but I will not risk waking him by coming to the door
+again."
+
+And with that I shut it in his face.  I was improving, as Raffles had
+said; but what would it profit me if some evil had befallen him?  And
+now I was prepared for the worst.  A boy came up whistling and leaving
+papers on the mats; it  was getting on for eight o'clock, and the
+whiskey  and soda of half-past twelve stood untouched and stagnant in
+the tumbler.  If the worst had happened to Raffles, I felt that I would
+either never drink again, or else seldom do anything else.
+
+Meanwhile I could not even break my fast, but roamed the flat in a
+misery not to be described, my very linen still unchanged, my cheeks
+and chin now tawny from the unwholesome night.  How long would it go
+on?  I wondered for a time.  Then I changed my tune: how long could I
+endure it?
+
+It went on actually until the forenoon only, but my endurance cannot be
+measured by the time, for to me every hour of it was an arctic night.
+Yet it cannot have been much after eleven when the ring came at the
+bell, which I had forgotten to tie up after all.  But this was not the
+doctor;  neither, too well I knew, was it the wanderer returned.  Our
+bell was the pneumatic one that tells  you if the touch be light or
+heavy; the hand upon it now was tentative and shy.
+
+The owner of the hand I had never seen before.  He was young and
+ragged, with one eye blank,  but the other ablaze with some fell
+excitement.  And straightway he burst into a low torrent of words, of
+which all I knew was that they were Italian, and therefore news of
+Raffles, if only I had known the language! But dumb-show might help us
+somewhat, and in I dragged him, though against his will, a new alarm in
+his one wild  eye.
+
+"Non capite?" he cried when I had him inside and had withstood the
+torrent.
+
+"No, I'm bothered if I do!" I answered, guessing his question from his
+tone.
+
+"Vostro amico," he repeated over and over again; and then, "Poco tempo,
+poco tempo, poco tempo!"
+
+For once in my life the classical education of  my public-school days
+was of real value.  "My  pal, my pal, and no time to be lost!" I
+translated freely, and flew for my hat.
+
+"Ecco, signore!" cried the fellow, snatching the watch from my
+waistcoat pocket, and putting one  black thumb-nail on the long hand,
+the other on  he numeral twelve.  "Mezzogiorno--poco tempo--poco
+tempo!"  And again I seized his meaning,  that it was twenty past
+eleven, and we must be there by twelve.  But where, but where?  It was
+maddening to be summoned like this, and not to know  what had happened,
+nor to have any means of finding out. But my presence of mind stood by
+me still, I was improving by seven-league strides, and I crammed my
+handkerchief between the drum and hammer of the bell before leaving.
+The doctor could ring now till he was black in the face, but I was not
+coming, and he need not think it.
+
+I half expected to find a hansom waiting, but there was none, and we
+had gone some distance down the Earl's Court Road before we got one; in
+fact, we had to run to the stand.  Opposite is the church with the
+clock upon it, as everybody knows, and at sight of the dial my
+companion had wrung his hands; it was close upon the half-hour.
+
+"Poco tempo--pochissimo!" he wailed.  "Bloom-buree Ske-warr," he then
+cried to the cabman--"numero trentotto!"
+
+"Bloomsbury Square," I roared on my own account, "I'll show you the
+house when we get there, only drive like be-damned!"
+
+My companion lay back gasping in his corner.  The small glass told me
+that my own face was pretty red.
+
+"A nice show!" I cried; "and not a word can you tell me.  Didn't you
+bring me a note?"
+
+I might have known by this time that he had not, still I went through
+the pantomime of writing with my finger on my cuff.  But he shrugged
+and  shook his head.
+
+"Niente," said he.  "Una quistione di vita, di vita!"
+
+"What's that?" I snapped, my early training come in again.  "Say it
+slowly--andante--rallentando."
+
+Thank Italy for the stage instructions in the songs one used to murder!
+The fellow actually understood.
+
+"Una--quistione--di--vita."
+
+"Or mors, eh?" I shouted, and up went the trap-door over our heads.
+
+"Avanti, avanti, avanti!" cried the Italian, turning up his one-eyed
+face.
+
+"Hell-to-leather," I translated, "and double fare if you do it by
+twelve o'clock."
+
+But in the streets of London how is one to know the time?  In the
+Earl's Court Road it had not  been half-past, and at Barker's in High
+Street it was but a minute later.  A long half-mile a minute, that was
+going like the wind, and indeed we had done much of it at a gallop.
+But the next hundred yards took us five minutes by the next clock, and
+which was one to believe?  I fell back upon my own old watch (it was my
+own), which made it eighteen minutes to the hour as we swung across the
+Serpentine bridge, and by the quarter we were in the Bayswater
+Road--not up for once.
+
+"Presto, presto," my pale guide murmured.  "Affretatevi--avanti!"
+
+"Ten bob if you do it," I cried through the trap, without the slightest
+notion of what we were to do.  But it was "una quistione di vita," and
+"vostro amico" must and could only be my miserable Raffles.
+
+What a very godsend is the perfect hansom to the man or woman in a
+hurry!  It had been our great good fortune to jump into a perfect
+hansom; there was no choice, we had to take the first upon the rank,
+but it must have deserved its place with the rest nowhere.  New tires,
+superb springs, a horse in a thousand, and a driver up to every trick
+of his trade!  In and out we went like a fast half-back at the Rugby
+game, yet where the traffic was thinnest, there were we.  And how he
+knew his way!  At the Marble Arch he slipped out of the main stream,
+and so into Wigmore Street, then up and in and out and on until I saw
+the gold tips of the Museum palisade gleaming between the horse's ears
+in the sun.  Plop, plop, plop; ting, ling, ling; bell and horse-shoes,
+horse-shoes and bell, until the colossal figure of C. J. Fox in a grimy
+toga spelt Bloomsbury Square with my watch still wanting three minutes
+to the hour.
+
+"What number?" cried the good fellow over-head.
+
+"Trentotto, trentotto," said my guide, but he was looking to the right,
+and I bundled him out to show the house on foot.  I had not
+half-a-sovereign after all, but I flung our dear driver a whole one
+instead, and only wish that it had been a hundred.
+
+Already the Italian had his latch-key in the door of 38, and in another
+moment we were rushing up the narrow stairs of as dingy a London house
+as prejudiced countryman can conceive.  It was panelled, but it was
+dark and evil-smelling, and how we should have found our way even to
+the stairs but for an unwholesome jet of yellow gas in the hall, I
+cannot myself imagine.  However, up we went pell-mell, to the
+right-about on the half-landing, and so like a whirlwind into the
+drawing-room a few steps higher.  There the gas was also burning behind
+closed shutters, and the scene is photographed upon my brain, though I
+cannot have looked upon it for a whole instant as I sprang in at my
+leader's heels.
+
+This room also was panelled, and in the middle of the wall on our left,
+his hands lashed to a ring-bolt high above his head, his toes barely
+touching the floor, his neck pinioned by a strap passing through
+smaller ring-bolts under either ear, and every inch of him secured on
+the same principle, stood, or rather hung, all that was left of
+Raffles, for at the first glance I believed him dead.  A black ruler
+gagged him, the ends lashed behind his neck, the blood upon it caked to
+bronze in the gaslight.  And in front of him, ticking like a
+sledge-hammer, its only hand upon the stroke of twelve, stood a
+simple, old-fashioned, grandfather's clock--but not for half an instant
+longer--only until my guide could hurl himself upon it and send the
+whole thing crashing into the corner.  An ear-splitting report
+accompanied the crash, a white cloud lifted from the fallen clock, and
+I saw a revolver smoking in a vice screwed below the dial, an
+arrangement of wires sprouting from the dial itself, and the single
+hand at once at its zenith and in contact with these.
+
+"Tumble to it, Bunny?"
+
+He was alive; these were his first words; the Italian had the
+blood-caked ruler in his hand, and with his knife was reaching up to
+cut the thongs that lashed the hands.  He was not tall enough, I seized
+him and lifted him up, then fell to work with my own knife upon the
+straps.  And Raffles smiled faintly upon us through his blood-stains.
+
+"I want you to tumble to it," he whispered; "the neatest thing in
+revenge I ever knew, and another minute would have fixed it. I've been
+waiting for it twelve hours, watching the clock round, death at the end
+of the lap!  Electric connection.  Simple enough.  Hour-hand only--O
+Lord!"
+
+We had cut the last strap.  He could not stand.  We supported him
+between us to a horsehair sofa,  for the room was furnished, and I
+begged him not to speak, while his one-eyed deliverer was at the  door
+before Raffles recalled him with a sharp word in Italian.
+
+"He wants to get me a drink, but that can wait,"  said he, in firmer
+voice; "I shall enjoy it the more when I've told you what happened.
+Don't let him  go, Bunny; put your back against the door.  He's  a
+decent soul, and it's lucky for me I got a word with him before they
+trussed me up.  I've promised to set him up in life, and I will, but I
+don't want him out of my sight for the moment."
+
+"If you squared him last night," I exclaimed, "why the blazes didn't he
+come to me till the eleventh hour?"
+
+"Ah, I knew he'd have to cut it fine though I  hoped not quite so fine
+as all that.  But all's well that ends well, and I declare I don't feel
+so much the worse.  I shall be sore about the gills for a bit--and what
+do you think?"
+
+He pointed to the long black ruler with the bronze stain; it lay upon
+the floor; he held out his hand for it, and I gave it to him.
+
+
+"The same one I gagged him with," said Raffles, with his still ghastly
+smile; "he was a bit of an artist, old Corbucci, after all!"
+
+"Now let's hear how you fell into his clutches," said I, briskly, for I
+was as anxious to hear as he seemed to tell me, only for my part I
+could have  waited until we were safe in the flat.
+
+"I do want to get it off my chest, Bunny," old Raffles admitted, "and
+yet I hardly can tell you after all.  I followed your friend with the
+velvet eyes.  I followed him all the way here. Of course I came up to
+have a good look at the house when he'd let himself in, and damme if he
+hadn't left the door ajar!  Who could resist that?  I had  pushed it
+half open and had just one foot on the mat when I got such a crack on
+the head as I hope never to get again.  When I came to my wits they
+were hauling me up to that ring-bolt by the hands, and old Corbucci
+himself was bowing to me, but how HE got here I don't know yet."
+
+"I can tell you that," said I, and told how I had seen the Count for
+myself on the pavement underneath our windows.  "Moreover," I
+continued, "I saw him spot you, and five minutes after in Earl's Court
+Road I was told he'd driven off in a cab.  He would see you following
+his man, drive home ahead, and catch you by having the door left open
+in the way you describe."
+
+"Well," said Raffles, "he deserved to catch me somehow, for he'd come
+from Naples on purpose, ruler and all, and the ring-bolts were ready
+fixed, and even this house taken furnished for nothing else!  He meant
+catching me before he'd done, and scoring me off in exactly the same
+way that I scored off him, only going one better of course.  He told me
+so himself, sitting where I am sitting now, at three o'clock this
+morning, and smoking a most abominable cigar that I've smelt ever
+since.  It appears he sat twenty-four hours when I left HIM trussed up,
+but he said twelve would content him in my case, as there was certain
+death at the end of them, and I mightn't have life enough left to
+appreciate my end if he made it longer.  But I wouldn't have trusted
+him if he could have got the clock to go twice round without firing off
+the  pistol.  He explained the whole mechanism of that to me; he had
+thought it all out on the vineyard I told you about; and then he asked
+if I remembered what he had promised me in the name of the  Camorra.  I
+only remembered some vague threats,  but he was good enough to give me
+so many particulars of that institution that I could make a European
+reputation by exposing the whole show if it wasn't for my unfortunate
+resemblance to that infernal rascal Raffles.  Do you think they would
+know me at the Yard, Bunny, after all this time?  Upon my soul I've a
+good mind to risk it!"
+
+I offered no opinion on the point.  How could it interest me then?  But
+interested I was in Raffles, never more so in my life.  He had been
+tortured all night and half a day, yet he could sit and talk like this
+the moment we cut him down; he had been within a minute of his death,
+yet he was as full of life as ever; ill-treated and defeated at the
+best, he could still smile through his blood as though the boot were on
+the other leg.  I had imagined that I knew my Raffles at last.  I was
+not likely so to flatter myself again.
+
+"But what has happened to these villains?" I burst out, and my
+indignation was not only against them for their cruelty, but also
+against their victim  for his phlegmatic attitude toward them.  It was
+difficult to believe that this was Raffles.
+
+"Oh," said he, "they were to go off to Italy INSTANTER; they should be
+crossing now.  But do listen to what I am telling you; it's
+interesting, my dear man.  This old sinner Corbucci turns out to have
+been no end of a boss in the Camorra--says so himself.  One of the capi
+paranze, my  boy, no less; and the velvety Johnny a giovano onorato,
+Anglice, fresher.  This fellow here was also in it, and I've sworn to
+protect him from them evermore; and it's just as I said, half the
+organ-grinders in London belong, and the whole lot of them were put on
+my tracks by secret instructions.  This excellent youth manufactures
+iced poison on Saffron Hill when he's at home."
+
+"And why on earth didn't he come to me quicker?"
+
+"Because he couldn't talk to you, he could only fetch you, and it was
+as much as his life was worth  to do that before our friends had
+departed.  They were going by the eleven o'clock from Victoria, and
+that didn't leave much chance, but he certainly  oughtn't to have run
+it as fine as he did.  Still you must remember that I had to fix things
+up with him in the fewest possible words, in a single minute that the
+other two were indiscreet enough to leave us alone together."
+
+The ragamuffin in question was watching us with all his solitary eye,
+as though he knew that we were discussing him.  Suddenly he broke out
+in agonized accents, his hands clasped, and a face so full of fear that
+every moment I expected to see him on his knees.  But Raffles answered
+kindly, reassuringly, I could tell from his tone, and then turned to me
+with a compassionate shrug.
+
+"He says he couldn't find the mansions, Bunny, and really it's not to
+be wondered at.  I had only time to tell him to hunt you up and bring
+you here by hook or crook before twelve to-day, and after all he has
+done that.  But now the poor devil thinks you're riled with him, and
+that we'll give him away to the Camorra."
+
+"Oh, it's not with him I'm riled," I said frankly, "but with those
+other blackguards, and--and with you, old chap, for taking it all  as
+you do, while such infamous scoundrels have the last laugh, and are
+safely on their way to France!"
+
+Raffles looked up at me with a curiously open eye, an eye that I never
+saw when he was not in earnest.  I fancied he did not like my last
+expression but one.  After all, it was no laughing matter to him.
+
+"But are they?" said he.  "I'm not so sure."
+
+"You said they were!"
+
+"I said they should be."
+
+"Didn't you hear them go?"
+
+"I heard nothing but the clock all night.  It was like Big Ben striking
+at the last--striking nine to the fellow on the drop."
+
+And in that open eye I saw at last a deep glimmer of the ordeal through
+which he had passed.
+
+"But, my dear old Raffles, if they're still on the premises--"
+
+The thought was too thrilling for a finished sentence.
+
+"I hope they are," he said grimly, going to the door.  "There's a gas
+on!  Was that burning when you came in?"
+
+Now that I thought of it, yes, it had been.
+
+"And there's a frightfully foul smell," I added, as I followed Raffles
+down the stairs.  He turned to me gravely with his hand upon the
+front-room door, and at the same moment I saw a coat with an astrakhan
+collar hanging on the pegs.
+
+"They are in here, Bunny," he said, and turned the handle.
+
+The door would only open a few inches.  But a detestable odor came out,
+with a broad bar of yellow gaslight.  Raffles put his handkerchief to
+his nose.  I followed his example, signing to our ally to do the same,
+and in another minute we had all three squeezed into the room.
+
+The man with the yellow boots was lying against the door, the Count's
+great carcass sprawled upon the table, and at a glance it was evident
+that both men had been dead some hours.  The old Camorrist had the stem
+of a liqueur-glass between his swollen blue fingers, one of which had
+been cut in the breakage, and the livid flesh was also brown with the
+last blood that it would ever shed.  His face was on the table, the
+huge moustache projecting from under either leaden cheek, yet looking
+itself strangely alive.  Broken bread and scraps of frozen macaroni lay
+upon the cloth and at the bottom of two soup-plates and a tureen; the
+macaroni had a tinge of tomato; and there was a crimson dram left in
+the tumblers, with an empty fiasco to show whence it came.  But near
+the great gray head upon the table another liqueur-glass stood,
+unbroken, and still full of some white and stinking liquid; and near
+that a tiny silver flask, which made me recoil from Raffles as I had
+not from the dead; for I knew it to be his.
+
+"Come out of this poisonous air," he said sternly, "and I will tell you
+how it has happened."
+
+So we all three gathered together in the hall.  But it was Raffles who
+stood nearest the street-door, his back to it, his eyes upon us two.
+And  though it was to me only that he spoke at first, he would pause
+from point to point, and translate into Italian for the benefit of the
+one-eyed alien to whom he owed his life.
+
+"You probably don't even know the name, Bunny," he began, "of the
+deadliest poison yet known to science.  It is cyanide of cacodyl, and I
+have carried that small flask of it about with me for months.  Where I
+got it matters nothing; the  whole point is that a mere sniff reduces
+flesh to clay.  I  have never had any opinion of suicide, as you  know,
+but I always felt it worth while to be forearmed against the very
+worst.  Well, a bottle of  this stuff is calculated to stiffen an
+ordinary roomful of ordinary people within five minutes;  and I
+remembered my flask when they had me as good as crucified in the small
+hours of this morning.  I asked them to take it out of my pocket.  I
+begged them to give me a drink before they left  me.  And what do you
+suppose they did?"
+
+I thought of many things but suggested none, while Raffles turned this
+much of his statement into sufficiently fluent Italian.  But when he
+faced  me again his face was still flaming.
+
+"That beast Corbucci!" said he--"how can I pity him?  He took the
+flask; he would give me none; he flicked me in the face instead. My
+idea  was that he, at least, should go with me--to sell my life as
+dearly as that--and a sniff would have settled us both. But no, he must
+tantalize and torment me; he thought it brandy; he must take it
+downstairs to drink to my destruction!  Can  you have any pity for a
+hound like that?"
+
+"Let us go," I at last said, hoarsely, as Raffles finished speaking in
+Italian, and his second listener stood open-mouthed.
+
+"We will go," said Raffles, "and we will chance being seen; if the
+worst comes to the worst this good chap will prove that I have been
+tied up since one o'clock this morning, and the medical evidence will
+decide how long those dogs have been dead."
+
+But the worst did not come to the worst, more power to my unforgotten
+friend the cabman, who never came forward to say what manner of men he
+had driven to Bloomsbury Square at top speed on the very day upon which
+the tragedy was discovered there, or whence he had driven them.  To be
+sure, they had not behaved like murderers, whereas the evidence at the
+inquest all went to show that the defunct Corbucci was little better.
+His reputation, which transpired with his identity, was that of a
+libertine and a renegade, while the infernal apparatus upstairs
+revealed the fiendish arts of the anarchist to boot.  The inquiry
+resulted  eventually in an open verdict, and was chiefly instrumental
+in killing such compassion as is usually felt for the dead who die in
+their sins.
+
+But Raffles would not have passed this title for this tale.
+
+
+
+TO CATCH A THIEF
+
+I
+
+Society persons are not likely to have forgotten the series of
+audacious robberies by which so many of themselves suffered in turn
+during the brief course of a recent season.  Raid after raid was made
+upon the smartest houses in town, and within a few weeks more than one
+exalted head had been shorn of its priceless tiara.  The Duke and
+Duchess of Dorchester lost half the portable pieces of their historic
+plate on the very night of their Graces' almost equally historic
+costume ball.  The Kenworthy diamonds were taken in broad daylight,
+during the excitement of a charitable meeting on the ground floor, and
+the gifts of her belted bridegroom to Lady May Paulton while the outer
+air was thick with a prismatic shower of confetti.  It was obvious that
+all this was the work of no ordinary thief, and perhaps inevitable that
+the name of Raffles should have been dragged from oblivion by callous
+disrespecters of the departed and unreasoning apologists for the
+police.  These wiseacres did not hesitate to bring a dead man back to
+life because they knew of no living one capable of such feats; it is
+their heedless and inconsequent calumnies that the present paper is
+partly intended to refute.  As a matter of fact, our joint innocence in
+this matter was only exceeded by our common envy, and for a long time,
+like the rest of the world, neither of us had the slightest clew to the
+identity of the person who was following in our steps with such
+irritating results.
