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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The False Faces, by Louis Joseph Vance
+
+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: The False Faces
+
+Author: Louis Joseph Vance
+
+Posting Date: November 15, 2011 [EBook #9908]
+Release Date: February, 2006
+First Posted: October 30, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FALSE FACES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, Tom
+Allen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FALSE FACES
+
+FURTHER ADVENTURES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LONE WOLF
+
+BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I Out of No Man's Land
+
+II From a British Port
+
+III In the Barred Zone
+
+IV In Deep Waters
+
+V On the Banks
+
+VI Under Suspicion
+
+VII In Stateroom 29
+
+VIII Off Nantucket
+
+IX Sub Sea
+
+X At Base
+
+XI Under the Rose
+
+XII Resurrection
+
+XIII Reincarnation
+
+XIV Defamation
+
+XV Recognition
+
+XVI Au Printemps
+
+XVII Finesse
+
+XVIII Danse Macabre
+
+XIX Force Majeure
+
+XX Riposte
+
+XXI Question
+
+XXII Chicane
+
+XXIII Amnesty
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+OUT OF NO MAN'S LAND
+
+
+On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still, as
+still as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him, where
+they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contests
+which the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few charnel yards of
+that debatable ground.
+
+Alone of all that awful company this man lived and, though he ached with
+the misery of hunger and cold and rain-drenched garments, was unharmed.
+
+Ever since nightfall and a brisk skirmish had made practicable an
+undetected escape through the German lines, he had been in the open,
+alternately creeping toward the British trenches under cover of darkness
+and resting in deathlike immobility, as he now rested, while pistol-lights
+and star-shells flamed overhead, flooding the night with ghastly glare
+and disclosing in pitiless detail that two-hundred-yard ribbon of earth,
+littered with indescribable abominations, which set apart the combatants.
+When this happened, the living had no other choice than to ape the dead,
+lest the least movement, detected by eyes that peered without rest through
+loopholes in the sandbag parapets, invite a bullet's blow.
+
+Now it was midnight, and lights were flaring less frequently, even as
+rifle-fire had grown more intermittent ... as if many waters might quench
+out hate in the heart of man!
+
+For it was raining hard--a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavy
+atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and
+inexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter of
+a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering of
+machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a dull thunder of
+cannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering a vast and shimmering
+curtain of slender lances, steel-bright, close-ranked, between the trenches
+and over all that weary land. Thus had it rained since noon, and thus--for
+want of any hint of slackening--it might rain for another twelve hours, or
+eighteen, or twenty-four....
+
+The star-rocket, whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool, paled and
+winked out in mid-air, and for several minutes unbroken darkness obtained
+while, on hands and knees, the man crept on toward that gap in the British
+barbed-wire entanglements which he had marked down ere daylight waned,
+shaping a tolerably straight course despite frequent detours to avoid the
+unspeakable. Only once was his progress interrupted--when straining senses
+apprised him that a British patrol was taking advantage of the false truce
+to reconnoitre toward the enemy lines, its approach betrayed by a nearing
+_squash_ of furtive feet in the boggy earth, the rasp of constrained
+respiration, a muttered curse when someone slipped and narrowly escaped a
+fall, the edged hiss of an officer's whisper reprimanding the offender.
+Incontinently he who crawled dropped flat to the greasy mud and lay
+moveless.
+
+Almost at the same instant, warned by a trail of sparks rising in a long
+arc from the German trenches, the soldiers imitated his action, and, as
+long as those triple stars shone in the murk, made themselves one with him
+and the heedless dead. Two lay so close beside him that the man could have
+touched either by moving a hand a mere six inches; he was at pains to do
+nothing of the sort; he was sedulous to clench his teeth against their
+chattering, even to hold his breath, and regretted that he might not mute
+the thumping of his heart. Nor dared he stir until, the lights fading out,
+the patrol rose and skulked onward.
+
+Thereafter his movements were less stealthy; with a detachment of their
+own abroad in No Man's Land, the British would refrain from shooting at
+shadows. One had now to fear only German bullets in event the patrol were
+discovered.
+
+Rising, the man slipped and stumbled on in semi-crouching posture, ready
+to flatten to earth as soon as any one of his many overshoulder glances
+detected another sky-spearing flight of sparks. But this necessity he was
+spared; no more lights were discharged before he groped through the wires
+to the parapet, with almost uncanny good luck, finding the very spot where
+the British had come over the top, indicated by protruding uprights of a
+rough wooden scaling ladder.
+
+As he turned, felt with a foot for the uppermost rung, and began to
+descend, he was saluted by a voice hoarse with exposure, from the black
+bowels of the trench:
+
+"Blimy! but ye're back in a 'urry! Wot's up? Forget to put perfume on yer
+pocket-'andkerchief--or wot?"
+
+The man's response, if he made any, was lost in a heavy splash as his feet
+slipped on the slimy rungs, delivering him precipitately into a knee-deep
+stream of foul water which moved sluggishly through the trench like the
+current of a half-choked sewer--a circumstance which neither suprised him
+nor added to his physical discomfort, who could be no more wet or defiled
+than he had been.
+
+Floundering to a foothold, he cast about vainly for a clue to the other's
+whereabouts; for if the night was thick in the open, here in the trench
+its density was as that of the pit; the man could distinguish positively
+nothing more than a pallid rift where the walls opened overhead.
+
+"Well, sullen, w'ere's yer manners? Carn't yer answer a civil question?"
+
+Turning toward the speaker, the man replied in good if rather carefully
+enunciated English:
+
+"I am not of your comrades. I am come from the enemy trenches."
+
+"The 'ell yer are! 'Ands up!"
+
+The muzzle of a rifle prodded the man's stomach. Obediently he lifted both
+hands above his head. A thought later, he was half blinded by the sudden
+spot-light of an electric flash-lamp.
+
+"Deserter, eh? You kamerad--wot?"
+
+"Kamerad!" the man echoed with an accent of contempt. "I am no German--I
+am French. I have come through the Boche lines to-night with important
+information which I desire to communicate forthwith to your commanding
+officer."
+
+"Strike me!" his catechist breathed, skeptical.
+
+There was a new sound of splashing in the trench. A third voice chimed in:
+"'Ello? Wot's all the row abaht?"
+
+"Step up and tike a look for yerself. 'Ere's a blighter wot sez 'e's com
+from the Germ trenches with important information for the O.C."
+
+"Bloody liar," the newcomer commented dispassionately. "Mind yer eye.
+Likely it's just another pl'yful little trick of the giddy Boche. 'Ere
+you!" The splashing drew nearer. "Wot's yer gime? Speak up if yer don't
+want a bullet through yer in'ards."
+
+"I play no game," the man said patiently. "I am unarmed--your prisoner, if
+you like."
+
+"I like, all right. Mike yer mind easy abaht that. But wot's all this
+'important information'?"
+
+"I shall divulge that only to the proper authorities. Be good enough to
+conduct me to your commanding officer without more delay."
+
+"Wot do yer mike of 'im, corp'ril?" the first soldier enquired. "'Ow abaht
+an inch or two o' the bay'net to loosen 'is tongue?"
+
+After a moment's hesitation in perplexed silence, the corporal took the
+flash-lamp from the private and with its beam raked the prisoner from head
+to foot, gaining little enlightenment from this review of a tall, spare
+figure clothed in the familiar gray overcoat of the German private--its
+face a mere mask of mud through which shone eyes of singular brilliance and
+steadiness, the eyes of a man of intelligence, determination, and courage.
+
+"Keep yer 'ands 'igh," the corporal advised curtly. "Ginger, you search
+'im."
+
+Propping his rifle against the wall of the trench, its butt on the
+firing-step just out of water, the private proceeded painstakingly
+to examine the person of the prisoner; in course of which process he
+unbuttoned and threw open the gray overcoat, exposing a shapeless tunic and
+trousers of shoddy drab stuff.
+
+"'E 'asn't got no arms--'e 'asn't got nothink, not so much as 'is blinkin'
+latch-key."
+
+"Very good. Get back on yer post. I'll tike charge o' this one."
+
+Grounding his own rifle, the corporal fixed its bayonet, then employed it
+in a gesture of unpleasant significance.
+
+"'Bout fice," he ordered. "March. Yer can drop yer 'ands--but don't go
+forgettin' I'm right 'ere be'ind yer."
+
+In silence the prisoner obeyed, wading down the flooded trench, the
+spot-light playing on his back, striking sullen gleams from the inky water
+that swirled about his knees, and disclosing glimpses of coated figures
+stationed at regular intervals along the firing-step, faces steadfast to
+loopholes in the parapet.
+
+Now and again they passed narrow rifts in the walls of the trench,
+entrances to dugouts betrayed by glimmers of candle-light through the
+cracks of makeshift doors or the coarse mesh of gunnysack curtains.
+
+From one of these, at the corporal's summons, a sleepy subaltern stumbled
+to attend ungraciously to his subordinate's report, and promptly ordered
+the prisoner taken on to the regimental headquarters behind the lines.
+
+A little farther on captive and captor turned off into a narrow and
+tortuous communication trench. Thereafter for upward of ten minutes they
+threaded a labyrinth of deep, constricted, reeking ditches, with so little
+to differentiate one from another that the prisoner wondered at the sure
+sense of direction which enabled the corporal to find his way without
+mis-step, with the added handicap of the abysmal darkness. Then, of a
+sudden, the sides of the trench shelved sharply downward, and the two
+debouched into a broad, open field. Here many men lay sleeping, with only
+waterproof sheets for protection from that bitter deluge which whipped the
+earth into an ankle-deep lake of slimy ooze and lent keener accent to the
+abiding stench of filth and decomposing flesh. A slight hillock stood
+between this field and the firing-line--where now lively fusillades
+were being exchanged--its profile crowned with a spectral rank of
+shell-shattered poplars sharply silhouetted against a sky in which
+star-shells and Verey lights flowered like blooms of hell.
+
+Here the corporal abruptly commanded his prisoner to halt and himself
+paused and stood stiffly at attention, saluting a group of three officers
+who were approaching with the evident intention of entering the trench. One
+of these loosed upon the pair the flash of a pocket lamp. At sight of the
+gray overcoat all three stopped short.
+
+A voice with the intonation of habitual command enquired: "What have we
+here?"
+
+The corporal replied: "A prisoner, sir--sez 'e's French--come across the
+open to-night with important information--so 'e sez."
+
+The spot-light picked out the prisoner's face. The officer addressed him
+directly.
+
+"What is your name, my man?"
+
+"That," said the prisoner, "is something which--like my intelligence--I
+should prefer to communicate privately."
+
+With a startled gesture the officer took a step forward and peered intently
+into that mud-smeared countenance.
+
+"I seem to know your voice," he said in a speculative tone.
+
+"You should," the prisoner returned.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the officer to his companions, "you may continue your
+rounds. Corporal, follow me with your prisoner."
+
+He swung round and slopped off heavily through the mud of the open field.
+
+Behind them the sound of firing in the forward trenches swelled to an
+uproar augmented by the shrewish chattering of machine-guns. Then a battery
+hidden somewhere in the blackness in front of them came into action,
+barking viciously. Shells whined hungrily overhead. The prisoner glanced
+back: the maimed poplars stood out stark against a sky washed with wave
+after wave of infernal light....
+
+Some time later he was conscious of a cobbled way beneath his sodden
+footgear. They were entering the outskirts of a ruined village. On either
+hand fragments of walls reared up with sashless windows and gaping doors
+like death masks of mad folk stricken in paroxysm.
+
+Within one doorway a dim light burned; through it the officer made his way,
+prisoner and corporal at his heels, passing a sentry, then descending a
+flight of crazy wooden steps to a dank and gloomy cellar, stone-walled
+and vaulted. In the middle of the cellar stood a broad table at which an
+orderly sat writing by the light of two candles stuck in the necks of empty
+bottles. At another table, in a corner, a sergeant and an operator of the
+Signal Corps were busy with field telephone and telegraph instruments. On a
+meagre bed of damp and mouldy straw, against the farther wall, several men,
+orderlies and subalterns, rested in stertorous slumbers. Despite the cold
+the atmosphere was a reek of tobacco smoke, sweat, and steam from wet
+clothing.
+
+The man at the centre table rose and saluted, offering the commanding
+officer a sheaf of scribbled messages and reports. Taking the chair thus
+vacated, the officer ran an eye over the papers, issued several orders
+inspired by them, then turned attention to the prisoner.
+
+"You may return to your post, corporal."
+
+The corporal executed a smart about-face and clumped up the steps. In
+answer to the officer's steadfast gaze the prisoner stepped forward and
+confronted him across the table.
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+"My name," said the prisoner, after looking around to make sure that none
+of the other tenants of the cellar was within earshot, "is Lanyard--Michael
+Lanyard."
+
+"The Lone Wolf!"
+
+Involuntarily the officer jumped up, almost overturning his chair.
+
+"That same," the prisoner affirmed, adding with a grimace of besmirched and
+emaciated features that was meant for a smile--"General Wertheimer."
+
+"Wertheimer is not my name."
+
+"I am aware of that. I uttered it merely to confirm my identity to you; it
+is the only name I ever knew you by in the old days, when you were in the
+British Secret Service and I a famous thief with a price upon my head, when
+you and I played hide and seek across half Europe and back again--in the
+days of Troyon's and 'the Pack,' the days of De Morbihan and Popinot
+and...."
+
+"Ekstrom," the officer supplied as the prisoner hesitated oddly.
+
+"And Ekstrom," the other agreed.
+
+There was a little silence between the two; then the officer mused aloud:
+"All dead!"
+
+"All ... but one."
+
+The officer looked up sharply. "Which--?"
+
+"The last-named."
+
+"Ekstrom? But we saw him die! You yourself fired the shot that--"
+
+"It was not Ekstrom. Trust that one not to imperil his precious carcase
+when he could find an underling to run the risk for him! I tell you I have
+seen Ekstrom within this last month, alive and serving the Fatherland as
+the genius of that system of espionage which keeps the enemy advised of
+your every move, down to the least considerable--that system which makes it
+possible for the Boche to greet every regiment by name when it moves up to
+serve its time in your advanced trenches."
+
+"You amaze me!"
+
+"I shall convince you; I bring intelligence which will enable you to tear
+apart this web of treason within your own lines and...."
+
+Lanyard's voice broke. The officer remarked that he was
+trembling--trembling so violently that to support himself he must grip the
+edge of the table with both hands.
+
+"You are wounded?"
+
+"No--but cold to my very marrow, and faint with hunger. Even the German
+soldiers are on starvation rations, now; the civilians are worse off; and
+I--I have been over there for years, a spy, a hunted thing, subsisting as
+casually as a sparrow!"
+
+"Sit down. Orderly!"
+
+And there was no more talk between these two for a time. Not only did the
+officer refuse to hear another word before Lanyard had gorged his fill of
+food and drink, but an exigent communication from the front, transmitted
+through the trench telephone system, diverted his attention temporarily.
+
+Gnawing ravenously at bread and meat, Lanyard watched curiously the scenes
+in the cellar, following, as best he might, the tides of combat; gathering
+that German resentment of a British bombing enterprise (doubtless the work
+of that same squad which had stolen past him in the gloom of No Man's Land)
+had developed into a violent attempt to storm the forward trenches.
+In these a desperate struggle was taking place. Reinforcements were
+imperatively wanted.
+
+Activities at the signallers' table became feverish; the commanding officer
+stood over it, reading incoming messages as they were jotted down and
+taking such action thereupon as his judgment dictated. Orderlies, dragged
+half asleep from their nests of straw, were shaken awake and despatched to
+rouse and rush to the front the troops Lanyard had seen sleeping in the
+open field. Other orderlies limped or reeled down the cellar steps,
+delivered their despatches, and, staggered out through a breach in the wall
+to have their injuries attended to in the field dressing-station in the
+adjoining cellar, or else threw themselves down on the straw to fall
+instantly asleep despite the deafening din.
+
+The Boche artillery, seeking blindly to silence the field batteries whose
+fire was galling their offensive, had begun to bombard the village. Shells
+fled shrieking overhead, to break in thunderous bellows. Walls toppled
+with appalling crashes, now near at hand, now far. The ebb and flow of
+rifle-fire at the front contributed a background of sound not unlike the
+roaring of an angry surf. Machine-guns gibbered like maniacs. Heavier
+artillery was brought into play behind the British lines, apparently at no
+great distance from the village; the very flag-stones of the cellar floor
+quaked to the concussions of big-calibre guns.
+
+Through the breach in the wall echoed the screams and groans of wounded.
+The foul air became saturated with a sickening stench of iodoform. Gusts of
+wet wind eddied hither and yon. Candles flickered and flared, guttered out,
+were renewed. Monstrous shadows stole out from black corners, crept along
+mouldy walls, crouched, sprang and vanished, or, inscrutably baffled,
+retreated sullenly to their lairs....
+
+For the better part of an hour the struggle continued; then its vigour
+began to wane. The heaviest British metal went out of action; some time
+later the field batteries discontinued their activities. The volume of
+firing in the advance trenches dwindled, was fiercely renewed some half a
+dozen times, died away to normal. Once more the Boche had been beaten back.
+
+Returning to his chair, the commanding officer rested his elbows upon the
+table and bowed his head between his hands in an attitude of profound
+fatigue. He seemed to remind himself of Lanyard's presence only at 'cost of
+a racking effort, lifting heavy-lidded eyes to stare almost incredulously
+at his face.
+
+"I presumed you were in America," he said in dulled accents.
+
+"I was ... for a time."
+
+"You came back to serve France?"
+
+Lanyard shook his head. "I returned to Europe after a year, the spring
+before the war."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I was hunted out of New York. The Boche would not let me be."
+
+The officer looked startled. "The Boche?"
+
+"More precisely, Herr Ekstrom--to name him as we knew him. But this I did
+not suspect for a long time, that it was he who was responsible for my
+persecution. I knew only that the police of America, informed of my
+identity with the Lone Wolf, sought to deport me, that every avenue to
+an honourable livelihood was closed. So I had to leave, to try to lose
+myself."
+
+"Your wife ... I mean to say, you married, didn't you?"
+
+Lanyard nodded. "Lucy stuck by me till ... the end.... She had a little
+money of her own. It financed our flight from the States. We made a
+round-about journey of it, to elude surveillance--and, I think, succeeded."
+
+"You returned to Paris?"
+
+"No: France, like England, was barred to the Lone Wolf.... We settled down
+in Belgium, Lucy and I and our boy. He was three months old. We found a
+quiet little home in Louvain--"
+
+The officer interrupted with a low cry of apprehension, Lanyard checked him
+with a sombre gesture. "Let me tell you....
+
+"We might have been happy. None knew us. We were sufficient unto ourselves.
+But I was without occupation; it occurred to me that my memoirs might
+make good reading--for Paris; my friends the French are as fond of their
+criminals as you English of your actors. On the second of August I
+journeyed to Paris to negotiate with a publisher. While I was away the
+Boche invaded Belgium. Before I could get back Louvain had been occupied,
+sacked...."
+
+He sat for a time in brooding silence; the officer made no attempt to
+rouse him, but the gaze he bent upon the man's lowered head was grave and
+pitiful. Abruptly, in a level and toneless voice, Lanyard resumed:
+
+"In order to regain my home I had to go round by way of England and
+Holland. I crossed the Dutch frontier disguised as a Belgian peasant. When
+I reentered Louvain it was to find ... But all the world knows what the
+blond beast did in Louvain. My wife and little son had vanished utterly. I
+searched three months before I found trace of either. Then ... Lucy died in
+my arms in a wretched hovel near Aerschot. She had seen our child butchered
+before her eyes. She herself...."
+
+Lanyard's hand, that rested on the table, clenched and whitened beneath its
+begrimed skin. His eyes fathomed distances immeasurably removed beyond the
+confines of that grim cellar. But he presently continued:
+
+"Ekstrom had accompanied the army of invasion, had seen and recognized Lucy
+in passing through Louvain. Therefore she and my son were among the first
+to be sacrificed.... When I stood over her grave I dedicated my life to the
+extermination of Ekstrom and all his breed. I have since done things I do
+not like to think about. But the Prussian spy system is the weaker for my
+work....
+
+"But Ekstrom I could never find. It was as if he knew I hunted him. He was
+seldom twenty-four hours ahead of me, yet I never caught up with him but
+once; and then he was too closely guarded.... I pursued him to Berlin,
+to Potsdam, three times to the western front, to Serbia, once to
+Constantinople, twice to Petrograd."
+
+The officer uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Lanyard looked his way
+with a depreciatory air.
+
+"Nothing strange about that. To one of my early training that was
+easy--everything was easy but the end I sought.... En passant I collected
+information concerning the workings of the Prussian spy system. From time
+to time I found means to communicate somewhat of this to the Surété in
+Paris. I believe France and England have already profited a little through
+my efforts. They shall profit more, and quickly, when I have told all that
+I have to tell....
+
+"Of a sudden Ekstrom vanished. Overnight he disappeared from Germany. A
+false lead brought me back to this front. Two days ago I learned he had
+been sent to America on a secret mission. Knowing that the States have
+severed diplomatic relations with Berlin and tremble on the verge of a
+declaration of war, we can surmise something of the nature of his mission.
+I mean to see that he fails.... To follow him to America, making my way
+out through Belgium and Holland, pursuing such furtive ways as I must in
+territory dominated by the Boche, meant much time lost. So I came through
+the lines to-night. Fortune was kind in throwing me into your hands: I
+count upon your assistance. As an ex-agent of the Secret Service you are in
+a position to make smooth my path; as an Englishman, you will advance the
+interests of a prospective ally of England if you help me to the limit of
+your ability; for what I mean to do in America will serve that country, by
+exposing the conspiracies of the Boche across the water, as much as it will
+serve my private ends."
+
+The officer's hand fell across the table and closed upon the knotted fist
+of the Lone Wolf.
+
+"As an Englishman," he said simply--"of course. But no less as your
+friend."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FROM A BRITISH PORT
+
+
+"And one man in his time plays many parts": few more than this same
+Lanyard. In no way to be identified with the hunted creature who crept into
+the British lines out of No Man's Land was the Monsieur Duchemin who, ten
+days after that wintry midnight, took passage for New York from "a British
+port," aboard the steamship _Assyrian_.
+
+André Duchemin was the name inscribed in the credentials furnished him in
+recognition of signal assistance rendered the British Secret Service in its
+task of scotching the Prussian spy system. And the personality he chose
+to assume suited well the name. A man of modest and amiable deportment,
+viewing the world with eyes intelligent and curious, his temper reacting
+from its ways in terms of grave humour, Monsieur Duchemin passed peaceably
+on his lawful occasions, took life as he found it, made the best of irksome
+circumstances.
+
+This last idiosyncrasy stood him in good stead. For the _Assyrian_ failed
+to clear upon her proposed sailing date and for a livelong week thereafter
+chafed alongside her landing stage, steam up, cargo laden and stowed,
+nothing lacking but the Admiralty's permission to begin her westbound
+voyage--a permission inscrutably withheld, giving rise to a common
+discontent which the passengers dissembled to the various best of their
+abilities, that is to say, in most cases thinly or not at all.
+
+Yet they were none of them unreasonable beings. They had come aboard one
+and all keyed up to a high nervous pitch, pardonable in such as must commit
+their lives to the dread adventure of the barred zone, wanting nothing
+so much as to get it over with, whatever its upshot. And everlasting
+procrastination required them day after day to steel their hearts anew
+against that Terror which followed its furtive ways beneath the leaden
+waters of the Channel!
+
+Alone among them this Monsieur Duchemin paraded successfully a false face
+of resignation, protesting no predilection whatsoever for a watery grave,
+no infatuate haste to challenge the Hun upon his chosen hunting-ground. In
+the fullness of time it would be permitted to him to go down to the sea in
+this ship. Meanwhile he found it apparently pleasant and restful to explore
+the winding cobbled ways of that antiquated waterside community, made over
+by the hand of War into a bustling seaport, or to tramp the sunken lanes
+that seamed those green old Cornish hills which embosomed the wide harbour
+waters, or to lounge about the broad white decks of the _Assyrian_ watching
+the diurnal traffic of the haven--a restless, warlike pageant.
+
+Daily, in earliest dusk of dawn, the wakeful might watch the faring forth
+of a weirdly assorted fleet of small craft, the day patrol, to relieve a
+night patrol as weirdly heterogeneous. Daily, at all hours, mine-sweepers
+came and went, by twos and twos, in flocks, in schools; and daily bellowing
+offshore detonations advertised their success in garnering those horned
+black seeds of death which the Hun and his kin were sedulous to sow in the
+fairways. While daily battleships both great and small rolled in wearily to
+refit and dress their wounds, or took swift departure on grim and secret
+errands.
+
+There was, moreover, the not-infrequent spectacle of some minor ship of
+war--a truculent, gray destroyer as like as not--shepherding in a sleek
+submarine, like a felon whale armoured and strangely caparisoned in
+gray-brown steel, to be moored in chains with a considerable company of its
+fellows on the far side of the roadstead, while its crew was taken ashore
+and consigned to some dark limbo of oblivion.
+
+And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian
+tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed, plying
+its assassin's trade beneath a neutral flag.
+
+Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the
+town gaol-yard.
+
+One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the _Assyrian_,
+Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed eyelids into the quarter
+whence the sounds reverberated.
+
+The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste,
+paused momentarily in his task of masticating a fat dark cigar.
+
+"This way out," he commented thoughtfully.
+
+Lanyard nodded; but the third, a plumply ingratiative native of Geneva,
+known to the ship as Emil Dressier, frowned in puzzlement.
+
+"Pardon, Monsieur Crane, but what is that you say--'this way out'?"
+
+"Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of our
+nootral friends from Norway."
+
+The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"
+
+"Well, I don't know about that. They done their damnedest to fix it for us
+to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm just as
+satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the
+warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur
+Duchemin?"
+
+"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.
+
+"And war is ... No: Sherman was all wrong. Hell's got perfectly good
+grounds for a libel suit against William Tecumseh for what he up and said
+about it and war, all in the same breath."
+
+Lanyard smiled faintly, but Dressler pondered this obscure reference with
+patent distress. Crane champed his cigar reflectively.
+
+"What's more to our purpose," he said presently: "I shouldn't be surprised
+if this meant the wind-up of our rest-cure here. That's the third
+mine-layer they've collected this week--two subs, and now this benevolent
+nootral. Am I right, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"Who knows?" Lanyard replied with a smile. "Even now the mine-sweeping
+flotilla is coming home, as you see; which means, the neighbouring waters
+have been cleared. It is altogether a possibility that we may be permitted
+to depart this night."
+
+Even so the event: as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter of
+crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the _Assyrian_
+warped out into mid-channel and anchored there for the night.
+
+Inasmuch as she was to sail as the tide served, some time before sunrise,
+the passengers were advised to seek their berths at an early hour. Thirty
+minutes before the steamship entered the danger zone (as she would soon
+after leaving the harbour) they would be roused and were expected promptly
+to assemble on deck, with life-preservers, and station themselves near the
+boats to which they were individually assigned.
+
+For their further comforting they were treated, in the ebb of the chill
+blue twilight, to boat-drill and final instructions in the right adjustment
+of life-belts.
+
+A preoccupied company assembled in the dining saloon for what might be
+its last meal. In the shadow of the general apprehension, conversation
+languished; expressions of relief on the part of those who had been loudest
+in complaining at the delays were notably unheard; even Crane, Lanyard's
+nearest neighbour at table, was abnormally subdued. Reviewing that array of
+sobered and anxious faces, Lanyard remarked--not for the first time, but
+with renewed gratitude--that in all the roster of passengers none were
+children and but two were women: the American widow of an English officer
+and her very English daughter, an angular and superior spinster.
+
+Avoiding the customary post-prandial symposium in the smoking room, Lanyard
+slipped away with his cigar for a lonely turn on deck.
+
+Beneath a sky heavily canopied, the night was stark black and loud with
+clashing waters. A fitful wind played in gusts now grim, now groping, like
+a lost thing blundering blindly about in that deep darkness. Ashore a
+few wan lights, widely spaced, winked uncertainly, withdrawn in vast
+remoteness; those near at hand, of the anchored shipping, skipped and
+swayed and flickered in mad mazes of goblin dance. To him who paced those
+vacant, darkened decks, the sense of dissociation from all the common,
+kindly phenomena of civilization was something intimate and inescapable.
+Melancholy as well rode upon that black-winged wind.
+
+At pause beneath the bridge, the adventurer rested elbows upon the teakwood
+rail and with importunate eyes searched the masked face of his destiny.
+There was great fear in his heart, not of death, but lest death overtake
+him before that scarlet hour when he should encounter the man whom he must
+always think of as "Ekstrom."
+
+After that, nothing would matter: let Death come then as swiftly as it
+willed....
+
+He was not even middle-aged, on the hither side of thirty; yet his attitude
+was that of one who had already crossed the great divide of the average
+mortal span: he looked backward upon a life, never forward to one. To him
+his history seemed a thing written, lacking the one word Finis: he had
+lived and loved and lost--had arrayed himself insolently against God and
+Man, had been lifted toward the light a little way by a woman's love, had
+been thrust relentlessly back into the black pit of his damnation. He made
+no pretense that it was otherwise with him: remained now merely the thing
+he had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once
+kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled
+again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous
+to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to
+destroy and be in turn destroyed....
+
+Two decks below, about amidships, a cargo port was thrust open to the
+night. A thick, broad beam of light leaped out, buffeting the murk,
+striking evanescent glimmers from the rocking facets of the waters.
+Deckhands busied themselves rigging out an accommodation ladder. A tender
+of little tonnage panted nervously up out of nowhere and was made fast
+alongside. The light raked its upper deck, picking out in passing a group
+of men in uniforms. Fugitively something resembling a petticoat snapped
+in the wind. Then several persons moved toward the accommodation ladder,
+climbed it, disappeared through the cargo port. The wearer of the petticoat
+did not accompany them.
+
+Lanyard noted these matters subconsciously, for the time altogether
+preoccupied, casting forward his thoughts along those dim trails his feet
+must tread who followed his dark star....
+
+Ten minutes later a deck-steward found him, and paused, touching his cap.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir, but all passingers is requested to report immedately in
+the music room."
+
+Indifferently Lanyard thanked the man and went below, to find the music
+room tenanted by a full muster of his fellow passengers, all more or less
+indignantly waiting to be cross-examined by the party of port officials
+from the tender--the ship's purser standing by together with the second and
+third officers and a number of stewards.
+
+Resentment was not unwarranted: already, before being suffered to take up
+quarters on board the _Assyrian_, each passenger had submitted to a most
+comprehensive survey of his credentials, his mental, moral, and social
+status, his past record, present affairs, and future purposes. A formality
+to be expected by all such as travel in war time, it had been rigid but
+mild in contrast with this eleventh-hour inquisition--a proceeding so
+drastic and exhaustive that the only plausible inference was official
+determination to find excuse for ordering somebody ashore in irons. Nothing
+was overlooked: once passports and other proofs of identity had been
+scrutinized, each passenger was conducted to his stateroom and his person
+and luggage subjected to painstaking search. None escaped; on the other
+hand, not one was found guilty of flagitious peculiarity. In the upshot the
+inquisitors, baffled and betraying every symptom of disappointment, were
+fain to give over and return to their tender.
+
+By this time Lanyard, one of the last to be grilled and passed, found
+himself as little inclined for sleep as the most timorous soul on board.
+Selecting an American novel from the ship's library, he repaired to
+the smoking room, where, established in a corner apart, he became an
+involuntary and, at first, a largely inattentive, eavesdropper upon an
+animated debate involving some eight or ten gentlemen at a table in the
+middle of the saloon--its subject, the recent visitation.
+
+Measures so extraordinary were generally held to indicate an incentive more
+extraordinary still.
+
+"You can't get away from it," he heard Crane declare: "there's some sort of
+funny business going on, or liable to go on, aboard this ship. She wasn't
+held up for a solid week out of pure cussedness. Neither did they come
+aboard to-night to give us another once-over through sheer voluptuousness.
+There's a reason."
+
+"And what," a satiric English voice enquired, "do you assume that reason to
+be?"
+
+"Search me. 'Sfar's I'm concerned the processes of the British Intelligence
+Office are a long sight past finding out."
+
+"It is simple enough," one of Crane's compatriots suggested: "the
+_Assyrian_ is suspected of entertaining a devil unawares."
+
+"Monsieur means--?" the Swiss enquired.
+
+"I mean, the authorities may have been led to believe some one of us a
+questionable character."
+
+"German spy?"
+
+"Possibly."
+
+"Or an English traitor?"
+
+"Impossible," asserted another Briton heavily. "There is to-day no such
+thing in England. Two years ago the supposition might have been plausible.
+But that breed has long since been stamped out--in England."
+
+"Another guess," Crane cut in: "they've taken considerable trouble to clear
+the track for us. Maybe it occurred to somebody at the last moment to make
+sure none of us was likely to pull off an inside job."
+
+"'Inside job?'" Dressler pleaded.
+
+"Planting bombs in the coal bunkers--things like that--anything to crab our
+getting through the barred zone in spite of mines and U-boats."
+
+"Any such attempt would mean almost certain death!"
+
+"What of it? It's been tried before--and got away with. You've got to hand
+it to Fritz, he'll risk hell-for-breakfast cheerful any time he gets it in
+his bean he's serving Gott und Vaterland."
+
+"Granted," said the Englishman. "But I fancy such an one would find it far
+from easy to secure passage upon this or any other vessel."
+
+"How so? You may have haltered all your traitors, but there's still
+a-plenty German spies living in England. Even you admit that. And if they
+can get by your Secret Service, to say nothing of Scotland Yard, what's to
+prevent their fixing to leave the country?"
+
+"Nothing, certainly. But I still contend it is hardly likely."
+
+"Of course it's hardly likely. Look at these guys to-night--dead set on
+making an awful example of anybody that couldn't come clean. I didn't
+notice them missing any bets. They combed me to the Queen's taste; for
+a while I was sure scared they'd extract my pivot tooth to see if there
+wasn't something incriminating and degrading secreted inside it. And nobody
+got off any easier. _I_ say the good ship _Assyrian_ has a pretty clean
+bill of health to go sailing with."
+
+"On the other hand"--yet another American voice was speaking--"no spy or
+criminal worth his salt would try to ship without preparations thorough
+enough to insure success, barring accidents."
+
+"Criminal?" drawled the Briton incredulously.
+
+"The enterprisin' burglar keeps a-burglin', even in war time. There have
+been notable burglaries in London of late, according to your newspapers."
+
+"And you think the thief would attempt to smuggle his loot out of the
+country aboard such a ship as this?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Scotland Yard to the contrary notwithstanding?"
+
+"If Scotland Yard is as efficient as you think, sir, certainly any sane
+thief would make every effort to leave a country it was making too hot for
+him."
+
+"Considerable criminal!" Crane jeered.
+
+"Undeceive yourself, seńor." This was a Brazilian, a quiet little dark body
+who commonly contented himself with a listening rôle in the smoking-room
+discussions. "There are truly criminals of intelligence. And war conditions
+are driving them out of Europe."
+
+Of a sudden Lanyard--stretched out at length upon the leather cushions,
+in full view of these gossips--became aware that he was being closely
+scrutinised. By whom, with what reason or purpose, he could not surmise;
+and it were unwise to look up from that printed page. But that sixth sense
+of his--intuition, what you will--that exquisitively sensitive sentinel
+admonished that at least one person in the room was watching him narrowly.
+
+Though he made no move other than to turn a page, his glance followed
+blindly blurring lines of text, and his quickened wits overlooked no shade
+of meaning or intonation as that talk continued.
+
+"A criminal of intelligence," some one observed, "is a giddy paradox whose
+fatuous existence is quite fittingly confined to the realm of fable."
+
+"You took the identical words right out of my mouth," Crane complained
+bitterly.
+
+"Your pardon, seńores: history confutes your incredulity."
+
+"But we are talking about to-day."
+
+"Even to-day--can you deny it?--men attain high places by means which the
+law would construe as criminal, were they not intelligent enough to outwit
+it."
+
+"Big game," Crane objected; "something else again. What we contend is no
+man of ordinary common sense could get his own consent to crack a safe, or
+pick a pocket, or do second-story work, or pull any rough stuff like that."
+
+"Again you overlook living facts," persisted the Brazilian.
+
+"Name one--just one."
+
+"The Lone Wolf, then."
+
+"Unnatural history is out of my line," Crane objected. "Why is a lone wolf,
+anyway?"
+
+The Brazilian's voice took on an accent of exasperation. "Seńores, I do not
+jest. I am a student of psychology, more especially of criminal psychology.
+I lived long in Paris before this war, and took deep interest in the case
+of the Lone Wolf."
+
+"Well, you've got me all excited. Go on with your story."
+
+"With much pleasure.... This gentleman, then, this Michael Lanyard, as he
+called himself, was a distinguished Parisian figure, a man of extraordinary
+attainment, esteemed the foremost connoisseur d'art in all Europe.
+Suddenly, at the zenith of his career, he disappeared. Subsequently it
+became known that he had been identical with that great Parisian criminal,
+the Lone Wolf, a superman of thieves who had plundered all Europe with
+unvarying success for almost a decade."
+
+"Then what made the silly ass quit?"
+
+"According to my information, he won the love of a young woman--"
+
+"And reformed for her sake, of course?"
+
+"To the contrary, seńor; Lanyard renounced his double life because of a
+theory on which he had founded his astonishing success. According to this
+theory, any man of intelligence may defy society as long as he will, always
+providing he has no friend, lover, or confederate in whom to confide. A man
+self-contained can never be betrayed; the stupid police seldom apprehend
+even the most stupid criminal, save through the treachery of some intimate.
+This Lanyard proved his theory by confounding not only the utmost
+efforts of the police but even the jealous enmity of that association of
+Continental criminals known as the Bande Noire--until he became a lover.
+Then he proved his intelligence: in one stroke he flouted the police,
+delivered into their hands the inner circle of the Bande Noire, and
+vanished with the woman he loved."
+
+"And then--?"
+
+"The rest," said the Brazilian, "is silence."
+
+"It is for to-night, anyway," Crane observed, yawning. "It's bedtime. Here
+comes the busy steward to put the lights and us out."
+
+There was a general stir; men drained glasses, knocked out pipes, got up,
+murmured good-nights. Lanyard closed the American novel upon a forefinger,
+looked up abstractedly, rose, moved toward the door. The utmost effort of
+exceptional powers of covert observation assured him that, at the moment,
+none of the company favoured him with especial attention; the author of
+that interest whose intensity had so weighed upon his consciousness had
+been swift to dissemble.
+
+On his way forward he exchanged bows and smiles with Crane and one or two
+others, his gesture completely casual. Yet when he entered the starboard
+alleyway he carried with him a complete catalogue of those who had
+contributed to the conversation. With all, thanks to seven days'
+association, he stood on terms of shipboard acquaintance. Not one, in his
+esteem, was more potentially mischievous than any other--not even the
+Brazilian Velasco, though he had been the first to name the Lone Wolf.
+
+It was, furthermore, quite possible that the mention of his erstwhile
+sobriquet had been utterly fortuitous.
+
+And yet, one might not forget that sensation of being under intent
+surveillance....
+
+In his stateroom Lanyard stood for several minutes gravely peering into the
+mirror above the washstand.
+
+The face he scanned was lean and worn in feature, darkly weathered, framed
+in hair whose jet already boasted an accent of silver at either temple--the
+face of a man inured to hardship, seasoned in suffering, strong in
+self-knowledge. The incandescence of an intelligence coldly dispassionate,
+quick and shrewd, lighted those dark eyes. Distinctively a face of Gallic
+cast, three years of long-drawn torment had served in part to erase from
+it wellnigh all resemblance to both the brilliant social freebooter of
+ante-bellum Paris and that undesirable alien whom the authorities had
+sought to deport from the States. Amazing facility in impersonation had
+done the rest; unrecognisable as what he had been, he was to-day flawlessly
+the incarnation of what he elected to seem--Monsieur Duchemin, gentleman,
+of Paris.
+
+Impossible to believe his disguise had been so soon penetrated....
+
+And yet, again, that gossip of the smoking room....
+
+Police work? Or had Ekstrom's creatures picked up his trail once more?
+
+Beneath that urbane mask of his, a hunted, wild thing poised in question,
+mistrustful of the very wind, prick-eared, fangs agleam, eyes grimly
+apprehensive....
+
+A little sound, the least of metallic clicks, breaking the hush of his
+solitude, froze the adventurer to attention. Only his glance swerved
+swiftly to a fastened door in the forward partition--his stateroom being
+the aftermost of three that might be thrown together to form a suite. The
+nickeled knob was being tried with infinite precaution. On the half turn it
+checked with a faint repetition of the click. Then the door itself quivered
+almost imperceptibly to pressure, though it yielded not a fraction of an
+inch.
+
+Lanyard's eyes hardened. He did not stir from where he stood, but one hand
+whipped an automatic from his pocket while the other darted out to the
+switch-box by the head of his berth and extinguished the light.
+
+Instantly a glimmer of light in the forward stateroom showed through
+a narrow strip of iron grill-work set in the top of the partition for
+ventilating purposes.
+
+Simultaneously the door-knob was gently released, and with another louder
+click the light in the adjoining cubicle was blotted out.
+
+Mystified, Lanyard undressed and turned in, but not to sleep--not for a
+little, at least.
+
+Who might this neighbour be who tried his door so stealthily? Before
+to-night that room had had no tenant. Apparently one of the passengers had
+seen fit to shift his quarters. To what end? To keep a jealous eye on
+the Lone Wolf, perhaps? So much the better, then: Lanyard need only make
+enquiry in the morning to identify his enemy.
+
+Deliberately closing his eyes, he dismissed the enigma. He possessed in
+marked degree that attribute of genius, ability to command slumber at will.
+Swiftly the troubled deeps of thought grew calm; on their placid surface
+inconsequent visions were mirrored darkly, fugitive scenes from the store
+of subconscious memory: Crane's lantern-jawed physiognomy, keen eyes
+semi-veiled by humorously drooping lids, the extreme corner of his mouth
+bulging round his everlasting cigar ... grimy lions in Trafalgar Square of
+a rainy afternoon ... the octagonal room of L'Abbaye Thęléme at three in
+the morning, a swirl of Bacchanalian shapes ... Wertheimer's soldierly
+figure beside the telegraphers' table in that noisome cave at the Front ...
+the deck of a tender in darkness swept by a shaft of yellow light which
+momentarily revealed a group of folk with upturned faces, a petticoat
+fluttering in its midst....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+IN THE BARRED ZONE
+
+
+Day broke with rather more than half a gale blowing beneath a louring sky.
+Once clear of the bottleneck mouth of the harbour, the _Assyrian_ ran into
+brutal quartering seas. An old hand at such work, for upward of a decade
+a steady-paced Dobbin of the transatlantic lanes, she buckled down to it
+doggedly and, remembering her duty by her passengers, rolled no more than
+she had to, buried her nose in the foaming green only when she must. For
+all her care, the main deck forward was alternately raked by stinging
+volleys of spray and scoured by frantic cascades. More than once the crew
+of the bow gun narrowly escaped being carried overboard to a man. Blue with
+cold, soaked to the buff despite oilskins, they stuck stubbornly to their
+posts. Perched beyond reach of shattering wavecrests, the passengers on the
+boat-deck huddled unhappily in the lee of the superstructure--and snarled
+in response to the cheering information that better conditions for baffling
+the ubiquitous U-boat could hardly have been brewed by an indulgent
+Providence. Sheeting spindrift contributed to lower visibility: two
+destroyers standing on parallel courses about a mile distant to port and
+to starboard were more often than not barely discernible, spectral vessels
+reeling and dipping in the haze. The ceaseless whistle of wind in the
+rigging was punctuated by long-drawn howls which must have filled any
+conscientious banshee with corrosive envy.
+
+Toward mid-morning rain fell in torrents, driving even the most fearful
+passengers to shelter within the superstructure. A majority crowded the
+landing at the head of the main companionway close by the leeward door.
+Bolder spirits marched off to the smoking room--Crane starting this
+movement with the declaration that, for his part, he would as lief drown
+like a rat in a trap as battling to keep up in the frigid inferno of those
+raging seas. A handful of miserables, too seasick to care whether the ship
+swam or sank, mutinously took to their berths.
+
+Stateroom 27--adjoining Lanyard's--sported obstinately a shut door.
+Lanyard, sedulous not to discover his interest by questioning the stewards,
+caught never a glimpse of its occupant. For his own satisfaction he took a
+covert census of passengers on deck as the vessel entered the danger zone,
+and made the tally seventy-one all told--the number on the passenger list
+when the _Assyrian_ had left her landing stage the previous evening.
+
+It seemed probable, therefore, that the person in 27 had come aboard from
+the tender, either with or following the official party. Lanyard was
+unable to say that more had not left the tender than appeared to sit in
+inquisition in the music room.
+
+By noon the wind was beginning to moderate, and the sea was being beaten
+down by that relentlessly lashing rain. Visibility, however, was more low
+than ever. A fairly representative number descended to the dining saloon
+for luncheon--a meal which none finished. Midway in its course a thunderous
+explosion to starboard drove all in panic once more to the decks.
+
+Within two hundred yards of the _Assyrian_ a floating mine had destroyed a
+patrol boat. No more was left of it than an oil-filmed welter of splintered
+wreckage: of its crew, never a trace.
+
+Imperturbably the _Assyrian_ proceeded. Not so her passengers: now the
+smoking room was deserted even by the insouciant Crane, and the seasick to
+a woman brought their troubles back to the boat-deck.
+
+Alone the tenant of 27 stopped below. And the riddle of this ostensible
+indifference to terrors that clawed at the vitals of every other soul on
+board grew to intrigue Lanyard to the point of obsession. Was the reason
+brute apathy or sheer foolhardihood? He refused either explanation,
+feeling sure some darker and more momentous motive dictated this obstinate
+avoidance of the public eye. Exasperation aroused by failure to fathom the
+mystery took precedence in his thoughts even to the personal solicitude
+excited by last night's gossip of the smoking room....
+
+With no other disturbing incident the afternoon wore away, the wind
+steadily flagging, the waves as steadily subsiding. When twilight closed in
+there was nothing more disturbing to one's equilibrium than a sea of long
+and sullen rolls scored by the pelting downpour.
+
+Perhaps as many as ten venturesome souls dined in the saloon, their fellows
+sticking desperately to the decks and contenting themselves with coffee and
+sandwiches.
+
+Daylight waned, terrors waxed: passengers instinctively gravitated into
+little knots and clusters, conversing guardedly as if fearful lest their
+normal accents bring down upon them those Apaches of the underseas for
+signs of whom their frightened glances incessantly ranged over-rail and
+searched the heaving wastes.
+
+The understanding was tacit that all would spend the night on deck.
+
+Dusk at length blotted out the shadows of their guardian destroyers, and a
+great and desolating loneliness settled down upon the ship. One by one
+the passengers grew dumb; still they clung together, but seemingly their
+tongues would no more function.
+
+With nightfall, the rain ceased, the breeze freshened a trifle, the pall of
+cloud lifted and broke, giving glimpses of remote, impersonal stars. Later
+a gibbous moon leered through the flying wrack, checkering the sea with
+a restless pattern of black and silver. In this ghastly setting the
+_Assyrian_, showing no lights, a shape of flying darkness pursuing a course
+secret to all save her navigators, strained ever onward, panting, groaning,
+quivering from stem to stern ... like an enchanted thing doomed to
+perpetual labours, striving vainly to break bonds invisible that transfixed
+her to one spot forever-more, in the midst of that bleak purgatory of
+shadow and moonshine and dread....
+
+Sensitive to the eerie influence of the hour, Lanyard interrupted the tour
+of the decks which he had steadily pursued for the better part of the
+evening, and rested at the forward rail, looking down over the main deck,
+its bleached planking dotted with dark shapes of fixed machinery. In the
+bows the formless, uncouth bulk of the gun squatted in its tarpaulin. Its
+crew tramped heavily to and fro, shivering in heavy jackets, hands in
+pockets, shoulders hunched up to ears. Farther aft an iron door clanged
+heavily behind a sailor emerging from an alleyway; he approached the ship's
+bell, with practised hand sounded two double strokes, then turned and sang
+out in the weird minor traditional in his calling:
+
+"_Four bells--and a-a-all's well_!"
+
+Even as the wind made free with the melancholy echoes of that assurance,
+the spell upon the ship was exorcised.
+
+Overhead, from the foremast crow's-nest, a voice screamed, hoarsely urgent:
+
+"_Torpedo! 'Ware submarine to port_!"
+
+Many things happened simultaneously, or in a span of seconds strangely
+scant. The gunners sprang to station, whipping away the tarpaulin, while
+their lieutenant focussed binoculars upon the confused distances of the
+night. Obedient to his instructions, the long, gleaming tube of steel
+pivoted smoothly to port.
+
+From the bridge a signal rocket soared, hissing. The whistle loosed
+stentorian squalls of indignation and distress--one long and four short.
+Commands were shouted; the engine-room telegraph wrangled madly. The
+momentum of the _Assyrian_ was checked startlingly; her bows sheered
+smartly off to port.
+
+A rumour of frightened voices and pounding feet came from the leeward
+boat-deck, where the main body of the passengers was congregated, hidden
+from Lanyard by the shoulder of the foreward deck-house. A number of men
+ran forward, paused by the rail, stared, and scurried back, yelling in
+alarm. At this the din swelled to uproar.
+
+Scanning closely the surface of the sea, Lanyard himself descried a silvery
+arrow of spray lancing the swells, making with deadly speed toward the port
+bow of the _Assyrian_. But now both screws were churning full speed astern;
+the vessel lost headway altogether. Then her engines stopped. For a
+breathless instant she rested inert, like something paralyzed with fright,
+bows-on to the torpedo, the telegraph ringing frantically. Then the
+starboard screw began to turn full ahead, the port remaining idle. The
+bows swung off still more sharply to port. The torpedo shot in under them,
+vanished for a breathless moment, reappeared a boat's-length to starboard,
+plunged harmlessly on its unhindered way down the side of the vessel, and
+disappeared astern.
+
+Amidships terrified passengers milled like sheep, hampering the work of the
+boat-crews at the davits. Ship's officers raged among them, endeavouring
+to restore order. Half a mile or so dead ahead a tiny tongue of flame spat
+viciously in the murk. A projectile shrieked overhead, and dropped into the
+sea astern. Another followed and fell short.
+
+The U-boat was shelling the _Assyrian_.
+
+The forward gun barked violent expostulation, if without visible effect;
+the submarine lobbing two more shells at the steamship with an indifference
+to its own peril astonishing in one of its craven breed, trained to strike
+and run before counterstroke may be delivered. Its extraordinary temerity,
+indeed, argued ignorance of the convoying destroyers.
+
+Coincident with the second shot, however, these unleashed searchlights
+slashed the dark through and through with their great, white, fanlike
+blades, till first one then the other picked up and steadied relentlessly
+upon a toy-boat shape that swam the swells about midway between the
+_Assyrian_ and the destroyer off the port bows.
+
+Simultaneously the quickfirers of the latter went into action, jetting
+orange flame. In the searchlights' glare, spurts of white water danced all
+round the submarine. A mutter of gunfire rolled over to the _Assyrian_,
+abruptly silenced by an imperative deep voice of heavier metal--which spoke
+but once.
+
+With the lurid unreality of clap-trap theatrical illusion the U-boat
+vomited a great, spreading sheet of flame....
+
+Someone at the rail, near Lanyard's shoulder, uttered a hushed cry of
+horror.
+
+He paid no heed, his interest wholly focussed upon that distant patch of
+shining water. As his dazzled vision cleared he saw that the submarine had
+disappeared.
+
+Unconsciously, in French, he commented: "So that is finished!"
+
+Likewise in French, but in a woman's voice of uncommon quality, deep
+and bell-sweet, came the protest from the passenger at his side: "But,
+monsieur, what are we doing? We turn away from them--those poor things
+drowning there!"
+
+That was quite true: under forced draught the _Assyrian_ was heading away
+on a new course.
+
+"They drown out there in that black water--and we leave them to that!"
+
+Lanyard turned. "The destroyers will take care of them," he said--"if any
+survived that explosion with strength enough to swim."
+
+He spoke from the surface of his thoughts and with a calm that veiled
+profound surprise. The woman by his side was neither the American widow nor
+her English daughter, but wholly a stranger to the ship's company he knew.
+
+The training of the Lone Wolf had been wasted if one swift glance had
+failed to comprehend every essential detail: that tall, straight, slender
+figure cloaked in the folds of a garment whose hood framed a face of
+singular pallor and sweetness in the moonlight, its shadowed eyes wide with
+emotion, its lips a little parted....
+
+With a shiver she lifted her hands to her eyes as if to darken the visions
+of her imagination.
+
+"They die out there," she said, in murmurs barely audible.... "We turn our
+backs on them.... You think that right?"
+
+"We play the game by the rules the enemy himself laid down," Lanyard
+returned. "They would have sunk us without one qualm of pity--would, in all
+probability, have shelled our boats had any succeeded in getting off. They
+have done as much before, and will again. It is out of reason to insist
+that the captain risk his ship in the hope of picking up one or two
+drowning assassins."
+
+"Risk his ship? How? They are helpless--"
+
+"As a rule, U-boats hunt in pairs; always, when specially charged to sink
+one certain vessel. It was so with the _Lusitania_, with the _Arabic_ as
+well; I don't doubt it was so in this instance--that we should have heard
+from a second submarine had not the destroyers opened fire when they did."
+
+The woman stared. "You think that--?"
+
+"That the Boche had specific instructions to waylay and sink the
+_Assyrian_? I begin to think that--yes."
+
+This declaration affected the woman curiously; she shrank away a little, as
+from a blow, her eyes winced, her pale lips quivered. When she spoke, it
+was, strangely enough, in English so naturally enunciated that Lanyard
+could not doubt that this was her mother tongue.
+
+"Then you think it is because...."
+
+Of a sudden she wilted, clinging to the rail and trembling wildly.
+
+Lanyard shot a glance aft. The disorder among the passengers was measurably
+less, though excitement still ran so high that he felt sure they were as
+yet unnoticed. On impulse he stepped nearer.
+
+"Pardon, mademoiselle," he said quietly; "you are excusably unstrung.
+But all danger is past; and there is still time to regain your stateroom
+unobserved. If you will permit me to escort you...."
+
+He watched her narrowly, but she showed no surprise at this suggestion of
+intimacy with her affairs. After a brief moment she pulled herself together
+and dropped a hand upon the arm he offered. In another minute he was
+helping her over the raised watersill of the door.
+
+Like all the ship the landing and main companionway were dark; but below,
+on the promenade deck, the second doorway aft on the starboard side stood
+ajar, affording a glimpse of a dimly lighted stateroom.
+
+With neither hesitation nor surprise--for he was already satisfied in this
+matter--Lanyard conducted the woman to this door and stopped.
+
+Her hand fell from his arm. She faltered on the threshold of Stateroom 27,
+eyeing him dubiously.
+
+"Thank you, monsieur...?"
+
+There was just enough accent of enquiry to warrant his giving her the name:
+"Duchemin, mademoiselle."
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin.... Please to tell me how you knew this was my
+stateroom?"
+
+"I occupy Stateroom 29. There was no one in 27 till after the tender came
+out last night. Furthermore, your face was strange, and I have come to know
+all others on board during our week's delay in port."
+
+The light was at her back; he could distinguish little of her shadowed
+features, but fancied her a bit discountenanced.
+
+In a subdued voice she said, "Thank you," once more, a hand resting
+significantly on the door-knob. But still he lingered.
+
+"If mademoiselle would be so good as to tell me something in return--?"
+
+"If I can...."
+
+"Then why, mademoiselle, did you try my door last night?"
+
+"It was neither locked nor bolted on my side. I wished to make sure--"
+
+"So one fancied. Thank you. Good-night, mademoiselle...?"
+
+She was impervious to his hint. "Good-night, Monsieur Duchemin," she said,
+and closed the door.
+
+Now Lanyard's quarters opened not on this alleyway fore-and-aft but on a
+short and narrow athwartship passage. And as he turned away he saw out of
+the corner of an eye a white-jacketed figure emerge from this passageway
+and move hurriedly aft. Something furtive in the round of the fellow's
+shoulders challenged his curiosity. He called quietly:
+
+"Steward!"
+
+There was no answer. By now the white jacket was no more than a blur moving
+in that deep gloom. He cried again, more loudly:
+
+"I say, steward!"
+
+He could hardly see, but fancied that the man quickened his steps: in
+another instant he vanished altogether.
+
+Smothering an impulse to give chase, the adventurer swung alertly into the
+narrow passage and opened the door to Stateroom 29. The room was dark, but
+as he fumbled for the switch, the door in the forward partition was thrust
+open and the girl's slight figure showed, tensely poised against the light
+behind her.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin!" she cried, in a voice sharp with doubt.
+
+Lanyard turned the switch. "Mademoiselle," he said, and coolly crossed to
+the port, drawing the light-proof curtains.
+
+"This door was locked all day--locked when the firing alarmed me and I went
+out to the deck."
+
+"And on my side, mademoiselle, it was locked and bolted when last I was
+here, shortly before dinner." "Whoever unfastened it entered my room during
+my absence and tampered with my luggage."
+
+"You have missed something?"
+
+Gaze intent to his she nodded. He shrugged and cast shrewdly round his
+quarters for some clue to the enigma. His glance fastened on a leather
+bellows-bag beneath the berth. Dropping to his knees he pulled this out,
+and looked up with a quizzical grimace, his forefinger indicating the lock,
+which was uncaught.
+
+"I left this latched but not locked," he said. "Perhaps I, too, have lost
+something."
+
+Opening the bag out flat, he sat back on his heels, with practised eye
+inspecting its neat arrangement of intimate things.
+
+"Nothing has been taken, mademoiselle," he announced gravely. "But
+something--I think--has been generously added. I seem to have an anonymous
+admirer on board."
+
+Bending forward, he rummaged beneath a sheaf of shirts and brought forth
+a small jewel-box of grained leather, with a monogram stamped on the
+lid--"C.B."
+
+"The lock is broken," he observed, and handed it up to the woman. "As to
+its contents, mademoiselle herself knows best...."
+
+The woman opened the box.
+
+"Nothing is missing," she said in a thoughtful voice.
+
+"I am relieved." Lanyard closed the bag, thrust it back beneath the berth,
+and got upon his feet. "But you are quite sure--?"
+
+"My jewels are all in order," she affirmed, without meeting his gaze.
+
+"And you miss nothing else?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Was there an accent of hesitation in this response?
+
+"Then, I take it, the thief was disappointed."
+
+Now she glanced quickly at his eyes. "Why do you say that?"
+
+"If the thief had found what he sought, he would never have presented it
+to me, mademoiselle would never again have seen her jewels. Failing in
+his object, after breaking that lock, and interrupted by your unexpected
+return, he planted the case with me, hoping to have me suspected. I am
+fortunately able to prove the best of alibis.... So then," said Lanyard,
+smiling, "it would appear that, though we met ten minutes ago for the first
+time--and I have yet to know mademoiselle by name--we are allies in a
+common cause."
+
+"My name is Brooke--Cecelia Brooke," she said quietly--"if it matters. But
+why 'allies'?"
+
+"It appears we own a common enemy. Each of us possesses something which
+that one desires--you a secret, I a good name. (Duchemin, indeed, I have
+always held to be an excellent name.) I shall not hesitate to call on you
+if my treasure is again violated. May I venture to hope mademoiselle will
+prove as ready to command my services?"
+
+"Thank you. I fancy, however, there will be no need."
+
+She moved irresolutely toward the communicating door, paused in its frame,
+eyeing him speculatively from under level brows. He detected, or imagined,
+a tremor of impulse toward him, as though she faltered on the verge of some
+grave confidence. If so, she curbed her tongue in time. Her gaze dropped,
+fixed itself abstractedly on the door.... "This must be fastened," she
+said, in a tone of complete disinterest.
+
+"I will speak to the chief steward immediately."
+
+"Don't trouble." She roused. "It doesn't matter, really, for to-night. I
+shall leave what valuables I have in the purser's care and stop on deck
+till daybreak."
+
+He gave a gesture of bewilderment. "You abandon your seclusion--leave your
+secret unguarded?"
+
+"Why not?" She shrugged slightly with a little _moue_ of discontent. "If,
+as you assume, I had a secret, it was that for certain reasons I did not
+wish my presence on board to become known. But it seems it has become
+known: my secret is no more. So I need no longer risk being cut off from
+the boats in the event of any accident."
+
+Momentarily her gravity was dissipated by a smile at once delightful and
+provocative.
+
+"Once more, monsieur--good-night!"
+
+After some moments Lanyard, with a start, found himself staring blankly at
+a blankly incommunicative communicating door.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IN DEEP WATERS
+
+
+Following this abrupt introduction to his interesting neighbour, Lanyard
+went back to his deck-chair and, bundling himself up against the cold,
+settled down to ponder the affair and await developments in a spirit of
+chastened resignation. That a dénouement would duly unfold he was quite
+satisfied; that he himself must willy-nilly play some part therein he was
+too well persuaded.
+
+Not that he wished to meddle. If this Miss Cecelia Brooke (as she named
+herself) fostered any sort of intrigue, he wanted nothing so fervently
+as to be left altogether out of it. But already he had been dragged in,
+without wish or consent of his; whoever coveted her secret--whatever that
+was, more precious to her than jewels--harboured designs upon his own as
+well. It was his duty henceforth to go warily, overlooking no circumstance,
+however trifling and inconsiderable it might appear. The slenderest thread
+may lead to the heart of the most intricate maze--and the heart of this was
+become Lanyard's immediate goal, for there his enemy lay perdu.
+
+It was never this man's fault to underrate an enemy, least of all
+an unknown; and he entertained wholesome respect for Secret Service
+operators--picked men, as a rule, the meanest no mean antagonist. And this
+business, he fancied, had all the flavour of Secret Service work--one
+of those blind duels, desperate and grim affairs of masked combatants
+feinting, thrusting, guarding in the dark, each with the other's sword ever
+feeling for his throat, fighting for life itself and making his own rules
+as the contest swayed.
+
+But what was this Brooke girl doing in that galley? What conceivable motive
+induced her to dabble those slender hands in the muck and blood of Secret
+Service work?
+
+Lanyard was fain to let that question rest. After all, it was no concern of
+his. There she was, up to her pretty eyebrows in some dark, bad business;
+and it was not for him to play the gratuitous ass, rush in unasked, and
+seek to extricate her....
+
+Through endless hours he sat brooding, vision blindly focussed upon the
+misty, shimmering mystery of that night.
+
+Ekstrom!... Slowly in his understanding intuition shaped the conviction
+that it was Ekstrom whom he was fighting now, Ekstrom in the guise of one
+of his creatures, some agent of the Prussian spy system who had contrived
+to smuggle himself aboard this British steamship.
+
+Out of those nine in the smoking room the previous night, then, he must
+beware of one primarily, perhaps of more.
+
+Four he was disposed, with reservations, to reckon negligible: Baron von
+Harden, head of a Netherlands banking house, a silent body whose acute
+mental processes went on behind a pallid screen of flabby features; Julius
+Becker, a theatrical manager of New York, whose right name ended in ski;
+Bartlett Putnam, late chargé d'affaires of the American embassy in Madrid;
+Edmund O'Reilly, naturalized citizen of the United States, interested in
+the manufacture of motor tractors somewhere in Michigan.
+
+Of the other five, two were English: Lieutenant Thackeray, a civilly
+reticent gentleman whose right arm rested in a black silk sling, making
+a flying trip to visit a married sister in New York; Archer Bartholomew,
+Esq., solicitor, a red-cheeked, bright-eyed, white-haired, brisk little
+Cockney, beyond the military age.
+
+There remained Dressier, the stout, self-satisfied Swiss, whose fawning
+manner was possibly accounted for by his statement that he journeyed to
+New York to engage in the trade of restaurateur in partnership with his
+brother; Crane, long and awkward and homely, of saturnine cast, slow of
+gesture and negligent as to dress, his humorous sense clouding a power
+of shrewd intelligence; and Seńor Arturo Velasco, of Buenos Aires,
+middle-aged, apparently extremely well-to-do, a thoughtful type, more
+self-contained than most of his countrymen.
+
+One of these probably ... But which?...
+
+Nor must he permit himself to forget that the _Assyrian_ carried fifty-nine
+other male passengers, in addition to her complement of officers, crew, and
+stewards, that any one of these might prove to be Potsdam's cat's-paw.
+
+Awesome pallor tinged the eastern horizon, gaining strength, spread in
+imperceptible yet rapid gradations toward the zenith. Stars faded, winked
+out, vanished. Silver and purple in the sea gave place to livid gray.
+Almost visibly the routed night rolled back over the western rim of the
+world. Shafts of supernal radiance lanced the formless void between sky
+and sea. Swollen and angry, the sun lifted up its enormous, ensanguined
+portent. And the discountenanced moon withdrew hastily into the
+immeasurable fastnessness of a cloudless firmament, yet failed therein to
+find complete concealment. Keen, sweet airs of dawn raked the decks, now
+to port, now to starboard, as the _Assyrian_ twisted and writhed on her
+corkscrew way.
+
+Passengers whose fears had become sufficiently numb to permit them to
+drowse, stirred in their chairs, roused blinking and blear-eyed, arose
+and stretched cramped, cold bodies. Others lay listless, enervated by the
+sleepless misery of that night. Crane found Lanyard awake and marched him
+off for coffee and cigarettes in the smoking room.
+
+Later, starting out for a turn around the decks, they passed a deck-chair
+sheltered in a jog where the engine-room ventilating shaft joined the
+forward deck-house, in which Miss Brooke lay cocooned in wraps and furs,
+her profile, turned aside from the sea, exquisitely etched against the rich
+blackness of a fox stole. She slept as quietly as the most carefree, a
+shadowy smile touching her lips.
+
+Crane's stride faltered. He whistled low.
+
+"In the name of all things wonderful! how did that get on board?"
+
+Lanyard mentioned the girl's name. "She has the stateroom next to
+mine--came off that tender, night before last."
+
+"And me sore on that darn' li'l boat because it brought aboard all the
+nosey Johnnies! Ain't it the truth, you never know your luck?"
+
+The American ruminated in silence till another lap of their walk took them
+past the girl again.
+
+"Funny," he mused, "if that's why they held us up...."
+
+"Comment, monsieur?"
+
+"Oh, I was just wondering if it was on that young lady's account they kept
+us kicking our heels back there so long."
+
+"I am still stupid," Lanyard confessed.
+
+"Why, she might be a special messenger, you know--something like that--the
+British Government wanted to smuggle out of the country without anybody
+suspecting."
+
+"Monsieur is a romantic."
+
+"You can't trust me," Crane averred unblushingly.
+
+When they passed the chair again it was empty.
+
+At breakfast Lanyard saw the girl from a distance: their places were
+separated by the width of the saloon. She had no neighbours at her table,
+did not look up when Lanyard entered, finished her meal some time before
+he did, and retired immediately to her stateroom, in whose seclusion she
+remained for the rest of the day.
+
+That second day was altogether innocent of untoward incident. At least
+superficially the life of the ship settled into the groove of "business
+as usual." Only the company of the _Assyrian's_ faithful convoys was an
+ever-present reminder of peril.
+
+And in the middle of the afternoon she passed close by a derelict, a
+torpedoed tramp, deep down by the stern, her bows helplessly high in air
+and crimson with rust, the melancholy haunt of a great multitude of gulls.
+
+More than slightly to Lanyard's surprise he received no quiet invitation
+to the captain's quarters to be interrogated concerning the burglary in
+Stateroom 27. Apparently, the young woman had contented herself with
+reporting merely that the communicating door had carelessly been left
+unfastened.
+
+For his own part, neither seeking nor avoiding individual members of the
+smoking-room group, Lanyard permitted himself to be drawn into their
+company, and sat among them amiably receptive. But this profited him
+scantily; there was no further talk of the Lone Wolf; he was not again
+aware of that covert surveillance.
+
+But when--the evening chill driving him below to don a fur-lined
+topcoat--the Brooke girl, coming up the companionway, acknowledged his look
+of recognition with the most distant of nods, he accepted the apparent
+rebuff without resentment. He understood. She was playing the game. The
+enemy was watching, listening. After that he was studious to refrain from
+seeming either to avoid or to seek her neighbourhood; and if he did keep a
+sharp eye on her, it was so circumspectly as to mock detection. To the
+best of his observation she found no friends on board, contracted no new
+acquaintances, kept herself to herself within walls of inexorable reserve.
+
+Dawn, ending the second night at sea, found the _Assyrian_ pursuing a
+course still devious, and now alone; the destroyers had turned back during
+the night. The western boundary of the barred zone lay astern. Ahead, at
+the end of a brief interval of time, the ivory towers of New York loomed,
+a-shimmer with endless sunlight, glorious in golden promise. Accordingly,
+the spirits of the passengers were exalted. The very ship seemed to grin in
+self-complacence; she had won safely through.
+
+Unremitting vigilance was none the less maintained. No hour of the
+twenty-four found either gun, forward or aft, wanting a full working crew
+on the keen qui vive. The life boats remained on outswung davits; boat
+drills for passengers as well as crew were features of the daily programme.
+Regulations concerning light and smoking on deck after dark were rigidly
+enforced. Fuel was never spared in the effort to widen the blue gulf
+between the steamship and those waters wherein she had so nearly met her
+end. By day a hunted thing, racing frantically toward a port of refuge in
+the West, all her stout fabric labouring with titanic pulsations, shying in
+panic from the faintest suspicion of smoke upon the horizon, the _Assyrian_
+slipped into the grateful obscurity of night like a snake into a thicket,
+made herself akin to its densest shadows, strained hopelessly not to be
+outdistanced by its fugitive mantle.
+
+And the benison of unseasonably clement weather was hers; day after shining
+day, night after placid night, the Atlantic revealed a singularly gracious
+humour, mirrored the changeful panorama of the heavens in a surface little
+flawed. So that the most squeamish voyagers, as well as those most beset
+with fears, slept sweetly in the comfort of their berths.
+
+Lanyard, however, never went to bed without first securing his door so that
+it might be opened by force alone; and never slept without a pistol beneath
+his pillow.
+
+But the truth is, he slept little. For the first time in his history he
+learned what it meant to will sleep to come and have his will defied. He
+lay for hours staring wide-eyed into darkness, hearkening to the steady
+throbbing of the engines, unable to dismiss the thought that their every
+revolution brought him so much nearer to America, so much the nearer to
+his hour with Ekstrom. In vain he sought to fatigue his senses by
+over-indulgence in his weakness for gambling. Day-long sessions at poker
+and auction in the smoking room--where he found formidable antagonists,
+principally in the persons of Crane, Bartlett Putnam, Velasco, Bartholomew,
+Julius Becker and Baron von Harden--served only to forward his financial
+fortunes; his luck was phenomenal; he multiplied many times that slender
+store of English banknotes with which he had embarked upon this adventure.
+But he left each exhausting sitting only to toss upon a wakeful pillow or
+to roam uneasily the dark and desolate decks, a man haunted by ghosts of
+his own raising, hagridden by passions of his own nurturing....
+
+About two o'clock on the third night (the first outside the danger zone,
+when every other passenger might reasonably be expected to be in his berth)
+Lanyard lay in a deck-chair deep in shadows, wondering if it was worthwhile
+to go below and woo sleep in his stateroom. By way of experiment he shut
+his eyes. When after a moment he opened them again he was no longer alone.
+
+Some distance away, at the rail, the woman of Stateroom 27 was standing
+with her back to Lanyard, looking intently forward, unquestionably ignorant
+of his presence.
+
+Without moving, he watched in listless incuriosity till he saw her
+straighten and stand away from the rail as if bracing herself against some
+crisis.
+
+A man was coming aft from the entrance to the main companionway, impatience
+in his stride--a tall man, of good carriage, muffled almost to the heels in
+a heavy ulster, a steamer-cap well forward over his eyes. But the light was
+poor, the pale shine of the aged moon blending trickily with the swaying
+shadows; Lanyard was unable to place him among the passengers. There was
+a suggestion of Lieutenant Thackeray--but that one was handicapped by one
+shell-shattered arm, whereas this man had the use of both.
+
+He demonstrated that promptly, taking the girl into them. She yielded
+herself gladly, with a hushed little cry, hiding her face in the bosom of
+his ulster, clinging to him.
+
+This, then, was an assignation prearranged! Miss Cecelia Brooke had a lover
+aboard the _Assyrian_, a lover whom she denied by day but met in stealth by
+night!
+
+And yet, after that first, swift embrace, their conduct became oddly
+unloverlike. The man released her of his own initiative, held her by the
+shoulders at arm's length. There was irritation in his manner. He seemed
+tempted to shake the young woman.
+
+"Celia! what madness!"
+
+So much, at least, Lanyard overheard; the rest was a mumble into the hand
+which the girl placed over the man's lips. She cried breathlessly: "Hush!
+not so loud!"
+
+And then she remembered to guard her own voice. In an undertone she spoke
+passionately for a moment. The man interrupted in a tone of profound
+vexation. She drew away, as if hurt, caught him up as he hesitated for a
+word, returned, clung to the lapels of his coat, her accents rapid and
+pitiful, eloquent of explanation, entreaty, determination. The man lifted
+his hands to her wrists, broke her grasp, cut her brusquely short, put her
+forcibly from him. She sobbed softly....
+
+Thus swiftly the scene suffered disillusioning transition. The pretty
+fiction of lovers meeting in secret was no more. Remained a man annoyed to
+the verge of anger, a woman desperately importunate.
+
+The wind, sweeping aft, carried broken snatches of their communications:
+
+"... _all I have ... could not let you go_...."
+
+"_Insanity_!"
+
+"_I was desperate_...."
+
+"... _drive me mad with your nonsense_...."
+
+Lanyard sat up, scraping his chair harshly on the deck. Stricken mute,
+the pair at the rail moved only to turn his way the pallid ovals of their
+faces.
+
+Heedless of the prohibition, he struck a vesta, cupped its flame in his
+hands, bending his face close and deliberately lighting a cigarette.
+Appreciably longer than necessary he permitted the flare to reveal his
+features. Then he blew it out, rose, sauntered to the rail, cast the
+cigarette into the sea, went aft and so below, satisfied that the girl must
+have recognised him and so knew that her secret was safe.
+
+But it was in an oddly disgruntled humour that he turned in--he who had
+been so ready to twit Crane with his fantastic speculations concerning
+the English girl, who had himself been the readiest to endue her with the
+romantic attributes becoming a heroine of her country's Secret Service!
+What if he must now esteem her in the merciless light of to-night's
+exposure, as the most pitiable of all human spectacles, a poor lovesick
+thing sans dignity, sans pride, sans heed for the world's respect, a woman
+pursuing a man weary of her?
+
+He resented unreasonably the unreasonable resentment which the affair
+inspired in him.
+
+What was it to him? He who had struck off all fettering bonds of common
+human interests, who had renounced all common human emotions, who had set
+his hand against all mankind that stood between him and that vengeful
+purpose to which he had dedicated his life! He, the Lone Wolf, the
+heartless, soulless, pitiless beast of prey!
+
+God in Heaven! what was any woman to him?
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ON THE BANKS
+
+
+Unaccountably enough in his esteem, and more and more to Lanyard's
+exasperation, the evil flavour of that overnight incident lasted; it
+tinctured distastefully his first waking thoughts; and through all that
+fourth day at sea his mood was dark with irrational depression.
+
+And the fifth day and the sixth were like unto the fourth.
+
+Constantly he caught himself on watch for the young woman, wondering how
+she would comport herself toward him, unwilling witness though he had been
+to that shabby scene.
+
+But, save distantly at meal times, he saw nothing of her.
+
+And though he knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was
+studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy
+stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the
+sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was
+nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at
+another encounter between the Brooke girl and her reluctant lover....
+
+Then that happened which lent the business another complexion altogether.
+Its second phase, of close development, drew toward an end. Subtle
+underlying forces began to stir in their portentous latency.
+
+The rapiers which thus far had merely touched, shivering lightly against
+each other, measuring each its opponent's strength, feeling out his skill,
+fell apart, then re-engaged in sharp and deadly play. Steel met steel and,
+clashing, struck off sparks whose fugitive glimmerings lightened measurably
+the murk....
+
+On the sixth night out, at eleven o'clock as a matter of routine, the
+smoking room was closed for the night, terminating an uncommonly protracted
+and, in Lanyard's esteem, irksome sitting at cards. Well tired, he went
+immediately to his quarters, undressed, stretched out in his berth, and
+switched off the light.
+
+Incontinently he found himself bedevilled by thoughts that would not rest.
+
+For upward of an hour he lay moveless, seeking oblivion in that very effort
+to preserve immobility, while the _Assyrian_, lunging heavily on her way,
+moaned and muttered tedious accompaniment to the chant of the working
+engines.
+
+Despairing at length, and fretted by the closeness of his quarters, he got
+up, dressed sketchily, and was shrugging into his fur-lined coat when he
+heard the door to the adjoining stateroom open and close, stealth in the
+sound of it.
+
+At that he hung up his overcoat, and threw himself down with a book on the
+lounge seat beneath the port. The novel was dull enough in all conscience;
+for that matter no tale within the compass of the cunningest weaver of
+words could have enthralled his temper at that time.
+
+He read and read again page after page, but without intelligence.
+
+Between his eyes and the type-blackened paper mirages of the past trembled
+and wavered; old faces, old scenes, old illusions took unsubstantial form,
+dissolved, blended, faded away: a saddening show of shadows.
+
+His heavy eyelids drooped; slumber's drowsy vestments trailed lazily
+athwart the sea of consciousness....
+
+A slight noise startled him, either the shutting of the door to Stateroom
+27, or the sound of the book dropping from his relaxed grasp. He sat up and
+consulted his watch. The hour was half after twelve.
+
+The ship's bell sounded remotely a single, doleful stroke.
+
+He might have dozed five minutes or fifteen--long enough at least to leave
+its tantalising effect of sleep desperately desirable, mockingly elusive,
+almost grasped, whisked beyond grasping. And with this he was aware of
+something even less tangible, a sense of something amiss, of something
+vaguely wrong, as of an evil spirit stalking furtively through the darkened
+labyrinth of the ship ... as impalpable and ineluctable as miasmic
+exhalations of a morass....
+
+Lanyard passed a hand across his forehead. Had he been dreaming, then? Was
+this merely the reaction from some bitter nightmare? He could not remember.
+
+On sheer impulse he stood up, extinguished the light, opened the door. As
+he did this he noted that a light burned in Stateroom 27, visible through
+the ventilating grille. So the girl must have returned while he slept. Or
+had she neglected to turn the switch when she went out? He could not be
+certain.
+
+On the threshold he paused a little, attentive to the familiar rumour of
+the ship by night: the prolonged sloughing of riven waters down the side,
+gnashing of swells hurled back by the bows, sibilance of draughts in
+alleyways, groaning of frames, a thin metallic rattle of indeterminate
+origin, the crunching grind of the steering gear, the everlasting
+deep-throated diapason of the engines, somewhere aft in that tier of
+staterooms a persistent human snore ... nothing unusual, no alarming
+discordance....
+
+Yet the feeling that mischief was afoot would not be still.
+
+Lanyard moved down to the junction of the thwartship passage with the
+fore-and-aft alleyway.
+
+Here he commanded a view of the promenade-deck landing and the main
+companionway, all in darkness but for a feeble glimmer of reflected
+starlight through the open deck port on the far side of the vessel. Beyond
+this the rail was stencilled against the dull face of the sea with its far
+lifting and falling horizon; within, no more was visible than the dimmed
+whiteness of the forward partition, the dense, indefinite mass of balusters
+winding up to the boat-deck, and the flat plane of the tiled landing.
+
+On this last, near the mouth of the port alleyway, half obscured by the
+intervening balusters, something moved, something huge, black, and formless
+swayed and writhed strangely, and in the strangest silence, like a dumb,
+tormented misshapen brute transfixed to one spot from which its most
+anguished efforts might not avail to budge it.
+
+Lanyard ran forward, rounded the well of the companionway, and pulled up.
+
+Now the nature of the thing was revealed. Blackly silhouetted against the
+square of the doorway two human figures were close-locked and struggling
+desperately, straining, resisting, thrusting, giving, recovering ... and
+all with never a sound more than the deadened thump of a shifting foot or
+the rasp of hard-won breathing.
+
+For several seconds the spectator could not distinguish one contestant from
+the other. Then a change in the fortunes of war enabled him to make out
+that one was a woman, the other, and momentarily more successful, a man.
+Slender and youthful and strong, she fought with the indomitable fury of
+a pantheress. He on his part had won this much temporary advantage--had
+broken the woman's clutch upon his throat and was bending her back over
+his hip, one hand fumbling at her windpipe, the other imprisoning her two
+wrists.
+
+Yet she was far from being vanquished. Even as Lanyard moved toward the
+pair, she drove a savage knee into the man's middle and, as he checked
+instantaneously with a grunt of pained surprise, regained her footing and
+planted both elbows against his chest, striving frantically to free her
+hands.
+
+Simultaneously Lanyard took the fellow from behind, wound an arm around his
+neck, jerked his head sharply back, twisted his forearm till he released
+the woman's wrists, and threw him with a force that must have jarred his
+every bone.
+
+The woman staggered back against the partition, panting and sobbing beneath
+her breath. The man rebounded from his fall with astonishing agility, and
+flew back at Lanyard. An object in his right hand gave off the dull gleam
+of polished steel.
+
+Lanyard, his automatic in his stateroom, in the pocket of the overcoat
+where he had deposited it when meaning to go out on deck, lacked any means
+of defense other than his two hands; but his one-time fame as an amateur
+pugilist had been second only to his fame as a connaisseur d'art; and to
+one whose youth had been passed in association with the Apaches of Paris,
+some mastery of la savate was an inevitable accomplishment.
+
+A lightning coup de pied planted a heel against one of the man's shins,
+and his onslaught faltered in a gust of curses. Then the point of his jaw
+received the full force of Lanyard's right fist with all the ill will
+imaginable behind it. The man reared back, reeled into the black mouth of
+the alleyway, fell heavily.
+
+Even so, he demonstrated extraordinary vitality and appetite for
+punishment. He had no more gone down than the adventurer, peering into the
+gloom, saw him struggle up on his knees. Instantly Lanyard made toward
+him, intent on finishing this work so well begun, but in his second stride
+tripped over a heavy body hidden in the shadows, and pitched headlong.
+Falling, he was conscious of a flashing thing that sped past his cheek,
+immediately above his shoulder. There followed an echoing thud against the
+forward partition.
+
+Picking himself up smartly, Lanyard crept several paces down the alleyway,
+flattening against the wall, straining his vision, listening intently,
+rewarded by neither sign nor sound of his antagonist.
+
+That one must have been swift to advantage himself of Lanyard's tumble.
+If he had not vanished into thin air, or gone to earth in some untenanted
+stateroom thereabouts, he found in the close blackness of that narrow
+passage a cloak of positive invisibility to cover his escape.
+
+And there is little wisdom in stalking an armed man whom one cannot see,
+with what little light there is at one's own back.
+
+So Lanyard went back to the landing, stepping carefully over the obstacle
+which had both thrown him and saved his life--the supine body of a third
+man, motionless; whether dead or merely insensible, he did not stop to
+investigate. His immediate concern was for the woman.
+
+As he came upon her now, she stood en profile to the partition, tugging
+strongly at something embedded in the woodwork close by her side, between
+her waist and armpit. At the sound of his approach she looked up with a
+tremor of apprehension quickly calmed.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin! If you please--"
+
+Lanyard, in no way surprised to recognise the voice of Miss Cecelia Brooke,
+stepped closer. "What is it?" he enquired; and then, bending over to look,
+found that her cloak was pinned to the partition by the blade of a heavy
+knife buried a full half of its considerable length.
+
+"He threw it as you fell," the girl explained. "I was in the direct line."
+
+"Permit me, mademoiselle...."
+
+He laid hold of the haft of the weapon and with some difficulty withdrew
+it.
+
+"Who was it?" he asked, weighing the knife in his palm and examining it as
+closely as he could without the aid of light.
+
+There was no reply. Directly her cloak was freed, the girl had moved
+hastily away to the body over which Lanyard had stumbled. He heard an
+imploring whisper--"Please!"--and looked up to see her on her knees.
+
+"Who, then, is this?" he demanded, joining her.
+
+"Lionel--Lieutenant Thackeray. Please--O please!--tell me he is not dead."
+
+Her voice broke; he saw her slender body convulsed with racking emotions.
+Kneeling, Lanyard made a hasty and superficial examination, necessarily no
+more under the conditions.
+
+"His heart beats," he announced--"he breathes. I do not think him seriously
+injured." He made as if to get up. "I will get a light--a flash-lamp from
+my stateroom--or, better still, the ship's surgeon--"
+
+Her hand fell upon his arm. "Please, no! Not that--not now. Later, if
+necessary; but now--surely, you can help me carry him to his stateroom."
+
+"You know the number?"
+
+"It's close by--30."
+
+"Find it, and light up. No--leave this to me; I can carry him without
+assistance."
+
+The girl rose and disappeared. Lanyard passed his arms beneath the
+Englishman's body, gathered him into them, and struggled to his feet: no
+inconsiderable task.
+
+Light gushed from an open doorway, the third aft from the landing.
+Staggering, the adventurer entered and deposited the body upon the berth.
+Immediately the girl closed and bolted the door, then passed between him
+and the berth to bend over the unconscious man. He lay in deep coma, limbs
+a-sprawl, unpleasant glints of white between his half-closed eyelids, his
+breathing stertorous through parted lips. Free of its sling, his wounded
+arm dangled over the edge of the berth. In putting him down, Lanyard had
+remarked that its sleeve had been slit to the shoulder, and that its
+bandages were undone. Now, in amazement, he saw the arm was firm and
+muscular, with an unbroken skin, never a sign of any injury in all its
+length.
+
+Gently the girl lifted the lieutenant's head to the light, discovering a
+hideously bruised swelling at the base of the skull, blood darkly matting
+the close-clipped hair.
+
+She requested without looking round: "Water, please--and a towel."
+
+Obediently Lanyard ran hot and cold water into the hand-basin in equal
+proportions.
+
+"Would it not be well now to call the ship's surgeon?" he suggested
+diffidently.
+
+"Is that necessary? I am something of a nurse. This is simply a bad
+contusion--no worse, I believe. He was struck down from behind, a cowardly
+blow in the dark, as he started to go up on deck. I had been waiting for
+him. When he didn't come I suspected something was wrong. I came down,
+found him lying there, that brute kneeling over him."
+
+She spoke coolly enough, in contrast with the high excitement that inflamed
+her eyes as she turned away from the berth.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin, are you armed?"
+
+"I have this," he said, exhibiting the knife thrown by the would-be
+murderer--a simple trench dagger, without distinguishing marks of any sort.
+
+"Then take this, please." Extracting an automatic pistol from a holster
+belted beneath Thackeray's coat, she proffered it. "You won't mind staying
+here a moment, standing guard, while I fetch a dressing from my room?"
+
+Before he could utter a word of protest she had slipped out into the
+alleyway, shutting the door behind her.
+
+When several minutes had passed the adventurer found himself beset by
+increasing concern. This long delay seemed not only inconsistent with her
+solicitude, but indicated a possibility that the girl had braved unwisely
+the chance of a resumption of hostilities on the part of her late and as
+yet anonymous assailant.
+
+Darkening the room as a matter of common-sense precaution, Lanyard, pistol
+in hand, stepped out into the alleyway in time to see the girl in the act
+of rising from her knees on the landing, near the spot where Thackeray had
+fallen. The light of her flash-lamp was blotted out as she came hurriedly
+aft.
+
+Perplexed, he turned back and switched on the light as she entered.
+
+Her eyes challenged his almost defiantly.
+
+"Was I long?" she asked, breathless. "I dropped something...."
+
+Lanyard bowed without speaking. Instinctively he knew that she was lying;
+and divining this in his attitude, she coloured and, disconcerted, turned
+away. For a moment, while she busied herself arranging on a convenient
+chair an assortment of first-aid accessories, he fancied that her
+half-averted face wore a look of sullen chagrin, with its compressed lips,
+downcast eyes, and faintly gathered brows.
+
+But directly she needed assistance, and requested it of him in a subdued
+and impersonal manner, showing a countenance devoid of any incongruous
+emotion.
+
+Lanyard, lifting the lieutenant's head and heavy torso, helped turn him
+face downward on the berth, then stood aside, thoughtfully watching the
+girl's deft fingers sop absorbent cotton in an antiseptic wash and apply it
+to the injury.
+
+After a little, he said: "If mademoiselle has no more immediate use for
+me--"
+
+"Thank you, monsieur. You have already done so very much!"
+
+"Then, if mademoiselle will supply the name of this assassin--"
+
+"I know it no more than you, monsieur!" She glanced up at him, startled.
+"What do you mean to do?"
+
+"Why, naturally, lodge an information with the captain concerning this
+outrage--"
+
+"Oh, please, no!"
+
+At a loss, Lanyard shrugged eloquently.
+
+"Not yet, at all events," she hastened to amend. "Let Lionel judge what is
+best to be done when he comes to."
+
+"But, mademoiselle, who can say when that will be?" He pointed out the
+ugly, ragged abrasion in the young Englishman's scalp exposed by the
+cleansing away of the clotted blood. "No ordinary blow," he commented;
+"something very like a slung-shot or a loaded cane did that work. If I may
+venture again to advise--unless mademoiselle is herself a surgeon--"
+
+Her colour faded and she caught her breath sharply. "You think it as
+serious as all that?"
+
+"I do not know. Such a blow might easily fracture the skull, possibly bring
+about a concussion of the brain. Regard, likewise, his laborious breathing.
+I most assuredly advise consulting competent authority."
+
+She did not immediately answer, turning back undivided attention to her
+task; but he noticed that her hands were tremulous, however, dextrously
+they finished dressing and bandaging the hurt; and deep distress troubled
+the handsome eyes she turned to his when she rose.
+
+"You are right," she murmured--"unquestionably right, monsieur. We must
+have the surgeon in...."
+
+But when Lanyard advanced a hand toward the bell-push, to call the steward,
+she interposed in quick alarm:
+
+"No--if you please, a moment; I must have time to think!" Her slender
+fingers writhed together in her agony of doubt and irresolution. "If only I
+knew what to do...."
+
+Lanyard was dumb. There was, indeed, nothing helpful he could offer, who
+was without a solitary tangible or trustworthy clue to the nature of this
+strange business.
+
+He owned himself sadly mystified. In the light--or, rather, the shadow--of
+this latest development, his revised suspicions seemed unwarranted to the
+point of impertinence; unless, of course, one assumed the unknown assailant
+to be a rejected lover or wronged husband. And somehow one did not, in
+the presence of this clear-eyed, straight-limbed, courageous young
+Englishwoman, so wanting in self-consciousness.
+
+And yet ... what the deuce was she to this man whom, indisputably, she
+followed against his wish?
+
+And what conceivable chain of circumstances linked their fortunes with his,
+and that double burglary of the first night out with this murderous assault
+of to-night?
+
+Nor was to-night's work, considered by itself, lacking in questionable
+features.
+
+Why had Thackeray carried that sound arm in a sling? How had its bandages
+come to be unwrapped? Not in struggles before being placed hors de combat,
+for he had never had a chance to resist. Had his assailant, then, unwrapped
+it subsequently? If so, with what end in view?
+
+Why had this Miss Cecelia Brooke, surprising the thug at his work, joined
+battle with him so bravely and so madly without calling for help?
+
+What hidden motive excused this singular hesitation to summon the surgeon,
+this reluctance to inform the officers of the ship?
+
+What duplicity was that which the girl had paraded concerning her
+procrastination when Lanyard had surprised her on her knees out there on
+the landing?
+
+If this were what Lanyard had first inclined to think it, Secret Service
+intrigue, surely it was weirdly intricate when an English girl hesitated
+to safeguard an Englishman by taking into her confidence the officers of a
+British ship, British manned!
+
+Nevertheless, and however much he might wonder and doubt, Lanyard would
+never question her. Never of his own volition would he probe more deeply
+into this mystery, take one farther step into the intricacies of its maze.
+
+So, in silence, he waited, passively courteous, at her further service if
+she had need of him, content if she had not, tolerant of her tacit prayer
+for time in which to think a way out of her difficulties.
+
+After some few moments he grew uncomfortably aware that he had become the
+object of a speculative regard not at all unfavourable.
+
+He indulged in a mental gesture of resignation.
+
+Then what he had feared befell, not altogether as he had apprehended, but
+in the girl's own fashion, if without material difference in the upshot.
+
+"I am afraid," said she in an even voice, so quietly pitched as to be
+inaudible to any eavesdropper. "This becomes a task greater than I had
+dreamed, more than my wits can cope with. Monsieur Duchemin...."
+
+She hesitated. He bowed slightly. "If mademoiselle can make any use of my
+poor abilities, she has but to command me."
+
+"We--I have much to thank you for already, monsieur, much more than I can
+ever hope to reward adequately--"
+
+"Reward?" he echoed. "But, mademoiselle--!"
+
+"Please don't misunderstand." She flushed a little, very prettily. "I am
+simply trying to express my sense of obligation, not only for what you have
+already done, but for what I mean to ask you to do."
+
+Again he bowed, without comment, amiably receptive.
+
+She resumed with perceptible effort: "I can trust you--"
+
+"You must make sure of that before you do," he warned her, smiling.
+
+"I am sure," she averred gravely.
+
+"You know nothing concerning me, mademoiselle--pardon! For all you know
+I may be the greatest rogue in Christendom. And I must tell you in all
+candour, sometimes I think I am."
+
+"What I may or may not know concerning you, Monsieur Duchemin, is
+immaterial as long as I know you are what you have proved yourself to me, a
+gentleman, considerate, generous, brave, and--not inquisitive."
+
+He was frankly touched. If this were flattery, tone and manner robbed it of
+fulsomeness, rendered it subtle beyond the coarser perceptions of the man.
+He knew himself for what he was, knew himself unworthy; and that part
+of him which was unaffectedly French, whether by accident of birth or
+influence of environment, and so impulsive and emotional, reacted in
+spontaneous gratitude to this implicit acceptance of him for what he strove
+to seem to be.
+
+"Mademoiselle is gracious beyond my deserts," he protested. "Only let me
+know how I may be of use...."
+
+"In three ways: Continue to be lenient in your judgments, and ask me no
+more questions than you must because ... I may not answer...." Her hands
+worked together again. She added unhappily, in a faint voice: "I dare not."
+
+That, too, moved him, since he had been far from lenient in his judgments.
+He responded the more readily: "All that is understood, mademoiselle."
+
+"Please go at once back to your stateroom, and as quietly as possible.
+There is a bare chance you were not recognised, that nobody knows who came
+to my aid to-night. If you can slip away without attracting attention, so
+much the better for us, for all of us. You may not be suspected."
+
+"Trust me to use my best discretion."
+
+"Lastly ... take and keep this for me, till I ask you for it again. Hide it
+as secretly as you can. It may be sought for, is certain to be if you are
+believed to be in my confidence. It must not be found. And I may not want
+it again before we land in New York."
+
+She extended a hand on whose palm rested a small and slender white
+cylinder, no longer and little thicker than the toy pencil that dangles
+from a dance-card: a tight roll of plain white paper enclosed in a wrapping
+of transparent oiled silk, gummed fast down its length and, at either end,
+sealed with miniature blobs of black wax.
+
+"Will you do this for me, Monsieur Duchemin? I warn you, it may cost you
+your life."
+
+He took it, his temper veering to the whimsical. "What is life?" he
+questioned. "A prelude--perhaps an overture to that great drama, Death. Who
+knows? Who cares?"
+
+She heard him in a stare. "You place no value on life?"
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have lived nearly thirty years in this world,
+three years in the theatre of war, seldom far from the trenches of one
+front or another. I tell you, I know death too well...."
+
+He shrugged and put the roll of paper away in a pocket.
+
+"You understand it must not be taken from you under any circumstance? As a
+last resort, it must be destroyed rather than yielded up."
+
+"It shall be," he said quietly. "Is there anything more?"
+
+She shook her head, thoughtfully knuckling her underlip.
+
+"How can I communicate with you in event of necessity after we get to New
+York?" she asked.
+
+"I shall stop for a week or two at the Hotel Knickerbocker."
+
+"If anything should happen"--with a swift glance of anxiety toward the
+motionless figure in the berth--"if anything should prevent my calling for
+it within a week after our arrival, you will be good enough to deliver it
+to--" She caught herself up quickly, the unuttered words trembling on her
+lip. "I will write down the address of the person to whom you will deliver
+it, and slip it underneath the door between our rooms--first making
+certain you are there to receive it--if I do not ask you to return
+the--thing--before we land."
+
+"That shall be as you will."
+
+"When you have memorized the address you will destroy it?"
+
+"Depend on that."
+
+"I think that is all. Thank you, Monsieur Duchemin--and good-night."
+
+She extended her hand. He saluted it punctiliously with fingertips and
+lips.
+
+"If you will put out the light, mademoiselle, it may aid me to get away
+unseen."
+
+She nodded and offered him Thackeray's pistol. "Take this. O, I have
+another with me."
+
+Lanyard accepted the weapon and, when she had darkened the room, opened the
+door, slipped out, and closed it behind him so noiselessly that the girl
+could not believe he was gone.
+
+Nothing hindered his return to Stateroom 29.
+
+Fully two minutes after he had locked himself in he heard the distant
+clamour of the annunciator, calling a steward to Stateroom 30.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+UNDER SUSPICION
+
+
+He sat for a long time on the edge of his berth, elbow on knee, chin in
+hand, unstirring, gaze fixed upon that little cylinder of white paper
+resting in the hollow of his palm, in profoundest concentration pondering
+the problems it presented: what it was, what possession of it meant to
+Michael Lanyard, what safe disposition to make of it pending welcome relief
+from this unsought and most unwelcome trust.
+
+This last question alone bade fair to confound his utmost ingenuity.
+
+As for what it was, Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true
+focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too
+momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the
+most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails which
+England herself controlled.
+
+Solely to prevent this communication from reaching America, Lanyard
+believed, Germany had sown mines broadcast in all the waters which the
+_Assyrian_ must cross, and had commissioned her U-boats, without fail and
+at whatever cost, to sink the vessel if by any accident she won safely
+through the mine-fields.
+
+In the effort to steal this secret, German spies had sailed on the
+_Assyrian_ knowing well the double risk they ran, of being shot like rats
+if found out, of being drowned like neutrals if the ship went down through
+the efforts of their compatriots.
+
+It was the zeal of Potsdam's agents, seeking the bearer of this secret,
+which had caused the rifling of Miss Brooke's luggage when she fell under
+suspicion, thanks to her clandestine way of coming aboard; and through the
+same agency young Thackeray had been all but murdered when suspicion, for
+whatever reason, shifted to him.
+
+To insure safe transmission of this communication, England had held the
+_Assyrian_ idle in port, day after day, while her augmented patrols scoured
+the seas, hunting down ruthlessly every submarine whose periscope dared
+peer above the surface, and while her trawlers innumerable swept the
+channels clear of mines.
+
+To prevent its theft, Lieutenant Thackeray had invented the subterfuge of
+the "wounded" arm, amid whose splints and bandages (Lanyard never doubted)
+the cylinder had been secreted.
+
+Finally, it was as a special agent, deep in her country's confidence, that
+this English girl had smuggled herself aboard at the last moment, bringing,
+no doubt, this very cylinder to be transferred to the keeping of Lieutenant
+Thackeray or, perhaps, another confrčre, should she find reason to think
+herself suspected, her trust endangered.
+
+Nothing strange in that; women had served their countries in such
+capacities before; the secret archives of European chancellories are
+replete with their records. Lanyard himself remembered many such women,
+brilliant mondaines from many lands domiciled in that Paris of the so-dead
+yesterday to serve by stealth their respective governments; but never, it
+was true, a woman of the caste of Cecelia Brooke; unless, indeed, this were
+an actress of surpassing talent, gifted to hoodwink the most skeptical and
+least susceptible of men.
+
+And yet....
+
+Lanyard's train of thought faltered. New doubt of the girl began to shadow
+his meditations. Contradictory circumstances he had noted intruded,
+uninvited, to challenge overcredulous conclusions concerning her.
+
+Would any secret agent worth her salt invite suspicion by making such a
+conspicuously furtive embarkation, by such ostentatious avoidance of her
+fellow passengers, by surrounding herself with an atmosphere of such
+palpable mystery? Would such an one confess she had a "secret" to an utter
+stranger, as she had to Lanyard that first night out? Would she, under any
+conceivable circumstances, entrust to that same stranger that selfsame
+secret upon whose inviolate preservation so much depended?
+
+And would she make love-trysts on the decks by night?
+
+Would a brother-agent take her in his arms, then reprove her with every
+symptom of vexation for her "madness," her "insanity," her "nonsense" that
+was like to "drive me mad"?--Thackeray's own words!
+
+Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits for some plausible reading of this
+riddle.
+
+Was this Brooke girl possibly (of a sudden he sat bolt upright) a Prussian
+agent infatuated with this young Englishman and by him beloved in spite of
+all that forbade their passion?
+
+Did not this explanation reconcile every apparent inconsistency in her
+conduct, even to the entrusting to a stranger of the stolen secret, the
+purloined paper she dared not keep about her lest it be found in her
+possession?
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. Visibly his features hardened. If this surmise of
+his were any way justified in the outcome, he promised Miss Cecelia Brooke
+an hour of most painful penitence.
+
+Woman or not, she need not look for mercy from him, who must ever be
+merciless in his dealings with Ekstrom's crew.
+
+To be made that one's tool!
+
+The very thought was intolerable....
+
+As for himself, possession of this paper meant that pitfalls were digged
+for his every step.
+
+If ever the British found cause to suspect him, his certain portion would
+be to face a firing squad in dusk of early day.
+
+If, on the other hand, these Prussian agents on board the _Assyrian_ ever
+got wind of the fact that the cylinder was in his care, his fate was apt to
+be a knife between his ribs the first time he was caught alone and--with
+his back to the assassin.
+
+Two courses, then, were open to him: the most sensible and obvious, to go
+straightway to the captain of the _Assyrian_, report all that he knew or
+surmised, and turn over the paper for safekeeping; one alternative, to hide
+the cylinder so absolutely that the most drastic search would overlook it,
+yet so handily that he could rid himself of it at an instant's notice.
+
+But the first course involved denunciation of the Brooke girl. And what
+if she were innocent? What if, after all, these doubts of her were the
+specious spawn of facts misinterpreted, misconstrued? What if she proved to
+be all she seemed? Could he, even though what he had warned her he might
+be, the greatest rogue unhung, be false to a trust reposed in him by such a
+woman?
+
+As to that, there was no question in his mind; he would never betray her,
+lacking irrefutable conviction that she was an employee of the Prussian spy
+system.
+
+Then how to hide the paper?
+
+Kneeling, Lanyard drew from beneath the berth his bellows-bag, selected
+from its contents a black japanned tin case containing a rather elaborate
+though compact trench medicine kit, the idle purchase of an empty afternoon
+in London. Extracting from its fittings a small leather-covered case, he
+replaced the kit, relocked and shoved the bag back beneath the berth.
+
+Then, standing over the hand-basin, he opened the leather-covered case. Its
+velvet-lined compartments held a hypodermic syringe and needle, and a glass
+phial of twenty-four one-thirtieth grain morphia tablets.
+
+Uncorking the phial, he shook out all the tablets, replaced three, then
+slid the paper cylinder into the tube; it fitted precisely, concealed by
+the label of the manufacturing chemist, leaving room for six more tablets.
+Lanyard inserted four on top of the cylinder, moistening the lowermost
+slightly to make it stick, recorked the phial, and returned it to its
+compartment.
+
+Next he dissolved three morphia tablets in a little water in the bottom of
+a glass, filled the syringe with the strong solution, fitted on the needle,
+squirted most of the contents down the waste-pipe, and consigned the
+remaining tablets to the same innocuous fate.
+
+Finally he replaced needle and syringe in the case, let the glass which had
+held the solution stand without rinsing, and put the open case upon the
+shelf above the basin.
+
+A light tapping sounded on the panels of his door.
+
+"Well? Who's there?"
+
+"Your steward, sir. Captain Osborne's compliments, an' 'e'd like to see you
+in 'is room as soon as convenient, sir."
+
+"You may say I will come at once."
+
+"'Nk you, sir."
+
+A summons to have been expected as a sequel to the surgeon's report after
+attending Lieutenant Thackeray; none the less, Lanyard had not expected it
+so soon.
+
+Authority, he reflected, ran true to form afloat as well as ashore; it was
+prompt enough when required to apply a pound or so of cure. Surely the
+officers, at least the captain, must have been advised why this voyage
+was apt to prove exceptionally hazardous; and surely in the light of such
+information it had been wiser to set armed watches on every deck by night,
+rather than permit the lives of passengers to be imperilled through the
+possible activities of Prussian agents among them incogniti.
+
+And now that he was reminded of it, was not this, perhaps, but a device of
+the enemy's to decoy him from the comparative safety of his stateroom?
+
+It was with a hand in his jacket pocket, grasping Thackeray's automatic,
+that he presently left the room. The alleyway, however, was deserted except
+for his steward; who, as he appeared, turned and led the way up to the
+boat-deck.
+
+Rounding the foot of the companionway, Lanyard contrived a hasty glance
+down the port alleyway. The door to Stateroom 30 was on the hook; a light
+burned within. Outside a guard was stationed, a sailor with a cutlass: the
+first application of the pound of cure!
+
+At the heels of his guide, he approached a door in the deck-house, devoted
+to officers' accommodations, beneath the bridge. Here the steward knocked
+discreetly. A heavy voice grumbling within was stilled for a moment, then
+barked a sharp invitation to enter. The steward turned the knob, announced
+dispassionately "Monseer Duchemin," and stood aside. Lanyard entered a
+well-lighted room, simply but comfortably furnished as the captain's office
+and sitting room; sleeping quarters adjoined, the head of a berth with a
+battered pillow showing through a door a foot or so ajar.
+
+Four persons were present; the notion entered Lanyard's head that a fifth
+possibly lurked in the room beyond, spying, eavesdropping: not a bad scheme
+if Thackeray had an associate on board whose identity it was desirable to
+keep under cover.
+
+The door closed gently behind him as he stood politely bowing, conscious
+that the four faces turned his way were distinguished by a singular variety
+of expression.
+
+Miss Cecelia Brooke was nearest him, beside a chair from which she had
+evidently just risen, her pretty young face rather pale and set, a scared
+look in her candid eyes.
+
+Beyond her, the captain sat with his back to a desk: a broad-beamed,
+vigorous body, intensely masculine, choleric by habit, and just now in an
+extraordinarily grim temper, his iron-gray hair bristling from his
+pillow, and his stout person visibly suffering the discomfort of wearing
+night-clothes beneath his uniform coat and trousers. Bending upon Lanyard
+the steel-hard regard of small, steel-blue eyes, he drummed the arms of his
+chair with thick and stubby fingers.
+
+To one side, standing, was the third officer, a Mr. Sherry, a youngish man
+with a pleasant cast of countenance which temporarily wore a look, rarely
+British, of ingrained sense of duty at odds with much embarrassment.
+
+Lastly Mr. Crane's lanky person was draped, with its customary effect of
+carelessness, on one end of the lounge seat. He looked up, nodded shortly
+but cheerfully to Lanyard, then resumed a somewhat quizzical contemplation
+of the half-smoked cigar which etiquette obliged him to neglect in the
+presence of a lady.
+
+"This is the gentleman?" Captain Osborne queried heavily of the girl.
+Receiving a murmured affirmative, he continued: "Good morning, Monsieur
+Duchemin.... Thanks, Miss Brooke; we won't keep you up any longer
+to-night."
+
+He rose, bowed stiffly as Mr. Sherry opened the door for the girl, and when
+she was gone threw himself back into his chair with a force which made it
+enter a violent protest.
+
+"Sit down, sir. Daresay you know what we want of you."
+
+"It is not difficult to guess," Lanyard admitted. "A sad business,
+monsieur."
+
+"Sad!" the captain iterated in a tone of harsh sarcasm. "That's a mild name
+to give murder."
+
+Even had it not been blurted violently at him, that word was staggering.
+The adventurer echoed it blankly. "You can't mean Lieutenant Thackeray--?"
+
+"Not yet, though doctor says it may come to that; the poor chap's in a bad
+way--concussion."
+
+"So one feared. But monsieur said 'murder'...."
+
+Captain Osborne sat forward, steely gaze mercilessly boring into Lanyard's
+eyes. "Monsieur Duchemin," he said slowly, "Lieutenant Thackeray was not
+the only passenger to suffer through to-night's villainy. The other died
+instantly."
+
+"In God's name, monsieur--who?"
+
+"Bartholomew."
+
+"Mr. Bartholomew!" A memory of that brisk little body's ruddy, cheerful,
+British personality flashed athwart the screen of memory. Lanyard murmured:
+"Incredible!"
+
+"Murdered," the captain proceeded, "in Stateroom 28. Lieutenant Thackeray
+and he were friends, shared the suite. Apparently Mr. Bartholomew heard
+some unusual noise in 30 and left his berth to investigate. He was struck
+down from behind as he approached the communicating door. The murderer had
+got in by way of the sitting room, 26."
+
+Mr. Sherry added in an awed voice: "Frightful blow--skull crushed like an
+eggshell."
+
+There was a pause. Crane thoughtfully relighted his cigar, and wrapped his
+right cheek round it. The captain glared glassily at Lanyard. Mr. Sherry
+looked, if possible, more uncomfortable than ever. Lanyard pondered,
+aghast.
+
+Ekstrom's work, of a certainty! This was his way, the way he imposed upon
+his creatures. Ekstrom, ever a killer, obsessed by the fallacious notion
+that dead men tell no tales....
+
+And Bartholomew had been in this mess with Thackeray, both of them
+operatives of the British Secret Service!
+
+"Miss Brooke has given her version of the attack on Lieutenant Thackeray,"
+the captain pursued. "Be good enough to let us have yours."
+
+Succinctly Lanyard recounted the happenings between the moment when
+premonition of evil drew him from his stateroom and the moment when he
+returned thereto.
+
+He was at pains, however, to omit all mention of the cylinder of paper;
+that, pending definite knowledge to the contrary, was a sacred trust, a
+matter of his honour, solely the affair of the Brooke girl.
+
+The captain squared himself toward Lanyard, his face louring, his jaw
+pugnacious.
+
+"How did you happen to be up and dressed at that late hour, so ready to
+respond to this--ah--premonition of yours?"
+
+"I sleep not well, monsieur. It was my intention to go on deck and
+endeavour to walk off my insomnia."
+
+Captain Osborne commented with a snort.
+
+"Why did you leave Miss Brooke alone before she called the doctor?"
+
+"At mademoiselle's request, naturally."
+
+"You'd been deuced gallant up to that time. I presume it didn't occur to
+you that the young woman might need further protection?"
+
+Lanyard shrugged. "It did not occur to me to refuse her request, monsieur."
+
+"Didn't it strike you as odd she should wish to be left alone with
+Lieutenant Thackeray?"
+
+"It was not my affair, monsieur. It was her wish."
+
+"Excuse me, cap'n." Crane sat up. "I'd like to ask Mr. Lanyard a question."
+
+But Lanyard had prepared himself against that, and acknowledged the touch
+with a quiet smile and the hint of a bow.
+
+"Monsieur Crane...."
+
+"U.S. Secret Service," Crane informed him with a grin. "Velasco spotted
+you--had seen you years ago in Paruss--tipped me off."
+
+"So one inferred. And these gentlemen?" Lanyard indicated the captain and
+third officer.
+
+"I wised them up--had to, when this happened."
+
+"Naturally, monsieur. Proceed...."
+
+"I only wanted to ask if you noticed anything to make you think perhaps
+there was an understanding between Miss Brooke and the lieutenant?"
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"I ain't curious why you should. What I want to know is, did you?"
+
+"No, monsieur," Lanyard lied blandly.
+
+"The little lady didn't seem to take on more'n she naturally would if the
+lieutenant'd been a stranger, eh?" "How to judge, when one has never seen
+mademoiselle distressed on behalf of another?"
+
+Crane abandoned his effort, resuming contemplation of his cigar.
+
+"Now we come to the point. Monsieur Lanyard, or whatever your name is."
+
+"I have found Duchemin very agreeable, monsieur le capitaine."
+
+"I daresay," Captain Osborne sneered. He hesitated, glowering in the
+difficulty of thinking. "See here, Monsieur Duchemin--since you prefer that
+style--I'm not going to beat about the bush with you. I'm a plain man,
+plain-spoken. They tell me you reformed. I don't know anything about that.
+It's my conviction, once a thief, always a thief. I may be wrong."
+
+"Right or wrong, monsieur might easily be less offensive."
+
+The captain's dark countenance became still more darkly congested.
+Implacable prejudice glinted in his small eyes. Nor was his temper softened
+by the effrontery of this offender in giving back look for look with a calm
+poise that overshadowed his arrogance of an honest, law-abiding man.
+
+He made a vague gesture of impatience.
+
+"The point is," he said, "this crime was accompanied by robbery."
+
+"Am I to understand I am accused?"
+
+"Nobody is accused," Crane cut in hastily.
+
+"You have found no clues--?"
+
+"Nary clue."
+
+"What I want to say to you, Monsieur Duchemin, is this: the stolen property
+has got to be recovered before this ship makes her dock in New York.
+It means the loss of my command if it isn't. It means more than that,
+according to my information; it means a disastrous calamity to the Allied
+cause. And you're a Frenchman, Monsieur--Duchemin."
+
+"And a thief. Monsieur le capitaine must not forget his pet conviction."
+
+"As to that, a man can't always be particular about the tools he employs. I
+believe the old saying, set a thief to catch a thief, holds good."
+
+"Do I understand," Lanyard suggested sweetly, "you are about to honour me
+by utilizing my reputed talents, by commissioning a thief to catch this
+thief of to-night?"
+
+"Precisely. You know more of this matter than any of us here. You were at
+hand-grips with the murderer--and let him get away."
+
+"To my deep regret. But I have told you how that happened."
+
+"Seems a bit strange you made no real effort to find out what the scoundrel
+looked like."
+
+"It was dark in that alleyway, monsieur."
+
+The captain made an inarticulate noise, apparently meant to convey an
+effect of ironic incredulity. More intelligible comment was interrupted by
+a ring of the telephone. He swung around, clapped receiver to ear, snapped
+an impatient "Well?" and listened with evident exasperation.
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. This business of telephoning was conceivably
+well-timed; not improbably the captain was receiving the report of somebody
+who had been sent to search Stateroom 29 in Lanyard's absence. He wondered
+and, wondering, glanced at Crane, to find that gentleman watching him with
+a whimsical glimmer which he was quick to extinguish when the captain said
+curtly, "Very good, Mr. Warde," and turned back from the telephone, his
+manner more than ever truculent.
+
+"Mr. Lanyard," he said--"Monsieur Duchemin, that is--a valuable paper has
+been stolen, an exceedingly valuable document. I don't know which carried
+it, Lieutenant Thackeray or Mr. Bartholomew. But I do know such a paper was
+in their possession. And to the best of my knowledge, we three were the
+only ones on board that did know it. And it has disappeared. Now, sir, you
+may or may not be deeper in this affair than you have admitted. If you are,
+I'd advise you to own up."
+
+"Monsieur le capitaine implies my complicity in this dastardly crime!"
+
+Osborne shook his head doggedly. "I imply nothing. I only say this: if you
+know anything you haven't told us, my advice is to make a clean breast of
+it."
+
+"I have nothing to tell you, monsieur, beyond the fact that I find you,
+your tone, your manner, and your choice of words, intolerably insolent."
+
+"Then you know nothing--?"
+
+"Monsieur!" Lanyard cried sharply.
+
+"Very good," the captain persisted. "I'll take your word for it--and give
+you till we take on our pilot to find the real criminal and make him give
+up that paper."
+
+"And if I fail?"
+
+"Not a soul on board leaves the _Assyrian_ till the murderer and thief are
+found--if they are not one."
+
+"But that is a general threat; whereas monsieur has honoured me by
+making this a personal matter. What punishment have you prepared for
+me specifically, if I fail to accomplish this task which baffles
+your--shrewdness?"
+
+"I'll at least inform the port authorities in New York, tell them who you
+are, and have you barred out of the country."
+
+"I want to say, Lanyard," Crane interposed, "this isn't my notion of how to
+deal with you, or in any way by my advice."
+
+"Thank you, monsieur," the adventurer replied icily, without removing his
+attention from the captain. "What else, Captain Osborne?"
+
+"That is all I have to say to you to-night, sir. Good-night."
+
+"But I have something more to say to you, monsieur le capitaine. First, I
+desire to give over to you this article which it will doubtless please you
+to consider stolen property." Lanyard placed the automatic pistol on the
+desk. "One of Lieutenant Thackeray's," he explained; "at Miss Brooke's
+suggestion, I borrowed it as a life-preserver, in event of another brush
+with this homicidal maniac."
+
+"She told us about that," Osborne said heavily, fumbling with the weapon.
+"What else, sir?"
+
+"Only this, monsieur le capitaine: I shall use my best endeavour to uncover
+the author of these crimes. If I succeed, be sure I shall denounce him. If
+I succeed only in securing this valuable paper you speak of, be equally
+sure you will never see it; for it shall leave my hands only to pass into
+those which I consider entirely trustworthy."
+
+"The devil!" Captain Osborne leaped from his chair quaking with fury. "You
+dare accuse me of disloyalty--!"
+
+"Now you mention it...." Lanyard cocked his head to one side with a
+maddening effect of deliberation. "No," he concluded--"no; I wouldn't
+accuse you of intentional treason, monsieur; for that would involve an
+imputation of intelligence...."
+
+He opened the door and nodded pleasantly to Crane and the third officer.
+
+"Good-night, gentlemen," he said silkily. "Oh, and you, too, Captain
+Osborne--good-night, I'm sure."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+IN STATEROOM 29
+
+
+In spite of his own anger, something far from being either assumed or
+inconsiderable, Lanyard was fain to pause, a few paces from the deck-house,
+and laugh quietly at a vast and incoherent booming which was resounding in
+the room he had just quitted--Captain Osborne trying to do justice to
+the emotions inspired in his virtuous bosom by the cheek of this damned
+gaol-bird.
+
+But suddenly, reminded of the grim reason for all this wretched brawling,
+Lanyard shrugged off his amusement. Beneath his very feet, almost a man
+lay dead, another perhaps dying, while the beast who had wrought that
+devilishness remained at large.
+
+He comprehended in a wondering regard that wide, star-blazoned arch of
+skies, that broad, dark, restful mystery of waters, that still, sweet world
+of peace through which the _Assyrian_ forged, muttering contentedly at her
+toil ... while Murder with foul hands and slavering chops skulked somewhere
+in the darkened fabric of her, somewhere beyond that black mouth of the
+deck-port yawning at Lanyard's elbow.
+
+From that same portal a man came abruptly but quietly, saw Lanyard standing
+there, gave him a staring look and grudging nod, and strode forward to the
+captain's quarters: Mr. Warde, the first officer.
+
+Lanyard recollected himself, and went below.
+
+Still the sailor guarded the door in that port alleyway; but now it stood
+wide, and Cecelia Brooke was on its threshold, conversing guardedly with
+the surgeon. Even as Lanyard caught sight of them, the latter bowed and
+turned aft, while the girl retreated and refastened the door on its hook.
+
+Thus reminded of Crane's shrewd questions, Lanyard was speculating rather
+foggily concerning the reason therefor as he turned down the passage to
+his own quarters. What had the American noticed, or been told, to make him
+surmise covert sympathy between the girl and the lieutenant?
+
+He caught himself yawning. Drowsiness buzzed in his brain. He had an
+incoherent feeling that he would now sleep long and heavily. Entering his
+stateroom, he put a shoulder against the door, pushing it to as he fumbled
+for the switch. The circumstance that the lights were no longer burning as
+he had left them failed to impress him as noteworthy in view of his belief
+that, by the captain's orders, Mr. Warde had been ransacking his effects in
+his absence.
+
+But when no more than a click responded to a turn of the switch, the room
+remaining quite dark, Lanyard uttered an imprecation, abruptly very wide
+awake indeed.
+
+Before he could move he stiffened to positive immobility: the cool, hard
+nose of a pistol had come into contact with his skull, just behind the ear.
+
+Simultaneously a softly-modulated voice advised him in purest German: "Be
+quite still, Herr Lanyard, and hold up your hands--so! Also, see that you
+utter no sound till I give you leave.... Karl, the handkerchief."
+
+Lanyard stood motionless, hands well elevated, while a heavy silk blindfold
+was whipped over his eyes and knotted tight at the back of his head.
+
+"Now your paws, Herr Lone Wolf--put them together behind your back,
+prudently making no attempt to reach a pocket."
+
+Obediently Lanyard permitted his wrists to be caught together with a second
+silk handkerchief. He could feel a slight sensation of heat upon his hands,
+and guessed that this was caused by the light of a flash-lamp held close
+to the flesh. None the less he took the chance of clenching his fists and
+tensing the muscles of his wrists.
+
+"Tightly, Karl."
+
+The bonds were made painfully fast. Still it did not seem to occur to his
+captors to oblige their prisoner to open his hands and relax his wrists.
+Lanyard perceived a glimmer of hope in this oversight: the enemy was
+normally stupid.
+
+"Now the lights again."
+
+After a little wait, during which he could hear the bulbs being pressed
+back into their sockets, the switch clicked once more.
+
+"And now, swine-dog!"--the pistol tapped his skull significantly--"if you
+value your life, speak, and speak quickly. Where is that document?"
+
+"Document?" Lanyard repeated in a tone of wonder.
+
+"Unless you are eager to explore the hereafter, tell us where we may find
+it without delay."
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know what you're talking about."
+
+"You lie!" the German snapped. "Face about!"
+
+Somebody grasped his shoulders roughly and swung him round to the light,
+the nose of the pistol shifting to press against his abdomen.
+
+"Search him, Karl."
+
+Unseen hands investigated his pockets cunningly. As they finished, the man
+who answered to the name of Karl became articulate for the first time,
+following a grunt of disappointment:
+
+"Nothing--he has it not upon him."
+
+"Look more thoroughly. Did you think him idiot enough to carry it where
+you'd find it at the first dip? Imbecile!"
+
+For the purpose of this second search Lanyard's garments were ripped
+open, and the enemy made sure that he carried nothing next his skin more
+incriminating than a money-belt, which was forcibly removed.
+
+"His shoes--see to his shoes!" the first speaker insisted irritably. "Sit
+down, Lanyard!"
+
+A petulant push sent the adventurer reeling across the cabin to fall upon
+the lounge seat beneath the port. With some effort he assumed a sitting
+position, while Karl, kneeling, hastily unlaced and tore off his shoes and
+socks.
+
+"Nothing, captain," was the report.
+
+"Damnation!... Continue to search his luggage. Leave nothing unexamined.
+In particular look into every hole and corner where none but a fool would
+attempt to hide anything. This fine gentleman imagines we value his
+intelligence too highly to believe he would leave the paper in plain
+sight."
+
+To an accompaniment of sounds indicating that Karl was obeying his
+superior, this last resumed in a tone of lofty contempt:
+
+"How is it you have abandoned the habit of going armed, Herr Lone Wolf?
+That is not like you. Is it that you grow unwary through drug-using? But
+that matters nothing. We have more important business to speak over, you
+and I. You will be very, very docile, and answer promptly, also in a low
+voice, if you would avoid getting hurt. Do you understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," Lanyard replied, furtively working at the bonds on his wrists.
+
+"Good. We speak together like good friends, yes?"
+
+"Naturally," said Lanyard. "It is so conducive to chumminess to be caressed
+with an automatic pistol--you've no idea!"
+
+"Oblige by speaking German. Our ears are sick with all this bastard
+English. Also, more quietly speak. Do not put me to the regrettable
+necessity of shooting you."
+
+"How regrettable? You didn't stick at braining those others--"
+
+"Hardly the same thing. You are not like those English swine. You are
+French; and Germany has no hatred for France, but only pity that it so
+fatuously opposes manifest destiny. In truth, you are not even French, but
+a great thief; and criminals have no patriotism, nor loyalty to any State
+but their own, the state of moral turpitude."
+
+The speaker interrupted himself to relish his wit with a thick chuckle. And
+Lanyard's jaws ached with the strain of self-control. He continued to pluck
+at the folds of silk while concentrating in effort to memorise the voice,
+which he failed utterly to place. Undoubtedly this animal was a shipboard
+acquaintance, one who knew him well; but those detestable German gutturals
+disguised his accents quite beyond identification.
+
+"For all that, you are not wise so to try my patience. I permit you five
+minutes by my watch in which to make up your mind to surrender that
+document."
+
+"How often must I tell you," Lanyard enquired, "all this talk of documents
+is Greek to me?"
+
+"Then you have five minutes to brush up your classical education, and
+translate into terms suited to your intelligence. I will have that document
+from you or--in four more minutes--shoot you dead."
+
+To this Lanyard said nothing. But his patient attentions to the
+handkerchief round his wrists were beginning perceptibly to be rewarded.
+
+"Moreover, Herr Lanyard, you will do yourself a very good turn by
+confessing--entirely aside from saving your life."
+
+"How is that?"
+
+"Providing you persuade me of your good faith, I am empowered to offer you
+employment in our service."
+
+Lanyard's breath passed hardly through a throat swollen with rage, chagrin,
+and hatred, all hopelessly impotent. But he succeeded in preserving an
+unruffled countenance, as his captor's next words demonstrated.
+
+"You are surprised, yes? You are thinking it over? Take your time--you have
+three minutes more. Or perhaps you are sulky, resenting that our cleverness
+has found you out? Be reasonable, my good man. Think: you cannot be
+insensible to the honour my offer does you."
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+"First, that paper--thereafter to use your surpassing talents to the glory
+of God and Fatherland. In addition, you will be greatly rewarded."
+
+"Now you do begin to interest me," Lanyard said coolly.... Surely he could
+contrive some way to slay this beast with his naked hands! He must play for
+time.... "How rewarded?"
+
+"As I say, with a place in the Prussian Secret Service, its protection,
+freedom to ply your trade unhindered in America, even countenanced, till
+that country becomes a German province under German laws."
+
+"But do I hear you offer this to a Frenchman?"
+
+"Undeceive yourself. Men of all nations to-day, recognising that the star
+of Germany is in the ascendant, that soon all nations will be German,
+are hastening to make their peace beforehand by rendering Germany good
+service."
+
+"Something in that, perhaps," Lanyard admitted thoughtfully.
+
+"Think well, my friend.... Yes, Karl?"
+
+The voice of the other spy responded sullenly: "Nothing--absolutely
+nothing."
+
+"Two minutes, Herr Lanyard."
+
+Of a sudden Lanyard's face was violently distorted in a grimace of terror.
+He lurched his shoulders forward, openly struggling with his bonds.
+
+"But--good God!" he protested in a voice of terror, "you can't possibly be
+so unreasonable! I tell you, I haven't got your damned paper!"
+
+A loop of the handkerchief slipped over one hand.
+
+"Be still! Cease your struggles. And not so loud, my friend!" The
+peremptory voice dropped into mockery as Lanyard, pale and exhausted, sat
+back trembling--and a second loop of silk dropped over the other hand. "So
+you begin to appreciate that we mean business, yes? One minute and thirty
+seconds!"
+
+"Have mercy!" the adventurer whined desperately--and licked his lips as if
+he found them dry with fear. Now both hands were all but wholly free. True:
+he remained blindfolded and covered by a deadly weapon. "Give me a chance.
+I'll do anything you wish! But I can't give you what I haven't got."
+
+"Be silent! Here, Karl."
+
+There was a sound of unintelligible murmuring as the two spies conferred
+together. Lanyard writhed in apparent extremity of terror. His hands were
+free. He sought hopelessly for inspiration. What to do without arms?
+
+"Be grateful to Karl. He urges that perhaps you know nothing of the
+document."
+
+"Don't you think I'd tell if I did know?"
+
+"Then you have one minute--no, forty seconds--in which to pledge yourself
+to the Prussian Secret Service."
+
+"You want me to swear--?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Then hear me," said Lanyard earnestly: "_You damned canaille_!" And in
+one movement he tore the bandage from his eyes and launched himself head
+foremost at the man who stood over him.
+
+He caught part of an oath drowned out by the splitting report of a pistol
+that went off within an inch of his ear. Then his head took the man full
+in the belly, and both went sprawling to the deck, Lanyard fighting like a
+maniac.
+
+Sheer luck had guided clawing fingers to the right wrist of his antagonist,
+round which they shut like jaws of a trap. At the same time he wrenched the
+other's arm high above his head.
+
+Momentarily expecting the shock of a bullet from the pistol of the second
+spy, he found time to wonder that it was so long deferred, and even in
+the fury of his struggles, out of the corner of one eye caught a fugitive
+glimpse of a tallish man, masked, standing back to the forward partition in
+a pose of singular indecision, pistol poised in his grasp.
+
+Then the efforts of his immediate adversary threw him into a position in
+which he was unable to see the other.
+
+Of a sudden the stateroom was filled with the thunder of an automatic, its
+seven cartridges discharged in one brisk, rippling crash.
+
+It was as if a white-hot iron had been laid across Lanyard's shoulder.
+Beneath him the man started convulsively, with such force as almost to
+throw him off bodily, then relaxed altogether and lay limp and still,
+pinning one of Lanyard's arms under him.
+
+Its visor displaced, the face of Baron von Harden was revealed, features
+distorted, eyes glaring, a frozen mask of hate and terror.
+
+His arm free, the adventurer rolled away from the corpse in time to see the
+open window-port blocked by the body of the other spy.
+
+Gathering himself together, he snatched up the pistol that dropped from the
+inert grasp of the dead man, and levelled it at the port.
+
+But now that space was empty.
+
+He rose and paused for an instant, his glance instinctively seeking the
+ledge above the hand-basin.
+
+The hypodermic outfit was there, but minus the phial.
+
+In the alleyway rose a confusion of running feet and shouting tongues.
+A heavy banging rang on the door to Stateroom 29. Crane's nasal accents
+called upon Lanyard to open.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+OFF NANTUCKET
+
+
+Upon the authors of that commotion Lanyard wasted no consideration
+whatever. Let them knock and clamour; he had more urgent work in hand, and
+knew too well the penalty were he stupid enough to unbolt to them. Their
+bodies would dam the doorway hopelessly; insistent hands would hinder him;
+innumerable importunate enquiries would be dinned at him, all immaterial
+in contrast with this emergency, a catechism one would need an hour to
+satisfy. And all attempts would be futile to make them understand that,
+while they plagued him with futile questions, a murderer and spy and thief
+was making good his escape, being afforded ample opportunity to slough all
+traces of his recent work and resume unchallenged his place among them.
+
+No; if by any freak of good fortune, any exertion of wit or daring, that
+one were to be apprehended, it must be within the next few minutes, it
+could only be through immediate pursuit.
+
+Nor did the adventurer waste time debating the better course. With him,
+whose ways of life were ceaselessly beset by instant and mortal perils,
+each with its especial and imperative demand upon his readiness and
+ingenuity, action must ever press so hard upon the heels of thought as to
+make the two seem one.
+
+For that matter, the whole transaction had been characterised by almost
+unbelievable rapidity. And that square opening of the window-port was
+hardly vacant when Lanyard sprang to his feet; the fugitive had barely time
+to find his own upon the outer deck before Lanyard leaped after him; the
+first thumps upon the panels of his door were still echoing when he thrust
+head and shoulders out of the port and began to pump the automatic at a
+shadow fleeing aft upon that narrow breadth of planking between rail and
+wall.
+
+Then, at the third shot, the automatic jammed upon a discharged shell.
+
+Exasperated, the adventurer cast the weapon from him, shrugged hastily out
+of his unfastened coat and waistcoat, hitched tight his belt, and clambered
+through the port.
+
+Dropping to the deck, he turned in time to see the fugitive dart round the
+shoulder of the superstructure.
+
+As Lanyard gained the after rail of the promenade deck a man standing on
+the boat-deck at the head of the companion-ladder greeted him with pistol
+fire. He dodged back, untouched, and instantaneously devised a stratagem to
+cope with this untoward development.
+
+Overhead, at the side, a lifeboat hung on its davits, ready for emergency
+launching, the gap in the rail which it filled when normally swung inboard
+spanned only by a length of line. And the darkness in the shadow of the
+boat was dense, an excellent screen.
+
+Climbing upon the rail, Lanyard grasped the edge of the deck overhead and
+drew himself up undetected by his quarry, whom he espied still holding
+the head of the companion ladder, hidden from the bridge by the after
+deck-house, standing ready to shoot Lanyard should he attempt to renew the
+pursuit by that approach.
+
+At the same time, "Karl" seemed mysteriously occupied with some object or
+objects in whose manipulation he was hampered to a degree by the necessity
+under which he laboured of holding his pistol ready and dividing his
+attention.
+
+A man of good stature, broad at the shoulders, slender at the hips, he
+poised himself with athletic grace--the lower part of his face masked by
+what Lanyard took to be a dark silk handkerchief.
+
+Lanyard heard him swearing in German.
+
+Then a brisk little spray of sparks jetted from the flint and steel of a
+patent cigar-lighter in the hands of the spy. And as Lanyard rose from his
+knees after ducking beneath the line, a stream of fatter sparks spat from
+the end of a fuse.
+
+The man leaned over the rail and cast a small black object to which the
+sputtering fuse was attached, down to the main deck.
+
+As it struck midway between superstructure and stern it burst into
+brilliant flame, releasing upon the night an electric-blue glare that must
+have been visible from any point within the compass of the horizon.
+
+A yell of profane remonstrance saluted the light, and throughout the brief
+passage that followed Lanyard was conscious that pistols and rifles on the
+after deck below were making him and his antagonist their targets.
+
+Before the German could face about, Lanyard, moving almost noiselessly in
+his bare feet, had covered more than half the intervening space. In another
+breath he might have had the fellow at a disadvantage. But the distance
+was too great. Twice the automatic blazed in his face as he closed in, the
+bullets clearing narrowly--or else he fancied that their deadly cold breath
+fanned his cheek.
+
+Then the spy's weapon in turn went out of action. Half blinded, Lanyard
+clipped the man round the body and hugged him tight, exerting all his skill
+and strength to effect a throw.
+
+That effort failed; his onslaught was met with address and ability that
+all but matched his own. The animal he embraced had muscles like tempered
+springs and the cunning and fury of a wild beast in a trap. For a moment
+Lanyard was able to accomplish no more than to smother resistance in a
+rib-crushing embrace; no sooner did he relax it than all attempts to shift
+his hold were anticipated and met half way, forcing him back upon the
+defensive.
+
+Yet he was given little chance to prove himself the master. The first phase
+of the struggle was still in contest when the rear door of the smoking room
+opened and a man stepped out, paused, summed up the situation in a glance,
+seized Lanyard from behind.
+
+The adventurer felt his arms grasped by hands whose strength seemed little
+short of superhuman, and wrenched back so violently that his very bones
+cracked. Fairly lifted from his feet, he was held as helpless as an infant
+kicking in the arms of its nurse.
+
+Released, the other spy stepped back and swung his left fist viciously to
+Lanyard's jaw. Something in the brain of the adventurer seemed to let
+go; his head dropped weakly to one side. The man who had struck him said
+quietly, "Loose the fool, Ed," and followed as Lanyard reeled away,
+striking him repeatedly.
+
+For a giddy moment Lanyard was darkly conscious--as one dreams an evil
+dream--of blows raining mercilessly about his head and body, blows that
+drove him back athwartships toward a fate dark and terrible, a great void
+of blackness. He felt unutterably weary, and was weakened by a sensation of
+nausea. Beneath him his knees buckled. There fell one final blow, ruthless
+as the wrath of God.
+
+He was falling backward into nothingness, into an everlasting gulf of night
+that yawned for him....
+
+As he shot under the guard rope and into space between the edge of the deck
+and the keel of the lifeboat, the spy rounded smartly on a heel and darted
+to the smoking-room door. His confederate was in the act of stepping across
+the raised threshold. He followed, closed the door.
+
+The first officer, charging aft from the bridge, rounded the deck-house and
+pulled up with a grunt of surprise to find the deck completely deserted....
+
+The shock of icy immersion reanimated Lanyard.
+
+He felt himself plunging headlong down, down, and down to inky depths
+unguessable. The sheer habit of an accustomed swimmer alone bade him hold
+his breath.
+
+Then came a pause: he was no more descending; for a time of indeterminate
+duration, an age of anguish, he seemed to float without motion, suspended
+in frigid purgatory. Against his ribs something hammered like a racing
+engine. In his ears sounded a vast roaring, the deafening voices of a
+thousand waterfalls. His head felt swollen and enormous, on the point of
+bursting wide.
+
+Without warning expelled from those depths, he shot full half-length out of
+water, and fell back into the milky welter of the _Assyrian's_ wake.
+
+Instinctively he kept afloat with feeble strokes.
+
+The cold was bitter, as sharp as the teeth of death; but his head was now
+clear, he was able to appreciate what had befallen him.
+
+Already the _Assyrian_, forging onward unchecked, had left him well astern,
+her progress distinctly disclosed by that infernal bluish glare spouting
+from her after deck.
+
+She seemed absurdly small. Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind. Nothing so
+tiny, so insignificant, so make-believe as that silhouette of a ship could
+conceivably be that great liner, the _Assyrian_....
+
+Temporarily a burning pain in his left shoulder drove all other
+considerations out of mind. The salt water was beginning to smart in the
+raw, superficial wound made by that assassin's bullet ... back there in the
+stateroom ... long ago....
+
+Then the cold began to bite into his marrow, and he struggled manfully
+to swim, taking long, slow strokes, at first comparatively powerful, by
+insensible degrees losing force.
+
+Just why he took this trouble he did not know: for some dim reason it
+seemed desirable to live as long as possible. Withal he was aware he could
+not live. Whether careless or utterly ignorant of his fate, the _Assyrian_
+was trudging on and on, leaving him ever farther astern, lost beyond rescue
+in that weird, bleak waste. Even were an alarm to be given, were she to
+stop now and put out a boat, it would find him, if it found him at all, too
+late.
+
+The cold was killing.
+
+He felt very sleepy. Drowsily he apprehended the beginning of the end.
+His senses, growing numb with cold, presently must cease to function
+altogether. Then he would forget, and nothing would matter any more.
+
+Yet the will to live persisted amazingly. Had Lanyard wished it he could
+not have ceased to swim, at least to keep afloat. Vaguely he wondered how
+people ever managed to commit suicide by drowning; it seemed to pass human
+power to resist that buoyancy which sustained one, to let go, let one's
+self go down. Impossible to conceive how that was ever done....
+
+Why should he care to go on living?
+
+No reading that riddle!...
+
+On obscure impulse he gave up swimming, turned upon his back, floated face
+to the sky, derelict, resigning himself to the cradling arms of the sea.
+The gradual, slow rocking of the swells soothed his passion like a kindly
+opiate. The cold no more irked him, but seemed somehow strangely anodynous.
+Imperturbably he envisaged death, without fear, without welcome. What must
+be, must....
+
+For all that, life clutched at him with jealous hands. More than ever
+sleepy, before he slept that last, long sleep he must somehow solve this
+enigma, learn the reason why life continued so to allure his failing
+senses.
+
+Athwart the drab texture of consciousness wild fancies played like heat
+lightning in a still midsummer night.
+
+Death's countenance was kind.
+
+That wide field of stars, drooping low and lifting away with rhythmic
+motion, would sometime dip swiftly down to the very sea itself and,
+swinging back, take with it his soul to some remote bourne....
+
+The deeps were yielding up their mysteries. Past him a huge pale monster
+swept at furious pace, hissing grimly as it passed, like some spectral
+Nemesis pursuing the _Assyrian_.
+
+Indifferently he speculated concerning the reality of this phenomenon.
+
+The heave of a swell enabled him to glance incuriously after the steamship.
+She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted
+visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck. Even
+that now had waned to a mere glimmer, the flicker of a candle lost in the
+immensities of that night-bound world of empty sky and empty ocean. Even as
+he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that
+guttered toward its swift extinction....
+
+Why live, when one might die and, dying, find endless rest?
+
+Like a blazing thunderbolt one word rent the slumbrous web of sentience:
+_Ekstrom_!
+
+Galvanised by the flood of hatred unpent by the syllables of that name,
+Lanyard began again to swim, flailing the water with frantic arms as if to
+win somewhither by the very violence of his efforts.
+
+This the one cogent reason why he must not, could not, die....
+
+Unjust to require him to give up life while that one lived. Unfair.... It
+must not be!...
+
+Across the sea rolled a dull, brutish detonation. The swimmer, swung high
+on the bosom of a great swell, saw a vast sheet of fire raving heavenward
+from the _Assyrian_.
+
+It vanished instantly.
+
+When his dazzled vision cleared, he could see no more of the ship. He
+imagined a faint, wild rumour of panic voices, conjured up scenes of horror
+indescribable as that great fabric sank almost instantaneously, as if some
+gigantic hand plucked her under.
+
+What had happened? Had the accomplices of the dead Baron von Harden set off
+an infernal machine aboard the vessel? In the name of reason, why? They had
+got what they sought, that accursed document, whatever it was, that page
+torn from the Book of Doom. Then why...?
+
+And to what end had they exploded that light bomb on the after deck?
+
+To make the _Assyrian_ a glaring target in the night--what else? A target
+for what?...
+
+Of a sudden all rational mental processes were erased from Lanyard's
+consciousness. A wave of pure fear flooded him, body, mind, and soul. He
+began to struggle like a maniac, fighting the waters that hindered his
+flight from some hideous thing that was lifting up from the ocean's ooze to
+drag him down.
+
+He heard a voice screaming thinly, and knew it was his own.
+
+The impossible was happening to him, out there, alone and helpless on the
+face of the waters. A shape of horror was rising out of the deep to engorge
+him. He could feel distinctly the slow, irresistible heave of its bulk
+beneath him. His feet touched and slipped upon its horrible sleek flanks.
+
+His most desperate efforts were all unavailing. He could not escape. The
+thing came up too rapidly. Following that first mad thrill of contact with
+it underfoot, he was lifted swiftly and irresistibly into the air. Almost
+instantly he was floundering in knee-deep waters that parted, cascading
+away on either hand. Then, elevated well above the sea, he slid and fell
+prone upon a slimy wet surface.
+
+His clawing hands clutched something solid and substantial, an upright bar
+of metal.
+
+Incredulously Lanyard pawed the body of the monster beneath him. His hands
+passed over a riveted joint of metal plates. Looking up, he made out the
+truncated cone of a conning tower with its antennae-like periscope tubes
+stencilled black upon the soft purple of the star-strewn sky.
+
+Slowly the truth came home: a submarine had risen beneath him. He lay upon
+its after deck, grasping a stanchion that supported the small raised bridge
+round the conning tower.
+
+He sobbed a little in sheer hysteric gratitude, that this miracle had been
+vouchsafed unto him, that he had thus been spared to live on against his
+hour with Ekstrom.
+
+But when he sought to drag himself up to the bridge, he could not, he
+was too weak and faint. Ceasing to struggle, he rested in half stupour,
+panting.
+
+With a harsh clang a hatch was thrown back. Rousing, Lanyard saw several
+figures emerge from the conning tower. Men uncouthly clothed in shapeless,
+shiny leather garments, straddled and stretched above him, filling their
+lungs with the sweet air. He tried to call to them, but evoked a mere
+rattle from his throat.
+
+Two came to the edge of the bridge and stood immediately over him, fixing
+binoculars to their eyes, their voices quite audible.
+
+A pang of despair shot through Lanyard when he heard them conferring
+together in the German tongue.
+
+Death, then, was but a little delayed.
+
+Thereafter he lay in dumb apathy, save that he shivered and his teeth
+chattered uncontrollably.
+
+Through the torpor that rested like a black cloud upon his senses he caught
+broken phrases, snatches of sentences:
+
+"... _sinking fast ... struck square amidships ... broke her back_...."
+
+"... _trouble with her boats. There goes one over_!..."
+
+"... _fools jumping overboard like cattle_...."
+
+"_What's that rocket? Do the swine want us to shell their boats_?"
+
+"_Why not? They're asking for it_!"
+
+One of the officers lowered his glasses and barked a series of sharp
+commands. The crew on deck leaped to attention. One leaned over the
+conning-tower hatch and shouted to his mates below. A hatch forward of
+the tower opened, and a quick-firing gun on a disappearing carriage swung
+smoothly and silently up from its lair.
+
+The other officer, looking down, started violently.
+
+"_Verdammt_! What's this?"
+
+The first rejoined him. "Impossible!"
+
+"Impossible or not--a man or a cadaver!"
+
+"Have him up and see...."
+
+By order, two of the crew dragged Lanyard up to the bridge, supporting him
+by main strength while the officers examined him.
+
+"At the last gasp, but alive," one announced.
+
+"How the devil did he get out here?"
+
+"From the _Assyrian_--"
+
+"Impossible for any man to swim this far since our torpedo struck--"
+
+"Then he must have gone overboard before it struck--or was thrown--"
+
+A cry of alarm from the group about the gun, awaiting final orders to open
+fire upon the _Assyrian's_ boats, interrupted the conference. The officers
+swung away in haste.
+
+"Hell's fury! what's that searchlight?"
+
+"A Yankee destroyer--in all probability the one we dodged yesterday
+afternoon."
+
+"She'll find us yet if we don't submerge. Forward, there--house that gun!
+And get below--quickly!"
+
+During a moment of apparent confusion, one of the men sustaining Lanyard
+caught the attention of an officer.
+
+"What shall we do with this fellow, sir?" he enquired.
+
+"Leave him here to sink or swim as we go down," snapped the officer--"and
+be damned to him!"
+
+With a supreme effort the adventurer sank his fingers deep into the arms of
+the two men.
+
+"Wait!" he gasped faintly in German. "On the Emperor's service--"
+
+"What's that?" The officer turned back sharply.
+
+"Imperial Secret Service," Lanyard faltered--"Personal
+Division--Wilhelmstrasse Number 27--"
+
+A brilliant glare settled suddenly upon the deck of the submarine, and was
+welcomed by a panicky gust of oaths. One officer had already popped through
+the conning-tower hatch, followed by several of the crew. There remained
+only those supporting Lanyard, and the second officer.
+
+"Take him below!" the latter ordered. "He may be telling the truth. If
+not...."
+
+In the distance a gun boomed. A shell shrieked over the submarine and
+dropped into the sea not a hundred yards to starboard. The men rushed
+Lanyard toward the conning tower. He tried feebly to help them. In that
+effort consciousness was altogether blotted out....
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+SUB SEA
+
+
+When he opened his eyes again he was resting, after a fashion, naked
+between harsh, damp blankets in a narrow, low-ceiled bunk inches too short
+for one of his stature.
+
+After an experimental squirm or two he lay very still; his back and all his
+limbs were stiff and sore, his bullet-seared shoulder burned intolerably
+beneath a rudely applied first-aid dressing, and he was breathing heavily
+long, labouring inhalations of an atmosphere sickeningly dank, close, and
+foul with unspeakable stenches, for which the fumes of sulphuric acid with
+a rank reek of petroleum and lubricating oils formed but a modest and
+retiring background.
+
+Also his head felt very thick and dull. He found it extremely difficult to
+think, and for some time, indeed, was quite unable to think to any purpose.
+
+His very eyes ached in their sockets.
+
+In the ceiling glowed an electric bulb, dimly illuminating a cubicle barely
+big enough to accommodate the bunk, a dresser, and a small desk with a
+folding seat. The inner wall was a slightly concave surface of steel plates
+whose seams oozed moisture. In the opposite wall was a sliding door, open,
+beyond which ran a narrow alleyway floored with metal grating. Everything
+in sight was enamelled with white paint and clammy with the sweat of that
+foetid air.
+
+Over all an unnatural hush brooded, now and again accentuated by a rumble
+of distant voices and gusts of vacant laughter, once or twice by a curious
+popping. For a long time he heard nothing else whatever. The effect was
+singularly disquieting and did its bit to quicken torpid senses to grasp
+his plight.
+
+Sluggishly enough Lanyard pieced together fragments of lurid memories,
+reconstructing the sequence of last night's events scene by scene to the
+moment of his rescue by the U-boat.
+
+So, it appeared, he was aboard a German submersible, virtually a prisoner,
+though posing as an agent of the Personal Intelligence Department of the
+German Secret Service.
+
+To that inspiration of failing consciousness he owed his life, or such
+of its span as now remained to him, a term whose duration could only be
+defined by his ability to carry off the imposture pending problematic
+opportunity to escape. And, assuming that this last were ever offered him,
+there was no present possibility of guessing how long it might not be
+deferred.
+
+Its butcher's mission successfully accomplished, the U-boat was not
+improbably even now en route for Heligoland, beginning a transatlantic
+cruise of weeks that might never end save in a nameless grave at the bottom
+of the Four Seas.
+
+Only the matter of impersonation failed to embarrass in prospect. A natural
+linguist, Lanyard's three years within the German lines had put a rare
+finish upon his mastery of German. More than this, he was well versed in
+the workings of the Prussian spy system. As Dr. Paul Rodiek, Wilhelmstrasse
+Agent Number 27, he was safe as long as he found no acquaintance of that
+gentleman in the complement of the submarine; for, largely upon information
+furnished by Lanyard himself, Dr. Rodiek had been secretly apprehended
+and executed in the Tower the day before Lanyard left London to join the
+_Assyrian_.
+
+But the question of the U-boat's present whereabouts and its movements
+in the immediate future disturbed the adventurer profoundly. He was
+elaborately incurious about Heligoland; and several weeks' association
+with the Boche in the close quarters of a submarine was a prospect that
+revolted. Wellnigh any fate were preferable....
+
+Uncertain footsteps sounded in the alleyway, paused at the entrance to his
+cubicle. He turned his head wearily on the pillow. In the doorway stood
+a man whose slenderly elegant carriage of a Prussian officer was not
+disguised even by his shapeless wreck of a naval lieutenant's uniform, a
+man with a countenance of singularly unpleasant cast, leaving out of all
+consideration the grease and grime that discoloured it. His narrow forehead
+slanted back just a trace too sharply, his nose was thin and overlong, his
+mouth thin and cruel beneath its ambitious mustache ŕ la Kaiser; his small
+black eyes, set much too close together, blazed with unholy exhilaration.
+
+As soon as he spoke Lanyard understood that he was drunk, drunk with more
+than the champagne of which he presently boasted.
+
+"Awake, eh?" he greeted Lanyard with a mirthless snarl. "You've slept like
+the dead man I took you for at first, my friend--a solid fourteen hours, my
+word for it! Feeling better now?"
+
+Lanyard's essays to reply began and ended in a croak for water. The
+Prussian nodded, disappeared, returned with an aluminium cup of stale cold
+water mixed with a little brandy.
+
+"Champagne if you like," he offered, as Lanyard, painfully propping himself
+up on an elbow, gulped like an animal from the vessel held to his lips. "We
+are holding a little celebration, you know."
+
+Lanyard dropped back to the pillow, the question in his eyes.
+
+"Celebrating our success," the Prussian responded. "We got her, and that
+means much honour and a long furlough to boot, when we get home, just as
+failure would have spelled--I don't like to think what. I shouldn't care to
+fill the shoes of those poor devils who let the _Assyrian_ escape them off
+Ireland, I can tell you."
+
+Something very much like true fear flickered in his small eyes as he
+pondered the punishment meted out to those who failed.
+
+So the U-boat was homeward bound! Strange one noticed no motion of her
+progress, heard no noise of machinery.
+
+"Where are we?" Lanyard whispered.
+
+"Peacefully asleep on the bottom, about five miles south of Martha's
+Vineyard, waiting till it is dark enough to slip in to our base."
+
+"Base?"
+
+The Prussian hiccoughed and giggled. "On the south shore of the Vineyard,"
+he confided with alcoholic glee: "snuggest little haven heart could wish,
+well to the north of all deep-sea traffic; and the coastwise trade runs
+still farther north, through Vineyard Sound, other side the island. Not
+a soul ever comes that way, not a soul suspects. How should they?
+The admirable charts of the Yankee Coast and Geodetic Survey"--he
+sneered--"show no break in the south beach of the island, between the ocean
+and the ponds. But there is one. The sea made the breach during a gale, our
+people helped with a little Trotyl, tides and storms did the rest. Now we
+can enter a secluded, landlocked harbour with just enough water at low
+tide, and lie hidden there till the word comes to move again--three miles
+of dense scrub forest, all privately owned as a game preserve, fenced and
+patrolled, between us and the nearest cultivated land--and friends in
+plenty on the island to keep all our needs supplied--petroleum, fresh
+vegetables, champagne, all that. Just the same we take no chances--never
+make our landfall by day, never enter or leave harbour except at night."
+
+He paused, contemplating Lanyard owlishly. "Ought not to tell you all
+this, I presume," he continued, more soberly, though the wild light still
+flickered ominously in his eyes. "But it is safe enough; you will see for
+yourself in a few hours; and then ... either you are all right, or you will
+never live to tell of it. We radio'd for information about Wilhelmstrasse
+Number 27 just before dawn, after we had dodged that damned Yankee
+destroyer. Ought to get an answer to-night, when we come up."
+
+Heavier footsteps rang in the alleyway. The Prussian made a grimace of
+dislike.
+
+"Here comes the commander," he cautioned uneasily.
+
+A great blond Viking of a German in the uniform of a captain shouldered
+heavily through the doorway and, acknowledging the salute of the rat-faced
+subaltern with a bare nod, stood looking down at Lanyard in taciturn
+silence, hostility in his blood-shot blue eyes.
+
+"How long since he wakened?" he asked thickly, with the accent of a
+Bavarian.
+
+"A minute or two ago."
+
+"Why did you not inform me?"
+
+The tone was offensively domineering, thanks like enough to drink, nerves,
+and hatred of his job and all things and persons pertaining to it.
+
+The subaltern coloured. "He asked for water--I got it for him."
+
+The commander stared churlishly, then addressed Lanyard: "How are you now?"
+
+"Very faint," Lanyard said truthfully. But he would have lied had it been
+otherwise with him. It was his book to make time in which to collect his
+thoughts, concoct a bullet-proof story, plan against an adverse answer to
+that wireless enquiry.
+
+"Can you eat, drink a little champagne?"
+
+Lanyard nodded slightly, adding a feeble "Please."
+
+The Bavarian glanced significantly at his subaltern, who hastened to leave
+them.
+
+"Who are you? What is your name?"
+
+"Dr. Paul Rodiek."
+
+"Your employment?"
+
+"Personal Intelligence Bureau--confidential agent."
+
+"What were you doing on board the _Assyrian_?"
+
+Lanyard mustered enough strength to look the man squarely in the eye.
+
+"Pardon," he said coldly. "You must know your question is indiscreet."
+
+"I must know more about you."
+
+"It should be enough," Lanyard ventured boldly, "to know that I set off
+that flare as arranged, at risk of my life."
+
+"How came you overboard?"
+
+"In the scuffle caused by my lighting the flare."
+
+"So you tell me. But we found you half clothed, lacking any sort of
+identification. Am I to accept your unsupported word?"
+
+"My papers are naturally at the bottom of the sea, in the garments I
+discarded lest their weight drag me down. If you have doubts," Lanyard
+continued firmly, "it is your privilege to settle them by communicating via
+radio with Seventy-ninth Street."
+
+He shut his eyes wearily and turned his head aside on the pillow, confident
+that this reference to the headquarters and secret wireless station of the
+Prussian spy system in New York would win him peace for a time at least.
+
+After a moment the commander uttered a non-committal grunt. "We shall see,"
+he prophesied darkly, and went away.
+
+Later, one of the crew brought Lanyard a dish of greasy stew and potatoes,
+lukewarm, with bread and a half-bottle of excellent champagne.
+
+He ate all he could stomach of the first, devoured the second ravenously,
+and drained the bottle of its ultimate life-giving drop.
+
+Then, immeasurably refreshed and fortified in body and spirit, he turned
+face to the wall, composed himself as if to sleep, shut his eyes, adjusted
+the tempo of his respiration, and lay quite still, wide awake and thinking
+hard.
+
+After a while somebody tramped into the cubicle, bent over Lanyard
+inquisitively and, satisfied that he slept, retired, taking away the empty
+bottle and dishes.
+
+Otherwise his meditations were disturbed only by those echoes of revelry
+in honour of the late manifestation of the Hun's divine right to do wanton
+murder on the high seas.
+
+The rumour waxed and waned, died into dull mutterings, broke out afresh in
+spurts of merriment that held an hysterical note. Once a quarrel sprang up
+and was silenced by the commander's deep, unpleasant tones. Corks popped
+spasmodically. Again there were sounds much like a man's sobbing; but these
+were promptly blared down by a phonograph with a typically American accent.
+When that palled, a sentimental disciple of frightfulness sang Tannenbaum
+in a melting tenor.
+
+Everything tended to effect an impression that all, commander and meanest
+mechanic alike, were making forlorn efforts to forget.
+
+Devoutly Lanyard prayed they might be successful, at least until the
+submarine made her secret base. If too much alcohol was bad, too much
+brooding was infinitely worse for the German temperament. He remembered
+one U-boat commander who, returning to the home port after a conspicuously
+successful cruise, had been taken ashore in a strait-jacket.
+
+Lanyard himself did not care to dwell upon those scenes which must have
+been enacted on board the _Assyrian_ after the torpedo struck....
+
+Deliberately ignoring all else, he set himself the task of reviewing those
+events which had led up to his going overboard.
+
+One by one he considered the incidents of that night, painstakingly
+dissected them, examined their every phase in minute analysis, weighing for
+ulterior meaning every word uttered in his presence, harking even farther
+back to reconstruct his acquaintance with each actor from the very moment
+of its inception, seeking that hint which he was convinced must be
+somewhere hidden in the history of the affair, waiting only recognition to
+lead straightway out of this gloomy maze of mystery into a sunlit open of
+understanding.
+
+In vain: there was an ambiguity in that business to baffle the keenest and
+most pertinacious investigation.
+
+The conduct of Cecelia Brooke alone bristled with inconsistencies
+inexplicable, the conduct of the German spies no less.
+
+To get better perspective upon the problem, he reduced the premises to
+their barest summary:
+
+A valuable dossier brought on board the _Assyrian_ (no matter by whom) had
+come into the possession of British agents, with the knowledge of Captain
+Osborne. Thackeray had secreted it in that fraudulent bandage. German
+agents, apparently under the leadership of Baron von Harden, had waylaid
+him, knocked him senseless, unwrapped the bandage, but somehow (probably
+in the first instance through the interference of the Brooke girl) had
+overlooked the document. Subsequently the Brooke girl had found and
+entrusted it to Lanyard. (No matter why!) He on his part had exerted his
+utmost inventiveness in hiding it away. Nevertheless it had been discovered
+and abstracted within an hour.
+
+By whom?
+
+Not improbably by the Brooke girl herself. Repenting her impulsiveness,
+after leaving Lanyard with the captain, from whom she had doubtless learned
+the truth about "Monsieur Duchemin," she might well have gone directly to
+Lanyard's stateroom and hit upon the morphia phial as the likeliest hiding
+place without delay, thanks to prior acquaintance with the proportions of
+the paper cylinder.
+
+But why should she have assumed that Lanyard had not disposed of the trust
+about his person?
+
+Not impossibly the thing had been found by the first officer of the
+_Assyrian_, searching by order of the captain--as Lanyard assumed he had.
+
+But, if Mr. Warde had found it, he had not reported his find when
+telephoning to Captain Osborne; or else the latter had gone to great
+lengths to mystify Lanyard.
+
+There remained the chance that the paper had been stolen by one of the two
+German agents--by either without the knowledge of the other.
+
+If Baron von Harden had found it--necessarily before Lanyard returned
+to the room--he had subsequently been at elaborate pains to conceal his
+success from both his victim and his confederate. Why? Did he distrust the
+latter? Again, why?
+
+If "Karl" had been the thief, it must have been after Lanyard's return,
+and while the Baron was preoccupied with the task of keeping the prisoner
+quiet, to let the search proceed.
+
+In that event "Karl" had lied deliberately to his superior. Why? Because
+the document was salable, and "Karl" intended to realize its value for his
+personal benefit?
+
+Not an unlikely explanation. Nor could this be called the first instance in
+which the Prussian spy system, admirably organized though it was, had been
+betrayed by one of its own agents.
+
+This hypothesis, too, accounted for that most perplexing circumstance of
+all, the murder of Baron von Harden. For Lanyard was fully persuaded that
+had been nothing less than premeditated murder, in no way an accident of
+faulty aim. Even the most nervous and unstrung man could hardly have missed
+six shots out of seven, point blank. A nervous man, indeed, could hardly
+have gained his own consent to take so hideous a chance of injuring or
+killing a collaborator.
+
+It appeared, then, that one of four things had happened to the cylinder of
+paper:
+
+Miss Brooke had taken it back into her own care. In which case Lanyard was
+no more concerned.
+
+Captain Osborne had secured it through Mr. Warde. This, however, Lanyard
+did not seriously credit.
+
+It had gone to the bottom when the _Assyrian_ sank with the body--among
+others--of Baron von Harden.
+
+Or "Karl" had stolen it.
+
+Privately, indeed, Lanyard rather inclined to hope that the last might
+prove to be the true solution. He desired earnestly to meet "Karl" once
+more, on equal terms. And the more counts in the score, the greater his
+satisfaction in exacting a reckoning in full.
+
+But he anticipated. That chapter might only too possibly have been closed
+forever by the hand of Death. As yet he knew nothing concerning the
+mortality of the _Assyrian_ débâcle. He had not enquired of the officers of
+the U-boat because they knew little if anything more than he. Their glasses
+had discovered to them trouble with the lifeboats; they had spoken of one
+boat capsizing, of "people going overboard like cattle." There must have
+been many drownings, even with a United States destroyer near by and
+speeding to the rescue.
+
+A single question troubled Lanyard greatly. Officers and crew of the U-boat
+had betrayed profoundest consternation upon the advent of that destroyer,
+presumably a warship of a neutral nation. And that same ship had without
+hesitation fired upon the submarine.
+
+Was it possible, then, that the United States had already declared war on
+Germany?
+
+It seemed extremely probable; in such event these Germans would have been
+notified instantly by wireless from the New York bureau of their country's
+Secret Service; whereas, Captain Osborne, receiving the same advice by
+wireless, might reasonably have kept it quiet lest the news stir to more
+formidable activity those agents of the Wilhelmstrasse whose presence among
+the passengers he must at least have strongly suspected.
+
+Presently the closeness of the atmosphere began to work upon Lanyard's
+perceptions. In spite of his long rest, a new drowsiness drugged his
+senses. He yielded without struggle, knowing he would soon need every ounce
+of strength and vitality that sleep could give him....
+
+The din of an inferno startled him awake. Those narrow metal walls were
+echoing a clangour of machinery maniacal in character and overpowering in
+volume. Clankings, tappings, hissings, coughings, clatterings, stridulation
+of a wireless spark, drone of dynamos, shrewdish scolding of Diesel motors
+developing two thousand horsepower, individual efforts of some two thousand
+valves, combined--or, declined to combine--in a cacophony like nothing
+under the sun but the chant of a submersible under way on the surface.
+
+Lanyard, gratefully aware of a current of fresh air sweeping through the
+hold, rolled out of his bunk to find that, while he slept, clothing had
+been provided for him, rough but adequate; heavy woollen underwear and
+socks, a sweater, a dungaree coat, trousers of the same stuff, all vilely
+damp, and a friendless pair of oil-sodden shoes: the sweepings of a dozen
+lockers, but as welcome as disreputable.
+
+Dressed, he turned aft through the alleyway, entering immediately the
+central operating room and storm center of that typhoon of noise, a
+wilderness of polished machinery in active being.
+
+Of the score or more leather-clad machinists silent at their posts, none
+paid him more heed than a passing, incurious glance as he crossed to a
+narrow steel companion ladder and ascended to the conning tower. This he
+found deserted; but its deck-hatch was open. He climbed out to the bridge.
+
+The night was calm and heavily overcast, with no sea more than long, slow
+swells. Through its windless quiet the U-boat racketed with the raving
+abandon of the Spirit of Discord on a spree in a boiler factory. To the
+riot of its internal strife was added the remonstrance of waters sliced by
+the stem and flung back by the sides, a prolonged and stertorous hiss like
+the rending of an endless sheet of canvas.
+
+To eyes new from the electric illumination of the hold, the blackness was
+positive, with the palpable quality of an element, relieved alone by the
+dull glow of the binnacle housing the gyroscope telltale, from which the
+faintest of golden reflections struck back to pick out a pair of seemingly
+severed fists gripping the handles of the bridge steering wheel with a
+singular effect of desperation.
+
+For some moments Lanyard could see nothing more.
+
+The mirthless chuckle of the lieutenant sounded at his elbow.
+
+"So the good Herr Doctor thought he had better come up for air, eh? My
+friend, the very dead might envy you the sincerity of your slumbers. We
+have been half an hour on the surface, with all this uproar--and you are
+only just wakened!"
+
+"Half an hour?" Lanyard repeated thoughtfully. "Then we should be close
+in...."
+
+"Give us ten minutes more ... if we don't go aground in this accursed
+blackness!"
+
+A broad-shouldered body passed between Lanyard and the binnacle,
+momentarily eclipsing its light. Down below in the operating room a bell
+shrilled, and of a sudden the Diesels were silenced.
+
+The dead quiet that followed the sharp extinction of that hubbub was as
+startling as the detonation of high explosive had been.
+
+Through this sudden stillness the submarine slipped stealthily, the hissing
+beneath her bows dying down to gentle sibilance.
+
+From forward the calls of an invisible leadsman were audible. In response
+the commander uttered throaty orders to the helmsman at his elbow, and
+those unattached hands shifted the wheel minutely.
+
+Lanyard started to speak, but a growl from the captain, and a touch of the
+lieutenant's hand on his sleeve cautioned him to silence.
+
+There was a small pause. The vessel seemed to have lost way altogether, to
+swim like a spirit ship that Stygian tide. The lieutenant moved forward,
+leaving Lanyard alone. The voice of the leadsman was stilled. By the wheel
+the captain stood absolutely motionless, his body vaguely silhouetted
+against the glow of the binnacle. The hands that gripped the wheel so
+savagely were as steady as if carven out of stone. An atmosphere of
+suspense enveloped the boat like a cloud.
+
+Lanyard grew conscious of something huge and formidable, a denser shadow in
+the darkness beyond the bows, the loom of land. Off to starboard a point
+of light appeared abruptly, precisely as if a golden pin had punctured the
+black blanket of the night. The captain growled gutturals of relief and
+command. The hands on the wheel shifted, steering exceeding small. A second
+light shone out to port, then shifted slowly into range with the first,
+till the two were as one. Again the bell sang in the operating room, and
+the vessel forged ahead quietly to the urge of electric motors alone. A
+third light and a fourth appeared, well apart to port and starboard, the
+range lights precisely equidistant between them. Between these the U-boat
+moved swiftly. They swam back on either hand and were abruptly extinguished
+as if the night, resenting their insolent trespass, had gobbled both at a
+gulp.
+
+The temperature became sensibly warmer and the salt air of the sea was
+strongly tinctured with the sweet smell of pines and forest mould.
+
+Up forward carbons sputtered and spat; a searchlight was unsheathed and
+carved the gloom as if it was butter, ranging swiftly over the tree-clad
+shore of a burnished black lagoon, picking out en passant several unpainted
+wooden structures, then steadying on a long and substantial landing stage,
+on which several men stood waiting.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+AT BASE
+
+
+As the U-boat, with motors dead and way lessening, glided up alongside
+the head of that T-shaped landing stage and was made fast, the wireless
+operator popped up from below, saluted the commander, and delivered a
+written message.
+
+Lanyard, instinctively aware that this was the expected report from
+Seventy-ninth Street on Dr. Paul Rodiek, quietly pulled himself together
+and took quick observations.
+
+At best his chances in the all-too-probable emergency were far from
+brilliant. Yet one might better perish trying, however hopelessly, than
+passively submit to being shot down.
+
+The lieutenant, waspishly superintending the work of crew and base guards
+at the mooring lines, stood preoccupied within an arm's length; while the
+landing stage was a fair six feet away. From its T-head to the shore, the
+distance was nothing less than two hundred yards.
+
+Desperate action and miraculous luck might take the Prussian by surprise
+and enable one to snatch the service automatic from its holster at his
+belt, leap to the stage, and shoot a way landward through the guards
+clustered there; after which everything would depend on swiftness of foot
+and the uncertain light permitting one to gain a refuge in the surrounding
+woodland without a bullet in one's back.
+
+It was a sorry hope....
+
+With catlike attention Lanyard watched the hands holding that paper to the
+binnacle light--large hands, heavy and muscular but tremulous with drink
+and nervous reaction from the long strain and cumulative horror of the
+cruise then ending. Their aim would not be good, except by accident. None
+the less, if the report were unfavourable, their first gesture would be
+toward the holster, signalling to Lanyard that the moment had come to
+initiate heroic measures.
+
+The Bavarian was an unconscionable time absorbing the import of the
+message. Bending his face close to the paper, the better to make out the
+writing, he read with moving lips, slowly, a doltish frown of concentration
+clouding his congested countenance.
+
+At length, however, he stood up, swaying a little as he folded and pocketed
+the paper.
+
+Lanyard relaxed. The man was too far gone in drink to be crafty, too sure
+of his absolute power of life and death to imagine a need for craft. Since
+his hand had not immediately sought the holster, it would not.
+
+Turbid accents uttered the name of Dr. Rodiek.
+
+Lanyard stepped forward alertly. "Yes, Herr Captain?"
+
+"New York says it had no knowledge of your intention to leave England on
+the _Assyrian_, but that you may well have done so. The Wilhelmstrasse will
+know, of course. It has already been telegraphed. Pending its reply, I am
+to detain you."
+
+"How long?" Lanyard demurred.
+
+"As you know, transatlantic communications must now go by land telegraph to
+the Border, by hand into Mexico, thence by radio via Venezuela to Berlin.
+All that takes time. Also, we may not signal New York but at stated times
+of night. You will be detained another twenty-four hours at least, possibly
+longer."
+
+"My errand cannot wait."
+
+"It must."
+
+"You will obstruct the business of the Imperial Government at your peril."
+
+"I would incur still greater peril did I let you go," the commander replied
+nervously. "With these swine-dogs at war with the Fatherland, our lives are
+not worth _that_ should this base be betrayed."
+
+"Do I understand America has declared war?"
+
+"Two days since. Did you not know?"
+
+"The _Assyrian's_ wireless room was under guard: the captain published no
+bulletins whatever."
+
+The Bavarian gave a gesture of impatience.
+
+"You will remain on board for the night," he announced heavily.
+
+"Pardon!" Lanyard insisted with every evidence of anxious excitement.
+"What you tell me makes it more than ever imperative that I reach New York
+without an hour's avoidable delay. I warn you, think well before you hinder
+the discharge of my duty."
+
+"It is not necessary that I think," the commander replied. "My thinking has
+all been done for me. Me, I obey my orders; it is not my part to question
+their wisdom. Moreover, Herr Doctor, to my mind your insistence is to say
+the least suspicious. Even had I discretion in the matter, I should hold
+you. Therefore, you will keep a civil tongue in your head, or go below in
+irons immediately!"
+
+He swung on his heel, showing an insolent back while he conferred with his
+subaltern.
+
+And Lanyard shrugged appreciation of the futility of more contention
+against such mulishness. Not that the Bavarian was not right enough! As to
+that, one had really hoped for no better issue; but every shift is worth
+trial till proved worthless; and he was no worse off now than if he had
+submitted without complaint. Still one had Chance to look to for aid and
+comfort in this stress; and Chance, the jade, is not always unkind to her
+audacious suitors.
+
+Even now she flashed upon Lanyard a provoking intimation of her smile.
+He began to divine possibilities in this overt ill-feeling between the
+officers; advantage might be made of the racial hostility of Prussian and
+Bavarian.
+
+The commander's attitude and tone were consistently overbearing, if his
+words were inaudible to Lanyard. The lieutenant quite evidently submitted
+only in form; his salute was punctiliously correct and curt; and as the
+commander lumbered off down the landing stage, he grumbled indistinctly in
+Lanyard's hearing:
+
+"Dog of a Bavarian!"
+
+"The good Herr Captain," Lanyard suggested pleasantly, "is not in the most
+agreeable of tempers, yes?"
+
+The high and well-born lieutenant spat comprehensively into the darkness
+overside. After a moment of hesitation he moved nearer and spoke in
+confidential accents. And the fragrant air of the night was tainted with
+the vinous effluvium of his breath.
+
+"Always he prattles of his precious duty!" the Prussian muttered. "Damn his
+duty! Look you, Herr Doctor: months we have been on this cruise, yes, more
+than three months out of Heligoland, penned together in this ramshackle
+stinkpot, or isolated here in this God-forgotten hole, seeing nothing of
+life, hearing nothing of the world but what little the radio tells
+us--sick of the very sight of one another's faces! And now, when we have
+accomplished a glorious feat and have every right to look for prompt recall
+and the rewards of heroes, orders come to remain indefinitely and operate
+against the North Atlantic fleet of the contemptible Yankee navy! The life
+of a dog! And that noble commander of mine pretends to welcome it, talks
+of one's duty to the Fatherland--as if he liked the work any better than
+I!--solely to spite me!"
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Because he hates me," the lieutenant snarled passionately--"hates me even
+as I hate him--he knows how well!"
+
+He interrupted himself to define his conception of the commander's
+character in the freest vernacular of the Berlin underworld.
+
+Lanyard laughed amiably. "They are like that," he agreed--"those
+Bavarians!"
+
+Which inspired the Prussian to deliver a phosphorescent diatribe on the
+racial traits of the Bavarian people as comprehended by the North German
+junker.
+
+"To be cooped up God knows how long in this putrescent death-trap with such
+cattle," he concluded mutinously--"it passes all endurance!"
+
+"I wonder you stand it," Lanyard sympathised--"a man of spirit and good
+birth, as one readily perceives. Though the life of a secret agent is not
+altogether heavenly either, if you ask me," he added gratuitously. "Regard
+me now, charged with a mission of most vital moment--more than ever so
+since the Yankees have shown their teeth--delayed here indefinitely because
+your excellent Herr Captain chooses to doubt my word."
+
+"Patience. Maybe your release comes quickly. Then he will regret--or would
+had he wit enough. There is no cure for a fool." The sententiousness of
+this aphorism was unhappily marred by a hiccough. "Anybody with eyes in his
+head could see you are what you are...."
+
+The last of the operating-room crew piled up the hatchway, saluted, and
+hurried ashore to join in noisy jubilations. There remained on the U-boat
+only the lieutenant with Lanyard, and two base guards detailed as anchor
+watch.
+
+"I must go," the lieutenant volunteered. "And believe me, one welcomes a
+change of clothing and a dry bed after a week in this reeking sieve. As for
+you, my friend, if it lay with me, you should receive the treatment due
+a gentleman." A wave of maudlin camaraderie affected him. He passed an
+affectionate arm through Lanyard's and was suffered, though the gorge of
+the adventurer revolted at the familiarity. "I am sorry to leave you. No,
+do not be astonished! No protestations, please! It is quite true. I know a
+man of the right sort when I meet one, the sort even I can associate with
+without loss of self-respect. It is a great pity you may not come with me
+and make a night of it."
+
+"Another time, perhaps," Lanyard said. "The night may yet come when you and
+I shall meet at the Metropole or the Admiral's Palace.... Who knows?"
+
+"Ah!" sighed the Prussian, enchanted. "What a night that will be, my
+friend!... But now, it is too bad, I really must ask you to step below.
+Such are my silly orders. I am made responsible for you. What do you think
+of that for a joke, eh?"
+
+He laughed vacantly but loudly, and, attempting to poke a derisive thumb
+into Lanyard's ribs, lost his balance.
+
+"What a responsibility!" said Lanyard gravely, holding him up.
+
+"Nonsense, that's what it is. You have no possible chance to escape."
+
+"Suppose I make one--tip you overboard, take to my heels--?"
+
+"You would be shot like a rabbit before you got half way to the shore."
+
+"Ah, but grant, for the sake of argument, that these brave fellows, the
+guards, aim poorly in this gloom?"
+
+"Where would you go? Into the forest, naturally. But how far? You may
+believe me when I tell you, not a hundred yards. It's a true wilderness,
+scrub-oak and cedar and second growth choked with underbrush, almost
+trackless. In five minutes you would be helplessly lost, in this blackness,
+with no stars to steer by. We need only wait till daylight to find you
+walking in a circle."
+
+"You can't mean," Lanyard pursued, learning something helpful every moment,
+"there is no communicating road?"
+
+"The main woods road, yes: but that is far too well patrolled. Without the
+countersign, you would be caught or shot a dozen times before you reached
+the end of it."
+
+"Ah, well!"--with the sigh of a philosopher--"then I presume there's no way
+out but by swimming."
+
+"Over to the beach you mean? Well, what then? You have got a twenty-mile
+walk either way through deep sand sure to betray your footprints. At dawn
+we follow and bag you at our leisure."
+
+"You are discouraging!" Lanyard complained. "I see I may as well go below
+and be good. It's a dull life."
+
+"Tell you what," giggled the lieutenant, leading his prisoner to the
+conning-tower hatch and lowering his voice: "do just that, go below and be
+nice, and presently I will come back and we'll split a bottle. What do you
+say to that, eh?"
+
+"Colossal!"
+
+"Not a bad notion, is it? I like it myself. One gets weary for the society
+of a gentleman, you've no idea.... As soon as my commander is drunk enough,
+I will slip away. How's that?"
+
+"Grossartig!" Lanyard approved, turning to descend.
+
+"Wait. You shall see for yourself what it means to have the friendship of
+a man of my stamp." The lieutenant raised his voice, addressing the anchor
+watch: "Attention. Heed with care: this gentleman is my friend. He is
+detained merely as a matter of form. I do not wish him to be annoyed. Do
+you understand? You are to leave him to himself as long as he remains
+quietly below. But he is not to come on deck again till I return. Is all
+that clear, imbeciles?"
+
+The imbeciles, saluting mechanically, indicated glimmerings of
+comprehension.
+
+"Then below you go, Dr. Rodiek. And don't get impatient: I will rejoin you
+as soon as possible."
+
+"Don't be long," Lanyard implored.
+
+As he lowered himself through the hatch he saw the Prussian stumble down
+the gangplank and reel shoreward.
+
+Well satisfied with his diplomacy, Lanyard lingered a while in the conning
+tower, closely studying and memorising the more salient features of the
+Island of Martha's Vineyard and its adjacent waters and mainland as
+delineated on a most comprehensive large-scale chart published by the
+German Admiralty from exhaustive soundings and surveys of its own
+navigators and typographers, with corrections of as recent date as the
+first part of the year 1917.
+
+Here the breach in the south coast line which permitted the utilisation
+of what had formerly been an extensive fresh-water pond as this secret
+submarine base, was clearly shown. And a single glance confirmed the
+lieutenant's statement concerning its remote isolation from settled
+sections of the island.
+
+Somewhat dismayed, Lanyard descended to the central operating compartment
+and scouted through the hold from bow bulkhead to stern, making certain he
+enjoyed undisputed privacy. And it was so; every man-jack of the U-boat's
+personnel--jaded to the marrow with its cramped accommodations, unremitting
+toil and care, unsanitary smells and forbidding associations--having
+naturally seized the earliest opportunity to escape so loathsome a prison.
+
+Lanyard, however, was anything but resentful of condemnation to this
+solitary confinement. His interest in the interior arrangements of
+submersibles seemed all but feverish, as intense as sudden; witness the
+minute attention to detail which marked his second tour of inspection. On
+this round he took his time. He had all night in which to work out his
+salvation; the wildest schemes were revolving in his mind, the least
+fantastic utterly impracticable without accurate knowledge of many matters;
+and such knowledge might be gained only through patient investigation and
+ungrudging expenditure of time.
+
+It was now something past ten by the chronometers. He could hardly do much
+before dawn, lacking the instinct of a red Indian to guide him through
+that night-bound waste of woodland. So he felt little need to slight his
+researches through haste, except in anticipation of his lieutenant's
+return. And as to that, Lanyard was moderately incredulous: he expected to
+see nothing more of this new-found friend, unless the infatuation of the
+Prussian proved far stronger than his head.
+
+Turning first to the private quarters of the commander, a somewhat more
+commodious cubicle than that across the alleyway in which Lanyard had been
+berthed, his interest was attracted by a small safe anchored to the deck
+beneath the desk.
+
+To this Lanyard addressed himself without hesitation, solving the secret
+of its combination readily through exercise of the most rudimentary of
+professional principles. The problem it offered, indeed, was child's play
+to such cunning of touch and hearing as had made the reputation of the Lone
+Wolf.
+
+Open, the safe discovered to him a variety of articles of interest:
+some five thousand dollars in English and American banknotes of large
+denomination, several hundred in American gold; three distinct cipher
+codes, one of these wholly novel in Lanyard's experience and so, he
+believed, in the knowledge of the Allied secret services; the log of the
+U-boat and the intimate diary of its commander, both in cryptograph; a
+compact directory of German agents domiciled in Atlantic coast ports; a
+very considerable accumulation of German Admiralty orders; together with
+many documents of lesser moment.
+
+Rapidly sorting out the more valuable of these, Lanyard disposed them about
+his person, then confiscated the banknotes as indemnity for his stolen
+money-belt, replaced the rejections, and reclosed and locked the safe.
+
+His next interest was to arm himself. After several disappointments he
+discovered arms-lockers beneath the berths for the crew in the forward
+compartment just aft of that devoted to torpedo tubes. Here he selected
+a latest pattern German navy automatic pistol with three extra cartridge
+clips and, after some hesitation, a peculiarly devilish magazine rifle
+firing explosive bullets. The latter he placed handily, yet out of sight,
+near the foot of the companion ladder. The pistol fitted snugly a trousers
+pocket, its bulk hidden by the sag of his sweater....
+
+Some time later the lieutenant, slipping down the ladder, found Lanyard
+studying with a convincing aspect of childlike bewilderment the complicated
+combinations of machinery which crowded the central operating compartment.
+
+Fresh from a bath and shave and wearing a clean uniform, the Prussian
+showed vast improvement in looks if not in equilibrium. But his mouth
+twitched fitfully, his eyes wandered and disclosed a disquieting
+superabundance of white, and his tongue was noticeably thicker than before.
+
+"Well, my friend!" he said--"you are truly disappointing. The watch said
+you had made no sound since going below. I was afraid of another of those
+famous naps of yours."
+
+"With the prospect of a bottle with you? Impossible! I have been waiting
+and waiting, with my tongue hanging out."
+
+"Too bad. Why did you not look around, help yourself? Why not?" the
+lieutenant demanded. "Have I not given you freedom of ship? It is yours,
+everything here 'yours!"
+
+"I want nothing but an end to this great thirst," Lanyard protested.
+
+"Then--God in Heaven!--why we standing here? Come!"
+
+Releasing the handrail the Prussian took careful aim for the alleyway door,
+launched himself toward it, slipped on the greasy metal grating, and would
+have fallen heavily but for Lanyard.
+
+Cursing pettishly, he stood up, threw off Lanyard's arms without thanks,
+and made a new attempt, this time shooting headlong through the alleyway,
+to bring up against the wing table in the third forward compartment, the
+kitchen and messroom in one.
+
+"A great pity," he muttered, opening a locker and fumbling in its
+depths--"rotten pity...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Keep you waiting so long. Not my fault." The lieutenant brought forth two
+bottles of champagne and one of brandy. "You open them, Herr Doctor, like
+'good fellow," he said, placing the three on the table. "I just wish you
+'understand no discourtesy meant ... unavoidably detained ... beastly
+commander ... drunk. Give 'my word, hopelessly drunk. Poor fool...."
+
+"If my judgment is sound," Lanyard said, "this noble vessel will soon need
+a new commander."
+
+"True. Quite true." The Prussian placed two aluminium cups upon the table
+and half filled one with brandy, then brimmed it with champagne. "Try
+that," he said thickly, "That will keep your tail up, my friend."
+
+"Many thanks," Lanyard protested, filling another cup with undiluted
+champagne. "I prefer one thing at a time."
+
+"Unfortunate ... don't know what is good ... King's peg ... wonderful
+drink. No matter. To 'new commander--prosit!"
+
+He drained his cup at a gulp.
+
+"To the new commander!" Lanyard echoed, and drank judiciously.
+"Excellent.... How long can he last, do you think, at this pace?"
+
+"No telling--not long--too long for my liking. Shall I tell 'something?"
+He filled his cup again, half and half, and sat down, his wicked, rat-like
+face more than ever pale and repulsive. "Not 'whisper of this, mind--though
+I think 'crew sometimes suspects: he's going mad!"
+
+"Not that Bavarian?"
+
+The lieutenant nodded wisely. "If 'knew him as I know him, 'never be
+surprised, my friend. You think too much drink. Yes, but not entirely. He
+keeps seeing things, hearing them, especially by night."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+"Faces." The Prussian licked his lips, glanced furtively over his shoulder,
+and drank. "Dead faces, eyes eaten out, seaweed in their hair.... And
+voices--he's forever hearing voices ... people trying to talk, 'can't
+make him understand because 'mouths 'full of water, you know. But they
+understand one another, keep discussing how to get at him.... He tells me
+about it ... I tell you, it is Hell to hear him talk ... especially when
+submerged, as last night. Then he hears them fumbling all over the hull
+with their stumpy fingers, trying to find 'way in, talking about him. And
+he tells me, and keeps insisting, till sometimes I seem to hear them, too.
+But I don't. Before God, I don't! You don't believe I do, do you?"
+
+His eyes rolled wildly.
+
+"Why should you?"
+
+"Just so: why should I?" The lieutenant's accents rose to a shrill pitch.
+"I have not his record ... still in training when he sent _Lusitania_ to
+the bottom. Yes: it was he, second-in-command, in charge of torpedo tubes.
+His own hand fired that torpedo...."
+
+He fell silent, staring moodily into his cup, perhaps thinking of the
+number of torpedoes it had been his own lot to discharge upon errands of
+slaughter.
+
+And the dead silence of the ship was made audible by a stealthy drip-drip
+of water from the seams, and the furtive slaver of the tide on the outer
+plates.
+
+A shiver ran through the body of the Prussian. He pulled himself together
+with obvious effort, looked up with an uncertain grin, and passed a shaking
+hand across his writhing lips.
+
+"All foolishness, of course, but 'gets on one's nerves ... constant
+association with man like that.... 'Know what he's doing now, or was, when
+I came away? Sitting up with doors and windows locked and blinds drawn,
+drinking brandy neat. He can't sleep by night if sober, or without 'light
+in the room. If he does, he knows they will get him ... people he hears
+crawling up from the sea, slopping round the house, mumbling, whimpering in
+the dark--"
+
+He broke off abruptly, with a whisper more dreadful than a
+shriek--"_God_!"--and jumped to his feet, whipping the automatic from his
+belt.
+
+A footfall sounded in one of the after compartments. Others followed.
+
+Someone was coming slowly down the alleyway, someone with dragging, heavy
+feet.
+
+The lieutenant waited motionless, as one petrified with terror.
+
+The bulkhead doorway framed the figure of the commander. He paused there,
+louring at his subaltern with haunted eyes ablaze in a face like parchment.
+
+"So!" he said, nodding. "As I thought. It is thus I find you, fraternising
+with one who may be, for all we know, an enemy to the Fatherland. You
+drunken, babbling fool! Get ashore!" His angry foot thumped the grating.
+"Get ashore, and report yourself under arrest!"
+
+With no more warning than a strangled snarl, the lieutenant shot him
+through the head.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+UNDER THE ROSE
+
+
+Vague stupefaction replaced the scowl upon the countenance of the
+commander. He swayed, a hand faltering to his forehead, where dark blood
+was beginning to well from a cleanly drilled puncture. Then he collapsed
+completely, falling prone across the raised sill of the bulkhead opening. A
+convulsive tremor shook savagely his huge frame.
+
+Thereafter he was quite still.
+
+The report of that one shot had reverberated stunningly within those narrow
+walls of steel. Momentarily Lanyard looked to see the alarmed anchor watch
+appear; so too, apparently, the lieutenant, who remained immobile, pistol
+poised in a hand for the moment strangely steady, gaze fixed upon the mouth
+of the alleyway.
+
+But through a long minute no other sounds were audible than that ceaseless
+dripping from frames and seams, with that muted, terrible mouthing of
+waters on the plates.
+
+Unable either to fathom or forecast the workings of the drink-maddened
+mentality masked by that rat-like face, Lanyard waited with a hand covertly
+grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment
+that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not
+yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast of a Boche.
+
+Slowly the arm of the lieutenant dropped, lowering the pistol till its
+muzzle chattered on the top of the table: a noise that broke the spell upon
+his senses. He looked down in dull brutish wonder, then roused and with a
+gesture of horror let the weapon fall clattering.
+
+His glance shifting to the body of his commander, he started violently,
+backing up against the plates to put all possible distance between himself
+and his handiwork. His lips moved, framing phrases at first incoherent,
+presently articulate in part:
+
+"... _done it at last!... Knew I must soon_...."
+
+Abruptly he looked up at Lanyard.
+
+"Bear witness," he cried: "I was provoked beyond human endurance. He
+insulted me in your presence ... me!... that scum!"
+
+Lanyard said nothing, but met his gaze with a blank, non-committal stare,
+under which the eyes of the lieutenant wavered and fell.
+
+Then with a start he realised anew the significance of that still figure at
+his feet, and tried to shake some of the swagger back into his wretched,
+fear-racked being.
+
+"A good job!" he muttered defiantly. "And you will stand by me, I know....
+Only there is nothing in that, of course, no justification possible before
+a court martial. Even your testimony could not save me ... I am done for,
+utterly...."
+
+He hung his head. Lanyard heard whispered words: "_degraded," "dishonour,"
+"firing squad_"....
+
+A chronometer in the central operating compartment tolled eight bells.
+
+With a sharp cry the lieutenant dropped to his knees. "He can't be dead!"
+he shrilled. "It is all play-acting, to frighten me!"
+
+Frantically he sought to turn the body over.
+
+Lanyard's hand shot swiftly out, capturing the automatic on the table. With
+rapid and sure gestures he extracted and pocketed the clip, drew back the
+breech, ejecting into his palm the one shell in the barrel, and replaced
+the weapon, all before the Prussian gave over his insane efforts to
+resurrect the dead.
+
+"He is dead enough," he announced, eyeing Lanyard morosely--"beyond
+helping.... Look here; are you with me or against me?"
+
+"Need you ask?"
+
+"I count on you, then. Good. I think we can cover this up."
+
+He checked and stood for a while lost in thought.
+
+"How?" Lanyard roused him.
+
+"Simply enough: I go on deck, send the watch ashore on some trumped-up
+errand. They suspect nothing, thinking the commander and I have you in
+charge. If they heard that shot, I will say one of us dropped a bottle
+of champagne, and it exploded.... When they are gone, I bring the dory
+alongside; and with your help it should be an easy matter to carry this
+body up, weight it, row it out to the middle of the lagoon, dump it
+overboard. Then we return. Our story is, the commander followed the anchor
+watch ashore; if later he wandered off, got lost in the woods in his
+alcoholic delirium, that is no affair of ours. Do you understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," said Lanyard with a look of fatuous innocence. "But how about
+the water--is it deep enough?"
+
+The Prussian took no pains to dissemble his scorn of this question,
+seemingly so witless. "To cover the body? Why, even here there is
+sufficient depth at low tide for us to submerge completely, barring the
+periscopes. And it is deeper yet in the middle."
+
+"Thanks," Lanyard replied meekly.
+
+"Have another drink? No?" The Prussian tossed off a half cupful of
+undiluted brandy, and shuddered. "Then stop here. I'll be back in a--"
+
+"Half a minute." The lieutenant halted in the act of stepping across the
+body. Lanyard levelled a hand at the automatic. "Do you mind taking that
+with you? I have no desire to be found here with it and a dead man, should
+anything prevent your return."
+
+With a sickly grimace the murderer snatched up the weapon, thrust it in its
+holster, and hurriedly departed.
+
+Lanyard watched him pass through the alleyway and turn toward the companion
+ladder, then followed quietly.
+
+As the lieutenant climbed out on deck, Lanyard ascended to the conning
+tower and waited there, listening. He could not quite make out what was
+said; but after a few brusque words of command two pair of boots rang on
+the gangplank and thumped away down the stage. At the same time Lanyard let
+himself noiselessly out through the hatch.
+
+As soon as his vision grew reconciled to the change from light to darkness,
+he discovered the slender figure of the lieutenant skulking on tip-toe
+after the retreating anchor watch; about midway on the landing stage,
+however, he paused and bent over one of the piles, apparently fumbling with
+the painter of a small boat moored in the black shadows below.
+
+At this Lanyard began to move along the deck, one by one working the
+mooring lines clear of their cleats and dropping them gently overboard,
+till but two were left to hold the U-boat in place.
+
+Throughout he kept watch upon the manoeuvres of the lieutenant--saw him
+drop over the side of the stage, heard a thump of feet as he landed in a
+boat, and a subsequent creak of oar-locks.
+
+The small boat was rounding the bows of the submarine when the adventurer
+ducked back through conning tower to hold.
+
+He was standing where he had been left when the lieutenant came below.
+
+"It's all right," this last announced with shabby bravado as he stepped
+over the body in the doorway. "We are rid of that damned watch for a time.
+They won't return within half an hour at least. I have the dory moored
+amidships. If we are lively, this dirty job will be over in no time at
+all."
+
+Lanyard nodded. "I am ready."
+
+"No need to hurry--plenty of time for one more drink." The Prussian
+splashed brandy into the cup, filling it to the brim. "And God knows I need
+it!"
+
+Lanyard watched critically as, with head well back, he drained that
+staggering dose of raw spirit gulp by gulp without once removing the cup
+from his lips. No mortal man could drink like that and stand up under it:
+it was now a mere question of time....
+
+Hardly that: the hand of the murderer shook and wavered widely as he put
+down the cup. For a moment he swayed with eyes fixed and glazing, features
+visibly losing plasticity, then lurched forward, knocking the brandy bottle
+to the floor, swung around a full half turn in blind effort to re-establish
+equilibrium, fell backward upon the table, and lay racked from head to foot
+with savage spasms, hands clawing empty air, chest labouring vainly to win
+sufficient oxygen to combat the poison with which his system was saturated.
+
+Moving to his side, Lanyard laid a hand upon the left breast. The man's
+heart was hammering his ribs with agonizing blows, at first rapid, by
+degrees more slow and feeble.
+
+No power on earth could save him now: he had committed suicide as surely as
+murder.
+
+Wasting not another glance or thought upon him Lanyard hurried aft to the
+central operating room.
+
+The time he had spent there, an hour earlier, was by no means lost in
+purposeless marvelling. He boasted a certain aptitude for mechanics,
+perhaps legitimately inherited from that obscure origin of his, largely
+fostered by the requirements of his craft; into the bargain, he had been
+privileged ere now to gain some slight insight into the principles of
+submersible operation. If obliged to work swiftly and in some instances
+upon the advice of intuition rather than practical knowledge, he went not
+unintelligently about his task, made few false moves.
+
+Turning first to the diving controls, he adjusted the hydroplanes to their
+extreme downward inclination, then made the rounds of the vent valves,
+opening all wide. With a sharp hissing and whistling the air from the
+auxiliary tanks was driven inboard, and as Lanyard manipulated the wheels
+operating the forward and aft groups of Kingston valves, to the hissing was
+added the suck and gurgle of water flooding the main and auxiliary ballast
+and adjusting tanks.
+
+Immediately the U-boat began to sink. Lanyard delayed only to close the
+switches which controlled the electric motors. As their drone gained volume
+he grasped the rifle and swarmed up the companion-ladder, passing through
+the conning tower to deck with little or nothing to spare--with, in fact,
+barely time to throw off the two mooring lines and jump into the small boat
+before water, sweeping hungrily up over deck and bridge, began to cascade
+through conning tower and torpedo hatchways.
+
+Constrained to cut the painter lest the dory be drawn down with the
+fast-sinking submarine, he fitted oars to locks and put his back to them,
+swinging the small boat hastily clear of whirlpools which formed as the
+waves closed over the spot where the U-boat had rested.
+
+From first to last less than five minutes' activity had been needed for
+the task of scotching this water-moccasin of the salt seas and putting its
+keepers at the mercy of the country whose hospitality they had too long
+abused.
+
+Well content, after a little, Lanyard lay on his oars and contemplated with
+much interest what the night permitted to be visible: the landing stage, no
+more than a dark, vague mass in the darkness; the land picked out with but
+few lights, mainly at windows of the base buildings, painting dim ribbons
+upon the polished floor of the lagoon.
+
+Methodically these were eclipsed as a moving figure passed before them.
+
+Listening intently, Lanyard could distinguish the slow footfalls of an
+unsuspecting sentry--no other sounds, more than gentle voices of the night:
+murmurs of blind wavelets, the plaintive whisper of a little breeze belated
+amid the tree-tops of that dark forest, and a slow, weary soughing of
+swells upon the distant ocean shore.
+
+Perceiving as yet not the slightest indication of an alarm ashore, Lanyard
+ventured to continue rowing, but with utmost caution, lifting and dipping
+his blades as gingerly as though they were fashioned of brittle glass, and
+for want of a better guide keeping the stern of the dory square to the
+shank of the T-stage.
+
+In time the bows grounded lightly on sand. The melancholy voice of the sea
+now seemed a heavier sighing in the stillness. He pushed off and rowed on
+parallel with a dark shore line, so close in that his starboard oar touched
+bottom at each stroke.
+
+At intervals he paused and rested, striving vainly to garner some clue to
+his bearings. Inexorably the blackness forbade that. He might have failed
+ere dawn to grope a way out of that trap had not the disappearance of the
+submarine been discovered within the hour.
+
+A sudden clamour rose in the quarter of the landing stage, first one great
+shout of dismay, then two voices bellowing together, then others. Several
+rifle-shots were fired in the air. More lights broke out in windows ashore.
+Many feet drummed resoundingly upon the stage, and the confusion of voices
+attained a pitch of wild, hysteric uproar. Of a sudden a flare was lighted
+and tossed far out upon the bosom of the lagoon.
+
+Surprised by that sharp and merciless blue glare, Lanyard instinctively
+shipped oars and picked up the rifle. He could see so clearly that
+huddle of figures upon the head of the landing stage that he confidently
+apprehended being fired upon at any moment; but minutes lengthened and
+he was not. Either the Germans were looking for bigger game than a dory
+adrift, or the dazzling flare hindered more than aided their vision.
+
+At length persuaded that he had not been detected, Lanyard put aside the
+rifle and resumed the oars. Now his course was made beautifully clear to
+him: the blue light showed him that outlet to the sea which he sought
+within a hundred yards' distance.
+
+Presently the flare began to wane. It was not renewed. Altogether unseen,
+unsuspected, Lanyard swung the dory into the breach, and drove it seaward
+with all his might.
+
+Swiftly the lagoon was shut out by narrow closing banks. The blue glare
+died out behind a black profile of rounded dunes. Lanyard turned the bow
+eastward, rowing broadside to the shore.
+
+After something more than an hour of this mode of progress, he struck in
+toward the beach, disembarked in ankle-deep waters, slung the rifle over
+his shoulder by its strap and, pushing the dory off, abandoned it to the
+whim of the sea.
+
+Then again he set his face to the east, following the contour of the beach
+just within the wash of the tide: thereby making sure that there should
+be no trail of footprints in the sand to guide a possible pursuit in the
+morning.
+
+The rising sun found him purposefully splashing on, weary but enheartened
+by the discovery that he had left behind the more thickly wooded section of
+the island.
+
+Presently, turning in to the dry beach for the first time, he climbed
+to the summit of a dune somewhat higher than its fellows, and took
+observations, finding that he had come near to the eastern extremity of the
+island.
+
+At some distance to his right a wagon road, faintly rutted in sand and
+overgrown with beach grass, struck inland.
+
+Following this at a venture, he came, at about eight o'clock, upon the
+outskirts of a waterside community.
+
+Before proceeding he hid the magazine rifle in a thicket, then made a wide
+detour, and picked up a roadway which entered the village from the north.
+
+If his disreputable appearance was calculated to excite comment, readiness
+in disbursing money to remedy such shortcomings made amends for Lanyard's
+taciturnity. Within two hours, shaved, bathed, and inconspicuously dressed
+in a cheap suit of ready-made clothing, he was breakfasting famously upon
+the plain fare of a commercial tavern.
+
+The town, he learned, was the one-time important whaling port of Edgartown.
+He would be able to leave for the mainland on a ferry steamer sailing early
+in the afternoon.
+
+Ten minutes before going abroad he filed a long telegram in code addressed
+to the head of the British Secret Service in New York....
+
+Consequences manifold and various ensued.
+
+When the telegram had been delivered and decoded--both transactions being
+marked by reasonable promptitude--the head of the British Secret Service
+in New York called the British Embassy in Washington on the long distance
+telephone.
+
+Shortly thereafter an attaché of the British Embassy jumped into a
+motor-car and had himself driven to one of the cardinal departments of the
+Federal Government.
+
+When he had kicked his heels in an antechamber upward of an hour, he was
+received, affably enough, by the head of the department, a smug, open-faced
+gentleman whose mood was largely preoccupied with illusions of grandeur,
+who was, in short, interested far more in considering how splendid it was
+to be himself than in hearing about any mare's-nest of a German U-boat base
+on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard.
+
+He was, however, indulgent enough to promise to give the matter his
+distinguished consideration in due course.
+
+He even went so far as to have his secretary make a note of what alleged
+information this young Englishman had to impart.
+
+During the night he chanced to wake up and recall the matter, and concluded
+that, all things considered, it would do no harm to give the United States
+Navy a little amusement and exercise, even if it should turn out that the
+rumour of this submarine base was a canard.
+
+So, the next morning, he went to his desk some time before noon, and issued
+a lot of orders. One of them had to do with the necessity for absolute
+secrecy.
+
+During the day several minor officials of the department might have been,
+and indeed were, observed going about their business with painfully
+tight-lipped expressions.
+
+Also many messages were transmitted by wireless, telephone, and telegraph,
+to various persons charged with the defense of the Atlantic Coast; some of
+these were code messages, some were not.
+
+That same night a great forest fire sprang up on the south shore of
+Martha's Vineyard, both preceded and accompanied by a series of heavy
+explosions.
+
+The first United States vessel to reach the lagoon found only charred
+remains of a landing stage and several buildings and, at the bottom of the
+lagoon, an incoherent mass of wreckage, a twisted and shattered chaos of
+steel plates and framework that might possibly have been a perfectly sound
+submarine, though sunken, had somebody not been warned in ample time
+to permit its destruction through the agency of trinitrotoluene, that
+enormously efficient modern explosive nicknamed by British military and
+naval experts "T.N.T.," and by the Germans "Trotyl."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+RESURRECTION
+
+
+The early editions of those New York evening newspapers which Lanyard
+purchased in Providence, when he changed trains there en route from New
+Bedford to New York, carried multi-column and most picturesque accounts of
+the _Assyrian_ disaster.
+
+But the whole truth was in none.
+
+Lanyard laid aside the last paper privately satisfied that, for no-doubt
+praiseworthy reasons of its own, Washington had seen fit to dictate the
+suppression of a number of extremely pertinent circumstances and facts
+which could hardly have escaped governmental knowledge.
+
+Already, one inferred, a sort of censorship was at work, an effective if
+comparatively modest precursor to that noble volunteer committee which was
+presently with touching spontaneity to fasten itself upon an astonished
+Ship of State before it could gather enough way to escape such cirripede
+attachments.
+
+Presumably it was not thought wise to disconcert a great people, in the
+complacence of its awakening to the fact that it was remotely at war with
+the Hun, with information that a Boche submersible was, or of late had
+been, operating in the neighbourhood of Nantucket.
+
+Unanimously the sinking of the _Assyrian_ was ascribed to an internal
+explosion of unknown origin. No paper hinted that German secret agents
+might possibly have figured incogniti among her passengers. There was
+mention neither of the flare which had burned on her after deck to make
+the _Assyrian_ a conspicuous target in the night, nor of any of the other
+untoward events which had led up to the explosion. Nothing whatever
+was said of the shot fired at the submerging U-boat by a United States
+torpedo-boat destroyer speeding to the rescue.
+
+Still, the bare facts alone were sufficiently appalling. Reading what had
+been permitted to gain publication, Lanyard experienced a qualm of horror
+together with the thought that, even had he drowned as he had expected to
+drown, such a fate had almost been preferable to participation in those
+awful ten minutes precipitated by that pale messenger of death which had so
+narrowly missed Lanyard himself as he rested on the bosom of the sea.
+
+Within ten minutes after receiving her coup de grâce the _Assyrian_ had
+gone under; barely that much time had been permitted a passenger list of
+seventy-two and a personnel of nearly three hundred souls in which to rouse
+from dreams of security and take to the lifeboats.
+
+Thanks to the frenzied haste compelled by the swift settling of the ship,
+more than one boat had been capsized. Others had been sunk--literally
+driven under--by masses of humanity cascading into them from slanting
+decks. Others, again, had never been launched at all.
+
+The utmost efforts of the destroyer, fortuitously so near at hand, had
+served to rescue but thirty-one passengers and one hundred and eighty of
+the crew.
+
+In the list of survivors Lanyard found these names:
+
+  Becker, Julius--New York
+  Brooke, Cecelia--London
+  Crane, Robert T.--New York
+  Dressier, Emil--Geneva
+  O'Reilly, Edmund--Detroit
+  Putnam, Bartlett--Philadelphia
+  Velasco, Arturo--Buenos Aires
+
+Among the injured, Lieutenant Lionel Thackeray, D.S.O., was listed as
+suffering from concussion of the brain, said to have been contracted
+through a fall while attempting to aid the launching of a lifeboat.
+
+In the long roster of the drowned these names appeared:
+
+  Bartholomew, Archer--London
+  Duchemin, André--Paris
+  Von Harden, Baron Gustav--Amsterdam
+  Osborne, Captain E. W.--London
+
+Of all the officers, Mr. Sherry was a solitary survivor, fished out of the
+sea after going down with his ship.
+
+No list boasted the name "Karl."
+
+Lacking accommodations for the rescued, it was stated, the destroyer had
+summoned by wireless the east-bound freight steamship _Saratoga_, which had
+trans-shipped the unfortunates and turned back to New York....
+
+Throughout the best part of that journey from Providence to New York
+Lanyard sat blankly staring into the black mirror of the window beside
+his chair, revolving schemes for his immediate future in the light of
+information derived, indirectly as much as directly, from these newspaper
+stories.
+
+Retrospective consideration of that voyage left little room for doubt that
+the designs of the German agents had been thoughtfully matured. They had
+been quiet enough between their first stroke in the dark and their last,
+between the burglary of Cecelia Brooke's stateroom the first night out and
+those murderous attacks on Bartholomew and Thackeray. Unquestionably,
+had they bided their time pending that hour when, according to their
+information, the submersible would be off Nantucket, awaiting their signal
+to sink the _Assyrian_--a signal which would never have been given had
+their plans proved successful, had they not made the ship too hot to hold
+them, and finally had they not made every provision for their own escape
+when the ship went down.
+
+Lanyard was confident that all of their company had been warned to hold
+themselves ready, and consequently had come off scot free--all, that is,
+save that victim of treachery, the unhappy Baron von Harden.
+
+If the number of that group which Lanyard had selected as comprising a
+majority of his enemies, those nine who had discussed the Lone Wolf in the
+smoking room, was now reduced to five--Becker, Dressier, O'Reilly, Putnam,
+and Velasco--or four, eliminating Putnam, of whose loyalty there could be
+no question--Lanyard still had no means of knowing how many confederates
+among the other passengers these four might not have had.
+
+And even four men who appreciated what peril to their plans inhered in the
+Lone Wolf, even four made a ponderable array of desperate enemies to have
+at large in New York, apt to be encountered at any corner, apt at any time
+to espy and recognise him without his knowledge.
+
+This situation imposed upon him two major tasks of immediate moment: he
+must hunt down those four one by one and either satisfy himself as to their
+innocence of harmful intent or put them permanently _hors de combat_; and
+he must extinguish utterly, once and for all time, that amiable personality
+whose brief span had been restricted to the decks of the _Assyrian_,
+Monsieur André Duchemin.
+
+That one must be buried deep, beyond all peradventure of involuntary
+resurrection.
+
+Fortunately the last step toward the positive metamorphosis indicated had
+been taken that very morning, when the Gallic beard of Monsieur Duchemin
+was erased by the razor of a New England barber, whose shears had likewise
+eradicated every trace of a Continental mode of hair-dressing. There
+remained about Lanyard little to remind of André Duchemin but his eyes; and
+the look of one's eyes, as every good actor knows, is something far more
+easy to disguise than is commonly believed.
+
+But it was hardly in human nature not to mourn the untimely demise of so
+useful a body, one who carried such beautiful credentials and serviceable
+letters of introduction, whose character boasted so much charm with a
+solitary fault--too facile vulnerability to the prying eyes of those to
+whom Paris meant those days and social strata in which Michael Lanyard
+had moved and had his being. Witness--according to Crane--the demoniac
+cleverness of the Brazilian in unmasking the Duchemin incognito.
+
+Suspicion was taking form in Lanyard's reflections that he had paid far
+too little attention to Seńor Arturo Velasco of Buenos Aires, whose
+avowed avocation of amateur criminologist might easily be synonymous with
+interests much less innocuous.
+
+Or why had Velasco been so quick to communicate recognition of Lanyard to
+an employee of the United States Secret Service?
+
+For that matter, why had he felt called so publicly to descant upon the
+natural history of the Lone Wolf? In order to focus upon that one the
+attentions of his enemies? Or to put him on guard?
+
+It was altogether perplexing. Was one to esteem Velasco friend or foe?
+
+Lanyard could comfort himself only with the promise he should one day know,
+and that without undue delay.
+
+Alighting in Grand Central Terminus late at night, he made his way to
+Forty-second Street and there, in the staring headlines of a "Late Extra,"
+read the news that the steamship _Saratoga_ had suffered a crippling
+engine-room accident and was limping slowly toward port, still something
+like eighteen hours out.
+
+Wondering if it were presumption to construe this as an omen that the stars
+in their courses fought for him, Lanyard went west to Broadway afoot, all
+the way beset with a sense of incredulity; it was difficult to believe that
+he was himself, alive and at large in this city of wonder and space, where
+people moved at leisure and without fear on broad streets that resembled
+deep-bitten channels for rivers of light. He was all too wont with nights
+of dread and trembling, with the mediaeval gloom that enwrapped the cities
+of Europe by night, their grim black streets desolate but for a few,
+infrequent, scurrying shapes of fright.... While here the very beggars
+walked with heads unbowed, and men and women of happier estate laughed and
+played and made love lightly in the scampering taxis that whisked them
+homeward from restaurants of the feverish midnight.
+
+A people at war, actually at grips with the Blond Beast, arrayed to
+defend itself and all humanity against conquest by that loathsome incubus
+incarnate, a people heedless, carefree, irresponsible, refusing to credit
+its peril....
+
+Here and there a recruiting poster, down the broad reaches of Fifth Avenue
+a display of bunting, no other hint of war-time spirit and gravity....
+
+Longacre Square, a weltering lake of kaleidoscopic radiance, even at this
+late hour thronged with carnival crowds, not one note of sobriety in the
+night....
+
+Lanyard lifted a wondering gaze to the livid sky whose far, clear stars
+were paled and shamed by the up-flung glare, like eyes of innocence peering
+down into a pit of hell.
+
+Inscrutable!
+
+Yet one could hardly be numb to the subtle, heady intoxication of those
+cool, immaculate, sea-sweet airs which swept the streets, instilling
+self-confidence and lightness of spirit even in heads shadowed with the woe
+of war-worn Europe.
+
+Lanyard had not crossed the Avenue before he found himself walking with a
+brisker stride, holding his own head high....
+
+On impulse, despite the lateness of the hour, albeit with misgivings
+justified in the issue, he hailed a taxicab and had himself driven to the
+headquarters of the British Secret Service in America, an unostentatious
+dwelling on the northwest corner of West End Avenue at Ninety-fifth Street.
+
+Here a civil footman answered the door and Lanyard's enquiries with the
+information that Colonel Stanistreet had unexpectedly been called out
+of town and would not return before evening of the next day, while his
+secretary, Mr. Blensop, had gone to a play and might not come home till all
+hours.
+
+More impatient than disappointed, Lanyard climbed back into his cab, and in
+consequence of consultation with its friendly minded chauffeur, eventually
+put up for the night in an Eighth Avenue hotel of the class that made
+Senator Raines famous, a hostelry brazenly proclaiming accommodations "for
+gentlemen only," whereas it offered entertainment for both man and beast
+and catered rather more to beast than to man.
+
+However, it served; it was inconspicuous and made no demands upon a shabby
+traveller sans luggage, more than payment in advance.
+
+Early abroad, Lanyard breakfasted with attention fixed to the advertising
+columns of the _Herald_, and by mid-morning was established as sub-tenant
+of a furnished bachelor apartment on Fifty-eighth Street near Seventh
+Avenue, a tiny nest of few rooms on the street level, with entrances from
+both the general lobby and the street direct: an admirable arrangement for
+one who might choose to come and go without supervision or challenge.
+
+Lacking local references as to his character, Lanyard was obliged to pay
+three months' rent in advance in addition to making a substantial deposit
+to cover possible damage to the furnishings.
+
+His name, a spur-of-the-moment selection, was recorded in the lease as
+Anthony Ember.
+
+At noon he brought to his lodgings two trunks salvaged from a storage
+warehouse wherein they had been deposited more than three years since, on
+the eve of his flight with his family from America, an affair of haste and
+secrecy forbidding the handicap of heavy impedimenta.
+
+Thus Lanyard became once more possessor of a tolerably comprehensive
+wardrobe.
+
+But, those trunks released more than his personal belongings; intermingled
+were possessions that had been his wife's and his boy's. As he unpacked,
+memories peopled those perfunctorily luxurious lodgings of the transient
+with melancholy ghosts as sweet and sad as lavender and rue.
+
+For hours on end the man sat idle, head bowed down, hands plucking
+aimlessly at small broidered garments.
+
+And if in the sweep and turmoil of late events he seemed to have forgotten
+for a little that feud which had brought him overseas, he roused from this
+brief interlude of saddened dreaming with the iron of deadly purpose newly
+entered into his soul, and in his heart one dominant thought, that now his
+hour with Ekstrom could not, must not, be long deferred.
+
+In the street there rose an uproar of inhuman bawling. Lanyard went to the
+private door, hailed one of the husky authors of the din, an itinerant
+news-vendor, and disbursed a nickel coin for one cent's worth of spushul
+uxtry and four cents' worth of howling impudence.
+
+He found no more of interest in the newspaper than the information that the
+_Saratoga_ had been sighted off Fire Island and was expected to dock in New
+York not later than eight o'clock that night.
+
+This, however, was acceptable reading. Lanyard had work to do which were
+better done before "Karl" and his crew found opportunity to communicate
+directly with their collaborators ashore, work which it were unwise
+to initiate before nightfall lent a cloak of shadows to hoodwink the
+ever-possible adventitious German spy.
+
+Nor was he so fatuous as to fancy it would profit him to call before nine
+o'clock at the house on West End Avenue. No earlier might he hope to find
+Colonel the Honourable George Fleetwood-Stanistreet near the end of his
+dinner, and so in a mood approachable and receptive.
+
+But there could be no harm in reconnaissance by daylight.
+
+He whiled away the latter part of the afternoon in taxicabs, by dint of
+frequent changes contriving in the most casual fashion imaginable to pass
+the Seventy-ninth Street branch of the Wilhelmstrasse no less than four
+times.
+
+Little rewarded these tactics other than a fairly accurate mental
+photograph of the building and its situation--and a growing suspicion that
+the United States Government had profited nothing by England's lessons
+of early war days in respect of the one way to cope with resident enemy
+aliens.
+
+The house stood upon a corner, occupying half of an avenue block--the
+northern half of which was the site of a towering apartment house in
+course of construction--and loomed over its lesser neighbours a monumental
+monstrosity of architecture, as formidable as a fortress, its lower tiers
+of windows barred with iron, substantial iron grilles ready to bar its
+main entrance, even heavier gates guarding the carriage court in the
+side street. In all a stronghold not easy for the most accomplished
+house-breaker to force; yet the heart of it was Lanyard's goal; for there,
+he believed, Ekstrom (under whatever _nom de guerre_) lay hidden, or if not
+Ekstrom, at least a clear lead to his whereabouts.
+
+Certainly that one could not be far from the powerful wireless station
+secretly maintained on the roof of this weird jumble of architectural
+periods, its aërials cunningly hidden in the crowning atrocity of its
+minaret: a station reputedly so powerful that it could receive Berlin's
+nightly outgivings of news and orders, and, in emergency, transmit them to
+other secret stations in Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela.
+
+Yet the shrewdest scrutiny of eyes trained to detect police agents at
+sight, however well disguised, failed to espy one sign of any sort of
+espionage upon this nest of rattlesnakes.
+
+Apparently its tenants came and went as they willed, untroubled by and
+contemptuous of governmental surveillance.
+
+A handsome limousine car pulled up at its carriage block as Lanyard drove
+by, one time, and a pretty woman, exquisitely gowned, alighted and was
+welcomed by hospitable front doors that opened before she could ring: a
+woman Lanyard knew as one of the most daring, diabolically clever, and
+unscrupulous creatures of the Wilhelmstrasse, one whose life would not have
+been worth an hour's purchase had she ventured to show herself in Paris,
+London, or Petrograd at any time since the outbreak of the war.
+
+He drove on, deep in amaze.
+
+Indications were not wanting, on the other hand, that enemy spies
+maintained close watch upon the movements of those who frequented the house
+on West End Avenue. A German agent whom Lanyard knew by sight was strolling
+by as his taxi rounded its corner and swung on down toward Riverside Drive.
+
+This more modest residence possessed a brick-walled garden at the back, on
+the Ninety-fifth Street side. And if the top of the wall was crusted with
+broken glass in a fashion truly British, it had a door, and the door a
+lock. And Lanyard made a note thereon.
+
+And when he went home to dress for dinner, he opened up the false bottom
+of one of his trunks and selected from a store of cloth-wrapped bundles
+therein one which contained a small bunch of innocent-looking keys whose
+true _raison d'ętre_ was anything in the world but guileless.
+
+Later he did himself very well at Delmonico's, enjoying for the first time
+in many years a well-balanced dinner faultlessly cooked and served amid
+quiet surroundings that carried memory back half a decade to the Paris that
+was, the Paris that nevermore will be....
+
+At nine precisely he paid off a taxicab at the corner of Ninety-fifth
+Street.
+
+While waiting on the doorstep of the corner house, he raked the street
+right and left with searching glances, and was somewhat reassured.
+Apparently he called at an hour when the Boche pickets were off duty; at
+the moment there was no pedestrian visible within a block's distance
+on either hand, nobody that he could see skulked in the areas of the
+old-fashioned brownstone houses across the way.
+
+The neighbourhood was, indeed, quiet even for an upper West Side
+residential quarter. A block over to the east Broadway was strident in the
+flood of its nocturnal traffic; a like distance to the west Riverside Drive
+hummed with pleasure cars taking advantage of the first bland night of that
+belated spring. But here, now that the taxi had wheeled away, there was
+never a car in sight, nor even a strolling brace of sidewalk lovers.
+
+The door opened, revealing the same footman.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet? I will see, sir."
+
+Lanyard entered.
+
+"If you will be kind enough to be seated," the footman suggested,
+indicating a small waiting room. "And what name shall I say?"
+
+It had been Lanyard's intention to have himself announced simply as the
+author of that telegram from Edgartown. Obscure impulse made him change his
+mind, some premonition so tenuous as to defy analysis.
+
+"Mr. Anthony Ember."
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+After a little the footman returned.
+
+"If you will come this way, sir...."
+
+He led toward the back of the house, introducing Lanyard to a spacious
+apartment, a library uncommonly well furnished, rather more than
+comfortably yet without a trace of ostentation in its complete luxury, a
+warm room, a room intimately lived in, a room, in short, characteristically
+British in atmosphere.
+
+Waist-high bookcases lined the walls, broken on the right by a cheerful
+fireplace with a grate of glowing cannel coal, in front of it a great club
+lounge upholstered, like all the chairs, in well-used leather. Opposite the
+chimney-piece, a handsome thing in carved oak, a door was draped with a
+curtain that swung with it. In the back of the room two long and wide
+French windows stood open to the night, beyond them that garden whose
+wall had attracted Lanyard's attention. There were a number of paintings,
+portraits for the most part, heavily framed, with overhead picture-lights.
+In the middle of the room was a table-desk, broad and long, supporting a
+shaded reading lamp. On the far side of the table a young man sat writing,
+with several dockets of papers arranged before him.
+
+As Lanyard entered, this one put down his pen, pushed back his chair, and
+came round the table: a tallish, well-made young man, dressed a shade too
+foppishly in spite of an unceremonious dinner coat, his manner assured,
+amiable, unconstrained, perhaps a little over-tolerant.
+
+"Mr. Ember, I believe?" he said in a voice studiously musical.
+
+"Yes," Lanyard replied, vaguely annoyed with himself because of an
+unreasoning resentment of this musical quality. "Mr. Blensop?"
+
+"I am Mr. Blensop," that one admitted gracefully. "And how may I have the
+pleasure of being of service?"
+
+He waved a hand toward an easy chair beside the table, and resumed his own.
+But Lanyard hesitated.
+
+"I wished to see Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+Mr. Blensop looked up with an indulgent smile. His face was round and
+smooth but for a perfectly docile little moustache, his lips full and red,
+his nose delicately chiselled; but his eyes, though large, were set cannily
+close together.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet is unfortunately not at home. I am his secretary."
+
+"Yes," said Lanyard, still standing. "In that case I'd be glad if you would
+be good enough to make an appointment for me with Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+"I am afraid he will not be home till very late to-night, but--"
+
+"Then to-morrow?"
+
+Mr. Blensop smiled patiently. "Colonel Stanistreet is a very busy man," he
+uttered melodiously. "If you could let me know something about the nature
+of your business...."
+
+"It is the King's," said Lanyard bluntly.
+
+The secretary went so far as to betray well-bred surprise. "You are an
+Englishman, Mr. Ember?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+And for all he knew to the contrary, so Lanyard was.
+
+"I am Colonel Stanistreet's secretary," the young man again suggested
+hopefully.
+
+"That is precisely why I ask you to make an appointment for me with your
+employer," Lanyard retorted politely.
+
+"You won't say what you wish to see him about?"
+
+A trace of asperity marred the music of those tones; Mr. Blensop further
+indicated distaste of the innuendo inherent in Lanyard's use of the word
+"employer" by delicately wrinkling his nose.
+
+"I am sorry," Lanyard replied sufficiently.
+
+The door behind him opened, and the footman intruded.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop...."
+
+"Yes, Walker?"
+
+The servant advanced to the table and proffered a visiting card on a tray.
+Mr. Blensop took it, arched pencilled brows over it.
+
+"To see me, Walker?"
+
+"The gentleman asked for Colonel Stanistreet, sir."
+
+"H'm.... You may show him in when I ring."
+
+The footman retired. Mr. Blensop looked up brightly, bending the card with
+nervous fingers.
+
+"You were saying your business was...?"
+
+"I was not," Lanyard replied with disarming good humour. "I'm afraid that
+is something much too important and confidential to reveal even to Colonel
+Stanistreet's secretary, if you don't mind my saying so."
+
+Mr. Blensop did mind, and betrayed vexation with an impatient little
+gesture which caused the card to fly from his fingers and fall face
+uppermost on the table. Almost instantly he recovered it, but not before
+Lanyard had read the name it bore.
+
+"Of course not," said the secretary pleasantly, rising. "But you understand
+my instructions are rigid ... I'm sorry."
+
+"You refuse me the appointment?"
+
+"Unless you can give me an inkling of your business--or perhaps bring a
+letter of introduction."
+
+"I can do neither, Mr. Blensop," said Lanyard earnestly. "I have
+information of the gravest moment to communicate to the head of the British
+Secret Service in this country."
+
+The secretary looked startled. "What makes you think Colonel Stanistreet is
+connected with the British Secret Service?"
+
+"I don't think so; I know it."
+
+After a moment of hesitation Mr. Blensop yielded graciously. "If you can
+come back at nine to-morrow morning, Mr. Ember, I'll do my best to persuade
+Colonel Stanistreet--"
+
+"I repeat, my business is of the most pressing nature. Can't you arrange
+for me to see your employer to-night?"
+
+"It is utterly impossible."
+
+Lanyard accepted defeat with a bow.
+
+"To-morrow at nine, then," he said, turning toward the door by which he had
+entered.
+
+"At nine," said Mr. Blensop, generous in triumph. "But do you mind going
+out this way?"
+
+He moved toward the curtained door opposite the chimney-piece. Lanyard
+paused, shrugged, and followed. Mr. Blensop opened the door, disclosing a
+vista of Ninety-fifth Street.
+
+"Thank _you_, Mr. Ember. _Good_-night," he intoned.
+
+The door closed with the click of a spring latch.
+
+Lanyard stood alone in the street, looking swiftly this way and that, his
+hand closing upon that little bunch of keys in his pocket, his humour
+lawless.
+
+For the name inscribed on that card which Mr. Blensop had so carelessly
+dropped was one to fill Lanyard with consuming anxiety for better
+acquaintance with its present wearer.
+
+Written in pencil, with all the individual angularity of French
+chirography, the name was André Duchemin.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+REINCARNATION
+
+
+It took a little time and patience but, on his third essay, Lanyard found
+a key which agreed with the lock. He permitted himself a sigh of relief;
+Ninety-fifth Street was bare, the door set flush with the outside of the
+wall afforded no concealment to the trespasser, while the direct light of a
+street lamp at the corner made his lonely figure uncomfortably conspicuous.
+
+Apparently, however, he had not been observed.
+
+Gently pushing the door open, he slipped in, as gently closed it, then for
+a full minute stood stirless, spying out the lay of the land.
+
+Fitting precisely his anticipations, the garden discovered a fine English
+flavour; it was well-kept, modest, fragrant and, best of all, quite dark,
+especially so in the shadow of the street wall. Only a glimmer of starlight
+enabled him to pick out the course of a pebbled footpath. A border of deep
+turf between this and the wall muffled his footsteps as he moved toward the
+back of the house.
+
+The library windows, deeply recessed, opened on a low, broad stoop of
+concrete, with a pergola effect above, and a few wicker pieces upon a grass
+mat underfoot.
+
+Noiselessly Lanyard stepped across the low sill and paused in the cover of
+heavy draperies, commanding a tolerably full view of the library if one
+somewhat unsatisfactory, since the light within was by no means bright.
+Still, this circumstance had its advantages for him; with his dark topcoat
+buttoned to the throat and its collar turned up to hide his linen, he was
+confident he would not be detected unless he gave his presence away by an
+abrupt movement--something which the Lone Wolf never made.
+
+At the moment Mr. Blensop seemed to be engaged in the surprising occupation
+of discoursing upon art to his caller.
+
+The latter occupied that chair which Lanyard had refused, on the far side
+of the table. Thus placed, the lamplight masked more than revealed him,
+throwing a dull glare into Lanyard's eyes. His man sat in a pose of earnest
+attention, bending forward a trifle to follow the exposition of Mr.
+Blensop, who stood beneath a portrait on the wall between the chimney-piece
+and the windows, his attitude incurably graceful, a hand on the switch
+controlling the picture-light. Apparently he had just finished speaking,
+for he paused, looking toward his guest with a quiet and intimate smile as
+he turned off the light.
+
+"And that's all there is to it," he declared, moving back to the table.
+
+"I see," said the other thoughtfully.
+
+Lanyard felt himself start almost uncontrollably: rage swept through him,
+storming brain and body, like a black squall over a hill-bound lake. For
+the moment he could neither see or hear clearly nor think coherently.
+
+For the voice of this latest incarnation of André Duchemin was the voice of
+"Karl."
+
+When the tumult of his senses subsided he heard Blensop saying, "I'll
+write it out for you," and saw him pick up a pad and pencil and jot down a
+memorandum.
+
+"There you are," he added, ripping off the sheet and passing it across the
+table. "Now you can't go wrong."
+
+"I precious seldom do," his caller commented drily.
+
+"I think--" Blensop began, and checked sharply as the man Walker came into
+the room.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop--"
+
+There was an accent of impatience in those beautifully modulated tones:
+"Well, what is it now?"
+
+"A lady to see you, sir."
+
+Blensop took the card from the proffered salver. "Never heard of her," he
+announced brusquely at a glance. "She asked for Colonel Stanistreet or for
+me?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, sir. But when I said he was not at home, she asked to
+see his secretary."
+
+"Any idea what she wants?"
+
+"She didn't say, sir--but she seemed much distressed."
+
+"They always are. H'm.... Young and good-looking?"
+
+"Quite, sir."
+
+"Dessay I may as well see her," said Mr. Blensop wearily. "Show her in when
+I ring."
+
+Walker shut himself out of the room.
+
+"It's just as well," Blensop added to his caller. "You understand, my clear
+fellow--?"
+
+"Assuredly." The man got up; but Blensop contrived exasperatingly to keep
+between him and the windows. "I'm to be back at midnight?"
+
+"Twelve sharp; you'll be sure to find him here then. Mind leaving by this
+emergency exit?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"Then _good_-night, my dear Monsieur Duchemin!"
+
+Was there a hint of irony in Blensop's employment of that style? Lanyard
+half fancied there was, but did not linger to analyse the impression.
+Already the secretary had opened the side door.
+
+In a bound Lanyard cleared the stoop, then ran back to the door in the
+wall. But with all his quickness he was all too slow; already, as he
+emerged to Ninety-fifth Street, his quarry was rounding the Avenue corner.
+
+Defiant of discretion, Lanyard gave chase at speed but, though he had not
+thirty yards to cover, again was baffled by the swiftness with which "Karl"
+got about.
+
+He had still some distance to go when the peace of the quarter was
+shattered by a door that slammed like a pistol shot, and with roaring
+motor and grinding gears a cab swung away from the curb in front of the
+Stanistreet residence and tore off down the Avenue.
+
+Swearing petulantly in his disappointment, Lanyard pulled up on the corner.
+The number on the license plate was plainly revealed as the vehicle showed
+its back to the street lamp. But what good was that to him? He memorised
+it mechanically, in mutinous appreciation of the fact that the taxi was
+setting a pace with which he could not hope to compete afoot.
+
+The rumble of another motor-car caught his ear, and he looked round
+eagerly. A second taxicab--undoubtedly that which had brought the young
+woman now presumably closeted with Mr. Blensop--was moving up into the
+place vacated by the first.
+
+In two strides Lanyard was at its side.
+
+"Follow that taxi!" he cried--"number seventy-six, three-eighty-five. Don't
+lose sight of it, but don't pass it--don't let them know we're following!"
+
+"Engaged," the driver growled.
+
+"Hang your engagement! Here"--Lanyard pressed a golden eagle into the
+fellow's palm--"there will be another of those if you do as I say!"
+
+"Le's go!" the driver agreed with resignation.
+
+If the cab was moving before Lanyard could hop in and shut the door, the
+other had already established a killing lead; and though Lanyard's man
+demonstrated characteristic contempt for municipal regulations governing
+the speed of motor-driven vehicles, and racketed his own madly down the
+Avenue, he was wholly helpless to do more than keep the tail-lamp of the
+first in sight.
+
+More than once that dull red eye seemed sardonically to wink.
+
+Still, Lanyard did not think "Karl" knew he was pursued. His conveyance had
+passed the corner before Lanyard emerged from the side street. There being
+no reason that Lanyard knew of why the spy should believe himself under
+suspicion, his haste seemed most probably due to natural desire to avoid
+adventitious recognition, coupled with, no doubt, other urgent business.
+
+At Seventy-second Street the chase turned east, with Lanyard two blocks
+behind, and for a few agonizing moments was altogether lost to him. But at
+Broadway the tide of southbound traffic hindered it momentarily, and it
+swung into that stream with its pursuer only a block astern.
+
+Thereafter through a ride of another mile and a half, the distance between
+the two was augmented or abbreviated arbitrarily by the rules of the road.
+
+At one time less than two cab-lengths separated them; then a Ford, driven
+Fordishly, wandered vaguely out of a crosstown street and hesitated in the
+middle of the thoroughfare with precisely the air of a staring yokel on
+a first visit to the city; and Lanyard's driver slammed on the emergency
+brake barely in time to escape committing involuntary but justifiable
+flivvercide.
+
+When he was able once more to throw the gears into high, the chase was a
+long block ahead.
+
+They were entering Longacre Square before he made up that loss.
+
+And at Forty-fourth Street, again, a stream of east-bound cars edged in
+between the two, reducing Lanyard's driver to the verge of gibbering
+lunacy.
+
+A car resembling "Karl's" was crossing Broadway at Forty-second Street when
+Lanyard was still on Seventh Avenue north of the Times Building.
+
+But only a minute later his driver pulled up in front of the Hotel
+Knickerbocker, and Lanyard, peering through the forward window, saw the
+number 76-385 on the license plate of a taxicab drawing away, empty, from
+the curb beneath the hotel canopy.
+
+He tossed the second gold piece to the driver as his feet touched the
+sidewalk, and shouldered through a cluster of men and women at the main
+entrance to the lobby.
+
+That rendezvous of Broadway was fairly thronged despite the slack
+mid-evening hour, between the dinner and the supper crushes; but Lanyard
+reviewed in vain the little knots of guests and loungers; if "Karl" were
+among them, he was nobody whom Lanyard had learned to know by sight on
+board the _Assyrian_.
+
+With as little success he searched unobtrusively all public rooms on the
+main floor.
+
+It was, of course, both possible and probable that "Karl," himself a guest
+of the hotel, had crossed directly to the elevators and been whisked aloft
+to his room.
+
+With this in mind, Lanyard paused at the desk, asked permission to examine
+the register and, being accommodated, was somewhat consoled; if his chase
+had failed of its immediate objective, it now proved not altogether
+fruitless. A majority of the _Assyrian_ survivors seemed to have elected to
+stop at the Knickerbocker. One after another Lanyard, scanning the entries,
+found these names:
+
+  Edmund O'Reilly--Detroit
+  Arturo Velasco--Buenos Aires
+  Bartlett Putnam--Philadelphia
+  Cecelia Brooke--London
+  Emil Dressier--Genčve
+
+Half inclined to commit the imprudence of sending a name up to Miss
+Brooke--any name but André Duchemin, Michael Lanyard, or Anthony
+Ember--together with a message artfully worded to fix her interest without
+giving comfort to the enemy, should it chance to go astray, the adventurer
+hesitated by the desk; and of a sudden was satisfied that such a move would
+be not only injudicious but waste of time; for, now that he paused to think
+of it, he surmised that the young woman--"young and good-looking", on
+Walker's word--who had called to see Colonel Stanistreet was none other
+than this same Cecelia Brooke.
+
+What more natural than that she should make early occasion to consult the
+head of the British Secret Service in America?
+
+A pity he had not waited there in the window! If he had, no doubt the
+mystery with which the girl had surrounded herself would be no more mystery
+to Lanyard; he would have learned the secret of that paper cylinder as well
+as the part the girl had played in the intrigue for its possession, and so
+be the better advised as to his own future conduct.
+
+But in his insensate passion for revenge upon one who had all but murdered
+him, he had forgotten all else but the moment's specious opportunity.
+
+With a grunt of impatience Lanyard turned away from the desk, and came face
+to face with Crane.
+
+The Secret Service man was coming from the direction of the bar in company
+with Velasco, O'Reilly, and Dressier.
+
+Of the three last named but one looked Lanyard's way, O'Reilly, and his
+gaze, resting transiently on the countenance of André Duchemin minus the
+Duchemin beard, passed on without perceptible glimmer of recognition.
+
+Why not? Why should it enter his head that one lived and had anticipated
+his own arrival in New York by twenty hours whom be believed to be buried
+many fathoms deep off Nantucket?
+
+As for Crane, his cool gray, humorous eyes, half-hooded with their heavy
+lids, favoured Lanyard with casual regard and never a tremor of interest
+or surprise; but as he passed his right eye closed deliberately and with a
+significance not to be ignored.
+
+To this Lanyard responded only with a look of blankest amaze.
+
+Chatting with an air of subdued self-congratulation pardonable in such
+as have come safe to land through many dangers of the deep, the quartet
+strolled round the desk and boarded one of the elevators.
+
+Not till its gate had closed did Lanyard stir. Then he went away from there
+with all haste and cunning at his command.
+
+The route through the café to Broadway offered the speediest and least
+conspicuous of exits. From the side door of the hotel he plunged directly
+into the mouth of the Subway kiosk and, chance favouring him, managed to
+purchase a ticket and board a southbound local train an instant before its
+doors ground shut.
+
+Believing Crane would take the next elevator down, once he had seen the
+others safely in their rooms, Lanyard was content to let him find the lobby
+destitute of ghosts, to let him fume and wonder and think himself perhaps
+mistaken.
+
+The last thing he desired was entanglement with the American Secret
+Service. For Crane he entertained personal respect and temperate liking,
+thought the man socially an amusing creature, professionally a deadly peril
+to one who had a feud to pursue.
+
+Leaving the train at Grand Central, the adventurer passed through the back
+ways of the Terminus, into the Hotel Biltmore, upstairs to its lobby,
+thence out by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance, walking through Forty-fourth
+Street to Fifth Avenue, where he chartered a taxicab, gave the address
+of his lodgings, and lay back in the corner of its seat satisfied he had
+successfully eluded pursuit and very, very grateful to the Subway system
+for the facilities it afforded fugitives like himself through its warren of
+underground passages.
+
+One thing troubled him, however, without respite: the Brooke girl was on
+his conscience. To her he owed an accounting of his stewardship of that
+trust which she had reposed in him. It was intolerable in his understanding
+that she should be permitted to go one unnecessary hour in ignorance of the
+truth about that business--the truth, that is, as far as he himself knew
+it.
+
+If through Crane or in some unforseeable fashion she were to learn that
+André Duchemin lived, she would think him faithless. If she knew that
+Duchemin had been one with Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf, she would not be
+surprised. But that, too, was intolerable; even the Lone Wolf had his code
+of honour.
+
+Again, if she remained in ignorance of the fact that Lanyard had escaped
+drowning, she would continue to believe her secret at the bottom of the sea
+with him; whereas, in the hands of the enemy, in the possession of "Karl"
+and his, confederates, it was potentially Heaven only knew how dangerous a
+weapon.
+
+Abruptly Lanyard reflected that at least one doubt had been eliminated by
+that encounter in the Knickerbocker. It was barely possible that "Karl" had
+gone to the bar on entering and added himself to Crane's party, but it
+was hardly creditable in Lanyard's consideration. He was convinced that,
+whether or not Velasco, O'Reilly, and Dressier were parties to the Hun
+conspiracy, none of these was "Karl."
+
+As for the Brooke matter, he felt it incumbent upon him immediately to find
+some safe means of communicating with the girl. She could be trusted not to
+betray him to the police, however much she might at first incline to doubt
+him. But he would persuade her of his sincerity, never fear!
+
+The telephone offered one solution of his difficulty, an agency
+non-committal enough, provided one were at pains not to call from one's
+private station, to which the call might be traced back.
+
+With this in mind he stopped and dismissed his taxicab at Fifty-seventh
+Street and Sixth Avenue, and availed himself of a coin-box telephone booth
+in the corner druggist's.
+
+The experience that followed was nothing out of the ordinary. Lanyard,
+connected with the Knickerbocker promptly, with the customary expenditure
+of patience laboriously spelled out the name B-r-double-o-k-e, and was told
+to hold the wire.
+
+Several minutes later he began to agitate the receiver hook and was
+eventually rewarded with the advice that the Knickerbocker operator, being
+informed his party was in the rest'runt, was having her paged.
+
+Still later the central operator told him his five minutes was up and
+consented to continue the connection only on deposit of an additional
+nickel.
+
+Eventually, in sequel to more abuse of the hook, he received this response
+from the Knickerbocker switchboard: "Wait a min'te, can't you? Here's your
+party."
+
+Lanyard was surprised at the eagerness with which he cried: "Hello!"
+
+A click answered, and a bland voice which was not the voice he had expected
+to hear: "Hello? That you, Jack?"
+
+He said wearily: "I am waiting to speak with Miss Cecelia Brooke."
+
+"Oh, then there _must_ be some mistake. This is Miss _Crooke_ speaking."
+
+Lanyard uttered a strangled "Sorry!" and hung up, abandoning further effort
+as hopeless.
+
+That matter would have to stand over till morning.
+
+Time now pressed: it was nearly eleven; he had a rendezvous with Destiny to
+keep at midnight, and meant to be more than punctual.
+
+Walking to his apartment house, he proceeded to establish an alibi by
+entering through the public hallway and registering with the telephone
+attendant a call for seven o'clock the next morning.
+
+In the course of the next half hour Lanyard let himself quietly out of the
+private door, slipped around the block and boarded a Riverside Drive bus.
+
+Alighting at Ninety-third Street, he walked two blocks north on the Drive,
+turned east, and without misadventure admitted himself a second time to the
+Stanistreet garden.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+DEFAMATION
+
+
+It was hardly possible to watch Mr. Blensop functioning in his vocational
+capacity without reflecting on that cruel injustice which Nature only too
+often practises upon her offspring in secreting most praiseworthy qualities
+within fleshy envelopes of hopelessly frivolous cast.
+
+The flowing gestures of this young man, his fluting accents, poetic eyes,
+and modestly ingratiating moustache, the preciosity of his taste in dress,
+assorted singularly with an austere devotion to duty rare if unaffected.
+
+Beyond question, whether or not naturally a man of studious and
+conscientious temper, Mr. Blensop figured to admiration in the role of such
+an one.
+
+Seated, the shaded lamplight an aureole for his fair young head, he wrought
+industriously with a beautiful gold-mounted fountain pen for fully five
+minutes after Lanyard had stolen into the draped recess of the French
+window, pausing only now and again to take a fresh sheet of paper or
+consult one of the sheaves of documents that lay before him.
+
+At length, however, he hesitated with pen lifted and abstracted gaze
+focussed upon vacancy, shook a bewildered head, and rose, moving directly
+toward the windows.
+
+For as long as thirty breathless seconds Lanyard remained in doubt; there
+was the barest chance that in his preoccupation Blensop might pass through
+to the garden without noticing that dark figure flattened against the
+inswung half of the window, in the dense shadow of the portičre. Otherwise
+the game was altogether up; Lanyard could see no way to avoid the necessity
+of staggering Blensop with a blow, racing for freedom, abandoning utterly
+further effort to learn the motive of "Karl's" impersonation of Duchemin.
+
+He gathered himself together, waited poised in readiness for any
+eventuality--and blessed his lucky stars to find his apprehensions idle.
+
+Three paces from the windows, Mr. Blensop made it plain that he was after
+all not minded to stroll in the garden. Pausing, he swung a high-backed
+wing chair round to face the corner of the room, switched on a reading
+lamp, sat down and selected a volume of some work of reference from the
+well-stocked book shelves.
+
+For several minutes, seated within arm's length of the trespasser, he
+studied intently, then with a cluck of satisfaction replaced the volume,
+extinguished the light, and went back to his writing.
+
+But presently he checked with a vexed little exclamation, shook his pen
+impatiently, and fixed it with a frown of pained reproach.
+
+But that did no good. The cussedness of the inanimate was strong in this
+pen: since its reservoir was quite empty it mulishly refused more service
+without refilling.
+
+With a long-suffering sigh, Mr. Blensop found a filler in one of the desk
+drawers, and unscrewed the nib of the pen.
+
+This accomplished, he paused, listened for a moment with head cocked
+intelligently to one side, dropped the dismembered implement, and got up
+alertly. At the same moment the door to the hallway opened, and two women
+entered, apparently sisters: one a lady of mature and distinguished charm,
+the other an equally prepossessing creature much her junior, the one
+strongly animated with intelligent interest in life, the other a listless
+prey to habitual ennui.
+
+To these fluttered Mr. Blensop, offering to relieve them of their wraps.
+
+"Permit me, Mrs. Arden," he addressed the elder woman, who tolerated him
+dispassionately. "And Mrs. Stanistreet ... I say, aren't you a bit late?"
+
+"Frightfully," assented Mrs. Stanistreet in a weary voice. "It must be all
+of midnight."
+
+"Hardly that, Adele," said Mrs. Arden with a humorous glance.
+
+"Dinner, the play, supper, and home before twelve!" commented Blensop,
+shocked. "I say, that is going some, you know."
+
+"George would insist on hurrying home," the young wife complained.
+"Frightfully tiresome. We were so comfy at the Ritz, too...."
+
+"The Crystal Room?" Dissembled envy poisoned Blensop's accents.
+
+"Frightfully interestin'--everybody was there. I did so want to
+dance--missed you, Arthur."
+
+"I say, you didn't, did you, really?"
+
+"Poor Mr. Blensop!" Mrs. Arden interjected with just a hint of malice.
+"What a pity you must be chained down by inexorable duty, while we fly
+round and amuse ourselves."
+
+"I must not complain," Blensop stated with humility becoming in a dutiful
+martyr, a pose which he saw fit quickly to discard as another man came
+briskly into the room. "Ah, good evening, Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+"Evening, Blensop."
+
+With a brusque nod, Colonel Stanistreet went straightway to the desk,
+stopping there to take up and examine the work upon which his secretary had
+been engaged: a gentleman considerably older than his wife, of grave and
+sturdy cast, with the habit of standing solidly on his feet and giving
+undivided attention to the matter in hand.
+
+"Anything of consequence turned up?" he enquired abstractedly, running
+through the sheets of pen-blackened paper.
+
+"Three persons called," Blensop admitted discreetly. "One returns at
+midnight."
+
+Stanistreet threw him a keen look. "Eh!" he said, making swift inference,
+and turned to his wife and sister-in-law. "It is nearly twelve now. Forgive
+me if I hurry you off."
+
+"Patience," said Mrs. Arden indulgently. "Not for worlds would I hinder
+your weighty affairs, dear old thing, but I sleep more sound o' nights when
+I know my trinkets are locked up securely in your safe."
+
+With a graceful gesture she unfastened a magnificent necklace and deposited
+it on the desk.
+
+"Frightful rot," her sister commented from the doorway. "As if anybody
+would dare break in here."
+
+"Why not?" Mrs. Arden enquired calmly, stripping her fingers of their
+rings.
+
+"With a watchman patrolling the grounds all night--"
+
+"Letty is sensible," Stanistreet interrupted. "Howson's faithful enough,
+and these American police dependable, but second-storey men happen in the
+best-guarded neighbourhoods. Be advised, Adele: leave your things here with
+Letty's."
+
+"No fear," his wife returned coolly. "Too frightfully weird...."
+
+She drifted across the threshold, then hesitated, a pretty figure of
+disdainful discontent.
+
+"But really, Colonel Stanistreet is right," Blensop interposed vivaciously.
+"What do you imagine I heard to-night? The Lone Wolf is in America!"
+
+"What is that you say?" Mrs. Arden demanded sharply.
+
+"The Lone Wolf ... Fact. Have it on most excellent authority."
+
+"The Lone Wolf!" Mrs. Stanistreet drawled. "If you ask me, I think the Lone
+Wolf nothing in the world but a scapegoat for police stupidity."
+
+"You wouldn't say that," Mrs. Arden retorted, "if you had lived in Paris as
+long as I. There, in the dear old days, we paid that rogue too heavy a tax
+not to believe in him."
+
+"Frightful nonsense," insisted the other. "I'm off. 'Night, Arthur. Shall
+you be long, George?"
+
+"Oh, half an hour or so," her husband responded absently as she
+disappeared.
+
+With a little gesture consigning her jewellery, heaped upon the desk, to
+the care of her brother-in-law, Mrs. Arden uttered good-nights and followed
+her sister.
+
+Blensop bowed her out respectfully, shut the door and returned to the desk.
+
+"What's this about the Lone Wolf?" Stanistreet enquired, sitting down to
+con the papers more intently.
+
+"Oh!" Blensop laughed lightly. "I was merely repeating the blighter's own
+assertion. I mean to say, he boasted he was the Lone Wolf."
+
+"Who boasted he was the Lone Wolf?"
+
+"Chap who called to-night, giving the name of Duchemin--André Duchemin. Had
+French passports, and letters from the Home Office recommending him rather
+highly. Useful creature, one would fancy, with his knowledge of the right
+way to go about the wrong thing. What? Ought to be especially helpful to us
+in hunting down the Hun over here."
+
+"Is this the man who returns at midnight?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I thought it best to make the appointment."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He said he had crossed on the _Assyrian_, said it significantly, you know.
+I fancied he might be the person you have been expecting."
+
+Stanistreet looked up with a frown. "Hardly," he said--"if, that is, he is
+really what he claims to be. I wonder how he came by those letters."
+
+"Does seem odd, doesn't it, sir? A confessed criminal!"
+
+"An extraordinary man, by all accounts.... Those other callers--?"
+
+"Nobody of importance, I should say. A man who gave his name as Ember and
+got a bit shirty when I asked his business. Told him you might consent to
+see him at nine in the morning."
+
+"And the other?"
+
+"A young woman--deuced pretty girl--also reticent. What was her name?
+Brooke--that was it: Cecelia Brooke."
+
+"The devil!" Stanistreet exclaimed, dropping the papers. "What did you say
+to her?"
+
+"What could I say, sir? She refused to divulge a word about her business
+with us. I told her--"
+
+Warned by a gesture from Colonel Stanistreet, Blensop broke off. Walker was
+opening the door.
+
+"Well, Walker?"
+
+"A Mr. Duchemin, sir, says Mr. Blensop made an appointment with you for
+twelve to-night."
+
+"Show him in, please."
+
+The footman shut himself out. Blensop clutched nervously at Mrs. Arden's
+jewels.
+
+"Hadn't I better put these in the safe first?"
+
+"No--no time." Stanistreet opened a drawer of the desk--"Here!"--and closed
+it as Blensop hastily swept the jewellery into it. "Safe enough there--as
+long as he doesn't know, at all events. But don't forget to put them away
+after he goes."
+
+"No, sir."
+
+Again the door opened. Walker announced: "Mr. Duchemin." Stanistreet rose
+in his place. A man strode in with the assurance of one who has discounted
+a cordial welcome.
+
+Through the gap which he had quietly created between the portičre and the
+side of the window, Lanyard stared hungrily, and for the second time that
+night damned heartily the inadequate light in the library.
+
+The impostor's face, barely distinguishable in the up-thrown penumbra
+of the lampshade, wore a beard--a rather thick, dark beard of negligent
+abundance, after a mode popular among Frenchmen--above which his features
+were an indefinite blur.
+
+Lanyard endeavoured with ill success to identify the fellow by his
+carriage; there was a perceptible suggestion of a military strut, but that
+is something hardly to be termed distinctive in these days. Otherwise, he
+was tall, quite as tall as Lanyard, and had much the same character of
+body, slender and lithe.
+
+But he was "Karl" beyond question, confederate and murderer of Baron von
+Harden, the man who had thrown the light bomb to signal the U-boat,
+the brute with whom Lanyard had struggled on the boat deck of the
+_Assyrian_--though the latter, in the confusion of that struggle, had
+thought the German's beard a masking handkerchief of black silk.
+
+Now by that same token he was no member of that smoking-room coterie upon
+which Lanyard's suspicions had centered.
+
+On the other hand, any number of passengers had worn beards, not a few of
+much the same mode as that sported by this nonchalant fraud.
+
+Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits to aid a laggard memory, haunted by a
+feeling that he ought to know this man instantly, even in so poor a light.
+Something in his habit, something in that insouciance which so narrowly
+escaped insolence, was at once strongly reminiscent and provokingly
+elusive....
+
+Pausing a little ways within the room, the fellow clicked heels and bowed
+punctiliously in Continental fashion, from the hips.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, I believe," he said in a sonorous voice--"Karl's"
+unmistakable voice--"chief of the American bureau of the British Secret
+Service?"
+
+"I am Colonel Stanistreet," that gentleman admitted. "And you, sir--?"
+
+"I have adopted the name of André Duchemin," the impostor stated. "With
+permission I retain it."
+
+Colonel Stanistreet inclined his head slightly. "As you will. Pray be
+seated."
+
+He dropped back into his chair, while "Karl" with a murmur of
+acknowledgment again took the armchair on the far side of the desk, where
+the lamp stood between him and the secret watcher.
+
+"My secretary tells me you have letters of introduction...."
+
+"Here." Calmly "Karl" produced and offered those purloined papers.
+
+"You will smoke?" Stanistreet indicated a cigarette-box and leaned back to
+glance through the letters.
+
+During a brief pause Blensop busied himself with collecting together the
+documents which had occupied him and began reassorting them, while "Karl,"
+helping himself to a cigarette, smoked with manifest enjoyment.
+
+"These seem to be in order," Stanistreet observed. "I note from this code
+letter that your true name is Michael Lanyard, you were once a professional
+French thief known as 'The Lone Wolf', but have since displayed every
+indication of desire to reform your ways, and have been of considerable
+use to the Intelligence Office. I am desired to employ your services in my
+discretion, contingent--pardon me--upon your continued good behaviour."
+
+"Precisely," assented "Karl."
+
+"Proceed, Monsieur Duchemin."
+
+"It is an affair of some delicacy.... Do we speak alone, Colonel
+Stanistreet?"
+
+"Mr. Blensop is my confidential secretary...."
+
+"Oh, no objection. Still--if I may venture the suggestion--those windows
+open upon a garden, I take it?"
+
+"Yes. Blensop, be good enough to close the windows."
+
+"Certainly, sir."
+
+Stepping delicately, Blensop moved toward the end of the room.
+
+Again Lanyard was confronted with the alternatives of incontinent flight or
+attempting to remain undetected through the adoption of an expedient of the
+most desperate audacity. He had prepared against such contingency, he did
+not mean to go; but the feasibility of his contemplated manoeuvre depended
+entirely upon chance, its success in any event was forlornly problematic.
+
+"Karl" remained hidden from him by the lamp, so he from "Karl." Colonel
+Stanistreet, facing his caller, sat half turned away from the windows.
+Everything rested with Blensop's choice, which of the two windows he would
+elect first to close.
+
+A right-handed man, he turned, as Lanyard had foreseen, to the right, and
+momentarily disappeared in the recess of the farther window.
+
+In the same instant Lanyard slipped noiselessly from behind the portičre,
+and dropped into that capacious wing chair which Blensop had thoughtfully
+placed for him some time since.
+
+Thus seated, making himself as small and still as possible, he was wholly
+concealed from all other occupants of the library but Blensop; and even
+this last was little likely to discover him.
+
+He did not. He closed and latched the farther window, then that wherein
+Lanyard had lurked, and ambled back into the room with never a glance
+toward that shadowed corner which held the wing chair.
+
+And Lanyard drew a deep breath, if a quiet one. Behind him the conversation
+had continued without break. It was true, he could see nothing; but he
+could hear all that was said, he had missed no syllable, and now every
+second was informing him to his profit....
+
+"Your secretary, no doubt, has told you I am a survivor of the _Assyrian_
+disaster."
+
+"Yes...."
+
+"You were, I believe, expecting a certain communication of extraordinary
+character by the _Assyrian_, to be brought, that is, by an agent of the
+British Secret Service."
+
+After an almost imperceptible pause Stanistreet said evenly: "It is
+possible."
+
+"A communication, in fact, of such character that it was impossible to
+entrust it to the mails or to cable transmission, even in code."
+
+"And if so, sir...?"
+
+"And you are aware that, of the two gentlemen entrusted with the care of
+this document, one was drowned when the _Assyrian_ went down, and the other
+so seriously injured that he has not yet recovered consciousness, but
+was transferred directly from the pier to a hospital when the _Saratoga_
+docked."
+
+"What then, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet," said the impostor deliberately, "I have that
+communication. I will ask you not to question me too closely as to how it
+came into my possession. I have it: that is sufficient."
+
+"If you possess any document which you conceive to be so valuable to the
+British Government, monsieur, and consequently to the Allied cause, I have
+every confidence in your intention to deliver it to me without delay."
+
+A note of mild derision crept into the accents of "Karl."
+
+"I have every intention of so doing, my dear sir.... But you must
+appreciate I have incurred considerable personal danger, hardship, and
+inconvenience in taking good care of this document, in seeing that it did
+not fall into the wrong hands; in short, in bringing it safely here to you
+to-night."
+
+A slightly longer pause prefaced Stanistreet's reply, something which
+he delivered in measured tones: "I am able to promise you the British
+Government will show due appreciation of your disinterested services,
+Monsieur--Duchemin."
+
+"Not disinterested--not that!" the cheat protested. "Gentlemen of my
+kidney, sir, seldom put themselves out except in lively anticipation of
+favours to come."
+
+"Be good enough to make yourself more clear."
+
+"Cheerfully. I possess this document. I understand its character is such
+that Germany would pay a round price for it. But I am a good patriot. In
+spite of the fact that nobody knew I possessed it, in spite of the fact
+that I need only have quietly taken it to Seventy-ninth Street to-night--"
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin!" Stanistreet's voice was icy. "Your price?"
+
+"Sorry you feel that way about it," said "Karl" with ill-concealed
+insincerity. "You must know thieving is no more what it once was. Even I,
+too, often am put to it to make both ends--"
+
+"If you please, sir--how much?"
+
+"Ten thousand dollars."
+
+Silence greeted this demand, a lull that to Lanyard seemed endless. For in
+his fury he was trembling so that he feared lest his agitation betray him.
+The very walls before his eyes seemed to quake in sympathy. He was aware of
+the ache of swollen veins in his temples, his teeth hurt with the pressure
+put upon them, his breath came heavily, and his nails were digging
+painfully into his palms.
+
+"Blensop?"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"How much have we on hand, in the emergency fund?"
+
+"Between ten and twelve thousand dollars, sir."
+
+"Intuition, monsieur, is an indispensable item in the equipment of a
+successful _chevalier d'Industrie_. So, at least, the good novelists tell
+us...."
+
+"Open the safe, Blensop, and fetch me ten thousand dollars."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+"I presume you won't object to satisfying me that you really have this
+document, before I pay you your price."
+
+"It is this which makes it a pleasure to deal with an Englishman, monsieur:
+one may safely trust his word of honour."
+
+"Indeed...."
+
+"Permit me: here is the document. Use that magnifying glass I see by your
+elbow, monsieur; take your time, satisfy yourself."
+
+"Thanks; I mean to."
+
+Another break in the dialogue, during which the eavesdropper heard an
+odd sound, a sort of muffled swishing ending in a slight thud, then the
+peculiar metallic whine of a combination dial rapidly manipulated, finally
+the dull clank of bolts falling back into their sockets.
+
+"Your _coffre-fort_--what do you say?--strong-box--safe--is cleverly
+concealed, Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+There was no direct reply, but after a moment Stanistreet announced
+quietly: "This seems to be an authentic paper.... Monsieur Duchemin, what
+knowledge precisely have you of the nature of this document?"
+
+"Surely monsieur cannot have overlooked the circumstance that its seals
+were intact."
+
+"True," Stanistreet admitted. "Still...."
+
+"I trust Monsieur does not question my good faith?"
+
+"Why not?" Stanistreet enquired drily.
+
+"Monsieur!"
+
+"Oh, damn your play-acting, sir! If you can be capable of one infamy, you
+are capable of more. None the less, you are right about an Englishman's
+word: here is your money. Count it and--get out!"
+
+"Thanks"--the impostor's tone was an impertinently exact imitation of
+Stanistreet's--"I mean to."
+
+"Permit me to excuse myself," Stanistreet added; and Lanyard heard the
+muffled scrape of chair-legs on the rug as the Englishman got up.
+
+"Gladly," the spy returned--"and ten thousand thanks, monsieur!"
+
+The secretary intoned melodiously: "This way, Monsieur Duchemin, if you
+please."
+
+"Pardon. Is it material which way I leave?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Stanistreet demanded.
+
+"I should be far easier in my mind if monsieur would permit me to go by way
+of his garden, rather than run the risk of his front door."
+
+"What's this?"
+
+"In these little affairs, monsieur, I try to make it a rule to avoid
+covering the same ground twice."
+
+"You have the insolence to imply I would lend myself to treachery!"
+
+"I beg monsieur's pardon very truly for suggesting such a thing.
+Nevertheless, one cannot well be overcautious when one is a hunted man."
+
+"Blensop ... be good enough to see this man out through the garden."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Again, monsieur, my thanks."
+
+"Good-night," said Stanistreet curtly.
+
+Blensop passed Lanyard's chair, unlatched and opened the window and stood
+aside. An instant later "Karl" joined him, swung on a heel, facing back,
+clicked heels again and bowed mockingly. Apparently he got no response, for
+he laughed quietly, then turned and went out through the window, Blensop
+mincing after.
+
+With a struggle Lanyard mastered the temptation to dash after the spy,
+overtake and overpower him, expose and give him up to justice. Only the
+knowledge that by remaining quiescent, by biding his time, he might be
+enabled to redeem his word to the Brooke girl, gave him strength to be
+still.
+
+But he suffered exquisitely, maddened by the defamation imposed upon his
+nick-name of a thief by this brazen impostor.
+
+Nor was wounded _amour-propre_ mended by an exclamation in the room behind
+his chair, the accents of Colonel Stanistreet thick with contempt:
+
+"The Lone Wolf! Faugh!"
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+RECOGNITION
+
+
+Presently Blensop came back, closed the window, and passed blindly by
+Lanyard, his reappearance saluted by Stanistreet in tones that shook with
+contained temper.
+
+"You saw that animal outside the walls?"
+
+Mildly injured surprise was indicated in the reply: "Surely, sir!"
+
+"And locked the door after him?"
+
+"Yes, sir--securely."
+
+"Howson anywhere about?"
+
+"I didn't see him. Daresay he's prowling somewhere within call. Do you wish
+to speak to him?"
+
+"No.... But you might, if you see anything of him, tell him to keep an
+extra eye open to-night. I don't trust this self-styled Lone Wolf."
+
+"Naturally not, sir, under the circumstances."
+
+Stanistreet acknowledged this with an irritated snort. "No matter," he
+thought aloud; "if it has cost us a pretty penny, we have got this safe in
+hand at last. I've not had too much sleep, I can promise you, since the
+report came through of Bartholomew's death and Thackeray's disablement.
+Nor am I satisfied that this Monsieur Duchemin came by the document
+fairly--confound his impudence! If he hadn't put me on honour, tacitly, I'd
+not hesitate an instant about informing the police."
+
+"Rather chancy course to take in this business, what?"
+
+"I don't know.... That Yankee invention known as the 'frame-up' would
+easily make America too small for the Lone Wolf without the British Secret
+Service ever being mentioned in the matter."
+
+"Yes; but suppose the beast knows the contents of this paper, suspects
+the authorship of the 'frame-up'--as he instinctively would--and blabs?
+Messages have been unsealed and copied and resealed before this."
+
+"That one consideration ties my hands.... Here, my boy: take this and
+put it in the safe--and don't forget Mrs. Arden's things, of course.
+Good-night."
+
+"Trust me, sir. Good-night."
+
+A door closed with a slight jar, and for half a minute the room was so
+positively quiet that Lanyard was beginning to wonder if Blensop himself
+had gone out with his employer, when he heard a low and musical chuckle,
+followed by a soft clashing as the secretary scooped Mrs. Arden's jewellery
+out of the desk drawer.
+
+Itching with curiosity, Lanyard turned with infinite care and peered round
+the wing of the chair, thus gaining a view of the wall farthest from the
+street.
+
+Blensop remaining invisible, Lanyard's interest centred immediately upon
+the safe the ingenuity of whose concealment had excited "Karl's" favourable
+comment, and with much excuse.
+
+One of the portraits--that upon whose merits Blensop had descanted to
+"Karl" earlier in the night--was, Lanyard saw, so mounted upon a solid
+panel of wood that, by means of hidden mechanism, it could be moved
+sidelong from its frame, uncovering the face of a safe built into the wall.
+
+This last now stood open, its door, swung out toward Lanyard, showing
+a simple arrangement of dials and locks with which he was on terms of
+contemptuous familiarity; only the veriest tyro of a cracksman would want
+more than a good ear and a subtle sense of touch in order to open it
+without knowledge of the combination.
+
+With all its reputation for efficiency and astuteness the British Secret
+Service entrusted its mysteries to an antiquated contraption such as this!
+
+Humming a blithe little air, Blensop moved into Lanyard's field of vision
+and stopped between him and the safe, deftly pigeonholing therein the
+docketed papers and Mrs. Arden's jewels. Then, closing the door, he shot
+its bolts, gave the dial a brisk twirl, located a lever in the side of the
+frame and thrust it into its socket.
+
+With the same swish and thud which had puzzled Lanyard at first hearing,
+the portrait slipped back into place.
+
+Rounding on a heel, Blensop paused, head to one side, a slight frown
+shadowing his bland countenance, and stood briefly rooted in some
+perplexity of obscure origin. Twice he shook a peevish head, then smiled
+radiantly and brought his hands together in an audible clap.
+
+"I have it!" he cried in delight and, dancing briskly toward the desk, once
+more disappeared.
+
+Now what was this which Mr. Blensop so spontaneously had, and from the
+having of which he derived so much apparently innocent enjoyment? Wanting
+an answer, Lanyard settled back in disgust, then sat sharply forward, gaze
+riveted to the near sash of the adjacent window.
+
+In showing "Karl" out, Blensop had moved the portičres, exposing more
+glass than previously had been visible. Now this mirrored darkly to the
+adventurer a somewhat distorted vision of Blensop standing over the
+desk, seemingly employed in no more amusing occupation than filling his
+fountain-pen. But undoubtedly he was in the highest spirits; for the lilt
+of his humming rose sweet and clear and ever louder.
+
+To this accompaniment he pocketed his pen, two-stepped to the windows,
+drew the portičres jealously close, returned to the desk, switched off the
+reading lamp, and left the room completely dark but for a dim glow from the
+ash-filmed embers of the fire.
+
+But before he went out the secretary interrupted his humming to laugh
+with a mischievous élan which completely confounded Lanyard. He was not
+unacquainted with the Blensop type, but the secret glee which seemed to
+animate this specimen was something far beyond his comprehension.
+
+As the door softly closed Lanyard moved silently across the room and bent
+an ear to its panels, meanwhile drawing over his hands a pair of thin white
+kid gloves.
+
+From beyond came no sound other than a faint creaking of stair-treads
+quickly silenced.
+
+Opening the door, Lanyard peered out, finding the hallway deserted and
+dimly lighted by a single bulb of little candle-power at its far end, then
+scouted out as far as the foot of the stairs, listened there for a little,
+hearing no sounds above, and reconnoitred through the other living rooms,
+at length returning to the library persuaded he was alone on the ground
+floor of the house.
+
+A Yale lock was fixed to the library side of the door. Lanyard released its
+catch, insuring freedom from interruption on the part of anybody who lacked
+the key, crossed to the other side door, left this on the latch and, having
+thus provided an avenue for escape, turned attention to business, in brief,
+to the safe.
+
+Turning on the picture-light he found and operated the lever, with his
+other hand so restraining the action of the panel that it moved aside
+without perceptible jar.
+
+Then with an ear to that smooth, cold face of enamelled steel, he began
+to manipulate the combination. From within the door a succession of soft
+clicks and knocks punctuated the muted whine of the dial, speaking
+a language only too intelligible to the trained hearing of a thief;
+synchronous breaks and resistance in the action of the dial conveyed
+additional information through the medium of supersensitive finger tips.
+Within two minutes he had learned all he needed to know, and standing back
+twirled the knob right and left with a confident hand. At its fourth stop
+he heard the dull bump of released tumblers, grasped the handle, and
+twisted it strongly. The door swung open.
+
+Systematically Lanyard searched the pigeonholes, emptying all but one,
+examining minutely their contents without finding that slender roll of
+paper.
+
+Mystified, he hesitated. The thing, of course, was somewhere there, only
+hidden more cunningly than he had hoped. It was possible, even probable,
+that Blensop had stowed the cylinder away in a secret compartment.
+
+But the interior arrangement was disconcertingly simple. Lanyard saw no
+sign of waste space in which such a drawer might be secreted. Unless, to be
+sure, one of the pigeonholes had a false back....
+
+He began a fresh examination, again emptying each pigeonhole and sounding
+its rear wall without result till there remained only that in which Blensop
+had placed the Arden jewels.
+
+It was necessary to move these, but Lanyard long withheld his hand,
+reluctant to touch them, for that same reason which had influenced him to
+avoid them in his first search.
+
+Jewels such as these he both worshipped and desired with the passionate
+adoration of connoisseur and lover in one. He feared violently the
+temptation of physical contact with such stuff.
+
+For his was no thief's errand to-night, but a matter, as he conceived
+it, of his private honour, something apart and distinct from the code of
+rogue's ethics which guided his professional activities. He had pledged
+his word to Cecelia Brooke to keep safe for her that cylinder of paper, to
+return it upon her demand for whatsoever disposition she might choose to
+make of it. It was no concern of his what that choice might turn out to
+be, any more than it was his affair if the document were a paper of
+international importance. But she must and should, if act of his could
+compass it, be given opportunity to redeem her word of honour if, as one
+believed, that likewise were involved in the fate of the document.
+
+He had stolen into this house like a thief because he had given his pledge
+and perforce had been made false to that pledge, because he had been
+despoiled of the concrete evidence of the trust reposed unasked in him, and
+because he had learned that his spoiler was to meet Stanistreet in this
+room at midnight.
+
+He was here solely to make good his word, to take away that cylinder, could
+he find it, and to return it to the girl ... not to thieve....
+
+Never that!...
+
+Slowly, reluctantly, inevitably he put forth his hand and selected from
+among those brilliant symbols of his soul's profound damnation the
+necklace, a rope of diamonds consummately matched, a rivulet of frozen
+fire, no single stone less lovely than another.
+
+"Admirable!" he whispered. "Oh, admirable!"
+
+Hesitant to do this thing which to him, by the strange standard of his
+warped code, spelled dishonour, he would and he would not; and while he
+paltered, was visited by an oddly vivid memory of the clear and candid eyes
+of Cecelia Brooke, seemed veritably to see them searching his own with
+their look of grieving wonder ... the eyes of one woman who had reckoned
+him worthy of her trust....
+
+Almost he won victory in this fight he was foredoomed to lose. Under the
+level and steadfast regard of those eyes his hand went out to replace the
+necklace, moved unsteadily, faltered....
+
+Beyond the windows an incautious footfall sounded. In the darkness out
+there someone blundered into a piece of wicker furniture and disturbed it
+with a small scraping sound, all but inaudible, but to the thief as loud as
+the blast of a police whistle.
+
+Instantly and instinctively, in two simultaneous gestures, Lanyard dropped
+the necklace into an inner pocket of his coat and switched off the
+picture-light.
+
+With hands now as steady and sure as they had been vacillant a moment
+since, he closed the safe door noiselessly, shot its bolts, and was yards
+away, crouching behind an armchair, before the man outside had ceased to
+fumble with the window fastenings.
+
+If this were the watchman Howson, doubtless he would be satisfied with
+finding the room dark and apparently untenanted, and would go off upon his
+rounds unsuspecting. If he did not, or if he noticed the displaced panel,
+then would come Lanyard's time to break cover and run for it.
+
+With a faint creak one of the windows swung inward. Curtain-rings clashed
+dully on their poles. Someone came through the portičres and paused,
+pulling them together behind him. The beam of an electric flash-lamp lanced
+the gloom and its spotlight danced erratically round the walls.
+
+Now there was no more thought of flight in Lanyard's humour, but rather a
+firm determination to stand his ground. This was no night watchman, but a
+housebreaker, one with no more title to trespass upon those premises than
+himself; and at that an unskilled hand at such work, the rawest of amateurs
+practising methods as clumsy and childish as any actor playing at burglary
+on a stage before a simple-minded audience.
+
+The noise he made on entering alone proved that, then this fatuous business
+with the flash-lamp. And as he moved inward from the windows it became
+evident that he had not even had the wit to close the portičres completely;
+a violet glimmer of starlight shone in through a deep triangular gap
+between them at the top.
+
+For all that, the intruder seemed to know what he wanted and where to seek
+it, betrayed a nice acquaintance with the room, proceeding directly to the
+safe picked out by his lamp.
+
+Arrived beneath it he uttered a low sound which might have been interpreted
+as surprise due to finding the panel already out of place. If so, surprise
+evidently roused in him no suspicion that all might not be well. On the
+contrary, he quite calmly located and turned the switch controlling the
+picture-light.
+
+Immediately, as its rays gushed down and disclosed the man, Lanyard
+rose boldly from his place in hiding. Now there was no more need for
+concealment; now was his enemy delivered into his hands.
+
+The man was "Karl."
+
+His back to Lanyard, unconscious of that one's catlike approach, the spy
+put up his flash-lamp, searched in a waistcoat pocket and produced a slip
+of paper, and bent his face close to the combination dial, studying its
+figures; but abruptly, like a startled animal, whirled round to face the
+windows.
+
+One of the sashes was thrown back roughly, and a figure clad in the gray
+livery of a private watchman parted the portičres and entered the library.
+
+"Everything all right in here, Mr. Blensop?"
+
+Lanyard saw the sheen of blue steel in the hands of "Karl," and leaped too
+late: even as he fell upon the spy's shoulders, the pistol exploded.
+
+The watchman reeled back with a choking cry, caught wildly at the
+portičres, and dragged them down with him as he fell.
+
+His screams of agony made hideous the night. And the second cry was no more
+than uttered when Lanyard, even in the heat of his struggle, heard sounds
+indicating that already the household was alarmed.
+
+But the door would hold for a while; it was not probable that the first to
+come downstairs would think to bring with him the key. Time enough to
+think of escape when Lanyard had settled his score with this one: no light
+undertaking; not only was the score a long one, longer than Lanyard then
+dreamed, but, as he had learned to his cost, the man was an antagonist of
+skill and strength not to be despised.
+
+Nevertheless, aided by the surprise of his onslaught, Lanyard succeeded
+in disarming the spy, forcing him to drop the pistol at the outset, and
+through attacking from behind had him at a further disadvantage. For all
+that he found his hands full till, by a trick of jiu-jitsu, he wrenched one
+of the fellow's arms behind him so roughly as almost to dislocate it at the
+shoulder and, forcing the forearm up toward his shoulder blades, held him
+temporarily helpless.
+
+"Be still, you murderous canaille!" he growled--"or must I tear your arm
+from its socket? Still, I say!"
+
+"Karl" uttered a grunt of pain and ceased to struggle.
+
+Pinning him against the bookcase, Lanyard hastily rifled his pockets, at
+the first dip bringing forth a thin sheaf of American bank-notes with the
+figures $1000 conspicuous on the uppermost.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," he said grimly--"precisely my fee for the use of my
+name--to say nothing of its abuse!"
+
+A torrent of untranslatable German blasphemy answered him. Intelligible was
+the half-frantic demand: "Who the devil are you?"
+
+"Take a look, assassin--see for yourself!" Lanyard twisted the spy around
+to face him, holding him helpless against the wall with a knee in his
+middle and a hand gripping his throat inexorably. "Do you know me now--the
+man you thought you'd drowned a hundred fathoms deep?"
+
+Blows thundered on the hallway door. Neither heeded. The spy was staring
+into Lanyard's face, his eyes starting with horror and affright.
+
+"Lanyard!" he gasped. "Good God! will you never die?"
+
+"Never by your hand--" Lanyard began, but stopped sharply.
+
+For a moment he glared incredulously, and in that moment knew his enemy.
+
+"Ekstrom!" he cried; and the man at his mercy winced and quailed.
+
+The din in the hallway grew louder. Voices cried out for the key. Somebody
+threw himself against the door so heavily that it shook.
+
+The emergency forced itself upon Lanyard's consciousness, would not be
+denied. Its dilemma seemed calculated to unseat his reason. If he lingered,
+he was lost. Either he must grant this creature new lease of life, or be
+caught and pay the penalty of murder for an execution as surely just as any
+in the history of mankind.
+
+It was bitter, too bitter to have come to this his hour so long desired, so
+long deferred, so arduously sought, and have the fruits of it snatched from
+his craving grasp.
+
+He could not bring himself to this renunciation; slowly his fingers
+tightened on the other's throat.
+
+Driven to desperation by the light of madness that began to flicker in
+Lanyard's eyes, the Prussian abruptly put all he had of might and fury into
+one final effort, threw Lanyard off, and in turn attacked him, fighting
+like a lunatic for footroom, for space enough to turn and make for the
+windows.
+
+In spite of all he could do Lanyard saw the man work away from the wall and
+manoeuvre his back toward the windows; then he flew at him with redoubled
+fury, driving home blow after blow that beat down Ekstrom's guard and sent
+him staggering helplessly, till an uppercut, swinging in under his uplifted
+forearms, put an end to the combat. Ekstrom shot backward half a dozen
+feet, stumbled over the prostrate body of the watchman, and crashed
+headlong into the windows, going down in a shower of shattered glass.
+
+In one and the same instant Lanyard darted back and dropped upon his knees
+in the shadow of the club lounge, and the door to the hallway slammed open.
+A knot of men, to the number of half a dozen, tumbling into the library,
+saw that figure floundering amid the ruins of the window, and made for it,
+passing on the other side of the lounge, between it and the fireplace.
+
+Unseen, Lanyard rose, ran crouching across the room; found the side door,
+opened it just far enough to permit the passage of his body, and drew it to
+behind him.
+
+Ninety-fifth Street was a lonely lane of midnight quiet. He sped across it
+like the shadow of a cloud wind-hunted.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+AU PRINTEMPS
+
+
+In those days New York nights were long; this was still young when Lanyard
+sauntered sedately from a side street and stopped on a corner of Broadway
+in the Nineties; he had not long to wait ere a southbound taxicab hove in
+sight and sheered over to the curb in answer to his signal.
+
+It was still something short of one o'clock when he was set down at his
+door.
+
+Wearily he let himself in by the private entrance, made a light, and
+without troubling even to discard his overcoat threw himself into a chair.
+Leaden depression weighed down his heart, and the flavour of failure was
+as aloes in his mouth. Thrice within an hour he had fallen short of his
+promises, to Cecelia Brooke, to himself, to his _idée fixe_. His three
+chances, to redeem his word to the girl, to measure up to his queer
+criterion of honour, to rid his world of Ekstrom, all had slipped through
+fingers seemingly too infirm to profit by them.
+
+He felt of a sudden old; old, and tired, and lonely.
+
+The uses of his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was
+his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of
+his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now
+swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the
+shameful habiliments of a felon self-condemned.
+
+What had prevented his dealing out to Ekstrom the punishment he had so well
+earned? That insatiable lust for loot of his. But for that damning evidence
+against him of the stolen necklace in his pocket he might have had his will
+of Ekstrom, and justified himself when discovered by proving that he had
+merely done justice to a thief who sold what he had stolen and stole back
+to steal again what he had sold.
+
+Self-contempt attacked self-conceit like an acid. He saw Michael Lanyard
+a sorry figure, sitting stultified with self-pity ... crying over spilt
+milk....
+
+Impatiently he shook himself. What though he had to-night forfeited his
+chances? He could, nay, would, make others. He must....
+
+To what end? Would life be sweeter if one found a way to restore to Cecelia
+Brooke her precious document and to smuggle back to Mrs. Arden her pilfered
+diamonds? Would this deadly ache of loneliness be less poignant with
+Ekstrom dead?
+
+With lack-lustre eyes he looked round that cheerless room, reckoning its
+perfunctory pretense of comfort the forlornest mockery. To lodgings such as
+this he was condemned for life, to an interminable sequence of transient
+quarters, sordid or splendid, rich or mean, alike in this common quality of
+hollow loneliness....
+
+His aimless gaze wandered toward the door opening on the public hallway,
+and became fixed upon a triangular shape of white paper, the half of an
+envelope tucked between door and sill.
+
+Presently he rose and got the thing, not until he touched it quite
+persuaded he was not the victim of an optical hallucination.
+
+A square envelope of creamy paper, it was superscribed simply in a hand
+strange to him, _Anthony Ember, Esq_., with the address of his apartment
+house.
+
+Tearing the envelope he found within a double sheet of plain notepaper
+bearing a message of five words penned hastily:
+
+  "_Au Printemps_--
+  "_one o'clock_--
+  "_Please_!"
+
+Nothing else, not another word or pen-scratch....
+
+Opening the door Lanyard hailed the hall-attendant, a sleepy and not
+over-intelligent negro.
+
+"When did this come for me?"
+
+"'Bout anour ago, Mistuh Embuh."
+
+"Who brought it?"
+
+"A messenger boy done fotch it, suh--look lak th' same boy."
+
+"What same boy?"
+
+"Same as come in when you do, 'bout 'leven o'clock--remembuh?"
+
+Lanyard nodded, recalling that on his way up the street from Sixth Avenue
+he had been subconsciously irritated by the shrill, untuneful whistling of
+a loutish youth in Western Union uniform, who had followed him into the
+house and become engaged in some minor altercation with the attendants
+while Lanyard was unlocking the door to his apartment.
+
+"What of him?"
+
+"Why, he bulge in heah an' say we done send a call, an' we tell him we don'
+know nuffin' 'bout no call, an' he sweah an' carry on, an' aftuh you done
+gone in he ast whut is yo' name, an' somebody tell him an' he go away. An'
+then 'bout haffanour aftuhwuds he come back with that theah lettuh--say to
+stick it undeh yo' do, ef yo' ain't home. Leastways he look to me lak th'
+same boy. Ah dunno fo' suah."
+
+Repeated efforts failing to extract more enlightenment from this source,
+Lanyard again shut himself in with the puzzle.
+
+Somebody had set a messenger boy to dog him and find out his name and
+address. Not Crane: Lanyard had seen that one disappear in the elevator of
+the Knickerbocker and had thereafter moved too quickly to permit of Crane's
+returning to the lobby, calling a messenger boy, and pointing out Lanyard.
+
+For that matter, Lanyard was prepared to swear nobody had followed him from
+the Knickerbocker to the Biltmore.
+
+Vaguely he seemed to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when
+he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone
+Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose
+flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the
+display of a catch-penny corn cure.
+
+Was there a link between that circumstance and the long delay which Lanyard
+had suffered in the telephone booth? Had the Knickerbocker operator been
+less stupid and negligent than she seemed? Was the truth of the matter that
+Crane had surmised Lanyard would attempt communication with the Brooke girl
+and had set a watch on the switchboard for the call?
+
+Assuming that the Secret Service man had been clever enough for that,
+it was not difficult to understand that Lanyard had purposely been kept
+dangling at the other end of the wire till the call could be traced back to
+its source and a messenger despatched from the nearest Western Union office
+with instructions to follow the man who left the booth, and report his name
+and local habitation.
+
+Sharp work, if these inferences were reasonable. And, satisfied that
+they were, Lanyard inclined to accord increased respect to the detective
+abilities of the American.
+
+But this note, this hurried, unsigned scrawl of five unintelligible words:
+what the deuce did it mean?
+
+On the evidence of the handwriting a woman had penned it. Cecelia Brooke?
+Who else? Crane might well have been taken into her confidence, subsequent
+to the sinking of the _Assyrian_, and on discovering that Lanyard had
+survived have used this means of relieving the girl's distress of mind.
+
+But its significance?... "Au Printemps" translated literally meant "in the
+springtime," and "in the springtime at one o'clock" was mere gibberish,
+incomprehensible. There is in Paris a department store calling itself "Au
+Printemps"; but surely no one was suggesting to Lanyard in New York a
+rendezvous in Paris!
+
+Nevertheless that "Please!" intrigued with a note at once pleading and
+imperative which decided Lanyard to answer it without delay, in person.
+
+"_Au Printemps--one o'clock--please_!"
+
+Upon the screen of memory there flashed a blurred vision of an electric
+sign emblazoning the phrase, "Au Printemps," against the façade of a
+building with windows all blind and dark save those of the street level,
+which glowed pink with light filtered through silken hangings; a building
+which Lanyard had already passed thrice that night without, in the
+preoccupation of his purpose, paying it any heed; a building on Broadway
+somewhere above Columbus Circle, if he were not mistaken.
+
+Already it was one o'clock. Fortunately he was still in evening dress, and
+needed only to change collar and tie to repair the disarray caused by his
+encounter with Ekstrom.
+
+In two minutes he was once more in the street.
+
+Within five a cab deposited him in front of the Restaurant Au Printemps, an
+institution of midnight New York whose title for distinction resided mainly
+in the fact that it opened its upper floors for the diversion of "members"
+about the time when others put up their shutters.
+
+Lanyard's advent occurred at the height of its traffic. The dining rooms on
+the street level were closed and unlighted: but men and women in pairs
+and parties were streaming across the sidewalk from an endless chain of
+motor-cars and being ground through the revolving doors like grist in the
+hopper of an unhallowed mill, the men all in evening dress, the women in
+garments whose insolence outrivalled the most Byzantine nights of L'Abbaye
+Thęlčme.
+
+Drawn in with the current through the turnstile door, Lanyard found himself
+in an absurdly little lobby thronged to suffocation, largely with people
+of the half-world--here and there a few celebrities, here and there small
+tight clusters of respectabilities making a brave show of feeling at
+ease--all waiting their turn to be lifted to delectable regions aloft in an
+elevator barely big enough to serve in a private residence.
+
+For a moment Lanyard lingered unnoticed on the outskirts of this
+assemblage, searching its pretty faces for the prettier face he had come to
+find and wondering that she should have chosen for her purpose with him a
+resort of this character. His memory of her was sweet with the clean smell
+of the sea; there was incongruity to spare in this atmosphere heady with
+the odours of wine, flesh, scent, and tobacco. Perplexing....
+
+A harpy with a painted leer and predacious eyes pounced upon him, tore away
+his hat and coat, gave him a numbered slip of pasteboard by presenting
+which he would be permitted to ransom his property on extortionate terms.
+
+And still he saw no Cecelia Brooke, though his aloof attitude coupled with
+an intent but impersonal inspection of every feminine face within his
+radius of vision earned him more than one smile at once furtively
+provocative and unwelcome.
+
+By degrees the crowd emptied itself into the toy elevator--such of it, that
+is, as was passed by a committee on membership consisting of one chubby,
+bearded gentleman with the look of a French diplomatist, the empressement
+of a head waiter and the authority of the Angel with the Flaming Sword.
+_Personae non gratae_ to the management--inexplicably so in most
+instances--were civilly requested to produce membership cards and, upon
+failure to comply, were inexorably rejected, and departed strangely
+shamefaced. Others of acceptable aspect were permitted to mingle with
+the upper circles of the elect without being required to prove their
+"membership."
+
+In the person of this suave but inflexible arbiter Lanyard identified a
+former maître d'hôtel of the Carlton who had abruptly and discreetly fled
+London soon after the outbreak of war.
+
+He fancied that this one knew him and was sedulous both to keep him in the
+corner of his eye and never to meet his regard directly.
+
+And once he saw the man speak covertly with the elevator attendant,
+guarding his lips with a hand, and suspected that he was the subject of
+their communication.
+
+The lobby was still comfortably filled, a constant trickle of arrivals
+replacing in measure the losses by election and rejection, when Lanyard,
+watching the revolving doors, saw Cecelia Brooke coming in.
+
+She was alone, at least momentarily; and in his sight very creditably
+turned out, remembering that all her luggage must have been lost with the
+_Assyrian_. But what Englishwoman of her caste ever permitted herself to be
+visible after nightfall except in an evening gown of some sort, even though
+a shabby sort? Not that Miss Brooke to-night was shabbily attired: she was
+much otherwise; from some mysterious source of wardrobe she had conjured
+wraps, furs, and a dancing frock as fresh and becoming as it was, oddly
+enough, not immodest. And with whatever cares preying upon her secret mind,
+she entered with the light step and bright countenance of any girl of her
+age embarked upon a lark.
+
+All that was changed at sight of Lanyard.
+
+He bowed formally at a moment when her glance, resting on him, seemed about
+to wander on; instead it became fixed in recognition. Instantly her smile
+was erased, her features stiffened, her eyes widened, her lips parted, the
+colour ebbed from her cheeks. And she stopped quite still in front of the
+door till lightly jostled by other arrivals.
+
+Then moving uncertainly toward him, she said, "Monsieur Duchemin!" not
+loudly, for she was not a woman to give excuse for a scene under any
+circumstances, but in a tone of complete dumbfounderment.
+
+Covering his own dashed contenance with a semblance of unruffled
+amiability, he bowed again, now over the hand which the girl tentatively
+offered, letting it rest lightly on his fingers, touching it as lightly
+with his lips.
+
+"It is such a pleasant surprise," he said at a venture, then added
+guardedly: "But my name--I thought you knew it was now Anthony Ember."
+
+Her eyes were blank. "I don't understand," she faltered. "I thought you ...
+I never dreamed.... Is it really you?"
+
+"Truly," he averred, lips smiling but mind rife with suspicion and
+distrust.
+
+This was not acting; he was convinced that her surprise was absolutely
+unfeigned.
+
+So she had not expected to find him "Au Printemps" at one o'clock in the
+morning, till that very moment had believed him as dead as any of those
+poor souls who had perished with the _Assyrian_!
+
+Therefore that note had not come from her, therefore Lanyard had
+complimented Crane without warrant, crediting him with another's
+cleverness. Then whose...?
+
+And while Lanyard's head buzzed with these thoughts, an independent chamber
+of his mind was engaged in admiring the address with which the girl was
+recovering from what must have been, what plainly had been, a staggering
+shock. Already she had begun to grapple with the situation, to take herself
+in hand and dissemble; already her face was regaining its accustomed cast
+of self-confidence, composure, and intelligent animation. Throughout she
+pursued without a break the thread of conventional small talk.
+
+"It is a surprise," she said calmly. "Really, you are a most astonishing
+person, Mr. Ember. One never knows where to look for you."
+
+"That is my good fortune, since it provides me with unexpected pleasures
+such as this. You are with friends?"
+
+"With a friend," she corrected quietly--"with Mr. Crane. He stopped outside
+to pay our taxi-driver. How odd it seems to find any place in the world as
+much alive as this New York!"
+
+"It seems almost impossible," Lanyard averred--"indeed, somehow wrong. I've
+a feeling one has no right to encourage so much frivolity. And yet...."
+
+"Yes," she responded quickly. "It is good to hear people laugh once more.
+That is why Mr. Crane suggested coming here to-night, to cheer me up. He
+said Au Printemps was unique, promised I'd find it most amusing."
+
+"I'm sure...." Lanyard began as Crane entered, breezing through the
+turnstile and comprehending the situation in a glance.
+
+"Hello!" he cried. "Didn't I tell you everybody alive would be here?"
+
+Nor was Cecelia Brooke less ready. "But fancy meeting Mr. Ember here! I had
+no idea he was in New York--had you?"
+
+"Perhaps a dim suspicion," Crane admitted with a twinkle, taking Lanyard's
+hand. "Howdy, Ember? Glad to see you, gladder'n you'd think."
+
+"How is that?" Lanyard asked, returning the cordiality of his grasp.
+
+Crane's penetrating accents must have been audible in the remotest corner
+of the ground-floor rooms: he made no effort to modulate them to a quieter
+pitch.
+
+"You can help me out of a fix if you feel like it. You see, I promised Miss
+Brooke if she'd take me for her guide, she'd see life to-night; and now,
+just when we're going good, I've got to renig. Man I know held me up
+outside, says I'm wanted down town on special business and must go. I might
+be able to toddle back later, but can't bank on it. Do you mind taking over
+my job?"
+
+"Chaperoning Miss Brooke's investigations into the seamy side of current
+social history? That will be delightful."
+
+"Attaboy! If I'm not back in half an hour you'll see her safely home, of
+course?"
+
+"Trust me."
+
+"And you'll excuse me, Miss Brooke? I hope you don't think--"
+
+"What I do think, Mr. Crane, is that you have been most kind to a lonely
+stranger. Of course I'll excuse you, not willingly, but understanding you
+must go."
+
+"That makes me a heap easier in my mind. But I' got to run. So it's
+good-night, unless maybe I see you later. So long, Ember!"
+
+With a flirt of a raw-boned hand, Crane swung about, threw himself
+spiritedly into the revolving door, was gone.
+
+"Amazing creature," Lanyard commented, laughing.
+
+"I think him delightful," the girl replied, surrendering her wraps to a
+maid. "If all Americans are like that--"
+
+"Shall we go up?"
+
+She nodded--"Please!"--and turned with him.
+
+The committee on membership himself bowed them into the elevator. Several
+others crowded in after them. For thirty seconds, while the car moved
+slowly upward, Lanyard was free to think without interruption.
+
+But what to think now? That Crane, actuated by some motive occult to
+Lanyard, had engineered this apparently adventitious _rencontre_ for the
+purpose of throwing him and the Brooke girl together? Or, again, that Crane
+was innocent of guile in this matter--that other persons unknown, causing
+Lanyard to be traced to his lodgings, had framed that note to entice him to
+this place to-night? In the latter event, who was conceivably responsible
+but Velasco, Dressier, O'Reilly--any one of these, or all three working in
+concert? The last-named had looked Lanyard squarely in the face without
+sign of recognition, back there in the lobby of the Knickerbocker,
+precisely as he should, if implicated in the conspiracies of the Boche;
+though it might easily have been Velasco or Dressier who had recognized the
+adventurer without his knowledge....
+
+The car stopped, a narrow-chested door slid open, a gush of hectic light
+coloured morbidly the faces of alighting passengers, a blare of syncopated
+noise singularly unmusical saluted the astonished ears of Lanyard and
+Cecelia Brooke. She met his gaze with a smiling _moue_ and slightly lifted
+eyebrows.
+
+"More than we bargained for?" he laughed. "But there is always something
+new in this America, I promise you. Au Printemps itself is new, at all
+events did not exist when I was last in New York."
+
+Following her out, he paused beside the girl in a constricted space hedged
+about with tables, waiting for the maître d'hôtel to seat those who had
+been first to leave the elevator.
+
+The room, of irregular conformation, held upward of two hundred guests and
+habitués seated at tables large and small and so closely set together
+that waiters with difficulty navigated narrow and tortuous channels of
+communication. In the middle, upon a small dancing floor, rudely octagonal
+in shape, made smaller by tables crowded round its edge to accommodate the
+crush, a mob of couples danced arduously, close-locked in one another's
+arms, swaying in rhythm with the over-emphasized time beaten out by a
+perspiring little band of musicians on a dais in a far corner, their
+activities directed by an antic conductor whose lantern-jawed, sallow face
+peered grotesquely out through a mop of hair as black and coarse and lush
+as a horse's mane.
+
+Execrable ventilation or absence thereof manufactured an atmosphere that
+reeked with heat animal and artificial and with ill-blended effluvia from a
+hundred sources. Perhaps the odour of alcohol predominated; Lanyard thought
+of a steam-heated wine-cellar. He observed nothing but champagne in any
+glass, and if food were being served it was done surreptitiously. Sweat
+dripped from the faces of the dancers, deep flushes discoloured all not so
+heavily enamelled as to preserve an inalterable complexion, the eyes of
+many stared with the fixity of hypnosis. Yet when the music ended with an
+unexpected crash of discord these dancers applauded insatiably till the
+jaded orchestra struck up once more, when they renewed their curious
+gyrations with quenchless abandon.
+
+The Brooke girl caught Lanyard's eye, her lips moved. Thanks to the din, he
+had to bend his head near to hear.
+
+She murmured with infinite expression: "Au Printemps!"
+
+The maître d'hôtel was plucking at his sleeve.
+
+"Monsieur had made reservations, no?" Startled recognition washed the man's
+tired and pasty countenance. "Pardon, monsieur: this way!" He turned and
+began to thread deviously between the jostling tables.
+
+Dubiously Lanyard followed. He likewise had known the maître d'hôtel at
+sight: a beastly little decadent whose cabaret on the rue d'Antin, just off
+the avenue de l'Opéra, had been a famous rendezvous of international spies
+till war had rendered it advisable for him to efface himself from the ken
+of Paris with the same expedition and discretion which had marked the
+departure from London of his confrčre who now guarded the lower gateway to
+these ethereal regions of Au Printemps.
+
+The coincidence of finding those two so closely associated worked with the
+riddle of that note further to trouble Lanyard's mind.
+
+Was he to believe Au Printemps the legitimate successor in America of that
+less pretentious establishment on the rue d'Antin, an overseas headquarters
+for Secret Service agents of the Central Powers?
+
+He began to regret heartily, not so much that he had presented himself in
+answer to that note, but the responsibility which now devolved upon him of
+caring for Miss Brooke. Much as he had wished to see her an hour ago, now
+he would willingly be rid of her company.
+
+Why had he been lured to this place, if its character were truly what he
+feared? Conceivably because he was believed--since it now appeared he had
+cheated death--still to possess either that desired document or knowledge
+of its whereabouts.
+
+Naturally the enemy would not think otherwise. He must not forget that
+Ekstrom was playing double; as yet none but Lanyard knew he had stolen the
+document and done a murder to cover the theft from his associates and leave
+him free to sell to England without exciting their suspicion.
+
+Consequently, Lanyard believed, he had been invited to this place to
+be sounded, to be tempted, bribed, intimidated--if need be, and
+possible--somehow to be won over to the uses of the Prussian spy system.
+
+Leading them to the farther side of the room, the maître d'hôtel paused
+bowing and mowing beside a large table already in the possession of a party
+of three.
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. One of the three was Velasco, another a young man
+unknown to him, a mannerly little creature who might have been written by
+the author of "What the Man Will Wear" in the theatre programmes. The third
+was Sophie Weringrode, the Wilhelmstrasse agent whom he had only that
+afternoon observed entering the house in Seventy-ninth Street.
+
+He stopped short, in a cold rage. Till that moment a mirror-sheathed pillar
+had hidden from him Velasco and the Weringrode; else Lanyard had refused
+to come so far; for obviously there were no unreserved tables, indeed few
+vacant chairs, in that part of the room.
+
+Not that he minded the cynical barefacedness of the dodge; that was indeed
+amusing; he was sanguine as to his ability to dominate any situation that
+might arise, and to a degree indifferent if the upshot should prove his
+confidence misplaced; and he did not in the least object to letting the
+enemy show his cards. But he did enormously resent what was, after all,
+something quite outside the calculations of these giddy conspirators, the
+fact that he must either beat incontinent retreat or introduce Cecelia
+Brooke to the company of Sophie Weringrode.
+
+His face darkened, a stinging reproof for the maître d'hôtel trembled on
+his tongue's tip; but that one was busily avoiding his eye on the far side
+of the table, drawing out a chair for "mademoiselle," while Velasco and the
+Weringrode were alert to read Lanyard's countenance and forestall any steps
+he might contemplate in defiance of their designs.
+
+At first glimpse of the Brooke girl Velasco jumped up and hastened to her,
+with eager Latin courtesy expressing his unanticipated delight in the
+prospect of her consenting to join their party. And she was suffering with
+quiet graciousness his florid compliments.
+
+At the same time the Weringrode was greeting Lanyard in the most intimate
+fashion--and damning him in the understanding of Cecelia Brooke with every
+word.
+
+"My dear friend!" she cried gayly, extending a bedizened hand. "I had begun
+to despair of you. Is it part of your system with women always to be a
+little late, always to keep us wondering?"
+
+Schooling his features to a civil smile, Lanyard bowed over the hand.
+
+"In warfare such as ours, my dear Sophie," he said with meaning, "one uses
+all weapons, even the most primitive, in sheer self-defense."
+
+The woman laughed delightedly. "I think," she said, "if you rose from the
+dead at the bottom of the sea, _Tony_, it would be with wit upon your
+lips.... And you have brought a friend with you? How charming!" She shifted
+in her chair to face Cecelia Brooke. "I wish to know her instantly!"
+
+Velasco was waiting only for that opening. "Dear princess," he said,
+instantly, "permit me to present Miss Cecelia Brooke ... Princess de
+Alavia...."
+
+Completely at ease and by every indication enjoying herself hugely, the
+girl bowed and took the hand the Weringrode thrust upon her. Her eyes,
+a-brim with excitement and mischief, veered to Lanyard's, ignored their
+warning, glanced away.
+
+"How do you do?" she said simply. "I didn't understand Mr. Ember expected
+to meet friends here, but that only makes it the more agreeable. May we sit
+down?"
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+FINESSE
+
+
+The person in the educated evening clothes was made known as Mr. Revel.
+For Lanyard's benefit and his own he vacated the chair beside Sophie
+Weringrode, seating himself to one side of Cecelia Brooke, who had Velasco
+between her and the soi-disant princess.
+
+Already a waiter had placed and was filling glasses for Lanyard and the
+girl.
+
+With the best grace he could muster the adventurer sat down, accepted
+a cigarette from the Weringrode case, and with openly impertinent eyes
+inspected the intrigante critically.
+
+She endured that ordeal well, smiling confidently, a handsome creature with
+a beautiful body bewitchingly gowned.
+
+Time, he considered, had been kind to Sophie--time, the mysteries of the
+modern toilette, and the astonishing adaptability of womankind. Splendidly
+vital, like all of her sort who survive, she seemed mysteriously able to
+renew that vitality through the very extravagance with which she squandered
+it. She had lived much of late years, rapidly but well, had learned much,
+had profited by her lessons. To-night she looked legitimately the princess
+of her pretensions; the manner of the grande dame suited her type; her
+gesture was as impeccable as her taste; prettier than ever, she seemed at
+worst little more than half her age.
+
+And her quick intelligence mocked the privacy of his reflections.
+
+"Fair, fast, and forty," she interpreted smilingly.
+
+He pretended to be stunned. "Never!" he protested feebly.
+
+The woman reaffirmed in a series of rapid nods. "Have I ever had secrets
+from you? You are too quick for me, monsieur: I do not intend to begin
+deceiving you at this late day--or trying to."
+
+"Flattery," he declared, "is meat and drink to me. Tell me more."
+
+She laughed lightly. "Thank you, no; vanity is unbecoming in men; I do not
+care to make you vain."
+
+Aware that Cecelia Brooke was listening all the while she seemed to be
+enchanted with the patter of Mr. Revel and the less vapid observations of
+Velasco, Lanyard sought to shunt personalities from himself.
+
+"And now a princess!"
+
+"Did you not know I had married? Yes, a princess of Spain--and with a
+castle there, if you must know."
+
+"Quite a change of atmosphere from Berlin," he remarked. "But it has done
+you no perceptible harm."
+
+That won him a black look. "Oh, Berlin!" she said with contemptuous lips.
+"I haven't been there since the beginning of the war. I wish never to see
+the place again. True: I was born an Austrian; but is that any reason why I
+should love Germany?"
+
+She leaned forward, her fan gently tapping the knuckles of his hand.
+
+"Pay less attention to me," she insisted, with a nod toward the middle of
+the room. "You are missing something. Me, I never tire of her."
+
+The floor had been cleared. A drummer on the dais was sounding the
+long-roll crescendo. At the culminating crash the lights were everywhere
+darkened save for an orange-coloured spot-light set in the ceiling
+immediately above the dancing floor. Into that circular field of torrid
+glare bounded a woman wearing little more than an abbreviated kirtle of
+grass strands with a few festoons of artificial flowers. Applause roared
+out to her, the orchestra sounded the opening bars of an Americanised
+Hawaiian melody, the woman with extraordinary vivacity began to perform a
+denatured hula: a wild and tawny animal, superbly physical, relying with
+warrant upon the stark sensuality of her body to make amends for the
+censored phrases of the primitive dance. The floor resounded like a great
+drum to the stamping of her bare feet, till one marvelled at such solidity
+of flesh as could endure that punishment.
+
+Sophie Weringrode lounged negligently upon the table, bringing her head
+near Lanyard's shoulder.
+
+"Play fair," she said between lips that barely moved.
+
+Without looking round Lanyard answered in the same manner: "Why ask more
+than you are prepared to give?"
+
+"The police ran you out of America once. We need only publish the fact that
+Mr. Anthony Ember is the Lone Wolf...."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Leave Berlin out of it before this girl."
+
+Lanyard shrugged and laughed quietly. "What else?"
+
+"We can't talk now. Ask me for the next dance."
+
+The woman sat back in her chair, attentive to the posturing of the dancer,
+slowly fanning herself.
+
+Lanyard's semblance of as much interest was nothing more; furtively his
+watchfulness alternated between two quarters of the room.
+
+On the farther edge of the circle of tropical radiance he had marked down a
+table at which two men were seated, Dressier and O'Reilly. No more question
+now as to the personnel of the conspiracy; even Velasco had thrown off
+the mask. The enemy had come boldly into the open, indicating a sense of
+impudent assurance, indicating even more, contempt of opposition. No
+longer afraid, they no longer skulked in shadows. Lanyard experienced a
+premonition of events impending.
+
+In addition he was keeping an eye on the door to the elevator shaft. Once
+already it had opened, letting a bright window into the farther wall of the
+shadowed room, discovering the figure of the maître d'hôtel in silhouette,
+anxiety in his attitude. He was waiting for somebody, waiting tensely. So
+were the others waiting, all that crew and their fellow workers scattered
+among the guests. Lanyard told himself he could guess for whom.
+
+Only Ekstrom was wanting to complete the circle. When he appeared--if by
+chance he should--things ought to begin to happen.
+
+If tolerably satisfied that Ekstrom would not come--not that night, at all
+events--Lanyard, none the less, continued to be jealously heedful of that
+doorway.
+
+But the hula came to an end without either his vigilance or the impatience
+of the maître d'hôtel being rewarded. Writhing with serpentine grace to the
+edge of the illuminated area, the dancer leaped back into darkness and the
+folds of a wrap held by a maid, in which garment she was seen, bowing and
+laughing, when the lights again blazed up.
+
+Without ceasing to play, changing only the time of the tune, the orchestra
+swung into a fox-trot. Lanyard glanced across the table to see Cecelia
+Brooke rising in response to the invitation of dapper Mr. Revel.
+
+In his turn, he rose with Sophie Weringrode. "Be patient with me,"
+he begged. "It is long since I danced to music more frivolous than a
+cannonade."
+
+"But it is simple," the woman promised--"simple, at least, to one who can
+dance as you could in the old days. Just follow me till you catch the step.
+It doesn't matter, anyway; I desire only the opportunity to converse."
+
+Yielding to his arms, she shifted into French when next she spoke.
+
+"You do admirably, my friend. Never again depreciate your dancing. If you
+knew how one suffers at the feet of these Americans--!"
+
+"Excellent!" he said. "Now that is settled: what is it you are instructed
+to propose to me?"
+
+She laughed softly. "Always direct! Truly you would never shine as a secret
+agent."
+
+"Not as they shine," Lanyard countered--"in the dark."
+
+"Don't be a fraud. We are what we are, and so are you. Let us not begin to
+be censorious of one another's methods of winning a living."
+
+"Agreed. But when do we begin to talk business?"
+
+"Why do you continue so persistently antagonistic?"
+
+"I am French."
+
+"That is silly. You are an outlaw, a man without a country. Why not change
+all that?"
+
+"And how does one effect miracles?"
+
+"Germany offers you a refuge, security, freedom to ply your trade
+unhindered--within reasonable limits."
+
+"And in exchange what do I give?"
+
+"Your services, as and when required, in our service."
+
+"Beginning when?"
+
+"To-night."
+
+"With what specific performance?"
+
+"We want, we must without fail have, that document you took from the Brooke
+girl."
+
+"Perhaps we had better continue in English. You are speaking a tongue
+unknown to me."
+
+"Don't talk rot. You know well what I mean. We know you have the thing.
+You didn't steal it to turn it over to England or the States. What is your
+price to Germany?"
+
+"Whatever you have in mind, believe me when I say I have nothing to sell to
+the Wilhelmstrasse."
+
+"But what else can you do with it? What other market--?"
+
+"My dear Sophie, upon my word I haven't got what you want."
+
+"Then why so keen to get the Brooke girl on the telephone as soon as you
+found out where she was stopping?"
+
+"How did you learn about that, by the way?"
+
+"Let the credit go to Seńor Velasco. He saw you first."
+
+"One thought as much.... Nevertheless, I haven't what you want."
+
+"You gave it back to Miss Brooke?"
+
+"Having nothing to give her, I gave her nothing."
+
+The woman was silent throughout a round of the floor; then, "Tell me
+something," she requested.
+
+"Can I keep anything from you?"
+
+"Are you in love with the English girl?"
+
+Lanyard almost lost step, then laughed the thought to derision. "What put
+that into your pretty head, Sophie?"
+
+"Do you not know it yourself, my friend?"
+
+"It is absurd."
+
+She laughed maliciously. "Think it over. Possibly you have not stopped to
+think as yet. When you know the truth yourself, you will be the better
+qualified to fib about it. Also, you will not forget...."
+
+"What?" he demanded bluntly as she paused with intention.
+
+"That as long as she possesses the document--since you have it not--her
+life is endangered even more than yours."
+
+"She hasn't got it!" Lanyard declared, as nearly in panic as he ever was.
+
+"Ah!" the woman jeered. "So you confess to some knowledge of it after all!"
+
+"My dear," he said, teasingly, "do you really want to know what has become
+of that paper?"
+
+"I do, and mean to."
+
+"What if I tell you?"
+
+Her eyes lifted to his in childlike candour. "Need you ask?"
+
+"You are irresistible.... Ask Karl."
+
+She demanded sharply: "Whom?"
+
+"Ekstrom."
+
+"Ah!" Again the adventuress was silent for a little. "What does he know?"
+
+"Ask him, enquire why he murdered von Harden, then what business took him
+to Ninety-fifth Street twice this evening--once about nine o'clock, again
+at midnight."
+
+"You must be mad, monsieur. Karl would not dare...."
+
+"You don't know him--or have forgotten he was trained in the International
+Bureau of Brussels, and there learned how to sell out both parties to a
+business that won't bear publicity."
+
+"I wonder," the woman mused. "Never have I wholly trusted that one."
+
+"Shall I give you the key?"
+
+"If you love Karl as little as I...."
+
+"But where do you suppose the good man is, this night of nights?"
+
+"Who knows? He was not here when I arrived at midnight. I have seen nothing
+of him since."
+
+"When you do--if he shows himself at all--look him over carefully for signs
+of wear and tear."
+
+"Yes, monsieur? And in what respect?"
+
+"Look for cuts about his head and hands, possibly elsewhere. And should he
+confess to an affair with a wind-shield in a motor accident, ask him what
+happened to the study window in the house at Ninety-fifth Street."
+
+Impish glee danced in the woman's eyes. "Your handiwork, dear friend?"
+
+"A mere beginning.... You may tell him so, if you like."
+
+He was subjected to a convulsive squeeze. "Never have I felt so kindly
+disposed toward an enemy!"
+
+"It is true, I were a better foe to Germany if I kept my counsel and let
+Ekstrom continue to play double."
+
+The music ceasing, to be followed by the inevitable clamour for more,
+Lanyard offered an arm upon which Sophie rested a detaining hand.
+
+"No--wait. We dance this encore. I have more to say."
+
+He submitted amiably, the more so since not ill-pleased with himself. And
+when again they were moving round the floor, she bore more heavily upon his
+shoulder and was thoughtful longer than he had expected. Then--
+
+"Attention, my friend."
+
+"I am listening, Sophie."
+
+"If what you hint is true--and I do not doubt it is--Karl's day is done."
+
+"More nearly than he dreams," Lanyard affirmed grimly.
+
+"I shan't be sorry. I am German through and through; what I do, I do for
+the Fatherland, and in that find absolution for many things I care not to
+remember. If through what you tell me I may prove Karl traitor, I owe you
+something."
+
+"Always it has been my fondest hope, Sophie, some day to have you in my
+debt."
+
+Her fingers tightened on his. "Do not jest in the shadow of death. Since
+you have been unwise enough to venture here to-night, you will not be
+permitted to leave alive--unless you pledge yourself to us and prove your
+sincerity by producing that paper."
+
+"That sounds reasonable--like Prussia. What next?"
+
+"I have warned you, so paid off my debt. The rest is your affair."
+
+"Do you imagine I take this seriously?"
+
+"It will turn out seriously for you if you do not."
+
+"How can I be prevented from leaving when I will, from a public
+restaurant?"
+
+"Is it possible you don't know this place? It is maintained by the
+Wilhelmstrasse. Attempt to leave it without coming to a satisfactory
+understanding, and see what happens."
+
+"What, for instance?"
+
+"The lights would be out before you were half across the room. When they
+went up again, the Lone Wolf would be no more, and never a soul here would
+know who stabbed him or what became of the knife."
+
+"Are you by any chance amusing yourself at my expense?"
+
+Once more the woman showed him her handsome eyes: he found them frankly
+grave, earnest, unwavering.
+
+"If you will not listen, your blood be on your own head."
+
+"Forgive me. I didn't mean to be rude...."
+
+"Still, you do not believe!"
+
+"You are wrong. I am merely amused."
+
+"If you understood, you could never mock your peril."
+
+"But I don't mock it. I am enchanted with it. I accept it, and it renews
+my youth. This might be Paris of the days when you ran with the Pack,
+Sophie--and I alone!"
+
+The woman moved her pretty shoulders impatiently. "I think you are either
+mad or ... the very soul of courage!"
+
+The encore ended; they returned to the table, Sophie leaning lightly on
+Lanyard's arm, chattering gay inconsequentialities.
+
+Dropping into her chair, she bent over toward Cecelia Brooke.
+
+"He dances adorably, my dear!" the intrigante declared. "But I dare say you
+know that already."
+
+The English girl shook her head, smiling. "Not yet."
+
+"Then lose no time. You two should dance well together, for you are more of
+a size. I think the next number will be a waltz. We get altogether too few
+of them; these American dances, these one-steps and foxtrots, they are not
+dances, they are mere romps, favourites none the less. And there is always
+more room on the floor; so few waltz nowadays. Really, you must not miss
+this opportunity."
+
+This playful insistence, the light stress she laid upon her suggestion that
+Cecelia Brooke dance with him, considered in conjunction with her recent
+admonition, impressed Lanyard as significantly inconsistent. Sophie was no
+more a woman to make purposeless gestures than she was one sufficiently
+wanting in finesse to signal him by pressures of her foot. There was sheer
+intention in that iteration: "... _lose no time ... you must not miss this
+opportunity_." Something had happened even since their dance; she had
+observed something momentous, and was warning him to act quickly if he
+meant to act at all.
+
+With unruffled amiability, amused, urbane, Lanyard bowed his petition
+across the table, and was rewarded by a bright nod of promise.
+
+Lighting another cigarette, he lounged back, poised his wine glass
+delicately, with the eye of a connoisseur appraised its pale amber tint,
+touched it lightly to his lips, inhaling critically its bouquet, sipped,
+and signified approval of the vintage by sipping again: all without missing
+one bit of business in a scene enacted on the far side of the room,
+directly behind him but reflected in a mirror panel of the wall he faced.
+
+The diplomatist charged with the task of discriminating the sheep from the
+goats in the lower lobby had come up to confer with his colleague, the
+maître d'hôtel of the upper storey. When Lanyard first saw the man he was
+standing by the elevator shaft, none too patiently awaiting the attention
+of the other, who, caught by inadvertence at some distance, was moving to
+join him, with what speed he could manage threading the thick-set tables.
+
+Was this what Sophie had noticed? Had she likewise, perhaps, received some
+secret signal from the guardian of the lower gateway?
+
+A signal possibly indicating that Ekstrom had arrived
+
+They met at last, those two, and discreetly confabulated, the maître
+d'hôtel betraying welcome mitigation of that nervous tension which had
+heretofore so palpably affected him; and, as the other stepped back into
+the elevator, Lanyard saw this one's glance irresistibly attracted to the
+table dedicated to the service of the Princess de Alavia. Something much
+resembling satisfaction glimmered in the fellow's leaden eyes: it was
+apparent that he anticipated early relief from a distasteful burden of
+responsibility.
+
+Then, at ease in the belief that he was unobserved, he turned to a near-by
+table round which four sat without the solace of feminine society--four
+men whose stamp was far from reassuring despite their strikingly quiet
+demeanour and inconspicuously correct investiture of evening dress.
+
+Two were unmistakable sons of the Fatherland; all were well set up, with
+the look of men who would figure to advantage in any affair calling for
+physical competence and courage, from coffee and pistols at sunrise in the
+Parc aux Princes to a battle royal in a Tenderloin dive.
+
+Their table commanded both ways out, by the stairs and by the elevator,
+much too closely for Lanyard's peace of mind.
+
+And more than one looked thoughtfully his way while the maître d'hôtel
+hovered above them, murmuring confidentially.
+
+Four nods sealed an understanding with him. He strutted off with far more
+manner than had been his at any time since the arrival of Lanyard, and
+vented an excess of spirits by berating bitterly an unhappy clown of a
+waiter for some trivial fault.
+
+The first bars of another dance number sang through the confusion of
+voices: truly, as Sophie had foretold, a waltz.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+DANSE MACABRE
+
+
+Trained in the old school of the dance, Lanyard was unversed in that
+graceless scamper which to-day passes as the waltz with a generation
+largely too indolent or too inept of foot to learn to dance.
+
+His was that flowing waltz of melting rhythm, the waltz of yesterday,
+that dance of dances to whose measures a civilization more sedate in its
+amusements, less jealous of its time, danced, flirted, loved, and broke its
+hearts.
+
+Into the swinging movement of that antiquated waltz Lanyard fell without
+a qualm of doubt, all ignorant as he was of his benighted ignorance; and
+instantly, with the ease and gracious assurance of a dancer born, Cecelia
+Brooke adapted herself to his step and guidance, with rare pliancy made her
+every movement exquisitely synchronous with his.
+
+No need to lead her, no need for more than the least of pressures upon her
+yielding waist, no need for anything but absolute surrender to the magic of
+the moment....
+
+Effortless, like creatures of the music adrift upon its sounding tides,
+they circled the floor once, twice, and again, before reluctantly Lanyard
+brought himself to shatter the spell of that enchantment.
+
+Looking down with an apologetic smile, he asked:
+
+"Mademoiselle, do you know you can be an excellent actress?"
+
+As if in resentment the girl glanced upward sharply, with clouded eyes.
+
+"So can most women, in emergency."
+
+"I mean ... I have something serious to say; nobody must guess your
+thoughts."
+
+She said simply: "I will do my best."
+
+"You must--you must appear quite charmed. Also, should you catch me
+smirking like an infatuated ninny, remember I am only doing my own
+indifferent best to act."
+
+Laughter trembled deliciously in her voice: "I promise faithfully to bear
+in mind your heartlessness!"
+
+"I am an ass," he enunciated with the humility of conviction. "But that
+can't be helped. Attend to me, if you please--and do not start. This place
+turns out to be a nest of Prussian spies. I was brought here by a trick. I
+understand the order is I may not leave alive."
+
+Playing her part so well as almost to embarrass Lanyard himself, the girl
+smiled daringly into his eyes.
+
+"Because of that packet?" she breathed.
+
+"Because of that, mademoiselle."
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+For an instant Lanyard lost countenance absolutely. Through sheer good
+fortune the girl was now dancing with face averted, her head so nearly
+touching his shoulder that it seemed to rest upon it.
+
+Nevertheless, it was at cost of an heroic struggle that he fought down all
+signs of that shock with which it had been borne in upon him that he dared
+not assure the girl her packet was in safe hands.
+
+If he had failed in his efforts to restore the thing to her, that she might
+consign it as she saw fit and so discharge her personal trust, till now
+Lanyard had solaced himself with a hazy notion that she would in turn be
+comforted when she learned the document was in the keeping of her country's
+Secret Service.
+
+Impossible to tell her that: his own act had rendered it impossible,
+that act the outcome of wilful trifling with his infirmity, his itch for
+thieving.
+
+Of a sudden the pilfered necklace secreted in an inner pocket of his
+waistcoat, above his heart, seemed to have gained the weight of so much
+lead. The hideous consciousness of the thing stung like the bite of live
+coals.
+
+This woman was in distress; he yearned to lighten her burden; he could do
+that with half a dozen words; his guilt prohibited.
+
+A thief!
+
+Now indeed the Lone Wolf tasted shame and realized its bitterness....
+
+Puzzled by his constraint, the girl's eyes again sought his; and warned
+in time by the movement of her head, he mustered impudence to meet their
+question with the look of tenderness that went with the rôle she suffered
+him to play.
+
+"What is the matter?"
+
+"I am ashamed that I have failed you...."
+
+"Don't think of that. I know you did your best. Only tell me what became of
+it."
+
+"It was stolen; when I returned to my stateroom that night I was held up
+and robbed. The thief shot at me, killed his confederate, decamped by
+way of the port. I pursued. Another aided him to overpower and cast me
+overboard."
+
+"Yet you escaped...!"
+
+Strange she should seem more intrigued by that than concerned about her
+loss!
+
+"I escaped, no matter how...."
+
+"You don't know who stole the packet?"
+
+"I don't recall the man among the passengers, but he may have been in one
+of the boats, a fellow of about my stature, with a flowing beard...."
+
+He sketched broadly Ekstrom as he had seen him in the Stanistreet library.
+
+Her eyes quickened.
+
+"One such escaped in our boat, the second steward; I think his name was
+Anderson."
+
+"Doubtless the same."
+
+"Then it is gone!"
+
+For once in his acquaintance with her, that brave spirit seemed to falter:
+she became a burden, bereft for a little of all grace and spontaneity.
+
+He was constrained to swing her forcibly into time.
+
+Almost instantly she recollected herself, covered her lapse with a little
+laugh innocent of any hint of its forced falsity, and showed him and the
+room as well a radiant countenance: all with such address and art that the
+incident might well have escaped notice, otherwise have passed for a bit of
+natural by-play.
+
+Yet distress was too eloquent in the broken query: "What _am_ I to do?"
+
+Heartsick, self-sick to boot, he essayed to suggest that she consult
+Colonel Stanistreet, but lacking so much effrontery, stammered and fell
+silent.
+
+Perhaps misinterpreting, she cried in quick contrition: "I am forgetting!
+Forgive me. I should have said: what are you to do?"
+
+He whipped his wits together.
+
+"Look down, turn your face aside, smile.... I have a plan, a desperate
+remedy, but the best I can contrive. When next the lift comes up, we must
+try to be near it. There is one row of tables which we must break through
+by main force. Leave that to me, follow as I clear a way, go straight into
+the lift. If anything happens, run down the stairway on the left. The
+ground floor is two flights below. If I am any way detained, don't stop--go
+on, get your wraps, take the first taxi you see, return directly to the
+Knickerbocker. I will telephone you later."
+
+"If you live," she breathed.
+
+"Never fear for me...."
+
+"But if I do? Do you imagine I could rest if I thought you had sacrificed
+yourself for me?"
+
+"You must not think that. I am far too selfish--"
+
+"That is not so. And I refuse positively to do as you wish unless you tell
+me how I may communicate with you."
+
+Resigned to humour her, he recited his address and the number of the house
+telephone, and when she had memorized both by iteration, resumed:
+
+"Once outside, if anybody tries to hinder you, don't let them intimidate
+you into keeping quiet, but scream, scream at the top of your lungs. These
+beasts abominate a screaming woman, or any other undue noise. Not only will
+that frighten them off, but it will fetch the nearest policeman."
+
+The music ceased. She stood flushed, smiling, adorably pretty, eyes
+star-like for him alone.
+
+"We are not far from the lift now," she said just audibly.
+
+"But the door is shut. Hush. Here comes the encore. Once more around...."
+
+They drifted again into that witching maze of melody and movement made one.
+
+"You are silent," she said, after a little. "Why?"
+
+Lanyard answered with a warning pressure on her hand.
+
+The elevator was stationary at the floor, its door wide, the maître d'hôtel
+engaged in a far quarter of the room, while those four formidable guardians
+of the exit were gossiping with animation over their glasses.
+
+"Steady. Now is our time."
+
+Abruptly they stopped. A couple that had been following them avoided
+collision by a close margin. Over his partner's head the man scowled
+portentously--and dissipated his display of temper on Lanyard's indifferent
+back.
+
+Upon those guests who sat between the dancing floor and elevator, Lanyard
+wasted no consideration. Pushing roughly between two adjoining tables, he
+lifted one chair with its astonished occupant bodily out of the way, then
+turned, swung an arm round the girl's waist, all but threw her through the
+lane he had created, followed without an instant's pause.
+
+It was all so quickly accomplished that the girl was in the car before
+another person in the room appreciated what was happening. And Lanyard, in
+the act of slamming the door shut without heed for the protesting operator,
+saw only a room full of amazed faces with gaping mouths and rounded
+eyes--and one man of the four at the near-by table in the act of rising
+uncertainly, with a stupefied look.
+
+Elbowing the boy aside, he seized the operating lever and thrust it to the
+notch labelled "Descend." An instant of pause followed: like its attendant
+the elevator seemed stalled in inertia of stupefaction.
+
+Beyond the door somebody loosed an infuriated screech. Angry hands
+drummed on the glass panel. With a premonitory shudder the car started
+spasmodically, moved downward at first gently, then with greater speed,
+coming to an abrupt stop at the street level with a shock that all but
+threw its passengers from their feet.
+
+Up the shaft that senseless punishment of the panel continued. Some other
+intelligence conceived the notion for ringing for the car to return: its
+annunciator buzzed stridently, continuously.
+
+Unlatching the lower door, Lanyard threw it back, stepped out, finding the
+lobby deserted but for a simpering group of coat-room girls, to one of whom
+he flipped a silver dollar.
+
+"Find this lady's wraps--be quick!"
+
+Deftly catching the coin, the girl snatched the check from Cecelia Brooke,
+and darted into the women's dressing room.
+
+Throughout a wait of agonising suspense, the elevator boy remained cowering
+in a corner of the car, staring at Lanyard as at some shape of terror,
+while the ignored buzzer droned without cessation to persistent pressure
+from above.
+
+Out of the dark entrance to the lower dining room the bearded diplomatist
+popped with the distracted look of a jack-in-the-box about to be ravished
+of its young.
+
+"Monsieur is not leaving?" he expostulated shrilly, darting forward.
+
+Lanyard stopped him with a look whose menace was like a kick.
+
+"I am seeing this lady to her cab," he said in a cold and level voice.
+
+The coat-room girl emerged from her lair with an armful of wraps and furs.
+
+Again the bearded one made as if to block the doorway.
+
+"But, monsieur--mademoiselle--!"
+
+Lanyard caught the fellow's arm and sent him spinning like a top.
+
+"Out of the way, you rat!" he snapped; then to the girl: "Be quick!"
+
+As she shouldered into a compartment of the revolving door incoherent yells
+began to echo down the staircase well. At length it had occurred to those
+above to utilize that means of descent.
+
+Wedged in the wheeling door, a final glimpse of the lobby showed Lanyard
+the startled, putty-like mask of the maître d'hôtel at the head of
+the stairway with, beyond him, the head of one who, though in shadow,
+uncommonly resembled Ekstrom--but Ekstrom as he was in the old days,
+without his beard.
+
+That picture passed like a flash on a cinema screen.
+
+They were on the sidewalk, and the girl was running toward a taxicab, the
+only vehicle of its sort in sight, at the curb just above the entrance.
+
+Coatless and bareheaded, Lanyard swung to face the door porter, a towering,
+brawny animal in livery, self-confident and something more than keen to
+interfere; but his mouth, opening to utter some sort of protest, shut
+suddenly without articulation when Lanyard displayed for his benefit a .22
+Colt's automatic. And he fell back smartly.
+
+Jerking open the cab door, the girl stumbled into the far corner of the
+seat. The motor was churning in promising fashion, the chauffeur settling
+into place at the wheel. Into his hand Lanyard thrust a ten-dollar bill.
+
+"The Knickerbocker," he ordered. "Stop for nobody. If followed steer for
+the nearest policeman. There'll be no change."
+
+He closed the door sharply, leaned over it, dropped the little pistol into
+the girl's lap.
+
+"Chances are you won't want that--but you may."
+
+She bent forward quickly, eyes darkly lustrous with alarm, and placed a
+hand upon his arm.
+
+"But you?"
+
+"It is I whom they want, not you. I won't subject you to the hazard of my
+company."
+
+Gently Lanyard lifted the hand from his sleeve, brushed it gallantly with
+his lips, released it.
+
+"Good-night!" he laughed, then stepped back, waved a hand to the
+chauffeur--"Go!"
+
+The taxicab shot away like a racing hound unleashed. With a sigh of relief
+Lanyard gave himself wholly to the question of his own salvation.
+
+The rank of waiting motor-cars offered no hope: all but one were private
+town cars and limousines, operated by liveried drivers. A solitary roadster
+at the head of the line tempted and was rejected; even though it had no
+guardian chauffeur, something of which he could not be sure, he would
+be overhauled before he could start the motor and get the knack of its
+gear-shift mechanism. Even now Au Printemps was in frantic eruption, its
+doors ejecting violently a man at each wild revolution.
+
+Down Broadway an omnibus of the Fifth Avenue line lumbered, at no less
+speed than twenty miles an hour, without passengers and sporting an
+illuminated "Special" sign above the driver's seat.
+
+Dashing out into the roadway, Lanyard launched himself at the narrow
+platform of the unwieldy vehicle and, in spite of a yell of warning from
+the guard, landed safely on the step and turned to repel boarders.
+
+But his manoeuvre had been executed too swiftly and unexpectedly. The group
+before Au Printemps huddled together in ludicrous inaction, as if stunned.
+Then one raged through it, plying vicious elbows. As he paused against the
+light Lanyard identified unmistakably the silhouette of Ekstrom.
+
+So that one had, after all, escaped the net of his own treachery!
+
+The 'bus guard was shaking Lanyard's arm with an ungentle hand.
+
+"Here, now, you got no business boardin' a Special."
+
+From his pocket Lanyard whipped the first bank-note his fingers
+encountered.
+
+"Divide that with the chauffeur," he said crisply--"tell him to drive like
+the devil. It's life or death with me!"
+
+The protruding eyeballs of the guard bore witness to the magnitude of the
+bribe.
+
+"You're on!" he breathed hoarsely, and ran forward through the body of the
+conveyance to advise the driver.
+
+Swarming up the curved stairway to the roof, Lanyard dropped into the rear
+seat, looking back.
+
+The group round the doorway was recovering from its stupefaction. Three
+struck off from it toward the line of waiting cars. Of these the foremost
+was Ekstrom.
+
+Simultaneously the 'bus, lumbering drunkenly, lurched into Columbus Circle,
+and the roadster left the curb carrying in addition to the driver two
+passengers--Ekstrom on the running-board.
+
+Tardily Lanyard repented of that impulse which had moved him to bestow his
+one weapon upon Cecelia Brooke.
+
+The night air had a biting edge. A chill rain had begun to drizzle down in
+minute globules of mist, which both lent each street light its individual
+nimbus of gold and dulled deceitfully the burnished asphaltum, rendering
+its surface greasy and treacherous. More than once Lanyard feared lest
+the 'bus skid and overturn; and before the old red brick building between
+Broadway and Eighth Avenue shut out the western sector of the Circle, he
+saw the roadster, driven insanely, shoot crabwise toward the curb, than
+answer desperate work at the wheel and whirl madly, executing a volte-face
+so violent that Ekstrom's hold was broken and he was hurled a dozen feet
+away. And Lanyard's chances were measurably advanced by the delay required
+in order to pick up the sprawling one, start the engine anew, and turn more
+cautiously to resume the pursuit.
+
+Striking diagonally across Broadway the 'bus swung into Fifty-seventh
+Street at the moment when the roadster turned the corner of Columbus
+Circle.
+
+The head of the guard lifted above the edge of the roof. Clinging to the
+supports of the stairway, he addressed Lanyard in accents of blended
+suspicion and respect.
+
+"Lis'n, boss: is this all right, on the level, now?"
+
+"Absolutely, unless that racing-car catches up with us, in which case
+you'll have a dead man--myself--on your hands."
+
+"Well ... we don't wanna lose our jobs, that's all."
+
+"You won't unless I lose my life."
+
+"Anything you'd like me to do?"
+
+"Go down, wait on the platform, if anybody attempts to get aboard kick him
+in the act."
+
+"Sure I will!"
+
+The guard disappeared.
+
+Wallowing like a barge in a strong seaway, the omnibus crossed Seventh
+Avenue and sped downhill toward Sixth with dangerous momentum. Shortly,
+however, this began to be modified by the brakes, a precaution against
+mishap which even the fugitive must approve. Ahead loomed the gaunt
+structure of the Sixth Avenue "L," bridging the roadway at so low an
+elevation as to afford the omnibus little more than clear headroom. Once
+beneath it a single bounce up from the surface-car tracks must mean a
+wreck.
+
+But the pursuit was less than half a block astern and gaining swiftly, even
+as the speed of the omnibus was growing less and desperately less.
+
+At what seemed little better than a snail's pace it began to pass beneath
+the span of the Elevated.
+
+Like a racing thoroughbred the roadster swept up alongside, motor chanting
+triumphantly, running-board level with the platform step.
+
+Ekstrom, poised to leap aboard, hesitated; a pistol in his hand exploded; a
+shattered window fell crashing.
+
+There was a yell from the guard, not of pain but of fright. Apparently he
+executed a von Hindenburg retreat. Without more opposition Ekstrom gained
+the platform.
+
+In the same breath Lanyard stood up. The lowermost girder of the "L" was
+immediately overhead. He grasped it, doubled his legs beneath him, swung
+clear. The omnibus shot from under him, the roadster convoying.
+
+Drawing himself up, he seized a round iron upright of guard-rail and heaved
+his body in over the edge of the platform round the switching-tower, which
+was at this hour dark and untenanted.
+
+In the street below a police whistle shrieked, and a fusillade of pistol
+shots woke scandalised echoes.
+
+Bending almost double Lanyard moved rapidly northward on the footway beside
+the western tracks, and so gained the old station on the west side of
+Fifty-eighth Street, for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude. Through
+this he crept, then down the stairs, encountering at the lower landing an
+iron gate which obliged him to climb over and jump.
+
+Not a soul paid the least attention to this matter of a gentleman in
+evening dress without hat or top coat dropping from the stairway of a
+disused elevated station at two o'clock in the morning.
+
+In New York anything can happen, and most things do, without stirring up
+meddlesome impulses in innocent bystanders.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+FORCE MAJEURE
+
+
+This visit to his rooms was the briefest of the several Lanyard made that
+night, considerations of mortal urgency dictating its drastic abbreviation.
+
+If the events of the last few hours had meant anything whatever they had
+demonstrated two truths which shone like beacon lights: that Manhattan
+Island was overpopulated as long as both he and Ekstrom remained on it;
+that Ekstrom had been goaded to the verge of aberration by the discovery
+that Lanyard had come safely through the _Assyrian_ débâcle to take up anew
+his self-appointed office of Nemesis to the Prussian spy system in general
+and to the genius of its American bureau in particular.
+
+Henceforth that one would know no more rest while Lanyard lived.
+
+Thus that little street-level apartment forfeited whatever attractions it
+originally had possessed in the adventurer's estimation. Not only was the
+address known to Ekstrom's associates, and so open to him, but its peculiar
+characteristics, its facilities for access from the street direct, rendered
+it a highly practicable death-trap for a hunted man.
+
+Lanyard was well persuaded he need only wait there long enough to receive a
+deputation from Seventy-ninth Street. And with any assurance that Ekstrom
+would come alone, he might have been content to wait. Not only had he
+through too intimate acquaintance with his methods every assurance that
+Ekstrom would never brave alone what he could induce another to risk with
+him, but Lanyard was never one willing to play the passive part.
+
+A banal axiom of all warfare applied: The advantage is with him who fights
+upon the offensive.
+
+Since midnight the offensive had shifted from Lanyard's grasp to the
+enemy's. He was determined to recapture it; and that was something never to
+be accomplished by sitting still and waiting for events to unfold, but only
+by carrying the war into the enemy's camp.
+
+He delayed, then, only long enough to change his clothing and to conceal
+about him certain properties which it seemed unwise to expose to chance
+discovery on the part of Ekstrom or in the ever-possible event of police
+intervention.
+
+Within five minutes from the time of his return he was closing behind him
+the private door.
+
+Wearing a quiet lounge suit but no top coat, with a hat not so soft as to
+lack character but soft enough to stick upon one's head in time of action,
+and carrying a stick neither brutishly stout nor ineffectively slender,
+he strolled up to Seventh Avenue, turned north, entered Central Park--and
+strolled no more.
+
+Kindly shadows enfolded him, engulfed him altogether. One minute after he
+had passed through the gateway he would have defied unaided apprehension
+by the most zealous officer of the peace. He went swiftly and secretly,
+avoiding all lighted ways.
+
+Not till then did conscience stir and remind him of his slighted promise to
+call up Cecelia Brooke.
+
+No time now for that; the errand that engaged him was of a nature to brook
+no more procrastination. The girl must wait. He was sorry if, as she had
+protested, solicitude for his welfare must interfere with her night's rest.
+But what must be, must: until he saw the end of this adventure he could be
+influenced by no minor consideration whatsoever.
+
+Not that he seriously believed Cecelia's sleep would be uneasy because of
+him. That was too much.
+
+His temper was grim and skeptical. The resentment roused by the trap that
+had so nearly laid him by the heels, together with the subsequent effort to
+assassinate him out of hand, had settled into a phase of smouldering fury
+whose heat consumed like misty vapours every lesser emotion, every humane
+consideration.
+
+Some by-thought recalling the Weringrode's innuendo that he was in love
+without his knowledge, moved him to laugh outright if strangely, an
+unpleasant laugh that held as much of pain as of derision.
+
+What room in that dark heart of his for love?... the heart of a thief and a
+potential assassin, the heart of the Lone Wolf!...
+
+How was he to know he had hardly left his lodgings before their hush was
+interrupted by the grumble of the house telephone?
+
+Intermittently for upward of three minutes that sound persisted. When
+at length it discontinued the quiet of the untenanted rooms reigned
+undisturbed for a brief time only.
+
+An odd metallic stridor became audible, a succession of scrapings of
+stealthy accent at the private entrance. Its latch clicked. The door swung
+back against the wall with a muffled bump. Two pairs of furtive feet padded
+in the little private hallway. The flash of an electric hand-lamp flickered
+hither and yon like a searching poignard, picked out the door to the one
+bedchamber and vanished. There was guarded whispering, then a thud as one
+of the intruders gained the middle of the bedchamber in a bound. An instant
+later a switch snapped, and the room was flooded with light.
+
+Beneath the chandelier stood a man in evening dress the worse for
+misadventure, one knee of his trousers cut open, both legs caked with
+a film of half-dry mud, his linen dingy with mud-stains, his top coat
+shockingly bedraggled. He was bareheaded, apparently having lost his hat; a
+black smear across one cheek added emphasis to the pallor of newly shaven
+jowls; and his eyes were blazing.
+
+"Stole away!" he muttered briefly in disgust, then called: "Ed!"
+
+As quietly as a shadow a second man joined him, greeting him with a "Hush!"
+
+This gentleman was in far more presentable repair and a more equable frame
+of mind. There was even a glint of amusement in his hard blue eyes. His
+countenance had an Irish cast.
+
+"Hush?" the other iterated with contempt. "What for? The hound's not here."
+
+"No, Karl," Ed admitted; "but there are others in the house. If it's known
+to them that Lanyard's out, they may turn in a police alarm; and I for one
+have had enough of bulls for one night."
+
+Karl grunted disdainfully. "I told you this would be a waste of time...."
+
+"And I agreed with you entirely. But you would come."
+
+"Lanyard's no such fool as to stick round a place he knows I know about."
+Karl's hands twitched and his features worked nervously. "He knows me too
+well, knows that if ever I lay hands on him again--"
+
+His voice was rising to an hysterical pitch when the other checked him with
+a sibilant hiss. At the same time his hand darted out and switched off the
+light. Karl uttered a startled ejaculation.
+
+"_Sssh_!" his companion repeated.
+
+In the street a motor-car was rumbling, stationary before the door. Then
+the remote grinding of the house door-bell was heard.
+
+"Let's get out of this," suggested the Irishman. "It's no good waiting,
+anyway."
+
+"Hold hard! We won't go till we have a clear field."
+
+The Prussian stole out into the sitting room and stood listening at the
+door to the public hallway, his companion standing by with a mutinous air.
+
+"Oh, come along!" he insisted, in a stage whisper.
+
+"Shut up! Listen...."
+
+Shuffling footfalls traversed the hallway. The front door was opened. The
+clear voice of an Englishwoman was answered in the slurring patois of a
+negro.
+
+"No'm, he ain't in."
+
+The next enquiry was intelligible: the speaker had entered the hallway.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Yas'm. Sumbody done call him up 'bout ten min'tes ago, an' I rung an' rung
+an' he don' answer. He ain't in or he don' mean to answer nobody, tha's
+all."
+
+"I am very anxious about him. Have you a key to his rooms?"
+
+"Yas'm, I got a pass-key, but--"
+
+"Please use it. Take this. Go in and make sure he is out, or if at home
+that he is all right."
+
+"Yas'm, thanky ma'am, but--"
+
+"Do as I tell you. I will see that you don't get into trouble."
+
+"All right, ma'am." The negro chuckled, probably over his tip. "Yo' sho'
+has got the p'suadin'est way...."
+
+The Irishman caught the German's arm. "Come out of this," he pleaded.
+
+"No fear. I'll see it through. That's the Brooke girl the fool got in with
+on the boat. She may know something...."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Leave this to me. You look out for the negro. I'll take care of Miss
+Cecelia Brooke."
+
+Swearing unhappily, the Irishman flattened against the wall to one side of
+the door. Karl waited behind it as it admitted the hall attendant, who made
+directly toward the central chandelier.
+
+"Yo' jes' wait, ma'am, an' I'll mek a light an'--"
+
+But the girl had impetuously followed him in.
+
+The light went up, and Karl put a heavy shoulder against the door, closing
+it with a slam. The negro turned and stood with gaping mouth and staring
+eyes, dumb with terror. The girl recognised Karl with a little cry, and
+darted back toward the door. Immediately he caught her in his arms. Her
+lips opened, but their utterance was stifled by a handkerchief thrust
+between them with the dexterity of a practised hand.
+
+Without one word of warning the Irishman stepped forward and struck the
+negro brutally in the face. The boy reeled, whimpering. Two more blows
+delivered with murderous ferocity silenced him altogether. He collapsed
+like a broken puppet, insensible on the floor, his face a curious ashen
+colour beneath its glossy skin of brown.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+RIPOSTE
+
+
+The drizzle had grown thicker, the night blacker, the early morning air
+still more chill. But Lanyard was moving too swiftly to be affected by
+this last circumstance; the first he anathematised with the perfunctory
+bitterness of a skilled artisan who sees his work in a fair way to be
+obstructed by elemental depravity. Another of his trade would have termed
+such weather conditions ideal, and so might the Lone Wolf on an everyday
+job; but the prospect of a footing rendered insecure by rain trebled the
+hazards attending a plan of campaign that would brook neither revision nor
+delay.
+
+There was only one way to break into the house on Seventy-ninth Street;
+this Lanyard had appreciated upon his first reconnaissance of the previous
+afternoon. He could have wished for more time in which to prepare and
+assemble tested equipment instead of relying upon chance to supply
+the requisite gear; but with all time at his disposal the mechanical
+difficulties of the problem would remain. Far from indifferent to these,
+Lanyard addressed himself to their conquest doggedly and with businesslike
+economy of motion.
+
+Shunning the public paths he went over the park wall like a cat, sped
+across town through Eightieth Street, and so came to that plot of land upon
+which an apartment building was in process of erection, immediately to the
+north of the American headquarters of the Prussian spy system.
+
+Walled in with stone two storeys deep, its gaunt skeleton of steel had
+been joined together as far as the seventh level. How much higher it was
+destined to rise was immaterial; for Lanyard's purpose it was enough that
+the frame had already outgrown its neighbour on the south.
+
+A litter of lumber, huge steel girders, and other material narrowed the
+side street to half its normal width. The sidewalk space was trampled earth
+roofed with heavy planks for the protection of pedestrian heads, a passage
+lighted by electric bulbs widely spaced; midway in this an entrance to
+the structure was flanked by a wooden shanty, by day a tool house, after
+working hours a shelter for the night watchman. This boasted one glazed
+window dull with orange light.
+
+Approaching with due precaution, Lanyard peered in. The light came from a
+single electric bulb and a potbellied sheet-iron stove, glowing red. Near
+by, in a chair tipped against the wall, sat the watchman, corncob pipe
+in hand, head drooping, eyes closed, mouth ajar. A snore of the first
+magnitude seemed to vibrate the very walls. On the floor beside the chair
+stood a two-quart tin pail full of arid emptiness.
+
+Dismissing further consideration of the watchman as a factor, satisfied
+that the entire neighbourhood as well was sound asleep, Lanyard darted up
+the plank walk that led into the building, then paused to get his bearings.
+
+Effluvia of mortar and damp lumber saluted him in an uncanny place whose
+darkness was slightly qualified by a faint refracted glow from the low
+canopy of cloud and by equally dim shafts of diffused street light. There
+was more or less flooring of a temporary character over a sable gulf of
+cellars, and overhead a sullen, weeping sky cross-hatched with stark black
+ironwork.
+
+With infinite patience Lanyard groped his way through that dark labyrinth
+to the foot of a ladder ascending an open shaft wherein a hoisting tackle
+dangled.
+
+Here he stumbled over what he had been seeking, a great coil of one-inch
+hempen cable, from which he measured off roughly what he would require, if
+his calculations were correct, and something over. This length he re-coiled
+and slung over his shoulder: an awkward, weighty handicap. Nevertheless he
+began to climb.
+
+Above the third level there was merely steel framework; he had somewhat
+more light to guide him, with a view of the north wall of the Seventy-ninth
+Street house, bright in the glare of avenue lamps.
+
+The wall was absolutely blank.
+
+At the seventh level the ladders ended. He stepped off upon a foot-wide
+beam, paused to make sure of his poise, and began to walk the girders with
+a sureness of foot any aviator might have envied.
+
+At regular intervals he encountered uprights: between these he had to
+depend upon his sense of direction and equilibrium to guide him safely
+across those narrow walks of steel made slippery by rain.
+
+But, thanks to forethought, his footwork was faultless: he wore shoes old,
+well-broken, very soft, flexible, and silent.
+
+The building was in the shape of a squat E, with two courts facing south.
+On this seventh level the first court was bridged by a single girder, the
+middle of which was Lanyard's immediate objective. Since it lacked uprights
+he took it cautiously on hands and knees until approximately equidistant
+from both ends, when he straddled it, took the cable from his shoulders,
+uncoiled a length and made it fast round the girder with a clove hitch:
+giddy work, in that darkness, on that greasy span, fashioning by simple
+sense of touch the knot upon which his life was to depend, half of the time
+prone upon the girder and fishing blindly beneath it for the rope's end,
+with nothing but a seventy--foot drop between him and eternity, not even
+another girder to break a fall....
+
+He was now immediately opposite the minaret, at an elevation of about
+twenty feet above the roof he wished to reach, and as far away, or perhaps
+a trifle farther.
+
+Still he detected no signs of life about that nest of spies: if the
+wireless were in operation its apparatus was well-housed; there was no
+sound of the spark, never a glimmer of its violet flash.
+
+Laboriously--the knot completed to his satisfaction--Lanyard returned via
+the eastern arm of the E, paying out the coiled cable as he progressed,
+working round to the north side of the court.
+
+Once again pausing opposite the minaret, he knotted the end of the cable
+loosely round an upright connecting with the sixth level, let it slide
+down, followed it, repeated the process, and rested finally on the fifth.
+
+Now his ordeal approached a climax which he contemplated with what calmness
+he could while securing the rope beneath the arms.
+
+In another sixty seconds or less it must be demonstrated whether his dead
+reckoning would set him down safe and sound on the roof or dash him against
+the walls of the Seventy-ninth Street house, to swing back and dangle
+impotently in mid-air till daylight and police discovered him--unless,
+escaping injury, he were able to pull himself up hand over hand to the
+girder.
+
+With one arm round the upright to prevent the sag of rope from dragging him
+over prematurely, he essayed a final survey.
+
+Either the murk deceived or Lanyard had judged shrewdly. His feet were on
+an approximate level with the coping round the roof, and he stood about as
+far from the upper girder to which the rope was hitched as that was distant
+from the coping.
+
+One look up and round at those louring skies, duskily flushed by subdued
+city lights: with no more ceremony Lanyard released the upright and
+committed his body to space.
+
+If the downward sweep was breathless, what followed was breath-taking:
+once past the nadir of that giant swing, he was borne upward by an impetus
+steadily and sensibly slackening.
+
+Instant followed leaden-winged instant while the wall, looming like
+a mountainside, seemed to be toppling, insensately bent upon his
+annihilation; even so his momentum, decreasing with frightful swiftness,
+seemed possessed of demoniac desire to frustrate him.
+
+After an age-long agony of doubt it became evident he was not destined
+to crash into the wall, but not that he was to gain the coping: through
+fractions of a second hideously protracted this last drew near, nearer,
+slowly, ever more slowly.
+
+And he was twisting dizzily....
+
+With frantic effort he crooked an arm over the coping at a juncture when,
+had he not acted instantly, he must have swung back. There was a racking
+wrench, as though his arm were being torn from its socket.
+
+At the end of a struggle even more wearing he flung his other arm across
+the ledge, and for some time hung there, at the end of an almost taut rope,
+unable to overcome its resistance and pull himself in over the coping,
+stubbornly refusing to loose his grasp.
+
+Presently, grown desperate, he let go with his right hand, holding fast
+only with the left, fumbled in a pocket, found his knife, opened it with
+his teeth, and began, to saw at the rope round his chest.
+
+Strand after strand parted grudgingly till it fell away altogether and
+reaction from its tension threw him against the coping with such violence
+that he all but lost his hold. Dropping the knife, he swept his right arm
+up and once more hooked his fingers over the inside of the ledge.
+
+Far down the knife clinked suggestively upon stone.
+
+Breathing deep, Lanyard braced knees and feet against the wall, worried,
+heaved, hauled, squirmed like a mad thing, in the end rolled over the top
+and fell at length upon the roof, panting, trembling, bathed in sweat,
+temporarily tormented by impulses to retch.
+
+By degrees regaining physical control, he sat up, took his bearings, and
+crept toward the foot of the minaret.
+
+A small, narrow doorway in its base was on the latch. He passed through to
+the landing of a dark winding stairway with a dim light at the bottom of
+its circular well.
+
+While he stood attentive, intermittent stridor troubled the stillness,
+originating at some point on the floors below: the proscribed wireless was
+at work.
+
+Hearing no other sounds, Lanyard went on down the steps, at their foot
+pausing to spy out through a half-open doorway to the topmost storey.
+
+Nobody moved in the corridor. He saw nothing but a line of closed doors,
+presumably to servants' quarters. Now, however, the vibrant rasp of the
+radio spark was perceptibly stronger and had a background of subdued noise,
+echoes of distant voices, deadened sounds of hasty footfalls, now and again
+a heavy thump or the bang of a door.
+
+Moving out, he commanded the length of the corridor. Toward one end a door
+stood open. He could see no more of the room beyond than a narrow patch of
+wall fitfully illuminated by a play of violet light.
+
+Then a man stepped out of this operating room, turning on the threshold to
+utter some parting observation; and Lanyard retired hastily to the shaft of
+the minaret stairway, but not before recognising Velasco.
+
+A moment later the Brazilian passed his lurking-place, walking with bended
+head, a worried frown darkening his swarthy countenance; and Lanyard
+emerged in time to see his head and shoulders vanish down a stairway at the
+far end of the corridor.
+
+Following with discretion, Lanyard leaned over the head of the main
+staircase well, looking down three flights to the ground floor, to which
+Velasco was descending.
+
+The house seemed veritably to hum with secret and, to judge by the pitch of
+its rumour, well-nigh panic activity. One divined a scurrying as of
+rats about to desert a sinking ship. Untoward events had thrown this
+establishment into a state of excited confusion: their nature Lanyard could
+not surmise, but their conjunction with his designs was exasperatingly
+inopportune. To search this place and find his man--if he were there at
+all--without being discovered, while its inmates buzzed about like so many
+startled hornets, was a fair impossibility; to attempt it was to court
+death.
+
+None the less he was inflexible in determination to go on, to push his luck
+to its extremity, by sheer force to bend fortuity to his service and suffer
+without complaint whatever the consequences of its recoil.
+
+Yet even as he advanced a foot to begin the descent, he withdrew it.
+
+On the ground floor, a door closing with a resounding crash had proved the
+signal for an outburst of expostulant, acrimonious voices: some half a
+dozen men giving angry tongue at one and the same time, their roars of
+polysyllabic gutturalisms fusing into utterly unintelligible clamour.
+
+One thought of a mutiny in a German madhouse.
+
+Moment after moment passed, the squall persisting with unmitigated
+viciousness. If now and again it subsided momentarily, it was only into
+uglier growls and swiftly to rise once more to high frenzy of incoherence.
+
+Two of the disputants appeared in the square frame of the staircase well,
+oddly foreshortened figures brandishing wild arms, one of them Velasco, the
+other a man whom Lanyard failed to identify, seemingly united in common
+anger directed at the head of some person invisible.
+
+Abruptly, with a gesture of almost homicidal fury, the Brazilian darted out
+of sight. The other followed.
+
+Then the object of their wrath took to the stairs, stopping at the rail
+of the first landing and gesticulating savagely over the heads of his
+audience, Velasco and the others returning amid a knot of fellows to bay
+round the newel post.
+
+His voice, full-throated, cried them all down--Ekstrom's deep and resonant
+voice, domineering over the uproar, hectoring one after another into sullen
+silence.
+
+In the beginning employing nothing but terms and phrases of insolence and
+objurgation untranslatable, when he had secured a measure of attention he
+delivered a short address in tones of unqualified contempt.
+
+"I will have obedience!" he stormed. "Let no one misunderstand my status
+here: I am come direct from His Majesty the Emperor with full power and
+authority to command and direct affairs which you have, individually,
+collectively, proved yourselves either unfit or unable to cope with. What I
+do, I do in my absolute discretion, with the full sanction and confidence
+of the Kaiser. He who questions my judgment or my actions, questions the
+wisdom of the All-Highest. Let it be clearly understood I am answerable
+to no one under God but myself and my Imperial master. Henceforth be good
+enough to hold your tongues or take the consequences--and be damned to you
+all!"
+
+Briefly he stood glowering down at their upturned faces, then sneered, and
+turned away.
+
+"Come along, O'Reilly," he said. "Fetch the woman, and give no more heed to
+swine-dogs!"
+
+His hand slipped up the rail to the first floor, vanished.
+
+If O'Reilly followed with the woman mentioned, both kept back from the rail
+and so out of Lanyard's field of vision.
+
+The group at the foot of the stairs moved away, grumbling profanely.
+
+At once Lanyard began to descend, rapidly and without care to avoid
+detection.
+
+One flight down he met face to face a manservant, evidently a footman, with
+an armful of clothing which he was conveying from one chamber to another.
+The fellow stopped short, jaw dropping, eyes popping; whereupon Lanyard
+paused and addressed him in German with a manner of overbearing contempt,
+that is to say, in character.
+
+"You're wanted upstairs in the radio room," he said--"at once!"
+
+The servant bleated one word of protest: "But--!"
+
+"Be silent. Do as I bid you. It is an emergency. Drop those things and go!
+Do you hear, imbecile?"
+
+Completely cowed and cheated, the man obeyed literally, letting his burden
+of garments fall to the floor and bounding hurriedly up the stairs.
+
+Another flight was negotiated without misadventure; on this floor as well
+servants were flitting busily to and fro, but none favoured the adventurer
+with the least attention.
+
+Midway down the third flight he pulled up to one side of the landing, and
+reconnoitred. It was on the next floor below, the first above the street,
+that Ekstrom had stopped. But in what quarter thereof? The exigency forbade
+the risk of one false turn. If Lanyard were to take Ekstrom unawares it
+must be at the first cast.
+
+From the ground floor came semi-coherent snatches of surly comment, like
+growls of a thunderstorm passing off into the distance:
+
+"_At a time such as this_...."
+
+"... _Secret Service snapping at our heels_ ..."
+
+"... _base on the Vineyard discovered_ ..."
+
+"... _Au Printemps raided, Sophie Weringrode under arrest. God knows
+whether she will hold her tongue_!"
+
+"_Trust her! But this ass_ ..."
+
+"_Bringing a woman here, putting all our necks into a halter_ ..."
+
+Immediately opposite the foot of the stairway, on the first storey, a door
+opened. O'Reilly came alertly forth, closed the door behind him, paused,
+fished in his pocket for a cigarette case, lighted and inhaled with deep
+appreciation, meantime eavesdropping on the utterances below with his head
+cocked to one side and a malicious smile shadowing his handsome Irish face.
+
+In his own good time he shrugged an indifferent shoulder, thrust his hands
+into his pockets, and sauntered coolly on down the stairs.
+
+The moment he disappeared, Lanyard went into action, in two bounds cleared
+landing and stairs, in another threw himself upon the door. It opened
+readily. Entering, he put his back to it, with his left hand groped for,
+found and turned a key, his right holding ready the automatic pistol he had
+taken from the lockers of the U-boat.
+
+The room was a combination of administrative bureau and study, very
+handsomely if somewhat over-decorated and furnished, with an atmosphere as
+distinctively German as that of a Bierstube, the sombreness of its colour
+scheme lending weight to its array of massive desks, tables, chairs,
+bookcases, and lounges.
+
+Between great draped windows and an impressive chimney-piece opposite,
+beside a broad, long desk, in a straight-backed chair sat a woman, gagged,
+bound as to her wrists, strips of cloth which had but lately bound ankles
+as well on the floor about her feet.
+
+That woman was Cecelia Brooke.
+
+Ekstrom stood behind her, in the act of loosening the knots which held the
+gag secure.
+
+For a space of thirty seconds, transfixed by the apparition of his enemy,
+he did not stir other than to raise weaponless hands in deference to the
+pistol trained upon his head. But the blood ebbed from his face, leaving
+it a ghastly mask in which shone the eyes of a man who sees certain death
+closing in upon him and is powerless to combat it, even to die fighting for
+life. And his lips curled back in a snarl neither of contempt nor of hatred
+but of terror.
+
+And for as long Lanyard remained as motionless, rooted in a despondency
+of thwarted hopes no less profound than the despair of the Prussian,
+apprehending what that one could not yet guess, that once more, and now
+certainly for the last time, vengeance was denied him, the fulfilment of
+all his labours and their sole purpose snatched from his grasp.
+
+The instincts of a killer were not his. Barring injudicious attempt to
+summon aid or take the offensive, Ekstrom was safe from injury at the hands
+of Michael Lanyard. His cunning, his favour in the countenance of fortune,
+or whatever it was that had enabled him to make the girl his prisoner and
+bring her here, bade fair to prove his salvation.
+
+Deep in Lanyard's consciousness an echo stirred of half-forgotten words:
+"_Vengeance is mine_...."
+
+The sense of frustration brewed a hopelessness as stark as that of a
+brow-beaten child. A blackness seemed to be settling down upon his
+faculties. A mist wavered momentarily before his eyes. He gulped
+convulsively, swallowing what had almost been a sob.
+
+But he spoke in a voice positively dispassionate.
+
+"Keep your hands up."
+
+Lanyard removed and pocketed the key, crossed to the middle of the room
+without once letting his gaze waver from the face of the Prussian,
+passed behind him, planted the muzzle of the pistol beneath Ekstrom's
+shoulder-blade, and methodically searched him, finding and putting aside on
+the desk one automatic, nothing else.
+
+"Stand aside!"
+
+The almost puerile measure of his disappointment was betrayed in the thrust
+with which he shouldered Ekstrom out of the way, so forcibly that the man
+was sent staggering wildly half a dozen paces.
+
+"Don't move, assassin!... Pardon, mademoiselle: one moment," Lanyard
+muttered, with his one free hand undoing the gag.
+
+He made slow work of that, fumbling while watching Ekstrom with unremitting
+intentness, hoping against hope that his enemy might make one false move,
+one only, by some infatuate endeavour to turn the tables excuse his
+killing.
+
+But Ekstrom would not. Recovery of his equilibrium had been coincident with
+the shock administered to his hardihood and sense of security by Lanyard's
+entrance. He stood now in a pose of insouciant grace, hands idly clasped
+before him, disdain glimmering in languid-lidded eyes, contempt in the set
+of his lips--an ensemble eloquent of brazen effrontery, the outgrowth of
+perception of the fact that Lanyard, being what he was, could neither shoot
+him down in cold blood nor, with the Brooke girl present, even attempt to
+injure him: compunctions unassembled in the make-up of the Boche, therefore
+when discovered in men of other races at once despicable and ridiculous....