+
+"I should mind less," said Raffles, "if the fellow were really playing
+my game.  But abuse of hospitality was never one of my strokes, and it
+seems to me the only shot he's got.  When we took old Lady Melrose's
+necklace, Bunny, we were not staying with the Melroses, if you
+recollect."
+
+We were discussing the robberies for the hundredth time, but for once
+under conditions more favorable to animated conversation than our
+unique circumstances permitted in the flat.  We did not often dine out.
+Dr. Theobald was one impediment, the risk of recognition was another.
+But there were exceptions, when the doctor was away or the patient
+defiant, and on these rare occasions we frequented a certain
+unpretentious restaurant in the Fulham quarter, where the cooking was
+plain but excellent, and the cellar a surprise.  Our bottle of '89
+champagne was empty to the label when the subject arose, to be touched
+by Raffles in the reminiscent manner indicated above.  I can see his
+clear eye upon me now, reading me, weighing me.  But I was not so
+sensitive to his scrutiny at the time.  His tone was deliberate,
+calculating, preparatory; not as I heard it then, through a head full
+of wine, but as it floats back to me across the gulf between that
+moment and this.
+
+"Excellent fillet!" said I, grossly.  "So you think this chap is as
+much in society as we were, do you?"
+
+I preferred not to think so myself.  We had cause enough for jealousy
+without that.  But Raffles raised his eyebrows an eloquent half-inch.
+
+"As much, my dear Bunny?  He is not only in it, but of it; there's no
+comparison between us there.  Society is in rings like a target, and we
+never were in the bull's-eye, however thick you may lay on the ink!  I
+was asked for my cricket.  I haven't forgotten it yet.  But this
+fellow's one of themselves,  with the right of entre into the houses
+which we could only 'enter' in a professional sense.  That's obvious
+unless all these little exploits are the work of different hands, which
+they as obviously are not.  And it's why I'd give five hundred pounds
+to put salt on him to-night!"
+
+"Not you," said I, as I drained my glass in festive incredulity.
+
+"But I would, my dear Bunny.  Waiter! another half-bottle of this," and
+Raffles leant across the table as the empty one was taken away.  "I
+never was more serious in my life," he continued below his breath.
+"Whatever else our successor may be, he's not a dead man like me, or a
+marked man like you.  If there's any truth in my theory he's one of the
+last people upon whom suspicion is ever likely to rest; and oh, Bunny,
+what a partner he would make for you and me!"
+
+Under less genial influences the very idea of a third partner would
+have filled my soul with offence; but Raffles had chosen his moment
+unerringly, and his arguments lost nothing by the flowing accompaniment
+of the extra pint.  They were, however, quite strong in themselves.
+The gist of them was that thus far we had remarkably little to show for
+what Raffles would call "our second innings."  This even I could not
+deny.  We had scored a few "long singles," but our "best shots"  had
+gone "straight to hand," and we were "playing a deuced slow game."
+Therefore we needed a new partner--and the metaphor failed Raffles.
+
+It had served its turn.  I already agreed with him.  In truth I was
+tired of my false position as hireling attendant, and had long fancied
+myself an object of suspicion to that other impostor the doctor.  A
+fresh, untrammelled start was a fascinating idea to me, though two was
+company, and three in our case might be worse than none.  But I did not
+see how we could hope, with our respective handicaps, to solve a
+problem which was already the despair of Scotland Yard.
+
+"Suppose I have solved it," observed Raffles, cracking a walnut in his
+palm.
+
+"How could you?" I asked, without believing for an instant that he had.
+
+"I have been taking the Morning Post for some time now."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"You have got me a good many odd numbers of the less base society
+papers."
+
+"I can't for the life of me see what you're driving at."
+
+Raffles smiled indulgently as he cracked another nut.
+
+"That's because you've neither observation nor imagination, Bunny--and
+yet you try to write!  Well, you wouldn't think it, but I have a fairly
+complete list of the people who were at the various functions under
+cover of which these different little coups were brought off."
+
+I said very stolidly that I did not see how that could help him. It was
+the only answer to his  good-humored but self-satisfied contempt; it
+happened also to be true.
+
+"Think," said Raffles, in a patient voice.
+
+"When thieves break in and steal," said I, "upstairs, I don't see much
+point in discovering who was downstairs at the time."
+
+"Quite," said Raffles--"when they do break in."
+
+"But that's what they have done in all these cases.  An upstairs door
+found screwed up, when things were at their height below; thief gone
+and jewels with him before alarm could be raised. Why, the trick's so
+old that I never knew you condescend to play it."
+
+"Not so old as it looks," said Raffles, choosing the cigars and handing
+me mine.  "Cognac or Benedictine, Bunny?"
+
+"Brandy," I said, coarsely.
+
+"Besides," he went on, "the rooms were not screwed up; at Dorchester
+House, at any rate, the door was only locked, and the key missing, so
+that it might have been done on either side."
+
+"But that was where he left his rope-ladder behind him!" I exclaimed in
+triumph; but Raffles only shook his head.
+
+"I don't believe in that rope-ladder, Bunny, except as a blind."
+
+"Then what on earth do you believe?"
+
+"That every one of these so-called burglaries has been done from the
+inside, by one of the guests; and what's more I'm very much mistaken if
+I haven't spotted the right sportsman."
+
+I began to believe that he really had, there was such a wicked gravity
+in the eyes that twinkled faintly into mine.  I raised my glass in
+convivial congratulation, and still remember the somewhat anxious eye
+with which Raffles saw it emptied.
+
+"I can only find one likely name," he continued, "that figures in all
+these lists, and it is anything  but a likely one at first sight.  Lord
+Ernest Belville was at all those functions.  Know anything about him,
+Bunny?"
+
+"Not the Rational Drink fanatic?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"That's all I want to know."
+
+"Quite," said Raffles; "and yet what could be more promising?  A man
+whose views are so broad and moderate, and so widely held already
+(saving your presence, Bunny), does not bore the world with them
+without ulterior motives.  So far so good.  What are this chap's
+motives?  Does he want to advertise himself?  No, he's somebody
+already.  But is he rich?  On the contrary, he's as poor as a rat for
+his position, and apparently without the least ambition to be anything
+else;  certainly he won't enrich himself by making a public fad of what
+all sensible people are agreed upon as it is.  Then suddenly one gets
+one's own old idea--the alternative profession!  My cricket--his
+Rational Drink!  But it is no use jumping to conclusions.  I must know
+more than the newspapers can tell me.  Our aristocratic friend is
+forty, and unmarried.  What has he been doing all these years?  How the
+devil was I to find out?"
+
+"How did you?" I asked, declining to spoil my digestion with a
+conundrum, as it was his evident intention that I should.
+
+"Interviewed him!" said Raffles, smiling slowly on my amazement.
+
+"You--interviewed him?" I echoed.  "When--and where?"
+
+"Last Thursday night, when, if you remember, we kept early hours,
+because I felt done.  What  was the use of telling you what I had up my
+sleeve, Bunny?  It might have ended in fizzle, as it still may.  But
+Lord Ernest Belville was addressing  the meeting at Exeter Hall; I
+waited for him when the show was over, dogged him home to King John's
+Mansions, and interviewed him in his own rooms there before he turned
+in."
+
+My journalistic jealousy was piqued to the quick.  Affecting a
+scepticism I did not feel (for  no outrage was beyond the pale of his
+impudence), I inquired dryly which journal Raffles had pretended to
+represent.  It is unnecessary to report his answer. I could not believe
+him without further explanation.
+
+"I should have thought," he said, "that even you would have spotted a
+practice I never omit upon certain occasions.  I always pay a visit to
+the drawing-room, and fill my waistcoat pocket from the card-tray.  It
+is an immense help in any little temporary impersonation.  On Thursday
+night I sent up the card of a powerful writer connected with a powerful
+paper; if Lord Ernest had known him in the flesh I should have been
+obliged to confess to a journalistic ruse; luckily he didn't--and I had
+been sent by my editor to get the interview for next morning.  What
+could be better--for the alternative profession?"
+
+I inquired what the interview had brought forth.
+
+"Everything," said Raffles.  "Lord Ernest has been a wanderer these
+twenty years.  Texas, Fiji, Australia.  I suspect him of wives and
+families in all three.  But his manners are a liberal education.  He
+gave me some beautiful whiskey, and forgot all about his fad.  He is
+strong and subtle, but I talked him off his guard.  He is going to the
+Kirkleathams' to-night--I saw the card stuck up.  I stuck some wax into
+his keyhole as he was switching off the lights."
+
+And, with an eye upon the waiters, Raffles showed me a skeleton key,
+newly twisted and filed;  but my share of the extra pint (I am afraid
+no fair share) had made me dense.  I looked from the key to Raffles
+with puckered forehead--for I happened to catch sight of it in the
+mirror behind him.
+
+"The Dowager Lady Kirkleatham," he whispered, "has diamonds as big as
+beans, and likes to have 'em all on--and goes to bed early--and happens
+to be in town!"
+
+And now I saw.
+
+"The villain means to get them from her!"
+
+"And I mean to get them from the villain," said Raffles; "or, rather,
+your share and mine."
+
+"Will he consent to a partnership?"
+
+"We shall have him at our mercy.  He daren't refuse."
+
+Raffles's plan was to gain access to Lord Ernest's rooms before
+midnight; there we were to lie in wait for the aristocratic rascal, and
+if I left all details to Raffles, and simply stood by in case of a
+rumpus, I should be playing my part and earning my share.  It was a
+part that I had played before, not always with a good grace, though
+there had never been any question about the share.  But to-night I was
+nothing loath.  I had had just champagne enough--how Raffles knew my
+measure!--and I was ready and eager for anything.  Indeed, I did not
+wish to wait for the coffee, which was  to be especially strong by
+order of Raffles. But on that he insisted, and it was between ten and
+eleven when at last we were in our cab.
+
+"It would be fatal to be too early," he said as we drove; "on the other
+hand, it would be dangerous to leave it too late.  One must risk
+something.  How I should love to drive down Piccadilly and see the
+lights!  But unnecessary risks are another story."
+
+
+II
+
+King John's Mansions, as everybody knows, are the oldest, the ugliest,
+and the tallest block  of flats in all London.  But they are built
+upon a more generous scale than has since become the rule, and with a
+less studious regard  for the economy of space. We were about to  drive
+into the spacious courtyard when the gate-keeper checked us in order to
+let another hansom  drive out.
+
+It contained a middle-aged man of the military type, like ourselves in
+evening dress.  That much I saw as his hansom crossed our bows,
+because I could not help seeing it, but I should  not have given the
+incident a second thought if it had not been for his extraordinary
+effect upon Raffles.  In an instant he was out upon the curb, paying
+the cabby, and in another he was leading me across the street, away
+from the mansions.
+
+"Where on earth are you going?" I naturally exclaimed.
+
+"Into the park," said he.  "We are too early."
+
+His voice told me more than his words.  It was strangely stern.
+
+"Was that him--in the hansom?"
+
+"It was."
+
+"Well, then, the coast's clear," said I, comfortably.  I was for
+turning back then and there, but Raffles forced me on with a hand that
+hardened  on my arm.
+
+"It was a nearer thing than I care about," said he.  "This seat will
+do; no, the next one's further from a lamp-post.  We will give him a
+good half-hour, and I don't want to talk."
+
+We had been seated some minutes when Big Ben sent a languid chime over
+our heads to the stars.  It was half-past ten, and a sultry night.
+Eleven had struck before Raffles awoke from his sullen reverie, and
+recalled me from mine with a slap on the back.  In a couple of minutes
+we were in the lighted vestibule at the inner end of the courtyard of
+King John's Mansions.
+
+"Just left Lord Ernest at Lady Kirkleatham's," said Raffles. "Gave me
+his key and asked us to wait for him in his rooms.  Will you send us up
+in the lift?"
+
+In a small way, I never knew old Raffles do anything better. There was
+not an instant's demur.  Lord Ernest Belville's rooms were at the top
+of the building, but we were in them as quickly as lift could carry and
+page-boy conduct us.  And there was no need for the skeleton key after
+all; the boy opened the outer door with one of his own, and switched on
+the lights before leaving us.
+
+"Now that's interesting," said Raffles, as soon as we were alone; "they
+can come in and clean when he is out.  What if he keeps his swag at the
+bank?  By Jove, that's an idea for him!  I don't believe he's getting
+rid of it; it's all lying low somewhere, if I'm not mistaken, and he's
+not a fool."
+
+While he spoke he was moving about the sitting-room, which was
+charmingly furnished in the antique style, and making as many remarks
+as  though he were an auctioneer's clerk with an inventory to prepare
+and a day to do it in, instead  of a cracksman who might be surprised
+in his crib at any moment.
+
+"Chippendale of sorts, eh, Bunny?  Not genuine, of course; but where
+can you get genuine Chippendale now, and who knows it when they  see
+it?  There's no merit in mere antiquity.  Yet the way people pose on
+the subject!  If a thing's handsome and useful, and good
+cabinet-making, it's good enough for me."
+
+"Hadn't we better explore the whole place?"  I suggested nervously.  He
+had not even bolted the outer door.  Nor would he when I called his
+attention to the omission.
+
+"If Lord Ernest finds his rooms locked up he'll raise Cain," said
+Raffles; "we must let him come in and lock up for himself before we
+corner him.  But he won't come yet; if he did it might be awkward, for
+they'd tell him down below what I told them.  A new staff comes on at
+midnight.  I discovered that the other night."
+
+"Supposing he does come in before?"
+
+"Well, he can't have us turned out without first seeing who we are, and
+he won't try it on when I've had one word with him. Unless my
+suspicions are unfounded, I mean."
+
+"Isn't it about time to test them?"
+
+"My good Bunny, what do you suppose I've been doing all this while?  He
+keeps nothing in  here.  There isn't a lock to the Chippendale that you
+couldn't pick with a penknife, and not a loose board in the floor, for
+I was treading for one before the boy left us.  Chimney's no use in a
+place like this where they keep them swept for you.  Yes, I'm quite
+ready to try his bedroom."
+
+There was but a bathroom besides; no kitchen, no servant's room;
+neither are necessary in King John's Mansions.  I thought it as well to
+put my  head inside the bathroom while Raffles went into the bedroom,
+for I was tormented by the horrible idea that the man might all this
+time be concealed somewhere in the flat.  But the bathroom blazed void
+in the electric light.  I found Raffles hanging out of the starry
+square which was the bedroom window, for the room was still in
+darkness.  I felt for the switch at the door.
+
+"Put it out again!" said Raffles fiercely.  He rose from the sill, drew
+blind and curtains carefully, then switched on the light himself.  It
+fell  upon a face creased more in pity than in anger, and Raffles only
+shook his head as I hung mine.
+
+"It's all right, old boy," said he; "but corridors have windows too,
+and servants have eyes; and you and I are supposed to be in the other
+room, not in this.  But cheer up, Bunny!  This is THE room; look at the
+extra bolt on the door; he's had that put on, and there's an iron
+ladder to his window in case of fire!  Way of escape ready against the
+hour of need; he's a better man than I thought him, Bunny, after all.
+But you may bet your bottom dollar that if there's any boodle in the
+flat it's in this room."
+
+Yet the room was very lightly furnished; and nothing was locked. We
+looked everywhere, but we looked in vain.  The wardrobe was filled with
+hanging coats and trousers in a press, the drawers with the softest
+silk and finest linen.  It was a  camp bedstead that would not have
+unsettled an anchorite; there was no place for treasure there.  I
+looked up the chimney, but Raffles told me not to be a fool, and asked
+if I ever listened to what he said. There was no question about his
+temper now.  I never knew him in a worse.
+
+"Then he has got it in the bank," he growled.  "I'll swear I'm not
+mistaken in my man!"
+
+I had the tact not to differ with him there.  But I could not help
+suggesting that now was our time to remedy any mistake we might have
+made.  We were on the right side of midnight still.
+
+"Then we stultify ourselves downstairs," said Raffles.  "No, I'll be
+shot if I do!  He may come in with the Kirkleatham diamonds! You do
+what you like, Bunny, but I don't budge."
+
+"I certainly shan't leave you," I retorted, "to be knocked into the
+middle of next week by a better man than yourself."
+
+I had borrowed his own tone, and he did not like it.  They never do.  I
+thought for a moment that Raffles was going to strike me--for the first
+and last time in his life.  He could if he liked.  My blood was up.  I
+was ready to send him to the devil. And I emphasized my offence by
+nodding and shrugging toward a pair of very large Indian clubs that
+stood in the fender, on either side of the chimney up which I had
+presumed to glance.
+
+In an instant Raffles had seized the clubs, and  was whirling them
+about his gray head in a mixture of childish pique and puerile bravado
+which I should have thought him altogether above.
+
+And  suddenly as I watched him his face changed, softened, lit up, and
+he swung the clubs gently down upon the bed.
+
+"They're not heavy enough for their size," said he rapidly; "and I'll
+take my oath they're not the same weight!"
+
+He shook one club after the other, with both hands, close to his ear;
+then he examined their butt-ends under the electric light. I saw what
+he  suspected now, and caught the contagion of his suppressed
+excitement.  Neither of us spoke.  But Raffles had taken out the
+portable tool-box that he called a knife, and always carried, and as he
+opened the gimlet he handed me the club he held.  Instinctively I
+tucked the small end under my arm, and presented the other to Raffles.
+
+"Hold him tight," he whispered, smiling.  "He's not only a better man
+than I thought him, Bunny; he's hit upon a better dodge than ever I
+did, of its kind.  Only I should have weighted them evenly--to a hair."
+
+He had screwed the gimlet into the circular butt, close to the edge,
+and now we were wrenching in opposite directions.  For a moment or more
+nothing happened.  Then all at once something gave, and Raffles swore
+an oath as soft as any prayer.  And for the minute after that his hand
+went round and round with the gimlet, as though he were grinding a
+piano-organ, while the end wormed slowly out on its delicate thread of
+fine hard wood.
+
+The clubs were as hollow as drinking-horns, the pair of them, for we
+went from one to the other without pausing to undo the padded packets
+that poured out upon the bed.  These were deliciously heavy to the
+hand, yet thickly swathed in cotton-wool, so that some stuck together,
+retaining the shape of the cavity, as though they had been run out of a
+mould.  And when we did open them--but let Raffles speak.
+
+He had deputed me to screw in the ends of the clubs, and to replace the
+latter in the fender where we had found them.  When I had done the
+counterpane was glittering with diamonds where it was not shimmering
+with pearls.
+
+"If this isn't that tiara that Lady May was married in," said Raffles,
+"and that disappeared out of the room she changed in, while it rained
+confetti on the steps, I'll present it to her instead of the one she
+lost....  It was stupid to keep these old gold spoons, valuable as they
+are;  they made the difference in the weight....  Here we have probably
+the Kenworthy diamonds....  I don't know the history of these
+pearls.... This looks like one family of rings--left on the
+basin-stand, perhaps--alas, poor lady!  And that's the lot."
+
+Our eyes met across the bed.
+
+"What's it all worth?" I asked, hoarsely.
+
+"Impossible to say.  But more than all we ever took in all our lives.
+That I'll swear to."
+
+"More than all--"
+
+My tongue swelled with the thought.
+
+"But it'll take some turning into cash, old chap!"
+
+"And--must it be a partnership?" I asked, finding a lugubrious voice at
+length.
+
+"Partnership be damned!" cried Raffles, heartily.  "Let's get out
+quicker than we came in."
+
+We pocketed the things between us, cotton-wool and all, not because we
+wanted the latter, but to remove all immediate traces of our really
+meritorious deed.
+
+"The sinner won't dare to say a word when he does find out," remarked
+Raffles of Lord Ernest; "but that's no reason why he should find out
+before he must.  Everything's straight in here, I think; no, better
+leave the window open as it was, and the blind up.  Now out with the
+light.  One peep at the other room.  That's all right, too.  Out with
+the passage light, Bunny, while I open--"
+
+His words died away in a whisper.  A key was fumbling at the lock
+outside.
+
+"Out with it--out with it!" whispered Raffles in an agony; and as I
+obeyed he picked me off my feet and swung me bodily but silently into
+the bedroom, just as the outer door opened, and a masterful step strode
+in.
+
+The next five were horrible minutes.  We heard the apostle of Rational
+Drink unlock one of the deep drawers in his antique sideboard, and
+sounds followed suspiciously like the splash of spirits and the steady
+stream from a siphon.  Never before or since did I experience such a
+thirst as assailed me at that moment, nor do I believe that many
+tropical explorers have known its equal.  But I  had Raffles with me,
+and his hand was as steady and as cool as the hand of a trained nurse.
+That I know because he turned up the collar of my overcoat for me, for
+some reason, and buttoned it at the throat.  I afterwards found that he
+had done the same to his own, but I did not hear him doing it.  The one
+thing I heard in the bedroom was a tiny metallic click, muffled and
+deadened in his overcoat pocket, and it not only removed my last
+tremor, but strung me to a higher pitch of excitement than ever.  Yet I
+had then no conception of the game that Raffles was deciding to play,
+and that I was to play with him in another minute.
+
+It cannot have been longer before Lord Ernest came into his bedroom.
+Heavens, but my heart had not forgotten how to thump! We were standing
+near the door, and I could swear he touched me; then his boots creaked,
+there was a rattle in the fender--and Raffles switched on the light.
+
+Lord Ernest Belville crouched in its glare with one Indian club held by
+the end, like a footman with a stolen bottle.  A good-looking,
+well-built, iron-gray, iron-jawed man; but a fool and a weakling at
+that moment, if he had never been either before.
+
+"Lord Ernest Belville," said Raffles, "it's no use.  This is a loaded
+revolver, and if you force me I shall use it on you as I would on any
+other desperate criminal.  I am here to arrest you for a series of
+robberies at the Duke of Dorchester's,  Sir John Kenworthy's, and other
+noblemen's and gentlemen's houses during the present season.  You'd
+better drop what you've got in your hand.  It's empty."
+
+Lord Ernest lifted the club an inch or two, and  with it his
+eyebrows--and after it his stalwart frame as the club crashed back into
+the fender.  And as he stood at his full height, a courteous but ironic
+smile under the cropped moustache, he looked what he was, criminal or
+not.
+
+"Scotland Yard?" said he.
+
+"That's our affair, my lord."
+
+"I didn't think they'd got it in them," said Lord Ernest.  "Now I
+recognize you.  You're my interviewer.  No, I didn't think any of you
+fellows had got all that in you.  Come into the other room, and I'll
+show you something else.  Oh, keep me covered by all means.  But look
+at this!"
+
+On the antique sideboard, their size doubled by reflection in the
+polished mahogany, lay a coruscating cluster of precious stones, that
+fell in festoons about Lord Ernest's fingers as he handed them to
+Raffles with scarcely a shrug.
+
+"The Kirkleatham diamonds," said he.  "Better add 'em to the bag."
+
+Raffles did so without a smile; with his overcoat buttoned up to the
+chin, his tall hat pressed  down to his eyes, and between the two his
+incisive features and his keen, stern glance, he looked the ideal
+detective of fiction and the stage.  What  _I_ looked God knows, but I
+did my best to glower and show my teeth at his side.  I had thrown
+myself into the game, and it was obviously a winning one.
+
+"Wouldn't take a share, I suppose?" Lord Ernest said casually.
+
+Raffles did not condescend to reply.  I rolled back my lips like a
+bull-pup.
+
+"Then a drink, at least!"
+
+My mouth watered, but Raffles shook his head impatiently.
+
+"We must be going, my lord, and you will have to come with us."
+
+I wondered what in the world we should do with him when we had got him.
+
+"Give me time to put some things together?  Pair of pyjamas and
+tooth-brush, don't you know?"
+
+"I cannot give you many minutes, my lord, but I don't want to cause a
+disturbance here, so I'll tell them to call a cab if you like.  But I
+shall be back in a minute, and you must be ready in five.  Here,
+inspector, you'd better keep this while I am gone."
+
+And I was left alone with that dangerous criminal!  Raffles nipped my
+arm as he handed me the revolver, but I got small comfort out of that.
+
+"'Sea-green Incorruptible?'" inquired Lord Ernest as we stood face to
+face.
+
+"You don't corrupt me," I replied through naked teeth.
+
+"Then come into my room.  I'll lead the way.  Think you can hit me if I
+misbehave?"
+
+I put the bed between us without a second's delay.  My prisoner flung a
+suit-case upon it, and tossed things into it with a dejected air;
+suddenly, as he was fitting them in, without raising his  head (which I
+was watching), his right hand closed over the barrel with which I
+covered him.
+
+"You'd better not shoot," he said, a knee upon his side of the bed; "if
+you do it may be as bad for you as it will be for me!"
+
+I tried to wrest the revolver from him.
+
+"I will if you force me," I hissed.
+
+"You'd better not," he repeated, smiling; and now I saw that if I did I
+should only shoot into the bed or my own legs.  His hand was on the top
+of mine, bending it down, and the revolver with it.  The strength of it
+was as the strength of ten of mine; and now both his knees were on the
+bed; and suddenly I saw his other hand, doubled into a fist, coming up
+slowly over the suit-case.
+
+"Help!" I called feebly.
+
+"Help, forsooth!  I begin to believe YOU ARE from the Yard," he
+said--and his upper-cut came with the "Yard."  It caught me under the
+chin.
+
+It lifted me off my legs.  I have a dim recollection of the crash that
+I made in falling.
+
+
+III
+
+Raffles was standing over me when I recovered consciousness.  I lay
+stretched upon the bed across which that blackguard Belville had struck
+his knavish blow.  The suit-case was on the floor, but its dastardly
+owner had disappeared.
+
+"Is he gone?" was my first faint question.
+
+"Thank God you're not, anyway!" replied Raffles, with what struck me
+then as mere flippancy.  I managed to raise myself upon one elbow.
+
+"I meant Lord Ernest Belville," said I, with dignity.  "Are you quite
+sure that he's cleared  out?"
+
+Raffles waved a hand towards the window, which stood wide open to the
+summer stars.
+
+"Of course," said he, "and by the route I intended him to take; he's
+gone by the iron-ladder,  as I hoped he would.  What on earth should we
+have done with him?  My poor, dear Bunny, I thought you'd take a bribe!
+But it's really more convincing as it is, and just as well for Lord
+Ernest to be convinced for the time being."
+
+"Are you sure he is?" I questioned, as I found a rather shaky pair of
+legs.
+
+"Of course!" cried Raffles again, in the tone to make one blush for the
+least misgiving on the  point.  "Not that it matters one bit," he
+added, airily, "for we have him either way; and when he does tumble to
+it, as he may any minute, he won't dare to open his mouth."
+
+"Then the sooner we clear out the better," said I, but I looked askance
+at the open window, for my head was spinning still.
+
+"When you feel up to it," returned Raffles, "we shall STROLL out, and I
+shall do myself the honor of ringing for the lift.  The force of habit
+is too strong in you, Bunny.  I shall shut the window and leave
+everything exactly as we found it.  Lord Ernest will probably tumble
+before he is badly missed; and then he may come back to put salt on us;
+but I should like to know what he can do even if he succeeds!  Come,
+Bunny, pull yourself together, and you'll be a different man when
+you're in the open air."
+
+And for a while I felt one, such was my relief at getting out of those
+infernal mansions with unfettered wrists; this we managed easily
+enough; but once more Raffles's performance of a small part was no less
+perfect than his more ambitious work upstairs, and something of the
+successful artist's elation possessed him as we walked arm-in-arm
+across St. James's Park.  It was long since I had known him so pleased
+with himself, and only too long since he had had such reason.
+
+"I don't think I ever had a brighter idea in my life," he said; "never
+thought of it till he was in the next room; never dreamt of its coming
+off so ideally even then, and didn't much care, because we had him all
+ways up.  I'm only sorry you let him knock you out.  I was waiting
+outside the door all the time, and it made me sick to hear it.  But I
+once broke my own head, Bunny, if you  remember, and not in half such
+an excellent cause!"
+
+Raffles touched all his pockets in his turn, the pockets that contained
+a small fortune apiece, and he smiled in my face as we crossed the
+lighted avenues of the Mall.  Next moment he was hailing a hansom--for
+I suppose I was still pretty  pale--and not a word would he let me
+speak until we had alighted as near as was prudent to the  flat.
+
+"What a brute I've been, Bunny!" he whispered  then, "but you take half
+the swag, old boy, and right well you've earned it. No, we'll go in by
+the wrong door and over the roof; it's too late for old Theobald to be
+still at the play, and too early for him to be safely in his cups."
+
+So we climbed the many stairs with cat-like stealth, and like cats
+crept out upon the grimy leads.  But to-night they were no blacker than
+their canopy of sky; not a chimney-stack stood out against the starless
+night; one had to feel one's way in order to avoid tripping over the
+low parapets of the L-shaped wells that ran from roof to basement to
+light the inner rooms.  One of these wells was spanned by a flimsy
+bridge with iron handrails that felt warm to the touch as Raffles led
+the way across!  A hotter and a closer night I have never known.
+
+"The flat will be like an oven," I grumbled, at the head of our own
+staircase.
+
+"Then we won't go down," said Raffles, promptly; "we'll slack it up
+here for a bit instead.  No, Bunny, you stay where you are! I'll fetch
+you a drink and a deck-chair, and you shan't come down till you feel
+more fit."
+
+And I let him have his way, I will not say as usual, for I had even
+less than my normal power of resistance that night.  That villainous
+upper-cut!  My head still sang and throbbed, as I seated  myself on one
+of the aforesaid parapets, and buried it in my hot hands.  Nor was the
+night one to dispel a headache; there was distinct thunder in the air.
+Thus I sat in a heap, and brooded  over my misadventure, a pretty
+figure of a subordinate villain, until the step came for which I
+waited; and it never struck me that it came from the wrong direction.
+
+"You have been quick," said I, simply.
+
+"Yes," hissed a voice I recognized; "and you've got to be quicker
+still!  Here, out with your wrists; no, one at a time; and if you utter
+a syllable you're a dead man."
+
+It was Lord Ernest Belville; his close-cropped, iron-gray moustache
+gleamed through the darkness, drawn up over his set teeth.  In his hand
+glittered a pair of handcuffs, and before I knew it one had snapped its
+jaws about my right wrist.
+
+"Now come this way," said Lord Ernest, showing me a revolver also, "and
+wait for your friend.  And, recollect, a single syllable of warning
+will be your death!"
+
+With that the ruffian led me to the very bridge I had just crossed at
+Raffles's heels, and handcuffed me to the iron rail midway across the
+chasm.  It no longer felt warm to my touch, but icy as the blood in all
+my veins.
+
+So this high-born hypocrite had beaten us at our game and his, and
+Raffles had met his match at last!  That was the most intolerable
+thought, that Raffles should be down in the flat on my account, and
+that I could not warn him of his impending fate; for how was it
+possible without  making such an outcry as should bring the mansions
+about our ears?  And there I shivered on that wretched plank, chained
+like Andromeda to the rock, with a black infinity above and below; and
+before my eyes, now grown familiar with the  peculiar darkness, stood
+Lord Ernest Belville, waiting for Raffles to emerge with full hands and
+unsuspecting heart! Taken so horribly unawares, even Raffles must fall
+an easy prey to a desperado in resource and courage scarcely second to
+himself, but one whom he had fatally underrated from the beginning.
+Not that I paused to think how the thing had happened; my one concern
+was for what was to happen next.
+
+And what did happen was worse than my worst foreboding, for first a
+light came flickering into the  sort of companion-hatch at the head of
+the stairs, and finally Raffles--in his shirt-sleeves! He was  not only
+carrying a candle to put the finishing touch to him as a target; he had
+dispensed with coat and waistcoat downstairs, and was at once
+full-handed and unarmed.
+
+"Where are you, old chap?" he cried, softly, himself blinded by the
+light he carried; and he advanced a couple of steps towards Belville.
+"This isn't you, is it?"
+
+And Raffles stopped, his candle held on high, a folding chair under the
+other arm.
+
+"No, I am not your friend," replied Lord Ernest, easily; "but kindly
+remain standing exactly where you are, and don't lower that candle an
+inch, unless you want your brains blown into the street."
+
+Raffles said never a word, but for a moment did as he was bid; and the
+unshaken flame of the candle was testimony alike to the stillness of
+the night and to the finest set of nerves in Europe.
+
+Then, to my horror, he coolly stooped, placing candle and chair on the
+leads, and his hands in his pockets, as though it were but a popgun
+that covered him.
+
+"Why didn't you shoot?" he asked insolently as he rose. "Frightened of
+the noise?  I should  be, too, with an old-pattern machine like that.
+All very well for service in the field--but on the house-tops at dead
+of night!"
+
+"I shall shoot, however," replied Lord Ernest, as quietly in his turn,
+and with less insolence, "and chance the noise, unless you instantly
+restore my property.  I am glad you don't dispute the last word," he
+continued after a slight pause.  "There  is no keener honor than that
+which subsists, or ought to subsist, among thieves; and I need hardly
+say that I soon spotted you as one of the fraternity.  Not in the
+beginning, mind you!  For the moment I did think you were one of these
+smart detectives jumped to life from some sixpenny  magazine; but to
+preserve the illusion you ought to provide yourself with a worthier
+lieutenant.  It  was he who gave your show away," chuckled the wretch,
+dropping for a moment the affected style of speech which seemed
+intended to enhance our humiliation; "smart detectives don't go about
+with little innocents to assist them.  You needn't be  anxious about
+him, by the way; it wasn't necessary to pitch him into the street; he
+is to be seen though not heard, if you look in the right direction.
+Nor must you put all the blame upon your friend; it  was not he, but
+you, who made so sure that I had got out by the window.  You see, I was
+in my bathroom all the time--with the door open."
+
+"The bathroom, eh?" Raffles echoed with professional interest. "And you
+followed us on foot across the park?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"And then in a cab?"
+
+"And afterwards on foot once more."
+
+"The simplest skeleton would let you in down below."
+
+I saw the lower half of Lord Ernest's face grinning in the light of the
+candle set between them on the ground.
+
+"You follow every move," said he; "there can be no doubt you are one of
+the fraternity; and I shouldn't wonder if we had formed our style upon
+the same model.  Ever know A. J. Raffles?"
+
+The abrupt question took my breath away; but Raffles himself did not
+lose an instant over his answer.
+
+"Intimately," said he.
+
+"That accounts for you, then," laughed Lord Ernest, "as it does for me,
+though I never had the honor of the master's acquaintance.  Nor is it
+for me to say which is the worthier disciple.  Perhaps, however, now
+that your friend is handcuffed in mid-air, and you yourself are at my
+mercy, you will concede me some little temporary advantage?"
+
+And his face split in another grin from the cropped moustache downward,
+as I saw no longer by candlelight but by a flash of lightning which
+tore the sky in two before Raffles could  reply.
+
+"You have the bulge at present," admitted Raffles; "but you have still
+to lay hands upon your, or our, ill-gotten goods.  To shoot me is not
+necessarily to do so; to bring either one of us to a violent end is
+only to court a yet more violent and  infinitely more disgraceful one
+for yourself.  Family considerations alone should rule that risk out of
+your game.  Now, an hour or two ago, when the exact opposite--"
+
+The remainder of Raffles's speech was drowned from my ears by the
+belated crash of thunder  which the lightning had foretold.  So loud,
+however, was the crash when it came, that the storm was evidently
+approaching us at a high velocity; yet as the last echo rumbled away, I
+heard Raffles talking as though he had never stopped.
+
+"You offered us a share," he was saying; "unless you mean to murder us
+both in cold blood, it will be worth your while to repeat that offer.
+We should be dangerous enemies; you had far better make the best of us
+as friends."
+
+"Lead the way down to your flat," said Lord Ernest, with a flourish of
+his service revolver, "and perhaps we may talk about it.  It is for me
+to make the terms, I imagine, and in the first place I am not going to
+get wet to the skin up here."
+
+The rain was beginning in great drops, even as he spoke, and by a
+second flash of lightning I saw Raffles pointing to me.
+
+"But what about my friend?" said he.
+
+And then came the second peal.
+
+"Oh, HE'S all right," the great brute replied;  "do him good! You don't
+catch me letting myself in for two to one!"
+
+"You will find it equally difficult," rejoined Raffles, "to induce me
+to leave my friend to the mercy of a night like this. He has not
+recovered from the blow you struck him in your own rooms.  I am not
+such a fool as to blame you for that, but you are a worse sportsman
+than I take you for if you think of leaving him where he is.  If he
+stays, however, so do I."
+
+And, just as it ceased, Raffles's voice seemed distinctly nearer to me;
+but in the darkness and the rain, which was now as heavy as hail, I
+could see nothing clearly.  The rain had already extinguished the
+candle.  I heard an oath from Belville, a laugh from Raffles, and for a
+second that was all.  Raffles was coming to me, and the other could not
+even see to fire; that was all I knew in the pitchy interval of
+invisible rain before the next crash and the next flash.
+
+And then!
+
+This time they came together, and not till my dying hour shall I forget
+the sight that the lightning lit and the thunder applauded.  Raffles
+was on one of the parapets of the gulf that my foot-bridge spanned, and
+in the sudden illumination he stepped across it as one might across a
+garden path.  The width was scarcely greater, but the  depth!  In the
+sudden flare I saw to the concrete bottom of the well, and it looked no
+larger than the hollow of my hand.  Raffles was laughing in  my ear; he
+had the iron railing fast; it was between us, but his foothold was as
+secure as mine.  Lord Ernest Belville, on the contrary, was the fifth
+of a second late for the light, and half a foot short in his spring.
+Something struck our plank bridge so hard as to set it quivering like a
+harp-string; there was half a gasp and half a sob in mid-air beneath
+our feet; and then a sound far below that I prefer not to describe.  I
+am not sure that I could hit upon the perfect simile; it is more than
+enough for me that I can hear it still.  And with that sickening sound
+came the loudest clap of thunder yet, and a great white glare that
+showed us our enemy's body far below, with one white hand spread like a
+starfish, but the head of him mercifully twisted underneath.
+
+"It was all his own fault, Bunny.  Poor devil!  May he and all of us be
+forgiven; but pull yourself together for your own sake. Well, you can't
+fall; stay where you are a minute."
+
+I remember the uproar of the elements while Raffles was gone; no other
+sound mingled with it; not the opening of a single window, not the
+uplifting of a single voice.  Then came Raffles with soap and water,
+and the gyve was wheedled from one wrist, as you withdraw a ring for
+which the finger has grown too large.  Of the rest, I only remember
+shivering till morning in a pitch-dark flat, whose invalid occupier was
+for once the nurse, and I his patient.
+
+And that is the true ending of the episode in which we two set
+ourselves to catch one of our own kidney, albeit in another place I
+have shirked  the whole truth.  It is not a grateful task to show
+Raffles as completely at fault as he really was on that occasion; nor
+do I derive any subtle satisfaction from recounting my own twofold
+humiliation, or from having assisted never so indirectly in the death
+of a not uncongenial sinner.  The truth, however, has after all a merit
+of its own, and the great kinsfolk of poor Lord Ernest have but little
+to lose by its divulgence.  It would seem that they knew more of the
+real character of the apostle of Rational Drink than was known at
+Exeter Hall.  The tragedy was indeed hushed up, as tragedies only are
+when they occur in such circles.  But the rumor that did get abroad, as
+to the class of enterprise which the poor scamp was pursuing when he
+met his death, cannot be too soon exploded, since it breathed upon the
+fair fame of some of the most respectable flats in Kensington.