+
+The gag came away.
+
+"Mademoiselle has not been injured?" Lanyard enquired, solicitous.
+
+The girl coughed and gasped, shaking her head, enunciating with difficulty
+in little better than a husky whisper: "... roughly handled, nothing
+worse."
+
+Lanyard's face burned as if his blood were molten mercury. "_Nothing
+worse_!" Appreciation of what handling she must have suffered, if she had
+resisted at all, before those beasts could have bound her, excited an
+indignation from whose light, as it blazed in Lanyard's eyes, even Ekstrom
+winced.
+
+The hand was tremulous with which he sought to loose her wrists, so much so
+that she could not but notice.
+
+"Don't mind me--look to that man!" she begged. "Leave me to unfasten these
+with my teeth. He can't be trusted for a single instant."
+
+"Mademoiselle," Lanyard mumbled, instinctively employing the French
+idiom--"you have reason."
+
+For an instant only he hesitated, swayed this way and that by the maddest
+of impulses, then resigned himself absolutely to their ascendancy.
+
+"This goes beyond all bounds," he said in an undertone.
+
+Deliberately leaving the Englishwoman to free herself according to her
+suggestion--forgetful, indeed, for the moment, that she was not altogether
+free--he moved to the desk and left his own automatic there beside
+Ekstrom's.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said mechanically, without looking at the girl, without
+power to perceive aught else in the world but the white, evil face of his
+enemy, "for what I am about to do, I beg you forgive me, of your charity. I
+can endure no more. It is too much...."
+
+He strode past her.
+
+She twisted in her chair, then rose, following him with wide eyes of alarm
+above her hands, whose bonds her teeth worried without rest.
+
+Ekstrom had not stirred, though one flash of pure exultation had
+transfigured his countenance on comprehension of Lanyard's purpose: thanks
+to the silly scruples of this animal, one more chance for life was granted
+him.
+
+Nor would the Prussian give an inch when Lanyard paused, confronting him
+squarely, within arm's length.
+
+"Ekstrom," the adventurer began in a voice lacking perceptible inflection
+... "what is between you and me needs no recounting. You know it too
+well--I likewise. It is my wish and my intention to kill you with my
+two hands. Nothing can prevent that, not even what you count upon, my
+reluctance--to you incomprehensible--to commit an act of violence in the
+presence of a woman. But because Miss Brooke is here, because you have
+brought her here by force, because you are what you are and so have treated
+her insolently ... before we come to our final accounting, you shall get
+down upon your knees and ask her pardon."
+
+He saw no yielding in the eyes of the Prussian, only arrogance; and when he
+paused, he was answered in one phrase of the gutters of Berlin, couched in
+the imagery of its lowest boozing-kens, so unspeakably vile in essence
+and application that Lanyard heard it with an incredulity almost
+stupefying--almost, not altogether.
+
+It was barely spoken when those lips that framed it were crushed by a blow
+of such lightning delivery that, though he must have been prepared for it,
+Ekstrom's guard was still lowered as he reeled back, lost footing, and went
+to his knees.
+
+Panting, snarling, uttering teeth and blasphemy, the Prussian recoiled like
+a serpent, gathered himself together and launched headlong at Lanyard, only
+to be met full tilt by a second blow and a third, each more merciless than
+its predecessor, beating him down once more.
+
+This time Lanyard did not wait for him to come back for punishment, but
+closed in, catching him as he strove to rise, meeting each fresh effort
+with ruthless accuracy, battering him into insanity of despair, so that
+Ekstrom came back again and again without thought, animated only by
+frenzied brute instinct to find the throat of his tormenter, and ever and
+ever failing; till at length he crumpled and lay crushed and writhing, then
+subsided into insensibility, was quite still but for heaving lungs and the
+spasmodic clutchings of his broken and ensanguined fingers....
+
+With a start, a broken sigh, a slight movement of the hand interpreting a
+crushing sense of the futility of human passion, Lanyard relaxed, drew back
+from standing over his antagonist, abstractedly found a handkerchief and
+dried his hands, of a sudden so inexpressibly shamed and degraded in his
+own sight that he dared not look the girl's way, but stood with hang-dog
+air, avoiding her regard.
+
+Yet, could he have mustered up heart, he might have surprised in her eyes
+a light to lift him out from this slough of humiliation, to obliterate
+chagrin in a flood of wonder and--misgivings.
+
+When, however, he did after a moment turn to her, that look was gone,
+replaced by one that reflected something of his own apprehension; for a
+heavy hand was hammering on the study door, and more than one voice on the
+other side was calling on "Karl" to open.
+
+Either the servant whom Lanyard had met and victimised on his way
+downstairs had given the alarm, or else the noise of the encounter within
+the study had brought that pack of spies to the door, wildly demanding
+admission.
+
+Steadied by one swift exchange of alarmed glances with the girl, Lanyard
+hastily reviewed the room, seeking some avenue of escape. None offered but
+the windows. He ran to them, tore back their draperies, and found them
+closed with shutters of steel and padlocked.
+
+Simultaneously the din at the door redoubled.
+
+With a worried shake Lanyard crossed to the chimney-piece, ducked his head,
+and stepped into its huge fireplace. One upward glance sufficed to dash his
+hopes: here was no way out, arduous though feasible; immediately above the
+fireplace the flue narrowed so that not even the most active man of normal
+stature might hope to negotiate its ascent.
+
+He returned with only a gesture of disconcertion to answer the girl's look
+of appeal.
+
+"Can we do nothing?" she asked, raising her voice a trifle to make it heard
+above the tumult in the corridor.
+
+"There's no help for it, I'm afraid," he said, going to the desk and taking
+up the pistols--"nothing to do but shoot our way out, if we can. Take
+this," he added, offering her one of the weapons, which she accepted
+without spirit. "If you can't get your own consent to use it, give it to me
+when I've emptied the other."
+
+She breathed a dismayed "Yes ..." and wonderingly consulted his face, since
+he did not stir other than thoughtfully to replace his pistol on the desk,
+then stood staring at his soot-smeared palms.
+
+"What is it?" she demanded nervously. "Why do you hesitate?"
+
+As one fretted by inconsequential questions, he merely shook his head,
+glancing sidelong once at the unconscious Prussian, again with calculation
+toward the door.
+
+This he saw quivering under repeated blows.
+
+With brusque decision he said: "Get a chair--brace it beneath the
+door-knob, please!"--and leaving her without more explanation turned back
+to the fireplace.
+
+Motionless, in dumb confusion, the girl stood staring after him till roused
+by a blow of such splintering force as to suggest that an axe had been
+brought into play upon the door, then ran to a ponderous club chair and
+with considerable exertion managed to trundle it to the door and tip it
+over, wedging its back beneath the knob.
+
+By this time it had become indisputably patent that an axe was battering
+the panels. But the door, in character with the room, was a substantial
+piece of workmanship and needed more than a few blows, even of an axe, to
+break down its barrier of solid oak.
+
+She looked round to discover Lanyard kneeling beside Ekstrom, insanely--so
+it seemed to the girl--engaged in blackening the upper half of the man's
+face with a handful of soot.
+
+Unconsciously uttering a little cry of distress she sped to his side and
+caught his shoulder with an importunate hand.
+
+"In Heaven's name, Monsieur Duchemin, what are you doing? Is this a time
+for childishness--?"
+
+He responded with a smile of boyish mischief so genuine that her doubts of
+his reason seemed all too well confirmed.
+
+"Making up my understudy," he said simply. And brushing his hands over the
+rug to rid them of superfluous soot, Lanyard rose. "Please go back and
+stand by the door--on the side of the hinges. I'll be with you in one
+minute."
+
+Resigned to humour this lunatic whim--what else could she do?--the girl
+retreated to the position designated, and watched with ever darker doubts
+of his sanity, while Lanyard hurriedly drew the shells from his automatic
+and carefully placed its butt in the slack grasp of Ekstrom's fingers.
+
+Then, lifting from a near-by table a great cut-glass bowl of flowers, the
+adventurer inverted it over Ekstrom's body.
+
+Expending its full force upon the man's chest, that miniature deluge
+splashed widely, wetting his face, half filling his open mouth. Some of
+the soot was washed away, but not a great deal: enough stuck fast to suit
+Lanyard's purpose.
+
+Roused by that cool shock, half strangled as well, Ekstrom coughed
+violently, squirmed, spat out a mouthful of water, and lifted on an elbow,
+still more than half dazed.
+
+Joining the girl by the door, Lanyard saw the Prussian sit up and glare
+blankly round the room, a figure of tragic fun, drenched, woefully
+disfigured, eyes rolling wildly in the wide spaces round them which Lanyard
+had left unblackened.
+
+Swinging the club chair away from the door, the adventurer placed it with
+its back to the room.
+
+"Get down behind that," he indicated shortly, and drew the key from his
+pocket. "Don't show yourself for your life. And let me have that pistol,
+please."
+
+A bright triangular wedge of steel broke through one of the panels as he
+fitted and turned the key in the lock.
+
+His wits clearing, Ekstrom saw him and with a howl of fury staggered to his
+feet, clutching the unloaded pistol and endeavouring to level it for steady
+aim.
+
+Simultaneously Lanyard turned the knob and let the door fly open, remaining
+beside the chair that hid the girl.
+
+A knot of spies, O'Reilly and Velasco among them, whirled into the room,
+pulled up at sight of that strange, grim figure, disguised beyond all
+recognition by its half-mask of black, facing and menacing them with a
+pistol.
+
+O'Reilly fired in the next breath, his shot echoed by half a dozen so
+closely bunched as to resemble the rattle of a mitrailleuse.
+
+At the first report the pistol dropped from Ekstrom's grasp. He carried a
+hand vaguely to his throat, staggered a single step, uttered a strangled
+moan, and fell forward, his body fairly riddled, his death little short of
+instantaneous.
+
+While the fusillade was still resounding Lanyard, seizing the girl's wrist,
+unceremoniously dragged her from behind the chair and thrust her through
+the door, retreating after her with his face to the roomfull, his pistol
+ready.
+
+None of that lot paid him any heed, the attention of all wholly absorbed by
+the tragedy their violent hands had wrought. Velasco, the first to stir,
+ran forward and dropped to his knees beside the dead man. Others followed.
+
+Gently Lanyard drew the door to, locked it on the outside, and at the sound
+of a choking cry from Cecelia Brooke, whirled smartly round, prepared if
+need be to make good his promise to clear with gun-play a way to the street
+though opposed by every inmate of the establishment.
+
+But the first face he saw was Crane's.
+
+The Secret Service man stood within a yard. To him as to a rock of refuge
+Cecelia Brooke had flown, to his hand she was clinging like a frightened
+child, trying to speak, failing because she choked on sobs and gasps of
+horror.
+
+Behind him, on the landing at the head of the staircase, running up from
+below, ascending to the upper storeys, were a score' or more of men of
+sturdy and business-like bearing and indubitably American stamp. Of
+these two were herding into a corner a little group of frightened German
+servants.
+
+Lanyard's stare of astonishment was met by Crane's twisted smile.
+
+"My friend," he said, as quietly as anyone could with his accent of a
+quizzical buzz-saw, "I sure got to hand it to you. Every time I try to pull
+anything off on the dead quiet you beat me to it clean. Everywhere I think
+you ain't and can't be, that's just where you are. But I ain't complaining;
+I got to admit, if you hadn't staged your act to occupy the minds of those
+gents in there, we might've had a lot more difficulty raiding this joint."
+
+Quickly he wound an arm round the waist of Cecelia Brooke when, without
+warning, she swayed blindly and would have fallen.
+
+"Here, now!" he protested. "That's no way to do.... Why, she's flickered
+out! Well, Monsieur Duchemin-Lanyard-Ember, to a man up a tree this looks
+like your job. You take this little lady off my hands and see her home, and
+I'll just naturally try and finish what I started--or what you did. For,
+son, I got to give you credit: you sure are one grand li'l trouble-hound!"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+QUESTION
+
+
+Through the breathing hush of that dark hour which foreruns the dawn, that
+hour in which the head that knows a wakeful pillow is prone to sudden
+and disquieting apprehension of its insignificance and it's soul's dread
+isolation, the cab sped swiftly south upon the Avenue, shadowed reaches of
+the park upon its right, upon its left the dull, tired faces of those homes
+whose tenants lay wrapped in the cotton-wool of riches.
+
+The rain had ceased. A little wind was blowing up. There was a fresh
+smell in the air. Sidewalks began to be maculated with spreading areas of
+dryness, but the roadway was still wet and shining, the wide black mirror
+of a myriad lights.
+
+Through the windows of the speeding cab an orderly procession of street
+lamps, marching past, threw each its fugitive and pallid glimmer. Periods
+of modified darkness intervened, when the face of the girl in her corner
+seemed a vision subtle and wraithlike. But ever the recurrent lights
+revealed her sweetly incarnate if deep in enervation of crushing weariness.
+
+Once she stirred and sighed profoundly; and Lanyard, bending toward her,
+asked if he could be in any way of service.
+
+She replied in an undertone scarcely better than a whisper: "Thank you, I
+am quite comfortable.... Please--what time is it?"
+
+The cab was passing Sixtieth Street. Lanyard caught a fleeting glimpse of a
+street clock with a dial like a little golden moon.
+
+"It's just four."
+
+"Thank you...."
+
+"Very tired?"
+
+"Very...."
+
+He had the maddest notion that her head inclined to droop toward his
+shoulder. Perhaps the motion of the cab.... If so, she recovered easily.
+
+"Can I do anything?"
+
+"No, thank you, only ..." An ungloved hand stirred from her lap and for
+the merest instant rested lightly above his own, or hovered rather, barely
+touching it with a touch tenuous and elusive, no sooner realised than gone.
+"I mean," she murmured, "I am a bit too overwrought, too tired, to talk."
+
+"I quite understand," he said. "Please forget I'm here; just rest."
+
+Perhaps she smiled drowsily. Or was that, too, a freak of his imagination?
+Lanyard assured himself it was, in excess of consideration even tried to
+persuade himself he had dreamed that ghost of a caress upon his hand. It
+seemed so little like her.
+
+Not that anything had happened more than a gesture of transient
+inadvertence due to fatigue. It could not have been intentional, that act
+of intimacy, when the girl was altogether engrossed in young Thackeray.
+
+There was something one must not forget, something that gave the lie flatly
+to that innuendo of the Weringrode's. Ignorant of the circumstances the
+intrigante had leaped blindly at conclusions, after the habit of her kind.
+
+True, Sophie had not implied that this girl cared for him, but vice versa:
+either supposition, however, was as absurd as the other. As if Lanyard
+could love a woman who loved another! As if the name of love meant aught
+to him but the memory of a sweetness like a vagrant air of Spring that had
+breathed fitfully for a season upon the Winter of his heart!
+
+A corner of Lanyard's mouth lifted in a sneer. That precious heart of
+his! the heart of a thief upon which even now the fruits of his thieving
+weighed....
+
+Irritated, he wrenched his thoughts into another channel, and began to
+piece together inconsecutive snatches of information gained from Crane
+in the confusion of the quarter hour just past, while the Secret Service
+operatives were busy rounding up the inmates of that spy-fold and searching
+for evidences of their impudent activities.
+
+It appeared that Washington had at length, however tardily, roused out of
+its inertia and at midnight had telegraphed instructions to arrest out
+of hand every enemy alien in the land against whom there was evidence of
+conspiracy or even a ponderable suspicion.
+
+So unexpected was this order that Crane had volunteered to show Cecelia
+Brooke that midnight rendezvous of the Prussian spy system without the
+least notion that he might be required before morning to lead a raiding
+force against the establishment; and even when a messenger stopped him as
+he turned to enter Au Printemps, he was not advised concerning the cause of
+this demand for his immediate presence at headquarters.
+
+The first cast of what Crane aptly termed the dragnet had brought in the
+management and service staff to a man, with a number of the restaurant's
+habitues, including Sophie Weringrode and her errand-boy, the exquisite Mr.
+Revel.
+
+Velasco, however, had somehow mysteriously managed to slip through the
+meshes and had straightway hastened to spread the alarm.
+
+As for O'Reilly and Dressier, they had left with Ekstrom in pursuit of
+Lanyard less than five minutes before, and so had escaped not only arrest
+but all knowledge of the raid prior to their return to Seventy-ninth
+Street.
+
+The second cast of the net had been made at the latter place as soon as
+the watchers were able to assure Crane that Ekstrom and O'Reilly had
+returned--Dressier having anticipated them there by something like half an
+hour.
+
+By daybreak, then, these gentry would be interned on Ellis Island....
+
+And break of day impended visibly in grayish shades that stole westward
+through the cross-town streets like clouds of secret agents spying out the
+city against invasion by the serried lances of the sun.
+
+A garish twilight washed Forty-second Street from wall to wall by the time
+the car swung round in front of the Knickerbocker. As yet, however, there
+was little evidence that the town was growing restive in its sleep with
+premonition of the ardour of another day.
+
+Lanyard stepped down and offered the girl a hand in whose palm her slender
+fingers rested lightly for an instant ere she passed on, while he turned to
+bid the driver wait. Following, he overtook her in the entrance, where by
+tacit consent both paused and lingered in an odd constraint. There was so
+much to be said that was impossible to say just then.
+
+Visibly the woman drooped, betraying physical exhaustion in every line of
+her pose, seeming scarcely strong enough to lift the silken lashes that
+trembled upon cheeks a little drawn and pale, with the faintest of bluish
+rings beneath the eyes.
+
+"I must not keep you," Lanyard broke the silence. "I merely wished to say
+good-night and ... I am sorry."
+
+"Sorry?" she echoed.
+
+"That you had such an unhappy experience," he explained--"thanks to your
+thoughtfulness for me. I do not deserve so much consideration; and that
+only makes me feel all the more regretful."
+
+"It was silly of me," she admitted with a shadowy, rueful smile. "I'm
+afraid my silliness makes too much trouble...."
+
+He commented honestly: "I don't understand."
+
+"If I had only been patient enough to wait for you to call me...."
+
+"Forgive that oversight. I was pressed for time, as you may imagine."
+
+"Oh, it all comes back to my own stupidity. I might have known you had come
+through all right."
+
+"How should you?"
+
+"Why not?--when you turn up here in New York safe and sound after being
+drowned on the _Assyrian_!--as if that were not proof enough that you bear
+a charmed life!"
+
+"Charmed!" he laughed.
+
+"And you haven't yet told me how you survived that adventure."
+
+"You are kind to be interested, and I am unfortunate in never seeing you
+save under circumstances unfavourable for yarn-spinning."
+
+"You might be more fortunate."
+
+"Only tell me how!"
+
+"If you cared to ask me to dine with you to-morrow--I mean, to-night--"
+
+"You would--?"
+
+He was distressed by consciousness that his voice had thrilled impetuously.
+But perhaps she had not noticed; there was no change in the even
+friendliness of her tone.
+
+"I'm as inquisitive as any woman that ever lived. Even if I wished to, I'm
+afraid I shouldn't be able to resist an invitation to hear your Odyssey."
+
+"Delmonico's at eight?"
+
+"Thank you," she said primly.
+
+"You make me too happy. May I call for you?"
+
+"Please." She offered a hand whose touch he found cool, steady, and
+impersonal. "Good morning, Mr. Ember."
+
+He stood in a stare while she went quickly through the lobby to a waiting
+elevator, then roused and went back to his cab.
+
+It was by daylight that he reentered his rooms and found them tenanted by
+a negro boy bound and gagged, bruised and sore, and scared beyond
+intelligible expression.
+
+Freeing him and salving his injuries bodily and spiritual with a liberal
+douceur, Lanyard exacted an oath of silence, then turned him out.
+
+He had approximately five hours to put in somehow before his appointment
+with Colonel Stanistreet at nine, and was too well versed in the lore of
+late hours to think of giving any part of that time to sleep. By so doing
+he would only insure a mutinous awakening, with mind and body sluggish and
+unrested. If, on the other hand, he remained awake, he would go to that
+interview in a state of supernormal animation exceedingly to be desired if
+he were to round out this adventure without discredit.
+
+For its end was not yet. He had still a part to play whose lines were not
+yet written, whose business remained to be invented. He neither dared
+shirk that appointment, for reasons of policy, nor wished to, while there
+remained reparation to be accomplished, a wrong to be righted, justice to
+be done, a question to be answered.
+
+Only when these matters had been put in order would he feel his honour
+discharged of its burdens, himself free once more to drop out and go in
+peace his lonely ways in life, ways henceforth to be both lonely and
+aimless.
+
+For, when he strove to peer into the future, only an emptiness confronted
+him. With Ekstrom accounted for finally and forevermore, there was nothing
+to come but the final accounting of the Lone Wolf with that civilization
+which had bred and suffered him.
+
+One way presented itself to make that reckoning even. The Foreign Legion of
+France asks no embarrassing questions of its recruits, and enlistment in
+its ranks offers with anonymity a consoling certainty.
+
+Thus alone might he find his way home to the heart of that enigma whence he
+had emerged, a nameless waif astray in grim Parisian by-ways....
+
+This vision of his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign
+for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with
+Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the passports of
+Monsieur André Duchemin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a
+berth on some steamer sailing for Europe, then the last evanishment.
+
+One detail alone troubled him, his promise to the Brooke girl that she
+should dine with him that night.
+
+Reminded of this obligation, figuratively he seized Michael Lanyard by the
+scruff of his neck and shook him with a savage hand. What insensate folly
+was ever his, what want of wit and strength to keep out of temptation's
+ways! Why must he have fallen in so readily with her suggestion? Why this
+infatuate thirst for sympathy, this eagerness to violate the seals of
+reticence at the wish of a strange woman? Was there any reasonable
+explanation of the strange lack of his wonted self-sufficiency in the
+company of Cecelia Brooke?
+
+No matter. If he might not contrive somehow to squirm out of that
+engagement, he could at all events school himself to decent reticence. He
+promised himself to make his account of the submarine adventure drearily
+bald and trite, to minimize to the last degree his part therein, above all
+things to refrain from painting the Lone Wolf in romantic colours.
+
+She was much too good a sort, too straight, sincere, fair-minded,
+honest--the sort of girl who deserved the Thackeray sort of man, never a
+thief.
+
+If she even dreamed....
+
+Lanyard brought forth from its hiding place the necklace, weighed it in
+his hand, examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he
+recognized no more its beauty, dispassionately reviewed in turn each stone
+of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity,
+perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent pebbles, cold,
+soulless, cruel.
+
+One by one they slipped through his fingers like beads of an unholy rosary.
+
+At length, crushing them together in the hollow of his palm, he stood a
+while in thought, then turning to his writing-desk bundled the necklace in
+wrappings of white tissue secured with rubber bands, counted carefully the
+sheaf of bills he had taken from Ekstrom, sealed the whole amount in a
+plain, long envelope, and put this aside in company with the necklace.
+
+Already two hours had passed and, since he meant to call at the house on
+West End Avenue well in advance of the hour when Cecelia Brooke might be
+there--presuming Blensop to have given her the same appointment as he had
+given "Mr. Ember," that is, nine o'clock--it was now time to prepare.
+
+Returning to his bedchamber, he laid out a carefully selected change of
+clothing, shaved, parboiled himself in a hot bath, chilled him to the
+pith in one of icy coldness, and dressed with scrupulous heed to detail,
+studiously effacing every sign of his sleepless night.
+
+That experience was in no way to be surmised from his appearance when he
+sallied forth to breakfast at the Plaza.
+
+At eight precisely, presenting himself at the Stanistreet residence, he
+desired the footman to announce him as the author of a certain telegram
+from Edgartown.
+
+He was obliged to wait less than a minute, the footman returning in haste
+to request him to step into the library.
+
+This apartment--which he found much as he had last seen it, eight hours
+ago, its window shattered, the portičres down, the furniture in some
+disorder--was, on his introduction, occupied by two persons, one an
+elderly, iron-gray gentleman of untidy dress and unobtrusive habit in spite
+of a discerning cool, gray eye, the other Mr. Blensop in the neatest of
+one-button morning-coat effects, with striped trouserings neither too smart
+nor too sober for that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call
+him, and fair white spats.
+
+If his attire was radiant, so was the temper of the secretary sunny. He
+tripped forward in sprightliest fashion, offering cordial hands to the
+caller till he recognized him, and even then was discountenanced only for
+the briefest moment.
+
+"My dear Mr. Ember!" he purred soothingly--"why didn't you tell me last
+night it was you who had sent that telegram? If I had for a moment
+suspected the truth you should have had your appointment with Colonel
+Stanistreet at any hour you might have cared to name, no matter how
+ungodly!"
+
+Lanyard bowed gravely. "Thank you," he said. "And Colonel Stanistreet--?"
+
+"Is just finishing breakfast. He will be down directly. Please be seated,
+make yourself entirely at ease. And will you excuse me--?"
+
+"With pleasure," Lanyard assured him, his gravity unbroken.
+
+A doubt clouded Mr. Blensop's bright eyes, but its transit was
+instantaneous. He turned forthwith to join the iron-gray man before the
+portrait which concealed the safe.
+
+"And now, Mr. Stone," said Mr. Blensop, with indulgence.
+
+"Well, sir," said Mr. Stone quietly, "if you'll be good enough to show me
+how this contraption works, maybe I'll find out something interesting,
+maybe not."
+
+Mr. Blensop proceeded to oblige by operating the lever and sliding aside
+the portrait.
+
+"Thanks," said Mr. Stone, producing a magnifying glass from a waistcoat
+pocket and beginning to peer myopically at the face of the safe. "I take
+it nobody's been pawing over this since the late, as you might say,
+unpleasantness?"
+
+"Not a soul has touched it. By Colonel Stanistreet's order it was covered
+as soon as we found it had been tampered with."
+
+"_Um-m_," Mr. Stone acknowledged, bending close to his work.
+
+Partially, perhaps, by way of administering an urbane rebuke to Lanyard for
+his readiness to dispense with his society, Mr. Blensop remained in
+the neighbourhood of Mr. Stone, hovering round him like a domesticated
+humming-bird.
+
+"Do you find anything?" he enquired, when Stone straightened up.
+
+"Fingerprints a-plenty," Mr. Stone admitted with a hint of temper--"a slew
+of the damn things. Looks like you must've called in the neighbours to help
+make a good show. However, we'll see what we can make of 'em."
+
+He conjured from some recess in his clothing a squat bottle, from another a
+stopper in which was fitted a blowpipe, joined the two together, approached
+the safe with one end of the pipe between his lips and sprayed it with a
+thin film of white powder, the contents of the bottle.
+
+"I say, do tell me what that's for?"
+
+"That," said Mr. Stone patiently, "is to make the fingerprints stand out,
+so we can get a good likeness of 'em."
+
+He put the bottle aside, blinked at the safe approvingly, and by further
+exercise of powers of legerdemain materialized a pocket kodak and a
+flashlight pistol.
+
+"Can't I help you?" Blensop offered eagerly. "I used to be rather a dab at
+amateur photography, you know."
+
+"Well, I'm kind of stuck on pressing the button myself," Stone confessed,
+adjusting the focus. "But if you want to work that flashlight, I don't
+mind."
+
+"Delighted," Mr. Blensop asserted. "How does it go, now?"
+
+"Like this." Stone set his camera down to demonstrate. "Now just stand
+behind me," he concluded, "and pull the trigger when I say 'now'."
+
+"I'll do my best, but--I say--will it bang?"
+
+Stone had taken up the camera once more. His sole answer was a grunt upon
+which his hearers placed two distinct interpretations--Lanyard's affording
+him considerable gratification.
+
+"If you're ready," said Stone--"_now_"
+
+Mr. Blensop squinted unbecomingly and pressed the trigger. A vivid flare
+lifted from the pan of the pistol, and winked out in a cloud of vapour,
+slowly dissipating.
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"Yes, sir--that's all of that." Stone stowed the camera away about his
+person and from another cranny produced a small cardboard box of glass
+slides, one of which he offered. "Now if you'll just run your fingers
+through your hair and rest them on this slide, light but steady...."
+
+"What for?" Blensop demanded with a giggle of nervous reluctance. "You
+don't think I'm the thief, do you?"
+
+"No, sir, I don't. But if I haven't got your fingerprints, how am I going
+to tell them from the thief's?"
+
+"Oh, I see," Blensop said with a note of allayed apprehension, and put
+himself on record.
+
+The door opening to admit Colonel Stanistreet, Lanyard rose. At sight of
+him the Englishman checked and stared enquiringly, his eyes shadowed by
+careworn brows; for it was apparent that, if the events of the night had
+not depressed the spirits of the secretary, his employer had known little
+sleep or none since the burglary.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet," Blensop said melodiously, abandoning Stone to his
+unsupervised devices, "this is Mr. Ember, the gentleman who called last
+night before you got home. It appears he is the person who sent us that
+telegram from Edgartown day before yesterday."
+
+"Indeed? Ember is not the name with which the message was signed."
+
+"The message was purposely left unsigned," Lanyard explained.
+
+Stanistreet nodded approval. "I am glad to meet you, Mr. Ember," he said,
+offering a hand. "Be seated. I am most anxious first to express our
+gratitude, next to learn how you came by your information."
+
+"You will find it an interesting story."
+
+"No doubt of that." Stanistreet took the desk chair, opened a cigar
+humidor, and offered it. "I shall be even more interested, however," he
+said with an evanescent trace of humour, "to know who the devil you are,
+sir."
+
+"That is something I am prepared to prove to your satisfaction."
+
+"If you will be so good.... But excuse me for one moment." Stanistreet
+turned in his chair. "Mr. Stone?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Have you finished with the safe? If so, I want my secretary to check over
+its contents carefully and make sure nothing else is missing."
+
+"I'm all through with it, Colonel Stanistreet. Now, if you don't mind,
+I'm going to mouse around and see if I can nose out anything else that's
+useful."
+
+"That shall be entirely as you will. Now, Blensop"--Stanistreet nodded to
+the secretary--"let us make certain...."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Blithely Mr. Blensop addressed himself to the safe.
+
+"There has been an accident of some sort, Colonel Stanistreet?" Lanyard
+enquired civilly, nodding toward the shattered French window.
+
+"A burglary, sir."
+
+"The criminal escaped--?"
+
+Stanistreet nodded. "Our watchman surprised him, and was shot for his
+pains--not seriously, I'm happy to say. The burglar got himself tangled
+up in that window, but extricated in time, and went over the garden wall
+before we could determine which way he had taken."
+
+"I trust you lost nothing of value?"
+
+Stanistreet shrugged. "Unhappily, we did--a diamond necklace, the property
+of my sister-in-law, and--ah--a document we could ill afford to part
+with.... But you offered to show me credentials, I believe."
+
+"Such as they are," Lanyard replied. "My passports and letters were stolen
+from me. But these, I think, should serve as well to prove my bona fides."
+
+He laid out in order upon the desk his plunder from the safe aboard the
+U-boat--all but the money--the three cipher codes, the log, the diary
+of the commander, the directory of German secret agents, and such other
+documents as he had selected.
+
+The first Colonel Stanistreet took up with a dubious frown which swiftly
+lightened, yielding, as he pursued his examination into the papers and
+began to recognize their surpassing value to the Allied cause, to a subdued
+glimmer of gratulatory excitement.
+
+But he was at pains to satisfy himself as to the authenticity of each paper
+in turn, providing a lull for which Lanyard was not ungrateful since it
+gave him a chance to adjust his understanding to an unexpected development
+in the affair.
+
+He lounged at ease, smoking, his eyes, half-veiled by lowered lids, keenly
+reviewing the room and its tenants.
+
+Stone, the detective (an operative, Lanyard rightly inferred, of the
+American Secret Service, loaned to the British in order to keep the
+burglary out of police records and newspapers), had wandered out into the
+garden that glowed with young April sunlight beyond the windows. From
+time to time he was to be seen stooping and inspecting the earth with the
+gravity of an earnest, efficient, sober-sided sleuth of the old school.
+
+Blensop was busy before the safe, extracting the contents of each
+pigeonhole in turn, thumbing its dockets of papers, checking each off upon
+a typewritten list several pages in length.
+
+To that lithe and debonair figure Lanyard's gaze oftenest reverted.
+
+So not only had the necklace been stolen but "a document" which the British
+Secret Service "could ill afford to part with"!
+
+Lanyard entertained no least doubt as to the identity of the document in
+question. There could be but one, he felt, which Stanistreet would so
+characterize.
+
+That document had not been in the safe when Lanyard had opened it at
+midnight.
+
+After a moment Mr. Blensop uttered a musical note of vexation. The lead of
+his pencil had broken. He threw it pettishly aside, came over to the desk,
+took up a penholder, dipped it in the ink-well, and returned to his task.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+CHICANE
+
+
+Colonel Stanistreet put down the last of the papers and slapped his hand
+upon it resoundingly.
+
+"This is one of the most remarkable collections of data, I venture to
+assert, that has ever come into the hands of the British Government. Have
+you any idea of its value?"
+
+Lanyard lifted a whimsical eyebrow. "Some," he admitted drily.
+
+"And what do you ask for it, sir?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+The gaze of the Englishman bored into his eyes; but he met their challenge
+with an unshaken countenance, smiling.
+
+"My dear sir," Stanistreet demanded--"who are you?"
+
+"The name under which I sailed for New York on board the _Assyrian_,"
+Lanyard announced quietly, "was André Duchemin."
+
+Disturbed by a startled exclamation, together with a sound of shuffling and
+a slight thump, he looked round in mild curiosity to see Blensop staggered
+and astare, standing over a litter of documents which had slipped from his
+grasp to the floor. Mastering his emotion quickly enough, the secretary
+knelt with a mumbled apology and began to pick up the papers.
+
+With no more notice of the incident Lanyard returned undivided attention to
+Colonel Stanistreet.
+
+"I had another name," he confessed, "and a reputation none too savoury,
+as, I daresay, you know. Through the courtesy of the British Intelligence
+Office I was permitted to disguise these; but on the _Assyrian_ I was
+recognized--in short, ran afoul of German Secret Service agents who knew
+me, but whom I did not know. On the sixth night out circumstances conspired
+to make me seem a serious obstacle to their schemes. Consequently I was
+waylaid, robbed, and thrown overboard. Within the next few minutes a
+torpedo struck the ship and the submarine which fired it came up under me
+as I struggled to keep afloat. By passing myself off as a Boche spy, I
+succeeded in inducing the commander to take me below, and so reached the
+Martha's Vineyard base. There chance played into my hands: I contrived to
+sink the U-boat and escape, as reported in my telegram."
+
+During a brief silence he found opportunity to observe that Mr. Blensop was
+working with hands that trembled singularly.
+
+"Incredible!" Stanistreet commented.
+
+"Yet here is proof," Lanyard asserted, indicating the papers beneath
+Stanistreet's hand.
+
+"My dear sir, I didn't mean--"
+
+"Pardon!" Lanyard smiled, with a lifted hand. "I never thought you did,
+Colonel Stanistreet. But it is your duty to make sure you are not imposed
+upon by plausible adventurers. Therefore--since my papers have been
+stolen--I am glad to be able to prove my identity with André Duchemin by
+referring to survivors of the _Assyrian_ disaster, among others Mr. Sherry,
+the second officer, Mr. Crane of the United States Secret Service, and a
+countrywoman of yours, a Miss Cecelia Brooke, whose acquaintance I was
+fortunate enough to make."
+
+Stanistreet nodded heavily, and consulted his watch. "Miss Brooke," he
+said, "should be here shortly. Blensop made an appointment with her last
+night, which I confirmed by telephone this morning."
+
+"Then, with permission, I shall remain and ask her to vouch for me,"
+Lanyard suggested in resignation, since it appeared he was not to be
+permitted to escape this girl, that destiny was not yet finished with their
+entanglement.
+
+"I shall be glad if you will, sir.... Monsieur Duchemin," Stanistreet
+began, but hesitated--"or do you prefer another style?"
+
+"I am content with Duchemin."
+
+"That is a matter for your own discretion, but I should warn you it may
+already have acquired an evil odour on this side. To my knowledge it has
+been used within the last twenty-four hours, and the pretensions of its
+wearer supported by your stolen credentials."
+
+"I am not surprised," Lanyard stated reflectively. "A chap with a beard,
+perhaps?"
+
+"Why, yes...."
+
+"Anderson," the adventurer nodded: "that, at least, was his alias when he
+jockeyed himself into the second steward's berth aboard the _Assyrian_."
+
+He glanced idly across the room, discovered Blensop once more at pause in a
+stare, and grinned amiably.
+
+"He came here last night," Stanistreet volunteered deliberately--
+"representing himself as André Duchemin--to sell me a certain paper, the
+same which subsequently, I am convinced, he returned to steal."
+
+"And did," Lanyard added.
+
+"And did," the Briton conceded. "Now you have told me who he is, I promise
+you every effort shall be made to apprehend him and prevent further misuse
+of the name you have assumed."
+
+"It has," Lanyard said tersely.
+
+"I beg your pardon?"
+
+"I say every effort has been made--and successfully--to accomplish the ends
+you mention."
+
+"What's that you say?" Blensop demanded shrilly, crossing to the desk.
+
+"My secretary," Stanistreet explained, "was present at the interview, and
+is naturally interested."
+
+"And very good of him, I'm sure," Lanyard agreed. "I was about to explain,
+Mr. Blensop, that Ekstrom, alias Anderson, was killed in the course of
+a raid on the Prussian spy headquarters in Seventy-ninth Street this
+morning."
+
+"Amazing!" Blensop gasped. "I am glad to hear it," he added, and went
+slowly back to his task.
+
+"I may as well tell you, sir," Lanyard pursued, "I have every reason to
+believe the document sold you last night was one of those stolen from me."
+
+Stanistreet wagged a contentious head.
+
+"I cannot conceive how it could have come into your possession, sir."
+
+"Simply enough. Miss Brooke requested me to take care of it for her."
+
+The eyes of the Englishman grew stony. "Miss Brooke!" he repeated testily.
+"I don't understand."
+
+"It was a document--I do not seek to know its nature from you, sir--of
+vital importance in this present crisis, with the United States newly
+entered into the war."
+
+Stanistreet affirmed with an inclination of his head.
+
+"I may tell you this much, Monsieur Duchemin: if it had not reached this
+country safely.... What am I saying? If it be not recovered without delay,
+the chances of America's early and efficient participation in the war will
+suffer a tremendous setback ... Blensop, be good enough to call up the
+American Secret Service at once and ask whether the document in question
+was found on the body of this--ah--Ekstrom."
+
+"Pardon," Lanyard interposed as Blensop hesitantly approached the
+telephone. "It would be a waste of time. I happen to know, because I was
+there, that no such document was found on Ekstrom's body."
+
+"The devil!" Stanistreet grumbled. "What can have become of it? This
+business grows only the blacker the deeper one seeks to fathom it. I
+must own myself completely at a loss. How it came into the hands of Miss
+Brooke--"
+
+"I can explain that, I think. The document was in the care of two
+gentlemen, Mr. Bartholomew and Lieutenant Thackeray. The former was
+murdered by the Huns in search of it, Lieutenant Thackeray murderously
+assaulted. But for Miss Brooke's intervention the assassins must have
+succeeded. As it was, the young woman herself found it and, one presumes,
+took charge of it because her fiancé was incapacitated, and possibly with
+the notion that she might thereby prevent further mischief of the same
+nature."
+
+"Her fiancé?" Stanistreet echoed blankly.
+
+"Lieutenant Thackeray--"
+
+"Her brother, sir!" the Briton laughed. "Thackeray was his nom de service."
+
+It was Lanyard's turn to stare. "Ah!" he murmured. "A light begins to
+dawn...."
+
+"Upon me as well," Stanistreet confessed. "Miss Brooke and her brother are
+orphans and, before the war, were inseparable companions. I do not doubt
+that, learning he had been commissioned with an uncommonly perilous errand,
+she booked passage by the _Assyrian_ without his consent, in order to be
+near him in event of danger."
+
+"This explains much," Lanyard conceded--"much that perplexed more than one
+can say."
+
+"But in no way advances us on the trail of the purloined document."
+
+"I am afraid, sir," Lanyard lied deliberately, "you may as well abandon all
+hope of ever seeing it again. Ekstrom made away with it: no question about
+that. There was time enough and to spare between his exploit here and his
+death for him to deliver it to safe hands. It is doubtless decoded by this
+time, a copy of it already well on the way to the Wilhelmstrasse."
+
+"I am afraid," Stanistreet echoed--"I am very much afraid you are right."
+
+His thick, spatulate fingers of an executive drummed heavily upon the desk.
+
+Stone's figure darkened the windows.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet?" he called diffidently.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Stone?"
+
+"There's something here I'd like to consult you about, sir, if you can
+spare a minute."
+
+"Certainly." The Englishman rose. "If you will excuse me, Monsieur
+Duchemin...." Half way to the windows he hesitated. "By the bye, Blensop, I
+wish you'd call up Apthorp and ask after Howson's condition."
+
+"Very good, sir," Blensop intoned cheerfully.
+
+"And do it without delay, please. I don't like to think of the poor fellow
+suffering."
+
+"Immediately, sir."
+
+As his employer passed out into the garden with Stone, the secretary
+discontinued his checking and came over to the desk, drawing up a chair and
+sitting down to telephone. At the same time Lanyard got up and began to
+pace thoughtfully to and fro.
+
+"Howson is the wounded night watchman, I take it, Mr. Blensop?"
+
+"Yes--an excellent fellow.... Schuyler nine, three hundred," Blensop cooed
+into the transmitter.
+
+Conceivably that ostensible discomfiture whose symptoms Lanyard had
+remarked had been a transitory humour. Mr. Blensop was now in what seemed
+the most equable and blithe of tempers. His very posture at the telephone
+eloquently betokened as much: he had thrown himself into the chair with
+picturesque nonchalance, sitting with body half turned from the desk, his
+right hand holding the receiver to his ear, his left thrust carelessly
+into his trouser pocket, thus dragging back the lapel of that impeccable
+morning-coat and exposing the bright cap of his gold-mounted fountain pen.
+
+Something in that implement seemed to possess for Lanyard overpowering
+fascination. His gaze yearned for it, returned again and again to it.
+
+He changed his course to stroll up and down behind Blensop, between him and
+the safe.
+
+"I understood Colonel Stanistreet to say the watchman was not seriously
+injured, I believe," he observed, with interest.
+
+"Shot through the shoulder, that is all.... Schuyler nine, three hundred?
+Dr. Apthorp, please. This is Mr. Blensop speaking, secretary to Colonel
+Stanistreet.... Are you there, Dr. Apthorp?"
+
+With professional dexterity Lanyard en passant dropped a hand over the
+young man's shoulder and lightly lifted the pen from its place in the
+pocket of Blensop's waistcoat; the even tempo of his step unbroken, he
+tossed it toward the safe, where it fell without sound upon a heavy Persian
+rug.
+
+"Yes--about Howson," the musical accents continued, "Colonel Stanistreet is
+most solicitous...."
+
+Swiftly Lanyard moved toward the safe, glanced through the French windows
+to assure himself that Stanistreet and Stone were safely preoccupied,
+whipped out the envelope he had prepared, and thrust it into a file of
+papers which did not crowd its pigeonhole; accomplishing the complete
+manoeuvre with such adroitness that, like the business of the pen, it
+passed utterly without the knowledge of the secretary.
+
+"Thank you so much. _Good_ morning, Dr. Apthorp."
+
+Lanyard was passing the desk when Blensop rose, and the footman was
+entering with his salver.
+
+"A lady to see Colonel Stanistreet, sir--by appointment, she says."
+
+Blensop glanced at the card. At the same time Stanistreet came in from the
+garden, leaving Stone to potter about visibly in the distance.
+
+"Miss Brooke is here, sir," the secretary announced.
+
+"Ask her to come in, please."
+
+The footman retired.
+
+"Howson is resting easily, Dr. Apthorp reports," Blensop added, going back
+to the safe. "Has Stone turned up anything of interest, sir?"
+
+"Footprints," Stanistreet replied with a snort of moderate impatience.
+"He's quite upset since I've informed him the man who made them is--"
+
+"_Good God_!"
+
+The interruption was Blensop's in a voice strangely out of tune.
+Stanistreet wheeled sharply upon him.
+
+"What the deuce--!" he snapped.
+
+By every indication the secretary had suffered the most severe shock of his
+experience. His face was ghastly, his eyes vacant; his knees shook beneath
+him; one hand pressed convulsively the bosom of his waistcoat. His
+endeavours to reply evoked only a husky, rattling sound.
+
+"What the devil has come over you?" Stanistreet insisted.
+
+The rattle became articulate: "I've lost it! It's gone!"
+
+"What have you lost?"
+
+"N-nothing, sir. That is--I mean to say--my fountain pen."
+
+"The way you take it, I should say you'd lost your head," Stanistreet
+commented. "You must have dropped the thing somewhere. Look about, see if
+you can't find it."
+
+Thus admonished, the secretary began to search the floor with frantic
+glances, and as the footman ushered in Cecelia Brooke, Lanyard saw the
+young man dart forward and retrieve the pen with a start of relief wellnigh
+as unmanning as the shock of loss had seemed.
+
+With that Lanyard's interest in the fellow waned; he was too poor a thing
+to consider seriously; while here was one who compelled anew, as ever when
+they met, the homage of sincere and marvelling admiration.
+
+Yet another of those miracles of feminine adaptability and makeshift had
+brought the girl to this meeting in the guise of one who had never known a
+broken night or an hour's care, with a look of such fresh tranquility that
+it seemed hardly possible she could be one and the same with that wilted
+little woman whom Lanyard had left in the gray dawn at the entrance to the
+Hotel Knickerbocker. A tailored suit, necessarily borrowed plumage, became
+her so completely that it was difficult to believe it not her own. Her eyes
+were calm and sweet with candour; her colour was a clear and artless glow;
+the hand she offered the Briton was tremorless.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet?"
+
+"I am he, Miss Brooke. It is kind of you to call so early to relieve my
+mind about your brother. I have known Lionel so long...."
+
+"He is resting easily," said the girl. "His complete recovery is merely a
+matter of time and nursing."
+
+"That is good news," said Stanistreet. "Monsieur Duchemin I believe you
+know."
+
+"I have been fortunate in that at least."
+
+Gravely Lanyard saluted the hand extended to him in turn. "Mademoiselle is
+most gracious," he said humbly.
+
+"Then--I understand--Monsieur Duchemin must have told you--?" The girl
+addressed Stanistreet.
+
+"Permit me to leave you--" Lanyard interposed.
+
+"No," she begged--"please not! I've nothing to say that you may not hear.
+You have been too much involved--"
+
+"If mademoiselle insists," Lanyard demurred. "I feel it is not right I
+should stay. And yet--if you will indulge me--I should like very much to
+demonstrate the truth of an old saw...."
+
+Two confused looks were his response.
+
+"I fear I, for one, do not follow," Stanistreet admitted.
+
+"I will explain quite briefly," Lanyard promised. "The adage I have in mind
+is as old as human wit: Set a thief to catch a thief. And the last time it
+was quoted in my hearing, it was not to my advantage. I recall, indeed,
+resenting it enormously."
+
+He paused with purpose, looking down at the desk. A pad of blank paper
+caught his eye. He took it up and examined it with an abstracted manner.
+
+"Well, monsieur: the application of your adage?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, what would you think if I were to tell you the
+combination of your safe?"
+
+"I should be inclined to suspect that you were the devil," Stanistreet
+chuckled.
+
+"By all accounts a gentleman of intelligence: one is flattered.... Very
+well: I proceed to demonstrate black art with the aid of this white
+paper pad. The combination, monsieur, is as follows: nine, twenty-seven,
+eighteen, thirty-six."
+
+A low cry of bewilderment greeted this announcement. Blensop had drawn near
+and was eyeing Lanyard as if under the influence of hypnotism.
+
+"How--how do you know that?" he asked in a broken voice.
+
+"Clairvoyance, Mr. Blensop. I seem to see, as I hold this pad, somebody
+writing upon it the combination for the information of another who had no
+right to have it--somebody using a pencil with a hard lead, Mr. Blensop;
+which was very foolish of him, since it made a distinct impression on the
+under sheet. So you see my magic is rather colourless, after all.... Now,
+a wiser man, Mr. Blensop, would have used a pen, a fountain pen by
+preference, with a soft gold nib, well broken. That would leave no
+impression. If you will lend me the beautiful pen I observe in your pocket,
+I will give a further demonstration."
+
+The eyes of the secretary shifted wildly. He hesitated, moistening dry lips
+with the tip of a nervous tongue.
+
+"And don't try to get out of it, Mr. Blensop, because I am armed and don't
+mean to let you escape. Besides, that good Mr. Stone patrols the garden."
+Lanyard's tone changed to one of command. "That pen, monsieur!"
+
+Blensop's hand faltered to his waistcoat pocket, hesitated, withdrew, and
+feebly extended the pen.
+
+"I think you _are_ the devil," he stammered in an under-tone--"the devil
+himself!"
+
+Deftly unscrewing the pen-point, Lanyard inverted the barrel above the
+desk.
+
+The cylinder of paper dropped out.
+
+"And now, Colonel Stanistreet, if you will call Mr. Stone and have this
+traitor removed...."
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+AMNESTY
+
+
+When Stanistreet had gone out in company with Stone, and the broken,
+weeping Blensop, ending a scene indescribably painful, a lull almost as
+uncomfortable to Lanyard ensued.
+
+Then--"How did you guess?" Cecelia Brooke asked in wonder.
+
+Discountenanced by the admiration glowing in her eyes, Lanyard stood
+fumbling with the disjointed members of Blensop's pen.
+
+"Do not give me too much credit," he depreciated: "anybody acquainted with
+that roll of paper could have guessed that an empty fountain pen would
+furnish an ideal place of concealment for it. Moreover, just before you
+came in, that traitor missed his pen, and his consternation betrayed him
+beyond more doubt to one whose distrust was already astir. As for the
+other, it was true: Blensop did write down the combination on this pad,
+using a pencil with a hard lead; the marks are very plain."
+
+"But for whose use?"
+
+"Ekstrom--Anderson--was here last night, and saw Blensop alone. Colonel
+Stanistreet was not at home. Knowing what we know now, that Blensop was
+a creature of the German system here, bought body, soul, and conscience
+through its studied pandering to his vices, we know he could not well have
+refused to surrender the combination on demand."
+
+"Still I fail to understand...."
+
+"Ekstrom, being Ekstrom, could not resist the opportunity to play double.
+Here was a property he could sell to England at a stiff price. Why not
+despoil the enemy, put the money in pocket, then return, steal the paper
+anew for the use of Germany, and collect the stipulated reward from that
+source? But he reckoned without Blensop's avarice, there; he showed Blensop
+too plainly the way to profit through betraying both parties to a bargain;
+Blensop saw no reason why he should not play the game that Ekstrom played.
+So he stole it for himself, to sell to Germany, but being a poor, witless
+fool, lacking Ekstrom's dash and audacity, was foredoomed to failure and
+exposure."
+
+The girl continued to eye him steadfastly, and he as steadfastly to evade
+her direct gaze.
+
+"Nothing that you tell me detracts from the wonder of your guessing so
+accurately," she insisted. "Now I know what Mr. Crane said of you was true,
+that you are one of the most extraordinary of men."
+
+"He was too kind when he said that," Lanyard protested wretchedly. "It is
+not true. If you must know...."
+
+"Well, Monsieur Lanyard?"
+
+Her tone was that of a light-hearted girl, arch with provocation. Of a
+sudden Lanyard understood that he might no longer stop here alone with her.
+
+"If you will be a little indulgent with me," he suggested, "I will try to
+explain what I mean."
+
+"And how indulgent, monsieur?"
+
+"I have a whim to take the air in this garden. Will you accompany me?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+As she led the way through the French windows, he noted with deeper
+misgivings how her action matched the temper of her voice, how she seemed
+to-day more deliciously alive and happier than any common mortal.
+
+So light her heart! And all since she had found him here!
+
+At his wits' ends, he conceded now what he had so long denied. With all her
+wit and wisdom, with all her charm of beauty, winsomeness, and breeding,
+with all her ingrained love of truth and honesty, she was no more than
+Nature had meant her to be, a woman with woman's weakness for the man
+she must admire. She liked him, divined in him latent qualities somehow
+excellent. Something in him worked upon her imagination, something, no
+doubt, in the overcoloured, romantic yarns current about the Lone Wolf,
+and so had touched her heart. She liked him too well already, and she was
+willing to like him better.
+
+But that must never be. He must rend ruthlessly apart this illusion of
+romance with which she chose to transfigure the prowling parasite of night,
+the sneaking thief....
+
+The garden was sweet with the bright promise of Spring. A few weeks more,
+and its formal walks would wend a riot of flowers. Now its sunlight made
+amends for what it lacked in beauty of growing things; and its air was warm
+and fragrant and still in the shelter of the red-brick walls.
+
+Midway down that walk, by the side of which a thief had skulked nine hours
+ago, near that door whose lock had yielded to his cunning keys, the girl
+paused and confronted Lanyard spiritedly as he came up with heavy step and
+hang-dog head.
+
+"Well, monsieur?" she demanded. "Do you mean to tantalize me longer with
+your reticence?"
+
+But something in the haggard eyes he showed her made the girl catch her
+breath.
+
+"What is it?" she cried anxiously. "Monsieur Duchemin, what is your
+trouble?"
+
+"Only this truth that I must tell you," he said bitterly: "I merely played
+a part back there, just now. There was neither wit nor guess-work in that
+business; once I had seen Blensop's panic over the fancied loss of his pen,
+the rest was knowledge. I saw him and Ekstrom together last night--skulking
+in those windows, I watched them; and though in my denseness I didn't
+understand, I saw him write upon that pad, tear off and give the sheet to
+Ekstrom. And I knew Ekstrom had not succeeded in stealing back what he had
+sold to Colonel Stanistreet, knew he was guiltless in fact if not in deed."
+
+"But--how could you know that?"
+
+"Because I was there, in the room, when he entered it after it had been
+shut up for the night."
+
+Conscious of her hands that fluttered like wounded things to her bosom, he
+looked away in misery.
+
+"What were you doing there?" she whispered in the end.
+
+"Trying to find that paper, which I had seen Ekstrom sell to Colonel
+Stanistreet, so that I might make good my promise and relieve your distress
+by returning it to you. I had opened the safe before he entered, and
+searched it thoroughly, and knew the paper was not there--though at that
+time it never entered my thick head to suspect Blensop of treachery. It
+was neither Blensop nor Ekstrom, Miss Brooke ... it was I who stole that
+necklace."
+
+She made no sound and did not stir; and though he dared not look he knew
+her stricken gaze was steadfast to his face.
+
+"I will say this much in my defence: I did not come with intent to steal,
+but only to take back what had been stolen from me, and return it to you,
+who had trusted it to my care. I wanted to do that, because I did not then
+understand the ins and outs of this intrigue, and had no means of knowing
+how deeply your honour might be involved."
+
+"But you did _not_ take that necklace!"
+
+"I am sorry.... I saw it, and could not resist it."
+
+"But Mr. Crane assured me you had given up all that sort of thing years
+ago!"
+
+"Notwithstanding that, it seems I may not be trusted...."
+
+After another trying silence she declared vehemently: "I do not believe
+you! You say this thing for some secret purpose of your own. For some
+reason I can't understand you wish to abase yourself in my sight, to make
+me think you capable of such infamy. Why--ah, monsieur!--why must you do
+this?"
+
+"Because it isn't fair to represent myself as what I am not, mademoiselle.
+Once a thief, always--"
+
+"No! It isn't true!"
+
+"Again I am sorry, but I know. You have been most generous to believe in
+me. If anything could save me from myself, it would be your confidence.
+That, I presume, is why I felt called upon to undo my thieving, and make
+good the loss. The money Colonel Stanistreet paid Ekstrom is now in the
+safe, back there in the library. The necklace is ... here."
+
+Blindly he thrust the tissue packet into her hands.
+
+"If you will consent to return it to its owner, when I have gone, I shall
+be most grateful."
+
+Her hands shook so that, when she would open the packet, it escaped her
+grasp and dropped into a little pool of rain-water which had collected in
+a hollow of the walk. Lanyard picked it up, stripped off the soiled and
+sodden paper, dried the necklace with his handkerchief, replaced it in her
+hand.
+
+He heard the deep intake of her breath as she recognized its beauty, then
+her quavering voice: "You give this back because of me...!"
+
+"Because I cannot be an ingrate. I know no other way to prove how I have
+prized your faith in me.... And now, with your leave, I will go away
+quietly by this garden gate--"
+
+"No--please, no!"
+
+"But--"
+
+"I have more to say to you. It isn't fair of you to go like this, when I--"
+
+She interrupted herself, and when next she spoke he was dashed by a change
+in her voice from a tone of passionate expostulation to one of amused
+animation.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet!" she called clearly. "Do come here at once, please!"
+
+Startled, Lanyard saw that Stanistreet had appeared in the French windows
+in company with Crane. In response to Cecelia's hail both came out into the
+garden, Stanistreet briskly leading, Crane lounging at his heels, champing
+his cigar, his weathered features knitted against the brightness of the
+sun.
+
+"Good morning, Miss Brooke. Howdy, Lanyard--or are you Duchemin again?" he
+said; but his salutations were lost in the wonder excited by the girl's
+next move.
+
+"See, Colonel Stanistreet, what we have found!" she cried, and showed him
+the necklace. "I mean, what Monsieur Duchemin found. It was he who saw it,
+lying beneath that rose-bush over there. Your burglar must have dropped it
+in making his escape; you can see the paper he wrapped it in, all rain-wet
+and muddied."
+
+Stanistreet's eyes protruded alarmingly, and his face grew very red before
+he found breath enough to ejaculate: "God bless my soul!" Breathing hard,
+he accepted the necklace from Cecelia's hands. "I must--excuse me--I must
+tell my sister-in-law about this immediately!"
+
+He turned and trotted hastily back into the house.
+
+Crane lingered but a moment longer. His cheek, as ever, was bulging round
+his everlasting cigar. Was his tongue therein as well? Lanyard never knew;
+the man's eyes remained inscrutable for all the kindly shrewdness that
+glimmered amid their netted wrinkles.
+
+"Excuse _me_!" he said suddenly. "I got to tell the colonel something."
+
+He got lankily into motion and presently passed in through the windows....
+
+Irresistibly her gaze drew Lanyard's. He lifted careworn eyes and realized
+her with a great wistfulness upon him.
+
+She awaited in silence his verdict, her chin proudly high, her face
+adorably flushed, her shining eyes level and brave to his, her generous
+hands outstretched.
+
+"Must you go now?" she said tenderly, as he stood hesitant and shamed.
+"Must you go now, my dear?"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The False Faces, by Louis Joseph Vance
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FALSE FACES ***
+
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The False Faces, by Louis Joseph Vance
+
+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: The False Faces
+
+Author: Louis Joseph Vance
+
+Posting Date: November 15, 2011 [EBook #9908]
+Release Date: February, 2006
+First Posted: October 30, 2003
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FALSE FACES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci, Tom
+Allen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE FALSE FACES
+
+FURTHER ADVENTURES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LONE WOLF
+
+BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I Out of No Man's Land
+
+II From a British Port
+
+III In the Barred Zone
+
+IV In Deep Waters
+
+V On the Banks
+
+VI Under Suspicion
+
+VII In Stateroom 29
+
+VIII Off Nantucket
+
+IX Sub Sea
+
+X At Base
+
+XI Under the Rose
+
+XII Resurrection
+
+XIII Reincarnation
+
+XIV Defamation
+
+XV Recognition
+
+XVI Au Printemps
+
+XVII Finesse
+
+XVIII Danse Macabre
+
+XIX Force Majeure
+
+XX Riposte
+
+XXI Question
+
+XXII Chicane
+
+XXIII Amnesty
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+OUT OF NO MAN'S LAND
+
+
+On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still, as
+still as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him, where
+they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contests
+which the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few charnel yards of
+that debatable ground.
+
+Alone of all that awful company this man lived and, though he ached with
+the misery of hunger and cold and rain-drenched garments, was unharmed.
+
+Ever since nightfall and a brisk skirmish had made practicable an
+undetected escape through the German lines, he had been in the open,
+alternately creeping toward the British trenches under cover of darkness
+and resting in deathlike immobility, as he now rested, while pistol-lights
+and star-shells flamed overhead, flooding the night with ghastly glare
+and disclosing in pitiless detail that two-hundred-yard ribbon of earth,
+littered with indescribable abominations, which set apart the combatants.
+When this happened, the living had no other choice than to ape the dead,
+lest the least movement, detected by eyes that peered without rest through
+loopholes in the sandbag parapets, invite a bullet's blow.
+
+Now it was midnight, and lights were flaring less frequently, even as
+rifle-fire had grown more intermittent ... as if many waters might quench
+out hate in the heart of man!
+
+For it was raining hard--a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavy
+atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and
+inexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter of
+a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering of
+machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a dull thunder of
+cannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering a vast and shimmering
+curtain of slender lances, steel-bright, close-ranked, between the trenches
+and over all that weary land. Thus had it rained since noon, and thus--for
+want of any hint of slackening--it might rain for another twelve hours, or
+eighteen, or twenty-four....
+
+The star-rocket, whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool, paled and
+winked out in mid-air, and for several minutes unbroken darkness obtained
+while, on hands and knees, the man crept on toward that gap in the British
+barbed-wire entanglements which he had marked down ere daylight waned,
+shaping a tolerably straight course despite frequent detours to avoid the
+unspeakable. Only once was his progress interrupted--when straining senses
+apprised him that a British patrol was taking advantage of the false truce
+to reconnoitre toward the enemy lines, its approach betrayed by a nearing
+_squash_ of furtive feet in the boggy earth, the rasp of constrained
+respiration, a muttered curse when someone slipped and narrowly escaped a
+fall, the edged hiss of an officer's whisper reprimanding the offender.
+Incontinently he who crawled dropped flat to the greasy mud and lay
+moveless.
+
+Almost at the same instant, warned by a trail of sparks rising in a long
+arc from the German trenches, the soldiers imitated his action, and, as
+long as those triple stars shone in the murk, made themselves one with him
+and the heedless dead. Two lay so close beside him that the man could have
+touched either by moving a hand a mere six inches; he was at pains to do
+nothing of the sort; he was sedulous to clench his teeth against their
+chattering, even to hold his breath, and regretted that he might not mute
+the thumping of his heart. Nor dared he stir until, the lights fading out,
+the patrol rose and skulked onward.
+
+Thereafter his movements were less stealthy; with a detachment of their
+own abroad in No Man's Land, the British would refrain from shooting at
+shadows. One had now to fear only German bullets in event the patrol were
+discovered.
+
+Rising, the man slipped and stumbled on in semi-crouching posture, ready
+to flatten to earth as soon as any one of his many overshoulder glances
+detected another sky-spearing flight of sparks. But this necessity he was
+spared; no more lights were discharged before he groped through the wires
+to the parapet, with almost uncanny good luck, finding the very spot where
+the British had come over the top, indicated by protruding uprights of a
+rough wooden scaling ladder.
+
+As he turned, felt with a foot for the uppermost rung, and began to
+descend, he was saluted by a voice hoarse with exposure, from the black
+bowels of the trench:
+
+"Blimy! but ye're back in a 'urry! Wot's up? Forget to put perfume on yer
+pocket-'andkerchief--or wot?"
+
+The man's response, if he made any, was lost in a heavy splash as his feet
+slipped on the slimy rungs, delivering him precipitately into a knee-deep
+stream of foul water which moved sluggishly through the trench like the
+current of a half-choked sewer--a circumstance which neither suprised him
+nor added to his physical discomfort, who could be no more wet or defiled
+than he had been.
+
+Floundering to a foothold, he cast about vainly for a clue to the other's
+whereabouts; for if the night was thick in the open, here in the trench
+its density was as that of the pit; the man could distinguish positively
+nothing more than a pallid rift where the walls opened overhead.
+
+"Well, sullen, w'ere's yer manners? Carn't yer answer a civil question?"
+
+Turning toward the speaker, the man replied in good if rather carefully
+enunciated English:
+
+"I am not of your comrades. I am come from the enemy trenches."
+
+"The 'ell yer are! 'Ands up!"
+
+The muzzle of a rifle prodded the man's stomach. Obediently he lifted both
+hands above his head. A thought later, he was half blinded by the sudden
+spot-light of an electric flash-lamp.
+
+"Deserter, eh? You kamerad--wot?"
+
+"Kamerad!" the man echoed with an accent of contempt. "I am no German--I
+am French. I have come through the Boche lines to-night with important
+information which I desire to communicate forthwith to your commanding
+officer."
+
+"Strike me!" his catechist breathed, skeptical.
+
+There was a new sound of splashing in the trench. A third voice chimed in:
+"'Ello? Wot's all the row abaht?"
+
+"Step up and tike a look for yerself. 'Ere's a blighter wot sez 'e's com
+from the Germ trenches with important information for the O.C."
+
+"Bloody liar," the newcomer commented dispassionately. "Mind yer eye.
+Likely it's just another pl'yful little trick of the giddy Boche. 'Ere
+you!" The splashing drew nearer. "Wot's yer gime? Speak up if yer don't
+want a bullet through yer in'ards."
+
+"I play no game," the man said patiently. "I am unarmed--your prisoner, if
+you like."
+
+"I like, all right. Mike yer mind easy abaht that. But wot's all this
+'important information'?"
+
+"I shall divulge that only to the proper authorities. Be good enough to
+conduct me to your commanding officer without more delay."
+
+"Wot do yer mike of 'im, corp'ril?" the first soldier enquired. "'Ow abaht
+an inch or two o' the bay'net to loosen 'is tongue?"
+
+After a moment's hesitation in perplexed silence, the corporal took the
+flash-lamp from the private and with its beam raked the prisoner from head
+to foot, gaining little enlightenment from this review of a tall, spare
+figure clothed in the familiar gray overcoat of the German private--its
+face a mere mask of mud through which shone eyes of singular brilliance and
+steadiness, the eyes of a man of intelligence, determination, and courage.
+
+"Keep yer 'ands 'igh," the corporal advised curtly. "Ginger, you search
+'im."
+
+Propping his rifle against the wall of the trench, its butt on the
+firing-step just out of water, the private proceeded painstakingly
+to examine the person of the prisoner; in course of which process he
+unbuttoned and threw open the gray overcoat, exposing a shapeless tunic and
+trousers of shoddy drab stuff.
+
+"'E 'asn't got no arms--'e 'asn't got nothink, not so much as 'is blinkin'
+latch-key."
+
+"Very good. Get back on yer post. I'll tike charge o' this one."
+
+Grounding his own rifle, the corporal fixed its bayonet, then employed it
+in a gesture of unpleasant significance.
+
+"'Bout fice," he ordered. "March. Yer can drop yer 'ands--but don't go
+forgettin' I'm right 'ere be'ind yer."
+
+In silence the prisoner obeyed, wading down the flooded trench, the
+spot-light playing on his back, striking sullen gleams from the inky water
+that swirled about his knees, and disclosing glimpses of coated figures
+stationed at regular intervals along the firing-step, faces steadfast to
+loopholes in the parapet.
+
+Now and again they passed narrow rifts in the walls of the trench,
+entrances to dugouts betrayed by glimmers of candle-light through the
+cracks of makeshift doors or the coarse mesh of gunnysack curtains.
+
+From one of these, at the corporal's summons, a sleepy subaltern stumbled
+to attend ungraciously to his subordinate's report, and promptly ordered
+the prisoner taken on to the regimental headquarters behind the lines.
+
+A little farther on captive and captor turned off into a narrow and
+tortuous communication trench. Thereafter for upward of ten minutes they
+threaded a labyrinth of deep, constricted, reeking ditches, with so little
+to differentiate one from another that the prisoner wondered at the sure
+sense of direction which enabled the corporal to find his way without
+mis-step, with the added handicap of the abysmal darkness. Then, of a
+sudden, the sides of the trench shelved sharply downward, and the two
+debouched into a broad, open field. Here many men lay sleeping, with only
+waterproof sheets for protection from that bitter deluge which whipped the
+earth into an ankle-deep lake of slimy ooze and lent keener accent to the
+abiding stench of filth and decomposing flesh. A slight hillock stood
+between this field and the firing-line--where now lively fusillades
+were being exchanged--its profile crowned with a spectral rank of
+shell-shattered poplars sharply silhouetted against a sky in which
+star-shells and Verey lights flowered like blooms of hell.
+
+Here the corporal abruptly commanded his prisoner to halt and himself
+paused and stood stiffly at attention, saluting a group of three officers
+who were approaching with the evident intention of entering the trench. One
+of these loosed upon the pair the flash of a pocket lamp. At sight of the
+gray overcoat all three stopped short.
+
+A voice with the intonation of habitual command enquired: "What have we
+here?"
+
+The corporal replied: "A prisoner, sir--sez 'e's French--come across the
+open to-night with important information--so 'e sez."
+
+The spot-light picked out the prisoner's face. The officer addressed him
+directly.
+
+"What is your name, my man?"
+
+"That," said the prisoner, "is something which--like my intelligence--I
+should prefer to communicate privately."
+
+With a startled gesture the officer took a step forward and peered intently
+into that mud-smeared countenance.
+
+"I seem to know your voice," he said in a speculative tone.
+
+"You should," the prisoner returned.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the officer to his companions, "you may continue your
+rounds. Corporal, follow me with your prisoner."
+
+He swung round and slopped off heavily through the mud of the open field.
+
+Behind them the sound of firing in the forward trenches swelled to an
+uproar augmented by the shrewish chattering of machine-guns. Then a battery
+hidden somewhere in the blackness in front of them came into action,
+barking viciously. Shells whined hungrily overhead. The prisoner glanced
+back: the maimed poplars stood out stark against a sky washed with wave
+after wave of infernal light....
+
+Some time later he was conscious of a cobbled way beneath his sodden
+footgear. They were entering the outskirts of a ruined village. On either
+hand fragments of walls reared up with sashless windows and gaping doors
+like death masks of mad folk stricken in paroxysm.
+
+Within one doorway a dim light burned; through it the officer made his way,
+prisoner and corporal at his heels, passing a sentry, then descending a
+flight of crazy wooden steps to a dank and gloomy cellar, stone-walled
+and vaulted. In the middle of the cellar stood a broad table at which an
+orderly sat writing by the light of two candles stuck in the necks of empty
+bottles. At another table, in a corner, a sergeant and an operator of the
+Signal Corps were busy with field telephone and telegraph instruments. On a
+meagre bed of damp and mouldy straw, against the farther wall, several men,
+orderlies and subalterns, rested in stertorous slumbers. Despite the cold
+the atmosphere was a reek of tobacco smoke, sweat, and steam from wet
+clothing.
+
+The man at the centre table rose and saluted, offering the commanding
+officer a sheaf of scribbled messages and reports. Taking the chair thus
+vacated, the officer ran an eye over the papers, issued several orders
+inspired by them, then turned attention to the prisoner.
+
+"You may return to your post, corporal."
+
+The corporal executed a smart about-face and clumped up the steps. In
+answer to the officer's steadfast gaze the prisoner stepped forward and
+confronted him across the table.
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+"My name," said the prisoner, after looking around to make sure that none
+of the other tenants of the cellar was within earshot, "is Lanyard--Michael
+Lanyard."
+
+"The Lone Wolf!"
+
+Involuntarily the officer jumped up, almost overturning his chair.
+
+"That same," the prisoner affirmed, adding with a grimace of besmirched and
+emaciated features that was meant for a smile--"General Wertheimer."
+
+"Wertheimer is not my name."
+
+"I am aware of that. I uttered it merely to confirm my identity to you; it
+is the only name I ever knew you by in the old days, when you were in the
+British Secret Service and I a famous thief with a price upon my head, when
+you and I played hide and seek across half Europe and back again--in the
+days of Troyon's and 'the Pack,' the days of De Morbihan and Popinot
+and...."
+
+"Ekstrom," the officer supplied as the prisoner hesitated oddly.
+
+"And Ekstrom," the other agreed.
+
+There was a little silence between the two; then the officer mused aloud:
+"All dead!"
+
+"All ... but one."
+
+The officer looked up sharply. "Which--?"
+
+"The last-named."
+
+"Ekstrom? But we saw him die! You yourself fired the shot that--"
+
+"It was not Ekstrom. Trust that one not to imperil his precious carcase
+when he could find an underling to run the risk for him! I tell you I have
+seen Ekstrom within this last month, alive and serving the Fatherland as
+the genius of that system of espionage which keeps the enemy advised of
+your every move, down to the least considerable--that system which makes it
+possible for the Boche to greet every regiment by name when it moves up to
+serve its time in your advanced trenches."
+
+"You amaze me!"
+
+"I shall convince you; I bring intelligence which will enable you to tear
+apart this web of treason within your own lines and...."
+
+Lanyard's voice broke. The officer remarked that he was
+trembling--trembling so violently that to support himself he must grip the
+edge of the table with both hands.
+
+"You are wounded?"
+
+"No--but cold to my very marrow, and faint with hunger. Even the German
+soldiers are on starvation rations, now; the civilians are worse off; and
+I--I have been over there for years, a spy, a hunted thing, subsisting as
+casually as a sparrow!"
+
+"Sit down. Orderly!"
+
+And there was no more talk between these two for a time. Not only did the
+officer refuse to hear another word before Lanyard had gorged his fill of
+food and drink, but an exigent communication from the front, transmitted
+through the trench telephone system, diverted his attention temporarily.
+
+Gnawing ravenously at bread and meat, Lanyard watched curiously the scenes
+in the cellar, following, as best he might, the tides of combat; gathering
+that German resentment of a British bombing enterprise (doubtless the work
+of that same squad which had stolen past him in the gloom of No Man's Land)
+had developed into a violent attempt to storm the forward trenches.
+In these a desperate struggle was taking place. Reinforcements were
+imperatively wanted.
+
+Activities at the signallers' table became feverish; the commanding officer
+stood over it, reading incoming messages as they were jotted down and
+taking such action thereupon as his judgment dictated. Orderlies, dragged
+half asleep from their nests of straw, were shaken awake and despatched to
+rouse and rush to the front the troops Lanyard had seen sleeping in the
+open field. Other orderlies limped or reeled down the cellar steps,
+delivered their despatches, and, staggered out through a breach in the wall
+to have their injuries attended to in the field dressing-station in the
+adjoining cellar, or else threw themselves down on the straw to fall
+instantly asleep despite the deafening din.
+
+The Boche artillery, seeking blindly to silence the field batteries whose
+fire was galling their offensive, had begun to bombard the village. Shells
+fled shrieking overhead, to break in thunderous bellows. Walls toppled
+with appalling crashes, now near at hand, now far. The ebb and flow of
+rifle-fire at the front contributed a background of sound not unlike the
+roaring of an angry surf. Machine-guns gibbered like maniacs. Heavier
+artillery was brought into play behind the British lines, apparently at no
+great distance from the village; the very flag-stones of the cellar floor
+quaked to the concussions of big-calibre guns.
+
+Through the breach in the wall echoed the screams and groans of wounded.
+The foul air became saturated with a sickening stench of iodoform. Gusts of
+wet wind eddied hither and yon. Candles flickered and flared, guttered out,
+were renewed. Monstrous shadows stole out from black corners, crept along
+mouldy walls, crouched, sprang and vanished, or, inscrutably baffled,
+retreated sullenly to their lairs....
+
+For the better part of an hour the struggle continued; then its vigour
+began to wane. The heaviest British metal went out of action; some time
+later the field batteries discontinued their activities. The volume of
+firing in the advance trenches dwindled, was fiercely renewed some half a
+dozen times, died away to normal. Once more the Boche had been beaten back.
+
+Returning to his chair, the commanding officer rested his elbows upon the
+table and bowed his head between his hands in an attitude of profound
+fatigue. He seemed to remind himself of Lanyard's presence only at 'cost of
+a racking effort, lifting heavy-lidded eyes to stare almost incredulously
+at his face.
+
+"I presumed you were in America," he said in dulled accents.
+
+"I was ... for a time."
+
+"You came back to serve France?"
+
+Lanyard shook his head. "I returned to Europe after a year, the spring
+before the war."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I was hunted out of New York. The Boche would not let me be."
+
+The officer looked startled. "The Boche?"
+
+"More precisely, Herr Ekstrom--to name him as we knew him. But this I did
+not suspect for a long time, that it was he who was responsible for my
+persecution. I knew only that the police of America, informed of my
+identity with the Lone Wolf, sought to deport me, that every avenue to
+an honourable livelihood was closed. So I had to leave, to try to lose
+myself."
+
+"Your wife ... I mean to say, you married, didn't you?"
+
+Lanyard nodded. "Lucy stuck by me till ... the end.... She had a little
+money of her own. It financed our flight from the States. We made a
+round-about journey of it, to elude surveillance--and, I think, succeeded."
+
+"You returned to Paris?"
+
+"No: France, like England, was barred to the Lone Wolf.... We settled down
+in Belgium, Lucy and I and our boy. He was three months old. We found a
+quiet little home in Louvain--"
+
+The officer interrupted with a low cry of apprehension, Lanyard checked him
+with a sombre gesture. "Let me tell you....
+
+"We might have been happy. None knew us. We were sufficient unto ourselves.
+But I was without occupation; it occurred to me that my memoirs might
+make good reading--for Paris; my friends the French are as fond of their
+criminals as you English of your actors. On the second of August I
+journeyed to Paris to negotiate with a publisher. While I was away the
+Boche invaded Belgium. Before I could get back Louvain had been occupied,
+sacked...."
+
+He sat for a time in brooding silence; the officer made no attempt to
+rouse him, but the gaze he bent upon the man's lowered head was grave and
+pitiful. Abruptly, in a level and toneless voice, Lanyard resumed:
+
+"In order to regain my home I had to go round by way of England and
+Holland. I crossed the Dutch frontier disguised as a Belgian peasant. When
+I reentered Louvain it was to find ... But all the world knows what the
+blond beast did in Louvain. My wife and little son had vanished utterly. I
+searched three months before I found trace of either. Then ... Lucy died in
+my arms in a wretched hovel near Aerschot. She had seen our child butchered
+before her eyes. She herself...."
+
+Lanyard's hand, that rested on the table, clenched and whitened beneath its
+begrimed skin. His eyes fathomed distances immeasurably removed beyond the
+confines of that grim cellar. But he presently continued:
+
+"Ekstrom had accompanied the army of invasion, had seen and recognized Lucy
+in passing through Louvain. Therefore she and my son were among the first
+to be sacrificed.... When I stood over her grave I dedicated my life to the
+extermination of Ekstrom and all his breed. I have since done things I do
+not like to think about. But the Prussian spy system is the weaker for my
+work....
+
+"But Ekstrom I could never find. It was as if he knew I hunted him. He was
+seldom twenty-four hours ahead of me, yet I never caught up with him but
+once; and then he was too closely guarded.... I pursued him to Berlin,
+to Potsdam, three times to the western front, to Serbia, once to
+Constantinople, twice to Petrograd."
+
+The officer uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Lanyard looked his way
+with a depreciatory air.
+
+"Nothing strange about that. To one of my early training that was
+easy--everything was easy but the end I sought.... En passant I collected
+information concerning the workings of the Prussian spy system. From time
+to time I found means to communicate somewhat of this to the Surete in
+Paris. I believe France and England have already profited a little through
+my efforts. They shall profit more, and quickly, when I have told all that
+I have to tell....
+
+"Of a sudden Ekstrom vanished. Overnight he disappeared from Germany. A
+false lead brought me back to this front. Two days ago I learned he had
+been sent to America on a secret mission. Knowing that the States have
+severed diplomatic relations with Berlin and tremble on the verge of a
+declaration of war, we can surmise something of the nature of his mission.
+I mean to see that he fails.... To follow him to America, making my way
+out through Belgium and Holland, pursuing such furtive ways as I must in
+territory dominated by the Boche, meant much time lost. So I came through
+the lines to-night. Fortune was kind in throwing me into your hands: I
+count upon your assistance. As an ex-agent of the Secret Service you are in
+a position to make smooth my path; as an Englishman, you will advance the
+interests of a prospective ally of England if you help me to the limit of
+your ability; for what I mean to do in America will serve that country, by
+exposing the conspiracies of the Boche across the water, as much as it will
+serve my private ends."
+
+The officer's hand fell across the table and closed upon the knotted fist
+of the Lone Wolf.
+
+"As an Englishman," he said simply--"of course. But no less as your
+friend."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FROM A BRITISH PORT
+
+
+"And one man in his time plays many parts": few more than this same
+Lanyard. In no way to be identified with the hunted creature who crept into
+the British lines out of No Man's Land was the Monsieur Duchemin who, ten
+days after that wintry midnight, took passage for New York from "a British
+port," aboard the steamship _Assyrian_.
+
+Andre Duchemin was the name inscribed in the credentials furnished him in
+recognition of signal assistance rendered the British Secret Service in its
+task of scotching the Prussian spy system. And the personality he chose
+to assume suited well the name. A man of modest and amiable deportment,
+viewing the world with eyes intelligent and curious, his temper reacting
+from its ways in terms of grave humour, Monsieur Duchemin passed peaceably
+on his lawful occasions, took life as he found it, made the best of irksome
+circumstances.
+
+This last idiosyncrasy stood him in good stead. For the _Assyrian_ failed
+to clear upon her proposed sailing date and for a livelong week thereafter
+chafed alongside her landing stage, steam up, cargo laden and stowed,
+nothing lacking but the Admiralty's permission to begin her westbound
+voyage--a permission inscrutably withheld, giving rise to a common
+discontent which the passengers dissembled to the various best of their
+abilities, that is to say, in most cases thinly or not at all.
+
+Yet they were none of them unreasonable beings. They had come aboard one
+and all keyed up to a high nervous pitch, pardonable in such as must commit
+their lives to the dread adventure of the barred zone, wanting nothing
+so much as to get it over with, whatever its upshot. And everlasting
+procrastination required them day after day to steel their hearts anew
+against that Terror which followed its furtive ways beneath the leaden
+waters of the Channel!
+
+Alone among them this Monsieur Duchemin paraded successfully a false face
+of resignation, protesting no predilection whatsoever for a watery grave,
+no infatuate haste to challenge the Hun upon his chosen hunting-ground. In
+the fullness of time it would be permitted to him to go down to the sea in
+this ship. Meanwhile he found it apparently pleasant and restful to explore
+the winding cobbled ways of that antiquated waterside community, made over
+by the hand of War into a bustling seaport, or to tramp the sunken lanes
+that seamed those green old Cornish hills which embosomed the wide harbour
+waters, or to lounge about the broad white decks of the _Assyrian_ watching
+the diurnal traffic of the haven--a restless, warlike pageant.
+
+Daily, in earliest dusk of dawn, the wakeful might watch the faring forth
+of a weirdly assorted fleet of small craft, the day patrol, to relieve a
+night patrol as weirdly heterogeneous. Daily, at all hours, mine-sweepers
+came and went, by twos and twos, in flocks, in schools; and daily bellowing
+offshore detonations advertised their success in garnering those horned
+black seeds of death which the Hun and his kin were sedulous to sow in the
+fairways. While daily battleships both great and small rolled in wearily to
+refit and dress their wounds, or took swift departure on grim and secret
+errands.
+
+There was, moreover, the not-infrequent spectacle of some minor ship of
+war--a truculent, gray destroyer as like as not--shepherding in a sleek
+submarine, like a felon whale armoured and strangely caparisoned in
+gray-brown steel, to be moored in chains with a considerable company of its
+fellows on the far side of the roadstead, while its crew was taken ashore
+and consigned to some dark limbo of oblivion.
+
+And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian
+tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed, plying
+its assassin's trade beneath a neutral flag.
+
+Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the
+town gaol-yard.
+
+One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the _Assyrian_,
+Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed eyelids into the quarter
+whence the sounds reverberated.
+
+The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste,
+paused momentarily in his task of masticating a fat dark cigar.
+
+"This way out," he commented thoughtfully.
+
+Lanyard nodded; but the third, a plumply ingratiative native of Geneva,
+known to the ship as Emil Dressier, frowned in puzzlement.
+
+"Pardon, Monsieur Crane, but what is that you say--'this way out'?"
+
+"Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of our
+nootral friends from Norway."
+
+The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"
+
+"Well, I don't know about that. They done their damnedest to fix it for us
+to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm just as
+satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the
+warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur
+Duchemin?"
+
+"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.
+
+"And war is ... No: Sherman was all wrong. Hell's got perfectly good
+grounds for a libel suit against William Tecumseh for what he up and said
+about it and war, all in the same breath."
+
+Lanyard smiled faintly, but Dressler pondered this obscure reference with
+patent distress. Crane champed his cigar reflectively.
+
+"What's more to our purpose," he said presently: "I shouldn't be surprised
+if this meant the wind-up of our rest-cure here. That's the third
+mine-layer they've collected this week--two subs, and now this benevolent
+nootral. Am I right, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"Who knows?" Lanyard replied with a smile. "Even now the mine-sweeping
+flotilla is coming home, as you see; which means, the neighbouring waters
+have been cleared. It is altogether a possibility that we may be permitted
+to depart this night."
+
+Even so the event: as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter of
+crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the _Assyrian_
+warped out into mid-channel and anchored there for the night.
+
+Inasmuch as she was to sail as the tide served, some time before sunrise,
+the passengers were advised to seek their berths at an early hour. Thirty
+minutes before the steamship entered the danger zone (as she would soon
+after leaving the harbour) they would be roused and were expected promptly
+to assemble on deck, with life-preservers, and station themselves near the
+boats to which they were individually assigned.
+
+For their further comforting they were treated, in the ebb of the chill
+blue twilight, to boat-drill and final instructions in the right adjustment
+of life-belts.
+
+A preoccupied company assembled in the dining saloon for what might be
+its last meal. In the shadow of the general apprehension, conversation
+languished; expressions of relief on the part of those who had been loudest
+in complaining at the delays were notably unheard; even Crane, Lanyard's
+nearest neighbour at table, was abnormally subdued. Reviewing that array of
+sobered and anxious faces, Lanyard remarked--not for the first time, but
+with renewed gratitude--that in all the roster of passengers none were
+children and but two were women: the American widow of an English officer
+and her very English daughter, an angular and superior spinster.
+
+Avoiding the customary post-prandial symposium in the smoking room, Lanyard
+slipped away with his cigar for a lonely turn on deck.
+
+Beneath a sky heavily canopied, the night was stark black and loud with
+clashing waters. A fitful wind played in gusts now grim, now groping, like
+a lost thing blundering blindly about in that deep darkness. Ashore a
+few wan lights, widely spaced, winked uncertainly, withdrawn in vast
+remoteness; those near at hand, of the anchored shipping, skipped and
+swayed and flickered in mad mazes of goblin dance. To him who paced those
+vacant, darkened decks, the sense of dissociation from all the common,
+kindly phenomena of civilization was something intimate and inescapable.
+Melancholy as well rode upon that black-winged wind.
+
+At pause beneath the bridge, the adventurer rested elbows upon the teakwood
+rail and with importunate eyes searched the masked face of his destiny.
+There was great fear in his heart, not of death, but lest death overtake
+him before that scarlet hour when he should encounter the man whom he must
+always think of as "Ekstrom."
+
+After that, nothing would matter: let Death come then as swiftly as it
+willed....
+
+He was not even middle-aged, on the hither side of thirty; yet his attitude
+was that of one who had already crossed the great divide of the average
+mortal span: he looked backward upon a life, never forward to one. To him
+his history seemed a thing written, lacking the one word Finis: he had
+lived and loved and lost--had arrayed himself insolently against God and
+Man, had been lifted toward the light a little way by a woman's love, had
+been thrust relentlessly back into the black pit of his damnation. He made
+no pretense that it was otherwise with him: remained now merely the thing
+he had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once
+kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled
+again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous
+to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to
+destroy and be in turn destroyed....
+
+Two decks below, about amidships, a cargo port was thrust open to the
+night. A thick, broad beam of light leaped out, buffeting the murk,
+striking evanescent glimmers from the rocking facets of the waters.
+Deckhands busied themselves rigging out an accommodation ladder. A tender
+of little tonnage panted nervously up out of nowhere and was made fast
+alongside. The light raked its upper deck, picking out in passing a group
+of men in uniforms. Fugitively something resembling a petticoat snapped
+in the wind. Then several persons moved toward the accommodation ladder,
+climbed it, disappeared through the cargo port. The wearer of the petticoat
+did not accompany them.
+
+Lanyard noted these matters subconsciously, for the time altogether
+preoccupied, casting forward his thoughts along those dim trails his feet
+must tread who followed his dark star....
+
+Ten minutes later a deck-steward found him, and paused, touching his cap.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir, but all passingers is requested to report immedately in
+the music room."
+
+Indifferently Lanyard thanked the man and went below, to find the music
+room tenanted by a full muster of his fellow passengers, all more or less
+indignantly waiting to be cross-examined by the party of port officials
+from the tender--the ship's purser standing by together with the second and
+third officers and a number of stewards.
+
+Resentment was not unwarranted: already, before being suffered to take up
+quarters on board the _Assyrian_, each passenger had submitted to a most
+comprehensive survey of his credentials, his mental, moral, and social
+status, his past record, present affairs, and future purposes. A formality
+to be expected by all such as travel in war time, it had been rigid but
+mild in contrast with this eleventh-hour inquisition--a proceeding so
+drastic and exhaustive that the only plausible inference was official
+determination to find excuse for ordering somebody ashore in irons. Nothing
+was overlooked: once passports and other proofs of identity had been
+scrutinized, each passenger was conducted to his stateroom and his person
+and luggage subjected to painstaking search. None escaped; on the other
+hand, not one was found guilty of flagitious peculiarity. In the upshot the
+inquisitors, baffled and betraying every symptom of disappointment, were
+fain to give over and return to their tender.
+
+By this time Lanyard, one of the last to be grilled and passed, found
+himself as little inclined for sleep as the most timorous soul on board.
+Selecting an American novel from the ship's library, he repaired to
+the smoking room, where, established in a corner apart, he became an
+involuntary and, at first, a largely inattentive, eavesdropper upon an
+animated debate involving some eight or ten gentlemen at a table in the
+middle of the saloon--its subject, the recent visitation.
+
+Measures so extraordinary were generally held to indicate an incentive more
+extraordinary still.
+
+"You can't get away from it," he heard Crane declare: "there's some sort of
+funny business going on, or liable to go on, aboard this ship. She wasn't
+held up for a solid week out of pure cussedness. Neither did they come
+aboard to-night to give us another once-over through sheer voluptuousness.
+There's a reason."
+
+"And what," a satiric English voice enquired, "do you assume that reason to
+be?"
+
+"Search me. 'Sfar's I'm concerned the processes of the British Intelligence
+Office are a long sight past finding out."
+
+"It is simple enough," one of Crane's compatriots suggested: "the
+_Assyrian_ is suspected of entertaining a devil unawares."
+
+"Monsieur means--?" the Swiss enquired.
+
+"I mean, the authorities may have been led to believe some one of us a
+questionable character."
+
+"German spy?"
+
+"Possibly."
+
+"Or an English traitor?"
+
+"Impossible," asserted another Briton heavily. "There is to-day no such
+thing in England. Two years ago the supposition might have been plausible.
+But that breed has long since been stamped out--in England."
+
+"Another guess," Crane cut in: "they've taken considerable trouble to clear
+the track for us. Maybe it occurred to somebody at the last moment to make
+sure none of us was likely to pull off an inside job."
+
+"'Inside job?'" Dressler pleaded.
+
+"Planting bombs in the coal bunkers--things like that--anything to crab our
+getting through the barred zone in spite of mines and U-boats."
+
+"Any such attempt would mean almost certain death!"
+
+"What of it? It's been tried before--and got away with. You've got to hand
+it to Fritz, he'll risk hell-for-breakfast cheerful any time he gets it in
+his bean he's serving Gott und Vaterland."
+
+"Granted," said the Englishman. "But I fancy such an one would find it far
+from easy to secure passage upon this or any other vessel."
+
+"How so? You may have haltered all your traitors, but there's still
+a-plenty German spies living in England. Even you admit that. And if they
+can get by your Secret Service, to say nothing of Scotland Yard, what's to
+prevent their fixing to leave the country?"
+
+"Nothing, certainly. But I still contend it is hardly likely."
+
+"Of course it's hardly likely. Look at these guys to-night--dead set on
+making an awful example of anybody that couldn't come clean. I didn't
+notice them missing any bets. They combed me to the Queen's taste; for
+a while I was sure scared they'd extract my pivot tooth to see if there
+wasn't something incriminating and degrading secreted inside it. And nobody
+got off any easier. _I_ say the good ship _Assyrian_ has a pretty clean
+bill of health to go sailing with."
+
+"On the other hand"--yet another American voice was speaking--"no spy or
+criminal worth his salt would try to ship without preparations thorough
+enough to insure success, barring accidents."
+
+"Criminal?" drawled the Briton incredulously.
+
+"The enterprisin' burglar keeps a-burglin', even in war time. There have
+been notable burglaries in London of late, according to your newspapers."
+
+"And you think the thief would attempt to smuggle his loot out of the
+country aboard such a ship as this?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Scotland Yard to the contrary notwithstanding?"
+
+"If Scotland Yard is as efficient as you think, sir, certainly any sane
+thief would make every effort to leave a country it was making too hot for
+him."
+
+"Considerable criminal!" Crane jeered.
+
+"Undeceive yourself, senor." This was a Brazilian, a quiet little dark body
+who commonly contented himself with a listening role in the smoking-room
+discussions. "There are truly criminals of intelligence. And war conditions
+are driving them out of Europe."
+
+Of a sudden Lanyard--stretched out at length upon the leather cushions,
+in full view of these gossips--became aware that he was being closely
+scrutinised. By whom, with what reason or purpose, he could not surmise;
+and it were unwise to look up from that printed page. But that sixth sense
+of his--intuition, what you will--that exquisitively sensitive sentinel
+admonished that at least one person in the room was watching him narrowly.
+
+Though he made no move other than to turn a page, his glance followed
+blindly blurring lines of text, and his quickened wits overlooked no shade
+of meaning or intonation as that talk continued.
+
+"A criminal of intelligence," some one observed, "is a giddy paradox whose
+fatuous existence is quite fittingly confined to the realm of fable."
+
+"You took the identical words right out of my mouth," Crane complained
+bitterly.
+
+"Your pardon, senores: history confutes your incredulity."
+
+"But we are talking about to-day."
+
+"Even to-day--can you deny it?--men attain high places by means which the
+law would construe as criminal, were they not intelligent enough to outwit
+it."
+
+"Big game," Crane objected; "something else again. What we contend is no
+man of ordinary common sense could get his own consent to crack a safe, or
+pick a pocket, or do second-story work, or pull any rough stuff like that."
+
+"Again you overlook living facts," persisted the Brazilian.
+
+"Name one--just one."
+
+"The Lone Wolf, then."
+
+"Unnatural history is out of my line," Crane objected. "Why is a lone wolf,
+anyway?"
+
+The Brazilian's voice took on an accent of exasperation. "Senores, I do not
+jest. I am a student of psychology, more especially of criminal psychology.
+I lived long in Paris before this war, and took deep interest in the case
+of the Lone Wolf."
+
+"Well, you've got me all excited. Go on with your story."
+
+"With much pleasure.... This gentleman, then, this Michael Lanyard, as he
+called himself, was a distinguished Parisian figure, a man of extraordinary
+attainment, esteemed the foremost connoisseur d'art in all Europe.
+Suddenly, at the zenith of his career, he disappeared. Subsequently it
+became known that he had been identical with that great Parisian criminal,
+the Lone Wolf, a superman of thieves who had plundered all Europe with
+unvarying success for almost a decade."
+
+"Then what made the silly ass quit?"
+
+"According to my information, he won the love of a young woman--"
+
+"And reformed for her sake, of course?"
+
+"To the contrary, senor; Lanyard renounced his double life because of a
+theory on which he had founded his astonishing success. According to this
+theory, any man of intelligence may defy society as long as he will, always
+providing he has no friend, lover, or confederate in whom to confide. A man
+self-contained can never be betrayed; the stupid police seldom apprehend
+even the most stupid criminal, save through the treachery of some intimate.
+This Lanyard proved his theory by confounding not only the utmost
+efforts of the police but even the jealous enmity of that association of
+Continental criminals known as the Bande Noire--until he became a lover.
+Then he proved his intelligence: in one stroke he flouted the police,
+delivered into their hands the inner circle of the Bande Noire, and
+vanished with the woman he loved."
+
+"And then--?"
+
+"The rest," said the Brazilian, "is silence."
+
+"It is for to-night, anyway," Crane observed, yawning. "It's bedtime. Here
+comes the busy steward to put the lights and us out."
+
+There was a general stir; men drained glasses, knocked out pipes, got up,
+murmured good-nights. Lanyard closed the American novel upon a forefinger,
+looked up abstractedly, rose, moved toward the door. The utmost effort of
+exceptional powers of covert observation assured him that, at the moment,
+none of the company favoured him with especial attention; the author of
+that interest whose intensity had so weighed upon his consciousness had
+been swift to dissemble.
+
+On his way forward he exchanged bows and smiles with Crane and one or two
+others, his gesture completely casual. Yet when he entered the starboard
+alleyway he carried with him a complete catalogue of those who had
+contributed to the conversation. With all, thanks to seven days'
+association, he stood on terms of shipboard acquaintance. Not one, in his
+esteem, was more potentially mischievous than any other--not even the
+Brazilian Velasco, though he had been the first to name the Lone Wolf.
+
+It was, furthermore, quite possible that the mention of his erstwhile
+sobriquet had been utterly fortuitous.
+
+And yet, one might not forget that sensation of being under intent
+surveillance....
+
+In his stateroom Lanyard stood for several minutes gravely peering into the
+mirror above the washstand.
+
+The face he scanned was lean and worn in feature, darkly weathered, framed
+in hair whose jet already boasted an accent of silver at either temple--the
+face of a man inured to hardship, seasoned in suffering, strong in
+self-knowledge. The incandescence of an intelligence coldly dispassionate,
+quick and shrewd, lighted those dark eyes. Distinctively a face of Gallic
+cast, three years of long-drawn torment had served in part to erase from
+it wellnigh all resemblance to both the brilliant social freebooter of
+ante-bellum Paris and that undesirable alien whom the authorities had
+sought to deport from the States. Amazing facility in impersonation had
+done the rest; unrecognisable as what he had been, he was to-day flawlessly
+the incarnation of what he elected to seem--Monsieur Duchemin, gentleman,
+of Paris.
+
+Impossible to believe his disguise had been so soon penetrated....
+
+And yet, again, that gossip of the smoking room....
+
+Police work? Or had Ekstrom's creatures picked up his trail once more?
+
+Beneath that urbane mask of his, a hunted, wild thing poised in question,
+mistrustful of the very wind, prick-eared, fangs agleam, eyes grimly
+apprehensive....
+
+A little sound, the least of metallic clicks, breaking the hush of his
+solitude, froze the adventurer to attention. Only his glance swerved
+swiftly to a fastened door in the forward partition--his stateroom being
+the aftermost of three that might be thrown together to form a suite. The
+nickeled knob was being tried with infinite precaution. On the half turn it
+checked with a faint repetition of the click. Then the door itself quivered
+almost imperceptibly to pressure, though it yielded not a fraction of an
+inch.
+
+Lanyard's eyes hardened. He did not stir from where he stood, but one hand
+whipped an automatic from his pocket while the other darted out to the
+switch-box by the head of his berth and extinguished the light.
+
+Instantly a glimmer of light in the forward stateroom showed through
+a narrow strip of iron grill-work set in the top of the partition for
+ventilating purposes.
+
+Simultaneously the door-knob was gently released, and with another louder
+click the light in the adjoining cubicle was blotted out.
+
+Mystified, Lanyard undressed and turned in, but not to sleep--not for a
+little, at least.
+
+Who might this neighbour be who tried his door so stealthily? Before
+to-night that room had had no tenant. Apparently one of the passengers had
+seen fit to shift his quarters. To what end? To keep a jealous eye on
+the Lone Wolf, perhaps? So much the better, then: Lanyard need only make
+enquiry in the morning to identify his enemy.
+
+Deliberately closing his eyes, he dismissed the enigma. He possessed in
+marked degree that attribute of genius, ability to command slumber at will.
+Swiftly the troubled deeps of thought grew calm; on their placid surface
+inconsequent visions were mirrored darkly, fugitive scenes from the store
+of subconscious memory: Crane's lantern-jawed physiognomy, keen eyes
+semi-veiled by humorously drooping lids, the extreme corner of his mouth
+bulging round his everlasting cigar ... grimy lions in Trafalgar Square of
+a rainy afternoon ... the octagonal room of L'Abbaye Theleme at three in
+the morning, a swirl of Bacchanalian shapes ... Wertheimer's soldierly
+figure beside the telegraphers' table in that noisome cave at the Front ...
+the deck of a tender in darkness swept by a shaft of yellow light which
+momentarily revealed a group of folk with upturned faces, a petticoat
+fluttering in its midst....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+IN THE BARRED ZONE
+
+
+Day broke with rather more than half a gale blowing beneath a louring sky.
+Once clear of the bottleneck mouth of the harbour, the _Assyrian_ ran into
+brutal quartering seas. An old hand at such work, for upward of a decade
+a steady-paced Dobbin of the transatlantic lanes, she buckled down to it
+doggedly and, remembering her duty by her passengers, rolled no more than
+she had to, buried her nose in the foaming green only when she must. For
+all her care, the main deck forward was alternately raked by stinging
+volleys of spray and scoured by frantic cascades. More than once the crew
+of the bow gun narrowly escaped being carried overboard to a man. Blue with
+cold, soaked to the buff despite oilskins, they stuck stubbornly to their
+posts. Perched beyond reach of shattering wavecrests, the passengers on the
+boat-deck huddled unhappily in the lee of the superstructure--and snarled
+in response to the cheering information that better conditions for baffling
+the ubiquitous U-boat could hardly have been brewed by an indulgent
+Providence. Sheeting spindrift contributed to lower visibility: two
+destroyers standing on parallel courses about a mile distant to port and
+to starboard were more often than not barely discernible, spectral vessels
+reeling and dipping in the haze. The ceaseless whistle of wind in the
+rigging was punctuated by long-drawn howls which must have filled any
+conscientious banshee with corrosive envy.
+
+Toward mid-morning rain fell in torrents, driving even the most fearful
+passengers to shelter within the superstructure. A majority crowded the
+landing at the head of the main companionway close by the leeward door.
+Bolder spirits marched off to the smoking room--Crane starting this
+movement with the declaration that, for his part, he would as lief drown
+like a rat in a trap as battling to keep up in the frigid inferno of those
+raging seas. A handful of miserables, too seasick to care whether the ship
+swam or sank, mutinously took to their berths.
+
+Stateroom 27--adjoining Lanyard's--sported obstinately a shut door.
+Lanyard, sedulous not to discover his interest by questioning the stewards,
+caught never a glimpse of its occupant. For his own satisfaction he took a
+covert census of passengers on deck as the vessel entered the danger zone,
+and made the tally seventy-one all told--the number on the passenger list
+when the _Assyrian_ had left her landing stage the previous evening.
+
+It seemed probable, therefore, that the person in 27 had come aboard from
+the tender, either with or following the official party. Lanyard was
+unable to say that more had not left the tender than appeared to sit in
+inquisition in the music room.
+
+By noon the wind was beginning to moderate, and the sea was being beaten
+down by that relentlessly lashing rain. Visibility, however, was more low
+than ever. A fairly representative number descended to the dining saloon
+for luncheon--a meal which none finished. Midway in its course a thunderous
+explosion to starboard drove all in panic once more to the decks.
+
+Within two hundred yards of the _Assyrian_ a floating mine had destroyed a
+patrol boat. No more was left of it than an oil-filmed welter of splintered
+wreckage: of its crew, never a trace.
+
+Imperturbably the _Assyrian_ proceeded. Not so her passengers: now the
+smoking room was deserted even by the insouciant Crane, and the seasick to
+a woman brought their troubles back to the boat-deck.
+
+Alone the tenant of 27 stopped below. And the riddle of this ostensible
+indifference to terrors that clawed at the vitals of every other soul on
+board grew to intrigue Lanyard to the point of obsession. Was the reason
+brute apathy or sheer foolhardihood? He refused either explanation,
+feeling sure some darker and more momentous motive dictated this obstinate
+avoidance of the public eye. Exasperation aroused by failure to fathom the
+mystery took precedence in his thoughts even to the personal solicitude
+excited by last night's gossip of the smoking room....
+
+With no other disturbing incident the afternoon wore away, the wind
+steadily flagging, the waves as steadily subsiding. When twilight closed in
+there was nothing more disturbing to one's equilibrium than a sea of long
+and sullen rolls scored by the pelting downpour.
+
+Perhaps as many as ten venturesome souls dined in the saloon, their fellows
+sticking desperately to the decks and contenting themselves with coffee and
+sandwiches.
+
+Daylight waned, terrors waxed: passengers instinctively gravitated into
+little knots and clusters, conversing guardedly as if fearful lest their
+normal accents bring down upon them those Apaches of the underseas for
+signs of whom their frightened glances incessantly ranged over-rail and
+searched the heaving wastes.
+
+The understanding was tacit that all would spend the night on deck.
+
+Dusk at length blotted out the shadows of their guardian destroyers, and a
+great and desolating loneliness settled down upon the ship. One by one
+the passengers grew dumb; still they clung together, but seemingly their
+tongues would no more function.
+
+With nightfall, the rain ceased, the breeze freshened a trifle, the pall of
+cloud lifted and broke, giving glimpses of remote, impersonal stars. Later
+a gibbous moon leered through the flying wrack, checkering the sea with
+a restless pattern of black and silver. In this ghastly setting the
+_Assyrian_, showing no lights, a shape of flying darkness pursuing a course
+secret to all save her navigators, strained ever onward, panting, groaning,
+quivering from stem to stern ... like an enchanted thing doomed to
+perpetual labours, striving vainly to break bonds invisible that transfixed
+her to one spot forever-more, in the midst of that bleak purgatory of
+shadow and moonshine and dread....
+
+Sensitive to the eerie influence of the hour, Lanyard interrupted the tour
+of the decks which he had steadily pursued for the better part of the
+evening, and rested at the forward rail, looking down over the main deck,
+its bleached planking dotted with dark shapes of fixed machinery. In the
+bows the formless, uncouth bulk of the gun squatted in its tarpaulin. Its
+crew tramped heavily to and fro, shivering in heavy jackets, hands in
+pockets, shoulders hunched up to ears. Farther aft an iron door clanged
+heavily behind a sailor emerging from an alleyway; he approached the ship's
+bell, with practised hand sounded two double strokes, then turned and sang
+out in the weird minor traditional in his calling:
+
+"_Four bells--and a-a-all's well_!"
+
+Even as the wind made free with the melancholy echoes of that assurance,
+the spell upon the ship was exorcised.
+
+Overhead, from the foremast crow's-nest, a voice screamed, hoarsely urgent:
+
+"_Torpedo! 'Ware submarine to port_!"
+
+Many things happened simultaneously, or in a span of seconds strangely
+scant. The gunners sprang to station, whipping away the tarpaulin, while
+their lieutenant focussed binoculars upon the confused distances of the
+night. Obedient to his instructions, the long, gleaming tube of steel
+pivoted smoothly to port.
+
+From the bridge a signal rocket soared, hissing. The whistle loosed
+stentorian squalls of indignation and distress--one long and four short.
+Commands were shouted; the engine-room telegraph wrangled madly. The
+momentum of the _Assyrian_ was checked startlingly; her bows sheered
+smartly off to port.
+
+A rumour of frightened voices and pounding feet came from the leeward
+boat-deck, where the main body of the passengers was congregated, hidden
+from Lanyard by the shoulder of the foreward deck-house. A number of men
+ran forward, paused by the rail, stared, and scurried back, yelling in
+alarm. At this the din swelled to uproar.
+
+Scanning closely the surface of the sea, Lanyard himself descried a silvery
+arrow of spray lancing the swells, making with deadly speed toward the port
+bow of the _Assyrian_. But now both screws were churning full speed astern;
+the vessel lost headway altogether. Then her engines stopped. For a
+breathless instant she rested inert, like something paralyzed with fright,
+bows-on to the torpedo, the telegraph ringing frantically. Then the
+starboard screw began to turn full ahead, the port remaining idle. The
+bows swung off still more sharply to port. The torpedo shot in under them,
+vanished for a breathless moment, reappeared a boat's-length to starboard,
+plunged harmlessly on its unhindered way down the side of the vessel, and
+disappeared astern.
+
+Amidships terrified passengers milled like sheep, hampering the work of the
+boat-crews at the davits. Ship's officers raged among them, endeavouring
+to restore order. Half a mile or so dead ahead a tiny tongue of flame spat
+viciously in the murk. A projectile shrieked overhead, and dropped into the
+sea astern. Another followed and fell short.
+
+The U-boat was shelling the _Assyrian_.
+
+The forward gun barked violent expostulation, if without visible effect;
+the submarine lobbing two more shells at the steamship with an indifference
+to its own peril astonishing in one of its craven breed, trained to strike
+and run before counterstroke may be delivered. Its extraordinary temerity,
+indeed, argued ignorance of the convoying destroyers.
+
+Coincident with the second shot, however, these unleashed searchlights
+slashed the dark through and through with their great, white, fanlike
+blades, till first one then the other picked up and steadied relentlessly
+upon a toy-boat shape that swam the swells about midway between the
+_Assyrian_ and the destroyer off the port bows.
+
+Simultaneously the quickfirers of the latter went into action, jetting
+orange flame. In the searchlights' glare, spurts of white water danced all
+round the submarine. A mutter of gunfire rolled over to the _Assyrian_,
+abruptly silenced by an imperative deep voice of heavier metal--which spoke
+but once.
+
+With the lurid unreality of clap-trap theatrical illusion the U-boat
+vomited a great, spreading sheet of flame....
+
+Someone at the rail, near Lanyard's shoulder, uttered a hushed cry of
+horror.
+
+He paid no heed, his interest wholly focussed upon that distant patch of
+shining water. As his dazzled vision cleared he saw that the submarine had
+disappeared.
+
+Unconsciously, in French, he commented: "So that is finished!"
+
+Likewise in French, but in a woman's voice of uncommon quality, deep
+and bell-sweet, came the protest from the passenger at his side: "But,
+monsieur, what are we doing? We turn away from them--those poor things
+drowning there!"
+
+That was quite true: under forced draught the _Assyrian_ was heading away
+on a new course.
+
+"They drown out there in that black water--and we leave them to that!"
+
+Lanyard turned. "The destroyers will take care of them," he said--"if any
+survived that explosion with strength enough to swim."
+
+He spoke from the surface of his thoughts and with a calm that veiled
+profound surprise. The woman by his side was neither the American widow nor
+her English daughter, but wholly a stranger to the ship's company he knew.
+
+The training of the Lone Wolf had been wasted if one swift glance had
+failed to comprehend every essential detail: that tall, straight, slender
+figure cloaked in the folds of a garment whose hood framed a face of
+singular pallor and sweetness in the moonlight, its shadowed eyes wide with
+emotion, its lips a little parted....
+
+With a shiver she lifted her hands to her eyes as if to darken the visions
+of her imagination.
+
+"They die out there," she said, in murmurs barely audible.... "We turn our
+backs on them.... You think that right?"
+
+"We play the game by the rules the enemy himself laid down," Lanyard
+returned. "They would have sunk us without one qualm of pity--would, in all
+probability, have shelled our boats had any succeeded in getting off. They
+have done as much before, and will again. It is out of reason to insist
+that the captain risk his ship in the hope of picking up one or two
+drowning assassins."
+
+"Risk his ship? How? They are helpless--"
+
+"As a rule, U-boats hunt in pairs; always, when specially charged to sink
+one certain vessel. It was so with the _Lusitania_, with the _Arabic_ as
+well; I don't doubt it was so in this instance--that we should have heard
+from a second submarine had not the destroyers opened fire when they did."
+
+The woman stared. "You think that--?"
+
+"That the Boche had specific instructions to waylay and sink the
+_Assyrian_? I begin to think that--yes."
+
+This declaration affected the woman curiously; she shrank away a little, as
+from a blow, her eyes winced, her pale lips quivered. When she spoke, it
+was, strangely enough, in English so naturally enunciated that Lanyard
+could not doubt that this was her mother tongue.
+
+"Then you think it is because...."
+
+Of a sudden she wilted, clinging to the rail and trembling wildly.
+
+Lanyard shot a glance aft. The disorder among the passengers was measurably
+less, though excitement still ran so high that he felt sure they were as
+yet unnoticed. On impulse he stepped nearer.
+
+"Pardon, mademoiselle," he said quietly; "you are excusably unstrung.
+But all danger is past; and there is still time to regain your stateroom
+unobserved. If you will permit me to escort you...."
+
+He watched her narrowly, but she showed no surprise at this suggestion of
+intimacy with her affairs. After a brief moment she pulled herself together
+and dropped a hand upon the arm he offered. In another minute he was
+helping her over the raised watersill of the door.
+
+Like all the ship the landing and main companionway were dark; but below,
+on the promenade deck, the second doorway aft on the starboard side stood
+ajar, affording a glimpse of a dimly lighted stateroom.
+
+With neither hesitation nor surprise--for he was already satisfied in this
+matter--Lanyard conducted the woman to this door and stopped.
+
+Her hand fell from his arm. She faltered on the threshold of Stateroom 27,
+eyeing him dubiously.
+
+"Thank you, monsieur...?"
+
+There was just enough accent of enquiry to warrant his giving her the name:
+"Duchemin, mademoiselle."
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin.... Please to tell me how you knew this was my
+stateroom?"
+
+"I occupy Stateroom 29. There was no one in 27 till after the tender came
+out last night. Furthermore, your face was strange, and I have come to know
+all others on board during our week's delay in port."
+
+The light was at her back; he could distinguish little of her shadowed
+features, but fancied her a bit discountenanced.
+
+In a subdued voice she said, "Thank you," once more, a hand resting
+significantly on the door-knob. But still he lingered.
+
+"If mademoiselle would be so good as to tell me something in return--?"
+
+"If I can...."
+
+"Then why, mademoiselle, did you try my door last night?"
+
+"It was neither locked nor bolted on my side. I wished to make sure--"
+
+"So one fancied. Thank you. Good-night, mademoiselle...?"
+
+She was impervious to his hint. "Good-night, Monsieur Duchemin," she said,
+and closed the door.
+
+Now Lanyard's quarters opened not on this alleyway fore-and-aft but on a
+short and narrow athwartship passage. And as he turned away he saw out of
+the corner of an eye a white-jacketed figure emerge from this passageway
+and move hurriedly aft. Something furtive in the round of the fellow's
+shoulders challenged his curiosity. He called quietly:
+
+"Steward!"
+
+There was no answer. By now the white jacket was no more than a blur moving
+in that deep gloom. He cried again, more loudly:
+
+"I say, steward!"
+
+He could hardly see, but fancied that the man quickened his steps: in
+another instant he vanished altogether.
+
+Smothering an impulse to give chase, the adventurer swung alertly into the
+narrow passage and opened the door to Stateroom 29. The room was dark, but
+as he fumbled for the switch, the door in the forward partition was thrust
+open and the girl's slight figure showed, tensely poised against the light
+behind her.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin!" she cried, in a voice sharp with doubt.
+
+Lanyard turned the switch. "Mademoiselle," he said, and coolly crossed to
+the port, drawing the light-proof curtains.
+
+"This door was locked all day--locked when the firing alarmed me and I went
+out to the deck."
+
+"And on my side, mademoiselle, it was locked and bolted when last I was
+here, shortly before dinner." "Whoever unfastened it entered my room during
+my absence and tampered with my luggage."
+
+"You have missed something?"
+
+Gaze intent to his she nodded. He shrugged and cast shrewdly round his
+quarters for some clue to the enigma. His glance fastened on a leather
+bellows-bag beneath the berth. Dropping to his knees he pulled this out,
+and looked up with a quizzical grimace, his forefinger indicating the lock,
+which was uncaught.
+
+"I left this latched but not locked," he said. "Perhaps I, too, have lost
+something."
+
+Opening the bag out flat, he sat back on his heels, with practised eye
+inspecting its neat arrangement of intimate things.
+
+"Nothing has been taken, mademoiselle," he announced gravely. "But
+something--I think--has been generously added. I seem to have an anonymous
+admirer on board."
+
+Bending forward, he rummaged beneath a sheaf of shirts and brought forth
+a small jewel-box of grained leather, with a monogram stamped on the
+lid--"C.B."
+
+"The lock is broken," he observed, and handed it up to the woman. "As to
+its contents, mademoiselle herself knows best...."
+
+The woman opened the box.
+
+"Nothing is missing," she said in a thoughtful voice.
+
+"I am relieved." Lanyard closed the bag, thrust it back beneath the berth,
+and got upon his feet. "But you are quite sure--?"
+
+"My jewels are all in order," she affirmed, without meeting his gaze.
+
+"And you miss nothing else?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Was there an accent of hesitation in this response?
+
+"Then, I take it, the thief was disappointed."
+
+Now she glanced quickly at his eyes. "Why do you say that?"
+
+"If the thief had found what he sought, he would never have presented it
+to me, mademoiselle would never again have seen her jewels. Failing in
+his object, after breaking that lock, and interrupted by your unexpected
+return, he planted the case with me, hoping to have me suspected. I am
+fortunately able to prove the best of alibis.... So then," said Lanyard,
+smiling, "it would appear that, though we met ten minutes ago for the first
+time--and I have yet to know mademoiselle by name--we are allies in a
+common cause."
+
+"My name is Brooke--Cecelia Brooke," she said quietly--"if it matters. But
+why 'allies'?"
+
+"It appears we own a common enemy. Each of us possesses something which
+that one desires--you a secret, I a good name. (Duchemin, indeed, I have
+always held to be an excellent name.) I shall not hesitate to call on you
+if my treasure is again violated. May I venture to hope mademoiselle will
+prove as ready to command my services?"
+
+"Thank you. I fancy, however, there will be no need."
+
+She moved irresolutely toward the communicating door, paused in its frame,
+eyeing him speculatively from under level brows. He detected, or imagined,
+a tremor of impulse toward him, as though she faltered on the verge of some
+grave confidence. If so, she curbed her tongue in time. Her gaze dropped,
+fixed itself abstractedly on the door.... "This must be fastened," she
+said, in a tone of complete disinterest.
+
+"I will speak to the chief steward immediately."
+
+"Don't trouble." She roused. "It doesn't matter, really, for to-night. I
+shall leave what valuables I have in the purser's care and stop on deck
+till daybreak."
+
+He gave a gesture of bewilderment. "You abandon your seclusion--leave your
+secret unguarded?"
+
+"Why not?" She shrugged slightly with a little _moue_ of discontent. "If,
+as you assume, I had a secret, it was that for certain reasons I did not
+wish my presence on board to become known. But it seems it has become
+known: my secret is no more. So I need no longer risk being cut off from
+the boats in the event of any accident."
+
+Momentarily her gravity was dissipated by a smile at once delightful and
+provocative.
+
+"Once more, monsieur--good-night!"
+
+After some moments Lanyard, with a start, found himself staring blankly at
+a blankly incommunicative communicating door.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IN DEEP WATERS
+
+
+Following this abrupt introduction to his interesting neighbour, Lanyard
+went back to his deck-chair and, bundling himself up against the cold,
+settled down to ponder the affair and await developments in a spirit of
+chastened resignation. That a denouement would duly unfold he was quite
+satisfied; that he himself must willy-nilly play some part therein he was
+too well persuaded.
+
+Not that he wished to meddle. If this Miss Cecelia Brooke (as she named
+herself) fostered any sort of intrigue, he wanted nothing so fervently
+as to be left altogether out of it. But already he had been dragged in,
+without wish or consent of his; whoever coveted her secret--whatever that
+was, more precious to her than jewels--harboured designs upon his own as
+well. It was his duty henceforth to go warily, overlooking no circumstance,
+however trifling and inconsiderable it might appear. The slenderest thread
+may lead to the heart of the most intricate maze--and the heart of this was
+become Lanyard's immediate goal, for there his enemy lay perdu.
+
+It was never this man's fault to underrate an enemy, least of all
+an unknown; and he entertained wholesome respect for Secret Service
+operators--picked men, as a rule, the meanest no mean antagonist. And this
+business, he fancied, had all the flavour of Secret Service work--one
+of those blind duels, desperate and grim affairs of masked combatants
+feinting, thrusting, guarding in the dark, each with the other's sword ever
+feeling for his throat, fighting for life itself and making his own rules
+as the contest swayed.
+
+But what was this Brooke girl doing in that galley? What conceivable motive
+induced her to dabble those slender hands in the muck and blood of Secret
+Service work?
+
+Lanyard was fain to let that question rest. After all, it was no concern of
+his. There she was, up to her pretty eyebrows in some dark, bad business;
+and it was not for him to play the gratuitous ass, rush in unasked, and
+seek to extricate her....
+
+Through endless hours he sat brooding, vision blindly focussed upon the
+misty, shimmering mystery of that night.
+
+Ekstrom!... Slowly in his understanding intuition shaped the conviction
+that it was Ekstrom whom he was fighting now, Ekstrom in the guise of one
+of his creatures, some agent of the Prussian spy system who had contrived
+to smuggle himself aboard this British steamship.
+
+Out of those nine in the smoking room the previous night, then, he must
+beware of one primarily, perhaps of more.
+
+Four he was disposed, with reservations, to reckon negligible: Baron von
+Harden, head of a Netherlands banking house, a silent body whose acute
+mental processes went on behind a pallid screen of flabby features; Julius
+Becker, a theatrical manager of New York, whose right name ended in ski;
+Bartlett Putnam, late charge d'affaires of the American embassy in Madrid;
+Edmund O'Reilly, naturalized citizen of the United States, interested in
+the manufacture of motor tractors somewhere in Michigan.
+
+Of the other five, two were English: Lieutenant Thackeray, a civilly
+reticent gentleman whose right arm rested in a black silk sling, making
+a flying trip to visit a married sister in New York; Archer Bartholomew,
+Esq., solicitor, a red-cheeked, bright-eyed, white-haired, brisk little
+Cockney, beyond the military age.
+
+There remained Dressier, the stout, self-satisfied Swiss, whose fawning
+manner was possibly accounted for by his statement that he journeyed to
+New York to engage in the trade of restaurateur in partnership with his
+brother; Crane, long and awkward and homely, of saturnine cast, slow of
+gesture and negligent as to dress, his humorous sense clouding a power
+of shrewd intelligence; and Senor Arturo Velasco, of Buenos Aires,
+middle-aged, apparently extremely well-to-do, a thoughtful type, more
+self-contained than most of his countrymen.
+
+One of these probably ... But which?...
+
+Nor must he permit himself to forget that the _Assyrian_ carried fifty-nine
+other male passengers, in addition to her complement of officers, crew, and
+stewards, that any one of these might prove to be Potsdam's cat's-paw.
+
+Awesome pallor tinged the eastern horizon, gaining strength, spread in
+imperceptible yet rapid gradations toward the zenith. Stars faded, winked
+out, vanished. Silver and purple in the sea gave place to livid gray.
+Almost visibly the routed night rolled back over the western rim of the
+world. Shafts of supernal radiance lanced the formless void between sky
+and sea. Swollen and angry, the sun lifted up its enormous, ensanguined
+portent. And the discountenanced moon withdrew hastily into the
+immeasurable fastnessness of a cloudless firmament, yet failed therein to
+find complete concealment. Keen, sweet airs of dawn raked the decks, now
+to port, now to starboard, as the _Assyrian_ twisted and writhed on her
+corkscrew way.
+
+Passengers whose fears had become sufficiently numb to permit them to
+drowse, stirred in their chairs, roused blinking and blear-eyed, arose
+and stretched cramped, cold bodies. Others lay listless, enervated by the
+sleepless misery of that night. Crane found Lanyard awake and marched him
+off for coffee and cigarettes in the smoking room.
+
+Later, starting out for a turn around the decks, they passed a deck-chair
+sheltered in a jog where the engine-room ventilating shaft joined the
+forward deck-house, in which Miss Brooke lay cocooned in wraps and furs,
+her profile, turned aside from the sea, exquisitely etched against the rich
+blackness of a fox stole. She slept as quietly as the most carefree, a
+shadowy smile touching her lips.
+
+Crane's stride faltered. He whistled low.
+
+"In the name of all things wonderful! how did that get on board?"
+
+Lanyard mentioned the girl's name. "She has the stateroom next to
+mine--came off that tender, night before last."
+
+"And me sore on that darn' li'l boat because it brought aboard all the
+nosey Johnnies! Ain't it the truth, you never know your luck?"
+
+The American ruminated in silence till another lap of their walk took them
+past the girl again.
+
+"Funny," he mused, "if that's why they held us up...."
+
+"Comment, monsieur?"
+
+"Oh, I was just wondering if it was on that young lady's account they kept
+us kicking our heels back there so long."
+
+"I am still stupid," Lanyard confessed.
+
+"Why, she might be a special messenger, you know--something like that--the
+British Government wanted to smuggle out of the country without anybody
+suspecting."
+
+"Monsieur is a romantic."
+
+"You can't trust me," Crane averred unblushingly.
+
+When they passed the chair again it was empty.
+
+At breakfast Lanyard saw the girl from a distance: their places were
+separated by the width of the saloon. She had no neighbours at her table,
+did not look up when Lanyard entered, finished her meal some time before
+he did, and retired immediately to her stateroom, in whose seclusion she
+remained for the rest of the day.
+
+That second day was altogether innocent of untoward incident. At least
+superficially the life of the ship settled into the groove of "business
+as usual." Only the company of the _Assyrian's_ faithful convoys was an
+ever-present reminder of peril.
+
+And in the middle of the afternoon she passed close by a derelict, a
+torpedoed tramp, deep down by the stern, her bows helplessly high in air
+and crimson with rust, the melancholy haunt of a great multitude of gulls.
+
+More than slightly to Lanyard's surprise he received no quiet invitation
+to the captain's quarters to be interrogated concerning the burglary in
+Stateroom 27. Apparently, the young woman had contented herself with
+reporting merely that the communicating door had carelessly been left
+unfastened.
+
+For his own part, neither seeking nor avoiding individual members of the
+smoking-room group, Lanyard permitted himself to be drawn into their
+company, and sat among them amiably receptive. But this profited him
+scantily; there was no further talk of the Lone Wolf; he was not again
+aware of that covert surveillance.
+
+But when--the evening chill driving him below to don a fur-lined
+topcoat--the Brooke girl, coming up the companionway, acknowledged his look
+of recognition with the most distant of nods, he accepted the apparent
+rebuff without resentment. He understood. She was playing the game. The
+enemy was watching, listening. After that he was studious to refrain from
+seeming either to avoid or to seek her neighbourhood; and if he did keep a
+sharp eye on her, it was so circumspectly as to mock detection. To the
+best of his observation she found no friends on board, contracted no new
+acquaintances, kept herself to herself within walls of inexorable reserve.
+
+Dawn, ending the second night at sea, found the _Assyrian_ pursuing a
+course still devious, and now alone; the destroyers had turned back during
+the night. The western boundary of the barred zone lay astern. Ahead, at
+the end of a brief interval of time, the ivory towers of New York loomed,
+a-shimmer with endless sunlight, glorious in golden promise. Accordingly,
+the spirits of the passengers were exalted. The very ship seemed to grin in
+self-complacence; she had won safely through.
+
+Unremitting vigilance was none the less maintained. No hour of the
+twenty-four found either gun, forward or aft, wanting a full working crew
+on the keen qui vive. The life boats remained on outswung davits; boat
+drills for passengers as well as crew were features of the daily programme.
+Regulations concerning light and smoking on deck after dark were rigidly
+enforced. Fuel was never spared in the effort to widen the blue gulf
+between the steamship and those waters wherein she had so nearly met her
+end. By day a hunted thing, racing frantically toward a port of refuge in
+the West, all her stout fabric labouring with titanic pulsations, shying in
+panic from the faintest suspicion of smoke upon the horizon, the _Assyrian_
+slipped into the grateful obscurity of night like a snake into a thicket,
+made herself akin to its densest shadows, strained hopelessly not to be
+outdistanced by its fugitive mantle.
+
+And the benison of unseasonably clement weather was hers; day after shining
+day, night after placid night, the Atlantic revealed a singularly gracious
+humour, mirrored the changeful panorama of the heavens in a surface little
+flawed. So that the most squeamish voyagers, as well as those most beset
+with fears, slept sweetly in the comfort of their berths.
+
+Lanyard, however, never went to bed without first securing his door so that
+it might be opened by force alone; and never slept without a pistol beneath
+his pillow.
+
+But the truth is, he slept little. For the first time in his history he
+learned what it meant to will sleep to come and have his will defied. He
+lay for hours staring wide-eyed into darkness, hearkening to the steady
+throbbing of the engines, unable to dismiss the thought that their every
+revolution brought him so much nearer to America, so much the nearer to
+his hour with Ekstrom. In vain he sought to fatigue his senses by
+over-indulgence in his weakness for gambling. Day-long sessions at poker
+and auction in the smoking room--where he found formidable antagonists,
+principally in the persons of Crane, Bartlett Putnam, Velasco, Bartholomew,
+Julius Becker and Baron von Harden--served only to forward his financial
+fortunes; his luck was phenomenal; he multiplied many times that slender
+store of English banknotes with which he had embarked upon this adventure.
+But he left each exhausting sitting only to toss upon a wakeful pillow or
+to roam uneasily the dark and desolate decks, a man haunted by ghosts of
+his own raising, hagridden by passions of his own nurturing....
+
+About two o'clock on the third night (the first outside the danger zone,
+when every other passenger might reasonably be expected to be in his berth)
+Lanyard lay in a deck-chair deep in shadows, wondering if it was worthwhile
+to go below and woo sleep in his stateroom. By way of experiment he shut
+his eyes. When after a moment he opened them again he was no longer alone.
+
+Some distance away, at the rail, the woman of Stateroom 27 was standing
+with her back to Lanyard, looking intently forward, unquestionably ignorant
+of his presence.
+
+Without moving, he watched in listless incuriosity till he saw her
+straighten and stand away from the rail as if bracing herself against some
+crisis.
+
+A man was coming aft from the entrance to the main companionway, impatience
+in his stride--a tall man, of good carriage, muffled almost to the heels in
+a heavy ulster, a steamer-cap well forward over his eyes. But the light was
+poor, the pale shine of the aged moon blending trickily with the swaying
+shadows; Lanyard was unable to place him among the passengers. There was
+a suggestion of Lieutenant Thackeray--but that one was handicapped by one
+shell-shattered arm, whereas this man had the use of both.
+
+He demonstrated that promptly, taking the girl into them. She yielded
+herself gladly, with a hushed little cry, hiding her face in the bosom of
+his ulster, clinging to him.
+
+This, then, was an assignation prearranged! Miss Cecelia Brooke had a lover
+aboard the _Assyrian_, a lover whom she denied by day but met in stealth by
+night!
+
+And yet, after that first, swift embrace, their conduct became oddly
+unloverlike. The man released her of his own initiative, held her by the
+shoulders at arm's length. There was irritation in his manner. He seemed
+tempted to shake the young woman.
+
+"Celia! what madness!"
+
+So much, at least, Lanyard overheard; the rest was a mumble into the hand
+which the girl placed over the man's lips. She cried breathlessly: "Hush!
+not so loud!"
+
+And then she remembered to guard her own voice. In an undertone she spoke
+passionately for a moment. The man interrupted in a tone of profound
+vexation. She drew away, as if hurt, caught him up as he hesitated for a
+word, returned, clung to the lapels of his coat, her accents rapid and
+pitiful, eloquent of explanation, entreaty, determination. The man lifted
+his hands to her wrists, broke her grasp, cut her brusquely short, put her
+forcibly from him. She sobbed softly....
+
+Thus swiftly the scene suffered disillusioning transition. The pretty
+fiction of lovers meeting in secret was no more. Remained a man annoyed to
+the verge of anger, a woman desperately importunate.
+
+The wind, sweeping aft, carried broken snatches of their communications:
+
+"... _all I have ... could not let you go_...."
+
+"_Insanity_!"
+
+"_I was desperate_...."
+
+"... _drive me mad with your nonsense_...."
+
+Lanyard sat up, scraping his chair harshly on the deck. Stricken mute,
+the pair at the rail moved only to turn his way the pallid ovals of their
+faces.
+
+Heedless of the prohibition, he struck a vesta, cupped its flame in his
+hands, bending his face close and deliberately lighting a cigarette.
+Appreciably longer than necessary he permitted the flare to reveal his
+features. Then he blew it out, rose, sauntered to the rail, cast the
+cigarette into the sea, went aft and so below, satisfied that the girl must
+have recognised him and so knew that her secret was safe.
+
+But it was in an oddly disgruntled humour that he turned in--he who had
+been so ready to twit Crane with his fantastic speculations concerning
+the English girl, who had himself been the readiest to endue her with the
+romantic attributes becoming a heroine of her country's Secret Service!
+What if he must now esteem her in the merciless light of to-night's
+exposure, as the most pitiable of all human spectacles, a poor lovesick
+thing sans dignity, sans pride, sans heed for the world's respect, a woman
+pursuing a man weary of her?
+
+He resented unreasonably the unreasonable resentment which the affair
+inspired in him.
+
+What was it to him? He who had struck off all fettering bonds of common
+human interests, who had renounced all common human emotions, who had set
+his hand against all mankind that stood between him and that vengeful
+purpose to which he had dedicated his life! He, the Lone Wolf, the
+heartless, soulless, pitiless beast of prey!
+
+God in Heaven! what was any woman to him?
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ON THE BANKS
+
+
+Unaccountably enough in his esteem, and more and more to Lanyard's
+exasperation, the evil flavour of that overnight incident lasted; it
+tinctured distastefully his first waking thoughts; and through all that
+fourth day at sea his mood was dark with irrational depression.
+
+And the fifth day and the sixth were like unto the fourth.
+
+Constantly he caught himself on watch for the young woman, wondering how
+she would comport herself toward him, unwilling witness though he had been
+to that shabby scene.
+
+But, save distantly at meal times, he saw nothing of her.
+
+And though he knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was
+studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy
+stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the
+sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was
+nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at
+another encounter between the Brooke girl and her reluctant lover....
+
+Then that happened which lent the business another complexion altogether.
+Its second phase, of close development, drew toward an end. Subtle
+underlying forces began to stir in their portentous latency.
+
+The rapiers which thus far had merely touched, shivering lightly against
+each other, measuring each its opponent's strength, feeling out his skill,
+fell apart, then re-engaged in sharp and deadly play. Steel met steel and,
+clashing, struck off sparks whose fugitive glimmerings lightened measurably
+the murk....
+
+On the sixth night out, at eleven o'clock as a matter of routine, the
+smoking room was closed for the night, terminating an uncommonly protracted
+and, in Lanyard's esteem, irksome sitting at cards. Well tired, he went
+immediately to his quarters, undressed, stretched out in his berth, and
+switched off the light.
+
+Incontinently he found himself bedevilled by thoughts that would not rest.
+
+For upward of an hour he lay moveless, seeking oblivion in that very effort
+to preserve immobility, while the _Assyrian_, lunging heavily on her way,
+moaned and muttered tedious accompaniment to the chant of the working
+engines.
+
+Despairing at length, and fretted by the closeness of his quarters, he got
+up, dressed sketchily, and was shrugging into his fur-lined coat when he
+heard the door to the adjoining stateroom open and close, stealth in the
+sound of it.
+
+At that he hung up his overcoat, and threw himself down with a book on the
+lounge seat beneath the port. The novel was dull enough in all conscience;
+for that matter no tale within the compass of the cunningest weaver of
+words could have enthralled his temper at that time.
+
+He read and read again page after page, but without intelligence.
+
+Between his eyes and the type-blackened paper mirages of the past trembled
+and wavered; old faces, old scenes, old illusions took unsubstantial form,
+dissolved, blended, faded away: a saddening show of shadows.
+
+His heavy eyelids drooped; slumber's drowsy vestments trailed lazily
+athwart the sea of consciousness....
+
+A slight noise startled him, either the shutting of the door to Stateroom
+27, or the sound of the book dropping from his relaxed grasp. He sat up and
+consulted his watch. The hour was half after twelve.
+
+The ship's bell sounded remotely a single, doleful stroke.
+
+He might have dozed five minutes or fifteen--long enough at least to leave
+its tantalising effect of sleep desperately desirable, mockingly elusive,
+almost grasped, whisked beyond grasping. And with this he was aware of
+something even less tangible, a sense of something amiss, of something
+vaguely wrong, as of an evil spirit stalking furtively through the darkened
+labyrinth of the ship ... as impalpable and ineluctable as miasmic
+exhalations of a morass....
+
+Lanyard passed a hand across his forehead. Had he been dreaming, then? Was
+this merely the reaction from some bitter nightmare? He could not remember.
+
+On sheer impulse he stood up, extinguished the light, opened the door. As
+he did this he noted that a light burned in Stateroom 27, visible through
+the ventilating grille. So the girl must have returned while he slept. Or
+had she neglected to turn the switch when she went out? He could not be
+certain.
+
+On the threshold he paused a little, attentive to the familiar rumour of
+the ship by night: the prolonged sloughing of riven waters down the side,
+gnashing of swells hurled back by the bows, sibilance of draughts in
+alleyways, groaning of frames, a thin metallic rattle of indeterminate
+origin, the crunching grind of the steering gear, the everlasting
+deep-throated diapason of the engines, somewhere aft in that tier of
+staterooms a persistent human snore ... nothing unusual, no alarming
+discordance....
+
+Yet the feeling that mischief was afoot would not be still.
+
+Lanyard moved down to the junction of the thwartship passage with the
+fore-and-aft alleyway.
+
+Here he commanded a view of the promenade-deck landing and the main
+companionway, all in darkness but for a feeble glimmer of reflected
+starlight through the open deck port on the far side of the vessel. Beyond
+this the rail was stencilled against the dull face of the sea with its far
+lifting and falling horizon; within, no more was visible than the dimmed
+whiteness of the forward partition, the dense, indefinite mass of balusters
+winding up to the boat-deck, and the flat plane of the tiled landing.
+
+On this last, near the mouth of the port alleyway, half obscured by the
+intervening balusters, something moved, something huge, black, and formless
+swayed and writhed strangely, and in the strangest silence, like a dumb,
+tormented misshapen brute transfixed to one spot from which its most
+anguished efforts might not avail to budge it.
+
+Lanyard ran forward, rounded the well of the companionway, and pulled up.
+
+Now the nature of the thing was revealed. Blackly silhouetted against the
+square of the doorway two human figures were close-locked and struggling
+desperately, straining, resisting, thrusting, giving, recovering ... and
+all with never a sound more than the deadened thump of a shifting foot or
+the rasp of hard-won breathing.
+
+For several seconds the spectator could not distinguish one contestant from
+the other. Then a change in the fortunes of war enabled him to make out
+that one was a woman, the other, and momentarily more successful, a man.
+Slender and youthful and strong, she fought with the indomitable fury of
+a pantheress. He on his part had won this much temporary advantage--had
+broken the woman's clutch upon his throat and was bending her back over
+his hip, one hand fumbling at her windpipe, the other imprisoning her two
+wrists.
+
+Yet she was far from being vanquished. Even as Lanyard moved toward the
+pair, she drove a savage knee into the man's middle and, as he checked
+instantaneously with a grunt of pained surprise, regained her footing and
+planted both elbows against his chest, striving frantically to free her
+hands.
+
+Simultaneously Lanyard took the fellow from behind, wound an arm around his
+neck, jerked his head sharply back, twisted his forearm till he released
+the woman's wrists, and threw him with a force that must have jarred his
+every bone.
+
+The woman staggered back against the partition, panting and sobbing beneath
+her breath. The man rebounded from his fall with astonishing agility, and
+flew back at Lanyard. An object in his right hand gave off the dull gleam
+of polished steel.
+
+Lanyard, his automatic in his stateroom, in the pocket of the overcoat
+where he had deposited it when meaning to go out on deck, lacked any means
+of defense other than his two hands; but his one-time fame as an amateur
+pugilist had been second only to his fame as a connaisseur d'art; and to
+one whose youth had been passed in association with the Apaches of Paris,
+some mastery of la savate was an inevitable accomplishment.
+
+A lightning coup de pied planted a heel against one of the man's shins,
+and his onslaught faltered in a gust of curses. Then the point of his jaw
+received the full force of Lanyard's right fist with all the ill will
+imaginable behind it. The man reared back, reeled into the black mouth of
+the alleyway, fell heavily.
+
+Even so, he demonstrated extraordinary vitality and appetite for
+punishment. He had no more gone down than the adventurer, peering into the
+gloom, saw him struggle up on his knees. Instantly Lanyard made toward
+him, intent on finishing this work so well begun, but in his second stride
+tripped over a heavy body hidden in the shadows, and pitched headlong.
+Falling, he was conscious of a flashing thing that sped past his cheek,
+immediately above his shoulder. There followed an echoing thud against the
+forward partition.
+
+Picking himself up smartly, Lanyard crept several paces down the alleyway,
+flattening against the wall, straining his vision, listening intently,
+rewarded by neither sign nor sound of his antagonist.
+
+That one must have been swift to advantage himself of Lanyard's tumble.
+If he had not vanished into thin air, or gone to earth in some untenanted
+stateroom thereabouts, he found in the close blackness of that narrow
+passage a cloak of positive invisibility to cover his escape.
+
+And there is little wisdom in stalking an armed man whom one cannot see,
+with what little light there is at one's own back.
+
+So Lanyard went back to the landing, stepping carefully over the obstacle
+which had both thrown him and saved his life--the supine body of a third
+man, motionless; whether dead or merely insensible, he did not stop to
+investigate. His immediate concern was for the woman.
+
+As he came upon her now, she stood en profile to the partition, tugging
+strongly at something embedded in the woodwork close by her side, between
+her waist and armpit. At the sound of his approach she looked up with a
+tremor of apprehension quickly calmed.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin! If you please--"
+
+Lanyard, in no way surprised to recognise the voice of Miss Cecelia Brooke,
+stepped closer. "What is it?" he enquired; and then, bending over to look,
+found that her cloak was pinned to the partition by the blade of a heavy
+knife buried a full half of its considerable length.
+
+"He threw it as you fell," the girl explained. "I was in the direct line."
+
+"Permit me, mademoiselle...."
+
+He laid hold of the haft of the weapon and with some difficulty withdrew
+it.
+
+"Who was it?" he asked, weighing the knife in his palm and examining it as
+closely as he could without the aid of light.
+
+There was no reply. Directly her cloak was freed, the girl had moved
+hastily away to the body over which Lanyard had stumbled. He heard an
+imploring whisper--"Please!"--and looked up to see her on her knees.
+
+"Who, then, is this?" he demanded, joining her.
+
+"Lionel--Lieutenant Thackeray. Please--O please!--tell me he is not dead."
+
+Her voice broke; he saw her slender body convulsed with racking emotions.
+Kneeling, Lanyard made a hasty and superficial examination, necessarily no
+more under the conditions.
+
+"His heart beats," he announced--"he breathes. I do not think him seriously
+injured." He made as if to get up. "I will get a light--a flash-lamp from
+my stateroom--or, better still, the ship's surgeon--"
+
+Her hand fell upon his arm. "Please, no! Not that--not now. Later, if
+necessary; but now--surely, you can help me carry him to his stateroom."
+
+"You know the number?"
+
+"It's close by--30."
+
+"Find it, and light up. No--leave this to me; I can carry him without
+assistance."
+
+The girl rose and disappeared. Lanyard passed his arms beneath the
+Englishman's body, gathered him into them, and struggled to his feet: no
+inconsiderable task.
+
+Light gushed from an open doorway, the third aft from the landing.
+Staggering, the adventurer entered and deposited the body upon the berth.
+Immediately the girl closed and bolted the door, then passed between him
+and the berth to bend over the unconscious man. He lay in deep coma, limbs
+a-sprawl, unpleasant glints of white between his half-closed eyelids, his
+breathing stertorous through parted lips. Free of its sling, his wounded
+arm dangled over the edge of the berth. In putting him down, Lanyard had
+remarked that its sleeve had been slit to the shoulder, and that its
+bandages were undone. Now, in amazement, he saw the arm was firm and
+muscular, with an unbroken skin, never a sign of any injury in all its
+length.
+
+Gently the girl lifted the lieutenant's head to the light, discovering a
+hideously bruised swelling at the base of the skull, blood darkly matting
+the close-clipped hair.
+
+She requested without looking round: "Water, please--and a towel."
+
+Obediently Lanyard ran hot and cold water into the hand-basin in equal
+proportions.
+
+"Would it not be well now to call the ship's surgeon?" he suggested
+diffidently.
+
+"Is that necessary? I am something of a nurse. This is simply a bad
+contusion--no worse, I believe. He was struck down from behind, a cowardly
+blow in the dark, as he started to go up on deck. I had been waiting for
+him. When he didn't come I suspected something was wrong. I came down,
+found him lying there, that brute kneeling over him."
+
+She spoke coolly enough, in contrast with the high excitement that inflamed
+her eyes as she turned away from the berth.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin, are you armed?"
+
+"I have this," he said, exhibiting the knife thrown by the would-be
+murderer--a simple trench dagger, without distinguishing marks of any sort.
+
+"Then take this, please." Extracting an automatic pistol from a holster
+belted beneath Thackeray's coat, she proffered it. "You won't mind staying
+here a moment, standing guard, while I fetch a dressing from my room?"
+
+Before he could utter a word of protest she had slipped out into the
+alleyway, shutting the door behind her.
+
+When several minutes had passed the adventurer found himself beset by
+increasing concern. This long delay seemed not only inconsistent with her
+solicitude, but indicated a possibility that the girl had braved unwisely
+the chance of a resumption of hostilities on the part of her late and as
+yet anonymous assailant.
+
+Darkening the room as a matter of common-sense precaution, Lanyard, pistol
+in hand, stepped out into the alleyway in time to see the girl in the act
+of rising from her knees on the landing, near the spot where Thackeray had
+fallen. The light of her flash-lamp was blotted out as she came hurriedly
+aft.
+
+Perplexed, he turned back and switched on the light as she entered.
+
+Her eyes challenged his almost defiantly.
+
+"Was I long?" she asked, breathless. "I dropped something...."
+
+Lanyard bowed without speaking. Instinctively he knew that she was lying;
+and divining this in his attitude, she coloured and, disconcerted, turned
+away. For a moment, while she busied herself arranging on a convenient
+chair an assortment of first-aid accessories, he fancied that her
+half-averted face wore a look of sullen chagrin, with its compressed lips,
+downcast eyes, and faintly gathered brows.
+
+But directly she needed assistance, and requested it of him in a subdued
+and impersonal manner, showing a countenance devoid of any incongruous
+emotion.
+
+Lanyard, lifting the lieutenant's head and heavy torso, helped turn him
+face downward on the berth, then stood aside, thoughtfully watching the
+girl's deft fingers sop absorbent cotton in an antiseptic wash and apply it
+to the injury.
+
+After a little, he said: "If mademoiselle has no more immediate use for
+me--"
+
+"Thank you, monsieur. You have already done so very much!"
+
+"Then, if mademoiselle will supply the name of this assassin--"
+
+"I know it no more than you, monsieur!" She glanced up at him, startled.
+"What do you mean to do?"
+
+"Why, naturally, lodge an information with the captain concerning this
+outrage--"
+
+"Oh, please, no!"
+
+At a loss, Lanyard shrugged eloquently.
+
+"Not yet, at all events," she hastened to amend. "Let Lionel judge what is
+best to be done when he comes to."
+
+"But, mademoiselle, who can say when that will be?" He pointed out the
+ugly, ragged abrasion in the young Englishman's scalp exposed by the
+cleansing away of the clotted blood. "No ordinary blow," he commented;
+"something very like a slung-shot or a loaded cane did that work. If I may
+venture again to advise--unless mademoiselle is herself a surgeon--"
+
+Her colour faded and she caught her breath sharply. "You think it as
+serious as all that?"
+
+"I do not know. Such a blow might easily fracture the skull, possibly bring
+about a concussion of the brain. Regard, likewise, his laborious breathing.
+I most assuredly advise consulting competent authority."
+
+She did not immediately answer, turning back undivided attention to her
+task; but he noticed that her hands were tremulous, however, dextrously
+they finished dressing and bandaging the hurt; and deep distress troubled
+the handsome eyes she turned to his when she rose.
+
+"You are right," she murmured--"unquestionably right, monsieur. We must
+have the surgeon in...."
+
+But when Lanyard advanced a hand toward the bell-push, to call the steward,
+she interposed in quick alarm:
+
+"No--if you please, a moment; I must have time to think!" Her slender
+fingers writhed together in her agony of doubt and irresolution. "If only I
+knew what to do...."
+
+Lanyard was dumb. There was, indeed, nothing helpful he could offer, who
+was without a solitary tangible or trustworthy clue to the nature of this
+strange business.
+
+He owned himself sadly mystified. In the light--or, rather, the shadow--of
+this latest development, his revised suspicions seemed unwarranted to the
+point of impertinence; unless, of course, one assumed the unknown assailant
+to be a rejected lover or wronged husband. And somehow one did not, in
+the presence of this clear-eyed, straight-limbed, courageous young
+Englishwoman, so wanting in self-consciousness.
+
+And yet ... what the deuce was she to this man whom, indisputably, she
+followed against his wish?
+
+And what conceivable chain of circumstances linked their fortunes with his,
+and that double burglary of the first night out with this murderous assault
+of to-night?
+
+Nor was to-night's work, considered by itself, lacking in questionable
+features.
+
+Why had Thackeray carried that sound arm in a sling? How had its bandages
+come to be unwrapped? Not in struggles before being placed hors de combat,
+for he had never had a chance to resist. Had his assailant, then, unwrapped
+it subsequently? If so, with what end in view?
+
+Why had this Miss Cecelia Brooke, surprising the thug at his work, joined
+battle with him so bravely and so madly without calling for help?
+
+What hidden motive excused this singular hesitation to summon the surgeon,
+this reluctance to inform the officers of the ship?
+
+What duplicity was that which the girl had paraded concerning her
+procrastination when Lanyard had surprised her on her knees out there on
+the landing?
+
+If this were what Lanyard had first inclined to think it, Secret Service
+intrigue, surely it was weirdly intricate when an English girl hesitated
+to safeguard an Englishman by taking into her confidence the officers of a
+British ship, British manned!
+
+Nevertheless, and however much he might wonder and doubt, Lanyard would
+never question her. Never of his own volition would he probe more deeply
+into this mystery, take one farther step into the intricacies of its maze.
+
+So, in silence, he waited, passively courteous, at her further service if
+she had need of him, content if she had not, tolerant of her tacit prayer
+for time in which to think a way out of her difficulties.
+
+After some few moments he grew uncomfortably aware that he had become the
+object of a speculative regard not at all unfavourable.
+
+He indulged in a mental gesture of resignation.
+
+Then what he had feared befell, not altogether as he had apprehended, but
+in the girl's own fashion, if without material difference in the upshot.
+
+"I am afraid," said she in an even voice, so quietly pitched as to be
+inaudible to any eavesdropper. "This becomes a task greater than I had
+dreamed, more than my wits can cope with. Monsieur Duchemin...."
+
+She hesitated. He bowed slightly. "If mademoiselle can make any use of my
+poor abilities, she has but to command me."
+
+"We--I have much to thank you for already, monsieur, much more than I can
+ever hope to reward adequately--"
+
+"Reward?" he echoed. "But, mademoiselle--!"
+
+"Please don't misunderstand." She flushed a little, very prettily. "I am
+simply trying to express my sense of obligation, not only for what you have
+already done, but for what I mean to ask you to do."
+
+Again he bowed, without comment, amiably receptive.
+
+She resumed with perceptible effort: "I can trust you--"
+
+"You must make sure of that before you do," he warned her, smiling.
+
+"I am sure," she averred gravely.
+
+"You know nothing concerning me, mademoiselle--pardon! For all you know
+I may be the greatest rogue in Christendom. And I must tell you in all
+candour, sometimes I think I am."
+
+"What I may or may not know concerning you, Monsieur Duchemin, is
+immaterial as long as I know you are what you have proved yourself to me, a
+gentleman, considerate, generous, brave, and--not inquisitive."
+
+He was frankly touched. If this were flattery, tone and manner robbed it of
+fulsomeness, rendered it subtle beyond the coarser perceptions of the man.
+He knew himself for what he was, knew himself unworthy; and that part
+of him which was unaffectedly French, whether by accident of birth or
+influence of environment, and so impulsive and emotional, reacted in
+spontaneous gratitude to this implicit acceptance of him for what he strove
+to seem to be.
+
+"Mademoiselle is gracious beyond my deserts," he protested. "Only let me
+know how I may be of use...."
+
+"In three ways: Continue to be lenient in your judgments, and ask me no
+more questions than you must because ... I may not answer...." Her hands
+worked together again. She added unhappily, in a faint voice: "I dare not."
+
+That, too, moved him, since he had been far from lenient in his judgments.
+He responded the more readily: "All that is understood, mademoiselle."
+
+"Please go at once back to your stateroom, and as quietly as possible.
+There is a bare chance you were not recognised, that nobody knows who came
+to my aid to-night. If you can slip away without attracting attention, so
+much the better for us, for all of us. You may not be suspected."
+
+"Trust me to use my best discretion."
+
+"Lastly ... take and keep this for me, till I ask you for it again. Hide it
+as secretly as you can. It may be sought for, is certain to be if you are
+believed to be in my confidence. It must not be found. And I may not want
+it again before we land in New York."
+
+She extended a hand on whose palm rested a small and slender white
+cylinder, no longer and little thicker than the toy pencil that dangles
+from a dance-card: a tight roll of plain white paper enclosed in a wrapping
+of transparent oiled silk, gummed fast down its length and, at either end,
+sealed with miniature blobs of black wax.
+
+"Will you do this for me, Monsieur Duchemin? I warn you, it may cost you
+your life."
+
+He took it, his temper veering to the whimsical. "What is life?" he
+questioned. "A prelude--perhaps an overture to that great drama, Death. Who
+knows? Who cares?"
+
+She heard him in a stare. "You place no value on life?"
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have lived nearly thirty years in this world,
+three years in the theatre of war, seldom far from the trenches of one
+front or another. I tell you, I know death too well...."
+
+He shrugged and put the roll of paper away in a pocket.
+
+"You understand it must not be taken from you under any circumstance? As a
+last resort, it must be destroyed rather than yielded up."
+
+"It shall be," he said quietly. "Is there anything more?"
+
+She shook her head, thoughtfully knuckling her underlip.
+
+"How can I communicate with you in event of necessity after we get to New
+York?" she asked.
+
+"I shall stop for a week or two at the Hotel Knickerbocker."
+
+"If anything should happen"--with a swift glance of anxiety toward the
+motionless figure in the berth--"if anything should prevent my calling for
+it within a week after our arrival, you will be good enough to deliver it
+to--" She caught herself up quickly, the unuttered words trembling on her
+lip. "I will write down the address of the person to whom you will deliver
+it, and slip it underneath the door between our rooms--first making
+certain you are there to receive it--if I do not ask you to return
+the--thing--before we land."
+
+"That shall be as you will."
+
+"When you have memorized the address you will destroy it?"
+
+"Depend on that."
+
+"I think that is all. Thank you, Monsieur Duchemin--and good-night."
+
+She extended her hand. He saluted it punctiliously with fingertips and
+lips.
+
+"If you will put out the light, mademoiselle, it may aid me to get away
+unseen."
+
+She nodded and offered him Thackeray's pistol. "Take this. O, I have
+another with me."
+
+Lanyard accepted the weapon and, when she had darkened the room, opened the
+door, slipped out, and closed it behind him so noiselessly that the girl
+could not believe he was gone.
+
+Nothing hindered his return to Stateroom 29.
+
+Fully two minutes after he had locked himself in he heard the distant
+clamour of the annunciator, calling a steward to Stateroom 30.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+UNDER SUSPICION
+
+
+He sat for a long time on the edge of his berth, elbow on knee, chin in
+hand, unstirring, gaze fixed upon that little cylinder of white paper
+resting in the hollow of his palm, in profoundest concentration pondering
+the problems it presented: what it was, what possession of it meant to
+Michael Lanyard, what safe disposition to make of it pending welcome relief
+from this unsought and most unwelcome trust.
+
+This last question alone bade fair to confound his utmost ingenuity.
+
+As for what it was, Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true
+focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too
+momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the
+most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails which
+England herself controlled.
+
+Solely to prevent this communication from reaching America, Lanyard
+believed, Germany had sown mines broadcast in all the waters which the
+_Assyrian_ must cross, and had commissioned her U-boats, without fail and
+at whatever cost, to sink the vessel if by any accident she won safely
+through the mine-fields.
+
+In the effort to steal this secret, German spies had sailed on the
+_Assyrian_ knowing well the double risk they ran, of being shot like rats
+if found out, of being drowned like neutrals if the ship went down through
+the efforts of their compatriots.
+
+It was the zeal of Potsdam's agents, seeking the bearer of this secret,
+which had caused the rifling of Miss Brooke's luggage when she fell under
+suspicion, thanks to her clandestine way of coming aboard; and through the
+same agency young Thackeray had been all but murdered when suspicion, for
+whatever reason, shifted to him.
+
+To insure safe transmission of this communication, England had held the
+_Assyrian_ idle in port, day after day, while her augmented patrols scoured
+the seas, hunting down ruthlessly every submarine whose periscope dared
+peer above the surface, and while her trawlers innumerable swept the
+channels clear of mines.
+
+To prevent its theft, Lieutenant Thackeray had invented the subterfuge of
+the "wounded" arm, amid whose splints and bandages (Lanyard never doubted)
+the cylinder had been secreted.
+
+Finally, it was as a special agent, deep in her country's confidence, that
+this English girl had smuggled herself aboard at the last moment, bringing,
+no doubt, this very cylinder to be transferred to the keeping of Lieutenant
+Thackeray or, perhaps, another confrere, should she find reason to think
+herself suspected, her trust endangered.
+
+Nothing strange in that; women had served their countries in such
+capacities before; the secret archives of European chancellories are
+replete with their records. Lanyard himself remembered many such women,
+brilliant mondaines from many lands domiciled in that Paris of the so-dead
+yesterday to serve by stealth their respective governments; but never, it
+was true, a woman of the caste of Cecelia Brooke; unless, indeed, this were
+an actress of surpassing talent, gifted to hoodwink the most skeptical and
+least susceptible of men.
+
+And yet....
+
+Lanyard's train of thought faltered. New doubt of the girl began to shadow
+his meditations. Contradictory circumstances he had noted intruded,
+uninvited, to challenge overcredulous conclusions concerning her.
+
+Would any secret agent worth her salt invite suspicion by making such a
+conspicuously furtive embarkation, by such ostentatious avoidance of her
+fellow passengers, by surrounding herself with an atmosphere of such
+palpable mystery? Would such an one confess she had a "secret" to an utter
+stranger, as she had to Lanyard that first night out? Would she, under any
+conceivable circumstances, entrust to that same stranger that selfsame
+secret upon whose inviolate preservation so much depended?
+
+And would she make love-trysts on the decks by night?
+
+Would a brother-agent take her in his arms, then reprove her with every
+symptom of vexation for her "madness," her "insanity," her "nonsense" that
+was like to "drive me mad"?--Thackeray's own words!
+
+Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits for some plausible reading of this
+riddle.
+
+Was this Brooke girl possibly (of a sudden he sat bolt upright) a Prussian
+agent infatuated with this young Englishman and by him beloved in spite of
+all that forbade their passion?
+
+Did not this explanation reconcile every apparent inconsistency in her
+conduct, even to the entrusting to a stranger of the stolen secret, the
+purloined paper she dared not keep about her lest it be found in her
+possession?
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. Visibly his features hardened. If this surmise of
+his were any way justified in the outcome, he promised Miss Cecelia Brooke
+an hour of most painful penitence.
+
+Woman or not, she need not look for mercy from him, who must ever be
+merciless in his dealings with Ekstrom's crew.
+
+To be made that one's tool!
+
+The very thought was intolerable....
+
+As for himself, possession of this paper meant that pitfalls were digged
+for his every step.
+
+If ever the British found cause to suspect him, his certain portion would
+be to face a firing squad in dusk of early day.
+
+If, on the other hand, these Prussian agents on board the _Assyrian_ ever
+got wind of the fact that the cylinder was in his care, his fate was apt to
+be a knife between his ribs the first time he was caught alone and--with
+his back to the assassin.
+
+Two courses, then, were open to him: the most sensible and obvious, to go
+straightway to the captain of the _Assyrian_, report all that he knew or
+surmised, and turn over the paper for safekeeping; one alternative, to hide
+the cylinder so absolutely that the most drastic search would overlook it,
+yet so handily that he could rid himself of it at an instant's notice.
+
+But the first course involved denunciation of the Brooke girl. And what
+if she were innocent? What if, after all, these doubts of her were the
+specious spawn of facts misinterpreted, misconstrued? What if she proved to
+be all she seemed? Could he, even though what he had warned her he might
+be, the greatest rogue unhung, be false to a trust reposed in him by such a
+woman?
+
+As to that, there was no question in his mind; he would never betray her,
+lacking irrefutable conviction that she was an employee of the Prussian spy
+system.
+
+Then how to hide the paper?
+
+Kneeling, Lanyard drew from beneath the berth his bellows-bag, selected
+from its contents a black japanned tin case containing a rather elaborate
+though compact trench medicine kit, the idle purchase of an empty afternoon
+in London. Extracting from its fittings a small leather-covered case, he
+replaced the kit, relocked and shoved the bag back beneath the berth.
+
+Then, standing over the hand-basin, he opened the leather-covered case. Its
+velvet-lined compartments held a hypodermic syringe and needle, and a glass
+phial of twenty-four one-thirtieth grain morphia tablets.
+
+Uncorking the phial, he shook out all the tablets, replaced three, then
+slid the paper cylinder into the tube; it fitted precisely, concealed by
+the label of the manufacturing chemist, leaving room for six more tablets.
+Lanyard inserted four on top of the cylinder, moistening the lowermost
+slightly to make it stick, recorked the phial, and returned it to its
+compartment.
+
+Next he dissolved three morphia tablets in a little water in the bottom of
+a glass, filled the syringe with the strong solution, fitted on the needle,
+squirted most of the contents down the waste-pipe, and consigned the
+remaining tablets to the same innocuous fate.
+
+Finally he replaced needle and syringe in the case, let the glass which had
+held the solution stand without rinsing, and put the open case upon the
+shelf above the basin.
+
+A light tapping sounded on the panels of his door.
+
+"Well? Who's there?"
+
+"Your steward, sir. Captain Osborne's compliments, an' 'e'd like to see you
+in 'is room as soon as convenient, sir."
+
+"You may say I will come at once."
+
+"'Nk you, sir."
+
+A summons to have been expected as a sequel to the surgeon's report after
+attending Lieutenant Thackeray; none the less, Lanyard had not expected it
+so soon.
+
+Authority, he reflected, ran true to form afloat as well as ashore; it was
+prompt enough when required to apply a pound or so of cure. Surely the
+officers, at least the captain, must have been advised why this voyage
+was apt to prove exceptionally hazardous; and surely in the light of such
+information it had been wiser to set armed watches on every deck by night,
+rather than permit the lives of passengers to be imperilled through the
+possible activities of Prussian agents among them incogniti.
+
+And now that he was reminded of it, was not this, perhaps, but a device of
+the enemy's to decoy him from the comparative safety of his stateroom?
+
+It was with a hand in his jacket pocket, grasping Thackeray's automatic,
+that he presently left the room. The alleyway, however, was deserted except
+for his steward; who, as he appeared, turned and led the way up to the
+boat-deck.
+
+Rounding the foot of the companionway, Lanyard contrived a hasty glance
+down the port alleyway. The door to Stateroom 30 was on the hook; a light
+burned within. Outside a guard was stationed, a sailor with a cutlass: the
+first application of the pound of cure!
+
+At the heels of his guide, he approached a door in the deck-house, devoted
+to officers' accommodations, beneath the bridge. Here the steward knocked
+discreetly. A heavy voice grumbling within was stilled for a moment, then
+barked a sharp invitation to enter. The steward turned the knob, announced
+dispassionately "Monseer Duchemin," and stood aside. Lanyard entered a
+well-lighted room, simply but comfortably furnished as the captain's office
+and sitting room; sleeping quarters adjoined, the head of a berth with a
+battered pillow showing through a door a foot or so ajar.
+
+Four persons were present; the notion entered Lanyard's head that a fifth
+possibly lurked in the room beyond, spying, eavesdropping: not a bad scheme
+if Thackeray had an associate on board whose identity it was desirable to
+keep under cover.
+
+The door closed gently behind him as he stood politely bowing, conscious
+that the four faces turned his way were distinguished by a singular variety
+of expression.
+
+Miss Cecelia Brooke was nearest him, beside a chair from which she had
+evidently just risen, her pretty young face rather pale and set, a scared
+look in her candid eyes.
+
+Beyond her, the captain sat with his back to a desk: a broad-beamed,
+vigorous body, intensely masculine, choleric by habit, and just now in an
+extraordinarily grim temper, his iron-gray hair bristling from his
+pillow, and his stout person visibly suffering the discomfort of wearing
+night-clothes beneath his uniform coat and trousers. Bending upon Lanyard
+the steel-hard regard of small, steel-blue eyes, he drummed the arms of his
+chair with thick and stubby fingers.
+
+To one side, standing, was the third officer, a Mr. Sherry, a youngish man
+with a pleasant cast of countenance which temporarily wore a look, rarely
+British, of ingrained sense of duty at odds with much embarrassment.
+
+Lastly Mr. Crane's lanky person was draped, with its customary effect of
+carelessness, on one end of the lounge seat. He looked up, nodded shortly
+but cheerfully to Lanyard, then resumed a somewhat quizzical contemplation
+of the half-smoked cigar which etiquette obliged him to neglect in the
+presence of a lady.
+
+"This is the gentleman?" Captain Osborne queried heavily of the girl.
+Receiving a murmured affirmative, he continued: "Good morning, Monsieur
+Duchemin.... Thanks, Miss Brooke; we won't keep you up any longer
+to-night."
+
+He rose, bowed stiffly as Mr. Sherry opened the door for the girl, and when
+she was gone threw himself back into his chair with a force which made it
+enter a violent protest.
+
+"Sit down, sir. Daresay you know what we want of you."
+
+"It is not difficult to guess," Lanyard admitted. "A sad business,
+monsieur."
+
+"Sad!" the captain iterated in a tone of harsh sarcasm. "That's a mild name
+to give murder."
+
+Even had it not been blurted violently at him, that word was staggering.
+The adventurer echoed it blankly. "You can't mean Lieutenant Thackeray--?"
+
+"Not yet, though doctor says it may come to that; the poor chap's in a bad
+way--concussion."
+
+"So one feared. But monsieur said 'murder'...."
+
+Captain Osborne sat forward, steely gaze mercilessly boring into Lanyard's
+eyes. "Monsieur Duchemin," he said slowly, "Lieutenant Thackeray was not
+the only passenger to suffer through to-night's villainy. The other died
+instantly."
+
+"In God's name, monsieur--who?"
+
+"Bartholomew."
+
+"Mr. Bartholomew!" A memory of that brisk little body's ruddy, cheerful,
+British personality flashed athwart the screen of memory. Lanyard murmured:
+"Incredible!"
+
+"Murdered," the captain proceeded, "in Stateroom 28. Lieutenant Thackeray
+and he were friends, shared the suite. Apparently Mr. Bartholomew heard
+some unusual noise in 30 and left his berth to investigate. He was struck
+down from behind as he approached the communicating door. The murderer had
+got in by way of the sitting room, 26."
+
+Mr. Sherry added in an awed voice: "Frightful blow--skull crushed like an
+eggshell."
+
+There was a pause. Crane thoughtfully relighted his cigar, and wrapped his
+right cheek round it. The captain glared glassily at Lanyard. Mr. Sherry
+looked, if possible, more uncomfortable than ever. Lanyard pondered,
+aghast.
+
+Ekstrom's work, of a certainty! This was his way, the way he imposed upon
+his creatures. Ekstrom, ever a killer, obsessed by the fallacious notion
+that dead men tell no tales....
+
+And Bartholomew had been in this mess with Thackeray, both of them
+operatives of the British Secret Service!
+
+"Miss Brooke has given her version of the attack on Lieutenant Thackeray,"
+the captain pursued. "Be good enough to let us have yours."
+
+Succinctly Lanyard recounted the happenings between the moment when
+premonition of evil drew him from his stateroom and the moment when he
+returned thereto.
+
+He was at pains, however, to omit all mention of the cylinder of paper;
+that, pending definite knowledge to the contrary, was a sacred trust, a
+matter of his honour, solely the affair of the Brooke girl.
+
+The captain squared himself toward Lanyard, his face louring, his jaw
+pugnacious.
+
+"How did you happen to be up and dressed at that late hour, so ready to
+respond to this--ah--premonition of yours?"
+
+"I sleep not well, monsieur. It was my intention to go on deck and
+endeavour to walk off my insomnia."
+
+Captain Osborne commented with a snort.
+
+"Why did you leave Miss Brooke alone before she called the doctor?"
+
+"At mademoiselle's request, naturally."
+
+"You'd been deuced gallant up to that time. I presume it didn't occur to
+you that the young woman might need further protection?"
+
+Lanyard shrugged. "It did not occur to me to refuse her request, monsieur."
+
+"Didn't it strike you as odd she should wish to be left alone with
+Lieutenant Thackeray?"
+
+"It was not my affair, monsieur. It was her wish."
+
+"Excuse me, cap'n." Crane sat up. "I'd like to ask Mr. Lanyard a question."
+
+But Lanyard had prepared himself against that, and acknowledged the touch
+with a quiet smile and the hint of a bow.
+
+"Monsieur Crane...."
+
+"U.S. Secret Service," Crane informed him with a grin. "Velasco spotted
+you--had seen you years ago in Paruss--tipped me off."
+
+"So one inferred. And these gentlemen?" Lanyard indicated the captain and
+third officer.
+
+"I wised them up--had to, when this happened."
+
+"Naturally, monsieur. Proceed...."
+
+"I only wanted to ask if you noticed anything to make you think perhaps
+there was an understanding between Miss Brooke and the lieutenant?"
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"I ain't curious why you should. What I want to know is, did you?"
+
+"No, monsieur," Lanyard lied blandly.
+
+"The little lady didn't seem to take on more'n she naturally would if the
+lieutenant'd been a stranger, eh?" "How to judge, when one has never seen
+mademoiselle distressed on behalf of another?"
+
+Crane abandoned his effort, resuming contemplation of his cigar.
+
+"Now we come to the point. Monsieur Lanyard, or whatever your name is."
+
+"I have found Duchemin very agreeable, monsieur le capitaine."
+
+"I daresay," Captain Osborne sneered. He hesitated, glowering in the
+difficulty of thinking. "See here, Monsieur Duchemin--since you prefer that
+style--I'm not going to beat about the bush with you. I'm a plain man,
+plain-spoken. They tell me you reformed. I don't know anything about that.
+It's my conviction, once a thief, always a thief. I may be wrong."
+
+"Right or wrong, monsieur might easily be less offensive."
+
+The captain's dark countenance became still more darkly congested.
+Implacable prejudice glinted in his small eyes. Nor was his temper softened
+by the effrontery of this offender in giving back look for look with a calm
+poise that overshadowed his arrogance of an honest, law-abiding man.
+
+He made a vague gesture of impatience.
+
+"The point is," he said, "this crime was accompanied by robbery."
+
+"Am I to understand I am accused?"
+
+"Nobody is accused," Crane cut in hastily.
+
+"You have found no clues--?"
+
+"Nary clue."
+
+"What I want to say to you, Monsieur Duchemin, is this: the stolen property
+has got to be recovered before this ship makes her dock in New York.
+It means the loss of my command if it isn't. It means more than that,
+according to my information; it means a disastrous calamity to the Allied
+cause. And you're a Frenchman, Monsieur--Duchemin."
+
+"And a thief. Monsieur le capitaine must not forget his pet conviction."
+
+"As to that, a man can't always be particular about the tools he employs. I
+believe the old saying, set a thief to catch a thief, holds good."
+
+"Do I understand," Lanyard suggested sweetly, "you are about to honour me
+by utilizing my reputed talents, by commissioning a thief to catch this
+thief of to-night?"
+
+"Precisely. You know more of this matter than any of us here. You were at
+hand-grips with the murderer--and let him get away."
+
+"To my deep regret. But I have told you how that happened."
+
+"Seems a bit strange you made no real effort to find out what the scoundrel
+looked like."
+
+"It was dark in that alleyway, monsieur."
+
+The captain made an inarticulate noise, apparently meant to convey an
+effect of ironic incredulity. More intelligible comment was interrupted by
+a ring of the telephone. He swung around, clapped receiver to ear, snapped
+an impatient "Well?" and listened with evident exasperation.
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. This business of telephoning was conceivably
+well-timed; not improbably the captain was receiving the report of somebody
+who had been sent to search Stateroom 29 in Lanyard's absence. He wondered
+and, wondering, glanced at Crane, to find that gentleman watching him with
+a whimsical glimmer which he was quick to extinguish when the captain said
+curtly, "Very good, Mr. Warde," and turned back from the telephone, his
+manner more than ever truculent.
+
+"Mr. Lanyard," he said--"Monsieur Duchemin, that is--a valuable paper has
+been stolen, an exceedingly valuable document. I don't know which carried
+it, Lieutenant Thackeray or Mr. Bartholomew. But I do know such a paper was
+in their possession. And to the best of my knowledge, we three were the
+only ones on board that did know it. And it has disappeared. Now, sir, you
+may or may not be deeper in this affair than you have admitted. If you are,
+I'd advise you to own up."
+
+"Monsieur le capitaine implies my complicity in this dastardly crime!"
+
+Osborne shook his head doggedly. "I imply nothing. I only say this: if you
+know anything you haven't told us, my advice is to make a clean breast of
+it."
+
+"I have nothing to tell you, monsieur, beyond the fact that I find you,
+your tone, your manner, and your choice of words, intolerably insolent."
+
+"Then you know nothing--?"
+
+"Monsieur!" Lanyard cried sharply.
+
+"Very good," the captain persisted. "I'll take your word for it--and give
+you till we take on our pilot to find the real criminal and make him give
+up that paper."
+
+"And if I fail?"
+
+"Not a soul on board leaves the _Assyrian_ till the murderer and thief are
+found--if they are not one."
+
+"But that is a general threat; whereas monsieur has honoured me by
+making this a personal matter. What punishment have you prepared for
+me specifically, if I fail to accomplish this task which baffles
+your--shrewdness?"
+
+"I'll at least inform the port authorities in New York, tell them who you
+are, and have you barred out of the country."
+
+"I want to say, Lanyard," Crane interposed, "this isn't my notion of how to
+deal with you, or in any way by my advice."
+
+"Thank you, monsieur," the adventurer replied icily, without removing his
+attention from the captain. "What else, Captain Osborne?"
+
+"That is all I have to say to you to-night, sir. Good-night."
+
+"But I have something more to say to you, monsieur le capitaine. First, I
+desire to give over to you this article which it will doubtless please you
+to consider stolen property." Lanyard placed the automatic pistol on the
+desk. "One of Lieutenant Thackeray's," he explained; "at Miss Brooke's
+suggestion, I borrowed it as a life-preserver, in event of another brush
+with this homicidal maniac."
+
+"She told us about that," Osborne said heavily, fumbling with the weapon.
+"What else, sir?"
+
+"Only this, monsieur le capitaine: I shall use my best endeavour to uncover
+the author of these crimes. If I succeed, be sure I shall denounce him. If
+I succeed only in securing this valuable paper you speak of, be equally
+sure you will never see it; for it shall leave my hands only to pass into
+those which I consider entirely trustworthy."
+
+"The devil!" Captain Osborne leaped from his chair quaking with fury. "You
+dare accuse me of disloyalty--!"
+
+"Now you mention it...." Lanyard cocked his head to one side with a
+maddening effect of deliberation. "No," he concluded--"no; I wouldn't
+accuse you of intentional treason, monsieur; for that would involve an
+imputation of intelligence...."
+
+He opened the door and nodded pleasantly to Crane and the third officer.
+
+"Good-night, gentlemen," he said silkily. "Oh, and you, too, Captain
+Osborne--good-night, I'm sure."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+IN STATEROOM 29
+
+
+In spite of his own anger, something far from being either assumed or
+inconsiderable, Lanyard was fain to pause, a few paces from the deck-house,
+and laugh quietly at a vast and incoherent booming which was resounding in
+the room he had just quitted--Captain Osborne trying to do justice to
+the emotions inspired in his virtuous bosom by the cheek of this damned
+gaol-bird.
+
+But suddenly, reminded of the grim reason for all this wretched brawling,
+Lanyard shrugged off his amusement. Beneath his very feet, almost a man
+lay dead, another perhaps dying, while the beast who had wrought that
+devilishness remained at large.
+
+He comprehended in a wondering regard that wide, star-blazoned arch of
+skies, that broad, dark, restful mystery of waters, that still, sweet world
+of peace through which the _Assyrian_ forged, muttering contentedly at her
+toil ... while Murder with foul hands and slavering chops skulked somewhere
+in the darkened fabric of her, somewhere beyond that black mouth of the
+deck-port yawning at Lanyard's elbow.
+
+From that same portal a man came abruptly but quietly, saw Lanyard standing
+there, gave him a staring look and grudging nod, and strode forward to the
+captain's quarters: Mr. Warde, the first officer.
+
+Lanyard recollected himself, and went below.
+
+Still the sailor guarded the door in that port alleyway; but now it stood
+wide, and Cecelia Brooke was on its threshold, conversing guardedly with
+the surgeon. Even as Lanyard caught sight of them, the latter bowed and
+turned aft, while the girl retreated and refastened the door on its hook.
+
+Thus reminded of Crane's shrewd questions, Lanyard was speculating rather
+foggily concerning the reason therefor as he turned down the passage to
+his own quarters. What had the American noticed, or been told, to make him
+surmise covert sympathy between the girl and the lieutenant?
+
+He caught himself yawning. Drowsiness buzzed in his brain. He had an
+incoherent feeling that he would now sleep long and heavily. Entering his
+stateroom, he put a shoulder against the door, pushing it to as he fumbled
+for the switch. The circumstance that the lights were no longer burning as
+he had left them failed to impress him as noteworthy in view of his belief
+that, by the captain's orders, Mr. Warde had been ransacking his effects in
+his absence.
+
+But when no more than a click responded to a turn of the switch, the room
+remaining quite dark, Lanyard uttered an imprecation, abruptly very wide
+awake indeed.
+
+Before he could move he stiffened to positive immobility: the cool, hard
+nose of a pistol had come into contact with his skull, just behind the ear.
+
+Simultaneously a softly-modulated voice advised him in purest German: "Be
+quite still, Herr Lanyard, and hold up your hands--so! Also, see that you
+utter no sound till I give you leave.... Karl, the handkerchief."
+
+Lanyard stood motionless, hands well elevated, while a heavy silk blindfold
+was whipped over his eyes and knotted tight at the back of his head.
+
+"Now your paws, Herr Lone Wolf--put them together behind your back,
+prudently making no attempt to reach a pocket."
+
+Obediently Lanyard permitted his wrists to be caught together with a second
+silk handkerchief. He could feel a slight sensation of heat upon his hands,
+and guessed that this was caused by the light of a flash-lamp held close
+to the flesh. None the less he took the chance of clenching his fists and
+tensing the muscles of his wrists.
+
+"Tightly, Karl."
+
+The bonds were made painfully fast. Still it did not seem to occur to his
+captors to oblige their prisoner to open his hands and relax his wrists.
+Lanyard perceived a glimmer of hope in this oversight: the enemy was
+normally stupid.
+
+"Now the lights again."
+
+After a little wait, during which he could hear the bulbs being pressed
+back into their sockets, the switch clicked once more.
+
+"And now, swine-dog!"--the pistol tapped his skull significantly--"if you
+value your life, speak, and speak quickly. Where is that document?"
+
+"Document?" Lanyard repeated in a tone of wonder.