+
+
+
+AN OLD FLAME
+
+I
+
+The square shall be nameless, but if you drive due west from Piccadilly
+the cab-man will eventually find it on his left, and he ought to thank
+you for two shillings.  It is not a fashionable square, but there are
+few with a finer garden,  while the studios on the south side lend
+distinction of another sort. The houses, however, are small and dingy,
+and about the last to attract the expert practitioner in search of a
+crib.  Heaven knows it was with no such thought I trailed Raffles
+thither, one unlucky evening at the latter end of that same season,
+when Dr. Theobald had at last insisted upon the bath-chair which I had
+foreseen in the beginning.  Trees whispered in the green garden
+aforesaid, and the cool, smooth lawns looked so inviting that I
+wondered whether some philanthropic resident could not be induced to
+lend us the key.  But Raffles would not listen to the suggestion, when
+I stopped to make it, and what was worse, I found him looking wistfully
+at the little houses instead.
+
+"Such balconies, Bunny!  A leg up, and there you would be!"
+
+I expressed a conviction that there would be nothing worth taking in
+the square, but took care to have him under way again as I spoke.
+
+"I daresay you're right," sighed Raffles.  "Rings and watches, I
+suppose, but it would be hard luck to take them from people who live in
+houses like these.  I don't know, though.  Here's one with an extra
+story.  Stop, Bunny; if you don't stop I'll hold on to the railings!
+This is a good house; look at the knocker and the electric bell.
+They've had that put in.  There's some money here, my rabbit!  I dare
+bet there's a silver-table in the drawing-room; and the windows are
+wide open.  Electric light, too, by Jove!"
+
+Since stop I must, I had done so on the other side of the road, in the
+shadow of the leafy palings, and as Raffles spoke the ground floor
+windows opposite had flown alight, showing as pretty a little
+dinner-table as one could wish to see, with a man at his wine at the
+far end, and the back  of a lady in evening dress toward us.  It was
+like a lantern-picture thrown upon a screen. There were only the pair
+of them, but the table was brilliant with silver and gay with flowers,
+and the maid waited with the indefinable air of a good servant.  It
+certainly seemed a good house.
+
+"She's going to let down the blind!" whispered Raffles, in high
+excitement.  "No, confound them, they've told her not to.  Mark down
+her necklace, Bunny, and invoice his stud.  What a brute he looks!  But
+I like the table, and that's her show.  She has the taste; but he must
+have money.  See the festive picture over the sideboard?  Looks  to me
+like a Jacques Saillard.  But that silver-table would be good enough
+for me."
+
+"Get on," said I.  "You're in a bath-chair."
+
+"But the whole square's at dinner!  We should have the ball at our
+feet.  It wouldn't take two twos!"
+
+"With those blinds up, and the cook in the kitchen underneath?"
+
+He nodded, leaning forward in the chair, his hands upon the wraps about
+his legs.
+
+"You must be mad," said I, and got back to my handles with the word,
+but when I tugged the chair ran light.
+
+"Keep an eye on the rug," came in a whisper from the middle of the
+road; and there stood my invalid, his pale face in a quiver of pure
+mischief, yet set with his insane resolve.  "I'm only going to see
+whether that woman has a silver-table--"
+
+"We don't want it--"
+
+"It won't take a minute--"
+
+"It's madness, madness--"
+
+"Then don't you wait!"
+
+It was like him to leave me with that, and this time I had taken him at
+his last word had not  my own given me an idea.  Mad I had called him,
+and mad I could declare him upon oath if  necessary. It was not as
+though the thing had happened far from home.  They could learn all
+about us at the nearest mansions.  I referred them  to Dr. Theobald;
+this was a Mr. Maturin, one of his patients, and I was his keeper, and
+he had never given me the slip before.  I heard myself making these
+explanations on the doorstep, and pointing to the deserted bath-chair
+as the proof, while the pretty parlor maid ran for the police.  It
+would be a more serious matter for me than for my charge.  I should
+lose my place.  No, he had never done such a thing before, and I would
+answer for it that he never should again.
+
+I saw myself conducting Raffles back to his chair, with a firm hand and
+a stern tongue.  I  heard him thanking me in whispers on the way  home.
+It would be the first tight place I had ever got him out of, and I was
+quite anxious for him to get into it, so sure was I of every move.  My
+whole position had altered in the few seconds that it took me to follow
+this illuminating train of ideas; it was now so strong that I could
+watch Raffles without much anxiety.  And he was worth watching.
+
+He had stepped boldly but softly to the front door, and there he was
+still waiting, ready to ring if the door opened or a face appeared in
+the  area, and doubtless to pretend that he had rung already.  But he
+had not to ring at all; and suddenly I saw his foot in the letter-box,
+his left hand on the lintel overhead.  It was thrilling, even to a
+hardened accomplice with an explanation up his  sleeve!  A tight grip
+with that left hand of his,  as he leant backward with all his weight
+upon those five fingers; a right arm stretched outward and upward to
+its last inch; and the base of the low, projecting balcony was safely
+caught.
+
+I looked down and took breath.  The maid was removing the crumbs in the
+lighted room, and the square was empty as before.  What a blessing it
+was the end of the season!  Many of the houses remained in darkness.  I
+looked up again, and Raffles was drawing his left leg over the balcony
+railing.  In another moment he had disappeared through one of the
+French windows which opened upon the balcony, and in yet another he had
+switched on the electric light within.  This was bad enough, for now I,
+at least, could see everything he did; but the crowning folly was still
+to come. There was no point in it; the mad thing was done for my
+benefit, as I knew at once and he afterward confessed; but the lunatic
+reappeared on the balcony, bowing like a mountebank--in his crape mask!
+
+I set off with the empty chair, but I came back.  I could not desert
+old Raffles, even when I would, but must try to explain away his mask
+as well, if  he had not the sense to take it off in time.  It  would be
+difficult, but burglaries are not usually committed from a bath-chair,
+and for the rest I put my faith in Dr. Theobald.  Meanwhile Raffles had
+at least withdrawn from the balcony, and now  I could only see his head
+as he peered into a cabinet at the other side of the room.  It was like
+the opera of Aida, in which two scenes are enacted simultaneously, one
+in the dungeon below, the other in the temple above.  In the same
+fashion my attention now became divided between the picture of Raffles
+moving stealthily about the upper room, and that of the husband and
+wife at table underneath.  And all at once, as the man replenished his
+glass with a shrug of the shoulders, the woman pushed back her chair
+and sailed to the door.
+
+Raffles was standing before the fireplace upstairs.  He had taken one
+of the framed photographs from the chimney-piece, and was scanning it
+at suicidal length through the eye-holes in the hideous mask which he
+still wore.  He would need it after all. The lady had left the room
+below, opening and shutting the door for herself; the man was filling
+his glass once more.  I would have shrieked my warning to Raffles, so
+fatally engrossed overhead, but at this moment (of all  others) a
+constable (of all men) was marching sedately down our side of the
+square.  There was nothing for it but to turn a melancholy eye upon the
+bath-chair, and to ask the constable the time.  I was evidently to be
+kept there all night, I remarked, and only realized with the words that
+they disposed of my other explanations before they were uttered.  It
+was a horrible moment for such a discovery. Fortunately the enemy was
+on the pavement, from which he could scarcely have seen more than the
+drawing-room ceiling, had he looked; but he was not many houses distant
+when a door opened and a woman gasped so that I  heard both across the
+road.  And never shall I forget the subsequent tableaux in the lighted
+room behind the low balcony and the French windows.
+
+Raffles stood confronted by a dark and handsome woman whose profile, as
+I saw it first in the electric light, is cut like a cameo in my memory.
+It had the undeviating line of brow and nose, the  short upper lip, the
+perfect chin, that are united  in marble oftener than in the flesh; and
+like marble she stood, or rather like some beautiful pale bronze; for
+that was her coloring, and she lost none of it that I could see,
+neither trembled; but her bosom rose and fell, and that was all.  So
+she stood without flinching before a masked ruffian, who, I felt, would
+be the first to appreciate her courage; to me it was so superb that I
+could think of it in this way even then, and marvel how Raffles himself
+could stand unabashed before so brave a figure.  He had not to do so
+long.  The woman scorned him, and he stood unmoved, a framed
+photograph still in his hand.  Then, with a quick, determined movement
+she turned, not to the door or to the bell, but to the open window by
+which Raffles had entered; and this with that accursed policeman still
+in view. So far no word had passed between the pair.  But at this point
+Raffles said something, I could not hear what, but at the sound of his
+voice the woman wheeled.  And Raffles was looking humbly in her face,
+the crape mask snatched from his own.
+
+"Arthur!" she cried; and that might have been heard in the middle of
+the square garden.
+
+Then they stood gazing at each other, neither unmoved any more, and
+while they stood the street-door opened and banged.  It was her husband
+leaving the house, a fine figure of a man, but a dissipated face, and a
+step even now distinguished  by the extreme caution which precedes
+unsteadiness.  He broke the spell. His wife came to the  balcony, then
+looked back into the room, and yet again along the road, and this time
+I saw her face.  It was the face of one glancing indeed from Hyperion
+to a satyr. And then I saw the rings flash, as her hand fell gently
+upon Raffles's arm.
+
+They disappeared from that window.  Their heads showed for an instant
+in the next.  Then they dipped out of sight, and an inner ceiling
+flashed out under a new light; they had gone into the back
+drawing-room, beyond my ken.  The  maid came up with coffee, her
+mistress hastily met her at the door, and once more disappeared.  The
+square was as quiet as ever.  I remained some minutes where I was.  Now
+and then I thought I heard their voices in the back drawing-room.  I
+was seldom sure.
+
+My state of mind may be imagined by those readers who take an interest
+in my personal psychology.  It does not amuse me to look back upon it.
+But at length I had the sense to put myself in Raffles's place.  He had
+been recognized at last, he had come to life.  Only one person knew as
+yet,  but that person was a woman, and a woman who had once been fond
+of him, if the human face could speak.  Would she keep his secret?
+Would  he tell her where he lived?  It was terrible to think we were
+such neighbors, and with the thought that it was terrible came a little
+enlightenment as to what could still be done for the best.  He would
+not tell her where he lived.  I knew him too well for that. He would
+run for it when he could, and the bath-chair and I must not be there to
+give him away.  I dragged the infernal vehicle round the nearer corner.
+Then I waited--there could be no harm in that--and at last he came.
+
+He was walking briskly, so I was right, and he had not played the
+invalid to her; yet I heard him cry out with pleasure as he turned the
+corner, and he flung himself into the chair with a long-drawn sigh that
+did me good.
+
+"Well done, Bunny--well done!  I am on my way to Earl's Court, she's
+capable of following me, but she won't look for me in a bath-chair.
+Home, home, home, and not another word till we get there!"
+
+Capable of following him?  She overtook us  before we were past the
+studios on the south side of the square, the woman herself, in a hooded
+opera-cloak.  But she never gave us a glance, and we saw her turn
+safely in the right direction for Earl's Court, and the wrong one for
+our humble mansions.  Raffles thanked his gods in a voice that
+trembled, and five minutes later we were in the flat.  Then for once it
+was Raffles who filled the tumblers and found the cigarettes, and for
+once (and once only in all my knowledge of him) did he drain his glass
+at a draught.
+
+"You didn't see the balcony scene?" he asked at length; and they were
+his first words since the woman passed us on his track.
+
+"Do you mean when she came in?"
+
+"No, when I came down."
+
+"I didn't."
+
+"I hope nobody else saw it," said Raffles devoutly.  "I don't say that
+Romeo and Juliet were brother and sister to us.  But you might have
+said so, Bunny!"
+
+He was staring at the carpet with as wry a face as lover ever wore.
+
+"An old flame?" said I, gently.
+
+"A married woman," he groaned.
+
+"So I gathered."
+
+"But she always was one, Bunny," said he, ruefully.  "That's the
+trouble.  It makes all the difference in the world!"
+
+I saw the difference, but said I did not see how it could make any now.
+He had eluded the lady, after all; had we not seen her off upon a scent
+as false as scent could be?  There was occasion for redoubled caution
+in the future, but none for immediate anxiety.  I quoted the bedside
+Theobald, but Raffles did not smile.  His eyes had been downcast all
+this time, and now, when he raised them, I perceived that my comfort
+had been administered to deaf ears.
+
+"Do you know who she is?" said he.
+
+"Not from Eve."
+
+"Jacques Saillard," he said, as though now I must know.
+
+But the name left me cold and stolid.  I had heard it, but that was
+all.  It was lamentable ignorance, I am aware, but I had specialized in
+Letters at the expense of Art.
+
+"You must know her pictures," said Raffles, patiently; "but I suppose
+you thought she was a man.  They would appeal to you, Bunny; that
+festive piece over the sideboard was her work. Sometimes they risk her
+at the Academy, sometimes they fight shy. She has one of those studios
+in the same square; they used to live up near  Lord's."
+
+My mind was busy brightening a dim memory of nymphs reflected in woody
+pools.  "Of course!"  I exclaimed, and added something about "a clever
+woman."  Raffles rose at the phrase.
+
+"A clever woman!" he echoed, scornfully; "if she were only that I
+should feel safe as houses.  Clever women can't forget their
+cleverness, they carry it as badly as a boy does his wine, and are
+about as dangerous.  I don't call Jacques Saillard clever outside her
+art, but neither do I call her a woman at all.  She does man's work
+over a man's name, has the will of any ten men I ever knew, and I don't
+mind telling you that I fear her more than any person on God's earth.
+I broke with her once," said Raffles, grimly, "but I know her.  If I
+had been asked to name the one person in London by whom I was keenest
+NOT to be bowled out, I should have named Jacques Saillard."
+
+That he had never before named her to me was as characteristic as the
+reticence with which Raffles  spoke of their past relations, and even
+of their conversation in the back drawing-room that evening.
+
+It was a question of principle with him, and one that I like to
+remember.  "Never give a woman away, Bunny," he used to say; and he
+said it again to-night, but with a heavy cloud upon him, as though his
+chivalry was sorely tried.
+
+"That's all right," said I, "if you're not going to be given away
+yourself."
+
+"That's just it, Bunny!  That's just--"
+
+The words were out of him, it was too late to recall them.  I had hit
+the nail upon the head.
+
+"So she threatened you," I said, "did she?"
+
+"I didn't say so," he replied, coldly.
+
+"And she is mated with a clown!" I pursued.
+
+"How she ever married him," he admitted, "is a mystery to me."
+
+"It always is," said I, the wise man for once, and rather enjoying the
+role.
+
+"Southern blood?"
+
+"Spanish."
+
+"She'll be pestering you to run off with her, old chap," said I.
+
+Raffles was pacing the room.  He stopped in his stride for half a
+second.  So she had begun pestering him already!  It is wonderful how
+acute any fool can be in the affairs of his friend.
+
+But  Raffles resumed his walk without a syllable, and I retreated to
+safer ground.
+
+"So you sent her to Earl's Court," I mused aloud; and at last he smiled.
+
+"You'll be interested to hear, Bunny," said he, "that I am now living
+in Seven Dials, and Bill Sikes couldn't hold a farthing dip to me.
+Bless you, she had my old police record at her fingers' ends, but it
+was fit to frame compared with the one  I gave her.  I had sunk as low
+as they dig.  I divided my nights between the open parks and a thieves'
+kitchen in Seven Dials.  If I was decently dressed it was because I had
+stolen the suit down the Thames Valley beat the night before last.  I
+was on my way back when first that sleepy square, and then her open
+window, proved too much for me.  You should have heard me beg her to
+let me push on to the devil in my own way; there I spread  myself, for
+I meant every word; but I swore the final stage would be a six-foot
+drop."
+
+"You did lay it on," said I.
+
+"It was necessary, and that had its effect.  She let me go.  But at the
+last moment she said she didn't believe I was so black as I painted
+myself, and then there was the balcony scene you missed."
+
+So that was all.  I could not help telling him that he had got out of
+it better than he deserved for ever getting in.  Next moment I
+regretted the  remark.
+
+"If I have got out of it," said Raffles, doubtfully.  "We are
+dreadfully near neighbors, and I can't move in a minute, with old
+Theobald taking a grave view of my case.  I suppose I had better lie
+low, and thank the gods again for putting her off the scent for the
+time being."
+
+No doubt our conversation was carried beyond this point, but it
+certainly was not many minutes later, nor had we left the subject, when
+the electric bell thrilled us both to a sudden silence.
+
+"The doctor?" I queried, hope fighting with my horror.
+
+"It was a single ring."
+
+"The last post?"
+
+"You know he knocks, and it's long past his time."
+
+The electric bell rang again, but now as though it never would stop.
+
+"You go, Bunny," said Raffles, with decision.  His eyes were sparkling.
+His smile was firm.
+
+"What am I to say?"
+
+"If it's the lady let her in."
+
+It was the lady, still in her evening cloak, with her fine dark head
+half-hidden by the hood, and an engaging contempt of appearances upon
+her angry face.  She was even handsomer than I had thought, and her
+beauty of a bolder type, but she was also angrier than I had
+anticipated when I came so readily to the door.  The passage into which
+it opened was an exceedingly narrow one, as I have often said, but I
+never dreamt of barring this woman's way, though not a word did she
+stoop to say to me.  I was only too glad to flatten myself against the
+wall, as the rustling fury strode past me into the lighted room with
+the open door.
+
+"So this is your thieves' kitchen!" she cried, in high-pitched scorn.
+
+I was on the threshold myself, and Raffles glanced towards me with
+raised eyebrows.
+
+"I have certainly had better quarters in my day," said he, "but you
+need not call them absurd names before my man."
+
+"Then send your 'man' about his business," said Jacques Saillard, with
+an unpleasant stress upon the word indicated.
+
+But when the door was shut I heard Raffles assuring her that I knew
+nothing, that he was a real invalid overcome by a sudden mad
+temptation, and all he had told her of his life a lie to hide his
+whereabouts, but all he was telling her now she could prove for herself
+without leaving that building.  It seemed, however, that she had proved
+it already by going first to the porter below stairs.  Yet I do not
+think she cared one atom which story was the truth.
+
+"So you thought I could pass you in your chair,"  she said, "or ever in
+this world again, without hearing from my heart that it was you!"
+
+
+II
+
+"Bunny," said Raffles, "I'm awfully sorry, old chap, but you've got to
+go."
+
+It was some weeks since the first untimely visitation of Jacques
+Saillard, but there had been many others at all hours of the day, while
+Raffles had  been induced to pay at least one to her studio in the
+neighboring square.  These intrusions he had endured at first with an
+air of humorous resignation which imposed upon me less than he
+imagined.  The woman meant well, he said, after all, and could be
+trusted to keep his secret loyally.  It was plain to me, however, that
+Raffles did not trust her, and that his pretence upon the point was a
+deliberate pose to conceal the extent to which she had him in her
+power.  Otherwise there would have been little point in hiding anything
+from the one person in possession of the cardinal secret of his
+identity.
+
+But Raffles thought it worth his while to hoodwink Jacques Saillard in
+the subsidiary matter of his health, in which Dr. Theobald lent him
+unwitting assistance, and, as we have seen, to impress upon  her that I
+was actually his attendant, and as ignorant of his past as the doctor
+himself.  "So you're all right, Bunny," he had assured me; "she thinks
+you knew nothing the other night.  I told you she wasn't a clever woman
+outside her work.  But hasn't she a will!"  I told Raffles it was very
+considerate of him to keep me out of it, but that it seemed to me like
+tying up the bag when the cat had escaped.  His reply was an admission
+that one must be on the defensive with such a woman and in such a case.
+Soon after this, Raffles, looking far  from well, fell back upon his
+own last line of  defence, namely, his bed; and now, as always in the
+end, I could see some sense in his subtleties, since it was
+comparatively easy for me to turn even Jacques Saillard from the door,
+with Dr. Theobald's explicit injunctions, and with my own honesty
+unquestioned.  So for a day we had peace once more.  Then came letters,
+then the doctor again and again, and finally my dismissal in the
+incredible words which have necessitated these explanations.
+
+"Go?" I echoed.  "Go where?"
+
+"It's that ass Theobald," said Raffles.  "He insists."
+
+"On my going altogether?"
+
+He nodded.
+
+"And you mean to let him have his way?"
+
+I had no language for my mortification and disgust, though neither was
+as yet quite so great as my  surprise.  I had foreseen almost every
+conceivable consequence of the mad act which brought all this trouble
+to pass, but a voluntary division between Raffles and me had certainly
+never entered my calculations.  Nor could I think that it had occurred
+to him before our egregious doctor's last visit, this very morning.
+Raffles had looked irritated as he broke the news to me from his
+pillow, and now there was some sympathy in the way he sat up in bed, as
+though he felt the thing himself.
+
+"I am obliged to give in to the fellow," said he.  "He's saving me from
+my friend, and I'm bound to humor him.  But I can tell you that we've
+been arguing about you for the last half hour, Bunny.  It was no use;
+the idiot has had his knife in you from the first; and he wouldn't see
+me through on any other conditions."
+
+"So he is going to see you through, is he?"
+
+"It tots up to that," said Raffles, looking at me rather hard. "At all
+events he has come to my rescue for the time being, and it's for me to
+manage the rest.  You don't know what it has been, Bunny,  these last
+few weeks; and gallantry forbids that I should tell you even now.  But
+would you rather elope against your will, or have your continued
+existence made known to the world in general and the police in
+particular?  That is practically the problem which I have had to solve,
+and the temporary  solution was to fall ill.  As a matter of fact, I am
+ill; and now what do you think?  I owe it to you to  tell you, Bunny,
+though it goes against the grain.  She would take me 'to the dear, warm
+underworld,  where the sun really shines,' and she would 'nurse me back
+to life and love!'  The artistic temperament is a fearsome thing,
+Bunny, in a woman with the devil's own will!"
+
+Raffles tore up the letter from which he had read these piquant
+extracts, and lay back on the pillows  with the tired air of the
+veritable invalid which he seemed able to assume at will.  But for once
+he did look as though bed was the best place for him; and I used the
+fact as an argument for my own retention in defiance of Dr. Theobald.
+The town was full of typhoid, I said, and certainly that autumnal
+scourge was in the air.  Did he want me to leave him at the very moment
+when he might be sickening for a serious illness?
+
+"You know I don't, my good fellow," said Raffles, wearily; "but
+Theobald does, and I can't  afford to go against him now.  Not that I
+really care what happens to me now that that woman knows I'm in the
+land of the living; she'll let it out, to a dead certainty, and at the
+best there'll be  a hue and cry, which is the very thing I have escaped
+all these years.  Now, what I want you  to do is to go and take some
+quiet place somewhere, and then let me know, so that I may have a port
+in the storm when it breaks."
+
+"Now you're talking!" I cried, recovering my spirits.  "I thought you
+meant to go and drop a fellow altogether!"
+
+"Exactly the sort of thing you would think," rejoined Raffles, with a
+contempt that was welcome enough after my late alarm. "No, my dear
+rabbit, what you've got to do is to make a new burrow for us both.  Try
+down the Thames, in some quiet nook that a literary man would naturally
+select.  I've often thought that more use might be made of a boat,
+while the family are at dinner, than there ever has been yet.  If
+Raffles is to come to life, old chap, he shall go a-Raffling for all
+he's worth!  There's something to be done with a bicycle, too.  Try Ham
+Common or Roehampton, or some such sleepy hollow a trifle off the line;
+and say you're expecting your brother from the colonies."
+
+Into this arrangement I entered without the slightest hesitation, for
+we had funds enough to carry it out on a comfortable scale, and Raffles
+placed a sufficient share at my disposal for the nonce.  Moreover, I
+for one was only too glad to seek fresh fields and pastures new--a
+phrase which  I determined to interpret literally in my choice of fresh
+surroundings.  I was tired of our submerged life in the poky little
+flat, especially now that we  had money enough for better things.  I
+myself of late had dark dealings with the receivers, with the result
+that poor Lord Ernest Belville's successes were now indeed ours.
+Subsequent complications had been the more galling on that account,
+while the wanton way in which they had been  created was the most
+irritating reflection of all.  But it had brought its own punishment
+upon Raffles, and I fancied the lesson would prove salutary when we
+again settled down.
+
+"If ever we do, Bunny!" said he, as I took his hand and told him how I
+was already looking forward to the time.
+
+"But of course we will!" I cried, concealing the resentment at leaving
+him which his tone and his appearance renewed in my breast.
+
+"I'm not so sure of it," he said, gloomily.  "I'm in somebody's
+clutches, and I've got to get out of them first."
+
+"I'll sit tight until you do."
+
+"Well," he said, "if you don't see me in ten days you never will."
+
+"Only ten days?" I echoed.  "That's nothing at all."
+
+"A lot may happen in ten days," replied Raffles, in the same depressing
+tone, so very depressing in him; and with that he held out his hand a
+second time, and dropped mine suddenly after as sudden a pressure for
+farewell.
+
+I left the flat in considerable dejection after all, unable to decide
+whether Raffles was really ill, or only worried as I knew him to be.
+And at the foot of the stairs the author of my dismissal, that
+confounded Theobald, flung open his door and waylaid me.
+
+"Are you going?" he demanded.
+
+The traps in my hands proclaimed that I was, but I dropped them at his
+feet to have it out with him then and there.
+
+"Yes," I answered fiercely, "thanks to you!"
+
+"Well, my good fellow," he said, his full-blooded face lightening and
+softening at the same  time, as though a load were off his mind, "it's
+no pleasure to me to deprive any man of his billet, but you never were
+a nurse, and you know that as well as I do."
+
+I began to wonder what he meant, and how much he did know, and my
+speculations kept me silent.  "But come in here a moment," he
+continued, just as I decided that he knew nothing at all.  And, leading
+me into his minute consulting-room,  Dr. Theobald solemnly presented me
+with a sovereign by way of compensation, which I pocketed as solemnly,
+and with as much gratitude as if I had not fifty of them distributed
+over my person as it was.  The good fellow had quite forgotten my
+social status, about which he himself had been so particular at our
+earliest interview; but he had  never accustomed himself to treat me as
+a gentleman, and I do not suppose he had been improving his memory by
+the tall tumbler which I saw him poke behind a photograph as we entered.
+
+"There's one thing I should like to know before I go," said I, turning
+suddenly on the doctor's mat, "and that is whether Mr. Maturin is
+really ill or not!"
+
+I meant, of course, at the present moment, but Dr. Theobald braced
+himself like a recruit at the drill-sergeant's voice.
+
+"Of course he is," he snapped--"so ill as to need a nurse who can
+nurse, by way of a change."
+
+With that his door shut in my face, and I had to go my way, in the dark
+as to whether he had mistaken my meaning, and was telling me a lie, or
+not.
+
+But for my misgivings upon this point I might have extracted some very
+genuine enjoyment out of the next few days.  I had decent clothes to my
+back, with money, as I say, in most of the pockets, and more freedom to
+spend it than was possible  in the constant society of a man whose
+personal liberty depended on a universal supposition that  he was dead.
+Raffles was as bold as ever, and I as fond of him, but whereas he would
+run any risk in a professional exploit, there were many innocent
+recreations still open to me which would have been sheer madness in
+him.  He could not even watch a match, from the sixpenny seats, at
+Lord's cricket-ground, where the Gentlemen were every year in a worse
+way without him.  He never travelled by rail, and dining out was a risk
+only to be run with some ulterior object in view.  In fact, much as it
+had changed, Raffles could no longer show his face with perfect
+impunity in any quarter or at any hour. Moreover, after the lesson he
+had now learnt, I foresaw increased caution on his part in this
+respect.  But I myself was under no such perpetual disadvantage, and,
+while what was good enough for Raffles was quite good enough for me so
+long as we were together, I saw no harm in profiting by the present
+opportunity of "doing my-self well."
+
+Such were my reflections on the way to Richmond in a hansom cab.
+Richmond had struck us both as the best centre of operations in search
+of the suburban retreat which Raffles wanted, and by road, in a
+well-appointed, well-selected hansom, was certainly the most agreeable
+way of getting there.  In a week or ten days Raffles was to write to me
+at the Richmond post-office, but for at least a week I should be "on my
+own."  It was not an unpleasant sensation as I leant back in the
+comfortable hansom, and rather to one side, in order to have a good
+look at myself in the bevelled mirror that is almost as great an
+improvement in these vehicles as the rubber tires.  Really I was not an
+ill-looking youth, if one may call one's self such at the age of
+thirty.  I could lay no claim either to the striking cast of
+countenance or to the peculiar charm of expression which made the face
+of  Raffles like no other in the world.  But this very distinction was
+in itself a danger, for its impression was indelible, whereas I might
+still have been mistaken for a hundred other young fellows at large in
+London.  Incredible as it may appear to the moralists, I had sustained
+no external hallmark  by my term of imprisonment, and I am vain enough
+to believe that the evil which I did had not a separate existence in my
+face.  This afternoon, indeed, I was struck by the purity of my fresh
+complexion,  and rather depressed by the general innocence of the
+visage which peered into mine from the little  mirror.  My
+straw-colored moustache, grown in the flat after a protracted holiday,
+again preserved the most disappointing dimensions, and was still
+invisible in certain lights without wax.  So far  from discerning the
+desperate criminal who has "done time" once, and deserved it over and
+over again, the superior but superficial observer might have imagined
+that he detected a certain element of folly in my face.
+
+At all events it was not the face to shut the doors of a first-class
+hotel against me, without accidental evidence of a more explicit kind,
+and it was with no little satisfaction that I directed the man to drive
+to the Star and Garter.  I also told him to  go through Richmond Park,
+though he warned me that it would add considerably to the distance and
+his fare.  It was autumn, and it struck me that the tints would be
+fine.  And I had learnt from Raffles to appreciate such things, even
+amid the excitement of an audacious enterprise.
+
+If I dwell upon my appreciation of this occasion it is because, like
+most pleasures, it was exceedingly short-lived.  I was very comfortable
+at the Star and Garter, which was so empty that I had a room worthy of
+a prince, where I could  enjoy the finest of all views (in patriotic
+opinion) every morning while I shaved.  I walked many miles through the
+noble park, over the commons of Ham and Wimbledon, and one day as far
+as  that of Esher, where I was forcibly reminded of a service we once
+rendered to a distinguished resident in this delightful locality.  But
+it was on Ham  Common, one of the places which Raffles had mentioned as
+specially desirable, that I actually found an almost ideal retreat.
+This was a cottage where I heard, on inquiry, that rooms were to be let
+in  the summer.  The landlady, a motherly body, of  visible excellence,
+was surprised indeed at receiving an application for the winter months;
+but I  have generally found that the title of "author,"  claimed with
+an air, explains every little innocent irregularity of conduct or
+appearance, and even requires something of the kind to carry conviction
+to the lay intelligence.  The present case was one in point, and when I
+said that I could only write in a room facing north, on mutton chops
+and milk,  with a cold ham in the wardrobe in case of nocturnal
+inspiration, to which I was liable, my literary character was
+established beyond dispute.  I secured the rooms, paid a month's rent
+in advance at my own request, and moped in them dreadfully until the
+week was up and Raffles due any day.  I explained that the inspiration
+would not come, and asked abruptly if the mutton was New Zealand.
+
+Thrice had I made fruitless inquiries at the Richmond post-office; but
+on the tenth day I was in and out almost every hour.  Not a word was
+there for me up to the last post at night. Home I trudged to Ham with
+horrible forebodings, and  back again to Richmond after breakfast next
+morning.  Still there was nothing.  I could bear it no more.  At ten
+minutes to eleven I was climbing the station stairs at Earl's Court.
+
+It was a wretched morning there, a weeping  mist shrouding the long,
+straight street, and clinging to one's face in clammy caresses.  I felt
+how  much better it was down at Ham, as I turned into our side street,
+and saw the flats looming like mountains, the chimney-pots hidden in
+the mist.  At our entrance stood a nebulous conveyance, that I took at
+first for a tradesman's van; to my horror it proved to be a hearse; and
+all at once the white breath ceased upon my lips.
+
+I had looked up at our windows and the blinds were down!
+
+I rushed within.  The doctor's door stood open.  I neither knocked nor
+rang, but found him in his consulting-room with red eyes and a blotchy
+face.  Otherwise he was in solemn black from head to  heel.
+
+"Who is dead?" I burst out.  "Who is dead?"
+
+The red eyes looked redder than ever as Dr. Theobald opened them at the
+unwarrantable sight of me; and he was terribly slow in answering.  But
+in the end he did answer, and did not kick me out as he evidently had a
+mind.
+
+"Mr. Maturin," he said, and sighed like a beaten man.
+
+I said nothing.  It was no surprise to me.  I had known it all these
+minutes.  Nay, I had dreaded this from the first, had divined it at the
+last, though to the last also I had refused to entertain my own
+conviction.  Raffles dead!  A real invalid after all!  Raffles dead,
+and on the point of burial!
+
+"What did he die of?" I asked, unconsciously drawing on that fund of
+grim self-control which the weakest of us seem to hold in reserve for
+real calamity.
+
+"Typhoid," he answered.  "Kensington is full of it."
+
+"He was sickening for it when I left, and you knew it, and could get
+rid of me then!"
+
+"My good fellow, I was obliged to have a more experienced nurse for
+that very reason."
+
+The doctor's tone was so conciliatory that I remembered in an instant
+what a humbug the man was, and became suddenly possessed with the vague
+conviction that he was imposing upon me now.
+
+"Are you sure it was typhoid at all?" I cried fiercely to his face.
+"Are you sure it wasn't suicide--or murder?"
+
+I confess that I can see little point in this speech as I write it
+down, but it was what I said in a burst of grief and of wild suspicion;
+nor was it without effect upon Dr. Theobald, who turned bright scarlet
+from his well-brushed hair to his immaculate collar.
+
+"Do you want me to throw you out into the street?" he cried; and all at
+once I remembered that I had come to Raffles as a perfect stranger, and
+for his sake might as well preserve that character to the last.
+
+"I beg your pardon," I said, brokenly.  "He  was so good to me--I
+became so attached to him.  You forget I am originally of his class."
+
+"I did forget it," replied Theobald, looking relieved at my new tone,
+"and I beg YOUR pardon for doing so.  Hush!  They are bringing him
+down.  I must have a drink before we start, and you'd  better join me."
+
+There was no pretence about his drink this time, and a pretty stiff one
+it was, but I fancy my own must have run it hard.  In my case it cast a
+merciful haze over much of the next hour, which I can  truthfully
+describe as one of the most painful of  my whole existence.  I can have
+known very little of what I was doing.  I only remember finding myself
+in a hansom, suddenly wondering why it was going so slowly, and once
+more awaking to the truth.  But it was to the truth itself more than to
+the liquor that I must have owed my dazed condition.  My next
+recollection is of looking down into the open grave, in a sudden
+passionate anxiety to see the name for myself.  It was not the name of
+my friend, of course, but it was the one under which he had passed for
+many months.
+
+I was still stupefied by a sense of inconceivable loss, and had not
+raised my eyes from that which was slowly forcing me to realize what
+had happened, when there was a rustle at my elbow, and a shower of
+hothouse flowers passed before them,  falling like huge snowflakes
+where my gaze had  rested.  I looked up, and at my side stood a
+majestic figure in deep mourning.  The face was  carefully veiled, but
+I was too close not to recognize the masterful beauty whom the world
+knew  as Jacques Saillard.  I had no sympathy with her; on the
+contrary, my blood boiled with the vague conviction that in some way
+she was responsible  for this death.  Yet she was the only woman
+present--there were not a half a dozen of us altogether--and her
+flowers were the only flowers.
+
+The melancholy ceremony was over, and Jacques Saillard had departed in
+a funeral brougham, evidently hired for the occasion. I had  watched
+her drive away, and the sight of my own cabman, making signs to me
+through the fog, had  suddenly reminded me that I had bidden him to
+wait.  I was the last to leave, and had turned my back upon the
+grave-diggers, already at their final task, when a hand fell lightly
+but firmly upon my shoulder.
+
+"I don't want to make a scene in a cemetery,"  said a voice, in a not
+unkindly, almost confidential whisper.  "Will you get into your own cab
+and come quietly?"
+
+"Who on earth are you?" I exclaimed.
+
+I now remembered having seen the fellow hovering about during the
+funeral, and subconsciously taking him for the undertaker's head man.
+He had certainly that appearance, and even now I could scarcely believe
+that he was anything  else.
+
+"My name won't help you," he said, pityingly.  "But you will guess
+where I come from when I tell you I have a warrant for your arrest."
+
+My sensations at this announcement may not be believed, but I solemnly
+declare that I have seldom experienced so fierce a satisfaction.  Here
+was a new excitement in which to drown my grief; here was something to
+think about; and I should be spared the intolerable experience of a
+solitary return to the little place at Ham.  It was as though I had
+lost a limb and some one had struck me so hard in the face that the
+greater agony was forgotten.  I got into the hansom without a word, my
+captor following at my heels, and giving his own directions to the
+cabman before taking his seat.  The word "station" was the only one I
+caught, and I wondered whether it was to be Bow Street again.  My
+companion's next words, however, or rather the tone in which he uttered
+them, destroyed my capacity for idle speculation.
+
+"Mr. Maturin!" said he.  "Mr. Maturin indeed!"
+
+"Well," said I, "what about him?"
+
+"Do you think we don't know who he was?"
+
+"Who was he?" I asked, defiantly.
+
+"You ought to know," said he.  "You got locked up through him the other
+time, too.  His favorite name was Raffles then."
+
+"It was his real name," I said, indignantly.  "And he has been dead for
+years."
+
+My captor simply chuckled.
+
+"He's at the bottom of the sea, I tell you!"
+
+But I do not know why I should have told him with such spirit, for what
+could it matter to Raffles now?  I did not think; instinct was still
+stronger than reason, and, fresh from his funeral,  I had taken up the
+cudgels for my dead friend as though he were still alive.  Next moment
+I saw this for myself, and my tears came nearer the surface than they
+had been yet; but the fellow at my side laughed outright.
+
+"Shall I tell you something else?" said he.
+
+"As you like."
+
+"He's not even at the bottom of that grave!  He's no more dead than you
+or I, and a sham burial is his latest piece of villainy!"
+
+I doubt whether I could have spoken if I had tried.  I did not try.  I
+had no use for speech.  I  did not even ask him if he was sure, I was
+so sure myself.  It was all as plain to me as riddles usually are when
+one has the answer.  The doctor's alarms, his unscrupulous venality,
+the simulated  illness, my own dismissal, each fitted in its obvious
+place, and not even the last had power as yet to mar my joy in the one
+central fact to which all the rest were as tapers to the sun.
+
+"He is alive!" I cried.  "Nothing else matters--he is alive!"
+
+At last I did ask whether they had got him  too; but thankful as I was
+for the greater knowledge, I confess that I did not much care what
+answer I received.  Already I was figuring out how much we might each
+get, and how old we should  be when we came out.  But my companion
+tilted his hat to the back of his head, at the same time putting his
+face close to mine, and compelling my  scrutiny.  And my answer, as you
+have already guessed, was the face of Raffles himself, superbly
+disguised (but less superbly than his voice), and yet so thinly that I
+should have known him in a trice had I not been too miserable in the
+beginning to give him a second glance.
+
+Jacques Saillard had made his life impossible, and this was the one
+escape.  Raffles had bought the doctor for a thousand pounds, and the
+doctor had bought a "nurse" of his own kidney, on his own account; me,
+for some reason, he would not trust; he had insisted upon my dismissal
+as an essential preliminary to his part in the conspiracy.  Here the
+details were half-humorous, half-grewsome, each in turn as Raffles told
+me the story.  At one period he had been very daringly drugged indeed,
+and, in his own words, "as dead as a man need be"; but he had left
+strict instructions that nobody but the nurse and "my devoted
+physician" should "lay a finger on me" afterwards; and by virtue of
+this proviso a library of books (largely acquired for the occasion) had
+been impiously interred at Kensal Green.  Raffles had definitely
+undertaken not to trust me with the secret, and, but for my untoward
+appearance at the funeral (which he had attended for his own final
+satisfaction), I was assured and am convinced that he would have kept
+his promise to the letter.  In explaining this he gave me the one
+explanation I desired, and in another moment we turned into Praed
+Street, Paddington.