+
+"Unless you are eager to explore the hereafter, tell us where we may find
+it without delay."
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know what you're talking about."
+
+"You lie!" the German snapped. "Face about!"
+
+Somebody grasped his shoulders roughly and swung him round to the light,
+the nose of the pistol shifting to press against his abdomen.
+
+"Search him, Karl."
+
+Unseen hands investigated his pockets cunningly. As they finished, the man
+who answered to the name of Karl became articulate for the first time,
+following a grunt of disappointment:
+
+"Nothing--he has it not upon him."
+
+"Look more thoroughly. Did you think him idiot enough to carry it where
+you'd find it at the first dip? Imbecile!"
+
+For the purpose of this second search Lanyard's garments were ripped
+open, and the enemy made sure that he carried nothing next his skin more
+incriminating than a money-belt, which was forcibly removed.
+
+"His shoes--see to his shoes!" the first speaker insisted irritably. "Sit
+down, Lanyard!"
+
+A petulant push sent the adventurer reeling across the cabin to fall upon
+the lounge seat beneath the port. With some effort he assumed a sitting
+position, while Karl, kneeling, hastily unlaced and tore off his shoes and
+socks.
+
+"Nothing, captain," was the report.
+
+"Damnation!... Continue to search his luggage. Leave nothing unexamined.
+In particular look into every hole and corner where none but a fool would
+attempt to hide anything. This fine gentleman imagines we value his
+intelligence too highly to believe he would leave the paper in plain
+sight."
+
+To an accompaniment of sounds indicating that Karl was obeying his
+superior, this last resumed in a tone of lofty contempt:
+
+"How is it you have abandoned the habit of going armed, Herr Lone Wolf?
+That is not like you. Is it that you grow unwary through drug-using? But
+that matters nothing. We have more important business to speak over, you
+and I. You will be very, very docile, and answer promptly, also in a low
+voice, if you would avoid getting hurt. Do you understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," Lanyard replied, furtively working at the bonds on his wrists.
+
+"Good. We speak together like good friends, yes?"
+
+"Naturally," said Lanyard. "It is so conducive to chumminess to be caressed
+with an automatic pistol--you've no idea!"
+
+"Oblige by speaking German. Our ears are sick with all this bastard
+English. Also, more quietly speak. Do not put me to the regrettable
+necessity of shooting you."
+
+"How regrettable? You didn't stick at braining those others--"
+
+"Hardly the same thing. You are not like those English swine. You are
+French; and Germany has no hatred for France, but only pity that it so
+fatuously opposes manifest destiny. In truth, you are not even French, but
+a great thief; and criminals have no patriotism, nor loyalty to any State
+but their own, the state of moral turpitude."
+
+The speaker interrupted himself to relish his wit with a thick chuckle. And
+Lanyard's jaws ached with the strain of self-control. He continued to pluck
+at the folds of silk while concentrating in effort to memorise the voice,
+which he failed utterly to place. Undoubtedly this animal was a shipboard
+acquaintance, one who knew him well; but those detestable German gutturals
+disguised his accents quite beyond identification.
+
+"For all that, you are not wise so to try my patience. I permit you five
+minutes by my watch in which to make up your mind to surrender that
+document."
+
+"How often must I tell you," Lanyard enquired, "all this talk of documents
+is Greek to me?"
+
+"Then you have five minutes to brush up your classical education, and
+translate into terms suited to your intelligence. I will have that document
+from you or--in four more minutes--shoot you dead."
+
+To this Lanyard said nothing. But his patient attentions to the
+handkerchief round his wrists were beginning perceptibly to be rewarded.
+
+"Moreover, Herr Lanyard, you will do yourself a very good turn by
+confessing--entirely aside from saving your life."
+
+"How is that?"
+
+"Providing you persuade me of your good faith, I am empowered to offer you
+employment in our service."
+
+Lanyard's breath passed hardly through a throat swollen with rage, chagrin,
+and hatred, all hopelessly impotent. But he succeeded in preserving an
+unruffled countenance, as his captor's next words demonstrated.
+
+"You are surprised, yes? You are thinking it over? Take your time--you have
+three minutes more. Or perhaps you are sulky, resenting that our cleverness
+has found you out? Be reasonable, my good man. Think: you cannot be
+insensible to the honour my offer does you."
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+"First, that paper--thereafter to use your surpassing talents to the glory
+of God and Fatherland. In addition, you will be greatly rewarded."
+
+"Now you do begin to interest me," Lanyard said coolly.... Surely he could
+contrive some way to slay this beast with his naked hands! He must play for
+time.... "How rewarded?"
+
+"As I say, with a place in the Prussian Secret Service, its protection,
+freedom to ply your trade unhindered in America, even countenanced, till
+that country becomes a German province under German laws."
+
+"But do I hear you offer this to a Frenchman?"
+
+"Undeceive yourself. Men of all nations to-day, recognising that the star
+of Germany is in the ascendant, that soon all nations will be German,
+are hastening to make their peace beforehand by rendering Germany good
+service."
+
+"Something in that, perhaps," Lanyard admitted thoughtfully.
+
+"Think well, my friend.... Yes, Karl?"
+
+The voice of the other spy responded sullenly: "Nothing--absolutely
+nothing."
+
+"Two minutes, Herr Lanyard."
+
+Of a sudden Lanyard's face was violently distorted in a grimace of terror.
+He lurched his shoulders forward, openly struggling with his bonds.
+
+"But--good God!" he protested in a voice of terror, "you can't possibly be
+so unreasonable! I tell you, I haven't got your damned paper!"
+
+A loop of the handkerchief slipped over one hand.
+
+"Be still! Cease your struggles. And not so loud, my friend!" The
+peremptory voice dropped into mockery as Lanyard, pale and exhausted, sat
+back trembling--and a second loop of silk dropped over the other hand. "So
+you begin to appreciate that we mean business, yes? One minute and thirty
+seconds!"
+
+"Have mercy!" the adventurer whined desperately--and licked his lips as if
+he found them dry with fear. Now both hands were all but wholly free. True:
+he remained blindfolded and covered by a deadly weapon. "Give me a chance.
+I'll do anything you wish! But I can't give you what I haven't got."
+
+"Be silent! Here, Karl."
+
+There was a sound of unintelligible murmuring as the two spies conferred
+together. Lanyard writhed in apparent extremity of terror. His hands were
+free. He sought hopelessly for inspiration. What to do without arms?
+
+"Be grateful to Karl. He urges that perhaps you know nothing of the
+document."
+
+"Don't you think I'd tell if I did know?"
+
+"Then you have one minute--no, forty seconds--in which to pledge yourself
+to the Prussian Secret Service."
+
+"You want me to swear--?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Then hear me," said Lanyard earnestly: "_You damned canaille_!" And in
+one movement he tore the bandage from his eyes and launched himself head
+foremost at the man who stood over him.
+
+He caught part of an oath drowned out by the splitting report of a pistol
+that went off within an inch of his ear. Then his head took the man full
+in the belly, and both went sprawling to the deck, Lanyard fighting like a
+maniac.
+
+Sheer luck had guided clawing fingers to the right wrist of his antagonist,
+round which they shut like jaws of a trap. At the same time he wrenched the
+other's arm high above his head.
+
+Momentarily expecting the shock of a bullet from the pistol of the second
+spy, he found time to wonder that it was so long deferred, and even in
+the fury of his struggles, out of the corner of one eye caught a fugitive
+glimpse of a tallish man, masked, standing back to the forward partition in
+a pose of singular indecision, pistol poised in his grasp.
+
+Then the efforts of his immediate adversary threw him into a position in
+which he was unable to see the other.
+
+Of a sudden the stateroom was filled with the thunder of an automatic, its
+seven cartridges discharged in one brisk, rippling crash.
+
+It was as if a white-hot iron had been laid across Lanyard's shoulder.
+Beneath him the man started convulsively, with such force as almost to
+throw him off bodily, then relaxed altogether and lay limp and still,
+pinning one of Lanyard's arms under him.
+
+Its visor displaced, the face of Baron von Harden was revealed, features
+distorted, eyes glaring, a frozen mask of hate and terror.
+
+His arm free, the adventurer rolled away from the corpse in time to see the
+open window-port blocked by the body of the other spy.
+
+Gathering himself together, he snatched up the pistol that dropped from the
+inert grasp of the dead man, and levelled it at the port.
+
+But now that space was empty.
+
+He rose and paused for an instant, his glance instinctively seeking the
+ledge above the hand-basin.
+
+The hypodermic outfit was there, but minus the phial.
+
+In the alleyway rose a confusion of running feet and shouting tongues.
+A heavy banging rang on the door to Stateroom 29. Crane's nasal accents
+called upon Lanyard to open.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+OFF NANTUCKET
+
+
+Upon the authors of that commotion Lanyard wasted no consideration
+whatever. Let them knock and clamour; he had more urgent work in hand, and
+knew too well the penalty were he stupid enough to unbolt to them. Their
+bodies would dam the doorway hopelessly; insistent hands would hinder him;
+innumerable importunate enquiries would be dinned at him, all immaterial
+in contrast with this emergency, a catechism one would need an hour to
+satisfy. And all attempts would be futile to make them understand that,
+while they plagued him with futile questions, a murderer and spy and thief
+was making good his escape, being afforded ample opportunity to slough all
+traces of his recent work and resume unchallenged his place among them.
+
+No; if by any freak of good fortune, any exertion of wit or daring, that
+one were to be apprehended, it must be within the next few minutes, it
+could only be through immediate pursuit.
+
+Nor did the adventurer waste time debating the better course. With him,
+whose ways of life were ceaselessly beset by instant and mortal perils,
+each with its especial and imperative demand upon his readiness and
+ingenuity, action must ever press so hard upon the heels of thought as to
+make the two seem one.
+
+For that matter, the whole transaction had been characterised by almost
+unbelievable rapidity. And that square opening of the window-port was
+hardly vacant when Lanyard sprang to his feet; the fugitive had barely time
+to find his own upon the outer deck before Lanyard leaped after him; the
+first thumps upon the panels of his door were still echoing when he thrust
+head and shoulders out of the port and began to pump the automatic at a
+shadow fleeing aft upon that narrow breadth of planking between rail and
+wall.
+
+Then, at the third shot, the automatic jammed upon a discharged shell.
+
+Exasperated, the adventurer cast the weapon from him, shrugged hastily out
+of his unfastened coat and waistcoat, hitched tight his belt, and clambered
+through the port.
+
+Dropping to the deck, he turned in time to see the fugitive dart round the
+shoulder of the superstructure.
+
+As Lanyard gained the after rail of the promenade deck a man standing on
+the boat-deck at the head of the companion-ladder greeted him with pistol
+fire. He dodged back, untouched, and instantaneously devised a stratagem to
+cope with this untoward development.
+
+Overhead, at the side, a lifeboat hung on its davits, ready for emergency
+launching, the gap in the rail which it filled when normally swung inboard
+spanned only by a length of line. And the darkness in the shadow of the
+boat was dense, an excellent screen.
+
+Climbing upon the rail, Lanyard grasped the edge of the deck overhead and
+drew himself up undetected by his quarry, whom he espied still holding
+the head of the companion ladder, hidden from the bridge by the after
+deck-house, standing ready to shoot Lanyard should he attempt to renew the
+pursuit by that approach.
+
+At the same time, "Karl" seemed mysteriously occupied with some object or
+objects in whose manipulation he was hampered to a degree by the necessity
+under which he laboured of holding his pistol ready and dividing his
+attention.
+
+A man of good stature, broad at the shoulders, slender at the hips, he
+poised himself with athletic grace--the lower part of his face masked by
+what Lanyard took to be a dark silk handkerchief.
+
+Lanyard heard him swearing in German.
+
+Then a brisk little spray of sparks jetted from the flint and steel of a
+patent cigar-lighter in the hands of the spy. And as Lanyard rose from his
+knees after ducking beneath the line, a stream of fatter sparks spat from
+the end of a fuse.
+
+The man leaned over the rail and cast a small black object to which the
+sputtering fuse was attached, down to the main deck.
+
+As it struck midway between superstructure and stern it burst into
+brilliant flame, releasing upon the night an electric-blue glare that must
+have been visible from any point within the compass of the horizon.
+
+A yell of profane remonstrance saluted the light, and throughout the brief
+passage that followed Lanyard was conscious that pistols and rifles on the
+after deck below were making him and his antagonist their targets.
+
+Before the German could face about, Lanyard, moving almost noiselessly in
+his bare feet, had covered more than half the intervening space. In another
+breath he might have had the fellow at a disadvantage. But the distance
+was too great. Twice the automatic blazed in his face as he closed in, the
+bullets clearing narrowly--or else he fancied that their deadly cold breath
+fanned his cheek.
+
+Then the spy's weapon in turn went out of action. Half blinded, Lanyard
+clipped the man round the body and hugged him tight, exerting all his skill
+and strength to effect a throw.
+
+That effort failed; his onslaught was met with address and ability that
+all but matched his own. The animal he embraced had muscles like tempered
+springs and the cunning and fury of a wild beast in a trap. For a moment
+Lanyard was able to accomplish no more than to smother resistance in a
+rib-crushing embrace; no sooner did he relax it than all attempts to shift
+his hold were anticipated and met half way, forcing him back upon the
+defensive.
+
+Yet he was given little chance to prove himself the master. The first phase
+of the struggle was still in contest when the rear door of the smoking room
+opened and a man stepped out, paused, summed up the situation in a glance,
+seized Lanyard from behind.
+
+The adventurer felt his arms grasped by hands whose strength seemed little
+short of superhuman, and wrenched back so violently that his very bones
+cracked. Fairly lifted from his feet, he was held as helpless as an infant
+kicking in the arms of its nurse.
+
+Released, the other spy stepped back and swung his left fist viciously to
+Lanyard's jaw. Something in the brain of the adventurer seemed to let
+go; his head dropped weakly to one side. The man who had struck him said
+quietly, "Loose the fool, Ed," and followed as Lanyard reeled away,
+striking him repeatedly.
+
+For a giddy moment Lanyard was darkly conscious--as one dreams an evil
+dream--of blows raining mercilessly about his head and body, blows that
+drove him back athwartships toward a fate dark and terrible, a great void
+of blackness. He felt unutterably weary, and was weakened by a sensation of
+nausea. Beneath him his knees buckled. There fell one final blow, ruthless
+as the wrath of God.
+
+He was falling backward into nothingness, into an everlasting gulf of night
+that yawned for him....
+
+As he shot under the guard rope and into space between the edge of the deck
+and the keel of the lifeboat, the spy rounded smartly on a heel and darted
+to the smoking-room door. His confederate was in the act of stepping across
+the raised threshold. He followed, closed the door.
+
+The first officer, charging aft from the bridge, rounded the deck-house and
+pulled up with a grunt of surprise to find the deck completely deserted....
+
+The shock of icy immersion reanimated Lanyard.
+
+He felt himself plunging headlong down, down, and down to inky depths
+unguessable. The sheer habit of an accustomed swimmer alone bade him hold
+his breath.
+
+Then came a pause: he was no more descending; for a time of indeterminate
+duration, an age of anguish, he seemed to float without motion, suspended
+in frigid purgatory. Against his ribs something hammered like a racing
+engine. In his ears sounded a vast roaring, the deafening voices of a
+thousand waterfalls. His head felt swollen and enormous, on the point of
+bursting wide.
+
+Without warning expelled from those depths, he shot full half-length out of
+water, and fell back into the milky welter of the _Assyrian's_ wake.
+
+Instinctively he kept afloat with feeble strokes.
+
+The cold was bitter, as sharp as the teeth of death; but his head was now
+clear, he was able to appreciate what had befallen him.
+
+Already the _Assyrian_, forging onward unchecked, had left him well astern,
+her progress distinctly disclosed by that infernal bluish glare spouting
+from her after deck.
+
+She seemed absurdly small. Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind. Nothing so
+tiny, so insignificant, so make-believe as that silhouette of a ship could
+conceivably be that great liner, the _Assyrian_....
+
+Temporarily a burning pain in his left shoulder drove all other
+considerations out of mind. The salt water was beginning to smart in the
+raw, superficial wound made by that assassin's bullet ... back there in the
+stateroom ... long ago....
+
+Then the cold began to bite into his marrow, and he struggled manfully
+to swim, taking long, slow strokes, at first comparatively powerful, by
+insensible degrees losing force.
+
+Just why he took this trouble he did not know: for some dim reason it
+seemed desirable to live as long as possible. Withal he was aware he could
+not live. Whether careless or utterly ignorant of his fate, the _Assyrian_
+was trudging on and on, leaving him ever farther astern, lost beyond rescue
+in that weird, bleak waste. Even were an alarm to be given, were she to
+stop now and put out a boat, it would find him, if it found him at all, too
+late.
+
+The cold was killing.
+
+He felt very sleepy. Drowsily he apprehended the beginning of the end.
+His senses, growing numb with cold, presently must cease to function
+altogether. Then he would forget, and nothing would matter any more.
+
+Yet the will to live persisted amazingly. Had Lanyard wished it he could
+not have ceased to swim, at least to keep afloat. Vaguely he wondered how
+people ever managed to commit suicide by drowning; it seemed to pass human
+power to resist that buoyancy which sustained one, to let go, let one's
+self go down. Impossible to conceive how that was ever done....
+
+Why should he care to go on living?
+
+No reading that riddle!...
+
+On obscure impulse he gave up swimming, turned upon his back, floated face
+to the sky, derelict, resigning himself to the cradling arms of the sea.
+The gradual, slow rocking of the swells soothed his passion like a kindly
+opiate. The cold no more irked him, but seemed somehow strangely anodynous.
+Imperturbably he envisaged death, without fear, without welcome. What must
+be, must....
+
+For all that, life clutched at him with jealous hands. More than ever
+sleepy, before he slept that last, long sleep he must somehow solve this
+enigma, learn the reason why life continued so to allure his failing
+senses.
+
+Athwart the drab texture of consciousness wild fancies played like heat
+lightning in a still midsummer night.
+
+Death's countenance was kind.
+
+That wide field of stars, drooping low and lifting away with rhythmic
+motion, would sometime dip swiftly down to the very sea itself and,
+swinging back, take with it his soul to some remote bourne....
+
+The deeps were yielding up their mysteries. Past him a huge pale monster
+swept at furious pace, hissing grimly as it passed, like some spectral
+Nemesis pursuing the _Assyrian_.
+
+Indifferently he speculated concerning the reality of this phenomenon.
+
+The heave of a swell enabled him to glance incuriously after the steamship.
+She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted
+visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck. Even
+that now had waned to a mere glimmer, the flicker of a candle lost in the
+immensities of that night-bound world of empty sky and empty ocean. Even as
+he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that
+guttered toward its swift extinction....
+
+Why live, when one might die and, dying, find endless rest?
+
+Like a blazing thunderbolt one word rent the slumbrous web of sentience:
+_Ekstrom_!
+
+Galvanised by the flood of hatred unpent by the syllables of that name,
+Lanyard began again to swim, flailing the water with frantic arms as if to
+win somewhither by the very violence of his efforts.
+
+This the one cogent reason why he must not, could not, die....
+
+Unjust to require him to give up life while that one lived. Unfair.... It
+must not be!...
+
+Across the sea rolled a dull, brutish detonation. The swimmer, swung high
+on the bosom of a great swell, saw a vast sheet of fire raving heavenward
+from the _Assyrian_.
+
+It vanished instantly.
+
+When his dazzled vision cleared, he could see no more of the ship. He
+imagined a faint, wild rumour of panic voices, conjured up scenes of horror
+indescribable as that great fabric sank almost instantaneously, as if some
+gigantic hand plucked her under.
+
+What had happened? Had the accomplices of the dead Baron von Harden set off
+an infernal machine aboard the vessel? In the name of reason, why? They had
+got what they sought, that accursed document, whatever it was, that page
+torn from the Book of Doom. Then why...?
+
+And to what end had they exploded that light bomb on the after deck?
+
+To make the _Assyrian_ a glaring target in the night--what else? A target
+for what?...
+
+Of a sudden all rational mental processes were erased from Lanyard's
+consciousness. A wave of pure fear flooded him, body, mind, and soul. He
+began to struggle like a maniac, fighting the waters that hindered his
+flight from some hideous thing that was lifting up from the ocean's ooze to
+drag him down.
+
+He heard a voice screaming thinly, and knew it was his own.
+
+The impossible was happening to him, out there, alone and helpless on the
+face of the waters. A shape of horror was rising out of the deep to engorge
+him. He could feel distinctly the slow, irresistible heave of its bulk
+beneath him. His feet touched and slipped upon its horrible sleek flanks.
+
+His most desperate efforts were all unavailing. He could not escape. The
+thing came up too rapidly. Following that first mad thrill of contact with
+it underfoot, he was lifted swiftly and irresistibly into the air. Almost
+instantly he was floundering in knee-deep waters that parted, cascading
+away on either hand. Then, elevated well above the sea, he slid and fell
+prone upon a slimy wet surface.
+
+His clawing hands clutched something solid and substantial, an upright bar
+of metal.
+
+Incredulously Lanyard pawed the body of the monster beneath him. His hands
+passed over a riveted joint of metal plates. Looking up, he made out the
+truncated cone of a conning tower with its antennae-like periscope tubes
+stencilled black upon the soft purple of the star-strewn sky.
+
+Slowly the truth came home: a submarine had risen beneath him. He lay upon
+its after deck, grasping a stanchion that supported the small raised bridge
+round the conning tower.
+
+He sobbed a little in sheer hysteric gratitude, that this miracle had been
+vouchsafed unto him, that he had thus been spared to live on against his
+hour with Ekstrom.
+
+But when he sought to drag himself up to the bridge, he could not, he
+was too weak and faint. Ceasing to struggle, he rested in half stupour,
+panting.
+
+With a harsh clang a hatch was thrown back. Rousing, Lanyard saw several
+figures emerge from the conning tower. Men uncouthly clothed in shapeless,
+shiny leather garments, straddled and stretched above him, filling their
+lungs with the sweet air. He tried to call to them, but evoked a mere
+rattle from his throat.
+
+Two came to the edge of the bridge and stood immediately over him, fixing
+binoculars to their eyes, their voices quite audible.
+
+A pang of despair shot through Lanyard when he heard them conferring
+together in the German tongue.
+
+Death, then, was but a little delayed.
+
+Thereafter he lay in dumb apathy, save that he shivered and his teeth
+chattered uncontrollably.
+
+Through the torpor that rested like a black cloud upon his senses he caught
+broken phrases, snatches of sentences:
+
+"... _sinking fast ... struck square amidships ... broke her back_...."
+
+"... _trouble with her boats. There goes one over_!..."
+
+"... _fools jumping overboard like cattle_...."
+
+"_What's that rocket? Do the swine want us to shell their boats_?"
+
+"_Why not? They're asking for it_!"
+
+One of the officers lowered his glasses and barked a series of sharp
+commands. The crew on deck leaped to attention. One leaned over the
+conning-tower hatch and shouted to his mates below. A hatch forward of
+the tower opened, and a quick-firing gun on a disappearing carriage swung
+smoothly and silently up from its lair.
+
+The other officer, looking down, started violently.
+
+"_Verdammt_! What's this?"
+
+The first rejoined him. "Impossible!"
+
+"Impossible or not--a man or a cadaver!"
+
+"Have him up and see...."
+
+By order, two of the crew dragged Lanyard up to the bridge, supporting him
+by main strength while the officers examined him.
+
+"At the last gasp, but alive," one announced.
+
+"How the devil did he get out here?"
+
+"From the _Assyrian_--"
+
+"Impossible for any man to swim this far since our torpedo struck--"
+
+"Then he must have gone overboard before it struck--or was thrown--"
+
+A cry of alarm from the group about the gun, awaiting final orders to open
+fire upon the _Assyrian's_ boats, interrupted the conference. The officers
+swung away in haste.
+
+"Hell's fury! what's that searchlight?"
+
+"A Yankee destroyer--in all probability the one we dodged yesterday
+afternoon."
+
+"She'll find us yet if we don't submerge. Forward, there--house that gun!
+And get below--quickly!"
+
+During a moment of apparent confusion, one of the men sustaining Lanyard
+caught the attention of an officer.
+
+"What shall we do with this fellow, sir?" he enquired.
+
+"Leave him here to sink or swim as we go down," snapped the officer--"and
+be damned to him!"
+
+With a supreme effort the adventurer sank his fingers deep into the arms of
+the two men.
+
+"Wait!" he gasped faintly in German. "On the Emperor's service--"
+
+"What's that?" The officer turned back sharply.
+
+"Imperial Secret Service," Lanyard faltered--"Personal
+Division--Wilhelmstrasse Number 27--"
+
+A brilliant glare settled suddenly upon the deck of the submarine, and was
+welcomed by a panicky gust of oaths. One officer had already popped through
+the conning-tower hatch, followed by several of the crew. There remained
+only those supporting Lanyard, and the second officer.
+
+"Take him below!" the latter ordered. "He may be telling the truth. If
+not...."
+
+In the distance a gun boomed. A shell shrieked over the submarine and
+dropped into the sea not a hundred yards to starboard. The men rushed
+Lanyard toward the conning tower. He tried feebly to help them. In that
+effort consciousness was altogether blotted out....
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+SUB SEA
+
+
+When he opened his eyes again he was resting, after a fashion, naked
+between harsh, damp blankets in a narrow, low-ceiled bunk inches too short
+for one of his stature.
+
+After an experimental squirm or two he lay very still; his back and all his
+limbs were stiff and sore, his bullet-seared shoulder burned intolerably
+beneath a rudely applied first-aid dressing, and he was breathing heavily
+long, labouring inhalations of an atmosphere sickeningly dank, close, and
+foul with unspeakable stenches, for which the fumes of sulphuric acid with
+a rank reek of petroleum and lubricating oils formed but a modest and
+retiring background.
+
+Also his head felt very thick and dull. He found it extremely difficult to
+think, and for some time, indeed, was quite unable to think to any purpose.
+
+His very eyes ached in their sockets.
+
+In the ceiling glowed an electric bulb, dimly illuminating a cubicle barely
+big enough to accommodate the bunk, a dresser, and a small desk with a
+folding seat. The inner wall was a slightly concave surface of steel plates
+whose seams oozed moisture. In the opposite wall was a sliding door, open,
+beyond which ran a narrow alleyway floored with metal grating. Everything
+in sight was enamelled with white paint and clammy with the sweat of that
+foetid air.
+
+Over all an unnatural hush brooded, now and again accentuated by a rumble
+of distant voices and gusts of vacant laughter, once or twice by a curious
+popping. For a long time he heard nothing else whatever. The effect was
+singularly disquieting and did its bit to quicken torpid senses to grasp
+his plight.
+
+Sluggishly enough Lanyard pieced together fragments of lurid memories,
+reconstructing the sequence of last night's events scene by scene to the
+moment of his rescue by the U-boat.
+
+So, it appeared, he was aboard a German submersible, virtually a prisoner,
+though posing as an agent of the Personal Intelligence Department of the
+German Secret Service.
+
+To that inspiration of failing consciousness he owed his life, or such
+of its span as now remained to him, a term whose duration could only be
+defined by his ability to carry off the imposture pending problematic
+opportunity to escape. And, assuming that this last were ever offered him,
+there was no present possibility of guessing how long it might not be
+deferred.
+
+Its butcher's mission successfully accomplished, the U-boat was not
+improbably even now en route for Heligoland, beginning a transatlantic
+cruise of weeks that might never end save in a nameless grave at the bottom
+of the Four Seas.
+
+Only the matter of impersonation failed to embarrass in prospect. A natural
+linguist, Lanyard's three years within the German lines had put a rare
+finish upon his mastery of German. More than this, he was well versed in
+the workings of the Prussian spy system. As Dr. Paul Rodiek, Wilhelmstrasse
+Agent Number 27, he was safe as long as he found no acquaintance of that
+gentleman in the complement of the submarine; for, largely upon information
+furnished by Lanyard himself, Dr. Rodiek had been secretly apprehended
+and executed in the Tower the day before Lanyard left London to join the
+_Assyrian_.
+
+But the question of the U-boat's present whereabouts and its movements
+in the immediate future disturbed the adventurer profoundly. He was
+elaborately incurious about Heligoland; and several weeks' association
+with the Boche in the close quarters of a submarine was a prospect that
+revolted. Wellnigh any fate were preferable....
+
+Uncertain footsteps sounded in the alleyway, paused at the entrance to his
+cubicle. He turned his head wearily on the pillow. In the doorway stood
+a man whose slenderly elegant carriage of a Prussian officer was not
+disguised even by his shapeless wreck of a naval lieutenant's uniform, a
+man with a countenance of singularly unpleasant cast, leaving out of all
+consideration the grease and grime that discoloured it. His narrow forehead
+slanted back just a trace too sharply, his nose was thin and overlong, his
+mouth thin and cruel beneath its ambitious mustache a la Kaiser; his small
+black eyes, set much too close together, blazed with unholy exhilaration.
+
+As soon as he spoke Lanyard understood that he was drunk, drunk with more
+than the champagne of which he presently boasted.
+
+"Awake, eh?" he greeted Lanyard with a mirthless snarl. "You've slept like
+the dead man I took you for at first, my friend--a solid fourteen hours, my
+word for it! Feeling better now?"
+
+Lanyard's essays to reply began and ended in a croak for water. The
+Prussian nodded, disappeared, returned with an aluminium cup of stale cold
+water mixed with a little brandy.
+
+"Champagne if you like," he offered, as Lanyard, painfully propping himself
+up on an elbow, gulped like an animal from the vessel held to his lips. "We
+are holding a little celebration, you know."
+
+Lanyard dropped back to the pillow, the question in his eyes.
+
+"Celebrating our success," the Prussian responded. "We got her, and that
+means much honour and a long furlough to boot, when we get home, just as
+failure would have spelled--I don't like to think what. I shouldn't care to
+fill the shoes of those poor devils who let the _Assyrian_ escape them off
+Ireland, I can tell you."
+
+Something very much like true fear flickered in his small eyes as he
+pondered the punishment meted out to those who failed.
+
+So the U-boat was homeward bound! Strange one noticed no motion of her
+progress, heard no noise of machinery.
+
+"Where are we?" Lanyard whispered.
+
+"Peacefully asleep on the bottom, about five miles south of Martha's
+Vineyard, waiting till it is dark enough to slip in to our base."
+
+"Base?"
+
+The Prussian hiccoughed and giggled. "On the south shore of the Vineyard,"
+he confided with alcoholic glee: "snuggest little haven heart could wish,
+well to the north of all deep-sea traffic; and the coastwise trade runs
+still farther north, through Vineyard Sound, other side the island. Not
+a soul ever comes that way, not a soul suspects. How should they?
+The admirable charts of the Yankee Coast and Geodetic Survey"--he
+sneered--"show no break in the south beach of the island, between the ocean
+and the ponds. But there is one. The sea made the breach during a gale, our
+people helped with a little Trotyl, tides and storms did the rest. Now we
+can enter a secluded, landlocked harbour with just enough water at low
+tide, and lie hidden there till the word comes to move again--three miles
+of dense scrub forest, all privately owned as a game preserve, fenced and
+patrolled, between us and the nearest cultivated land--and friends in
+plenty on the island to keep all our needs supplied--petroleum, fresh
+vegetables, champagne, all that. Just the same we take no chances--never
+make our landfall by day, never enter or leave harbour except at night."
+
+He paused, contemplating Lanyard owlishly. "Ought not to tell you all
+this, I presume," he continued, more soberly, though the wild light still
+flickered ominously in his eyes. "But it is safe enough; you will see for
+yourself in a few hours; and then ... either you are all right, or you will
+never live to tell of it. We radio'd for information about Wilhelmstrasse
+Number 27 just before dawn, after we had dodged that damned Yankee
+destroyer. Ought to get an answer to-night, when we come up."
+
+Heavier footsteps rang in the alleyway. The Prussian made a grimace of
+dislike.
+
+"Here comes the commander," he cautioned uneasily.
+
+A great blond Viking of a German in the uniform of a captain shouldered
+heavily through the doorway and, acknowledging the salute of the rat-faced
+subaltern with a bare nod, stood looking down at Lanyard in taciturn
+silence, hostility in his blood-shot blue eyes.
+
+"How long since he wakened?" he asked thickly, with the accent of a
+Bavarian.
+
+"A minute or two ago."
+
+"Why did you not inform me?"
+
+The tone was offensively domineering, thanks like enough to drink, nerves,
+and hatred of his job and all things and persons pertaining to it.
+
+The subaltern coloured. "He asked for water--I got it for him."
+
+The commander stared churlishly, then addressed Lanyard: "How are you now?"
+
+"Very faint," Lanyard said truthfully. But he would have lied had it been
+otherwise with him. It was his book to make time in which to collect his
+thoughts, concoct a bullet-proof story, plan against an adverse answer to
+that wireless enquiry.
+
+"Can you eat, drink a little champagne?"
+
+Lanyard nodded slightly, adding a feeble "Please."
+
+The Bavarian glanced significantly at his subaltern, who hastened to leave
+them.
+
+"Who are you? What is your name?"
+
+"Dr. Paul Rodiek."
+
+"Your employment?"
+
+"Personal Intelligence Bureau--confidential agent."
+
+"What were you doing on board the _Assyrian_?"
+
+Lanyard mustered enough strength to look the man squarely in the eye.
+
+"Pardon," he said coldly. "You must know your question is indiscreet."
+
+"I must know more about you."
+
+"It should be enough," Lanyard ventured boldly, "to know that I set off
+that flare as arranged, at risk of my life."
+
+"How came you overboard?"
+
+"In the scuffle caused by my lighting the flare."
+
+"So you tell me. But we found you half clothed, lacking any sort of
+identification. Am I to accept your unsupported word?"
+
+"My papers are naturally at the bottom of the sea, in the garments I
+discarded lest their weight drag me down. If you have doubts," Lanyard
+continued firmly, "it is your privilege to settle them by communicating via
+radio with Seventy-ninth Street."
+
+He shut his eyes wearily and turned his head aside on the pillow, confident
+that this reference to the headquarters and secret wireless station of the
+Prussian spy system in New York would win him peace for a time at least.
+
+After a moment the commander uttered a non-committal grunt. "We shall see,"
+he prophesied darkly, and went away.
+
+Later, one of the crew brought Lanyard a dish of greasy stew and potatoes,
+lukewarm, with bread and a half-bottle of excellent champagne.
+
+He ate all he could stomach of the first, devoured the second ravenously,
+and drained the bottle of its ultimate life-giving drop.
+
+Then, immeasurably refreshed and fortified in body and spirit, he turned
+face to the wall, composed himself as if to sleep, shut his eyes, adjusted
+the tempo of his respiration, and lay quite still, wide awake and thinking
+hard.
+
+After a while somebody tramped into the cubicle, bent over Lanyard
+inquisitively and, satisfied that he slept, retired, taking away the empty
+bottle and dishes.
+
+Otherwise his meditations were disturbed only by those echoes of revelry
+in honour of the late manifestation of the Hun's divine right to do wanton
+murder on the high seas.
+
+The rumour waxed and waned, died into dull mutterings, broke out afresh in
+spurts of merriment that held an hysterical note. Once a quarrel sprang up
+and was silenced by the commander's deep, unpleasant tones. Corks popped
+spasmodically. Again there were sounds much like a man's sobbing; but these
+were promptly blared down by a phonograph with a typically American accent.
+When that palled, a sentimental disciple of frightfulness sang Tannenbaum
+in a melting tenor.
+
+Everything tended to effect an impression that all, commander and meanest
+mechanic alike, were making forlorn efforts to forget.
+
+Devoutly Lanyard prayed they might be successful, at least until the
+submarine made her secret base. If too much alcohol was bad, too much
+brooding was infinitely worse for the German temperament. He remembered
+one U-boat commander who, returning to the home port after a conspicuously
+successful cruise, had been taken ashore in a strait-jacket.
+
+Lanyard himself did not care to dwell upon those scenes which must have
+been enacted on board the _Assyrian_ after the torpedo struck....
+
+Deliberately ignoring all else, he set himself the task of reviewing those
+events which had led up to his going overboard.
+
+One by one he considered the incidents of that night, painstakingly
+dissected them, examined their every phase in minute analysis, weighing for
+ulterior meaning every word uttered in his presence, harking even farther
+back to reconstruct his acquaintance with each actor from the very moment
+of its inception, seeking that hint which he was convinced must be
+somewhere hidden in the history of the affair, waiting only recognition to
+lead straightway out of this gloomy maze of mystery into a sunlit open of
+understanding.
+
+In vain: there was an ambiguity in that business to baffle the keenest and
+most pertinacious investigation.
+
+The conduct of Cecelia Brooke alone bristled with inconsistencies
+inexplicable, the conduct of the German spies no less.
+
+To get better perspective upon the problem, he reduced the premises to
+their barest summary:
+
+A valuable dossier brought on board the _Assyrian_ (no matter by whom) had
+come into the possession of British agents, with the knowledge of Captain
+Osborne. Thackeray had secreted it in that fraudulent bandage. German
+agents, apparently under the leadership of Baron von Harden, had waylaid
+him, knocked him senseless, unwrapped the bandage, but somehow (probably
+in the first instance through the interference of the Brooke girl) had
+overlooked the document. Subsequently the Brooke girl had found and
+entrusted it to Lanyard. (No matter why!) He on his part had exerted his
+utmost inventiveness in hiding it away. Nevertheless it had been discovered
+and abstracted within an hour.
+
+By whom?
+
+Not improbably by the Brooke girl herself. Repenting her impulsiveness,
+after leaving Lanyard with the captain, from whom she had doubtless learned
+the truth about "Monsieur Duchemin," she might well have gone directly to
+Lanyard's stateroom and hit upon the morphia phial as the likeliest hiding
+place without delay, thanks to prior acquaintance with the proportions of
+the paper cylinder.
+
+But why should she have assumed that Lanyard had not disposed of the trust
+about his person?
+
+Not impossibly the thing had been found by the first officer of the
+_Assyrian_, searching by order of the captain--as Lanyard assumed he had.
+
+But, if Mr. Warde had found it, he had not reported his find when
+telephoning to Captain Osborne; or else the latter had gone to great
+lengths to mystify Lanyard.
+
+There remained the chance that the paper had been stolen by one of the two
+German agents--by either without the knowledge of the other.
+
+If Baron von Harden had found it--necessarily before Lanyard returned
+to the room--he had subsequently been at elaborate pains to conceal his
+success from both his victim and his confederate. Why? Did he distrust the
+latter? Again, why?
+
+If "Karl" had been the thief, it must have been after Lanyard's return,
+and while the Baron was preoccupied with the task of keeping the prisoner
+quiet, to let the search proceed.
+
+In that event "Karl" had lied deliberately to his superior. Why? Because
+the document was salable, and "Karl" intended to realize its value for his
+personal benefit?
+
+Not an unlikely explanation. Nor could this be called the first instance in
+which the Prussian spy system, admirably organized though it was, had been
+betrayed by one of its own agents.
+
+This hypothesis, too, accounted for that most perplexing circumstance of
+all, the murder of Baron von Harden. For Lanyard was fully persuaded that
+had been nothing less than premeditated murder, in no way an accident of
+faulty aim. Even the most nervous and unstrung man could hardly have missed
+six shots out of seven, point blank. A nervous man, indeed, could hardly
+have gained his own consent to take so hideous a chance of injuring or
+killing a collaborator.
+
+It appeared, then, that one of four things had happened to the cylinder of
+paper:
+
+Miss Brooke had taken it back into her own care. In which case Lanyard was
+no more concerned.
+
+Captain Osborne had secured it through Mr. Warde. This, however, Lanyard
+did not seriously credit.
+
+It had gone to the bottom when the _Assyrian_ sank with the body--among
+others--of Baron von Harden.
+
+Or "Karl" had stolen it.
+
+Privately, indeed, Lanyard rather inclined to hope that the last might
+prove to be the true solution. He desired earnestly to meet "Karl" once
+more, on equal terms. And the more counts in the score, the greater his
+satisfaction in exacting a reckoning in full.
+
+But he anticipated. That chapter might only too possibly have been closed
+forever by the hand of Death. As yet he knew nothing concerning the
+mortality of the _Assyrian_ debacle. He had not enquired of the officers of
+the U-boat because they knew little if anything more than he. Their glasses
+had discovered to them trouble with the lifeboats; they had spoken of one
+boat capsizing, of "people going overboard like cattle." There must have
+been many drownings, even with a United States destroyer near by and
+speeding to the rescue.
+
+A single question troubled Lanyard greatly. Officers and crew of the U-boat
+had betrayed profoundest consternation upon the advent of that destroyer,
+presumably a warship of a neutral nation. And that same ship had without
+hesitation fired upon the submarine.
+
+Was it possible, then, that the United States had already declared war on
+Germany?
+
+It seemed extremely probable; in such event these Germans would have been
+notified instantly by wireless from the New York bureau of their country's
+Secret Service; whereas, Captain Osborne, receiving the same advice by
+wireless, might reasonably have kept it quiet lest the news stir to more
+formidable activity those agents of the Wilhelmstrasse whose presence among
+the passengers he must at least have strongly suspected.
+
+Presently the closeness of the atmosphere began to work upon Lanyard's
+perceptions. In spite of his long rest, a new drowsiness drugged his
+senses. He yielded without struggle, knowing he would soon need every ounce
+of strength and vitality that sleep could give him....
+
+The din of an inferno startled him awake. Those narrow metal walls were
+echoing a clangour of machinery maniacal in character and overpowering in
+volume. Clankings, tappings, hissings, coughings, clatterings, stridulation
+of a wireless spark, drone of dynamos, shrewdish scolding of Diesel motors
+developing two thousand horsepower, individual efforts of some two thousand
+valves, combined--or, declined to combine--in a cacophony like nothing
+under the sun but the chant of a submersible under way on the surface.
+
+Lanyard, gratefully aware of a current of fresh air sweeping through the
+hold, rolled out of his bunk to find that, while he slept, clothing had
+been provided for him, rough but adequate; heavy woollen underwear and
+socks, a sweater, a dungaree coat, trousers of the same stuff, all vilely
+damp, and a friendless pair of oil-sodden shoes: the sweepings of a dozen
+lockers, but as welcome as disreputable.
+
+Dressed, he turned aft through the alleyway, entering immediately the
+central operating room and storm center of that typhoon of noise, a
+wilderness of polished machinery in active being.
+
+Of the score or more leather-clad machinists silent at their posts, none
+paid him more heed than a passing, incurious glance as he crossed to a
+narrow steel companion ladder and ascended to the conning tower. This he
+found deserted; but its deck-hatch was open. He climbed out to the bridge.
+
+The night was calm and heavily overcast, with no sea more than long, slow
+swells. Through its windless quiet the U-boat racketed with the raving
+abandon of the Spirit of Discord on a spree in a boiler factory. To the
+riot of its internal strife was added the remonstrance of waters sliced by
+the stem and flung back by the sides, a prolonged and stertorous hiss like
+the rending of an endless sheet of canvas.
+
+To eyes new from the electric illumination of the hold, the blackness was
+positive, with the palpable quality of an element, relieved alone by the
+dull glow of the binnacle housing the gyroscope telltale, from which the
+faintest of golden reflections struck back to pick out a pair of seemingly
+severed fists gripping the handles of the bridge steering wheel with a
+singular effect of desperation.
+
+For some moments Lanyard could see nothing more.
+
+The mirthless chuckle of the lieutenant sounded at his elbow.
+
+"So the good Herr Doctor thought he had better come up for air, eh? My
+friend, the very dead might envy you the sincerity of your slumbers. We
+have been half an hour on the surface, with all this uproar--and you are
+only just wakened!"
+
+"Half an hour?" Lanyard repeated thoughtfully. "Then we should be close
+in...."
+
+"Give us ten minutes more ... if we don't go aground in this accursed
+blackness!"
+
+A broad-shouldered body passed between Lanyard and the binnacle,
+momentarily eclipsing its light. Down below in the operating room a bell
+shrilled, and of a sudden the Diesels were silenced.
+
+The dead quiet that followed the sharp extinction of that hubbub was as
+startling as the detonation of high explosive had been.
+
+Through this sudden stillness the submarine slipped stealthily, the hissing
+beneath her bows dying down to gentle sibilance.
+
+From forward the calls of an invisible leadsman were audible. In response
+the commander uttered throaty orders to the helmsman at his elbow, and
+those unattached hands shifted the wheel minutely.
+
+Lanyard started to speak, but a growl from the captain, and a touch of the
+lieutenant's hand on his sleeve cautioned him to silence.
+
+There was a small pause. The vessel seemed to have lost way altogether, to
+swim like a spirit ship that Stygian tide. The lieutenant moved forward,
+leaving Lanyard alone. The voice of the leadsman was stilled. By the wheel
+the captain stood absolutely motionless, his body vaguely silhouetted
+against the glow of the binnacle. The hands that gripped the wheel so
+savagely were as steady as if carven out of stone. An atmosphere of
+suspense enveloped the boat like a cloud.
+
+Lanyard grew conscious of something huge and formidable, a denser shadow in
+the darkness beyond the bows, the loom of land. Off to starboard a point
+of light appeared abruptly, precisely as if a golden pin had punctured the
+black blanket of the night. The captain growled gutturals of relief and
+command. The hands on the wheel shifted, steering exceeding small. A second
+light shone out to port, then shifted slowly into range with the first,
+till the two were as one. Again the bell sang in the operating room, and
+the vessel forged ahead quietly to the urge of electric motors alone. A
+third light and a fourth appeared, well apart to port and starboard, the
+range lights precisely equidistant between them. Between these the U-boat
+moved swiftly. They swam back on either hand and were abruptly extinguished
+as if the night, resenting their insolent trespass, had gobbled both at a
+gulp.
+
+The temperature became sensibly warmer and the salt air of the sea was
+strongly tinctured with the sweet smell of pines and forest mould.
+
+Up forward carbons sputtered and spat; a searchlight was unsheathed and
+carved the gloom as if it was butter, ranging swiftly over the tree-clad
+shore of a burnished black lagoon, picking out en passant several unpainted
+wooden structures, then steadying on a long and substantial landing stage,
+on which several men stood waiting.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+AT BASE
+
+
+As the U-boat, with motors dead and way lessening, glided up alongside
+the head of that T-shaped landing stage and was made fast, the wireless
+operator popped up from below, saluted the commander, and delivered a
+written message.
+
+Lanyard, instinctively aware that this was the expected report from
+Seventy-ninth Street on Dr. Paul Rodiek, quietly pulled himself together
+and took quick observations.
+
+At best his chances in the all-too-probable emergency were far from
+brilliant. Yet one might better perish trying, however hopelessly, than
+passively submit to being shot down.
+
+The lieutenant, waspishly superintending the work of crew and base guards
+at the mooring lines, stood preoccupied within an arm's length; while the
+landing stage was a fair six feet away. From its T-head to the shore, the
+distance was nothing less than two hundred yards.
+
+Desperate action and miraculous luck might take the Prussian by surprise
+and enable one to snatch the service automatic from its holster at his
+belt, leap to the stage, and shoot a way landward through the guards
+clustered there; after which everything would depend on swiftness of foot
+and the uncertain light permitting one to gain a refuge in the surrounding
+woodland without a bullet in one's back.
+
+It was a sorry hope....
+
+With catlike attention Lanyard watched the hands holding that paper to the
+binnacle light--large hands, heavy and muscular but tremulous with drink
+and nervous reaction from the long strain and cumulative horror of the
+cruise then ending. Their aim would not be good, except by accident. None
+the less, if the report were unfavourable, their first gesture would be
+toward the holster, signalling to Lanyard that the moment had come to
+initiate heroic measures.
+
+The Bavarian was an unconscionable time absorbing the import of the
+message. Bending his face close to the paper, the better to make out the
+writing, he read with moving lips, slowly, a doltish frown of concentration
+clouding his congested countenance.
+
+At length, however, he stood up, swaying a little as he folded and pocketed
+the paper.
+
+Lanyard relaxed. The man was too far gone in drink to be crafty, too sure
+of his absolute power of life and death to imagine a need for craft. Since
+his hand had not immediately sought the holster, it would not.
+
+Turbid accents uttered the name of Dr. Rodiek.
+
+Lanyard stepped forward alertly. "Yes, Herr Captain?"
+
+"New York says it had no knowledge of your intention to leave England on
+the _Assyrian_, but that you may well have done so. The Wilhelmstrasse will
+know, of course. It has already been telegraphed. Pending its reply, I am
+to detain you."
+
+"How long?" Lanyard demurred.
+
+"As you know, transatlantic communications must now go by land telegraph to
+the Border, by hand into Mexico, thence by radio via Venezuela to Berlin.
+All that takes time. Also, we may not signal New York but at stated times
+of night. You will be detained another twenty-four hours at least, possibly
+longer."
+
+"My errand cannot wait."
+
+"It must."
+
+"You will obstruct the business of the Imperial Government at your peril."
+
+"I would incur still greater peril did I let you go," the commander replied
+nervously. "With these swine-dogs at war with the Fatherland, our lives are
+not worth _that_ should this base be betrayed."
+
+"Do I understand America has declared war?"
+
+"Two days since. Did you not know?"
+
+"The _Assyrian's_ wireless room was under guard: the captain published no
+bulletins whatever."
+
+The Bavarian gave a gesture of impatience.
+
+"You will remain on board for the night," he announced heavily.
+
+"Pardon!" Lanyard insisted with every evidence of anxious excitement.
+"What you tell me makes it more than ever imperative that I reach New York
+without an hour's avoidable delay. I warn you, think well before you hinder
+the discharge of my duty."
+
+"It is not necessary that I think," the commander replied. "My thinking has
+all been done for me. Me, I obey my orders; it is not my part to question
+their wisdom. Moreover, Herr Doctor, to my mind your insistence is to say
+the least suspicious. Even had I discretion in the matter, I should hold
+you. Therefore, you will keep a civil tongue in your head, or go below in
+irons immediately!"
+
+He swung on his heel, showing an insolent back while he conferred with his
+subaltern.
+
+And Lanyard shrugged appreciation of the futility of more contention
+against such mulishness. Not that the Bavarian was not right enough! As to
+that, one had really hoped for no better issue; but every shift is worth
+trial till proved worthless; and he was no worse off now than if he had
+submitted without complaint. Still one had Chance to look to for aid and
+comfort in this stress; and Chance, the jade, is not always unkind to her
+audacious suitors.
+
+Even now she flashed upon Lanyard a provoking intimation of her smile.
+He began to divine possibilities in this overt ill-feeling between the
+officers; advantage might be made of the racial hostility of Prussian and
+Bavarian.
+
+The commander's attitude and tone were consistently overbearing, if his
+words were inaudible to Lanyard. The lieutenant quite evidently submitted
+only in form; his salute was punctiliously correct and curt; and as the
+commander lumbered off down the landing stage, he grumbled indistinctly in
+Lanyard's hearing:
+
+"Dog of a Bavarian!"
+
+"The good Herr Captain," Lanyard suggested pleasantly, "is not in the most
+agreeable of tempers, yes?"
+
+The high and well-born lieutenant spat comprehensively into the darkness
+overside. After a moment of hesitation he moved nearer and spoke in
+confidential accents. And the fragrant air of the night was tainted with
+the vinous effluvium of his breath.
+
+"Always he prattles of his precious duty!" the Prussian muttered. "Damn his
+duty! Look you, Herr Doctor: months we have been on this cruise, yes, more
+than three months out of Heligoland, penned together in this ramshackle
+stinkpot, or isolated here in this God-forgotten hole, seeing nothing of
+life, hearing nothing of the world but what little the radio tells
+us--sick of the very sight of one another's faces! And now, when we have
+accomplished a glorious feat and have every right to look for prompt recall
+and the rewards of heroes, orders come to remain indefinitely and operate
+against the North Atlantic fleet of the contemptible Yankee navy! The life
+of a dog! And that noble commander of mine pretends to welcome it, talks
+of one's duty to the Fatherland--as if he liked the work any better than
+I!--solely to spite me!"
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Because he hates me," the lieutenant snarled passionately--"hates me even
+as I hate him--he knows how well!"
+
+He interrupted himself to define his conception of the commander's
+character in the freest vernacular of the Berlin underworld.
+
+Lanyard laughed amiably. "They are like that," he agreed--"those
+Bavarians!"
+
+Which inspired the Prussian to deliver a phosphorescent diatribe on the
+racial traits of the Bavarian people as comprehended by the North German
+junker.
+
+"To be cooped up God knows how long in this putrescent death-trap with such
+cattle," he concluded mutinously--"it passes all endurance!"
+
+"I wonder you stand it," Lanyard sympathised--"a man of spirit and good
+birth, as one readily perceives. Though the life of a secret agent is not
+altogether heavenly either, if you ask me," he added gratuitously. "Regard
+me now, charged with a mission of most vital moment--more than ever so
+since the Yankees have shown their teeth--delayed here indefinitely because
+your excellent Herr Captain chooses to doubt my word."
+
+"Patience. Maybe your release comes quickly. Then he will regret--or would
+had he wit enough. There is no cure for a fool." The sententiousness of
+this aphorism was unhappily marred by a hiccough. "Anybody with eyes in his
+head could see you are what you are...."
+
+The last of the operating-room crew piled up the hatchway, saluted, and
+hurried ashore to join in noisy jubilations. There remained on the U-boat
+only the lieutenant with Lanyard, and two base guards detailed as anchor
+watch.
+
+"I must go," the lieutenant volunteered. "And believe me, one welcomes a
+change of clothing and a dry bed after a week in this reeking sieve. As for
+you, my friend, if it lay with me, you should receive the treatment due
+a gentleman." A wave of maudlin camaraderie affected him. He passed an
+affectionate arm through Lanyard's and was suffered, though the gorge of
+the adventurer revolted at the familiarity. "I am sorry to leave you. No,
+do not be astonished! No protestations, please! It is quite true. I know a
+man of the right sort when I meet one, the sort even I can associate with
+without loss of self-respect. It is a great pity you may not come with me
+and make a night of it."
+
+"Another time, perhaps," Lanyard said. "The night may yet come when you and
+I shall meet at the Metropole or the Admiral's Palace.... Who knows?"
+
+"Ah!" sighed the Prussian, enchanted. "What a night that will be, my
+friend!... But now, it is too bad, I really must ask you to step below.
+Such are my silly orders. I am made responsible for you. What do you think
+of that for a joke, eh?"
+
+He laughed vacantly but loudly, and, attempting to poke a derisive thumb
+into Lanyard's ribs, lost his balance.
+
+"What a responsibility!" said Lanyard gravely, holding him up.
+
+"Nonsense, that's what it is. You have no possible chance to escape."
+
+"Suppose I make one--tip you overboard, take to my heels--?"
+
+"You would be shot like a rabbit before you got half way to the shore."
+
+"Ah, but grant, for the sake of argument, that these brave fellows, the
+guards, aim poorly in this gloom?"
+
+"Where would you go? Into the forest, naturally. But how far? You may
+believe me when I tell you, not a hundred yards. It's a true wilderness,
+scrub-oak and cedar and second growth choked with underbrush, almost
+trackless. In five minutes you would be helplessly lost, in this blackness,
+with no stars to steer by. We need only wait till daylight to find you
+walking in a circle."
+
+"You can't mean," Lanyard pursued, learning something helpful every moment,
+"there is no communicating road?"
+
+"The main woods road, yes: but that is far too well patrolled. Without the
+countersign, you would be caught or shot a dozen times before you reached
+the end of it."
+
+"Ah, well!"--with the sigh of a philosopher--"then I presume there's no way
+out but by swimming."
+
+"Over to the beach you mean? Well, what then? You have got a twenty-mile
+walk either way through deep sand sure to betray your footprints. At dawn
+we follow and bag you at our leisure."
+
+"You are discouraging!" Lanyard complained. "I see I may as well go below
+and be good. It's a dull life."
+
+"Tell you what," giggled the lieutenant, leading his prisoner to the
+conning-tower hatch and lowering his voice: "do just that, go below and be
+nice, and presently I will come back and we'll split a bottle. What do you
+say to that, eh?"
+
+"Colossal!"
+
+"Not a bad notion, is it? I like it myself. One gets weary for the society
+of a gentleman, you've no idea.... As soon as my commander is drunk enough,
+I will slip away. How's that?"
+
+"Grossartig!" Lanyard approved, turning to descend.
+
+"Wait. You shall see for yourself what it means to have the friendship of
+a man of my stamp." The lieutenant raised his voice, addressing the anchor
+watch: "Attention. Heed with care: this gentleman is my friend. He is
+detained merely as a matter of form. I do not wish him to be annoyed. Do
+you understand? You are to leave him to himself as long as he remains
+quietly below. But he is not to come on deck again till I return. Is all
+that clear, imbeciles?"
+
+The imbeciles, saluting mechanically, indicated glimmerings of
+comprehension.
+
+"Then below you go, Dr. Rodiek. And don't get impatient: I will rejoin you
+as soon as possible."
+
+"Don't be long," Lanyard implored.
+
+As he lowered himself through the hatch he saw the Prussian stumble down
+the gangplank and reel shoreward.
+
+Well satisfied with his diplomacy, Lanyard lingered a while in the conning
+tower, closely studying and memorising the more salient features of the
+Island of Martha's Vineyard and its adjacent waters and mainland as
+delineated on a most comprehensive large-scale chart published by the
+German Admiralty from exhaustive soundings and surveys of its own
+navigators and typographers, with corrections of as recent date as the
+first part of the year 1917.
+
+Here the breach in the south coast line which permitted the utilisation
+of what had formerly been an extensive fresh-water pond as this secret
+submarine base, was clearly shown. And a single glance confirmed the
+lieutenant's statement concerning its remote isolation from settled
+sections of the island.
+
+Somewhat dismayed, Lanyard descended to the central operating compartment
+and scouted through the hold from bow bulkhead to stern, making certain he
+enjoyed undisputed privacy. And it was so; every man-jack of the U-boat's
+personnel--jaded to the marrow with its cramped accommodations, unremitting
+toil and care, unsanitary smells and forbidding associations--having
+naturally seized the earliest opportunity to escape so loathsome a prison.
+
+Lanyard, however, was anything but resentful of condemnation to this
+solitary confinement. His interest in the interior arrangements of
+submersibles seemed all but feverish, as intense as sudden; witness the
+minute attention to detail which marked his second tour of inspection. On
+this round he took his time. He had all night in which to work out his
+salvation; the wildest schemes were revolving in his mind, the least
+fantastic utterly impracticable without accurate knowledge of many matters;
+and such knowledge might be gained only through patient investigation and
+ungrudging expenditure of time.
+
+It was now something past ten by the chronometers. He could hardly do much
+before dawn, lacking the instinct of a red Indian to guide him through
+that night-bound waste of woodland. So he felt little need to slight his
+researches through haste, except in anticipation of his lieutenant's
+return. And as to that, Lanyard was moderately incredulous: he expected to
+see nothing more of this new-found friend, unless the infatuation of the
+Prussian proved far stronger than his head.
+
+Turning first to the private quarters of the commander, a somewhat more
+commodious cubicle than that across the alleyway in which Lanyard had been
+berthed, his interest was attracted by a small safe anchored to the deck
+beneath the desk.
+
+To this Lanyard addressed himself without hesitation, solving the secret
+of its combination readily through exercise of the most rudimentary of
+professional principles. The problem it offered, indeed, was child's play
+to such cunning of touch and hearing as had made the reputation of the Lone
+Wolf.
+
+Open, the safe discovered to him a variety of articles of interest:
+some five thousand dollars in English and American banknotes of large
+denomination, several hundred in American gold; three distinct cipher
+codes, one of these wholly novel in Lanyard's experience and so, he
+believed, in the knowledge of the Allied secret services; the log of the
+U-boat and the intimate diary of its commander, both in cryptograph; a
+compact directory of German agents domiciled in Atlantic coast ports; a
+very considerable accumulation of German Admiralty orders; together with
+many documents of lesser moment.
+
+Rapidly sorting out the more valuable of these, Lanyard disposed them about
+his person, then confiscated the banknotes as indemnity for his stolen
+money-belt, replaced the rejections, and reclosed and locked the safe.
+
+His next interest was to arm himself. After several disappointments he
+discovered arms-lockers beneath the berths for the crew in the forward
+compartment just aft of that devoted to torpedo tubes. Here he selected
+a latest pattern German navy automatic pistol with three extra cartridge
+clips and, after some hesitation, a peculiarly devilish magazine rifle
+firing explosive bullets. The latter he placed handily, yet out of sight,
+near the foot of the companion ladder. The pistol fitted snugly a trousers
+pocket, its bulk hidden by the sag of his sweater....
+
+Some time later the lieutenant, slipping down the ladder, found Lanyard
+studying with a convincing aspect of childlike bewilderment the complicated
+combinations of machinery which crowded the central operating compartment.
+
+Fresh from a bath and shave and wearing a clean uniform, the Prussian
+showed vast improvement in looks if not in equilibrium. But his mouth
+twitched fitfully, his eyes wandered and disclosed a disquieting
+superabundance of white, and his tongue was noticeably thicker than before.
+
+"Well, my friend!" he said--"you are truly disappointing. The watch said
+you had made no sound since going below. I was afraid of another of those
+famous naps of yours."
+
+"With the prospect of a bottle with you? Impossible! I have been waiting
+and waiting, with my tongue hanging out."
+
+"Too bad. Why did you not look around, help yourself? Why not?" the
+lieutenant demanded. "Have I not given you freedom of ship? It is yours,
+everything here 'yours!"
+
+"I want nothing but an end to this great thirst," Lanyard protested.
+
+"Then--God in Heaven!--why we standing here? Come!"
+
+Releasing the handrail the Prussian took careful aim for the alleyway door,
+launched himself toward it, slipped on the greasy metal grating, and would
+have fallen heavily but for Lanyard.
+
+Cursing pettishly, he stood up, threw off Lanyard's arms without thanks,
+and made a new attempt, this time shooting headlong through the alleyway,
+to bring up against the wing table in the third forward compartment, the
+kitchen and messroom in one.
+
+"A great pity," he muttered, opening a locker and fumbling in its
+depths--"rotten pity...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Keep you waiting so long. Not my fault." The lieutenant brought forth two
+bottles of champagne and one of brandy. "You open them, Herr Doctor, like
+'good fellow," he said, placing the three on the table. "I just wish you
+'understand no discourtesy meant ... unavoidably detained ... beastly
+commander ... drunk. Give 'my word, hopelessly drunk. Poor fool...."
+
+"If my judgment is sound," Lanyard said, "this noble vessel will soon need
+a new commander."
+
+"True. Quite true." The Prussian placed two aluminium cups upon the table
+and half filled one with brandy, then brimmed it with champagne. "Try
+that," he said thickly, "That will keep your tail up, my friend."
+
+"Many thanks," Lanyard protested, filling another cup with undiluted
+champagne. "I prefer one thing at a time."
+
+"Unfortunate ... don't know what is good ... King's peg ... wonderful
+drink. No matter. To 'new commander--prosit!"
+
+He drained his cup at a gulp.
+
+"To the new commander!" Lanyard echoed, and drank judiciously.
+"Excellent.... How long can he last, do you think, at this pace?"
+
+"No telling--not long--too long for my liking. Shall I tell 'something?"
+He filled his cup again, half and half, and sat down, his wicked, rat-like
+face more than ever pale and repulsive. "Not 'whisper of this, mind--though
+I think 'crew sometimes suspects: he's going mad!"
+
+"Not that Bavarian?"
+
+The lieutenant nodded wisely. "If 'knew him as I know him, 'never be
+surprised, my friend. You think too much drink. Yes, but not entirely. He
+keeps seeing things, hearing them, especially by night."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+"Faces." The Prussian licked his lips, glanced furtively over his shoulder,
+and drank. "Dead faces, eyes eaten out, seaweed in their hair.... And
+voices--he's forever hearing voices ... people trying to talk, 'can't
+make him understand because 'mouths 'full of water, you know. But they
+understand one another, keep discussing how to get at him.... He tells me
+about it ... I tell you, it is Hell to hear him talk ... especially when
+submerged, as last night. Then he hears them fumbling all over the hull
+with their stumpy fingers, trying to find 'way in, talking about him. And
+he tells me, and keeps insisting, till sometimes I seem to hear them, too.
+But I don't. Before God, I don't! You don't believe I do, do you?"
+
+His eyes rolled wildly.
+
+"Why should you?"
+
+"Just so: why should I?" The lieutenant's accents rose to a shrill pitch.
+"I have not his record ... still in training when he sent _Lusitania_ to
+the bottom. Yes: it was he, second-in-command, in charge of torpedo tubes.
+His own hand fired that torpedo...."
+
+He fell silent, staring moodily into his cup, perhaps thinking of the
+number of torpedoes it had been his own lot to discharge upon errands of
+slaughter.
+
+And the dead silence of the ship was made audible by a stealthy drip-drip
+of water from the seams, and the furtive slaver of the tide on the outer
+plates.
+
+A shiver ran through the body of the Prussian. He pulled himself together
+with obvious effort, looked up with an uncertain grin, and passed a shaking
+hand across his writhing lips.
+
+"All foolishness, of course, but 'gets on one's nerves ... constant
+association with man like that.... 'Know what he's doing now, or was, when
+I came away? Sitting up with doors and windows locked and blinds drawn,
+drinking brandy neat. He can't sleep by night if sober, or without 'light
+in the room. If he does, he knows they will get him ... people he hears
+crawling up from the sea, slopping round the house, mumbling, whimpering in
+the dark--"
+
+He broke off abruptly, with a whisper more dreadful than a
+shriek--"_God_!"--and jumped to his feet, whipping the automatic from his
+belt.
+
+A footfall sounded in one of the after compartments. Others followed.
+
+Someone was coming slowly down the alleyway, someone with dragging, heavy
+feet.
+
+The lieutenant waited motionless, as one petrified with terror.
+
+The bulkhead doorway framed the figure of the commander. He paused there,
+louring at his subaltern with haunted eyes ablaze in a face like parchment.
+
+"So!" he said, nodding. "As I thought. It is thus I find you, fraternising
+with one who may be, for all we know, an enemy to the Fatherland. You
+drunken, babbling fool! Get ashore!" His angry foot thumped the grating.
+"Get ashore, and report yourself under arrest!"
+
+With no more warning than a strangled snarl, the lieutenant shot him
+through the head.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+UNDER THE ROSE
+
+
+Vague stupefaction replaced the scowl upon the countenance of the
+commander. He swayed, a hand faltering to his forehead, where dark blood
+was beginning to well from a cleanly drilled puncture. Then he collapsed
+completely, falling prone across the raised sill of the bulkhead opening. A
+convulsive tremor shook savagely his huge frame.
+
+Thereafter he was quite still.
+
+The report of that one shot had reverberated stunningly within those narrow
+walls of steel. Momentarily Lanyard looked to see the alarmed anchor watch
+appear; so too, apparently, the lieutenant, who remained immobile, pistol
+poised in a hand for the moment strangely steady, gaze fixed upon the mouth
+of the alleyway.
+
+But through a long minute no other sounds were audible than that ceaseless
+dripping from frames and seams, with that muted, terrible mouthing of
+waters on the plates.
+
+Unable either to fathom or forecast the workings of the drink-maddened
+mentality masked by that rat-like face, Lanyard waited with a hand covertly
+grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment
+that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not
+yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast of a Boche.
+
+Slowly the arm of the lieutenant dropped, lowering the pistol till its
+muzzle chattered on the top of the table: a noise that broke the spell upon
+his senses. He looked down in dull brutish wonder, then roused and with a
+gesture of horror let the weapon fall clattering.
+
+His glance shifting to the body of his commander, he started violently,
+backing up against the plates to put all possible distance between himself
+and his handiwork. His lips moved, framing phrases at first incoherent,
+presently articulate in part:
+
+"... _done it at last!... Knew I must soon_...."
+
+Abruptly he looked up at Lanyard.
+
+"Bear witness," he cried: "I was provoked beyond human endurance. He
+insulted me in your presence ... me!... that scum!"
+
+Lanyard said nothing, but met his gaze with a blank, non-committal stare,
+under which the eyes of the lieutenant wavered and fell.
+
+Then with a start he realised anew the significance of that still figure at
+his feet, and tried to shake some of the swagger back into his wretched,
+fear-racked being.
+
+"A good job!" he muttered defiantly. "And you will stand by me, I know....
+Only there is nothing in that, of course, no justification possible before
+a court martial. Even your testimony could not save me ... I am done for,
+utterly...."
+
+He hung his head. Lanyard heard whispered words: "_degraded," "dishonour,"
+"firing squad_"....
+
+A chronometer in the central operating compartment tolled eight bells.
+
+With a sharp cry the lieutenant dropped to his knees. "He can't be dead!"
+he shrilled. "It is all play-acting, to frighten me!"
+
+Frantically he sought to turn the body over.
+
+Lanyard's hand shot swiftly out, capturing the automatic on the table. With
+rapid and sure gestures he extracted and pocketed the clip, drew back the
+breech, ejecting into his palm the one shell in the barrel, and replaced
+the weapon, all before the Prussian gave over his insane efforts to
+resurrect the dead.
+
+"He is dead enough," he announced, eyeing Lanyard morosely--"beyond
+helping.... Look here; are you with me or against me?"
+
+"Need you ask?"
+
+"I count on you, then. Good. I think we can cover this up."
+
+He checked and stood for a while lost in thought.
+
+"How?" Lanyard roused him.
+
+"Simply enough: I go on deck, send the watch ashore on some trumped-up
+errand. They suspect nothing, thinking the commander and I have you in
+charge. If they heard that shot, I will say one of us dropped a bottle
+of champagne, and it exploded.... When they are gone, I bring the dory
+alongside; and with your help it should be an easy matter to carry this
+body up, weight it, row it out to the middle of the lagoon, dump it
+overboard. Then we return. Our story is, the commander followed the anchor
+watch ashore; if later he wandered off, got lost in the woods in his
+alcoholic delirium, that is no affair of ours. Do you understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," said Lanyard with a look of fatuous innocence. "But how about
+the water--is it deep enough?"
+
+The Prussian took no pains to dissemble his scorn of this question,
+seemingly so witless. "To cover the body? Why, even here there is
+sufficient depth at low tide for us to submerge completely, barring the
+periscopes. And it is deeper yet in the middle."
+
+"Thanks," Lanyard replied meekly.
+
+"Have another drink? No?" The Prussian tossed off a half cupful of
+undiluted brandy, and shuddered. "Then stop here. I'll be back in a--"
+
+"Half a minute." The lieutenant halted in the act of stepping across the
+body. Lanyard levelled a hand at the automatic. "Do you mind taking that
+with you? I have no desire to be found here with it and a dead man, should
+anything prevent your return."
+
+With a sickly grimace the murderer snatched up the weapon, thrust it in its
+holster, and hurriedly departed.
+
+Lanyard watched him pass through the alleyway and turn toward the companion
+ladder, then followed quietly.
+
+As the lieutenant climbed out on deck, Lanyard ascended to the conning
+tower and waited there, listening. He could not quite make out what was
+said; but after a few brusque words of command two pair of boots rang on
+the gangplank and thumped away down the stage. At the same time Lanyard let
+himself noiselessly out through the hatch.
+
+As soon as his vision grew reconciled to the change from light to darkness,
+he discovered the slender figure of the lieutenant skulking on tip-toe
+after the retreating anchor watch; about midway on the landing stage,
+however, he paused and bent over one of the piles, apparently fumbling with
+the painter of a small boat moored in the black shadows below.
+
+At this Lanyard began to move along the deck, one by one working the
+mooring lines clear of their cleats and dropping them gently overboard,
+till but two were left to hold the U-boat in place.
+
+Throughout he kept watch upon the manoeuvres of the lieutenant--saw him
+drop over the side of the stage, heard a thump of feet as he landed in a
+boat, and a subsequent creak of oar-locks.
+
+The small boat was rounding the bows of the submarine when the adventurer
+ducked back through conning tower to hold.
+
+He was standing where he had been left when the lieutenant came below.
+
+"It's all right," this last announced with shabby bravado as he stepped
+over the body in the doorway. "We are rid of that damned watch for a time.
+They won't return within half an hour at least. I have the dory moored
+amidships. If we are lively, this dirty job will be over in no time at
+all."
+
+Lanyard nodded. "I am ready."
+
+"No need to hurry--plenty of time for one more drink." The Prussian
+splashed brandy into the cup, filling it to the brim. "And God knows I need
+it!"
+
+Lanyard watched critically as, with head well back, he drained that
+staggering dose of raw spirit gulp by gulp without once removing the cup
+from his lips. No mortal man could drink like that and stand up under it:
+it was now a mere question of time....
+
+Hardly that: the hand of the murderer shook and wavered widely as he put
+down the cup. For a moment he swayed with eyes fixed and glazing, features
+visibly losing plasticity, then lurched forward, knocking the brandy bottle
+to the floor, swung around a full half turn in blind effort to re-establish
+equilibrium, fell backward upon the table, and lay racked from head to foot
+with savage spasms, hands clawing empty air, chest labouring vainly to win
+sufficient oxygen to combat the poison with which his system was saturated.
+
+Moving to his side, Lanyard laid a hand upon the left breast. The man's
+heart was hammering his ribs with agonizing blows, at first rapid, by
+degrees more slow and feeble.
+
+No power on earth could save him now: he had committed suicide as surely as
+murder.
+
+Wasting not another glance or thought upon him Lanyard hurried aft to the
+central operating room.
+
+The time he had spent there, an hour earlier, was by no means lost in
+purposeless marvelling. He boasted a certain aptitude for mechanics,
+perhaps legitimately inherited from that obscure origin of his, largely
+fostered by the requirements of his craft; into the bargain, he had been
+privileged ere now to gain some slight insight into the principles of
+submersible operation. If obliged to work swiftly and in some instances
+upon the advice of intuition rather than practical knowledge, he went not
+unintelligently about his task, made few false moves.
+
+Turning first to the diving controls, he adjusted the hydroplanes to their
+extreme downward inclination, then made the rounds of the vent valves,
+opening all wide. With a sharp hissing and whistling the air from the
+auxiliary tanks was driven inboard, and as Lanyard manipulated the wheels
+operating the forward and aft groups of Kingston valves, to the hissing was
+added the suck and gurgle of water flooding the main and auxiliary ballast
+and adjusting tanks.
+
+Immediately the U-boat began to sink. Lanyard delayed only to close the
+switches which controlled the electric motors. As their drone gained volume
+he grasped the rifle and swarmed up the companion-ladder, passing through
+the conning tower to deck with little or nothing to spare--with, in fact,
+barely time to throw off the two mooring lines and jump into the small boat
+before water, sweeping hungrily up over deck and bridge, began to cascade
+through conning tower and torpedo hatchways.
+
+Constrained to cut the painter lest the dory be drawn down with the
+fast-sinking submarine, he fitted oars to locks and put his back to them,
+swinging the small boat hastily clear of whirlpools which formed as the
+waves closed over the spot where the U-boat had rested.
+
+From first to last less than five minutes' activity had been needed for
+the task of scotching this water-moccasin of the salt seas and putting its
+keepers at the mercy of the country whose hospitality they had too long
+abused.
+
+Well content, after a little, Lanyard lay on his oars and contemplated with
+much interest what the night permitted to be visible: the landing stage, no
+more than a dark, vague mass in the darkness; the land picked out with but
+few lights, mainly at windows of the base buildings, painting dim ribbons
+upon the polished floor of the lagoon.
+
+Methodically these were eclipsed as a moving figure passed before them.
+
+Listening intently, Lanyard could distinguish the slow footfalls of an
+unsuspecting sentry--no other sounds, more than gentle voices of the night:
+murmurs of blind wavelets, the plaintive whisper of a little breeze belated
+amid the tree-tops of that dark forest, and a slow, weary soughing of
+swells upon the distant ocean shore.
+
+Perceiving as yet not the slightest indication of an alarm ashore, Lanyard
+ventured to continue rowing, but with utmost caution, lifting and dipping
+his blades as gingerly as though they were fashioned of brittle glass, and
+for want of a better guide keeping the stern of the dory square to the
+shank of the T-stage.
+
+In time the bows grounded lightly on sand. The melancholy voice of the sea
+now seemed a heavier sighing in the stillness. He pushed off and rowed on
+parallel with a dark shore line, so close in that his starboard oar touched
+bottom at each stroke.
+
+At intervals he paused and rested, striving vainly to garner some clue to
+his bearings. Inexorably the blackness forbade that. He might have failed
+ere dawn to grope a way out of that trap had not the disappearance of the
+submarine been discovered within the hour.
+
+A sudden clamour rose in the quarter of the landing stage, first one great
+shout of dismay, then two voices bellowing together, then others. Several
+rifle-shots were fired in the air. More lights broke out in windows ashore.
+Many feet drummed resoundingly upon the stage, and the confusion of voices
+attained a pitch of wild, hysteric uproar. Of a sudden a flare was lighted
+and tossed far out upon the bosom of the lagoon.
+
+Surprised by that sharp and merciless blue glare, Lanyard instinctively
+shipped oars and picked up the rifle. He could see so clearly that
+huddle of figures upon the head of the landing stage that he confidently
+apprehended being fired upon at any moment; but minutes lengthened and
+he was not. Either the Germans were looking for bigger game than a dory
+adrift, or the dazzling flare hindered more than aided their vision.
+
+At length persuaded that he had not been detected, Lanyard put aside the
+rifle and resumed the oars. Now his course was made beautifully clear to
+him: the blue light showed him that outlet to the sea which he sought
+within a hundred yards' distance.
+
+Presently the flare began to wane. It was not renewed. Altogether unseen,
+unsuspected, Lanyard swung the dory into the breach, and drove it seaward
+with all his might.
+
+Swiftly the lagoon was shut out by narrow closing banks. The blue glare
+died out behind a black profile of rounded dunes. Lanyard turned the bow
+eastward, rowing broadside to the shore.
+
+After something more than an hour of this mode of progress, he struck in
+toward the beach, disembarked in ankle-deep waters, slung the rifle over
+his shoulder by its strap and, pushing the dory off, abandoned it to the
+whim of the sea.
+
+Then again he set his face to the east, following the contour of the beach
+just within the wash of the tide: thereby making sure that there should
+be no trail of footprints in the sand to guide a possible pursuit in the
+morning.
+
+The rising sun found him purposefully splashing on, weary but enheartened
+by the discovery that he had left behind the more thickly wooded section of
+the island.
+
+Presently, turning in to the dry beach for the first time, he climbed
+to the summit of a dune somewhat higher than its fellows, and took
+observations, finding that he had come near to the eastern extremity of the
+island.
+
+At some distance to his right a wagon road, faintly rutted in sand and
+overgrown with beach grass, struck inland.
+
+Following this at a venture, he came, at about eight o'clock, upon the
+outskirts of a waterside community.
+
+Before proceeding he hid the magazine rifle in a thicket, then made a wide
+detour, and picked up a roadway which entered the village from the north.
+
+If his disreputable appearance was calculated to excite comment, readiness
+in disbursing money to remedy such shortcomings made amends for Lanyard's
+taciturnity. Within two hours, shaved, bathed, and inconspicuously dressed
+in a cheap suit of ready-made clothing, he was breakfasting famously upon
+the plain fare of a commercial tavern.
+
+The town, he learned, was the one-time important whaling port of Edgartown.
+He would be able to leave for the mainland on a ferry steamer sailing early
+in the afternoon.
+
+Ten minutes before going abroad he filed a long telegram in code addressed
+to the head of the British Secret Service in New York....
+
+Consequences manifold and various ensued.
+
+When the telegram had been delivered and decoded--both transactions being
+marked by reasonable promptitude--the head of the British Secret Service
+in New York called the British Embassy in Washington on the long distance
+telephone.
+
+Shortly thereafter an attache of the British Embassy jumped into a
+motor-car and had himself driven to one of the cardinal departments of the
+Federal Government.
+
+When he had kicked his heels in an antechamber upward of an hour, he was
+received, affably enough, by the head of the department, a smug, open-faced
+gentleman whose mood was largely preoccupied with illusions of grandeur,
+who was, in short, interested far more in considering how splendid it was
+to be himself than in hearing about any mare's-nest of a German U-boat base
+on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard.
+
+He was, however, indulgent enough to promise to give the matter his
+distinguished consideration in due course.
+
+He even went so far as to have his secretary make a note of what alleged
+information this young Englishman had to impart.
+
+During the night he chanced to wake up and recall the matter, and concluded
+that, all things considered, it would do no harm to give the United States
+Navy a little amusement and exercise, even if it should turn out that the
+rumour of this submarine base was a canard.
+
+So, the next morning, he went to his desk some time before noon, and issued
+a lot of orders. One of them had to do with the necessity for absolute
+secrecy.
+
+During the day several minor officials of the department might have been,
+and indeed were, observed going about their business with painfully
+tight-lipped expressions.
+
+Also many messages were transmitted by wireless, telephone, and telegraph,
+to various persons charged with the defense of the Atlantic Coast; some of
+these were code messages, some were not.
+
+That same night a great forest fire sprang up on the south shore of
+Martha's Vineyard, both preceded and accompanied by a series of heavy
+explosions.
+
+The first United States vessel to reach the lagoon found only charred
+remains of a landing stage and several buildings and, at the bottom of the
+lagoon, an incoherent mass of wreckage, a twisted and shattered chaos of
+steel plates and framework that might possibly have been a perfectly sound
+submarine, though sunken, had somebody not been warned in ample time
+to permit its destruction through the agency of trinitrotoluene, that
+enormously efficient modern explosive nicknamed by British military and
+naval experts "T.N.T.," and by the Germans "Trotyl."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+RESURRECTION
+
+
+The early editions of those New York evening newspapers which Lanyard
+purchased in Providence, when he changed trains there en route from New
+Bedford to New York, carried multi-column and most picturesque accounts of
+the _Assyrian_ disaster.
+
+But the whole truth was in none.
+
+Lanyard laid aside the last paper privately satisfied that, for no-doubt
+praiseworthy reasons of its own, Washington had seen fit to dictate the
+suppression of a number of extremely pertinent circumstances and facts
+which could hardly have escaped governmental knowledge.
+
+Already, one inferred, a sort of censorship was at work, an effective if
+comparatively modest precursor to that noble volunteer committee which was
+presently with touching spontaneity to fasten itself upon an astonished
+Ship of State before it could gather enough way to escape such cirripede
+attachments.
+
+Presumably it was not thought wise to disconcert a great people, in the
+complacence of its awakening to the fact that it was remotely at war with
+the Hun, with information that a Boche submersible was, or of late had
+been, operating in the neighbourhood of Nantucket.
+
+Unanimously the sinking of the _Assyrian_ was ascribed to an internal
+explosion of unknown origin. No paper hinted that German secret agents
+might possibly have figured incogniti among her passengers. There was
+mention neither of the flare which had burned on her after deck to make
+the _Assyrian_ a conspicuous target in the night, nor of any of the other
+untoward events which had led up to the explosion. Nothing whatever
+was said of the shot fired at the submerging U-boat by a United States
+torpedo-boat destroyer speeding to the rescue.
+
+Still, the bare facts alone were sufficiently appalling. Reading what had
+been permitted to gain publication, Lanyard experienced a qualm of horror
+together with the thought that, even had he drowned as he had expected to
+drown, such a fate had almost been preferable to participation in those
+awful ten minutes precipitated by that pale messenger of death which had so
+narrowly missed Lanyard himself as he rested on the bosom of the sea.
+
+Within ten minutes after receiving her coup de grace the _Assyrian_ had
+gone under; barely that much time had been permitted a passenger list of
+seventy-two and a personnel of nearly three hundred souls in which to rouse
+from dreams of security and take to the lifeboats.
+
+Thanks to the frenzied haste compelled by the swift settling of the ship,
+more than one boat had been capsized. Others had been sunk--literally
+driven under--by masses of humanity cascading into them from slanting
+decks. Others, again, had never been launched at all.
+
+The utmost efforts of the destroyer, fortuitously so near at hand, had
+served to rescue but thirty-one passengers and one hundred and eighty of
+the crew.
+
+In the list of survivors Lanyard found these names:
+
+  Becker, Julius--New York
+  Brooke, Cecelia--London
+  Crane, Robert T.--New York
+  Dressier, Emil--Geneva
+  O'Reilly, Edmund--Detroit
+  Putnam, Bartlett--Philadelphia
+  Velasco, Arturo--Buenos Aires
+
+Among the injured, Lieutenant Lionel Thackeray, D.S.O., was listed as
+suffering from concussion of the brain, said to have been contracted
+through a fall while attempting to aid the launching of a lifeboat.
+
+In the long roster of the drowned these names appeared:
+
+  Bartholomew, Archer--London
+  Duchemin, Andre--Paris
+  Von Harden, Baron Gustav--Amsterdam
+  Osborne, Captain E. W.--London
+
+Of all the officers, Mr. Sherry was a solitary survivor, fished out of the
+sea after going down with his ship.
+
+No list boasted the name "Karl."
+
+Lacking accommodations for the rescued, it was stated, the destroyer had
+summoned by wireless the east-bound freight steamship _Saratoga_, which had
+trans-shipped the unfortunates and turned back to New York....
+
+Throughout the best part of that journey from Providence to New York
+Lanyard sat blankly staring into the black mirror of the window beside
+his chair, revolving schemes for his immediate future in the light of
+information derived, indirectly as much as directly, from these newspaper
+stories.
+
+Retrospective consideration of that voyage left little room for doubt that
+the designs of the German agents had been thoughtfully matured. They had
+been quiet enough between their first stroke in the dark and their last,
+between the burglary of Cecelia Brooke's stateroom the first night out and
+those murderous attacks on Bartholomew and Thackeray. Unquestionably,
+had they bided their time pending that hour when, according to their
+information, the submersible would be off Nantucket, awaiting their signal
+to sink the _Assyrian_--a signal which would never have been given had
+their plans proved successful, had they not made the ship too hot to hold
+them, and finally had they not made every provision for their own escape
+when the ship went down.
+
+Lanyard was confident that all of their company had been warned to hold
+themselves ready, and consequently had come off scot free--all, that is,
+save that victim of treachery, the unhappy Baron von Harden.
+
+If the number of that group which Lanyard had selected as comprising a
+majority of his enemies, those nine who had discussed the Lone Wolf in the
+smoking room, was now reduced to five--Becker, Dressier, O'Reilly, Putnam,
+and Velasco--or four, eliminating Putnam, of whose loyalty there could be
+no question--Lanyard still had no means of knowing how many confederates
+among the other passengers these four might not have had.
+
+And even four men who appreciated what peril to their plans inhered in the
+Lone Wolf, even four made a ponderable array of desperate enemies to have
+at large in New York, apt to be encountered at any corner, apt at any time
+to espy and recognise him without his knowledge.
+
+This situation imposed upon him two major tasks of immediate moment: he
+must hunt down those four one by one and either satisfy himself as to their
+innocence of harmful intent or put them permanently _hors de combat_; and
+he must extinguish utterly, once and for all time, that amiable personality
+whose brief span had been restricted to the decks of the _Assyrian_,
+Monsieur Andre Duchemin.
+
+That one must be buried deep, beyond all peradventure of involuntary
+resurrection.
+
+Fortunately the last step toward the positive metamorphosis indicated had
+been taken that very morning, when the Gallic beard of Monsieur Duchemin
+was erased by the razor of a New England barber, whose shears had likewise
+eradicated every trace of a Continental mode of hair-dressing. There
+remained about Lanyard little to remind of Andre Duchemin but his eyes; and
+the look of one's eyes, as every good actor knows, is something far more
+easy to disguise than is commonly believed.
+
+But it was hardly in human nature not to mourn the untimely demise of so
+useful a body, one who carried such beautiful credentials and serviceable
+letters of introduction, whose character boasted so much charm with a
+solitary fault--too facile vulnerability to the prying eyes of those to
+whom Paris meant those days and social strata in which Michael Lanyard
+had moved and had his being. Witness--according to Crane--the demoniac
+cleverness of the Brazilian in unmasking the Duchemin incognito.
+
+Suspicion was taking form in Lanyard's reflections that he had paid far
+too little attention to Senor Arturo Velasco of Buenos Aires, whose
+avowed avocation of amateur criminologist might easily be synonymous with
+interests much less innocuous.
+
+Or why had Velasco been so quick to communicate recognition of Lanyard to
+an employee of the United States Secret Service?
+
+For that matter, why had he felt called so publicly to descant upon the
+natural history of the Lone Wolf? In order to focus upon that one the
+attentions of his enemies? Or to put him on guard?
+
+It was altogether perplexing. Was one to esteem Velasco friend or foe?
+
+Lanyard could comfort himself only with the promise he should one day know,
+and that without undue delay.
+
+Alighting in Grand Central Terminus late at night, he made his way to
+Forty-second Street and there, in the staring headlines of a "Late Extra,"
+read the news that the steamship _Saratoga_ had suffered a crippling
+engine-room accident and was limping slowly toward port, still something
+like eighteen hours out.
+
+Wondering if it were presumption to construe this as an omen that the stars
+in their courses fought for him, Lanyard went west to Broadway afoot, all
+the way beset with a sense of incredulity; it was difficult to believe that
+he was himself, alive and at large in this city of wonder and space, where
+people moved at leisure and without fear on broad streets that resembled
+deep-bitten channels for rivers of light. He was all too wont with nights
+of dread and trembling, with the mediaeval gloom that enwrapped the cities
+of Europe by night, their grim black streets desolate but for a few,
+infrequent, scurrying shapes of fright.... While here the very beggars
+walked with heads unbowed, and men and women of happier estate laughed and
+played and made love lightly in the scampering taxis that whisked them
+homeward from restaurants of the feverish midnight.
+
+A people at war, actually at grips with the Blond Beast, arrayed to
+defend itself and all humanity against conquest by that loathsome incubus
+incarnate, a people heedless, carefree, irresponsible, refusing to credit
+its peril....
+
+Here and there a recruiting poster, down the broad reaches of Fifth Avenue
+a display of bunting, no other hint of war-time spirit and gravity....
+
+Longacre Square, a weltering lake of kaleidoscopic radiance, even at this
+late hour thronged with carnival crowds, not one note of sobriety in the
+night....
+
+Lanyard lifted a wondering gaze to the livid sky whose far, clear stars
+were paled and shamed by the up-flung glare, like eyes of innocence peering
+down into a pit of hell.
+
+Inscrutable!
+
+Yet one could hardly be numb to the subtle, heady intoxication of those
+cool, immaculate, sea-sweet airs which swept the streets, instilling
+self-confidence and lightness of spirit even in heads shadowed with the woe
+of war-worn Europe.
+
+Lanyard had not crossed the Avenue before he found himself walking with a
+brisker stride, holding his own head high....
+
+On impulse, despite the lateness of the hour, albeit with misgivings
+justified in the issue, he hailed a taxicab and had himself driven to the
+headquarters of the British Secret Service in America, an unostentatious
+dwelling on the northwest corner of West End Avenue at Ninety-fifth Street.
+
+Here a civil footman answered the door and Lanyard's enquiries with the
+information that Colonel Stanistreet had unexpectedly been called out
+of town and would not return before evening of the next day, while his
+secretary, Mr. Blensop, had gone to a play and might not come home till all
+hours.
+
+More impatient than disappointed, Lanyard climbed back into his cab, and in
+consequence of consultation with its friendly minded chauffeur, eventually
+put up for the night in an Eighth Avenue hotel of the class that made
+Senator Raines famous, a hostelry brazenly proclaiming accommodations "for
+gentlemen only," whereas it offered entertainment for both man and beast
+and catered rather more to beast than to man.
+
+However, it served; it was inconspicuous and made no demands upon a shabby
+traveller sans luggage, more than payment in advance.
+
+Early abroad, Lanyard breakfasted with attention fixed to the advertising
+columns of the _Herald_, and by mid-morning was established as sub-tenant
+of a furnished bachelor apartment on Fifty-eighth Street near Seventh
+Avenue, a tiny nest of few rooms on the street level, with entrances from
+both the general lobby and the street direct: an admirable arrangement for
+one who might choose to come and go without supervision or challenge.
+
+Lacking local references as to his character, Lanyard was obliged to pay
+three months' rent in advance in addition to making a substantial deposit
+to cover possible damage to the furnishings.
+
+His name, a spur-of-the-moment selection, was recorded in the lease as
+Anthony Ember.
+
+At noon he brought to his lodgings two trunks salvaged from a storage
+warehouse wherein they had been deposited more than three years since, on
+the eve of his flight with his family from America, an affair of haste and
+secrecy forbidding the handicap of heavy impedimenta.
+
+Thus Lanyard became once more possessor of a tolerably comprehensive
+wardrobe.
+
+But, those trunks released more than his personal belongings; intermingled
+were possessions that had been his wife's and his boy's. As he unpacked,
+memories peopled those perfunctorily luxurious lodgings of the transient
+with melancholy ghosts as sweet and sad as lavender and rue.
+
+For hours on end the man sat idle, head bowed down, hands plucking
+aimlessly at small broidered garments.
+
+And if in the sweep and turmoil of late events he seemed to have forgotten
+for a little that feud which had brought him overseas, he roused from this
+brief interlude of saddened dreaming with the iron of deadly purpose newly
+entered into his soul, and in his heart one dominant thought, that now his
+hour with Ekstrom could not, must not, be long deferred.
+
+In the street there rose an uproar of inhuman bawling. Lanyard went to the
+private door, hailed one of the husky authors of the din, an itinerant
+news-vendor, and disbursed a nickel coin for one cent's worth of spushul
+uxtry and four cents' worth of howling impudence.
+
+He found no more of interest in the newspaper than the information that the
+_Saratoga_ had been sighted off Fire Island and was expected to dock in New
+York not later than eight o'clock that night.
+
+This, however, was acceptable reading. Lanyard had work to do which were
+better done before "Karl" and his crew found opportunity to communicate
+directly with their collaborators ashore, work which it were unwise
+to initiate before nightfall lent a cloak of shadows to hoodwink the
+ever-possible adventitious German spy.
+
+Nor was he so fatuous as to fancy it would profit him to call before nine
+o'clock at the house on West End Avenue. No earlier might he hope to find
+Colonel the Honourable George Fleetwood-Stanistreet near the end of his
+dinner, and so in a mood approachable and receptive.
+
+But there could be no harm in reconnaissance by daylight.
+
+He whiled away the latter part of the afternoon in taxicabs, by dint of
+frequent changes contriving in the most casual fashion imaginable to pass
+the Seventy-ninth Street branch of the Wilhelmstrasse no less than four
+times.
+
+Little rewarded these tactics other than a fairly accurate mental
+photograph of the building and its situation--and a growing suspicion that
+the United States Government had profited nothing by England's lessons
+of early war days in respect of the one way to cope with resident enemy
+aliens.
+
+The house stood upon a corner, occupying half of an avenue block--the
+northern half of which was the site of a towering apartment house in
+course of construction--and loomed over its lesser neighbours a monumental
+monstrosity of architecture, as formidable as a fortress, its lower tiers
+of windows barred with iron, substantial iron grilles ready to bar its
+main entrance, even heavier gates guarding the carriage court in the
+side street. In all a stronghold not easy for the most accomplished
+house-breaker to force; yet the heart of it was Lanyard's goal; for there,
+he believed, Ekstrom (under whatever _nom de guerre_) lay hidden, or if not
+Ekstrom, at least a clear lead to his whereabouts.
+
+Certainly that one could not be far from the powerful wireless station
+secretly maintained on the roof of this weird jumble of architectural
+periods, its aerials cunningly hidden in the crowning atrocity of its
+minaret: a station reputedly so powerful that it could receive Berlin's
+nightly outgivings of news and orders, and, in emergency, transmit them to
+other secret stations in Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela.
+
+Yet the shrewdest scrutiny of eyes trained to detect police agents at
+sight, however well disguised, failed to espy one sign of any sort of
+espionage upon this nest of rattlesnakes.
+
+Apparently its tenants came and went as they willed, untroubled by and
+contemptuous of governmental surveillance.
+
+A handsome limousine car pulled up at its carriage block as Lanyard drove
+by, one time, and a pretty woman, exquisitely gowned, alighted and was
+welcomed by hospitable front doors that opened before she could ring: a
+woman Lanyard knew as one of the most daring, diabolically clever, and
+unscrupulous creatures of the Wilhelmstrasse, one whose life would not have
+been worth an hour's purchase had she ventured to show herself in Paris,
+London, or Petrograd at any time since the outbreak of the war.
+
+He drove on, deep in amaze.
+
+Indications were not wanting, on the other hand, that enemy spies
+maintained close watch upon the movements of those who frequented the house
+on West End Avenue. A German agent whom Lanyard knew by sight was strolling
+by as his taxi rounded its corner and swung on down toward Riverside Drive.
+
+This more modest residence possessed a brick-walled garden at the back, on
+the Ninety-fifth Street side. And if the top of the wall was crusted with
+broken glass in a fashion truly British, it had a door, and the door a
+lock. And Lanyard made a note thereon.
+
+And when he went home to dress for dinner, he opened up the false bottom
+of one of his trunks and selected from a store of cloth-wrapped bundles
+therein one which contained a small bunch of innocent-looking keys whose
+true _raison d'etre_ was anything in the world but guileless.
+
+Later he did himself very well at Delmonico's, enjoying for the first time
+in many years a well-balanced dinner faultlessly cooked and served amid
+quiet surroundings that carried memory back half a decade to the Paris that
+was, the Paris that nevermore will be....
+
+At nine precisely he paid off a taxicab at the corner of Ninety-fifth
+Street.
+
+While waiting on the doorstep of the corner house, he raked the street
+right and left with searching glances, and was somewhat reassured.
+Apparently he called at an hour when the Boche pickets were off duty; at
+the moment there was no pedestrian visible within a block's distance
+on either hand, nobody that he could see skulked in the areas of the
+old-fashioned brownstone houses across the way.
+
+The neighbourhood was, indeed, quiet even for an upper West Side
+residential quarter. A block over to the east Broadway was strident in the
+flood of its nocturnal traffic; a like distance to the west Riverside Drive
+hummed with pleasure cars taking advantage of the first bland night of that
+belated spring. But here, now that the taxi had wheeled away, there was
+never a car in sight, nor even a strolling brace of sidewalk lovers.
+
+The door opened, revealing the same footman.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet? I will see, sir."
+
+Lanyard entered.
+
+"If you will be kind enough to be seated," the footman suggested,
+indicating a small waiting room. "And what name shall I say?"
+
+It had been Lanyard's intention to have himself announced simply as the
+author of that telegram from Edgartown. Obscure impulse made him change his
+mind, some premonition so tenuous as to defy analysis.
+
+"Mr. Anthony Ember."
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+After a little the footman returned.
+
+"If you will come this way, sir...."
+
+He led toward the back of the house, introducing Lanyard to a spacious
+apartment, a library uncommonly well furnished, rather more than
+comfortably yet without a trace of ostentation in its complete luxury, a
+warm room, a room intimately lived in, a room, in short, characteristically
+British in atmosphere.
+
+Waist-high bookcases lined the walls, broken on the right by a cheerful
+fireplace with a grate of glowing cannel coal, in front of it a great club
+lounge upholstered, like all the chairs, in well-used leather. Opposite the
+chimney-piece, a handsome thing in carved oak, a door was draped with a
+curtain that swung with it. In the back of the room two long and wide
+French windows stood open to the night, beyond them that garden whose
+wall had attracted Lanyard's attention. There were a number of paintings,
+portraits for the most part, heavily framed, with overhead picture-lights.
+In the middle of the room was a table-desk, broad and long, supporting a
+shaded reading lamp. On the far side of the table a young man sat writing,
+with several dockets of papers arranged before him.
+
+As Lanyard entered, this one put down his pen, pushed back his chair, and
+came round the table: a tallish, well-made young man, dressed a shade too
+foppishly in spite of an unceremonious dinner coat, his manner assured,
+amiable, unconstrained, perhaps a little over-tolerant.
+
+"Mr. Ember, I believe?" he said in a voice studiously musical.
+
+"Yes," Lanyard replied, vaguely annoyed with himself because of an
+unreasoning resentment of this musical quality. "Mr. Blensop?"
+
+"I am Mr. Blensop," that one admitted gracefully. "And how may I have the
+pleasure of being of service?"
+
+He waved a hand toward an easy chair beside the table, and resumed his own.
+But Lanyard hesitated.
+
+"I wished to see Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+Mr. Blensop looked up with an indulgent smile. His face was round and
+smooth but for a perfectly docile little moustache, his lips full and red,
+his nose delicately chiselled; but his eyes, though large, were set cannily
+close together.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet is unfortunately not at home. I am his secretary."
+
+"Yes," said Lanyard, still standing. "In that case I'd be glad if you would
+be good enough to make an appointment for me with Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+"I am afraid he will not be home till very late to-night, but--"
+
+"Then to-morrow?"
+
+Mr. Blensop smiled patiently. "Colonel Stanistreet is a very busy man," he
+uttered melodiously. "If you could let me know something about the nature
+of your business...."
+
+"It is the King's," said Lanyard bluntly.
+
+The secretary went so far as to betray well-bred surprise. "You are an
+Englishman, Mr. Ember?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+And for all he knew to the contrary, so Lanyard was.
+
+"I am Colonel Stanistreet's secretary," the young man again suggested
+hopefully.
+
+"That is precisely why I ask you to make an appointment for me with your
+employer," Lanyard retorted politely.
+
+"You won't say what you wish to see him about?"
+
+A trace of asperity marred the music of those tones; Mr. Blensop further
+indicated distaste of the innuendo inherent in Lanyard's use of the word
+"employer" by delicately wrinkling his nose.
+
+"I am sorry," Lanyard replied sufficiently.
+
+The door behind him opened, and the footman intruded.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop...."
+
+"Yes, Walker?"
+
+The servant advanced to the table and proffered a visiting card on a tray.
+Mr. Blensop took it, arched pencilled brows over it.
+
+"To see me, Walker?"
+
+"The gentleman asked for Colonel Stanistreet, sir."
+
+"H'm.... You may show him in when I ring."
+
+The footman retired. Mr. Blensop looked up brightly, bending the card with
+nervous fingers.
+
+"You were saying your business was...?"
+
+"I was not," Lanyard replied with disarming good humour. "I'm afraid that
+is something much too important and confidential to reveal even to Colonel
+Stanistreet's secretary, if you don't mind my saying so."
+
+Mr. Blensop did mind, and betrayed vexation with an impatient little
+gesture which caused the card to fly from his fingers and fall face
+uppermost on the table. Almost instantly he recovered it, but not before
+Lanyard had read the name it bore.
+
+"Of course not," said the secretary pleasantly, rising. "But you understand
+my instructions are rigid ... I'm sorry."
+
+"You refuse me the appointment?"
+
+"Unless you can give me an inkling of your business--or perhaps bring a
+letter of introduction."
+
+"I can do neither, Mr. Blensop," said Lanyard earnestly. "I have
+information of the gravest moment to communicate to the head of the British
+Secret Service in this country."
+
+The secretary looked startled. "What makes you think Colonel Stanistreet is
+connected with the British Secret Service?"
+
+"I don't think so; I know it."
+
+After a moment of hesitation Mr. Blensop yielded graciously. "If you can
+come back at nine to-morrow morning, Mr. Ember, I'll do my best to persuade
+Colonel Stanistreet--"
+
+"I repeat, my business is of the most pressing nature. Can't you arrange
+for me to see your employer to-night?"
+
+"It is utterly impossible."
+
+Lanyard accepted defeat with a bow.
+
+"To-morrow at nine, then," he said, turning toward the door by which he had
+entered.
+
+"At nine," said Mr. Blensop, generous in triumph. "But do you mind going
+out this way?"
+
+He moved toward the curtained door opposite the chimney-piece. Lanyard
+paused, shrugged, and followed. Mr. Blensop opened the door, disclosing a
+vista of Ninety-fifth Street.
+
+"Thank _you_, Mr. Ember. _Good_-night," he intoned.
+
+The door closed with the click of a spring latch.
+
+Lanyard stood alone in the street, looking swiftly this way and that, his
+hand closing upon that little bunch of keys in his pocket, his humour
+lawless.
+
+For the name inscribed on that card which Mr. Blensop had so carelessly
+dropped was one to fill Lanyard with consuming anxiety for better
+acquaintance with its present wearer.
+
+Written in pencil, with all the individual angularity of French
+chirography, the name was Andre Duchemin.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+REINCARNATION
+
+
+It took a little time and patience but, on his third essay, Lanyard found
+a key which agreed with the lock. He permitted himself a sigh of relief;
+Ninety-fifth Street was bare, the door set flush with the outside of the
+wall afforded no concealment to the trespasser, while the direct light of a
+street lamp at the corner made his lonely figure uncomfortably conspicuous.
+
+Apparently, however, he had not been observed.
+
+Gently pushing the door open, he slipped in, as gently closed it, then for
+a full minute stood stirless, spying out the lay of the land.
+
+Fitting precisely his anticipations, the garden discovered a fine English
+flavour; it was well-kept, modest, fragrant and, best of all, quite dark,
+especially so in the shadow of the street wall. Only a glimmer of starlight
+enabled him to pick out the course of a pebbled footpath. A border of deep
+turf between this and the wall muffled his footsteps as he moved toward the
+back of the house.
+
+The library windows, deeply recessed, opened on a low, broad stoop of
+concrete, with a pergola effect above, and a few wicker pieces upon a grass
+mat underfoot.
+
+Noiselessly Lanyard stepped across the low sill and paused in the cover of
+heavy draperies, commanding a tolerably full view of the library if one
+somewhat unsatisfactory, since the light within was by no means bright.
+Still, this circumstance had its advantages for him; with his dark topcoat
+buttoned to the throat and its collar turned up to hide his linen, he was
+confident he would not be detected unless he gave his presence away by an
+abrupt movement--something which the Lone Wolf never made.
+
+At the moment Mr. Blensop seemed to be engaged in the surprising occupation
+of discoursing upon art to his caller.
+
+The latter occupied that chair which Lanyard had refused, on the far side
+of the table. Thus placed, the lamplight masked more than revealed him,
+throwing a dull glare into Lanyard's eyes. His man sat in a pose of earnest
+attention, bending forward a trifle to follow the exposition of Mr.
+Blensop, who stood beneath a portrait on the wall between the chimney-piece
+and the windows, his attitude incurably graceful, a hand on the switch
+controlling the picture-light. Apparently he had just finished speaking,
+for he paused, looking toward his guest with a quiet and intimate smile as
+he turned off the light.
+
+"And that's all there is to it," he declared, moving back to the table.
+
+"I see," said the other thoughtfully.
+
+Lanyard felt himself start almost uncontrollably: rage swept through him,
+storming brain and body, like a black squall over a hill-bound lake. For
+the moment he could neither see or hear clearly nor think coherently.
+
+For the voice of this latest incarnation of Andre Duchemin was the voice of
+"Karl."
+
+When the tumult of his senses subsided he heard Blensop saying, "I'll
+write it out for you," and saw him pick up a pad and pencil and jot down a
+memorandum.
+
+"There you are," he added, ripping off the sheet and passing it across the
+table. "Now you can't go wrong."
+
+"I precious seldom do," his caller commented drily.
+
+"I think--" Blensop began, and checked sharply as the man Walker came into
+the room.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop--"
+
+There was an accent of impatience in those beautifully modulated tones:
+"Well, what is it now?"
+
+"A lady to see you, sir."
+
+Blensop took the card from the proffered salver. "Never heard of her," he
+announced brusquely at a glance. "She asked for Colonel Stanistreet or for
+me?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, sir. But when I said he was not at home, she asked to
+see his secretary."
+
+"Any idea what she wants?"
+
+"She didn't say, sir--but she seemed much distressed."
+
+"They always are. H'm.... Young and good-looking?"
+
+"Quite, sir."
+
+"Dessay I may as well see her," said Mr. Blensop wearily. "Show her in when
+I ring."
+
+Walker shut himself out of the room.
+
+"It's just as well," Blensop added to his caller. "You understand, my clear
+fellow--?"
+
+"Assuredly." The man got up; but Blensop contrived exasperatingly to keep
+between him and the windows. "I'm to be back at midnight?"
+
+"Twelve sharp; you'll be sure to find him here then. Mind leaving by this
+emergency exit?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"Then _good_-night, my dear Monsieur Duchemin!"
+
+Was there a hint of irony in Blensop's employment of that style? Lanyard
+half fancied there was, but did not linger to analyse the impression.
+Already the secretary had opened the side door.
+
+In a bound Lanyard cleared the stoop, then ran back to the door in the
+wall. But with all his quickness he was all too slow; already, as he
+emerged to Ninety-fifth Street, his quarry was rounding the Avenue corner.
+
+Defiant of discretion, Lanyard gave chase at speed but, though he had not
+thirty yards to cover, again was baffled by the swiftness with which "Karl"
+got about.
+
+He had still some distance to go when the peace of the quarter was
+shattered by a door that slammed like a pistol shot, and with roaring
+motor and grinding gears a cab swung away from the curb in front of the
+Stanistreet residence and tore off down the Avenue.
+
+Swearing petulantly in his disappointment, Lanyard pulled up on the corner.
+The number on the license plate was plainly revealed as the vehicle showed
+its back to the street lamp. But what good was that to him? He memorised
+it mechanically, in mutinous appreciation of the fact that the taxi was
+setting a pace with which he could not hope to compete afoot.
+
+The rumble of another motor-car caught his ear, and he looked round
+eagerly. A second taxicab--undoubtedly that which had brought the young
+woman now presumably closeted with Mr. Blensop--was moving up into the
+place vacated by the first.
+
+In two strides Lanyard was at its side.
+
+"Follow that taxi!" he cried--"number seventy-six, three-eighty-five. Don't
+lose sight of it, but don't pass it--don't let them know we're following!"
+
+"Engaged," the driver growled.
+
+"Hang your engagement! Here"--Lanyard pressed a golden eagle into the
+fellow's palm--"there will be another of those if you do as I say!"
+
+"Le's go!" the driver agreed with resignation.
+
+If the cab was moving before Lanyard could hop in and shut the door, the
+other had already established a killing lead; and though Lanyard's man
+demonstrated characteristic contempt for municipal regulations governing
+the speed of motor-driven vehicles, and racketed his own madly down the
+Avenue, he was wholly helpless to do more than keep the tail-lamp of the
+first in sight.
+
+More than once that dull red eye seemed sardonically to wink.
+
+Still, Lanyard did not think "Karl" knew he was pursued. His conveyance had
+passed the corner before Lanyard emerged from the side street. There being
+no reason that Lanyard knew of why the spy should believe himself under
+suspicion, his haste seemed most probably due to natural desire to avoid
+adventitious recognition, coupled with, no doubt, other urgent business.
+
+At Seventy-second Street the chase turned east, with Lanyard two blocks
+behind, and for a few agonizing moments was altogether lost to him. But at
+Broadway the tide of southbound traffic hindered it momentarily, and it
+swung into that stream with its pursuer only a block astern.
+
+Thereafter through a ride of another mile and a half, the distance between
+the two was augmented or abbreviated arbitrarily by the rules of the road.
+
+At one time less than two cab-lengths separated them; then a Ford, driven
+Fordishly, wandered vaguely out of a crosstown street and hesitated in the
+middle of the thoroughfare with precisely the air of a staring yokel on
+a first visit to the city; and Lanyard's driver slammed on the emergency
+brake barely in time to escape committing involuntary but justifiable
+flivvercide.
+
+When he was able once more to throw the gears into high, the chase was a
+long block ahead.
+
+They were entering Longacre Square before he made up that loss.
+
+And at Forty-fourth Street, again, a stream of east-bound cars edged in
+between the two, reducing Lanyard's driver to the verge of gibbering
+lunacy.
+
+A car resembling "Karl's" was crossing Broadway at Forty-second Street when
+Lanyard was still on Seventh Avenue north of the Times Building.
+
+But only a minute later his driver pulled up in front of the Hotel
+Knickerbocker, and Lanyard, peering through the forward window, saw the
+number 76-385 on the license plate of a taxicab drawing away, empty, from
+the curb beneath the hotel canopy.
+
+He tossed the second gold piece to the driver as his feet touched the
+sidewalk, and shouldered through a cluster of men and women at the main
+entrance to the lobby.
+
+That rendezvous of Broadway was fairly thronged despite the slack
+mid-evening hour, between the dinner and the supper crushes; but Lanyard
+reviewed in vain the little knots of guests and loungers; if "Karl" were
+among them, he was nobody whom Lanyard had learned to know by sight on
+board the _Assyrian_.
+
+With as little success he searched unobtrusively all public rooms on the
+main floor.
+
+It was, of course, both possible and probable that "Karl," himself a guest
+of the hotel, had crossed directly to the elevators and been whisked aloft
+to his room.
+
+With this in mind, Lanyard paused at the desk, asked permission to examine
+the register and, being accommodated, was somewhat consoled; if his chase
+had failed of its immediate objective, it now proved not altogether
+fruitless. A majority of the _Assyrian_ survivors seemed to have elected to
+stop at the Knickerbocker. One after another Lanyard, scanning the entries,
+found these names:
+
+  Edmund O'Reilly--Detroit
+  Arturo Velasco--Buenos Aires
+  Bartlett Putnam--Philadelphia
+  Cecelia Brooke--London
+  Emil Dressier--Geneve
+
+Half inclined to commit the imprudence of sending a name up to Miss
+Brooke--any name but Andre Duchemin, Michael Lanyard, or Anthony
+Ember--together with a message artfully worded to fix her interest without
+giving comfort to the enemy, should it chance to go astray, the adventurer
+hesitated by the desk; and of a sudden was satisfied that such a move would
+be not only injudicious but waste of time; for, now that he paused to think
+of it, he surmised that the young woman--"young and good-looking", on
+Walker's word--who had called to see Colonel Stanistreet was none other
+than this same Cecelia Brooke.
+
+What more natural than that she should make early occasion to consult the
+head of the British Secret Service in America?
+
+A pity he had not waited there in the window! If he had, no doubt the
+mystery with which the girl had surrounded herself would be no more mystery
+to Lanyard; he would have learned the secret of that paper cylinder as well
+as the part the girl had played in the intrigue for its possession, and so
+be the better advised as to his own future conduct.
+
+But in his insensate passion for revenge upon one who had all but murdered
+him, he had forgotten all else but the moment's specious opportunity.
+
+With a grunt of impatience Lanyard turned away from the desk, and came face
+to face with Crane.
+
+The Secret Service man was coming from the direction of the bar in company
+with Velasco, O'Reilly, and Dressier.
+
+Of the three last named but one looked Lanyard's way, O'Reilly, and his
+gaze, resting transiently on the countenance of Andre Duchemin minus the
+Duchemin beard, passed on without perceptible glimmer of recognition.
+
+Why not? Why should it enter his head that one lived and had anticipated
+his own arrival in New York by twenty hours whom be believed to be buried
+many fathoms deep off Nantucket?
+
+As for Crane, his cool gray, humorous eyes, half-hooded with their heavy
+lids, favoured Lanyard with casual regard and never a tremor of interest
+or surprise; but as he passed his right eye closed deliberately and with a
+significance not to be ignored.
+
+To this Lanyard responded only with a look of blankest amaze.
+
+Chatting with an air of subdued self-congratulation pardonable in such
+as have come safe to land through many dangers of the deep, the quartet
+strolled round the desk and boarded one of the elevators.
+
+Not till its gate had closed did Lanyard stir. Then he went away from there
+with all haste and cunning at his command.
+
+The route through the cafe to Broadway offered the speediest and least
+conspicuous of exits. From the side door of the hotel he plunged directly
+into the mouth of the Subway kiosk and, chance favouring him, managed to
+purchase a ticket and board a southbound local train an instant before its
+doors ground shut.
+
+Believing Crane would take the next elevator down, once he had seen the
+others safely in their rooms, Lanyard was content to let him find the lobby
+destitute of ghosts, to let him fume and wonder and think himself perhaps
+mistaken.
+
+The last thing he desired was entanglement with the American Secret
+Service. For Crane he entertained personal respect and temperate liking,
+thought the man socially an amusing creature, professionally a deadly peril
+to one who had a feud to pursue.
+
+Leaving the train at Grand Central, the adventurer passed through the back
+ways of the Terminus, into the Hotel Biltmore, upstairs to its lobby,
+thence out by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance, walking through Forty-fourth
+Street to Fifth Avenue, where he chartered a taxicab, gave the address
+of his lodgings, and lay back in the corner of its seat satisfied he had
+successfully eluded pursuit and very, very grateful to the Subway system
+for the facilities it afforded fugitives like himself through its warren of
+underground passages.
+
+One thing troubled him, however, without respite: the Brooke girl was on
+his conscience. To her he owed an accounting of his stewardship of that
+trust which she had reposed in him. It was intolerable in his understanding
+that she should be permitted to go one unnecessary hour in ignorance of the
+truth about that business--the truth, that is, as far as he himself knew
+it.
+
+If through Crane or in some unforseeable fashion she were to learn that
+Andre Duchemin lived, she would think him faithless. If she knew that
+Duchemin had been one with Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf, she would not be
+surprised. But that, too, was intolerable; even the Lone Wolf had his code
+of honour.
+
+Again, if she remained in ignorance of the fact that Lanyard had escaped
+drowning, she would continue to believe her secret at the bottom of the sea
+with him; whereas, in the hands of the enemy, in the possession of "Karl"
+and his, confederates, it was potentially Heaven only knew how dangerous a
+weapon.
+
+Abruptly Lanyard reflected that at least one doubt had been eliminated by
+that encounter in the Knickerbocker. It was barely possible that "Karl" had
+gone to the bar on entering and added himself to Crane's party, but it
+was hardly creditable in Lanyard's consideration. He was convinced that,
+whether or not Velasco, O'Reilly, and Dressier were parties to the Hun
+conspiracy, none of these was "Karl."
+
+As for the Brooke matter, he felt it incumbent upon him immediately to find
+some safe means of communicating with the girl. She could be trusted not to
+betray him to the police, however much she might at first incline to doubt
+him. But he would persuade her of his sincerity, never fear!
+
+The telephone offered one solution of his difficulty, an agency
+non-committal enough, provided one were at pains not to call from one's
+private station, to which the call might be traced back.
+
+With this in mind he stopped and dismissed his taxicab at Fifty-seventh
+Street and Sixth Avenue, and availed himself of a coin-box telephone booth
+in the corner druggist's.
+
+The experience that followed was nothing out of the ordinary. Lanyard,
+connected with the Knickerbocker promptly, with the customary expenditure
+of patience laboriously spelled out the name B-r-double-o-k-e, and was told
+to hold the wire.
+
+Several minutes later he began to agitate the receiver hook and was
+eventually rewarded with the advice that the Knickerbocker operator, being
+informed his party was in the rest'runt, was having her paged.
+
+Still later the central operator told him his five minutes was up and
+consented to continue the connection only on deposit of an additional
+nickel.
+
+Eventually, in sequel to more abuse of the hook, he received this response
+from the Knickerbocker switchboard: "Wait a min'te, can't you? Here's your
+party."
+
+Lanyard was surprised at the eagerness with which he cried: "Hello!"
+
+A click answered, and a bland voice which was not the voice he had expected
+to hear: "Hello? That you, Jack?"
+
+He said wearily: "I am waiting to speak with Miss Cecelia Brooke."
+
+"Oh, then there _must_ be some mistake. This is Miss _Crooke_ speaking."
+
+Lanyard uttered a strangled "Sorry!" and hung up, abandoning further effort
+as hopeless.
+
+That matter would have to stand over till morning.
+
+Time now pressed: it was nearly eleven; he had a rendezvous with Destiny to
+keep at midnight, and meant to be more than punctual.
+
+Walking to his apartment house, he proceeded to establish an alibi by
+entering through the public hallway and registering with the telephone
+attendant a call for seven o'clock the next morning.
+
+In the course of the next half hour Lanyard let himself quietly out of the
+private door, slipped around the block and boarded a Riverside Drive bus.
+
+Alighting at Ninety-third Street, he walked two blocks north on the Drive,
+turned east, and without misadventure admitted himself a second time to the
+Stanistreet garden.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+DEFAMATION
+
+
+It was hardly possible to watch Mr. Blensop functioning in his vocational
+capacity without reflecting on that cruel injustice which Nature only too
+often practises upon her offspring in secreting most praiseworthy qualities
+within fleshy envelopes of hopelessly frivolous cast.
+
+The flowing gestures of this young man, his fluting accents, poetic eyes,
+and modestly ingratiating moustache, the preciosity of his taste in dress,
+assorted singularly with an austere devotion to duty rare if unaffected.
+
+Beyond question, whether or not naturally a man of studious and
+conscientious temper, Mr. Blensop figured to admiration in the role of such
+an one.
+
+Seated, the shaded lamplight an aureole for his fair young head, he wrought
+industriously with a beautiful gold-mounted fountain pen for fully five
+minutes after Lanyard had stolen into the draped recess of the French
+window, pausing only now and again to take a fresh sheet of paper or
+consult one of the sheaves of documents that lay before him.
+
+At length, however, he hesitated with pen lifted and abstracted gaze
+focussed upon vacancy, shook a bewildered head, and rose, moving directly
+toward the windows.
+
+For as long as thirty breathless seconds Lanyard remained in doubt; there
+was the barest chance that in his preoccupation Blensop might pass through
+to the garden without noticing that dark figure flattened against the
+inswung half of the window, in the dense shadow of the portiere. Otherwise
+the game was altogether up; Lanyard could see no way to avoid the necessity
+of staggering Blensop with a blow, racing for freedom, abandoning utterly
+further effort to learn the motive of "Karl's" impersonation of Duchemin.
+
+He gathered himself together, waited poised in readiness for any
+eventuality--and blessed his lucky stars to find his apprehensions idle.
+
+Three paces from the windows, Mr. Blensop made it plain that he was after
+all not minded to stroll in the garden. Pausing, he swung a high-backed
+wing chair round to face the corner of the room, switched on a reading
+lamp, sat down and selected a volume of some work of reference from the
+well-stocked book shelves.
+
+For several minutes, seated within arm's length of the trespasser, he
+studied intently, then with a cluck of satisfaction replaced the volume,
+extinguished the light, and went back to his writing.
+
+But presently he checked with a vexed little exclamation, shook his pen
+impatiently, and fixed it with a frown of pained reproach.
+
+But that did no good. The cussedness of the inanimate was strong in this
+pen: since its reservoir was quite empty it mulishly refused more service
+without refilling.
+
+With a long-suffering sigh, Mr. Blensop found a filler in one of the desk
+drawers, and unscrewed the nib of the pen.
+
+This accomplished, he paused, listened for a moment with head cocked
+intelligently to one side, dropped the dismembered implement, and got up
+alertly. At the same moment the door to the hallway opened, and two women
+entered, apparently sisters: one a lady of mature and distinguished charm,
+the other an equally prepossessing creature much her junior, the one
+strongly animated with intelligent interest in life, the other a listless
+prey to habitual ennui.
+
+To these fluttered Mr. Blensop, offering to relieve them of their wraps.
+
+"Permit me, Mrs. Arden," he addressed the elder woman, who tolerated him
+dispassionately. "And Mrs. Stanistreet ... I say, aren't you a bit late?"
+
+"Frightfully," assented Mrs. Stanistreet in a weary voice. "It must be all
+of midnight."
+
+"Hardly that, Adele," said Mrs. Arden with a humorous glance.
+
+"Dinner, the play, supper, and home before twelve!" commented Blensop,
+shocked. "I say, that is going some, you know."
+
+"George would insist on hurrying home," the young wife complained.
+"Frightfully tiresome. We were so comfy at the Ritz, too...."
+
+"The Crystal Room?" Dissembled envy poisoned Blensop's accents.
+
+"Frightfully interestin'--everybody was there. I did so want to
+dance--missed you, Arthur."
+
+"I say, you didn't, did you, really?"
+
+"Poor Mr. Blensop!" Mrs. Arden interjected with just a hint of malice.
+"What a pity you must be chained down by inexorable duty, while we fly
+round and amuse ourselves."
+
+"I must not complain," Blensop stated with humility becoming in a dutiful
+martyr, a pose which he saw fit quickly to discard as another man came
+briskly into the room. "Ah, good evening, Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+"Evening, Blensop."
+
+With a brusque nod, Colonel Stanistreet went straightway to the desk,
+stopping there to take up and examine the work upon which his secretary had
+been engaged: a gentleman considerably older than his wife, of grave and
+sturdy cast, with the habit of standing solidly on his feet and giving
+undivided attention to the matter in hand.
+
+"Anything of consequence turned up?" he enquired abstractedly, running
+through the sheets of pen-blackened paper.
+
+"Three persons called," Blensop admitted discreetly. "One returns at
+midnight."
+
+Stanistreet threw him a keen look. "Eh!" he said, making swift inference,
+and turned to his wife and sister-in-law. "It is nearly twelve now. Forgive
+me if I hurry you off."
+
+"Patience," said Mrs. Arden indulgently. "Not for worlds would I hinder
+your weighty affairs, dear old thing, but I sleep more sound o' nights when
+I know my trinkets are locked up securely in your safe."
+
+With a graceful gesture she unfastened a magnificent necklace and deposited
+it on the desk.
+
+"Frightful rot," her sister commented from the doorway. "As if anybody
+would dare break in here."
+
+"Why not?" Mrs. Arden enquired calmly, stripping her fingers of their
+rings.
+
+"With a watchman patrolling the grounds all night--"
+
+"Letty is sensible," Stanistreet interrupted. "Howson's faithful enough,
+and these American police dependable, but second-storey men happen in the
+best-guarded neighbourhoods. Be advised, Adele: leave your things here with
+Letty's."
+
+"No fear," his wife returned coolly. "Too frightfully weird...."
+
+She drifted across the threshold, then hesitated, a pretty figure of
+disdainful discontent.
+
+"But really, Colonel Stanistreet is right," Blensop interposed vivaciously.
+"What do you imagine I heard to-night? The Lone Wolf is in America!"
+
+"What is that you say?" Mrs. Arden demanded sharply.
+
+"The Lone Wolf ... Fact. Have it on most excellent authority."
+
+"The Lone Wolf!" Mrs. Stanistreet drawled. "If you ask me, I think the Lone
+Wolf nothing in the world but a scapegoat for police stupidity."
+
+"You wouldn't say that," Mrs. Arden retorted, "if you had lived in Paris as
+long as I. There, in the dear old days, we paid that rogue too heavy a tax
+not to believe in him."
+
+"Frightful nonsense," insisted the other. "I'm off. 'Night, Arthur. Shall
+you be long, George?"
+
+"Oh, half an hour or so," her husband responded absently as she
+disappeared.
+
+With a little gesture consigning her jewellery, heaped upon the desk, to
+the care of her brother-in-law, Mrs. Arden uttered good-nights and followed
+her sister.
+
+Blensop bowed her out respectfully, shut the door and returned to the desk.
+
+"What's this about the Lone Wolf?" Stanistreet enquired, sitting down to
+con the papers more intently.
+
+"Oh!" Blensop laughed lightly. "I was merely repeating the blighter's own
+assertion. I mean to say, he boasted he was the Lone Wolf."
+
+"Who boasted he was the Lone Wolf?"
+
+"Chap who called to-night, giving the name of Duchemin--Andre Duchemin. Had
+French passports, and letters from the Home Office recommending him rather
+highly. Useful creature, one would fancy, with his knowledge of the right
+way to go about the wrong thing. What? Ought to be especially helpful to us
+in hunting down the Hun over here."
+
+"Is this the man who returns at midnight?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I thought it best to make the appointment."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He said he had crossed on the _Assyrian_, said it significantly, you know.
+I fancied he might be the person you have been expecting."
+
+Stanistreet looked up with a frown. "Hardly," he said--"if, that is, he is
+really what he claims to be. I wonder how he came by those letters."
+
+"Does seem odd, doesn't it, sir? A confessed criminal!"
+
+"An extraordinary man, by all accounts.... Those other callers--?"
+
+"Nobody of importance, I should say. A man who gave his name as Ember and
+got a bit shirty when I asked his business. Told him you might consent to
+see him at nine in the morning."
+
+"And the other?"
+
+"A young woman--deuced pretty girl--also reticent. What was her name?
+Brooke--that was it: Cecelia Brooke."
+
+"The devil!" Stanistreet exclaimed, dropping the papers. "What did you say
+to her?"
+
+"What could I say, sir? She refused to divulge a word about her business
+with us. I told her--"
+
+Warned by a gesture from Colonel Stanistreet, Blensop broke off. Walker was
+opening the door.
+
+"Well, Walker?"
+
+"A Mr. Duchemin, sir, says Mr. Blensop made an appointment with you for
+twelve to-night."
+
+"Show him in, please."
+
+The footman shut himself out. Blensop clutched nervously at Mrs. Arden's
+jewels.
+
+"Hadn't I better put these in the safe first?"
+
+"No--no time." Stanistreet opened a drawer of the desk--"Here!"--and closed
+it as Blensop hastily swept the jewellery into it. "Safe enough there--as
+long as he doesn't know, at all events. But don't forget to put them away
+after he goes."
+
+"No, sir."
+
+Again the door opened. Walker announced: "Mr. Duchemin." Stanistreet rose
+in his place. A man strode in with the assurance of one who has discounted
+a cordial welcome.
+
+Through the gap which he had quietly created between the portiere and the
+side of the window, Lanyard stared hungrily, and for the second time that
+night damned heartily the inadequate light in the library.
+
+The impostor's face, barely distinguishable in the up-thrown penumbra
+of the lampshade, wore a beard--a rather thick, dark beard of negligent
+abundance, after a mode popular among Frenchmen--above which his features
+were an indefinite blur.
+
+Lanyard endeavoured with ill success to identify the fellow by his
+carriage; there was a perceptible suggestion of a military strut, but that
+is something hardly to be termed distinctive in these days. Otherwise, he
+was tall, quite as tall as Lanyard, and had much the same character of
+body, slender and lithe.
+
+But he was "Karl" beyond question, confederate and murderer of Baron von
+Harden, the man who had thrown the light bomb to signal the U-boat,
+the brute with whom Lanyard had struggled on the boat deck of the
+_Assyrian_--though the latter, in the confusion of that struggle, had
+thought the German's beard a masking handkerchief of black silk.
+
+Now by that same token he was no member of that smoking-room coterie upon
+which Lanyard's suspicions had centered.
+
+On the other hand, any number of passengers had worn beards, not a few of
+much the same mode as that sported by this nonchalant fraud.
+
+Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits to aid a laggard memory, haunted by a
+feeling that he ought to know this man instantly, even in so poor a light.
+Something in his habit, something in that insouciance which so narrowly
+escaped insolence, was at once strongly reminiscent and provokingly
+elusive....
+
+Pausing a little ways within the room, the fellow clicked heels and bowed
+punctiliously in Continental fashion, from the hips.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, I believe," he said in a sonorous voice--"Karl's"
+unmistakable voice--"chief of the American bureau of the British Secret
+Service?"
+
+"I am Colonel Stanistreet," that gentleman admitted. "And you, sir--?"
+
+"I have adopted the name of Andre Duchemin," the impostor stated. "With
+permission I retain it."
+
+Colonel Stanistreet inclined his head slightly. "As you will. Pray be
+seated."
+
+He dropped back into his chair, while "Karl" with a murmur of
+acknowledgment again took the armchair on the far side of the desk, where
+the lamp stood between him and the secret watcher.
+
+"My secretary tells me you have letters of introduction...."
+
+"Here." Calmly "Karl" produced and offered those purloined papers.
+
+"You will smoke?" Stanistreet indicated a cigarette-box and leaned back to
+glance through the letters.
+
+During a brief pause Blensop busied himself with collecting together the
+documents which had occupied him and began reassorting them, while "Karl,"
+helping himself to a cigarette, smoked with manifest enjoyment.
+
+"These seem to be in order," Stanistreet observed. "I note from this code
+letter that your true name is Michael Lanyard, you were once a professional
+French thief known as 'The Lone Wolf', but have since displayed every
+indication of desire to reform your ways, and have been of considerable
+use to the Intelligence Office. I am desired to employ your services in my
+discretion, contingent--pardon me--upon your continued good behaviour."
+
+"Precisely," assented "Karl."
+
+"Proceed, Monsieur Duchemin."
+
+"It is an affair of some delicacy.... Do we speak alone, Colonel
+Stanistreet?"
+
+"Mr. Blensop is my confidential secretary...."
+
+"Oh, no objection. Still--if I may venture the suggestion--those windows
+open upon a garden, I take it?"
+
+"Yes. Blensop, be good enough to close the windows."
+
+"Certainly, sir."
+
+Stepping delicately, Blensop moved toward the end of the room.
+
+Again Lanyard was confronted with the alternatives of incontinent flight or
+attempting to remain undetected through the adoption of an expedient of the
+most desperate audacity. He had prepared against such contingency, he did
+not mean to go; but the feasibility of his contemplated manoeuvre depended
+entirely upon chance, its success in any event was forlornly problematic.
+
+"Karl" remained hidden from him by the lamp, so he from "Karl." Colonel
+Stanistreet, facing his caller, sat half turned away from the windows.
+Everything rested with Blensop's choice, which of the two windows he would
+elect first to close.
+
+A right-handed man, he turned, as Lanyard had foreseen, to the right, and
+momentarily disappeared in the recess of the farther window.
+
+In the same instant Lanyard slipped noiselessly from behind the portiere,
+and dropped into that capacious wing chair which Blensop had thoughtfully
+placed for him some time since.
+
+Thus seated, making himself as small and still as possible, he was wholly
+concealed from all other occupants of the library but Blensop; and even
+this last was little likely to discover him.
+
+He did not. He closed and latched the farther window, then that wherein
+Lanyard had lurked, and ambled back into the room with never a glance
+toward that shadowed corner which held the wing chair.
+
+And Lanyard drew a deep breath, if a quiet one. Behind him the conversation
+had continued without break. It was true, he could see nothing; but he
+could hear all that was said, he had missed no syllable, and now every
+second was informing him to his profit....
+
+"Your secretary, no doubt, has told you I am a survivor of the _Assyrian_
+disaster."
+
+"Yes...."
+
+"You were, I believe, expecting a certain communication of extraordinary
+character by the _Assyrian_, to be brought, that is, by an agent of the
+British Secret Service."
+
+After an almost imperceptible pause Stanistreet said evenly: "It is
+possible."
+
+"A communication, in fact, of such character that it was impossible to
+entrust it to the mails or to cable transmission, even in code."
+
+"And if so, sir...?"
+
+"And you are aware that, of the two gentlemen entrusted with the care of
+this document, one was drowned when the _Assyrian_ went down, and the other
+so seriously injured that he has not yet recovered consciousness, but
+was transferred directly from the pier to a hospital when the _Saratoga_
+docked."
+
+"What then, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet," said the impostor deliberately, "I have that
+communication. I will ask you not to question me too closely as to how it
+came into my possession. I have it: that is sufficient."
+
+"If you possess any document which you conceive to be so valuable to the
+British Government, monsieur, and consequently to the Allied cause, I have
+every confidence in your intention to deliver it to me without delay."
+
+A note of mild derision crept into the accents of "Karl."
+
+"I have every intention of so doing, my dear sir.... But you must
+appreciate I have incurred considerable personal danger, hardship, and
+inconvenience in taking good care of this document, in seeing that it did
+not fall into the wrong hands; in short, in bringing it safely here to you
+to-night."
+
+A slightly longer pause prefaced Stanistreet's reply, something which
+he delivered in measured tones: "I am able to promise you the British
+Government will show due appreciation of your disinterested services,
+Monsieur--Duchemin."
+
+"Not disinterested--not that!" the cheat protested. "Gentlemen of my
+kidney, sir, seldom put themselves out except in lively anticipation of
+favours to come."
+
+"Be good enough to make yourself more clear."
+
+"Cheerfully. I possess this document. I understand its character is such
+that Germany would pay a round price for it. But I am a good patriot. In
+spite of the fact that nobody knew I possessed it, in spite of the fact
+that I need only have quietly taken it to Seventy-ninth Street to-night--"
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin!" Stanistreet's voice was icy. "Your price?"
+
+"Sorry you feel that way about it," said "Karl" with ill-concealed
+insincerity. "You must know thieving is no more what it once was. Even I,
+too, often am put to it to make both ends--"
+
+"If you please, sir--how much?"
+
+"Ten thousand dollars."
+
+Silence greeted this demand, a lull that to Lanyard seemed endless. For in
+his fury he was trembling so that he feared lest his agitation betray him.
+The very walls before his eyes seemed to quake in sympathy. He was aware of
+the ache of swollen veins in his temples, his teeth hurt with the pressure
+put upon them, his breath came heavily, and his nails were digging
+painfully into his palms.
+
+"Blensop?"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"How much have we on hand, in the emergency fund?"
+
+"Between ten and twelve thousand dollars, sir."
+
+"Intuition, monsieur, is an indispensable item in the equipment of a
+successful _chevalier d'Industrie_. So, at least, the good novelists tell
+us...."
+
+"Open the safe, Blensop, and fetch me ten thousand dollars."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+"I presume you won't object to satisfying me that you really have this
+document, before I pay you your price."
+
+"It is this which makes it a pleasure to deal with an Englishman, monsieur:
+one may safely trust his word of honour."
+
+"Indeed...."
+
+"Permit me: here is the document. Use that magnifying glass I see by your
+elbow, monsieur; take your time, satisfy yourself."
+
+"Thanks; I mean to."
+
+Another break in the dialogue, during which the eavesdropper heard an
+odd sound, a sort of muffled swishing ending in a slight thud, then the
+peculiar metallic whine of a combination dial rapidly manipulated, finally
+the dull clank of bolts falling back into their sockets.
+
+"Your _coffre-fort_--what do you say?--strong-box--safe--is cleverly
+concealed, Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+There was no direct reply, but after a moment Stanistreet announced
+quietly: "This seems to be an authentic paper.... Monsieur Duchemin, what
+knowledge precisely have you of the nature of this document?"
+
+"Surely monsieur cannot have overlooked the circumstance that its seals
+were intact."
+
+"True," Stanistreet admitted. "Still...."
+
+"I trust Monsieur does not question my good faith?"
+
+"Why not?" Stanistreet enquired drily.
+
+"Monsieur!"
+
+"Oh, damn your play-acting, sir! If you can be capable of one infamy, you
+are capable of more. None the less, you are right about an Englishman's
+word: here is your money. Count it and--get out!"
+
+"Thanks"--the impostor's tone was an impertinently exact imitation of
+Stanistreet's--"I mean to."
+
+"Permit me to excuse myself," Stanistreet added; and Lanyard heard the
+muffled scrape of chair-legs on the rug as the Englishman got up.
+
+"Gladly," the spy returned--"and ten thousand thanks, monsieur!"
+
+The secretary intoned melodiously: "This way, Monsieur Duchemin, if you
+please."
+
+"Pardon. Is it material which way I leave?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Stanistreet demanded.
+
+"I should be far easier in my mind if monsieur would permit me to go by way
+of his garden, rather than run the risk of his front door."
+
+"What's this?"
+
+"In these little affairs, monsieur, I try to make it a rule to avoid
+covering the same ground twice."
+
+"You have the insolence to imply I would lend myself to treachery!"
+
+"I beg monsieur's pardon very truly for suggesting such a thing.
+Nevertheless, one cannot well be overcautious when one is a hunted man."
+
+"Blensop ... be good enough to see this man out through the garden."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Again, monsieur, my thanks."
+
+"Good-night," said Stanistreet curtly.
+
+Blensop passed Lanyard's chair, unlatched and opened the window and stood
+aside. An instant later "Karl" joined him, swung on a heel, facing back,
+clicked heels again and bowed mockingly. Apparently he got no response, for
+he laughed quietly, then turned and went out through the window, Blensop
+mincing after.
+
+With a struggle Lanyard mastered the temptation to dash after the spy,
+overtake and overpower him, expose and give him up to justice. Only the
+knowledge that by remaining quiescent, by biding his time, he might be
+enabled to redeem his word to the Brooke girl, gave him strength to be
+still.
+
+But he suffered exquisitely, maddened by the defamation imposed upon his
+nick-name of a thief by this brazen impostor.
+
+Nor was wounded _amour-propre_ mended by an exclamation in the room behind
+his chair, the accents of Colonel Stanistreet thick with contempt:
+
+"The Lone Wolf! Faugh!"
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+RECOGNITION
+
+
+Presently Blensop came back, closed the window, and passed blindly by
+Lanyard, his reappearance saluted by Stanistreet in tones that shook with
+contained temper.
+
+"You saw that animal outside the walls?"
+
+Mildly injured surprise was indicated in the reply: "Surely, sir!"
+
+"And locked the door after him?"
+
+"Yes, sir--securely."
+
+"Howson anywhere about?"
+
+"I didn't see him. Daresay he's prowling somewhere within call. Do you wish
+to speak to him?"
+
+"No.... But you might, if you see anything of him, tell him to keep an
+extra eye open to-night. I don't trust this self-styled Lone Wolf."
+
+"Naturally not, sir, under the circumstances."
+
+Stanistreet acknowledged this with an irritated snort. "No matter," he
+thought aloud; "if it has cost us a pretty penny, we have got this safe in
+hand at last. I've not had too much sleep, I can promise you, since the
+report came through of Bartholomew's death and Thackeray's disablement.
+Nor am I satisfied that this Monsieur Duchemin came by the document
+fairly--confound his impudence! If he hadn't put me on honour, tacitly, I'd
+not hesitate an instant about informing the police."
+
+"Rather chancy course to take in this business, what?"
+
+"I don't know.... That Yankee invention known as the 'frame-up' would
+easily make America too small for the Lone Wolf without the British Secret
+Service ever being mentioned in the matter."
+
+"Yes; but suppose the beast knows the contents of this paper, suspects
+the authorship of the 'frame-up'--as he instinctively would--and blabs?
+Messages have been unsealed and copied and resealed before this."
+
+"That one consideration ties my hands.... Here, my boy: take this and
+put it in the safe--and don't forget Mrs. Arden's things, of course.
+Good-night."
+
+"Trust me, sir. Good-night."
+
+A door closed with a slight jar, and for half a minute the room was so
+positively quiet that Lanyard was beginning to wonder if Blensop himself
+had gone out with his employer, when he heard a low and musical chuckle,
+followed by a soft clashing as the secretary scooped Mrs. Arden's jewellery
+out of the desk drawer.
+
+Itching with curiosity, Lanyard turned with infinite care and peered round
+the wing of the chair, thus gaining a view of the wall farthest from the
+street.
+
+Blensop remaining invisible, Lanyard's interest centred immediately upon
+the safe the ingenuity of whose concealment had excited "Karl's" favourable
+comment, and with much excuse.
+
+One of the portraits--that upon whose merits Blensop had descanted to
+"Karl" earlier in the night--was, Lanyard saw, so mounted upon a solid
+panel of wood that, by means of hidden mechanism, it could be moved
+sidelong from its frame, uncovering the face of a safe built into the wall.
+
+This last now stood open, its door, swung out toward Lanyard, showing
+a simple arrangement of dials and locks with which he was on terms of
+contemptuous familiarity; only the veriest tyro of a cracksman would want
+more than a good ear and a subtle sense of touch in order to open it
+without knowledge of the combination.
+
+With all its reputation for efficiency and astuteness the British Secret
+Service entrusted its mysteries to an antiquated contraption such as this!
+
+Humming a blithe little air, Blensop moved into Lanyard's field of vision
+and stopped between him and the safe, deftly pigeonholing therein the
+docketed papers and Mrs. Arden's jewels. Then, closing the door, he shot
+its bolts, gave the dial a brisk twirl, located a lever in the side of the
+frame and thrust it into its socket.
+
+With the same swish and thud which had puzzled Lanyard at first hearing,
+the portrait slipped back into place.
+
+Rounding on a heel, Blensop paused, head to one side, a slight frown
+shadowing his bland countenance, and stood briefly rooted in some
+perplexity of obscure origin. Twice he shook a peevish head, then smiled
+radiantly and brought his hands together in an audible clap.
+
+"I have it!" he cried in delight and, dancing briskly toward the desk, once
+more disappeared.
+
+Now what was this which Mr. Blensop so spontaneously had, and from the
+having of which he derived so much apparently innocent enjoyment? Wanting
+an answer, Lanyard settled back in disgust, then sat sharply forward, gaze
+riveted to the near sash of the adjacent window.
+
+In showing "Karl" out, Blensop had moved the portieres, exposing more
+glass than previously had been visible. Now this mirrored darkly to the
+adventurer a somewhat distorted vision of Blensop standing over the
+desk, seemingly employed in no more amusing occupation than filling his
+fountain-pen. But undoubtedly he was in the highest spirits; for the lilt
+of his humming rose sweet and clear and ever louder.
+
+To this accompaniment he pocketed his pen, two-stepped to the windows,
+drew the portieres jealously close, returned to the desk, switched off the
+reading lamp, and left the room completely dark but for a dim glow from the
+ash-filmed embers of the fire.
+
+But before he went out the secretary interrupted his humming to laugh
+with a mischievous elan which completely confounded Lanyard. He was not
+unacquainted with the Blensop type, but the secret glee which seemed to
+animate this specimen was something far beyond his comprehension.
+
+As the door softly closed Lanyard moved silently across the room and bent
+an ear to its panels, meanwhile drawing over his hands a pair of thin white
+kid gloves.
+
+From beyond came no sound other than a faint creaking of stair-treads
+quickly silenced.
+
+Opening the door, Lanyard peered out, finding the hallway deserted and
+dimly lighted by a single bulb of little candle-power at its far end, then
+scouted out as far as the foot of the stairs, listened there for a little,
+hearing no sounds above, and reconnoitred through the other living rooms,
+at length returning to the library persuaded he was alone on the ground
+floor of the house.
+
+A Yale lock was fixed to the library side of the door. Lanyard released its
+catch, insuring freedom from interruption on the part of anybody who lacked
+the key, crossed to the other side door, left this on the latch and, having
+thus provided an avenue for escape, turned attention to business, in brief,
+to the safe.
+
+Turning on the picture-light he found and operated the lever, with his
+other hand so restraining the action of the panel that it moved aside
+without perceptible jar.
+
+Then with an ear to that smooth, cold face of enamelled steel, he began
+to manipulate the combination. From within the door a succession of soft
+clicks and knocks punctuated the muted whine of the dial, speaking
+a language only too intelligible to the trained hearing of a thief;
+synchronous breaks and resistance in the action of the dial conveyed
+additional information through the medium of supersensitive finger tips.
+Within two minutes he had learned all he needed to know, and standing back
+twirled the knob right and left with a confident hand. At its fourth stop
+he heard the dull bump of released tumblers, grasped the handle, and
+twisted it strongly. The door swung open.
+
+Systematically Lanyard searched the pigeonholes, emptying all but one,
+examining minutely their contents without finding that slender roll of
+paper.
+
+Mystified, he hesitated. The thing, of course, was somewhere there, only
+hidden more cunningly than he had hoped. It was possible, even probable,
+that Blensop had stowed the cylinder away in a secret compartment.
+
+But the interior arrangement was disconcertingly simple. Lanyard saw no
+sign of waste space in which such a drawer might be secreted. Unless, to be
+sure, one of the pigeonholes had a false back....
+
+He began a fresh examination, again emptying each pigeonhole and sounding
+its rear wall without result till there remained only that in which Blensop
+had placed the Arden jewels.
+
+It was necessary to move these, but Lanyard long withheld his hand,
+reluctant to touch them, for that same reason which had influenced him to
+avoid them in his first search.
+
+Jewels such as these he both worshipped and desired with the passionate
+adoration of connoisseur and lover in one. He feared violently the
+temptation of physical contact with such stuff.
+
+For his was no thief's errand to-night, but a matter, as he conceived
+it, of his private honour, something apart and distinct from the code of
+rogue's ethics which guided his professional activities. He had pledged
+his word to Cecelia Brooke to keep safe for her that cylinder of paper, to
+return it upon her demand for whatsoever disposition she might choose to
+make of it. It was no concern of his what that choice might turn out to
+be, any more than it was his affair if the document were a paper of
+international importance. But she must and should, if act of his could
+compass it, be given opportunity to redeem her word of honour if, as one
+believed, that likewise were involved in the fate of the document.
+
+He had stolen into this house like a thief because he had given his pledge
+and perforce had been made false to that pledge, because he had been
+despoiled of the concrete evidence of the trust reposed unasked in him, and
+because he had learned that his spoiler was to meet Stanistreet in this
+room at midnight.
+
+He was here solely to make good his word, to take away that cylinder, could
+he find it, and to return it to the girl ... not to thieve....
+
+Never that!...
+
+Slowly, reluctantly, inevitably he put forth his hand and selected from
+among those brilliant symbols of his soul's profound damnation the
+necklace, a rope of diamonds consummately matched, a rivulet of frozen
+fire, no single stone less lovely than another.
+
+"Admirable!" he whispered. "Oh, admirable!"
+
+Hesitant to do this thing which to him, by the strange standard of his
+warped code, spelled dishonour, he would and he would not; and while he
+paltered, was visited by an oddly vivid memory of the clear and candid eyes
+of Cecelia Brooke, seemed veritably to see them searching his own with
+their look of grieving wonder ... the eyes of one woman who had reckoned
+him worthy of her trust....
+
+Almost he won victory in this fight he was foredoomed to lose. Under the
+level and steadfast regard of those eyes his hand went out to replace the
+necklace, moved unsteadily, faltered....
+
+Beyond the windows an incautious footfall sounded. In the darkness out
+there someone blundered into a piece of wicker furniture and disturbed it
+with a small scraping sound, all but inaudible, but to the thief as loud as
+the blast of a police whistle.
+
+Instantly and instinctively, in two simultaneous gestures, Lanyard dropped
+the necklace into an inner pocket of his coat and switched off the
+picture-light.
+
+With hands now as steady and sure as they had been vacillant a moment
+since, he closed the safe door noiselessly, shot its bolts, and was yards
+away, crouching behind an armchair, before the man outside had ceased to
+fumble with the window fastenings.
+
+If this were the watchman Howson, doubtless he would be satisfied with
+finding the room dark and apparently untenanted, and would go off upon his
+rounds unsuspecting. If he did not, or if he noticed the displaced panel,
+then would come Lanyard's time to break cover and run for it.
+
+With a faint creak one of the windows swung inward. Curtain-rings clashed
+dully on their poles. Someone came through the portieres and paused,
+pulling them together behind him. The beam of an electric flash-lamp lanced
+the gloom and its spotlight danced erratically round the walls.
+
+Now there was no more thought of flight in Lanyard's humour, but rather a
+firm determination to stand his ground. This was no night watchman, but a
+housebreaker, one with no more title to trespass upon those premises than
+himself; and at that an unskilled hand at such work, the rawest of amateurs
+practising methods as clumsy and childish as any actor playing at burglary
+on a stage before a simple-minded audience.
+
+The noise he made on entering alone proved that, then this fatuous business
+with the flash-lamp. And as he moved inward from the windows it became
+evident that he had not even had the wit to close the portieres completely;
+a violet glimmer of starlight shone in through a deep triangular gap
+between them at the top.
+
+For all that, the intruder seemed to know what he wanted and where to seek
+it, betrayed a nice acquaintance with the room, proceeding directly to the
+safe picked out by his lamp.
+
+Arrived beneath it he uttered a low sound which might have been interpreted
+as surprise due to finding the panel already out of place. If so, surprise
+evidently roused in him no suspicion that all might not be well. On the
+contrary, he quite calmly located and turned the switch controlling the
+picture-light.
+
+Immediately, as its rays gushed down and disclosed the man, Lanyard
+rose boldly from his place in hiding. Now there was no more need for
+concealment; now was his enemy delivered into his hands.
+
+The man was "Karl."
+
+His back to Lanyard, unconscious of that one's catlike approach, the spy
+put up his flash-lamp, searched in a waistcoat pocket and produced a slip
+of paper, and bent his face close to the combination dial, studying its
+figures; but abruptly, like a startled animal, whirled round to face the
+windows.
+
+One of the sashes was thrown back roughly, and a figure clad in the gray
+livery of a private watchman parted the portieres and entered the library.
+
+"Everything all right in here, Mr. Blensop?"
+
+Lanyard saw the sheen of blue steel in the hands of "Karl," and leaped too
+late: even as he fell upon the spy's shoulders, the pistol exploded.
+
+The watchman reeled back with a choking cry, caught wildly at the
+portieres, and dragged them down with him as he fell.
+
+His screams of agony made hideous the night. And the second cry was no more
+than uttered when Lanyard, even in the heat of his struggle, heard sounds
+indicating that already the household was alarmed.
+
+But the door would hold for a while; it was not probable that the first to
+come downstairs would think to bring with him the key. Time enough to
+think of escape when Lanyard had settled his score with this one: no light
+undertaking; not only was the score a long one, longer than Lanyard then
+dreamed, but, as he had learned to his cost, the man was an antagonist of
+skill and strength not to be despised.
+
+Nevertheless, aided by the surprise of his onslaught, Lanyard succeeded
+in disarming the spy, forcing him to drop the pistol at the outset, and
+through attacking from behind had him at a further disadvantage. For all
+that he found his hands full till, by a trick of jiu-jitsu, he wrenched one
+of the fellow's arms behind him so roughly as almost to dislocate it at the
+shoulder and, forcing the forearm up toward his shoulder blades, held him
+temporarily helpless.
+
+"Be still, you murderous canaille!" he growled--"or must I tear your arm
+from its socket? Still, I say!"
+
+"Karl" uttered a grunt of pain and ceased to struggle.
+
+Pinning him against the bookcase, Lanyard hastily rifled his pockets, at
+the first dip bringing forth a thin sheaf of American bank-notes with the
+figures $1000 conspicuous on the uppermost.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," he said grimly--"precisely my fee for the use of my
+name--to say nothing of its abuse!"
+
+A torrent of untranslatable German blasphemy answered him. Intelligible was
+the half-frantic demand: "Who the devil are you?"
+
+"Take a look, assassin--see for yourself!" Lanyard twisted the spy around
+to face him, holding him helpless against the wall with a knee in his
+middle and a hand gripping his throat inexorably. "Do you know me now--the
+man you thought you'd drowned a hundred fathoms deep?"
+
+Blows thundered on the hallway door. Neither heeded. The spy was staring
+into Lanyard's face, his eyes starting with horror and affright.
+
+"Lanyard!" he gasped. "Good God! will you never die?"
+
+"Never by your hand--" Lanyard began, but stopped sharply.
+
+For a moment he glared incredulously, and in that moment knew his enemy.
+
+"Ekstrom!" he cried; and the man at his mercy winced and quailed.
+
+The din in the hallway grew louder. Voices cried out for the key. Somebody
+threw himself against the door so heavily that it shook.
+
+The emergency forced itself upon Lanyard's consciousness, would not be
+denied. Its dilemma seemed calculated to unseat his reason. If he lingered,
+he was lost. Either he must grant this creature new lease of life, or be
+caught and pay the penalty of murder for an execution as surely just as any
+in the history of mankind.
+
+It was bitter, too bitter to have come to this his hour so long desired, so
+long deferred, so arduously sought, and have the fruits of it snatched from
+his craving grasp.
+
+He could not bring himself to this renunciation; slowly his fingers
+tightened on the other's throat.
+
+Driven to desperation by the light of madness that began to flicker in
+Lanyard's eyes, the Prussian abruptly put all he had of might and fury into
+one final effort, threw Lanyard off, and in turn attacked him, fighting
+like a lunatic for footroom, for space enough to turn and make for the
+windows.
+
+In spite of all he could do Lanyard saw the man work away from the wall and
+manoeuvre his back toward the windows; then he flew at him with redoubled
+fury, driving home blow after blow that beat down Ekstrom's guard and sent
+him staggering helplessly, till an uppercut, swinging in under his uplifted
+forearms, put an end to the combat. Ekstrom shot backward half a dozen
+feet, stumbled over the prostrate body of the watchman, and crashed
+headlong into the windows, going down in a shower of shattered glass.
+
+In one and the same instant Lanyard darted back and dropped upon his knees
+in the shadow of the club lounge, and the door to the hallway slammed open.
+A knot of men, to the number of half a dozen, tumbling into the library,
+saw that figure floundering amid the ruins of the window, and made for it,
+passing on the other side of the lounge, between it and the fireplace.
+
+Unseen, Lanyard rose, ran crouching across the room; found the side door,
+opened it just far enough to permit the passage of his body, and drew it to
+behind him.
+
+Ninety-fifth Street was a lonely lane of midnight quiet. He sped across it
+like the shadow of a cloud wind-hunted.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+AU PRINTEMPS
+
+
+In those days New York nights were long; this was still young when Lanyard
+sauntered sedately from a side street and stopped on a corner of Broadway
+in the Nineties; he had not long to wait ere a southbound taxicab hove in
+sight and sheered over to the curb in answer to his signal.
+
+It was still something short of one o'clock when he was set down at his
+door.
+
+Wearily he let himself in by the private entrance, made a light, and
+without troubling even to discard his overcoat threw himself into a chair.
+Leaden depression weighed down his heart, and the flavour of failure was
+as aloes in his mouth. Thrice within an hour he had fallen short of his
+promises, to Cecelia Brooke, to himself, to his _idee fixe_. His three
+chances, to redeem his word to the girl, to measure up to his queer
+criterion of honour, to rid his world of Ekstrom, all had slipped through
+fingers seemingly too infirm to profit by them.
+
+He felt of a sudden old; old, and tired, and lonely.
+
+The uses of his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was
+his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of
+his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now
+swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the
+shameful habiliments of a felon self-condemned.
+
+What had prevented his dealing out to Ekstrom the punishment he had so well
+earned? That insatiable lust for loot of his. But for that damning evidence
+against him of the stolen necklace in his pocket he might have had his will
+of Ekstrom, and justified himself when discovered by proving that he had
+merely done justice to a thief who sold what he had stolen and stole back
+to steal again what he had sold.
+
+Self-contempt attacked self-conceit like an acid. He saw Michael Lanyard
+a sorry figure, sitting stultified with self-pity ... crying over spilt
+milk....
+
+Impatiently he shook himself. What though he had to-night forfeited his
+chances? He could, nay, would, make others. He must....
+
+To what end? Would life be sweeter if one found a way to restore to Cecelia
+Brooke her precious document and to smuggle back to Mrs. Arden her pilfered
+diamonds? Would this deadly ache of loneliness be less poignant with
+Ekstrom dead?
+
+With lack-lustre eyes he looked round that cheerless room, reckoning its
+perfunctory pretense of comfort the forlornest mockery. To lodgings such as
+this he was condemned for life, to an interminable sequence of transient
+quarters, sordid or splendid, rich or mean, alike in this common quality of
+hollow loneliness....
+
+His aimless gaze wandered toward the door opening on the public hallway,
+and became fixed upon a triangular shape of white paper, the half of an
+envelope tucked between door and sill.
+
+Presently he rose and got the thing, not until he touched it quite
+persuaded he was not the victim of an optical hallucination.
+
+A square envelope of creamy paper, it was superscribed simply in a hand
+strange to him, _Anthony Ember, Esq_., with the address of his apartment
+house.
+
+Tearing the envelope he found within a double sheet of plain notepaper
+bearing a message of five words penned hastily:
+
+  "_Au Printemps_--
+  "_one o'clock_--
+  "_Please_!"
+
+Nothing else, not another word or pen-scratch....
+
+Opening the door Lanyard hailed the hall-attendant, a sleepy and not
+over-intelligent negro.
+
+"When did this come for me?"
+
+"'Bout anour ago, Mistuh Embuh."
+
+"Who brought it?"
+
+"A messenger boy done fotch it, suh--look lak th' same boy."
+
+"What same boy?"
+
+"Same as come in when you do, 'bout 'leven o'clock--remembuh?"
+
+Lanyard nodded, recalling that on his way up the street from Sixth Avenue
+he had been subconsciously irritated by the shrill, untuneful whistling of
+a loutish youth in Western Union uniform, who had followed him into the
+house and become engaged in some minor altercation with the attendants
+while Lanyard was unlocking the door to his apartment.
+
+"What of him?"
+
+"Why, he bulge in heah an' say we done send a call, an' we tell him we don'
+know nuffin' 'bout no call, an' he sweah an' carry on, an' aftuh you done
+gone in he ast whut is yo' name, an' somebody tell him an' he go away. An'
+then 'bout haffanour aftuhwuds he come back with that theah lettuh--say to
+stick it undeh yo' do, ef yo' ain't home. Leastways he look to me lak th'
+same boy. Ah dunno fo' suah."
+
+Repeated efforts failing to extract more enlightenment from this source,
+Lanyard again shut himself in with the puzzle.
+
+Somebody had set a messenger boy to dog him and find out his name and
+address. Not Crane: Lanyard had seen that one disappear in the elevator of
+the Knickerbocker and had thereafter moved too quickly to permit of Crane's
+returning to the lobby, calling a messenger boy, and pointing out Lanyard.
+
+For that matter, Lanyard was prepared to swear nobody had followed him from
+the Knickerbocker to the Biltmore.
+
+Vaguely he seemed to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when
+he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone
+Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose
+flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the
+display of a catch-penny corn cure.
+
+Was there a link between that circumstance and the long delay which Lanyard
+had suffered in the telephone booth? Had the Knickerbocker operator been
+less stupid and negligent than she seemed? Was the truth of the matter that
+Crane had surmised Lanyard would attempt communication with the Brooke girl
+and had set a watch on the switchboard for the call?
+
+Assuming that the Secret Service man had been clever enough for that,
+it was not difficult to understand that Lanyard had purposely been kept
+dangling at the other end of the wire till the call could be traced back to
+its source and a messenger despatched from the nearest Western Union office
+with instructions to follow the man who left the booth, and report his name
+and local habitation.
+
+Sharp work, if these inferences were reasonable. And, satisfied that
+they were, Lanyard inclined to accord increased respect to the detective
+abilities of the American.
+
+But this note, this hurried, unsigned scrawl of five unintelligible words:
+what the deuce did it mean?
+
+On the evidence of the handwriting a woman had penned it. Cecelia Brooke?
+Who else? Crane might well have been taken into her confidence, subsequent
+to the sinking of the _Assyrian_, and on discovering that Lanyard had
+survived have used this means of relieving the girl's distress of mind.
+
+But its significance?... "Au Printemps" translated literally meant "in the
+springtime," and "in the springtime at one o'clock" was mere gibberish,
+incomprehensible. There is in Paris a department store calling itself "Au
+Printemps"; but surely no one was suggesting to Lanyard in New York a
+rendezvous in Paris!
+
+Nevertheless that "Please!" intrigued with a note at once pleading and
+imperative which decided Lanyard to answer it without delay, in person.
+
+"_Au Printemps--one o'clock--please_!"
+
+Upon the screen of memory there flashed a blurred vision of an electric
+sign emblazoning the phrase, "Au Printemps," against the facade of a
+building with windows all blind and dark save those of the street level,
+which glowed pink with light filtered through silken hangings; a building
+which Lanyard had already passed thrice that night without, in the
+preoccupation of his purpose, paying it any heed; a building on Broadway
+somewhere above Columbus Circle, if he were not mistaken.
+
+Already it was one o'clock. Fortunately he was still in evening dress, and
+needed only to change collar and tie to repair the disarray caused by his
+encounter with Ekstrom.
+
+In two minutes he was once more in the street.
+
+Within five a cab deposited him in front of the Restaurant Au Printemps, an
+institution of midnight New York whose title for distinction resided mainly
+in the fact that it opened its upper floors for the diversion of "members"
+about the time when others put up their shutters.
+
+Lanyard's advent occurred at the height of its traffic. The dining rooms on
+the street level were closed and unlighted: but men and women in pairs
+and parties were streaming across the sidewalk from an endless chain of
+motor-cars and being ground through the revolving doors like grist in the
+hopper of an unhallowed mill, the men all in evening dress, the women in
+garments whose insolence outrivalled the most Byzantine nights of L'Abbaye
+Theleme.
+
+Drawn in with the current through the turnstile door, Lanyard found himself
+in an absurdly little lobby thronged to suffocation, largely with people
+of the half-world--here and there a few celebrities, here and there small
+tight clusters of respectabilities making a brave show of feeling at
+ease--all waiting their turn to be lifted to delectable regions aloft in an
+elevator barely big enough to serve in a private residence.
+
+For a moment Lanyard lingered unnoticed on the outskirts of this
+assemblage, searching its pretty faces for the prettier face he had come to
+find and wondering that she should have chosen for her purpose with him a
+resort of this character. His memory of her was sweet with the clean smell
+of the sea; there was incongruity to spare in this atmosphere heady with
+the odours of wine, flesh, scent, and tobacco. Perplexing....
+
+A harpy with a painted leer and predacious eyes pounced upon him, tore away
+his hat and coat, gave him a numbered slip of pasteboard by presenting
+which he would be permitted to ransom his property on extortionate terms.
+
+And still he saw no Cecelia Brooke, though his aloof attitude coupled with
+an intent but impersonal inspection of every feminine face within his
+radius of vision earned him more than one smile at once furtively
+provocative and unwelcome.
+
+By degrees the crowd emptied itself into the toy elevator--such of it, that
+is, as was passed by a committee on membership consisting of one chubby,
+bearded gentleman with the look of a French diplomatist, the empressement
+of a head waiter and the authority of the Angel with the Flaming Sword.
+_Personae non gratae_ to the management--inexplicably so in most
+instances--were civilly requested to produce membership cards and, upon
+failure to comply, were inexorably rejected, and departed strangely
+shamefaced. Others of acceptable aspect were permitted to mingle with
+the upper circles of the elect without being required to prove their
+"membership."
+
+In the person of this suave but inflexible arbiter Lanyard identified a
+former maitre d'hotel of the Carlton who had abruptly and discreetly fled
+London soon after the outbreak of war.
+
+He fancied that this one knew him and was sedulous both to keep him in the
+corner of his eye and never to meet his regard directly.
+
+And once he saw the man speak covertly with the elevator attendant,
+guarding his lips with a hand, and suspected that he was the subject of
+their communication.
+
+The lobby was still comfortably filled, a constant trickle of arrivals
+replacing in measure the losses by election and rejection, when Lanyard,
+watching the revolving doors, saw Cecelia Brooke coming in.
+
+She was alone, at least momentarily; and in his sight very creditably
+turned out, remembering that all her luggage must have been lost with the
+_Assyrian_. But what Englishwoman of her caste ever permitted herself to be
+visible after nightfall except in an evening gown of some sort, even though
+a shabby sort? Not that Miss Brooke to-night was shabbily attired: she was
+much otherwise; from some mysterious source of wardrobe she had conjured
+wraps, furs, and a dancing frock as fresh and becoming as it was, oddly
+enough, not immodest. And with whatever cares preying upon her secret mind,
+she entered with the light step and bright countenance of any girl of her
+age embarked upon a lark.
+
+All that was changed at sight of Lanyard.
+
+He bowed formally at a moment when her glance, resting on him, seemed about
+to wander on; instead it became fixed in recognition. Instantly her smile
+was erased, her features stiffened, her eyes widened, her lips parted, the
+colour ebbed from her cheeks. And she stopped quite still in front of the
+door till lightly jostled by other arrivals.
+
+Then moving uncertainly toward him, she said, "Monsieur Duchemin!" not
+loudly, for she was not a woman to give excuse for a scene under any
+circumstances, but in a tone of complete dumbfounderment.
+
+Covering his own dashed contenance with a semblance of unruffled
+amiability, he bowed again, now over the hand which the girl tentatively
+offered, letting it rest lightly on his fingers, touching it as lightly
+with his lips.
+
+"It is such a pleasant surprise," he said at a venture, then added
+guardedly: "But my name--I thought you knew it was now Anthony Ember."
+
+Her eyes were blank. "I don't understand," she faltered. "I thought you ...
+I never dreamed.... Is it really you?"
+
+"Truly," he averred, lips smiling but mind rife with suspicion and
+distrust.
+
+This was not acting; he was convinced that her surprise was absolutely
+unfeigned.
+
+So she had not expected to find him "Au Printemps" at one o'clock in the
+morning, till that very moment had believed him as dead as any of those
+poor souls who had perished with the _Assyrian_!
+
+Therefore that note had not come from her, therefore Lanyard had
+complimented Crane without warrant, crediting him with another's
+cleverness. Then whose...?
+
+And while Lanyard's head buzzed with these thoughts, an independent chamber
+of his mind was engaged in admiring the address with which the girl was
+recovering from what must have been, what plainly had been, a staggering
+shock. Already she had begun to grapple with the situation, to take herself
+in hand and dissemble; already her face was regaining its accustomed cast
+of self-confidence, composure, and intelligent animation. Throughout she
+pursued without a break the thread of conventional small talk.
+
+"It is a surprise," she said calmly. "Really, you are a most astonishing
+person, Mr. Ember. One never knows where to look for you."
+
+"That is my good fortune, since it provides me with unexpected pleasures
+such as this. You are with friends?"
+
+"With a friend," she corrected quietly--"with Mr. Crane. He stopped outside
+to pay our taxi-driver. How odd it seems to find any place in the world as
+much alive as this New York!"
+
+"It seems almost impossible," Lanyard averred--"indeed, somehow wrong. I've
+a feeling one has no right to encourage so much frivolity. And yet...."
+
+"Yes," she responded quickly. "It is good to hear people laugh once more.
+That is why Mr. Crane suggested coming here to-night, to cheer me up. He
+said Au Printemps was unique, promised I'd find it most amusing."
+
+"I'm sure...." Lanyard began as Crane entered, breezing through the
+turnstile and comprehending the situation in a glance.
+
+"Hello!" he cried. "Didn't I tell you everybody alive would be here?"
+
+Nor was Cecelia Brooke less ready. "But fancy meeting Mr. Ember here! I had
+no idea he was in New York--had you?"
+
+"Perhaps a dim suspicion," Crane admitted with a twinkle, taking Lanyard's
+hand. "Howdy, Ember? Glad to see you, gladder'n you'd think."
+
+"How is that?" Lanyard asked, returning the cordiality of his grasp.
+
+Crane's penetrating accents must have been audible in the remotest corner
+of the ground-floor rooms: he made no effort to modulate them to a quieter
+pitch.
+
+"You can help me out of a fix if you feel like it. You see, I promised Miss
+Brooke if she'd take me for her guide, she'd see life to-night; and now,
+just when we're going good, I've got to renig. Man I know held me up
+outside, says I'm wanted down town on special business and must go. I might
+be able to toddle back later, but can't bank on it. Do you mind taking over
+my job?"
+
+"Chaperoning Miss Brooke's investigations into the seamy side of current
+social history? That will be delightful."
+
+"Attaboy! If I'm not back in half an hour you'll see her safely home, of
+course?"
+
+"Trust me."
+
+"And you'll excuse me, Miss Brooke? I hope you don't think--"
+
+"What I do think, Mr. Crane, is that you have been most kind to a lonely
+stranger. Of course I'll excuse you, not willingly, but understanding you
+must go."
+
+"That makes me a heap easier in my mind. But I' got to run. So it's
+good-night, unless maybe I see you later. So long, Ember!"
+
+With a flirt of a raw-boned hand, Crane swung about, threw himself
+spiritedly into the revolving door, was gone.
+
+"Amazing creature," Lanyard commented, laughing.
+
+"I think him delightful," the girl replied, surrendering her wraps to a
+maid. "If all Americans are like that--"
+
+"Shall we go up?"
+
+She nodded--"Please!"--and turned with him.
+
+The committee on membership himself bowed them into the elevator. Several
+others crowded in after them. For thirty seconds, while the car moved
+slowly upward, Lanyard was free to think without interruption.
+
+But what to think now? That Crane, actuated by some motive occult to
+Lanyard, had engineered this apparently adventitious _rencontre_ for the
+purpose of throwing him and the Brooke girl together? Or, again, that Crane
+was innocent of guile in this matter--that other persons unknown, causing
+Lanyard to be traced to his lodgings, had framed that note to entice him to
+this place to-night? In the latter event, who was conceivably responsible
+but Velasco, Dressier, O'Reilly--any one of these, or all three working in
+concert? The last-named had looked Lanyard squarely in the face without
+sign of recognition, back there in the lobby of the Knickerbocker,
+precisely as he should, if implicated in the conspiracies of the Boche;
+though it might easily have been Velasco or Dressier who had recognized the
+adventurer without his knowledge....
+
+The car stopped, a narrow-chested door slid open, a gush of hectic light
+coloured morbidly the faces of alighting passengers, a blare of syncopated
+noise singularly unmusical saluted the astonished ears of Lanyard and
+Cecelia Brooke. She met his gaze with a smiling _moue_ and slightly lifted
+eyebrows.
+
+"More than we bargained for?" he laughed. "But there is always something
+new in this America, I promise you. Au Printemps itself is new, at all
+events did not exist when I was last in New York."
+
+Following her out, he paused beside the girl in a constricted space hedged
+about with tables, waiting for the maitre d'hotel to seat those who had
+been first to leave the elevator.
+
+The room, of irregular conformation, held upward of two hundred guests and
+habitues seated at tables large and small and so closely set together
+that waiters with difficulty navigated narrow and tortuous channels of
+communication. In the middle, upon a small dancing floor, rudely octagonal
+in shape, made smaller by tables crowded round its edge to accommodate the
+crush, a mob of couples danced arduously, close-locked in one another's
+arms, swaying in rhythm with the over-emphasized time beaten out by a
+perspiring little band of musicians on a dais in a far corner, their
+activities directed by an antic conductor whose lantern-jawed, sallow face
+peered grotesquely out through a mop of hair as black and coarse and lush
+as a horse's mane.
+
+Execrable ventilation or absence thereof manufactured an atmosphere that
+reeked with heat animal and artificial and with ill-blended effluvia from a
+hundred sources. Perhaps the odour of alcohol predominated; Lanyard thought
+of a steam-heated wine-cellar. He observed nothing but champagne in any
+glass, and if food were being served it was done surreptitiously. Sweat
+dripped from the faces of the dancers, deep flushes discoloured all not so
+heavily enamelled as to preserve an inalterable complexion, the eyes of
+many stared with the fixity of hypnosis. Yet when the music ended with an
+unexpected crash of discord these dancers applauded insatiably till the
+jaded orchestra struck up once more, when they renewed their curious
+gyrations with quenchless abandon.
+
+The Brooke girl caught Lanyard's eye, her lips moved. Thanks to the din, he
+had to bend his head near to hear.
+
+She murmured with infinite expression: "Au Printemps!"
+
+The maitre d'hotel was plucking at his sleeve.
+
+"Monsieur had made reservations, no?" Startled recognition washed the man's
+tired and pasty countenance. "Pardon, monsieur: this way!" He turned and
+began to thread deviously between the jostling tables.
+
+Dubiously Lanyard followed. He likewise had known the maitre d'hotel at
+sight: a beastly little decadent whose cabaret on the rue d'Antin, just off
+the avenue de l'Opera, had been a famous rendezvous of international spies
+till war had rendered it advisable for him to efface himself from the ken
+of Paris with the same expedition and discretion which had marked the
+departure from London of his confrere who now guarded the lower gateway to
+these ethereal regions of Au Printemps.
+
+The coincidence of finding those two so closely associated worked with the
+riddle of that note further to trouble Lanyard's mind.
+
+Was he to believe Au Printemps the legitimate successor in America of that
+less pretentious establishment on the rue d'Antin, an overseas headquarters
+for Secret Service agents of the Central Powers?
+
+He began to regret heartily, not so much that he had presented himself in
+answer to that note, but the responsibility which now devolved upon him of
+caring for Miss Brooke. Much as he had wished to see her an hour ago, now
+he would willingly be rid of her company.
+
+Why had he been lured to this place, if its character were truly what he
+feared? Conceivably because he was believed--since it now appeared he had
+cheated death--still to possess either that desired document or knowledge
+of its whereabouts.
+
+Naturally the enemy would not think otherwise. He must not forget that
+Ekstrom was playing double; as yet none but Lanyard knew he had stolen the
+document and done a murder to cover the theft from his associates and leave
+him free to sell to England without exciting their suspicion.
+
+Consequently, Lanyard believed, he had been invited to this place to
+be sounded, to be tempted, bribed, intimidated--if need be, and
+possible--somehow to be won over to the uses of the Prussian spy system.
+
+Leading them to the farther side of the room, the maitre d'hotel paused
+bowing and mowing beside a large table already in the possession of a party
+of three.
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. One of the three was Velasco, another a young man
+unknown to him, a mannerly little creature who might have been written by
+the author of "What the Man Will Wear" in the theatre programmes. The third
+was Sophie Weringrode, the Wilhelmstrasse agent whom he had only that
+afternoon observed entering the house in Seventy-ninth Street.
+
+He stopped short, in a cold rage. Till that moment a mirror-sheathed pillar
+had hidden from him Velasco and the Weringrode; else Lanyard had refused
+to come so far; for obviously there were no unreserved tables, indeed few
+vacant chairs, in that part of the room.
+
+Not that he minded the cynical barefacedness of the dodge; that was indeed
+amusing; he was sanguine as to his ability to dominate any situation that
+might arise, and to a degree indifferent if the upshot should prove his
+confidence misplaced; and he did not in the least object to letting the
+enemy show his cards. But he did enormously resent what was, after all,
+something quite outside the calculations of these giddy conspirators, the
+fact that he must either beat incontinent retreat or introduce Cecelia
+Brooke to the company of Sophie Weringrode.
+
+His face darkened, a stinging reproof for the maitre d'hotel trembled on
+his tongue's tip; but that one was busily avoiding his eye on the far side
+of the table, drawing out a chair for "mademoiselle," while Velasco and the
+Weringrode were alert to read Lanyard's countenance and forestall any steps
+he might contemplate in defiance of their designs.
+
+At first glimpse of the Brooke girl Velasco jumped up and hastened to her,
+with eager Latin courtesy expressing his unanticipated delight in the
+prospect of her consenting to join their party. And she was suffering with
+quiet graciousness his florid compliments.
+
+At the same time the Weringrode was greeting Lanyard in the most intimate
+fashion--and damning him in the understanding of Cecelia Brooke with every
+word.
+
+"My dear friend!" she cried gayly, extending a bedizened hand. "I had begun
+to despair of you. Is it part of your system with women always to be a
+little late, always to keep us wondering?"
+
+Schooling his features to a civil smile, Lanyard bowed over the hand.
+
+"In warfare such as ours, my dear Sophie," he said with meaning, "one uses
+all weapons, even the most primitive, in sheer self-defense."
+
+The woman laughed delightedly. "I think," she said, "if you rose from the
+dead at the bottom of the sea, _Tony_, it would be with wit upon your
+lips.... And you have brought a friend with you? How charming!" She shifted
+in her chair to face Cecelia Brooke. "I wish to know her instantly!"
+
+Velasco was waiting only for that opening. "Dear princess," he said,
+instantly, "permit me to present Miss Cecelia Brooke ... Princess de
+Alavia...."
+
+Completely at ease and by every indication enjoying herself hugely, the
+girl bowed and took the hand the Weringrode thrust upon her. Her eyes,
+a-brim with excitement and mischief, veered to Lanyard's, ignored their
+warning, glanced away.
+
+"How do you do?" she said simply. "I didn't understand Mr. Ember expected
+to meet friends here, but that only makes it the more agreeable. May we sit
+down?"
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+FINESSE
+
+
+The person in the educated evening clothes was made known as Mr. Revel.
+For Lanyard's benefit and his own he vacated the chair beside Sophie
+Weringrode, seating himself to one side of Cecelia Brooke, who had Velasco
+between her and the soi-disant princess.
+
+Already a waiter had placed and was filling glasses for Lanyard and the
+girl.
+
+With the best grace he could muster the adventurer sat down, accepted
+a cigarette from the Weringrode case, and with openly impertinent eyes
+inspected the intrigante critically.
+
+She endured that ordeal well, smiling confidently, a handsome creature with
+a beautiful body bewitchingly gowned.
+
+Time, he considered, had been kind to Sophie--time, the mysteries of the
+modern toilette, and the astonishing adaptability of womankind. Splendidly
+vital, like all of her sort who survive, she seemed mysteriously able to
+renew that vitality through the very extravagance with which she squandered
+it. She had lived much of late years, rapidly but well, had learned much,
+had profited by her lessons. To-night she looked legitimately the princess
+of her pretensions; the manner of the grande dame suited her type; her
+gesture was as impeccable as her taste; prettier than ever, she seemed at
+worst little more than half her age.
+
+And her quick intelligence mocked the privacy of his reflections.
+
+"Fair, fast, and forty," she interpreted smilingly.
+
+He pretended to be stunned. "Never!" he protested feebly.