+
+"And I thought you said Bow Street!" said I.  "Are you coming straight
+down to Richmond with me?"
+
+"I may as well," said Raffles, "though I did mean to get my kit first,
+so as to start in fair and  square as the long-lost brother from the
+bush.  That's why I hadn't written.  The function was a  day later than
+I calculated.  I was going to write to-night."
+
+"But what are we to do?" said I, hesitating when he had paid the cab.
+"I have been playing the colonies for all they are worth!"
+
+"Oh, I've lost my luggage," said he, "or a wave came into my cabin and
+spoilt every stitch, or I  had nothing fit to bring ashore.  We'll
+settle that in the train."
+
+
+
+THE WRONG HOUSE
+
+My brother Ralph, who now lived with me on the edge of Ham Common, had
+come home from Australia with a curious affection of the eyes,  due to
+long exposure to the glare out there, and necessitating the use of
+clouded spectacles in the open air.  He had not the rich complexion of
+the typical colonist, being indeed peculiarly pale, but it appeared
+that he had been confined to his berth for the greater part of the
+voyage, while his prematurely gray hair was sufficient proof that the
+rigors of bush life had at last undermined an originally tough
+constitution.  Our landlady, who spoilt my brother from the first, was
+much concerned on his behalf, and wished to call in the local doctor;
+but Ralph said dreadful things about the profession, and quite
+frightened the good woman by arbitrarily forbidding her ever to let a
+doctor inside her door.  I had to apologize to her for the painful
+prejudices and violent language of "these colonists," but the old soul
+was easily mollified.  She had fallen in love with my brother at first
+sight, and she never could do too much for him.  It was owing to our
+landlady that I took to calling him Ralph, for the first time in our
+lives, on her beginning to speak of and to him as "Mr. Raffles."
+
+"This won't do," said he to me.  "It's a name that sticks."
+
+"It must be my fault!  She must have heard it from me," said I
+self-reproachfully.
+
+"You must tell her it's the short for Ralph."
+
+"But it's longer."
+
+"It's the short," said he; "and you've got to tell her so."
+
+Henceforth I heard as much of "Mr. Ralph," his likes and dislikes, what
+he would fancy and what he would not, and oh, what a dear gentleman he
+was, that I often remembered to say "Ralph, old chap," myself.
+
+It was an ideal cottage, as I said when I found it, and in it our
+delicate man became rapidly  robust.  Not that the air was also ideal,
+for, when  it was not raining, we had the same faithful mist from
+November to March.  But it was something to Ralph to get any air at
+all, other than  night-air, and the bicycle did the rest.  We taught
+ourselves, and may I never forget our earlier rides,  through and
+through Richmond Park when the  afternoons were shortest, upon the
+incomparable Ripley Road when we gave a day to it.  Raffles  rode a
+Beeston Humber, a Royal Sunbeam was good enough for me, but he insisted
+on our both having Dunlop tires.
+
+"They seem the most popular brand.  I had my eye on the road all the
+way from Ripley to Cobham, and there were more Dunlop marks than any
+other kind.  Bless you, yes, they all leave their special tracks, and
+we don't want ours to be extra special; the Dunlop's like a
+rattlesnake, and the Palmer leaves telegraph-wires, but surely the
+serpent is more in our line."
+
+That was the winter when there were so many burglaries in the Thames
+Valley from Richmond upward.  It was said that the thieves used
+bicycles in every case, but what is not said?  They were sometimes on
+foot to my knowledge, and we took a great interest in the series, or
+rather sequence of successful crimes.  Raffles would often get his
+devoted old lady to read him the latest local accounts, while I was
+busy with my writing (much I  wrote) in my own room.  We even rode out
+by night ourselves, to see if we could not get on the tracks of the
+thieves, and never did we fail to find hot coffee on the hob for our
+return.  We had indeed fallen upon our feet.  Also, the misty nights
+might have been made for the thieves.  But their success was not so
+consistent, and never so enormous as people said, especially the
+sufferers, who lost more valuables than they had ever been known to
+possess. Failure was often the caitiff's portion,  and disaster once;
+owing, ironically enough, to that very mist which should have served
+them.  But as I am going to tell the story with some particularity, and
+perhaps some gusto, you will see why who read.
+
+The right house stood on high ground near the river, with quite a drive
+(in at one gate and out at the other) sweeping past the steps.  Between
+the  two gates was a half-moon of shrubs, to the left of the steps a
+conservatory, and to their right the walk leading to the tradesmen's
+entrance and the back premises; here also was the pantry window, of
+which more anon.  The right house was the  residence of an opulent
+stockbroker who wore a heavy watch-chain and seemed fair game.  There
+would have been two objections to it had I been  the stockbroker.  The
+house was one of a row, though a goodly row, and an army-crammer had
+established himself next door.  There is a type of such institutions in
+the suburbs; the youths go about in knickerbockers, smoking pipes,
+except on Saturday nights, when they lead each other home from the last
+train.  It was none of our business to spy upon these boys, but their
+manners and customs fell within the field of observation.  And we did
+not choose the night upon which the whole row was likely to be kept
+awake.
+
+The night that we did choose was as misty as even the Thames Valley is
+capable of making them.  Raffles smeared vaseline upon the plated parts
+of his Beeston Humber before starting, and our dear landlady cosseted
+us both, and prayed we might see nothing of the nasty burglars, not
+denying as the reward would be very handy to them that got it, to say
+nothing of the honor and glory.  We had promised her a liberal
+perquisite  in the event of our success, but she must not give other
+cyclists our idea by mentioning it to a soul.  It was about midnight
+when we cycled through  Kingston to Surbiton, having trundled our
+machines across Ham Fields, mournful in the mist as those by Acheron,
+and so over Teddington  Bridge.
+
+I often wonder why the pantry window is the  vulnerable point of nine
+houses out of ten.  This  house of ours was almost the tenth, for the
+window  in question had bars of sorts, but not the right sort.  The
+only bars that Raffles allowed to beat him were the kind that are let
+into the stone outside; those fixed within are merely screwed to the
+woodwork, and you can unscrew as many as necessary if you take the
+trouble and have the time.  Barred windows are usually devoid of other
+fasteners worthy the name; this one was no exception to that foolish
+rule, and a push with the pen-knife did its business.  I am giving
+householders some valuable hints, and perhaps deserving a good mark
+from the critics.  These, in any case, are the points that I would see
+to, were I a rich stockbroker in a riverside suburb.  In giving good
+advice, however, I should not have omitted to say that we had left our
+machines in the semi-circular  shrubbery in front, or that Raffles had
+most ingeniously fitted our lamps with dark slides, which  enabled us
+to leave them burning.
+
+It proved sufficient to unscrew the bars at the bottom only, and then
+to wrench them to either side.  Neither of us had grown stout with
+advancing years, and in a few minutes we both had wormed through into
+the sink, and thence to the floor.  It was not an absolutely noiseless
+process, but once in the pantry we were mice, and no longer blind mice.
+There was a gas-bracket, but we did not meddle with that.  Raffles went
+armed these nights with a better light than gas; if it were not
+immoral, I might recommend a dark-lantern which  was more or less his
+patent.  It was that handy invention, the electric torch, fitted by
+Raffles with a  dark hood to fulfil the functions of a slide. I had
+held it through the bars while he undid the screws,  and now he held it
+to the keyhole, in which a key was turned upon the other side.
+
+There was a pause for consideration, and in the pause we put on our
+masks.  It was never known that these Thames Valley robberies were all
+committed by miscreants decked in the livery of crime, but that was
+because until this night we had never even shown our masks.  It was a
+point upon which  Raffles had insisted on all feasible occasions since
+his furtive return to the world. To-night it twice nearly lost us
+everything--but you shall hear.
+
+There is a forceps for turning keys from the wrong side of the door,
+but the implement is not so easy of manipulation as it might be.
+Raffles for one preferred a sharp knife and the corner of  the panel.
+You go through the panel because that is thinnest, of course in the
+corner nearest the key,  and you use a knife when you can, because it
+makes least noise.  But it does take minutes, and even I can remember
+shifting the electric torch from one hand to the other before the
+aperture was large enough to receive the hand and wrist of Raffles.
+
+He had at such times a motto of which I might have made earlier use,
+but the fact is that I have only once before described a downright
+burglary in which I assisted, and that without knowing it at the time.
+The most solemn student of these annals cannot affirm that he has cut
+through many doors in our company, since (what was to me) the maiden
+effort to which I allude.  I, however, have cracked only too many a
+crib in conjunction with A. J. Raffles, and at the crucial moment he
+would whisper "Victory or Wormwood Scrubbs, Bunny!"  or instead of
+Wormwood Scrubbs it might be  Portland Bill.  This time it was neither
+one nor the other, for with that very word "victory" upon his lips,
+they whitened and parted with the first taste of defeat.
+
+"My hand's held!" gasped Raffles, and the white of his eyes showed all
+round the iris, a rarer thing than you may think.
+
+At the same moment I heard the shuffling feet and the low, excited
+young voices on the other side of the door, and a faint light shone
+round Raffles's wrist.
+
+"Well done, Beefy!"
+
+"Hang on to him!"
+
+"Good old Beefy!"
+
+"Beefy's got him!"
+
+"So have I--so have I!"
+
+And Raffles caught my arm with his one free hand.  "They've got me
+tight," he whispered.  "I'm done."
+
+"Blaze through the door," I urged, and might have done it had I been
+armed.  But I never was.  It was Raffles who monopolized that risk.
+
+"I can't--it's the boys--the wrong house!" he  whispered.  "Curse the
+fog--it's done me.  But you get out, Bunn, while you can; never mind
+me; it's my turn, old chap."
+
+His one hand tightened in affectionate farewell.  I put the electric
+torch in it before I went, trembling in every inch, but without a word.
+
+Get out!  His turn!  Yes, I would get out, but only to come in again,
+for it was my turn--mine--not his.  Would Raffles leave me held by a
+hand through a hole in a door?  What he would have done in my place was
+the thing for me to do now.  I began by diving head-first through the
+pantry window and coming to earth upon all fours.  But even as I stood
+up, and brushed the gravel from the palms of my hands and the knees of
+my knickerbockers, I had no notion what to do next.  And  yet I was
+halfway to the front door before I remembered the vile crape mask upon
+my face, and  tore it off as the door flew open and my feet were  on
+the steps.
+
+"He's into the next garden," I cried to a bevy of pyjamas with bare
+feet and young faces at either end of them.
+
+"Who?  Who?" said they, giving way before me.
+
+"Some fellow who came through one of your windows head-first."
+
+"The other Johnny, the other Johnny," the cherubs chorused.
+
+"Biking past--saw the light--why, what have you there?"
+
+Of course it was Raffles's hand that they had, but now I was in the
+hall among them.  A red-faced barrel of a boy did all the holding, one
+hand round the wrist, the other palm to palm, and his knees braced up
+against the panel.  Another was rendering ostentatious but ineffectual
+aid, and three or four others danced about in their pyjamas.  After
+all, they were not more than four to one.  I had raised my voice, so
+that Raffles might hear me and take heart, and now I raised it again.
+Yet to this day I cannot account for my inspiration, that proved
+nothing less.
+
+"Don't talk so loud," they were crying below their breath; "don't wake
+'em upstairs, this is our show."
+
+"Then I see you've got one of them," said I, as desired.  "Well, if you
+want the other you can have him, too.  I believe he's hurt himself."
+
+"After him, after him!" they exclaimed as one.
+
+"But I think he got over the wall--"
+
+"Come on, you chaps, come on!"
+
+And there was a soft stampede to the hall door.
+
+"Don't all desert me, I say!" gasped the red-faced hero who held
+Raffles prisoner.
+
+"We must have them both, Beefy!"
+
+"That's all very well--"
+
+"Look here," I interposed, "I'll stay by you.  I've a friend outside,
+I'll get him too."
+
+"Thanks awfully," said the valiant Beefy.
+
+The hall was empty now.  My heart beat high.
+
+"How did you hear them?" I inquired, my eye running over him.
+
+"We were down having drinks--game o' Nap--in there."
+
+Beefy jerked his great head toward an open door, and the tail of my eye
+caught the glint of  glasses in the firelight, but the rest of it was
+otherwise engaged.
+
+"Let me relieve you," I said, trembling.
+
+"No, I'm all right."
+
+"Then I must insist."
+
+And before he could answer I had him round the neck with such a will
+that not a gurgle passed my fingers, for they were almost buried in his
+hot, smooth flesh.  Oh, I am not proud of it; the act was as vile as
+act could be; but I was not going to see Raffles taken, my one desire
+was to be the saving of him, and I tremble even now to think to what
+lengths I might have gone for its fulfilment.  As it was, I squeezed
+and tugged until one strong hand gave way after the other and came
+feeling  round for me, but feebly because they had held on so long.
+And what do you suppose was happening at the same moment?  The pinched
+white hand of Raffles, reddening with returning blood, and with a clot
+of blood upon the wrist, was craning upward and turning the key in the
+lock without a moment's loss.
+
+"Steady on, Bunny!"
+
+And I saw that Beefy's ears were blue; but Raffles was feeling in his
+pockets as he spoke.  "Now let him breathe," said he, clapping his
+handkerchief over the poor youth's mouth.  An empty vial was in his
+other hand, and the first few stertorous breaths that the poor boy took
+were the end of him for the time being. Oh, but it was villainous, my
+part especially, for he must have been far gone to go the rest of the
+way so readily.  I began by saying I was not proud of this deed, but
+its dastardly character has come home to me more than ever with the
+penance of writing it out.  I see in myself, at least my then self,
+things that I never saw quite so clearly before.  Yet let me be  quite
+sure that I would not do the same again.  I  had not the smallest
+desire to throttle this innocent lad (nor did I), but only to extricate
+Raffles from the most hopeless position he was ever in; and after all
+it was better than a blow from behind.  On the whole, I will not alter
+a word, nor whine about the thing any more.
+
+We lifted the plucky fellow into Raffles's place in the pantry, locked
+the door on him, and put the key through the panel.  Now was the moment
+for thinking of ourselves, and again that infernal mask which Raffles
+swore by came near the undoing of us both.  We had reached the steps
+when we were hailed by a voice, not from without but from within, and I
+had just time to tear the accursed thing from Raffles's face before he
+turned.
+
+A stout man with a blonde moustache was on the stairs, in his pyjamas
+like the boys.
+
+"What are you doing here?" said he.
+
+"There has been an attempt upon your house,"  said I, still spokesman
+for the night, and still on the wings of inspiration.
+
+"Your sons--"
+
+"My pupils."
+
+"Indeed.  Well, they heard it, drove off the thieves, and have given
+chase."
+
+"And where do you come in?" inquired the stout man, descending.
+
+"We were bicycling past, and I actually saw one fellow come head-first
+through your pantry window.  I think he got over the wall."
+
+Here a breathless boy returned.
+
+"Can't see anything of him," he gasped.
+
+"It's true, then," remarked the crammer.
+
+"Look at that door," said I.
+
+But unfortunately the breathless boy looked also, and now he was being
+joined by others equally short of wind.
+
+"Where's Beefy?" he screamed.  "What on earth's happened to Beefy?"
+
+"My good boys," exclaimed the crammer,  "will one of you be kind enough
+to tell me what you've been doing, and what these gentlemen have been
+doing for you?  Come in all, before you get your death.  I see lights
+in the class-room, and  more than lights.  Can these be signs of a
+carouse?"
+
+"A very innocent one, sir," said a well set-up youth with more
+moustache than I have yet.
+
+"Well, Olphert, boys will be boys.  Suppose you tell me what happened,
+before we come to recriminations."
+
+The bad old proverb was my first warning.  I caught two of the youths
+exchanging glances under raised eyebrows.  Yet their stout, easy-going
+mentor had given me such a reassuring glance of side-long humor, as
+between man of the world and man of the world, that it was difficult to
+suspect him of suspicion.  I was nevertheless itching to be gone.
+
+Young Olphert told his story with engaging candor.  It was true that
+they had come down for an hour's Nap and cigarettes; well, and there
+was no denying that there was whiskey in the glasses. The boys were now
+all back in their class-room, I  think entirely for the sake of warmth;
+but Raffles and I were in knickerbockers and Norfolk jackets, and very
+naturally remained without, while the  army-crammer (who wore bedroom
+slippers) stood on the threshold, with an eye each way.  The more I saw
+of the man the better I liked and the more I feared him.  His chief
+annoyance thus far was that they had not called him when they heard the
+noise, that they had dreamt of leaving him out of the fun.  But he
+seemed more hurt than angry about that.
+
+"Well, sir," concluded Olphert, "we left old Beefy Smith hanging on to
+his hand, and this gentleman with him, so perhaps he can tell us what
+happened next?"
+
+"I wish I could," I cried with all their eyes upon me, for I had had
+time to think.  "Some of you must have heard me say I'd fetch my friend
+in from the road?"
+
+"Yes, I did," piped an innocent from within.
+
+"Well, and when I came back with him things were exactly as you see
+them now.  Evidently the man's strength was too much for the boy's; but
+whether he ran upstairs or outside I know no more than you do."
+
+"It wasn't like that boy to run either way," said the crammer, cocking
+a clear blue eye on me.
+
+"But if he gave chase!"
+
+"It wasn't like him even to let go."
+
+"I don't believe Beefy ever would," put in Olphert.  "That's why we
+gave him the billet."
+
+"He may have followed him through the pantry window," I suggested
+wildly.
+
+"But the door's shut," put in a boy.
+
+"I'll have a look at it," said the crammer.
+
+And the key no longer in the lock, and the insensible youth within!
+The key would be missed,  the door kicked in; nay, with the man's eye
+still upon me, I thought I could smell the chloroform.
+
+I thought I could hear a moan, and prepared for either any moment.  And
+how he did stare!  I  have detested blue eyes ever since, and blonde
+moustaches, and the whole stout easy-going type that is not such a fool
+as it looks.  I had brazened it out with the boys, but the first grown
+man was too many for me, and the blood ran out of my heart as though
+there was no Raffles at my back.  Indeed, I had forgotten him.  I had
+so longed to put this thing through by myself!  Even in my extremity it
+was almost a disappointment to me when his dear, cool voice fell like a
+delicious  draught upon my ears.  But its effect upon the others is
+more interesting to recall.  Until now  the crammer had the centre of
+the stage, but at this point Raffles usurped a place which was always
+his at will.  People would wait for what he had to say, as these people
+waited now for the simplest and most natural thing in the world.
+
+"One moment!" he had begun.
+
+"Well?" said the crammer, relieving me of his eyes at last.
+
+"I don't want to lose any of the fun--"
+
+"Nor must you," said the crammer, with emphasis.
+
+"But we've left our bikes outside, and mine's a Beeston Humber,"
+continued Raffles.  "If you don't mind, we'll bring 'em in before these
+fellows get away on them."
+
+And out he went without a look to see the effect of his words, I after
+him with a determined imitation of his self-control.  But I would have
+given  something to turn round.  I believe that for one  moment the
+shrewd instructor was taken in, but as  I reached the steps I heard him
+asking his pupils whether any of them had seen any bicycles outside.
+
+That moment, however, made the difference.  We were in the shrubbery,
+Raffles with his electric torch drawn and blazing, when we heard the
+kicking at the pantry door, and in the drive with our bicycles before
+man and boys poured pell-mell  down the steps.
+
+We rushed our machines to the nearer gate, for both were shut, and we
+got through and swung it home behind us in the nick of time.  Even I
+could mount before they could reopen the gate, which Raffles held
+against them for half an instant with unnecessary gallantry.  But he
+would see me in front of him, and so it fell to me to lead the way.
+
+Now, I have said that it was a very misty night (hence the whole
+thing), and also that these houses were on a hill.  But they were not
+nearly on the top of the hill, and I did what I firmly believe that
+almost everybody would have done in my place. Raffles, indeed, said he
+would have done it himself, but that was his generosity, and he was the
+one man who would not.  What I did was to turn in the opposite
+direction to the other gate, where we might so easily have been cut
+off, and to pedal for my life--up-hill!
+
+"My God!" I shouted when I found it out.
+
+"Can you turn in your own length?" asked Raffles, following loyally.
+
+"Not certain."
+
+"Then stick to it.  You couldn't help it.  But it's the devil of a
+hill!"
+
+"And here they come!"
+
+"Let them," said Raffles, and brandished his electric torch, our only
+light as yet.
+
+A hill seems endless in the dark, for you cannot see the end, and with
+the patter of bare feet gaining on us, I thought this one could have no
+end at all.  Of course the boys could charge up it quicker than we
+could pedal, but I even heard the voice of their stout instructor
+growing louder through the mist.
+
+"Oh, to think I've let you in for this!"  I groaned, my head over the
+handle-bars, every ounce of my weight first on one foot and then on the
+other.  I glanced at Raffles, and in the white light of his torch he
+was doing it all with his ankles, exactly as though he had been riding
+in a Gymkhana.
+
+"It's the most sporting chase I was ever in,"  said he.
+
+"All my fault!"
+
+"My dear Bunny, I wouldn't have missed it for the world!"
+
+Nor would he forge ahead of me, though he could have done so in a
+moment, he who from his  boyhood had done everything of the kind so
+much  better than anybody else.  No, he must ride a wheel's length
+behind me, and now we could not only hear the boys running, but
+breathing also.  And then of a sudden I saw Raffles on my right
+striking with his torch; a face flew out of the darkness to meet the
+thick glass bulb with the glowing wire enclosed; it was the face of the
+boy Olphert, with his enviable moustache, but it vanished with the
+crash of glass, and the naked wire thickened to the eye like a
+tuning-fork struck red-hot.
+
+I saw no more of that.  One of them had crept up on my side also; as I
+looked, hearing him pant, he was grabbing at my left handle, and I
+nearly sent Raffles into the hedge by the sharp turn I took to the
+right.  His wheel's length saved him.  But my boy could run, was
+overhauling me again, seemed certain of me this time, when all at once
+the Sunbeam ran easily; every ounce of my weight with either foot once
+more, and I was over the crest of the hill, the gray road reeling out
+from under me as I felt for my brake. I looked back at Raffles.  He had
+put up his feet.  I screwed my head round still further, and there were
+the boys in their pyjamas, their hands upon their knees, like  so many
+wicket-keepers, and a big man shaking his fist.  There was a lamp-post
+on the hill-top, and that was the last I saw.
+
+We sailed down to the river, then on through Thames Ditton as far as
+Esher Station, when we turned sharp to the right, and from the dark
+stretch by Imber Court came to light in Molesey,  and were soon
+pedalling like gentlemen of leisure through Bushey Park, our lights
+turned up, the broken torch put out and away.  The big gates had long
+been shut, but you can manoeuvre a bicycle through the others.  We had
+no further adventures on the way home, and our coffee was still warm
+upon the hob.
+
+"But I think it's an occasion for Sullivans," said Raffles, who now
+kept them for such.  "By all my  gods, Bunny, it's been the most
+sporting night we ever had in our lives!  And do you know which was the
+most sporting part of it?"
+
+"That up-hill ride?"
+
+"I wasn't thinking of it."
+
+"Turning your torch into a truncheon?"
+
+"My dear Bunny!  A gallant lad--I hated hitting him."
+
+"I know," I said.  "The way you got us out of the house!"
+
+"No, Bunny," said Raffles, blowing rings.  "It came before that, you
+sinner, and you know it!"
+
+"You don't mean anything I did?" said I, self-consciously, for I began
+to see that this was what he did mean.  And now at latest it will also
+be  seen why this story has been told with undue and inexcusable gusto;
+there is none other like it for me to tell; it is my one ewe-lamb in
+all these annals.  But Raffles had a ruder name for it.
+
+"It was the Apotheosis of the Bunny," said he, but in a tone I never
+shall forget.
+
+"I hardly knew what I was doing or saying," I said.  "The whole thing
+was a fluke."
+
+"Then," said Raffles, "it was the kind of fluke I always trusted you to
+make when runs were wanted."
+
+And he held out his dear old hand.
+
+
+THE KNEES OF THE GODS
+
+I
+
+"The worst of this war," said Raffles, "is the way it puts a fellow off
+his work."
+
+It was, of course, the winter before last, and we had done nothing
+dreadful since the early autumn.  Undoubtedly the war was the cause.
+Not that we were among the earlier victims of the fever.  I took
+disgracefully little interest in the Negotiations, while the Ultimatum
+appealed to Raffles as a sporting flutter.  Then we gave the  whole
+thing till Christmas. We still missed the cricket in the papers.  But
+one russet afternoon  we were in Richmond, and a terrible type was
+shouting himself hoarse with "'Eavy British  lorsses--orful slorter o'
+the Bo-wers!  Orful slorter!  Orful slorter!  'Eavy British lorsses!"
+I thought the terrible type had invented it, but Raffles gave him more
+than he asked, and then I held the bicycle while he tried to pronounce
+Eland's Laagte.  We were never again without our sheaf of evening
+papers, and Raffles ordered three morning ones, and I gave up mine in
+spite  of its literary page. We became strategists.  We  knew exactly
+what Buller was to do on landing,  and, still better, what the other
+Generals should  have done.  Our map was the best that could be
+bought, with flags that deserved a better fate than standing still.
+Raffles woke me to hear "The Absent-Minded Beggar" on the morning it
+appeared; he was one of the first substantial subscribers to the fund.
+By this time our dear landlady was more excited than we.  To our
+enthusiasm for Thomas she added a personal bitterness against the Wild
+Boars, as she persisted in calling them, each time as though it were
+the first.  I could linger over our landlady's attitude in the whole
+matter.  That was her only joke about it, and the  true humorist never
+smiled at it herself.  But you had only to say a syllable for a
+venerable gentleman, declared by her to be at the bottom of it all,  to
+hear what she could do to him if she caught him.  She could put him in
+a cage and go on tour with him, and make him howl and dance for his
+food like a debased bear before a fresh audience every day.  Yet a more
+kind-hearted woman I have never known.  The war did not uplift our
+landlady as it did her lodgers.
+
+But presently it ceased to have that precise effect upon us.  Bad was
+being made worse and worse;  and then came more than Englishmen could
+endure in that black week across which the names of  three African
+villages are written forever in letters of blood.  "All three pegs,"
+groaned Raffles on the last morning of the week; "neck-and-crop,
+neck-and-crop!"  It was his first word of cricket since the beginning
+of the war.
+
+We were both depressed.  Old school-fellows had fallen, and I know
+Raffles envied them; he spoke so wistfully of such an end. To cheer him
+up I proposed to break into one of the many more or less royal
+residences in our neighborhood; a tough crib was what he needed; but I
+will not trouble you with what he said to me. There was less crime in
+England that winter than for years past; there was none at all in
+Raffles.  And yet there were those who could denounce the war!
+
+So we went on for a few of those dark days,  Raffles very glum and
+grim, till one fine morning the Yeomanry idea put new heart into us
+all.  It  struck me at once as the glorious scheme it was to  prove,
+but it did not hit me where it hit others.  I was not a fox-hunter, and
+the gentlemen of England would scarcely have owned me as one of them.
+The case of Raffles was in that respect still more  hopeless (he who
+had even played for them at Lord's), and he seemed to feel it.  He
+would not speak to me all the morning; in the afternoon he went for a
+walk alone.  It was another man who came home, flourishing a small
+bottle packed in white paper.
+
+"Bunny," said he, "I never did lift my elbow; it's the one vice I never
+had.  It has taken me all these years to find my tipple, Bunny; but
+here it is, my panacea, my elixir, my magic philtre!"
+
+I thought he had been at it on the road, and asked him the name of the
+stuff.
+
+"Look and see, Bunny."
+
+And if it wasn't a bottle of ladies' hair-dye, warranted to change any
+shade into the once fashionable yellow within a given number of
+applications!
+
+"What on earth," said I, "are you going to do with this?"
+
+"Dye for my country," he cried, swelling.  "Dulce et decorum est,
+Bunny, my boy!"
+
+"Do you mean that you are going to the front?"
+
+"If I can without coming to it."
+
+I looked at him as he stood in the firelight, straight as a dart, spare
+but wiry, alert, laughing, flushed from his wintry walk; and as I
+looked, all the years that I had known him, and more besides, slipped
+from him in my eyes.  I saw him captain of the eleven at school.  I saw
+him running with the muddy ball on days like this, running round the
+other fifteen as a sheep-dog round a flock of sheep.  He had his cap on
+still, and but for the  gray hairs underneath--but here I lost him in a
+sudden mist.  It was not sorrow at his going, for I did not mean to let
+him go alone. It was enthusiasm, admiration, affection, and also, I
+believe, a sudden regret that he had not always appealed to that part
+of my nature to which he was appealing now.  It was a little thrill of
+penitence.  Enough  of it.
+
+"I think it great of you," I said, and at first that was all.
+
+How he laughed at me.  He had had his innings; there was no better way
+of getting out.  He had scored off an African millionaire, the Players,
+a Queensland Legislator, the Camorra, the late Lord Ernest Belville,
+and again and again off Scotland Yard.  What more could one man do in
+one lifetime?  And at the worst it was the death to die: no bed, no
+doctor, no temperature--and Raffles stopped himself.
+
+"No pinioning, no white cap," he added, "if you like that better."
+
+"I don't like any of it," I cried, cordially; "you've simply got to
+come back."
+
+"To what?" he asked, a strange look on him.
+
+And I wondered--for one instant--whether my little thrill had gone
+through him.  He was not a man of little thrills.
+
+Then for a minute I was in misery.  Of course I wanted to go too--he
+shook my hand without a word--but how could I?  They would never  have
+me, a branded jailbird, in the Imperial Yeomanry!  Raffles burst out
+laughing; he had been looking very hard at me for about three seconds.
+
+"You rabbit," he cried, "even to think of it!  We might as well offer
+ourselves to the Metropolitan Police Force.  No, Bunny, we go out to
+the Cape on our own, and that's where we enlist.  One of these
+regiments of irregular horse is the thing for us; you spent part of
+your pretty penny on horse-flesh, I believe, and you remember how  I
+rode in the bush!  We're the very men for them, Bunny, and they won't
+ask to see our birthmarks out there. I don't think even my hoary locks
+would put them off, but it would be too conspicuous in the ranks."
+
+Our landlady first wept on hearing our determination, and then longed
+to have the pulling of certain whiskers (with the tongs, and they
+should be red-hot); but from that day, and for as many as were left to
+us, the good soul made more of us than ever.  Not that she was at all
+surprised; dear brave gentlemen who could look for burglars on their
+bicycles at dead of night, it was only what  you might expect of them,
+bless their lion hearts.  I wanted to wink at Raffles, but he would not
+catch my eye.  He was a ginger-headed Raffles by the end of January,
+and it was extraordinary what a difference it made.  His most elaborate
+disguises had not been more effectual than this simple expedient, and,
+with khaki to complete the subdual of his individuality, he had every
+hope of escaping recognition in the field.  The man he dreaded was the
+officer he had known in old days; there were ever so many of him at the
+Front; and it was to minimize this risk that we went out second-class
+at the beginning of February.
+
+It was a weeping day, a day in a shroud, cold as clay, yet for that
+very reason an ideal day upon which to leave England for the sunny
+Front.  Yet my heart was heavy as I looked my last at her; it was heavy
+as the raw, thick air, until Raffles came and leant upon the rail at my
+side.
+
+"I know what you are thinking, and you've got to stop," said he. "It's
+on the knees of the gods,  Bunny, whether we do or we don't, and
+thinking won't make us see over their shoulders."
+
+
+II
+
+Now I made as bad a soldier (except at heart) as Raffles made a good
+one, and I could not say a harder thing of myself.  My ignorance of
+matters military was up to that time unfathomable, and is still
+profound.  I was always a fool with horses, though I did not think so
+at one time, and I had  never been any good with a gun.  The average
+Tommy may be my intellectual inferior, but he must know some part of
+his work better than I ever knew any of mine.  I never even learnt to
+be killed.  I do not mean that I ever ran away.  The South African
+Field Force might have been strengthened if I had.
+
+The foregoing remarks do not express a pose affected out of superiority
+to the usual spirit of the conquering hero, for no man was keener on
+the war than I, before I went to it.  But one can only write with gusto
+of events (like that little affair at Surbiton) in which one has
+acquitted oneself without discredit, and I cannot say that of my part
+in the war, of which I now loathe the thought for other reasons.  The
+battlefield was no place for me, and neither was the camp.  My
+ineptitude made me the butt of the looting, cursing, swash-buckling lot
+who formed the very irregular squadron which we joined; and it would
+have gone hard with me but for Raffles, who was soon the darling devil
+of them all, but never more loyally my friend.  Your fireside
+fire-eater does not think of these  things.  He imagines all the
+fighting to be with the enemy.  He will probably be horrified to hear
+that men can detest each other as cordially in khaki as in any other
+wear, and with a virulence seldom inspired by the bearded dead-shot in
+the opposite trench.  To the fireside fire-eater, therefore (for you
+have seen me one myself), I dedicate the story of Corporal Connal,
+Captain Bellingham, the General, Raffles, and myself.
+
+I must be vague, for obvious reasons.  The troop is fighting as I
+write; you will soon hear why I am not; but neither is Raffles, nor
+Corporal Connal.  They are fighting as well as ever, those other
+hard-living, harder-dying sons of all soils; but I am not going to say
+where it was that we fought with them.  I believe that no body of men
+of equal size has done half so much heroic work.  But they had got
+themselves a bad name off the field, so to speak; and I am not going to
+make it worse by saddling them before the world with Raffles and
+myself, and that ruffian Connal.
+
+The fellow was a mongrel type, a Glasgow Irishman by birth and
+upbringing, but he had been  in South Africa for years, and he
+certainly knew the country very well.  This circumstance, coupled with
+the fact that he was a very handy man with horses, as all colonists
+are, had procured him the first small step from the ranks which
+facilitates bullying if a man be a bully by nature, and is physically
+fitted to be a successful one.  Connal was a hulking ruffian, and in me
+had ideal game.  The  brute was offensive to me from the hour I joined.
+The details are of no importance, but I stood up to him at first in
+words, and finally for a few seconds on my feet.  Then I went down like
+an ox, and Raffles came out of his tent.  Their fight lasted twenty
+minutes, and Raffles was marked, but the net result was dreadfully
+conventional, for the  bully was a bully no more.
+
+But I began gradually to suspect that he was something worse. All this
+time we were fighting  every day, or so it seems when I look back.
+Never a great engagement, and yet never a day when we were wholly out
+of touch with the enemy.  I had thus several opportunities of watching
+the other enemy under fire, and had almost convinced myself of the
+systematic harmlessness of his own shooting, when a more glaring
+incident occurred.
+
+One night three troops of our squadron were ordered to a certain point
+whither they had patrolled the previous week; but our own particular
+troop was to stay behind, and in charge of no other than the villanous
+corporal, both our officer and sergeant having gone into hospital with
+enteric.  Our detention, however, was very temporary, and Connal would
+seem to have received the usual vague orders to proceed in the early
+morning to the place where the other three companies had camped.  It
+appeared that we were to form an escort to two squadron-wagons
+containing kits, provisions, and ammunition.
+
+Before daylight Connal had reported his departure to the commanding
+officer, and we passed the outposts at gray dawn. Now, though I was
+perhaps the least observant person in the troop, I was not the least
+wideawake where Corporal Connal was concerned, and it struck me at once
+that we were heading in the wrong direction.  My reasons are not
+material, but as a matter of fact our last week's patrol had pushed its
+khaki tentacles both east and west; and eastward they had met with
+resistance so determined as to compel them to retire; yet it was
+eastward that we were travelling now.  I at once spurred alongside
+Raffles, as he rode, bronzed and bearded, with warworn wide-awake over
+eyes grown keen as a hawk's, and a cutty-pipe sticking straight out
+from his front teeth.  I can see him now, so gaunt and grim and
+debonair, yet already with much of the nonsense gone out of him, though
+I thought he only smiled on my misgivings.
+
+"Did he get the instructions, Bunny, or did we?  Very well, then; give
+the devil a chance."
+
+There was nothing further to be said, but I felt more crushed than
+convinced; so we jogged along into broad daylight, until Raffles
+himself gave a whistle of surprise.
+
+"A white flag, Bunny, by all my gods!"
+
+I could not see it; he had the longest sight in all our squadron; but
+in a little the fluttering emblem, which had gained such a sinister
+significance in most of our eyes, was patent even to mine.  A little
+longer, and the shaggy Boer was in our midst upon his shaggy pony, with
+a half-scared, half-incredulous look in his deep-set eyes.  He was on
+his way to our lines with some missive, and had little enough to say to
+us, though frivolous and flippant questions were showered upon him from
+most saddles.
+
+"Any Boers over there?" asked one, pointing in the direction in which
+we were still heading.
+
+"Shut up!" interjected Raffles in crisp rebuke.
+
+The Boer looked stolid but sinister.
+
+"Any of our chaps?" added another.
+
+The Boer rode on with an open grin.
+
+And the incredible conclusion of the matter was that we were actually
+within their lines in another hour; saw them as large as life within a
+mile and a half on either side of us; and must every man of us have
+been taken prisoner had not every man but Connal refused to go one inch
+further, and had not the Boers themselves obviously suspected some
+subtle ruse as the only conceivable explanation of so madcap a
+manoeuvre.  They allowed us to retire  without firing a shot; and
+retire you may be sure we did, the Kaffirs flogging their teams in a
+fury of fear, and our precious corporal sullen but defiant.
+
+I have said this was the conclusion of the matter, and I blush to
+repeat that it practically was.  Connal was indeed wheeled up before
+the colonel, but his instructions were not written instructions, and he
+lied his way out with equal hardihood and tact.
+
+"You said 'over there,' sir," he stoutly reiterated; and the vagueness
+with which such orders were undoubtedly given was the saving of him for
+the time being.
+
+I need not tell you how indignant I felt, for one.
+
+"The fellow is a spy!" I said to Raffles, with no nursery oath, as we
+strolled within the lines that night.
+
+He merely smiled in my face.
+
+"And have you only just found it out, Bunny?  I have known it almost
+ever since we joined; but this morning I did think we had him on toast."
+
+"It's disgraceful that we had not," cried I.  "He ought to have been
+shot like a dog."
+
+"Not so loud, Bunny, though I quite agree; but I don't regret what has
+happened as much as you do.  Not that I am less bloodthirsty than you
+are in this case, but a good deal more so! Bunny, I'm  mad-keen on
+bowling him out with my own unaided hand--though I may ask you to take
+the wicket.  Meanwhile, don't wear all your animosity upon your sleeve;
+the fellow has friends who still believe in him; and there is no need
+for you to be more openly his enemy than you were before."
+
+Well, I can only vow that I did my best to follow this sound advice;
+but who but a Raffles can control his every look?  It was never my
+forte, as you  know, yet to this day I cannot conceive what I did to
+excite the treacherous corporal's suspicions.  He was clever enough,
+however, not to betray them, and lucky enough to turn the tables on us,
+as you shall hear.
+
+
+III
+
+Bloemfontein had fallen since our arrival, but there was plenty of
+fight in the Free Staters still, and I will not deny that it was these
+gentry who were showing us the sport for which our corps came in.
+Constant skirmishing was our portion, with now and then an action that
+you would know at least by name, did I feel free to mention them.  But
+I do not, and indeed it is better so.  I have not to describe the war
+even as I saw it, I am thankful to say, but only the martial story of
+us two and those others of whom you wot.  Corporal Connal was the
+dangerous blackguard you have seen.  Captain Bellingham is best known
+for his position in the batting averages a year or two ago, and for his
+subsequent failure to obtain a place in any of the five Test Matches.
+But I only think of him as the officer who recognized Raffles.