+
+The woman reaffirmed in a series of rapid nods. "Have I ever had secrets
+from you? You are too quick for me, monsieur: I do not intend to begin
+deceiving you at this late day--or trying to."
+
+"Flattery," he declared, "is meat and drink to me. Tell me more."
+
+She laughed lightly. "Thank you, no; vanity is unbecoming in men; I do not
+care to make you vain."
+
+Aware that Cecelia Brooke was listening all the while she seemed to be
+enchanted with the patter of Mr. Revel and the less vapid observations of
+Velasco, Lanyard sought to shunt personalities from himself.
+
+"And now a princess!"
+
+"Did you not know I had married? Yes, a princess of Spain--and with a
+castle there, if you must know."
+
+"Quite a change of atmosphere from Berlin," he remarked. "But it has done
+you no perceptible harm."
+
+That won him a black look. "Oh, Berlin!" she said with contemptuous lips.
+"I haven't been there since the beginning of the war. I wish never to see
+the place again. True: I was born an Austrian; but is that any reason why I
+should love Germany?"
+
+She leaned forward, her fan gently tapping the knuckles of his hand.
+
+"Pay less attention to me," she insisted, with a nod toward the middle of
+the room. "You are missing something. Me, I never tire of her."
+
+The floor had been cleared. A drummer on the dais was sounding the
+long-roll crescendo. At the culminating crash the lights were everywhere
+darkened save for an orange-coloured spot-light set in the ceiling
+immediately above the dancing floor. Into that circular field of torrid
+glare bounded a woman wearing little more than an abbreviated kirtle of
+grass strands with a few festoons of artificial flowers. Applause roared
+out to her, the orchestra sounded the opening bars of an Americanised
+Hawaiian melody, the woman with extraordinary vivacity began to perform a
+denatured hula: a wild and tawny animal, superbly physical, relying with
+warrant upon the stark sensuality of her body to make amends for the
+censored phrases of the primitive dance. The floor resounded like a great
+drum to the stamping of her bare feet, till one marvelled at such solidity
+of flesh as could endure that punishment.
+
+Sophie Weringrode lounged negligently upon the table, bringing her head
+near Lanyard's shoulder.
+
+"Play fair," she said between lips that barely moved.
+
+Without looking round Lanyard answered in the same manner: "Why ask more
+than you are prepared to give?"
+
+"The police ran you out of America once. We need only publish the fact that
+Mr. Anthony Ember is the Lone Wolf...."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Leave Berlin out of it before this girl."
+
+Lanyard shrugged and laughed quietly. "What else?"
+
+"We can't talk now. Ask me for the next dance."
+
+The woman sat back in her chair, attentive to the posturing of the dancer,
+slowly fanning herself.
+
+Lanyard's semblance of as much interest was nothing more; furtively his
+watchfulness alternated between two quarters of the room.
+
+On the farther edge of the circle of tropical radiance he had marked down a
+table at which two men were seated, Dressier and O'Reilly. No more question
+now as to the personnel of the conspiracy; even Velasco had thrown off
+the mask. The enemy had come boldly into the open, indicating a sense of
+impudent assurance, indicating even more, contempt of opposition. No
+longer afraid, they no longer skulked in shadows. Lanyard experienced a
+premonition of events impending.
+
+In addition he was keeping an eye on the door to the elevator shaft. Once
+already it had opened, letting a bright window into the farther wall of the
+shadowed room, discovering the figure of the maitre d'hotel in silhouette,
+anxiety in his attitude. He was waiting for somebody, waiting tensely. So
+were the others waiting, all that crew and their fellow workers scattered
+among the guests. Lanyard told himself he could guess for whom.
+
+Only Ekstrom was wanting to complete the circle. When he appeared--if by
+chance he should--things ought to begin to happen.
+
+If tolerably satisfied that Ekstrom would not come--not that night, at all
+events--Lanyard, none the less, continued to be jealously heedful of that
+doorway.
+
+But the hula came to an end without either his vigilance or the impatience
+of the maitre d'hotel being rewarded. Writhing with serpentine grace to the
+edge of the illuminated area, the dancer leaped back into darkness and the
+folds of a wrap held by a maid, in which garment she was seen, bowing and
+laughing, when the lights again blazed up.
+
+Without ceasing to play, changing only the time of the tune, the orchestra
+swung into a fox-trot. Lanyard glanced across the table to see Cecelia
+Brooke rising in response to the invitation of dapper Mr. Revel.
+
+In his turn, he rose with Sophie Weringrode. "Be patient with me,"
+he begged. "It is long since I danced to music more frivolous than a
+cannonade."
+
+"But it is simple," the woman promised--"simple, at least, to one who can
+dance as you could in the old days. Just follow me till you catch the step.
+It doesn't matter, anyway; I desire only the opportunity to converse."
+
+Yielding to his arms, she shifted into French when next she spoke.
+
+"You do admirably, my friend. Never again depreciate your dancing. If you
+knew how one suffers at the feet of these Americans--!"
+
+"Excellent!" he said. "Now that is settled: what is it you are instructed
+to propose to me?"
+
+She laughed softly. "Always direct! Truly you would never shine as a secret
+agent."
+
+"Not as they shine," Lanyard countered--"in the dark."
+
+"Don't be a fraud. We are what we are, and so are you. Let us not begin to
+be censorious of one another's methods of winning a living."
+
+"Agreed. But when do we begin to talk business?"
+
+"Why do you continue so persistently antagonistic?"
+
+"I am French."
+
+"That is silly. You are an outlaw, a man without a country. Why not change
+all that?"
+
+"And how does one effect miracles?"
+
+"Germany offers you a refuge, security, freedom to ply your trade
+unhindered--within reasonable limits."
+
+"And in exchange what do I give?"
+
+"Your services, as and when required, in our service."
+
+"Beginning when?"
+
+"To-night."
+
+"With what specific performance?"
+
+"We want, we must without fail have, that document you took from the Brooke
+girl."
+
+"Perhaps we had better continue in English. You are speaking a tongue
+unknown to me."
+
+"Don't talk rot. You know well what I mean. We know you have the thing.
+You didn't steal it to turn it over to England or the States. What is your
+price to Germany?"
+
+"Whatever you have in mind, believe me when I say I have nothing to sell to
+the Wilhelmstrasse."
+
+"But what else can you do with it? What other market--?"
+
+"My dear Sophie, upon my word I haven't got what you want."
+
+"Then why so keen to get the Brooke girl on the telephone as soon as you
+found out where she was stopping?"
+
+"How did you learn about that, by the way?"
+
+"Let the credit go to Senor Velasco. He saw you first."
+
+"One thought as much.... Nevertheless, I haven't what you want."
+
+"You gave it back to Miss Brooke?"
+
+"Having nothing to give her, I gave her nothing."
+
+The woman was silent throughout a round of the floor; then, "Tell me
+something," she requested.
+
+"Can I keep anything from you?"
+
+"Are you in love with the English girl?"
+
+Lanyard almost lost step, then laughed the thought to derision. "What put
+that into your pretty head, Sophie?"
+
+"Do you not know it yourself, my friend?"
+
+"It is absurd."
+
+She laughed maliciously. "Think it over. Possibly you have not stopped to
+think as yet. When you know the truth yourself, you will be the better
+qualified to fib about it. Also, you will not forget...."
+
+"What?" he demanded bluntly as she paused with intention.
+
+"That as long as she possesses the document--since you have it not--her
+life is endangered even more than yours."
+
+"She hasn't got it!" Lanyard declared, as nearly in panic as he ever was.
+
+"Ah!" the woman jeered. "So you confess to some knowledge of it after all!"
+
+"My dear," he said, teasingly, "do you really want to know what has become
+of that paper?"
+
+"I do, and mean to."
+
+"What if I tell you?"
+
+Her eyes lifted to his in childlike candour. "Need you ask?"
+
+"You are irresistible.... Ask Karl."
+
+She demanded sharply: "Whom?"
+
+"Ekstrom."
+
+"Ah!" Again the adventuress was silent for a little. "What does he know?"
+
+"Ask him, enquire why he murdered von Harden, then what business took him
+to Ninety-fifth Street twice this evening--once about nine o'clock, again
+at midnight."
+
+"You must be mad, monsieur. Karl would not dare...."
+
+"You don't know him--or have forgotten he was trained in the International
+Bureau of Brussels, and there learned how to sell out both parties to a
+business that won't bear publicity."
+
+"I wonder," the woman mused. "Never have I wholly trusted that one."
+
+"Shall I give you the key?"
+
+"If you love Karl as little as I...."
+
+"But where do you suppose the good man is, this night of nights?"
+
+"Who knows? He was not here when I arrived at midnight. I have seen nothing
+of him since."
+
+"When you do--if he shows himself at all--look him over carefully for signs
+of wear and tear."
+
+"Yes, monsieur? And in what respect?"
+
+"Look for cuts about his head and hands, possibly elsewhere. And should he
+confess to an affair with a wind-shield in a motor accident, ask him what
+happened to the study window in the house at Ninety-fifth Street."
+
+Impish glee danced in the woman's eyes. "Your handiwork, dear friend?"
+
+"A mere beginning.... You may tell him so, if you like."
+
+He was subjected to a convulsive squeeze. "Never have I felt so kindly
+disposed toward an enemy!"
+
+"It is true, I were a better foe to Germany if I kept my counsel and let
+Ekstrom continue to play double."
+
+The music ceasing, to be followed by the inevitable clamour for more,
+Lanyard offered an arm upon which Sophie rested a detaining hand.
+
+"No--wait. We dance this encore. I have more to say."
+
+He submitted amiably, the more so since not ill-pleased with himself. And
+when again they were moving round the floor, she bore more heavily upon his
+shoulder and was thoughtful longer than he had expected. Then--
+
+"Attention, my friend."
+
+"I am listening, Sophie."
+
+"If what you hint is true--and I do not doubt it is--Karl's day is done."
+
+"More nearly than he dreams," Lanyard affirmed grimly.
+
+"I shan't be sorry. I am German through and through; what I do, I do for
+the Fatherland, and in that find absolution for many things I care not to
+remember. If through what you tell me I may prove Karl traitor, I owe you
+something."
+
+"Always it has been my fondest hope, Sophie, some day to have you in my
+debt."
+
+Her fingers tightened on his. "Do not jest in the shadow of death. Since
+you have been unwise enough to venture here to-night, you will not be
+permitted to leave alive--unless you pledge yourself to us and prove your
+sincerity by producing that paper."
+
+"That sounds reasonable--like Prussia. What next?"
+
+"I have warned you, so paid off my debt. The rest is your affair."
+
+"Do you imagine I take this seriously?"
+
+"It will turn out seriously for you if you do not."
+
+"How can I be prevented from leaving when I will, from a public
+restaurant?"
+
+"Is it possible you don't know this place? It is maintained by the
+Wilhelmstrasse. Attempt to leave it without coming to a satisfactory
+understanding, and see what happens."
+
+"What, for instance?"
+
+"The lights would be out before you were half across the room. When they
+went up again, the Lone Wolf would be no more, and never a soul here would
+know who stabbed him or what became of the knife."
+
+"Are you by any chance amusing yourself at my expense?"
+
+Once more the woman showed him her handsome eyes: he found them frankly
+grave, earnest, unwavering.
+
+"If you will not listen, your blood be on your own head."
+
+"Forgive me. I didn't mean to be rude...."
+
+"Still, you do not believe!"
+
+"You are wrong. I am merely amused."
+
+"If you understood, you could never mock your peril."
+
+"But I don't mock it. I am enchanted with it. I accept it, and it renews
+my youth. This might be Paris of the days when you ran with the Pack,
+Sophie--and I alone!"
+
+The woman moved her pretty shoulders impatiently. "I think you are either
+mad or ... the very soul of courage!"
+
+The encore ended; they returned to the table, Sophie leaning lightly on
+Lanyard's arm, chattering gay inconsequentialities.
+
+Dropping into her chair, she bent over toward Cecelia Brooke.
+
+"He dances adorably, my dear!" the intrigante declared. "But I dare say you
+know that already."
+
+The English girl shook her head, smiling. "Not yet."
+
+"Then lose no time. You two should dance well together, for you are more of
+a size. I think the next number will be a waltz. We get altogether too few
+of them; these American dances, these one-steps and foxtrots, they are not
+dances, they are mere romps, favourites none the less. And there is always
+more room on the floor; so few waltz nowadays. Really, you must not miss
+this opportunity."
+
+This playful insistence, the light stress she laid upon her suggestion that
+Cecelia Brooke dance with him, considered in conjunction with her recent
+admonition, impressed Lanyard as significantly inconsistent. Sophie was no
+more a woman to make purposeless gestures than she was one sufficiently
+wanting in finesse to signal him by pressures of her foot. There was sheer
+intention in that iteration: "... _lose no time ... you must not miss this
+opportunity_." Something had happened even since their dance; she had
+observed something momentous, and was warning him to act quickly if he
+meant to act at all.
+
+With unruffled amiability, amused, urbane, Lanyard bowed his petition
+across the table, and was rewarded by a bright nod of promise.
+
+Lighting another cigarette, he lounged back, poised his wine glass
+delicately, with the eye of a connoisseur appraised its pale amber tint,
+touched it lightly to his lips, inhaling critically its bouquet, sipped,
+and signified approval of the vintage by sipping again: all without missing
+one bit of business in a scene enacted on the far side of the room,
+directly behind him but reflected in a mirror panel of the wall he faced.
+
+The diplomatist charged with the task of discriminating the sheep from the
+goats in the lower lobby had come up to confer with his colleague, the
+maitre d'hotel of the upper storey. When Lanyard first saw the man he was
+standing by the elevator shaft, none too patiently awaiting the attention
+of the other, who, caught by inadvertence at some distance, was moving to
+join him, with what speed he could manage threading the thick-set tables.
+
+Was this what Sophie had noticed? Had she likewise, perhaps, received some
+secret signal from the guardian of the lower gateway?
+
+A signal possibly indicating that Ekstrom had arrived
+
+They met at last, those two, and discreetly confabulated, the maitre
+d'hotel betraying welcome mitigation of that nervous tension which had
+heretofore so palpably affected him; and, as the other stepped back into
+the elevator, Lanyard saw this one's glance irresistibly attracted to the
+table dedicated to the service of the Princess de Alavia. Something much
+resembling satisfaction glimmered in the fellow's leaden eyes: it was
+apparent that he anticipated early relief from a distasteful burden of
+responsibility.
+
+Then, at ease in the belief that he was unobserved, he turned to a near-by
+table round which four sat without the solace of feminine society--four
+men whose stamp was far from reassuring despite their strikingly quiet
+demeanour and inconspicuously correct investiture of evening dress.
+
+Two were unmistakable sons of the Fatherland; all were well set up, with
+the look of men who would figure to advantage in any affair calling for
+physical competence and courage, from coffee and pistols at sunrise in the
+Parc aux Princes to a battle royal in a Tenderloin dive.
+
+Their table commanded both ways out, by the stairs and by the elevator,
+much too closely for Lanyard's peace of mind.
+
+And more than one looked thoughtfully his way while the maitre d'hotel
+hovered above them, murmuring confidentially.
+
+Four nods sealed an understanding with him. He strutted off with far more
+manner than had been his at any time since the arrival of Lanyard, and
+vented an excess of spirits by berating bitterly an unhappy clown of a
+waiter for some trivial fault.
+
+The first bars of another dance number sang through the confusion of
+voices: truly, as Sophie had foretold, a waltz.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+DANSE MACABRE
+
+
+Trained in the old school of the dance, Lanyard was unversed in that
+graceless scamper which to-day passes as the waltz with a generation
+largely too indolent or too inept of foot to learn to dance.
+
+His was that flowing waltz of melting rhythm, the waltz of yesterday,
+that dance of dances to whose measures a civilization more sedate in its
+amusements, less jealous of its time, danced, flirted, loved, and broke its
+hearts.
+
+Into the swinging movement of that antiquated waltz Lanyard fell without
+a qualm of doubt, all ignorant as he was of his benighted ignorance; and
+instantly, with the ease and gracious assurance of a dancer born, Cecelia
+Brooke adapted herself to his step and guidance, with rare pliancy made her
+every movement exquisitely synchronous with his.
+
+No need to lead her, no need for more than the least of pressures upon her
+yielding waist, no need for anything but absolute surrender to the magic of
+the moment....
+
+Effortless, like creatures of the music adrift upon its sounding tides,
+they circled the floor once, twice, and again, before reluctantly Lanyard
+brought himself to shatter the spell of that enchantment.
+
+Looking down with an apologetic smile, he asked:
+
+"Mademoiselle, do you know you can be an excellent actress?"
+
+As if in resentment the girl glanced upward sharply, with clouded eyes.
+
+"So can most women, in emergency."
+
+"I mean ... I have something serious to say; nobody must guess your
+thoughts."
+
+She said simply: "I will do my best."
+
+"You must--you must appear quite charmed. Also, should you catch me
+smirking like an infatuated ninny, remember I am only doing my own
+indifferent best to act."
+
+Laughter trembled deliciously in her voice: "I promise faithfully to bear
+in mind your heartlessness!"
+
+"I am an ass," he enunciated with the humility of conviction. "But that
+can't be helped. Attend to me, if you please--and do not start. This place
+turns out to be a nest of Prussian spies. I was brought here by a trick. I
+understand the order is I may not leave alive."
+
+Playing her part so well as almost to embarrass Lanyard himself, the girl
+smiled daringly into his eyes.
+
+"Because of that packet?" she breathed.
+
+"Because of that, mademoiselle."
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+For an instant Lanyard lost countenance absolutely. Through sheer good
+fortune the girl was now dancing with face averted, her head so nearly
+touching his shoulder that it seemed to rest upon it.
+
+Nevertheless, it was at cost of an heroic struggle that he fought down all
+signs of that shock with which it had been borne in upon him that he dared
+not assure the girl her packet was in safe hands.
+
+If he had failed in his efforts to restore the thing to her, that she might
+consign it as she saw fit and so discharge her personal trust, till now
+Lanyard had solaced himself with a hazy notion that she would in turn be
+comforted when she learned the document was in the keeping of her country's
+Secret Service.
+
+Impossible to tell her that: his own act had rendered it impossible,
+that act the outcome of wilful trifling with his infirmity, his itch for
+thieving.
+
+Of a sudden the pilfered necklace secreted in an inner pocket of his
+waistcoat, above his heart, seemed to have gained the weight of so much
+lead. The hideous consciousness of the thing stung like the bite of live
+coals.
+
+This woman was in distress; he yearned to lighten her burden; he could do
+that with half a dozen words; his guilt prohibited.
+
+A thief!
+
+Now indeed the Lone Wolf tasted shame and realized its bitterness....
+
+Puzzled by his constraint, the girl's eyes again sought his; and warned
+in time by the movement of her head, he mustered impudence to meet their
+question with the look of tenderness that went with the role she suffered
+him to play.
+
+"What is the matter?"
+
+"I am ashamed that I have failed you...."
+
+"Don't think of that. I know you did your best. Only tell me what became of
+it."
+
+"It was stolen; when I returned to my stateroom that night I was held up
+and robbed. The thief shot at me, killed his confederate, decamped by
+way of the port. I pursued. Another aided him to overpower and cast me
+overboard."
+
+"Yet you escaped...!"
+
+Strange she should seem more intrigued by that than concerned about her
+loss!
+
+"I escaped, no matter how...."
+
+"You don't know who stole the packet?"
+
+"I don't recall the man among the passengers, but he may have been in one
+of the boats, a fellow of about my stature, with a flowing beard...."
+
+He sketched broadly Ekstrom as he had seen him in the Stanistreet library.
+
+Her eyes quickened.
+
+"One such escaped in our boat, the second steward; I think his name was
+Anderson."
+
+"Doubtless the same."
+
+"Then it is gone!"
+
+For once in his acquaintance with her, that brave spirit seemed to falter:
+she became a burden, bereft for a little of all grace and spontaneity.
+
+He was constrained to swing her forcibly into time.
+
+Almost instantly she recollected herself, covered her lapse with a little
+laugh innocent of any hint of its forced falsity, and showed him and the
+room as well a radiant countenance: all with such address and art that the
+incident might well have escaped notice, otherwise have passed for a bit of
+natural by-play.
+
+Yet distress was too eloquent in the broken query: "What _am_ I to do?"
+
+Heartsick, self-sick to boot, he essayed to suggest that she consult
+Colonel Stanistreet, but lacking so much effrontery, stammered and fell
+silent.
+
+Perhaps misinterpreting, she cried in quick contrition: "I am forgetting!
+Forgive me. I should have said: what are you to do?"
+
+He whipped his wits together.
+
+"Look down, turn your face aside, smile.... I have a plan, a desperate
+remedy, but the best I can contrive. When next the lift comes up, we must
+try to be near it. There is one row of tables which we must break through
+by main force. Leave that to me, follow as I clear a way, go straight into
+the lift. If anything happens, run down the stairway on the left. The
+ground floor is two flights below. If I am any way detained, don't stop--go
+on, get your wraps, take the first taxi you see, return directly to the
+Knickerbocker. I will telephone you later."
+
+"If you live," she breathed.
+
+"Never fear for me...."
+
+"But if I do? Do you imagine I could rest if I thought you had sacrificed
+yourself for me?"
+
+"You must not think that. I am far too selfish--"
+
+"That is not so. And I refuse positively to do as you wish unless you tell
+me how I may communicate with you."
+
+Resigned to humour her, he recited his address and the number of the house
+telephone, and when she had memorized both by iteration, resumed:
+
+"Once outside, if anybody tries to hinder you, don't let them intimidate
+you into keeping quiet, but scream, scream at the top of your lungs. These
+beasts abominate a screaming woman, or any other undue noise. Not only will
+that frighten them off, but it will fetch the nearest policeman."
+
+The music ceased. She stood flushed, smiling, adorably pretty, eyes
+star-like for him alone.
+
+"We are not far from the lift now," she said just audibly.
+
+"But the door is shut. Hush. Here comes the encore. Once more around...."
+
+They drifted again into that witching maze of melody and movement made one.
+
+"You are silent," she said, after a little. "Why?"
+
+Lanyard answered with a warning pressure on her hand.
+
+The elevator was stationary at the floor, its door wide, the maitre d'hotel
+engaged in a far quarter of the room, while those four formidable guardians
+of the exit were gossiping with animation over their glasses.
+
+"Steady. Now is our time."
+
+Abruptly they stopped. A couple that had been following them avoided
+collision by a close margin. Over his partner's head the man scowled
+portentously--and dissipated his display of temper on Lanyard's indifferent
+back.
+
+Upon those guests who sat between the dancing floor and elevator, Lanyard
+wasted no consideration. Pushing roughly between two adjoining tables, he
+lifted one chair with its astonished occupant bodily out of the way, then
+turned, swung an arm round the girl's waist, all but threw her through the
+lane he had created, followed without an instant's pause.
+
+It was all so quickly accomplished that the girl was in the car before
+another person in the room appreciated what was happening. And Lanyard, in
+the act of slamming the door shut without heed for the protesting operator,
+saw only a room full of amazed faces with gaping mouths and rounded
+eyes--and one man of the four at the near-by table in the act of rising
+uncertainly, with a stupefied look.
+
+Elbowing the boy aside, he seized the operating lever and thrust it to the
+notch labelled "Descend." An instant of pause followed: like its attendant
+the elevator seemed stalled in inertia of stupefaction.
+
+Beyond the door somebody loosed an infuriated screech. Angry hands
+drummed on the glass panel. With a premonitory shudder the car started
+spasmodically, moved downward at first gently, then with greater speed,
+coming to an abrupt stop at the street level with a shock that all but
+threw its passengers from their feet.
+
+Up the shaft that senseless punishment of the panel continued. Some other
+intelligence conceived the notion for ringing for the car to return: its
+annunciator buzzed stridently, continuously.
+
+Unlatching the lower door, Lanyard threw it back, stepped out, finding the
+lobby deserted but for a simpering group of coat-room girls, to one of whom
+he flipped a silver dollar.
+
+"Find this lady's wraps--be quick!"
+
+Deftly catching the coin, the girl snatched the check from Cecelia Brooke,
+and darted into the women's dressing room.
+
+Throughout a wait of agonising suspense, the elevator boy remained cowering
+in a corner of the car, staring at Lanyard as at some shape of terror,
+while the ignored buzzer droned without cessation to persistent pressure
+from above.
+
+Out of the dark entrance to the lower dining room the bearded diplomatist
+popped with the distracted look of a jack-in-the-box about to be ravished
+of its young.
+
+"Monsieur is not leaving?" he expostulated shrilly, darting forward.
+
+Lanyard stopped him with a look whose menace was like a kick.
+
+"I am seeing this lady to her cab," he said in a cold and level voice.
+
+The coat-room girl emerged from her lair with an armful of wraps and furs.
+
+Again the bearded one made as if to block the doorway.
+
+"But, monsieur--mademoiselle--!"
+
+Lanyard caught the fellow's arm and sent him spinning like a top.
+
+"Out of the way, you rat!" he snapped; then to the girl: "Be quick!"
+
+As she shouldered into a compartment of the revolving door incoherent yells
+began to echo down the staircase well. At length it had occurred to those
+above to utilize that means of descent.
+
+Wedged in the wheeling door, a final glimpse of the lobby showed Lanyard
+the startled, putty-like mask of the maitre d'hotel at the head of
+the stairway with, beyond him, the head of one who, though in shadow,
+uncommonly resembled Ekstrom--but Ekstrom as he was in the old days,
+without his beard.
+
+That picture passed like a flash on a cinema screen.
+
+They were on the sidewalk, and the girl was running toward a taxicab, the
+only vehicle of its sort in sight, at the curb just above the entrance.
+
+Coatless and bareheaded, Lanyard swung to face the door porter, a towering,
+brawny animal in livery, self-confident and something more than keen to
+interfere; but his mouth, opening to utter some sort of protest, shut
+suddenly without articulation when Lanyard displayed for his benefit a .22
+Colt's automatic. And he fell back smartly.
+
+Jerking open the cab door, the girl stumbled into the far corner of the
+seat. The motor was churning in promising fashion, the chauffeur settling
+into place at the wheel. Into his hand Lanyard thrust a ten-dollar bill.
+
+"The Knickerbocker," he ordered. "Stop for nobody. If followed steer for
+the nearest policeman. There'll be no change."
+
+He closed the door sharply, leaned over it, dropped the little pistol into
+the girl's lap.
+
+"Chances are you won't want that--but you may."
+
+She bent forward quickly, eyes darkly lustrous with alarm, and placed a
+hand upon his arm.
+
+"But you?"
+
+"It is I whom they want, not you. I won't subject you to the hazard of my
+company."
+
+Gently Lanyard lifted the hand from his sleeve, brushed it gallantly with
+his lips, released it.
+
+"Good-night!" he laughed, then stepped back, waved a hand to the
+chauffeur--"Go!"
+
+The taxicab shot away like a racing hound unleashed. With a sigh of relief
+Lanyard gave himself wholly to the question of his own salvation.
+
+The rank of waiting motor-cars offered no hope: all but one were private
+town cars and limousines, operated by liveried drivers. A solitary roadster
+at the head of the line tempted and was rejected; even though it had no
+guardian chauffeur, something of which he could not be sure, he would
+be overhauled before he could start the motor and get the knack of its
+gear-shift mechanism. Even now Au Printemps was in frantic eruption, its
+doors ejecting violently a man at each wild revolution.
+
+Down Broadway an omnibus of the Fifth Avenue line lumbered, at no less
+speed than twenty miles an hour, without passengers and sporting an
+illuminated "Special" sign above the driver's seat.
+
+Dashing out into the roadway, Lanyard launched himself at the narrow
+platform of the unwieldy vehicle and, in spite of a yell of warning from
+the guard, landed safely on the step and turned to repel boarders.
+
+But his manoeuvre had been executed too swiftly and unexpectedly. The group
+before Au Printemps huddled together in ludicrous inaction, as if stunned.
+Then one raged through it, plying vicious elbows. As he paused against the
+light Lanyard identified unmistakably the silhouette of Ekstrom.
+
+So that one had, after all, escaped the net of his own treachery!
+
+The 'bus guard was shaking Lanyard's arm with an ungentle hand.
+
+"Here, now, you got no business boardin' a Special."
+
+From his pocket Lanyard whipped the first bank-note his fingers
+encountered.
+
+"Divide that with the chauffeur," he said crisply--"tell him to drive like
+the devil. It's life or death with me!"
+
+The protruding eyeballs of the guard bore witness to the magnitude of the
+bribe.
+
+"You're on!" he breathed hoarsely, and ran forward through the body of the
+conveyance to advise the driver.
+
+Swarming up the curved stairway to the roof, Lanyard dropped into the rear
+seat, looking back.
+
+The group round the doorway was recovering from its stupefaction. Three
+struck off from it toward the line of waiting cars. Of these the foremost
+was Ekstrom.
+
+Simultaneously the 'bus, lumbering drunkenly, lurched into Columbus Circle,
+and the roadster left the curb carrying in addition to the driver two
+passengers--Ekstrom on the running-board.
+
+Tardily Lanyard repented of that impulse which had moved him to bestow his
+one weapon upon Cecelia Brooke.
+
+The night air had a biting edge. A chill rain had begun to drizzle down in
+minute globules of mist, which both lent each street light its individual
+nimbus of gold and dulled deceitfully the burnished asphaltum, rendering
+its surface greasy and treacherous. More than once Lanyard feared lest
+the 'bus skid and overturn; and before the old red brick building between
+Broadway and Eighth Avenue shut out the western sector of the Circle, he
+saw the roadster, driven insanely, shoot crabwise toward the curb, than
+answer desperate work at the wheel and whirl madly, executing a volte-face
+so violent that Ekstrom's hold was broken and he was hurled a dozen feet
+away. And Lanyard's chances were measurably advanced by the delay required
+in order to pick up the sprawling one, start the engine anew, and turn more
+cautiously to resume the pursuit.
+
+Striking diagonally across Broadway the 'bus swung into Fifty-seventh
+Street at the moment when the roadster turned the corner of Columbus
+Circle.
+
+The head of the guard lifted above the edge of the roof. Clinging to the
+supports of the stairway, he addressed Lanyard in accents of blended
+suspicion and respect.
+
+"Lis'n, boss: is this all right, on the level, now?"
+
+"Absolutely, unless that racing-car catches up with us, in which case
+you'll have a dead man--myself--on your hands."
+
+"Well ... we don't wanna lose our jobs, that's all."
+
+"You won't unless I lose my life."
+
+"Anything you'd like me to do?"
+
+"Go down, wait on the platform, if anybody attempts to get aboard kick him
+in the act."
+
+"Sure I will!"
+
+The guard disappeared.
+
+Wallowing like a barge in a strong seaway, the omnibus crossed Seventh
+Avenue and sped downhill toward Sixth with dangerous momentum. Shortly,
+however, this began to be modified by the brakes, a precaution against
+mishap which even the fugitive must approve. Ahead loomed the gaunt
+structure of the Sixth Avenue "L," bridging the roadway at so low an
+elevation as to afford the omnibus little more than clear headroom. Once
+beneath it a single bounce up from the surface-car tracks must mean a
+wreck.
+
+But the pursuit was less than half a block astern and gaining swiftly, even
+as the speed of the omnibus was growing less and desperately less.
+
+At what seemed little better than a snail's pace it began to pass beneath
+the span of the Elevated.
+
+Like a racing thoroughbred the roadster swept up alongside, motor chanting
+triumphantly, running-board level with the platform step.
+
+Ekstrom, poised to leap aboard, hesitated; a pistol in his hand exploded; a
+shattered window fell crashing.
+
+There was a yell from the guard, not of pain but of fright. Apparently he
+executed a von Hindenburg retreat. Without more opposition Ekstrom gained
+the platform.
+
+In the same breath Lanyard stood up. The lowermost girder of the "L" was
+immediately overhead. He grasped it, doubled his legs beneath him, swung
+clear. The omnibus shot from under him, the roadster convoying.
+
+Drawing himself up, he seized a round iron upright of guard-rail and heaved
+his body in over the edge of the platform round the switching-tower, which
+was at this hour dark and untenanted.
+
+In the street below a police whistle shrieked, and a fusillade of pistol
+shots woke scandalised echoes.
+
+Bending almost double Lanyard moved rapidly northward on the footway beside
+the western tracks, and so gained the old station on the west side of
+Fifty-eighth Street, for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude. Through
+this he crept, then down the stairs, encountering at the lower landing an
+iron gate which obliged him to climb over and jump.
+
+Not a soul paid the least attention to this matter of a gentleman in
+evening dress without hat or top coat dropping from the stairway of a
+disused elevated station at two o'clock in the morning.
+
+In New York anything can happen, and most things do, without stirring up
+meddlesome impulses in innocent bystanders.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+FORCE MAJEURE
+
+
+This visit to his rooms was the briefest of the several Lanyard made that
+night, considerations of mortal urgency dictating its drastic abbreviation.
+
+If the events of the last few hours had meant anything whatever they had
+demonstrated two truths which shone like beacon lights: that Manhattan
+Island was overpopulated as long as both he and Ekstrom remained on it;
+that Ekstrom had been goaded to the verge of aberration by the discovery
+that Lanyard had come safely through the _Assyrian_ debacle to take up anew
+his self-appointed office of Nemesis to the Prussian spy system in general
+and to the genius of its American bureau in particular.
+
+Henceforth that one would know no more rest while Lanyard lived.
+
+Thus that little street-level apartment forfeited whatever attractions it
+originally had possessed in the adventurer's estimation. Not only was the
+address known to Ekstrom's associates, and so open to him, but its peculiar
+characteristics, its facilities for access from the street direct, rendered
+it a highly practicable death-trap for a hunted man.
+
+Lanyard was well persuaded he need only wait there long enough to receive a
+deputation from Seventy-ninth Street. And with any assurance that Ekstrom
+would come alone, he might have been content to wait. Not only had he
+through too intimate acquaintance with his methods every assurance that
+Ekstrom would never brave alone what he could induce another to risk with
+him, but Lanyard was never one willing to play the passive part.
+
+A banal axiom of all warfare applied: The advantage is with him who fights
+upon the offensive.
+
+Since midnight the offensive had shifted from Lanyard's grasp to the
+enemy's. He was determined to recapture it; and that was something never to
+be accomplished by sitting still and waiting for events to unfold, but only
+by carrying the war into the enemy's camp.
+
+He delayed, then, only long enough to change his clothing and to conceal
+about him certain properties which it seemed unwise to expose to chance
+discovery on the part of Ekstrom or in the ever-possible event of police
+intervention.
+
+Within five minutes from the time of his return he was closing behind him
+the private door.
+
+Wearing a quiet lounge suit but no top coat, with a hat not so soft as to
+lack character but soft enough to stick upon one's head in time of action,
+and carrying a stick neither brutishly stout nor ineffectively slender,
+he strolled up to Seventh Avenue, turned north, entered Central Park--and
+strolled no more.
+
+Kindly shadows enfolded him, engulfed him altogether. One minute after he
+had passed through the gateway he would have defied unaided apprehension
+by the most zealous officer of the peace. He went swiftly and secretly,
+avoiding all lighted ways.
+
+Not till then did conscience stir and remind him of his slighted promise to
+call up Cecelia Brooke.
+
+No time now for that; the errand that engaged him was of a nature to brook
+no more procrastination. The girl must wait. He was sorry if, as she had
+protested, solicitude for his welfare must interfere with her night's rest.
+But what must be, must: until he saw the end of this adventure he could be
+influenced by no minor consideration whatsoever.
+
+Not that he seriously believed Cecelia's sleep would be uneasy because of
+him. That was too much.
+
+His temper was grim and skeptical. The resentment roused by the trap that
+had so nearly laid him by the heels, together with the subsequent effort to
+assassinate him out of hand, had settled into a phase of smouldering fury
+whose heat consumed like misty vapours every lesser emotion, every humane
+consideration.
+
+Some by-thought recalling the Weringrode's innuendo that he was in love
+without his knowledge, moved him to laugh outright if strangely, an
+unpleasant laugh that held as much of pain as of derision.
+
+What room in that dark heart of his for love?... the heart of a thief and a
+potential assassin, the heart of the Lone Wolf!...
+
+How was he to know he had hardly left his lodgings before their hush was
+interrupted by the grumble of the house telephone?
+
+Intermittently for upward of three minutes that sound persisted. When
+at length it discontinued the quiet of the untenanted rooms reigned
+undisturbed for a brief time only.
+
+An odd metallic stridor became audible, a succession of scrapings of
+stealthy accent at the private entrance. Its latch clicked. The door swung
+back against the wall with a muffled bump. Two pairs of furtive feet padded
+in the little private hallway. The flash of an electric hand-lamp flickered
+hither and yon like a searching poignard, picked out the door to the one
+bedchamber and vanished. There was guarded whispering, then a thud as one
+of the intruders gained the middle of the bedchamber in a bound. An instant
+later a switch snapped, and the room was flooded with light.
+
+Beneath the chandelier stood a man in evening dress the worse for
+misadventure, one knee of his trousers cut open, both legs caked with
+a film of half-dry mud, his linen dingy with mud-stains, his top coat
+shockingly bedraggled. He was bareheaded, apparently having lost his hat; a
+black smear across one cheek added emphasis to the pallor of newly shaven
+jowls; and his eyes were blazing.
+
+"Stole away!" he muttered briefly in disgust, then called: "Ed!"
+
+As quietly as a shadow a second man joined him, greeting him with a "Hush!"
+
+This gentleman was in far more presentable repair and a more equable frame
+of mind. There was even a glint of amusement in his hard blue eyes. His
+countenance had an Irish cast.
+
+"Hush?" the other iterated with contempt. "What for? The hound's not here."
+
+"No, Karl," Ed admitted; "but there are others in the house. If it's known
+to them that Lanyard's out, they may turn in a police alarm; and I for one
+have had enough of bulls for one night."
+
+Karl grunted disdainfully. "I told you this would be a waste of time...."
+
+"And I agreed with you entirely. But you would come."
+
+"Lanyard's no such fool as to stick round a place he knows I know about."
+Karl's hands twitched and his features worked nervously. "He knows me too
+well, knows that if ever I lay hands on him again--"
+
+His voice was rising to an hysterical pitch when the other checked him with
+a sibilant hiss. At the same time his hand darted out and switched off the
+light. Karl uttered a startled ejaculation.
+
+"_Sssh_!" his companion repeated.
+
+In the street a motor-car was rumbling, stationary before the door. Then
+the remote grinding of the house door-bell was heard.
+
+"Let's get out of this," suggested the Irishman. "It's no good waiting,
+anyway."
+
+"Hold hard! We won't go till we have a clear field."
+
+The Prussian stole out into the sitting room and stood listening at the
+door to the public hallway, his companion standing by with a mutinous air.
+
+"Oh, come along!" he insisted, in a stage whisper.
+
+"Shut up! Listen...."
+
+Shuffling footfalls traversed the hallway. The front door was opened. The
+clear voice of an Englishwoman was answered in the slurring patois of a
+negro.
+
+"No'm, he ain't in."
+
+The next enquiry was intelligible: the speaker had entered the hallway.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Yas'm. Sumbody done call him up 'bout ten min'tes ago, an' I rung an' rung
+an' he don' answer. He ain't in or he don' mean to answer nobody, tha's
+all."
+
+"I am very anxious about him. Have you a key to his rooms?"
+
+"Yas'm, I got a pass-key, but--"
+
+"Please use it. Take this. Go in and make sure he is out, or if at home
+that he is all right."
+
+"Yas'm, thanky ma'am, but--"
+
+"Do as I tell you. I will see that you don't get into trouble."
+
+"All right, ma'am." The negro chuckled, probably over his tip. "Yo' sho'
+has got the p'suadin'est way...."
+
+The Irishman caught the German's arm. "Come out of this," he pleaded.
+
+"No fear. I'll see it through. That's the Brooke girl the fool got in with
+on the boat. She may know something...."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Leave this to me. You look out for the negro. I'll take care of Miss
+Cecelia Brooke."
+
+Swearing unhappily, the Irishman flattened against the wall to one side of
+the door. Karl waited behind it as it admitted the hall attendant, who made
+directly toward the central chandelier.
+
+"Yo' jes' wait, ma'am, an' I'll mek a light an'--"
+
+But the girl had impetuously followed him in.
+
+The light went up, and Karl put a heavy shoulder against the door, closing
+it with a slam. The negro turned and stood with gaping mouth and staring
+eyes, dumb with terror. The girl recognised Karl with a little cry, and
+darted back toward the door. Immediately he caught her in his arms. Her
+lips opened, but their utterance was stifled by a handkerchief thrust
+between them with the dexterity of a practised hand.
+
+Without one word of warning the Irishman stepped forward and struck the
+negro brutally in the face. The boy reeled, whimpering. Two more blows
+delivered with murderous ferocity silenced him altogether. He collapsed
+like a broken puppet, insensible on the floor, his face a curious ashen
+colour beneath its glossy skin of brown.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+RIPOSTE
+
+
+The drizzle had grown thicker, the night blacker, the early morning air
+still more chill. But Lanyard was moving too swiftly to be affected by
+this last circumstance; the first he anathematised with the perfunctory
+bitterness of a skilled artisan who sees his work in a fair way to be
+obstructed by elemental depravity. Another of his trade would have termed
+such weather conditions ideal, and so might the Lone Wolf on an everyday
+job; but the prospect of a footing rendered insecure by rain trebled the
+hazards attending a plan of campaign that would brook neither revision nor
+delay.
+
+There was only one way to break into the house on Seventy-ninth Street;
+this Lanyard had appreciated upon his first reconnaissance of the previous
+afternoon. He could have wished for more time in which to prepare and
+assemble tested equipment instead of relying upon chance to supply
+the requisite gear; but with all time at his disposal the mechanical
+difficulties of the problem would remain. Far from indifferent to these,
+Lanyard addressed himself to their conquest doggedly and with businesslike
+economy of motion.
+
+Shunning the public paths he went over the park wall like a cat, sped
+across town through Eightieth Street, and so came to that plot of land upon
+which an apartment building was in process of erection, immediately to the
+north of the American headquarters of the Prussian spy system.
+
+Walled in with stone two storeys deep, its gaunt skeleton of steel had
+been joined together as far as the seventh level. How much higher it was
+destined to rise was immaterial; for Lanyard's purpose it was enough that
+the frame had already outgrown its neighbour on the south.
+
+A litter of lumber, huge steel girders, and other material narrowed the
+side street to half its normal width. The sidewalk space was trampled earth
+roofed with heavy planks for the protection of pedestrian heads, a passage
+lighted by electric bulbs widely spaced; midway in this an entrance to
+the structure was flanked by a wooden shanty, by day a tool house, after
+working hours a shelter for the night watchman. This boasted one glazed
+window dull with orange light.
+
+Approaching with due precaution, Lanyard peered in. The light came from a
+single electric bulb and a potbellied sheet-iron stove, glowing red. Near
+by, in a chair tipped against the wall, sat the watchman, corncob pipe
+in hand, head drooping, eyes closed, mouth ajar. A snore of the first
+magnitude seemed to vibrate the very walls. On the floor beside the chair
+stood a two-quart tin pail full of arid emptiness.
+
+Dismissing further consideration of the watchman as a factor, satisfied
+that the entire neighbourhood as well was sound asleep, Lanyard darted up
+the plank walk that led into the building, then paused to get his bearings.
+
+Effluvia of mortar and damp lumber saluted him in an uncanny place whose
+darkness was slightly qualified by a faint refracted glow from the low
+canopy of cloud and by equally dim shafts of diffused street light. There
+was more or less flooring of a temporary character over a sable gulf of
+cellars, and overhead a sullen, weeping sky cross-hatched with stark black
+ironwork.
+
+With infinite patience Lanyard groped his way through that dark labyrinth
+to the foot of a ladder ascending an open shaft wherein a hoisting tackle
+dangled.
+
+Here he stumbled over what he had been seeking, a great coil of one-inch
+hempen cable, from which he measured off roughly what he would require, if
+his calculations were correct, and something over. This length he re-coiled
+and slung over his shoulder: an awkward, weighty handicap. Nevertheless he
+began to climb.
+
+Above the third level there was merely steel framework; he had somewhat
+more light to guide him, with a view of the north wall of the Seventy-ninth
+Street house, bright in the glare of avenue lamps.
+
+The wall was absolutely blank.
+
+At the seventh level the ladders ended. He stepped off upon a foot-wide
+beam, paused to make sure of his poise, and began to walk the girders with
+a sureness of foot any aviator might have envied.
+
+At regular intervals he encountered uprights: between these he had to
+depend upon his sense of direction and equilibrium to guide him safely
+across those narrow walks of steel made slippery by rain.
+
+But, thanks to forethought, his footwork was faultless: he wore shoes old,
+well-broken, very soft, flexible, and silent.
+
+The building was in the shape of a squat E, with two courts facing south.
+On this seventh level the first court was bridged by a single girder, the
+middle of which was Lanyard's immediate objective. Since it lacked uprights
+he took it cautiously on hands and knees until approximately equidistant
+from both ends, when he straddled it, took the cable from his shoulders,
+uncoiled a length and made it fast round the girder with a clove hitch:
+giddy work, in that darkness, on that greasy span, fashioning by simple
+sense of touch the knot upon which his life was to depend, half of the time
+prone upon the girder and fishing blindly beneath it for the rope's end,
+with nothing but a seventy--foot drop between him and eternity, not even
+another girder to break a fall....
+
+He was now immediately opposite the minaret, at an elevation of about
+twenty feet above the roof he wished to reach, and as far away, or perhaps
+a trifle farther.
+
+Still he detected no signs of life about that nest of spies: if the
+wireless were in operation its apparatus was well-housed; there was no
+sound of the spark, never a glimmer of its violet flash.
+
+Laboriously--the knot completed to his satisfaction--Lanyard returned via
+the eastern arm of the E, paying out the coiled cable as he progressed,
+working round to the north side of the court.
+
+Once again pausing opposite the minaret, he knotted the end of the cable
+loosely round an upright connecting with the sixth level, let it slide
+down, followed it, repeated the process, and rested finally on the fifth.
+
+Now his ordeal approached a climax which he contemplated with what calmness
+he could while securing the rope beneath the arms.
+
+In another sixty seconds or less it must be demonstrated whether his dead
+reckoning would set him down safe and sound on the roof or dash him against
+the walls of the Seventy-ninth Street house, to swing back and dangle
+impotently in mid-air till daylight and police discovered him--unless,
+escaping injury, he were able to pull himself up hand over hand to the
+girder.
+
+With one arm round the upright to prevent the sag of rope from dragging him
+over prematurely, he essayed a final survey.
+
+Either the murk deceived or Lanyard had judged shrewdly. His feet were on
+an approximate level with the coping round the roof, and he stood about as
+far from the upper girder to which the rope was hitched as that was distant
+from the coping.
+
+One look up and round at those louring skies, duskily flushed by subdued
+city lights: with no more ceremony Lanyard released the upright and
+committed his body to space.
+
+If the downward sweep was breathless, what followed was breath-taking:
+once past the nadir of that giant swing, he was borne upward by an impetus
+steadily and sensibly slackening.
+
+Instant followed leaden-winged instant while the wall, looming like
+a mountainside, seemed to be toppling, insensately bent upon his
+annihilation; even so his momentum, decreasing with frightful swiftness,
+seemed possessed of demoniac desire to frustrate him.
+
+After an age-long agony of doubt it became evident he was not destined
+to crash into the wall, but not that he was to gain the coping: through
+fractions of a second hideously protracted this last drew near, nearer,
+slowly, ever more slowly.
+
+And he was twisting dizzily....
+
+With frantic effort he crooked an arm over the coping at a juncture when,
+had he not acted instantly, he must have swung back. There was a racking
+wrench, as though his arm were being torn from its socket.
+
+At the end of a struggle even more wearing he flung his other arm across
+the ledge, and for some time hung there, at the end of an almost taut rope,
+unable to overcome its resistance and pull himself in over the coping,
+stubbornly refusing to loose his grasp.
+
+Presently, grown desperate, he let go with his right hand, holding fast
+only with the left, fumbled in a pocket, found his knife, opened it with
+his teeth, and began, to saw at the rope round his chest.
+
+Strand after strand parted grudgingly till it fell away altogether and
+reaction from its tension threw him against the coping with such violence
+that he all but lost his hold. Dropping the knife, he swept his right arm
+up and once more hooked his fingers over the inside of the ledge.
+
+Far down the knife clinked suggestively upon stone.
+
+Breathing deep, Lanyard braced knees and feet against the wall, worried,
+heaved, hauled, squirmed like a mad thing, in the end rolled over the top
+and fell at length upon the roof, panting, trembling, bathed in sweat,
+temporarily tormented by impulses to retch.
+
+By degrees regaining physical control, he sat up, took his bearings, and
+crept toward the foot of the minaret.
+
+A small, narrow doorway in its base was on the latch. He passed through to
+the landing of a dark winding stairway with a dim light at the bottom of
+its circular well.
+
+While he stood attentive, intermittent stridor troubled the stillness,
+originating at some point on the floors below: the proscribed wireless was
+at work.
+
+Hearing no other sounds, Lanyard went on down the steps, at their foot
+pausing to spy out through a half-open doorway to the topmost storey.
+
+Nobody moved in the corridor. He saw nothing but a line of closed doors,
+presumably to servants' quarters. Now, however, the vibrant rasp of the
+radio spark was perceptibly stronger and had a background of subdued noise,
+echoes of distant voices, deadened sounds of hasty footfalls, now and again
+a heavy thump or the bang of a door.
+
+Moving out, he commanded the length of the corridor. Toward one end a door
+stood open. He could see no more of the room beyond than a narrow patch of
+wall fitfully illuminated by a play of violet light.
+
+Then a man stepped out of this operating room, turning on the threshold to
+utter some parting observation; and Lanyard retired hastily to the shaft of
+the minaret stairway, but not before recognising Velasco.
+
+A moment later the Brazilian passed his lurking-place, walking with bended
+head, a worried frown darkening his swarthy countenance; and Lanyard
+emerged in time to see his head and shoulders vanish down a stairway at the
+far end of the corridor.
+
+Following with discretion, Lanyard leaned over the head of the main
+staircase well, looking down three flights to the ground floor, to which
+Velasco was descending.
+
+The house seemed veritably to hum with secret and, to judge by the pitch of
+its rumour, well-nigh panic activity. One divined a scurrying as of
+rats about to desert a sinking ship. Untoward events had thrown this
+establishment into a state of excited confusion: their nature Lanyard could
+not surmise, but their conjunction with his designs was exasperatingly
+inopportune. To search this place and find his man--if he were there at
+all--without being discovered, while its inmates buzzed about like so many
+startled hornets, was a fair impossibility; to attempt it was to court
+death.
+
+None the less he was inflexible in determination to go on, to push his luck
+to its extremity, by sheer force to bend fortuity to his service and suffer
+without complaint whatever the consequences of its recoil.
+
+Yet even as he advanced a foot to begin the descent, he withdrew it.
+
+On the ground floor, a door closing with a resounding crash had proved the
+signal for an outburst of expostulant, acrimonious voices: some half a
+dozen men giving angry tongue at one and the same time, their roars of
+polysyllabic gutturalisms fusing into utterly unintelligible clamour.
+
+One thought of a mutiny in a German madhouse.
+
+Moment after moment passed, the squall persisting with unmitigated
+viciousness. If now and again it subsided momentarily, it was only into
+uglier growls and swiftly to rise once more to high frenzy of incoherence.
+
+Two of the disputants appeared in the square frame of the staircase well,
+oddly foreshortened figures brandishing wild arms, one of them Velasco, the
+other a man whom Lanyard failed to identify, seemingly united in common
+anger directed at the head of some person invisible.
+
+Abruptly, with a gesture of almost homicidal fury, the Brazilian darted out
+of sight. The other followed.
+
+Then the object of their wrath took to the stairs, stopping at the rail
+of the first landing and gesticulating savagely over the heads of his
+audience, Velasco and the others returning amid a knot of fellows to bay
+round the newel post.
+
+His voice, full-throated, cried them all down--Ekstrom's deep and resonant
+voice, domineering over the uproar, hectoring one after another into sullen
+silence.
+
+In the beginning employing nothing but terms and phrases of insolence and
+objurgation untranslatable, when he had secured a measure of attention he
+delivered a short address in tones of unqualified contempt.
+
+"I will have obedience!" he stormed. "Let no one misunderstand my status
+here: I am come direct from His Majesty the Emperor with full power and
+authority to command and direct affairs which you have, individually,
+collectively, proved yourselves either unfit or unable to cope with. What I
+do, I do in my absolute discretion, with the full sanction and confidence
+of the Kaiser. He who questions my judgment or my actions, questions the
+wisdom of the All-Highest. Let it be clearly understood I am answerable
+to no one under God but myself and my Imperial master. Henceforth be good
+enough to hold your tongues or take the consequences--and be damned to you
+all!"
+
+Briefly he stood glowering down at their upturned faces, then sneered, and
+turned away.
+
+"Come along, O'Reilly," he said. "Fetch the woman, and give no more heed to
+swine-dogs!"
+
+His hand slipped up the rail to the first floor, vanished.
+
+If O'Reilly followed with the woman mentioned, both kept back from the rail
+and so out of Lanyard's field of vision.
+
+The group at the foot of the stairs moved away, grumbling profanely.
+
+At once Lanyard began to descend, rapidly and without care to avoid
+detection.
+
+One flight down he met face to face a manservant, evidently a footman, with
+an armful of clothing which he was conveying from one chamber to another.
+The fellow stopped short, jaw dropping, eyes popping; whereupon Lanyard
+paused and addressed him in German with a manner of overbearing contempt,
+that is to say, in character.
+
+"You're wanted upstairs in the radio room," he said--"at once!"
+
+The servant bleated one word of protest: "But--!"
+
+"Be silent. Do as I bid you. It is an emergency. Drop those things and go!
+Do you hear, imbecile?"
+
+Completely cowed and cheated, the man obeyed literally, letting his burden
+of garments fall to the floor and bounding hurriedly up the stairs.
+
+Another flight was negotiated without misadventure; on this floor as well
+servants were flitting busily to and fro, but none favoured the adventurer
+with the least attention.
+
+Midway down the third flight he pulled up to one side of the landing, and
+reconnoitred. It was on the next floor below, the first above the street,
+that Ekstrom had stopped. But in what quarter thereof? The exigency forbade
+the risk of one false turn. If Lanyard were to take Ekstrom unawares it
+must be at the first cast.
+
+From the ground floor came semi-coherent snatches of surly comment, like
+growls of a thunderstorm passing off into the distance:
+
+"_At a time such as this_...."
+
+"... _Secret Service snapping at our heels_ ..."
+
+"... _base on the Vineyard discovered_ ..."
+
+"... _Au Printemps raided, Sophie Weringrode under arrest. God knows
+whether she will hold her tongue_!"
+
+"_Trust her! But this ass_ ..."
+
+"_Bringing a woman here, putting all our necks into a halter_ ..."
+
+Immediately opposite the foot of the stairway, on the first storey, a door
+opened. O'Reilly came alertly forth, closed the door behind him, paused,
+fished in his pocket for a cigarette case, lighted and inhaled with deep
+appreciation, meantime eavesdropping on the utterances below with his head
+cocked to one side and a malicious smile shadowing his handsome Irish face.
+
+In his own good time he shrugged an indifferent shoulder, thrust his hands
+into his pockets, and sauntered coolly on down the stairs.
+
+The moment he disappeared, Lanyard went into action, in two bounds cleared
+landing and stairs, in another threw himself upon the door. It opened
+readily. Entering, he put his back to it, with his left hand groped for,
+found and turned a key, his right holding ready the automatic pistol he had
+taken from the lockers of the U-boat.
+
+The room was a combination of administrative bureau and study, very
+handsomely if somewhat over-decorated and furnished, with an atmosphere as
+distinctively German as that of a Bierstube, the sombreness of its colour
+scheme lending weight to its array of massive desks, tables, chairs,
+bookcases, and lounges.
+
+Between great draped windows and an impressive chimney-piece opposite,
+beside a broad, long desk, in a straight-backed chair sat a woman, gagged,
+bound as to her wrists, strips of cloth which had but lately bound ankles
+as well on the floor about her feet.
+
+That woman was Cecelia Brooke.
+
+Ekstrom stood behind her, in the act of loosening the knots which held the
+gag secure.
+
+For a space of thirty seconds, transfixed by the apparition of his enemy,
+he did not stir other than to raise weaponless hands in deference to the
+pistol trained upon his head. But the blood ebbed from his face, leaving
+it a ghastly mask in which shone the eyes of a man who sees certain death
+closing in upon him and is powerless to combat it, even to die fighting for
+life. And his lips curled back in a snarl neither of contempt nor of hatred
+but of terror.
+
+And for as long Lanyard remained as motionless, rooted in a despondency
+of thwarted hopes no less profound than the despair of the Prussian,
+apprehending what that one could not yet guess, that once more, and now
+certainly for the last time, vengeance was denied him, the fulfilment of
+all his labours and their sole purpose snatched from his grasp.
+
+The instincts of a killer were not his. Barring injudicious attempt to
+summon aid or take the offensive, Ekstrom was safe from injury at the hands
+of Michael Lanyard. His cunning, his favour in the countenance of fortune,
+or whatever it was that had enabled him to make the girl his prisoner and
+bring her here, bade fair to prove his salvation.
+
+Deep in Lanyard's consciousness an echo stirred of half-forgotten words:
+"_Vengeance is mine_...."
+
+The sense of frustration brewed a hopelessness as stark as that of a
+brow-beaten child. A blackness seemed to be settling down upon his
+faculties. A mist wavered momentarily before his eyes. He gulped
+convulsively, swallowing what had almost been a sob.
+
+But he spoke in a voice positively dispassionate.
+
+"Keep your hands up."
+
+Lanyard removed and pocketed the key, crossed to the middle of the room
+without once letting his gaze waver from the face of the Prussian,
+passed behind him, planted the muzzle of the pistol beneath Ekstrom's
+shoulder-blade, and methodically searched him, finding and putting aside on
+the desk one automatic, nothing else.
+
+"Stand aside!"
+
+The almost puerile measure of his disappointment was betrayed in the thrust
+with which he shouldered Ekstrom out of the way, so forcibly that the man
+was sent staggering wildly half a dozen paces.
+
+"Don't move, assassin!... Pardon, mademoiselle: one moment," Lanyard
+muttered, with his one free hand undoing the gag.
+
+He made slow work of that, fumbling while watching Ekstrom with unremitting
+intentness, hoping against hope that his enemy might make one false move,
+one only, by some infatuate endeavour to turn the tables excuse his
+killing.
+
+But Ekstrom would not. Recovery of his equilibrium had been coincident with
+the shock administered to his hardihood and sense of security by Lanyard's
+entrance. He stood now in a pose of insouciant grace, hands idly clasped
+before him, disdain glimmering in languid-lidded eyes, contempt in the set
+of his lips--an ensemble eloquent of brazen effrontery, the outgrowth of
+perception of the fact that Lanyard, being what he was, could neither shoot
+him down in cold blood nor, with the Brooke girl present, even attempt to
+injure him: compunctions unassembled in the make-up of the Boche, therefore
+when discovered in men of other races at once despicable and ridiculous....
+
+The gag came away.
+
+"Mademoiselle has not been injured?" Lanyard enquired, solicitous.
+
+The girl coughed and gasped, shaking her head, enunciating with difficulty
+in little better than a husky whisper: "... roughly handled, nothing
+worse."
+
+Lanyard's face burned as if his blood were molten mercury. "_Nothing
+worse_!" Appreciation of what handling she must have suffered, if she had
+resisted at all, before those beasts could have bound her, excited an
+indignation from whose light, as it blazed in Lanyard's eyes, even Ekstrom
+winced.
+
+The hand was tremulous with which he sought to loose her wrists, so much so
+that she could not but notice.
+
+"Don't mind me--look to that man!" she begged. "Leave me to unfasten these
+with my teeth. He can't be trusted for a single instant."
+
+"Mademoiselle," Lanyard mumbled, instinctively employing the French
+idiom--"you have reason."
+
+For an instant only he hesitated, swayed this way and that by the maddest
+of impulses, then resigned himself absolutely to their ascendancy.
+
+"This goes beyond all bounds," he said in an undertone.
+
+Deliberately leaving the Englishwoman to free herself according to her
+suggestion--forgetful, indeed, for the moment, that she was not altogether
+free--he moved to the desk and left his own automatic there beside
+Ekstrom's.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said mechanically, without looking at the girl, without
+power to perceive aught else in the world but the white, evil face of his
+enemy, "for what I am about to do, I beg you forgive me, of your charity. I
+can endure no more. It is too much...."
+
+He strode past her.
+
+She twisted in her chair, then rose, following him with wide eyes of alarm
+above her hands, whose bonds her teeth worried without rest.
+
+Ekstrom had not stirred, though one flash of pure exultation had
+transfigured his countenance on comprehension of Lanyard's purpose: thanks
+to the silly scruples of this animal, one more chance for life was granted
+him.
+
+Nor would the Prussian give an inch when Lanyard paused, confronting him
+squarely, within arm's length.
+
+"Ekstrom," the adventurer began in a voice lacking perceptible inflection
+... "what is between you and me needs no recounting. You know it too
+well--I likewise. It is my wish and my intention to kill you with my
+two hands. Nothing can prevent that, not even what you count upon, my
+reluctance--to you incomprehensible--to commit an act of violence in the
+presence of a woman. But because Miss Brooke is here, because you have
+brought her here by force, because you are what you are and so have treated
+her insolently ... before we come to our final accounting, you shall get
+down upon your knees and ask her pardon."
+
+He saw no yielding in the eyes of the Prussian, only arrogance; and when he
+paused, he was answered in one phrase of the gutters of Berlin, couched in
+the imagery of its lowest boozing-kens, so unspeakably vile in essence
+and application that Lanyard heard it with an incredulity almost
+stupefying--almost, not altogether.
+
+It was barely spoken when those lips that framed it were crushed by a blow
+of such lightning delivery that, though he must have been prepared for it,
+Ekstrom's guard was still lowered as he reeled back, lost footing, and went
+to his knees.
+
+Panting, snarling, uttering teeth and blasphemy, the Prussian recoiled like
+a serpent, gathered himself together and launched headlong at Lanyard, only
+to be met full tilt by a second blow and a third, each more merciless than
+its predecessor, beating him down once more.
+
+This time Lanyard did not wait for him to come back for punishment, but
+closed in, catching him as he strove to rise, meeting each fresh effort
+with ruthless accuracy, battering him into insanity of despair, so that
+Ekstrom came back again and again without thought, animated only by
+frenzied brute instinct to find the throat of his tormenter, and ever and
+ever failing; till at length he crumpled and lay crushed and writhing, then
+subsided into insensibility, was quite still but for heaving lungs and the
+spasmodic clutchings of his broken and ensanguined fingers....
+
+With a start, a broken sigh, a slight movement of the hand interpreting a
+crushing sense of the futility of human passion, Lanyard relaxed, drew back
+from standing over his antagonist, abstractedly found a handkerchief and
+dried his hands, of a sudden so inexpressibly shamed and degraded in his
+own sight that he dared not look the girl's way, but stood with hang-dog
+air, avoiding her regard.
+
+Yet, could he have mustered up heart, he might have surprised in her eyes
+a light to lift him out from this slough of humiliation, to obliterate
+chagrin in a flood of wonder and--misgivings.
+
+When, however, he did after a moment turn to her, that look was gone,
+replaced by one that reflected something of his own apprehension; for a
+heavy hand was hammering on the study door, and more than one voice on the
+other side was calling on "Karl" to open.
+
+Either the servant whom Lanyard had met and victimised on his way
+downstairs had given the alarm, or else the noise of the encounter within
+the study had brought that pack of spies to the door, wildly demanding
+admission.
+
+Steadied by one swift exchange of alarmed glances with the girl, Lanyard
+hastily reviewed the room, seeking some avenue of escape. None offered but
+the windows. He ran to them, tore back their draperies, and found them
+closed with shutters of steel and padlocked.
+
+Simultaneously the din at the door redoubled.
+
+With a worried shake Lanyard crossed to the chimney-piece, ducked his head,
+and stepped into its huge fireplace. One upward glance sufficed to dash his
+hopes: here was no way out, arduous though feasible; immediately above the
+fireplace the flue narrowed so that not even the most active man of normal
+stature might hope to negotiate its ascent.
+
+He returned with only a gesture of disconcertion to answer the girl's look
+of appeal.
+
+"Can we do nothing?" she asked, raising her voice a trifle to make it heard
+above the tumult in the corridor.
+
+"There's no help for it, I'm afraid," he said, going to the desk and taking
+up the pistols--"nothing to do but shoot our way out, if we can. Take
+this," he added, offering her one of the weapons, which she accepted
+without spirit. "If you can't get your own consent to use it, give it to me
+when I've emptied the other."
+
+She breathed a dismayed "Yes ..." and wonderingly consulted his face, since
+he did not stir other than thoughtfully to replace his pistol on the desk,
+then stood staring at his soot-smeared palms.
+
+"What is it?" she demanded nervously. "Why do you hesitate?"
+
+As one fretted by inconsequential questions, he merely shook his head,
+glancing sidelong once at the unconscious Prussian, again with calculation
+toward the door.
+
+This he saw quivering under repeated blows.
+
+With brusque decision he said: "Get a chair--brace it beneath the
+door-knob, please!"--and leaving her without more explanation turned back
+to the fireplace.
+
+Motionless, in dumb confusion, the girl stood staring after him till roused
+by a blow of such splintering force as to suggest that an axe had been
+brought into play upon the door, then ran to a ponderous club chair and
+with considerable exertion managed to trundle it to the door and tip it
+over, wedging its back beneath the knob.
+
+By this time it had become indisputably patent that an axe was battering
+the panels. But the door, in character with the room, was a substantial
+piece of workmanship and needed more than a few blows, even of an axe, to
+break down its barrier of solid oak.
+
+She looked round to discover Lanyard kneeling beside Ekstrom, insanely--so
+it seemed to the girl--engaged in blackening the upper half of the man's
+face with a handful of soot.
+
+Unconsciously uttering a little cry of distress she sped to his side and
+caught his shoulder with an importunate hand.
+
+"In Heaven's name, Monsieur Duchemin, what are you doing? Is this a time
+for childishness--?"
+
+He responded with a smile of boyish mischief so genuine that her doubts of
+his reason seemed all too well confirmed.
+
+"Making up my understudy," he said simply. And brushing his hands over the
+rug to rid them of superfluous soot, Lanyard rose. "Please go back and
+stand by the door--on the side of the hinges. I'll be with you in one
+minute."
+
+Resigned to humour this lunatic whim--what else could she do?--the girl
+retreated to the position designated, and watched with ever darker doubts
+of his sanity, while Lanyard hurriedly drew the shells from his automatic
+and carefully placed its butt in the slack grasp of Ekstrom's fingers.
+
+Then, lifting from a near-by table a great cut-glass bowl of flowers, the
+adventurer inverted it over Ekstrom's body.
+
+Expending its full force upon the man's chest, that miniature deluge
+splashed widely, wetting his face, half filling his open mouth. Some of
+the soot was washed away, but not a great deal: enough stuck fast to suit
+Lanyard's purpose.
+
+Roused by that cool shock, half strangled as well, Ekstrom coughed
+violently, squirmed, spat out a mouthful of water, and lifted on an elbow,
+still more than half dazed.
+
+Joining the girl by the door, Lanyard saw the Prussian sit up and glare
+blankly round the room, a figure of tragic fun, drenched, woefully
+disfigured, eyes rolling wildly in the wide spaces round them which Lanyard
+had left unblackened.
+
+Swinging the club chair away from the door, the adventurer placed it with
+its back to the room.
+
+"Get down behind that," he indicated shortly, and drew the key from his
+pocket. "Don't show yourself for your life. And let me have that pistol,
+please."
+
+A bright triangular wedge of steel broke through one of the panels as he
+fitted and turned the key in the lock.
+
+His wits clearing, Ekstrom saw him and with a howl of fury staggered to his
+feet, clutching the unloaded pistol and endeavouring to level it for steady
+aim.
+
+Simultaneously Lanyard turned the knob and let the door fly open, remaining
+beside the chair that hid the girl.
+
+A knot of spies, O'Reilly and Velasco among them, whirled into the room,
+pulled up at sight of that strange, grim figure, disguised beyond all
+recognition by its half-mask of black, facing and menacing them with a
+pistol.
+
+O'Reilly fired in the next breath, his shot echoed by half a dozen so
+closely bunched as to resemble the rattle of a mitrailleuse.
+
+At the first report the pistol dropped from Ekstrom's grasp. He carried a
+hand vaguely to his throat, staggered a single step, uttered a strangled
+moan, and fell forward, his body fairly riddled, his death little short of
+instantaneous.
+
+While the fusillade was still resounding Lanyard, seizing the girl's wrist,
+unceremoniously dragged her from behind the chair and thrust her through
+the door, retreating after her with his face to the roomfull, his pistol
+ready.
+
+None of that lot paid him any heed, the attention of all wholly absorbed by
+the tragedy their violent hands had wrought. Velasco, the first to stir,
+ran forward and dropped to his knees beside the dead man. Others followed.
+
+Gently Lanyard drew the door to, locked it on the outside, and at the sound
+of a choking cry from Cecelia Brooke, whirled smartly round, prepared if
+need be to make good his promise to clear with gun-play a way to the street
+though opposed by every inmate of the establishment.
+
+But the first face he saw was Crane's.
+
+The Secret Service man stood within a yard. To him as to a rock of refuge
+Cecelia Brooke had flown, to his hand she was clinging like a frightened
+child, trying to speak, failing because she choked on sobs and gasps of
+horror.
+
+Behind him, on the landing at the head of the staircase, running up from
+below, ascending to the upper storeys, were a score' or more of men of
+sturdy and business-like bearing and indubitably American stamp. Of
+these two were herding into a corner a little group of frightened German
+servants.
+
+Lanyard's stare of astonishment was met by Crane's twisted smile.
+
+"My friend," he said, as quietly as anyone could with his accent of a
+quizzical buzz-saw, "I sure got to hand it to you. Every time I try to pull
+anything off on the dead quiet you beat me to it clean. Everywhere I think
+you ain't and can't be, that's just where you are. But I ain't complaining;
+I got to admit, if you hadn't staged your act to occupy the minds of those
+gents in there, we might've had a lot more difficulty raiding this joint."
+
+Quickly he wound an arm round the waist of Cecelia Brooke when, without
+warning, she swayed blindly and would have fallen.
+
+"Here, now!" he protested. "That's no way to do.... Why, she's flickered
+out! Well, Monsieur Duchemin-Lanyard-Ember, to a man up a tree this looks
+like your job. You take this little lady off my hands and see her home, and
+I'll just naturally try and finish what I started--or what you did. For,
+son, I got to give you credit: you sure are one grand li'l trouble-hound!"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+QUESTION
+
+
+Through the breathing hush of that dark hour which foreruns the dawn, that
+hour in which the head that knows a wakeful pillow is prone to sudden
+and disquieting apprehension of its insignificance and it's soul's dread
+isolation, the cab sped swiftly south upon the Avenue, shadowed reaches of
+the park upon its right, upon its left the dull, tired faces of those homes
+whose tenants lay wrapped in the cotton-wool of riches.
+
+The rain had ceased. A little wind was blowing up. There was a fresh
+smell in the air. Sidewalks began to be maculated with spreading areas of
+dryness, but the roadway was still wet and shining, the wide black mirror
+of a myriad lights.
+
+Through the windows of the speeding cab an orderly procession of street
+lamps, marching past, threw each its fugitive and pallid glimmer. Periods
+of modified darkness intervened, when the face of the girl in her corner
+seemed a vision subtle and wraithlike. But ever the recurrent lights
+revealed her sweetly incarnate if deep in enervation of crushing weariness.
+
+Once she stirred and sighed profoundly; and Lanyard, bending toward her,
+asked if he could be in any way of service.
+
+She replied in an undertone scarcely better than a whisper: "Thank you, I
+am quite comfortable.... Please--what time is it?"
+
+The cab was passing Sixtieth Street. Lanyard caught a fleeting glimpse of a
+street clock with a dial like a little golden moon.
+
+"It's just four."
+
+"Thank you...."
+
+"Very tired?"
+
+"Very...."
+
+He had the maddest notion that her head inclined to droop toward his
+shoulder. Perhaps the motion of the cab.... If so, she recovered easily.
+
+"Can I do anything?"
+
+"No, thank you, only ..." An ungloved hand stirred from her lap and for
+the merest instant rested lightly above his own, or hovered rather, barely
+touching it with a touch tenuous and elusive, no sooner realised than gone.
+"I mean," she murmured, "I am a bit too overwrought, too tired, to talk."
+
+"I quite understand," he said. "Please forget I'm here; just rest."
+
+Perhaps she smiled drowsily. Or was that, too, a freak of his imagination?
+Lanyard assured himself it was, in excess of consideration even tried to
+persuade himself he had dreamed that ghost of a caress upon his hand. It
+seemed so little like her.
+
+Not that anything had happened more than a gesture of transient
+inadvertence due to fatigue. It could not have been intentional, that act
+of intimacy, when the girl was altogether engrossed in young Thackeray.
+
+There was something one must not forget, something that gave the lie flatly
+to that innuendo of the Weringrode's. Ignorant of the circumstances the
+intrigante had leaped blindly at conclusions, after the habit of her kind.
+
+True, Sophie had not implied that this girl cared for him, but vice versa:
+either supposition, however, was as absurd as the other. As if Lanyard
+could love a woman who loved another! As if the name of love meant aught
+to him but the memory of a sweetness like a vagrant air of Spring that had
+breathed fitfully for a season upon the Winter of his heart!
+
+A corner of Lanyard's mouth lifted in a sneer. That precious heart of
+his! the heart of a thief upon which even now the fruits of his thieving
+weighed....
+
+Irritated, he wrenched his thoughts into another channel, and began to
+piece together inconsecutive snatches of information gained from Crane
+in the confusion of the quarter hour just past, while the Secret Service
+operatives were busy rounding up the inmates of that spy-fold and searching
+for evidences of their impudent activities.
+
+It appeared that Washington had at length, however tardily, roused out of
+its inertia and at midnight had telegraphed instructions to arrest out
+of hand every enemy alien in the land against whom there was evidence of
+conspiracy or even a ponderable suspicion.
+
+So unexpected was this order that Crane had volunteered to show Cecelia
+Brooke that midnight rendezvous of the Prussian spy system without the
+least notion that he might be required before morning to lead a raiding
+force against the establishment; and even when a messenger stopped him as
+he turned to enter Au Printemps, he was not advised concerning the cause of
+this demand for his immediate presence at headquarters.
+
+The first cast of what Crane aptly termed the dragnet had brought in the
+management and service staff to a man, with a number of the restaurant's
+habitues, including Sophie Weringrode and her errand-boy, the exquisite Mr.
+Revel.
+
+Velasco, however, had somehow mysteriously managed to slip through the
+meshes and had straightway hastened to spread the alarm.
+
+As for O'Reilly and Dressier, they had left with Ekstrom in pursuit of
+Lanyard less than five minutes before, and so had escaped not only arrest
+but all knowledge of the raid prior to their return to Seventy-ninth
+Street.
+
+The second cast of the net had been made at the latter place as soon as
+the watchers were able to assure Crane that Ekstrom and O'Reilly had
+returned--Dressier having anticipated them there by something like half an
+hour.
+
+By daybreak, then, these gentry would be interned on Ellis Island....
+
+And break of day impended visibly in grayish shades that stole westward
+through the cross-town streets like clouds of secret agents spying out the
+city against invasion by the serried lances of the sun.
+
+A garish twilight washed Forty-second Street from wall to wall by the time
+the car swung round in front of the Knickerbocker. As yet, however, there
+was little evidence that the town was growing restive in its sleep with
+premonition of the ardour of another day.
+
+Lanyard stepped down and offered the girl a hand in whose palm her slender
+fingers rested lightly for an instant ere she passed on, while he turned to
+bid the driver wait. Following, he overtook her in the entrance, where by
+tacit consent both paused and lingered in an odd constraint. There was so
+much to be said that was impossible to say just then.
+
+Visibly the woman drooped, betraying physical exhaustion in every line of
+her pose, seeming scarcely strong enough to lift the silken lashes that
+trembled upon cheeks a little drawn and pale, with the faintest of bluish
+rings beneath the eyes.
+
+"I must not keep you," Lanyard broke the silence. "I merely wished to say
+good-night and ... I am sorry."
+
+"Sorry?" she echoed.
+
+"That you had such an unhappy experience," he explained--"thanks to your
+thoughtfulness for me. I do not deserve so much consideration; and that
+only makes me feel all the more regretful."
+
+"It was silly of me," she admitted with a shadowy, rueful smile. "I'm
+afraid my silliness makes too much trouble...."
+
+He commented honestly: "I don't understand."
+
+"If I had only been patient enough to wait for you to call me...."
+
+"Forgive that oversight. I was pressed for time, as you may imagine."
+
+"Oh, it all comes back to my own stupidity. I might have known you had come
+through all right."
+
+"How should you?"
+
+"Why not?--when you turn up here in New York safe and sound after being
+drowned on the _Assyrian_!--as if that were not proof enough that you bear
+a charmed life!"
+
+"Charmed!" he laughed.
+
+"And you haven't yet told me how you survived that adventure."
+
+"You are kind to be interested, and I am unfortunate in never seeing you
+save under circumstances unfavourable for yarn-spinning."
+
+"You might be more fortunate."
+
+"Only tell me how!"
+
+"If you cared to ask me to dine with you to-morrow--I mean, to-night--"
+
+"You would--?"
+
+He was distressed by consciousness that his voice had thrilled impetuously.
+But perhaps she had not noticed; there was no change in the even
+friendliness of her tone.
+
+"I'm as inquisitive as any woman that ever lived. Even if I wished to, I'm
+afraid I shouldn't be able to resist an invitation to hear your Odyssey."
+
+"Delmonico's at eight?"
+
+"Thank you," she said primly.
+
+"You make me too happy. May I call for you?"
+
+"Please." She offered a hand whose touch he found cool, steady, and
+impersonal. "Good morning, Mr. Ember."
+
+He stood in a stare while she went quickly through the lobby to a waiting
+elevator, then roused and went back to his cab.
+
+It was by daylight that he reentered his rooms and found them tenanted by
+a negro boy bound and gagged, bruised and sore, and scared beyond
+intelligible expression.
+
+Freeing him and salving his injuries bodily and spiritual with a liberal
+douceur, Lanyard exacted an oath of silence, then turned him out.
+
+He had approximately five hours to put in somehow before his appointment
+with Colonel Stanistreet at nine, and was too well versed in the lore of
+late hours to think of giving any part of that time to sleep. By so doing
+he would only insure a mutinous awakening, with mind and body sluggish and
+unrested. If, on the other hand, he remained awake, he would go to that
+interview in a state of supernormal animation exceedingly to be desired if
+he were to round out this adventure without discredit.
+
+For its end was not yet. He had still a part to play whose lines were not
+yet written, whose business remained to be invented. He neither dared
+shirk that appointment, for reasons of policy, nor wished to, while there
+remained reparation to be accomplished, a wrong to be righted, justice to
+be done, a question to be answered.
+
+Only when these matters had been put in order would he feel his honour
+discharged of its burdens, himself free once more to drop out and go in
+peace his lonely ways in life, ways henceforth to be both lonely and
+aimless.
+
+For, when he strove to peer into the future, only an emptiness confronted
+him. With Ekstrom accounted for finally and forevermore, there was nothing
+to come but the final accounting of the Lone Wolf with that civilization
+which had bred and suffered him.
+
+One way presented itself to make that reckoning even. The Foreign Legion of
+France asks no embarrassing questions of its recruits, and enlistment in
+its ranks offers with anonymity a consoling certainty.
+
+Thus alone might he find his way home to the heart of that enigma whence he
+had emerged, a nameless waif astray in grim Parisian by-ways....
+
+This vision of his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign
+for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with
+Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the passports of
+Monsieur Andre Duchemin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a
+berth on some steamer sailing for Europe, then the last evanishment.
+
+One detail alone troubled him, his promise to the Brooke girl that she
+should dine with him that night.
+
+Reminded of this obligation, figuratively he seized Michael Lanyard by the
+scruff of his neck and shook him with a savage hand. What insensate folly
+was ever his, what want of wit and strength to keep out of temptation's
+ways! Why must he have fallen in so readily with her suggestion? Why this
+infatuate thirst for sympathy, this eagerness to violate the seals of
+reticence at the wish of a strange woman? Was there any reasonable
+explanation of the strange lack of his wonted self-sufficiency in the
+company of Cecelia Brooke?
+
+No matter. If he might not contrive somehow to squirm out of that
+engagement, he could at all events school himself to decent reticence. He
+promised himself to make his account of the submarine adventure drearily
+bald and trite, to minimize to the last degree his part therein, above all
+things to refrain from painting the Lone Wolf in romantic colours.
+
+She was much too good a sort, too straight, sincere, fair-minded,
+honest--the sort of girl who deserved the Thackeray sort of man, never a
+thief.
+
+If she even dreamed....
+
+Lanyard brought forth from its hiding place the necklace, weighed it in
+his hand, examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he
+recognized no more its beauty, dispassionately reviewed in turn each stone
+of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity,
+perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent pebbles, cold,
+soulless, cruel.
+
+One by one they slipped through his fingers like beads of an unholy rosary.
+
+At length, crushing them together in the hollow of his palm, he stood a
+while in thought, then turning to his writing-desk bundled the necklace in
+wrappings of white tissue secured with rubber bands, counted carefully the
+sheaf of bills he had taken from Ekstrom, sealed the whole amount in a
+plain, long envelope, and put this aside in company with the necklace.
+
+Already two hours had passed and, since he meant to call at the house on
+West End Avenue well in advance of the hour when Cecelia Brooke might be
+there--presuming Blensop to have given her the same appointment as he had
+given "Mr. Ember," that is, nine o'clock--it was now time to prepare.
+
+Returning to his bedchamber, he laid out a carefully selected change of
+clothing, shaved, parboiled himself in a hot bath, chilled him to the
+pith in one of icy coldness, and dressed with scrupulous heed to detail,
+studiously effacing every sign of his sleepless night.
+
+That experience was in no way to be surmised from his appearance when he
+sallied forth to breakfast at the Plaza.
+
+At eight precisely, presenting himself at the Stanistreet residence, he
+desired the footman to announce him as the author of a certain telegram
+from Edgartown.
+
+He was obliged to wait less than a minute, the footman returning in haste
+to request him to step into the library.
+
+This apartment--which he found much as he had last seen it, eight hours
+ago, its window shattered, the portieres down, the furniture in some
+disorder--was, on his introduction, occupied by two persons, one an
+elderly, iron-gray gentleman of untidy dress and unobtrusive habit in spite
+of a discerning cool, gray eye, the other Mr. Blensop in the neatest of
+one-button morning-coat effects, with striped trouserings neither too smart
+nor too sober for that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call
+him, and fair white spats.
+
+If his attire was radiant, so was the temper of the secretary sunny. He
+tripped forward in sprightliest fashion, offering cordial hands to the
+caller till he recognized him, and even then was discountenanced only for
+the briefest moment.
+
+"My dear Mr. Ember!" he purred soothingly--"why didn't you tell me last
+night it was you who had sent that telegram? If I had for a moment
+suspected the truth you should have had your appointment with Colonel
+Stanistreet at any hour you might have cared to name, no matter how
+ungodly!"
+
+Lanyard bowed gravely. "Thank you," he said. "And Colonel Stanistreet--?"
+
+"Is just finishing breakfast. He will be down directly. Please be seated,
+make yourself entirely at ease. And will you excuse me--?"
+
+"With pleasure," Lanyard assured him, his gravity unbroken.
+
+A doubt clouded Mr. Blensop's bright eyes, but its transit was
+instantaneous. He turned forthwith to join the iron-gray man before the
+portrait which concealed the safe.
+
+"And now, Mr. Stone," said Mr. Blensop, with indulgence.
+
+"Well, sir," said Mr. Stone quietly, "if you'll be good enough to show me
+how this contraption works, maybe I'll find out something interesting,
+maybe not."
+
+Mr. Blensop proceeded to oblige by operating the lever and sliding aside
+the portrait.
+
+"Thanks," said Mr. Stone, producing a magnifying glass from a waistcoat
+pocket and beginning to peer myopically at the face of the safe. "I take
+it nobody's been pawing over this since the late, as you might say,
+unpleasantness?"
+
+"Not a soul has touched it. By Colonel Stanistreet's order it was covered
+as soon as we found it had been tampered with."
+
+"_Um-m_," Mr. Stone acknowledged, bending close to his work.
+
+Partially, perhaps, by way of administering an urbane rebuke to Lanyard for
+his readiness to dispense with his society, Mr. Blensop remained in
+the neighbourhood of Mr. Stone, hovering round him like a domesticated
+humming-bird.
+
+"Do you find anything?" he enquired, when Stone straightened up.
+
+"Fingerprints a-plenty," Mr. Stone admitted with a hint of temper--"a slew
+of the damn things. Looks like you must've called in the neighbours to help
+make a good show. However, we'll see what we can make of 'em."
+
+He conjured from some recess in his clothing a squat bottle, from another a
+stopper in which was fitted a blowpipe, joined the two together, approached
+the safe with one end of the pipe between his lips and sprayed it with a
+thin film of white powder, the contents of the bottle.
+
+"I say, do tell me what that's for?"
+
+"That," said Mr. Stone patiently, "is to make the fingerprints stand out,
+so we can get a good likeness of 'em."
+
+He put the bottle aside, blinked at the safe approvingly, and by further
+exercise of powers of legerdemain materialized a pocket kodak and a
+flashlight pistol.
+
+"Can't I help you?" Blensop offered eagerly. "I used to be rather a dab at
+amateur photography, you know."
+
+"Well, I'm kind of stuck on pressing the button myself," Stone confessed,
+adjusting the focus. "But if you want to work that flashlight, I don't
+mind."
+
+"Delighted," Mr. Blensop asserted. "How does it go, now?"
+
+"Like this." Stone set his camera down to demonstrate. "Now just stand
+behind me," he concluded, "and pull the trigger when I say 'now'."
+
+"I'll do my best, but--I say--will it bang?"
+
+Stone had taken up the camera once more. His sole answer was a grunt upon
+which his hearers placed two distinct interpretations--Lanyard's affording
+him considerable gratification.
+
+"If you're ready," said Stone--"_now_"
+
+Mr. Blensop squinted unbecomingly and pressed the trigger. A vivid flare
+lifted from the pan of the pistol, and winked out in a cloud of vapour,
+slowly dissipating.
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"Yes, sir--that's all of that." Stone stowed the camera away about his
+person and from another cranny produced a small cardboard box of glass
+slides, one of which he offered. "Now if you'll just run your fingers
+through your hair and rest them on this slide, light but steady...."
+
+"What for?" Blensop demanded with a giggle of nervous reluctance. "You
+don't think I'm the thief, do you?"
+
+"No, sir, I don't. But if I haven't got your fingerprints, how am I going
+to tell them from the thief's?"
+
+"Oh, I see," Blensop said with a note of allayed apprehension, and put
+himself on record.
+
+The door opening to admit Colonel Stanistreet, Lanyard rose. At sight of
+him the Englishman checked and stared enquiringly, his eyes shadowed by
+careworn brows; for it was apparent that, if the events of the night had
+not depressed the spirits of the secretary, his employer had known little
+sleep or none since the burglary.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet," Blensop said melodiously, abandoning Stone to his
+unsupervised devices, "this is Mr. Ember, the gentleman who called last
+night before you got home. It appears he is the person who sent us that
+telegram from Edgartown day before yesterday."
+
+"Indeed? Ember is not the name with which the message was signed."
+
+"The message was purposely left unsigned," Lanyard explained.
+
+Stanistreet nodded approval. "I am glad to meet you, Mr. Ember," he said,
+offering a hand. "Be seated. I am most anxious first to express our
+gratitude, next to learn how you came by your information."
+
+"You will find it an interesting story."
+
+"No doubt of that." Stanistreet took the desk chair, opened a cigar
+humidor, and offered it. "I shall be even more interested, however," he
+said with an evanescent trace of humour, "to know who the devil you are,
+sir."
+
+"That is something I am prepared to prove to your satisfaction."
+
+"If you will be so good.... But excuse me for one moment." Stanistreet
+turned in his chair. "Mr. Stone?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Have you finished with the safe? If so, I want my secretary to check over
+its contents carefully and make sure nothing else is missing."
+
+"I'm all through with it, Colonel Stanistreet. Now, if you don't mind,
+I'm going to mouse around and see if I can nose out anything else that's
+useful."
+
+"That shall be entirely as you will. Now, Blensop"--Stanistreet nodded to
+the secretary--"let us make certain...."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Blithely Mr. Blensop addressed himself to the safe.
+
+"There has been an accident of some sort, Colonel Stanistreet?" Lanyard
+enquired civilly, nodding toward the shattered French window.
+
+"A burglary, sir."
+
+"The criminal escaped--?"
+
+Stanistreet nodded. "Our watchman surprised him, and was shot for his
+pains--not seriously, I'm happy to say. The burglar got himself tangled
+up in that window, but extricated in time, and went over the garden wall
+before we could determine which way he had taken."
+
+"I trust you lost nothing of value?"
+
+Stanistreet shrugged. "Unhappily, we did--a diamond necklace, the property
+of my sister-in-law, and--ah--a document we could ill afford to part
+with.... But you offered to show me credentials, I believe."
+
+"Such as they are," Lanyard replied. "My passports and letters were stolen
+from me. But these, I think, should serve as well to prove my bona fides."
+
+He laid out in order upon the desk his plunder from the safe aboard the
+U-boat--all but the money--the three cipher codes, the log, the diary
+of the commander, the directory of German secret agents, and such other
+documents as he had selected.
+
+The first Colonel Stanistreet took up with a dubious frown which swiftly
+lightened, yielding, as he pursued his examination into the papers and
+began to recognize their surpassing value to the Allied cause, to a subdued
+glimmer of gratulatory excitement.
+
+But he was at pains to satisfy himself as to the authenticity of each paper
+in turn, providing a lull for which Lanyard was not ungrateful since it
+gave him a chance to adjust his understanding to an unexpected development
+in the affair.
+
+He lounged at ease, smoking, his eyes, half-veiled by lowered lids, keenly
+reviewing the room and its tenants.
+
+Stone, the detective (an operative, Lanyard rightly inferred, of the
+American Secret Service, loaned to the British in order to keep the
+burglary out of police records and newspapers), had wandered out into the
+garden that glowed with young April sunlight beyond the windows. From
+time to time he was to be seen stooping and inspecting the earth with the
+gravity of an earnest, efficient, sober-sided sleuth of the old school.
+
+Blensop was busy before the safe, extracting the contents of each
+pigeonhole in turn, thumbing its dockets of papers, checking each off upon
+a typewritten list several pages in length.
+
+To that lithe and debonair figure Lanyard's gaze oftenest reverted.
+
+So not only had the necklace been stolen but "a document" which the British
+Secret Service "could ill afford to part with"!
+
+Lanyard entertained no least doubt as to the identity of the document in
+question. There could be but one, he felt, which Stanistreet would so
+characterize.
+
+That document had not been in the safe when Lanyard had opened it at
+midnight.
+
+After a moment Mr. Blensop uttered a musical note of vexation. The lead of
+his pencil had broken. He threw it pettishly aside, came over to the desk,
+took up a penholder, dipped it in the ink-well, and returned to his task.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+CHICANE
+
+
+Colonel Stanistreet put down the last of the papers and slapped his hand
+upon it resoundingly.
+
+"This is one of the most remarkable collections of data, I venture to
+assert, that has ever come into the hands of the British Government. Have
+you any idea of its value?"
+
+Lanyard lifted a whimsical eyebrow. "Some," he admitted drily.
+
+"And what do you ask for it, sir?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+The gaze of the Englishman bored into his eyes; but he met their challenge
+with an unshaken countenance, smiling.
+
+"My dear sir," Stanistreet demanded--"who are you?"
+
+"The name under which I sailed for New York on board the _Assyrian_,"
+Lanyard announced quietly, "was Andre Duchemin."
+
+Disturbed by a startled exclamation, together with a sound of shuffling and
+a slight thump, he looked round in mild curiosity to see Blensop staggered
+and astare, standing over a litter of documents which had slipped from his
+grasp to the floor. Mastering his emotion quickly enough, the secretary
+knelt with a mumbled apology and began to pick up the papers.
+
+With no more notice of the incident Lanyard returned undivided attention to
+Colonel Stanistreet.
+
+"I had another name," he confessed, "and a reputation none too savoury,
+as, I daresay, you know. Through the courtesy of the British Intelligence
+Office I was permitted to disguise these; but on the _Assyrian_ I was
+recognized--in short, ran afoul of German Secret Service agents who knew
+me, but whom I did not know. On the sixth night out circumstances conspired
+to make me seem a serious obstacle to their schemes. Consequently I was
+waylaid, robbed, and thrown overboard. Within the next few minutes a
+torpedo struck the ship and the submarine which fired it came up under me
+as I struggled to keep afloat. By passing myself off as a Boche spy, I
+succeeded in inducing the commander to take me below, and so reached the
+Martha's Vineyard base. There chance played into my hands: I contrived to
+sink the U-boat and escape, as reported in my telegram."
+
+During a brief silence he found opportunity to observe that Mr. Blensop was
+working with hands that trembled singularly.
+
+"Incredible!" Stanistreet commented.
+
+"Yet here is proof," Lanyard asserted, indicating the papers beneath
+Stanistreet's hand.
+
+"My dear sir, I didn't mean--"
+
+"Pardon!" Lanyard smiled, with a lifted hand. "I never thought you did,
+Colonel Stanistreet. But it is your duty to make sure you are not imposed
+upon by plausible adventurers. Therefore--since my papers have been
+stolen--I am glad to be able to prove my identity with Andre Duchemin by
+referring to survivors of the _Assyrian_ disaster, among others Mr. Sherry,
+the second officer, Mr. Crane of the United States Secret Service, and a
+countrywoman of yours, a Miss Cecelia Brooke, whose acquaintance I was
+fortunate enough to make."
+
+Stanistreet nodded heavily, and consulted his watch. "Miss Brooke," he
+said, "should be here shortly. Blensop made an appointment with her last
+night, which I confirmed by telephone this morning."
+
+"Then, with permission, I shall remain and ask her to vouch for me,"
+Lanyard suggested in resignation, since it appeared he was not to be
+permitted to escape this girl, that destiny was not yet finished with their
+entanglement.
+
+"I shall be glad if you will, sir.... Monsieur Duchemin," Stanistreet
+began, but hesitated--"or do you prefer another style?"
+
+"I am content with Duchemin."
+
+"That is a matter for your own discretion, but I should warn you it may
+already have acquired an evil odour on this side. To my knowledge it has
+been used within the last twenty-four hours, and the pretensions of its
+wearer supported by your stolen credentials."
+
+"I am not surprised," Lanyard stated reflectively. "A chap with a beard,
+perhaps?"
+
+"Why, yes...."
+
+"Anderson," the adventurer nodded: "that, at least, was his alias when he
+jockeyed himself into the second steward's berth aboard the _Assyrian_."
+
+He glanced idly across the room, discovered Blensop once more at pause in a
+stare, and grinned amiably.
+
+"He came here last night," Stanistreet volunteered deliberately--
+"representing himself as Andre Duchemin--to sell me a certain paper, the
+same which subsequently, I am convinced, he returned to steal."
+
+"And did," Lanyard added.
+
+"And did," the Briton conceded. "Now you have told me who he is, I promise
+you every effort shall be made to apprehend him and prevent further misuse
+of the name you have assumed."
+
+"It has," Lanyard said tersely.
+
+"I beg your pardon?"
+
+"I say every effort has been made--and successfully--to accomplish the ends
+you mention."
+
+"What's that you say?" Blensop demanded shrilly, crossing to the desk.
+
+"My secretary," Stanistreet explained, "was present at the interview, and
+is naturally interested."
+
+"And very good of him, I'm sure," Lanyard agreed. "I was about to explain,
+Mr. Blensop, that Ekstrom, alias Anderson, was killed in the course of
+a raid on the Prussian spy headquarters in Seventy-ninth Street this
+morning."
+
+"Amazing!" Blensop gasped. "I am glad to hear it," he added, and went
+slowly back to his task.
+
+"I may as well tell you, sir," Lanyard pursued, "I have every reason to
+believe the document sold you last night was one of those stolen from me."
+
+Stanistreet wagged a contentious head.
+
+"I cannot conceive how it could have come into your possession, sir."
+
+"Simply enough. Miss Brooke requested me to take care of it for her."
+
+The eyes of the Englishman grew stony. "Miss Brooke!" he repeated testily.
+"I don't understand."
+
+"It was a document--I do not seek to know its nature from you, sir--of
+vital importance in this present crisis, with the United States newly
+entered into the war."
+
+Stanistreet affirmed with an inclination of his head.
+
+"I may tell you this much, Monsieur Duchemin: if it had not reached this
+country safely.... What am I saying? If it be not recovered without delay,
+the chances of America's early and efficient participation in the war will
+suffer a tremendous setback ... Blensop, be good enough to call up the
+American Secret Service at once and ask whether the document in question
+was found on the body of this--ah--Ekstrom."
+
+"Pardon," Lanyard interposed as Blensop hesitantly approached the
+telephone. "It would be a waste of time. I happen to know, because I was
+there, that no such document was found on Ekstrom's body."
+
+"The devil!" Stanistreet grumbled. "What can have become of it? This
+business grows only the blacker the deeper one seeks to fathom it. I
+must own myself completely at a loss. How it came into the hands of Miss
+Brooke--"
+
+"I can explain that, I think. The document was in the care of two
+gentlemen, Mr. Bartholomew and Lieutenant Thackeray. The former was
+murdered by the Huns in search of it, Lieutenant Thackeray murderously
+assaulted. But for Miss Brooke's intervention the assassins must have
+succeeded. As it was, the young woman herself found it and, one presumes,
+took charge of it because her fiance was incapacitated, and possibly with
+the notion that she might thereby prevent further mischief of the same
+nature."
+
+"Her fiance?" Stanistreet echoed blankly.
+
+"Lieutenant Thackeray--"
+
+"Her brother, sir!" the Briton laughed. "Thackeray was his nom de service."
+
+It was Lanyard's turn to stare. "Ah!" he murmured. "A light begins to
+dawn...."
+
+"Upon me as well," Stanistreet confessed. "Miss Brooke and her brother are
+orphans and, before the war, were inseparable companions. I do not doubt
+that, learning he had been commissioned with an uncommonly perilous errand,
+she booked passage by the _Assyrian_ without his consent, in order to be
+near him in event of danger."
+
+"This explains much," Lanyard conceded--"much that perplexed more than one
+can say."
+
+"But in no way advances us on the trail of the purloined document."
+
+"I am afraid, sir," Lanyard lied deliberately, "you may as well abandon all
+hope of ever seeing it again. Ekstrom made away with it: no question about
+that. There was time enough and to spare between his exploit here and his
+death for him to deliver it to safe hands. It is doubtless decoded by this
+time, a copy of it already well on the way to the Wilhelmstrasse."
+
+"I am afraid," Stanistreet echoed--"I am very much afraid you are right."
+
+His thick, spatulate fingers of an executive drummed heavily upon the desk.
+
+Stone's figure darkened the windows.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet?" he called diffidently.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Stone?"
+
+"There's something here I'd like to consult you about, sir, if you can
+spare a minute."
+
+"Certainly." The Englishman rose. "If you will excuse me, Monsieur
+Duchemin...." Half way to the windows he hesitated. "By the bye, Blensop, I
+wish you'd call up Apthorp and ask after Howson's condition."
+
+"Very good, sir," Blensop intoned cheerfully.
+
+"And do it without delay, please. I don't like to think of the poor fellow
+suffering."
+
+"Immediately, sir."
+
+As his employer passed out into the garden with Stone, the secretary
+discontinued his checking and came over to the desk, drawing up a chair and
+sitting down to telephone. At the same time Lanyard got up and began to
+pace thoughtfully to and fro.
+
+"Howson is the wounded night watchman, I take it, Mr. Blensop?"
+
+"Yes--an excellent fellow.... Schuyler nine, three hundred," Blensop cooed
+into the transmitter.
+
+Conceivably that ostensible discomfiture whose symptoms Lanyard had
+remarked had been a transitory humour. Mr. Blensop was now in what seemed
+the most equable and blithe of tempers. His very posture at the telephone
+eloquently betokened as much: he had thrown himself into the chair with
+picturesque nonchalance, sitting with body half turned from the desk, his
+right hand holding the receiver to his ear, his left thrust carelessly
+into his trouser pocket, thus dragging back the lapel of that impeccable
+morning-coat and exposing the bright cap of his gold-mounted fountain pen.
+
+Something in that implement seemed to possess for Lanyard overpowering
+fascination. His gaze yearned for it, returned again and again to it.
+
+He changed his course to stroll up and down behind Blensop, between him and
+the safe.
+
+"I understood Colonel Stanistreet to say the watchman was not seriously
+injured, I believe," he observed, with interest.
+
+"Shot through the shoulder, that is all.... Schuyler nine, three hundred?
+Dr. Apthorp, please. This is Mr. Blensop speaking, secretary to Colonel
+Stanistreet.... Are you there, Dr. Apthorp?"
+
+With professional dexterity Lanyard en passant dropped a hand over the
+young man's shoulder and lightly lifted the pen from its place in the
+pocket of Blensop's waistcoat; the even tempo of his step unbroken, he
+tossed it toward the safe, where it fell without sound upon a heavy Persian
+rug.
+
+"Yes--about Howson," the musical accents continued, "Colonel Stanistreet is
+most solicitous...."
+
+Swiftly Lanyard moved toward the safe, glanced through the French windows
+to assure himself that Stanistreet and Stone were safely preoccupied,
+whipped out the envelope he had prepared, and thrust it into a file of
+papers which did not crowd its pigeonhole; accomplishing the complete
+manoeuvre with such adroitness that, like the business of the pen, it
+passed utterly without the knowledge of the secretary.
+
+"Thank you so much. _Good_ morning, Dr. Apthorp."
+
+Lanyard was passing the desk when Blensop rose, and the footman was
+entering with his salver.
+
+"A lady to see Colonel Stanistreet, sir--by appointment, she says."
+
+Blensop glanced at the card. At the same time Stanistreet came in from the
+garden, leaving Stone to potter about visibly in the distance.
+
+"Miss Brooke is here, sir," the secretary announced.
+
+"Ask her to come in, please."
+
+The footman retired.
+
+"Howson is resting easily, Dr. Apthorp reports," Blensop added, going back
+to the safe. "Has Stone turned up anything of interest, sir?"
+
+"Footprints," Stanistreet replied with a snort of moderate impatience.
+"He's quite upset since I've informed him the man who made them is--"
+
+"_Good God_!"
+
+The interruption was Blensop's in a voice strangely out of tune.
+Stanistreet wheeled sharply upon him.
+
+"What the deuce--!" he snapped.
+
+By every indication the secretary had suffered the most severe shock of his
+experience. His face was ghastly, his eyes vacant; his knees shook beneath
+him; one hand pressed convulsively the bosom of his waistcoat. His
+endeavours to reply evoked only a husky, rattling sound.
+
+"What the devil has come over you?" Stanistreet insisted.
+
+The rattle became articulate: "I've lost it! It's gone!"
+
+"What have you lost?"
+
+"N-nothing, sir. That is--I mean to say--my fountain pen."
+
+"The way you take it, I should say you'd lost your head," Stanistreet
+commented. "You must have dropped the thing somewhere. Look about, see if
+you can't find it."
+
+Thus admonished, the secretary began to search the floor with frantic
+glances, and as the footman ushered in Cecelia Brooke, Lanyard saw the
+young man dart forward and retrieve the pen with a start of relief wellnigh
+as unmanning as the shock of loss had seemed.
+
+With that Lanyard's interest in the fellow waned; he was too poor a thing
+to consider seriously; while here was one who compelled anew, as ever when
+they met, the homage of sincere and marvelling admiration.
+
+Yet another of those miracles of feminine adaptability and makeshift had
+brought the girl to this meeting in the guise of one who had never known a
+broken night or an hour's care, with a look of such fresh tranquility that
+it seemed hardly possible she could be one and the same with that wilted
+little woman whom Lanyard had left in the gray dawn at the entrance to the
+Hotel Knickerbocker. A tailored suit, necessarily borrowed plumage, became
+her so completely that it was difficult to believe it not her own. Her eyes
+were calm and sweet with candour; her colour was a clear and artless glow;
+the hand she offered the Briton was tremorless.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet?"
+
+"I am he, Miss Brooke. It is kind of you to call so early to relieve my
+mind about your brother. I have known Lionel so long...."
+
+"He is resting easily," said the girl. "His complete recovery is merely a
+matter of time and nursing."
+
+"That is good news," said Stanistreet. "Monsieur Duchemin I believe you
+know."
+
+"I have been fortunate in that at least."
+
+Gravely Lanyard saluted the hand extended to him in turn. "Mademoiselle is
+most gracious," he said humbly.
+
+"Then--I understand--Monsieur Duchemin must have told you--?" The girl
+addressed Stanistreet.
+
+"Permit me to leave you--" Lanyard interposed.
+
+"No," she begged--"please not! I've nothing to say that you may not hear.
+You have been too much involved--"
+
+"If mademoiselle insists," Lanyard demurred. "I feel it is not right I
+should stay. And yet--if you will indulge me--I should like very much to
+demonstrate the truth of an old saw...."
+
+Two confused looks were his response.
+
+"I fear I, for one, do not follow," Stanistreet admitted.
+
+"I will explain quite briefly," Lanyard promised. "The adage I have in mind
+is as old as human wit: Set a thief to catch a thief. And the last time it
+was quoted in my hearing, it was not to my advantage. I recall, indeed,
+resenting it enormously."
+
+He paused with purpose, looking down at the desk. A pad of blank paper
+caught his eye. He took it up and examined it with an abstracted manner.
+
+"Well, monsieur: the application of your adage?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, what would you think if I were to tell you the
+combination of your safe?"
+
+"I should be inclined to suspect that you were the devil," Stanistreet
+chuckled.
+
+"By all accounts a gentleman of intelligence: one is flattered.... Very
+well: I proceed to demonstrate black art with the aid of this white
+paper pad. The combination, monsieur, is as follows: nine, twenty-seven,
+eighteen, thirty-six."
+
+A low cry of bewilderment greeted this announcement. Blensop had drawn near
+and was eyeing Lanyard as if under the influence of hypnotism.
+
+"How--how do you know that?" he asked in a broken voice.
+
+"Clairvoyance, Mr. Blensop. I seem to see, as I hold this pad, somebody
+writing upon it the combination for the information of another who had no
+right to have it--somebody using a pencil with a hard lead, Mr. Blensop;
+which was very foolish of him, since it made a distinct impression on the
+under sheet. So you see my magic is rather colourless, after all.... Now,
+a wiser man, Mr. Blensop, would have used a pen, a fountain pen by
+preference, with a soft gold nib, well broken. That would leave no
+impression. If you will lend me the beautiful pen I observe in your pocket,
+I will give a further demonstration."
+
+The eyes of the secretary shifted wildly. He hesitated, moistening dry lips
+with the tip of a nervous tongue.
+
+"And don't try to get out of it, Mr. Blensop, because I am armed and don't
+mean to let you escape. Besides, that good Mr. Stone patrols the garden."
+Lanyard's tone changed to one of command. "That pen, monsieur!"
+
+Blensop's hand faltered to his waistcoat pocket, hesitated, withdrew, and
+feebly extended the pen.
+
+"I think you _are_ the devil," he stammered in an under-tone--"the devil
+himself!"
+
+Deftly unscrewing the pen-point, Lanyard inverted the barrel above the
+desk.
+
+The cylinder of paper dropped out.
+
+"And now, Colonel Stanistreet, if you will call Mr. Stone and have this
+traitor removed...."
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+AMNESTY
+
+
+When Stanistreet had gone out in company with Stone, and the broken,
+weeping Blensop, ending a scene indescribably painful, a lull almost as
+uncomfortable to Lanyard ensued.
+
+Then--"How did you guess?" Cecelia Brooke asked in wonder.
+
+Discountenanced by the admiration glowing in her eyes, Lanyard stood
+fumbling with the disjointed members of Blensop's pen.
+
+"Do not give me too much credit," he depreciated: "anybody acquainted with
+that roll of paper could have guessed that an empty fountain pen would
+furnish an ideal place of concealment for it. Moreover, just before you
+came in, that traitor missed his pen, and his consternation betrayed him
+beyond more doubt to one whose distrust was already astir. As for the
+other, it was true: Blensop did write down the combination on this pad,
+using a pencil with a hard lead; the marks are very plain."
+
+"But for whose use?"
+
+"Ekstrom--Anderson--was here last night, and saw Blensop alone. Colonel
+Stanistreet was not at home. Knowing what we know now, that Blensop was
+a creature of the German system here, bought body, soul, and conscience
+through its studied pandering to his vices, we know he could not well have
+refused to surrender the combination on demand."
+
+"Still I fail to understand...."
+
+"Ekstrom, being Ekstrom, could not resist the opportunity to play double.
+Here was a property he could sell to England at a stiff price. Why not
+despoil the enemy, put the money in pocket, then return, steal the paper
+anew for the use of Germany, and collect the stipulated reward from that
+source? But he reckoned without Blensop's avarice, there; he showed Blensop
+too plainly the way to profit through betraying both parties to a bargain;
+Blensop saw no reason why he should not play the game that Ekstrom played.
+So he stole it for himself, to sell to Germany, but being a poor, witless
+fool, lacking Ekstrom's dash and audacity, was foredoomed to failure and
+exposure."
+
+The girl continued to eye him steadfastly, and he as steadfastly to evade
+her direct gaze.
+
+"Nothing that you tell me detracts from the wonder of your guessing so
+accurately," she insisted. "Now I know what Mr. Crane said of you was true,
+that you are one of the most extraordinary of men."
+
+"He was too kind when he said that," Lanyard protested wretchedly. "It is
+not true. If you must know...."
+
+"Well, Monsieur Lanyard?"
+
+Her tone was that of a light-hearted girl, arch with provocation. Of a
+sudden Lanyard understood that he might no longer stop here alone with her.
+
+"If you will be a little indulgent with me," he suggested, "I will try to
+explain what I mean."
+
+"And how indulgent, monsieur?"
+
+"I have a whim to take the air in this garden. Will you accompany me?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+As she led the way through the French windows, he noted with deeper
+misgivings how her action matched the temper of her voice, how she seemed
+to-day more deliciously alive and happier than any common mortal.
+
+So light her heart! And all since she had found him here!
+
+At his wits' ends, he conceded now what he had so long denied. With all her
+wit and wisdom, with all her charm of beauty, winsomeness, and breeding,
+with all her ingrained love of truth and honesty, she was no more than
+Nature had meant her to be, a woman with woman's weakness for the man
+she must admire. She liked him, divined in him latent qualities somehow
+excellent. Something in him worked upon her imagination, something, no
+doubt, in the overcoloured, romantic yarns current about the Lone Wolf,
+and so had touched her heart. She liked him too well already, and she was
+willing to like him better.
+
+But that must never be. He must rend ruthlessly apart this illusion of
+romance with which she chose to transfigure the prowling parasite of night,
+the sneaking thief....
+
+The garden was sweet with the bright promise of Spring. A few weeks more,
+and its formal walks would wend a riot of flowers. Now its sunlight made
+amends for what it lacked in beauty of growing things; and its air was warm
+and fragrant and still in the shelter of the red-brick walls.
+
+Midway down that walk, by the side of which a thief had skulked nine hours
+ago, near that door whose lock had yielded to his cunning keys, the girl
+paused and confronted Lanyard spiritedly as he came up with heavy step and
+hang-dog head.
+
+"Well, monsieur?" she demanded. "Do you mean to tantalize me longer with
+your reticence?"
+
+But something in the haggard eyes he showed her made the girl catch her
+breath.
+
+"What is it?" she cried anxiously. "Monsieur Duchemin, what is your
+trouble?"
+
+"Only this truth that I must tell you," he said bitterly: "I merely played
+a part back there, just now. There was neither wit nor guess-work in that
+business; once I had seen Blensop's panic over the fancied loss of his pen,
+the rest was knowledge. I saw him and Ekstrom together last night--skulking
+in those windows, I watched them; and though in my denseness I didn't
+understand, I saw him write upon that pad, tear off and give the sheet to
+Ekstrom. And I knew Ekstrom had not succeeded in stealing back what he had
+sold to Colonel Stanistreet, knew he was guiltless in fact if not in deed."
+
+"But--how could you know that?"
+
+"Because I was there, in the room, when he entered it after it had been
+shut up for the night."
+
+Conscious of her hands that fluttered like wounded things to her bosom, he
+looked away in misery.
+
+"What were you doing there?" she whispered in the end.
+
+"Trying to find that paper, which I had seen Ekstrom sell to Colonel
+Stanistreet, so that I might make good my promise and relieve your distress
+by returning it to you. I had opened the safe before he entered, and
+searched it thoroughly, and knew the paper was not there--though at that
+time it never entered my thick head to suspect Blensop of treachery. It
+was neither Blensop nor Ekstrom, Miss Brooke ... it was I who stole that
+necklace."
+
+She made no sound and did not stir; and though he dared not look he knew
+her stricken gaze was steadfast to his face.
+
+"I will say this much in my defence: I did not come with intent to steal,
+but only to take back what had been stolen from me, and return it to you,
+who had trusted it to my care. I wanted to do that, because I did not then
+understand the ins and outs of this intrigue, and had no means of knowing
+how deeply your honour might be involved."
+
+"But you did _not_ take that necklace!"
+
+"I am sorry.... I saw it, and could not resist it."
+
+"But Mr. Crane assured me you had given up all that sort of thing years
+ago!"
+
+"Notwithstanding that, it seems I may not be trusted...."
+
+After another trying silence she declared vehemently: "I do not believe
+you! You say this thing for some secret purpose of your own. For some
+reason I can't understand you wish to abase yourself in my sight, to make
+me think you capable of such infamy. Why--ah, monsieur!--why must you do
+this?"
+
+"Because it isn't fair to represent myself as what I am not, mademoiselle.
+Once a thief, always--"
+
+"No! It isn't true!"
+
+"Again I am sorry, but I know. You have been most generous to believe in
+me. If anything could save me from myself, it would be your confidence.
+That, I presume, is why I felt called upon to undo my thieving, and make
+good the loss. The money Colonel Stanistreet paid Ekstrom is now in the
+safe, back there in the library. The necklace is ... here."
+
+Blindly he thrust the tissue packet into her hands.
+
+"If you will consent to return it to its owner, when I have gone, I shall
+be most grateful."
+
+Her hands shook so that, when she would open the packet, it escaped her
+grasp and dropped into a little pool of rain-water which had collected in
+a hollow of the walk. Lanyard picked it up, stripped off the soiled and
+sodden paper, dried the necklace with his handkerchief, replaced it in her
+hand.
+
+He heard the deep intake of her breath as she recognized its beauty, then
+her quavering voice: "You give this back because of me...!"
+
+"Because I cannot be an ingrate. I know no other way to prove how I have
+prized your faith in me.... And now, with your leave, I will go away
+quietly by this garden gate--"
+
+"No--please, no!"
+
+"But--"
+
+"I have more to say to you. It isn't fair of you to go like this, when I--"
+
+She interrupted herself, and when next she spoke he was dashed by a change
+in her voice from a tone of passionate expostulation to one of amused
+animation.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet!" she called clearly. "Do come here at once, please!"
+
+Startled, Lanyard saw that Stanistreet had appeared in the French windows
+in company with Crane. In response to Cecelia's hail both came out into the
+garden, Stanistreet briskly leading, Crane lounging at his heels, champing
+his cigar, his weathered features knitted against the brightness of the
+sun.
+
+"Good morning, Miss Brooke. Howdy, Lanyard--or are you Duchemin again?" he
+said; but his salutations were lost in the wonder excited by the girl's
+next move.
+
+"See, Colonel Stanistreet, what we have found!" she cried, and showed him
+the necklace. "I mean, what Monsieur Duchemin found. It was he who saw it,
+lying beneath that rose-bush over there. Your burglar must have dropped it
+in making his escape; you can see the paper he wrapped it in, all rain-wet
+and muddied."
+
+Stanistreet's eyes protruded alarmingly, and his face grew very red before
+he found breath enough to ejaculate: "God bless my soul!" Breathing hard,
+he accepted the necklace from Cecelia's hands. "I must--excuse me--I must
+tell my sister-in-law about this immediately!"
+
+He turned and trotted hastily back into the house.
+
+Crane lingered but a moment longer. His cheek, as ever, was bulging round
+his everlasting cigar. Was his tongue therein as well? Lanyard never knew;
+the man's eyes remained inscrutable for all the kindly shrewdness that
+glimmered amid their netted wrinkles.
+
+"Excuse _me_!" he said suddenly. "I got to tell the colonel something."
+
+He got lankily into motion and presently passed in through the windows....
+
+Irresistibly her gaze drew Lanyard's. He lifted careworn eyes and realized
+her with a great wistfulness upon him.
+
+She awaited in silence his verdict, her chin proudly high, her face
+adorably flushed, her shining eyes level and brave to his, her generous
+hands outstretched.
+
+"Must you go now?" she said tenderly, as he stood hesitant and shamed.
+"Must you go now, my dear?"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The False Faces, by Louis Joseph Vance
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The False Faces, by Vance, Louis Joseph
+
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+
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+Title: The False Faces
+
+Author: Vance, Louis Joseph
+
+Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9908]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 30, 2003]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FALSE FACES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci,
+Tom Allen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE FALSE FACES
+
+FURTHER ADVENTURES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LONE WOLF
+
+BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I Out of No Man's Land
+
+II From a British Port
+
+III In the Barred Zone
+
+IV In Deep Waters
+
+V On the Banks
+
+VI Under Suspicion
+
+VII In Stateroom 29
+
+VIII Off Nantucket
+
+IX Sub Sea
+
+X At Base
+
+XI Under the Rose
+
+XII Resurrection
+
+XIII Reincarnation
+
+XIV Defamation
+
+XV Recognition
+
+XVI Au Printemps
+
+XVII Finesse
+
+XVIII Danse Macabre
+
+XIX Force Majeure
+
+XX Riposte
+
+XXI Question
+
+XXII Chicane
+
+XXIII Amnesty
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+OUT OF NO MAN'S LAND
+
+
+On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still, as
+still as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him, where
+they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contests
+which the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few charnel yards of
+that debatable ground.
+
+Alone of all that awful company this man lived and, though he ached with
+the misery of hunger and cold and rain-drenched garments, was unharmed.
+
+Ever since nightfall and a brisk skirmish had made practicable an
+undetected escape through the German lines, he had been in the open,
+alternately creeping toward the British trenches under cover of darkness
+and resting in deathlike immobility, as he now rested, while pistol-lights
+and star-shells flamed overhead, flooding the night with ghastly glare
+and disclosing in pitiless detail that two-hundred-yard ribbon of earth,
+littered with indescribable abominations, which set apart the combatants.
+When this happened, the living had no other choice than to ape the dead,
+lest the least movement, detected by eyes that peered without rest through
+loopholes in the sandbag parapets, invite a bullet's blow.
+
+Now it was midnight, and lights were flaring less frequently, even as
+rifle-fire had grown more intermittent ... as if many waters might quench
+out hate in the heart of man!
+
+For it was raining hard--a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavy
+atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and
+inexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter of
+a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering of
+machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a dull thunder of
+cannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering a vast and shimmering
+curtain of slender lances, steel-bright, close-ranked, between the trenches
+and over all that weary land. Thus had it rained since noon, and thus--for
+want of any hint of slackening--it might rain for another twelve hours, or
+eighteen, or twenty-four....
+
+The star-rocket, whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool, paled and
+winked out in mid-air, and for several minutes unbroken darkness obtained
+while, on hands and knees, the man crept on toward that gap in the British
+barbed-wire entanglements which he had marked down ere daylight waned,
+shaping a tolerably straight course despite frequent detours to avoid the
+unspeakable. Only once was his progress interrupted--when straining senses
+apprised him that a British patrol was taking advantage of the false truce
+to reconnoitre toward the enemy lines, its approach betrayed by a nearing
+_squash_ of furtive feet in the boggy earth, the rasp of constrained
+respiration, a muttered curse when someone slipped and narrowly escaped a
+fall, the edged hiss of an officer's whisper reprimanding the offender.
+Incontinently he who crawled dropped flat to the greasy mud and lay
+moveless.
+
+Almost at the same instant, warned by a trail of sparks rising in a long
+arc from the German trenches, the soldiers imitated his action, and, as
+long as those triple stars shone in the murk, made themselves one with him
+and the heedless dead. Two lay so close beside him that the man could have
+touched either by moving a hand a mere six inches; he was at pains to do
+nothing of the sort; he was sedulous to clench his teeth against their
+chattering, even to hold his breath, and regretted that he might not mute
+the thumping of his heart. Nor dared he stir until, the lights fading out,
+the patrol rose and skulked onward.
+
+Thereafter his movements were less stealthy; with a detachment of their
+own abroad in No Man's Land, the British would refrain from shooting at
+shadows. One had now to fear only German bullets in event the patrol were
+discovered.
+
+Rising, the man slipped and stumbled on in semi-crouching posture, ready
+to flatten to earth as soon as any one of his many overshoulder glances
+detected another sky-spearing flight of sparks. But this necessity he was
+spared; no more lights were discharged before he groped through the wires
+to the parapet, with almost uncanny good luck, finding the very spot where
+the British had come over the top, indicated by protruding uprights of a
+rough wooden scaling ladder.
+
+As he turned, felt with a foot for the uppermost rung, and began to
+descend, he was saluted by a voice hoarse with exposure, from the black
+bowels of the trench:
+
+"Blimy! but ye're back in a 'urry! Wot's up? Forget to put perfume on yer
+pocket-'andkerchief--or wot?"
+
+The man's response, if he made any, was lost in a heavy splash as his feet
+slipped on the slimy rungs, delivering him precipitately into a knee-deep
+stream of foul water which moved sluggishly through the trench like the
+current of a half-choked sewer--a circumstance which neither suprised him
+nor added to his physical discomfort, who could be no more wet or defiled
+than he had been.
+
+Floundering to a foothold, he cast about vainly for a clue to the other's
+whereabouts; for if the night was thick in the open, here in the trench
+its density was as that of the pit; the man could distinguish positively
+nothing more than a pallid rift where the walls opened overhead.
+
+"Well, sullen, w'ere's yer manners? Carn't yer answer a civil question?"
+
+Turning toward the speaker, the man replied in good if rather carefully
+enunciated English:
+
+"I am not of your comrades. I am come from the enemy trenches."
+
+"The 'ell yer are! 'Ands up!"
+
+The muzzle of a rifle prodded the man's stomach. Obediently he lifted both
+hands above his head. A thought later, he was half blinded by the sudden
+spot-light of an electric flash-lamp.
+
+"Deserter, eh? You kamerad--wot?"
+
+"Kamerad!" the man echoed with an accent of contempt. "I am no German--I
+am French. I have come through the Boche lines to-night with important
+information which I desire to communicate forthwith to your commanding
+officer."
+
+"Strike me!" his catechist breathed, skeptical.
+
+There was a new sound of splashing in the trench. A third voice chimed in:
+"'Ello? Wot's all the row abaht?"
+
+"Step up and tike a look for yerself. 'Ere's a blighter wot sez 'e's com
+from the Germ trenches with important information for the O.C."
+
+"Bloody liar," the newcomer commented dispassionately. "Mind yer eye.
+Likely it's just another pl'yful little trick of the giddy Boche. 'Ere
+you!" The splashing drew nearer. "Wot's yer gime? Speak up if yer don't
+want a bullet through yer in'ards."
+
+"I play no game," the man said patiently. "I am unarmed--your prisoner, if
+you like."
+
+"I like, all right. Mike yer mind easy abaht that. But wot's all this
+'important information'?"
+
+"I shall divulge that only to the proper authorities. Be good enough to
+conduct me to your commanding officer without more delay."
+
+"Wot do yer mike of 'im, corp'ril?" the first soldier enquired. "'Ow abaht
+an inch or two o' the bay'net to loosen 'is tongue?"
+
+After a moment's hesitation in perplexed silence, the corporal took the
+flash-lamp from the private and with its beam raked the prisoner from head
+to foot, gaining little enlightenment from this review of a tall, spare
+figure clothed in the familiar gray overcoat of the German private--its
+face a mere mask of mud through which shone eyes of singular brilliance and
+steadiness, the eyes of a man of intelligence, determination, and courage.
+
+"Keep yer 'ands 'igh," the corporal advised curtly. "Ginger, you search
+'im."
+
+Propping his rifle against the wall of the trench, its butt on the
+firing-step just out of water, the private proceeded painstakingly
+to examine the person of the prisoner; in course of which process he
+unbuttoned and threw open the gray overcoat, exposing a shapeless tunic and
+trousers of shoddy drab stuff.
+
+"'E 'asn't got no arms--'e 'asn't got nothink, not so much as 'is blinkin'
+latch-key."
+
+"Very good. Get back on yer post. I'll tike charge o' this one."
+
+Grounding his own rifle, the corporal fixed its bayonet, then employed it
+in a gesture of unpleasant significance.
+
+"'Bout fice," he ordered. "March. Yer can drop yer 'ands--but don't go
+forgettin' I'm right 'ere be'ind yer."
+
+In silence the prisoner obeyed, wading down the flooded trench, the
+spot-light playing on his back, striking sullen gleams from the inky water
+that swirled about his knees, and disclosing glimpses of coated figures
+stationed at regular intervals along the firing-step, faces steadfast to
+loopholes in the parapet.
+
+Now and again they passed narrow rifts in the walls of the trench,
+entrances to dugouts betrayed by glimmers of candle-light through the
+cracks of makeshift doors or the coarse mesh of gunnysack curtains.
+
+From one of these, at the corporal's summons, a sleepy subaltern stumbled
+to attend ungraciously to his subordinate's report, and promptly ordered
+the prisoner taken on to the regimental headquarters behind the lines.
+
+A little farther on captive and captor turned off into a narrow and
+tortuous communication trench. Thereafter for upward of ten minutes they
+threaded a labyrinth of deep, constricted, reeking ditches, with so little
+to differentiate one from another that the prisoner wondered at the sure
+sense of direction which enabled the corporal to find his way without
+mis-step, with the added handicap of the abysmal darkness. Then, of a
+sudden, the sides of the trench shelved sharply downward, and the two
+debouched into a broad, open field. Here many men lay sleeping, with only
+waterproof sheets for protection from that bitter deluge which whipped the
+earth into an ankle-deep lake of slimy ooze and lent keener accent to the
+abiding stench of filth and decomposing flesh. A slight hillock stood
+between this field and the firing-line--where now lively fusillades
+were being exchanged--its profile crowned with a spectral rank of
+shell-shattered poplars sharply silhouetted against a sky in which
+star-shells and Verey lights flowered like blooms of hell.
+
+Here the corporal abruptly commanded his prisoner to halt and himself
+paused and stood stiffly at attention, saluting a group of three officers
+who were approaching with the evident intention of entering the trench. One
+of these loosed upon the pair the flash of a pocket lamp. At sight of the
+gray overcoat all three stopped short.
+
+A voice with the intonation of habitual command enquired: "What have we
+here?"
+
+The corporal replied: "A prisoner, sir--sez 'e's French--come across the
+open to-night with important information--so 'e sez."
+
+The spot-light picked out the prisoner's face. The officer addressed him
+directly.
+
+"What is your name, my man?"
+
+"That," said the prisoner, "is something which--like my intelligence--I
+should prefer to communicate privately."
+
+With a startled gesture the officer took a step forward and peered intently
+into that mud-smeared countenance.
+
+"I seem to know your voice," he said in a speculative tone.
+
+"You should," the prisoner returned.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the officer to his companions, "you may continue your
+rounds. Corporal, follow me with your prisoner."
+
+He swung round and slopped off heavily through the mud of the open field.
+
+Behind them the sound of firing in the forward trenches swelled to an
+uproar augmented by the shrewish chattering of machine-guns. Then a battery
+hidden somewhere in the blackness in front of them came into action,
+barking viciously. Shells whined hungrily overhead. The prisoner glanced
+back: the maimed poplars stood out stark against a sky washed with wave
+after wave of infernal light....
+
+Some time later he was conscious of a cobbled way beneath his sodden
+footgear. They were entering the outskirts of a ruined village. On either
+hand fragments of walls reared up with sashless windows and gaping doors
+like death masks of mad folk stricken in paroxysm.
+
+Within one doorway a dim light burned; through it the officer made his way,
+prisoner and corporal at his heels, passing a sentry, then descending a
+flight of crazy wooden steps to a dank and gloomy cellar, stone-walled
+and vaulted. In the middle of the cellar stood a broad table at which an
+orderly sat writing by the light of two candles stuck in the necks of empty
+bottles. At another table, in a corner, a sergeant and an operator of the
+Signal Corps were busy with field telephone and telegraph instruments. On a
+meagre bed of damp and mouldy straw, against the farther wall, several men,
+orderlies and subalterns, rested in stertorous slumbers. Despite the cold
+the atmosphere was a reek of tobacco smoke, sweat, and steam from wet
+clothing.
+
+The man at the centre table rose and saluted, offering the commanding
+officer a sheaf of scribbled messages and reports. Taking the chair thus
+vacated, the officer ran an eye over the papers, issued several orders
+inspired by them, then turned attention to the prisoner.
+
+"You may return to your post, corporal."
+
+The corporal executed a smart about-face and clumped up the steps. In
+answer to the officer's steadfast gaze the prisoner stepped forward and
+confronted him across the table.
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+"My name," said the prisoner, after looking around to make sure that none
+of the other tenants of the cellar was within earshot, "is Lanyard--Michael
+Lanyard."
+
+"The Lone Wolf!"
+
+Involuntarily the officer jumped up, almost overturning his chair.
+
+"That same," the prisoner affirmed, adding with a grimace of besmirched and
+emaciated features that was meant for a smile--"General Wertheimer."
+
+"Wertheimer is not my name."
+
+"I am aware of that. I uttered it merely to confirm my identity to you; it
+is the only name I ever knew you by in the old days, when you were in the
+British Secret Service and I a famous thief with a price upon my head, when
+you and I played hide and seek across half Europe and back again--in the
+days of Troyon's and 'the Pack,' the days of De Morbihan and Popinot
+and...."
+
+"Ekstrom," the officer supplied as the prisoner hesitated oddly.
+
+"And Ekstrom," the other agreed.
+
+There was a little silence between the two; then the officer mused aloud:
+"All dead!"
+
+"All ... but one."
+
+The officer looked up sharply. "Which--?"
+
+"The last-named."
+
+"Ekstrom? But we saw him die! You yourself fired the shot that--"
+
+"It was not Ekstrom. Trust that one not to imperil his precious carcase
+when he could find an underling to run the risk for him! I tell you I have
+seen Ekstrom within this last month, alive and serving the Fatherland as
+the genius of that system of espionage which keeps the enemy advised of
+your every move, down to the least considerable--that system which makes it
+possible for the Boche to greet every regiment by name when it moves up to
+serve its time in your advanced trenches."
+
+"You amaze me!"
+
+"I shall convince you; I bring intelligence which will enable you to tear
+apart this web of treason within your own lines and...."
+
+Lanyard's voice broke. The officer remarked that he was
+trembling--trembling so violently that to support himself he must grip the
+edge of the table with both hands.
+
+"You are wounded?"
+
+"No--but cold to my very marrow, and faint with hunger. Even the German
+soldiers are on starvation rations, now; the civilians are worse off; and
+I--I have been over there for years, a spy, a hunted thing, subsisting as
+casually as a sparrow!"
+
+"Sit down. Orderly!"
+
+And there was no more talk between these two for a time. Not only did the
+officer refuse to hear another word before Lanyard had gorged his fill of
+food and drink, but an exigent communication from the front, transmitted
+through the trench telephone system, diverted his attention temporarily.
+
+Gnawing ravenously at bread and meat, Lanyard watched curiously the scenes
+in the cellar, following, as best he might, the tides of combat; gathering
+that German resentment of a British bombing enterprise (doubtless the work
+of that same squad which had stolen past him in the gloom of No Man's Land)
+had developed into a violent attempt to storm the forward trenches.
+In these a desperate struggle was taking place. Reinforcements were
+imperatively wanted.
+
+Activities at the signallers' table became feverish; the commanding officer
+stood over it, reading incoming messages as they were jotted down and
+taking such action thereupon as his judgment dictated. Orderlies, dragged
+half asleep from their nests of straw, were shaken awake and despatched to
+rouse and rush to the front the troops Lanyard had seen sleeping in the
+open field. Other orderlies limped or reeled down the cellar steps,
+delivered their despatches, and, staggered out through a breach in the wall
+to have their injuries attended to in the field dressing-station in the
+adjoining cellar, or else threw themselves down on the straw to fall
+instantly asleep despite the deafening din.
+
+The Boche artillery, seeking blindly to silence the field batteries whose
+fire was galling their offensive, had begun to bombard the village. Shells
+fled shrieking overhead, to break in thunderous bellows. Walls toppled
+with appalling crashes, now near at hand, now far. The ebb and flow of
+rifle-fire at the front contributed a background of sound not unlike the
+roaring of an angry surf. Machine-guns gibbered like maniacs. Heavier
+artillery was brought into play behind the British lines, apparently at no
+great distance from the village; the very flag-stones of the cellar floor
+quaked to the concussions of big-calibre guns.
+
+Through the breach in the wall echoed the screams and groans of wounded.
+The foul air became saturated with a sickening stench of iodoform. Gusts of
+wet wind eddied hither and yon. Candles flickered and flared, guttered out,
+were renewed. Monstrous shadows stole out from black corners, crept along
+mouldy walls, crouched, sprang and vanished, or, inscrutably baffled,
+retreated sullenly to their lairs....
+
+For the better part of an hour the struggle continued; then its vigour
+began to wane. The heaviest British metal went out of action; some time
+later the field batteries discontinued their activities. The volume of
+firing in the advance trenches dwindled, was fiercely renewed some half a
+dozen times, died away to normal. Once more the Boche had been beaten back.
+
+Returning to his chair, the commanding officer rested his elbows upon the
+table and bowed his head between his hands in an attitude of profound
+fatigue. He seemed to remind himself of Lanyard's presence only at 'cost of
+a racking effort, lifting heavy-lidded eyes to stare almost incredulously
+at his face.
+
+"I presumed you were in America," he said in dulled accents.
+
+"I was ... for a time."
+
+"You came back to serve France?"
+
+Lanyard shook his head. "I returned to Europe after a year, the spring
+before the war."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I was hunted out of New York. The Boche would not let me be."
+
+The officer looked startled. "The Boche?"
+
+"More precisely, Herr Ekstrom--to name him as we knew him. But this I did
+not suspect for a long time, that it was he who was responsible for my
+persecution. I knew only that the police of America, informed of my
+identity with the Lone Wolf, sought to deport me, that every avenue to
+an honourable livelihood was closed. So I had to leave, to try to lose
+myself."
+
+"Your wife ... I mean to say, you married, didn't you?"
+
+Lanyard nodded. "Lucy stuck by me till ... the end.... She had a little
+money of her own. It financed our flight from the States. We made a
+round-about journey of it, to elude surveillance--and, I think, succeeded."
+
+"You returned to Paris?"
+
+"No: France, like England, was barred to the Lone Wolf.... We settled down
+in Belgium, Lucy and I and our boy. He was three months old. We found a
+quiet little home in Louvain--"
+
+The officer interrupted with a low cry of apprehension, Lanyard checked him
+with a sombre gesture. "Let me tell you....
+
+"We might have been happy. None knew us. We were sufficient unto ourselves.
+But I was without occupation; it occurred to me that my memoirs might
+make good reading--for Paris; my friends the French are as fond of their
+criminals as you English of your actors. On the second of August I
+journeyed to Paris to negotiate with a publisher. While I was away the
+Boche invaded Belgium. Before I could get back Louvain had been occupied,
+sacked...."
+
+He sat for a time in brooding silence; the officer made no attempt to
+rouse him, but the gaze he bent upon the man's lowered head was grave and
+pitiful. Abruptly, in a level and toneless voice, Lanyard resumed:
+
+"In order to regain my home I had to go round by way of England and
+Holland. I crossed the Dutch frontier disguised as a Belgian peasant. When
+I reentered Louvain it was to find ... But all the world knows what the
+blond beast did in Louvain. My wife and little son had vanished utterly. I
+searched three months before I found trace of either. Then ... Lucy died in
+my arms in a wretched hovel near Aerschot. She had seen our child butchered
+before her eyes. She herself...."
+
+Lanyard's hand, that rested on the table, clenched and whitened beneath its
+begrimed skin. His eyes fathomed distances immeasurably removed beyond the
+confines of that grim cellar. But he presently continued:
+
+"Ekstrom had accompanied the army of invasion, had seen and recognized Lucy
+in passing through Louvain. Therefore she and my son were among the first
+to be sacrificed.... When I stood over her grave I dedicated my life to the
+extermination of Ekstrom and all his breed. I have since done things I do
+not like to think about. But the Prussian spy system is the weaker for my
+work....
+
+"But Ekstrom I could never find. It was as if he knew I hunted him. He was
+seldom twenty-four hours ahead of me, yet I never caught up with him but
+once; and then he was too closely guarded.... I pursued him to Berlin,
+to Potsdam, three times to the western front, to Serbia, once to
+Constantinople, twice to Petrograd."
+
+The officer uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Lanyard looked his way
+with a depreciatory air.
+
+"Nothing strange about that. To one of my early training that was
+easy--everything was easy but the end I sought.... En passant I collected
+information concerning the workings of the Prussian spy system. From time
+to time I found means to communicate somewhat of this to the Surete in
+Paris. I believe France and England have already profited a little through
+my efforts. They shall profit more, and quickly, when I have told all that
+I have to tell....
+
+"Of a sudden Ekstrom vanished. Overnight he disappeared from Germany. A
+false lead brought me back to this front. Two days ago I learned he had
+been sent to America on a secret mission. Knowing that the States have
+severed diplomatic relations with Berlin and tremble on the verge of a
+declaration of war, we can surmise something of the nature of his mission.
+I mean to see that he fails.... To follow him to America, making my way
+out through Belgium and Holland, pursuing such furtive ways as I must in
+territory dominated by the Boche, meant much time lost. So I came through
+the lines to-night. Fortune was kind in throwing me into your hands: I
+count upon your assistance. As an ex-agent of the Secret Service you are in
+a position to make smooth my path; as an Englishman, you will advance the
+interests of a prospective ally of England if you help me to the limit of
+your ability; for what I mean to do in America will serve that country, by
+exposing the conspiracies of the Boche across the water, as much as it will
+serve my private ends."
+
+The officer's hand fell across the table and closed upon the knotted fist
+of the Lone Wolf.
+
+"As an Englishman," he said simply--"of course. But no less as your
+friend."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FROM A BRITISH PORT
+
+
+"And one man in his time plays many parts": few more than this same
+Lanyard. In no way to be identified with the hunted creature who crept into
+the British lines out of No Man's Land was the Monsieur Duchemin who, ten
+days after that wintry midnight, took passage for New York from "a British
+port," aboard the steamship _Assyrian_.
+
+Andre Duchemin was the name inscribed in the credentials furnished him in
+recognition of signal assistance rendered the British Secret Service in its
+task of scotching the Prussian spy system. And the personality he chose
+to assume suited well the name. A man of modest and amiable deportment,
+viewing the world with eyes intelligent and curious, his temper reacting
+from its ways in terms of grave humour, Monsieur Duchemin passed peaceably
+on his lawful occasions, took life as he found it, made the best of irksome
+circumstances.
+
+This last idiosyncrasy stood him in good stead. For the _Assyrian_ failed
+to clear upon her proposed sailing date and for a livelong week thereafter
+chafed alongside her landing stage, steam up, cargo laden and stowed,
+nothing lacking but the Admiralty's permission to begin her westbound
+voyage--a permission inscrutably withheld, giving rise to a common
+discontent which the passengers dissembled to the various best of their
+abilities, that is to say, in most cases thinly or not at all.
+
+Yet they were none of them unreasonable beings. They had come aboard one
+and all keyed up to a high nervous pitch, pardonable in such as must commit
+their lives to the dread adventure of the barred zone, wanting nothing
+so much as to get it over with, whatever its upshot. And everlasting
+procrastination required them day after day to steel their hearts anew
+against that Terror which followed its furtive ways beneath the leaden
+waters of the Channel!
+
+Alone among them this Monsieur Duchemin paraded successfully a false face
+of resignation, protesting no predilection whatsoever for a watery grave,
+no infatuate haste to challenge the Hun upon his chosen hunting-ground. In
+the fullness of time it would be permitted to him to go down to the sea in
+this ship. Meanwhile he found it apparently pleasant and restful to explore
+the winding cobbled ways of that antiquated waterside community, made over
+by the hand of War into a bustling seaport, or to tramp the sunken lanes
+that seamed those green old Cornish hills which embosomed the wide harbour
+waters, or to lounge about the broad white decks of the _Assyrian_ watching
+the diurnal traffic of the haven--a restless, warlike pageant.
+
+Daily, in earliest dusk of dawn, the wakeful might watch the faring forth
+of a weirdly assorted fleet of small craft, the day patrol, to relieve a
+night patrol as weirdly heterogeneous. Daily, at all hours, mine-sweepers
+came and went, by twos and twos, in flocks, in schools; and daily bellowing
+offshore detonations advertised their success in garnering those horned
+black seeds of death which the Hun and his kin were sedulous to sow in the
+fairways. While daily battleships both great and small rolled in wearily to
+refit and dress their wounds, or took swift departure on grim and secret
+errands.
+
+There was, moreover, the not-infrequent spectacle of some minor ship of
+war--a truculent, gray destroyer as like as not--shepherding in a sleek
+submarine, like a felon whale armoured and strangely caparisoned in
+gray-brown steel, to be moored in chains with a considerable company of its
+fellows on the far side of the roadstead, while its crew was taken ashore
+and consigned to some dark limbo of oblivion.
+
+And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian
+tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed, plying
+its assassin's trade beneath a neutral flag.
+
+Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the
+town gaol-yard.
+
+One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the _Assyrian_,
+Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed eyelids into the quarter
+whence the sounds reverberated.
+
+The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste,
+paused momentarily in his task of masticating a fat dark cigar.
+
+"This way out," he commented thoughtfully.
+
+Lanyard nodded; but the third, a plumply ingratiative native of Geneva,
+known to the ship as Emil Dressier, frowned in puzzlement.
+
+"Pardon, Monsieur Crane, but what is that you say--'this way out'?"
+
+"Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of our
+nootral friends from Norway."
+
+The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"
+
+"Well, I don't know about that. They done their damnedest to fix it for us
+to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm just as
+satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the
+warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur
+Duchemin?"
+
+"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.
+
+"And war is ... No: Sherman was all wrong. Hell's got perfectly good
+grounds for a libel suit against William Tecumseh for what he up and said
+about it and war, all in the same breath."
+
+Lanyard smiled faintly, but Dressler pondered this obscure reference with
+patent distress. Crane champed his cigar reflectively.
+
+"What's more to our purpose," he said presently: "I shouldn't be surprised
+if this meant the wind-up of our rest-cure here. That's the third
+mine-layer they've collected this week--two subs, and now this benevolent
+nootral. Am I right, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"Who knows?" Lanyard replied with a smile. "Even now the mine-sweeping
+flotilla is coming home, as you see; which means, the neighbouring waters
+have been cleared. It is altogether a possibility that we may be permitted
+to depart this night."
+
+Even so the event: as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter of
+crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the _Assyrian_
+warped out into mid-channel and anchored there for the night.
+
+Inasmuch as she was to sail as the tide served, some time before sunrise,
+the passengers were advised to seek their berths at an early hour. Thirty
+minutes before the steamship entered the danger zone (as she would soon
+after leaving the harbour) they would be roused and were expected promptly
+to assemble on deck, with life-preservers, and station themselves near the
+boats to which they were individually assigned.
+
+For their further comforting they were treated, in the ebb of the chill
+blue twilight, to boat-drill and final instructions in the right adjustment
+of life-belts.
+
+A preoccupied company assembled in the dining saloon for what might be
+its last meal. In the shadow of the general apprehension, conversation
+languished; expressions of relief on the part of those who had been loudest
+in complaining at the delays were notably unheard; even Crane, Lanyard's
+nearest neighbour at table, was abnormally subdued. Reviewing that array of
+sobered and anxious faces, Lanyard remarked--not for the first time, but
+with renewed gratitude--that in all the roster of passengers none were
+children and but two were women: the American widow of an English officer
+and her very English daughter, an angular and superior spinster.
+
+Avoiding the customary post-prandial symposium in the smoking room, Lanyard
+slipped away with his cigar for a lonely turn on deck.
+
+Beneath a sky heavily canopied, the night was stark black and loud with
+clashing waters. A fitful wind played in gusts now grim, now groping, like
+a lost thing blundering blindly about in that deep darkness. Ashore a
+few wan lights, widely spaced, winked uncertainly, withdrawn in vast
+remoteness; those near at hand, of the anchored shipping, skipped and
+swayed and flickered in mad mazes of goblin dance. To him who paced those
+vacant, darkened decks, the sense of dissociation from all the common,
+kindly phenomena of civilization was something intimate and inescapable.
+Melancholy as well rode upon that black-winged wind.
+
+At pause beneath the bridge, the adventurer rested elbows upon the teakwood
+rail and with importunate eyes searched the masked face of his destiny.
+There was great fear in his heart, not of death, but lest death overtake
+him before that scarlet hour when he should encounter the man whom he must
+always think of as "Ekstrom."
+
+After that, nothing would matter: let Death come then as swiftly as it
+willed....
+
+He was not even middle-aged, on the hither side of thirty; yet his attitude
+was that of one who had already crossed the great divide of the average
+mortal span: he looked backward upon a life, never forward to one. To him
+his history seemed a thing written, lacking the one word Finis: he had
+lived and loved and lost--had arrayed himself insolently against God and
+Man, had been lifted toward the light a little way by a woman's love, had
+been thrust relentlessly back into the black pit of his damnation. He made
+no pretense that it was otherwise with him: remained now merely the thing
+he had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once
+kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled
+again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous
+to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to
+destroy and be in turn destroyed....
+
+Two decks below, about amidships, a cargo port was thrust open to the
+night. A thick, broad beam of light leaped out, buffeting the murk,
+striking evanescent glimmers from the rocking facets of the waters.
+Deckhands busied themselves rigging out an accommodation ladder. A tender
+of little tonnage panted nervously up out of nowhere and was made fast
+alongside. The light raked its upper deck, picking out in passing a group
+of men in uniforms. Fugitively something resembling a petticoat snapped
+in the wind. Then several persons moved toward the accommodation ladder,
+climbed it, disappeared through the cargo port. The wearer of the petticoat
+did not accompany them.
+
+Lanyard noted these matters subconsciously, for the time altogether
+preoccupied, casting forward his thoughts along those dim trails his feet
+must tread who followed his dark star....
+
+Ten minutes later a deck-steward found him, and paused, touching his cap.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir, but all passingers is requested to report immedately in
+the music room."
+
+Indifferently Lanyard thanked the man and went below, to find the music
+room tenanted by a full muster of his fellow passengers, all more or less
+indignantly waiting to be cross-examined by the party of port officials
+from the tender--the ship's purser standing by together with the second and
+third officers and a number of stewards.
+
+Resentment was not unwarranted: already, before being suffered to take up
+quarters on board the _Assyrian_, each passenger had submitted to a most
+comprehensive survey of his credentials, his mental, moral, and social
+status, his past record, present affairs, and future purposes. A formality
+to be expected by all such as travel in war time, it had been rigid but
+mild in contrast with this eleventh-hour inquisition--a proceeding so
+drastic and exhaustive that the only plausible inference was official
+determination to find excuse for ordering somebody ashore in irons. Nothing
+was overlooked: once passports and other proofs of identity had been
+scrutinized, each passenger was conducted to his stateroom and his person
+and luggage subjected to painstaking search. None escaped; on the other
+hand, not one was found guilty of flagitious peculiarity. In the upshot the
+inquisitors, baffled and betraying every symptom of disappointment, were
+fain to give over and return to their tender.
+
+By this time Lanyard, one of the last to be grilled and passed, found
+himself as little inclined for sleep as the most timorous soul on board.
+Selecting an American novel from the ship's library, he repaired to
+the smoking room, where, established in a corner apart, he became an
+involuntary and, at first, a largely inattentive, eavesdropper upon an
+animated debate involving some eight or ten gentlemen at a table in the
+middle of the saloon--its subject, the recent visitation.
+
+Measures so extraordinary were generally held to indicate an incentive more
+extraordinary still.
+
+"You can't get away from it," he heard Crane declare: "there's some sort of
+funny business going on, or liable to go on, aboard this ship. She wasn't
+held up for a solid week out of pure cussedness. Neither did they come
+aboard to-night to give us another once-over through sheer voluptuousness.
+There's a reason."
+
+"And what," a satiric English voice enquired, "do you assume that reason to
+be?"
+
+"Search me. 'Sfar's I'm concerned the processes of the British Intelligence
+Office are a long sight past finding out."
+
+"It is simple enough," one of Crane's compatriots suggested: "the
+_Assyrian_ is suspected of entertaining a devil unawares."
+
+"Monsieur means--?" the Swiss enquired.
+
+"I mean, the authorities may have been led to believe some one of us a
+questionable character."
+
+"German spy?"
+
+"Possibly."
+
+"Or an English traitor?"
+
+"Impossible," asserted another Briton heavily. "There is to-day no such
+thing in England. Two years ago the supposition might have been plausible.
+But that breed has long since been stamped out--in England."
+
+"Another guess," Crane cut in: "they've taken considerable trouble to clear
+the track for us. Maybe it occurred to somebody at the last moment to make
+sure none of us was likely to pull off an inside job."
+
+"'Inside job?'" Dressler pleaded.
+
+"Planting bombs in the coal bunkers--things like that--anything to crab our
+getting through the barred zone in spite of mines and U-boats."
+
+"Any such attempt would mean almost certain death!"
+
+"What of it? It's been tried before--and got away with. You've got to hand
+it to Fritz, he'll risk hell-for-breakfast cheerful any time he gets it in
+his bean he's serving Gott und Vaterland."
+
+"Granted," said the Englishman. "But I fancy such an one would find it far
+from easy to secure passage upon this or any other vessel."
+
+"How so? You may have haltered all your traitors, but there's still
+a-plenty German spies living in England. Even you admit that. And if they
+can get by your Secret Service, to say nothing of Scotland Yard, what's to
+prevent their fixing to leave the country?"
+
+"Nothing, certainly. But I still contend it is hardly likely."
+
+"Of course it's hardly likely. Look at these guys to-night--dead set on
+making an awful example of anybody that couldn't come clean. I didn't
+notice them missing any bets. They combed me to the Queen's taste; for
+a while I was sure scared they'd extract my pivot tooth to see if there
+wasn't something incriminating and degrading secreted inside it. And nobody
+got off any easier. _I_ say the good ship _Assyrian_ has a pretty clean
+bill of health to go sailing with."
+
+"On the other hand"--yet another American voice was speaking--"no spy or
+criminal worth his salt would try to ship without preparations thorough
+enough to insure success, barring accidents."
+
+"Criminal?" drawled the Briton incredulously.
+
+"The enterprisin' burglar keeps a-burglin', even in war time. There have
+been notable burglaries in London of late, according to your newspapers."
+
+"And you think the thief would attempt to smuggle his loot out of the
+country aboard such a ship as this?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Scotland Yard to the contrary notwithstanding?"
+
+"If Scotland Yard is as efficient as you think, sir, certainly any sane
+thief would make every effort to leave a country it was making too hot for
+him."
+
+"Considerable criminal!" Crane jeered.
+
+"Undeceive yourself, senor." This was a Brazilian, a quiet little dark body
+who commonly contented himself with a listening role in the smoking-room
+discussions. "There are truly criminals of intelligence. And war conditions
+are driving them out of Europe."
+
+Of a sudden Lanyard--stretched out at length upon the leather cushions,
+in full view of these gossips--became aware that he was being closely
+scrutinised. By whom, with what reason or purpose, he could not surmise;
+and it were unwise to look up from that printed page. But that sixth sense
+of his--intuition, what you will--that exquisitively sensitive sentinel
+admonished that at least one person in the room was watching him narrowly.
+
+Though he made no move other than to turn a page, his glance followed
+blindly blurring lines of text, and his quickened wits overlooked no shade
+of meaning or intonation as that talk continued.
+
+"A criminal of intelligence," some one observed, "is a giddy paradox whose
+fatuous existence is quite fittingly confined to the realm of fable."
+
+"You took the identical words right out of my mouth," Crane complained
+bitterly.
+
+"Your pardon, senores: history confutes your incredulity."
+
+"But we are talking about to-day."
+
+"Even to-day--can you deny it?--men attain high places by means which the
+law would construe as criminal, were they not intelligent enough to outwit
+it."
+
+"Big game," Crane objected; "something else again. What we contend is no
+man of ordinary common sense could get his own consent to crack a safe, or
+pick a pocket, or do second-story work, or pull any rough stuff like that."
+
+"Again you overlook living facts," persisted the Brazilian.
+
+"Name one--just one."
+
+"The Lone Wolf, then."
+
+"Unnatural history is out of my line," Crane objected. "Why is a lone wolf,
+anyway?"
+
+The Brazilian's voice took on an accent of exasperation. "Senores, I do not
+jest. I am a student of psychology, more especially of criminal psychology.
+I lived long in Paris before this war, and took deep interest in the case
+of the Lone Wolf."
+
+"Well, you've got me all excited. Go on with your story."
+
+"With much pleasure.... This gentleman, then, this Michael Lanyard, as he
+called himself, was a distinguished Parisian figure, a man of extraordinary
+attainment, esteemed the foremost connoisseur d'art in all Europe.
+Suddenly, at the zenith of his career, he disappeared. Subsequently it
+became known that he had been identical with that great Parisian criminal,
+the Lone Wolf, a superman of thieves who had plundered all Europe with
+unvarying success for almost a decade."
+
+"Then what made the silly ass quit?"
+
+"According to my information, he won the love of a young woman--"
+
+"And reformed for her sake, of course?"
+
+"To the contrary, senor; Lanyard renounced his double life because of a
+theory on which he had founded his astonishing success. According to this
+theory, any man of intelligence may defy society as long as he will, always
+providing he has no friend, lover, or confederate in whom to confide. A man
+self-contained can never be betrayed; the stupid police seldom apprehend
+even the most stupid criminal, save through the treachery of some intimate.
+This Lanyard proved his theory by confounding not only the utmost
+efforts of the police but even the jealous enmity of that association of
+Continental criminals known as the Bande Noire--until he became a lover.
+Then he proved his intelligence: in one stroke he flouted the police,
+delivered into their hands the inner circle of the Bande Noire, and
+vanished with the woman he loved."
+
+"And then--?"
+
+"The rest," said the Brazilian, "is silence."
+
+"It is for to-night, anyway," Crane observed, yawning. "It's bedtime. Here
+comes the busy steward to put the lights and us out."
+
+There was a general stir; men drained glasses, knocked out pipes, got up,
+murmured good-nights. Lanyard closed the American novel upon a forefinger,
+looked up abstractedly, rose, moved toward the door. The utmost effort of
+exceptional powers of covert observation assured him that, at the moment,
+none of the company favoured him with especial attention; the author of
+that interest whose intensity had so weighed upon his consciousness had
+been swift to dissemble.
+
+On his way forward he exchanged bows and smiles with Crane and one or two
+others, his gesture completely casual. Yet when he entered the starboard
+alleyway he carried with him a complete catalogue of those who had
+contributed to the conversation. With all, thanks to seven days'
+association, he stood on terms of shipboard acquaintance. Not one, in his
+esteem, was more potentially mischievous than any other--not even the
+Brazilian Velasco, though he had been the first to name the Lone Wolf.
+
+It was, furthermore, quite possible that the mention of his erstwhile
+sobriquet had been utterly fortuitous.
+
+And yet, one might not forget that sensation of being under intent
+surveillance....
+
+In his stateroom Lanyard stood for several minutes gravely peering into the
+mirror above the washstand.
+
+The face he scanned was lean and worn in feature, darkly weathered, framed
+in hair whose jet already boasted an accent of silver at either temple--the
+face of a man inured to hardship, seasoned in suffering, strong in
+self-knowledge. The incandescence of an intelligence coldly dispassionate,
+quick and shrewd, lighted those dark eyes. Distinctively a face of Gallic
+cast, three years of long-drawn torment had served in part to erase from
+it wellnigh all resemblance to both the brilliant social freebooter of
+ante-bellum Paris and that undesirable alien whom the authorities had
+sought to deport from the States. Amazing facility in impersonation had
+done the rest; unrecognisable as what he had been, he was to-day flawlessly
+the incarnation of what he elected to seem--Monsieur Duchemin, gentleman,
+of Paris.
+
+Impossible to believe his disguise had been so soon penetrated....
+
+And yet, again, that gossip of the smoking room....
+
+Police work? Or had Ekstrom's creatures picked up his trail once more?
+
+Beneath that urbane mask of his, a hunted, wild thing poised in question,
+mistrustful of the very wind, prick-eared, fangs agleam, eyes grimly
+apprehensive....
+
+A little sound, the least of metallic clicks, breaking the hush of his
+solitude, froze the adventurer to attention. Only his glance swerved
+swiftly to a fastened door in the forward partition--his stateroom being
+the aftermost of three that might be thrown together to form a suite. The
+nickeled knob was being tried with infinite precaution. On the half turn it
+checked with a faint repetition of the click. Then the door itself quivered
+almost imperceptibly to pressure, though it yielded not a fraction of an
+inch.
+
+Lanyard's eyes hardened. He did not stir from where he stood, but one hand
+whipped an automatic from his pocket while the other darted out to the
+switch-box by the head of his berth and extinguished the light.
+
+Instantly a glimmer of light in the forward stateroom showed through
+a narrow strip of iron grill-work set in the top of the partition for
+ventilating purposes.
+
+Simultaneously the door-knob was gently released, and with another louder
+click the light in the adjoining cubicle was blotted out.
+
+Mystified, Lanyard undressed and turned in, but not to sleep--not for a
+little, at least.
+
+Who might this neighbour be who tried his door so stealthily? Before
+to-night that room had had no tenant. Apparently one of the passengers had
+seen fit to shift his quarters. To what end? To keep a jealous eye on
+the Lone Wolf, perhaps? So much the better, then: Lanyard need only make
+enquiry in the morning to identify his enemy.
+
+Deliberately closing his eyes, he dismissed the enigma. He possessed in
+marked degree that attribute of genius, ability to command slumber at will.
+Swiftly the troubled deeps of thought grew calm; on their placid surface
+inconsequent visions were mirrored darkly, fugitive scenes from the store
+of subconscious memory: Crane's lantern-jawed physiognomy, keen eyes
+semi-veiled by humorously drooping lids, the extreme corner of his mouth
+bulging round his everlasting cigar ... grimy lions in Trafalgar Square of
+a rainy afternoon ... the octagonal room of L'Abbaye Theleme at three in
+the morning, a swirl of Bacchanalian shapes ... Wertheimer's soldierly
+figure beside the telegraphers' table in that noisome cave at the Front ...
+the deck of a tender in darkness swept by a shaft of yellow light which
+momentarily revealed a group of folk with upturned faces, a petticoat
+fluttering in its midst....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+IN THE BARRED ZONE
+
+
+Day broke with rather more than half a gale blowing beneath a louring sky.
+Once clear of the bottleneck mouth of the harbour, the _Assyrian_ ran into
+brutal quartering seas. An old hand at such work, for upward of a decade
+a steady-paced Dobbin of the transatlantic lanes, she buckled down to it
+doggedly and, remembering her duty by her passengers, rolled no more than
+she had to, buried her nose in the foaming green only when she must. For
+all her care, the main deck forward was alternately raked by stinging
+volleys of spray and scoured by frantic cascades. More than once the crew
+of the bow gun narrowly escaped being carried overboard to a man. Blue with
+cold, soaked to the buff despite oilskins, they stuck stubbornly to their
+posts. Perched beyond reach of shattering wavecrests, the passengers on the
+boat-deck huddled unhappily in the lee of the superstructure--and snarled
+in response to the cheering information that better conditions for baffling
+the ubiquitous U-boat could hardly have been brewed by an indulgent
+Providence. Sheeting spindrift contributed to lower visibility: two
+destroyers standing on parallel courses about a mile distant to port and
+to starboard were more often than not barely discernible, spectral vessels
+reeling and dipping in the haze. The ceaseless whistle of wind in the
+rigging was punctuated by long-drawn howls which must have filled any
+conscientious banshee with corrosive envy.
+
+Toward mid-morning rain fell in torrents, driving even the most fearful
+passengers to shelter within the superstructure. A majority crowded the
+landing at the head of the main companionway close by the leeward door.
+Bolder spirits marched off to the smoking room--Crane starting this
+movement with the declaration that, for his part, he would as lief drown
+like a rat in a trap as battling to keep up in the frigid inferno of those
+raging seas. A handful of miserables, too seasick to care whether the ship
+swam or sank, mutinously took to their berths.
+
+Stateroom 27--adjoining Lanyard's--sported obstinately a shut door.
+Lanyard, sedulous not to discover his interest by questioning the stewards,
+caught never a glimpse of its occupant. For his own satisfaction he took a
+covert census of passengers on deck as the vessel entered the danger zone,
+and made the tally seventy-one all told--the number on the passenger list
+when the _Assyrian_ had left her landing stage the previous evening.
+
+It seemed probable, therefore, that the person in 27 had come aboard from
+the tender, either with or following the official party. Lanyard was
+unable to say that more had not left the tender than appeared to sit in
+inquisition in the music room.
+
+By noon the wind was beginning to moderate, and the sea was being beaten
+down by that relentlessly lashing rain. Visibility, however, was more low
+than ever. A fairly representative number descended to the dining saloon
+for luncheon--a meal which none finished. Midway in its course a thunderous
+explosion to starboard drove all in panic once more to the decks.
+
+Within two hundred yards of the _Assyrian_ a floating mine had destroyed a
+patrol boat. No more was left of it than an oil-filmed welter of splintered
+wreckage: of its crew, never a trace.
+
+Imperturbably the _Assyrian_ proceeded. Not so her passengers: now the
+smoking room was deserted even by the insouciant Crane, and the seasick to
+a woman brought their troubles back to the boat-deck.
+
+Alone the tenant of 27 stopped below. And the riddle of this ostensible
+indifference to terrors that clawed at the vitals of every other soul on
+board grew to intrigue Lanyard to the point of obsession. Was the reason
+brute apathy or sheer foolhardihood? He refused either explanation,
+feeling sure some darker and more momentous motive dictated this obstinate
+avoidance of the public eye. Exasperation aroused by failure to fathom the
+mystery took precedence in his thoughts even to the personal solicitude
+excited by last night's gossip of the smoking room....
+
+With no other disturbing incident the afternoon wore away, the wind
+steadily flagging, the waves as steadily subsiding. When twilight closed in
+there was nothing more disturbing to one's equilibrium than a sea of long
+and sullen rolls scored by the pelting downpour.
+
+Perhaps as many as ten venturesome souls dined in the saloon, their fellows
+sticking desperately to the decks and contenting themselves with coffee and
+sandwiches.
+
+Daylight waned, terrors waxed: passengers instinctively gravitated into
+little knots and clusters, conversing guardedly as if fearful lest their
+normal accents bring down upon them those Apaches of the underseas for
+signs of whom their frightened glances incessantly ranged over-rail and
+searched the heaving wastes.
+
+The understanding was tacit that all would spend the night on deck.
+
+Dusk at length blotted out the shadows of their guardian destroyers, and a
+great and desolating loneliness settled down upon the ship. One by one
+the passengers grew dumb; still they clung together, but seemingly their
+tongues would no more function.
+
+With nightfall, the rain ceased, the breeze freshened a trifle, the pall of
+cloud lifted and broke, giving glimpses of remote, impersonal stars. Later
+a gibbous moon leered through the flying wrack, checkering the sea with
+a restless pattern of black and silver. In this ghastly setting the
+_Assyrian_, showing no lights, a shape of flying darkness pursuing a course
+secret to all save her navigators, strained ever onward, panting, groaning,
+quivering from stem to stern ... like an enchanted thing doomed to
+perpetual labours, striving vainly to break bonds invisible that transfixed
+her to one spot forever-more, in the midst of that bleak purgatory of
+shadow and moonshine and dread....
+
+Sensitive to the eerie influence of the hour, Lanyard interrupted the tour
+of the decks which he had steadily pursued for the better part of the
+evening, and rested at the forward rail, looking down over the main deck,
+its bleached planking dotted with dark shapes of fixed machinery. In the
+bows the formless, uncouth bulk of the gun squatted in its tarpaulin. Its
+crew tramped heavily to and fro, shivering in heavy jackets, hands in
+pockets, shoulders hunched up to ears. Farther aft an iron door clanged
+heavily behind a sailor emerging from an alleyway; he approached the ship's
+bell, with practised hand sounded two double strokes, then turned and sang
+out in the weird minor traditional in his calling:
+
+"_Four bells--and a-a-all's well_!"
+
+Even as the wind made free with the melancholy echoes of that assurance,
+the spell upon the ship was exorcised.
+
+Overhead, from the foremast crow's-nest, a voice screamed, hoarsely urgent:
+
+"_Torpedo! 'Ware submarine to port_!"
+
+Many things happened simultaneously, or in a span of seconds strangely
+scant. The gunners sprang to station, whipping away the tarpaulin, while
+their lieutenant focussed binoculars upon the confused distances of the
+night. Obedient to his instructions, the long, gleaming tube of steel
+pivoted smoothly to port.
+
+From the bridge a signal rocket soared, hissing. The whistle loosed
+stentorian squalls of indignation and distress--one long and four short.
+Commands were shouted; the engine-room telegraph wrangled madly. The
+momentum of the _Assyrian_ was checked startlingly; her bows sheered
+smartly off to port.
+
+A rumour of frightened voices and pounding feet came from the leeward
+boat-deck, where the main body of the passengers was congregated, hidden
+from Lanyard by the shoulder of the foreward deck-house. A number of men
+ran forward, paused by the rail, stared, and scurried back, yelling in
+alarm. At this the din swelled to uproar.
+
+Scanning closely the surface of the sea, Lanyard himself descried a silvery
+arrow of spray lancing the swells, making with deadly speed toward the port
+bow of the _Assyrian_. But now both screws were churning full speed astern;
+the vessel lost headway altogether. Then her engines stopped. For a
+breathless instant she rested inert, like something paralyzed with fright,
+bows-on to the torpedo, the telegraph ringing frantically. Then the
+starboard screw began to turn full ahead, the port remaining idle. The
+bows swung off still more sharply to port. The torpedo shot in under them,
+vanished for a breathless moment, reappeared a boat's-length to starboard,
+plunged harmlessly on its unhindered way down the side of the vessel, and
+disappeared astern.
+
+Amidships terrified passengers milled like sheep, hampering the work of the
+boat-crews at the davits. Ship's officers raged among them, endeavouring
+to restore order. Half a mile or so dead ahead a tiny tongue of flame spat
+viciously in the murk. A projectile shrieked overhead, and dropped into the
+sea astern. Another followed and fell short.
+
+The U-boat was shelling the _Assyrian_.
+
+The forward gun barked violent expostulation, if without visible effect;
+the submarine lobbing two more shells at the steamship with an indifference
+to its own peril astonishing in one of its craven breed, trained to strike
+and run before counterstroke may be delivered. Its extraordinary temerity,
+indeed, argued ignorance of the convoying destroyers.
+
+Coincident with the second shot, however, these unleashed searchlights
+slashed the dark through and through with their great, white, fanlike
+blades, till first one then the other picked up and steadied relentlessly
+upon a toy-boat shape that swam the swells about midway between the
+_Assyrian_ and the destroyer off the port bows.
+
+Simultaneously the quickfirers of the latter went into action, jetting
+orange flame. In the searchlights' glare, spurts of white water danced all
+round the submarine. A mutter of gunfire rolled over to the _Assyrian_,
+abruptly silenced by an imperative deep voice of heavier metal--which spoke
+but once.
+
+With the lurid unreality of clap-trap theatrical illusion the U-boat
+vomited a great, spreading sheet of flame....
+
+Someone at the rail, near Lanyard's shoulder, uttered a hushed cry of
+horror.
+
+He paid no heed, his interest wholly focussed upon that distant patch of
+shining water. As his dazzled vision cleared he saw that the submarine had
+disappeared.
+
+Unconsciously, in French, he commented: "So that is finished!"
+
+Likewise in French, but in a woman's voice of uncommon quality, deep
+and bell-sweet, came the protest from the passenger at his side: "But,
+monsieur, what are we doing? We turn away from them--those poor things
+drowning there!"
+
+That was quite true: under forced draught the _Assyrian_ was heading away
+on a new course.
+
+"They drown out there in that black water--and we leave them to that!"
+
+Lanyard turned. "The destroyers will take care of them," he said--"if any
+survived that explosion with strength enough to swim."
+
+He spoke from the surface of his thoughts and with a calm that veiled
+profound surprise. The woman by his side was neither the American widow nor
+her English daughter, but wholly a stranger to the ship's company he knew.
+
+The training of the Lone Wolf had been wasted if one swift glance had
+failed to comprehend every essential detail: that tall, straight, slender
+figure cloaked in the folds of a garment whose hood framed a face of
+singular pallor and sweetness in the moonlight, its shadowed eyes wide with
+emotion, its lips a little parted....
+
+With a shiver she lifted her hands to her eyes as if to darken the visions
+of her imagination.
+
+"They die out there," she said, in murmurs barely audible.... "We turn our
+backs on them.... You think that right?"
+
+"We play the game by the rules the enemy himself laid down," Lanyard
+returned. "They would have sunk us without one qualm of pity--would, in all
+probability, have shelled our boats had any succeeded in getting off. They
+have done as much before, and will again. It is out of reason to insist
+that the captain risk his ship in the hope of picking up one or two
+drowning assassins."
+
+"Risk his ship? How? They are helpless--"
+
+"As a rule, U-boats hunt in pairs; always, when specially charged to sink
+one certain vessel. It was so with the _Lusitania_, with the _Arabic_ as
+well; I don't doubt it was so in this instance--that we should have heard
+from a second submarine had not the destroyers opened fire when they did."
+
+The woman stared. "You think that--?"
+
+"That the Boche had specific instructions to waylay and sink the
+_Assyrian_? I begin to think that--yes."
+
+This declaration affected the woman curiously; she shrank away a little, as
+from a blow, her eyes winced, her pale lips quivered. When she spoke, it
+was, strangely enough, in English so naturally enunciated that Lanyard
+could not doubt that this was her mother tongue.
+
+"Then you think it is because...."
+
+Of a sudden she wilted, clinging to the rail and trembling wildly.
+
+Lanyard shot a glance aft. The disorder among the passengers was measurably
+less, though excitement still ran so high that he felt sure they were as
+yet unnoticed. On impulse he stepped nearer.
+
+"Pardon, mademoiselle," he said quietly; "you are excusably unstrung.
+But all danger is past; and there is still time to regain your stateroom
+unobserved. If you will permit me to escort you...."
+
+He watched her narrowly, but she showed no surprise at this suggestion of
+intimacy with her affairs. After a brief moment she pulled herself together
+and dropped a hand upon the arm he offered. In another minute he was
+helping her over the raised watersill of the door.
+
+Like all the ship the landing and main companionway were dark; but below,
+on the promenade deck, the second doorway aft on the starboard side stood
+ajar, affording a glimpse of a dimly lighted stateroom.
+
+With neither hesitation nor surprise--for he was already satisfied in this
+matter--Lanyard conducted the woman to this door and stopped.
+
+Her hand fell from his arm. She faltered on the threshold of Stateroom 27,
+eyeing him dubiously.
+
+"Thank you, monsieur...?"
+
+There was just enough accent of enquiry to warrant his giving her the name:
+"Duchemin, mademoiselle."
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin.... Please to tell me how you knew this was my
+stateroom?"
+
+"I occupy Stateroom 29. There was no one in 27 till after the tender came
+out last night. Furthermore, your face was strange, and I have come to know
+all others on board during our week's delay in port."
+
+The light was at her back; he could distinguish little of her shadowed
+features, but fancied her a bit discountenanced.
+
+In a subdued voice she said, "Thank you," once more, a hand resting
+significantly on the door-knob. But still he lingered.
+
+"If mademoiselle would be so good as to tell me something in return--?"
+
+"If I can...."
+
+"Then why, mademoiselle, did you try my door last night?"
+
+"It was neither locked nor bolted on my side. I wished to make sure--"
+
+"So one fancied. Thank you. Good-night, mademoiselle...?"
+
+She was impervious to his hint. "Good-night, Monsieur Duchemin," she said,
+and closed the door.
+
+Now Lanyard's quarters opened not on this alleyway fore-and-aft but on a
+short and narrow athwartship passage. And as he turned away he saw out of
+the corner of an eye a white-jacketed figure emerge from this passageway
+and move hurriedly aft. Something furtive in the round of the fellow's
+shoulders challenged his curiosity. He called quietly:
+
+"Steward!"
+
+There was no answer. By now the white jacket was no more than a blur moving
+in that deep gloom. He cried again, more loudly:
+
+"I say, steward!"
+
+He could hardly see, but fancied that the man quickened his steps: in
+another instant he vanished altogether.
+
+Smothering an impulse to give chase, the adventurer swung alertly into the
+narrow passage and opened the door to Stateroom 29. The room was dark, but
+as he fumbled for the switch, the door in the forward partition was thrust
+open and the girl's slight figure showed, tensely poised against the light
+behind her.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin!" she cried, in a voice sharp with doubt.
+
+Lanyard turned the switch. "Mademoiselle," he said, and coolly crossed to
+the port, drawing the light-proof curtains.
+
+"This door was locked all day--locked when the firing alarmed me and I went
+out to the deck."
+
+"And on my side, mademoiselle, it was locked and bolted when last I was
+here, shortly before dinner." "Whoever unfastened it entered my room during
+my absence and tampered with my luggage."
+
+"You have missed something?"
+
+Gaze intent to his she nodded. He shrugged and cast shrewdly round his
+quarters for some clue to the enigma. His glance fastened on a leather
+bellows-bag beneath the berth. Dropping to his knees he pulled this out,
+and looked up with a quizzical grimace, his forefinger indicating the lock,
+which was uncaught.
+
+"I left this latched but not locked," he said. "Perhaps I, too, have lost
+something."
+
+Opening the bag out flat, he sat back on his heels, with practised eye
+inspecting its neat arrangement of intimate things.
+
+"Nothing has been taken, mademoiselle," he announced gravely. "But
+something--I think--has been generously added. I seem to have an anonymous
+admirer on board."
+
+Bending forward, he rummaged beneath a sheaf of shirts and brought forth
+a small jewel-box of grained leather, with a monogram stamped on the
+lid--"C.B."
+
+"The lock is broken," he observed, and handed it up to the woman. "As to
+its contents, mademoiselle herself knows best...."
+
+The woman opened the box.
+
+"Nothing is missing," she said in a thoughtful voice.
+
+"I am relieved." Lanyard closed the bag, thrust it back beneath the berth,
+and got upon his feet. "But you are quite sure--?"
+
+"My jewels are all in order," she affirmed, without meeting his gaze.
+
+"And you miss nothing else?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Was there an accent of hesitation in this response?
+
+"Then, I take it, the thief was disappointed."
+
+Now she glanced quickly at his eyes. "Why do you say that?"
+
+"If the thief had found what he sought, he would never have presented it
+to me, mademoiselle would never again have seen her jewels. Failing in
+his object, after breaking that lock, and interrupted by your unexpected
+return, he planted the case with me, hoping to have me suspected. I am
+fortunately able to prove the best of alibis.... So then," said Lanyard,
+smiling, "it would appear that, though we met ten minutes ago for the first
+time--and I have yet to know mademoiselle by name--we are allies in a
+common cause."
+
+"My name is Brooke--Cecelia Brooke," she said quietly--"if it matters. But
+why 'allies'?"
+
+"It appears we own a common enemy. Each of us possesses something which
+that one desires--you a secret, I a good name. (Duchemin, indeed, I have
+always held to be an excellent name.) I shall not hesitate to call on you
+if my treasure is again violated. May I venture to hope mademoiselle will
+prove as ready to command my services?"
+
+"Thank you. I fancy, however, there will be no need."
+
+She moved irresolutely toward the communicating door, paused in its frame,
+eyeing him speculatively from under level brows. He detected, or imagined,
+a tremor of impulse toward him, as though she faltered on the verge of some
+grave confidence. If so, she curbed her tongue in time. Her gaze dropped,
+fixed itself abstractedly on the door.... "This must be fastened," she
+said, in a tone of complete disinterest.
+
+"I will speak to the chief steward immediately."
+
+"Don't trouble." She roused. "It doesn't matter, really, for to-night. I
+shall leave what valuables I have in the purser's care and stop on deck
+till daybreak."
+
+He gave a gesture of bewilderment. "You abandon your seclusion--leave your
+secret unguarded?"
+
+"Why not?" She shrugged slightly with a little _moue_ of discontent. "If,
+as you assume, I had a secret, it was that for certain reasons I did not
+wish my presence on board to become known. But it seems it has become
+known: my secret is no more. So I need no longer risk being cut off from
+the boats in the event of any accident."
+
+Momentarily her gravity was dissipated by a smile at once delightful and
+provocative.
+
+"Once more, monsieur--good-night!"
+
+After some moments Lanyard, with a start, found himself staring blankly at
+a blankly incommunicative communicating door.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IN DEEP WATERS
+
+
+Following this abrupt introduction to his interesting neighbour, Lanyard
+went back to his deck-chair and, bundling himself up against the cold,
+settled down to ponder the affair and await developments in a spirit of
+chastened resignation. That a denouement would duly unfold he was quite
+satisfied; that he himself must willy-nilly play some part therein he was
+too well persuaded.
+
+Not that he wished to meddle. If this Miss Cecelia Brooke (as she named
+herself) fostered any sort of intrigue, he wanted nothing so fervently
+as to be left altogether out of it. But already he had been dragged in,
+without wish or consent of his; whoever coveted her secret--whatever that
+was, more precious to her than jewels--harboured designs upon his own as
+well. It was his duty henceforth to go warily, overlooking no circumstance,
+however trifling and inconsiderable it might appear. The slenderest thread
+may lead to the heart of the most intricate maze--and the heart of this was
+become Lanyard's immediate goal, for there his enemy lay perdu.
+
+It was never this man's fault to underrate an enemy, least of all
+an unknown; and he entertained wholesome respect for Secret Service
+operators--picked men, as a rule, the meanest no mean antagonist. And this
+business, he fancied, had all the flavour of Secret Service work--one
+of those blind duels, desperate and grim affairs of masked combatants
+feinting, thrusting, guarding in the dark, each with the other's sword ever
+feeling for his throat, fighting for life itself and making his own rules
+as the contest swayed.
+
+But what was this Brooke girl doing in that galley? What conceivable motive
+induced her to dabble those slender hands in the muck and blood of Secret
+Service work?
+
+Lanyard was fain to let that question rest. After all, it was no concern of
+his. There she was, up to her pretty eyebrows in some dark, bad business;
+and it was not for him to play the gratuitous ass, rush in unasked, and
+seek to extricate her....
+
+Through endless hours he sat brooding, vision blindly focussed upon the
+misty, shimmering mystery of that night.
+
+Ekstrom!... Slowly in his understanding intuition shaped the conviction
+that it was Ekstrom whom he was fighting now, Ekstrom in the guise of one
+of his creatures, some agent of the Prussian spy system who had contrived
+to smuggle himself aboard this British steamship.
+
+Out of those nine in the smoking room the previous night, then, he must
+beware of one primarily, perhaps of more.
+
+Four he was disposed, with reservations, to reckon negligible: Baron von
+Harden, head of a Netherlands banking house, a silent body whose acute
+mental processes went on behind a pallid screen of flabby features; Julius
+Becker, a theatrical manager of New York, whose right name ended in ski;
+Bartlett Putnam, late charge d'affaires of the American embassy in Madrid;
+Edmund O'Reilly, naturalized citizen of the United States, interested in
+the manufacture of motor tractors somewhere in Michigan.
+
+Of the other five, two were English: Lieutenant Thackeray, a civilly
+reticent gentleman whose right arm rested in a black silk sling, making
+a flying trip to visit a married sister in New York; Archer Bartholomew,
+Esq., solicitor, a red-cheeked, bright-eyed, white-haired, brisk little
+Cockney, beyond the military age.
+
+There remained Dressier, the stout, self-satisfied Swiss, whose fawning
+manner was possibly accounted for by his statement that he journeyed to
+New York to engage in the trade of restaurateur in partnership with his
+brother; Crane, long and awkward and homely, of saturnine cast, slow of
+gesture and negligent as to dress, his humorous sense clouding a power
+of shrewd intelligence; and Senor Arturo Velasco, of Buenos Aires,
+middle-aged, apparently extremely well-to-do, a thoughtful type, more
+self-contained than most of his countrymen.
+
+One of these probably ... But which?...
+
+Nor must he permit himself to forget that the _Assyrian_ carried fifty-nine
+other male passengers, in addition to her complement of officers, crew, and
+stewards, that any one of these might prove to be Potsdam's cat's-paw.
+
+Awesome pallor tinged the eastern horizon, gaining strength, spread in
+imperceptible yet rapid gradations toward the zenith. Stars faded, winked
+out, vanished. Silver and purple in the sea gave place to livid gray.
+Almost visibly the routed night rolled back over the western rim of the
+world. Shafts of supernal radiance lanced the formless void between sky
+and sea. Swollen and angry, the sun lifted up its enormous, ensanguined
+portent. And the discountenanced moon withdrew hastily into the
+immeasurable fastnessness of a cloudless firmament, yet failed therein to
+find complete concealment. Keen, sweet airs of dawn raked the decks, now
+to port, now to starboard, as the _Assyrian_ twisted and writhed on her
+corkscrew way.
+
+Passengers whose fears had become sufficiently numb to permit them to
+drowse, stirred in their chairs, roused blinking and blear-eyed, arose
+and stretched cramped, cold bodies. Others lay listless, enervated by the
+sleepless misery of that night. Crane found Lanyard awake and marched him
+off for coffee and cigarettes in the smoking room.
+
+Later, starting out for a turn around the decks, they passed a deck-chair
+sheltered in a jog where the engine-room ventilating shaft joined the
+forward deck-house, in which Miss Brooke lay cocooned in wraps and furs,
+her profile, turned aside from the sea, exquisitely etched against the rich
+blackness of a fox stole. She slept as quietly as the most carefree, a
+shadowy smile touching her lips.
+
+Crane's stride faltered. He whistled low.
+
+"In the name of all things wonderful! how did that get on board?"
+
+Lanyard mentioned the girl's name. "She has the stateroom next to
+mine--came off that tender, night before last."
+
+"And me sore on that darn' li'l boat because it brought aboard all the
+nosey Johnnies! Ain't it the truth, you never know your luck?"
+
+The American ruminated in silence till another lap of their walk took them
+past the girl again.
+
+"Funny," he mused, "if that's why they held us up...."
+
+"Comment, monsieur?"
+
+"Oh, I was just wondering if it was on that young lady's account they kept
+us kicking our heels back there so long."
+
+"I am still stupid," Lanyard confessed.
+
+"Why, she might be a special messenger, you know--something like that--the
+British Government wanted to smuggle out of the country without anybody
+suspecting."
+
+"Monsieur is a romantic."
+
+"You can't trust me," Crane averred unblushingly.
+
+When they passed the chair again it was empty.
+
+At breakfast Lanyard saw the girl from a distance: their places were
+separated by the width of the saloon. She had no neighbours at her table,
+did not look up when Lanyard entered, finished her meal some time before
+he did, and retired immediately to her stateroom, in whose seclusion she
+remained for the rest of the day.
+
+That second day was altogether innocent of untoward incident. At least
+superficially the life of the ship settled into the groove of "business
+as usual." Only the company of the _Assyrian's_ faithful convoys was an
+ever-present reminder of peril.
+
+And in the middle of the afternoon she passed close by a derelict, a
+torpedoed tramp, deep down by the stern, her bows helplessly high in air
+and crimson with rust, the melancholy haunt of a great multitude of gulls.
+
+More than slightly to Lanyard's surprise he received no quiet invitation
+to the captain's quarters to be interrogated concerning the burglary in
+Stateroom 27. Apparently, the young woman had contented herself with
+reporting merely that the communicating door had carelessly been left
+unfastened.
+
+For his own part, neither seeking nor avoiding individual members of the
+smoking-room group, Lanyard permitted himself to be drawn into their
+company, and sat among them amiably receptive. But this profited him
+scantily; there was no further talk of the Lone Wolf; he was not again
+aware of that covert surveillance.
+
+But when--the evening chill driving him below to don a fur-lined
+topcoat--the Brooke girl, coming up the companionway, acknowledged his look
+of recognition with the most distant of nods, he accepted the apparent
+rebuff without resentment. He understood. She was playing the game. The
+enemy was watching, listening. After that he was studious to refrain from
+seeming either to avoid or to seek her neighbourhood; and if he did keep a
+sharp eye on her, it was so circumspectly as to mock detection. To the
+best of his observation she found no friends on board, contracted no new
+acquaintances, kept herself to herself within walls of inexorable reserve.
+
+Dawn, ending the second night at sea, found the _Assyrian_ pursuing a
+course still devious, and now alone; the destroyers had turned back during
+the night. The western boundary of the barred zone lay astern. Ahead, at
+the end of a brief interval of time, the ivory towers of New York loomed,
+a-shimmer with endless sunlight, glorious in golden promise. Accordingly,
+the spirits of the passengers were exalted. The very ship seemed to grin in
+self-complacence; she had won safely through.
+
+Unremitting vigilance was none the less maintained. No hour of the
+twenty-four found either gun, forward or aft, wanting a full working crew
+on the keen qui vive. The life boats remained on outswung davits; boat
+drills for passengers as well as crew were features of the daily programme.
+Regulations concerning light and smoking on deck after dark were rigidly
+enforced. Fuel was never spared in the effort to widen the blue gulf
+between the steamship and those waters wherein she had so nearly met her
+end. By day a hunted thing, racing frantically toward a port of refuge in
+the West, all her stout fabric labouring with titanic pulsations, shying in
+panic from the faintest suspicion of smoke upon the horizon, the _Assyrian_
+slipped into the grateful obscurity of night like a snake into a thicket,
+made herself akin to its densest shadows, strained hopelessly not to be
+outdistanced by its fugitive mantle.
+
+And the benison of unseasonably clement weather was hers; day after shining
+day, night after placid night, the Atlantic revealed a singularly gracious
+humour, mirrored the changeful panorama of the heavens in a surface little
+flawed. So that the most squeamish voyagers, as well as those most beset
+with fears, slept sweetly in the comfort of their berths.
+
+Lanyard, however, never went to bed without first securing his door so that
+it might be opened by force alone; and never slept without a pistol beneath
+his pillow.
+
+But the truth is, he slept little. For the first time in his history he
+learned what it meant to will sleep to come and have his will defied. He
+lay for hours staring wide-eyed into darkness, hearkening to the steady
+throbbing of the engines, unable to dismiss the thought that their every
+revolution brought him so much nearer to America, so much the nearer to
+his hour with Ekstrom. In vain he sought to fatigue his senses by
+over-indulgence in his weakness for gambling. Day-long sessions at poker
+and auction in the smoking room--where he found formidable antagonists,
+principally in the persons of Crane, Bartlett Putnam, Velasco, Bartholomew,
+Julius Becker and Baron von Harden--served only to forward his financial
+fortunes; his luck was phenomenal; he multiplied many times that slender
+store of English banknotes with which he had embarked upon this adventure.
+But he left each exhausting sitting only to toss upon a wakeful pillow or
+to roam uneasily the dark and desolate decks, a man haunted by ghosts of
+his own raising, hagridden by passions of his own nurturing....
+
+About two o'clock on the third night (the first outside the danger zone,
+when every other passenger might reasonably be expected to be in his berth)
+Lanyard lay in a deck-chair deep in shadows, wondering if it was worthwhile
+to go below and woo sleep in his stateroom. By way of experiment he shut
+his eyes. When after a moment he opened them again he was no longer alone.
+
+Some distance away, at the rail, the woman of Stateroom 27 was standing
+with her back to Lanyard, looking intently forward, unquestionably ignorant
+of his presence.
+
+Without moving, he watched in listless incuriosity till he saw her
+straighten and stand away from the rail as if bracing herself against some
+crisis.
+
+A man was coming aft from the entrance to the main companionway, impatience
+in his stride--a tall man, of good carriage, muffled almost to the heels in
+a heavy ulster, a steamer-cap well forward over his eyes. But the light was
+poor, the pale shine of the aged moon blending trickily with the swaying
+shadows; Lanyard was unable to place him among the passengers. There was
+a suggestion of Lieutenant Thackeray--but that one was handicapped by one
+shell-shattered arm, whereas this man had the use of both.
+
+He demonstrated that promptly, taking the girl into them. She yielded
+herself gladly, with a hushed little cry, hiding her face in the bosom of
+his ulster, clinging to him.
+
+This, then, was an assignation prearranged! Miss Cecelia Brooke had a lover
+aboard the _Assyrian_, a lover whom she denied by day but met in stealth by
+night!
+
+And yet, after that first, swift embrace, their conduct became oddly
+unloverlike. The man released her of his own initiative, held her by the
+shoulders at arm's length. There was irritation in his manner. He seemed
+tempted to shake the young woman.
+
+"Celia! what madness!"
+
+So much, at least, Lanyard overheard; the rest was a mumble into the hand
+which the girl placed over the man's lips. She cried breathlessly: "Hush!
+not so loud!"
+
+And then she remembered to guard her own voice. In an undertone she spoke
+passionately for a moment. The man interrupted in a tone of profound
+vexation. She drew away, as if hurt, caught him up as he hesitated for a
+word, returned, clung to the lapels of his coat, her accents rapid and
+pitiful, eloquent of explanation, entreaty, determination. The man lifted
+his hands to her wrists, broke her grasp, cut her brusquely short, put her
+forcibly from him. She sobbed softly....
+
+Thus swiftly the scene suffered disillusioning transition. The pretty
+fiction of lovers meeting in secret was no more. Remained a man annoyed to
+the verge of anger, a woman desperately importunate.
+
+The wind, sweeping aft, carried broken snatches of their communications:
+
+"... _all I have ... could not let you go_...."
+
+"_Insanity_!"
+
+"_I was desperate_...."
+
+"... _drive me mad with your nonsense_...."
+
+Lanyard sat up, scraping his chair harshly on the deck. Stricken mute,
+the pair at the rail moved only to turn his way the pallid ovals of their
+faces.
+
+Heedless of the prohibition, he struck a vesta, cupped its flame in his
+hands, bending his face close and deliberately lighting a cigarette.
+Appreciably longer than necessary he permitted the flare to reveal his
+features. Then he blew it out, rose, sauntered to the rail, cast the
+cigarette into the sea, went aft and so below, satisfied that the girl must
+have recognised him and so knew that her secret was safe.
+
+But it was in an oddly disgruntled humour that he turned in--he who had
+been so ready to twit Crane with his fantastic speculations concerning
+the English girl, who had himself been the readiest to endue her with the
+romantic attributes becoming a heroine of her country's Secret Service!
+What if he must now esteem her in the merciless light of to-night's
+exposure, as the most pitiable of all human spectacles, a poor lovesick
+thing sans dignity, sans pride, sans heed for the world's respect, a woman
+pursuing a man weary of her?
+
+He resented unreasonably the unreasonable resentment which the affair
+inspired in him.
+
+What was it to him? He who had struck off all fettering bonds of common
+human interests, who had renounced all common human emotions, who had set
+his hand against all mankind that stood between him and that vengeful
+purpose to which he had dedicated his life! He, the Lone Wolf, the
+heartless, soulless, pitiless beast of prey!
+
+God in Heaven! what was any woman to him?
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ON THE BANKS
+
+
+Unaccountably enough in his esteem, and more and more to Lanyard's
+exasperation, the evil flavour of that overnight incident lasted; it
+tinctured distastefully his first waking thoughts; and through all that
+fourth day at sea his mood was dark with irrational depression.
+
+And the fifth day and the sixth were like unto the fourth.
+
+Constantly he caught himself on watch for the young woman, wondering how
+she would comport herself toward him, unwilling witness though he had been
+to that shabby scene.
+
+But, save distantly at meal times, he saw nothing of her.
+
+And though he knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was
+studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy
+stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the
+sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was
+nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at
+another encounter between the Brooke girl and her reluctant lover....
+
+Then that happened which lent the business another complexion altogether.
+Its second phase, of close development, drew toward an end. Subtle
+underlying forces began to stir in their portentous latency.
+
+The rapiers which thus far had merely touched, shivering lightly against
+each other, measuring each its opponent's strength, feeling out his skill,
+fell apart, then re-engaged in sharp and deadly play. Steel met steel and,
+clashing, struck off sparks whose fugitive glimmerings lightened measurably
+the murk....
+
+On the sixth night out, at eleven o'clock as a matter of routine, the
+smoking room was closed for the night, terminating an uncommonly protracted
+and, in Lanyard's esteem, irksome sitting at cards. Well tired, he went
+immediately to his quarters, undressed, stretched out in his berth, and
+switched off the light.
+
+Incontinently he found himself bedevilled by thoughts that would not rest.
+
+For upward of an hour he lay moveless, seeking oblivion in that very effort
+to preserve immobility, while the _Assyrian_, lunging heavily on her way,
+moaned and muttered tedious accompaniment to the chant of the working
+engines.
+
+Despairing at length, and fretted by the closeness of his quarters, he got
+up, dressed sketchily, and was shrugging into his fur-lined coat when he
+heard the door to the adjoining stateroom open and close, stealth in the
+sound of it.
+
+At that he hung up his overcoat, and threw himself down with a book on the
+lounge seat beneath the port. The novel was dull enough in all conscience;
+for that matter no tale within the compass of the cunningest weaver of
+words could have enthralled his temper at that time.
+
+He read and read again page after page, but without intelligence.
+
+Between his eyes and the type-blackened paper mirages of the past trembled
+and wavered; old faces, old scenes, old illusions took unsubstantial form,
+dissolved, blended, faded away: a saddening show of shadows.
+
+His heavy eyelids drooped; slumber's drowsy vestments trailed lazily
+athwart the sea of consciousness....
+
+A slight noise startled him, either the shutting of the door to Stateroom
+27, or the sound of the book dropping from his relaxed grasp. He sat up and
+consulted his watch. The hour was half after twelve.
+
+The ship's bell sounded remotely a single, doleful stroke.
+
+He might have dozed five minutes or fifteen--long enough at least to leave
+its tantalising effect of sleep desperately desirable, mockingly elusive,
+almost grasped, whisked beyond grasping. And with this he was aware of
+something even less tangible, a sense of something amiss, of something
+vaguely wrong, as of an evil spirit stalking furtively through the darkened
+labyrinth of the ship ... as impalpable and ineluctable as miasmic
+exhalations of a morass....
+
+Lanyard passed a hand across his forehead. Had he been dreaming, then? Was
+this merely the reaction from some bitter nightmare? He could not remember.
+
+On sheer impulse he stood up, extinguished the light, opened the door. As
+he did this he noted that a light burned in Stateroom 27, visible through
+the ventilating grille. So the girl must have returned while he slept. Or
+had she neglected to turn the switch when she went out? He could not be
+certain.
+
+On the threshold he paused a little, attentive to the familiar rumour of
+the ship by night: the prolonged sloughing of riven waters down the side,
+gnashing of swells hurled back by the bows, sibilance of draughts in
+alleyways, groaning of frames, a thin metallic rattle of indeterminate
+origin, the crunching grind of the steering gear, the everlasting
+deep-throated diapason of the engines, somewhere aft in that tier of
+staterooms a persistent human snore ... nothing unusual, no alarming
+discordance....
+
+Yet the feeling that mischief was afoot would not be still.
+
+Lanyard moved down to the junction of the thwartship passage with the
+fore-and-aft alleyway.
+
+Here he commanded a view of the promenade-deck landing and the main
+companionway, all in darkness but for a feeble glimmer of reflected
+starlight through the open deck port on the far side of the vessel. Beyond
+this the rail was stencilled against the dull face of the sea with its far
+lifting and falling horizon; within, no more was visible than the dimmed
+whiteness of the forward partition, the dense, indefinite mass of balusters
+winding up to the boat-deck, and the flat plane of the tiled landing.
+
+On this last, near the mouth of the port alleyway, half obscured by the
+intervening balusters, something moved, something huge, black, and formless
+swayed and writhed strangely, and in the strangest silence, like a dumb,
+tormented misshapen brute transfixed to one spot from which its most
+anguished efforts might not avail to budge it.
+
+Lanyard ran forward, rounded the well of the companionway, and pulled up.
+
+Now the nature of the thing was revealed. Blackly silhouetted against the
+square of the doorway two human figures were close-locked and struggling
+desperately, straining, resisting, thrusting, giving, recovering ... and
+all with never a sound more than the deadened thump of a shifting foot or
+the rasp of hard-won breathing.
+
+For several seconds the spectator could not distinguish one contestant from
+the other. Then a change in the fortunes of war enabled him to make out
+that one was a woman, the other, and momentarily more successful, a man.
+Slender and youthful and strong, she fought with the indomitable fury of
+a pantheress. He on his part had won this much temporary advantage--had
+broken the woman's clutch upon his throat and was bending her back over
+his hip, one hand fumbling at her windpipe, the other imprisoning her two
+wrists.
+
+Yet she was far from being vanquished. Even as Lanyard moved toward the
+pair, she drove a savage knee into the man's middle and, as he checked
+instantaneously with a grunt of pained surprise, regained her footing and
+planted both elbows against his chest, striving frantically to free her
+hands.
+
+Simultaneously Lanyard took the fellow from behind, wound an arm around his
+neck, jerked his head sharply back, twisted his forearm till he released
+the woman's wrists, and threw him with a force that must have jarred his
+every bone.
+
+The woman staggered back against the partition, panting and sobbing beneath
+her breath. The man rebounded from his fall with astonishing agility, and
+flew back at Lanyard. An object in his right hand gave off the dull gleam
+of polished steel.
+
+Lanyard, his automatic in his stateroom, in the pocket of the overcoat
+where he had deposited it when meaning to go out on deck, lacked any means
+of defense other than his two hands; but his one-time fame as an amateur
+pugilist had been second only to his fame as a connaisseur d'art; and to
+one whose youth had been passed in association with the Apaches of Paris,
+some mastery of la savate was an inevitable accomplishment.
+
+A lightning coup de pied planted a heel against one of the man's shins,
+and his onslaught faltered in a gust of curses. Then the point of his jaw
+received the full force of Lanyard's right fist with all the ill will
+imaginable behind it. The man reared back, reeled into the black mouth of
+the alleyway, fell heavily.
+
+Even so, he demonstrated extraordinary vitality and appetite for
+punishment. He had no more gone down than the adventurer, peering into the
+gloom, saw him struggle up on his knees. Instantly Lanyard made toward
+him, intent on finishing this work so well begun, but in his second stride
+tripped over a heavy body hidden in the shadows, and pitched headlong.
+Falling, he was conscious of a flashing thing that sped past his cheek,
+immediately above his shoulder. There followed an echoing thud against the
+forward partition.
+
+Picking himself up smartly, Lanyard crept several paces down the alleyway,
+flattening against the wall, straining his vision, listening intently,
+rewarded by neither sign nor sound of his antagonist.
+
+That one must have been swift to advantage himself of Lanyard's tumble.
+If he had not vanished into thin air, or gone to earth in some untenanted
+stateroom thereabouts, he found in the close blackness of that narrow
+passage a cloak of positive invisibility to cover his escape.
+
+And there is little wisdom in stalking an armed man whom one cannot see,
+with what little light there is at one's own back.
+
+So Lanyard went back to the landing, stepping carefully over the obstacle
+which had both thrown him and saved his life--the supine body of a third
+man, motionless; whether dead or merely insensible, he did not stop to
+investigate. His immediate concern was for the woman.
+
+As he came upon her now, she stood en profile to the partition, tugging
+strongly at something embedded in the woodwork close by her side, between
+her waist and armpit. At the sound of his approach she looked up with a
+tremor of apprehension quickly calmed.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin! If you please--"
+
+Lanyard, in no way surprised to recognise the voice of Miss Cecelia Brooke,
+stepped closer. "What is it?" he enquired; and then, bending over to look,
+found that her cloak was pinned to the partition by the blade of a heavy
+knife buried a full half of its considerable length.
+
+"He threw it as you fell," the girl explained. "I was in the direct line."
+
+"Permit me, mademoiselle...."
+
+He laid hold of the haft of the weapon and with some difficulty withdrew
+it.
+
+"Who was it?" he asked, weighing the knife in his palm and examining it as
+closely as he could without the aid of light.
+
+There was no reply. Directly her cloak was freed, the girl had moved
+hastily away to the body over which Lanyard had stumbled. He heard an
+imploring whisper--"Please!"--and looked up to see her on her knees.
+
+"Who, then, is this?" he demanded, joining her.
+
+"Lionel--Lieutenant Thackeray. Please--O please!--tell me he is not dead."
+
+Her voice broke; he saw her slender body convulsed with racking emotions.
+Kneeling, Lanyard made a hasty and superficial examination, necessarily no
+more under the conditions.
+
+"His heart beats," he announced--"he breathes. I do not think him seriously
+injured." He made as if to get up. "I will get a light--a flash-lamp from
+my stateroom--or, better still, the ship's surgeon--"
+
+Her hand fell upon his arm. "Please, no! Not that--not now. Later, if
+necessary; but now--surely, you can help me carry him to his stateroom."
+
+"You know the number?"
+
+"It's close by--30."
+
+"Find it, and light up. No--leave this to me; I can carry him without
+assistance."
+
+The girl rose and disappeared. Lanyard passed his arms beneath the
+Englishman's body, gathered him into them, and struggled to his feet: no
+inconsiderable task.
+
+Light gushed from an open doorway, the third aft from the landing.
+Staggering, the adventurer entered and deposited the body upon the berth.
+Immediately the girl closed and bolted the door, then passed between him
+and the berth to bend over the unconscious man. He lay in deep coma, limbs
+a-sprawl, unpleasant glints of white between his half-closed eyelids, his
+breathing stertorous through parted lips. Free of its sling, his wounded
+arm dangled over the edge of the berth. In putting him down, Lanyard had
+remarked that its sleeve had been slit to the shoulder, and that its
+bandages were undone. Now, in amazement, he saw the arm was firm and
+muscular, with an unbroken skin, never a sign of any injury in all its
+length.
+
+Gently the girl lifted the lieutenant's head to the light, discovering a
+hideously bruised swelling at the base of the skull, blood darkly matting
+the close-clipped hair.
+
+She requested without looking round: "Water, please--and a towel."
+
+Obediently Lanyard ran hot and cold water into the hand-basin in equal
+proportions.
+
+"Would it not be well now to call the ship's surgeon?" he suggested
+diffidently.
+
+"Is that necessary? I am something of a nurse. This is simply a bad
+contusion--no worse, I believe. He was struck down from behind, a cowardly
+blow in the dark, as he started to go up on deck. I had been waiting for
+him. When he didn't come I suspected something was wrong. I came down,
+found him lying there, that brute kneeling over him."
+
+She spoke coolly enough, in contrast with the high excitement that inflamed
+her eyes as she turned away from the berth.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin, are you armed?"
+
+"I have this," he said, exhibiting the knife thrown by the would-be
+murderer--a simple trench dagger, without distinguishing marks of any sort.
+
+"Then take this, please." Extracting an automatic pistol from a holster
+belted beneath Thackeray's coat, she proffered it. "You won't mind staying
+here a moment, standing guard, while I fetch a dressing from my room?"
+
+Before he could utter a word of protest she had slipped out into the
+alleyway, shutting the door behind her.
+
+When several minutes had passed the adventurer found himself beset by
+increasing concern. This long delay seemed not only inconsistent with her
+solicitude, but indicated a possibility that the girl had braved unwisely
+the chance of a resumption of hostilities on the part of her late and as
+yet anonymous assailant.
+
+Darkening the room as a matter of common-sense precaution, Lanyard, pistol
+in hand, stepped out into the alleyway in time to see the girl in the act
+of rising from her knees on the landing, near the spot where Thackeray had
+fallen. The light of her flash-lamp was blotted out as she came hurriedly
+aft.
+
+Perplexed, he turned back and switched on the light as she entered.
+
+Her eyes challenged his almost defiantly.
+
+"Was I long?" she asked, breathless. "I dropped something...."
+
+Lanyard bowed without speaking. Instinctively he knew that she was lying;
+and divining this in his attitude, she coloured and, disconcerted, turned
+away. For a moment, while she busied herself arranging on a convenient
+chair an assortment of first-aid accessories, he fancied that her
+half-averted face wore a look of sullen chagrin, with its compressed lips,
+downcast eyes, and faintly gathered brows.
+
+But directly she needed assistance, and requested it of him in a subdued
+and impersonal manner, showing a countenance devoid of any incongruous
+emotion.
+
+Lanyard, lifting the lieutenant's head and heavy torso, helped turn him
+face downward on the berth, then stood aside, thoughtfully watching the
+girl's deft fingers sop absorbent cotton in an antiseptic wash and apply it
+to the injury.
+
+After a little, he said: "If mademoiselle has no more immediate use for
+me--"
+
+"Thank you, monsieur. You have already done so very much!"
+
+"Then, if mademoiselle will supply the name of this assassin--"
+
+"I know it no more than you, monsieur!" She glanced up at him, startled.
+"What do you mean to do?"
+
+"Why, naturally, lodge an information with the captain concerning this
+outrage--"
+
+"Oh, please, no!"
+
+At a loss, Lanyard shrugged eloquently.
+
+"Not yet, at all events," she hastened to amend. "Let Lionel judge what is
+best to be done when he comes to."
+
+"But, mademoiselle, who can say when that will be?" He pointed out the
+ugly, ragged abrasion in the young Englishman's scalp exposed by the
+cleansing away of the clotted blood. "No ordinary blow," he commented;
+"something very like a slung-shot or a loaded cane did that work. If I may
+venture again to advise--unless mademoiselle is herself a surgeon--"
+
+Her colour faded and she caught her breath sharply. "You think it as
+serious as all that?"
+
+"I do not know. Such a blow might easily fracture the skull, possibly bring
+about a concussion of the brain. Regard, likewise, his laborious breathing.
+I most assuredly advise consulting competent authority."
+
+She did not immediately answer, turning back undivided attention to her
+task; but he noticed that her hands were tremulous, however, dextrously
+they finished dressing and bandaging the hurt; and deep distress troubled
+the handsome eyes she turned to his when she rose.
+
+"You are right," she murmured--"unquestionably right, monsieur. We must
+have the surgeon in...."
+
+But when Lanyard advanced a hand toward the bell-push, to call the steward,
+she interposed in quick alarm:
+
+"No--if you please, a moment; I must have time to think!" Her slender
+fingers writhed together in her agony of doubt and irresolution. "If only I
+knew what to do...."
+
+Lanyard was dumb. There was, indeed, nothing helpful he could offer, who
+was without a solitary tangible or trustworthy clue to the nature of this
+strange business.
+
+He owned himself sadly mystified. In the light--or, rather, the shadow--of
+this latest development, his revised suspicions seemed unwarranted to the
+point of impertinence; unless, of course, one assumed the unknown assailant
+to be a rejected lover or wronged husband. And somehow one did not, in
+the presence of this clear-eyed, straight-limbed, courageous young
+Englishwoman, so wanting in self-consciousness.
+
+And yet ... what the deuce was she to this man whom, indisputably, she
+followed against his wish?
+
+And what conceivable chain of circumstances linked their fortunes with his,
+and that double burglary of the first night out with this murderous assault
+of to-night?
+
+Nor was to-night's work, considered by itself, lacking in questionable
+features.
+
+Why had Thackeray carried that sound arm in a sling? How had its bandages
+come to be unwrapped? Not in struggles before being placed hors de combat,
+for he had never had a chance to resist. Had his assailant, then, unwrapped
+it subsequently? If so, with what end in view?
+
+Why had this Miss Cecelia Brooke, surprising the thug at his work, joined
+battle with him so bravely and so madly without calling for help?
+
+What hidden motive excused this singular hesitation to summon the surgeon,
+this reluctance to inform the officers of the ship?
+
+What duplicity was that which the girl had paraded concerning her
+procrastination when Lanyard had surprised her on her knees out there on
+the landing?
+
+If this were what Lanyard had first inclined to think it, Secret Service
+intrigue, surely it was weirdly intricate when an English girl hesitated
+to safeguard an Englishman by taking into her confidence the officers of a
+British ship, British manned!
+
+Nevertheless, and however much he might wonder and doubt, Lanyard would
+never question her. Never of his own volition would he probe more deeply
+into this mystery, take one farther step into the intricacies of its maze.
+
+So, in silence, he waited, passively courteous, at her further service if
+she had need of him, content if she had not, tolerant of her tacit prayer
+for time in which to think a way out of her difficulties.
+
+After some few moments he grew uncomfortably aware that he had become the
+object of a speculative regard not at all unfavourable.
+
+He indulged in a mental gesture of resignation.
+
+Then what he had feared befell, not altogether as he had apprehended, but
+in the girl's own fashion, if without material difference in the upshot.
+
+"I am afraid," said she in an even voice, so quietly pitched as to be
+inaudible to any eavesdropper. "This becomes a task greater than I had
+dreamed, more than my wits can cope with. Monsieur Duchemin...."
+
+She hesitated. He bowed slightly. "If mademoiselle can make any use of my
+poor abilities, she has but to command me."
+
+"We--I have much to thank you for already, monsieur, much more than I can
+ever hope to reward adequately--"
+
+"Reward?" he echoed. "But, mademoiselle--!"
+
+"Please don't misunderstand." She flushed a little, very prettily. "I am
+simply trying to express my sense of obligation, not only for what you have
+already done, but for what I mean to ask you to do."
+
+Again he bowed, without comment, amiably receptive.
+
+She resumed with perceptible effort: "I can trust you--"
+
+"You must make sure of that before you do," he warned her, smiling.
+
+"I am sure," she averred gravely.
+
+"You know nothing concerning me, mademoiselle--pardon! For all you know
+I may be the greatest rogue in Christendom. And I must tell you in all
+candour, sometimes I think I am."
+
+"What I may or may not know concerning you, Monsieur Duchemin, is
+immaterial as long as I know you are what you have proved yourself to me, a
+gentleman, considerate, generous, brave, and--not inquisitive."
+
+He was frankly touched. If this were flattery, tone and manner robbed it of
+fulsomeness, rendered it subtle beyond the coarser perceptions of the man.
+He knew himself for what he was, knew himself unworthy; and that part
+of him which was unaffectedly French, whether by accident of birth or
+influence of environment, and so impulsive and emotional, reacted in
+spontaneous gratitude to this implicit acceptance of him for what he strove
+to seem to be.
+
+"Mademoiselle is gracious beyond my deserts," he protested. "Only let me
+know how I may be of use...."
+
+"In three ways: Continue to be lenient in your judgments, and ask me no
+more questions than you must because ... I may not answer...." Her hands
+worked together again. She added unhappily, in a faint voice: "I dare not."
+
+That, too, moved him, since he had been far from lenient in his judgments.
+He responded the more readily: "All that is understood, mademoiselle."
+
+"Please go at once back to your stateroom, and as quietly as possible.
+There is a bare chance you were not recognised, that nobody knows who came
+to my aid to-night. If you can slip away without attracting attention, so
+much the better for us, for all of us. You may not be suspected."
+
+"Trust me to use my best discretion."
+
+"Lastly ... take and keep this for me, till I ask you for it again. Hide it
+as secretly as you can. It may be sought for, is certain to be if you are
+believed to be in my confidence. It must not be found. And I may not want
+it again before we land in New York."
+
+She extended a hand on whose palm rested a small and slender white
+cylinder, no longer and little thicker than the toy pencil that dangles
+from a dance-card: a tight roll of plain white paper enclosed in a wrapping
+of transparent oiled silk, gummed fast down its length and, at either end,
+sealed with miniature blobs of black wax.
+
+"Will you do this for me, Monsieur Duchemin? I warn you, it may cost you
+your life."
+
+He took it, his temper veering to the whimsical. "What is life?" he
+questioned. "A prelude--perhaps an overture to that great drama, Death. Who
+knows? Who cares?"
+
+She heard him in a stare. "You place no value on life?"
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have lived nearly thirty years in this world,
+three years in the theatre of war, seldom far from the trenches of one
+front or another. I tell you, I know death too well...."
+
+He shrugged and put the roll of paper away in a pocket.
+
+"You understand it must not be taken from you under any circumstance? As a
+last resort, it must be destroyed rather than yielded up."
+
+"It shall be," he said quietly. "Is there anything more?"
+
+She shook her head, thoughtfully knuckling her underlip.
+
+"How can I communicate with you in event of necessity after we get to New
+York?" she asked.
+
+"I shall stop for a week or two at the Hotel Knickerbocker."
+
+"If anything should happen"--with a swift glance of anxiety toward the
+motionless figure in the berth--"if anything should prevent my calling for
+it within a week after our arrival, you will be good enough to deliver it
+to--" She caught herself up quickly, the unuttered words trembling on her
+lip. "I will write down the address of the person to whom you will deliver
+it, and slip it underneath the door between our rooms--first making
+certain you are there to receive it--if I do not ask you to return
+the--thing--before we land."
+
+"That shall be as you will."
+
+"When you have memorized the address you will destroy it?"
+
+"Depend on that."
+
+"I think that is all. Thank you, Monsieur Duchemin--and good-night."
+
+She extended her hand. He saluted it punctiliously with fingertips and
+lips.
+
+"If you will put out the light, mademoiselle, it may aid me to get away
+unseen."
+
+She nodded and offered him Thackeray's pistol. "Take this. O, I have
+another with me."
+
+Lanyard accepted the weapon and, when she had darkened the room, opened the
+door, slipped out, and closed it behind him so noiselessly that the girl
+could not believe he was gone.
+
+Nothing hindered his return to Stateroom 29.
+
+Fully two minutes after he had locked himself in he heard the distant
+clamour of the annunciator, calling a steward to Stateroom 30.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+UNDER SUSPICION
+
+
+He sat for a long time on the edge of his berth, elbow on knee, chin in
+hand, unstirring, gaze fixed upon that little cylinder of white paper
+resting in the hollow of his palm, in profoundest concentration pondering
+the problems it presented: what it was, what possession of it meant to
+Michael Lanyard, what safe disposition to make of it pending welcome relief
+from this unsought and most unwelcome trust.
+
+This last question alone bade fair to confound his utmost ingenuity.
+
+As for what it was, Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true
+focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too
+momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the
+most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails which
+England herself controlled.
+
+Solely to prevent this communication from reaching America, Lanyard
+believed, Germany had sown mines broadcast in all the waters which the
+_Assyrian_ must cross, and had commissioned her U-boats, without fail and
+at whatever cost, to sink the vessel if by any accident she won safely
+through the mine-fields.
+
+In the effort to steal this secret, German spies had sailed on the
+_Assyrian_ knowing well the double risk they ran, of being shot like rats
+if found out, of being drowned like neutrals if the ship went down through
+the efforts of their compatriots.
+
+It was the zeal of Potsdam's agents, seeking the bearer of this secret,
+which had caused the rifling of Miss Brooke's luggage when she fell under
+suspicion, thanks to her clandestine way of coming aboard; and through the
+same agency young Thackeray had been all but murdered when suspicion, for
+whatever reason, shifted to him.
+
+To insure safe transmission of this communication, England had held the
+_Assyrian_ idle in port, day after day, while her augmented patrols scoured
+the seas, hunting down ruthlessly every submarine whose periscope dared
+peer above the surface, and while her trawlers innumerable swept the
+channels clear of mines.
+
+To prevent its theft, Lieutenant Thackeray had invented the subterfuge of
+the "wounded" arm, amid whose splints and bandages (Lanyard never doubted)
+the cylinder had been secreted.
+
+Finally, it was as a special agent, deep in her country's confidence, that
+this English girl had smuggled herself aboard at the last moment, bringing,
+no doubt, this very cylinder to be transferred to the keeping of Lieutenant
+Thackeray or, perhaps, another confrere, should she find reason to think
+herself suspected, her trust endangered.
+
+Nothing strange in that; women had served their countries in such
+capacities before; the secret archives of European chancellories are
+replete with their records. Lanyard himself remembered many such women,
+brilliant mondaines from many lands domiciled in that Paris of the so-dead
+yesterday to serve by stealth their respective governments; but never, it
+was true, a woman of the caste of Cecelia Brooke; unless, indeed, this were
+an actress of surpassing talent, gifted to hoodwink the most skeptical and
+least susceptible of men.
+
+And yet....
+
+Lanyard's train of thought faltered. New doubt of the girl began to shadow
+his meditations. Contradictory circumstances he had noted intruded,
+uninvited, to challenge overcredulous conclusions concerning her.
+
+Would any secret agent worth her salt invite suspicion by making such a
+conspicuously furtive embarkation, by such ostentatious avoidance of her
+fellow passengers, by surrounding herself with an atmosphere of such
+palpable mystery? Would such an one confess she had a "secret" to an utter
+stranger, as she had to Lanyard that first night out? Would she, under any
+conceivable circumstances, entrust to that same stranger that selfsame
+secret upon whose inviolate preservation so much depended?
+
+And would she make love-trysts on the decks by night?
+
+Would a brother-agent take her in his arms, then reprove her with every
+symptom of vexation for her "madness," her "insanity," her "nonsense" that
+was like to "drive me mad"?--Thackeray's own words!
+
+Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits for some plausible reading of this
+riddle.
+
+Was this Brooke girl possibly (of a sudden he sat bolt upright) a Prussian
+agent infatuated with this young Englishman and by him beloved in spite of
+all that forbade their passion?
+
+Did not this explanation reconcile every apparent inconsistency in her
+conduct, even to the entrusting to a stranger of the stolen secret, the
+purloined paper she dared not keep about her lest it be found in her
+possession?
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. Visibly his features hardened. If this surmise of
+his were any way justified in the outcome, he promised Miss Cecelia Brooke
+an hour of most painful penitence.
+
+Woman or not, she need not look for mercy from him, who must ever be
+merciless in his dealings with Ekstrom's crew.
+
+To be made that one's tool!
+
+The very thought was intolerable....
+
+As for himself, possession of this paper meant that pitfalls were digged
+for his every step.
+
+If ever the British found cause to suspect him, his certain portion would
+be to face a firing squad in dusk of early day.
+
+If, on the other hand, these Prussian agents on board the _Assyrian_ ever
+got wind of the fact that the cylinder was in his care, his fate was apt to
+be a knife between his ribs the first time he was caught alone and--with
+his back to the assassin.
+
+Two courses, then, were open to him: the most sensible and obvious, to go
+straightway to the captain of the _Assyrian_, report all that he knew or
+surmised, and turn over the paper for safekeeping; one alternative, to hide
+the cylinder so absolutely that the most drastic search would overlook it,
+yet so handily that he could rid himself of it at an instant's notice.
+
+But the first course involved denunciation of the Brooke girl. And what
+if she were innocent? What if, after all, these doubts of her were the
+specious spawn of facts misinterpreted, misconstrued? What if she proved to
+be all she seemed? Could he, even though what he had warned her he might
+be, the greatest rogue unhung, be false to a trust reposed in him by such a
+woman?
+
+As to that, there was no question in his mind; he would never betray her,
+lacking irrefutable conviction that she was an employee of the Prussian spy
+system.
+
+Then how to hide the paper?
+
+Kneeling, Lanyard drew from beneath the berth his bellows-bag, selected
+from its contents a black japanned tin case containing a rather elaborate
+though compact trench medicine kit, the idle purchase of an empty afternoon
+in London. Extracting from its fittings a small leather-covered case, he
+replaced the kit, relocked and shoved the bag back beneath the berth.
+
+Then, standing over the hand-basin, he opened the leather-covered case. Its
+velvet-lined compartments held a hypodermic syringe and needle, and a glass
+phial of twenty-four one-thirtieth grain morphia tablets.
+
+Uncorking the phial, he shook out all the tablets, replaced three, then
+slid the paper cylinder into the tube; it fitted precisely, concealed by
+the label of the manufacturing chemist, leaving room for six more tablets.
+Lanyard inserted four on top of the cylinder, moistening the lowermost
+slightly to make it stick, recorked the phial, and returned it to its
+compartment.
+
+Next he dissolved three morphia tablets in a little water in the bottom of
+a glass, filled the syringe with the strong solution, fitted on the needle,
+squirted most of the contents down the waste-pipe, and consigned the
+remaining tablets to the same innocuous fate.
+
+Finally he replaced needle and syringe in the case, let the glass which had
+held the solution stand without rinsing, and put the open case upon the
+shelf above the basin.
+
+A light tapping sounded on the panels of his door.
+
+"Well? Who's there?"
+
+"Your steward, sir. Captain Osborne's compliments, an' 'e'd like to see you
+in 'is room as soon as convenient, sir."
+
+"You may say I will come at once."
+
+"'Nk you, sir."
+
+A summons to have been expected as a sequel to the surgeon's report after
+attending Lieutenant Thackeray; none the less, Lanyard had not expected it
+so soon.
+
+Authority, he reflected, ran true to form afloat as well as ashore; it was
+prompt enough when required to apply a pound or so of cure. Surely the
+officers, at least the captain, must have been advised why this voyage
+was apt to prove exceptionally hazardous; and surely in the light of such
+information it had been wiser to set armed watches on every deck by night,
+rather than permit the lives of passengers to be imperilled through the
+possible activities of Prussian agents among them incogniti.
+
+And now that he was reminded of it, was not this, perhaps, but a device of
+the enemy's to decoy him from the comparative safety of his stateroom?
+
+It was with a hand in his jacket pocket, grasping Thackeray's automatic,
+that he presently left the room. The alleyway, however, was deserted except
+for his steward; who, as he appeared, turned and led the way up to the
+boat-deck.
+
+Rounding the foot of the companionway, Lanyard contrived a hasty glance
+down the port alleyway. The door to Stateroom 30 was on the hook; a light
+burned within. Outside a guard was stationed, a sailor with a cutlass: the
+first application of the pound of cure!
+
+At the heels of his guide, he approached a door in the deck-house, devoted
+to officers' accommodations, beneath the bridge. Here the steward knocked
+discreetly. A heavy voice grumbling within was stilled for a moment, then
+barked a sharp invitation to enter. The steward turned the knob, announced
+dispassionately "Monseer Duchemin," and stood aside. Lanyard entered a
+well-lighted room, simply but comfortably furnished as the captain's office
+and sitting room; sleeping quarters adjoined, the head of a berth with a
+battered pillow showing through a door a foot or so ajar.
+
+Four persons were present; the notion entered Lanyard's head that a fifth
+possibly lurked in the room beyond, spying, eavesdropping: not a bad scheme
+if Thackeray had an associate on board whose identity it was desirable to
+keep under cover.
+
+The door closed gently behind him as he stood politely bowing, conscious
+that the four faces turned his way were distinguished by a singular variety
+of expression.
+
+Miss Cecelia Brooke was nearest him, beside a chair from which she had
+evidently just risen, her pretty young face rather pale and set, a scared
+look in her candid eyes.
+
+Beyond her, the captain sat with his back to a desk: a broad-beamed,
+vigorous body, intensely masculine, choleric by habit, and just now in an
+extraordinarily grim temper, his iron-gray hair bristling from his
+pillow, and his stout person visibly suffering the discomfort of wearing
+night-clothes beneath his uniform coat and trousers. Bending upon Lanyard
+the steel-hard regard of small, steel-blue eyes, he drummed the arms of his
+chair with thick and stubby fingers.
+
+To one side, standing, was the third officer, a Mr. Sherry, a youngish man
+with a pleasant cast of countenance which temporarily wore a look, rarely
+British, of ingrained sense of duty at odds with much embarrassment.
+
+Lastly Mr. Crane's lanky person was draped, with its customary effect of
+carelessness, on one end of the lounge seat. He looked up, nodded shortly
+but cheerfully to Lanyard, then resumed a somewhat quizzical contemplation
+of the half-smoked cigar which etiquette obliged him to neglect in the
+presence of a lady.
+
+"This is the gentleman?" Captain Osborne queried heavily of the girl.
+Receiving a murmured affirmative, he continued: "Good morning, Monsieur
+Duchemin.... Thanks, Miss Brooke; we won't keep you up any longer
+to-night."
+
+He rose, bowed stiffly as Mr. Sherry opened the door for the girl, and when
+she was gone threw himself back into his chair with a force which made it
+enter a violent protest.
+
+"Sit down, sir. Daresay you know what we want of you."
+
+"It is not difficult to guess," Lanyard admitted. "A sad business,
+monsieur."
+
+"Sad!" the captain iterated in a tone of harsh sarcasm. "That's a mild name
+to give murder."
+
+Even had it not been blurted violently at him, that word was staggering.
+The adventurer echoed it blankly. "You can't mean Lieutenant Thackeray--?"
+
+"Not yet, though doctor says it may come to that; the poor chap's in a bad
+way--concussion."
+
+"So one feared. But monsieur said 'murder'...."
+
+Captain Osborne sat forward, steely gaze mercilessly boring into Lanyard's
+eyes. "Monsieur Duchemin," he said slowly, "Lieutenant Thackeray was not
+the only passenger to suffer through to-night's villainy. The other died
+instantly."
+
+"In God's name, monsieur--who?"
+
+"Bartholomew."
+
+"Mr. Bartholomew!" A memory of that brisk little body's ruddy, cheerful,
+British personality flashed athwart the screen of memory. Lanyard murmured:
+"Incredible!"
+
+"Murdered," the captain proceeded, "in Stateroom 28. Lieutenant Thackeray
+and he were friends, shared the suite. Apparently Mr. Bartholomew heard
+some unusual noise in 30 and left his berth to investigate. He was struck
+down from behind as he approached the communicating door. The murderer had
+got in by way of the sitting room, 26."
+
+Mr. Sherry added in an awed voice: "Frightful blow--skull crushed like an
+eggshell."
+
+There was a pause. Crane thoughtfully relighted his cigar, and wrapped his
+right cheek round it. The captain glared glassily at Lanyard. Mr. Sherry
+looked, if possible, more uncomfortable than ever. Lanyard pondered,
+aghast.
+
+Ekstrom's work, of a certainty! This was his way, the way he imposed upon
+his creatures. Ekstrom, ever a killer, obsessed by the fallacious notion
+that dead men tell no tales....
+
+And Bartholomew had been in this mess with Thackeray, both of them
+operatives of the British Secret Service!
+
+"Miss Brooke has given her version of the attack on Lieutenant Thackeray,"
+the captain pursued. "Be good enough to let us have yours."
+
+Succinctly Lanyard recounted the happenings between the moment when
+premonition of evil drew him from his stateroom and the moment when he
+returned thereto.
+
+He was at pains, however, to omit all mention of the cylinder of paper;
+that, pending definite knowledge to the contrary, was a sacred trust, a
+matter of his honour, solely the affair of the Brooke girl.
+
+The captain squared himself toward Lanyard, his face louring, his jaw
+pugnacious.
+
+"How did you happen to be up and dressed at that late hour, so ready to
+respond to this--ah--premonition of yours?"
+
+"I sleep not well, monsieur. It was my intention to go on deck and
+endeavour to walk off my insomnia."
+
+Captain Osborne commented with a snort.
+
+"Why did you leave Miss Brooke alone before she called the doctor?"
+
+"At mademoiselle's request, naturally."
+
+"You'd been deuced gallant up to that time. I presume it didn't occur to
+you that the young woman might need further protection?"
+
+Lanyard shrugged. "It did not occur to me to refuse her request, monsieur."
+
+"Didn't it strike you as odd she should wish to be left alone with
+Lieutenant Thackeray?"
+
+"It was not my affair, monsieur. It was her wish."
+
+"Excuse me, cap'n." Crane sat up. "I'd like to ask Mr. Lanyard a question."
+
+But Lanyard had prepared himself against that, and acknowledged the touch
+with a quiet smile and the hint of a bow.
+
+"Monsieur Crane...."
+
+"U.S. Secret Service," Crane informed him with a grin. "Velasco spotted
+you--had seen you years ago in Paruss--tipped me off."
+
+"So one inferred. And these gentlemen?" Lanyard indicated the captain and
+third officer.
+
+"I wised them up--had to, when this happened."
+
+"Naturally, monsieur. Proceed...."
+
+"I only wanted to ask if you noticed anything to make you think perhaps
+there was an understanding between Miss Brooke and the lieutenant?"
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"I ain't curious why you should. What I want to know is, did you?"
+
+"No, monsieur," Lanyard lied blandly.
+
+"The little lady didn't seem to take on more'n she naturally would if the
+lieutenant'd been a stranger, eh?" "How to judge, when one has never seen
+mademoiselle distressed on behalf of another?"
+
+Crane abandoned his effort, resuming contemplation of his cigar.
+
+"Now we come to the point. Monsieur Lanyard, or whatever your name is."
+
+"I have found Duchemin very agreeable, monsieur le capitaine."
+
+"I daresay," Captain Osborne sneered. He hesitated, glowering in the
+difficulty of thinking. "See here, Monsieur Duchemin--since you prefer that
+style--I'm not going to beat about the bush with you. I'm a plain man,
+plain-spoken. They tell me you reformed. I don't know anything about that.
+It's my conviction, once a thief, always a thief. I may be wrong."
+
+"Right or wrong, monsieur might easily be less offensive."
+
+The captain's dark countenance became still more darkly congested.
+Implacable prejudice glinted in his small eyes. Nor was his temper softened
+by the effrontery of this offender in giving back look for look with a calm
+poise that overshadowed his arrogance of an honest, law-abiding man.
+
+He made a vague gesture of impatience.
+
+"The point is," he said, "this crime was accompanied by robbery."
+
+"Am I to understand I am accused?"
+
+"Nobody is accused," Crane cut in hastily.
+
+"You have found no clues--?"
+
+"Nary clue."
+
+"What I want to say to you, Monsieur Duchemin, is this: the stolen property
+has got to be recovered before this ship makes her dock in New York.
+It means the loss of my command if it isn't. It means more than that,
+according to my information; it means a disastrous calamity to the Allied
+cause. And you're a Frenchman, Monsieur--Duchemin."
+
+"And a thief. Monsieur le capitaine must not forget his pet conviction."
+
+"As to that, a man can't always be particular about the tools he employs. I
+believe the old saying, set a thief to catch a thief, holds good."
+
+"Do I understand," Lanyard suggested sweetly, "you are about to honour me
+by utilizing my reputed talents, by commissioning a thief to catch this
+thief of to-night?"
+
+"Precisely. You know more of this matter than any of us here. You were at
+hand-grips with the murderer--and let him get away."
+
+"To my deep regret. But I have told you how that happened."
+
+"Seems a bit strange you made no real effort to find out what the scoundrel
+looked like."
+
+"It was dark in that alleyway, monsieur."
+
+The captain made an inarticulate noise, apparently meant to convey an
+effect of ironic incredulity. More intelligible comment was interrupted by
+a ring of the telephone. He swung around, clapped receiver to ear, snapped
+an impatient "Well?" and listened with evident exasperation.
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. This business of telephoning was conceivably
+well-timed; not improbably the captain was receiving the report of somebody
+who had been sent to search Stateroom 29 in Lanyard's absence. He wondered
+and, wondering, glanced at Crane, to find that gentleman watching him with
+a whimsical glimmer which he was quick to extinguish when the captain said
+curtly, "Very good, Mr. Warde," and turned back from the telephone, his
+manner more than ever truculent.
+
+"Mr. Lanyard," he said--"Monsieur Duchemin, that is--a valuable paper has
+been stolen, an exceedingly valuable document. I don't know which carried
+it, Lieutenant Thackeray or Mr. Bartholomew. But I do know such a paper was
+in their possession. And to the best of my knowledge, we three were the
+only ones on board that did know it. And it has disappeared. Now, sir, you
+may or may not be deeper in this affair than you have admitted. If you are,
+I'd advise you to own up."
+
+"Monsieur le capitaine implies my complicity in this dastardly crime!"
+
+Osborne shook his head doggedly. "I imply nothing. I only say this: if you
+know anything you haven't told us, my advice is to make a clean breast of
+it."
+
+"I have nothing to tell you, monsieur, beyond the fact that I find you,
+your tone, your manner, and your choice of words, intolerably insolent."
+
+"Then you know nothing--?"
+
+"Monsieur!" Lanyard cried sharply.
+
+"Very good," the captain persisted. "I'll take your word for it--and give
+you till we take on our pilot to find the real criminal and make him give
+up that paper."
+
+"And if I fail?"
+
+"Not a soul on board leaves the _Assyrian_ till the murderer and thief are
+found--if they are not one."
+
+"But that is a general threat; whereas monsieur has honoured me by
+making this a personal matter. What punishment have you prepared for
+me specifically, if I fail to accomplish this task which baffles
+your--shrewdness?"
+
+"I'll at least inform the port authorities in New York, tell them who you
+are, and have you barred out of the country."
+
+"I want to say, Lanyard," Crane interposed, "this isn't my notion of how to
+deal with you, or in any way by my advice."
+
+"Thank you, monsieur," the adventurer replied icily, without removing his
+attention from the captain. "What else, Captain Osborne?"
+
+"That is all I have to say to you to-night, sir. Good-night."
+
+"But I have something more to say to you, monsieur le capitaine. First, I
+desire to give over to you this article which it will doubtless please you
+to consider stolen property." Lanyard placed the automatic pistol on the
+desk. "One of Lieutenant Thackeray's," he explained; "at Miss Brooke's
+suggestion, I borrowed it as a life-preserver, in event of another brush
+with this homicidal maniac."
+
+"She told us about that," Osborne said heavily, fumbling with the weapon.
+"What else, sir?"
+
+"Only this, monsieur le capitaine: I shall use my best endeavour to uncover
+the author of these crimes. If I succeed, be sure I shall denounce him. If
+I succeed only in securing this valuable paper you speak of, be equally
+sure you will never see it; for it shall leave my hands only to pass into
+those which I consider entirely trustworthy."
+
+"The devil!" Captain Osborne leaped from his chair quaking with fury. "You
+dare accuse me of disloyalty--!"
+
+"Now you mention it...." Lanyard cocked his head to one side with a
+maddening effect of deliberation. "No," he concluded--"no; I wouldn't
+accuse you of intentional treason, monsieur; for that would involve an
+imputation of intelligence...."
+
+He opened the door and nodded pleasantly to Crane and the third officer.
+
+"Good-night, gentlemen," he said silkily. "Oh, and you, too, Captain
+Osborne--good-night, I'm sure."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+IN STATEROOM 29
+
+
+In spite of his own anger, something far from being either assumed or
+inconsiderable, Lanyard was fain to pause, a few paces from the deck-house,
+and laugh quietly at a vast and incoherent booming which was resounding in
+the room he had just quitted--Captain Osborne trying to do justice to
+the emotions inspired in his virtuous bosom by the cheek of this damned
+gaol-bird.
+
+But suddenly, reminded of the grim reason for all this wretched brawling,
+Lanyard shrugged off his amusement. Beneath his very feet, almost a man
+lay dead, another perhaps dying, while the beast who had wrought that
+devilishness remained at large.
+
+He comprehended in a wondering regard that wide, star-blazoned arch of
+skies, that broad, dark, restful mystery of waters, that still, sweet world
+of peace through which the _Assyrian_ forged, muttering contentedly at her
+toil ... while Murder with foul hands and slavering chops skulked somewhere
+in the darkened fabric of her, somewhere beyond that black mouth of the
+deck-port yawning at Lanyard's elbow.
+
+From that same portal a man came abruptly but quietly, saw Lanyard standing
+there, gave him a staring look and grudging nod, and strode forward to the
+captain's quarters: Mr. Warde, the first officer.
+
+Lanyard recollected himself, and went below.
+
+Still the sailor guarded the door in that port alleyway; but now it stood
+wide, and Cecelia Brooke was on its threshold, conversing guardedly with
+the surgeon. Even as Lanyard caught sight of them, the latter bowed and
+turned aft, while the girl retreated and refastened the door on its hook.
+
+Thus reminded of Crane's shrewd questions, Lanyard was speculating rather
+foggily concerning the reason therefor as he turned down the passage to
+his own quarters. What had the American noticed, or been told, to make him
+surmise covert sympathy between the girl and the lieutenant?
+
+He caught himself yawning. Drowsiness buzzed in his brain. He had an
+incoherent feeling that he would now sleep long and heavily. Entering his
+stateroom, he put a shoulder against the door, pushing it to as he fumbled
+for the switch. The circumstance that the lights were no longer burning as
+he had left them failed to impress him as noteworthy in view of his belief
+that, by the captain's orders, Mr. Warde had been ransacking his effects in
+his absence.
+
+But when no more than a click responded to a turn of the switch, the room
+remaining quite dark, Lanyard uttered an imprecation, abruptly very wide
+awake indeed.
+
+Before he could move he stiffened to positive immobility: the cool, hard
+nose of a pistol had come into contact with his skull, just behind the ear.
+
+Simultaneously a softly-modulated voice advised him in purest German: "Be
+quite still, Herr Lanyard, and hold up your hands--so! Also, see that you
+utter no sound till I give you leave.... Karl, the handkerchief."
+
+Lanyard stood motionless, hands well elevated, while a heavy silk blindfold
+was whipped over his eyes and knotted tight at the back of his head.
+
+"Now your paws, Herr Lone Wolf--put them together behind your back,
+prudently making no attempt to reach a pocket."
+
+Obediently Lanyard permitted his wrists to be caught together with a second
+silk handkerchief. He could feel a slight sensation of heat upon his hands,
+and guessed that this was caused by the light of a flash-lamp held close
+to the flesh. None the less he took the chance of clenching his fists and
+tensing the muscles of his wrists.
+
+"Tightly, Karl."
+
+The bonds were made painfully fast. Still it did not seem to occur to his
+captors to oblige their prisoner to open his hands and relax his wrists.
+Lanyard perceived a glimmer of hope in this oversight: the enemy was
+normally stupid.
+
+"Now the lights again."
+
+After a little wait, during which he could hear the bulbs being pressed
+back into their sockets, the switch clicked once more.
+
+"And now, swine-dog!"--the pistol tapped his skull significantly--"if you
+value your life, speak, and speak quickly. Where is that document?"
+
+"Document?" Lanyard repeated in a tone of wonder.
+
+"Unless you are eager to explore the hereafter, tell us where we may find
+it without delay."
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know what you're talking about."
+
+"You lie!" the German snapped. "Face about!"
+
+Somebody grasped his shoulders roughly and swung him round to the light,
+the nose of the pistol shifting to press against his abdomen.
+
+"Search him, Karl."
+
+Unseen hands investigated his pockets cunningly. As they finished, the man
+who answered to the name of Karl became articulate for the first time,
+following a grunt of disappointment:
+
+"Nothing--he has it not upon him."
+
+"Look more thoroughly. Did you think him idiot enough to carry it where
+you'd find it at the first dip? Imbecile!"
+
+For the purpose of this second search Lanyard's garments were ripped
+open, and the enemy made sure that he carried nothing next his skin more
+incriminating than a money-belt, which was forcibly removed.
+
+"His shoes--see to his shoes!" the first speaker insisted irritably. "Sit
+down, Lanyard!"
+
+A petulant push sent the adventurer reeling across the cabin to fall upon
+the lounge seat beneath the port. With some effort he assumed a sitting
+position, while Karl, kneeling, hastily unlaced and tore off his shoes and
+socks.
+
+"Nothing, captain," was the report.
+
+"Damnation!... Continue to search his luggage. Leave nothing unexamined.
+In particular look into every hole and corner where none but a fool would
+attempt to hide anything. This fine gentleman imagines we value his
+intelligence too highly to believe he would leave the paper in plain
+sight."
+
+To an accompaniment of sounds indicating that Karl was obeying his
+superior, this last resumed in a tone of lofty contempt:
+
+"How is it you have abandoned the habit of going armed, Herr Lone Wolf?
+That is not like you. Is it that you grow unwary through drug-using? But
+that matters nothing. We have more important business to speak over, you
+and I. You will be very, very docile, and answer promptly, also in a low
+voice, if you would avoid getting hurt. Do you understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," Lanyard replied, furtively working at the bonds on his wrists.
+
+"Good. We speak together like good friends, yes?"
+
+"Naturally," said Lanyard. "It is so conducive to chumminess to be caressed
+with an automatic pistol--you've no idea!"
+
+"Oblige by speaking German. Our ears are sick with all this bastard
+English. Also, more quietly speak. Do not put me to the regrettable
+necessity of shooting you."
+
+"How regrettable? You didn't stick at braining those others--"
+
+"Hardly the same thing. You are not like those English swine. You are
+French; and Germany has no hatred for France, but only pity that it so
+fatuously opposes manifest destiny. In truth, you are not even French, but
+a great thief; and criminals have no patriotism, nor loyalty to any State
+but their own, the state of moral turpitude."
+
+The speaker interrupted himself to relish his wit with a thick chuckle. And
+Lanyard's jaws ached with the strain of self-control. He continued to pluck
+at the folds of silk while concentrating in effort to memorise the voice,
+which he failed utterly to place. Undoubtedly this animal was a shipboard
+acquaintance, one who knew him well; but those detestable German gutturals
+disguised his accents quite beyond identification.
+
+"For all that, you are not wise so to try my patience. I permit you five
+minutes by my watch in which to make up your mind to surrender that
+document."
+
+"How often must I tell you," Lanyard enquired, "all this talk of documents
+is Greek to me?"
+
+"Then you have five minutes to brush up your classical education, and
+translate into terms suited to your intelligence. I will have that document
+from you or--in four more minutes--shoot you dead."
+
+To this Lanyard said nothing. But his patient attentions to the
+handkerchief round his wrists were beginning perceptibly to be rewarded.
+
+"Moreover, Herr Lanyard, you will do yourself a very good turn by
+confessing--entirely aside from saving your life."
+
+"How is that?"
+
+"Providing you persuade me of your good faith, I am empowered to offer you
+employment in our service."
+
+Lanyard's breath passed hardly through a throat swollen with rage, chagrin,
+and hatred, all hopelessly impotent. But he succeeded in preserving an
+unruffled countenance, as his captor's next words demonstrated.
+
+"You are surprised, yes? You are thinking it over? Take your time--you have
+three minutes more. Or perhaps you are sulky, resenting that our cleverness
+has found you out? Be reasonable, my good man. Think: you cannot be
+insensible to the honour my offer does you."
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+"First, that paper--thereafter to use your surpassing talents to the glory
+of God and Fatherland. In addition, you will be greatly rewarded."
+
+"Now you do begin to interest me," Lanyard said coolly.... Surely he could
+contrive some way to slay this beast with his naked hands! He must play for
+time.... "How rewarded?"
+
+"As I say, with a place in the Prussian Secret Service, its protection,
+freedom to ply your trade unhindered in America, even countenanced, till
+that country becomes a German province under German laws."
+
+"But do I hear you offer this to a Frenchman?"
+
+"Undeceive yourself. Men of all nations to-day, recognising that the star
+of Germany is in the ascendant, that soon all nations will be German,
+are hastening to make their peace beforehand by rendering Germany good
+service."
+
+"Something in that, perhaps," Lanyard admitted thoughtfully.
+
+"Think well, my friend.... Yes, Karl?"
+
+The voice of the other spy responded sullenly: "Nothing--absolutely
+nothing."
+
+"Two minutes, Herr Lanyard."
+
+Of a sudden Lanyard's face was violently distorted in a grimace of terror.
+He lurched his shoulders forward, openly struggling with his bonds.
+
+"But--good God!" he protested in a voice of terror, "you can't possibly be
+so unreasonable! I tell you, I haven't got your damned paper!"
+
+A loop of the handkerchief slipped over one hand.
+
+"Be still! Cease your struggles. And not so loud, my friend!" The
+peremptory voice dropped into mockery as Lanyard, pale and exhausted, sat
+back trembling--and a second loop of silk dropped over the other hand. "So
+you begin to appreciate that we mean business, yes? One minute and thirty
+seconds!"
+
+"Have mercy!" the adventurer whined desperately--and licked his lips as if
+he found them dry with fear. Now both hands were all but wholly free. True:
+he remained blindfolded and covered by a deadly weapon. "Give me a chance.
+I'll do anything you wish! But I can't give you what I haven't got."
+
+"Be silent! Here, Karl."
+
+There was a sound of unintelligible murmuring as the two spies conferred
+together. Lanyard writhed in apparent extremity of terror. His hands were
+free. He sought hopelessly for inspiration. What to do without arms?
+
+"Be grateful to Karl. He urges that perhaps you know nothing of the
+document."
+
+"Don't you think I'd tell if I did know?"
+
+"Then you have one minute--no, forty seconds--in which to pledge yourself
+to the Prussian Secret Service."
+
+"You want me to swear--?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Then hear me," said Lanyard earnestly: "_You damned canaille_!" And in
+one movement he tore the bandage from his eyes and launched himself head
+foremost at the man who stood over him.
+
+He caught part of an oath drowned out by the splitting report of a pistol
+that went off within an inch of his ear. Then his head took the man full
+in the belly, and both went sprawling to the deck, Lanyard fighting like a
+maniac.
+
+Sheer luck had guided clawing fingers to the right wrist of his antagonist,
+round which they shut like jaws of a trap. At the same time he wrenched the
+other's arm high above his head.
+
+Momentarily expecting the shock of a bullet from the pistol of the second
+spy, he found time to wonder that it was so long deferred, and even in
+the fury of his struggles, out of the corner of one eye caught a fugitive
+glimpse of a tallish man, masked, standing back to the forward partition in
+a pose of singular indecision, pistol poised in his grasp.
+
+Then the efforts of his immediate adversary threw him into a position in
+which he was unable to see the other.
+
+Of a sudden the stateroom was filled with the thunder of an automatic, its
+seven cartridges discharged in one brisk, rippling crash.
+
+It was as if a white-hot iron had been laid across Lanyard's shoulder.
+Beneath him the man started convulsively, with such force as almost to
+throw him off bodily, then relaxed altogether and lay limp and still,
+pinning one of Lanyard's arms under him.
+
+Its visor displaced, the face of Baron von Harden was revealed, features
+distorted, eyes glaring, a frozen mask of hate and terror.
+
+His arm free, the adventurer rolled away from the corpse in time to see the
+open window-port blocked by the body of the other spy.
+
+Gathering himself together, he snatched up the pistol that dropped from the
+inert grasp of the dead man, and levelled it at the port.
+
+But now that space was empty.
+
+He rose and paused for an instant, his glance instinctively seeking the
+ledge above the hand-basin.
+
+The hypodermic outfit was there, but minus the phial.
+
+In the alleyway rose a confusion of running feet and shouting tongues.
+A heavy banging rang on the door to Stateroom 29. Crane's nasal accents
+called upon Lanyard to open.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+OFF NANTUCKET
+
+
+Upon the authors of that commotion Lanyard wasted no consideration
+whatever. Let them knock and clamour; he had more urgent work in hand, and
+knew too well the penalty were he stupid enough to unbolt to them. Their
+bodies would dam the doorway hopelessly; insistent hands would hinder him;
+innumerable importunate enquiries would be dinned at him, all immaterial
+in contrast with this emergency, a catechism one would need an hour to
+satisfy. And all attempts would be futile to make them understand that,
+while they plagued him with futile questions, a murderer and spy and thief
+was making good his escape, being afforded ample opportunity to slough all
+traces of his recent work and resume unchallenged his place among them.
+
+No; if by any freak of good fortune, any exertion of wit or daring, that
+one were to be apprehended, it must be within the next few minutes, it
+could only be through immediate pursuit.
+
+Nor did the adventurer waste time debating the better course. With him,
+whose ways of life were ceaselessly beset by instant and mortal perils,
+each with its especial and imperative demand upon his readiness and
+ingenuity, action must ever press so hard upon the heels of thought as to
+make the two seem one.
+
+For that matter, the whole transaction had been characterised by almost
+unbelievable rapidity. And that square opening of the window-port was
+hardly vacant when Lanyard sprang to his feet; the fugitive had barely time
+to find his own upon the outer deck before Lanyard leaped after him; the
+first thumps upon the panels of his door were still echoing when he thrust
+head and shoulders out of the port and began to pump the automatic at a
+shadow fleeing aft upon that narrow breadth of planking between rail and
+wall.
+
+Then, at the third shot, the automatic jammed upon a discharged shell.
+
+Exasperated, the adventurer cast the weapon from him, shrugged hastily out
+of his unfastened coat and waistcoat, hitched tight his belt, and clambered
+through the port.
+
+Dropping to the deck, he turned in time to see the fugitive dart round the
+shoulder of the superstructure.
+
+As Lanyard gained the after rail of the promenade deck a man standing on
+the boat-deck at the head of the companion-ladder greeted him with pistol
+fire. He dodged back, untouched, and instantaneously devised a stratagem to
+cope with this untoward development.
+
+Overhead, at the side, a lifeboat hung on its davits, ready for emergency
+launching, the gap in the rail which it filled when normally swung inboard
+spanned only by a length of line. And the darkness in the shadow of the
+boat was dense, an excellent screen.
+
+Climbing upon the rail, Lanyard grasped the edge of the deck overhead and
+drew himself up undetected by his quarry, whom he espied still holding
+the head of the companion ladder, hidden from the bridge by the after
+deck-house, standing ready to shoot Lanyard should he attempt to renew the
+pursuit by that approach.
+
+At the same time, "Karl" seemed mysteriously occupied with some object or
+objects in whose manipulation he was hampered to a degree by the necessity
+under which he laboured of holding his pistol ready and dividing his
+attention.
+
+A man of good stature, broad at the shoulders, slender at the hips, he
+poised himself with athletic grace--the lower part of his face masked by
+what Lanyard took to be a dark silk handkerchief.
+
+Lanyard heard him swearing in German.
+
+Then a brisk little spray of sparks jetted from the flint and steel of a
+patent cigar-lighter in the hands of the spy. And as Lanyard rose from his
+knees after ducking beneath the line, a stream of fatter sparks spat from
+the end of a fuse.
+
+The man leaned over the rail and cast a small black object to which the
+sputtering fuse was attached, down to the main deck.
+
+As it struck midway between superstructure and stern it burst into
+brilliant flame, releasing upon the night an electric-blue glare that must
+have been visible from any point within the compass of the horizon.
+
+A yell of profane remonstrance saluted the light, and throughout the brief
+passage that followed Lanyard was conscious that pistols and rifles on the
+after deck below were making him and his antagonist their targets.
+
+Before the German could face about, Lanyard, moving almost noiselessly in
+his bare feet, had covered more than half the intervening space. In another
+breath he might have had the fellow at a disadvantage. But the distance
+was too great. Twice the automatic blazed in his face as he closed in, the
+bullets clearing narrowly--or else he fancied that their deadly cold breath
+fanned his cheek.
+
+Then the spy's weapon in turn went out of action. Half blinded, Lanyard
+clipped the man round the body and hugged him tight, exerting all his skill
+and strength to effect a throw.
+
+That effort failed; his onslaught was met with address and ability that
+all but matched his own. The animal he embraced had muscles like tempered
+springs and the cunning and fury of a wild beast in a trap. For a moment
+Lanyard was able to accomplish no more than to smother resistance in a
+rib-crushing embrace; no sooner did he relax it than all attempts to shift
+his hold were anticipated and met half way, forcing him back upon the
+defensive.
+
+Yet he was given little chance to prove himself the master. The first phase
+of the struggle was still in contest when the rear door of the smoking room
+opened and a man stepped out, paused, summed up the situation in a glance,
+seized Lanyard from behind.
+
+The adventurer felt his arms grasped by hands whose strength seemed little
+short of superhuman, and wrenched back so violently that his very bones
+cracked. Fairly lifted from his feet, he was held as helpless as an infant
+kicking in the arms of its nurse.
+
+Released, the other spy stepped back and swung his left fist viciously to
+Lanyard's jaw. Something in the brain of the adventurer seemed to let
+go; his head dropped weakly to one side. The man who had struck him said
+quietly, "Loose the fool, Ed," and followed as Lanyard reeled away,
+striking him repeatedly.
+
+For a giddy moment Lanyard was darkly conscious--as one dreams an evil
+dream--of blows raining mercilessly about his head and body, blows that
+drove him back athwartships toward a fate dark and terrible, a great void
+of blackness. He felt unutterably weary, and was weakened by a sensation of
+nausea. Beneath him his knees buckled. There fell one final blow, ruthless
+as the wrath of God.
+
+He was falling backward into nothingness, into an everlasting gulf of night
+that yawned for him....
+
+As he shot under the guard rope and into space between the edge of the deck
+and the keel of the lifeboat, the spy rounded smartly on a heel and darted
+to the smoking-room door. His confederate was in the act of stepping across
+the raised threshold. He followed, closed the door.
+
+The first officer, charging aft from the bridge, rounded the deck-house and
+pulled up with a grunt of surprise to find the deck completely deserted....
+
+The shock of icy immersion reanimated Lanyard.
+
+He felt himself plunging headlong down, down, and down to inky depths
+unguessable. The sheer habit of an accustomed swimmer alone bade him hold
+his breath.
+
+Then came a pause: he was no more descending; for a time of indeterminate
+duration, an age of anguish, he seemed to float without motion, suspended
+in frigid purgatory. Against his ribs something hammered like a racing
+engine. In his ears sounded a vast roaring, the deafening voices of a
+thousand waterfalls. His head felt swollen and enormous, on the point of
+bursting wide.
+
+Without warning expelled from those depths, he shot full half-length out of
+water, and fell back into the milky welter of the _Assyrian's_ wake.
+
+Instinctively he kept afloat with feeble strokes.
+
+The cold was bitter, as sharp as the teeth of death; but his head was now
+clear, he was able to appreciate what had befallen him.
+
+Already the _Assyrian_, forging onward unchecked, had left him well astern,
+her progress distinctly disclosed by that infernal bluish glare spouting
+from her after deck.
+
+She seemed absurdly small. Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind. Nothing so
+tiny, so insignificant, so make-believe as that silhouette of a ship could
+conceivably be that great liner, the _Assyrian_....
+
+Temporarily a burning pain in his left shoulder drove all other
+considerations out of mind. The salt water was beginning to smart in the
+raw, superficial wound made by that assassin's bullet ... back there in the
+stateroom ... long ago....
+
+Then the cold began to bite into his marrow, and he struggled manfully
+to swim, taking long, slow strokes, at first comparatively powerful, by
+insensible degrees losing force.
+
+Just why he took this trouble he did not know: for some dim reason it
+seemed desirable to live as long as possible. Withal he was aware he could
+not live. Whether careless or utterly ignorant of his fate, the _Assyrian_
+was trudging on and on, leaving him ever farther astern, lost beyond rescue
+in that weird, bleak waste. Even were an alarm to be given, were she to
+stop now and put out a boat, it would find him, if it found him at all, too
+late.
+
+The cold was killing.
+
+He felt very sleepy. Drowsily he apprehended the beginning of the end.
+His senses, growing numb with cold, presently must cease to function
+altogether. Then he would forget, and nothing would matter any more.
+
+Yet the will to live persisted amazingly. Had Lanyard wished it he could
+not have ceased to swim, at least to keep afloat. Vaguely he wondered how
+people ever managed to commit suicide by drowning; it seemed to pass human
+power to resist that buoyancy which sustained one, to let go, let one's
+self go down. Impossible to conceive how that was ever done....
+
+Why should he care to go on living?
+
+No reading that riddle!...
+
+On obscure impulse he gave up swimming, turned upon his back, floated face
+to the sky, derelict, resigning himself to the cradling arms of the sea.
+The gradual, slow rocking of the swells soothed his passion like a kindly
+opiate. The cold no more irked him, but seemed somehow strangely anodynous.
+Imperturbably he envisaged death, without fear, without welcome. What must
+be, must....
+
+For all that, life clutched at him with jealous hands. More than ever
+sleepy, before he slept that last, long sleep he must somehow solve this
+enigma, learn the reason why life continued so to allure his failing
+senses.
+
+Athwart the drab texture of consciousness wild fancies played like heat
+lightning in a still midsummer night.
+
+Death's countenance was kind.
+
+That wide field of stars, drooping low and lifting away with rhythmic
+motion, would sometime dip swiftly down to the very sea itself and,
+swinging back, take with it his soul to some remote bourne....
+
+The deeps were yielding up their mysteries. Past him a huge pale monster
+swept at furious pace, hissing grimly as it passed, like some spectral
+Nemesis pursuing the _Assyrian_.
+
+Indifferently he speculated concerning the reality of this phenomenon.
+
+The heave of a swell enabled him to glance incuriously after the steamship.
+She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted
+visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck. Even
+that now had waned to a mere glimmer, the flicker of a candle lost in the
+immensities of that night-bound world of empty sky and empty ocean. Even as
+he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that
+guttered toward its swift extinction....
+
+Why live, when one might die and, dying, find endless rest?
+
+Like a blazing thunderbolt one word rent the slumbrous web of sentience:
+_Ekstrom_!
+
+Galvanised by the flood of hatred unpent by the syllables of that name,
+Lanyard began again to swim, flailing the water with frantic arms as if to
+win somewhither by the very violence of his efforts.
+
+This the one cogent reason why he must not, could not, die....
+
+Unjust to require him to give up life while that one lived. Unfair.... It
+must not be!...
+
+Across the sea rolled a dull, brutish detonation. The swimmer, swung high
+on the bosom of a great swell, saw a vast sheet of fire raving heavenward
+from the _Assyrian_.
+
+It vanished instantly.
+
+When his dazzled vision cleared, he could see no more of the ship. He
+imagined a faint, wild rumour of panic voices, conjured up scenes of horror
+indescribable as that great fabric sank almost instantaneously, as if some
+gigantic hand plucked her under.
+
+What had happened? Had the accomplices of the dead Baron von Harden set off
+an infernal machine aboard the vessel? In the name of reason, why? They had
+got what they sought, that accursed document, whatever it was, that page
+torn from the Book of Doom. Then why...?
+
+And to what end had they exploded that light bomb on the after deck?
+
+To make the _Assyrian_ a glaring target in the night--what else? A target
+for what?...
+
+Of a sudden all rational mental processes were erased from Lanyard's
+consciousness. A wave of pure fear flooded him, body, mind, and soul. He
+began to struggle like a maniac, fighting the waters that hindered his
+flight from some hideous thing that was lifting up from the ocean's ooze to
+drag him down.
+
+He heard a voice screaming thinly, and knew it was his own.
+
+The impossible was happening to him, out there, alone and helpless on the
+face of the waters. A shape of horror was rising out of the deep to engorge
+him. He could feel distinctly the slow, irresistible heave of its bulk
+beneath him. His feet touched and slipped upon its horrible sleek flanks.
+
+His most desperate efforts were all unavailing. He could not escape. The
+thing came up too rapidly. Following that first mad thrill of contact with
+it underfoot, he was lifted swiftly and irresistibly into the air. Almost
+instantly he was floundering in knee-deep waters that parted, cascading
+away on either hand. Then, elevated well above the sea, he slid and fell
+prone upon a slimy wet surface.
+
+His clawing hands clutched something solid and substantial, an upright bar
+of metal.
+
+Incredulously Lanyard pawed the body of the monster beneath him. His hands
+passed over a riveted joint of metal plates. Looking up, he made out the
+truncated cone of a conning tower with its antennae-like periscope tubes
+stencilled black upon the soft purple of the star-strewn sky.
+
+Slowly the truth came home: a submarine had risen beneath him. He lay upon
+its after deck, grasping a stanchion that supported the small raised bridge
+round the conning tower.
+
+He sobbed a little in sheer hysteric gratitude, that this miracle had been
+vouchsafed unto him, that he had thus been spared to live on against his
+hour with Ekstrom.
+
+But when he sought to drag himself up to the bridge, he could not, he
+was too weak and faint. Ceasing to struggle, he rested in half stupour,
+panting.
+
+With a harsh clang a hatch was thrown back. Rousing, Lanyard saw several
+figures emerge from the conning tower. Men uncouthly clothed in shapeless,
+shiny leather garments, straddled and stretched above him, filling their
+lungs with the sweet air. He tried to call to them, but evoked a mere
+rattle from his throat.
+
+Two came to the edge of the bridge and stood immediately over him, fixing
+binoculars to their eyes, their voices quite audible.
+
+A pang of despair shot through Lanyard when he heard them conferring
+together in the German tongue.
+
+Death, then, was but a little delayed.
+
+Thereafter he lay in dumb apathy, save that he shivered and his teeth
+chattered uncontrollably.
+
+Through the torpor that rested like a black cloud upon his senses he caught
+broken phrases, snatches of sentences:
+
+"... _sinking fast ... struck square amidships ... broke her back_...."
+
+"... _trouble with her boats. There goes one over_!..."
+
+"... _fools jumping overboard like cattle_...."
+
+"_What's that rocket? Do the swine want us to shell their boats_?"
+
+"_Why not? They're asking for it_!"
+
+One of the officers lowered his glasses and barked a series of sharp
+commands. The crew on deck leaped to attention. One leaned over the
+conning-tower hatch and shouted to his mates below. A hatch forward of
+the tower opened, and a quick-firing gun on a disappearing carriage swung
+smoothly and silently up from its lair.
+
+The other officer, looking down, started violently.
+
+"_Verdammt_! What's this?"
+
+The first rejoined him. "Impossible!"
+
+"Impossible or not--a man or a cadaver!"
+
+"Have him up and see...."
+
+By order, two of the crew dragged Lanyard up to the bridge, supporting him
+by main strength while the officers examined him.
+
+"At the last gasp, but alive," one announced.
+
+"How the devil did he get out here?"
+
+"From the _Assyrian_--"
+
+"Impossible for any man to swim this far since our torpedo struck--"
+
+"Then he must have gone overboard before it struck--or was thrown--"
+
+A cry of alarm from the group about the gun, awaiting final orders to open
+fire upon the _Assyrian's_ boats, interrupted the conference. The officers
+swung away in haste.
+
+"Hell's fury! what's that searchlight?"
+
+"A Yankee destroyer--in all probability the one we dodged yesterday
+afternoon."
+
+"She'll find us yet if we don't submerge. Forward, there--house that gun!
+And get below--quickly!"
+
+During a moment of apparent confusion, one of the men sustaining Lanyard
+caught the attention of an officer.
+
+"What shall we do with this fellow, sir?" he enquired.
+
+"Leave him here to sink or swim as we go down," snapped the officer--"and
+be damned to him!"
+
+With a supreme effort the adventurer sank his fingers deep into the arms of
+the two men.
+
+"Wait!" he gasped faintly in German. "On the Emperor's service--"
+
+"What's that?" The officer turned back sharply.
+
+"Imperial Secret Service," Lanyard faltered--"Personal
+Division--Wilhelmstrasse Number 27--"
+
+A brilliant glare settled suddenly upon the deck of the submarine, and was
+welcomed by a panicky gust of oaths. One officer had already popped through
+the conning-tower hatch, followed by several of the crew. There remained
+only those supporting Lanyard, and the second officer.
+
+"Take him below!" the latter ordered. "He may be telling the truth. If
+not...."
+
+In the distance a gun boomed. A shell shrieked over the submarine and
+dropped into the sea not a hundred yards to starboard. The men rushed
+Lanyard toward the conning tower. He tried feebly to help them. In that
+effort consciousness was altogether blotted out....
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+SUB SEA
+
+
+When he opened his eyes again he was resting, after a fashion, naked
+between harsh, damp blankets in a narrow, low-ceiled bunk inches too short
+for one of his stature.
+
+After an experimental squirm or two he lay very still; his back and all his
+limbs were stiff and sore, his bullet-seared shoulder burned intolerably
+beneath a rudely applied first-aid dressing, and he was breathing heavily
+long, labouring inhalations of an atmosphere sickeningly dank, close, and
+foul with unspeakable stenches, for which the fumes of sulphuric acid with
+a rank reek of petroleum and lubricating oils formed but a modest and
+retiring background.
+
+Also his head felt very thick and dull. He found it extremely difficult to
+think, and for some time, indeed, was quite unable to think to any purpose.
+
+His very eyes ached in their sockets.
+
+In the ceiling glowed an electric bulb, dimly illuminating a cubicle barely
+big enough to accommodate the bunk, a dresser, and a small desk with a
+folding seat. The inner wall was a slightly concave surface of steel plates
+whose seams oozed moisture. In the opposite wall was a sliding door, open,
+beyond which ran a narrow alleyway floored with metal grating. Everything
+in sight was enamelled with white paint and clammy with the sweat of that
+foetid air.
+
+Over all an unnatural hush brooded, now and again accentuated by a rumble
+of distant voices and gusts of vacant laughter, once or twice by a curious
+popping. For a long time he heard nothing else whatever. The effect was
+singularly disquieting and did its bit to quicken torpid senses to grasp
+his plight.
+
+Sluggishly enough Lanyard pieced together fragments of lurid memories,
+reconstructing the sequence of last night's events scene by scene to the
+moment of his rescue by the U-boat.
+
+So, it appeared, he was aboard a German submersible, virtually a prisoner,
+though posing as an agent of the Personal Intelligence Department of the
+German Secret Service.
+
+To that inspiration of failing consciousness he owed his life, or such
+of its span as now remained to him, a term whose duration could only be
+defined by his ability to carry off the imposture pending problematic
+opportunity to escape. And, assuming that this last were ever offered him,
+there was no present possibility of guessing how long it might not be
+deferred.
+
+Its butcher's mission successfully accomplished, the U-boat was not
+improbably even now en route for Heligoland, beginning a transatlantic
+cruise of weeks that might never end save in a nameless grave at the bottom
+of the Four Seas.
+
+Only the matter of impersonation failed to embarrass in prospect. A natural
+linguist, Lanyard's three years within the German lines had put a rare
+finish upon his mastery of German. More than this, he was well versed in
+the workings of the Prussian spy system. As Dr. Paul Rodiek, Wilhelmstrasse
+Agent Number 27, he was safe as long as he found no acquaintance of that
+gentleman in the complement of the submarine; for, largely upon information
+furnished by Lanyard himself, Dr. Rodiek had been secretly apprehended
+and executed in the Tower the day before Lanyard left London to join the
+_Assyrian_.
+
+But the question of the U-boat's present whereabouts and its movements
+in the immediate future disturbed the adventurer profoundly. He was
+elaborately incurious about Heligoland; and several weeks' association
+with the Boche in the close quarters of a submarine was a prospect that
+revolted. Wellnigh any fate were preferable....
+
+Uncertain footsteps sounded in the alleyway, paused at the entrance to his
+cubicle. He turned his head wearily on the pillow. In the doorway stood
+a man whose slenderly elegant carriage of a Prussian officer was not
+disguised even by his shapeless wreck of a naval lieutenant's uniform, a
+man with a countenance of singularly unpleasant cast, leaving out of all
+consideration the grease and grime that discoloured it. His narrow forehead
+slanted back just a trace too sharply, his nose was thin and overlong, his
+mouth thin and cruel beneath its ambitious mustache a la Kaiser; his small
+black eyes, set much too close together, blazed with unholy exhilaration.
+
+As soon as he spoke Lanyard understood that he was drunk, drunk with more
+than the champagne of which he presently boasted.
+
+"Awake, eh?" he greeted Lanyard with a mirthless snarl. "You've slept like
+the dead man I took you for at first, my friend--a solid fourteen hours, my
+word for it! Feeling better now?"
+
+Lanyard's essays to reply began and ended in a croak for water. The
+Prussian nodded, disappeared, returned with an aluminium cup of stale cold
+water mixed with a little brandy.
+
+"Champagne if you like," he offered, as Lanyard, painfully propping himself
+up on an elbow, gulped like an animal from the vessel held to his lips. "We
+are holding a little celebration, you know."
+
+Lanyard dropped back to the pillow, the question in his eyes.
+
+"Celebrating our success," the Prussian responded. "We got her, and that
+means much honour and a long furlough to boot, when we get home, just as
+failure would have spelled--I don't like to think what. I shouldn't care to
+fill the shoes of those poor devils who let the _Assyrian_ escape them off
+Ireland, I can tell you."
+
+Something very much like true fear flickered in his small eyes as he
+pondered the punishment meted out to those who failed.
+
+So the U-boat was homeward bound! Strange one noticed no motion of her
+progress, heard no noise of machinery.
+
+"Where are we?" Lanyard whispered.
+
+"Peacefully asleep on the bottom, about five miles south of Martha's
+Vineyard, waiting till it is dark enough to slip in to our base."
+
+"Base?"
+
+The Prussian hiccoughed and giggled. "On the south shore of the Vineyard,"
+he confided with alcoholic glee: "snuggest little haven heart could wish,
+well to the north of all deep-sea traffic; and the coastwise trade runs
+still farther north, through Vineyard Sound, other side the island. Not
+a soul ever comes that way, not a soul suspects. How should they?
+The admirable charts of the Yankee Coast and Geodetic Survey"--he
+sneered--"show no break in the south beach of the island, between the ocean
+and the ponds. But there is one. The sea made the breach during a gale, our
+people helped with a little Trotyl, tides and storms did the rest. Now we
+can enter a secluded, landlocked harbour with just enough water at low
+tide, and lie hidden there till the word comes to move again--three miles
+of dense scrub forest, all privately owned as a game preserve, fenced and
+patrolled, between us and the nearest cultivated land--and friends in
+plenty on the island to keep all our needs supplied--petroleum, fresh
+vegetables, champagne, all that. Just the same we take no chances--never
+make our landfall by day, never enter or leave harbour except at night."
+
+He paused, contemplating Lanyard owlishly. "Ought not to tell you all
+this, I presume," he continued, more soberly, though the wild light still
+flickered ominously in his eyes. "But it is safe enough; you will see for
+yourself in a few hours; and then ... either you are all right, or you will
+never live to tell of it. We radio'd for information about Wilhelmstrasse
+Number 27 just before dawn, after we had dodged that damned Yankee
+destroyer. Ought to get an answer to-night, when we come up."
+
+Heavier footsteps rang in the alleyway. The Prussian made a grimace of
+dislike.
+
+"Here comes the commander," he cautioned uneasily.
+
+A great blond Viking of a German in the uniform of a captain shouldered
+heavily through the doorway and, acknowledging the salute of the rat-faced
+subaltern with a bare nod, stood looking down at Lanyard in taciturn
+silence, hostility in his blood-shot blue eyes.
+
+"How long since he wakened?" he asked thickly, with the accent of a
+Bavarian.
+
+"A minute or two ago."
+
+"Why did you not inform me?"
+
+The tone was offensively domineering, thanks like enough to drink, nerves,
+and hatred of his job and all things and persons pertaining to it.
+
+The subaltern coloured. "He asked for water--I got it for him."
+
+The commander stared churlishly, then addressed Lanyard: "How are you now?"
+
+"Very faint," Lanyard said truthfully. But he would have lied had it been
+otherwise with him. It was his book to make time in which to collect his
+thoughts, concoct a bullet-proof story, plan against an adverse answer to
+that wireless enquiry.
+
+"Can you eat, drink a little champagne?"
+
+Lanyard nodded slightly, adding a feeble "Please."
+
+The Bavarian glanced significantly at his subaltern, who hastened to leave
+them.
+
+"Who are you? What is your name?"
+
+"Dr. Paul Rodiek."
+
+"Your employment?"
+
+"Personal Intelligence Bureau--confidential agent."
+
+"What were you doing on board the _Assyrian_?"
+
+Lanyard mustered enough strength to look the man squarely in the eye.
+
+"Pardon," he said coldly. "You must know your question is indiscreet."
+
+"I must know more about you."
+
+"It should be enough," Lanyard ventured boldly, "to know that I set off
+that flare as arranged, at risk of my life."
+
+"How came you overboard?"
+
+"In the scuffle caused by my lighting the flare."
+
+"So you tell me. But we found you half clothed, lacking any sort of
+identification. Am I to accept your unsupported word?"
+
+"My papers are naturally at the bottom of the sea, in the garments I
+discarded lest their weight drag me down. If you have doubts," Lanyard
+continued firmly, "it is your privilege to settle them by communicating via
+radio with Seventy-ninth Street."
+
+He shut his eyes wearily and turned his head aside on the pillow, confident
+that this reference to the headquarters and secret wireless station of the
+Prussian spy system in New York would win him peace for a time at least.
+
+After a moment the commander uttered a non-committal grunt. "We shall see,"
+he prophesied darkly, and went away.
+
+Later, one of the crew brought Lanyard a dish of greasy stew and potatoes,
+lukewarm, with bread and a half-bottle of excellent champagne.
+
+He ate all he could stomach of the first, devoured the second ravenously,
+and drained the bottle of its ultimate life-giving drop.
+
+Then, immeasurably refreshed and fortified in body and spirit, he turned
+face to the wall, composed himself as if to sleep, shut his eyes, adjusted
+the tempo of his respiration, and lay quite still, wide awake and thinking
+hard.
+
+After a while somebody tramped into the cubicle, bent over Lanyard
+inquisitively and, satisfied that he slept, retired, taking away the empty
+bottle and dishes.
+
+Otherwise his meditations were disturbed only by those echoes of revelry
+in honour of the late manifestation of the Hun's divine right to do wanton
+murder on the high seas.
+
+The rumour waxed and waned, died into dull mutterings, broke out afresh in
+spurts of merriment that held an hysterical note. Once a quarrel sprang up
+and was silenced by the commander's deep, unpleasant tones. Corks popped
+spasmodically. Again there were sounds much like a man's sobbing; but these
+were promptly blared down by a phonograph with a typically American accent.
+When that palled, a sentimental disciple of frightfulness sang Tannenbaum
+in a melting tenor.
+
+Everything tended to effect an impression that all, commander and meanest
+mechanic alike, were making forlorn efforts to forget.
+
+Devoutly Lanyard prayed they might be successful, at least until the
+submarine made her secret base. If too much alcohol was bad, too much
+brooding was infinitely worse for the German temperament. He remembered
+one U-boat commander who, returning to the home port after a conspicuously
+successful cruise, had been taken ashore in a strait-jacket.
+
+Lanyard himself did not care to dwell upon those scenes which must have
+been enacted on board the _Assyrian_ after the torpedo struck....
+
+Deliberately ignoring all else, he set himself the task of reviewing those
+events which had led up to his going overboard.
+
+One by one he considered the incidents of that night, painstakingly
+dissected them, examined their every phase in minute analysis, weighing for
+ulterior meaning every word uttered in his presence, harking even farther
+back to reconstruct his acquaintance with each actor from the very moment
+of its inception, seeking that hint which he was convinced must be
+somewhere hidden in the history of the affair, waiting only recognition to
+lead straightway out of this gloomy maze of mystery into a sunlit open of
+understanding.
+
+In vain: there was an ambiguity in that business to baffle the keenest and
+most pertinacious investigation.
+
+The conduct of Cecelia Brooke alone bristled with inconsistencies
+inexplicable, the conduct of the German spies no less.
+
+To get better perspective upon the problem, he reduced the premises to
+their barest summary:
+
+A valuable dossier brought on board the _Assyrian_ (no matter by whom) had
+come into the possession of British agents, with the knowledge of Captain
+Osborne. Thackeray had secreted it in that fraudulent bandage. German
+agents, apparently under the leadership of Baron von Harden, had waylaid
+him, knocked him senseless, unwrapped the bandage, but somehow (probably
+in the first instance through the interference of the Brooke girl) had
+overlooked the document. Subsequently the Brooke girl had found and
+entrusted it to Lanyard. (No matter why!) He on his part had exerted his
+utmost inventiveness in hiding it away. Nevertheless it had been discovered
+and abstracted within an hour.
+
+By whom?
+
+Not improbably by the Brooke girl herself. Repenting her impulsiveness,
+after leaving Lanyard with the captain, from whom she had doubtless learned
+the truth about "Monsieur Duchemin," she might well have gone directly to
+Lanyard's stateroom and hit upon the morphia phial as the likeliest hiding
+place without delay, thanks to prior acquaintance with the proportions of
+the paper cylinder.
+
+But why should she have assumed that Lanyard had not disposed of the trust
+about his person?
+
+Not impossibly the thing had been found by the first officer of the
+_Assyrian_, searching by order of the captain--as Lanyard assumed he had.
+
+But, if Mr. Warde had found it, he had not reported his find when
+telephoning to Captain Osborne; or else the latter had gone to great
+lengths to mystify Lanyard.
+
+There remained the chance that the paper had been stolen by one of the two
+German agents--by either without the knowledge of the other.
+
+If Baron von Harden had found it--necessarily before Lanyard returned
+to the room--he had subsequently been at elaborate pains to conceal his
+success from both his victim and his confederate. Why? Did he distrust the
+latter? Again, why?
+
+If "Karl" had been the thief, it must have been after Lanyard's return,
+and while the Baron was preoccupied with the task of keeping the prisoner
+quiet, to let the search proceed.
+
+In that event "Karl" had lied deliberately to his superior. Why? Because
+the document was salable, and "Karl" intended to realize its value for his
+personal benefit?
+
+Not an unlikely explanation. Nor could this be called the first instance in
+which the Prussian spy system, admirably organized though it was, had been
+betrayed by one of its own agents.
+
+This hypothesis, too, accounted for that most perplexing circumstance of
+all, the murder of Baron von Harden. For Lanyard was fully persuaded that
+had been nothing less than premeditated murder, in no way an accident of
+faulty aim. Even the most nervous and unstrung man could hardly have missed
+six shots out of seven, point blank. A nervous man, indeed, could hardly
+have gained his own consent to take so hideous a chance of injuring or
+killing a collaborator.
+
+It appeared, then, that one of four things had happened to the cylinder of
+paper:
+
+Miss Brooke had taken it back into her own care. In which case Lanyard was
+no more concerned.
+
+Captain Osborne had secured it through Mr. Warde. This, however, Lanyard
+did not seriously credit.
+
+It had gone to the bottom when the _Assyrian_ sank with the body--among
+others--of Baron von Harden.
+
+Or "Karl" had stolen it.
+
+Privately, indeed, Lanyard rather inclined to hope that the last might
+prove to be the true solution. He desired earnestly to meet "Karl" once
+more, on equal terms. And the more counts in the score, the greater his
+satisfaction in exacting a reckoning in full.
+
+But he anticipated. That chapter might only too possibly have been closed
+forever by the hand of Death. As yet he knew nothing concerning the
+mortality of the _Assyrian_ debacle. He had not enquired of the officers of
+the U-boat because they knew little if anything more than he. Their glasses
+had discovered to them trouble with the lifeboats; they had spoken of one
+boat capsizing, of "people going overboard like cattle." There must have
+been many drownings, even with a United States destroyer near by and
+speeding to the rescue.
+
+A single question troubled Lanyard greatly. Officers and crew of the U-boat
+had betrayed profoundest consternation upon the advent of that destroyer,
+presumably a warship of a neutral nation. And that same ship had without
+hesitation fired upon the submarine.
+
+Was it possible, then, that the United States had already declared war on
+Germany?
+
+It seemed extremely probable; in such event these Germans would have been
+notified instantly by wireless from the New York bureau of their country's
+Secret Service; whereas, Captain Osborne, receiving the same advice by
+wireless, might reasonably have kept it quiet lest the news stir to more
+formidable activity those agents of the Wilhelmstrasse whose presence among
+the passengers he must at least have strongly suspected.
+
+Presently the closeness of the atmosphere began to work upon Lanyard's
+perceptions. In spite of his long rest, a new drowsiness drugged his
+senses. He yielded without struggle, knowing he would soon need every ounce
+of strength and vitality that sleep could give him....
+
+The din of an inferno startled him awake. Those narrow metal walls were
+echoing a clangour of machinery maniacal in character and overpowering in
+volume. Clankings, tappings, hissings, coughings, clatterings, stridulation
+of a wireless spark, drone of dynamos, shrewdish scolding of Diesel motors
+developing two thousand horsepower, individual efforts of some two thousand
+valves, combined--or, declined to combine--in a cacophony like nothing
+under the sun but the chant of a submersible under way on the surface.
+
+Lanyard, gratefully aware of a current of fresh air sweeping through the
+hold, rolled out of his bunk to find that, while he slept, clothing had
+been provided for him, rough but adequate; heavy woollen underwear and
+socks, a sweater, a dungaree coat, trousers of the same stuff, all vilely
+damp, and a friendless pair of oil-sodden shoes: the sweepings of a dozen
+lockers, but as welcome as disreputable.
+
+Dressed, he turned aft through the alleyway, entering immediately the
+central operating room and storm center of that typhoon of noise, a
+wilderness of polished machinery in active being.
+
+Of the score or more leather-clad machinists silent at their posts, none
+paid him more heed than a passing, incurious glance as he crossed to a
+narrow steel companion ladder and ascended to the conning tower. This he
+found deserted; but its deck-hatch was open. He climbed out to the bridge.
+
+The night was calm and heavily overcast, with no sea more than long, slow
+swells. Through its windless quiet the U-boat racketed with the raving
+abandon of the Spirit of Discord on a spree in a boiler factory. To the
+riot of its internal strife was added the remonstrance of waters sliced by
+the stem and flung back by the sides, a prolonged and stertorous hiss like
+the rending of an endless sheet of canvas.
+
+To eyes new from the electric illumination of the hold, the blackness was
+positive, with the palpable quality of an element, relieved alone by the
+dull glow of the binnacle housing the gyroscope telltale, from which the
+faintest of golden reflections struck back to pick out a pair of seemingly
+severed fists gripping the handles of the bridge steering wheel with a
+singular effect of desperation.
+
+For some moments Lanyard could see nothing more.
+
+The mirthless chuckle of the lieutenant sounded at his elbow.
+
+"So the good Herr Doctor thought he had better come up for air, eh? My
+friend, the very dead might envy you the sincerity of your slumbers. We
+have been half an hour on the surface, with all this uproar--and you are
+only just wakened!"
+
+"Half an hour?" Lanyard repeated thoughtfully. "Then we should be close
+in...."
+
+"Give us ten minutes more ... if we don't go aground in this accursed
+blackness!"
+
+A broad-shouldered body passed between Lanyard and the binnacle,
+momentarily eclipsing its light. Down below in the operating room a bell
+shrilled, and of a sudden the Diesels were silenced.
+
+The dead quiet that followed the sharp extinction of that hubbub was as
+startling as the detonation of high explosive had been.
+
+Through this sudden stillness the submarine slipped stealthily, the hissing
+beneath her bows dying down to gentle sibilance.
+
+From forward the calls of an invisible leadsman were audible. In response
+the commander uttered throaty orders to the helmsman at his elbow, and
+those unattached hands shifted the wheel minutely.
+
+Lanyard started to speak, but a growl from the captain, and a touch of the
+lieutenant's hand on his sleeve cautioned him to silence.
+
+There was a small pause. The vessel seemed to have lost way altogether, to
+swim like a spirit ship that Stygian tide. The lieutenant moved forward,
+leaving Lanyard alone. The voice of the leadsman was stilled. By the wheel
+the captain stood absolutely motionless, his body vaguely silhouetted
+against the glow of the binnacle. The hands that gripped the wheel so
+savagely were as steady as if carven out of stone. An atmosphere of
+suspense enveloped the boat like a cloud.
+
+Lanyard grew conscious of something huge and formidable, a denser shadow in
+the darkness beyond the bows, the loom of land. Off to starboard a point
+of light appeared abruptly, precisely as if a golden pin had punctured the
+black blanket of the night. The captain growled gutturals of relief and
+command. The hands on the wheel shifted, steering exceeding small. A second
+light shone out to port, then shifted slowly into range with the first,
+till the two were as one. Again the bell sang in the operating room, and
+the vessel forged ahead quietly to the urge of electric motors alone. A
+third light and a fourth appeared, well apart to port and starboard, the
+range lights precisely equidistant between them. Between these the U-boat
+moved swiftly. They swam back on either hand and were abruptly extinguished
+as if the night, resenting their insolent trespass, had gobbled both at a
+gulp.
+
+The temperature became sensibly warmer and the salt air of the sea was
+strongly tinctured with the sweet smell of pines and forest mould.
+
+Up forward carbons sputtered and spat; a searchlight was unsheathed and
+carved the gloom as if it was butter, ranging swiftly over the tree-clad
+shore of a burnished black lagoon, picking out en passant several unpainted
+wooden structures, then steadying on a long and substantial landing stage,
+on which several men stood waiting.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+AT BASE
+
+
+As the U-boat, with motors dead and way lessening, glided up alongside
+the head of that T-shaped landing stage and was made fast, the wireless
+operator popped up from below, saluted the commander, and delivered a
+written message.
+
+Lanyard, instinctively aware that this was the expected report from
+Seventy-ninth Street on Dr. Paul Rodiek, quietly pulled himself together
+and took quick observations.
+
+At best his chances in the all-too-probable emergency were far from
+brilliant. Yet one might better perish trying, however hopelessly, than
+passively submit to being shot down.
+
+The lieutenant, waspishly superintending the work of crew and base guards
+at the mooring lines, stood preoccupied within an arm's length; while the
+landing stage was a fair six feet away. From its T-head to the shore, the
+distance was nothing less than two hundred yards.
+
+Desperate action and miraculous luck might take the Prussian by surprise
+and enable one to snatch the service automatic from its holster at his
+belt, leap to the stage, and shoot a way landward through the guards
+clustered there; after which everything would depend on swiftness of foot
+and the uncertain light permitting one to gain a refuge in the surrounding
+woodland without a bullet in one's back.
+
+It was a sorry hope....
+
+With catlike attention Lanyard watched the hands holding that paper to the
+binnacle light--large hands, heavy and muscular but tremulous with drink
+and nervous reaction from the long strain and cumulative horror of the
+cruise then ending. Their aim would not be good, except by accident. None
+the less, if the report were unfavourable, their first gesture would be
+toward the holster, signalling to Lanyard that the moment had come to
+initiate heroic measures.
+
+The Bavarian was an unconscionable time absorbing the import of the
+message. Bending his face close to the paper, the better to make out the
+writing, he read with moving lips, slowly, a doltish frown of concentration
+clouding his congested countenance.
+
+At length, however, he stood up, swaying a little as he folded and pocketed
+the paper.
+
+Lanyard relaxed. The man was too far gone in drink to be crafty, too sure
+of his absolute power of life and death to imagine a need for craft. Since
+his hand had not immediately sought the holster, it would not.
+
+Turbid accents uttered the name of Dr. Rodiek.
+
+Lanyard stepped forward alertly. "Yes, Herr Captain?"
+
+"New York says it had no knowledge of your intention to leave England on
+the _Assyrian_, but that you may well have done so. The Wilhelmstrasse will
+know, of course. It has already been telegraphed. Pending its reply, I am
+to detain you."
+
+"How long?" Lanyard demurred.
+
+"As you know, transatlantic communications must now go by land telegraph to
+the Border, by hand into Mexico, thence by radio via Venezuela to Berlin.
+All that takes time. Also, we may not signal New York but at stated times
+of night. You will be detained another twenty-four hours at least, possibly
+longer."
+
+"My errand cannot wait."
+
+"It must."
+
+"You will obstruct the business of the Imperial Government at your peril."
+
+"I would incur still greater peril did I let you go," the commander replied
+nervously. "With these swine-dogs at war with the Fatherland, our lives are
+not worth _that_ should this base be betrayed."
+
+"Do I understand America has declared war?"
+
+"Two days since. Did you not know?"
+
+"The _Assyrian's_ wireless room was under guard: the captain published no
+bulletins whatever."
+
+The Bavarian gave a gesture of impatience.
+
+"You will remain on board for the night," he announced heavily.
+
+"Pardon!" Lanyard insisted with every evidence of anxious excitement.
+"What you tell me makes it more than ever imperative that I reach New York
+without an hour's avoidable delay. I warn you, think well before you hinder
+the discharge of my duty."
+
+"It is not necessary that I think," the commander replied. "My thinking has
+all been done for me. Me, I obey my orders; it is not my part to question
+their wisdom. Moreover, Herr Doctor, to my mind your insistence is to say
+the least suspicious. Even had I discretion in the matter, I should hold
+you. Therefore, you will keep a civil tongue in your head, or go below in
+irons immediately!"
+
+He swung on his heel, showing an insolent back while he conferred with his
+subaltern.
+
+And Lanyard shrugged appreciation of the futility of more contention
+against such mulishness. Not that the Bavarian was not right enough! As to
+that, one had really hoped for no better issue; but every shift is worth
+trial till proved worthless; and he was no worse off now than if he had
+submitted without complaint. Still one had Chance to look to for aid and
+comfort in this stress; and Chance, the jade, is not always unkind to her
+audacious suitors.
+
+Even now she flashed upon Lanyard a provoking intimation of her smile.
+He began to divine possibilities in this overt ill-feeling between the
+officers; advantage might be made of the racial hostility of Prussian and
+Bavarian.
+
+The commander's attitude and tone were consistently overbearing, if his
+words were inaudible to Lanyard. The lieutenant quite evidently submitted
+only in form; his salute was punctiliously correct and curt; and as the
+commander lumbered off down the landing stage, he grumbled indistinctly in
+Lanyard's hearing:
+
+"Dog of a Bavarian!"
+
+"The good Herr Captain," Lanyard suggested pleasantly, "is not in the most
+agreeable of tempers, yes?"
+
+The high and well-born lieutenant spat comprehensively into the darkness
+overside. After a moment of hesitation he moved nearer and spoke in
+confidential accents. And the fragrant air of the night was tainted with
+the vinous effluvium of his breath.
+
+"Always he prattles of his precious duty!" the Prussian muttered. "Damn his
+duty! Look you, Herr Doctor: months we have been on this cruise, yes, more
+than three months out of Heligoland, penned together in this ramshackle
+stinkpot, or isolated here in this God-forgotten hole, seeing nothing of
+life, hearing nothing of the world but what little the radio tells
+us--sick of the very sight of one another's faces! And now, when we have
+accomplished a glorious feat and have every right to look for prompt recall
+and the rewards of heroes, orders come to remain indefinitely and operate
+against the North Atlantic fleet of the contemptible Yankee navy! The life
+of a dog! And that noble commander of mine pretends to welcome it, talks
+of one's duty to the Fatherland--as if he liked the work any better than
+I!--solely to spite me!"
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Because he hates me," the lieutenant snarled passionately--"hates me even
+as I hate him--he knows how well!"
+
+He interrupted himself to define his conception of the commander's
+character in the freest vernacular of the Berlin underworld.
+
+Lanyard laughed amiably. "They are like that," he agreed--"those
+Bavarians!"
+
+Which inspired the Prussian to deliver a phosphorescent diatribe on the
+racial traits of the Bavarian people as comprehended by the North German
+junker.
+
+"To be cooped up God knows how long in this putrescent death-trap with such
+cattle," he concluded mutinously--"it passes all endurance!"
+
+"I wonder you stand it," Lanyard sympathised--"a man of spirit and good
+birth, as one readily perceives. Though the life of a secret agent is not
+altogether heavenly either, if you ask me," he added gratuitously. "Regard
+me now, charged with a mission of most vital moment--more than ever so
+since the Yankees have shown their teeth--delayed here indefinitely because
+your excellent Herr Captain chooses to doubt my word."
+
+"Patience. Maybe your release comes quickly. Then he will regret--or would
+had he wit enough. There is no cure for a fool." The sententiousness of
+this aphorism was unhappily marred by a hiccough. "Anybody with eyes in his
+head could see you are what you are...."
+
+The last of the operating-room crew piled up the hatchway, saluted, and
+hurried ashore to join in noisy jubilations. There remained on the U-boat
+only the lieutenant with Lanyard, and two base guards detailed as anchor
+watch.
+
+"I must go," the lieutenant volunteered. "And believe me, one welcomes a
+change of clothing and a dry bed after a week in this reeking sieve. As for
+you, my friend, if it lay with me, you should receive the treatment due
+a gentleman." A wave of maudlin camaraderie affected him. He passed an
+affectionate arm through Lanyard's and was suffered, though the gorge of
+the adventurer revolted at the familiarity. "I am sorry to leave you. No,
+do not be astonished! No protestations, please! It is quite true. I know a
+man of the right sort when I meet one, the sort even I can associate with
+without loss of self-respect. It is a great pity you may not come with me
+and make a night of it."
+
+"Another time, perhaps," Lanyard said. "The night may yet come when you and
+I shall meet at the Metropole or the Admiral's Palace.... Who knows?"
+
+"Ah!" sighed the Prussian, enchanted. "What a night that will be, my
+friend!... But now, it is too bad, I really must ask you to step below.
+Such are my silly orders. I am made responsible for you. What do you think
+of that for a joke, eh?"
+
+He laughed vacantly but loudly, and, attempting to poke a derisive thumb
+into Lanyard's ribs, lost his balance.
+
+"What a responsibility!" said Lanyard gravely, holding him up.
+
+"Nonsense, that's what it is. You have no possible chance to escape."
+
+"Suppose I make one--tip you overboard, take to my heels--?"
+
+"You would be shot like a rabbit before you got half way to the shore."
+
+"Ah, but grant, for the sake of argument, that these brave fellows, the
+guards, aim poorly in this gloom?"
+
+"Where would you go? Into the forest, naturally. But how far? You may
+believe me when I tell you, not a hundred yards. It's a true wilderness,
+scrub-oak and cedar and second growth choked with underbrush, almost
+trackless. In five minutes you would be helplessly lost, in this blackness,
+with no stars to steer by. We need only wait till daylight to find you
+walking in a circle."
+
+"You can't mean," Lanyard pursued, learning something helpful every moment,
+"there is no communicating road?"
+
+"The main woods road, yes: but that is far too well patrolled. Without the
+countersign, you would be caught or shot a dozen times before you reached
+the end of it."
+
+"Ah, well!"--with the sigh of a philosopher--"then I presume there's no way
+out but by swimming."
+
+"Over to the beach you mean? Well, what then? You have got a twenty-mile
+walk either way through deep sand sure to betray your footprints. At dawn
+we follow and bag you at our leisure."
+
+"You are discouraging!" Lanyard complained. "I see I may as well go below
+and be good. It's a dull life."
+
+"Tell you what," giggled the lieutenant, leading his prisoner to the
+conning-tower hatch and lowering his voice: "do just that, go below and be
+nice, and presently I will come back and we'll split a bottle. What do you
+say to that, eh?"
+
+"Colossal!"
+
+"Not a bad notion, is it? I like it myself. One gets weary for the society
+of a gentleman, you've no idea.... As soon as my commander is drunk enough,
+I will slip away. How's that?"
+
+"Grossartig!" Lanyard approved, turning to descend.
+
+"Wait. You shall see for yourself what it means to have the friendship of
+a man of my stamp." The lieutenant raised his voice, addressing the anchor
+watch: "Attention. Heed with care: this gentleman is my friend. He is
+detained merely as a matter of form. I do not wish him to be annoyed. Do
+you understand? You are to leave him to himself as long as he remains
+quietly below. But he is not to come on deck again till I return. Is all
+that clear, imbeciles?"
+
+The imbeciles, saluting mechanically, indicated glimmerings of
+comprehension.
+
+"Then below you go, Dr. Rodiek. And don't get impatient: I will rejoin you
+as soon as possible."
+
+"Don't be long," Lanyard implored.
+
+As he lowered himself through the hatch he saw the Prussian stumble down
+the gangplank and reel shoreward.
+
+Well satisfied with his diplomacy, Lanyard lingered a while in the conning
+tower, closely studying and memorising the more salient features of the
+Island of Martha's Vineyard and its adjacent waters and mainland as
+delineated on a most comprehensive large-scale chart published by the
+German Admiralty from exhaustive soundings and surveys of its own
+navigators and typographers, with corrections of as recent date as the
+first part of the year 1917.
+
+Here the breach in the south coast line which permitted the utilisation
+of what had formerly been an extensive fresh-water pond as this secret
+submarine base, was clearly shown. And a single glance confirmed the
+lieutenant's statement concerning its remote isolation from settled
+sections of the island.
+
+Somewhat dismayed, Lanyard descended to the central operating compartment
+and scouted through the hold from bow bulkhead to stern, making certain he
+enjoyed undisputed privacy. And it was so; every man-jack of the U-boat's
+personnel--jaded to the marrow with its cramped accommodations, unremitting
+toil and care, unsanitary smells and forbidding associations--having
+naturally seized the earliest opportunity to escape so loathsome a prison.
+
+Lanyard, however, was anything but resentful of condemnation to this
+solitary confinement. His interest in the interior arrangements of
+submersibles seemed all but feverish, as intense as sudden; witness the
+minute attention to detail which marked his second tour of inspection. On
+this round he took his time. He had all night in which to work out his
+salvation; the wildest schemes were revolving in his mind, the least
+fantastic utterly impracticable without accurate knowledge of many matters;
+and such knowledge might be gained only through patient investigation and
+ungrudging expenditure of time.
+
+It was now something past ten by the chronometers. He could hardly do much
+before dawn, lacking the instinct of a red Indian to guide him through
+that night-bound waste of woodland. So he felt little need to slight his
+researches through haste, except in anticipation of his lieutenant's
+return. And as to that, Lanyard was moderately incredulous: he expected to
+see nothing more of this new-found friend, unless the infatuation of the
+Prussian proved far stronger than his head.
+
+Turning first to the private quarters of the commander, a somewhat more
+commodious cubicle than that across the alleyway in which Lanyard had been
+berthed, his interest was attracted by a small safe anchored to the deck
+beneath the desk.
+
+To this Lanyard addressed himself without hesitation, solving the secret
+of its combination readily through exercise of the most rudimentary of
+professional principles. The problem it offered, indeed, was child's play
+to such cunning of touch and hearing as had made the reputation of the Lone
+Wolf.
+
+Open, the safe discovered to him a variety of articles of interest:
+some five thousand dollars in English and American banknotes of large
+denomination, several hundred in American gold; three distinct cipher
+codes, one of these wholly novel in Lanyard's experience and so, he
+believed, in the knowledge of the Allied secret services; the log of the
+U-boat and the intimate diary of its commander, both in cryptograph; a
+compact directory of German agents domiciled in Atlantic coast ports; a
+very considerable accumulation of German Admiralty orders; together with
+many documents of lesser moment.
+
+Rapidly sorting out the more valuable of these, Lanyard disposed them about
+his person, then confiscated the banknotes as indemnity for his stolen
+money-belt, replaced the rejections, and reclosed and locked the safe.
+
+His next interest was to arm himself. After several disappointments he
+discovered arms-lockers beneath the berths for the crew in the forward
+compartment just aft of that devoted to torpedo tubes. Here he selected
+a latest pattern German navy automatic pistol with three extra cartridge
+clips and, after some hesitation, a peculiarly devilish magazine rifle
+firing explosive bullets. The latter he placed handily, yet out of sight,
+near the foot of the companion ladder. The pistol fitted snugly a trousers
+pocket, its bulk hidden by the sag of his sweater....
+
+Some time later the lieutenant, slipping down the ladder, found Lanyard
+studying with a convincing aspect of childlike bewilderment the complicated
+combinations of machinery which crowded the central operating compartment.
+
+Fresh from a bath and shave and wearing a clean uniform, the Prussian
+showed vast improvement in looks if not in equilibrium. But his mouth
+twitched fitfully, his eyes wandered and disclosed a disquieting
+superabundance of white, and his tongue was noticeably thicker than before.
+
+"Well, my friend!" he said--"you are truly disappointing. The watch said
+you had made no sound since going below. I was afraid of another of those
+famous naps of yours."
+
+"With the prospect of a bottle with you? Impossible! I have been waiting
+and waiting, with my tongue hanging out."
+
+"Too bad. Why did you not look around, help yourself? Why not?" the
+lieutenant demanded. "Have I not given you freedom of ship? It is yours,
+everything here 'yours!"
+
+"I want nothing but an end to this great thirst," Lanyard protested.
+
+"Then--God in Heaven!--why we standing here? Come!"
+
+Releasing the handrail the Prussian took careful aim for the alleyway door,
+launched himself toward it, slipped on the greasy metal grating, and would
+have fallen heavily but for Lanyard.
+
+Cursing pettishly, he stood up, threw off Lanyard's arms without thanks,
+and made a new attempt, this time shooting headlong through the alleyway,
+to bring up against the wing table in the third forward compartment, the
+kitchen and messroom in one.
+
+"A great pity," he muttered, opening a locker and fumbling in its
+depths--"rotten pity...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Keep you waiting so long. Not my fault." The lieutenant brought forth two
+bottles of champagne and one of brandy. "You open them, Herr Doctor, like
+'good fellow," he said, placing the three on the table. "I just wish you
+'understand no discourtesy meant ... unavoidably detained ... beastly
+commander ... drunk. Give 'my word, hopelessly drunk. Poor fool...."
+
+"If my judgment is sound," Lanyard said, "this noble vessel will soon need
+a new commander."
+
+"True. Quite true." The Prussian placed two aluminium cups upon the table
+and half filled one with brandy, then brimmed it with champagne. "Try
+that," he said thickly, "That will keep your tail up, my friend."
+
+"Many thanks," Lanyard protested, filling another cup with undiluted
+champagne. "I prefer one thing at a time."
+
+"Unfortunate ... don't know what is good ... King's peg ... wonderful
+drink. No matter. To 'new commander--prosit!"
+
+He drained his cup at a gulp.
+
+"To the new commander!" Lanyard echoed, and drank judiciously.
+"Excellent.... How long can he last, do you think, at this pace?"
+
+"No telling--not long--too long for my liking. Shall I tell 'something?"
+He filled his cup again, half and half, and sat down, his wicked, rat-like
+face more than ever pale and repulsive. "Not 'whisper of this, mind--though
+I think 'crew sometimes suspects: he's going mad!"
+
+"Not that Bavarian?"
+
+The lieutenant nodded wisely. "If 'knew him as I know him, 'never be
+surprised, my friend. You think too much drink. Yes, but not entirely. He
+keeps seeing things, hearing them, especially by night."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+"Faces." The Prussian licked his lips, glanced furtively over his shoulder,
+and drank. "Dead faces, eyes eaten out, seaweed in their hair.... And
+voices--he's forever hearing voices ... people trying to talk, 'can't
+make him understand because 'mouths 'full of water, you know. But they
+understand one another, keep discussing how to get at him.... He tells me
+about it ... I tell you, it is Hell to hear him talk ... especially when
+submerged, as last night. Then he hears them fumbling all over the hull
+with their stumpy fingers, trying to find 'way in, talking about him. And
+he tells me, and keeps insisting, till sometimes I seem to hear them, too.
+But I don't. Before God, I don't! You don't believe I do, do you?"
+
+His eyes rolled wildly.
+
+"Why should you?"
+
+"Just so: why should I?" The lieutenant's accents rose to a shrill pitch.
+"I have not his record ... still in training when he sent _Lusitania_ to
+the bottom. Yes: it was he, second-in-command, in charge of torpedo tubes.
+His own hand fired that torpedo...."
+
+He fell silent, staring moodily into his cup, perhaps thinking of the
+number of torpedoes it had been his own lot to discharge upon errands of
+slaughter.
+
+And the dead silence of the ship was made audible by a stealthy drip-drip
+of water from the seams, and the furtive slaver of the tide on the outer
+plates.
+
+A shiver ran through the body of the Prussian. He pulled himself together
+with obvious effort, looked up with an uncertain grin, and passed a shaking
+hand across his writhing lips.
+
+"All foolishness, of course, but 'gets on one's nerves ... constant
+association with man like that.... 'Know what he's doing now, or was, when
+I came away? Sitting up with doors and windows locked and blinds drawn,
+drinking brandy neat. He can't sleep by night if sober, or without 'light
+in the room. If he does, he knows they will get him ... people he hears
+crawling up from the sea, slopping round the house, mumbling, whimpering in
+the dark--"
+
+He broke off abruptly, with a whisper more dreadful than a
+shriek--"_God_!"--and jumped to his feet, whipping the automatic from his
+belt.
+
+A footfall sounded in one of the after compartments. Others followed.
+
+Someone was coming slowly down the alleyway, someone with dragging, heavy
+feet.
+
+The lieutenant waited motionless, as one petrified with terror.
+
+The bulkhead doorway framed the figure of the commander. He paused there,
+louring at his subaltern with haunted eyes ablaze in a face like parchment.
+
+"So!" he said, nodding. "As I thought. It is thus I find you, fraternising
+with one who may be, for all we know, an enemy to the Fatherland. You
+drunken, babbling fool! Get ashore!" His angry foot thumped the grating.
+"Get ashore, and report yourself under arrest!"
+
+With no more warning than a strangled snarl, the lieutenant shot him
+through the head.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+UNDER THE ROSE
+
+
+Vague stupefaction replaced the scowl upon the countenance of the
+commander. He swayed, a hand faltering to his forehead, where dark blood
+was beginning to well from a cleanly drilled puncture. Then he collapsed
+completely, falling prone across the raised sill of the bulkhead opening. A
+convulsive tremor shook savagely his huge frame.
+
+Thereafter he was quite still.
+
+The report of that one shot had reverberated stunningly within those narrow
+walls of steel. Momentarily Lanyard looked to see the alarmed anchor watch
+appear; so too, apparently, the lieutenant, who remained immobile, pistol
+poised in a hand for the moment strangely steady, gaze fixed upon the mouth
+of the alleyway.
+
+But through a long minute no other sounds were audible than that ceaseless
+dripping from frames and seams, with that muted, terrible mouthing of
+waters on the plates.
+
+Unable either to fathom or forecast the workings of the drink-maddened
+mentality masked by that rat-like face, Lanyard waited with a hand covertly
+grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment
+that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not
+yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast of a Boche.
+
+Slowly the arm of the lieutenant dropped, lowering the pistol till its
+muzzle chattered on the top of the table: a noise that broke the spell upon
+his senses. He looked down in dull brutish wonder, then roused and with a
+gesture of horror let the weapon fall clattering.
+
+His glance shifting to the body of his commander, he started violently,
+backing up against the plates to put all possible distance between himself
+and his handiwork. His lips moved, framing phrases at first incoherent,
+presently articulate in part:
+
+"... _done it at last!... Knew I must soon_...."
+
+Abruptly he looked up at Lanyard.
+
+"Bear witness," he cried: "I was provoked beyond human endurance. He
+insulted me in your presence ... me!... that scum!"
+
+Lanyard said nothing, but met his gaze with a blank, non-committal stare,
+under which the eyes of the lieutenant wavered and fell.
+
+Then with a start he realised anew the significance of that still figure at
+his feet, and tried to shake some of the swagger back into his wretched,
+fear-racked being.
+
+"A good job!" he muttered defiantly. "And you will stand by me, I know....
+Only there is nothing in that, of course, no justification possible before
+a court martial. Even your testimony could not save me ... I am done for,
+utterly...."
+
+He hung his head. Lanyard heard whispered words: "_degraded," "dishonour,"
+"firing squad_"....
+
+A chronometer in the central operating compartment tolled eight bells.
+
+With a sharp cry the lieutenant dropped to his knees. "He can't be dead!"
+he shrilled. "It is all play-acting, to frighten me!"
+
+Frantically he sought to turn the body over.
+
+Lanyard's hand shot swiftly out, capturing the automatic on the table. With
+rapid and sure gestures he extracted and pocketed the clip, drew back the
+breech, ejecting into his palm the one shell in the barrel, and replaced
+the weapon, all before the Prussian gave over his insane efforts to
+resurrect the dead.
+
+"He is dead enough," he announced, eyeing Lanyard morosely--"beyond
+helping.... Look here; are you with me or against me?"
+
+"Need you ask?"
+
+"I count on you, then. Good. I think we can cover this up."
+
+He checked and stood for a while lost in thought.
+
+"How?" Lanyard roused him.
+
+"Simply enough: I go on deck, send the watch ashore on some trumped-up
+errand. They suspect nothing, thinking the commander and I have you in
+charge. If they heard that shot, I will say one of us dropped a bottle
+of champagne, and it exploded.... When they are gone, I bring the dory
+alongside; and with your help it should be an easy matter to carry this
+body up, weight it, row it out to the middle of the lagoon, dump it
+overboard. Then we return. Our story is, the commander followed the anchor
+watch ashore; if later he wandered off, got lost in the woods in his
+alcoholic delirium, that is no affair of ours. Do you understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," said Lanyard with a look of fatuous innocence. "But how about
+the water--is it deep enough?"
+
+The Prussian took no pains to dissemble his scorn of this question,
+seemingly so witless. "To cover the body? Why, even here there is
+sufficient depth at low tide for us to submerge completely, barring the
+periscopes. And it is deeper yet in the middle."
+
+"Thanks," Lanyard replied meekly.
+
+"Have another drink? No?" The Prussian tossed off a half cupful of
+undiluted brandy, and shuddered. "Then stop here. I'll be back in a--"
+
+"Half a minute." The lieutenant halted in the act of stepping across the
+body. Lanyard levelled a hand at the automatic. "Do you mind taking that
+with you? I have no desire to be found here with it and a dead man, should
+anything prevent your return."
+
+With a sickly grimace the murderer snatched up the weapon, thrust it in its
+holster, and hurriedly departed.
+
+Lanyard watched him pass through the alleyway and turn toward the companion
+ladder, then followed quietly.
+
+As the lieutenant climbed out on deck, Lanyard ascended to the conning
+tower and waited there, listening. He could not quite make out what was
+said; but after a few brusque words of command two pair of boots rang on
+the gangplank and thumped away down the stage. At the same time Lanyard let
+himself noiselessly out through the hatch.
+
+As soon as his vision grew reconciled to the change from light to darkness,
+he discovered the slender figure of the lieutenant skulking on tip-toe
+after the retreating anchor watch; about midway on the landing stage,
+however, he paused and bent over one of the piles, apparently fumbling with
+the painter of a small boat moored in the black shadows below.
+
+At this Lanyard began to move along the deck, one by one working the
+mooring lines clear of their cleats and dropping them gently overboard,
+till but two were left to hold the U-boat in place.
+
+Throughout he kept watch upon the manoeuvres of the lieutenant--saw him
+drop over the side of the stage, heard a thump of feet as he landed in a
+boat, and a subsequent creak of oar-locks.
+
+The small boat was rounding the bows of the submarine when the adventurer
+ducked back through conning tower to hold.
+
+He was standing where he had been left when the lieutenant came below.
+
+"It's all right," this last announced with shabby bravado as he stepped
+over the body in the doorway. "We are rid of that damned watch for a time.
+They won't return within half an hour at least. I have the dory moored
+amidships. If we are lively, this dirty job will be over in no time at
+all."
+
+Lanyard nodded. "I am ready."
+
+"No need to hurry--plenty of time for one more drink." The Prussian
+splashed brandy into the cup, filling it to the brim. "And God knows I need
+it!"
+
+Lanyard watched critically as, with head well back, he drained that
+staggering dose of raw spirit gulp by gulp without once removing the cup
+from his lips. No mortal man could drink like that and stand up under it:
+it was now a mere question of time....
+
+Hardly that: the hand of the murderer shook and wavered widely as he put
+down the cup. For a moment he swayed with eyes fixed and glazing, features
+visibly losing plasticity, then lurched forward, knocking the brandy bottle
+to the floor, swung around a full half turn in blind effort to re-establish
+equilibrium, fell backward upon the table, and lay racked from head to foot
+with savage spasms, hands clawing empty air, chest labouring vainly to win
+sufficient oxygen to combat the poison with which his system was saturated.
+
+Moving to his side, Lanyard laid a hand upon the left breast. The man's
+heart was hammering his ribs with agonizing blows, at first rapid, by
+degrees more slow and feeble.
+
+No power on earth could save him now: he had committed suicide as surely as
+murder.
+
+Wasting not another glance or thought upon him Lanyard hurried aft to the
+central operating room.
+
+The time he had spent there, an hour earlier, was by no means lost in
+purposeless marvelling. He boasted a certain aptitude for mechanics,
+perhaps legitimately inherited from that obscure origin of his, largely
+fostered by the requirements of his craft; into the bargain, he had been
+privileged ere now to gain some slight insight into the principles of
+submersible operation. If obliged to work swiftly and in some instances
+upon the advice of intuition rather than practical knowledge, he went not
+unintelligently about his task, made few false moves.
+
+Turning first to the diving controls, he adjusted the hydroplanes to their
+extreme downward inclination, then made the rounds of the vent valves,
+opening all wide. With a sharp hissing and whistling the air from the
+auxiliary tanks was driven inboard, and as Lanyard manipulated the wheels
+operating the forward and aft groups of Kingston valves, to the hissing was
+added the suck and gurgle of water flooding the main and auxiliary ballast
+and adjusting tanks.
+
+Immediately the U-boat began to sink. Lanyard delayed only to close the
+switches which controlled the electric motors. As their drone gained volume
+he grasped the rifle and swarmed up the companion-ladder, passing through
+the conning tower to deck with little or nothing to spare--with, in fact,
+barely time to throw off the two mooring lines and jump into the small boat
+before water, sweeping hungrily up over deck and bridge, began to cascade
+through conning tower and torpedo hatchways.
+
+Constrained to cut the painter lest the dory be drawn down with the
+fast-sinking submarine, he fitted oars to locks and put his back to them,
+swinging the small boat hastily clear of whirlpools which formed as the
+waves closed over the spot where the U-boat had rested.
+
+From first to last less than five minutes' activity had been needed for
+the task of scotching this water-moccasin of the salt seas and putting its
+keepers at the mercy of the country whose hospitality they had too long
+abused.
+
+Well content, after a little, Lanyard lay on his oars and contemplated with
+much interest what the night permitted to be visible: the landing stage, no
+more than a dark, vague mass in the darkness; the land picked out with but
+few lights, mainly at windows of the base buildings, painting dim ribbons
+upon the polished floor of the lagoon.
+
+Methodically these were eclipsed as a moving figure passed before them.
+
+Listening intently, Lanyard could distinguish the slow footfalls of an
+unsuspecting sentry--no other sounds, more than gentle voices of the night:
+murmurs of blind wavelets, the plaintive whisper of a little breeze belated
+amid the tree-tops of that dark forest, and a slow, weary soughing of
+swells upon the distant ocean shore.
+
+Perceiving as yet not the slightest indication of an alarm ashore, Lanyard
+ventured to continue rowing, but with utmost caution, lifting and dipping
+his blades as gingerly as though they were fashioned of brittle glass, and
+for want of a better guide keeping the stern of the dory square to the
+shank of the T-stage.
+
+In time the bows grounded lightly on sand. The melancholy voice of the sea
+now seemed a heavier sighing in the stillness. He pushed off and rowed on
+parallel with a dark shore line, so close in that his starboard oar touched
+bottom at each stroke.
+
+At intervals he paused and rested, striving vainly to garner some clue to
+his bearings. Inexorably the blackness forbade that. He might have failed
+ere dawn to grope a way out of that trap had not the disappearance of the
+submarine been discovered within the hour.
+
+A sudden clamour rose in the quarter of the landing stage, first one great
+shout of dismay, then two voices bellowing together, then others. Several
+rifle-shots were fired in the air. More lights broke out in windows ashore.
+Many feet drummed resoundingly upon the stage, and the confusion of voices
+attained a pitch of wild, hysteric uproar. Of a sudden a flare was lighted
+and tossed far out upon the bosom of the lagoon.
+
+Surprised by that sharp and merciless blue glare, Lanyard instinctively
+shipped oars and picked up the rifle. He could see so clearly that
+huddle of figures upon the head of the landing stage that he confidently
+apprehended being fired upon at any moment; but minutes lengthened and
+he was not. Either the Germans were looking for bigger game than a dory
+adrift, or the dazzling flare hindered more than aided their vision.
+
+At length persuaded that he had not been detected, Lanyard put aside the
+rifle and resumed the oars. Now his course was made beautifully clear to
+him: the blue light showed him that outlet to the sea which he sought
+within a hundred yards' distance.
+
+Presently the flare began to wane. It was not renewed. Altogether unseen,
+unsuspected, Lanyard swung the dory into the breach, and drove it seaward
+with all his might.
+
+Swiftly the lagoon was shut out by narrow closing banks. The blue glare
+died out behind a black profile of rounded dunes. Lanyard turned the bow
+eastward, rowing broadside to the shore.
+
+After something more than an hour of this mode of progress, he struck in
+toward the beach, disembarked in ankle-deep waters, slung the rifle over
+his shoulder by its strap and, pushing the dory off, abandoned it to the
+whim of the sea.
+
+Then again he set his face to the east, following the contour of the beach
+just within the wash of the tide: thereby making sure that there should
+be no trail of footprints in the sand to guide a possible pursuit in the
+morning.
+
+The rising sun found him purposefully splashing on, weary but enheartened
+by the discovery that he had left behind the more thickly wooded section of
+the island.
+
+Presently, turning in to the dry beach for the first time, he climbed
+to the summit of a dune somewhat higher than its fellows, and took
+observations, finding that he had come near to the eastern extremity of the
+island.
+
+At some distance to his right a wagon road, faintly rutted in sand and
+overgrown with beach grass, struck inland.
+
+Following this at a venture, he came, at about eight o'clock, upon the
+outskirts of a waterside community.
+
+Before proceeding he hid the magazine rifle in a thicket, then made a wide
+detour, and picked up a roadway which entered the village from the north.
+
+If his disreputable appearance was calculated to excite comment, readiness
+in disbursing money to remedy such shortcomings made amends for Lanyard's
+taciturnity. Within two hours, shaved, bathed, and inconspicuously dressed
+in a cheap suit of ready-made clothing, he was breakfasting famously upon
+the plain fare of a commercial tavern.
+
+The town, he learned, was the one-time important whaling port of Edgartown.
+He would be able to leave for the mainland on a ferry steamer sailing early
+in the afternoon.
+
+Ten minutes before going abroad he filed a long telegram in code addressed
+to the head of the British Secret Service in New York....
+
+Consequences manifold and various ensued.
+
+When the telegram had been delivered and decoded--both transactions being
+marked by reasonable promptitude--the head of the British Secret Service
+in New York called the British Embassy in Washington on the long distance
+telephone.
+
+Shortly thereafter an attache of the British Embassy jumped into a
+motor-car and had himself driven to one of the cardinal departments of the
+Federal Government.
+
+When he had kicked his heels in an antechamber upward of an hour, he was
+received, affably enough, by the head of the department, a smug, open-faced
+gentleman whose mood was largely preoccupied with illusions of grandeur,
+who was, in short, interested far more in considering how splendid it was
+to be himself than in hearing about any mare's-nest of a German U-boat base
+on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard.
+
+He was, however, indulgent enough to promise to give the matter his
+distinguished consideration in due course.
+
+He even went so far as to have his secretary make a note of what alleged
+information this young Englishman had to impart.
+
+During the night he chanced to wake up and recall the matter, and concluded
+that, all things considered, it would do no harm to give the United States
+Navy a little amusement and exercise, even if it should turn out that the
+rumour of this submarine base was a canard.
+
+So, the next morning, he went to his desk some time before noon, and issued
+a lot of orders. One of them had to do with the necessity for absolute
+secrecy.
+
+During the day several minor officials of the department might have been,
+and indeed were, observed going about their business with painfully
+tight-lipped expressions.
+
+Also many messages were transmitted by wireless, telephone, and telegraph,
+to various persons charged with the defense of the Atlantic Coast; some of
+these were code messages, some were not.
+
+That same night a great forest fire sprang up on the south shore of
+Martha's Vineyard, both preceded and accompanied by a series of heavy
+explosions.
+
+The first United States vessel to reach the lagoon found only charred
+remains of a landing stage and several buildings and, at the bottom of the
+lagoon, an incoherent mass of wreckage, a twisted and shattered chaos of
+steel plates and framework that might possibly have been a perfectly sound
+submarine, though sunken, had somebody not been warned in ample time
+to permit its destruction through the agency of trinitrotoluene, that
+enormously efficient modern explosive nicknamed by British military and
+naval experts "T.N.T.," and by the Germans "Trotyl."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+RESURRECTION
+
+
+The early editions of those New York evening newspapers which Lanyard
+purchased in Providence, when he changed trains there en route from New
+Bedford to New York, carried multi-column and most picturesque accounts of
+the _Assyrian_ disaster.
+
+But the whole truth was in none.
+
+Lanyard laid aside the last paper privately satisfied that, for no-doubt
+praiseworthy reasons of its own, Washington had seen fit to dictate the
+suppression of a number of extremely pertinent circumstances and facts
+which could hardly have escaped governmental knowledge.
+
+Already, one inferred, a sort of censorship was at work, an effective if
+comparatively modest precursor to that noble volunteer committee which was
+presently with touching spontaneity to fasten itself upon an astonished
+Ship of State before it could gather enough way to escape such cirripede
+attachments.
+
+Presumably it was not thought wise to disconcert a great people, in the
+complacence of its awakening to the fact that it was remotely at war with
+the Hun, with information that a Boche submersible was, or of late had
+been, operating in the neighbourhood of Nantucket.
+
+Unanimously the sinking of the _Assyrian_ was ascribed to an internal
+explosion of unknown origin. No paper hinted that German secret agents
+might possibly have figured incogniti among her passengers. There was
+mention neither of the flare which had burned on her after deck to make
+the _Assyrian_ a conspicuous target in the night, nor of any of the other
+untoward events which had led up to the explosion. Nothing whatever
+was said of the shot fired at the submerging U-boat by a United States
+torpedo-boat destroyer speeding to the rescue.
+
+Still, the bare facts alone were sufficiently appalling. Reading what had
+been permitted to gain publication, Lanyard experienced a qualm of horror
+together with the thought that, even had he drowned as he had expected to
+drown, such a fate had almost been preferable to participation in those
+awful ten minutes precipitated by that pale messenger of death which had so
+narrowly missed Lanyard himself as he rested on the bosom of the sea.
+
+Within ten minutes after receiving her coup de grace the _Assyrian_ had
+gone under; barely that much time had been permitted a passenger list of
+seventy-two and a personnel of nearly three hundred souls in which to rouse
+from dreams of security and take to the lifeboats.
+
+Thanks to the frenzied haste compelled by the swift settling of the ship,
+more than one boat had been capsized. Others had been sunk--literally
+driven under--by masses of humanity cascading into them from slanting
+decks. Others, again, had never been launched at all.
+
+The utmost efforts of the destroyer, fortuitously so near at hand, had
+served to rescue but thirty-one passengers and one hundred and eighty of
+the crew.
+
+In the list of survivors Lanyard found these names:
+
+  Becker, Julius--New York
+  Brooke, Cecelia--London
+  Crane, Robert T.--New York
+  Dressier, Emil--Geneva
+  O'Reilly, Edmund--Detroit
+  Putnam, Bartlett--Philadelphia
+  Velasco, Arturo--Buenos Aires
+
+Among the injured, Lieutenant Lionel Thackeray, D.S.O., was listed as
+suffering from concussion of the brain, said to have been contracted
+through a fall while attempting to aid the launching of a lifeboat.
+
+In the long roster of the drowned these names appeared:
+
+  Bartholomew, Archer--London
+  Duchemin, Andre--Paris
+  Von Harden, Baron Gustav--Amsterdam
+  Osborne, Captain E. W.--London
+
+Of all the officers, Mr. Sherry was a solitary survivor, fished out of the
+sea after going down with his ship.
+
+No list boasted the name "Karl."
+
+Lacking accommodations for the rescued, it was stated, the destroyer had
+summoned by wireless the east-bound freight steamship _Saratoga_, which had
+trans-shipped the unfortunates and turned back to New York....
+
+Throughout the best part of that journey from Providence to New York
+Lanyard sat blankly staring into the black mirror of the window beside
+his chair, revolving schemes for his immediate future in the light of
+information derived, indirectly as much as directly, from these newspaper
+stories.
+
+Retrospective consideration of that voyage left little room for doubt that
+the designs of the German agents had been thoughtfully matured. They had
+been quiet enough between their first stroke in the dark and their last,
+between the burglary of Cecelia Brooke's stateroom the first night out and
+those murderous attacks on Bartholomew and Thackeray. Unquestionably,
+had they bided their time pending that hour when, according to their
+information, the submersible would be off Nantucket, awaiting their signal
+to sink the _Assyrian_--a signal which would never have been given had
+their plans proved successful, had they not made the ship too hot to hold
+them, and finally had they not made every provision for their own escape
+when the ship went down.
+
+Lanyard was confident that all of their company had been warned to hold
+themselves ready, and consequently had come off scot free--all, that is,
+save that victim of treachery, the unhappy Baron von Harden.
+
+If the number of that group which Lanyard had selected as comprising a
+majority of his enemies, those nine who had discussed the Lone Wolf in the
+smoking room, was now reduced to five--Becker, Dressier, O'Reilly, Putnam,
+and Velasco--or four, eliminating Putnam, of whose loyalty there could be
+no question--Lanyard still had no means of knowing how many confederates
+among the other passengers these four might not have had.
+
+And even four men who appreciated what peril to their plans inhered in the
+Lone Wolf, even four made a ponderable array of desperate enemies to have
+at large in New York, apt to be encountered at any corner, apt at any time
+to espy and recognise him without his knowledge.
+
+This situation imposed upon him two major tasks of immediate moment: he
+must hunt down those four one by one and either satisfy himself as to their
+innocence of harmful intent or put them permanently _hors de combat_; and
+he must extinguish utterly, once and for all time, that amiable personality
+whose brief span had been restricted to the decks of the _Assyrian_,
+Monsieur Andre Duchemin.
+
+That one must be buried deep, beyond all peradventure of involuntary
+resurrection.
+
+Fortunately the last step toward the positive metamorphosis indicated had
+been taken that very morning, when the Gallic beard of Monsieur Duchemin
+was erased by the razor of a New England barber, whose shears had likewise
+eradicated every trace of a Continental mode of hair-dressing. There
+remained about Lanyard little to remind of Andre Duchemin but his eyes; and
+the look of one's eyes, as every good actor knows, is something far more
+easy to disguise than is commonly believed.
+
+But it was hardly in human nature not to mourn the untimely demise of so
+useful a body, one who carried such beautiful credentials and serviceable
+letters of introduction, whose character boasted so much charm with a
+solitary fault--too facile vulnerability to the prying eyes of those to
+whom Paris meant those days and social strata in which Michael Lanyard
+had moved and had his being. Witness--according to Crane--the demoniac
+cleverness of the Brazilian in unmasking the Duchemin incognito.
+
+Suspicion was taking form in Lanyard's reflections that he had paid far
+too little attention to Senor Arturo Velasco of Buenos Aires, whose
+avowed avocation of amateur criminologist might easily be synonymous with
+interests much less innocuous.
+
+Or why had Velasco been so quick to communicate recognition of Lanyard to
+an employee of the United States Secret Service?
+
+For that matter, why had he felt called so publicly to descant upon the
+natural history of the Lone Wolf? In order to focus upon that one the
+attentions of his enemies? Or to put him on guard?
+
+It was altogether perplexing. Was one to esteem Velasco friend or foe?
+
+Lanyard could comfort himself only with the promise he should one day know,
+and that without undue delay.
+
+Alighting in Grand Central Terminus late at night, he made his way to
+Forty-second Street and there, in the staring headlines of a "Late Extra,"
+read the news that the steamship _Saratoga_ had suffered a crippling
+engine-room accident and was limping slowly toward port, still something
+like eighteen hours out.
+
+Wondering if it were presumption to construe this as an omen that the stars
+in their courses fought for him, Lanyard went west to Broadway afoot, all
+the way beset with a sense of incredulity; it was difficult to believe that
+he was himself, alive and at large in this city of wonder and space, where
+people moved at leisure and without fear on broad streets that resembled
+deep-bitten channels for rivers of light. He was all too wont with nights
+of dread and trembling, with the mediaeval gloom that enwrapped the cities
+of Europe by night, their grim black streets desolate but for a few,
+infrequent, scurrying shapes of fright.... While here the very beggars
+walked with heads unbowed, and men and women of happier estate laughed and
+played and made love lightly in the scampering taxis that whisked them
+homeward from restaurants of the feverish midnight.
+
+A people at war, actually at grips with the Blond Beast, arrayed to
+defend itself and all humanity against conquest by that loathsome incubus
+incarnate, a people heedless, carefree, irresponsible, refusing to credit
+its peril....
+
+Here and there a recruiting poster, down the broad reaches of Fifth Avenue
+a display of bunting, no other hint of war-time spirit and gravity....
+
+Longacre Square, a weltering lake of kaleidoscopic radiance, even at this
+late hour thronged with carnival crowds, not one note of sobriety in the
+night....
+
+Lanyard lifted a wondering gaze to the livid sky whose far, clear stars
+were paled and shamed by the up-flung glare, like eyes of innocence peering
+down into a pit of hell.
+
+Inscrutable!
+
+Yet one could hardly be numb to the subtle, heady intoxication of those
+cool, immaculate, sea-sweet airs which swept the streets, instilling
+self-confidence and lightness of spirit even in heads shadowed with the woe
+of war-worn Europe.
+
+Lanyard had not crossed the Avenue before he found himself walking with a
+brisker stride, holding his own head high....
+
+On impulse, despite the lateness of the hour, albeit with misgivings
+justified in the issue, he hailed a taxicab and had himself driven to the
+headquarters of the British Secret Service in America, an unostentatious
+dwelling on the northwest corner of West End Avenue at Ninety-fifth Street.
+
+Here a civil footman answered the door and Lanyard's enquiries with the
+information that Colonel Stanistreet had unexpectedly been called out
+of town and would not return before evening of the next day, while his
+secretary, Mr. Blensop, had gone to a play and might not come home till all
+hours.
+
+More impatient than disappointed, Lanyard climbed back into his cab, and in
+consequence of consultation with its friendly minded chauffeur, eventually
+put up for the night in an Eighth Avenue hotel of the class that made
+Senator Raines famous, a hostelry brazenly proclaiming accommodations "for
+gentlemen only," whereas it offered entertainment for both man and beast
+and catered rather more to beast than to man.
+
+However, it served; it was inconspicuous and made no demands upon a shabby
+traveller sans luggage, more than payment in advance.
+
+Early abroad, Lanyard breakfasted with attention fixed to the advertising
+columns of the _Herald_, and by mid-morning was established as sub-tenant
+of a furnished bachelor apartment on Fifty-eighth Street near Seventh
+Avenue, a tiny nest of few rooms on the street level, with entrances from
+both the general lobby and the street direct: an admirable arrangement for
+one who might choose to come and go without supervision or challenge.
+
+Lacking local references as to his character, Lanyard was obliged to pay
+three months' rent in advance in addition to making a substantial deposit
+to cover possible damage to the furnishings.
+
+His name, a spur-of-the-moment selection, was recorded in the lease as
+Anthony Ember.
+
+At noon he brought to his lodgings two trunks salvaged from a storage
+warehouse wherein they had been deposited more than three years since, on
+the eve of his flight with his family from America, an affair of haste and
+secrecy forbidding the handicap of heavy impedimenta.
+
+Thus Lanyard became once more possessor of a tolerably comprehensive
+wardrobe.
+
+But, those trunks released more than his personal belongings; intermingled
+were possessions that had been his wife's and his boy's. As he unpacked,
+memories peopled those perfunctorily luxurious lodgings of the transient
+with melancholy ghosts as sweet and sad as lavender and rue.
+
+For hours on end the man sat idle, head bowed down, hands plucking
+aimlessly at small broidered garments.
+
+And if in the sweep and turmoil of late events he seemed to have forgotten
+for a little that feud which had brought him overseas, he roused from this
+brief interlude of saddened dreaming with the iron of deadly purpose newly
+entered into his soul, and in his heart one dominant thought, that now his
+hour with Ekstrom could not, must not, be long deferred.
+
+In the street there rose an uproar of inhuman bawling. Lanyard went to the
+private door, hailed one of the husky authors of the din, an itinerant
+news-vendor, and disbursed a nickel coin for one cent's worth of spushul
+uxtry and four cents' worth of howling impudence.
+
+He found no more of interest in the newspaper than the information that the
+_Saratoga_ had been sighted off Fire Island and was expected to dock in New
+York not later than eight o'clock that night.
+
+This, however, was acceptable reading. Lanyard had work to do which were
+better done before "Karl" and his crew found opportunity to communicate
+directly with their collaborators ashore, work which it were unwise
+to initiate before nightfall lent a cloak of shadows to hoodwink the
+ever-possible adventitious German spy.
+
+Nor was he so fatuous as to fancy it would profit him to call before nine
+o'clock at the house on West End Avenue. No earlier might he hope to find
+Colonel the Honourable George Fleetwood-Stanistreet near the end of his
+dinner, and so in a mood approachable and receptive.
+
+But there could be no harm in reconnaissance by daylight.
+
+He whiled away the latter part of the afternoon in taxicabs, by dint of
+frequent changes contriving in the most casual fashion imaginable to pass
+the Seventy-ninth Street branch of the Wilhelmstrasse no less than four
+times.
+
+Little rewarded these tactics other than a fairly accurate mental
+photograph of the building and its situation--and a growing suspicion that
+the United States Government had profited nothing by England's lessons
+of early war days in respect of the one way to cope with resident enemy
+aliens.
+
+The house stood upon a corner, occupying half of an avenue block--the
+northern half of which was the site of a towering apartment house in
+course of construction--and loomed over its lesser neighbours a monumental
+monstrosity of architecture, as formidable as a fortress, its lower tiers
+of windows barred with iron, substantial iron grilles ready to bar its
+main entrance, even heavier gates guarding the carriage court in the
+side street. In all a stronghold not easy for the most accomplished
+house-breaker to force; yet the heart of it was Lanyard's goal; for there,
+he believed, Ekstrom (under whatever _nom de guerre_) lay hidden, or if not
+Ekstrom, at least a clear lead to his whereabouts.
+
+Certainly that one could not be far from the powerful wireless station
+secretly maintained on the roof of this weird jumble of architectural
+periods, its aerials cunningly hidden in the crowning atrocity of its
+minaret: a station reputedly so powerful that it could receive Berlin's
+nightly outgivings of news and orders, and, in emergency, transmit them to
+other secret stations in Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela.
+
+Yet the shrewdest scrutiny of eyes trained to detect police agents at
+sight, however well disguised, failed to espy one sign of any sort of
+espionage upon this nest of rattlesnakes.
+
+Apparently its tenants came and went as they willed, untroubled by and
+contemptuous of governmental surveillance.
+
+A handsome limousine car pulled up at its carriage block as Lanyard drove
+by, one time, and a pretty woman, exquisitely gowned, alighted and was
+welcomed by hospitable front doors that opened before she could ring: a
+woman Lanyard knew as one of the most daring, diabolically clever, and
+unscrupulous creatures of the Wilhelmstrasse, one whose life would not have
+been worth an hour's purchase had she ventured to show herself in Paris,
+London, or Petrograd at any time since the outbreak of the war.
+
+He drove on, deep in amaze.
+
+Indications were not wanting, on the other hand, that enemy spies
+maintained close watch upon the movements of those who frequented the house
+on West End Avenue. A German agent whom Lanyard knew by sight was strolling
+by as his taxi rounded its corner and swung on down toward Riverside Drive.
+
+This more modest residence possessed a brick-walled garden at the back, on
+the Ninety-fifth Street side. And if the top of the wall was crusted with
+broken glass in a fashion truly British, it had a door, and the door a
+lock. And Lanyard made a note thereon.
+
+And when he went home to dress for dinner, he opened up the false bottom
+of one of his trunks and selected from a store of cloth-wrapped bundles
+therein one which contained a small bunch of innocent-looking keys whose
+true _raison d'etre_ was anything in the world but guileless.
+
+Later he did himself very well at Delmonico's, enjoying for the first time
+in many years a well-balanced dinner faultlessly cooked and served amid
+quiet surroundings that carried memory back half a decade to the Paris that
+was, the Paris that nevermore will be....
+
+At nine precisely he paid off a taxicab at the corner of Ninety-fifth
+Street.
+
+While waiting on the doorstep of the corner house, he raked the street
+right and left with searching glances, and was somewhat reassured.
+Apparently he called at an hour when the Boche pickets were off duty; at
+the moment there was no pedestrian visible within a block's distance
+on either hand, nobody that he could see skulked in the areas of the
+old-fashioned brownstone houses across the way.
+
+The neighbourhood was, indeed, quiet even for an upper West Side
+residential quarter. A block over to the east Broadway was strident in the
+flood of its nocturnal traffic; a like distance to the west Riverside Drive
+hummed with pleasure cars taking advantage of the first bland night of that
+belated spring. But here, now that the taxi had wheeled away, there was
+never a car in sight, nor even a strolling brace of sidewalk lovers.
+
+The door opened, revealing the same footman.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet? I will see, sir."
+
+Lanyard entered.
+
+"If you will be kind enough to be seated," the footman suggested,
+indicating a small waiting room. "And what name shall I say?"
+
+It had been Lanyard's intention to have himself announced simply as the
+author of that telegram from Edgartown. Obscure impulse made him change his
+mind, some premonition so tenuous as to defy analysis.
+
+"Mr. Anthony Ember."
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+After a little the footman returned.
+
+"If you will come this way, sir...."
+
+He led toward the back of the house, introducing Lanyard to a spacious
+apartment, a library uncommonly well furnished, rather more than
+comfortably yet without a trace of ostentation in its complete luxury, a
+warm room, a room intimately lived in, a room, in short, characteristically
+British in atmosphere.
+
+Waist-high bookcases lined the walls, broken on the right by a cheerful
+fireplace with a grate of glowing cannel coal, in front of it a great club
+lounge upholstered, like all the chairs, in well-used leather. Opposite the
+chimney-piece, a handsome thing in carved oak, a door was draped with a
+curtain that swung with it. In the back of the room two long and wide
+French windows stood open to the night, beyond them that garden whose
+wall had attracted Lanyard's attention. There were a number of paintings,
+portraits for the most part, heavily framed, with overhead picture-lights.
+In the middle of the room was a table-desk, broad and long, supporting a
+shaded reading lamp. On the far side of the table a young man sat writing,
+with several dockets of papers arranged before him.
+
+As Lanyard entered, this one put down his pen, pushed back his chair, and
+came round the table: a tallish, well-made young man, dressed a shade too
+foppishly in spite of an unceremonious dinner coat, his manner assured,
+amiable, unconstrained, perhaps a little over-tolerant.
+
+"Mr. Ember, I believe?" he said in a voice studiously musical.
+
+"Yes," Lanyard replied, vaguely annoyed with himself because of an
+unreasoning resentment of this musical quality. "Mr. Blensop?"
+
+"I am Mr. Blensop," that one admitted gracefully. "And how may I have the
+pleasure of being of service?"
+
+He waved a hand toward an easy chair beside the table, and resumed his own.
+But Lanyard hesitated.
+
+"I wished to see Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+Mr. Blensop looked up with an indulgent smile. His face was round and
+smooth but for a perfectly docile little moustache, his lips full and red,
+his nose delicately chiselled; but his eyes, though large, were set cannily
+close together.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet is unfortunately not at home. I am his secretary."
+
+"Yes," said Lanyard, still standing. "In that case I'd be glad if you would
+be good enough to make an appointment for me with Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+"I am afraid he will not be home till very late to-night, but--"
+
+"Then to-morrow?"
+
+Mr. Blensop smiled patiently. "Colonel Stanistreet is a very busy man," he
+uttered melodiously. "If you could let me know something about the nature
+of your business...."
+
+"It is the King's," said Lanyard bluntly.
+
+The secretary went so far as to betray well-bred surprise. "You are an
+Englishman, Mr. Ember?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+And for all he knew to the contrary, so Lanyard was.
+
+"I am Colonel Stanistreet's secretary," the young man again suggested
+hopefully.
+
+"That is precisely why I ask you to make an appointment for me with your
+employer," Lanyard retorted politely.
+
+"You won't say what you wish to see him about?"
+
+A trace of asperity marred the music of those tones; Mr. Blensop further
+indicated distaste of the innuendo inherent in Lanyard's use of the word
+"employer" by delicately wrinkling his nose.
+
+"I am sorry," Lanyard replied sufficiently.
+
+The door behind him opened, and the footman intruded.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop...."
+
+"Yes, Walker?"
+
+The servant advanced to the table and proffered a visiting card on a tray.
+Mr. Blensop took it, arched pencilled brows over it.
+
+"To see me, Walker?"
+
+"The gentleman asked for Colonel Stanistreet, sir."
+
+"H'm.... You may show him in when I ring."
+
+The footman retired. Mr. Blensop looked up brightly, bending the card with
+nervous fingers.
+
+"You were saying your business was...?"
+
+"I was not," Lanyard replied with disarming good humour. "I'm afraid that
+is something much too important and confidential to reveal even to Colonel
+Stanistreet's secretary, if you don't mind my saying so."
+
+Mr. Blensop did mind, and betrayed vexation with an impatient little
+gesture which caused the card to fly from his fingers and fall face
+uppermost on the table. Almost instantly he recovered it, but not before
+Lanyard had read the name it bore.
+
+"Of course not," said the secretary pleasantly, rising. "But you understand
+my instructions are rigid ... I'm sorry."
+
+"You refuse me the appointment?"
+
+"Unless you can give me an inkling of your business--or perhaps bring a
+letter of introduction."
+
+"I can do neither, Mr. Blensop," said Lanyard earnestly. "I have
+information of the gravest moment to communicate to the head of the British
+Secret Service in this country."
+
+The secretary looked startled. "What makes you think Colonel Stanistreet is
+connected with the British Secret Service?"
+
+"I don't think so; I know it."
+
+After a moment of hesitation Mr. Blensop yielded graciously. "If you can
+come back at nine to-morrow morning, Mr. Ember, I'll do my best to persuade
+Colonel Stanistreet--"
+
+"I repeat, my business is of the most pressing nature. Can't you arrange
+for me to see your employer to-night?"
+
+"It is utterly impossible."
+
+Lanyard accepted defeat with a bow.
+
+"To-morrow at nine, then," he said, turning toward the door by which he had
+entered.
+
+"At nine," said Mr. Blensop, generous in triumph. "But do you mind going
+out this way?"
+
+He moved toward the curtained door opposite the chimney-piece. Lanyard
+paused, shrugged, and followed. Mr. Blensop opened the door, disclosing a
+vista of Ninety-fifth Street.
+
+"Thank _you_, Mr. Ember. _Good_-night," he intoned.
+
+The door closed with the click of a spring latch.
+
+Lanyard stood alone in the street, looking swiftly this way and that, his
+hand closing upon that little bunch of keys in his pocket, his humour
+lawless.
+
+For the name inscribed on that card which Mr. Blensop had so carelessly
+dropped was one to fill Lanyard with consuming anxiety for better
+acquaintance with its present wearer.
+
+Written in pencil, with all the individual angularity of French
+chirography, the name was Andre Duchemin.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+REINCARNATION
+
+
+It took a little time and patience but, on his third essay, Lanyard found
+a key which agreed with the lock. He permitted himself a sigh of relief;
+Ninety-fifth Street was bare, the door set flush with the outside of the
+wall afforded no concealment to the trespasser, while the direct light of a
+street lamp at the corner made his lonely figure uncomfortably conspicuous.
+
+Apparently, however, he had not been observed.
+
+Gently pushing the door open, he slipped in, as gently closed it, then for
+a full minute stood stirless, spying out the lay of the land.
+
+Fitting precisely his anticipations, the garden discovered a fine English
+flavour; it was well-kept, modest, fragrant and, best of all, quite dark,
+especially so in the shadow of the street wall. Only a glimmer of starlight
+enabled him to pick out the course of a pebbled footpath. A border of deep
+turf between this and the wall muffled his footsteps as he moved toward the
+back of the house.
+
+The library windows, deeply recessed, opened on a low, broad stoop of
+concrete, with a pergola effect above, and a few wicker pieces upon a grass
+mat underfoot.
+
+Noiselessly Lanyard stepped across the low sill and paused in the cover of
+heavy draperies, commanding a tolerably full view of the library if one
+somewhat unsatisfactory, since the light within was by no means bright.
+Still, this circumstance had its advantages for him; with his dark topcoat
+buttoned to the throat and its collar turned up to hide his linen, he was
+confident he would not be detected unless he gave his presence away by an
+abrupt movement--something which the Lone Wolf never made.
+
+At the moment Mr. Blensop seemed to be engaged in the surprising occupation
+of discoursing upon art to his caller.
+
+The latter occupied that chair which Lanyard had refused, on the far side
+of the table. Thus placed, the lamplight masked more than revealed him,
+throwing a dull glare into Lanyard's eyes. His man sat in a pose of earnest
+attention, bending forward a trifle to follow the exposition of Mr.
+Blensop, who stood beneath a portrait on the wall between the chimney-piece
+and the windows, his attitude incurably graceful, a hand on the switch
+controlling the picture-light. Apparently he had just finished speaking,
+for he paused, looking toward his guest with a quiet and intimate smile as
+he turned off the light.
+
+"And that's all there is to it," he declared, moving back to the table.
+
+"I see," said the other thoughtfully.
+
+Lanyard felt himself start almost uncontrollably: rage swept through him,
+storming brain and body, like a black squall over a hill-bound lake. For
+the moment he could neither see or hear clearly nor think coherently.
+
+For the voice of this latest incarnation of Andre Duchemin was the voice of
+"Karl."
+
+When the tumult of his senses subsided he heard Blensop saying, "I'll
+write it out for you," and saw him pick up a pad and pencil and jot down a
+memorandum.
+
+"There you are," he added, ripping off the sheet and passing it across the
+table. "Now you can't go wrong."
+
+"I precious seldom do," his caller commented drily.
+
+"I think--" Blensop began, and checked sharply as the man Walker came into
+the room.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop--"
+
+There was an accent of impatience in those beautifully modulated tones:
+"Well, what is it now?"
+
+"A lady to see you, sir."
+
+Blensop took the card from the proffered salver. "Never heard of her," he
+announced brusquely at a glance. "She asked for Colonel Stanistreet or for
+me?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, sir. But when I said he was not at home, she asked to
+see his secretary."
+
+"Any idea what she wants?"
+
+"She didn't say, sir--but she seemed much distressed."
+
+"They always are. H'm.... Young and good-looking?"
+
+"Quite, sir."
+
+"Dessay I may as well see her," said Mr. Blensop wearily. "Show her in when
+I ring."
+
+Walker shut himself out of the room.
+
+"It's just as well," Blensop added to his caller. "You understand, my clear
+fellow--?"
+
+"Assuredly." The man got up; but Blensop contrived exasperatingly to keep
+between him and the windows. "I'm to be back at midnight?"
+
+"Twelve sharp; you'll be sure to find him here then. Mind leaving by this
+emergency exit?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"Then _good_-night, my dear Monsieur Duchemin!"
+
+Was there a hint of irony in Blensop's employment of that style? Lanyard
+half fancied there was, but did not linger to analyse the impression.
+Already the secretary had opened the side door.
+
+In a bound Lanyard cleared the stoop, then ran back to the door in the
+wall. But with all his quickness he was all too slow; already, as he
+emerged to Ninety-fifth Street, his quarry was rounding the Avenue corner.
+
+Defiant of discretion, Lanyard gave chase at speed but, though he had not
+thirty yards to cover, again was baffled by the swiftness with which "Karl"
+got about.
+
+He had still some distance to go when the peace of the quarter was
+shattered by a door that slammed like a pistol shot, and with roaring
+motor and grinding gears a cab swung away from the curb in front of the
+Stanistreet residence and tore off down the Avenue.
+
+Swearing petulantly in his disappointment, Lanyard pulled up on the corner.
+The number on the license plate was plainly revealed as the vehicle showed
+its back to the street lamp. But what good was that to him? He memorised
+it mechanically, in mutinous appreciation of the fact that the taxi was
+setting a pace with which he could not hope to compete afoot.
+
+The rumble of another motor-car caught his ear, and he looked round
+eagerly. A second taxicab--undoubtedly that which had brought the young
+woman now presumably closeted with Mr. Blensop--was moving up into the
+place vacated by the first.
+
+In two strides Lanyard was at its side.
+
+"Follow that taxi!" he cried--"number seventy-six, three-eighty-five. Don't
+lose sight of it, but don't pass it--don't let them know we're following!"
+
+"Engaged," the driver growled.
+
+"Hang your engagement! Here"--Lanyard pressed a golden eagle into the
+fellow's palm--"there will be another of those if you do as I say!"
+
+"Le's go!" the driver agreed with resignation.
+
+If the cab was moving before Lanyard could hop in and shut the door, the
+other had already established a killing lead; and though Lanyard's man
+demonstrated characteristic contempt for municipal regulations governing
+the speed of motor-driven vehicles, and racketed his own madly down the
+Avenue, he was wholly helpless to do more than keep the tail-lamp of the
+first in sight.
+
+More than once that dull red eye seemed sardonically to wink.
+
+Still, Lanyard did not think "Karl" knew he was pursued. His conveyance had
+passed the corner before Lanyard emerged from the side street. There being
+no reason that Lanyard knew of why the spy should believe himself under
+suspicion, his haste seemed most probably due to natural desire to avoid
+adventitious recognition, coupled with, no doubt, other urgent business.
+
+At Seventy-second Street the chase turned east, with Lanyard two blocks
+behind, and for a few agonizing moments was altogether lost to him. But at
+Broadway the tide of southbound traffic hindered it momentarily, and it
+swung into that stream with its pursuer only a block astern.
+
+Thereafter through a ride of another mile and a half, the distance between
+the two was augmented or abbreviated arbitrarily by the rules of the road.
+
+At one time less than two cab-lengths separated them; then a Ford, driven
+Fordishly, wandered vaguely out of a crosstown street and hesitated in the
+middle of the thoroughfare with precisely the air of a staring yokel on
+a first visit to the city; and Lanyard's driver slammed on the emergency
+brake barely in time to escape committing involuntary but justifiable
+flivvercide.
+
+When he was able once more to throw the gears into high, the chase was a
+long block ahead.
+
+They were entering Longacre Square before he made up that loss.
+
+And at Forty-fourth Street, again, a stream of east-bound cars edged in
+between the two, reducing Lanyard's driver to the verge of gibbering
+lunacy.
+
+A car resembling "Karl's" was crossing Broadway at Forty-second Street when
+Lanyard was still on Seventh Avenue north of the Times Building.
+
+But only a minute later his driver pulled up in front of the Hotel
+Knickerbocker, and Lanyard, peering through the forward window, saw the
+number 76-385 on the license plate of a taxicab drawing away, empty, from
+the curb beneath the hotel canopy.
+
+He tossed the second gold piece to the driver as his feet touched the
+sidewalk, and shouldered through a cluster of men and women at the main
+entrance to the lobby.
+
+That rendezvous of Broadway was fairly thronged despite the slack
+mid-evening hour, between the dinner and the supper crushes; but Lanyard
+reviewed in vain the little knots of guests and loungers; if "Karl" were
+among them, he was nobody whom Lanyard had learned to know by sight on
+board the _Assyrian_.
+
+With as little success he searched unobtrusively all public rooms on the
+main floor.
+
+It was, of course, both possible and probable that "Karl," himself a guest
+of the hotel, had crossed directly to the elevators and been whisked aloft
+to his room.
+
+With this in mind, Lanyard paused at the desk, asked permission to examine
+the register and, being accommodated, was somewhat consoled; if his chase
+had failed of its immediate objective, it now proved not altogether
+fruitless. A majority of the _Assyrian_ survivors seemed to have elected to
+stop at the Knickerbocker. One after another Lanyard, scanning the entries,
+found these names:
+
+  Edmund O'Reilly--Detroit
+  Arturo Velasco--Buenos Aires
+  Bartlett Putnam--Philadelphia
+  Cecelia Brooke--London
+  Emil Dressier--Geneve
+
+Half inclined to commit the imprudence of sending a name up to Miss
+Brooke--any name but Andre Duchemin, Michael Lanyard, or Anthony
+Ember--together with a message artfully worded to fix her interest without
+giving comfort to the enemy, should it chance to go astray, the adventurer
+hesitated by the desk; and of a sudden was satisfied that such a move would
+be not only injudicious but waste of time; for, now that he paused to think
+of it, he surmised that the young woman--"young and good-looking", on
+Walker's word--who had called to see Colonel Stanistreet was none other
+than this same Cecelia Brooke.
+
+What more natural than that she should make early occasion to consult the
+head of the British Secret Service in America?
+
+A pity he had not waited there in the window! If he had, no doubt the
+mystery with which the girl had surrounded herself would be no more mystery
+to Lanyard; he would have learned the secret of that paper cylinder as well
+as the part the girl had played in the intrigue for its possession, and so
+be the better advised as to his own future conduct.
+
+But in his insensate passion for revenge upon one who had all but murdered
+him, he had forgotten all else but the moment's specious opportunity.
+
+With a grunt of impatience Lanyard turned away from the desk, and came face
+to face with Crane.
+
+The Secret Service man was coming from the direction of the bar in company
+with Velasco, O'Reilly, and Dressier.
+
+Of the three last named but one looked Lanyard's way, O'Reilly, and his
+gaze, resting transiently on the countenance of Andre Duchemin minus the
+Duchemin beard, passed on without perceptible glimmer of recognition.
+
+Why not? Why should it enter his head that one lived and had anticipated
+his own arrival in New York by twenty hours whom be believed to be buried
+many fathoms deep off Nantucket?
+
+As for Crane, his cool gray, humorous eyes, half-hooded with their heavy
+lids, favoured Lanyard with casual regard and never a tremor of interest
+or surprise; but as he passed his right eye closed deliberately and with a
+significance not to be ignored.
+
+To this Lanyard responded only with a look of blankest amaze.
+
+Chatting with an air of subdued self-congratulation pardonable in such
+as have come safe to land through many dangers of the deep, the quartet
+strolled round the desk and boarded one of the elevators.
+
+Not till its gate had closed did Lanyard stir. Then he went away from there
+with all haste and cunning at his command.
+
+The route through the cafe to Broadway offered the speediest and least
+conspicuous of exits. From the side door of the hotel he plunged directly
+into the mouth of the Subway kiosk and, chance favouring him, managed to
+purchase a ticket and board a southbound local train an instant before its
+doors ground shut.
+
+Believing Crane would take the next elevator down, once he had seen the
+others safely in their rooms, Lanyard was content to let him find the lobby
+destitute of ghosts, to let him fume and wonder and think himself perhaps
+mistaken.
+
+The last thing he desired was entanglement with the American Secret
+Service. For Crane he entertained personal respect and temperate liking,
+thought the man socially an amusing creature, professionally a deadly peril
+to one who had a feud to pursue.
+
+Leaving the train at Grand Central, the adventurer passed through the back
+ways of the Terminus, into the Hotel Biltmore, upstairs to its lobby,
+thence out by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance, walking through Forty-fourth
+Street to Fifth Avenue, where he chartered a taxicab, gave the address
+of his lodgings, and lay back in the corner of its seat satisfied he had
+successfully eluded pursuit and very, very grateful to the Subway system
+for the facilities it afforded fugitives like himself through its warren of
+underground passages.
+
+One thing troubled him, however, without respite: the Brooke girl was on
+his conscience. To her he owed an accounting of his stewardship of that
+trust which she had reposed in him. It was intolerable in his understanding
+that she should be permitted to go one unnecessary hour in ignorance of the
+truth about that business--the truth, that is, as far as he himself knew
+it.
+
+If through Crane or in some unforseeable fashion she were to learn that
+Andre Duchemin lived, she would think him faithless. If she knew that
+Duchemin had been one with Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf, she would not be
+surprised. But that, too, was intolerable; even the Lone Wolf had his code
+of honour.
+
+Again, if she remained in ignorance of the fact that Lanyard had escaped
+drowning, she would continue to believe her secret at the bottom of the sea
+with him; whereas, in the hands of the enemy, in the possession of "Karl"
+and his, confederates, it was potentially Heaven only knew how dangerous a
+weapon.
+
+Abruptly Lanyard reflected that at least one doubt had been eliminated by
+that encounter in the Knickerbocker. It was barely possible that "Karl" had
+gone to the bar on entering and added himself to Crane's party, but it
+was hardly creditable in Lanyard's consideration. He was convinced that,
+whether or not Velasco, O'Reilly, and Dressier were parties to the Hun
+conspiracy, none of these was "Karl."
+
+As for the Brooke matter, he felt it incumbent upon him immediately to find
+some safe means of communicating with the girl. She could be trusted not to
+betray him to the police, however much she might at first incline to doubt
+him. But he would persuade her of his sincerity, never fear!
+
+The telephone offered one solution of his difficulty, an agency
+non-committal enough, provided one were at pains not to call from one's
+private station, to which the call might be traced back.
+
+With this in mind he stopped and dismissed his taxicab at Fifty-seventh
+Street and Sixth Avenue, and availed himself of a coin-box telephone booth
+in the corner druggist's.
+
+The experience that followed was nothing out of the ordinary. Lanyard,
+connected with the Knickerbocker promptly, with the customary expenditure
+of patience laboriously spelled out the name B-r-double-o-k-e, and was told
+to hold the wire.
+
+Several minutes later he began to agitate the receiver hook and was
+eventually rewarded with the advice that the Knickerbocker operator, being
+informed his party was in the rest'runt, was having her paged.
+
+Still later the central operator told him his five minutes was up and
+consented to continue the connection only on deposit of an additional
+nickel.
+
+Eventually, in sequel to more abuse of the hook, he received this response
+from the Knickerbocker switchboard: "Wait a min'te, can't you? Here's your
+party."
+
+Lanyard was surprised at the eagerness with which he cried: "Hello!"
+
+A click answered, and a bland voice which was not the voice he had expected
+to hear: "Hello? That you, Jack?"
+
+He said wearily: "I am waiting to speak with Miss Cecelia Brooke."
+
+"Oh, then there _must_ be some mistake. This is Miss _Crooke_ speaking."
+
+Lanyard uttered a strangled "Sorry!" and hung up, abandoning further effort
+as hopeless.
+
+That matter would have to stand over till morning.
+
+Time now pressed: it was nearly eleven; he had a rendezvous with Destiny to
+keep at midnight, and meant to be more than punctual.
+
+Walking to his apartment house, he proceeded to establish an alibi by
+entering through the public hallway and registering with the telephone
+attendant a call for seven o'clock the next morning.
+
+In the course of the next half hour Lanyard let himself quietly out of the
+private door, slipped around the block and boarded a Riverside Drive bus.
+
+Alighting at Ninety-third Street, he walked two blocks north on the Drive,
+turned east, and without misadventure admitted himself a second time to the
+Stanistreet garden.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+DEFAMATION
+
+
+It was hardly possible to watch Mr. Blensop functioning in his vocational
+capacity without reflecting on that cruel injustice which Nature only too
+often practises upon her offspring in secreting most praiseworthy qualities
+within fleshy envelopes of hopelessly frivolous cast.
+
+The flowing gestures of this young man, his fluting accents, poetic eyes,
+and modestly ingratiating moustache, the preciosity of his taste in dress,
+assorted singularly with an austere devotion to duty rare if unaffected.
+
+Beyond question, whether or not naturally a man of studious and
+conscientious temper, Mr. Blensop figured to admiration in the role of such
+an one.
+
+Seated, the shaded lamplight an aureole for his fair young head, he wrought
+industriously with a beautiful gold-mounted fountain pen for fully five
+minutes after Lanyard had stolen into the draped recess of the French
+window, pausing only now and again to take a fresh sheet of paper or
+consult one of the sheaves of documents that lay before him.
+
+At length, however, he hesitated with pen lifted and abstracted gaze
+focussed upon vacancy, shook a bewildered head, and rose, moving directly
+toward the windows.
+
+For as long as thirty breathless seconds Lanyard remained in doubt; there
+was the barest chance that in his preoccupation Blensop might pass through
+to the garden without noticing that dark figure flattened against the
+inswung half of the window, in the dense shadow of the portiere. Otherwise
+the game was altogether up; Lanyard could see no way to avoid the necessity
+of staggering Blensop with a blow, racing for freedom, abandoning utterly
+further effort to learn the motive of "Karl's" impersonation of Duchemin.
+
+He gathered himself together, waited poised in readiness for any
+eventuality--and blessed his lucky stars to find his apprehensions idle.
+
+Three paces from the windows, Mr. Blensop made it plain that he was after
+all not minded to stroll in the garden. Pausing, he swung a high-backed
+wing chair round to face the corner of the room, switched on a reading
+lamp, sat down and selected a volume of some work of reference from the
+well-stocked book shelves.