+
+We had taken a village, making quite a little name for it and for
+ourselves, and in the village our division was reinforced by a fresh
+brigade of the Imperial troops.  It was a day of rest, our first for
+weeks, but Raffles and I spent no small part of it in seeking high and
+low for a worthy means of quenching the kind of thirst which used to
+beset Yeomen and others who had left good cellars for the veldt.  The
+old knack came back to us both, though I believe that I alone was
+conscious of it at the time; and we were leaving the house, splendidly
+supplied, when we almost ran into the arms of an infantry officer, with
+a scowl upon his red-hot face, and an eye-glass flaming at us in the
+sun.
+
+"Peter Bellingham!" gasped Raffles under his  breath, and then we
+saluted and tried to pass on, with the bottles ringing like
+church-bells under our  khaki.  But Captain Bellingham was a hard man.
+
+"What have you men been doin'?" drawled he.
+
+"Nothing, sir," we protested, like innocence with an injury.
+
+"Lootin' 's forbidden," said he.  "You had better let me see those
+bottles."
+
+"We are done," whispered Raffles, and straightway we made a sideboard
+of the stoop across which he had crept at so inopportune a moment.  I
+had not the heart to raise my eyes again, yet it was many moments
+before the officer broke silence.
+
+"Uam Var!" he murmured reverentially at last.  "And Long John of Ben
+Nevis!  The first drop that's been discovered in the whole
+psalm-singing show!  What lot do you two belong to?"
+
+I answered.
+
+"I must have your names."
+
+In my agitation I gave my real one.  Raffles had turned away, as though
+in heart-broken contemplation of our lost loot.  I saw the officer
+studying his half-profile with an alarming face.
+
+"What's YOUR name?" he rapped out at last.
+
+But his strange, low voice said plainly that he knew, and Raffles faced
+him with the monosyllable of confession and assent.  I did not count
+the seconds until the next word, but it was Captain Bellingham who
+uttered it at last.
+
+"I thought you were dead."
+
+"Now you see I am not."
+
+"But you are at your old games!"
+
+"I am not," cried Raffles, and his tone was new to me.  I have seldom
+heard one more indignant.  "Yes," he continued, "this is loot, and the
+wrong  'un will out.  That's what you're thinking, Peter--I beg your
+pardon--sir.  But he isn't let out in the field!  We're playing the
+game as much as you are, old--sir."
+
+The plural number caused the captain to toss me a contemptuous look.
+"Is this the fellah who was taken when you swam for it?" he inquired,
+relapsing into his drawl.  Raffles said I was, and with that took a
+passionate oath upon our absolute rectitude as volunteers.  There could
+be no doubting him; but the officer's eyes went back at the bottles on
+the stoop.
+
+"But look at those," said he; and as he looked himself the light eye
+melted in his fiery face.  "And I've got Sparklets in my tent," he
+sighed.  "You make it in a minute!"
+
+Not a word from Raffles, and none, you may be sure, from me. Then
+suddenly Bellingham told  me where his tent was, and, adding that our
+case  was one for serious consideration, strode in its direction
+without another word until some sunlit paces separated us.
+
+"You can bring that stuff with you," he then flung over a
+shoulder-strap, "and I advise you to  put it where you had it before."
+
+A trooper saluted him some yards further on, and looked evilly at us as
+we followed with our loot.  It was Corporal Connal of ours, and the
+thought of him takes my mind off the certainly gallant captain who only
+that day had joined our division with the reinforcements.  I could not
+stand the man myself.  He added soda-water to our whiskey in his tent,
+and would only keep a couple of bottles when we came away.  Softened by
+the spirit, to which disuse made us all a little sensitive, our officer
+was soon convinced of the honest part that we were playing for once,
+and for fifty minutes of the hour we spent with him he and Raffles
+talked cricket without a break.  On parting they even shook hands; that
+was Long John in the captain's head; but the snob never addressed a
+syllable to me.
+
+And now to the gallows-bird who was still corporal of our troop: it was
+not long before Raffles was to have his wish and the traitor's wicket.
+We had resumed our advance, or rather our humble part in the great
+surrounding movement then taking place, and were under pretty heavy
+fire once more, when Connal was shot in the hand.  It was a curious
+casualty in more than one respect, and nobody seems to have seen it
+happen.  Though a flesh wound, it was a bloody one, and that may be why
+the surgeon did not at once detect those features which afterwards
+convinced him that the injury had been self-inflicted.  It was the
+right hand, and until it healed the man could be of no further use in
+the firing line; nor was the case serious enough for admission to a
+crowded field-hospital; and Connal himself offered his services as
+custodian of a number of our horses which we were keeping out of harm's
+way in a donga.  They had come there in the following manner: That
+morning we had been heliographed to reinforce the C.M.R., only to find
+that the enemy had the range to a nicety when we reached the spot.
+There were trenches for us men, but no place of safety for our horses
+nearer than this long and narrow donga which ran from within our lines
+towards those of the Boers.  So some of us galloped them thither,
+six-in-hand, amid the whine of shrapnel and the whistle of shot. I
+remember the man next me being killed by a shell with all his team, and
+the tangle of flying harness, torn horseflesh, and crimson khaki, that
+we left behind us on the veldt; also that a small red  flag,
+ludicrously like those used to indicate a putting-green, marked the
+single sloping entrance to the otherwise precipitous donga, which I for
+one was duly thankful to reach alive.
+
+The same evening Connal, with a few other light casualties to assist
+him, took over the charge for which he had volunteered and for which he
+was so admirably fitted by his knowledge of horses and his general
+experience of the country; nevertheless, he managed to lose three or
+four fine chargers in the course of the first night; and, early in the
+second, Raffles shook me out of a heavy slumber in the trenches where
+we had been firing all day.
+
+"I have found the spot, Bunny," he whispered; "we ought to out him
+before the night is over."
+
+"Connal?"
+
+Raffles nodded.
+
+"You know what happened to some of his horses last night?  Well, he let
+them go himself."
+
+"Never!"
+
+"I'm as certain of it," said Raffles, "as though I'd seen him do it;
+and if he does it again I shall see him.  I can even tell you how it
+happened.  Connal insisted on having one end of the donga to  himself,
+and of course his end is the one nearest the Boers. Well, then, he
+tells the other fellows to go to sleep at their end--I have it direct
+from one of them--and you bet they don't need a second invitation.  The
+rest I hope to see to-night."
+
+"It seems almost incredible," said I.
+
+"Not more so than the Light Horseman's dodge of poisoning the troughs;
+that happened at Ladysmith before Christmas; and two kind friends did
+for that blackguard what you and I are going to do for this one, and a
+firing-party did the rest.  Brutes!  A mounted man's worth a file on
+foot in  this country, and well they know it.  But this  beauty goes
+one better than the poison; that was  wilful waste; but I'll eat my
+wideawake if our loss last night wasn't the enemy's double gain!  What
+we've got to do, Bunny, is to catch him in the act.  It may mean
+watching him all night, but was ever game so well worth the candle?"
+
+One may say in passing that, at this particular point of contact, the
+enemy were in superior force, and for once in a mood as aggressive as
+our own.  They were led with a dash, and handled with a skill, which
+did not always characterize their commanders at this stage of the war.
+Their position  was very similar to ours, and indeed we were to spend
+the whole of next day in trying with an  equal will to turn each other
+out.  The result will scarcely be forgotten by those who recognize the
+occasion from these remarks.  Meanwhile it was  the eve of battle (most
+evenings were), and there  was that villain with the horses in the
+donga, and here were we two upon his track.
+
+Raffles's plan was to reconnoitre the place, and then take up a
+position from which we could watch our man and pounce upon him if he
+gave us cause.  The spot that we eventually chose and stealthily
+occupied was behind some bushes through which we could see down into
+the donga; there were the precious horses; and there sure enough was
+our wounded corporal, sitting smoking in his cloak, some glimmering
+thing in his lap.
+
+"That's his revolver, and it's a Mauser," whispered Raffles.  "He
+shan't have a chance of using it on us; either we must be on him before
+he knows we are anywhere near, or simply report.  It's easily proved
+once we are sure; but I should like to have the taking of him too."
+
+There was a setting moon.  Shadows were sharp and black.  The man
+smoked steadily, and the hungry horses did what I never saw horses do
+before; they stood and nibbled at each other's tails. I was used to
+sleeping in the open, under the  jewelled dome that seems so much
+vaster and  grander in these wide spaces of the earth.  I lay listening
+to the horses, and to the myriad small strange voices of the veldt, to
+which I cannot even now put a name, while Raffles watched.  "One  head
+is better than two," he said, "when you don't want it to be seen."  We
+were to take watch and watch about, however, and the other might sleep
+if he could; it was not my fault that I did nothing else; it was
+Raffles who could trust nobody but himself.  Nor was there any time for
+recriminations when he did rouse me in the end.
+
+But a moment ago, as it seemed to me, I had been gazing upward at the
+stars and listening to the dear, minute sounds of peace; and in another
+the great gray slate was clean, and every bone of me set in plaster of
+Paris, and sniping beginning between pickets with the day.  It was an
+occasional crack, not a constant crackle, but the whistle of a  bullet
+as it passed us by, or a tiny transitory flame for the one bit of
+detail on a blue hill-side, was an unpleasant warning that we two on
+ours were a target in ourselves.  But Raffles paid no attention to
+their fire; he was pointing downward through the bushes to where
+Corporal Connal stood with his back to us, shooing a last charger out
+of the mouth of the donga towards the Boer trenches.
+
+"That's his third," whispered Raffles, "but it's the first I've seen
+distinctly, for he waited for the blind spot before the dawn.  It's
+enough to land him, I fancy, but we mustn't lose time.  Are you ready
+for a creep?"
+
+I stretched myself, and said I was; but I devoutly wished it was not
+quite so early in the  morning.
+
+"Like cats, then, till he hears, and then into him for all we're worth.
+He's stowed his iron safe away, but he mustn't have time even to feel
+for it.  You take his left arm, Bunny, and hang on to that like a
+ferret, and I'll do the rest.  Ready?  Then  now!"
+
+And in less time than it would take to tell, we were over the lip of
+the donga and had fallen upon the fellow before he could turn his head;
+nevertheless, for a few instants he fought like a wild beast, striking,
+kicking, and swinging me off my feet as I obeyed my instructions to the
+letter, and stuck to his left like a leech.  But he soon gave that up,
+panting and blaspheming, demanded explanations in his hybrid tongue
+that had half a brogue and  half a burr.  What were we doing?  What had
+he done? Raffles at his back, with his right wrist twisted round and
+pinned into the small of it, soon told him that, and I think the words
+must have been the first intimation that he had as to who his
+assailants were.
+
+"So it's you two!" he cried, and a light broke over him.  He was no
+longer trying to shake us off, and now he dropped his curses also, and
+stood chuckling to himself instead.  "Well," he went on, "you're bloody
+liars both, but I know something else that you are, so you'd better let
+go."
+
+A coldness ran through me, and I never saw  Raffles so taken aback.
+His grip must have relaxed for a fraction of time, for our captive
+broke out in a fresh and desperate struggle, but now we pinned him
+tighter than ever, and soon I saw him turning green and yellow with the
+pain.
+
+"You're breaking my wrist!" he yelled at last.
+
+"Then stand still and tell us who we are."
+
+And he stood still and told us our real names.  But Raffles insisted on
+hearing how he had found us out, and smiled as though he had known what
+was coming when it came.  I was dumbfounded.
+
+The accursed hound had followed us that evening to Captain Bellingham's
+tent, and his undoubted cleverness in his own profession of spy had
+done  the rest.
+
+"And now you'd better let me go," said the master of the situation, as
+I for one could not help  regarding him.
+
+"I'll see you damned," said Raffles, savagely.
+
+"Then you're damned and done for yourself, my cocky criminal. Raffles
+the burglar!  Raffles  the society thief!  Not dead after all, but
+'live and  'listed.  Send him home and give him fourteen years, and
+won't he like 'em, that's all!"
+
+"I shall have the pleasure of hearing you shot first," retorted
+Raffles, through his teeth, "and  that alone will make them bearable.
+Come on, Bunny, let's drive the swine along and get it over."
+
+And drive him we did, he cursing, cajoling, struggling, gloating, and
+blubbering by turns.  But Raffles never wavered for an instant, though
+his face was tragic, and it went to my heart, where that look stays
+still.  I remember at the time, though I never let my hold relax, there
+was a moment when I added my entreaties to those of our prisoner.
+Raffles did not even reply to me.  But I was thinking of him, I swear.
+I was thinking of that gray set face that I never saw before or after.
+
+"Your story will be tested," said the commanding officer, when Connal
+had been marched to the guard-tent.  "Is there any truth in his?"
+
+"It is perfectly true, sir."
+
+"And the notorious Raffles has been alive all these years, and you are
+really he?"
+
+"I am, sir."
+
+"And what are you doing at the front?"
+
+Somehow I thought that Raffles was going to smile, but the grim set of
+his mouth never altered, neither was there any change in the ashy
+pallor which had come over him in the donga when Connal mouthed his
+name.  It was only his eyes that lighted up at the last question.
+
+"I am fighting, sir," said he, as simply as any subaltern in the army.
+
+The commanding officer inclined a grizzled head perceptibly, and no
+more.  He was not one of any school, our General; he had his own ways,
+and we loved both him and them; and I believe that he loved the rough
+but gallant corps that bore his name.  He once told us that he knew
+something about most of us, and there were things that Raffles had done
+of which he must have heard.  But he only moved his grizzled head.
+
+"Did you know he was going to give you away?"  he asked at length, with
+a jerk of it toward the guard-tent.
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"But you thought it worth while, did you?"
+
+"I thought it necessary, sir."
+
+The General paused, drumming on his table, making up his mind. Then his
+chin came up with the decision that we loved in him.
+
+"I shall sift all this," said he.  "An officer's name was mentioned,
+and I shall see him myself.  Meanwhile you had better go on--fighting."
+
+
+IV
+
+Corporal Connal paid the penalty of his crime before the sun was far
+above the hill held by the enemy.  There was abundance of
+circumstantial evidence against him, besides the direct testimony of
+Raffles and myself, and the wretch was shot at last with little
+ceremony and less shrift.  And that was the one good thing that
+happened on the day that broke upon us hiding behind the bushes
+overlooking the donga; by noon it was my own turn.
+
+I have avoided speaking of my wound before I need, and from the
+preceding pages you would not gather that I am more or less lame for
+life.  You will soon see now why I was in no hurry to recall the
+incident.  I used to think of a wound received in one's country's
+service as the proudest trophy a man could acquire. But the sight of
+mine depresses me every morning of my life; it was due for one thing to
+my own slow eye for cover, in taking which (to aggravate my case) our
+hardy little corps happened to excel.
+
+The bullet went clean through my thigh, drilling the bone, but happily
+missing the sciatic nerve; thus the mere pain was less than it might
+have been, but of course I went over in a light-brown heap.  We were
+advancing on our stomachs to take the hill, and thus extend our
+position, and it was at this point that the fire became too heavy for
+us, so  that for hours (in the event) we moved neither  forward nor
+back.  But it was not a minute before Raffles came to me through the
+whistling scud, and in another I was on my back behind a shallow rock,
+with him kneeling over me and unrolling my  bandage in the teeth of
+that murderous fire.  It was on the knees of the gods, he said, when I
+begged him to bend lower, but for the moment I thought his tone as
+changed as his face had been earlier in the morning.  To oblige me,
+however, he took more care; and, when he had done all that one comrade
+could for another, he did avail himself of the cover he had found for
+me.  So there  we lay together on the veldt, under blinding sun and
+withering fire, and I suppose it is the veldt that I should describe,
+as it swims and flickers before wounded eyes.  I shut mine to bring it
+back, but all that comes is the keen brown face of Raffles, still a
+shade paler than its wont; now bending to sight and fire; now peering
+to see results, brows raised, eyes widened; anon turning to me with the
+word to set my tight lips grinning.  He  was talking all the time, but
+for my sake, and I knew it.  Can you wonder that I could not see an
+inch beyond him?  He was the battle to me then; he is the whole war to
+me as I look back  now.
+
+"Feel equal to a cigarette?  It will buck you up, Bunny.  No, that one
+in the silver paper, I've hoarded it for this.  Here's a light; and so
+Bunny takes the Sullivan!  All honor to the sporting  rabbit!"
+
+"At least I went over like one," said I, sending the only clouds into
+the blue, and chiefly wishing  for their longer endurance. I was as hot
+as a cinder from my head to one foot; the other leg was ceasing to
+belong to me.
+
+"Wait a bit," says Raffles, puckering; "there's a gray felt hat at deep
+long-on, and I want to add  it to the bag for vengeance....
+Wait--yes--no, no luck!  I must pitch 'em up a bit more. Hallo!
+Magazine empty.  How goes the Sullivan, Bunny?  Rum to be smoking one
+on the veldt with a hole in your leg!"
+
+"It's doing me good," I said, and I believe it was.  But Raffles lay
+looking at me as he lightened his bandolier.
+
+"Do you remember," he said softly, "the day we first began to think
+about the war?  I can see the pink, misty river light, and feel the
+first bite there was in the air when one stood about; don't you wish we
+had either here!  'Orful slorter, orful slorter;' that fellow's face, I
+see it too; and here we have the thing he cried.  Can you believe it's
+only six months ago?"
+
+"Yes," I sighed, enjoying the thought of that afternoon less than he
+did; "yes, we were slow to catch fire at first."
+
+"Too slow," he said quickly.
+
+"But when we did catch," I went on, wishing we never had, "we soon
+burnt up."
+
+"And then went out," laughed Raffles gayly.  He was loaded up again.
+"Another over at the  gray felt hat," said he; "by Jove, though, I
+believe he's having an over at me!"
+
+"I wish you'd be careful," I urged.  "I heard it too."
+
+"My dear Bunny, it's on the knees you wot of.  If anything's down in
+the specifications surely that is.  Besides--that was nearer!"
+
+"To you?"
+
+"No, to him.  Poor devil, he has his specifications too; it's
+comforting to think that....  I can't see where that one pitched; it
+may have been a wide; and it's very nearly the end of the over again.
+Feeling worse, Bunny?"
+
+"No, I've only closed my eyes.  Go on talking."
+
+"It was I who let you in for this," he said, at his bandolier again.
+
+"No, I'm glad I came out."
+
+And I believe I still was, in a way; for it WAS rather fine to be
+wounded, just then, with the pain growing less; but the sensation was
+not to last me  many minutes, and I can truthfully say that I have
+never felt it since.
+
+"Ah, but you haven't had such a good time as I  have!"
+
+"Perhaps not."
+
+Had his voice vibrated, or had I imagined it?  Pain-waves and loss of
+blood were playing tricks with my senses; now they were quite dull, and
+my leg alive and throbbing; now I had no leg at all, but more than all
+my ordinary senses in every other part of me.  And the devil's
+orchestra was  playing all the time, and all around me, on every class
+of fiendish instrument, which you have been made to hear for yourselves
+in every newspaper.  Yet all that I heard was Raffles talking.
+
+"I have had a good time, Bunny."
+
+Yes, his voice was sad; but that was all; the vibration must have been
+in me.
+
+"I know you have, old chap," said I.
+
+"I am grateful to the General for giving me to-day.  It may be the
+last.  Then I can only say it's been the best--by Jove!"
+
+"What is it?"
+
+And I opened my eyes.  His were shining.  I can see them now.
+
+"Got him--got the hat!  No, I'm hanged if I have; at least he wasn't in
+it.  The crafty cuss, he must have stuck it up on purpose.  Another
+over ... scoring's slow....  I wonder if he's sportsman enough to take
+a hint?  His hat-trick's foolish. Will he show his face if I show mine?"
+
+I lay with closed ears and eyes.  My leg had come to life again, and
+the rest of me was numb.
+
+"Bunny!"
+
+His voice sounded higher.  He must have been sitting upright.
+
+"Well?"
+
+But it was not well with me; that was all I thought as my lips made the
+word.
+
+"It's not only been the best time I ever had, old Bunny, but I'm not
+half sure--"
+
+Of what I can but guess; the sentence was not finished, and never could
+be in this world.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Raffles, by E. W. Hornung
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RAFFLES ***
+
+***** This file should be named 707.txt or 707.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/7/0/707/
+
+Produced by Judith Boss.  HTML version by Al Haines.
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.