+
+For several minutes, seated within arm's length of the trespasser, he
+studied intently, then with a cluck of satisfaction replaced the volume,
+extinguished the light, and went back to his writing.
+
+But presently he checked with a vexed little exclamation, shook his pen
+impatiently, and fixed it with a frown of pained reproach.
+
+But that did no good. The cussedness of the inanimate was strong in this
+pen: since its reservoir was quite empty it mulishly refused more service
+without refilling.
+
+With a long-suffering sigh, Mr. Blensop found a filler in one of the desk
+drawers, and unscrewed the nib of the pen.
+
+This accomplished, he paused, listened for a moment with head cocked
+intelligently to one side, dropped the dismembered implement, and got up
+alertly. At the same moment the door to the hallway opened, and two women
+entered, apparently sisters: one a lady of mature and distinguished charm,
+the other an equally prepossessing creature much her junior, the one
+strongly animated with intelligent interest in life, the other a listless
+prey to habitual ennui.
+
+To these fluttered Mr. Blensop, offering to relieve them of their wraps.
+
+"Permit me, Mrs. Arden," he addressed the elder woman, who tolerated him
+dispassionately. "And Mrs. Stanistreet ... I say, aren't you a bit late?"
+
+"Frightfully," assented Mrs. Stanistreet in a weary voice. "It must be all
+of midnight."
+
+"Hardly that, Adele," said Mrs. Arden with a humorous glance.
+
+"Dinner, the play, supper, and home before twelve!" commented Blensop,
+shocked. "I say, that is going some, you know."
+
+"George would insist on hurrying home," the young wife complained.
+"Frightfully tiresome. We were so comfy at the Ritz, too...."
+
+"The Crystal Room?" Dissembled envy poisoned Blensop's accents.
+
+"Frightfully interestin'--everybody was there. I did so want to
+dance--missed you, Arthur."
+
+"I say, you didn't, did you, really?"
+
+"Poor Mr. Blensop!" Mrs. Arden interjected with just a hint of malice.
+"What a pity you must be chained down by inexorable duty, while we fly
+round and amuse ourselves."
+
+"I must not complain," Blensop stated with humility becoming in a dutiful
+martyr, a pose which he saw fit quickly to discard as another man came
+briskly into the room. "Ah, good evening, Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+"Evening, Blensop."
+
+With a brusque nod, Colonel Stanistreet went straightway to the desk,
+stopping there to take up and examine the work upon which his secretary had
+been engaged: a gentleman considerably older than his wife, of grave and
+sturdy cast, with the habit of standing solidly on his feet and giving
+undivided attention to the matter in hand.
+
+"Anything of consequence turned up?" he enquired abstractedly, running
+through the sheets of pen-blackened paper.
+
+"Three persons called," Blensop admitted discreetly. "One returns at
+midnight."
+
+Stanistreet threw him a keen look. "Eh!" he said, making swift inference,
+and turned to his wife and sister-in-law. "It is nearly twelve now. Forgive
+me if I hurry you off."
+
+"Patience," said Mrs. Arden indulgently. "Not for worlds would I hinder
+your weighty affairs, dear old thing, but I sleep more sound o' nights when
+I know my trinkets are locked up securely in your safe."
+
+With a graceful gesture she unfastened a magnificent necklace and deposited
+it on the desk.
+
+"Frightful rot," her sister commented from the doorway. "As if anybody
+would dare break in here."
+
+"Why not?" Mrs. Arden enquired calmly, stripping her fingers of their
+rings.
+
+"With a watchman patrolling the grounds all night--"
+
+"Letty is sensible," Stanistreet interrupted. "Howson's faithful enough,
+and these American police dependable, but second-storey men happen in the
+best-guarded neighbourhoods. Be advised, Adele: leave your things here with
+Letty's."
+
+"No fear," his wife returned coolly. "Too frightfully weird...."
+
+She drifted across the threshold, then hesitated, a pretty figure of
+disdainful discontent.
+
+"But really, Colonel Stanistreet is right," Blensop interposed vivaciously.
+"What do you imagine I heard to-night? The Lone Wolf is in America!"
+
+"What is that you say?" Mrs. Arden demanded sharply.
+
+"The Lone Wolf ... Fact. Have it on most excellent authority."
+
+"The Lone Wolf!" Mrs. Stanistreet drawled. "If you ask me, I think the Lone
+Wolf nothing in the world but a scapegoat for police stupidity."
+
+"You wouldn't say that," Mrs. Arden retorted, "if you had lived in Paris as
+long as I. There, in the dear old days, we paid that rogue too heavy a tax
+not to believe in him."
+
+"Frightful nonsense," insisted the other. "I'm off. 'Night, Arthur. Shall
+you be long, George?"
+
+"Oh, half an hour or so," her husband responded absently as she
+disappeared.
+
+With a little gesture consigning her jewellery, heaped upon the desk, to
+the care of her brother-in-law, Mrs. Arden uttered good-nights and followed
+her sister.
+
+Blensop bowed her out respectfully, shut the door and returned to the desk.
+
+"What's this about the Lone Wolf?" Stanistreet enquired, sitting down to
+con the papers more intently.
+
+"Oh!" Blensop laughed lightly. "I was merely repeating the blighter's own
+assertion. I mean to say, he boasted he was the Lone Wolf."
+
+"Who boasted he was the Lone Wolf?"
+
+"Chap who called to-night, giving the name of Duchemin--Andre Duchemin. Had
+French passports, and letters from the Home Office recommending him rather
+highly. Useful creature, one would fancy, with his knowledge of the right
+way to go about the wrong thing. What? Ought to be especially helpful to us
+in hunting down the Hun over here."
+
+"Is this the man who returns at midnight?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I thought it best to make the appointment."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He said he had crossed on the _Assyrian_, said it significantly, you know.
+I fancied he might be the person you have been expecting."
+
+Stanistreet looked up with a frown. "Hardly," he said--"if, that is, he is
+really what he claims to be. I wonder how he came by those letters."
+
+"Does seem odd, doesn't it, sir? A confessed criminal!"
+
+"An extraordinary man, by all accounts.... Those other callers--?"
+
+"Nobody of importance, I should say. A man who gave his name as Ember and
+got a bit shirty when I asked his business. Told him you might consent to
+see him at nine in the morning."
+
+"And the other?"
+
+"A young woman--deuced pretty girl--also reticent. What was her name?
+Brooke--that was it: Cecelia Brooke."
+
+"The devil!" Stanistreet exclaimed, dropping the papers. "What did you say
+to her?"
+
+"What could I say, sir? She refused to divulge a word about her business
+with us. I told her--"
+
+Warned by a gesture from Colonel Stanistreet, Blensop broke off. Walker was
+opening the door.
+
+"Well, Walker?"
+
+"A Mr. Duchemin, sir, says Mr. Blensop made an appointment with you for
+twelve to-night."
+
+"Show him in, please."
+
+The footman shut himself out. Blensop clutched nervously at Mrs. Arden's
+jewels.
+
+"Hadn't I better put these in the safe first?"
+
+"No--no time." Stanistreet opened a drawer of the desk--"Here!"--and closed
+it as Blensop hastily swept the jewellery into it. "Safe enough there--as
+long as he doesn't know, at all events. But don't forget to put them away
+after he goes."
+
+"No, sir."
+
+Again the door opened. Walker announced: "Mr. Duchemin." Stanistreet rose
+in his place. A man strode in with the assurance of one who has discounted
+a cordial welcome.
+
+Through the gap which he had quietly created between the portiere and the
+side of the window, Lanyard stared hungrily, and for the second time that
+night damned heartily the inadequate light in the library.
+
+The impostor's face, barely distinguishable in the up-thrown penumbra
+of the lampshade, wore a beard--a rather thick, dark beard of negligent
+abundance, after a mode popular among Frenchmen--above which his features
+were an indefinite blur.
+
+Lanyard endeavoured with ill success to identify the fellow by his
+carriage; there was a perceptible suggestion of a military strut, but that
+is something hardly to be termed distinctive in these days. Otherwise, he
+was tall, quite as tall as Lanyard, and had much the same character of
+body, slender and lithe.
+
+But he was "Karl" beyond question, confederate and murderer of Baron von
+Harden, the man who had thrown the light bomb to signal the U-boat,
+the brute with whom Lanyard had struggled on the boat deck of the
+_Assyrian_--though the latter, in the confusion of that struggle, had
+thought the German's beard a masking handkerchief of black silk.
+
+Now by that same token he was no member of that smoking-room coterie upon
+which Lanyard's suspicions had centered.
+
+On the other hand, any number of passengers had worn beards, not a few of
+much the same mode as that sported by this nonchalant fraud.
+
+Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits to aid a laggard memory, haunted by a
+feeling that he ought to know this man instantly, even in so poor a light.
+Something in his habit, something in that insouciance which so narrowly
+escaped insolence, was at once strongly reminiscent and provokingly
+elusive....
+
+Pausing a little ways within the room, the fellow clicked heels and bowed
+punctiliously in Continental fashion, from the hips.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, I believe," he said in a sonorous voice--"Karl's"
+unmistakable voice--"chief of the American bureau of the British Secret
+Service?"
+
+"I am Colonel Stanistreet," that gentleman admitted. "And you, sir--?"
+
+"I have adopted the name of Andre Duchemin," the impostor stated. "With
+permission I retain it."
+
+Colonel Stanistreet inclined his head slightly. "As you will. Pray be
+seated."
+
+He dropped back into his chair, while "Karl" with a murmur of
+acknowledgment again took the armchair on the far side of the desk, where
+the lamp stood between him and the secret watcher.
+
+"My secretary tells me you have letters of introduction...."
+
+"Here." Calmly "Karl" produced and offered those purloined papers.
+
+"You will smoke?" Stanistreet indicated a cigarette-box and leaned back to
+glance through the letters.
+
+During a brief pause Blensop busied himself with collecting together the
+documents which had occupied him and began reassorting them, while "Karl,"
+helping himself to a cigarette, smoked with manifest enjoyment.
+
+"These seem to be in order," Stanistreet observed. "I note from this code
+letter that your true name is Michael Lanyard, you were once a professional
+French thief known as 'The Lone Wolf', but have since displayed every
+indication of desire to reform your ways, and have been of considerable
+use to the Intelligence Office. I am desired to employ your services in my
+discretion, contingent--pardon me--upon your continued good behaviour."
+
+"Precisely," assented "Karl."
+
+"Proceed, Monsieur Duchemin."
+
+"It is an affair of some delicacy.... Do we speak alone, Colonel
+Stanistreet?"
+
+"Mr. Blensop is my confidential secretary...."
+
+"Oh, no objection. Still--if I may venture the suggestion--those windows
+open upon a garden, I take it?"
+
+"Yes. Blensop, be good enough to close the windows."
+
+"Certainly, sir."
+
+Stepping delicately, Blensop moved toward the end of the room.
+
+Again Lanyard was confronted with the alternatives of incontinent flight or
+attempting to remain undetected through the adoption of an expedient of the
+most desperate audacity. He had prepared against such contingency, he did
+not mean to go; but the feasibility of his contemplated manoeuvre depended
+entirely upon chance, its success in any event was forlornly problematic.
+
+"Karl" remained hidden from him by the lamp, so he from "Karl." Colonel
+Stanistreet, facing his caller, sat half turned away from the windows.
+Everything rested with Blensop's choice, which of the two windows he would
+elect first to close.
+
+A right-handed man, he turned, as Lanyard had foreseen, to the right, and
+momentarily disappeared in the recess of the farther window.
+
+In the same instant Lanyard slipped noiselessly from behind the portiere,
+and dropped into that capacious wing chair which Blensop had thoughtfully
+placed for him some time since.
+
+Thus seated, making himself as small and still as possible, he was wholly
+concealed from all other occupants of the library but Blensop; and even
+this last was little likely to discover him.
+
+He did not. He closed and latched the farther window, then that wherein
+Lanyard had lurked, and ambled back into the room with never a glance
+toward that shadowed corner which held the wing chair.
+
+And Lanyard drew a deep breath, if a quiet one. Behind him the conversation
+had continued without break. It was true, he could see nothing; but he
+could hear all that was said, he had missed no syllable, and now every
+second was informing him to his profit....
+
+"Your secretary, no doubt, has told you I am a survivor of the _Assyrian_
+disaster."
+
+"Yes...."
+
+"You were, I believe, expecting a certain communication of extraordinary
+character by the _Assyrian_, to be brought, that is, by an agent of the
+British Secret Service."
+
+After an almost imperceptible pause Stanistreet said evenly: "It is
+possible."
+
+"A communication, in fact, of such character that it was impossible to
+entrust it to the mails or to cable transmission, even in code."
+
+"And if so, sir...?"
+
+"And you are aware that, of the two gentlemen entrusted with the care of
+this document, one was drowned when the _Assyrian_ went down, and the other
+so seriously injured that he has not yet recovered consciousness, but
+was transferred directly from the pier to a hospital when the _Saratoga_
+docked."
+
+"What then, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet," said the impostor deliberately, "I have that
+communication. I will ask you not to question me too closely as to how it
+came into my possession. I have it: that is sufficient."
+
+"If you possess any document which you conceive to be so valuable to the
+British Government, monsieur, and consequently to the Allied cause, I have
+every confidence in your intention to deliver it to me without delay."
+
+A note of mild derision crept into the accents of "Karl."
+
+"I have every intention of so doing, my dear sir.... But you must
+appreciate I have incurred considerable personal danger, hardship, and
+inconvenience in taking good care of this document, in seeing that it did
+not fall into the wrong hands; in short, in bringing it safely here to you
+to-night."
+
+A slightly longer pause prefaced Stanistreet's reply, something which
+he delivered in measured tones: "I am able to promise you the British
+Government will show due appreciation of your disinterested services,
+Monsieur--Duchemin."
+
+"Not disinterested--not that!" the cheat protested. "Gentlemen of my
+kidney, sir, seldom put themselves out except in lively anticipation of
+favours to come."
+
+"Be good enough to make yourself more clear."
+
+"Cheerfully. I possess this document. I understand its character is such
+that Germany would pay a round price for it. But I am a good patriot. In
+spite of the fact that nobody knew I possessed it, in spite of the fact
+that I need only have quietly taken it to Seventy-ninth Street to-night--"
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin!" Stanistreet's voice was icy. "Your price?"
+
+"Sorry you feel that way about it," said "Karl" with ill-concealed
+insincerity. "You must know thieving is no more what it once was. Even I,
+too, often am put to it to make both ends--"
+
+"If you please, sir--how much?"
+
+"Ten thousand dollars."
+
+Silence greeted this demand, a lull that to Lanyard seemed endless. For in
+his fury he was trembling so that he feared lest his agitation betray him.
+The very walls before his eyes seemed to quake in sympathy. He was aware of
+the ache of swollen veins in his temples, his teeth hurt with the pressure
+put upon them, his breath came heavily, and his nails were digging
+painfully into his palms.
+
+"Blensop?"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"How much have we on hand, in the emergency fund?"
+
+"Between ten and twelve thousand dollars, sir."
+
+"Intuition, monsieur, is an indispensable item in the equipment of a
+successful _chevalier d'Industrie_. So, at least, the good novelists tell
+us...."
+
+"Open the safe, Blensop, and fetch me ten thousand dollars."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+"I presume you won't object to satisfying me that you really have this
+document, before I pay you your price."
+
+"It is this which makes it a pleasure to deal with an Englishman, monsieur:
+one may safely trust his word of honour."
+
+"Indeed...."
+
+"Permit me: here is the document. Use that magnifying glass I see by your
+elbow, monsieur; take your time, satisfy yourself."
+
+"Thanks; I mean to."
+
+Another break in the dialogue, during which the eavesdropper heard an
+odd sound, a sort of muffled swishing ending in a slight thud, then the
+peculiar metallic whine of a combination dial rapidly manipulated, finally
+the dull clank of bolts falling back into their sockets.
+
+"Your _coffre-fort_--what do you say?--strong-box--safe--is cleverly
+concealed, Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+There was no direct reply, but after a moment Stanistreet announced
+quietly: "This seems to be an authentic paper.... Monsieur Duchemin, what
+knowledge precisely have you of the nature of this document?"
+
+"Surely monsieur cannot have overlooked the circumstance that its seals
+were intact."
+
+"True," Stanistreet admitted. "Still...."
+
+"I trust Monsieur does not question my good faith?"
+
+"Why not?" Stanistreet enquired drily.
+
+"Monsieur!"
+
+"Oh, damn your play-acting, sir! If you can be capable of one infamy, you
+are capable of more. None the less, you are right about an Englishman's
+word: here is your money. Count it and--get out!"
+
+"Thanks"--the impostor's tone was an impertinently exact imitation of
+Stanistreet's--"I mean to."
+
+"Permit me to excuse myself," Stanistreet added; and Lanyard heard the
+muffled scrape of chair-legs on the rug as the Englishman got up.
+
+"Gladly," the spy returned--"and ten thousand thanks, monsieur!"
+
+The secretary intoned melodiously: "This way, Monsieur Duchemin, if you
+please."
+
+"Pardon. Is it material which way I leave?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Stanistreet demanded.
+
+"I should be far easier in my mind if monsieur would permit me to go by way
+of his garden, rather than run the risk of his front door."
+
+"What's this?"
+
+"In these little affairs, monsieur, I try to make it a rule to avoid
+covering the same ground twice."
+
+"You have the insolence to imply I would lend myself to treachery!"
+
+"I beg monsieur's pardon very truly for suggesting such a thing.
+Nevertheless, one cannot well be overcautious when one is a hunted man."
+
+"Blensop ... be good enough to see this man out through the garden."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Again, monsieur, my thanks."
+
+"Good-night," said Stanistreet curtly.
+
+Blensop passed Lanyard's chair, unlatched and opened the window and stood
+aside. An instant later "Karl" joined him, swung on a heel, facing back,
+clicked heels again and bowed mockingly. Apparently he got no response, for
+he laughed quietly, then turned and went out through the window, Blensop
+mincing after.
+
+With a struggle Lanyard mastered the temptation to dash after the spy,
+overtake and overpower him, expose and give him up to justice. Only the
+knowledge that by remaining quiescent, by biding his time, he might be
+enabled to redeem his word to the Brooke girl, gave him strength to be
+still.
+
+But he suffered exquisitely, maddened by the defamation imposed upon his
+nick-name of a thief by this brazen impostor.
+
+Nor was wounded _amour-propre_ mended by an exclamation in the room behind
+his chair, the accents of Colonel Stanistreet thick with contempt:
+
+"The Lone Wolf! Faugh!"
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+RECOGNITION
+
+
+Presently Blensop came back, closed the window, and passed blindly by
+Lanyard, his reappearance saluted by Stanistreet in tones that shook with
+contained temper.
+
+"You saw that animal outside the walls?"
+
+Mildly injured surprise was indicated in the reply: "Surely, sir!"
+
+"And locked the door after him?"
+
+"Yes, sir--securely."
+
+"Howson anywhere about?"
+
+"I didn't see him. Daresay he's prowling somewhere within call. Do you wish
+to speak to him?"
+
+"No.... But you might, if you see anything of him, tell him to keep an
+extra eye open to-night. I don't trust this self-styled Lone Wolf."
+
+"Naturally not, sir, under the circumstances."
+
+Stanistreet acknowledged this with an irritated snort. "No matter," he
+thought aloud; "if it has cost us a pretty penny, we have got this safe in
+hand at last. I've not had too much sleep, I can promise you, since the
+report came through of Bartholomew's death and Thackeray's disablement.
+Nor am I satisfied that this Monsieur Duchemin came by the document
+fairly--confound his impudence! If he hadn't put me on honour, tacitly, I'd
+not hesitate an instant about informing the police."
+
+"Rather chancy course to take in this business, what?"
+
+"I don't know.... That Yankee invention known as the 'frame-up' would
+easily make America too small for the Lone Wolf without the British Secret
+Service ever being mentioned in the matter."
+
+"Yes; but suppose the beast knows the contents of this paper, suspects
+the authorship of the 'frame-up'--as he instinctively would--and blabs?
+Messages have been unsealed and copied and resealed before this."
+
+"That one consideration ties my hands.... Here, my boy: take this and
+put it in the safe--and don't forget Mrs. Arden's things, of course.
+Good-night."
+
+"Trust me, sir. Good-night."
+
+A door closed with a slight jar, and for half a minute the room was so
+positively quiet that Lanyard was beginning to wonder if Blensop himself
+had gone out with his employer, when he heard a low and musical chuckle,
+followed by a soft clashing as the secretary scooped Mrs. Arden's jewellery
+out of the desk drawer.
+
+Itching with curiosity, Lanyard turned with infinite care and peered round
+the wing of the chair, thus gaining a view of the wall farthest from the
+street.
+
+Blensop remaining invisible, Lanyard's interest centred immediately upon
+the safe the ingenuity of whose concealment had excited "Karl's" favourable
+comment, and with much excuse.
+
+One of the portraits--that upon whose merits Blensop had descanted to
+"Karl" earlier in the night--was, Lanyard saw, so mounted upon a solid
+panel of wood that, by means of hidden mechanism, it could be moved
+sidelong from its frame, uncovering the face of a safe built into the wall.
+
+This last now stood open, its door, swung out toward Lanyard, showing
+a simple arrangement of dials and locks with which he was on terms of
+contemptuous familiarity; only the veriest tyro of a cracksman would want
+more than a good ear and a subtle sense of touch in order to open it
+without knowledge of the combination.
+
+With all its reputation for efficiency and astuteness the British Secret
+Service entrusted its mysteries to an antiquated contraption such as this!
+
+Humming a blithe little air, Blensop moved into Lanyard's field of vision
+and stopped between him and the safe, deftly pigeonholing therein the
+docketed papers and Mrs. Arden's jewels. Then, closing the door, he shot
+its bolts, gave the dial a brisk twirl, located a lever in the side of the
+frame and thrust it into its socket.
+
+With the same swish and thud which had puzzled Lanyard at first hearing,
+the portrait slipped back into place.
+
+Rounding on a heel, Blensop paused, head to one side, a slight frown
+shadowing his bland countenance, and stood briefly rooted in some
+perplexity of obscure origin. Twice he shook a peevish head, then smiled
+radiantly and brought his hands together in an audible clap.
+
+"I have it!" he cried in delight and, dancing briskly toward the desk, once
+more disappeared.
+
+Now what was this which Mr. Blensop so spontaneously had, and from the
+having of which he derived so much apparently innocent enjoyment? Wanting
+an answer, Lanyard settled back in disgust, then sat sharply forward, gaze
+riveted to the near sash of the adjacent window.
+
+In showing "Karl" out, Blensop had moved the portieres, exposing more
+glass than previously had been visible. Now this mirrored darkly to the
+adventurer a somewhat distorted vision of Blensop standing over the
+desk, seemingly employed in no more amusing occupation than filling his
+fountain-pen. But undoubtedly he was in the highest spirits; for the lilt
+of his humming rose sweet and clear and ever louder.
+
+To this accompaniment he pocketed his pen, two-stepped to the windows,
+drew the portieres jealously close, returned to the desk, switched off the
+reading lamp, and left the room completely dark but for a dim glow from the
+ash-filmed embers of the fire.
+
+But before he went out the secretary interrupted his humming to laugh
+with a mischievous elan which completely confounded Lanyard. He was not
+unacquainted with the Blensop type, but the secret glee which seemed to
+animate this specimen was something far beyond his comprehension.
+
+As the door softly closed Lanyard moved silently across the room and bent
+an ear to its panels, meanwhile drawing over his hands a pair of thin white
+kid gloves.
+
+From beyond came no sound other than a faint creaking of stair-treads
+quickly silenced.
+
+Opening the door, Lanyard peered out, finding the hallway deserted and
+dimly lighted by a single bulb of little candle-power at its far end, then
+scouted out as far as the foot of the stairs, listened there for a little,
+hearing no sounds above, and reconnoitred through the other living rooms,
+at length returning to the library persuaded he was alone on the ground
+floor of the house.
+
+A Yale lock was fixed to the library side of the door. Lanyard released its
+catch, insuring freedom from interruption on the part of anybody who lacked
+the key, crossed to the other side door, left this on the latch and, having
+thus provided an avenue for escape, turned attention to business, in brief,
+to the safe.
+
+Turning on the picture-light he found and operated the lever, with his
+other hand so restraining the action of the panel that it moved aside
+without perceptible jar.
+
+Then with an ear to that smooth, cold face of enamelled steel, he began
+to manipulate the combination. From within the door a succession of soft
+clicks and knocks punctuated the muted whine of the dial, speaking
+a language only too intelligible to the trained hearing of a thief;
+synchronous breaks and resistance in the action of the dial conveyed
+additional information through the medium of supersensitive finger tips.
+Within two minutes he had learned all he needed to know, and standing back
+twirled the knob right and left with a confident hand. At its fourth stop
+he heard the dull bump of released tumblers, grasped the handle, and
+twisted it strongly. The door swung open.
+
+Systematically Lanyard searched the pigeonholes, emptying all but one,
+examining minutely their contents without finding that slender roll of
+paper.
+
+Mystified, he hesitated. The thing, of course, was somewhere there, only
+hidden more cunningly than he had hoped. It was possible, even probable,
+that Blensop had stowed the cylinder away in a secret compartment.
+
+But the interior arrangement was disconcertingly simple. Lanyard saw no
+sign of waste space in which such a drawer might be secreted. Unless, to be
+sure, one of the pigeonholes had a false back....
+
+He began a fresh examination, again emptying each pigeonhole and sounding
+its rear wall without result till there remained only that in which Blensop
+had placed the Arden jewels.
+
+It was necessary to move these, but Lanyard long withheld his hand,
+reluctant to touch them, for that same reason which had influenced him to
+avoid them in his first search.
+
+Jewels such as these he both worshipped and desired with the passionate
+adoration of connoisseur and lover in one. He feared violently the
+temptation of physical contact with such stuff.
+
+For his was no thief's errand to-night, but a matter, as he conceived
+it, of his private honour, something apart and distinct from the code of
+rogue's ethics which guided his professional activities. He had pledged
+his word to Cecelia Brooke to keep safe for her that cylinder of paper, to
+return it upon her demand for whatsoever disposition she might choose to
+make of it. It was no concern of his what that choice might turn out to
+be, any more than it was his affair if the document were a paper of
+international importance. But she must and should, if act of his could
+compass it, be given opportunity to redeem her word of honour if, as one
+believed, that likewise were involved in the fate of the document.
+
+He had stolen into this house like a thief because he had given his pledge
+and perforce had been made false to that pledge, because he had been
+despoiled of the concrete evidence of the trust reposed unasked in him, and
+because he had learned that his spoiler was to meet Stanistreet in this
+room at midnight.
+
+He was here solely to make good his word, to take away that cylinder, could
+he find it, and to return it to the girl ... not to thieve....
+
+Never that!...
+
+Slowly, reluctantly, inevitably he put forth his hand and selected from
+among those brilliant symbols of his soul's profound damnation the
+necklace, a rope of diamonds consummately matched, a rivulet of frozen
+fire, no single stone less lovely than another.
+
+"Admirable!" he whispered. "Oh, admirable!"
+
+Hesitant to do this thing which to him, by the strange standard of his
+warped code, spelled dishonour, he would and he would not; and while he
+paltered, was visited by an oddly vivid memory of the clear and candid eyes
+of Cecelia Brooke, seemed veritably to see them searching his own with
+their look of grieving wonder ... the eyes of one woman who had reckoned
+him worthy of her trust....
+
+Almost he won victory in this fight he was foredoomed to lose. Under the
+level and steadfast regard of those eyes his hand went out to replace the
+necklace, moved unsteadily, faltered....
+
+Beyond the windows an incautious footfall sounded. In the darkness out
+there someone blundered into a piece of wicker furniture and disturbed it
+with a small scraping sound, all but inaudible, but to the thief as loud as
+the blast of a police whistle.
+
+Instantly and instinctively, in two simultaneous gestures, Lanyard dropped
+the necklace into an inner pocket of his coat and switched off the
+picture-light.
+
+With hands now as steady and sure as they had been vacillant a moment
+since, he closed the safe door noiselessly, shot its bolts, and was yards
+away, crouching behind an armchair, before the man outside had ceased to
+fumble with the window fastenings.
+
+If this were the watchman Howson, doubtless he would be satisfied with
+finding the room dark and apparently untenanted, and would go off upon his
+rounds unsuspecting. If he did not, or if he noticed the displaced panel,
+then would come Lanyard's time to break cover and run for it.
+
+With a faint creak one of the windows swung inward. Curtain-rings clashed
+dully on their poles. Someone came through the portieres and paused,
+pulling them together behind him. The beam of an electric flash-lamp lanced
+the gloom and its spotlight danced erratically round the walls.
+
+Now there was no more thought of flight in Lanyard's humour, but rather a
+firm determination to stand his ground. This was no night watchman, but a
+housebreaker, one with no more title to trespass upon those premises than
+himself; and at that an unskilled hand at such work, the rawest of amateurs
+practising methods as clumsy and childish as any actor playing at burglary
+on a stage before a simple-minded audience.
+
+The noise he made on entering alone proved that, then this fatuous business
+with the flash-lamp. And as he moved inward from the windows it became
+evident that he had not even had the wit to close the portieres completely;
+a violet glimmer of starlight shone in through a deep triangular gap
+between them at the top.
+
+For all that, the intruder seemed to know what he wanted and where to seek
+it, betrayed a nice acquaintance with the room, proceeding directly to the
+safe picked out by his lamp.
+
+Arrived beneath it he uttered a low sound which might have been interpreted
+as surprise due to finding the panel already out of place. If so, surprise
+evidently roused in him no suspicion that all might not be well. On the
+contrary, he quite calmly located and turned the switch controlling the
+picture-light.
+
+Immediately, as its rays gushed down and disclosed the man, Lanyard
+rose boldly from his place in hiding. Now there was no more need for
+concealment; now was his enemy delivered into his hands.
+
+The man was "Karl."
+
+His back to Lanyard, unconscious of that one's catlike approach, the spy
+put up his flash-lamp, searched in a waistcoat pocket and produced a slip
+of paper, and bent his face close to the combination dial, studying its
+figures; but abruptly, like a startled animal, whirled round to face the
+windows.
+
+One of the sashes was thrown back roughly, and a figure clad in the gray
+livery of a private watchman parted the portieres and entered the library.
+
+"Everything all right in here, Mr. Blensop?"
+
+Lanyard saw the sheen of blue steel in the hands of "Karl," and leaped too
+late: even as he fell upon the spy's shoulders, the pistol exploded.
+
+The watchman reeled back with a choking cry, caught wildly at the
+portieres, and dragged them down with him as he fell.
+
+His screams of agony made hideous the night. And the second cry was no more
+than uttered when Lanyard, even in the heat of his struggle, heard sounds
+indicating that already the household was alarmed.
+
+But the door would hold for a while; it was not probable that the first to
+come downstairs would think to bring with him the key. Time enough to
+think of escape when Lanyard had settled his score with this one: no light
+undertaking; not only was the score a long one, longer than Lanyard then
+dreamed, but, as he had learned to his cost, the man was an antagonist of
+skill and strength not to be despised.
+
+Nevertheless, aided by the surprise of his onslaught, Lanyard succeeded
+in disarming the spy, forcing him to drop the pistol at the outset, and
+through attacking from behind had him at a further disadvantage. For all
+that he found his hands full till, by a trick of jiu-jitsu, he wrenched one
+of the fellow's arms behind him so roughly as almost to dislocate it at the
+shoulder and, forcing the forearm up toward his shoulder blades, held him
+temporarily helpless.
+
+"Be still, you murderous canaille!" he growled--"or must I tear your arm
+from its socket? Still, I say!"
+
+"Karl" uttered a grunt of pain and ceased to struggle.
+
+Pinning him against the bookcase, Lanyard hastily rifled his pockets, at
+the first dip bringing forth a thin sheaf of American bank-notes with the
+figures $1000 conspicuous on the uppermost.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," he said grimly--"precisely my fee for the use of my
+name--to say nothing of its abuse!"
+
+A torrent of untranslatable German blasphemy answered him. Intelligible was
+the half-frantic demand: "Who the devil are you?"
+
+"Take a look, assassin--see for yourself!" Lanyard twisted the spy around
+to face him, holding him helpless against the wall with a knee in his
+middle and a hand gripping his throat inexorably. "Do you know me now--the
+man you thought you'd drowned a hundred fathoms deep?"
+
+Blows thundered on the hallway door. Neither heeded. The spy was staring
+into Lanyard's face, his eyes starting with horror and affright.
+
+"Lanyard!" he gasped. "Good God! will you never die?"
+
+"Never by your hand--" Lanyard began, but stopped sharply.
+
+For a moment he glared incredulously, and in that moment knew his enemy.
+
+"Ekstrom!" he cried; and the man at his mercy winced and quailed.
+
+The din in the hallway grew louder. Voices cried out for the key. Somebody
+threw himself against the door so heavily that it shook.
+
+The emergency forced itself upon Lanyard's consciousness, would not be
+denied. Its dilemma seemed calculated to unseat his reason. If he lingered,
+he was lost. Either he must grant this creature new lease of life, or be
+caught and pay the penalty of murder for an execution as surely just as any
+in the history of mankind.
+
+It was bitter, too bitter to have come to this his hour so long desired, so
+long deferred, so arduously sought, and have the fruits of it snatched from
+his craving grasp.
+
+He could not bring himself to this renunciation; slowly his fingers
+tightened on the other's throat.
+
+Driven to desperation by the light of madness that began to flicker in
+Lanyard's eyes, the Prussian abruptly put all he had of might and fury into
+one final effort, threw Lanyard off, and in turn attacked him, fighting
+like a lunatic for footroom, for space enough to turn and make for the
+windows.
+
+In spite of all he could do Lanyard saw the man work away from the wall and
+manoeuvre his back toward the windows; then he flew at him with redoubled
+fury, driving home blow after blow that beat down Ekstrom's guard and sent
+him staggering helplessly, till an uppercut, swinging in under his uplifted
+forearms, put an end to the combat. Ekstrom shot backward half a dozen
+feet, stumbled over the prostrate body of the watchman, and crashed
+headlong into the windows, going down in a shower of shattered glass.
+
+In one and the same instant Lanyard darted back and dropped upon his knees
+in the shadow of the club lounge, and the door to the hallway slammed open.
+A knot of men, to the number of half a dozen, tumbling into the library,
+saw that figure floundering amid the ruins of the window, and made for it,
+passing on the other side of the lounge, between it and the fireplace.
+
+Unseen, Lanyard rose, ran crouching across the room; found the side door,
+opened it just far enough to permit the passage of his body, and drew it to
+behind him.
+
+Ninety-fifth Street was a lonely lane of midnight quiet. He sped across it
+like the shadow of a cloud wind-hunted.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+AU PRINTEMPS
+
+
+In those days New York nights were long; this was still young when Lanyard
+sauntered sedately from a side street and stopped on a corner of Broadway
+in the Nineties; he had not long to wait ere a southbound taxicab hove in
+sight and sheered over to the curb in answer to his signal.
+
+It was still something short of one o'clock when he was set down at his
+door.
+
+Wearily he let himself in by the private entrance, made a light, and
+without troubling even to discard his overcoat threw himself into a chair.
+Leaden depression weighed down his heart, and the flavour of failure was
+as aloes in his mouth. Thrice within an hour he had fallen short of his
+promises, to Cecelia Brooke, to himself, to his _idee fixe_. His three
+chances, to redeem his word to the girl, to measure up to his queer
+criterion of honour, to rid his world of Ekstrom, all had slipped through
+fingers seemingly too infirm to profit by them.
+
+He felt of a sudden old; old, and tired, and lonely.
+
+The uses of his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was
+his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of
+his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now
+swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the
+shameful habiliments of a felon self-condemned.
+
+What had prevented his dealing out to Ekstrom the punishment he had so well
+earned? That insatiable lust for loot of his. But for that damning evidence
+against him of the stolen necklace in his pocket he might have had his will
+of Ekstrom, and justified himself when discovered by proving that he had
+merely done justice to a thief who sold what he had stolen and stole back
+to steal again what he had sold.
+
+Self-contempt attacked self-conceit like an acid. He saw Michael Lanyard
+a sorry figure, sitting stultified with self-pity ... crying over spilt
+milk....
+
+Impatiently he shook himself. What though he had to-night forfeited his
+chances? He could, nay, would, make others. He must....
+
+To what end? Would life be sweeter if one found a way to restore to Cecelia
+Brooke her precious document and to smuggle back to Mrs. Arden her pilfered
+diamonds? Would this deadly ache of loneliness be less poignant with
+Ekstrom dead?
+
+With lack-lustre eyes he looked round that cheerless room, reckoning its
+perfunctory pretense of comfort the forlornest mockery. To lodgings such as
+this he was condemned for life, to an interminable sequence of transient
+quarters, sordid or splendid, rich or mean, alike in this common quality of
+hollow loneliness....
+
+His aimless gaze wandered toward the door opening on the public hallway,
+and became fixed upon a triangular shape of white paper, the half of an
+envelope tucked between door and sill.
+
+Presently he rose and got the thing, not until he touched it quite
+persuaded he was not the victim of an optical hallucination.
+
+A square envelope of creamy paper, it was superscribed simply in a hand
+strange to him, _Anthony Ember, Esq_., with the address of his apartment
+house.
+
+Tearing the envelope he found within a double sheet of plain notepaper
+bearing a message of five words penned hastily:
+
+  "_Au Printemps_--
+  "_one o'clock_--
+  "_Please_!"
+
+Nothing else, not another word or pen-scratch....
+
+Opening the door Lanyard hailed the hall-attendant, a sleepy and not
+over-intelligent negro.
+
+"When did this come for me?"
+
+"'Bout anour ago, Mistuh Embuh."
+
+"Who brought it?"
+
+"A messenger boy done fotch it, suh--look lak th' same boy."
+
+"What same boy?"
+
+"Same as come in when you do, 'bout 'leven o'clock--remembuh?"
+
+Lanyard nodded, recalling that on his way up the street from Sixth Avenue
+he had been subconsciously irritated by the shrill, untuneful whistling of
+a loutish youth in Western Union uniform, who had followed him into the
+house and become engaged in some minor altercation with the attendants
+while Lanyard was unlocking the door to his apartment.
+
+"What of him?"
+
+"Why, he bulge in heah an' say we done send a call, an' we tell him we don'
+know nuffin' 'bout no call, an' he sweah an' carry on, an' aftuh you done
+gone in he ast whut is yo' name, an' somebody tell him an' he go away. An'
+then 'bout haffanour aftuhwuds he come back with that theah lettuh--say to
+stick it undeh yo' do, ef yo' ain't home. Leastways he look to me lak th'
+same boy. Ah dunno fo' suah."
+
+Repeated efforts failing to extract more enlightenment from this source,
+Lanyard again shut himself in with the puzzle.
+
+Somebody had set a messenger boy to dog him and find out his name and
+address. Not Crane: Lanyard had seen that one disappear in the elevator of
+the Knickerbocker and had thereafter moved too quickly to permit of Crane's
+returning to the lobby, calling a messenger boy, and pointing out Lanyard.
+
+For that matter, Lanyard was prepared to swear nobody had followed him from
+the Knickerbocker to the Biltmore.
+
+Vaguely he seemed to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when
+he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone
+Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose
+flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the
+display of a catch-penny corn cure.
+
+Was there a link between that circumstance and the long delay which Lanyard
+had suffered in the telephone booth? Had the Knickerbocker operator been
+less stupid and negligent than she seemed? Was the truth of the matter that
+Crane had surmised Lanyard would attempt communication with the Brooke girl
+and had set a watch on the switchboard for the call?
+
+Assuming that the Secret Service man had been clever enough for that,
+it was not difficult to understand that Lanyard had purposely been kept
+dangling at the other end of the wire till the call could be traced back to
+its source and a messenger despatched from the nearest Western Union office
+with instructions to follow the man who left the booth, and report his name
+and local habitation.
+
+Sharp work, if these inferences were reasonable. And, satisfied that
+they were, Lanyard inclined to accord increased respect to the detective
+abilities of the American.
+
+But this note, this hurried, unsigned scrawl of five unintelligible words:
+what the deuce did it mean?
+
+On the evidence of the handwriting a woman had penned it. Cecelia Brooke?
+Who else? Crane might well have been taken into her confidence, subsequent
+to the sinking of the _Assyrian_, and on discovering that Lanyard had
+survived have used this means of relieving the girl's distress of mind.
+
+But its significance?... "Au Printemps" translated literally meant "in the
+springtime," and "in the springtime at one o'clock" was mere gibberish,
+incomprehensible. There is in Paris a department store calling itself "Au
+Printemps"; but surely no one was suggesting to Lanyard in New York a
+rendezvous in Paris!
+
+Nevertheless that "Please!" intrigued with a note at once pleading and
+imperative which decided Lanyard to answer it without delay, in person.
+
+"_Au Printemps--one o'clock--please_!"
+
+Upon the screen of memory there flashed a blurred vision of an electric
+sign emblazoning the phrase, "Au Printemps," against the facade of a
+building with windows all blind and dark save those of the street level,
+which glowed pink with light filtered through silken hangings; a building
+which Lanyard had already passed thrice that night without, in the
+preoccupation of his purpose, paying it any heed; a building on Broadway
+somewhere above Columbus Circle, if he were not mistaken.
+
+Already it was one o'clock. Fortunately he was still in evening dress, and
+needed only to change collar and tie to repair the disarray caused by his
+encounter with Ekstrom.
+
+In two minutes he was once more in the street.
+
+Within five a cab deposited him in front of the Restaurant Au Printemps, an
+institution of midnight New York whose title for distinction resided mainly
+in the fact that it opened its upper floors for the diversion of "members"
+about the time when others put up their shutters.
+
+Lanyard's advent occurred at the height of its traffic. The dining rooms on
+the street level were closed and unlighted: but men and women in pairs
+and parties were streaming across the sidewalk from an endless chain of
+motor-cars and being ground through the revolving doors like grist in the
+hopper of an unhallowed mill, the men all in evening dress, the women in
+garments whose insolence outrivalled the most Byzantine nights of L'Abbaye
+Theleme.
+
+Drawn in with the current through the turnstile door, Lanyard found himself
+in an absurdly little lobby thronged to suffocation, largely with people
+of the half-world--here and there a few celebrities, here and there small
+tight clusters of respectabilities making a brave show of feeling at
+ease--all waiting their turn to be lifted to delectable regions aloft in an
+elevator barely big enough to serve in a private residence.
+
+For a moment Lanyard lingered unnoticed on the outskirts of this
+assemblage, searching its pretty faces for the prettier face he had come to
+find and wondering that she should have chosen for her purpose with him a
+resort of this character. His memory of her was sweet with the clean smell
+of the sea; there was incongruity to spare in this atmosphere heady with
+the odours of wine, flesh, scent, and tobacco. Perplexing....
+
+A harpy with a painted leer and predacious eyes pounced upon him, tore away
+his hat and coat, gave him a numbered slip of pasteboard by presenting
+which he would be permitted to ransom his property on extortionate terms.
+
+And still he saw no Cecelia Brooke, though his aloof attitude coupled with
+an intent but impersonal inspection of every feminine face within his
+radius of vision earned him more than one smile at once furtively
+provocative and unwelcome.
+
+By degrees the crowd emptied itself into the toy elevator--such of it, that
+is, as was passed by a committee on membership consisting of one chubby,
+bearded gentleman with the look of a French diplomatist, the empressement
+of a head waiter and the authority of the Angel with the Flaming Sword.
+_Personae non gratae_ to the management--inexplicably so in most
+instances--were civilly requested to produce membership cards and, upon
+failure to comply, were inexorably rejected, and departed strangely
+shamefaced. Others of acceptable aspect were permitted to mingle with
+the upper circles of the elect without being required to prove their
+"membership."
+
+In the person of this suave but inflexible arbiter Lanyard identified a
+former maitre d'hotel of the Carlton who had abruptly and discreetly fled
+London soon after the outbreak of war.
+
+He fancied that this one knew him and was sedulous both to keep him in the
+corner of his eye and never to meet his regard directly.
+
+And once he saw the man speak covertly with the elevator attendant,
+guarding his lips with a hand, and suspected that he was the subject of
+their communication.
+
+The lobby was still comfortably filled, a constant trickle of arrivals
+replacing in measure the losses by election and rejection, when Lanyard,
+watching the revolving doors, saw Cecelia Brooke coming in.
+
+She was alone, at least momentarily; and in his sight very creditably
+turned out, remembering that all her luggage must have been lost with the
+_Assyrian_. But what Englishwoman of her caste ever permitted herself to be
+visible after nightfall except in an evening gown of some sort, even though
+a shabby sort? Not that Miss Brooke to-night was shabbily attired: she was
+much otherwise; from some mysterious source of wardrobe she had conjured
+wraps, furs, and a dancing frock as fresh and becoming as it was, oddly
+enough, not immodest. And with whatever cares preying upon her secret mind,
+she entered with the light step and bright countenance of any girl of her
+age embarked upon a lark.
+
+All that was changed at sight of Lanyard.
+
+He bowed formally at a moment when her glance, resting on him, seemed about
+to wander on; instead it became fixed in recognition. Instantly her smile
+was erased, her features stiffened, her eyes widened, her lips parted, the
+colour ebbed from her cheeks. And she stopped quite still in front of the
+door till lightly jostled by other arrivals.
+
+Then moving uncertainly toward him, she said, "Monsieur Duchemin!" not
+loudly, for she was not a woman to give excuse for a scene under any
+circumstances, but in a tone of complete dumbfounderment.
+
+Covering his own dashed contenance with a semblance of unruffled
+amiability, he bowed again, now over the hand which the girl tentatively
+offered, letting it rest lightly on his fingers, touching it as lightly
+with his lips.
+
+"It is such a pleasant surprise," he said at a venture, then added
+guardedly: "But my name--I thought you knew it was now Anthony Ember."
+
+Her eyes were blank. "I don't understand," she faltered. "I thought you ...
+I never dreamed.... Is it really you?"
+
+"Truly," he averred, lips smiling but mind rife with suspicion and
+distrust.
+
+This was not acting; he was convinced that her surprise was absolutely
+unfeigned.
+
+So she had not expected to find him "Au Printemps" at one o'clock in the
+morning, till that very moment had believed him as dead as any of those
+poor souls who had perished with the _Assyrian_!
+
+Therefore that note had not come from her, therefore Lanyard had
+complimented Crane without warrant, crediting him with another's
+cleverness. Then whose...?
+
+And while Lanyard's head buzzed with these thoughts, an independent chamber
+of his mind was engaged in admiring the address with which the girl was
+recovering from what must have been, what plainly had been, a staggering
+shock. Already she had begun to grapple with the situation, to take herself
+in hand and dissemble; already her face was regaining its accustomed cast
+of self-confidence, composure, and intelligent animation. Throughout she
+pursued without a break the thread of conventional small talk.
+
+"It is a surprise," she said calmly. "Really, you are a most astonishing
+person, Mr. Ember. One never knows where to look for you."
+
+"That is my good fortune, since it provides me with unexpected pleasures
+such as this. You are with friends?"
+
+"With a friend," she corrected quietly--"with Mr. Crane. He stopped outside
+to pay our taxi-driver. How odd it seems to find any place in the world as
+much alive as this New York!"
+
+"It seems almost impossible," Lanyard averred--"indeed, somehow wrong. I've
+a feeling one has no right to encourage so much frivolity. And yet...."
+
+"Yes," she responded quickly. "It is good to hear people laugh once more.
+That is why Mr. Crane suggested coming here to-night, to cheer me up. He
+said Au Printemps was unique, promised I'd find it most amusing."
+
+"I'm sure...." Lanyard began as Crane entered, breezing through the
+turnstile and comprehending the situation in a glance.
+
+"Hello!" he cried. "Didn't I tell you everybody alive would be here?"
+
+Nor was Cecelia Brooke less ready. "But fancy meeting Mr. Ember here! I had
+no idea he was in New York--had you?"
+
+"Perhaps a dim suspicion," Crane admitted with a twinkle, taking Lanyard's
+hand. "Howdy, Ember? Glad to see you, gladder'n you'd think."
+
+"How is that?" Lanyard asked, returning the cordiality of his grasp.
+
+Crane's penetrating accents must have been audible in the remotest corner
+of the ground-floor rooms: he made no effort to modulate them to a quieter
+pitch.
+
+"You can help me out of a fix if you feel like it. You see, I promised Miss
+Brooke if she'd take me for her guide, she'd see life to-night; and now,
+just when we're going good, I've got to renig. Man I know held me up
+outside, says I'm wanted down town on special business and must go. I might
+be able to toddle back later, but can't bank on it. Do you mind taking over
+my job?"
+
+"Chaperoning Miss Brooke's investigations into the seamy side of current
+social history? That will be delightful."
+
+"Attaboy! If I'm not back in half an hour you'll see her safely home, of
+course?"
+
+"Trust me."
+
+"And you'll excuse me, Miss Brooke? I hope you don't think--"
+
+"What I do think, Mr. Crane, is that you have been most kind to a lonely
+stranger. Of course I'll excuse you, not willingly, but understanding you
+must go."
+
+"That makes me a heap easier in my mind. But I' got to run. So it's
+good-night, unless maybe I see you later. So long, Ember!"
+
+With a flirt of a raw-boned hand, Crane swung about, threw himself
+spiritedly into the revolving door, was gone.
+
+"Amazing creature," Lanyard commented, laughing.
+
+"I think him delightful," the girl replied, surrendering her wraps to a
+maid. "If all Americans are like that--"
+
+"Shall we go up?"
+
+She nodded--"Please!"--and turned with him.
+
+The committee on membership himself bowed them into the elevator. Several
+others crowded in after them. For thirty seconds, while the car moved
+slowly upward, Lanyard was free to think without interruption.
+
+But what to think now? That Crane, actuated by some motive occult to
+Lanyard, had engineered this apparently adventitious _rencontre_ for the
+purpose of throwing him and the Brooke girl together? Or, again, that Crane
+was innocent of guile in this matter--that other persons unknown, causing
+Lanyard to be traced to his lodgings, had framed that note to entice him to
+this place to-night? In the latter event, who was conceivably responsible
+but Velasco, Dressier, O'Reilly--any one of these, or all three working in
+concert? The last-named had looked Lanyard squarely in the face without
+sign of recognition, back there in the lobby of the Knickerbocker,
+precisely as he should, if implicated in the conspiracies of the Boche;
+though it might easily have been Velasco or Dressier who had recognized the
+adventurer without his knowledge....
+
+The car stopped, a narrow-chested door slid open, a gush of hectic light
+coloured morbidly the faces of alighting passengers, a blare of syncopated
+noise singularly unmusical saluted the astonished ears of Lanyard and
+Cecelia Brooke. She met his gaze with a smiling _moue_ and slightly lifted
+eyebrows.
+
+"More than we bargained for?" he laughed. "But there is always something
+new in this America, I promise you. Au Printemps itself is new, at all
+events did not exist when I was last in New York."
+
+Following her out, he paused beside the girl in a constricted space hedged
+about with tables, waiting for the maitre d'hotel to seat those who had
+been first to leave the elevator.
+
+The room, of irregular conformation, held upward of two hundred guests and
+habitues seated at tables large and small and so closely set together
+that waiters with difficulty navigated narrow and tortuous channels of
+communication. In the middle, upon a small dancing floor, rudely octagonal
+in shape, made smaller by tables crowded round its edge to accommodate the
+crush, a mob of couples danced arduously, close-locked in one another's
+arms, swaying in rhythm with the over-emphasized time beaten out by a
+perspiring little band of musicians on a dais in a far corner, their
+activities directed by an antic conductor whose lantern-jawed, sallow face
+peered grotesquely out through a mop of hair as black and coarse and lush
+as a horse's mane.
+
+Execrable ventilation or absence thereof manufactured an atmosphere that
+reeked with heat animal and artificial and with ill-blended effluvia from a
+hundred sources. Perhaps the odour of alcohol predominated; Lanyard thought
+of a steam-heated wine-cellar. He observed nothing but champagne in any
+glass, and if food were being served it was done surreptitiously. Sweat
+dripped from the faces of the dancers, deep flushes discoloured all not so
+heavily enamelled as to preserve an inalterable complexion, the eyes of
+many stared with the fixity of hypnosis. Yet when the music ended with an
+unexpected crash of discord these dancers applauded insatiably till the
+jaded orchestra struck up once more, when they renewed their curious
+gyrations with quenchless abandon.
+
+The Brooke girl caught Lanyard's eye, her lips moved. Thanks to the din, he
+had to bend his head near to hear.
+
+She murmured with infinite expression: "Au Printemps!"
+
+The maitre d'hotel was plucking at his sleeve.
+
+"Monsieur had made reservations, no?" Startled recognition washed the man's
+tired and pasty countenance. "Pardon, monsieur: this way!" He turned and
+began to thread deviously between the jostling tables.
+
+Dubiously Lanyard followed. He likewise had known the maitre d'hotel at
+sight: a beastly little decadent whose cabaret on the rue d'Antin, just off
+the avenue de l'Opera, had been a famous rendezvous of international spies
+till war had rendered it advisable for him to efface himself from the ken
+of Paris with the same expedition and discretion which had marked the
+departure from London of his confrere who now guarded the lower gateway to
+these ethereal regions of Au Printemps.
+
+The coincidence of finding those two so closely associated worked with the
+riddle of that note further to trouble Lanyard's mind.
+
+Was he to believe Au Printemps the legitimate successor in America of that
+less pretentious establishment on the rue d'Antin, an overseas headquarters
+for Secret Service agents of the Central Powers?
+
+He began to regret heartily, not so much that he had presented himself in
+answer to that note, but the responsibility which now devolved upon him of
+caring for Miss Brooke. Much as he had wished to see her an hour ago, now
+he would willingly be rid of her company.
+
+Why had he been lured to this place, if its character were truly what he
+feared? Conceivably because he was believed--since it now appeared he had
+cheated death--still to possess either that desired document or knowledge
+of its whereabouts.
+
+Naturally the enemy would not think otherwise. He must not forget that
+Ekstrom was playing double; as yet none but Lanyard knew he had stolen the
+document and done a murder to cover the theft from his associates and leave
+him free to sell to England without exciting their suspicion.
+
+Consequently, Lanyard believed, he had been invited to this place to
+be sounded, to be tempted, bribed, intimidated--if need be, and
+possible--somehow to be won over to the uses of the Prussian spy system.
+
+Leading them to the farther side of the room, the maitre d'hotel paused
+bowing and mowing beside a large table already in the possession of a party
+of three.
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. One of the three was Velasco, another a young man
+unknown to him, a mannerly little creature who might have been written by
+the author of "What the Man Will Wear" in the theatre programmes. The third
+was Sophie Weringrode, the Wilhelmstrasse agent whom he had only that
+afternoon observed entering the house in Seventy-ninth Street.
+
+He stopped short, in a cold rage. Till that moment a mirror-sheathed pillar
+had hidden from him Velasco and the Weringrode; else Lanyard had refused
+to come so far; for obviously there were no unreserved tables, indeed few
+vacant chairs, in that part of the room.
+
+Not that he minded the cynical barefacedness of the dodge; that was indeed
+amusing; he was sanguine as to his ability to dominate any situation that
+might arise, and to a degree indifferent if the upshot should prove his
+confidence misplaced; and he did not in the least object to letting the
+enemy show his cards. But he did enormously resent what was, after all,
+something quite outside the calculations of these giddy conspirators, the
+fact that he must either beat incontinent retreat or introduce Cecelia
+Brooke to the company of Sophie Weringrode.
+
+His face darkened, a stinging reproof for the maitre d'hotel trembled on
+his tongue's tip; but that one was busily avoiding his eye on the far side
+of the table, drawing out a chair for "mademoiselle," while Velasco and the
+Weringrode were alert to read Lanyard's countenance and forestall any steps
+he might contemplate in defiance of their designs.
+
+At first glimpse of the Brooke girl Velasco jumped up and hastened to her,
+with eager Latin courtesy expressing his unanticipated delight in the
+prospect of her consenting to join their party. And she was suffering with
+quiet graciousness his florid compliments.
+
+At the same time the Weringrode was greeting Lanyard in the most intimate
+fashion--and damning him in the understanding of Cecelia Brooke with every
+word.
+
+"My dear friend!" she cried gayly, extending a bedizened hand. "I had begun
+to despair of you. Is it part of your system with women always to be a
+little late, always to keep us wondering?"
+
+Schooling his features to a civil smile, Lanyard bowed over the hand.
+
+"In warfare such as ours, my dear Sophie," he said with meaning, "one uses
+all weapons, even the most primitive, in sheer self-defense."
+
+The woman laughed delightedly. "I think," she said, "if you rose from the
+dead at the bottom of the sea, _Tony_, it would be with wit upon your
+lips.... And you have brought a friend with you? How charming!" She shifted
+in her chair to face Cecelia Brooke. "I wish to know her instantly!"
+
+Velasco was waiting only for that opening. "Dear princess," he said,
+instantly, "permit me to present Miss Cecelia Brooke ... Princess de
+Alavia...."
+
+Completely at ease and by every indication enjoying herself hugely, the
+girl bowed and took the hand the Weringrode thrust upon her. Her eyes,
+a-brim with excitement and mischief, veered to Lanyard's, ignored their
+warning, glanced away.
+
+"How do you do?" she said simply. "I didn't understand Mr. Ember expected
+to meet friends here, but that only makes it the more agreeable. May we sit
+down?"
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+FINESSE
+
+
+The person in the educated evening clothes was made known as Mr. Revel.
+For Lanyard's benefit and his own he vacated the chair beside Sophie
+Weringrode, seating himself to one side of Cecelia Brooke, who had Velasco
+between her and the soi-disant princess.
+
+Already a waiter had placed and was filling glasses for Lanyard and the
+girl.
+
+With the best grace he could muster the adventurer sat down, accepted
+a cigarette from the Weringrode case, and with openly impertinent eyes
+inspected the intrigante critically.
+
+She endured that ordeal well, smiling confidently, a handsome creature with
+a beautiful body bewitchingly gowned.
+
+Time, he considered, had been kind to Sophie--time, the mysteries of the
+modern toilette, and the astonishing adaptability of womankind. Splendidly
+vital, like all of her sort who survive, she seemed mysteriously able to
+renew that vitality through the very extravagance with which she squandered
+it. She had lived much of late years, rapidly but well, had learned much,
+had profited by her lessons. To-night she looked legitimately the princess
+of her pretensions; the manner of the grande dame suited her type; her
+gesture was as impeccable as her taste; prettier than ever, she seemed at
+worst little more than half her age.
+
+And her quick intelligence mocked the privacy of his reflections.
+
+"Fair, fast, and forty," she interpreted smilingly.
+
+He pretended to be stunned. "Never!" he protested feebly.
+
+The woman reaffirmed in a series of rapid nods. "Have I ever had secrets
+from you? You are too quick for me, monsieur: I do not intend to begin
+deceiving you at this late day--or trying to."
+
+"Flattery," he declared, "is meat and drink to me. Tell me more."
+
+She laughed lightly. "Thank you, no; vanity is unbecoming in men; I do not
+care to make you vain."
+
+Aware that Cecelia Brooke was listening all the while she seemed to be
+enchanted with the patter of Mr. Revel and the less vapid observations of
+Velasco, Lanyard sought to shunt personalities from himself.
+
+"And now a princess!"
+
+"Did you not know I had married? Yes, a princess of Spain--and with a
+castle there, if you must know."
+
+"Quite a change of atmosphere from Berlin," he remarked. "But it has done
+you no perceptible harm."
+
+That won him a black look. "Oh, Berlin!" she said with contemptuous lips.
+"I haven't been there since the beginning of the war. I wish never to see
+the place again. True: I was born an Austrian; but is that any reason why I
+should love Germany?"
+
+She leaned forward, her fan gently tapping the knuckles of his hand.
+
+"Pay less attention to me," she insisted, with a nod toward the middle of
+the room. "You are missing something. Me, I never tire of her."
+
+The floor had been cleared. A drummer on the dais was sounding the
+long-roll crescendo. At the culminating crash the lights were everywhere
+darkened save for an orange-coloured spot-light set in the ceiling
+immediately above the dancing floor. Into that circular field of torrid
+glare bounded a woman wearing little more than an abbreviated kirtle of
+grass strands with a few festoons of artificial flowers. Applause roared
+out to her, the orchestra sounded the opening bars of an Americanised
+Hawaiian melody, the woman with extraordinary vivacity began to perform a
+denatured hula: a wild and tawny animal, superbly physical, relying with
+warrant upon the stark sensuality of her body to make amends for the
+censored phrases of the primitive dance. The floor resounded like a great
+drum to the stamping of her bare feet, till one marvelled at such solidity
+of flesh as could endure that punishment.
+
+Sophie Weringrode lounged negligently upon the table, bringing her head
+near Lanyard's shoulder.
+
+"Play fair," she said between lips that barely moved.
+
+Without looking round Lanyard answered in the same manner: "Why ask more
+than you are prepared to give?"
+
+"The police ran you out of America once. We need only publish the fact that
+Mr. Anthony Ember is the Lone Wolf...."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Leave Berlin out of it before this girl."
+
+Lanyard shrugged and laughed quietly. "What else?"
+
+"We can't talk now. Ask me for the next dance."
+
+The woman sat back in her chair, attentive to the posturing of the dancer,
+slowly fanning herself.
+
+Lanyard's semblance of as much interest was nothing more; furtively his
+watchfulness alternated between two quarters of the room.
+
+On the farther edge of the circle of tropical radiance he had marked down a
+table at which two men were seated, Dressier and O'Reilly. No more question
+now as to the personnel of the conspiracy; even Velasco had thrown off
+the mask. The enemy had come boldly into the open, indicating a sense of
+impudent assurance, indicating even more, contempt of opposition. No
+longer afraid, they no longer skulked in shadows. Lanyard experienced a
+premonition of events impending.
+
+In addition he was keeping an eye on the door to the elevator shaft. Once
+already it had opened, letting a bright window into the farther wall of the
+shadowed room, discovering the figure of the maitre d'hotel in silhouette,
+anxiety in his attitude. He was waiting for somebody, waiting tensely. So
+were the others waiting, all that crew and their fellow workers scattered
+among the guests. Lanyard told himself he could guess for whom.
+
+Only Ekstrom was wanting to complete the circle. When he appeared--if by
+chance he should--things ought to begin to happen.
+
+If tolerably satisfied that Ekstrom would not come--not that night, at all
+events--Lanyard, none the less, continued to be jealously heedful of that
+doorway.
+
+But the hula came to an end without either his vigilance or the impatience
+of the maitre d'hotel being rewarded. Writhing with serpentine grace to the
+edge of the illuminated area, the dancer leaped back into darkness and the
+folds of a wrap held by a maid, in which garment she was seen, bowing and
+laughing, when the lights again blazed up.
+
+Without ceasing to play, changing only the time of the tune, the orchestra
+swung into a fox-trot. Lanyard glanced across the table to see Cecelia
+Brooke rising in response to the invitation of dapper Mr. Revel.
+
+In his turn, he rose with Sophie Weringrode. "Be patient with me,"
+he begged. "It is long since I danced to music more frivolous than a
+cannonade."
+
+"But it is simple," the woman promised--"simple, at least, to one who can
+dance as you could in the old days. Just follow me till you catch the step.
+It doesn't matter, anyway; I desire only the opportunity to converse."
+
+Yielding to his arms, she shifted into French when next she spoke.
+
+"You do admirably, my friend. Never again depreciate your dancing. If you
+knew how one suffers at the feet of these Americans--!"
+
+"Excellent!" he said. "Now that is settled: what is it you are instructed
+to propose to me?"
+
+She laughed softly. "Always direct! Truly you would never shine as a secret
+agent."
+
+"Not as they shine," Lanyard countered--"in the dark."
+
+"Don't be a fraud. We are what we are, and so are you. Let us not begin to
+be censorious of one another's methods of winning a living."
+
+"Agreed. But when do we begin to talk business?"
+
+"Why do you continue so persistently antagonistic?"
+
+"I am French."
+
+"That is silly. You are an outlaw, a man without a country. Why not change
+all that?"
+
+"And how does one effect miracles?"
+
+"Germany offers you a refuge, security, freedom to ply your trade
+unhindered--within reasonable limits."
+
+"And in exchange what do I give?"
+
+"Your services, as and when required, in our service."
+
+"Beginning when?"
+
+"To-night."
+
+"With what specific performance?"
+
+"We want, we must without fail have, that document you took from the Brooke
+girl."
+
+"Perhaps we had better continue in English. You are speaking a tongue
+unknown to me."
+
+"Don't talk rot. You know well what I mean. We know you have the thing.
+You didn't steal it to turn it over to England or the States. What is your
+price to Germany?"
+
+"Whatever you have in mind, believe me when I say I have nothing to sell to
+the Wilhelmstrasse."
+
+"But what else can you do with it? What other market--?"
+
+"My dear Sophie, upon my word I haven't got what you want."
+
+"Then why so keen to get the Brooke girl on the telephone as soon as you
+found out where she was stopping?"
+
+"How did you learn about that, by the way?"
+
+"Let the credit go to Senor Velasco. He saw you first."
+
+"One thought as much.... Nevertheless, I haven't what you want."
+
+"You gave it back to Miss Brooke?"
+
+"Having nothing to give her, I gave her nothing."
+
+The woman was silent throughout a round of the floor; then, "Tell me
+something," she requested.
+
+"Can I keep anything from you?"
+
+"Are you in love with the English girl?"
+
+Lanyard almost lost step, then laughed the thought to derision. "What put
+that into your pretty head, Sophie?"
+
+"Do you not know it yourself, my friend?"
+
+"It is absurd."
+
+She laughed maliciously. "Think it over. Possibly you have not stopped to
+think as yet. When you know the truth yourself, you will be the better
+qualified to fib about it. Also, you will not forget...."
+
+"What?" he demanded bluntly as she paused with intention.
+
+"That as long as she possesses the document--since you have it not--her
+life is endangered even more than yours."
+
+"She hasn't got it!" Lanyard declared, as nearly in panic as he ever was.
+
+"Ah!" the woman jeered. "So you confess to some knowledge of it after all!"
+
+"My dear," he said, teasingly, "do you really want to know what has become
+of that paper?"
+
+"I do, and mean to."
+
+"What if I tell you?"
+
+Her eyes lifted to his in childlike candour. "Need you ask?"
+
+"You are irresistible.... Ask Karl."
+
+She demanded sharply: "Whom?"
+
+"Ekstrom."
+
+"Ah!" Again the adventuress was silent for a little. "What does he know?"
+
+"Ask him, enquire why he murdered von Harden, then what business took him
+to Ninety-fifth Street twice this evening--once about nine o'clock, again
+at midnight."
+
+"You must be mad, monsieur. Karl would not dare...."
+
+"You don't know him--or have forgotten he was trained in the International
+Bureau of Brussels, and there learned how to sell out both parties to a
+business that won't bear publicity."
+
+"I wonder," the woman mused. "Never have I wholly trusted that one."
+
+"Shall I give you the key?"
+
+"If you love Karl as little as I...."
+
+"But where do you suppose the good man is, this night of nights?"
+
+"Who knows? He was not here when I arrived at midnight. I have seen nothing
+of him since."
+
+"When you do--if he shows himself at all--look him over carefully for signs
+of wear and tear."
+
+"Yes, monsieur? And in what respect?"
+
+"Look for cuts about his head and hands, possibly elsewhere. And should he
+confess to an affair with a wind-shield in a motor accident, ask him what
+happened to the study window in the house at Ninety-fifth Street."
+
+Impish glee danced in the woman's eyes. "Your handiwork, dear friend?"
+
+"A mere beginning.... You may tell him so, if you like."
+
+He was subjected to a convulsive squeeze. "Never have I felt so kindly
+disposed toward an enemy!"
+
+"It is true, I were a better foe to Germany if I kept my counsel and let
+Ekstrom continue to play double."
+
+The music ceasing, to be followed by the inevitable clamour for more,
+Lanyard offered an arm upon which Sophie rested a detaining hand.
+
+"No--wait. We dance this encore. I have more to say."
+
+He submitted amiably, the more so since not ill-pleased with himself. And
+when again they were moving round the floor, she bore more heavily upon his
+shoulder and was thoughtful longer than he had expected. Then--
+
+"Attention, my friend."
+
+"I am listening, Sophie."
+
+"If what you hint is true--and I do not doubt it is--Karl's day is done."
+
+"More nearly than he dreams," Lanyard affirmed grimly.
+
+"I shan't be sorry. I am German through and through; what I do, I do for
+the Fatherland, and in that find absolution for many things I care not to
+remember. If through what you tell me I may prove Karl traitor, I owe you
+something."
+
+"Always it has been my fondest hope, Sophie, some day to have you in my
+debt."
+
+Her fingers tightened on his. "Do not jest in the shadow of death. Since
+you have been unwise enough to venture here to-night, you will not be
+permitted to leave alive--unless you pledge yourself to us and prove your
+sincerity by producing that paper."
+
+"That sounds reasonable--like Prussia. What next?"
+
+"I have warned you, so paid off my debt. The rest is your affair."
+
+"Do you imagine I take this seriously?"
+
+"It will turn out seriously for you if you do not."
+
+"How can I be prevented from leaving when I will, from a public
+restaurant?"
+
+"Is it possible you don't know this place? It is maintained by the
+Wilhelmstrasse. Attempt to leave it without coming to a satisfactory
+understanding, and see what happens."
+
+"What, for instance?"
+
+"The lights would be out before you were half across the room. When they
+went up again, the Lone Wolf would be no more, and never a soul here would
+know who stabbed him or what became of the knife."
+
+"Are you by any chance amusing yourself at my expense?"
+
+Once more the woman showed him her handsome eyes: he found them frankly
+grave, earnest, unwavering.
+
+"If you will not listen, your blood be on your own head."
+
+"Forgive me. I didn't mean to be rude...."
+
+"Still, you do not believe!"
+
+"You are wrong. I am merely amused."
+
+"If you understood, you could never mock your peril."
+
+"But I don't mock it. I am enchanted with it. I accept it, and it renews
+my youth. This might be Paris of the days when you ran with the Pack,
+Sophie--and I alone!"
+
+The woman moved her pretty shoulders impatiently. "I think you are either
+mad or ... the very soul of courage!"
+
+The encore ended; they returned to the table, Sophie leaning lightly on
+Lanyard's arm, chattering gay inconsequentialities.
+
+Dropping into her chair, she bent over toward Cecelia Brooke.
+
+"He dances adorably, my dear!" the intrigante declared. "But I dare say you
+know that already."
+
+The English girl shook her head, smiling. "Not yet."
+
+"Then lose no time. You two should dance well together, for you are more of
+a size. I think the next number will be a waltz. We get altogether too few
+of them; these American dances, these one-steps and foxtrots, they are not
+dances, they are mere romps, favourites none the less. And there is always
+more room on the floor; so few waltz nowadays. Really, you must not miss
+this opportunity."
+
+This playful insistence, the light stress she laid upon her suggestion that
+Cecelia Brooke dance with him, considered in conjunction with her recent
+admonition, impressed Lanyard as significantly inconsistent. Sophie was no
+more a woman to make purposeless gestures than she was one sufficiently
+wanting in finesse to signal him by pressures of her foot. There was sheer
+intention in that iteration: "... _lose no time ... you must not miss this
+opportunity_." Something had happened even since their dance; she had
+observed something momentous, and was warning him to act quickly if he
+meant to act at all.
+
+With unruffled amiability, amused, urbane, Lanyard bowed his petition
+across the table, and was rewarded by a bright nod of promise.
+
+Lighting another cigarette, he lounged back, poised his wine glass
+delicately, with the eye of a connoisseur appraised its pale amber tint,
+touched it lightly to his lips, inhaling critically its bouquet, sipped,
+and signified approval of the vintage by sipping again: all without missing
+one bit of business in a scene enacted on the far side of the room,
+directly behind him but reflected in a mirror panel of the wall he faced.
+
+The diplomatist charged with the task of discriminating the sheep from the
+goats in the lower lobby had come up to confer with his colleague, the
+maitre d'hotel of the upper storey. When Lanyard first saw the man he was
+standing by the elevator shaft, none too patiently awaiting the attention
+of the other, who, caught by inadvertence at some distance, was moving to
+join him, with what speed he could manage threading the thick-set tables.
+
+Was this what Sophie had noticed? Had she likewise, perhaps, received some
+secret signal from the guardian of the lower gateway?
+
+A signal possibly indicating that Ekstrom had arrived
+
+They met at last, those two, and discreetly confabulated, the maitre
+d'hotel betraying welcome mitigation of that nervous tension which had
+heretofore so palpably affected him; and, as the other stepped back into
+the elevator, Lanyard saw this one's glance irresistibly attracted to the
+table dedicated to the service of the Princess de Alavia. Something much
+resembling satisfaction glimmered in the fellow's leaden eyes: it was
+apparent that he anticipated early relief from a distasteful burden of
+responsibility.
+
+Then, at ease in the belief that he was unobserved, he turned to a near-by
+table round which four sat without the solace of feminine society--four
+men whose stamp was far from reassuring despite their strikingly quiet
+demeanour and inconspicuously correct investiture of evening dress.
+
+Two were unmistakable sons of the Fatherland; all were well set up, with
+the look of men who would figure to advantage in any affair calling for
+physical competence and courage, from coffee and pistols at sunrise in the
+Parc aux Princes to a battle royal in a Tenderloin dive.
+
+Their table commanded both ways out, by the stairs and by the elevator,
+much too closely for Lanyard's peace of mind.
+
+And more than one looked thoughtfully his way while the maitre d'hotel
+hovered above them, murmuring confidentially.
+
+Four nods sealed an understanding with him. He strutted off with far more
+manner than had been his at any time since the arrival of Lanyard, and
+vented an excess of spirits by berating bitterly an unhappy clown of a
+waiter for some trivial fault.
+
+The first bars of another dance number sang through the confusion of
+voices: truly, as Sophie had foretold, a waltz.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+DANSE MACABRE
+
+
+Trained in the old school of the dance, Lanyard was unversed in that
+graceless scamper which to-day passes as the waltz with a generation
+largely too indolent or too inept of foot to learn to dance.
+
+His was that flowing waltz of melting rhythm, the waltz of yesterday,
+that dance of dances to whose measures a civilization more sedate in its
+amusements, less jealous of its time, danced, flirted, loved, and broke its
+hearts.
+
+Into the swinging movement of that antiquated waltz Lanyard fell without
+a qualm of doubt, all ignorant as he was of his benighted ignorance; and
+instantly, with the ease and gracious assurance of a dancer born, Cecelia
+Brooke adapted herself to his step and guidance, with rare pliancy made her
+every movement exquisitely synchronous with his.
+
+No need to lead her, no need for more than the least of pressures upon her
+yielding waist, no need for anything but absolute surrender to the magic of
+the moment....
+
+Effortless, like creatures of the music adrift upon its sounding tides,
+they circled the floor once, twice, and again, before reluctantly Lanyard
+brought himself to shatter the spell of that enchantment.
+
+Looking down with an apologetic smile, he asked:
+
+"Mademoiselle, do you know you can be an excellent actress?"
+
+As if in resentment the girl glanced upward sharply, with clouded eyes.
+
+"So can most women, in emergency."
+
+"I mean ... I have something serious to say; nobody must guess your
+thoughts."
+
+She said simply: "I will do my best."
+
+"You must--you must appear quite charmed. Also, should you catch me
+smirking like an infatuated ninny, remember I am only doing my own
+indifferent best to act."
+
+Laughter trembled deliciously in her voice: "I promise faithfully to bear
+in mind your heartlessness!"
+
+"I am an ass," he enunciated with the humility of conviction. "But that
+can't be helped. Attend to me, if you please--and do not start. This place
+turns out to be a nest of Prussian spies. I was brought here by a trick. I
+understand the order is I may not leave alive."
+
+Playing her part so well as almost to embarrass Lanyard himself, the girl
+smiled daringly into his eyes.
+
+"Because of that packet?" she breathed.
+
+"Because of that, mademoiselle."
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+For an instant Lanyard lost countenance absolutely. Through sheer good
+fortune the girl was now dancing with face averted, her head so nearly
+touching his shoulder that it seemed to rest upon it.
+
+Nevertheless, it was at cost of an heroic struggle that he fought down all
+signs of that shock with which it had been borne in upon him that he dared
+not assure the girl her packet was in safe hands.
+
+If he had failed in his efforts to restore the thing to her, that she might
+consign it as she saw fit and so discharge her personal trust, till now
+Lanyard had solaced himself with a hazy notion that she would in turn be
+comforted when she learned the document was in the keeping of her country's
+Secret Service.
+
+Impossible to tell her that: his own act had rendered it impossible,
+that act the outcome of wilful trifling with his infirmity, his itch for
+thieving.
+
+Of a sudden the pilfered necklace secreted in an inner pocket of his
+waistcoat, above his heart, seemed to have gained the weight of so much
+lead. The hideous consciousness of the thing stung like the bite of live
+coals.
+
+This woman was in distress; he yearned to lighten her burden; he could do
+that with half a dozen words; his guilt prohibited.
+
+A thief!
+
+Now indeed the Lone Wolf tasted shame and realized its bitterness....
+
+Puzzled by his constraint, the girl's eyes again sought his; and warned
+in time by the movement of her head, he mustered impudence to meet their
+question with the look of tenderness that went with the role she suffered
+him to play.
+
+"What is the matter?"
+
+"I am ashamed that I have failed you...."
+
+"Don't think of that. I know you did your best. Only tell me what became of
+it."
+
+"It was stolen; when I returned to my stateroom that night I was held up
+and robbed. The thief shot at me, killed his confederate, decamped by
+way of the port. I pursued. Another aided him to overpower and cast me
+overboard."
+
+"Yet you escaped...!"
+
+Strange she should seem more intrigued by that than concerned about her
+loss!
+
+"I escaped, no matter how...."
+
+"You don't know who stole the packet?"
+
+"I don't recall the man among the passengers, but he may have been in one
+of the boats, a fellow of about my stature, with a flowing beard...."
+
+He sketched broadly Ekstrom as he had seen him in the Stanistreet library.
+
+Her eyes quickened.
+
+"One such escaped in our boat, the second steward; I think his name was
+Anderson."
+
+"Doubtless the same."
+
+"Then it is gone!"
+
+For once in his acquaintance with her, that brave spirit seemed to falter:
+she became a burden, bereft for a little of all grace and spontaneity.
+
+He was constrained to swing her forcibly into time.
+
+Almost instantly she recollected herself, covered her lapse with a little
+laugh innocent of any hint of its forced falsity, and showed him and the
+room as well a radiant countenance: all with such address and art that the
+incident might well have escaped notice, otherwise have passed for a bit of
+natural by-play.
+
+Yet distress was too eloquent in the broken query: "What _am_ I to do?"
+
+Heartsick, self-sick to boot, he essayed to suggest that she consult
+Colonel Stanistreet, but lacking so much effrontery, stammered and fell
+silent.
+
+Perhaps misinterpreting, she cried in quick contrition: "I am forgetting!
+Forgive me. I should have said: what are you to do?"
+
+He whipped his wits together.
+
+"Look down, turn your face aside, smile.... I have a plan, a desperate
+remedy, but the best I can contrive. When next the lift comes up, we must
+try to be near it. There is one row of tables which we must break through
+by main force. Leave that to me, follow as I clear a way, go straight into
+the lift. If anything happens, run down the stairway on the left. The
+ground floor is two flights below. If I am any way detained, don't stop--go
+on, get your wraps, take the first taxi you see, return directly to the
+Knickerbocker. I will telephone you later."
+
+"If you live," she breathed.
+
+"Never fear for me...."
+
+"But if I do? Do you imagine I could rest if I thought you had sacrificed
+yourself for me?"
+
+"You must not think that. I am far too selfish--"
+
+"That is not so. And I refuse positively to do as you wish unless you tell
+me how I may communicate with you."
+
+Resigned to humour her, he recited his address and the number of the house
+telephone, and when she had memorized both by iteration, resumed:
+
+"Once outside, if anybody tries to hinder you, don't let them intimidate
+you into keeping quiet, but scream, scream at the top of your lungs. These
+beasts abominate a screaming woman, or any other undue noise. Not only will
+that frighten them off, but it will fetch the nearest policeman."
+
+The music ceased. She stood flushed, smiling, adorably pretty, eyes
+star-like for him alone.
+
+"We are not far from the lift now," she said just audibly.
+
+"But the door is shut. Hush. Here comes the encore. Once more around...."
+
+They drifted again into that witching maze of melody and movement made one.
+
+"You are silent," she said, after a little. "Why?"
+
+Lanyard answered with a warning pressure on her hand.
+
+The elevator was stationary at the floor, its door wide, the maitre d'hotel
+engaged in a far quarter of the room, while those four formidable guardians
+of the exit were gossiping with animation over their glasses.
+
+"Steady. Now is our time."
+
+Abruptly they stopped. A couple that had been following them avoided
+collision by a close margin. Over his partner's head the man scowled
+portentously--and dissipated his display of temper on Lanyard's indifferent
+back.
+
+Upon those guests who sat between the dancing floor and elevator, Lanyard
+wasted no consideration. Pushing roughly between two adjoining tables, he
+lifted one chair with its astonished occupant bodily out of the way, then
+turned, swung an arm round the girl's waist, all but threw her through the
+lane he had created, followed without an instant's pause.
+
+It was all so quickly accomplished that the girl was in the car before
+another person in the room appreciated what was happening. And Lanyard, in
+the act of slamming the door shut without heed for the protesting operator,
+saw only a room full of amazed faces with gaping mouths and rounded
+eyes--and one man of the four at the near-by table in the act of rising
+uncertainly, with a stupefied look.
+
+Elbowing the boy aside, he seized the operating lever and thrust it to the
+notch labelled "Descend." An instant of pause followed: like its attendant
+the elevator seemed stalled in inertia of stupefaction.
+
+Beyond the door somebody loosed an infuriated screech. Angry hands
+drummed on the glass panel. With a premonitory shudder the car started
+spasmodically, moved downward at first gently, then with greater speed,
+coming to an abrupt stop at the street level with a shock that all but
+threw its passengers from their feet.
+
+Up the shaft that senseless punishment of the panel continued. Some other
+intelligence conceived the notion for ringing for the car to return: its
+annunciator buzzed stridently, continuously.
+
+Unlatching the lower door, Lanyard threw it back, stepped out, finding the
+lobby deserted but for a simpering group of coat-room girls, to one of whom
+he flipped a silver dollar.
+
+"Find this lady's wraps--be quick!"
+
+Deftly catching the coin, the girl snatched the check from Cecelia Brooke,
+and darted into the women's dressing room.
+
+Throughout a wait of agonising suspense, the elevator boy remained cowering
+in a corner of the car, staring at Lanyard as at some shape of terror,
+while the ignored buzzer droned without cessation to persistent pressure
+from above.
+
+Out of the dark entrance to the lower dining room the bearded diplomatist
+popped with the distracted look of a jack-in-the-box about to be ravished
+of its young.
+
+"Monsieur is not leaving?" he expostulated shrilly, darting forward.
+
+Lanyard stopped him with a look whose menace was like a kick.
+
+"I am seeing this lady to her cab," he said in a cold and level voice.
+
+The coat-room girl emerged from her lair with an armful of wraps and furs.
+
+Again the bearded one made as if to block the doorway.
+
+"But, monsieur--mademoiselle--!"
+
+Lanyard caught the fellow's arm and sent him spinning like a top.
+
+"Out of the way, you rat!" he snapped; then to the girl: "Be quick!"
+
+As she shouldered into a compartment of the revolving door incoherent yells
+began to echo down the staircase well. At length it had occurred to those
+above to utilize that means of descent.
+
+Wedged in the wheeling door, a final glimpse of the lobby showed Lanyard
+the startled, putty-like mask of the maitre d'hotel at the head of
+the stairway with, beyond him, the head of one who, though in shadow,
+uncommonly resembled Ekstrom--but Ekstrom as he was in the old days,
+without his beard.
+
+That picture passed like a flash on a cinema screen.
+
+They were on the sidewalk, and the girl was running toward a taxicab, the
+only vehicle of its sort in sight, at the curb just above the entrance.
+
+Coatless and bareheaded, Lanyard swung to face the door porter, a towering,
+brawny animal in livery, self-confident and something more than keen to
+interfere; but his mouth, opening to utter some sort of protest, shut
+suddenly without articulation when Lanyard displayed for his benefit a .22
+Colt's automatic. And he fell back smartly.
+
+Jerking open the cab door, the girl stumbled into the far corner of the
+seat. The motor was churning in promising fashion, the chauffeur settling
+into place at the wheel. Into his hand Lanyard thrust a ten-dollar bill.
+
+"The Knickerbocker," he ordered. "Stop for nobody. If followed steer for
+the nearest policeman. There'll be no change."
+
+He closed the door sharply, leaned over it, dropped the little pistol into
+the girl's lap.
+
+"Chances are you won't want that--but you may."
+
+She bent forward quickly, eyes darkly lustrous with alarm, and placed a
+hand upon his arm.
+
+"But you?"
+
+"It is I whom they want, not you. I won't subject you to the hazard of my
+company."
+
+Gently Lanyard lifted the hand from his sleeve, brushed it gallantly with
+his lips, released it.
+
+"Good-night!" he laughed, then stepped back, waved a hand to the
+chauffeur--"Go!"
+
+The taxicab shot away like a racing hound unleashed. With a sigh of relief
+Lanyard gave himself wholly to the question of his own salvation.
+
+The rank of waiting motor-cars offered no hope: all but one were private
+town cars and limousines, operated by liveried drivers. A solitary roadster
+at the head of the line tempted and was rejected; even though it had no
+guardian chauffeur, something of which he could not be sure, he would
+be overhauled before he could start the motor and get the knack of its
+gear-shift mechanism. Even now Au Printemps was in frantic eruption, its
+doors ejecting violently a man at each wild revolution.
+
+Down Broadway an omnibus of the Fifth Avenue line lumbered, at no less
+speed than twenty miles an hour, without passengers and sporting an
+illuminated "Special" sign above the driver's seat.
+
+Dashing out into the roadway, Lanyard launched himself at the narrow
+platform of the unwieldy vehicle and, in spite of a yell of warning from
+the guard, landed safely on the step and turned to repel boarders.
+
+But his manoeuvre had been executed too swiftly and unexpectedly. The group
+before Au Printemps huddled together in ludicrous inaction, as if stunned.
+Then one raged through it, plying vicious elbows. As he paused against the
+light Lanyard identified unmistakably the silhouette of Ekstrom.
+
+So that one had, after all, escaped the net of his own treachery!
+
+The 'bus guard was shaking Lanyard's arm with an ungentle hand.
+
+"Here, now, you got no business boardin' a Special."
+
+From his pocket Lanyard whipped the first bank-note his fingers
+encountered.
+
+"Divide that with the chauffeur," he said crisply--"tell him to drive like
+the devil. It's life or death with me!"
+
+The protruding eyeballs of the guard bore witness to the magnitude of the
+bribe.
+
+"You're on!" he breathed hoarsely, and ran forward through the body of the
+conveyance to advise the driver.
+
+Swarming up the curved stairway to the roof, Lanyard dropped into the rear
+seat, looking back.
+
+The group round the doorway was recovering from its stupefaction. Three
+struck off from it toward the line of waiting cars. Of these the foremost
+was Ekstrom.
+
+Simultaneously the 'bus, lumbering drunkenly, lurched into Columbus Circle,
+and the roadster left the curb carrying in addition to the driver two
+passengers--Ekstrom on the running-board.
+
+Tardily Lanyard repented of that impulse which had moved him to bestow his
+one weapon upon Cecelia Brooke.
+
+The night air had a biting edge. A chill rain had begun to drizzle down in
+minute globules of mist, which both lent each street light its individual
+nimbus of gold and dulled deceitfully the burnished asphaltum, rendering
+its surface greasy and treacherous. More than once Lanyard feared lest
+the 'bus skid and overturn; and before the old red brick building between
+Broadway and Eighth Avenue shut out the western sector of the Circle, he
+saw the roadster, driven insanely, shoot crabwise toward the curb, than
+answer desperate work at the wheel and whirl madly, executing a volte-face
+so violent that Ekstrom's hold was broken and he was hurled a dozen feet
+away. And Lanyard's chances were measurably advanced by the delay required
+in order to pick up the sprawling one, start the engine anew, and turn more
+cautiously to resume the pursuit.
+
+Striking diagonally across Broadway the 'bus swung into Fifty-seventh
+Street at the moment when the roadster turned the corner of Columbus
+Circle.
+
+The head of the guard lifted above the edge of the roof. Clinging to the
+supports of the stairway, he addressed Lanyard in accents of blended
+suspicion and respect.
+
+"Lis'n, boss: is this all right, on the level, now?"
+
+"Absolutely, unless that racing-car catches up with us, in which case
+you'll have a dead man--myself--on your hands."
+
+"Well ... we don't wanna lose our jobs, that's all."
+
+"You won't unless I lose my life."
+
+"Anything you'd like me to do?"
+
+"Go down, wait on the platform, if anybody attempts to get aboard kick him
+in the act."
+
+"Sure I will!"
+
+The guard disappeared.
+
+Wallowing like a barge in a strong seaway, the omnibus crossed Seventh
+Avenue and sped downhill toward Sixth with dangerous momentum. Shortly,
+however, this began to be modified by the brakes, a precaution against
+mishap which even the fugitive must approve. Ahead loomed the gaunt
+structure of the Sixth Avenue "L," bridging the roadway at so low an
+elevation as to afford the omnibus little more than clear headroom. Once
+beneath it a single bounce up from the surface-car tracks must mean a
+wreck.
+
+But the pursuit was less than half a block astern and gaining swiftly, even
+as the speed of the omnibus was growing less and desperately less.
+
+At what seemed little better than a snail's pace it began to pass beneath
+the span of the Elevated.
+
+Like a racing thoroughbred the roadster swept up alongside, motor chanting
+triumphantly, running-board level with the platform step.
+
+Ekstrom, poised to leap aboard, hesitated; a pistol in his hand exploded; a
+shattered window fell crashing.
+
+There was a yell from the guard, not of pain but of fright. Apparently he
+executed a von Hindenburg retreat. Without more opposition Ekstrom gained
+the platform.
+
+In the same breath Lanyard stood up. The lowermost girder of the "L" was
+immediately overhead. He grasped it, doubled his legs beneath him, swung
+clear. The omnibus shot from under him, the roadster convoying.
+
+Drawing himself up, he seized a round iron upright of guard-rail and heaved
+his body in over the edge of the platform round the switching-tower, which
+was at this hour dark and untenanted.
+
+In the street below a police whistle shrieked, and a fusillade of pistol
+shots woke scandalised echoes.
+
+Bending almost double Lanyard moved rapidly northward on the footway beside
+the western tracks, and so gained the old station on the west side of
+Fifty-eighth Street, for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude. Through
+this he crept, then down the stairs, encountering at the lower landing an
+iron gate which obliged him to climb over and jump.
+
+Not a soul paid the least attention to this matter of a gentleman in
+evening dress without hat or top coat dropping from the stairway of a
+disused elevated station at two o'clock in the morning.
+
+In New York anything can happen, and most things do, without stirring up
+meddlesome impulses in innocent bystanders.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+FORCE MAJEURE
+
+
+This visit to his rooms was the briefest of the several Lanyard made that
+night, considerations of mortal urgency dictating its drastic abbreviation.
+
+If the events of the last few hours had meant anything whatever they had
+demonstrated two truths which shone like beacon lights: that Manhattan
+Island was overpopulated as long as both he and Ekstrom remained on it;
+that Ekstrom had been goaded to the verge of aberration by the discovery
+that Lanyard had come safely through the _Assyrian_ debacle to take up anew
+his self-appointed office of Nemesis to the Prussian spy system in general
+and to the genius of its American bureau in particular.
+
+Henceforth that one would know no more rest while Lanyard lived.
+
+Thus that little street-level apartment forfeited whatever attractions it
+originally had possessed in the adventurer's estimation. Not only was the
+address known to Ekstrom's associates, and so open to him, but its peculiar
+characteristics, its facilities for access from the street direct, rendered
+it a highly practicable death-trap for a hunted man.
+
+Lanyard was well persuaded he need only wait there long enough to receive a
+deputation from Seventy-ninth Street. And with any assurance that Ekstrom
+would come alone, he might have been content to wait. Not only had he
+through too intimate acquaintance with his methods every assurance that
+Ekstrom would never brave alone what he could induce another to risk with
+him, but Lanyard was never one willing to play the passive part.
+
+A banal axiom of all warfare applied: The advantage is with him who fights
+upon the offensive.
+
+Since midnight the offensive had shifted from Lanyard's grasp to the
+enemy's. He was determined to recapture it; and that was something never to
+be accomplished by sitting still and waiting for events to unfold, but only
+by carrying the war into the enemy's camp.
+
+He delayed, then, only long enough to change his clothing and to conceal
+about him certain properties which it seemed unwise to expose to chance
+discovery on the part of Ekstrom or in the ever-possible event of police
+intervention.
+
+Within five minutes from the time of his return he was closing behind him
+the private door.
+
+Wearing a quiet lounge suit but no top coat, with a hat not so soft as to
+lack character but soft enough to stick upon one's head in time of action,
+and carrying a stick neither brutishly stout nor ineffectively slender,
+he strolled up to Seventh Avenue, turned north, entered Central Park--and
+strolled no more.
+
+Kindly shadows enfolded him, engulfed him altogether. One minute after he
+had passed through the gateway he would have defied unaided apprehension
+by the most zealous officer of the peace. He went swiftly and secretly,
+avoiding all lighted ways.
+
+Not till then did conscience stir and remind him of his slighted promise to
+call up Cecelia Brooke.
+
+No time now for that; the errand that engaged him was of a nature to brook
+no more procrastination. The girl must wait. He was sorry if, as she had
+protested, solicitude for his welfare must interfere with her night's rest.
+But what must be, must: until he saw the end of this adventure he could be
+influenced by no minor consideration whatsoever.
+
+Not that he seriously believed Cecelia's sleep would be uneasy because of
+him. That was too much.
+
+His temper was grim and skeptical. The resentment roused by the trap that
+had so nearly laid him by the heels, together with the subsequent effort to
+assassinate him out of hand, had settled into a phase of smouldering fury
+whose heat consumed like misty vapours every lesser emotion, every humane
+consideration.
+
+Some by-thought recalling the Weringrode's innuendo that he was in love
+without his knowledge, moved him to laugh outright if strangely, an
+unpleasant laugh that held as much of pain as of derision.
+
+What room in that dark heart of his for love?... the heart of a thief and a
+potential assassin, the heart of the Lone Wolf!...
+
+How was he to know he had hardly left his lodgings before their hush was
+interrupted by the grumble of the house telephone?
+
+Intermittently for upward of three minutes that sound persisted. When
+at length it discontinued the quiet of the untenanted rooms reigned
+undisturbed for a brief time only.
+
+An odd metallic stridor became audible, a succession of scrapings of
+stealthy accent at the private entrance. Its latch clicked. The door swung
+back against the wall with a muffled bump. Two pairs of furtive feet padded
+in the little private hallway. The flash of an electric hand-lamp flickered
+hither and yon like a searching poignard, picked out the door to the one
+bedchamber and vanished. There was guarded whispering, then a thud as one
+of the intruders gained the middle of the bedchamber in a bound. An instant
+later a switch snapped, and the room was flooded with light.
+
+Beneath the chandelier stood a man in evening dress the worse for
+misadventure, one knee of his trousers cut open, both legs caked with
+a film of half-dry mud, his linen dingy with mud-stains, his top coat
+shockingly bedraggled. He was bareheaded, apparently having lost his hat; a
+black smear across one cheek added emphasis to the pallor of newly shaven
+jowls; and his eyes were blazing.
+
+"Stole away!" he muttered briefly in disgust, then called: "Ed!"
+
+As quietly as a shadow a second man joined him, greeting him with a "Hush!"
+
+This gentleman was in far more presentable repair and a more equable frame
+of mind. There was even a glint of amusement in his hard blue eyes. His
+countenance had an Irish cast.
+
+"Hush?" the other iterated with contempt. "What for? The hound's not here."
+
+"No, Karl," Ed admitted; "but there are others in the house. If it's known
+to them that Lanyard's out, they may turn in a police alarm; and I for one
+have had enough of bulls for one night."
+
+Karl grunted disdainfully. "I told you this would be a waste of time...."
+
+"And I agreed with you entirely. But you would come."
+
+"Lanyard's no such fool as to stick round a place he knows I know about."
+Karl's hands twitched and his features worked nervously. "He knows me too
+well, knows that if ever I lay hands on him again--"
+
+His voice was rising to an hysterical pitch when the other checked him with
+a sibilant hiss. At the same time his hand darted out and switched off the
+light. Karl uttered a startled ejaculation.
+
+"_Sssh_!" his companion repeated.
+
+In the street a motor-car was rumbling, stationary before the door. Then
+the remote grinding of the house door-bell was heard.
+
+"Let's get out of this," suggested the Irishman. "It's no good waiting,
+anyway."
+
+"Hold hard! We won't go till we have a clear field."
+
+The Prussian stole out into the sitting room and stood listening at the
+door to the public hallway, his companion standing by with a mutinous air.
+
+"Oh, come along!" he insisted, in a stage whisper.
+
+"Shut up! Listen...."
+
+Shuffling footfalls traversed the hallway. The front door was opened. The
+clear voice of an Englishwoman was answered in the slurring patois of a
+negro.
+
+"No'm, he ain't in."
+
+The next enquiry was intelligible: the speaker had entered the hallway.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Yas'm. Sumbody done call him up 'bout ten min'tes ago, an' I rung an' rung
+an' he don' answer. He ain't in or he don' mean to answer nobody, tha's
+all."
+
+"I am very anxious about him. Have you a key to his rooms?"
+
+"Yas'm, I got a pass-key, but--"
+
+"Please use it. Take this. Go in and make sure he is out, or if at home
+that he is all right."
+
+"Yas'm, thanky ma'am, but--"
+
+"Do as I tell you. I will see that you don't get into trouble."
+
+"All right, ma'am." The negro chuckled, probably over his tip. "Yo' sho'
+has got the p'suadin'est way...."
+
+The Irishman caught the German's arm. "Come out of this," he pleaded.
+
+"No fear. I'll see it through. That's the Brooke girl the fool got in with
+on the boat. She may know something...."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Leave this to me. You look out for the negro. I'll take care of Miss
+Cecelia Brooke."
+
+Swearing unhappily, the Irishman flattened against the wall to one side of
+the door. Karl waited behind it as it admitted the hall attendant, who made
+directly toward the central chandelier.
+
+"Yo' jes' wait, ma'am, an' I'll mek a light an'--"
+
+But the girl had impetuously followed him in.
+
+The light went up, and Karl put a heavy shoulder against the door, closing
+it with a slam. The negro turned and stood with gaping mouth and staring
+eyes, dumb with terror. The girl recognised Karl with a little cry, and
+darted back toward the door. Immediately he caught her in his arms. Her
+lips opened, but their utterance was stifled by a handkerchief thrust
+between them with the dexterity of a practised hand.
+
+Without one word of warning the Irishman stepped forward and struck the
+negro brutally in the face. The boy reeled, whimpering. Two more blows
+delivered with murderous ferocity silenced him altogether. He collapsed
+like a broken puppet, insensible on the floor, his face a curious ashen
+colour beneath its glossy skin of brown.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+RIPOSTE
+
+
+The drizzle had grown thicker, the night blacker, the early morning air
+still more chill. But Lanyard was moving too swiftly to be affected by
+this last circumstance; the first he anathematised with the perfunctory
+bitterness of a skilled artisan who sees his work in a fair way to be
+obstructed by elemental depravity. Another of his trade would have termed
+such weather conditions ideal, and so might the Lone Wolf on an everyday
+job; but the prospect of a footing rendered insecure by rain trebled the
+hazards attending a plan of campaign that would brook neither revision nor
+delay.
+
+There was only one way to break into the house on Seventy-ninth Street;
+this Lanyard had appreciated upon his first reconnaissance of the previous
+afternoon. He could have wished for more time in which to prepare and
+assemble tested equipment instead of relying upon chance to supply
+the requisite gear; but with all time at his disposal the mechanical
+difficulties of the problem would remain. Far from indifferent to these,
+Lanyard addressed himself to their conquest doggedly and with businesslike
+economy of motion.
+
+Shunning the public paths he went over the park wall like a cat, sped
+across town through Eightieth Street, and so came to that plot of land upon
+which an apartment building was in process of erection, immediately to the
+north of the American headquarters of the Prussian spy system.
+
+Walled in with stone two storeys deep, its gaunt skeleton of steel had
+been joined together as far as the seventh level. How much higher it was
+destined to rise was immaterial; for Lanyard's purpose it was enough that
+the frame had already outgrown its neighbour on the south.
+
+A litter of lumber, huge steel girders, and other material narrowed the
+side street to half its normal width. The sidewalk space was trampled earth
+roofed with heavy planks for the protection of pedestrian heads, a passage
+lighted by electric bulbs widely spaced; midway in this an entrance to
+the structure was flanked by a wooden shanty, by day a tool house, after
+working hours a shelter for the night watchman. This boasted one glazed
+window dull with orange light.
+
+Approaching with due precaution, Lanyard peered in. The light came from a
+single electric bulb and a potbellied sheet-iron stove, glowing red. Near
+by, in a chair tipped against the wall, sat the watchman, corncob pipe
+in hand, head drooping, eyes closed, mouth ajar. A snore of the first
+magnitude seemed to vibrate the very walls. On the floor beside the chair
+stood a two-quart tin pail full of arid emptiness.
+
+Dismissing further consideration of the watchman as a factor, satisfied
+that the entire neighbourhood as well was sound asleep, Lanyard darted up
+the plank walk that led into the building, then paused to get his bearings.
+
+Effluvia of mortar and damp lumber saluted him in an uncanny place whose
+darkness was slightly qualified by a faint refracted glow from the low
+canopy of cloud and by equally dim shafts of diffused street light. There
+was more or less flooring of a temporary character over a sable gulf of
+cellars, and overhead a sullen, weeping sky cross-hatched with stark black
+ironwork.
+
+With infinite patience Lanyard groped his way through that dark labyrinth
+to the foot of a ladder ascending an open shaft wherein a hoisting tackle
+dangled.
+
+Here he stumbled over what he had been seeking, a great coil of one-inch
+hempen cable, from which he measured off roughly what he would require, if
+his calculations were correct, and something over. This length he re-coiled
+and slung over his shoulder: an awkward, weighty handicap. Nevertheless he
+began to climb.
+
+Above the third level there was merely steel framework; he had somewhat
+more light to guide him, with a view of the north wall of the Seventy-ninth
+Street house, bright in the glare of avenue lamps.
+
+The wall was absolutely blank.
+
+At the seventh level the ladders ended. He stepped off upon a foot-wide
+beam, paused to make sure of his poise, and began to walk the girders with
+a sureness of foot any aviator might have envied.
+
+At regular intervals he encountered uprights: between these he had to
+depend upon his sense of direction and equilibrium to guide him safely
+across those narrow walks of steel made slippery by rain.
+
+But, thanks to forethought, his footwork was faultless: he wore shoes old,
+well-broken, very soft, flexible, and silent.
+
+The building was in the shape of a squat E, with two courts facing south.
+On this seventh level the first court was bridged by a single girder, the
+middle of which was Lanyard's immediate objective. Since it lacked uprights
+he took it cautiously on hands and knees until approximately equidistant
+from both ends, when he straddled it, took the cable from his shoulders,
+uncoiled a length and made it fast round the girder with a clove hitch:
+giddy work, in that darkness, on that greasy span, fashioning by simple
+sense of touch the knot upon which his life was to depend, half of the time
+prone upon the girder and fishing blindly beneath it for the rope's end,
+with nothing but a seventy--foot drop between him and eternity, not even
+another girder to break a fall....
+
+He was now immediately opposite the minaret, at an elevation of about
+twenty feet above the roof he wished to reach, and as far away, or perhaps
+a trifle farther.
+
+Still he detected no signs of life about that nest of spies: if the
+wireless were in operation its apparatus was well-housed; there was no
+sound of the spark, never a glimmer of its violet flash.
+
+Laboriously--the knot completed to his satisfaction--Lanyard returned via
+the eastern arm of the E, paying out the coiled cable as he progressed,
+working round to the north side of the court.
+
+Once again pausing opposite the minaret, he knotted the end of the cable
+loosely round an upright connecting with the sixth level, let it slide
+down, followed it, repeated the process, and rested finally on the fifth.
+
+Now his ordeal approached a climax which he contemplated with what calmness
+he could while securing the rope beneath the arms.
+
+In another sixty seconds or less it must be demonstrated whether his dead
+reckoning would set him down safe and sound on the roof or dash him against
+the walls of the Seventy-ninth Street house, to swing back and dangle
+impotently in mid-air till daylight and police discovered him--unless,
+escaping injury, he were able to pull himself up hand over hand to the
+girder.
+
+With one arm round the upright to prevent the sag of rope from dragging him
+over prematurely, he essayed a final survey.
+
+Either the murk deceived or Lanyard had judged shrewdly. His feet were on
+an approximate level with the coping round the roof, and he stood about as
+far from the upper girder to which the rope was hitched as that was distant
+from the coping.
+
+One look up and round at those louring skies, duskily flushed by subdued
+city lights: with no more ceremony Lanyard released the upright and
+committed his body to space.
+
+If the downward sweep was breathless, what followed was breath-taking:
+once past the nadir of that giant swing, he was borne upward by an impetus
+steadily and sensibly slackening.
+
+Instant followed leaden-winged instant while the wall, looming like
+a mountainside, seemed to be toppling, insensately bent upon his
+annihilation; even so his momentum, decreasing with frightful swiftness,
+seemed possessed of demoniac desire to frustrate him.
+
+After an age-long agony of doubt it became evident he was not destined
+to crash into the wall, but not that he was to gain the coping: through
+fractions of a second hideously protracted this last drew near, nearer,
+slowly, ever more slowly.
+
+And he was twisting dizzily....
+
+With frantic effort he crooked an arm over the coping at a juncture when,
+had he not acted instantly, he must have swung back. There was a racking
+wrench, as though his arm were being torn from its socket.
+
+At the end of a struggle even more wearing he flung his other arm across
+the ledge, and for some time hung there, at the end of an almost taut rope,
+unable to overcome its resistance and pull himself in over the coping,
+stubbornly refusing to loose his grasp.
+
+Presently, grown desperate, he let go with his right hand, holding fast
+only with the left, fumbled in a pocket, found his knife, opened it with
+his teeth, and began, to saw at the rope round his chest.
+
+Strand after strand parted grudgingly till it fell away altogether and
+reaction from its tension threw him against the coping with such violence
+that he all but lost his hold. Dropping the knife, he swept his right arm
+up and once more hooked his fingers over the inside of the ledge.
+
+Far down the knife clinked suggestively upon stone.
+
+Breathing deep, Lanyard braced knees and feet against the wall, worried,
+heaved, hauled, squirmed like a mad thing, in the end rolled over the top
+and fell at length upon the roof, panting, trembling, bathed in sweat,
+temporarily tormented by impulses to retch.
+
+By degrees regaining physical control, he sat up, took his bearings, and
+crept toward the foot of the minaret.
+
+A small, narrow doorway in its base was on the latch. He passed through to
+the landing of a dark winding stairway with a dim light at the bottom of
+its circular well.
+
+While he stood attentive, intermittent stridor troubled the stillness,
+originating at some point on the floors below: the proscribed wireless was
+at work.
+
+Hearing no other sounds, Lanyard went on down the steps, at their foot
+pausing to spy out through a half-open doorway to the topmost storey.
+
+Nobody moved in the corridor. He saw nothing but a line of closed doors,
+presumably to servants' quarters. Now, however, the vibrant rasp of the
+radio spark was perceptibly stronger and had a background of subdued noise,
+echoes of distant voices, deadened sounds of hasty footfalls, now and again
+a heavy thump or the bang of a door.
+
+Moving out, he commanded the length of the corridor. Toward one end a door
+stood open. He could see no more of the room beyond than a narrow patch of
+wall fitfully illuminated by a play of violet light.
+
+Then a man stepped out of this operating room, turning on the threshold to
+utter some parting observation; and Lanyard retired hastily to the shaft of
+the minaret stairway, but not before recognising Velasco.
+
+A moment later the Brazilian passed his lurking-place, walking with bended
+head, a worried frown darkening his swarthy countenance; and Lanyard
+emerged in time to see his head and shoulders vanish down a stairway at the
+far end of the corridor.
+
+Following with discretion, Lanyard leaned over the head of the main
+staircase well, looking down three flights to the ground floor, to which
+Velasco was descending.
+
+The house seemed veritably to hum with secret and, to judge by the pitch of
+its rumour, well-nigh panic activity. One divined a scurrying as of
+rats about to desert a sinking ship. Untoward events had thrown this
+establishment into a state of excited confusion: their nature Lanyard could
+not surmise, but their conjunction with his designs was exasperatingly
+inopportune. To search this place and find his man--if he were there at
+all--without being discovered, while its inmates buzzed about like so many
+startled hornets, was a fair impossibility; to attempt it was to court
+death.
+
+None the less he was inflexible in determination to go on, to push his luck
+to its extremity, by sheer force to bend fortuity to his service and suffer
+without complaint whatever the consequences of its recoil.
+
+Yet even as he advanced a foot to begin the descent, he withdrew it.
+
+On the ground floor, a door closing with a resounding crash had proved the
+signal for an outburst of expostulant, acrimonious voices: some half a
+dozen men giving angry tongue at one and the same time, their roars of
+polysyllabic gutturalisms fusing into utterly unintelligible clamour.
+
+One thought of a mutiny in a German madhouse.
+
+Moment after moment passed, the squall persisting with unmitigated
+viciousness. If now and again it subsided momentarily, it was only into
+uglier growls and swiftly to rise once more to high frenzy of incoherence.
+
+Two of the disputants appeared in the square frame of the staircase well,
+oddly foreshortened figures brandishing wild arms, one of them Velasco, the
+other a man whom Lanyard failed to identify, seemingly united in common
+anger directed at the head of some person invisible.
+
+Abruptly, with a gesture of almost homicidal fury, the Brazilian darted out
+of sight. The other followed.
+
+Then the object of their wrath took to the stairs, stopping at the rail
+of the first landing and gesticulating savagely over the heads of his
+audience, Velasco and the others returning amid a knot of fellows to bay
+round the newel post.
+
+His voice, full-throated, cried them all down--Ekstrom's deep and resonant
+voice, domineering over the uproar, hectoring one after another into sullen
+silence.
+
+In the beginning employing nothing but terms and phrases of insolence and
+objurgation untranslatable, when he had secured a measure of attention he
+delivered a short address in tones of unqualified contempt.
+
+"I will have obedience!" he stormed. "Let no one misunderstand my status
+here: I am come direct from His Majesty the Emperor with full power and
+authority to command and direct affairs which you have, individually,
+collectively, proved yourselves either unfit or unable to cope with. What I
+do, I do in my absolute discretion, with the full sanction and confidence
+of the Kaiser. He who questions my judgment or my actions, questions the
+wisdom of the All-Highest. Let it be clearly understood I am answerable
+to no one under God but myself and my Imperial master. Henceforth be good
+enough to hold your tongues or take the consequences--and be damned to you
+all!"
+
+Briefly he stood glowering down at their upturned faces, then sneered, and
+turned away.
+
+"Come along, O'Reilly," he said. "Fetch the woman, and give no more heed to
+swine-dogs!"
+
+His hand slipped up the rail to the first floor, vanished.
+
+If O'Reilly followed with the woman mentioned, both kept back from the rail
+and so out of Lanyard's field of vision.
+
+The group at the foot of the stairs moved away, grumbling profanely.
+
+At once Lanyard began to descend, rapidly and without care to avoid
+detection.
+
+One flight down he met face to face a manservant, evidently a footman, with
+an armful of clothing which he was conveying from one chamber to another.
+The fellow stopped short, jaw dropping, eyes popping; whereupon Lanyard
+paused and addressed him in German with a manner of overbearing contempt,
+that is to say, in character.
+
+"You're wanted upstairs in the radio room," he said--"at once!"
+
+The servant bleated one word of protest: "But--!"
+
+"Be silent. Do as I bid you. It is an emergency. Drop those things and go!
+Do you hear, imbecile?"
+
+Completely cowed and cheated, the man obeyed literally, letting his burden
+of garments fall to the floor and bounding hurriedly up the stairs.
+
+Another flight was negotiated without misadventure; on this floor as well
+servants were flitting busily to and fro, but none favoured the adventurer
+with the least attention.
+
+Midway down the third flight he pulled up to one side of the landing, and
+reconnoitred. It was on the next floor below, the first above the street,
+that Ekstrom had stopped. But in what quarter thereof? The exigency forbade
+the risk of one false turn. If Lanyard were to take Ekstrom unawares it
+must be at the first cast.
+
+From the ground floor came semi-coherent snatches of surly comment, like
+growls of a thunderstorm passing off into the distance:
+
+"_At a time such as this_...."
+
+"... _Secret Service snapping at our heels_ ..."
+
+"... _base on the Vineyard discovered_ ..."
+
+"... _Au Printemps raided, Sophie Weringrode under arrest. God knows
+whether she will hold her tongue_!"
+
+"_Trust her! But this ass_ ..."
+
+"_Bringing a woman here, putting all our necks into a halter_ ..."
+
+Immediately opposite the foot of the stairway, on the first storey, a door
+opened. O'Reilly came alertly forth, closed the door behind him, paused,
+fished in his pocket for a cigarette case, lighted and inhaled with deep
+appreciation, meantime eavesdropping on the utterances below with his head
+cocked to one side and a malicious smile shadowing his handsome Irish face.
+
+In his own good time he shrugged an indifferent shoulder, thrust his hands
+into his pockets, and sauntered coolly on down the stairs.
+
+The moment he disappeared, Lanyard went into action, in two bounds cleared
+landing and stairs, in another threw himself upon the door. It opened
+readily. Entering, he put his back to it, with his left hand groped for,
+found and turned a key, his right holding ready the automatic pistol he had
+taken from the lockers of the U-boat.
+
+The room was a combination of administrative bureau and study, very
+handsomely if somewhat over-decorated and furnished, with an atmosphere as
+distinctively German as that of a Bierstube, the sombreness of its colour
+scheme lending weight to its array of massive desks, tables, chairs,
+bookcases, and lounges.
+
+Between great draped windows and an impressive chimney-piece opposite,
+beside a broad, long desk, in a straight-backed chair sat a woman, gagged,
+bound as to her wrists, strips of cloth which had but lately bound ankles
+as well on the floor about her feet.
+
+That woman was Cecelia Brooke.
+
+Ekstrom stood behind her, in the act of loosening the knots which held the
+gag secure.
+
+For a space of thirty seconds, transfixed by the apparition of his enemy,
+he did not stir other than to raise weaponless hands in deference to the
+pistol trained upon his head. But the blood ebbed from his face, leaving
+it a ghastly mask in which shone the eyes of a man who sees certain death
+closing in upon him and is powerless to combat it, even to die fighting for
+life. And his lips curled back in a snarl neither of contempt nor of hatred
+but of terror.
+
+And for as long Lanyard remained as motionless, rooted in a despondency
+of thwarted hopes no less profound than the despair of the Prussian,
+apprehending what that one could not yet guess, that once more, and now
+certainly for the last time, vengeance was denied him, the fulfilment of
+all his labours and their sole purpose snatched from his grasp.
+
+The instincts of a killer were not his. Barring injudicious attempt to
+summon aid or take the offensive, Ekstrom was safe from injury at the hands
+of Michael Lanyard. His cunning, his favour in the countenance of fortune,
+or whatever it was that had enabled him to make the girl his prisoner and
+bring her here, bade fair to prove his salvation.
+
+Deep in Lanyard's consciousness an echo stirred of half-forgotten words:
+"_Vengeance is mine_...."
+
+The sense of frustration brewed a hopelessness as stark as that of a
+brow-beaten child. A blackness seemed to be settling down upon his
+faculties. A mist wavered momentarily before his eyes. He gulped
+convulsively, swallowing what had almost been a sob.
+
+But he spoke in a voice positively dispassionate.
+
+"Keep your hands up."
+
+Lanyard removed and pocketed the key, crossed to the middle of the room
+without once letting his gaze waver from the face of the Prussian,
+passed behind him, planted the muzzle of the pistol beneath Ekstrom's
+shoulder-blade, and methodically searched him, finding and putting aside on
+the desk one automatic, nothing else.
+
+"Stand aside!"
+
+The almost puerile measure of his disappointment was betrayed in the thrust
+with which he shouldered Ekstrom out of the way, so forcibly that the man
+was sent staggering wildly half a dozen paces.
+
+"Don't move, assassin!... Pardon, mademoiselle: one moment," Lanyard
+muttered, with his one free hand undoing the gag.
+
+He made slow work of that, fumbling while watching Ekstrom with unremitting
+intentness, hoping against hope that his enemy might make one false move,
+one only, by some infatuate endeavour to turn the tables excuse his
+killing.
+
+But Ekstrom would not. Recovery of his equilibrium had been coincident with
+the shock administered to his hardihood and sense of security by Lanyard's
+entrance. He stood now in a pose of insouciant grace, hands idly clasped
+before him, disdain glimmering in languid-lidded eyes, contempt in the set
+of his lips--an ensemble eloquent of brazen effrontery, the outgrowth of
+perception of the fact that Lanyard, being what he was, could neither shoot
+him down in cold blood nor, with the Brooke girl present, even attempt to
+injure him: compunctions unassembled in the make-up of the Boche, therefore
+when discovered in men of other races at once despicable and ridiculous....
+
+The gag came away.
+
+"Mademoiselle has not been injured?" Lanyard enquired, solicitous.
+
+The girl coughed and gasped, shaking her head, enunciating with difficulty
+in little better than a husky whisper: "... roughly handled, nothing
+worse."
+
+Lanyard's face burned as if his blood were molten mercury. "_Nothing
+worse_!" Appreciation of what handling she must have suffered, if she had
+resisted at all, before those beasts could have bound her, excited an
+indignation from whose light, as it blazed in Lanyard's eyes, even Ekstrom
+winced.
+
+The hand was tremulous with which he sought to loose her wrists, so much so
+that she could not but notice.
+
+"Don't mind me--look to that man!" she begged. "Leave me to unfasten these
+with my teeth. He can't be trusted for a single instant."
+
+"Mademoiselle," Lanyard mumbled, instinctively employing the French
+idiom--"you have reason."
+
+For an instant only he hesitated, swayed this way and that by the maddest
+of impulses, then resigned himself absolutely to their ascendancy.
+
+"This goes beyond all bounds," he said in an undertone.
+
+Deliberately leaving the Englishwoman to free herself according to her
+suggestion--forgetful, indeed, for the moment, that she was not altogether
+free--he moved to the desk and left his own automatic there beside
+Ekstrom's.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said mechanically, without looking at the girl, without
+power to perceive aught else in the world but the white, evil face of his
+enemy, "for what I am about to do, I beg you forgive me, of your charity. I
+can endure no more. It is too much...."
+
+He strode past her.
+
+She twisted in her chair, then rose, following him with wide eyes of alarm
+above her hands, whose bonds her teeth worried without rest.
+
+Ekstrom had not stirred, though one flash of pure exultation had
+transfigured his countenance on comprehension of Lanyard's purpose: thanks
+to the silly scruples of this animal, one more chance for life was granted
+him.
+
+Nor would the Prussian give an inch when Lanyard paused, confronting him
+squarely, within arm's length.
+
+"Ekstrom," the adventurer began in a voice lacking perceptible inflection
+... "what is between you and me needs no recounting. You know it too
+well--I likewise. It is my wish and my intention to kill you with my
+two hands. Nothing can prevent that, not even what you count upon, my
+reluctance--to you incomprehensible--to commit an act of violence in the
+presence of a woman. But because Miss Brooke is here, because you have
+brought her here by force, because you are what you are and so have treated
+her insolently ... before we come to our final accounting, you shall get
+down upon your knees and ask her pardon."
+
+He saw no yielding in the eyes of the Prussian, only arrogance; and when he
+paused, he was answered in one phrase of the gutters of Berlin, couched in
+the imagery of its lowest boozing-kens, so unspeakably vile in essence
+and application that Lanyard heard it with an incredulity almost
+stupefying--almost, not altogether.
+
+It was barely spoken when those lips that framed it were crushed by a blow
+of such lightning delivery that, though he must have been prepared for it,
+Ekstrom's guard was still lowered as he reeled back, lost footing, and went
+to his knees.
+
+Panting, snarling, uttering teeth and blasphemy, the Prussian recoiled like
+a serpent, gathered himself together and launched headlong at Lanyard, only
+to be met full tilt by a second blow and a third, each more merciless than
+its predecessor, beating him down once more.
+
+This time Lanyard did not wait for him to come back for punishment, but
+closed in, catching him as he strove to rise, meeting each fresh effort
+with ruthless accuracy, battering him into insanity of despair, so that
+Ekstrom came back again and again without thought, animated only by
+frenzied brute instinct to find the throat of his tormenter, and ever and
+ever failing; till at length he crumpled and lay crushed and writhing, then
+subsided into insensibility, was quite still but for heaving lungs and the
+spasmodic clutchings of his broken and ensanguined fingers....
+
+With a start, a broken sigh, a slight movement of the hand interpreting a
+crushing sense of the futility of human passion, Lanyard relaxed, drew back
+from standing over his antagonist, abstractedly found a handkerchief and
+dried his hands, of a sudden so inexpressibly shamed and degraded in his
+own sight that he dared not look the girl's way, but stood with hang-dog
+air, avoiding her regard.
+
+Yet, could he have mustered up heart, he might have surprised in her eyes
+a light to lift him out from this slough of humiliation, to obliterate
+chagrin in a flood of wonder and--misgivings.
+
+When, however, he did after a moment turn to her, that look was gone,
+replaced by one that reflected something of his own apprehension; for a
+heavy hand was hammering on the study door, and more than one voice on the
+other side was calling on "Karl" to open.
+
+Either the servant whom Lanyard had met and victimised on his way
+downstairs had given the alarm, or else the noise of the encounter within
+the study had brought that pack of spies to the door, wildly demanding
+admission.
+
+Steadied by one swift exchange of alarmed glances with the girl, Lanyard
+hastily reviewed the room, seeking some avenue of escape. None offered but
+the windows. He ran to them, tore back their draperies, and found them
+closed with shutters of steel and padlocked.
+
+Simultaneously the din at the door redoubled.
+
+With a worried shake Lanyard crossed to the chimney-piece, ducked his head,
+and stepped into its huge fireplace. One upward glance sufficed to dash his
+hopes: here was no way out, arduous though feasible; immediately above the
+fireplace the flue narrowed so that not even the most active man of normal
+stature might hope to negotiate its ascent.
+
+He returned with only a gesture of disconcertion to answer the girl's look
+of appeal.
+
+"Can we do nothing?" she asked, raising her voice a trifle to make it heard
+above the tumult in the corridor.
+
+"There's no help for it, I'm afraid," he said, going to the desk and taking
+up the pistols--"nothing to do but shoot our way out, if we can. Take
+this," he added, offering her one of the weapons, which she accepted
+without spirit. "If you can't get your own consent to use it, give it to me
+when I've emptied the other."
+
+She breathed a dismayed "Yes ..." and wonderingly consulted his face, since
+he did not stir other than thoughtfully to replace his pistol on the desk,
+then stood staring at his soot-smeared palms.
+
+"What is it?" she demanded nervously. "Why do you hesitate?"
+
+As one fretted by inconsequential questions, he merely shook his head,
+glancing sidelong once at the unconscious Prussian, again with calculation
+toward the door.
+
+This he saw quivering under repeated blows.
+
+With brusque decision he said: "Get a chair--brace it beneath the
+door-knob, please!"--and leaving her without more explanation turned back
+to the fireplace.
+
+Motionless, in dumb confusion, the girl stood staring after him till roused
+by a blow of such splintering force as to suggest that an axe had been
+brought into play upon the door, then ran to a ponderous club chair and
+with considerable exertion managed to trundle it to the door and tip it
+over, wedging its back beneath the knob.
+
+By this time it had become indisputably patent that an axe was battering
+the panels. But the door, in character with the room, was a substantial
+piece of workmanship and needed more than a few blows, even of an axe, to
+break down its barrier of solid oak.
+
+She looked round to discover Lanyard kneeling beside Ekstrom, insanely--so
+it seemed to the girl--engaged in blackening the upper half of the man's
+face with a handful of soot.
+
+Unconsciously uttering a little cry of distress she sped to his side and
+caught his shoulder with an importunate hand.
+
+"In Heaven's name, Monsieur Duchemin, what are you doing? Is this a time
+for childishness--?"
+
+He responded with a smile of boyish mischief so genuine that her doubts of
+his reason seemed all too well confirmed.
+
+"Making up my understudy," he said simply. And brushing his hands over the
+rug to rid them of superfluous soot, Lanyard rose. "Please go back and
+stand by the door--on the side of the hinges. I'll be with you in one
+minute."
+
+Resigned to humour this lunatic whim--what else could she do?--the girl
+retreated to the position designated, and watched with ever darker doubts
+of his sanity, while Lanyard hurriedly drew the shells from his automatic
+and carefully placed its butt in the slack grasp of Ekstrom's fingers.
+
+Then, lifting from a near-by table a great cut-glass bowl of flowers, the
+adventurer inverted it over Ekstrom's body.
+
+Expending its full force upon the man's chest, that miniature deluge
+splashed widely, wetting his face, half filling his open mouth. Some of
+the soot was washed away, but not a great deal: enough stuck fast to suit
+Lanyard's purpose.
+
+Roused by that cool shock, half strangled as well, Ekstrom coughed
+violently, squirmed, spat out a mouthful of water, and lifted on an elbow,
+still more than half dazed.
+
+Joining the girl by the door, Lanyard saw the Prussian sit up and glare
+blankly round the room, a figure of tragic fun, drenched, woefully
+disfigured, eyes rolling wildly in the wide spaces round them which Lanyard
+had left unblackened.
+
+Swinging the club chair away from the door, the adventurer placed it with
+its back to the room.
+
+"Get down behind that," he indicated shortly, and drew the key from his
+pocket. "Don't show yourself for your life. And let me have that pistol,
+please."
+
+A bright triangular wedge of steel broke through one of the panels as he
+fitted and turned the key in the lock.
+
+His wits clearing, Ekstrom saw him and with a howl of fury staggered to his
+feet, clutching the unloaded pistol and endeavouring to level it for steady
+aim.
+
+Simultaneously Lanyard turned the knob and let the door fly open, remaining
+beside the chair that hid the girl.
+
+A knot of spies, O'Reilly and Velasco among them, whirled into the room,
+pulled up at sight of that strange, grim figure, disguised beyond all
+recognition by its half-mask of black, facing and menacing them with a
+pistol.
+
+O'Reilly fired in the next breath, his shot echoed by half a dozen so
+closely bunched as to resemble the rattle of a mitrailleuse.
+
+At the first report the pistol dropped from Ekstrom's grasp. He carried a
+hand vaguely to his throat, staggered a single step, uttered a strangled
+moan, and fell forward, his body fairly riddled, his death little short of
+instantaneous.
+
+While the fusillade was still resounding Lanyard, seizing the girl's wrist,
+unceremoniously dragged her from behind the chair and thrust her through
+the door, retreating after her with his face to the roomfull, his pistol
+ready.
+
+None of that lot paid him any heed, the attention of all wholly absorbed by
+the tragedy their violent hands had wrought. Velasco, the first to stir,
+ran forward and dropped to his knees beside the dead man. Others followed.
+
+Gently Lanyard drew the door to, locked it on the outside, and at the sound
+of a choking cry from Cecelia Brooke, whirled smartly round, prepared if
+need be to make good his promise to clear with gun-play a way to the street
+though opposed by every inmate of the establishment.
+
+But the first face he saw was Crane's.
+
+The Secret Service man stood within a yard. To him as to a rock of refuge
+Cecelia Brooke had flown, to his hand she was clinging like a frightened
+child, trying to speak, failing because she choked on sobs and gasps of
+horror.
+
+Behind him, on the landing at the head of the staircase, running up from
+below, ascending to the upper storeys, were a score' or more of men of
+sturdy and business-like bearing and indubitably American stamp. Of
+these two were herding into a corner a little group of frightened German
+servants.
+
+Lanyard's stare of astonishment was met by Crane's twisted smile.
+
+"My friend," he said, as quietly as anyone could with his accent of a
+quizzical buzz-saw, "I sure got to hand it to you. Every time I try to pull
+anything off on the dead quiet you beat me to it clean. Everywhere I think
+you ain't and can't be, that's just where you are. But I ain't complaining;
+I got to admit, if you hadn't staged your act to occupy the minds of those
+gents in there, we might've had a lot more difficulty raiding this joint."
+
+Quickly he wound an arm round the waist of Cecelia Brooke when, without
+warning, she swayed blindly and would have fallen.
+
+"Here, now!" he protested. "That's no way to do.... Why, she's flickered
+out! Well, Monsieur Duchemin-Lanyard-Ember, to a man up a tree this looks
+like your job. You take this little lady off my hands and see her home, and
+I'll just naturally try and finish what I started--or what you did. For,
+son, I got to give you credit: you sure are one grand li'l trouble-hound!"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+QUESTION
+
+
+Through the breathing hush of that dark hour which foreruns the dawn, that
+hour in which the head that knows a wakeful pillow is prone to sudden
+and disquieting apprehension of its insignificance and it's soul's dread
+isolation, the cab sped swiftly south upon the Avenue, shadowed reaches of
+the park upon its right, upon its left the dull, tired faces of those homes
+whose tenants lay wrapped in the cotton-wool of riches.
+
+The rain had ceased. A little wind was blowing up. There was a fresh
+smell in the air. Sidewalks began to be maculated with spreading areas of
+dryness, but the roadway was still wet and shining, the wide black mirror
+of a myriad lights.
+
+Through the windows of the speeding cab an orderly procession of street
+lamps, marching past, threw each its fugitive and pallid glimmer. Periods
+of modified darkness intervened, when the face of the girl in her corner
+seemed a vision subtle and wraithlike. But ever the recurrent lights
+revealed her sweetly incarnate if deep in enervation of crushing weariness.
+
+Once she stirred and sighed profoundly; and Lanyard, bending toward her,
+asked if he could be in any way of service.
+
+She replied in an undertone scarcely better than a whisper: "Thank you, I
+am quite comfortable.... Please--what time is it?"
+
+The cab was passing Sixtieth Street. Lanyard caught a fleeting glimpse of a
+street clock with a dial like a little golden moon.
+
+"It's just four."
+
+"Thank you...."
+
+"Very tired?"
+
+"Very...."
+
+He had the maddest notion that her head inclined to droop toward his
+shoulder. Perhaps the motion of the cab.... If so, she recovered easily.
+
+"Can I do anything?"
+
+"No, thank you, only ..." An ungloved hand stirred from her lap and for
+the merest instant rested lightly above his own, or hovered rather, barely
+touching it with a touch tenuous and elusive, no sooner realised than gone.
+"I mean," she murmured, "I am a bit too overwrought, too tired, to talk."
+
+"I quite understand," he said. "Please forget I'm here; just rest."
+
+Perhaps she smiled drowsily. Or was that, too, a freak of his imagination?
+Lanyard assured himself it was, in excess of consideration even tried to
+persuade himself he had dreamed that ghost of a caress upon his hand. It
+seemed so little like her.
+
+Not that anything had happened more than a gesture of transient
+inadvertence due to fatigue. It could not have been intentional, that act
+of intimacy, when the girl was altogether engrossed in young Thackeray.
+
+There was something one must not forget, something that gave the lie flatly
+to that innuendo of the Weringrode's. Ignorant of the circumstances the
+intrigante had leaped blindly at conclusions, after the habit of her kind.
+
+True, Sophie had not implied that this girl cared for him, but vice versa:
+either supposition, however, was as absurd as the other. As if Lanyard
+could love a woman who loved another! As if the name of love meant aught
+to him but the memory of a sweetness like a vagrant air of Spring that had
+breathed fitfully for a season upon the Winter of his heart!
+
+A corner of Lanyard's mouth lifted in a sneer. That precious heart of
+his! the heart of a thief upon which even now the fruits of his thieving
+weighed....
+
+Irritated, he wrenched his thoughts into another channel, and began to
+piece together inconsecutive snatches of information gained from Crane
+in the confusion of the quarter hour just past, while the Secret Service
+operatives were busy rounding up the inmates of that spy-fold and searching
+for evidences of their impudent activities.
+
+It appeared that Washington had at length, however tardily, roused out of
+its inertia and at midnight had telegraphed instructions to arrest out
+of hand every enemy alien in the land against whom there was evidence of
+conspiracy or even a ponderable suspicion.
+
+So unexpected was this order that Crane had volunteered to show Cecelia
+Brooke that midnight rendezvous of the Prussian spy system without the
+least notion that he might be required before morning to lead a raiding
+force against the establishment; and even when a messenger stopped him as
+he turned to enter Au Printemps, he was not advised concerning the cause of
+this demand for his immediate presence at headquarters.
+
+The first cast of what Crane aptly termed the dragnet had brought in the
+management and service staff to a man, with a number of the restaurant's
+habitues, including Sophie Weringrode and her errand-boy, the exquisite Mr.
+Revel.
+
+Velasco, however, had somehow mysteriously managed to slip through the
+meshes and had straightway hastened to spread the alarm.
+
+As for O'Reilly and Dressier, they had left with Ekstrom in pursuit of
+Lanyard less than five minutes before, and so had escaped not only arrest
+but all knowledge of the raid prior to their return to Seventy-ninth
+Street.
+
+The second cast of the net had been made at the latter place as soon as
+the watchers were able to assure Crane that Ekstrom and O'Reilly had
+returned--Dressier having anticipated them there by something like half an
+hour.
+
+By daybreak, then, these gentry would be interned on Ellis Island....
+
+And break of day impended visibly in grayish shades that stole westward
+through the cross-town streets like clouds of secret agents spying out the
+city against invasion by the serried lances of the sun.
+
+A garish twilight washed Forty-second Street from wall to wall by the time
+the car swung round in front of the Knickerbocker. As yet, however, there
+was little evidence that the town was growing restive in its sleep with
+premonition of the ardour of another day.
+
+Lanyard stepped down and offered the girl a hand in whose palm her slender
+fingers rested lightly for an instant ere she passed on, while he turned to
+bid the driver wait. Following, he overtook her in the entrance, where by
+tacit consent both paused and lingered in an odd constraint. There was so
+much to be said that was impossible to say just then.
+
+Visibly the woman drooped, betraying physical exhaustion in every line of
+her pose, seeming scarcely strong enough to lift the silken lashes that
+trembled upon cheeks a little drawn and pale, with the faintest of bluish
+rings beneath the eyes.
+
+"I must not keep you," Lanyard broke the silence. "I merely wished to say
+good-night and ... I am sorry."
+
+"Sorry?" she echoed.
+
+"That you had such an unhappy experience," he explained--"thanks to your
+thoughtfulness for me. I do not deserve so much consideration; and that
+only makes me feel all the more regretful."
+
+"It was silly of me," she admitted with a shadowy, rueful smile. "I'm
+afraid my silliness makes too much trouble...."
+
+He commented honestly: "I don't understand."
+
+"If I had only been patient enough to wait for you to call me...."
+
+"Forgive that oversight. I was pressed for time, as you may imagine."
+
+"Oh, it all comes back to my own stupidity. I might have known you had come
+through all right."
+
+"How should you?"
+
+"Why not?--when you turn up here in New York safe and sound after being
+drowned on the _Assyrian_!--as if that were not proof enough that you bear
+a charmed life!"
+
+"Charmed!" he laughed.
+
+"And you haven't yet told me how you survived that adventure."
+
+"You are kind to be interested, and I am unfortunate in never seeing you
+save under circumstances unfavourable for yarn-spinning."
+
+"You might be more fortunate."
+
+"Only tell me how!"
+
+"If you cared to ask me to dine with you to-morrow--I mean, to-night--"
+
+"You would--?"
+
+He was distressed by consciousness that his voice had thrilled impetuously.
+But perhaps she had not noticed; there was no change in the even
+friendliness of her tone.
+
+"I'm as inquisitive as any woman that ever lived. Even if I wished to, I'm
+afraid I shouldn't be able to resist an invitation to hear your Odyssey."
+
+"Delmonico's at eight?"
+
+"Thank you," she said primly.
+
+"You make me too happy. May I call for you?"
+
+"Please." She offered a hand whose touch he found cool, steady, and
+impersonal. "Good morning, Mr. Ember."
+
+He stood in a stare while she went quickly through the lobby to a waiting
+elevator, then roused and went back to his cab.
+
+It was by daylight that he reentered his rooms and found them tenanted by
+a negro boy bound and gagged, bruised and sore, and scared beyond
+intelligible expression.
+
+Freeing him and salving his injuries bodily and spiritual with a liberal
+douceur, Lanyard exacted an oath of silence, then turned him out.
+
+He had approximately five hours to put in somehow before his appointment
+with Colonel Stanistreet at nine, and was too well versed in the lore of
+late hours to think of giving any part of that time to sleep. By so doing
+he would only insure a mutinous awakening, with mind and body sluggish and
+unrested. If, on the other hand, he remained awake, he would go to that
+interview in a state of supernormal animation exceedingly to be desired if
+he were to round out this adventure without discredit.
+
+For its end was not yet. He had still a part to play whose lines were not
+yet written, whose business remained to be invented. He neither dared
+shirk that appointment, for reasons of policy, nor wished to, while there
+remained reparation to be accomplished, a wrong to be righted, justice to
+be done, a question to be answered.
+
+Only when these matters had been put in order would he feel his honour
+discharged of its burdens, himself free once more to drop out and go in
+peace his lonely ways in life, ways henceforth to be both lonely and
+aimless.
+
+For, when he strove to peer into the future, only an emptiness confronted
+him. With Ekstrom accounted for finally and forevermore, there was nothing
+to come but the final accounting of the Lone Wolf with that civilization
+which had bred and suffered him.
+
+One way presented itself to make that reckoning even. The Foreign Legion of
+France asks no embarrassing questions of its recruits, and enlistment in
+its ranks offers with anonymity a consoling certainty.
+
+Thus alone might he find his way home to the heart of that enigma whence he
+had emerged, a nameless waif astray in grim Parisian by-ways....
+
+This vision of his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign
+for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with
+Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the passports of
+Monsieur Andre Duchemin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a
+berth on some steamer sailing for Europe, then the last evanishment.
+
+One detail alone troubled him, his promise to the Brooke girl that she
+should dine with him that night.
+
+Reminded of this obligation, figuratively he seized Michael Lanyard by the
+scruff of his neck and shook him with a savage hand. What insensate folly
+was ever his, what want of wit and strength to keep out of temptation's
+ways! Why must he have fallen in so readily with her suggestion? Why this
+infatuate thirst for sympathy, this eagerness to violate the seals of
+reticence at the wish of a strange woman? Was there any reasonable
+explanation of the strange lack of his wonted self-sufficiency in the
+company of Cecelia Brooke?
+
+No matter. If he might not contrive somehow to squirm out of that
+engagement, he could at all events school himself to decent reticence. He
+promised himself to make his account of the submarine adventure drearily
+bald and trite, to minimize to the last degree his part therein, above all
+things to refrain from painting the Lone Wolf in romantic colours.
+
+She was much too good a sort, too straight, sincere, fair-minded,
+honest--the sort of girl who deserved the Thackeray sort of man, never a
+thief.
+
+If she even dreamed....
+
+Lanyard brought forth from its hiding place the necklace, weighed it in
+his hand, examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he
+recognized no more its beauty, dispassionately reviewed in turn each stone
+of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity,
+perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent pebbles, cold,
+soulless, cruel.
+
+One by one they slipped through his fingers like beads of an unholy rosary.
+
+At length, crushing them together in the hollow of his palm, he stood a
+while in thought, then turning to his writing-desk bundled the necklace in
+wrappings of white tissue secured with rubber bands, counted carefully the
+sheaf of bills he had taken from Ekstrom, sealed the whole amount in a
+plain, long envelope, and put this aside in company with the necklace.
+
+Already two hours had passed and, since he meant to call at the house on
+West End Avenue well in advance of the hour when Cecelia Brooke might be
+there--presuming Blensop to have given her the same appointment as he had
+given "Mr. Ember," that is, nine o'clock--it was now time to prepare.
+
+Returning to his bedchamber, he laid out a carefully selected change of
+clothing, shaved, parboiled himself in a hot bath, chilled him to the
+pith in one of icy coldness, and dressed with scrupulous heed to detail,
+studiously effacing every sign of his sleepless night.
+
+That experience was in no way to be surmised from his appearance when he
+sallied forth to breakfast at the Plaza.
+
+At eight precisely, presenting himself at the Stanistreet residence, he
+desired the footman to announce him as the author of a certain telegram
+from Edgartown.
+
+He was obliged to wait less than a minute, the footman returning in haste
+to request him to step into the library.
+
+This apartment--which he found much as he had last seen it, eight hours
+ago, its window shattered, the portieres down, the furniture in some
+disorder--was, on his introduction, occupied by two persons, one an
+elderly, iron-gray gentleman of untidy dress and unobtrusive habit in spite
+of a discerning cool, gray eye, the other Mr. Blensop in the neatest of
+one-button morning-coat effects, with striped trouserings neither too smart
+nor too sober for that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call
+him, and fair white spats.
+
+If his attire was radiant, so was the temper of the secretary sunny. He
+tripped forward in sprightliest fashion, offering cordial hands to the
+caller till he recognized him, and even then was discountenanced only for
+the briefest moment.
+
+"My dear Mr. Ember!" he purred soothingly--"why didn't you tell me last
+night it was you who had sent that telegram? If I had for a moment
+suspected the truth you should have had your appointment with Colonel
+Stanistreet at any hour you might have cared to name, no matter how
+ungodly!"
+
+Lanyard bowed gravely. "Thank you," he said. "And Colonel Stanistreet--?"
+
+"Is just finishing breakfast. He will be down directly. Please be seated,
+make yourself entirely at ease. And will you excuse me--?"
+
+"With pleasure," Lanyard assured him, his gravity unbroken.
+
+A doubt clouded Mr. Blensop's bright eyes, but its transit was
+instantaneous. He turned forthwith to join the iron-gray man before the
+portrait which concealed the safe.
+
+"And now, Mr. Stone," said Mr. Blensop, with indulgence.
+
+"Well, sir," said Mr. Stone quietly, "if you'll be good enough to show me
+how this contraption works, maybe I'll find out something interesting,
+maybe not."
+
+Mr. Blensop proceeded to oblige by operating the lever and sliding aside
+the portrait.
+
+"Thanks," said Mr. Stone, producing a magnifying glass from a waistcoat
+pocket and beginning to peer myopically at the face of the safe. "I take
+it nobody's been pawing over this since the late, as you might say,
+unpleasantness?"
+
+"Not a soul has touched it. By Colonel Stanistreet's order it was covered
+as soon as we found it had been tampered with."
+
+"_Um-m_," Mr. Stone acknowledged, bending close to his work.
+
+Partially, perhaps, by way of administering an urbane rebuke to Lanyard for
+his readiness to dispense with his society, Mr. Blensop remained in
+the neighbourhood of Mr. Stone, hovering round him like a domesticated
+humming-bird.
+
+"Do you find anything?" he enquired, when Stone straightened up.
+
+"Fingerprints a-plenty," Mr. Stone admitted with a hint of temper--"a slew
+of the damn things. Looks like you must've called in the neighbours to help
+make a good show. However, we'll see what we can make of 'em."
+
+He conjured from some recess in his clothing a squat bottle, from another a
+stopper in which was fitted a blowpipe, joined the two together, approached
+the safe with one end of the pipe between his lips and sprayed it with a
+thin film of white powder, the contents of the bottle.
+
+"I say, do tell me what that's for?"
+
+"That," said Mr. Stone patiently, "is to make the fingerprints stand out,
+so we can get a good likeness of 'em."
+
+He put the bottle aside, blinked at the safe approvingly, and by further
+exercise of powers of legerdemain materialized a pocket kodak and a
+flashlight pistol.
+
+"Can't I help you?" Blensop offered eagerly. "I used to be rather a dab at
+amateur photography, you know."
+
+"Well, I'm kind of stuck on pressing the button myself," Stone confessed,
+adjusting the focus. "But if you want to work that flashlight, I don't
+mind."
+
+"Delighted," Mr. Blensop asserted. "How does it go, now?"
+
+"Like this." Stone set his camera down to demonstrate. "Now just stand
+behind me," he concluded, "and pull the trigger when I say 'now'."
+
+"I'll do my best, but--I say--will it bang?"
+
+Stone had taken up the camera once more. His sole answer was a grunt upon
+which his hearers placed two distinct interpretations--Lanyard's affording
+him considerable gratification.
+
+"If you're ready," said Stone--"_now_"
+
+Mr. Blensop squinted unbecomingly and pressed the trigger. A vivid flare
+lifted from the pan of the pistol, and winked out in a cloud of vapour,
+slowly dissipating.
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"Yes, sir--that's all of that." Stone stowed the camera away about his
+person and from another cranny produced a small cardboard box of glass
+slides, one of which he offered. "Now if you'll just run your fingers
+through your hair and rest them on this slide, light but steady...."
+
+"What for?" Blensop demanded with a giggle of nervous reluctance. "You
+don't think I'm the thief, do you?"
+
+"No, sir, I don't. But if I haven't got your fingerprints, how am I going
+to tell them from the thief's?"
+
+"Oh, I see," Blensop said with a note of allayed apprehension, and put
+himself on record.
+
+The door opening to admit Colonel Stanistreet, Lanyard rose. At sight of
+him the Englishman checked and stared enquiringly, his eyes shadowed by
+careworn brows; for it was apparent that, if the events of the night had
+not depressed the spirits of the secretary, his employer had known little
+sleep or none since the burglary.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet," Blensop said melodiously, abandoning Stone to his
+unsupervised devices, "this is Mr. Ember, the gentleman who called last
+night before you got home. It appears he is the person who sent us that
+telegram from Edgartown day before yesterday."
+
+"Indeed? Ember is not the name with which the message was signed."
+
+"The message was purposely left unsigned," Lanyard explained.
+
+Stanistreet nodded approval. "I am glad to meet you, Mr. Ember," he said,
+offering a hand. "Be seated. I am most anxious first to express our
+gratitude, next to learn how you came by your information."
+
+"You will find it an interesting story."
+
+"No doubt of that." Stanistreet took the desk chair, opened a cigar
+humidor, and offered it. "I shall be even more interested, however," he
+said with an evanescent trace of humour, "to know who the devil you are,
+sir."
+
+"That is something I am prepared to prove to your satisfaction."
+
+"If you will be so good.... But excuse me for one moment." Stanistreet
+turned in his chair. "Mr. Stone?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Have you finished with the safe? If so, I want my secretary to check over
+its contents carefully and make sure nothing else is missing."
+
+"I'm all through with it, Colonel Stanistreet. Now, if you don't mind,
+I'm going to mouse around and see if I can nose out anything else that's
+useful."
+
+"That shall be entirely as you will. Now, Blensop"--Stanistreet nodded to
+the secretary--"let us make certain...."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Blithely Mr. Blensop addressed himself to the safe.
+
+"There has been an accident of some sort, Colonel Stanistreet?" Lanyard
+enquired civilly, nodding toward the shattered French window.
+
+"A burglary, sir."
+
+"The criminal escaped--?"
+
+Stanistreet nodded. "Our watchman surprised him, and was shot for his
+pains--not seriously, I'm happy to say. The burglar got himself tangled
+up in that window, but extricated in time, and went over the garden wall
+before we could determine which way he had taken."
+
+"I trust you lost nothing of value?"
+
+Stanistreet shrugged. "Unhappily, we did--a diamond necklace, the property
+of my sister-in-law, and--ah--a document we could ill afford to part
+with.... But you offered to show me credentials, I believe."
+
+"Such as they are," Lanyard replied. "My passports and letters were stolen
+from me. But these, I think, should serve as well to prove my bona fides."
+
+He laid out in order upon the desk his plunder from the safe aboard the
+U-boat--all but the money--the three cipher codes, the log, the diary
+of the commander, the directory of German secret agents, and such other
+documents as he had selected.
+
+The first Colonel Stanistreet took up with a dubious frown which swiftly
+lightened, yielding, as he pursued his examination into the papers and
+began to recognize their surpassing value to the Allied cause, to a subdued
+glimmer of gratulatory excitement.
+
+But he was at pains to satisfy himself as to the authenticity of each paper
+in turn, providing a lull for which Lanyard was not ungrateful since it
+gave him a chance to adjust his understanding to an unexpected development
+in the affair.
+
+He lounged at ease, smoking, his eyes, half-veiled by lowered lids, keenly
+reviewing the room and its tenants.
+
+Stone, the detective (an operative, Lanyard rightly inferred, of the
+American Secret Service, loaned to the British in order to keep the
+burglary out of police records and newspapers), had wandered out into the
+garden that glowed with young April sunlight beyond the windows. From
+time to time he was to be seen stooping and inspecting the earth with the
+gravity of an earnest, efficient, sober-sided sleuth of the old school.
+
+Blensop was busy before the safe, extracting the contents of each
+pigeonhole in turn, thumbing its dockets of papers, checking each off upon
+a typewritten list several pages in length.
+
+To that lithe and debonair figure Lanyard's gaze oftenest reverted.
+
+So not only had the necklace been stolen but "a document" which the British
+Secret Service "could ill afford to part with"!
+
+Lanyard entertained no least doubt as to the identity of the document in
+question. There could be but one, he felt, which Stanistreet would so
+characterize.
+
+That document had not been in the safe when Lanyard had opened it at
+midnight.
+
+After a moment Mr. Blensop uttered a musical note of vexation. The lead of
+his pencil had broken. He threw it pettishly aside, came over to the desk,
+took up a penholder, dipped it in the ink-well, and returned to his task.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+CHICANE
+
+
+Colonel Stanistreet put down the last of the papers and slapped his hand
+upon it resoundingly.
+
+"This is one of the most remarkable collections of data, I venture to
+assert, that has ever come into the hands of the British Government. Have
+you any idea of its value?"
+
+Lanyard lifted a whimsical eyebrow. "Some," he admitted drily.
+
+"And what do you ask for it, sir?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+The gaze of the Englishman bored into his eyes; but he met their challenge
+with an unshaken countenance, smiling.
+
+"My dear sir," Stanistreet demanded--"who are you?"
+
+"The name under which I sailed for New York on board the _Assyrian_,"
+Lanyard announced quietly, "was Andre Duchemin."
+
+Disturbed by a startled exclamation, together with a sound of shuffling and
+a slight thump, he looked round in mild curiosity to see Blensop staggered
+and astare, standing over a litter of documents which had slipped from his
+grasp to the floor. Mastering his emotion quickly enough, the secretary
+knelt with a mumbled apology and began to pick up the papers.
+
+With no more notice of the incident Lanyard returned undivided attention to
+Colonel Stanistreet.
+
+"I had another name," he confessed, "and a reputation none too savoury,
+as, I daresay, you know. Through the courtesy of the British Intelligence
+Office I was permitted to disguise these; but on the _Assyrian_ I was
+recognized--in short, ran afoul of German Secret Service agents who knew
+me, but whom I did not know. On the sixth night out circumstances conspired
+to make me seem a serious obstacle to their schemes. Consequently I was
+waylaid, robbed, and thrown overboard. Within the next few minutes a
+torpedo struck the ship and the submarine which fired it came up under me
+as I struggled to keep afloat. By passing myself off as a Boche spy, I
+succeeded in inducing the commander to take me below, and so reached the
+Martha's Vineyard base. There chance played into my hands: I contrived to
+sink the U-boat and escape, as reported in my telegram."
+
+During a brief silence he found opportunity to observe that Mr. Blensop was
+working with hands that trembled singularly.
+
+"Incredible!" Stanistreet commented.
+
+"Yet here is proof," Lanyard asserted, indicating the papers beneath
+Stanistreet's hand.
+
+"My dear sir, I didn't mean--"
+
+"Pardon!" Lanyard smiled, with a lifted hand. "I never thought you did,
+Colonel Stanistreet. But it is your duty to make sure you are not imposed
+upon by plausible adventurers. Therefore--since my papers have been
+stolen--I am glad to be able to prove my identity with Andre Duchemin by
+referring to survivors of the _Assyrian_ disaster, among others Mr. Sherry,
+the second officer, Mr. Crane of the United States Secret Service, and a
+countrywoman of yours, a Miss Cecelia Brooke, whose acquaintance I was
+fortunate enough to make."
+
+Stanistreet nodded heavily, and consulted his watch. "Miss Brooke," he
+said, "should be here shortly. Blensop made an appointment with her last
+night, which I confirmed by telephone this morning."
+
+"Then, with permission, I shall remain and ask her to vouch for me,"
+Lanyard suggested in resignation, since it appeared he was not to be
+permitted to escape this girl, that destiny was not yet finished with their
+entanglement.
+
+"I shall be glad if you will, sir.... Monsieur Duchemin," Stanistreet
+began, but hesitated--"or do you prefer another style?"
+
+"I am content with Duchemin."
+
+"That is a matter for your own discretion, but I should warn you it may
+already have acquired an evil odour on this side. To my knowledge it has
+been used within the last twenty-four hours, and the pretensions of its
+wearer supported by your stolen credentials."
+
+"I am not surprised," Lanyard stated reflectively. "A chap with a beard,
+perhaps?"
+
+"Why, yes...."
+
+"Anderson," the adventurer nodded: "that, at least, was his alias when he
+jockeyed himself into the second steward's berth aboard the _Assyrian_."
+
+He glanced idly across the room, discovered Blensop once more at pause in a
+stare, and grinned amiably.
+
+"He came here last night," Stanistreet volunteered deliberately--
+"representing himself as Andre Duchemin--to sell me a certain paper, the
+same which subsequently, I am convinced, he returned to steal."
+
+"And did," Lanyard added.
+
+"And did," the Briton conceded. "Now you have told me who he is, I promise
+you every effort shall be made to apprehend him and prevent further misuse
+of the name you have assumed."
+
+"It has," Lanyard said tersely.
+
+"I beg your pardon?"
+
+"I say every effort has been made--and successfully--to accomplish the ends
+you mention."
+
+"What's that you say?" Blensop demanded shrilly, crossing to the desk.
+
+"My secretary," Stanistreet explained, "was present at the interview, and
+is naturally interested."
+
+"And very good of him, I'm sure," Lanyard agreed. "I was about to explain,
+Mr. Blensop, that Ekstrom, alias Anderson, was killed in the course of
+a raid on the Prussian spy headquarters in Seventy-ninth Street this
+morning."
+
+"Amazing!" Blensop gasped. "I am glad to hear it," he added, and went
+slowly back to his task.
+
+"I may as well tell you, sir," Lanyard pursued, "I have every reason to
+believe the document sold you last night was one of those stolen from me."
+
+Stanistreet wagged a contentious head.
+
+"I cannot conceive how it could have come into your possession, sir."
+
+"Simply enough. Miss Brooke requested me to take care of it for her."
+
+The eyes of the Englishman grew stony. "Miss Brooke!" he repeated testily.
+"I don't understand."
+
+"It was a document--I do not seek to know its nature from you, sir--of
+vital importance in this present crisis, with the United States newly
+entered into the war."
+
+Stanistreet affirmed with an inclination of his head.
+
+"I may tell you this much, Monsieur Duchemin: if it had not reached this
+country safely.... What am I saying? If it be not recovered without delay,
+the chances of America's early and efficient participation in the war will
+suffer a tremendous setback ... Blensop, be good enough to call up the
+American Secret Service at once and ask whether the document in question
+was found on the body of this--ah--Ekstrom."
+
+"Pardon," Lanyard interposed as Blensop hesitantly approached the
+telephone. "It would be a waste of time. I happen to know, because I was
+there, that no such document was found on Ekstrom's body."
+
+"The devil!" Stanistreet grumbled. "What can have become of it? This
+business grows only the blacker the deeper one seeks to fathom it. I
+must own myself completely at a loss. How it came into the hands of Miss
+Brooke--"
+
+"I can explain that, I think. The document was in the care of two
+gentlemen, Mr. Bartholomew and Lieutenant Thackeray. The former was
+murdered by the Huns in search of it, Lieutenant Thackeray murderously
+assaulted. But for Miss Brooke's intervention the assassins must have
+succeeded. As it was, the young woman herself found it and, one presumes,
+took charge of it because her fiance was incapacitated, and possibly with
+the notion that she might thereby prevent further mischief of the same
+nature."
+
+"Her fiance?" Stanistreet echoed blankly.
+
+"Lieutenant Thackeray--"
+
+"Her brother, sir!" the Briton laughed. "Thackeray was his nom de service."
+
+It was Lanyard's turn to stare. "Ah!" he murmured. "A light begins to
+dawn...."
+
+"Upon me as well," Stanistreet confessed. "Miss Brooke and her brother are
+orphans and, before the war, were inseparable companions. I do not doubt
+that, learning he had been commissioned with an uncommonly perilous errand,
+she booked passage by the _Assyrian_ without his consent, in order to be
+near him in event of danger."
+
+"This explains much," Lanyard conceded--"much that perplexed more than one
+can say."
+
+"But in no way advances us on the trail of the purloined document."
+
+"I am afraid, sir," Lanyard lied deliberately, "you may as well abandon all
+hope of ever seeing it again. Ekstrom made away with it: no question about
+that. There was time enough and to spare between his exploit here and his
+death for him to deliver it to safe hands. It is doubtless decoded by this
+time, a copy of it already well on the way to the Wilhelmstrasse."
+
+"I am afraid," Stanistreet echoed--"I am very much afraid you are right."
+
+His thick, spatulate fingers of an executive drummed heavily upon the desk.
+
+Stone's figure darkened the windows.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet?" he called diffidently.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Stone?"
+
+"There's something here I'd like to consult you about, sir, if you can
+spare a minute."
+
+"Certainly." The Englishman rose. "If you will excuse me, Monsieur
+Duchemin...." Half way to the windows he hesitated. "By the bye, Blensop, I
+wish you'd call up Apthorp and ask after Howson's condition."
+
+"Very good, sir," Blensop intoned cheerfully.
+
+"And do it without delay, please. I don't like to think of the poor fellow
+suffering."
+
+"Immediately, sir."
+
+As his employer passed out into the garden with Stone, the secretary
+discontinued his checking and came over to the desk, drawing up a chair and
+sitting down to telephone. At the same time Lanyard got up and began to
+pace thoughtfully to and fro.
+
+"Howson is the wounded night watchman, I take it, Mr. Blensop?"
+
+"Yes--an excellent fellow.... Schuyler nine, three hundred," Blensop cooed
+into the transmitter.
+
+Conceivably that ostensible discomfiture whose symptoms Lanyard had
+remarked had been a transitory humour. Mr. Blensop was now in what seemed
+the most equable and blithe of tempers. His very posture at the telephone
+eloquently betokened as much: he had thrown himself into the chair with
+picturesque nonchalance, sitting with body half turned from the desk, his
+right hand holding the receiver to his ear, his left thrust carelessly
+into his trouser pocket, thus dragging back the lapel of that impeccable
+morning-coat and exposing the bright cap of his gold-mounted fountain pen.
+
+Something in that implement seemed to possess for Lanyard overpowering
+fascination. His gaze yearned for it, returned again and again to it.
+
+He changed his course to stroll up and down behind Blensop, between him and
+the safe.
+
+"I understood Colonel Stanistreet to say the watchman was not seriously
+injured, I believe," he observed, with interest.
+
+"Shot through the shoulder, that is all.... Schuyler nine, three hundred?
+Dr. Apthorp, please. This is Mr. Blensop speaking, secretary to Colonel
+Stanistreet.... Are you there, Dr. Apthorp?"
+
+With professional dexterity Lanyard en passant dropped a hand over the
+young man's shoulder and lightly lifted the pen from its place in the
+pocket of Blensop's waistcoat; the even tempo of his step unbroken, he
+tossed it toward the safe, where it fell without sound upon a heavy Persian
+rug.
+
+"Yes--about Howson," the musical accents continued, "Colonel Stanistreet is
+most solicitous...."
+
+Swiftly Lanyard moved toward the safe, glanced through the French windows
+to assure himself that Stanistreet and Stone were safely preoccupied,
+whipped out the envelope he had prepared, and thrust it into a file of
+papers which did not crowd its pigeonhole; accomplishing the complete
+manoeuvre with such adroitness that, like the business of the pen, it
+passed utterly without the knowledge of the secretary.
+
+"Thank you so much. _Good_ morning, Dr. Apthorp."
+
+Lanyard was passing the desk when Blensop rose, and the footman was
+entering with his salver.
+
+"A lady to see Colonel Stanistreet, sir--by appointment, she says."
+
+Blensop glanced at the card. At the same time Stanistreet came in from the
+garden, leaving Stone to potter about visibly in the distance.
+
+"Miss Brooke is here, sir," the secretary announced.
+
+"Ask her to come in, please."
+
+The footman retired.
+
+"Howson is resting easily, Dr. Apthorp reports," Blensop added, going back
+to the safe. "Has Stone turned up anything of interest, sir?"
+
+"Footprints," Stanistreet replied with a snort of moderate impatience.
+"He's quite upset since I've informed him the man who made them is--"
+
+"_Good God_!"
+
+The interruption was Blensop's in a voice strangely out of tune.
+Stanistreet wheeled sharply upon him.
+
+"What the deuce--!" he snapped.
+
+By every indication the secretary had suffered the most severe shock of his
+experience. His face was ghastly, his eyes vacant; his knees shook beneath
+him; one hand pressed convulsively the bosom of his waistcoat. His
+endeavours to reply evoked only a husky, rattling sound.
+
+"What the devil has come over you?" Stanistreet insisted.
+
+The rattle became articulate: "I've lost it! It's gone!"
+
+"What have you lost?"
+
+"N-nothing, sir. That is--I mean to say--my fountain pen."
+
+"The way you take it, I should say you'd lost your head," Stanistreet
+commented. "You must have dropped the thing somewhere. Look about, see if
+you can't find it."
+
+Thus admonished, the secretary began to search the floor with frantic
+glances, and as the footman ushered in Cecelia Brooke, Lanyard saw the
+young man dart forward and retrieve the pen with a start of relief wellnigh
+as unmanning as the shock of loss had seemed.
+
+With that Lanyard's interest in the fellow waned; he was too poor a thing
+to consider seriously; while here was one who compelled anew, as ever when
+they met, the homage of sincere and marvelling admiration.
+
+Yet another of those miracles of feminine adaptability and makeshift had
+brought the girl to this meeting in the guise of one who had never known a
+broken night or an hour's care, with a look of such fresh tranquility that
+it seemed hardly possible she could be one and the same with that wilted
+little woman whom Lanyard had left in the gray dawn at the entrance to the
+Hotel Knickerbocker. A tailored suit, necessarily borrowed plumage, became
+her so completely that it was difficult to believe it not her own. Her eyes
+were calm and sweet with candour; her colour was a clear and artless glow;
+the hand she offered the Briton was tremorless.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet?"
+
+"I am he, Miss Brooke. It is kind of you to call so early to relieve my
+mind about your brother. I have known Lionel so long...."
+
+"He is resting easily," said the girl. "His complete recovery is merely a
+matter of time and nursing."
+
+"That is good news," said Stanistreet. "Monsieur Duchemin I believe you
+know."
+
+"I have been fortunate in that at least."
+
+Gravely Lanyard saluted the hand extended to him in turn. "Mademoiselle is
+most gracious," he said humbly.
+
+"Then--I understand--Monsieur Duchemin must have told you--?" The girl
+addressed Stanistreet.
+
+"Permit me to leave you--" Lanyard interposed.
+
+"No," she begged--"please not! I've nothing to say that you may not hear.
+You have been too much involved--"
+
+"If mademoiselle insists," Lanyard demurred. "I feel it is not right I
+should stay. And yet--if you will indulge me--I should like very much to
+demonstrate the truth of an old saw...."
+
+Two confused looks were his response.
+
+"I fear I, for one, do not follow," Stanistreet admitted.
+
+"I will explain quite briefly," Lanyard promised. "The adage I have in mind
+is as old as human wit: Set a thief to catch a thief. And the last time it
+was quoted in my hearing, it was not to my advantage. I recall, indeed,
+resenting it enormously."
+
+He paused with purpose, looking down at the desk. A pad of blank paper
+caught his eye. He took it up and examined it with an abstracted manner.
+
+"Well, monsieur: the application of your adage?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, what would you think if I were to tell you the
+combination of your safe?"
+
+"I should be inclined to suspect that you were the devil," Stanistreet
+chuckled.
+
+"By all accounts a gentleman of intelligence: one is flattered.... Very
+well: I proceed to demonstrate black art with the aid of this white
+paper pad. The combination, monsieur, is as follows: nine, twenty-seven,
+eighteen, thirty-six."
+
+A low cry of bewilderment greeted this announcement. Blensop had drawn near
+and was eyeing Lanyard as if under the influence of hypnotism.
+
+"How--how do you know that?" he asked in a broken voice.
+
+"Clairvoyance, Mr. Blensop. I seem to see, as I hold this pad, somebody
+writing upon it the combination for the information of another who had no
+right to have it--somebody using a pencil with a hard lead, Mr. Blensop;
+which was very foolish of him, since it made a distinct impression on the
+under sheet. So you see my magic is rather colourless, after all.... Now,
+a wiser man, Mr. Blensop, would have used a pen, a fountain pen by
+preference, with a soft gold nib, well broken. That would leave no
+impression. If you will lend me the beautiful pen I observe in your pocket,
+I will give a further demonstration."
+
+The eyes of the secretary shifted wildly. He hesitated, moistening dry lips
+with the tip of a nervous tongue.
+
+"And don't try to get out of it, Mr. Blensop, because I am armed and don't
+mean to let you escape. Besides, that good Mr. Stone patrols the garden."
+Lanyard's tone changed to one of command. "That pen, monsieur!"
+
+Blensop's hand faltered to his waistcoat pocket, hesitated, withdrew, and
+feebly extended the pen.
+
+"I think you _are_ the devil," he stammered in an under-tone--"the devil
+himself!"
+
+Deftly unscrewing the pen-point, Lanyard inverted the barrel above the
+desk.
+
+The cylinder of paper dropped out.
+
+"And now, Colonel Stanistreet, if you will call Mr. Stone and have this
+traitor removed...."
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+AMNESTY
+
+
+When Stanistreet had gone out in company with Stone, and the broken,
+weeping Blensop, ending a scene indescribably painful, a lull almost as
+uncomfortable to Lanyard ensued.
+
+Then--"How did you guess?" Cecelia Brooke asked in wonder.
+
+Discountenanced by the admiration glowing in her eyes, Lanyard stood
+fumbling with the disjointed members of Blensop's pen.
+
+"Do not give me too much credit," he depreciated: "anybody acquainted with
+that roll of paper could have guessed that an empty fountain pen would
+furnish an ideal place of concealment for it. Moreover, just before you
+came in, that traitor missed his pen, and his consternation betrayed him
+beyond more doubt to one whose distrust was already astir. As for the
+other, it was true: Blensop did write down the combination on this pad,
+using a pencil with a hard lead; the marks are very plain."
+
+"But for whose use?"
+
+"Ekstrom--Anderson--was here last night, and saw Blensop alone. Colonel
+Stanistreet was not at home. Knowing what we know now, that Blensop was
+a creature of the German system here, bought body, soul, and conscience
+through its studied pandering to his vices, we know he could not well have
+refused to surrender the combination on demand."
+
+"Still I fail to understand...."
+
+"Ekstrom, being Ekstrom, could not resist the opportunity to play double.
+Here was a property he could sell to England at a stiff price. Why not
+despoil the enemy, put the money in pocket, then return, steal the paper
+anew for the use of Germany, and collect the stipulated reward from that
+source? But he reckoned without Blensop's avarice, there; he showed Blensop
+too plainly the way to profit through betraying both parties to a bargain;
+Blensop saw no reason why he should not play the game that Ekstrom played.
+So he stole it for himself, to sell to Germany, but being a poor, witless
+fool, lacking Ekstrom's dash and audacity, was foredoomed to failure and
+exposure."
+
+The girl continued to eye him steadfastly, and he as steadfastly to evade
+her direct gaze.
+
+"Nothing that you tell me detracts from the wonder of your guessing so
+accurately," she insisted. "Now I know what Mr. Crane said of you was true,
+that you are one of the most extraordinary of men."
+
+"He was too kind when he said that," Lanyard protested wretchedly. "It is
+not true. If you must know...."
+
+"Well, Monsieur Lanyard?"
+
+Her tone was that of a light-hearted girl, arch with provocation. Of a
+sudden Lanyard understood that he might no longer stop here alone with her.
+
+"If you will be a little indulgent with me," he suggested, "I will try to
+explain what I mean."
+
+"And how indulgent, monsieur?"
+
+"I have a whim to take the air in this garden. Will you accompany me?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+As she led the way through the French windows, he noted with deeper
+misgivings how her action matched the temper of her voice, how she seemed
+to-day more deliciously alive and happier than any common mortal.
+
+So light her heart! And all since she had found him here!
+
+At his wits' ends, he conceded now what he had so long denied. With all her
+wit and wisdom, with all her charm of beauty, winsomeness, and breeding,
+with all her ingrained love of truth and honesty, she was no more than
+Nature had meant her to be, a woman with woman's weakness for the man
+she must admire. She liked him, divined in him latent qualities somehow
+excellent. Something in him worked upon her imagination, something, no
+doubt, in the overcoloured, romantic yarns current about the Lone Wolf,
+and so had touched her heart. She liked him too well already, and she was
+willing to like him better.
+
+But that must never be. He must rend ruthlessly apart this illusion of
+romance with which she chose to transfigure the prowling parasite of night,
+the sneaking thief....
+
+The garden was sweet with the bright promise of Spring. A few weeks more,
+and its formal walks would wend a riot of flowers. Now its sunlight made
+amends for what it lacked in beauty of growing things; and its air was warm
+and fragrant and still in the shelter of the red-brick walls.
+
+Midway down that walk, by the side of which a thief had skulked nine hours
+ago, near that door whose lock had yielded to his cunning keys, the girl
+paused and confronted Lanyard spiritedly as he came up with heavy step and
+hang-dog head.
+
+"Well, monsieur?" she demanded. "Do you mean to tantalize me longer with
+your reticence?"
+
+But something in the haggard eyes he showed her made the girl catch her
+breath.
+
+"What is it?" she cried anxiously. "Monsieur Duchemin, what is your
+trouble?"
+
+"Only this truth that I must tell you," he said bitterly: "I merely played
+a part back there, just now. There was neither wit nor guess-work in that
+business; once I had seen Blensop's panic over the fancied loss of his pen,
+the rest was knowledge. I saw him and Ekstrom together last night--skulking
+in those windows, I watched them; and though in my denseness I didn't
+understand, I saw him write upon that pad, tear off and give the sheet to
+Ekstrom. And I knew Ekstrom had not succeeded in stealing back what he had
+sold to Colonel Stanistreet, knew he was guiltless in fact if not in deed."
+
+"But--how could you know that?"
+
+"Because I was there, in the room, when he entered it after it had been
+shut up for the night."
+
+Conscious of her hands that fluttered like wounded things to her bosom, he
+looked away in misery.
+
+"What were you doing there?" she whispered in the end.
+
+"Trying to find that paper, which I had seen Ekstrom sell to Colonel
+Stanistreet, so that I might make good my promise and relieve your distress
+by returning it to you. I had opened the safe before he entered, and
+searched it thoroughly, and knew the paper was not there--though at that
+time it never entered my thick head to suspect Blensop of treachery. It
+was neither Blensop nor Ekstrom, Miss Brooke ... it was I who stole that
+necklace."
+
+She made no sound and did not stir; and though he dared not look he knew
+her stricken gaze was steadfast to his face.
+
+"I will say this much in my defence: I did not come with intent to steal,
+but only to take back what had been stolen from me, and return it to you,
+who had trusted it to my care. I wanted to do that, because I did not then
+understand the ins and outs of this intrigue, and had no means of knowing
+how deeply your honour might be involved."
+
+"But you did _not_ take that necklace!"
+
+"I am sorry.... I saw it, and could not resist it."
+
+"But Mr. Crane assured me you had given up all that sort of thing years
+ago!"
+
+"Notwithstanding that, it seems I may not be trusted...."
+
+After another trying silence she declared vehemently: "I do not believe
+you! You say this thing for some secret purpose of your own. For some
+reason I can't understand you wish to abase yourself in my sight, to make
+me think you capable of such infamy. Why--ah, monsieur!--why must you do
+this?"
+
+"Because it isn't fair to represent myself as what I am not, mademoiselle.
+Once a thief, always--"
+
+"No! It isn't true!"
+
+"Again I am sorry, but I know. You have been most generous to believe in
+me. If anything could save me from myself, it would be your confidence.
+That, I presume, is why I felt called upon to undo my thieving, and make
+good the loss. The money Colonel Stanistreet paid Ekstrom is now in the
+safe, back there in the library. The necklace is ... here."
+
+Blindly he thrust the tissue packet into her hands.
+
+"If you will consent to return it to its owner, when I have gone, I shall
+be most grateful."
+
+Her hands shook so that, when she would open the packet, it escaped her
+grasp and dropped into a little pool of rain-water which had collected in
+a hollow of the walk. Lanyard picked it up, stripped off the soiled and
+sodden paper, dried the necklace with his handkerchief, replaced it in her
+hand.
+
+He heard the deep intake of her breath as she recognized its beauty, then
+her quavering voice: "You give this back because of me...!"
+
+"Because I cannot be an ingrate. I know no other way to prove how I have
+prized your faith in me.... And now, with your leave, I will go away
+quietly by this garden gate--"
+
+"No--please, no!"
+
+"But--"
+
+"I have more to say to you. It isn't fair of you to go like this, when I--"
+
+She interrupted herself, and when next she spoke he was dashed by a change
+in her voice from a tone of passionate expostulation to one of amused
+animation.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet!" she called clearly. "Do come here at once, please!"
+
+Startled, Lanyard saw that Stanistreet had appeared in the French windows
+in company with Crane. In response to Cecelia's hail both came out into the
+garden, Stanistreet briskly leading, Crane lounging at his heels, champing
+his cigar, his weathered features knitted against the brightness of the
+sun.
+
+"Good morning, Miss Brooke. Howdy, Lanyard--or are you Duchemin again?" he
+said; but his salutations were lost in the wonder excited by the girl's
+next move.
+
+"See, Colonel Stanistreet, what we have found!" she cried, and showed him
+the necklace. "I mean, what Monsieur Duchemin found. It was he who saw it,
+lying beneath that rose-bush over there. Your burglar must have dropped it
+in making his escape; you can see the paper he wrapped it in, all rain-wet
+and muddied."
+
+Stanistreet's eyes protruded alarmingly, and his face grew very red before
+he found breath enough to ejaculate: "God bless my soul!" Breathing hard,
+he accepted the necklace from Cecelia's hands. "I must--excuse me--I must
+tell my sister-in-law about this immediately!"
+
+He turned and trotted hastily back into the house.
+
+Crane lingered but a moment longer. His cheek, as ever, was bulging round
+his everlasting cigar. Was his tongue therein as well? Lanyard never knew;
+the man's eyes remained inscrutable for all the kindly shrewdness that
+glimmered amid their netted wrinkles.
+
+"Excuse _me_!" he said suddenly. "I got to tell the colonel something."
+
+He got lankily into motion and presently passed in through the windows....
+
+Irresistibly her gaze drew Lanyard's. He lifted careworn eyes and realized
+her with a great wistfulness upon him.
+
+She awaited in silence his verdict, her chin proudly high, her face
+adorably flushed, her shining eyes level and brave to his, her generous
+hands outstretched.
+
+"Must you go now?" she said tenderly, as he stood hesitant and shamed.
+"Must you go now, my dear?"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The False Faces, by Vance, Louis Joseph
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FALSE FACES ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The False Faces, by Vance, Louis Joseph
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
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+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The False Faces
+
+Author: Vance, Louis Joseph
+
+Release Date: February, 2006 [EBook #9908]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on October 30, 2003]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FALSE FACES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Josephine Paolucci,
+Tom Allen, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE FALSE FACES
+
+FURTHER ADVENTURES FROM THE HISTORY OF THE LONE WOLF
+
+BY LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE
+
+1918
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I Out of No Man's Land
+
+II From a British Port
+
+III In the Barred Zone
+
+IV In Deep Waters
+
+V On the Banks
+
+VI Under Suspicion
+
+VII In Stateroom 29
+
+VIII Off Nantucket
+
+IX Sub Sea
+
+X At Base
+
+XI Under the Rose
+
+XII Resurrection
+
+XIII Reincarnation
+
+XIV Defamation
+
+XV Recognition
+
+XVI Au Printemps
+
+XVII Finesse
+
+XVIII Danse Macabre
+
+XIX Force Majeure
+
+XX Riposte
+
+XXI Question
+
+XXII Chicane
+
+XXIII Amnesty
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+OUT OF NO MAN'S LAND
+
+
+On the muddy verge of a shallow little pool the man lay prone and still, as
+still as those poor dead whose broken bodies rested all about him, where
+they had fallen, months or days, hours or weeks ago, in those grim contests
+which the quick were wont insensately to wage for a few charnel yards of
+that debatable ground.
+
+Alone of all that awful company this man lived and, though he ached with
+the misery of hunger and cold and rain-drenched garments, was unharmed.
+
+Ever since nightfall and a brisk skirmish had made practicable an
+undetected escape through the German lines, he had been in the open,
+alternately creeping toward the British trenches under cover of darkness
+and resting in deathlike immobility, as he now rested, while pistol-lights
+and star-shells flamed overhead, flooding the night with ghastly glare
+and disclosing in pitiless detail that two-hundred-yard ribbon of earth,
+littered with indescribable abominations, which set apart the combatants.
+When this happened, the living had no other choice than to ape the dead,
+lest the least movement, detected by eyes that peered without rest through
+loopholes in the sandbag parapets, invite a bullet's blow.
+
+Now it was midnight, and lights were flaring less frequently, even as
+rifle-fire had grown more intermittent ... as if many waters might quench
+out hate in the heart of man!
+
+For it was raining hard--a dogged, dreary downpour drilling through a heavy
+atmosphere whose enervation was like the oppression of some malign and
+inexorable incubus; its incessant crepitation resembling the mutter of
+a weary, sullen drum, dwarfing to insignificance the stuttering of
+machine-guns remote in the northward, dominating even a dull thunder of
+cannonading somewhere down the far horizon; lowering a vast and shimmering
+curtain of slender lances, steel-bright, close-ranked, between the trenches
+and over all that weary land. Thus had it rained since noon, and thus--for
+want of any hint of slackening--it might rain for another twelve hours, or
+eighteen, or twenty-four....
+
+The star-rocket, whose rays had transfixed him beside the pool, paled and
+winked out in mid-air, and for several minutes unbroken darkness obtained
+while, on hands and knees, the man crept on toward that gap in the British
+barbed-wire entanglements which he had marked down ere daylight waned,
+shaping a tolerably straight course despite frequent detours to avoid the
+unspeakable. Only once was his progress interrupted--when straining senses
+apprised him that a British patrol was taking advantage of the false truce
+to reconnoitre toward the enemy lines, its approach betrayed by a nearing
+_squash_ of furtive feet in the boggy earth, the rasp of constrained
+respiration, a muttered curse when someone slipped and narrowly escaped a
+fall, the edged hiss of an officer's whisper reprimanding the offender.
+Incontinently he who crawled dropped flat to the greasy mud and lay
+moveless.
+
+Almost at the same instant, warned by a trail of sparks rising in a long
+arc from the German trenches, the soldiers imitated his action, and, as
+long as those triple stars shone in the murk, made themselves one with him
+and the heedless dead. Two lay so close beside him that the man could have
+touched either by moving a hand a mere six inches; he was at pains to do
+nothing of the sort; he was sedulous to clench his teeth against their
+chattering, even to hold his breath, and regretted that he might not mute
+the thumping of his heart. Nor dared he stir until, the lights fading out,
+the patrol rose and skulked onward.
+
+Thereafter his movements were less stealthy; with a detachment of their
+own abroad in No Man's Land, the British would refrain from shooting at
+shadows. One had now to fear only German bullets in event the patrol were
+discovered.
+
+Rising, the man slipped and stumbled on in semi-crouching posture, ready
+to flatten to earth as soon as any one of his many overshoulder glances
+detected another sky-spearing flight of sparks. But this necessity he was
+spared; no more lights were discharged before he groped through the wires
+to the parapet, with almost uncanny good luck, finding the very spot where
+the British had come over the top, indicated by protruding uprights of a
+rough wooden scaling ladder.
+
+As he turned, felt with a foot for the uppermost rung, and began to
+descend, he was saluted by a voice hoarse with exposure, from the black
+bowels of the trench:
+
+"Blimy! but ye're back in a 'urry! Wot's up? Forget to put perfume on yer
+pocket-'andkerchief--or wot?"
+
+The man's response, if he made any, was lost in a heavy splash as his feet
+slipped on the slimy rungs, delivering him precipitately into a knee-deep
+stream of foul water which moved sluggishly through the trench like the
+current of a half-choked sewer--a circumstance which neither suprised him
+nor added to his physical discomfort, who could be no more wet or defiled
+than he had been.
+
+Floundering to a foothold, he cast about vainly for a clue to the other's
+whereabouts; for if the night was thick in the open, here in the trench
+its density was as that of the pit; the man could distinguish positively
+nothing more than a pallid rift where the walls opened overhead.
+
+"Well, sullen, w'ere's yer manners? Carn't yer answer a civil question?"
+
+Turning toward the speaker, the man replied in good if rather carefully
+enunciated English:
+
+"I am not of your comrades. I am come from the enemy trenches."
+
+"The 'ell yer are! 'Ands up!"
+
+The muzzle of a rifle prodded the man's stomach. Obediently he lifted both
+hands above his head. A thought later, he was half blinded by the sudden
+spot-light of an electric flash-lamp.
+
+"Deserter, eh? You kamerad--wot?"
+
+"Kamerad!" the man echoed with an accent of contempt. "I am no German--I
+am French. I have come through the Boche lines to-night with important
+information which I desire to communicate forthwith to your commanding
+officer."
+
+"Strike me!" his catechist breathed, skeptical.
+
+There was a new sound of splashing in the trench. A third voice chimed in:
+"'Ello? Wot's all the row abaht?"
+
+"Step up and tike a look for yerself. 'Ere's a blighter wot sez 'e's com
+from the Germ trenches with important information for the O.C."
+
+"Bloody liar," the newcomer commented dispassionately. "Mind yer eye.
+Likely it's just another pl'yful little trick of the giddy Boche. 'Ere
+you!" The splashing drew nearer. "Wot's yer gime? Speak up if yer don't
+want a bullet through yer in'ards."
+
+"I play no game," the man said patiently. "I am unarmed--your prisoner, if
+you like."
+
+"I like, all right. Mike yer mind easy abaht that. But wot's all this
+'important information'?"
+
+"I shall divulge that only to the proper authorities. Be good enough to
+conduct me to your commanding officer without more delay."
+
+"Wot do yer mike of 'im, corp'ril?" the first soldier enquired. "'Ow abaht
+an inch or two o' the bay'net to loosen 'is tongue?"
+
+After a moment's hesitation in perplexed silence, the corporal took the
+flash-lamp from the private and with its beam raked the prisoner from head
+to foot, gaining little enlightenment from this review of a tall, spare
+figure clothed in the familiar gray overcoat of the German private--its
+face a mere mask of mud through which shone eyes of singular brilliance and
+steadiness, the eyes of a man of intelligence, determination, and courage.
+
+"Keep yer 'ands 'igh," the corporal advised curtly. "Ginger, you search
+'im."
+
+Propping his rifle against the wall of the trench, its butt on the
+firing-step just out of water, the private proceeded painstakingly
+to examine the person of the prisoner; in course of which process he
+unbuttoned and threw open the gray overcoat, exposing a shapeless tunic and
+trousers of shoddy drab stuff.
+
+"'E 'asn't got no arms--'e 'asn't got nothink, not so much as 'is blinkin'
+latch-key."
+
+"Very good. Get back on yer post. I'll tike charge o' this one."
+
+Grounding his own rifle, the corporal fixed its bayonet, then employed it
+in a gesture of unpleasant significance.
+
+"'Bout fice," he ordered. "March. Yer can drop yer 'ands--but don't go
+forgettin' I'm right 'ere be'ind yer."
+
+In silence the prisoner obeyed, wading down the flooded trench, the
+spot-light playing on his back, striking sullen gleams from the inky water
+that swirled about his knees, and disclosing glimpses of coated figures
+stationed at regular intervals along the firing-step, faces steadfast to
+loopholes in the parapet.
+
+Now and again they passed narrow rifts in the walls of the trench,
+entrances to dugouts betrayed by glimmers of candle-light through the
+cracks of makeshift doors or the coarse mesh of gunnysack curtains.
+
+From one of these, at the corporal's summons, a sleepy subaltern stumbled
+to attend ungraciously to his subordinate's report, and promptly ordered
+the prisoner taken on to the regimental headquarters behind the lines.
+
+A little farther on captive and captor turned off into a narrow and
+tortuous communication trench. Thereafter for upward of ten minutes they
+threaded a labyrinth of deep, constricted, reeking ditches, with so little
+to differentiate one from another that the prisoner wondered at the sure
+sense of direction which enabled the corporal to find his way without
+mis-step, with the added handicap of the abysmal darkness. Then, of a
+sudden, the sides of the trench shelved sharply downward, and the two
+debouched into a broad, open field. Here many men lay sleeping, with only
+waterproof sheets for protection from that bitter deluge which whipped the
+earth into an ankle-deep lake of slimy ooze and lent keener accent to the
+abiding stench of filth and decomposing flesh. A slight hillock stood
+between this field and the firing-line--where now lively fusillades
+were being exchanged--its profile crowned with a spectral rank of
+shell-shattered poplars sharply silhouetted against a sky in which
+star-shells and Verey lights flowered like blooms of hell.
+
+Here the corporal abruptly commanded his prisoner to halt and himself
+paused and stood stiffly at attention, saluting a group of three officers
+who were approaching with the evident intention of entering the trench. One
+of these loosed upon the pair the flash of a pocket lamp. At sight of the
+gray overcoat all three stopped short.
+
+A voice with the intonation of habitual command enquired: "What have we
+here?"
+
+The corporal replied: "A prisoner, sir--sez 'e's French--come across the
+open to-night with important information--so 'e sez."
+
+The spot-light picked out the prisoner's face. The officer addressed him
+directly.
+
+"What is your name, my man?"
+
+"That," said the prisoner, "is something which--like my intelligence--I
+should prefer to communicate privately."
+
+With a startled gesture the officer took a step forward and peered intently
+into that mud-smeared countenance.
+
+"I seem to know your voice," he said in a speculative tone.
+
+"You should," the prisoner returned.
+
+"Gentlemen," said the officer to his companions, "you may continue your
+rounds. Corporal, follow me with your prisoner."
+
+He swung round and slopped off heavily through the mud of the open field.
+
+Behind them the sound of firing in the forward trenches swelled to an
+uproar augmented by the shrewish chattering of machine-guns. Then a battery
+hidden somewhere in the blackness in front of them came into action,
+barking viciously. Shells whined hungrily overhead. The prisoner glanced
+back: the maimed poplars stood out stark against a sky washed with wave
+after wave of infernal light....
+
+Some time later he was conscious of a cobbled way beneath his sodden
+footgear. They were entering the outskirts of a ruined village. On either
+hand fragments of walls reared up with sashless windows and gaping doors
+like death masks of mad folk stricken in paroxysm.
+
+Within one doorway a dim light burned; through it the officer made his way,
+prisoner and corporal at his heels, passing a sentry, then descending a
+flight of crazy wooden steps to a dank and gloomy cellar, stone-walled
+and vaulted. In the middle of the cellar stood a broad table at which an
+orderly sat writing by the light of two candles stuck in the necks of empty
+bottles. At another table, in a corner, a sergeant and an operator of the
+Signal Corps were busy with field telephone and telegraph instruments. On a
+meagre bed of damp and mouldy straw, against the farther wall, several men,
+orderlies and subalterns, rested in stertorous slumbers. Despite the cold
+the atmosphere was a reek of tobacco smoke, sweat, and steam from wet
+clothing.
+
+The man at the centre table rose and saluted, offering the commanding
+officer a sheaf of scribbled messages and reports. Taking the chair thus
+vacated, the officer ran an eye over the papers, issued several orders
+inspired by them, then turned attention to the prisoner.
+
+"You may return to your post, corporal."
+
+The corporal executed a smart about-face and clumped up the steps. In
+answer to the officer's steadfast gaze the prisoner stepped forward and
+confronted him across the table.
+
+"Who are you?"
+
+"My name," said the prisoner, after looking around to make sure that none
+of the other tenants of the cellar was within earshot, "is Lanyard--Michael
+Lanyard."
+
+"The Lone Wolf!"
+
+Involuntarily the officer jumped up, almost overturning his chair.
+
+"That same," the prisoner affirmed, adding with a grimace of besmirched and
+emaciated features that was meant for a smile--"General Wertheimer."
+
+"Wertheimer is not my name."
+
+"I am aware of that. I uttered it merely to confirm my identity to you; it
+is the only name I ever knew you by in the old days, when you were in the
+British Secret Service and I a famous thief with a price upon my head, when
+you and I played hide and seek across half Europe and back again--in the
+days of Troyon's and 'the Pack,' the days of De Morbihan and Popinot
+and...."
+
+"Ekstrom," the officer supplied as the prisoner hesitated oddly.
+
+"And Ekstrom," the other agreed.
+
+There was a little silence between the two; then the officer mused aloud:
+"All dead!"
+
+"All ... but one."
+
+The officer looked up sharply. "Which--?"
+
+"The last-named."
+
+"Ekstrom? But we saw him die! You yourself fired the shot that--"
+
+"It was not Ekstrom. Trust that one not to imperil his precious carcase
+when he could find an underling to run the risk for him! I tell you I have
+seen Ekstrom within this last month, alive and serving the Fatherland as
+the genius of that system of espionage which keeps the enemy advised of
+your every move, down to the least considerable--that system which makes it
+possible for the Boche to greet every regiment by name when it moves up to
+serve its time in your advanced trenches."
+
+"You amaze me!"
+
+"I shall convince you; I bring intelligence which will enable you to tear
+apart this web of treason within your own lines and...."
+
+Lanyard's voice broke. The officer remarked that he was
+trembling--trembling so violently that to support himself he must grip the
+edge of the table with both hands.
+
+"You are wounded?"
+
+"No--but cold to my very marrow, and faint with hunger. Even the German
+soldiers are on starvation rations, now; the civilians are worse off; and
+I--I have been over there for years, a spy, a hunted thing, subsisting as
+casually as a sparrow!"
+
+"Sit down. Orderly!"
+
+And there was no more talk between these two for a time. Not only did the
+officer refuse to hear another word before Lanyard had gorged his fill of
+food and drink, but an exigent communication from the front, transmitted
+through the trench telephone system, diverted his attention temporarily.
+
+Gnawing ravenously at bread and meat, Lanyard watched curiously the scenes
+in the cellar, following, as best he might, the tides of combat; gathering
+that German resentment of a British bombing enterprise (doubtless the work
+of that same squad which had stolen past him in the gloom of No Man's Land)
+had developed into a violent attempt to storm the forward trenches.
+In these a desperate struggle was taking place. Reinforcements were
+imperatively wanted.
+
+Activities at the signallers' table became feverish; the commanding officer
+stood over it, reading incoming messages as they were jotted down and
+taking such action thereupon as his judgment dictated. Orderlies, dragged
+half asleep from their nests of straw, were shaken awake and despatched to
+rouse and rush to the front the troops Lanyard had seen sleeping in the
+open field. Other orderlies limped or reeled down the cellar steps,
+delivered their despatches, and, staggered out through a breach in the wall
+to have their injuries attended to in the field dressing-station in the
+adjoining cellar, or else threw themselves down on the straw to fall
+instantly asleep despite the deafening din.
+
+The Boche artillery, seeking blindly to silence the field batteries whose
+fire was galling their offensive, had begun to bombard the village. Shells
+fled shrieking overhead, to break in thunderous bellows. Walls toppled
+with appalling crashes, now near at hand, now far. The ebb and flow of
+rifle-fire at the front contributed a background of sound not unlike the
+roaring of an angry surf. Machine-guns gibbered like maniacs. Heavier
+artillery was brought into play behind the British lines, apparently at no
+great distance from the village; the very flag-stones of the cellar floor
+quaked to the concussions of big-calibre guns.
+
+Through the breach in the wall echoed the screams and groans of wounded.
+The foul air became saturated with a sickening stench of iodoform. Gusts of
+wet wind eddied hither and yon. Candles flickered and flared, guttered out,
+were renewed. Monstrous shadows stole out from black corners, crept along
+mouldy walls, crouched, sprang and vanished, or, inscrutably baffled,
+retreated sullenly to their lairs....
+
+For the better part of an hour the struggle continued; then its vigour
+began to wane. The heaviest British metal went out of action; some time
+later the field batteries discontinued their activities. The volume of
+firing in the advance trenches dwindled, was fiercely renewed some half a
+dozen times, died away to normal. Once more the Boche had been beaten back.
+
+Returning to his chair, the commanding officer rested his elbows upon the
+table and bowed his head between his hands in an attitude of profound
+fatigue. He seemed to remind himself of Lanyard's presence only at 'cost of
+a racking effort, lifting heavy-lidded eyes to stare almost incredulously
+at his face.
+
+"I presumed you were in America," he said in dulled accents.
+
+"I was ... for a time."
+
+"You came back to serve France?"
+
+Lanyard shook his head. "I returned to Europe after a year, the spring
+before the war."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"I was hunted out of New York. The Boche would not let me be."
+
+The officer looked startled. "The Boche?"
+
+"More precisely, Herr Ekstrom--to name him as we knew him. But this I did
+not suspect for a long time, that it was he who was responsible for my
+persecution. I knew only that the police of America, informed of my
+identity with the Lone Wolf, sought to deport me, that every avenue to
+an honourable livelihood was closed. So I had to leave, to try to lose
+myself."
+
+"Your wife ... I mean to say, you married, didn't you?"
+
+Lanyard nodded. "Lucy stuck by me till ... the end.... She had a little
+money of her own. It financed our flight from the States. We made a
+round-about journey of it, to elude surveillance--and, I think, succeeded."
+
+"You returned to Paris?"
+
+"No: France, like England, was barred to the Lone Wolf.... We settled down
+in Belgium, Lucy and I and our boy. He was three months old. We found a
+quiet little home in Louvain--"
+
+The officer interrupted with a low cry of apprehension, Lanyard checked him
+with a sombre gesture. "Let me tell you....
+
+"We might have been happy. None knew us. We were sufficient unto ourselves.
+But I was without occupation; it occurred to me that my memoirs might
+make good reading--for Paris; my friends the French are as fond of their
+criminals as you English of your actors. On the second of August I
+journeyed to Paris to negotiate with a publisher. While I was away the
+Boche invaded Belgium. Before I could get back Louvain had been occupied,
+sacked...."
+
+He sat for a time in brooding silence; the officer made no attempt to
+rouse him, but the gaze he bent upon the man's lowered head was grave and
+pitiful. Abruptly, in a level and toneless voice, Lanyard resumed:
+
+"In order to regain my home I had to go round by way of England and
+Holland. I crossed the Dutch frontier disguised as a Belgian peasant. When
+I reentered Louvain it was to find ... But all the world knows what the
+blond beast did in Louvain. My wife and little son had vanished utterly. I
+searched three months before I found trace of either. Then ... Lucy died in
+my arms in a wretched hovel near Aerschot. She had seen our child butchered
+before her eyes. She herself...."
+
+Lanyard's hand, that rested on the table, clenched and whitened beneath its
+begrimed skin. His eyes fathomed distances immeasurably removed beyond the
+confines of that grim cellar. But he presently continued:
+
+"Ekstrom had accompanied the army of invasion, had seen and recognized Lucy
+in passing through Louvain. Therefore she and my son were among the first
+to be sacrificed.... When I stood over her grave I dedicated my life to the
+extermination of Ekstrom and all his breed. I have since done things I do
+not like to think about. But the Prussian spy system is the weaker for my
+work....
+
+"But Ekstrom I could never find. It was as if he knew I hunted him. He was
+seldom twenty-four hours ahead of me, yet I never caught up with him but
+once; and then he was too closely guarded.... I pursued him to Berlin,
+to Potsdam, three times to the western front, to Serbia, once to
+Constantinople, twice to Petrograd."
+
+The officer uttered an exclamation of astonishment. Lanyard looked his way
+with a depreciatory air.
+
+"Nothing strange about that. To one of my early training that was
+easy--everything was easy but the end I sought.... En passant I collected
+information concerning the workings of the Prussian spy system. From time
+to time I found means to communicate somewhat of this to the Surété in
+Paris. I believe France and England have already profited a little through
+my efforts. They shall profit more, and quickly, when I have told all that
+I have to tell....
+
+"Of a sudden Ekstrom vanished. Overnight he disappeared from Germany. A
+false lead brought me back to this front. Two days ago I learned he had
+been sent to America on a secret mission. Knowing that the States have
+severed diplomatic relations with Berlin and tremble on the verge of a
+declaration of war, we can surmise something of the nature of his mission.
+I mean to see that he fails.... To follow him to America, making my way
+out through Belgium and Holland, pursuing such furtive ways as I must in
+territory dominated by the Boche, meant much time lost. So I came through
+the lines to-night. Fortune was kind in throwing me into your hands: I
+count upon your assistance. As an ex-agent of the Secret Service you are in
+a position to make smooth my path; as an Englishman, you will advance the
+interests of a prospective ally of England if you help me to the limit of
+your ability; for what I mean to do in America will serve that country, by
+exposing the conspiracies of the Boche across the water, as much as it will
+serve my private ends."
+
+The officer's hand fell across the table and closed upon the knotted fist
+of the Lone Wolf.
+
+"As an Englishman," he said simply--"of course. But no less as your
+friend."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+FROM A BRITISH PORT
+
+
+"And one man in his time plays many parts": few more than this same
+Lanyard. In no way to be identified with the hunted creature who crept into
+the British lines out of No Man's Land was the Monsieur Duchemin who, ten
+days after that wintry midnight, took passage for New York from "a British
+port," aboard the steamship _Assyrian_.
+
+André Duchemin was the name inscribed in the credentials furnished him in
+recognition of signal assistance rendered the British Secret Service in its
+task of scotching the Prussian spy system. And the personality he chose
+to assume suited well the name. A man of modest and amiable deportment,
+viewing the world with eyes intelligent and curious, his temper reacting
+from its ways in terms of grave humour, Monsieur Duchemin passed peaceably
+on his lawful occasions, took life as he found it, made the best of irksome
+circumstances.
+
+This last idiosyncrasy stood him in good stead. For the _Assyrian_ failed
+to clear upon her proposed sailing date and for a livelong week thereafter
+chafed alongside her landing stage, steam up, cargo laden and stowed,
+nothing lacking but the Admiralty's permission to begin her westbound
+voyage--a permission inscrutably withheld, giving rise to a common
+discontent which the passengers dissembled to the various best of their
+abilities, that is to say, in most cases thinly or not at all.
+
+Yet they were none of them unreasonable beings. They had come aboard one
+and all keyed up to a high nervous pitch, pardonable in such as must commit
+their lives to the dread adventure of the barred zone, wanting nothing
+so much as to get it over with, whatever its upshot. And everlasting
+procrastination required them day after day to steel their hearts anew
+against that Terror which followed its furtive ways beneath the leaden
+waters of the Channel!
+
+Alone among them this Monsieur Duchemin paraded successfully a false face
+of resignation, protesting no predilection whatsoever for a watery grave,
+no infatuate haste to challenge the Hun upon his chosen hunting-ground. In
+the fullness of time it would be permitted to him to go down to the sea in
+this ship. Meanwhile he found it apparently pleasant and restful to explore
+the winding cobbled ways of that antiquated waterside community, made over
+by the hand of War into a bustling seaport, or to tramp the sunken lanes
+that seamed those green old Cornish hills which embosomed the wide harbour
+waters, or to lounge about the broad white decks of the _Assyrian_ watching
+the diurnal traffic of the haven--a restless, warlike pageant.
+
+Daily, in earliest dusk of dawn, the wakeful might watch the faring forth
+of a weirdly assorted fleet of small craft, the day patrol, to relieve a
+night patrol as weirdly heterogeneous. Daily, at all hours, mine-sweepers
+came and went, by twos and twos, in flocks, in schools; and daily bellowing
+offshore detonations advertised their success in garnering those horned
+black seeds of death which the Hun and his kin were sedulous to sow in the
+fairways. While daily battleships both great and small rolled in wearily to
+refit and dress their wounds, or took swift departure on grim and secret
+errands.
+
+There was, moreover, the not-infrequent spectacle of some minor ship of
+war--a truculent, gray destroyer as like as not--shepherding in a sleek
+submarine, like a felon whale armoured and strangely caparisoned in
+gray-brown steel, to be moored in chains with a considerable company of its
+fellows on the far side of the roadstead, while its crew was taken ashore
+and consigned to some dark limbo of oblivion.
+
+And once, with a light cruiser snapping at her heels, a drab Norwegian
+tramp plodded sullenly into port, a mine-layer caught red-handed, plying
+its assassin's trade beneath a neutral flag.
+
+Not long after its crew had been landed, volleys of musketry crashed in the
+town gaol-yard.
+
+One of a group of three idling on the promenade deck of the _Assyrian_,
+Lanyard turned sharply and stared through narrowed eyelids into the quarter
+whence the sounds reverberated.
+
+The man at his side, a loose-jointed American of the commercial caste,
+paused momentarily in his task of masticating a fat dark cigar.
+
+"This way out," he commented thoughtfully.
+
+Lanyard nodded; but the third, a plumply ingratiative native of Geneva,
+known to the ship as Emil Dressier, frowned in puzzlement.
+
+"Pardon, Monsieur Crane, but what is that you say--'this way out'?"
+
+"Simply," Crane explained, "I take the firing to mean the execution of our
+nootral friends from Norway."
+
+The Swiss shuddered. "It is most terrible!"
+
+"Well, I don't know about that. They done their damnedest to fix it for us
+to drown somewhere out there in the nice, cold English Channel. I'm just as
+satisfied it's them, instead, with their backs to a stone wall in the
+warm sunlight, getting their needin's. That's only justice. Eh, Monsieur
+Duchemin?"
+
+"It is war," said Lanyard with a shrug.
+
+"And war is ... No: Sherman was all wrong. Hell's got perfectly good
+grounds for a libel suit against William Tecumseh for what he up and said
+about it and war, all in the same breath."
+
+Lanyard smiled faintly, but Dressler pondered this obscure reference with
+patent distress. Crane champed his cigar reflectively.
+
+"What's more to our purpose," he said presently: "I shouldn't be surprised
+if this meant the wind-up of our rest-cure here. That's the third
+mine-layer they've collected this week--two subs, and now this benevolent
+nootral. Am I right, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"Who knows?" Lanyard replied with a smile. "Even now the mine-sweeping
+flotilla is coming home, as you see; which means, the neighbouring waters
+have been cleared. It is altogether a possibility that we may be permitted
+to depart this night."
+
+Even so the event: as that day's sun declined amid a portentous welter of
+crimson and purple and gold, the moorings were cast off and the _Assyrian_
+warped out into mid-channel and anchored there for the night.
+
+Inasmuch as she was to sail as the tide served, some time before sunrise,
+the passengers were advised to seek their berths at an early hour. Thirty
+minutes before the steamship entered the danger zone (as she would soon
+after leaving the harbour) they would be roused and were expected promptly
+to assemble on deck, with life-preservers, and station themselves near the
+boats to which they were individually assigned.
+
+For their further comforting they were treated, in the ebb of the chill
+blue twilight, to boat-drill and final instructions in the right adjustment
+of life-belts.
+
+A preoccupied company assembled in the dining saloon for what might be
+its last meal. In the shadow of the general apprehension, conversation
+languished; expressions of relief on the part of those who had been loudest
+in complaining at the delays were notably unheard; even Crane, Lanyard's
+nearest neighbour at table, was abnormally subdued. Reviewing that array of
+sobered and anxious faces, Lanyard remarked--not for the first time, but
+with renewed gratitude--that in all the roster of passengers none were
+children and but two were women: the American widow of an English officer
+and her very English daughter, an angular and superior spinster.
+
+Avoiding the customary post-prandial symposium in the smoking room, Lanyard
+slipped away with his cigar for a lonely turn on deck.
+
+Beneath a sky heavily canopied, the night was stark black and loud with
+clashing waters. A fitful wind played in gusts now grim, now groping, like
+a lost thing blundering blindly about in that deep darkness. Ashore a
+few wan lights, widely spaced, winked uncertainly, withdrawn in vast
+remoteness; those near at hand, of the anchored shipping, skipped and
+swayed and flickered in mad mazes of goblin dance. To him who paced those
+vacant, darkened decks, the sense of dissociation from all the common,
+kindly phenomena of civilization was something intimate and inescapable.
+Melancholy as well rode upon that black-winged wind.
+
+At pause beneath the bridge, the adventurer rested elbows upon the teakwood
+rail and with importunate eyes searched the masked face of his destiny.
+There was great fear in his heart, not of death, but lest death overtake
+him before that scarlet hour when he should encounter the man whom he must
+always think of as "Ekstrom."
+
+After that, nothing would matter: let Death come then as swiftly as it
+willed....
+
+He was not even middle-aged, on the hither side of thirty; yet his attitude
+was that of one who had already crossed the great divide of the average
+mortal span: he looked backward upon a life, never forward to one. To him
+his history seemed a thing written, lacking the one word Finis: he had
+lived and loved and lost--had arrayed himself insolently against God and
+Man, had been lifted toward the light a little way by a woman's love, had
+been thrust relentlessly back into the black pit of his damnation. He made
+no pretense that it was otherwise with him: remained now merely the thing
+he had been in the beginning, minus that divine spark which love had once
+kindled into consuming aspiration toward the right; the Lone Wolf prowled
+again to-day and would henceforth forevermore, the beast of prey callous
+to every human emotion, animated by one deadly purpose, existing but to
+destroy and be in turn destroyed....
+
+Two decks below, about amidships, a cargo port was thrust open to the
+night. A thick, broad beam of light leaped out, buffeting the murk,
+striking evanescent glimmers from the rocking facets of the waters.
+Deckhands busied themselves rigging out an accommodation ladder. A tender
+of little tonnage panted nervously up out of nowhere and was made fast
+alongside. The light raked its upper deck, picking out in passing a group
+of men in uniforms. Fugitively something resembling a petticoat snapped
+in the wind. Then several persons moved toward the accommodation ladder,
+climbed it, disappeared through the cargo port. The wearer of the petticoat
+did not accompany them.
+
+Lanyard noted these matters subconsciously, for the time altogether
+preoccupied, casting forward his thoughts along those dim trails his feet
+must tread who followed his dark star....
+
+Ten minutes later a deck-steward found him, and paused, touching his cap.
+
+"Beg pardon, sir, but all passingers is requested to report immedately in
+the music room."
+
+Indifferently Lanyard thanked the man and went below, to find the music
+room tenanted by a full muster of his fellow passengers, all more or less
+indignantly waiting to be cross-examined by the party of port officials
+from the tender--the ship's purser standing by together with the second and
+third officers and a number of stewards.
+
+Resentment was not unwarranted: already, before being suffered to take up
+quarters on board the _Assyrian_, each passenger had submitted to a most
+comprehensive survey of his credentials, his mental, moral, and social
+status, his past record, present affairs, and future purposes. A formality
+to be expected by all such as travel in war time, it had been rigid but
+mild in contrast with this eleventh-hour inquisition--a proceeding so
+drastic and exhaustive that the only plausible inference was official
+determination to find excuse for ordering somebody ashore in irons. Nothing
+was overlooked: once passports and other proofs of identity had been
+scrutinized, each passenger was conducted to his stateroom and his person
+and luggage subjected to painstaking search. None escaped; on the other
+hand, not one was found guilty of flagitious peculiarity. In the upshot the
+inquisitors, baffled and betraying every symptom of disappointment, were
+fain to give over and return to their tender.
+
+By this time Lanyard, one of the last to be grilled and passed, found
+himself as little inclined for sleep as the most timorous soul on board.
+Selecting an American novel from the ship's library, he repaired to
+the smoking room, where, established in a corner apart, he became an
+involuntary and, at first, a largely inattentive, eavesdropper upon an
+animated debate involving some eight or ten gentlemen at a table in the
+middle of the saloon--its subject, the recent visitation.
+
+Measures so extraordinary were generally held to indicate an incentive more
+extraordinary still.
+
+"You can't get away from it," he heard Crane declare: "there's some sort of
+funny business going on, or liable to go on, aboard this ship. She wasn't
+held up for a solid week out of pure cussedness. Neither did they come
+aboard to-night to give us another once-over through sheer voluptuousness.
+There's a reason."
+
+"And what," a satiric English voice enquired, "do you assume that reason to
+be?"
+
+"Search me. 'Sfar's I'm concerned the processes of the British Intelligence
+Office are a long sight past finding out."
+
+"It is simple enough," one of Crane's compatriots suggested: "the
+_Assyrian_ is suspected of entertaining a devil unawares."
+
+"Monsieur means--?" the Swiss enquired.
+
+"I mean, the authorities may have been led to believe some one of us a
+questionable character."
+
+"German spy?"
+
+"Possibly."
+
+"Or an English traitor?"
+
+"Impossible," asserted another Briton heavily. "There is to-day no such
+thing in England. Two years ago the supposition might have been plausible.
+But that breed has long since been stamped out--in England."
+
+"Another guess," Crane cut in: "they've taken considerable trouble to clear
+the track for us. Maybe it occurred to somebody at the last moment to make
+sure none of us was likely to pull off an inside job."
+
+"'Inside job?'" Dressler pleaded.
+
+"Planting bombs in the coal bunkers--things like that--anything to crab our
+getting through the barred zone in spite of mines and U-boats."
+
+"Any such attempt would mean almost certain death!"
+
+"What of it? It's been tried before--and got away with. You've got to hand
+it to Fritz, he'll risk hell-for-breakfast cheerful any time he gets it in
+his bean he's serving Gott und Vaterland."
+
+"Granted," said the Englishman. "But I fancy such an one would find it far
+from easy to secure passage upon this or any other vessel."
+
+"How so? You may have haltered all your traitors, but there's still
+a-plenty German spies living in England. Even you admit that. And if they
+can get by your Secret Service, to say nothing of Scotland Yard, what's to
+prevent their fixing to leave the country?"
+
+"Nothing, certainly. But I still contend it is hardly likely."
+
+"Of course it's hardly likely. Look at these guys to-night--dead set on
+making an awful example of anybody that couldn't come clean. I didn't
+notice them missing any bets. They combed me to the Queen's taste; for
+a while I was sure scared they'd extract my pivot tooth to see if there
+wasn't something incriminating and degrading secreted inside it. And nobody
+got off any easier. _I_ say the good ship _Assyrian_ has a pretty clean
+bill of health to go sailing with."
+
+"On the other hand"--yet another American voice was speaking--"no spy or
+criminal worth his salt would try to ship without preparations thorough
+enough to insure success, barring accidents."
+
+"Criminal?" drawled the Briton incredulously.
+
+"The enterprisin' burglar keeps a-burglin', even in war time. There have
+been notable burglaries in London of late, according to your newspapers."
+
+"And you think the thief would attempt to smuggle his loot out of the
+country aboard such a ship as this?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Scotland Yard to the contrary notwithstanding?"
+
+"If Scotland Yard is as efficient as you think, sir, certainly any sane
+thief would make every effort to leave a country it was making too hot for
+him."
+
+"Considerable criminal!" Crane jeered.
+
+"Undeceive yourself, seńor." This was a Brazilian, a quiet little dark body
+who commonly contented himself with a listening rôle in the smoking-room
+discussions. "There are truly criminals of intelligence. And war conditions
+are driving them out of Europe."
+
+Of a sudden Lanyard--stretched out at length upon the leather cushions,
+in full view of these gossips--became aware that he was being closely
+scrutinised. By whom, with what reason or purpose, he could not surmise;
+and it were unwise to look up from that printed page. But that sixth sense
+of his--intuition, what you will--that exquisitively sensitive sentinel
+admonished that at least one person in the room was watching him narrowly.
+
+Though he made no move other than to turn a page, his glance followed
+blindly blurring lines of text, and his quickened wits overlooked no shade
+of meaning or intonation as that talk continued.
+
+"A criminal of intelligence," some one observed, "is a giddy paradox whose
+fatuous existence is quite fittingly confined to the realm of fable."
+
+"You took the identical words right out of my mouth," Crane complained
+bitterly.
+
+"Your pardon, seńores: history confutes your incredulity."
+
+"But we are talking about to-day."
+
+"Even to-day--can you deny it?--men attain high places by means which the
+law would construe as criminal, were they not intelligent enough to outwit
+it."
+
+"Big game," Crane objected; "something else again. What we contend is no
+man of ordinary common sense could get his own consent to crack a safe, or
+pick a pocket, or do second-story work, or pull any rough stuff like that."
+
+"Again you overlook living facts," persisted the Brazilian.
+
+"Name one--just one."
+
+"The Lone Wolf, then."
+
+"Unnatural history is out of my line," Crane objected. "Why is a lone wolf,
+anyway?"
+
+The Brazilian's voice took on an accent of exasperation. "Seńores, I do not
+jest. I am a student of psychology, more especially of criminal psychology.
+I lived long in Paris before this war, and took deep interest in the case
+of the Lone Wolf."
+
+"Well, you've got me all excited. Go on with your story."
+
+"With much pleasure.... This gentleman, then, this Michael Lanyard, as he
+called himself, was a distinguished Parisian figure, a man of extraordinary
+attainment, esteemed the foremost connoisseur d'art in all Europe.
+Suddenly, at the zenith of his career, he disappeared. Subsequently it
+became known that he had been identical with that great Parisian criminal,
+the Lone Wolf, a superman of thieves who had plundered all Europe with
+unvarying success for almost a decade."
+
+"Then what made the silly ass quit?"
+
+"According to my information, he won the love of a young woman--"
+
+"And reformed for her sake, of course?"
+
+"To the contrary, seńor; Lanyard renounced his double life because of a
+theory on which he had founded his astonishing success. According to this
+theory, any man of intelligence may defy society as long as he will, always
+providing he has no friend, lover, or confederate in whom to confide. A man
+self-contained can never be betrayed; the stupid police seldom apprehend
+even the most stupid criminal, save through the treachery of some intimate.
+This Lanyard proved his theory by confounding not only the utmost
+efforts of the police but even the jealous enmity of that association of
+Continental criminals known as the Bande Noire--until he became a lover.
+Then he proved his intelligence: in one stroke he flouted the police,
+delivered into their hands the inner circle of the Bande Noire, and
+vanished with the woman he loved."
+
+"And then--?"
+
+"The rest," said the Brazilian, "is silence."
+
+"It is for to-night, anyway," Crane observed, yawning. "It's bedtime. Here
+comes the busy steward to put the lights and us out."
+
+There was a general stir; men drained glasses, knocked out pipes, got up,
+murmured good-nights. Lanyard closed the American novel upon a forefinger,
+looked up abstractedly, rose, moved toward the door. The utmost effort of
+exceptional powers of covert observation assured him that, at the moment,
+none of the company favoured him with especial attention; the author of
+that interest whose intensity had so weighed upon his consciousness had
+been swift to dissemble.
+
+On his way forward he exchanged bows and smiles with Crane and one or two
+others, his gesture completely casual. Yet when he entered the starboard
+alleyway he carried with him a complete catalogue of those who had
+contributed to the conversation. With all, thanks to seven days'
+association, he stood on terms of shipboard acquaintance. Not one, in his
+esteem, was more potentially mischievous than any other--not even the
+Brazilian Velasco, though he had been the first to name the Lone Wolf.
+
+It was, furthermore, quite possible that the mention of his erstwhile
+sobriquet had been utterly fortuitous.
+
+And yet, one might not forget that sensation of being under intent
+surveillance....
+
+In his stateroom Lanyard stood for several minutes gravely peering into the
+mirror above the washstand.
+
+The face he scanned was lean and worn in feature, darkly weathered, framed
+in hair whose jet already boasted an accent of silver at either temple--the
+face of a man inured to hardship, seasoned in suffering, strong in
+self-knowledge. The incandescence of an intelligence coldly dispassionate,
+quick and shrewd, lighted those dark eyes. Distinctively a face of Gallic
+cast, three years of long-drawn torment had served in part to erase from
+it wellnigh all resemblance to both the brilliant social freebooter of
+ante-bellum Paris and that undesirable alien whom the authorities had
+sought to deport from the States. Amazing facility in impersonation had
+done the rest; unrecognisable as what he had been, he was to-day flawlessly
+the incarnation of what he elected to seem--Monsieur Duchemin, gentleman,
+of Paris.
+
+Impossible to believe his disguise had been so soon penetrated....
+
+And yet, again, that gossip of the smoking room....
+
+Police work? Or had Ekstrom's creatures picked up his trail once more?
+
+Beneath that urbane mask of his, a hunted, wild thing poised in question,
+mistrustful of the very wind, prick-eared, fangs agleam, eyes grimly
+apprehensive....
+
+A little sound, the least of metallic clicks, breaking the hush of his
+solitude, froze the adventurer to attention. Only his glance swerved
+swiftly to a fastened door in the forward partition--his stateroom being
+the aftermost of three that might be thrown together to form a suite. The
+nickeled knob was being tried with infinite precaution. On the half turn it
+checked with a faint repetition of the click. Then the door itself quivered
+almost imperceptibly to pressure, though it yielded not a fraction of an
+inch.
+
+Lanyard's eyes hardened. He did not stir from where he stood, but one hand
+whipped an automatic from his pocket while the other darted out to the
+switch-box by the head of his berth and extinguished the light.
+
+Instantly a glimmer of light in the forward stateroom showed through
+a narrow strip of iron grill-work set in the top of the partition for
+ventilating purposes.
+
+Simultaneously the door-knob was gently released, and with another louder
+click the light in the adjoining cubicle was blotted out.
+
+Mystified, Lanyard undressed and turned in, but not to sleep--not for a
+little, at least.
+
+Who might this neighbour be who tried his door so stealthily? Before
+to-night that room had had no tenant. Apparently one of the passengers had
+seen fit to shift his quarters. To what end? To keep a jealous eye on
+the Lone Wolf, perhaps? So much the better, then: Lanyard need only make
+enquiry in the morning to identify his enemy.
+
+Deliberately closing his eyes, he dismissed the enigma. He possessed in
+marked degree that attribute of genius, ability to command slumber at will.
+Swiftly the troubled deeps of thought grew calm; on their placid surface
+inconsequent visions were mirrored darkly, fugitive scenes from the store
+of subconscious memory: Crane's lantern-jawed physiognomy, keen eyes
+semi-veiled by humorously drooping lids, the extreme corner of his mouth
+bulging round his everlasting cigar ... grimy lions in Trafalgar Square of
+a rainy afternoon ... the octagonal room of L'Abbaye Thęléme at three in
+the morning, a swirl of Bacchanalian shapes ... Wertheimer's soldierly
+figure beside the telegraphers' table in that noisome cave at the Front ...
+the deck of a tender in darkness swept by a shaft of yellow light which
+momentarily revealed a group of folk with upturned faces, a petticoat
+fluttering in its midst....
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+IN THE BARRED ZONE
+
+
+Day broke with rather more than half a gale blowing beneath a louring sky.
+Once clear of the bottleneck mouth of the harbour, the _Assyrian_ ran into
+brutal quartering seas. An old hand at such work, for upward of a decade
+a steady-paced Dobbin of the transatlantic lanes, she buckled down to it
+doggedly and, remembering her duty by her passengers, rolled no more than
+she had to, buried her nose in the foaming green only when she must. For
+all her care, the main deck forward was alternately raked by stinging
+volleys of spray and scoured by frantic cascades. More than once the crew
+of the bow gun narrowly escaped being carried overboard to a man. Blue with
+cold, soaked to the buff despite oilskins, they stuck stubbornly to their
+posts. Perched beyond reach of shattering wavecrests, the passengers on the
+boat-deck huddled unhappily in the lee of the superstructure--and snarled
+in response to the cheering information that better conditions for baffling
+the ubiquitous U-boat could hardly have been brewed by an indulgent
+Providence. Sheeting spindrift contributed to lower visibility: two
+destroyers standing on parallel courses about a mile distant to port and
+to starboard were more often than not barely discernible, spectral vessels
+reeling and dipping in the haze. The ceaseless whistle of wind in the
+rigging was punctuated by long-drawn howls which must have filled any
+conscientious banshee with corrosive envy.
+
+Toward mid-morning rain fell in torrents, driving even the most fearful
+passengers to shelter within the superstructure. A majority crowded the
+landing at the head of the main companionway close by the leeward door.
+Bolder spirits marched off to the smoking room--Crane starting this
+movement with the declaration that, for his part, he would as lief drown
+like a rat in a trap as battling to keep up in the frigid inferno of those
+raging seas. A handful of miserables, too seasick to care whether the ship
+swam or sank, mutinously took to their berths.
+
+Stateroom 27--adjoining Lanyard's--sported obstinately a shut door.
+Lanyard, sedulous not to discover his interest by questioning the stewards,
+caught never a glimpse of its occupant. For his own satisfaction he took a
+covert census of passengers on deck as the vessel entered the danger zone,
+and made the tally seventy-one all told--the number on the passenger list
+when the _Assyrian_ had left her landing stage the previous evening.
+
+It seemed probable, therefore, that the person in 27 had come aboard from
+the tender, either with or following the official party. Lanyard was
+unable to say that more had not left the tender than appeared to sit in
+inquisition in the music room.
+
+By noon the wind was beginning to moderate, and the sea was being beaten
+down by that relentlessly lashing rain. Visibility, however, was more low
+than ever. A fairly representative number descended to the dining saloon
+for luncheon--a meal which none finished. Midway in its course a thunderous
+explosion to starboard drove all in panic once more to the decks.
+
+Within two hundred yards of the _Assyrian_ a floating mine had destroyed a
+patrol boat. No more was left of it than an oil-filmed welter of splintered
+wreckage: of its crew, never a trace.
+
+Imperturbably the _Assyrian_ proceeded. Not so her passengers: now the
+smoking room was deserted even by the insouciant Crane, and the seasick to
+a woman brought their troubles back to the boat-deck.
+
+Alone the tenant of 27 stopped below. And the riddle of this ostensible
+indifference to terrors that clawed at the vitals of every other soul on
+board grew to intrigue Lanyard to the point of obsession. Was the reason
+brute apathy or sheer foolhardihood? He refused either explanation,
+feeling sure some darker and more momentous motive dictated this obstinate
+avoidance of the public eye. Exasperation aroused by failure to fathom the
+mystery took precedence in his thoughts even to the personal solicitude
+excited by last night's gossip of the smoking room....
+
+With no other disturbing incident the afternoon wore away, the wind
+steadily flagging, the waves as steadily subsiding. When twilight closed in
+there was nothing more disturbing to one's equilibrium than a sea of long
+and sullen rolls scored by the pelting downpour.
+
+Perhaps as many as ten venturesome souls dined in the saloon, their fellows
+sticking desperately to the decks and contenting themselves with coffee and
+sandwiches.
+
+Daylight waned, terrors waxed: passengers instinctively gravitated into
+little knots and clusters, conversing guardedly as if fearful lest their
+normal accents bring down upon them those Apaches of the underseas for
+signs of whom their frightened glances incessantly ranged over-rail and
+searched the heaving wastes.
+
+The understanding was tacit that all would spend the night on deck.
+
+Dusk at length blotted out the shadows of their guardian destroyers, and a
+great and desolating loneliness settled down upon the ship. One by one
+the passengers grew dumb; still they clung together, but seemingly their
+tongues would no more function.
+
+With nightfall, the rain ceased, the breeze freshened a trifle, the pall of
+cloud lifted and broke, giving glimpses of remote, impersonal stars. Later
+a gibbous moon leered through the flying wrack, checkering the sea with
+a restless pattern of black and silver. In this ghastly setting the
+_Assyrian_, showing no lights, a shape of flying darkness pursuing a course
+secret to all save her navigators, strained ever onward, panting, groaning,
+quivering from stem to stern ... like an enchanted thing doomed to
+perpetual labours, striving vainly to break bonds invisible that transfixed
+her to one spot forever-more, in the midst of that bleak purgatory of
+shadow and moonshine and dread....
+
+Sensitive to the eerie influence of the hour, Lanyard interrupted the tour
+of the decks which he had steadily pursued for the better part of the
+evening, and rested at the forward rail, looking down over the main deck,
+its bleached planking dotted with dark shapes of fixed machinery. In the
+bows the formless, uncouth bulk of the gun squatted in its tarpaulin. Its
+crew tramped heavily to and fro, shivering in heavy jackets, hands in
+pockets, shoulders hunched up to ears. Farther aft an iron door clanged
+heavily behind a sailor emerging from an alleyway; he approached the ship's
+bell, with practised hand sounded two double strokes, then turned and sang
+out in the weird minor traditional in his calling:
+
+"_Four bells--and a-a-all's well_!"
+
+Even as the wind made free with the melancholy echoes of that assurance,
+the spell upon the ship was exorcised.
+
+Overhead, from the foremast crow's-nest, a voice screamed, hoarsely urgent:
+
+"_Torpedo! 'Ware submarine to port_!"
+
+Many things happened simultaneously, or in a span of seconds strangely
+scant. The gunners sprang to station, whipping away the tarpaulin, while
+their lieutenant focussed binoculars upon the confused distances of the
+night. Obedient to his instructions, the long, gleaming tube of steel
+pivoted smoothly to port.
+
+From the bridge a signal rocket soared, hissing. The whistle loosed
+stentorian squalls of indignation and distress--one long and four short.
+Commands were shouted; the engine-room telegraph wrangled madly. The
+momentum of the _Assyrian_ was checked startlingly; her bows sheered
+smartly off to port.
+
+A rumour of frightened voices and pounding feet came from the leeward
+boat-deck, where the main body of the passengers was congregated, hidden
+from Lanyard by the shoulder of the foreward deck-house. A number of men
+ran forward, paused by the rail, stared, and scurried back, yelling in
+alarm. At this the din swelled to uproar.
+
+Scanning closely the surface of the sea, Lanyard himself descried a silvery
+arrow of spray lancing the swells, making with deadly speed toward the port
+bow of the _Assyrian_. But now both screws were churning full speed astern;
+the vessel lost headway altogether. Then her engines stopped. For a
+breathless instant she rested inert, like something paralyzed with fright,
+bows-on to the torpedo, the telegraph ringing frantically. Then the
+starboard screw began to turn full ahead, the port remaining idle. The
+bows swung off still more sharply to port. The torpedo shot in under them,
+vanished for a breathless moment, reappeared a boat's-length to starboard,
+plunged harmlessly on its unhindered way down the side of the vessel, and
+disappeared astern.
+
+Amidships terrified passengers milled like sheep, hampering the work of the
+boat-crews at the davits. Ship's officers raged among them, endeavouring
+to restore order. Half a mile or so dead ahead a tiny tongue of flame spat
+viciously in the murk. A projectile shrieked overhead, and dropped into the
+sea astern. Another followed and fell short.
+
+The U-boat was shelling the _Assyrian_.
+
+The forward gun barked violent expostulation, if without visible effect;
+the submarine lobbing two more shells at the steamship with an indifference
+to its own peril astonishing in one of its craven breed, trained to strike
+and run before counterstroke may be delivered. Its extraordinary temerity,
+indeed, argued ignorance of the convoying destroyers.
+
+Coincident with the second shot, however, these unleashed searchlights
+slashed the dark through and through with their great, white, fanlike
+blades, till first one then the other picked up and steadied relentlessly
+upon a toy-boat shape that swam the swells about midway between the
+_Assyrian_ and the destroyer off the port bows.
+
+Simultaneously the quickfirers of the latter went into action, jetting
+orange flame. In the searchlights' glare, spurts of white water danced all
+round the submarine. A mutter of gunfire rolled over to the _Assyrian_,
+abruptly silenced by an imperative deep voice of heavier metal--which spoke
+but once.
+
+With the lurid unreality of clap-trap theatrical illusion the U-boat
+vomited a great, spreading sheet of flame....
+
+Someone at the rail, near Lanyard's shoulder, uttered a hushed cry of
+horror.
+
+He paid no heed, his interest wholly focussed upon that distant patch of
+shining water. As his dazzled vision cleared he saw that the submarine had
+disappeared.
+
+Unconsciously, in French, he commented: "So that is finished!"
+
+Likewise in French, but in a woman's voice of uncommon quality, deep
+and bell-sweet, came the protest from the passenger at his side: "But,
+monsieur, what are we doing? We turn away from them--those poor things
+drowning there!"
+
+That was quite true: under forced draught the _Assyrian_ was heading away
+on a new course.
+
+"They drown out there in that black water--and we leave them to that!"
+
+Lanyard turned. "The destroyers will take care of them," he said--"if any
+survived that explosion with strength enough to swim."
+
+He spoke from the surface of his thoughts and with a calm that veiled
+profound surprise. The woman by his side was neither the American widow nor
+her English daughter, but wholly a stranger to the ship's company he knew.
+
+The training of the Lone Wolf had been wasted if one swift glance had
+failed to comprehend every essential detail: that tall, straight, slender
+figure cloaked in the folds of a garment whose hood framed a face of
+singular pallor and sweetness in the moonlight, its shadowed eyes wide with
+emotion, its lips a little parted....
+
+With a shiver she lifted her hands to her eyes as if to darken the visions
+of her imagination.
+
+"They die out there," she said, in murmurs barely audible.... "We turn our
+backs on them.... You think that right?"
+
+"We play the game by the rules the enemy himself laid down," Lanyard
+returned. "They would have sunk us without one qualm of pity--would, in all
+probability, have shelled our boats had any succeeded in getting off. They
+have done as much before, and will again. It is out of reason to insist
+that the captain risk his ship in the hope of picking up one or two
+drowning assassins."
+
+"Risk his ship? How? They are helpless--"
+
+"As a rule, U-boats hunt in pairs; always, when specially charged to sink
+one certain vessel. It was so with the _Lusitania_, with the _Arabic_ as
+well; I don't doubt it was so in this instance--that we should have heard
+from a second submarine had not the destroyers opened fire when they did."
+
+The woman stared. "You think that--?"
+
+"That the Boche had specific instructions to waylay and sink the
+_Assyrian_? I begin to think that--yes."
+
+This declaration affected the woman curiously; she shrank away a little, as
+from a blow, her eyes winced, her pale lips quivered. When she spoke, it
+was, strangely enough, in English so naturally enunciated that Lanyard
+could not doubt that this was her mother tongue.
+
+"Then you think it is because...."
+
+Of a sudden she wilted, clinging to the rail and trembling wildly.
+
+Lanyard shot a glance aft. The disorder among the passengers was measurably
+less, though excitement still ran so high that he felt sure they were as
+yet unnoticed. On impulse he stepped nearer.
+
+"Pardon, mademoiselle," he said quietly; "you are excusably unstrung.
+But all danger is past; and there is still time to regain your stateroom
+unobserved. If you will permit me to escort you...."
+
+He watched her narrowly, but she showed no surprise at this suggestion of
+intimacy with her affairs. After a brief moment she pulled herself together
+and dropped a hand upon the arm he offered. In another minute he was
+helping her over the raised watersill of the door.
+
+Like all the ship the landing and main companionway were dark; but below,
+on the promenade deck, the second doorway aft on the starboard side stood
+ajar, affording a glimpse of a dimly lighted stateroom.
+
+With neither hesitation nor surprise--for he was already satisfied in this
+matter--Lanyard conducted the woman to this door and stopped.
+
+Her hand fell from his arm. She faltered on the threshold of Stateroom 27,
+eyeing him dubiously.
+
+"Thank you, monsieur...?"
+
+There was just enough accent of enquiry to warrant his giving her the name:
+"Duchemin, mademoiselle."
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin.... Please to tell me how you knew this was my
+stateroom?"
+
+"I occupy Stateroom 29. There was no one in 27 till after the tender came
+out last night. Furthermore, your face was strange, and I have come to know
+all others on board during our week's delay in port."
+
+The light was at her back; he could distinguish little of her shadowed
+features, but fancied her a bit discountenanced.
+
+In a subdued voice she said, "Thank you," once more, a hand resting
+significantly on the door-knob. But still he lingered.
+
+"If mademoiselle would be so good as to tell me something in return--?"
+
+"If I can...."
+
+"Then why, mademoiselle, did you try my door last night?"
+
+"It was neither locked nor bolted on my side. I wished to make sure--"
+
+"So one fancied. Thank you. Good-night, mademoiselle...?"
+
+She was impervious to his hint. "Good-night, Monsieur Duchemin," she said,
+and closed the door.
+
+Now Lanyard's quarters opened not on this alleyway fore-and-aft but on a
+short and narrow athwartship passage. And as he turned away he saw out of
+the corner of an eye a white-jacketed figure emerge from this passageway
+and move hurriedly aft. Something furtive in the round of the fellow's
+shoulders challenged his curiosity. He called quietly:
+
+"Steward!"
+
+There was no answer. By now the white jacket was no more than a blur moving
+in that deep gloom. He cried again, more loudly:
+
+"I say, steward!"
+
+He could hardly see, but fancied that the man quickened his steps: in
+another instant he vanished altogether.
+
+Smothering an impulse to give chase, the adventurer swung alertly into the
+narrow passage and opened the door to Stateroom 29. The room was dark, but
+as he fumbled for the switch, the door in the forward partition was thrust
+open and the girl's slight figure showed, tensely poised against the light
+behind her.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin!" she cried, in a voice sharp with doubt.
+
+Lanyard turned the switch. "Mademoiselle," he said, and coolly crossed to
+the port, drawing the light-proof curtains.
+
+"This door was locked all day--locked when the firing alarmed me and I went
+out to the deck."
+
+"And on my side, mademoiselle, it was locked and bolted when last I was
+here, shortly before dinner." "Whoever unfastened it entered my room during
+my absence and tampered with my luggage."
+
+"You have missed something?"
+
+Gaze intent to his she nodded. He shrugged and cast shrewdly round his
+quarters for some clue to the enigma. His glance fastened on a leather
+bellows-bag beneath the berth. Dropping to his knees he pulled this out,
+and looked up with a quizzical grimace, his forefinger indicating the lock,
+which was uncaught.
+
+"I left this latched but not locked," he said. "Perhaps I, too, have lost
+something."
+
+Opening the bag out flat, he sat back on his heels, with practised eye
+inspecting its neat arrangement of intimate things.
+
+"Nothing has been taken, mademoiselle," he announced gravely. "But
+something--I think--has been generously added. I seem to have an anonymous
+admirer on board."
+
+Bending forward, he rummaged beneath a sheaf of shirts and brought forth
+a small jewel-box of grained leather, with a monogram stamped on the
+lid--"C.B."
+
+"The lock is broken," he observed, and handed it up to the woman. "As to
+its contents, mademoiselle herself knows best...."
+
+The woman opened the box.
+
+"Nothing is missing," she said in a thoughtful voice.
+
+"I am relieved." Lanyard closed the bag, thrust it back beneath the berth,
+and got upon his feet. "But you are quite sure--?"
+
+"My jewels are all in order," she affirmed, without meeting his gaze.
+
+"And you miss nothing else?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+Was there an accent of hesitation in this response?
+
+"Then, I take it, the thief was disappointed."
+
+Now she glanced quickly at his eyes. "Why do you say that?"
+
+"If the thief had found what he sought, he would never have presented it
+to me, mademoiselle would never again have seen her jewels. Failing in
+his object, after breaking that lock, and interrupted by your unexpected
+return, he planted the case with me, hoping to have me suspected. I am
+fortunately able to prove the best of alibis.... So then," said Lanyard,
+smiling, "it would appear that, though we met ten minutes ago for the first
+time--and I have yet to know mademoiselle by name--we are allies in a
+common cause."
+
+"My name is Brooke--Cecelia Brooke," she said quietly--"if it matters. But
+why 'allies'?"
+
+"It appears we own a common enemy. Each of us possesses something which
+that one desires--you a secret, I a good name. (Duchemin, indeed, I have
+always held to be an excellent name.) I shall not hesitate to call on you
+if my treasure is again violated. May I venture to hope mademoiselle will
+prove as ready to command my services?"
+
+"Thank you. I fancy, however, there will be no need."
+
+She moved irresolutely toward the communicating door, paused in its frame,
+eyeing him speculatively from under level brows. He detected, or imagined,
+a tremor of impulse toward him, as though she faltered on the verge of some
+grave confidence. If so, she curbed her tongue in time. Her gaze dropped,
+fixed itself abstractedly on the door.... "This must be fastened," she
+said, in a tone of complete disinterest.
+
+"I will speak to the chief steward immediately."
+
+"Don't trouble." She roused. "It doesn't matter, really, for to-night. I
+shall leave what valuables I have in the purser's care and stop on deck
+till daybreak."
+
+He gave a gesture of bewilderment. "You abandon your seclusion--leave your
+secret unguarded?"
+
+"Why not?" She shrugged slightly with a little _moue_ of discontent. "If,
+as you assume, I had a secret, it was that for certain reasons I did not
+wish my presence on board to become known. But it seems it has become
+known: my secret is no more. So I need no longer risk being cut off from
+the boats in the event of any accident."
+
+Momentarily her gravity was dissipated by a smile at once delightful and
+provocative.
+
+"Once more, monsieur--good-night!"
+
+After some moments Lanyard, with a start, found himself staring blankly at
+a blankly incommunicative communicating door.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IN DEEP WATERS
+
+
+Following this abrupt introduction to his interesting neighbour, Lanyard
+went back to his deck-chair and, bundling himself up against the cold,
+settled down to ponder the affair and await developments in a spirit of
+chastened resignation. That a dénouement would duly unfold he was quite
+satisfied; that he himself must willy-nilly play some part therein he was
+too well persuaded.
+
+Not that he wished to meddle. If this Miss Cecelia Brooke (as she named
+herself) fostered any sort of intrigue, he wanted nothing so fervently
+as to be left altogether out of it. But already he had been dragged in,
+without wish or consent of his; whoever coveted her secret--whatever that
+was, more precious to her than jewels--harboured designs upon his own as
+well. It was his duty henceforth to go warily, overlooking no circumstance,
+however trifling and inconsiderable it might appear. The slenderest thread
+may lead to the heart of the most intricate maze--and the heart of this was
+become Lanyard's immediate goal, for there his enemy lay perdu.
+
+It was never this man's fault to underrate an enemy, least of all
+an unknown; and he entertained wholesome respect for Secret Service
+operators--picked men, as a rule, the meanest no mean antagonist. And this
+business, he fancied, had all the flavour of Secret Service work--one
+of those blind duels, desperate and grim affairs of masked combatants
+feinting, thrusting, guarding in the dark, each with the other's sword ever
+feeling for his throat, fighting for life itself and making his own rules
+as the contest swayed.
+
+But what was this Brooke girl doing in that galley? What conceivable motive
+induced her to dabble those slender hands in the muck and blood of Secret
+Service work?
+
+Lanyard was fain to let that question rest. After all, it was no concern of
+his. There she was, up to her pretty eyebrows in some dark, bad business;
+and it was not for him to play the gratuitous ass, rush in unasked, and
+seek to extricate her....
+
+Through endless hours he sat brooding, vision blindly focussed upon the
+misty, shimmering mystery of that night.
+
+Ekstrom!... Slowly in his understanding intuition shaped the conviction
+that it was Ekstrom whom he was fighting now, Ekstrom in the guise of one
+of his creatures, some agent of the Prussian spy system who had contrived
+to smuggle himself aboard this British steamship.
+
+Out of those nine in the smoking room the previous night, then, he must
+beware of one primarily, perhaps of more.
+
+Four he was disposed, with reservations, to reckon negligible: Baron von
+Harden, head of a Netherlands banking house, a silent body whose acute
+mental processes went on behind a pallid screen of flabby features; Julius
+Becker, a theatrical manager of New York, whose right name ended in ski;
+Bartlett Putnam, late chargé d'affaires of the American embassy in Madrid;
+Edmund O'Reilly, naturalized citizen of the United States, interested in
+the manufacture of motor tractors somewhere in Michigan.
+
+Of the other five, two were English: Lieutenant Thackeray, a civilly
+reticent gentleman whose right arm rested in a black silk sling, making
+a flying trip to visit a married sister in New York; Archer Bartholomew,
+Esq., solicitor, a red-cheeked, bright-eyed, white-haired, brisk little
+Cockney, beyond the military age.
+
+There remained Dressier, the stout, self-satisfied Swiss, whose fawning
+manner was possibly accounted for by his statement that he journeyed to
+New York to engage in the trade of restaurateur in partnership with his
+brother; Crane, long and awkward and homely, of saturnine cast, slow of
+gesture and negligent as to dress, his humorous sense clouding a power
+of shrewd intelligence; and Seńor Arturo Velasco, of Buenos Aires,
+middle-aged, apparently extremely well-to-do, a thoughtful type, more
+self-contained than most of his countrymen.
+
+One of these probably ... But which?...
+
+Nor must he permit himself to forget that the _Assyrian_ carried fifty-nine
+other male passengers, in addition to her complement of officers, crew, and
+stewards, that any one of these might prove to be Potsdam's cat's-paw.
+
+Awesome pallor tinged the eastern horizon, gaining strength, spread in
+imperceptible yet rapid gradations toward the zenith. Stars faded, winked
+out, vanished. Silver and purple in the sea gave place to livid gray.
+Almost visibly the routed night rolled back over the western rim of the
+world. Shafts of supernal radiance lanced the formless void between sky
+and sea. Swollen and angry, the sun lifted up its enormous, ensanguined
+portent. And the discountenanced moon withdrew hastily into the
+immeasurable fastnessness of a cloudless firmament, yet failed therein to
+find complete concealment. Keen, sweet airs of dawn raked the decks, now
+to port, now to starboard, as the _Assyrian_ twisted and writhed on her
+corkscrew way.
+
+Passengers whose fears had become sufficiently numb to permit them to
+drowse, stirred in their chairs, roused blinking and blear-eyed, arose
+and stretched cramped, cold bodies. Others lay listless, enervated by the
+sleepless misery of that night. Crane found Lanyard awake and marched him
+off for coffee and cigarettes in the smoking room.
+
+Later, starting out for a turn around the decks, they passed a deck-chair
+sheltered in a jog where the engine-room ventilating shaft joined the
+forward deck-house, in which Miss Brooke lay cocooned in wraps and furs,
+her profile, turned aside from the sea, exquisitely etched against the rich
+blackness of a fox stole. She slept as quietly as the most carefree, a
+shadowy smile touching her lips.
+
+Crane's stride faltered. He whistled low.
+
+"In the name of all things wonderful! how did that get on board?"
+
+Lanyard mentioned the girl's name. "She has the stateroom next to
+mine--came off that tender, night before last."
+
+"And me sore on that darn' li'l boat because it brought aboard all the
+nosey Johnnies! Ain't it the truth, you never know your luck?"
+
+The American ruminated in silence till another lap of their walk took them
+past the girl again.
+
+"Funny," he mused, "if that's why they held us up...."
+
+"Comment, monsieur?"
+
+"Oh, I was just wondering if it was on that young lady's account they kept
+us kicking our heels back there so long."
+
+"I am still stupid," Lanyard confessed.
+
+"Why, she might be a special messenger, you know--something like that--the
+British Government wanted to smuggle out of the country without anybody
+suspecting."
+
+"Monsieur is a romantic."
+
+"You can't trust me," Crane averred unblushingly.
+
+When they passed the chair again it was empty.
+
+At breakfast Lanyard saw the girl from a distance: their places were
+separated by the width of the saloon. She had no neighbours at her table,
+did not look up when Lanyard entered, finished her meal some time before
+he did, and retired immediately to her stateroom, in whose seclusion she
+remained for the rest of the day.
+
+That second day was altogether innocent of untoward incident. At least
+superficially the life of the ship settled into the groove of "business
+as usual." Only the company of the _Assyrian's_ faithful convoys was an
+ever-present reminder of peril.
+
+And in the middle of the afternoon she passed close by a derelict, a
+torpedoed tramp, deep down by the stern, her bows helplessly high in air
+and crimson with rust, the melancholy haunt of a great multitude of gulls.
+
+More than slightly to Lanyard's surprise he received no quiet invitation
+to the captain's quarters to be interrogated concerning the burglary in
+Stateroom 27. Apparently, the young woman had contented herself with
+reporting merely that the communicating door had carelessly been left
+unfastened.
+
+For his own part, neither seeking nor avoiding individual members of the
+smoking-room group, Lanyard permitted himself to be drawn into their
+company, and sat among them amiably receptive. But this profited him
+scantily; there was no further talk of the Lone Wolf; he was not again
+aware of that covert surveillance.
+
+But when--the evening chill driving him below to don a fur-lined
+topcoat--the Brooke girl, coming up the companionway, acknowledged his look
+of recognition with the most distant of nods, he accepted the apparent
+rebuff without resentment. He understood. She was playing the game. The
+enemy was watching, listening. After that he was studious to refrain from
+seeming either to avoid or to seek her neighbourhood; and if he did keep a
+sharp eye on her, it was so circumspectly as to mock detection. To the
+best of his observation she found no friends on board, contracted no new
+acquaintances, kept herself to herself within walls of inexorable reserve.
+
+Dawn, ending the second night at sea, found the _Assyrian_ pursuing a
+course still devious, and now alone; the destroyers had turned back during
+the night. The western boundary of the barred zone lay astern. Ahead, at
+the end of a brief interval of time, the ivory towers of New York loomed,
+a-shimmer with endless sunlight, glorious in golden promise. Accordingly,
+the spirits of the passengers were exalted. The very ship seemed to grin in
+self-complacence; she had won safely through.
+
+Unremitting vigilance was none the less maintained. No hour of the
+twenty-four found either gun, forward or aft, wanting a full working crew
+on the keen qui vive. The life boats remained on outswung davits; boat
+drills for passengers as well as crew were features of the daily programme.
+Regulations concerning light and smoking on deck after dark were rigidly
+enforced. Fuel was never spared in the effort to widen the blue gulf
+between the steamship and those waters wherein she had so nearly met her
+end. By day a hunted thing, racing frantically toward a port of refuge in
+the West, all her stout fabric labouring with titanic pulsations, shying in
+panic from the faintest suspicion of smoke upon the horizon, the _Assyrian_
+slipped into the grateful obscurity of night like a snake into a thicket,
+made herself akin to its densest shadows, strained hopelessly not to be
+outdistanced by its fugitive mantle.
+
+And the benison of unseasonably clement weather was hers; day after shining
+day, night after placid night, the Atlantic revealed a singularly gracious
+humour, mirrored the changeful panorama of the heavens in a surface little
+flawed. So that the most squeamish voyagers, as well as those most beset
+with fears, slept sweetly in the comfort of their berths.
+
+Lanyard, however, never went to bed without first securing his door so that
+it might be opened by force alone; and never slept without a pistol beneath
+his pillow.
+
+But the truth is, he slept little. For the first time in his history he
+learned what it meant to will sleep to come and have his will defied. He
+lay for hours staring wide-eyed into darkness, hearkening to the steady
+throbbing of the engines, unable to dismiss the thought that their every
+revolution brought him so much nearer to America, so much the nearer to
+his hour with Ekstrom. In vain he sought to fatigue his senses by
+over-indulgence in his weakness for gambling. Day-long sessions at poker
+and auction in the smoking room--where he found formidable antagonists,
+principally in the persons of Crane, Bartlett Putnam, Velasco, Bartholomew,
+Julius Becker and Baron von Harden--served only to forward his financial
+fortunes; his luck was phenomenal; he multiplied many times that slender
+store of English banknotes with which he had embarked upon this adventure.
+But he left each exhausting sitting only to toss upon a wakeful pillow or
+to roam uneasily the dark and desolate decks, a man haunted by ghosts of
+his own raising, hagridden by passions of his own nurturing....
+
+About two o'clock on the third night (the first outside the danger zone,
+when every other passenger might reasonably be expected to be in his berth)
+Lanyard lay in a deck-chair deep in shadows, wondering if it was worthwhile
+to go below and woo sleep in his stateroom. By way of experiment he shut
+his eyes. When after a moment he opened them again he was no longer alone.
+
+Some distance away, at the rail, the woman of Stateroom 27 was standing
+with her back to Lanyard, looking intently forward, unquestionably ignorant
+of his presence.
+
+Without moving, he watched in listless incuriosity till he saw her
+straighten and stand away from the rail as if bracing herself against some
+crisis.
+
+A man was coming aft from the entrance to the main companionway, impatience
+in his stride--a tall man, of good carriage, muffled almost to the heels in
+a heavy ulster, a steamer-cap well forward over his eyes. But the light was
+poor, the pale shine of the aged moon blending trickily with the swaying
+shadows; Lanyard was unable to place him among the passengers. There was
+a suggestion of Lieutenant Thackeray--but that one was handicapped by one
+shell-shattered arm, whereas this man had the use of both.
+
+He demonstrated that promptly, taking the girl into them. She yielded
+herself gladly, with a hushed little cry, hiding her face in the bosom of
+his ulster, clinging to him.
+
+This, then, was an assignation prearranged! Miss Cecelia Brooke had a lover
+aboard the _Assyrian_, a lover whom she denied by day but met in stealth by
+night!
+
+And yet, after that first, swift embrace, their conduct became oddly
+unloverlike. The man released her of his own initiative, held her by the
+shoulders at arm's length. There was irritation in his manner. He seemed
+tempted to shake the young woman.
+
+"Celia! what madness!"
+
+So much, at least, Lanyard overheard; the rest was a mumble into the hand
+which the girl placed over the man's lips. She cried breathlessly: "Hush!
+not so loud!"
+
+And then she remembered to guard her own voice. In an undertone she spoke
+passionately for a moment. The man interrupted in a tone of profound
+vexation. She drew away, as if hurt, caught him up as he hesitated for a
+word, returned, clung to the lapels of his coat, her accents rapid and
+pitiful, eloquent of explanation, entreaty, determination. The man lifted
+his hands to her wrists, broke her grasp, cut her brusquely short, put her
+forcibly from him. She sobbed softly....
+
+Thus swiftly the scene suffered disillusioning transition. The pretty
+fiction of lovers meeting in secret was no more. Remained a man annoyed to
+the verge of anger, a woman desperately importunate.
+
+The wind, sweeping aft, carried broken snatches of their communications:
+
+"... _all I have ... could not let you go_...."
+
+"_Insanity_!"
+
+"_I was desperate_...."
+
+"... _drive me mad with your nonsense_...."
+
+Lanyard sat up, scraping his chair harshly on the deck. Stricken mute,
+the pair at the rail moved only to turn his way the pallid ovals of their
+faces.
+
+Heedless of the prohibition, he struck a vesta, cupped its flame in his
+hands, bending his face close and deliberately lighting a cigarette.
+Appreciably longer than necessary he permitted the flare to reveal his
+features. Then he blew it out, rose, sauntered to the rail, cast the
+cigarette into the sea, went aft and so below, satisfied that the girl must
+have recognised him and so knew that her secret was safe.
+
+But it was in an oddly disgruntled humour that he turned in--he who had
+been so ready to twit Crane with his fantastic speculations concerning
+the English girl, who had himself been the readiest to endue her with the
+romantic attributes becoming a heroine of her country's Secret Service!
+What if he must now esteem her in the merciless light of to-night's
+exposure, as the most pitiable of all human spectacles, a poor lovesick
+thing sans dignity, sans pride, sans heed for the world's respect, a woman
+pursuing a man weary of her?
+
+He resented unreasonably the unreasonable resentment which the affair
+inspired in him.
+
+What was it to him? He who had struck off all fettering bonds of common
+human interests, who had renounced all common human emotions, who had set
+his hand against all mankind that stood between him and that vengeful
+purpose to which he had dedicated his life! He, the Lone Wolf, the
+heartless, soulless, pitiless beast of prey!
+
+God in Heaven! what was any woman to him?
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+ON THE BANKS
+
+
+Unaccountably enough in his esteem, and more and more to Lanyard's
+exasperation, the evil flavour of that overnight incident lasted; it
+tinctured distastefully his first waking thoughts; and through all that
+fourth day at sea his mood was dark with irrational depression.
+
+And the fifth day and the sixth were like unto the fourth.
+
+Constantly he caught himself on watch for the young woman, wondering how
+she would comport herself toward him, unwilling witness though he had been
+to that shabby scene.
+
+But, save distantly at meal times, he saw nothing of her.
+
+And though he knew that she was much on deck after midnight, he was
+studious to keep out of her way. The tedium of stopping in a stuffy
+stateroom, when the spell of restlessness was on him, waiting for the
+sounds of his neighbour's return before he might venture forth, was
+nothing; anything were preferable to figuring as the innocent bystander at
+another encounter between the Brooke girl and her reluctant lover....
+
+Then that happened which lent the business another complexion altogether.
+Its second phase, of close development, drew toward an end. Subtle
+underlying forces began to stir in their portentous latency.
+
+The rapiers which thus far had merely touched, shivering lightly against
+each other, measuring each its opponent's strength, feeling out his skill,
+fell apart, then re-engaged in sharp and deadly play. Steel met steel and,
+clashing, struck off sparks whose fugitive glimmerings lightened measurably
+the murk....
+
+On the sixth night out, at eleven o'clock as a matter of routine, the
+smoking room was closed for the night, terminating an uncommonly protracted
+and, in Lanyard's esteem, irksome sitting at cards. Well tired, he went
+immediately to his quarters, undressed, stretched out in his berth, and
+switched off the light.
+
+Incontinently he found himself bedevilled by thoughts that would not rest.
+
+For upward of an hour he lay moveless, seeking oblivion in that very effort
+to preserve immobility, while the _Assyrian_, lunging heavily on her way,
+moaned and muttered tedious accompaniment to the chant of the working
+engines.
+
+Despairing at length, and fretted by the closeness of his quarters, he got
+up, dressed sketchily, and was shrugging into his fur-lined coat when he
+heard the door to the adjoining stateroom open and close, stealth in the
+sound of it.
+
+At that he hung up his overcoat, and threw himself down with a book on the
+lounge seat beneath the port. The novel was dull enough in all conscience;
+for that matter no tale within the compass of the cunningest weaver of
+words could have enthralled his temper at that time.
+
+He read and read again page after page, but without intelligence.
+
+Between his eyes and the type-blackened paper mirages of the past trembled
+and wavered; old faces, old scenes, old illusions took unsubstantial form,
+dissolved, blended, faded away: a saddening show of shadows.
+
+His heavy eyelids drooped; slumber's drowsy vestments trailed lazily
+athwart the sea of consciousness....
+
+A slight noise startled him, either the shutting of the door to Stateroom
+27, or the sound of the book dropping from his relaxed grasp. He sat up and
+consulted his watch. The hour was half after twelve.
+
+The ship's bell sounded remotely a single, doleful stroke.
+
+He might have dozed five minutes or fifteen--long enough at least to leave
+its tantalising effect of sleep desperately desirable, mockingly elusive,
+almost grasped, whisked beyond grasping. And with this he was aware of
+something even less tangible, a sense of something amiss, of something
+vaguely wrong, as of an evil spirit stalking furtively through the darkened
+labyrinth of the ship ... as impalpable and ineluctable as miasmic
+exhalations of a morass....
+
+Lanyard passed a hand across his forehead. Had he been dreaming, then? Was
+this merely the reaction from some bitter nightmare? He could not remember.
+
+On sheer impulse he stood up, extinguished the light, opened the door. As
+he did this he noted that a light burned in Stateroom 27, visible through
+the ventilating grille. So the girl must have returned while he slept. Or
+had she neglected to turn the switch when she went out? He could not be
+certain.
+
+On the threshold he paused a little, attentive to the familiar rumour of
+the ship by night: the prolonged sloughing of riven waters down the side,
+gnashing of swells hurled back by the bows, sibilance of draughts in
+alleyways, groaning of frames, a thin metallic rattle of indeterminate
+origin, the crunching grind of the steering gear, the everlasting
+deep-throated diapason of the engines, somewhere aft in that tier of
+staterooms a persistent human snore ... nothing unusual, no alarming
+discordance....
+
+Yet the feeling that mischief was afoot would not be still.
+
+Lanyard moved down to the junction of the thwartship passage with the
+fore-and-aft alleyway.
+
+Here he commanded a view of the promenade-deck landing and the main
+companionway, all in darkness but for a feeble glimmer of reflected
+starlight through the open deck port on the far side of the vessel. Beyond
+this the rail was stencilled against the dull face of the sea with its far
+lifting and falling horizon; within, no more was visible than the dimmed
+whiteness of the forward partition, the dense, indefinite mass of balusters
+winding up to the boat-deck, and the flat plane of the tiled landing.
+
+On this last, near the mouth of the port alleyway, half obscured by the
+intervening balusters, something moved, something huge, black, and formless
+swayed and writhed strangely, and in the strangest silence, like a dumb,
+tormented misshapen brute transfixed to one spot from which its most
+anguished efforts might not avail to budge it.
+
+Lanyard ran forward, rounded the well of the companionway, and pulled up.
+
+Now the nature of the thing was revealed. Blackly silhouetted against the
+square of the doorway two human figures were close-locked and struggling
+desperately, straining, resisting, thrusting, giving, recovering ... and
+all with never a sound more than the deadened thump of a shifting foot or
+the rasp of hard-won breathing.
+
+For several seconds the spectator could not distinguish one contestant from
+the other. Then a change in the fortunes of war enabled him to make out
+that one was a woman, the other, and momentarily more successful, a man.
+Slender and youthful and strong, she fought with the indomitable fury of
+a pantheress. He on his part had won this much temporary advantage--had
+broken the woman's clutch upon his throat and was bending her back over
+his hip, one hand fumbling at her windpipe, the other imprisoning her two
+wrists.
+
+Yet she was far from being vanquished. Even as Lanyard moved toward the
+pair, she drove a savage knee into the man's middle and, as he checked
+instantaneously with a grunt of pained surprise, regained her footing and
+planted both elbows against his chest, striving frantically to free her
+hands.
+
+Simultaneously Lanyard took the fellow from behind, wound an arm around his
+neck, jerked his head sharply back, twisted his forearm till he released
+the woman's wrists, and threw him with a force that must have jarred his
+every bone.
+
+The woman staggered back against the partition, panting and sobbing beneath
+her breath. The man rebounded from his fall with astonishing agility, and
+flew back at Lanyard. An object in his right hand gave off the dull gleam
+of polished steel.
+
+Lanyard, his automatic in his stateroom, in the pocket of the overcoat
+where he had deposited it when meaning to go out on deck, lacked any means
+of defense other than his two hands; but his one-time fame as an amateur
+pugilist had been second only to his fame as a connaisseur d'art; and to
+one whose youth had been passed in association with the Apaches of Paris,
+some mastery of la savate was an inevitable accomplishment.
+
+A lightning coup de pied planted a heel against one of the man's shins,
+and his onslaught faltered in a gust of curses. Then the point of his jaw
+received the full force of Lanyard's right fist with all the ill will
+imaginable behind it. The man reared back, reeled into the black mouth of
+the alleyway, fell heavily.
+
+Even so, he demonstrated extraordinary vitality and appetite for
+punishment. He had no more gone down than the adventurer, peering into the
+gloom, saw him struggle up on his knees. Instantly Lanyard made toward
+him, intent on finishing this work so well begun, but in his second stride
+tripped over a heavy body hidden in the shadows, and pitched headlong.
+Falling, he was conscious of a flashing thing that sped past his cheek,
+immediately above his shoulder. There followed an echoing thud against the
+forward partition.
+
+Picking himself up smartly, Lanyard crept several paces down the alleyway,
+flattening against the wall, straining his vision, listening intently,
+rewarded by neither sign nor sound of his antagonist.
+
+That one must have been swift to advantage himself of Lanyard's tumble.
+If he had not vanished into thin air, or gone to earth in some untenanted
+stateroom thereabouts, he found in the close blackness of that narrow
+passage a cloak of positive invisibility to cover his escape.
+
+And there is little wisdom in stalking an armed man whom one cannot see,
+with what little light there is at one's own back.
+
+So Lanyard went back to the landing, stepping carefully over the obstacle
+which had both thrown him and saved his life--the supine body of a third
+man, motionless; whether dead or merely insensible, he did not stop to
+investigate. His immediate concern was for the woman.
+
+As he came upon her now, she stood en profile to the partition, tugging
+strongly at something embedded in the woodwork close by her side, between
+her waist and armpit. At the sound of his approach she looked up with a
+tremor of apprehension quickly calmed.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin! If you please--"
+
+Lanyard, in no way surprised to recognise the voice of Miss Cecelia Brooke,
+stepped closer. "What is it?" he enquired; and then, bending over to look,
+found that her cloak was pinned to the partition by the blade of a heavy
+knife buried a full half of its considerable length.
+
+"He threw it as you fell," the girl explained. "I was in the direct line."
+
+"Permit me, mademoiselle...."
+
+He laid hold of the haft of the weapon and with some difficulty withdrew
+it.
+
+"Who was it?" he asked, weighing the knife in his palm and examining it as
+closely as he could without the aid of light.
+
+There was no reply. Directly her cloak was freed, the girl had moved
+hastily away to the body over which Lanyard had stumbled. He heard an
+imploring whisper--"Please!"--and looked up to see her on her knees.
+
+"Who, then, is this?" he demanded, joining her.
+
+"Lionel--Lieutenant Thackeray. Please--O please!--tell me he is not dead."
+
+Her voice broke; he saw her slender body convulsed with racking emotions.
+Kneeling, Lanyard made a hasty and superficial examination, necessarily no
+more under the conditions.
+
+"His heart beats," he announced--"he breathes. I do not think him seriously
+injured." He made as if to get up. "I will get a light--a flash-lamp from
+my stateroom--or, better still, the ship's surgeon--"
+
+Her hand fell upon his arm. "Please, no! Not that--not now. Later, if
+necessary; but now--surely, you can help me carry him to his stateroom."
+
+"You know the number?"
+
+"It's close by--30."
+
+"Find it, and light up. No--leave this to me; I can carry him without
+assistance."
+
+The girl rose and disappeared. Lanyard passed his arms beneath the
+Englishman's body, gathered him into them, and struggled to his feet: no
+inconsiderable task.
+
+Light gushed from an open doorway, the third aft from the landing.
+Staggering, the adventurer entered and deposited the body upon the berth.
+Immediately the girl closed and bolted the door, then passed between him
+and the berth to bend over the unconscious man. He lay in deep coma, limbs
+a-sprawl, unpleasant glints of white between his half-closed eyelids, his
+breathing stertorous through parted lips. Free of its sling, his wounded
+arm dangled over the edge of the berth. In putting him down, Lanyard had
+remarked that its sleeve had been slit to the shoulder, and that its
+bandages were undone. Now, in amazement, he saw the arm was firm and
+muscular, with an unbroken skin, never a sign of any injury in all its
+length.
+
+Gently the girl lifted the lieutenant's head to the light, discovering a
+hideously bruised swelling at the base of the skull, blood darkly matting
+the close-clipped hair.
+
+She requested without looking round: "Water, please--and a towel."
+
+Obediently Lanyard ran hot and cold water into the hand-basin in equal
+proportions.
+
+"Would it not be well now to call the ship's surgeon?" he suggested
+diffidently.
+
+"Is that necessary? I am something of a nurse. This is simply a bad
+contusion--no worse, I believe. He was struck down from behind, a cowardly
+blow in the dark, as he started to go up on deck. I had been waiting for
+him. When he didn't come I suspected something was wrong. I came down,
+found him lying there, that brute kneeling over him."
+
+She spoke coolly enough, in contrast with the high excitement that inflamed
+her eyes as she turned away from the berth.
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin, are you armed?"
+
+"I have this," he said, exhibiting the knife thrown by the would-be
+murderer--a simple trench dagger, without distinguishing marks of any sort.
+
+"Then take this, please." Extracting an automatic pistol from a holster
+belted beneath Thackeray's coat, she proffered it. "You won't mind staying
+here a moment, standing guard, while I fetch a dressing from my room?"
+
+Before he could utter a word of protest she had slipped out into the
+alleyway, shutting the door behind her.
+
+When several minutes had passed the adventurer found himself beset by
+increasing concern. This long delay seemed not only inconsistent with her
+solicitude, but indicated a possibility that the girl had braved unwisely
+the chance of a resumption of hostilities on the part of her late and as
+yet anonymous assailant.
+
+Darkening the room as a matter of common-sense precaution, Lanyard, pistol
+in hand, stepped out into the alleyway in time to see the girl in the act
+of rising from her knees on the landing, near the spot where Thackeray had
+fallen. The light of her flash-lamp was blotted out as she came hurriedly
+aft.
+
+Perplexed, he turned back and switched on the light as she entered.
+
+Her eyes challenged his almost defiantly.
+
+"Was I long?" she asked, breathless. "I dropped something...."
+
+Lanyard bowed without speaking. Instinctively he knew that she was lying;
+and divining this in his attitude, she coloured and, disconcerted, turned
+away. For a moment, while she busied herself arranging on a convenient
+chair an assortment of first-aid accessories, he fancied that her
+half-averted face wore a look of sullen chagrin, with its compressed lips,
+downcast eyes, and faintly gathered brows.
+
+But directly she needed assistance, and requested it of him in a subdued
+and impersonal manner, showing a countenance devoid of any incongruous
+emotion.
+
+Lanyard, lifting the lieutenant's head and heavy torso, helped turn him
+face downward on the berth, then stood aside, thoughtfully watching the
+girl's deft fingers sop absorbent cotton in an antiseptic wash and apply it
+to the injury.
+
+After a little, he said: "If mademoiselle has no more immediate use for
+me--"
+
+"Thank you, monsieur. You have already done so very much!"
+
+"Then, if mademoiselle will supply the name of this assassin--"
+
+"I know it no more than you, monsieur!" She glanced up at him, startled.
+"What do you mean to do?"
+
+"Why, naturally, lodge an information with the captain concerning this
+outrage--"
+
+"Oh, please, no!"
+
+At a loss, Lanyard shrugged eloquently.
+
+"Not yet, at all events," she hastened to amend. "Let Lionel judge what is
+best to be done when he comes to."
+
+"But, mademoiselle, who can say when that will be?" He pointed out the
+ugly, ragged abrasion in the young Englishman's scalp exposed by the
+cleansing away of the clotted blood. "No ordinary blow," he commented;
+"something very like a slung-shot or a loaded cane did that work. If I may
+venture again to advise--unless mademoiselle is herself a surgeon--"
+
+Her colour faded and she caught her breath sharply. "You think it as
+serious as all that?"
+
+"I do not know. Such a blow might easily fracture the skull, possibly bring
+about a concussion of the brain. Regard, likewise, his laborious breathing.
+I most assuredly advise consulting competent authority."
+
+She did not immediately answer, turning back undivided attention to her
+task; but he noticed that her hands were tremulous, however, dextrously
+they finished dressing and bandaging the hurt; and deep distress troubled
+the handsome eyes she turned to his when she rose.
+
+"You are right," she murmured--"unquestionably right, monsieur. We must
+have the surgeon in...."
+
+But when Lanyard advanced a hand toward the bell-push, to call the steward,
+she interposed in quick alarm:
+
+"No--if you please, a moment; I must have time to think!" Her slender
+fingers writhed together in her agony of doubt and irresolution. "If only I
+knew what to do...."
+
+Lanyard was dumb. There was, indeed, nothing helpful he could offer, who
+was without a solitary tangible or trustworthy clue to the nature of this
+strange business.
+
+He owned himself sadly mystified. In the light--or, rather, the shadow--of
+this latest development, his revised suspicions seemed unwarranted to the
+point of impertinence; unless, of course, one assumed the unknown assailant
+to be a rejected lover or wronged husband. And somehow one did not, in
+the presence of this clear-eyed, straight-limbed, courageous young
+Englishwoman, so wanting in self-consciousness.
+
+And yet ... what the deuce was she to this man whom, indisputably, she
+followed against his wish?
+
+And what conceivable chain of circumstances linked their fortunes with his,
+and that double burglary of the first night out with this murderous assault
+of to-night?
+
+Nor was to-night's work, considered by itself, lacking in questionable
+features.
+
+Why had Thackeray carried that sound arm in a sling? How had its bandages
+come to be unwrapped? Not in struggles before being placed hors de combat,
+for he had never had a chance to resist. Had his assailant, then, unwrapped
+it subsequently? If so, with what end in view?
+
+Why had this Miss Cecelia Brooke, surprising the thug at his work, joined
+battle with him so bravely and so madly without calling for help?
+
+What hidden motive excused this singular hesitation to summon the surgeon,
+this reluctance to inform the officers of the ship?
+
+What duplicity was that which the girl had paraded concerning her
+procrastination when Lanyard had surprised her on her knees out there on
+the landing?
+
+If this were what Lanyard had first inclined to think it, Secret Service
+intrigue, surely it was weirdly intricate when an English girl hesitated
+to safeguard an Englishman by taking into her confidence the officers of a
+British ship, British manned!
+
+Nevertheless, and however much he might wonder and doubt, Lanyard would
+never question her. Never of his own volition would he probe more deeply
+into this mystery, take one farther step into the intricacies of its maze.
+
+So, in silence, he waited, passively courteous, at her further service if
+she had need of him, content if she had not, tolerant of her tacit prayer
+for time in which to think a way out of her difficulties.
+
+After some few moments he grew uncomfortably aware that he had become the
+object of a speculative regard not at all unfavourable.
+
+He indulged in a mental gesture of resignation.
+
+Then what he had feared befell, not altogether as he had apprehended, but
+in the girl's own fashion, if without material difference in the upshot.
+
+"I am afraid," said she in an even voice, so quietly pitched as to be
+inaudible to any eavesdropper. "This becomes a task greater than I had
+dreamed, more than my wits can cope with. Monsieur Duchemin...."
+
+She hesitated. He bowed slightly. "If mademoiselle can make any use of my
+poor abilities, she has but to command me."
+
+"We--I have much to thank you for already, monsieur, much more than I can
+ever hope to reward adequately--"
+
+"Reward?" he echoed. "But, mademoiselle--!"
+
+"Please don't misunderstand." She flushed a little, very prettily. "I am
+simply trying to express my sense of obligation, not only for what you have
+already done, but for what I mean to ask you to do."
+
+Again he bowed, without comment, amiably receptive.
+
+She resumed with perceptible effort: "I can trust you--"
+
+"You must make sure of that before you do," he warned her, smiling.
+
+"I am sure," she averred gravely.
+
+"You know nothing concerning me, mademoiselle--pardon! For all you know
+I may be the greatest rogue in Christendom. And I must tell you in all
+candour, sometimes I think I am."
+
+"What I may or may not know concerning you, Monsieur Duchemin, is
+immaterial as long as I know you are what you have proved yourself to me, a
+gentleman, considerate, generous, brave, and--not inquisitive."
+
+He was frankly touched. If this were flattery, tone and manner robbed it of
+fulsomeness, rendered it subtle beyond the coarser perceptions of the man.
+He knew himself for what he was, knew himself unworthy; and that part
+of him which was unaffectedly French, whether by accident of birth or
+influence of environment, and so impulsive and emotional, reacted in
+spontaneous gratitude to this implicit acceptance of him for what he strove
+to seem to be.
+
+"Mademoiselle is gracious beyond my deserts," he protested. "Only let me
+know how I may be of use...."
+
+"In three ways: Continue to be lenient in your judgments, and ask me no
+more questions than you must because ... I may not answer...." Her hands
+worked together again. She added unhappily, in a faint voice: "I dare not."
+
+That, too, moved him, since he had been far from lenient in his judgments.
+He responded the more readily: "All that is understood, mademoiselle."
+
+"Please go at once back to your stateroom, and as quietly as possible.
+There is a bare chance you were not recognised, that nobody knows who came
+to my aid to-night. If you can slip away without attracting attention, so
+much the better for us, for all of us. You may not be suspected."
+
+"Trust me to use my best discretion."
+
+"Lastly ... take and keep this for me, till I ask you for it again. Hide it
+as secretly as you can. It may be sought for, is certain to be if you are
+believed to be in my confidence. It must not be found. And I may not want
+it again before we land in New York."
+
+She extended a hand on whose palm rested a small and slender white
+cylinder, no longer and little thicker than the toy pencil that dangles
+from a dance-card: a tight roll of plain white paper enclosed in a wrapping
+of transparent oiled silk, gummed fast down its length and, at either end,
+sealed with miniature blobs of black wax.
+
+"Will you do this for me, Monsieur Duchemin? I warn you, it may cost you
+your life."
+
+He took it, his temper veering to the whimsical. "What is life?" he
+questioned. "A prelude--perhaps an overture to that great drama, Death. Who
+knows? Who cares?"
+
+She heard him in a stare. "You place no value on life?"
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have lived nearly thirty years in this world,
+three years in the theatre of war, seldom far from the trenches of one
+front or another. I tell you, I know death too well...."
+
+He shrugged and put the roll of paper away in a pocket.
+
+"You understand it must not be taken from you under any circumstance? As a
+last resort, it must be destroyed rather than yielded up."
+
+"It shall be," he said quietly. "Is there anything more?"
+
+She shook her head, thoughtfully knuckling her underlip.
+
+"How can I communicate with you in event of necessity after we get to New
+York?" she asked.
+
+"I shall stop for a week or two at the Hotel Knickerbocker."
+
+"If anything should happen"--with a swift glance of anxiety toward the
+motionless figure in the berth--"if anything should prevent my calling for
+it within a week after our arrival, you will be good enough to deliver it
+to--" She caught herself up quickly, the unuttered words trembling on her
+lip. "I will write down the address of the person to whom you will deliver
+it, and slip it underneath the door between our rooms--first making
+certain you are there to receive it--if I do not ask you to return
+the--thing--before we land."
+
+"That shall be as you will."
+
+"When you have memorized the address you will destroy it?"
+
+"Depend on that."
+
+"I think that is all. Thank you, Monsieur Duchemin--and good-night."
+
+She extended her hand. He saluted it punctiliously with fingertips and
+lips.
+
+"If you will put out the light, mademoiselle, it may aid me to get away
+unseen."
+
+She nodded and offered him Thackeray's pistol. "Take this. O, I have
+another with me."
+
+Lanyard accepted the weapon and, when she had darkened the room, opened the
+door, slipped out, and closed it behind him so noiselessly that the girl
+could not believe he was gone.
+
+Nothing hindered his return to Stateroom 29.
+
+Fully two minutes after he had locked himself in he heard the distant
+clamour of the annunciator, calling a steward to Stateroom 30.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+UNDER SUSPICION
+
+
+He sat for a long time on the edge of his berth, elbow on knee, chin in
+hand, unstirring, gaze fixed upon that little cylinder of white paper
+resting in the hollow of his palm, in profoundest concentration pondering
+the problems it presented: what it was, what possession of it meant to
+Michael Lanyard, what safe disposition to make of it pending welcome relief
+from this unsought and most unwelcome trust.
+
+This last question alone bade fair to confound his utmost ingenuity.
+
+As for what it was, Lanyard was well satisfied that he now held the true
+focus of this conspiracy, a secret of the first consequence, far too
+momentous to the designs of England to be entrusted, though couched in the
+most cryptic cipher ever mind of man devised, even to cables or mails which
+England herself controlled.
+
+Solely to prevent this communication from reaching America, Lanyard
+believed, Germany had sown mines broadcast in all the waters which the
+_Assyrian_ must cross, and had commissioned her U-boats, without fail and
+at whatever cost, to sink the vessel if by any accident she won safely
+through the mine-fields.
+
+In the effort to steal this secret, German spies had sailed on the
+_Assyrian_ knowing well the double risk they ran, of being shot like rats
+if found out, of being drowned like neutrals if the ship went down through
+the efforts of their compatriots.
+
+It was the zeal of Potsdam's agents, seeking the bearer of this secret,
+which had caused the rifling of Miss Brooke's luggage when she fell under
+suspicion, thanks to her clandestine way of coming aboard; and through the
+same agency young Thackeray had been all but murdered when suspicion, for
+whatever reason, shifted to him.
+
+To insure safe transmission of this communication, England had held the
+_Assyrian_ idle in port, day after day, while her augmented patrols scoured
+the seas, hunting down ruthlessly every submarine whose periscope dared
+peer above the surface, and while her trawlers innumerable swept the
+channels clear of mines.
+
+To prevent its theft, Lieutenant Thackeray had invented the subterfuge of
+the "wounded" arm, amid whose splints and bandages (Lanyard never doubted)
+the cylinder had been secreted.
+
+Finally, it was as a special agent, deep in her country's confidence, that
+this English girl had smuggled herself aboard at the last moment, bringing,
+no doubt, this very cylinder to be transferred to the keeping of Lieutenant
+Thackeray or, perhaps, another confrčre, should she find reason to think
+herself suspected, her trust endangered.
+
+Nothing strange in that; women had served their countries in such
+capacities before; the secret archives of European chancellories are
+replete with their records. Lanyard himself remembered many such women,
+brilliant mondaines from many lands domiciled in that Paris of the so-dead
+yesterday to serve by stealth their respective governments; but never, it
+was true, a woman of the caste of Cecelia Brooke; unless, indeed, this were
+an actress of surpassing talent, gifted to hoodwink the most skeptical and
+least susceptible of men.
+
+And yet....
+
+Lanyard's train of thought faltered. New doubt of the girl began to shadow
+his meditations. Contradictory circumstances he had noted intruded,
+uninvited, to challenge overcredulous conclusions concerning her.
+
+Would any secret agent worth her salt invite suspicion by making such a
+conspicuously furtive embarkation, by such ostentatious avoidance of her
+fellow passengers, by surrounding herself with an atmosphere of such
+palpable mystery? Would such an one confess she had a "secret" to an utter
+stranger, as she had to Lanyard that first night out? Would she, under any
+conceivable circumstances, entrust to that same stranger that selfsame
+secret upon whose inviolate preservation so much depended?
+
+And would she make love-trysts on the decks by night?
+
+Would a brother-agent take her in his arms, then reprove her with every
+symptom of vexation for her "madness," her "insanity," her "nonsense" that
+was like to "drive me mad"?--Thackeray's own words!
+
+Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits for some plausible reading of this
+riddle.
+
+Was this Brooke girl possibly (of a sudden he sat bolt upright) a Prussian
+agent infatuated with this young Englishman and by him beloved in spite of
+all that forbade their passion?
+
+Did not this explanation reconcile every apparent inconsistency in her
+conduct, even to the entrusting to a stranger of the stolen secret, the
+purloined paper she dared not keep about her lest it be found in her
+possession?
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. Visibly his features hardened. If this surmise of
+his were any way justified in the outcome, he promised Miss Cecelia Brooke
+an hour of most painful penitence.
+
+Woman or not, she need not look for mercy from him, who must ever be
+merciless in his dealings with Ekstrom's crew.
+
+To be made that one's tool!
+
+The very thought was intolerable....
+
+As for himself, possession of this paper meant that pitfalls were digged
+for his every step.
+
+If ever the British found cause to suspect him, his certain portion would
+be to face a firing squad in dusk of early day.
+
+If, on the other hand, these Prussian agents on board the _Assyrian_ ever
+got wind of the fact that the cylinder was in his care, his fate was apt to
+be a knife between his ribs the first time he was caught alone and--with
+his back to the assassin.
+
+Two courses, then, were open to him: the most sensible and obvious, to go
+straightway to the captain of the _Assyrian_, report all that he knew or
+surmised, and turn over the paper for safekeeping; one alternative, to hide
+the cylinder so absolutely that the most drastic search would overlook it,
+yet so handily that he could rid himself of it at an instant's notice.
+
+But the first course involved denunciation of the Brooke girl. And what
+if she were innocent? What if, after all, these doubts of her were the
+specious spawn of facts misinterpreted, misconstrued? What if she proved to
+be all she seemed? Could he, even though what he had warned her he might
+be, the greatest rogue unhung, be false to a trust reposed in him by such a
+woman?
+
+As to that, there was no question in his mind; he would never betray her,
+lacking irrefutable conviction that she was an employee of the Prussian spy
+system.
+
+Then how to hide the paper?
+
+Kneeling, Lanyard drew from beneath the berth his bellows-bag, selected
+from its contents a black japanned tin case containing a rather elaborate
+though compact trench medicine kit, the idle purchase of an empty afternoon
+in London. Extracting from its fittings a small leather-covered case, he
+replaced the kit, relocked and shoved the bag back beneath the berth.
+
+Then, standing over the hand-basin, he opened the leather-covered case. Its
+velvet-lined compartments held a hypodermic syringe and needle, and a glass
+phial of twenty-four one-thirtieth grain morphia tablets.
+
+Uncorking the phial, he shook out all the tablets, replaced three, then
+slid the paper cylinder into the tube; it fitted precisely, concealed by
+the label of the manufacturing chemist, leaving room for six more tablets.
+Lanyard inserted four on top of the cylinder, moistening the lowermost
+slightly to make it stick, recorked the phial, and returned it to its
+compartment.
+
+Next he dissolved three morphia tablets in a little water in the bottom of
+a glass, filled the syringe with the strong solution, fitted on the needle,
+squirted most of the contents down the waste-pipe, and consigned the
+remaining tablets to the same innocuous fate.
+
+Finally he replaced needle and syringe in the case, let the glass which had
+held the solution stand without rinsing, and put the open case upon the
+shelf above the basin.
+
+A light tapping sounded on the panels of his door.
+
+"Well? Who's there?"
+
+"Your steward, sir. Captain Osborne's compliments, an' 'e'd like to see you
+in 'is room as soon as convenient, sir."
+
+"You may say I will come at once."
+
+"'Nk you, sir."
+
+A summons to have been expected as a sequel to the surgeon's report after
+attending Lieutenant Thackeray; none the less, Lanyard had not expected it
+so soon.
+
+Authority, he reflected, ran true to form afloat as well as ashore; it was
+prompt enough when required to apply a pound or so of cure. Surely the
+officers, at least the captain, must have been advised why this voyage
+was apt to prove exceptionally hazardous; and surely in the light of such
+information it had been wiser to set armed watches on every deck by night,
+rather than permit the lives of passengers to be imperilled through the
+possible activities of Prussian agents among them incogniti.
+
+And now that he was reminded of it, was not this, perhaps, but a device of
+the enemy's to decoy him from the comparative safety of his stateroom?
+
+It was with a hand in his jacket pocket, grasping Thackeray's automatic,
+that he presently left the room. The alleyway, however, was deserted except
+for his steward; who, as he appeared, turned and led the way up to the
+boat-deck.
+
+Rounding the foot of the companionway, Lanyard contrived a hasty glance
+down the port alleyway. The door to Stateroom 30 was on the hook; a light
+burned within. Outside a guard was stationed, a sailor with a cutlass: the
+first application of the pound of cure!
+
+At the heels of his guide, he approached a door in the deck-house, devoted
+to officers' accommodations, beneath the bridge. Here the steward knocked
+discreetly. A heavy voice grumbling within was stilled for a moment, then
+barked a sharp invitation to enter. The steward turned the knob, announced
+dispassionately "Monseer Duchemin," and stood aside. Lanyard entered a
+well-lighted room, simply but comfortably furnished as the captain's office
+and sitting room; sleeping quarters adjoined, the head of a berth with a
+battered pillow showing through a door a foot or so ajar.
+
+Four persons were present; the notion entered Lanyard's head that a fifth
+possibly lurked in the room beyond, spying, eavesdropping: not a bad scheme
+if Thackeray had an associate on board whose identity it was desirable to
+keep under cover.
+
+The door closed gently behind him as he stood politely bowing, conscious
+that the four faces turned his way were distinguished by a singular variety
+of expression.
+
+Miss Cecelia Brooke was nearest him, beside a chair from which she had
+evidently just risen, her pretty young face rather pale and set, a scared
+look in her candid eyes.
+
+Beyond her, the captain sat with his back to a desk: a broad-beamed,
+vigorous body, intensely masculine, choleric by habit, and just now in an
+extraordinarily grim temper, his iron-gray hair bristling from his
+pillow, and his stout person visibly suffering the discomfort of wearing
+night-clothes beneath his uniform coat and trousers. Bending upon Lanyard
+the steel-hard regard of small, steel-blue eyes, he drummed the arms of his
+chair with thick and stubby fingers.
+
+To one side, standing, was the third officer, a Mr. Sherry, a youngish man
+with a pleasant cast of countenance which temporarily wore a look, rarely
+British, of ingrained sense of duty at odds with much embarrassment.
+
+Lastly Mr. Crane's lanky person was draped, with its customary effect of
+carelessness, on one end of the lounge seat. He looked up, nodded shortly
+but cheerfully to Lanyard, then resumed a somewhat quizzical contemplation
+of the half-smoked cigar which etiquette obliged him to neglect in the
+presence of a lady.
+
+"This is the gentleman?" Captain Osborne queried heavily of the girl.
+Receiving a murmured affirmative, he continued: "Good morning, Monsieur
+Duchemin.... Thanks, Miss Brooke; we won't keep you up any longer
+to-night."
+
+He rose, bowed stiffly as Mr. Sherry opened the door for the girl, and when
+she was gone threw himself back into his chair with a force which made it
+enter a violent protest.
+
+"Sit down, sir. Daresay you know what we want of you."
+
+"It is not difficult to guess," Lanyard admitted. "A sad business,
+monsieur."
+
+"Sad!" the captain iterated in a tone of harsh sarcasm. "That's a mild name
+to give murder."
+
+Even had it not been blurted violently at him, that word was staggering.
+The adventurer echoed it blankly. "You can't mean Lieutenant Thackeray--?"
+
+"Not yet, though doctor says it may come to that; the poor chap's in a bad
+way--concussion."
+
+"So one feared. But monsieur said 'murder'...."
+
+Captain Osborne sat forward, steely gaze mercilessly boring into Lanyard's
+eyes. "Monsieur Duchemin," he said slowly, "Lieutenant Thackeray was not
+the only passenger to suffer through to-night's villainy. The other died
+instantly."
+
+"In God's name, monsieur--who?"
+
+"Bartholomew."
+
+"Mr. Bartholomew!" A memory of that brisk little body's ruddy, cheerful,
+British personality flashed athwart the screen of memory. Lanyard murmured:
+"Incredible!"
+
+"Murdered," the captain proceeded, "in Stateroom 28. Lieutenant Thackeray
+and he were friends, shared the suite. Apparently Mr. Bartholomew heard
+some unusual noise in 30 and left his berth to investigate. He was struck
+down from behind as he approached the communicating door. The murderer had
+got in by way of the sitting room, 26."
+
+Mr. Sherry added in an awed voice: "Frightful blow--skull crushed like an
+eggshell."
+
+There was a pause. Crane thoughtfully relighted his cigar, and wrapped his
+right cheek round it. The captain glared glassily at Lanyard. Mr. Sherry
+looked, if possible, more uncomfortable than ever. Lanyard pondered,
+aghast.
+
+Ekstrom's work, of a certainty! This was his way, the way he imposed upon
+his creatures. Ekstrom, ever a killer, obsessed by the fallacious notion
+that dead men tell no tales....
+
+And Bartholomew had been in this mess with Thackeray, both of them
+operatives of the British Secret Service!
+
+"Miss Brooke has given her version of the attack on Lieutenant Thackeray,"
+the captain pursued. "Be good enough to let us have yours."
+
+Succinctly Lanyard recounted the happenings between the moment when
+premonition of evil drew him from his stateroom and the moment when he
+returned thereto.
+
+He was at pains, however, to omit all mention of the cylinder of paper;
+that, pending definite knowledge to the contrary, was a sacred trust, a
+matter of his honour, solely the affair of the Brooke girl.
+
+The captain squared himself toward Lanyard, his face louring, his jaw
+pugnacious.
+
+"How did you happen to be up and dressed at that late hour, so ready to
+respond to this--ah--premonition of yours?"
+
+"I sleep not well, monsieur. It was my intention to go on deck and
+endeavour to walk off my insomnia."
+
+Captain Osborne commented with a snort.
+
+"Why did you leave Miss Brooke alone before she called the doctor?"
+
+"At mademoiselle's request, naturally."
+
+"You'd been deuced gallant up to that time. I presume it didn't occur to
+you that the young woman might need further protection?"
+
+Lanyard shrugged. "It did not occur to me to refuse her request, monsieur."
+
+"Didn't it strike you as odd she should wish to be left alone with
+Lieutenant Thackeray?"
+
+"It was not my affair, monsieur. It was her wish."
+
+"Excuse me, cap'n." Crane sat up. "I'd like to ask Mr. Lanyard a question."
+
+But Lanyard had prepared himself against that, and acknowledged the touch
+with a quiet smile and the hint of a bow.
+
+"Monsieur Crane...."
+
+"U.S. Secret Service," Crane informed him with a grin. "Velasco spotted
+you--had seen you years ago in Paruss--tipped me off."
+
+"So one inferred. And these gentlemen?" Lanyard indicated the captain and
+third officer.
+
+"I wised them up--had to, when this happened."
+
+"Naturally, monsieur. Proceed...."
+
+"I only wanted to ask if you noticed anything to make you think perhaps
+there was an understanding between Miss Brooke and the lieutenant?"
+
+"Why should I?"
+
+"I ain't curious why you should. What I want to know is, did you?"
+
+"No, monsieur," Lanyard lied blandly.
+
+"The little lady didn't seem to take on more'n she naturally would if the
+lieutenant'd been a stranger, eh?" "How to judge, when one has never seen
+mademoiselle distressed on behalf of another?"
+
+Crane abandoned his effort, resuming contemplation of his cigar.
+
+"Now we come to the point. Monsieur Lanyard, or whatever your name is."
+
+"I have found Duchemin very agreeable, monsieur le capitaine."
+
+"I daresay," Captain Osborne sneered. He hesitated, glowering in the
+difficulty of thinking. "See here, Monsieur Duchemin--since you prefer that
+style--I'm not going to beat about the bush with you. I'm a plain man,
+plain-spoken. They tell me you reformed. I don't know anything about that.
+It's my conviction, once a thief, always a thief. I may be wrong."
+
+"Right or wrong, monsieur might easily be less offensive."
+
+The captain's dark countenance became still more darkly congested.
+Implacable prejudice glinted in his small eyes. Nor was his temper softened
+by the effrontery of this offender in giving back look for look with a calm
+poise that overshadowed his arrogance of an honest, law-abiding man.
+
+He made a vague gesture of impatience.
+
+"The point is," he said, "this crime was accompanied by robbery."
+
+"Am I to understand I am accused?"
+
+"Nobody is accused," Crane cut in hastily.
+
+"You have found no clues--?"
+
+"Nary clue."
+
+"What I want to say to you, Monsieur Duchemin, is this: the stolen property
+has got to be recovered before this ship makes her dock in New York.
+It means the loss of my command if it isn't. It means more than that,
+according to my information; it means a disastrous calamity to the Allied
+cause. And you're a Frenchman, Monsieur--Duchemin."
+
+"And a thief. Monsieur le capitaine must not forget his pet conviction."
+
+"As to that, a man can't always be particular about the tools he employs. I
+believe the old saying, set a thief to catch a thief, holds good."
+
+"Do I understand," Lanyard suggested sweetly, "you are about to honour me
+by utilizing my reputed talents, by commissioning a thief to catch this
+thief of to-night?"
+
+"Precisely. You know more of this matter than any of us here. You were at
+hand-grips with the murderer--and let him get away."
+
+"To my deep regret. But I have told you how that happened."
+
+"Seems a bit strange you made no real effort to find out what the scoundrel
+looked like."
+
+"It was dark in that alleyway, monsieur."
+
+The captain made an inarticulate noise, apparently meant to convey an
+effect of ironic incredulity. More intelligible comment was interrupted by
+a ring of the telephone. He swung around, clapped receiver to ear, snapped
+an impatient "Well?" and listened with evident exasperation.
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. This business of telephoning was conceivably
+well-timed; not improbably the captain was receiving the report of somebody
+who had been sent to search Stateroom 29 in Lanyard's absence. He wondered
+and, wondering, glanced at Crane, to find that gentleman watching him with
+a whimsical glimmer which he was quick to extinguish when the captain said
+curtly, "Very good, Mr. Warde," and turned back from the telephone, his
+manner more than ever truculent.
+
+"Mr. Lanyard," he said--"Monsieur Duchemin, that is--a valuable paper has
+been stolen, an exceedingly valuable document. I don't know which carried
+it, Lieutenant Thackeray or Mr. Bartholomew. But I do know such a paper was
+in their possession. And to the best of my knowledge, we three were the
+only ones on board that did know it. And it has disappeared. Now, sir, you
+may or may not be deeper in this affair than you have admitted. If you are,
+I'd advise you to own up."
+
+"Monsieur le capitaine implies my complicity in this dastardly crime!"
+
+Osborne shook his head doggedly. "I imply nothing. I only say this: if you
+know anything you haven't told us, my advice is to make a clean breast of
+it."
+
+"I have nothing to tell you, monsieur, beyond the fact that I find you,
+your tone, your manner, and your choice of words, intolerably insolent."
+
+"Then you know nothing--?"
+
+"Monsieur!" Lanyard cried sharply.
+
+"Very good," the captain persisted. "I'll take your word for it--and give
+you till we take on our pilot to find the real criminal and make him give
+up that paper."
+
+"And if I fail?"
+
+"Not a soul on board leaves the _Assyrian_ till the murderer and thief are
+found--if they are not one."
+
+"But that is a general threat; whereas monsieur has honoured me by
+making this a personal matter. What punishment have you prepared for
+me specifically, if I fail to accomplish this task which baffles
+your--shrewdness?"
+
+"I'll at least inform the port authorities in New York, tell them who you
+are, and have you barred out of the country."
+
+"I want to say, Lanyard," Crane interposed, "this isn't my notion of how to
+deal with you, or in any way by my advice."
+
+"Thank you, monsieur," the adventurer replied icily, without removing his
+attention from the captain. "What else, Captain Osborne?"
+
+"That is all I have to say to you to-night, sir. Good-night."
+
+"But I have something more to say to you, monsieur le capitaine. First, I
+desire to give over to you this article which it will doubtless please you
+to consider stolen property." Lanyard placed the automatic pistol on the
+desk. "One of Lieutenant Thackeray's," he explained; "at Miss Brooke's
+suggestion, I borrowed it as a life-preserver, in event of another brush
+with this homicidal maniac."
+
+"She told us about that," Osborne said heavily, fumbling with the weapon.
+"What else, sir?"
+
+"Only this, monsieur le capitaine: I shall use my best endeavour to uncover
+the author of these crimes. If I succeed, be sure I shall denounce him. If
+I succeed only in securing this valuable paper you speak of, be equally
+sure you will never see it; for it shall leave my hands only to pass into
+those which I consider entirely trustworthy."
+
+"The devil!" Captain Osborne leaped from his chair quaking with fury. "You
+dare accuse me of disloyalty--!"
+
+"Now you mention it...." Lanyard cocked his head to one side with a
+maddening effect of deliberation. "No," he concluded--"no; I wouldn't
+accuse you of intentional treason, monsieur; for that would involve an
+imputation of intelligence...."
+
+He opened the door and nodded pleasantly to Crane and the third officer.
+
+"Good-night, gentlemen," he said silkily. "Oh, and you, too, Captain
+Osborne--good-night, I'm sure."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+IN STATEROOM 29
+
+
+In spite of his own anger, something far from being either assumed or
+inconsiderable, Lanyard was fain to pause, a few paces from the deck-house,
+and laugh quietly at a vast and incoherent booming which was resounding in
+the room he had just quitted--Captain Osborne trying to do justice to
+the emotions inspired in his virtuous bosom by the cheek of this damned
+gaol-bird.
+
+But suddenly, reminded of the grim reason for all this wretched brawling,
+Lanyard shrugged off his amusement. Beneath his very feet, almost a man
+lay dead, another perhaps dying, while the beast who had wrought that
+devilishness remained at large.
+
+He comprehended in a wondering regard that wide, star-blazoned arch of
+skies, that broad, dark, restful mystery of waters, that still, sweet world
+of peace through which the _Assyrian_ forged, muttering contentedly at her
+toil ... while Murder with foul hands and slavering chops skulked somewhere
+in the darkened fabric of her, somewhere beyond that black mouth of the
+deck-port yawning at Lanyard's elbow.
+
+From that same portal a man came abruptly but quietly, saw Lanyard standing
+there, gave him a staring look and grudging nod, and strode forward to the
+captain's quarters: Mr. Warde, the first officer.
+
+Lanyard recollected himself, and went below.
+
+Still the sailor guarded the door in that port alleyway; but now it stood
+wide, and Cecelia Brooke was on its threshold, conversing guardedly with
+the surgeon. Even as Lanyard caught sight of them, the latter bowed and
+turned aft, while the girl retreated and refastened the door on its hook.
+
+Thus reminded of Crane's shrewd questions, Lanyard was speculating rather
+foggily concerning the reason therefor as he turned down the passage to
+his own quarters. What had the American noticed, or been told, to make him
+surmise covert sympathy between the girl and the lieutenant?
+
+He caught himself yawning. Drowsiness buzzed in his brain. He had an
+incoherent feeling that he would now sleep long and heavily. Entering his
+stateroom, he put a shoulder against the door, pushing it to as he fumbled
+for the switch. The circumstance that the lights were no longer burning as
+he had left them failed to impress him as noteworthy in view of his belief
+that, by the captain's orders, Mr. Warde had been ransacking his effects in
+his absence.
+
+But when no more than a click responded to a turn of the switch, the room
+remaining quite dark, Lanyard uttered an imprecation, abruptly very wide
+awake indeed.
+
+Before he could move he stiffened to positive immobility: the cool, hard
+nose of a pistol had come into contact with his skull, just behind the ear.
+
+Simultaneously a softly-modulated voice advised him in purest German: "Be
+quite still, Herr Lanyard, and hold up your hands--so! Also, see that you
+utter no sound till I give you leave.... Karl, the handkerchief."
+
+Lanyard stood motionless, hands well elevated, while a heavy silk blindfold
+was whipped over his eyes and knotted tight at the back of his head.
+
+"Now your paws, Herr Lone Wolf--put them together behind your back,
+prudently making no attempt to reach a pocket."
+
+Obediently Lanyard permitted his wrists to be caught together with a second
+silk handkerchief. He could feel a slight sensation of heat upon his hands,
+and guessed that this was caused by the light of a flash-lamp held close
+to the flesh. None the less he took the chance of clenching his fists and
+tensing the muscles of his wrists.
+
+"Tightly, Karl."
+
+The bonds were made painfully fast. Still it did not seem to occur to his
+captors to oblige their prisoner to open his hands and relax his wrists.
+Lanyard perceived a glimmer of hope in this oversight: the enemy was
+normally stupid.
+
+"Now the lights again."
+
+After a little wait, during which he could hear the bulbs being pressed
+back into their sockets, the switch clicked once more.
+
+"And now, swine-dog!"--the pistol tapped his skull significantly--"if you
+value your life, speak, and speak quickly. Where is that document?"
+
+"Document?" Lanyard repeated in a tone of wonder.
+
+"Unless you are eager to explore the hereafter, tell us where we may find
+it without delay."
+
+"Upon my word, I don't know what you're talking about."
+
+"You lie!" the German snapped. "Face about!"
+
+Somebody grasped his shoulders roughly and swung him round to the light,
+the nose of the pistol shifting to press against his abdomen.
+
+"Search him, Karl."
+
+Unseen hands investigated his pockets cunningly. As they finished, the man
+who answered to the name of Karl became articulate for the first time,
+following a grunt of disappointment:
+
+"Nothing--he has it not upon him."
+
+"Look more thoroughly. Did you think him idiot enough to carry it where
+you'd find it at the first dip? Imbecile!"
+
+For the purpose of this second search Lanyard's garments were ripped
+open, and the enemy made sure that he carried nothing next his skin more
+incriminating than a money-belt, which was forcibly removed.
+
+"His shoes--see to his shoes!" the first speaker insisted irritably. "Sit
+down, Lanyard!"
+
+A petulant push sent the adventurer reeling across the cabin to fall upon
+the lounge seat beneath the port. With some effort he assumed a sitting
+position, while Karl, kneeling, hastily unlaced and tore off his shoes and
+socks.
+
+"Nothing, captain," was the report.
+
+"Damnation!... Continue to search his luggage. Leave nothing unexamined.
+In particular look into every hole and corner where none but a fool would
+attempt to hide anything. This fine gentleman imagines we value his
+intelligence too highly to believe he would leave the paper in plain
+sight."
+
+To an accompaniment of sounds indicating that Karl was obeying his
+superior, this last resumed in a tone of lofty contempt:
+
+"How is it you have abandoned the habit of going armed, Herr Lone Wolf?
+That is not like you. Is it that you grow unwary through drug-using? But
+that matters nothing. We have more important business to speak over, you
+and I. You will be very, very docile, and answer promptly, also in a low
+voice, if you would avoid getting hurt. Do you understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," Lanyard replied, furtively working at the bonds on his wrists.
+
+"Good. We speak together like good friends, yes?"
+
+"Naturally," said Lanyard. "It is so conducive to chumminess to be caressed
+with an automatic pistol--you've no idea!"
+
+"Oblige by speaking German. Our ears are sick with all this bastard
+English. Also, more quietly speak. Do not put me to the regrettable
+necessity of shooting you."
+
+"How regrettable? You didn't stick at braining those others--"
+
+"Hardly the same thing. You are not like those English swine. You are
+French; and Germany has no hatred for France, but only pity that it so
+fatuously opposes manifest destiny. In truth, you are not even French, but
+a great thief; and criminals have no patriotism, nor loyalty to any State
+but their own, the state of moral turpitude."
+
+The speaker interrupted himself to relish his wit with a thick chuckle. And
+Lanyard's jaws ached with the strain of self-control. He continued to pluck
+at the folds of silk while concentrating in effort to memorise the voice,
+which he failed utterly to place. Undoubtedly this animal was a shipboard
+acquaintance, one who knew him well; but those detestable German gutturals
+disguised his accents quite beyond identification.
+
+"For all that, you are not wise so to try my patience. I permit you five
+minutes by my watch in which to make up your mind to surrender that
+document."
+
+"How often must I tell you," Lanyard enquired, "all this talk of documents
+is Greek to me?"
+
+"Then you have five minutes to brush up your classical education, and
+translate into terms suited to your intelligence. I will have that document
+from you or--in four more minutes--shoot you dead."
+
+To this Lanyard said nothing. But his patient attentions to the
+handkerchief round his wrists were beginning perceptibly to be rewarded.
+
+"Moreover, Herr Lanyard, you will do yourself a very good turn by
+confessing--entirely aside from saving your life."
+
+"How is that?"
+
+"Providing you persuade me of your good faith, I am empowered to offer you
+employment in our service."
+
+Lanyard's breath passed hardly through a throat swollen with rage, chagrin,
+and hatred, all hopelessly impotent. But he succeeded in preserving an
+unruffled countenance, as his captor's next words demonstrated.
+
+"You are surprised, yes? You are thinking it over? Take your time--you have
+three minutes more. Or perhaps you are sulky, resenting that our cleverness
+has found you out? Be reasonable, my good man. Think: you cannot be
+insensible to the honour my offer does you."
+
+"What do you want of me?"
+
+"First, that paper--thereafter to use your surpassing talents to the glory
+of God and Fatherland. In addition, you will be greatly rewarded."
+
+"Now you do begin to interest me," Lanyard said coolly.... Surely he could
+contrive some way to slay this beast with his naked hands! He must play for
+time.... "How rewarded?"
+
+"As I say, with a place in the Prussian Secret Service, its protection,
+freedom to ply your trade unhindered in America, even countenanced, till
+that country becomes a German province under German laws."
+
+"But do I hear you offer this to a Frenchman?"
+
+"Undeceive yourself. Men of all nations to-day, recognising that the star
+of Germany is in the ascendant, that soon all nations will be German,
+are hastening to make their peace beforehand by rendering Germany good
+service."
+
+"Something in that, perhaps," Lanyard admitted thoughtfully.
+
+"Think well, my friend.... Yes, Karl?"
+
+The voice of the other spy responded sullenly: "Nothing--absolutely
+nothing."
+
+"Two minutes, Herr Lanyard."
+
+Of a sudden Lanyard's face was violently distorted in a grimace of terror.
+He lurched his shoulders forward, openly struggling with his bonds.
+
+"But--good God!" he protested in a voice of terror, "you can't possibly be
+so unreasonable! I tell you, I haven't got your damned paper!"
+
+A loop of the handkerchief slipped over one hand.
+
+"Be still! Cease your struggles. And not so loud, my friend!" The
+peremptory voice dropped into mockery as Lanyard, pale and exhausted, sat
+back trembling--and a second loop of silk dropped over the other hand. "So
+you begin to appreciate that we mean business, yes? One minute and thirty
+seconds!"
+
+"Have mercy!" the adventurer whined desperately--and licked his lips as if
+he found them dry with fear. Now both hands were all but wholly free. True:
+he remained blindfolded and covered by a deadly weapon. "Give me a chance.
+I'll do anything you wish! But I can't give you what I haven't got."
+
+"Be silent! Here, Karl."
+
+There was a sound of unintelligible murmuring as the two spies conferred
+together. Lanyard writhed in apparent extremity of terror. His hands were
+free. He sought hopelessly for inspiration. What to do without arms?
+
+"Be grateful to Karl. He urges that perhaps you know nothing of the
+document."
+
+"Don't you think I'd tell if I did know?"
+
+"Then you have one minute--no, forty seconds--in which to pledge yourself
+to the Prussian Secret Service."
+
+"You want me to swear--?"
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"Then hear me," said Lanyard earnestly: "_You damned canaille_!" And in
+one movement he tore the bandage from his eyes and launched himself head
+foremost at the man who stood over him.
+
+He caught part of an oath drowned out by the splitting report of a pistol
+that went off within an inch of his ear. Then his head took the man full
+in the belly, and both went sprawling to the deck, Lanyard fighting like a
+maniac.
+
+Sheer luck had guided clawing fingers to the right wrist of his antagonist,
+round which they shut like jaws of a trap. At the same time he wrenched the
+other's arm high above his head.
+
+Momentarily expecting the shock of a bullet from the pistol of the second
+spy, he found time to wonder that it was so long deferred, and even in
+the fury of his struggles, out of the corner of one eye caught a fugitive
+glimpse of a tallish man, masked, standing back to the forward partition in
+a pose of singular indecision, pistol poised in his grasp.
+
+Then the efforts of his immediate adversary threw him into a position in
+which he was unable to see the other.
+
+Of a sudden the stateroom was filled with the thunder of an automatic, its
+seven cartridges discharged in one brisk, rippling crash.
+
+It was as if a white-hot iron had been laid across Lanyard's shoulder.
+Beneath him the man started convulsively, with such force as almost to
+throw him off bodily, then relaxed altogether and lay limp and still,
+pinning one of Lanyard's arms under him.
+
+Its visor displaced, the face of Baron von Harden was revealed, features
+distorted, eyes glaring, a frozen mask of hate and terror.
+
+His arm free, the adventurer rolled away from the corpse in time to see the
+open window-port blocked by the body of the other spy.
+
+Gathering himself together, he snatched up the pistol that dropped from the
+inert grasp of the dead man, and levelled it at the port.
+
+But now that space was empty.
+
+He rose and paused for an instant, his glance instinctively seeking the
+ledge above the hand-basin.
+
+The hypodermic outfit was there, but minus the phial.
+
+In the alleyway rose a confusion of running feet and shouting tongues.
+A heavy banging rang on the door to Stateroom 29. Crane's nasal accents
+called upon Lanyard to open.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+OFF NANTUCKET
+
+
+Upon the authors of that commotion Lanyard wasted no consideration
+whatever. Let them knock and clamour; he had more urgent work in hand, and
+knew too well the penalty were he stupid enough to unbolt to them. Their
+bodies would dam the doorway hopelessly; insistent hands would hinder him;
+innumerable importunate enquiries would be dinned at him, all immaterial
+in contrast with this emergency, a catechism one would need an hour to
+satisfy. And all attempts would be futile to make them understand that,
+while they plagued him with futile questions, a murderer and spy and thief
+was making good his escape, being afforded ample opportunity to slough all
+traces of his recent work and resume unchallenged his place among them.
+
+No; if by any freak of good fortune, any exertion of wit or daring, that
+one were to be apprehended, it must be within the next few minutes, it
+could only be through immediate pursuit.
+
+Nor did the adventurer waste time debating the better course. With him,
+whose ways of life were ceaselessly beset by instant and mortal perils,
+each with its especial and imperative demand upon his readiness and
+ingenuity, action must ever press so hard upon the heels of thought as to
+make the two seem one.
+
+For that matter, the whole transaction had been characterised by almost
+unbelievable rapidity. And that square opening of the window-port was
+hardly vacant when Lanyard sprang to his feet; the fugitive had barely time
+to find his own upon the outer deck before Lanyard leaped after him; the
+first thumps upon the panels of his door were still echoing when he thrust
+head and shoulders out of the port and began to pump the automatic at a
+shadow fleeing aft upon that narrow breadth of planking between rail and
+wall.
+
+Then, at the third shot, the automatic jammed upon a discharged shell.
+
+Exasperated, the adventurer cast the weapon from him, shrugged hastily out
+of his unfastened coat and waistcoat, hitched tight his belt, and clambered
+through the port.
+
+Dropping to the deck, he turned in time to see the fugitive dart round the
+shoulder of the superstructure.
+
+As Lanyard gained the after rail of the promenade deck a man standing on
+the boat-deck at the head of the companion-ladder greeted him with pistol
+fire. He dodged back, untouched, and instantaneously devised a stratagem to
+cope with this untoward development.
+
+Overhead, at the side, a lifeboat hung on its davits, ready for emergency
+launching, the gap in the rail which it filled when normally swung inboard
+spanned only by a length of line. And the darkness in the shadow of the
+boat was dense, an excellent screen.
+
+Climbing upon the rail, Lanyard grasped the edge of the deck overhead and
+drew himself up undetected by his quarry, whom he espied still holding
+the head of the companion ladder, hidden from the bridge by the after
+deck-house, standing ready to shoot Lanyard should he attempt to renew the
+pursuit by that approach.
+
+At the same time, "Karl" seemed mysteriously occupied with some object or
+objects in whose manipulation he was hampered to a degree by the necessity
+under which he laboured of holding his pistol ready and dividing his
+attention.
+
+A man of good stature, broad at the shoulders, slender at the hips, he
+poised himself with athletic grace--the lower part of his face masked by
+what Lanyard took to be a dark silk handkerchief.
+
+Lanyard heard him swearing in German.
+
+Then a brisk little spray of sparks jetted from the flint and steel of a
+patent cigar-lighter in the hands of the spy. And as Lanyard rose from his
+knees after ducking beneath the line, a stream of fatter sparks spat from
+the end of a fuse.
+
+The man leaned over the rail and cast a small black object to which the
+sputtering fuse was attached, down to the main deck.
+
+As it struck midway between superstructure and stern it burst into
+brilliant flame, releasing upon the night an electric-blue glare that must
+have been visible from any point within the compass of the horizon.
+
+A yell of profane remonstrance saluted the light, and throughout the brief
+passage that followed Lanyard was conscious that pistols and rifles on the
+after deck below were making him and his antagonist their targets.
+
+Before the German could face about, Lanyard, moving almost noiselessly in
+his bare feet, had covered more than half the intervening space. In another
+breath he might have had the fellow at a disadvantage. But the distance
+was too great. Twice the automatic blazed in his face as he closed in, the
+bullets clearing narrowly--or else he fancied that their deadly cold breath
+fanned his cheek.
+
+Then the spy's weapon in turn went out of action. Half blinded, Lanyard
+clipped the man round the body and hugged him tight, exerting all his skill
+and strength to effect a throw.
+
+That effort failed; his onslaught was met with address and ability that
+all but matched his own. The animal he embraced had muscles like tempered
+springs and the cunning and fury of a wild beast in a trap. For a moment
+Lanyard was able to accomplish no more than to smother resistance in a
+rib-crushing embrace; no sooner did he relax it than all attempts to shift
+his hold were anticipated and met half way, forcing him back upon the
+defensive.
+
+Yet he was given little chance to prove himself the master. The first phase
+of the struggle was still in contest when the rear door of the smoking room
+opened and a man stepped out, paused, summed up the situation in a glance,
+seized Lanyard from behind.
+
+The adventurer felt his arms grasped by hands whose strength seemed little
+short of superhuman, and wrenched back so violently that his very bones
+cracked. Fairly lifted from his feet, he was held as helpless as an infant
+kicking in the arms of its nurse.
+
+Released, the other spy stepped back and swung his left fist viciously to
+Lanyard's jaw. Something in the brain of the adventurer seemed to let
+go; his head dropped weakly to one side. The man who had struck him said
+quietly, "Loose the fool, Ed," and followed as Lanyard reeled away,
+striking him repeatedly.
+
+For a giddy moment Lanyard was darkly conscious--as one dreams an evil
+dream--of blows raining mercilessly about his head and body, blows that
+drove him back athwartships toward a fate dark and terrible, a great void
+of blackness. He felt unutterably weary, and was weakened by a sensation of
+nausea. Beneath him his knees buckled. There fell one final blow, ruthless
+as the wrath of God.
+
+He was falling backward into nothingness, into an everlasting gulf of night
+that yawned for him....
+
+As he shot under the guard rope and into space between the edge of the deck
+and the keel of the lifeboat, the spy rounded smartly on a heel and darted
+to the smoking-room door. His confederate was in the act of stepping across
+the raised threshold. He followed, closed the door.
+
+The first officer, charging aft from the bridge, rounded the deck-house and
+pulled up with a grunt of surprise to find the deck completely deserted....
+
+The shock of icy immersion reanimated Lanyard.
+
+He felt himself plunging headlong down, down, and down to inky depths
+unguessable. The sheer habit of an accustomed swimmer alone bade him hold
+his breath.
+
+Then came a pause: he was no more descending; for a time of indeterminate
+duration, an age of anguish, he seemed to float without motion, suspended
+in frigid purgatory. Against his ribs something hammered like a racing
+engine. In his ears sounded a vast roaring, the deafening voices of a
+thousand waterfalls. His head felt swollen and enormous, on the point of
+bursting wide.
+
+Without warning expelled from those depths, he shot full half-length out of
+water, and fell back into the milky welter of the _Assyrian's_ wake.
+
+Instinctively he kept afloat with feeble strokes.
+
+The cold was bitter, as sharp as the teeth of death; but his head was now
+clear, he was able to appreciate what had befallen him.
+
+Already the _Assyrian_, forging onward unchecked, had left him well astern,
+her progress distinctly disclosed by that infernal bluish glare spouting
+from her after deck.
+
+She seemed absurdly small. Incredulity infected Lanyard's mind. Nothing so
+tiny, so insignificant, so make-believe as that silhouette of a ship could
+conceivably be that great liner, the _Assyrian_....
+
+Temporarily a burning pain in his left shoulder drove all other
+considerations out of mind. The salt water was beginning to smart in the
+raw, superficial wound made by that assassin's bullet ... back there in the
+stateroom ... long ago....
+
+Then the cold began to bite into his marrow, and he struggled manfully
+to swim, taking long, slow strokes, at first comparatively powerful, by
+insensible degrees losing force.
+
+Just why he took this trouble he did not know: for some dim reason it
+seemed desirable to live as long as possible. Withal he was aware he could
+not live. Whether careless or utterly ignorant of his fate, the _Assyrian_
+was trudging on and on, leaving him ever farther astern, lost beyond rescue
+in that weird, bleak waste. Even were an alarm to be given, were she to
+stop now and put out a boat, it would find him, if it found him at all, too
+late.
+
+The cold was killing.
+
+He felt very sleepy. Drowsily he apprehended the beginning of the end.
+His senses, growing numb with cold, presently must cease to function
+altogether. Then he would forget, and nothing would matter any more.
+
+Yet the will to live persisted amazingly. Had Lanyard wished it he could
+not have ceased to swim, at least to keep afloat. Vaguely he wondered how
+people ever managed to commit suicide by drowning; it seemed to pass human
+power to resist that buoyancy which sustained one, to let go, let one's
+self go down. Impossible to conceive how that was ever done....
+
+Why should he care to go on living?
+
+No reading that riddle!...
+
+On obscure impulse he gave up swimming, turned upon his back, floated face
+to the sky, derelict, resigning himself to the cradling arms of the sea.
+The gradual, slow rocking of the swells soothed his passion like a kindly
+opiate. The cold no more irked him, but seemed somehow strangely anodynous.
+Imperturbably he envisaged death, without fear, without welcome. What must
+be, must....
+
+For all that, life clutched at him with jealous hands. More than ever
+sleepy, before he slept that last, long sleep he must somehow solve this
+enigma, learn the reason why life continued so to allure his failing
+senses.
+
+Athwart the drab texture of consciousness wild fancies played like heat
+lightning in a still midsummer night.
+
+Death's countenance was kind.
+
+That wide field of stars, drooping low and lifting away with rhythmic
+motion, would sometime dip swiftly down to the very sea itself and,
+swinging back, take with it his soul to some remote bourne....
+
+The deeps were yielding up their mysteries. Past him a huge pale monster
+swept at furious pace, hissing grimly as it passed, like some spectral
+Nemesis pursuing the _Assyrian_.
+
+Indifferently he speculated concerning the reality of this phenomenon.
+
+The heave of a swell enabled him to glance incuriously after the steamship.
+She seemed smaller, less genuine than ever, a shadow shape that boasted
+visibility solely through that unearthly light on her after deck. Even
+that now had waned to a mere glimmer, the flicker of a candle lost in the
+immensities of that night-bound world of empty sky and empty ocean. Even as
+he that had been named Michael Lanyard was a lost light, a tiny flame that
+guttered toward its swift extinction....
+
+Why live, when one might die and, dying, find endless rest?
+
+Like a blazing thunderbolt one word rent the slumbrous web of sentience:
+_Ekstrom_!
+
+Galvanised by the flood of hatred unpent by the syllables of that name,
+Lanyard began again to swim, flailing the water with frantic arms as if to
+win somewhither by the very violence of his efforts.
+
+This the one cogent reason why he must not, could not, die....
+
+Unjust to require him to give up life while that one lived. Unfair.... It
+must not be!...
+
+Across the sea rolled a dull, brutish detonation. The swimmer, swung high
+on the bosom of a great swell, saw a vast sheet of fire raving heavenward
+from the _Assyrian_.
+
+It vanished instantly.
+
+When his dazzled vision cleared, he could see no more of the ship. He
+imagined a faint, wild rumour of panic voices, conjured up scenes of horror
+indescribable as that great fabric sank almost instantaneously, as if some
+gigantic hand plucked her under.
+
+What had happened? Had the accomplices of the dead Baron von Harden set off
+an infernal machine aboard the vessel? In the name of reason, why? They had
+got what they sought, that accursed document, whatever it was, that page
+torn from the Book of Doom. Then why...?
+
+And to what end had they exploded that light bomb on the after deck?
+
+To make the _Assyrian_ a glaring target in the night--what else? A target
+for what?...
+
+Of a sudden all rational mental processes were erased from Lanyard's
+consciousness. A wave of pure fear flooded him, body, mind, and soul. He
+began to struggle like a maniac, fighting the waters that hindered his
+flight from some hideous thing that was lifting up from the ocean's ooze to
+drag him down.
+
+He heard a voice screaming thinly, and knew it was his own.
+
+The impossible was happening to him, out there, alone and helpless on the
+face of the waters. A shape of horror was rising out of the deep to engorge
+him. He could feel distinctly the slow, irresistible heave of its bulk
+beneath him. His feet touched and slipped upon its horrible sleek flanks.
+
+His most desperate efforts were all unavailing. He could not escape. The
+thing came up too rapidly. Following that first mad thrill of contact with
+it underfoot, he was lifted swiftly and irresistibly into the air. Almost
+instantly he was floundering in knee-deep waters that parted, cascading
+away on either hand. Then, elevated well above the sea, he slid and fell
+prone upon a slimy wet surface.
+
+His clawing hands clutched something solid and substantial, an upright bar
+of metal.
+
+Incredulously Lanyard pawed the body of the monster beneath him. His hands
+passed over a riveted joint of metal plates. Looking up, he made out the
+truncated cone of a conning tower with its antennae-like periscope tubes
+stencilled black upon the soft purple of the star-strewn sky.
+
+Slowly the truth came home: a submarine had risen beneath him. He lay upon
+its after deck, grasping a stanchion that supported the small raised bridge
+round the conning tower.
+
+He sobbed a little in sheer hysteric gratitude, that this miracle had been
+vouchsafed unto him, that he had thus been spared to live on against his
+hour with Ekstrom.
+
+But when he sought to drag himself up to the bridge, he could not, he
+was too weak and faint. Ceasing to struggle, he rested in half stupour,
+panting.
+
+With a harsh clang a hatch was thrown back. Rousing, Lanyard saw several
+figures emerge from the conning tower. Men uncouthly clothed in shapeless,
+shiny leather garments, straddled and stretched above him, filling their
+lungs with the sweet air. He tried to call to them, but evoked a mere
+rattle from his throat.
+
+Two came to the edge of the bridge and stood immediately over him, fixing
+binoculars to their eyes, their voices quite audible.
+
+A pang of despair shot through Lanyard when he heard them conferring
+together in the German tongue.
+
+Death, then, was but a little delayed.
+
+Thereafter he lay in dumb apathy, save that he shivered and his teeth
+chattered uncontrollably.
+
+Through the torpor that rested like a black cloud upon his senses he caught
+broken phrases, snatches of sentences:
+
+"... _sinking fast ... struck square amidships ... broke her back_...."
+
+"... _trouble with her boats. There goes one over_!..."
+
+"... _fools jumping overboard like cattle_...."
+
+"_What's that rocket? Do the swine want us to shell their boats_?"
+
+"_Why not? They're asking for it_!"
+
+One of the officers lowered his glasses and barked a series of sharp
+commands. The crew on deck leaped to attention. One leaned over the
+conning-tower hatch and shouted to his mates below. A hatch forward of
+the tower opened, and a quick-firing gun on a disappearing carriage swung
+smoothly and silently up from its lair.
+
+The other officer, looking down, started violently.
+
+"_Verdammt_! What's this?"
+
+The first rejoined him. "Impossible!"
+
+"Impossible or not--a man or a cadaver!"
+
+"Have him up and see...."
+
+By order, two of the crew dragged Lanyard up to the bridge, supporting him
+by main strength while the officers examined him.
+
+"At the last gasp, but alive," one announced.
+
+"How the devil did he get out here?"
+
+"From the _Assyrian_--"
+
+"Impossible for any man to swim this far since our torpedo struck--"
+
+"Then he must have gone overboard before it struck--or was thrown--"
+
+A cry of alarm from the group about the gun, awaiting final orders to open
+fire upon the _Assyrian's_ boats, interrupted the conference. The officers
+swung away in haste.
+
+"Hell's fury! what's that searchlight?"
+
+"A Yankee destroyer--in all probability the one we dodged yesterday
+afternoon."
+
+"She'll find us yet if we don't submerge. Forward, there--house that gun!
+And get below--quickly!"
+
+During a moment of apparent confusion, one of the men sustaining Lanyard
+caught the attention of an officer.
+
+"What shall we do with this fellow, sir?" he enquired.
+
+"Leave him here to sink or swim as we go down," snapped the officer--"and
+be damned to him!"
+
+With a supreme effort the adventurer sank his fingers deep into the arms of
+the two men.
+
+"Wait!" he gasped faintly in German. "On the Emperor's service--"
+
+"What's that?" The officer turned back sharply.
+
+"Imperial Secret Service," Lanyard faltered--"Personal
+Division--Wilhelmstrasse Number 27--"
+
+A brilliant glare settled suddenly upon the deck of the submarine, and was
+welcomed by a panicky gust of oaths. One officer had already popped through
+the conning-tower hatch, followed by several of the crew. There remained
+only those supporting Lanyard, and the second officer.
+
+"Take him below!" the latter ordered. "He may be telling the truth. If
+not...."
+
+In the distance a gun boomed. A shell shrieked over the submarine and
+dropped into the sea not a hundred yards to starboard. The men rushed
+Lanyard toward the conning tower. He tried feebly to help them. In that
+effort consciousness was altogether blotted out....
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+SUB SEA
+
+
+When he opened his eyes again he was resting, after a fashion, naked
+between harsh, damp blankets in a narrow, low-ceiled bunk inches too short
+for one of his stature.
+
+After an experimental squirm or two he lay very still; his back and all his
+limbs were stiff and sore, his bullet-seared shoulder burned intolerably
+beneath a rudely applied first-aid dressing, and he was breathing heavily
+long, labouring inhalations of an atmosphere sickeningly dank, close, and
+foul with unspeakable stenches, for which the fumes of sulphuric acid with
+a rank reek of petroleum and lubricating oils formed but a modest and
+retiring background.
+
+Also his head felt very thick and dull. He found it extremely difficult to
+think, and for some time, indeed, was quite unable to think to any purpose.
+
+His very eyes ached in their sockets.
+
+In the ceiling glowed an electric bulb, dimly illuminating a cubicle barely
+big enough to accommodate the bunk, a dresser, and a small desk with a
+folding seat. The inner wall was a slightly concave surface of steel plates
+whose seams oozed moisture. In the opposite wall was a sliding door, open,
+beyond which ran a narrow alleyway floored with metal grating. Everything
+in sight was enamelled with white paint and clammy with the sweat of that
+foetid air.
+
+Over all an unnatural hush brooded, now and again accentuated by a rumble
+of distant voices and gusts of vacant laughter, once or twice by a curious
+popping. For a long time he heard nothing else whatever. The effect was
+singularly disquieting and did its bit to quicken torpid senses to grasp
+his plight.
+
+Sluggishly enough Lanyard pieced together fragments of lurid memories,
+reconstructing the sequence of last night's events scene by scene to the
+moment of his rescue by the U-boat.
+
+So, it appeared, he was aboard a German submersible, virtually a prisoner,
+though posing as an agent of the Personal Intelligence Department of the
+German Secret Service.
+
+To that inspiration of failing consciousness he owed his life, or such
+of its span as now remained to him, a term whose duration could only be
+defined by his ability to carry off the imposture pending problematic
+opportunity to escape. And, assuming that this last were ever offered him,
+there was no present possibility of guessing how long it might not be
+deferred.
+
+Its butcher's mission successfully accomplished, the U-boat was not
+improbably even now en route for Heligoland, beginning a transatlantic
+cruise of weeks that might never end save in a nameless grave at the bottom
+of the Four Seas.
+
+Only the matter of impersonation failed to embarrass in prospect. A natural
+linguist, Lanyard's three years within the German lines had put a rare
+finish upon his mastery of German. More than this, he was well versed in
+the workings of the Prussian spy system. As Dr. Paul Rodiek, Wilhelmstrasse
+Agent Number 27, he was safe as long as he found no acquaintance of that
+gentleman in the complement of the submarine; for, largely upon information
+furnished by Lanyard himself, Dr. Rodiek had been secretly apprehended
+and executed in the Tower the day before Lanyard left London to join the
+_Assyrian_.
+
+But the question of the U-boat's present whereabouts and its movements
+in the immediate future disturbed the adventurer profoundly. He was
+elaborately incurious about Heligoland; and several weeks' association
+with the Boche in the close quarters of a submarine was a prospect that
+revolted. Wellnigh any fate were preferable....
+
+Uncertain footsteps sounded in the alleyway, paused at the entrance to his
+cubicle. He turned his head wearily on the pillow. In the doorway stood
+a man whose slenderly elegant carriage of a Prussian officer was not
+disguised even by his shapeless wreck of a naval lieutenant's uniform, a
+man with a countenance of singularly unpleasant cast, leaving out of all
+consideration the grease and grime that discoloured it. His narrow forehead
+slanted back just a trace too sharply, his nose was thin and overlong, his
+mouth thin and cruel beneath its ambitious mustache ŕ la Kaiser; his small
+black eyes, set much too close together, blazed with unholy exhilaration.
+
+As soon as he spoke Lanyard understood that he was drunk, drunk with more
+than the champagne of which he presently boasted.
+
+"Awake, eh?" he greeted Lanyard with a mirthless snarl. "You've slept like
+the dead man I took you for at first, my friend--a solid fourteen hours, my
+word for it! Feeling better now?"
+
+Lanyard's essays to reply began and ended in a croak for water. The
+Prussian nodded, disappeared, returned with an aluminium cup of stale cold
+water mixed with a little brandy.
+
+"Champagne if you like," he offered, as Lanyard, painfully propping himself
+up on an elbow, gulped like an animal from the vessel held to his lips. "We
+are holding a little celebration, you know."
+
+Lanyard dropped back to the pillow, the question in his eyes.
+
+"Celebrating our success," the Prussian responded. "We got her, and that
+means much honour and a long furlough to boot, when we get home, just as
+failure would have spelled--I don't like to think what. I shouldn't care to
+fill the shoes of those poor devils who let the _Assyrian_ escape them off
+Ireland, I can tell you."
+
+Something very much like true fear flickered in his small eyes as he
+pondered the punishment meted out to those who failed.
+
+So the U-boat was homeward bound! Strange one noticed no motion of her
+progress, heard no noise of machinery.
+
+"Where are we?" Lanyard whispered.
+
+"Peacefully asleep on the bottom, about five miles south of Martha's
+Vineyard, waiting till it is dark enough to slip in to our base."
+
+"Base?"
+
+The Prussian hiccoughed and giggled. "On the south shore of the Vineyard,"
+he confided with alcoholic glee: "snuggest little haven heart could wish,
+well to the north of all deep-sea traffic; and the coastwise trade runs
+still farther north, through Vineyard Sound, other side the island. Not
+a soul ever comes that way, not a soul suspects. How should they?
+The admirable charts of the Yankee Coast and Geodetic Survey"--he
+sneered--"show no break in the south beach of the island, between the ocean
+and the ponds. But there is one. The sea made the breach during a gale, our
+people helped with a little Trotyl, tides and storms did the rest. Now we
+can enter a secluded, landlocked harbour with just enough water at low
+tide, and lie hidden there till the word comes to move again--three miles
+of dense scrub forest, all privately owned as a game preserve, fenced and
+patrolled, between us and the nearest cultivated land--and friends in
+plenty on the island to keep all our needs supplied--petroleum, fresh
+vegetables, champagne, all that. Just the same we take no chances--never
+make our landfall by day, never enter or leave harbour except at night."
+
+He paused, contemplating Lanyard owlishly. "Ought not to tell you all
+this, I presume," he continued, more soberly, though the wild light still
+flickered ominously in his eyes. "But it is safe enough; you will see for
+yourself in a few hours; and then ... either you are all right, or you will
+never live to tell of it. We radio'd for information about Wilhelmstrasse
+Number 27 just before dawn, after we had dodged that damned Yankee
+destroyer. Ought to get an answer to-night, when we come up."
+
+Heavier footsteps rang in the alleyway. The Prussian made a grimace of
+dislike.
+
+"Here comes the commander," he cautioned uneasily.
+
+A great blond Viking of a German in the uniform of a captain shouldered
+heavily through the doorway and, acknowledging the salute of the rat-faced
+subaltern with a bare nod, stood looking down at Lanyard in taciturn
+silence, hostility in his blood-shot blue eyes.
+
+"How long since he wakened?" he asked thickly, with the accent of a
+Bavarian.
+
+"A minute or two ago."
+
+"Why did you not inform me?"
+
+The tone was offensively domineering, thanks like enough to drink, nerves,
+and hatred of his job and all things and persons pertaining to it.
+
+The subaltern coloured. "He asked for water--I got it for him."
+
+The commander stared churlishly, then addressed Lanyard: "How are you now?"
+
+"Very faint," Lanyard said truthfully. But he would have lied had it been
+otherwise with him. It was his book to make time in which to collect his
+thoughts, concoct a bullet-proof story, plan against an adverse answer to
+that wireless enquiry.
+
+"Can you eat, drink a little champagne?"
+
+Lanyard nodded slightly, adding a feeble "Please."
+
+The Bavarian glanced significantly at his subaltern, who hastened to leave
+them.
+
+"Who are you? What is your name?"
+
+"Dr. Paul Rodiek."
+
+"Your employment?"
+
+"Personal Intelligence Bureau--confidential agent."
+
+"What were you doing on board the _Assyrian_?"
+
+Lanyard mustered enough strength to look the man squarely in the eye.
+
+"Pardon," he said coldly. "You must know your question is indiscreet."
+
+"I must know more about you."
+
+"It should be enough," Lanyard ventured boldly, "to know that I set off
+that flare as arranged, at risk of my life."
+
+"How came you overboard?"
+
+"In the scuffle caused by my lighting the flare."
+
+"So you tell me. But we found you half clothed, lacking any sort of
+identification. Am I to accept your unsupported word?"
+
+"My papers are naturally at the bottom of the sea, in the garments I
+discarded lest their weight drag me down. If you have doubts," Lanyard
+continued firmly, "it is your privilege to settle them by communicating via
+radio with Seventy-ninth Street."
+
+He shut his eyes wearily and turned his head aside on the pillow, confident
+that this reference to the headquarters and secret wireless station of the
+Prussian spy system in New York would win him peace for a time at least.
+
+After a moment the commander uttered a non-committal grunt. "We shall see,"
+he prophesied darkly, and went away.
+
+Later, one of the crew brought Lanyard a dish of greasy stew and potatoes,
+lukewarm, with bread and a half-bottle of excellent champagne.
+
+He ate all he could stomach of the first, devoured the second ravenously,
+and drained the bottle of its ultimate life-giving drop.
+
+Then, immeasurably refreshed and fortified in body and spirit, he turned
+face to the wall, composed himself as if to sleep, shut his eyes, adjusted
+the tempo of his respiration, and lay quite still, wide awake and thinking
+hard.
+
+After a while somebody tramped into the cubicle, bent over Lanyard
+inquisitively and, satisfied that he slept, retired, taking away the empty
+bottle and dishes.
+
+Otherwise his meditations were disturbed only by those echoes of revelry
+in honour of the late manifestation of the Hun's divine right to do wanton
+murder on the high seas.
+
+The rumour waxed and waned, died into dull mutterings, broke out afresh in
+spurts of merriment that held an hysterical note. Once a quarrel sprang up
+and was silenced by the commander's deep, unpleasant tones. Corks popped
+spasmodically. Again there were sounds much like a man's sobbing; but these
+were promptly blared down by a phonograph with a typically American accent.
+When that palled, a sentimental disciple of frightfulness sang Tannenbaum
+in a melting tenor.
+
+Everything tended to effect an impression that all, commander and meanest
+mechanic alike, were making forlorn efforts to forget.
+
+Devoutly Lanyard prayed they might be successful, at least until the
+submarine made her secret base. If too much alcohol was bad, too much
+brooding was infinitely worse for the German temperament. He remembered
+one U-boat commander who, returning to the home port after a conspicuously
+successful cruise, had been taken ashore in a strait-jacket.
+
+Lanyard himself did not care to dwell upon those scenes which must have
+been enacted on board the _Assyrian_ after the torpedo struck....
+
+Deliberately ignoring all else, he set himself the task of reviewing those
+events which had led up to his going overboard.
+
+One by one he considered the incidents of that night, painstakingly
+dissected them, examined their every phase in minute analysis, weighing for
+ulterior meaning every word uttered in his presence, harking even farther
+back to reconstruct his acquaintance with each actor from the very moment
+of its inception, seeking that hint which he was convinced must be
+somewhere hidden in the history of the affair, waiting only recognition to
+lead straightway out of this gloomy maze of mystery into a sunlit open of
+understanding.
+
+In vain: there was an ambiguity in that business to baffle the keenest and
+most pertinacious investigation.
+
+The conduct of Cecelia Brooke alone bristled with inconsistencies
+inexplicable, the conduct of the German spies no less.
+
+To get better perspective upon the problem, he reduced the premises to
+their barest summary:
+
+A valuable dossier brought on board the _Assyrian_ (no matter by whom) had
+come into the possession of British agents, with the knowledge of Captain
+Osborne. Thackeray had secreted it in that fraudulent bandage. German
+agents, apparently under the leadership of Baron von Harden, had waylaid
+him, knocked him senseless, unwrapped the bandage, but somehow (probably
+in the first instance through the interference of the Brooke girl) had
+overlooked the document. Subsequently the Brooke girl had found and
+entrusted it to Lanyard. (No matter why!) He on his part had exerted his
+utmost inventiveness in hiding it away. Nevertheless it had been discovered
+and abstracted within an hour.
+
+By whom?
+
+Not improbably by the Brooke girl herself. Repenting her impulsiveness,
+after leaving Lanyard with the captain, from whom she had doubtless learned
+the truth about "Monsieur Duchemin," she might well have gone directly to
+Lanyard's stateroom and hit upon the morphia phial as the likeliest hiding
+place without delay, thanks to prior acquaintance with the proportions of
+the paper cylinder.
+
+But why should she have assumed that Lanyard had not disposed of the trust
+about his person?
+
+Not impossibly the thing had been found by the first officer of the
+_Assyrian_, searching by order of the captain--as Lanyard assumed he had.
+
+But, if Mr. Warde had found it, he had not reported his find when
+telephoning to Captain Osborne; or else the latter had gone to great
+lengths to mystify Lanyard.
+
+There remained the chance that the paper had been stolen by one of the two
+German agents--by either without the knowledge of the other.
+
+If Baron von Harden had found it--necessarily before Lanyard returned
+to the room--he had subsequently been at elaborate pains to conceal his
+success from both his victim and his confederate. Why? Did he distrust the
+latter? Again, why?
+
+If "Karl" had been the thief, it must have been after Lanyard's return,
+and while the Baron was preoccupied with the task of keeping the prisoner
+quiet, to let the search proceed.
+
+In that event "Karl" had lied deliberately to his superior. Why? Because
+the document was salable, and "Karl" intended to realize its value for his
+personal benefit?
+
+Not an unlikely explanation. Nor could this be called the first instance in
+which the Prussian spy system, admirably organized though it was, had been
+betrayed by one of its own agents.
+
+This hypothesis, too, accounted for that most perplexing circumstance of
+all, the murder of Baron von Harden. For Lanyard was fully persuaded that
+had been nothing less than premeditated murder, in no way an accident of
+faulty aim. Even the most nervous and unstrung man could hardly have missed
+six shots out of seven, point blank. A nervous man, indeed, could hardly
+have gained his own consent to take so hideous a chance of injuring or
+killing a collaborator.
+
+It appeared, then, that one of four things had happened to the cylinder of
+paper:
+
+Miss Brooke had taken it back into her own care. In which case Lanyard was
+no more concerned.
+
+Captain Osborne had secured it through Mr. Warde. This, however, Lanyard
+did not seriously credit.
+
+It had gone to the bottom when the _Assyrian_ sank with the body--among
+others--of Baron von Harden.
+
+Or "Karl" had stolen it.
+
+Privately, indeed, Lanyard rather inclined to hope that the last might
+prove to be the true solution. He desired earnestly to meet "Karl" once
+more, on equal terms. And the more counts in the score, the greater his
+satisfaction in exacting a reckoning in full.
+
+But he anticipated. That chapter might only too possibly have been closed
+forever by the hand of Death. As yet he knew nothing concerning the
+mortality of the _Assyrian_ débâcle. He had not enquired of the officers of
+the U-boat because they knew little if anything more than he. Their glasses
+had discovered to them trouble with the lifeboats; they had spoken of one
+boat capsizing, of "people going overboard like cattle." There must have
+been many drownings, even with a United States destroyer near by and
+speeding to the rescue.
+
+A single question troubled Lanyard greatly. Officers and crew of the U-boat
+had betrayed profoundest consternation upon the advent of that destroyer,
+presumably a warship of a neutral nation. And that same ship had without
+hesitation fired upon the submarine.
+
+Was it possible, then, that the United States had already declared war on
+Germany?
+
+It seemed extremely probable; in such event these Germans would have been
+notified instantly by wireless from the New York bureau of their country's
+Secret Service; whereas, Captain Osborne, receiving the same advice by
+wireless, might reasonably have kept it quiet lest the news stir to more
+formidable activity those agents of the Wilhelmstrasse whose presence among
+the passengers he must at least have strongly suspected.
+
+Presently the closeness of the atmosphere began to work upon Lanyard's
+perceptions. In spite of his long rest, a new drowsiness drugged his
+senses. He yielded without struggle, knowing he would soon need every ounce
+of strength and vitality that sleep could give him....
+
+The din of an inferno startled him awake. Those narrow metal walls were
+echoing a clangour of machinery maniacal in character and overpowering in
+volume. Clankings, tappings, hissings, coughings, clatterings, stridulation
+of a wireless spark, drone of dynamos, shrewdish scolding of Diesel motors
+developing two thousand horsepower, individual efforts of some two thousand
+valves, combined--or, declined to combine--in a cacophony like nothing
+under the sun but the chant of a submersible under way on the surface.
+
+Lanyard, gratefully aware of a current of fresh air sweeping through the
+hold, rolled out of his bunk to find that, while he slept, clothing had
+been provided for him, rough but adequate; heavy woollen underwear and
+socks, a sweater, a dungaree coat, trousers of the same stuff, all vilely
+damp, and a friendless pair of oil-sodden shoes: the sweepings of a dozen
+lockers, but as welcome as disreputable.
+
+Dressed, he turned aft through the alleyway, entering immediately the
+central operating room and storm center of that typhoon of noise, a
+wilderness of polished machinery in active being.
+
+Of the score or more leather-clad machinists silent at their posts, none
+paid him more heed than a passing, incurious glance as he crossed to a
+narrow steel companion ladder and ascended to the conning tower. This he
+found deserted; but its deck-hatch was open. He climbed out to the bridge.
+
+The night was calm and heavily overcast, with no sea more than long, slow
+swells. Through its windless quiet the U-boat racketed with the raving
+abandon of the Spirit of Discord on a spree in a boiler factory. To the
+riot of its internal strife was added the remonstrance of waters sliced by
+the stem and flung back by the sides, a prolonged and stertorous hiss like
+the rending of an endless sheet of canvas.
+
+To eyes new from the electric illumination of the hold, the blackness was
+positive, with the palpable quality of an element, relieved alone by the
+dull glow of the binnacle housing the gyroscope telltale, from which the
+faintest of golden reflections struck back to pick out a pair of seemingly
+severed fists gripping the handles of the bridge steering wheel with a
+singular effect of desperation.
+
+For some moments Lanyard could see nothing more.
+
+The mirthless chuckle of the lieutenant sounded at his elbow.
+
+"So the good Herr Doctor thought he had better come up for air, eh? My
+friend, the very dead might envy you the sincerity of your slumbers. We
+have been half an hour on the surface, with all this uproar--and you are
+only just wakened!"
+
+"Half an hour?" Lanyard repeated thoughtfully. "Then we should be close
+in...."
+
+"Give us ten minutes more ... if we don't go aground in this accursed
+blackness!"
+
+A broad-shouldered body passed between Lanyard and the binnacle,
+momentarily eclipsing its light. Down below in the operating room a bell
+shrilled, and of a sudden the Diesels were silenced.
+
+The dead quiet that followed the sharp extinction of that hubbub was as
+startling as the detonation of high explosive had been.
+
+Through this sudden stillness the submarine slipped stealthily, the hissing
+beneath her bows dying down to gentle sibilance.
+
+From forward the calls of an invisible leadsman were audible. In response
+the commander uttered throaty orders to the helmsman at his elbow, and
+those unattached hands shifted the wheel minutely.
+
+Lanyard started to speak, but a growl from the captain, and a touch of the
+lieutenant's hand on his sleeve cautioned him to silence.
+
+There was a small pause. The vessel seemed to have lost way altogether, to
+swim like a spirit ship that Stygian tide. The lieutenant moved forward,
+leaving Lanyard alone. The voice of the leadsman was stilled. By the wheel
+the captain stood absolutely motionless, his body vaguely silhouetted
+against the glow of the binnacle. The hands that gripped the wheel so
+savagely were as steady as if carven out of stone. An atmosphere of
+suspense enveloped the boat like a cloud.
+
+Lanyard grew conscious of something huge and formidable, a denser shadow in
+the darkness beyond the bows, the loom of land. Off to starboard a point
+of light appeared abruptly, precisely as if a golden pin had punctured the
+black blanket of the night. The captain growled gutturals of relief and
+command. The hands on the wheel shifted, steering exceeding small. A second
+light shone out to port, then shifted slowly into range with the first,
+till the two were as one. Again the bell sang in the operating room, and
+the vessel forged ahead quietly to the urge of electric motors alone. A
+third light and a fourth appeared, well apart to port and starboard, the
+range lights precisely equidistant between them. Between these the U-boat
+moved swiftly. They swam back on either hand and were abruptly extinguished
+as if the night, resenting their insolent trespass, had gobbled both at a
+gulp.
+
+The temperature became sensibly warmer and the salt air of the sea was
+strongly tinctured with the sweet smell of pines and forest mould.
+
+Up forward carbons sputtered and spat; a searchlight was unsheathed and
+carved the gloom as if it was butter, ranging swiftly over the tree-clad
+shore of a burnished black lagoon, picking out en passant several unpainted
+wooden structures, then steadying on a long and substantial landing stage,
+on which several men stood waiting.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+AT BASE
+
+
+As the U-boat, with motors dead and way lessening, glided up alongside
+the head of that T-shaped landing stage and was made fast, the wireless
+operator popped up from below, saluted the commander, and delivered a
+written message.
+
+Lanyard, instinctively aware that this was the expected report from
+Seventy-ninth Street on Dr. Paul Rodiek, quietly pulled himself together
+and took quick observations.
+
+At best his chances in the all-too-probable emergency were far from
+brilliant. Yet one might better perish trying, however hopelessly, than
+passively submit to being shot down.
+
+The lieutenant, waspishly superintending the work of crew and base guards
+at the mooring lines, stood preoccupied within an arm's length; while the
+landing stage was a fair six feet away. From its T-head to the shore, the
+distance was nothing less than two hundred yards.
+
+Desperate action and miraculous luck might take the Prussian by surprise
+and enable one to snatch the service automatic from its holster at his
+belt, leap to the stage, and shoot a way landward through the guards
+clustered there; after which everything would depend on swiftness of foot
+and the uncertain light permitting one to gain a refuge in the surrounding
+woodland without a bullet in one's back.
+
+It was a sorry hope....
+
+With catlike attention Lanyard watched the hands holding that paper to the
+binnacle light--large hands, heavy and muscular but tremulous with drink
+and nervous reaction from the long strain and cumulative horror of the
+cruise then ending. Their aim would not be good, except by accident. None
+the less, if the report were unfavourable, their first gesture would be
+toward the holster, signalling to Lanyard that the moment had come to
+initiate heroic measures.
+
+The Bavarian was an unconscionable time absorbing the import of the
+message. Bending his face close to the paper, the better to make out the
+writing, he read with moving lips, slowly, a doltish frown of concentration
+clouding his congested countenance.
+
+At length, however, he stood up, swaying a little as he folded and pocketed
+the paper.
+
+Lanyard relaxed. The man was too far gone in drink to be crafty, too sure
+of his absolute power of life and death to imagine a need for craft. Since
+his hand had not immediately sought the holster, it would not.
+
+Turbid accents uttered the name of Dr. Rodiek.
+
+Lanyard stepped forward alertly. "Yes, Herr Captain?"
+
+"New York says it had no knowledge of your intention to leave England on
+the _Assyrian_, but that you may well have done so. The Wilhelmstrasse will
+know, of course. It has already been telegraphed. Pending its reply, I am
+to detain you."
+
+"How long?" Lanyard demurred.
+
+"As you know, transatlantic communications must now go by land telegraph to
+the Border, by hand into Mexico, thence by radio via Venezuela to Berlin.
+All that takes time. Also, we may not signal New York but at stated times
+of night. You will be detained another twenty-four hours at least, possibly
+longer."
+
+"My errand cannot wait."
+
+"It must."
+
+"You will obstruct the business of the Imperial Government at your peril."
+
+"I would incur still greater peril did I let you go," the commander replied
+nervously. "With these swine-dogs at war with the Fatherland, our lives are
+not worth _that_ should this base be betrayed."
+
+"Do I understand America has declared war?"
+
+"Two days since. Did you not know?"
+
+"The _Assyrian's_ wireless room was under guard: the captain published no
+bulletins whatever."
+
+The Bavarian gave a gesture of impatience.
+
+"You will remain on board for the night," he announced heavily.
+
+"Pardon!" Lanyard insisted with every evidence of anxious excitement.
+"What you tell me makes it more than ever imperative that I reach New York
+without an hour's avoidable delay. I warn you, think well before you hinder
+the discharge of my duty."
+
+"It is not necessary that I think," the commander replied. "My thinking has
+all been done for me. Me, I obey my orders; it is not my part to question
+their wisdom. Moreover, Herr Doctor, to my mind your insistence is to say
+the least suspicious. Even had I discretion in the matter, I should hold
+you. Therefore, you will keep a civil tongue in your head, or go below in
+irons immediately!"
+
+He swung on his heel, showing an insolent back while he conferred with his
+subaltern.
+
+And Lanyard shrugged appreciation of the futility of more contention
+against such mulishness. Not that the Bavarian was not right enough! As to
+that, one had really hoped for no better issue; but every shift is worth
+trial till proved worthless; and he was no worse off now than if he had
+submitted without complaint. Still one had Chance to look to for aid and
+comfort in this stress; and Chance, the jade, is not always unkind to her
+audacious suitors.
+
+Even now she flashed upon Lanyard a provoking intimation of her smile.
+He began to divine possibilities in this overt ill-feeling between the
+officers; advantage might be made of the racial hostility of Prussian and
+Bavarian.
+
+The commander's attitude and tone were consistently overbearing, if his
+words were inaudible to Lanyard. The lieutenant quite evidently submitted
+only in form; his salute was punctiliously correct and curt; and as the
+commander lumbered off down the landing stage, he grumbled indistinctly in
+Lanyard's hearing:
+
+"Dog of a Bavarian!"
+
+"The good Herr Captain," Lanyard suggested pleasantly, "is not in the most
+agreeable of tempers, yes?"
+
+The high and well-born lieutenant spat comprehensively into the darkness
+overside. After a moment of hesitation he moved nearer and spoke in
+confidential accents. And the fragrant air of the night was tainted with
+the vinous effluvium of his breath.
+
+"Always he prattles of his precious duty!" the Prussian muttered. "Damn his
+duty! Look you, Herr Doctor: months we have been on this cruise, yes, more
+than three months out of Heligoland, penned together in this ramshackle
+stinkpot, or isolated here in this God-forgotten hole, seeing nothing of
+life, hearing nothing of the world but what little the radio tells
+us--sick of the very sight of one another's faces! And now, when we have
+accomplished a glorious feat and have every right to look for prompt recall
+and the rewards of heroes, orders come to remain indefinitely and operate
+against the North Atlantic fleet of the contemptible Yankee navy! The life
+of a dog! And that noble commander of mine pretends to welcome it, talks
+of one's duty to the Fatherland--as if he liked the work any better than
+I!--solely to spite me!"
+
+"But why?"
+
+"Because he hates me," the lieutenant snarled passionately--"hates me even
+as I hate him--he knows how well!"
+
+He interrupted himself to define his conception of the commander's
+character in the freest vernacular of the Berlin underworld.
+
+Lanyard laughed amiably. "They are like that," he agreed--"those
+Bavarians!"
+
+Which inspired the Prussian to deliver a phosphorescent diatribe on the
+racial traits of the Bavarian people as comprehended by the North German
+junker.
+
+"To be cooped up God knows how long in this putrescent death-trap with such
+cattle," he concluded mutinously--"it passes all endurance!"
+
+"I wonder you stand it," Lanyard sympathised--"a man of spirit and good
+birth, as one readily perceives. Though the life of a secret agent is not
+altogether heavenly either, if you ask me," he added gratuitously. "Regard
+me now, charged with a mission of most vital moment--more than ever so
+since the Yankees have shown their teeth--delayed here indefinitely because
+your excellent Herr Captain chooses to doubt my word."
+
+"Patience. Maybe your release comes quickly. Then he will regret--or would
+had he wit enough. There is no cure for a fool." The sententiousness of
+this aphorism was unhappily marred by a hiccough. "Anybody with eyes in his
+head could see you are what you are...."
+
+The last of the operating-room crew piled up the hatchway, saluted, and
+hurried ashore to join in noisy jubilations. There remained on the U-boat
+only the lieutenant with Lanyard, and two base guards detailed as anchor
+watch.
+
+"I must go," the lieutenant volunteered. "And believe me, one welcomes a
+change of clothing and a dry bed after a week in this reeking sieve. As for
+you, my friend, if it lay with me, you should receive the treatment due
+a gentleman." A wave of maudlin camaraderie affected him. He passed an
+affectionate arm through Lanyard's and was suffered, though the gorge of
+the adventurer revolted at the familiarity. "I am sorry to leave you. No,
+do not be astonished! No protestations, please! It is quite true. I know a
+man of the right sort when I meet one, the sort even I can associate with
+without loss of self-respect. It is a great pity you may not come with me
+and make a night of it."
+
+"Another time, perhaps," Lanyard said. "The night may yet come when you and
+I shall meet at the Metropole or the Admiral's Palace.... Who knows?"
+
+"Ah!" sighed the Prussian, enchanted. "What a night that will be, my
+friend!... But now, it is too bad, I really must ask you to step below.
+Such are my silly orders. I am made responsible for you. What do you think
+of that for a joke, eh?"
+
+He laughed vacantly but loudly, and, attempting to poke a derisive thumb
+into Lanyard's ribs, lost his balance.
+
+"What a responsibility!" said Lanyard gravely, holding him up.
+
+"Nonsense, that's what it is. You have no possible chance to escape."
+
+"Suppose I make one--tip you overboard, take to my heels--?"
+
+"You would be shot like a rabbit before you got half way to the shore."
+
+"Ah, but grant, for the sake of argument, that these brave fellows, the
+guards, aim poorly in this gloom?"
+
+"Where would you go? Into the forest, naturally. But how far? You may
+believe me when I tell you, not a hundred yards. It's a true wilderness,
+scrub-oak and cedar and second growth choked with underbrush, almost
+trackless. In five minutes you would be helplessly lost, in this blackness,
+with no stars to steer by. We need only wait till daylight to find you
+walking in a circle."
+
+"You can't mean," Lanyard pursued, learning something helpful every moment,
+"there is no communicating road?"
+
+"The main woods road, yes: but that is far too well patrolled. Without the
+countersign, you would be caught or shot a dozen times before you reached
+the end of it."
+
+"Ah, well!"--with the sigh of a philosopher--"then I presume there's no way
+out but by swimming."
+
+"Over to the beach you mean? Well, what then? You have got a twenty-mile
+walk either way through deep sand sure to betray your footprints. At dawn
+we follow and bag you at our leisure."
+
+"You are discouraging!" Lanyard complained. "I see I may as well go below
+and be good. It's a dull life."
+
+"Tell you what," giggled the lieutenant, leading his prisoner to the
+conning-tower hatch and lowering his voice: "do just that, go below and be
+nice, and presently I will come back and we'll split a bottle. What do you
+say to that, eh?"
+
+"Colossal!"
+
+"Not a bad notion, is it? I like it myself. One gets weary for the society
+of a gentleman, you've no idea.... As soon as my commander is drunk enough,
+I will slip away. How's that?"
+
+"Grossartig!" Lanyard approved, turning to descend.
+
+"Wait. You shall see for yourself what it means to have the friendship of
+a man of my stamp." The lieutenant raised his voice, addressing the anchor
+watch: "Attention. Heed with care: this gentleman is my friend. He is
+detained merely as a matter of form. I do not wish him to be annoyed. Do
+you understand? You are to leave him to himself as long as he remains
+quietly below. But he is not to come on deck again till I return. Is all
+that clear, imbeciles?"
+
+The imbeciles, saluting mechanically, indicated glimmerings of
+comprehension.
+
+"Then below you go, Dr. Rodiek. And don't get impatient: I will rejoin you
+as soon as possible."
+
+"Don't be long," Lanyard implored.
+
+As he lowered himself through the hatch he saw the Prussian stumble down
+the gangplank and reel shoreward.
+
+Well satisfied with his diplomacy, Lanyard lingered a while in the conning
+tower, closely studying and memorising the more salient features of the
+Island of Martha's Vineyard and its adjacent waters and mainland as
+delineated on a most comprehensive large-scale chart published by the
+German Admiralty from exhaustive soundings and surveys of its own
+navigators and typographers, with corrections of as recent date as the
+first part of the year 1917.
+
+Here the breach in the south coast line which permitted the utilisation
+of what had formerly been an extensive fresh-water pond as this secret
+submarine base, was clearly shown. And a single glance confirmed the
+lieutenant's statement concerning its remote isolation from settled
+sections of the island.
+
+Somewhat dismayed, Lanyard descended to the central operating compartment
+and scouted through the hold from bow bulkhead to stern, making certain he
+enjoyed undisputed privacy. And it was so; every man-jack of the U-boat's
+personnel--jaded to the marrow with its cramped accommodations, unremitting
+toil and care, unsanitary smells and forbidding associations--having
+naturally seized the earliest opportunity to escape so loathsome a prison.
+
+Lanyard, however, was anything but resentful of condemnation to this
+solitary confinement. His interest in the interior arrangements of
+submersibles seemed all but feverish, as intense as sudden; witness the
+minute attention to detail which marked his second tour of inspection. On
+this round he took his time. He had all night in which to work out his
+salvation; the wildest schemes were revolving in his mind, the least
+fantastic utterly impracticable without accurate knowledge of many matters;
+and such knowledge might be gained only through patient investigation and
+ungrudging expenditure of time.
+
+It was now something past ten by the chronometers. He could hardly do much
+before dawn, lacking the instinct of a red Indian to guide him through
+that night-bound waste of woodland. So he felt little need to slight his
+researches through haste, except in anticipation of his lieutenant's
+return. And as to that, Lanyard was moderately incredulous: he expected to
+see nothing more of this new-found friend, unless the infatuation of the
+Prussian proved far stronger than his head.
+
+Turning first to the private quarters of the commander, a somewhat more
+commodious cubicle than that across the alleyway in which Lanyard had been
+berthed, his interest was attracted by a small safe anchored to the deck
+beneath the desk.
+
+To this Lanyard addressed himself without hesitation, solving the secret
+of its combination readily through exercise of the most rudimentary of
+professional principles. The problem it offered, indeed, was child's play
+to such cunning of touch and hearing as had made the reputation of the Lone
+Wolf.
+
+Open, the safe discovered to him a variety of articles of interest:
+some five thousand dollars in English and American banknotes of large
+denomination, several hundred in American gold; three distinct cipher
+codes, one of these wholly novel in Lanyard's experience and so, he
+believed, in the knowledge of the Allied secret services; the log of the
+U-boat and the intimate diary of its commander, both in cryptograph; a
+compact directory of German agents domiciled in Atlantic coast ports; a
+very considerable accumulation of German Admiralty orders; together with
+many documents of lesser moment.
+
+Rapidly sorting out the more valuable of these, Lanyard disposed them about
+his person, then confiscated the banknotes as indemnity for his stolen
+money-belt, replaced the rejections, and reclosed and locked the safe.
+
+His next interest was to arm himself. After several disappointments he
+discovered arms-lockers beneath the berths for the crew in the forward
+compartment just aft of that devoted to torpedo tubes. Here he selected
+a latest pattern German navy automatic pistol with three extra cartridge
+clips and, after some hesitation, a peculiarly devilish magazine rifle
+firing explosive bullets. The latter he placed handily, yet out of sight,
+near the foot of the companion ladder. The pistol fitted snugly a trousers
+pocket, its bulk hidden by the sag of his sweater....
+
+Some time later the lieutenant, slipping down the ladder, found Lanyard
+studying with a convincing aspect of childlike bewilderment the complicated
+combinations of machinery which crowded the central operating compartment.
+
+Fresh from a bath and shave and wearing a clean uniform, the Prussian
+showed vast improvement in looks if not in equilibrium. But his mouth
+twitched fitfully, his eyes wandered and disclosed a disquieting
+superabundance of white, and his tongue was noticeably thicker than before.
+
+"Well, my friend!" he said--"you are truly disappointing. The watch said
+you had made no sound since going below. I was afraid of another of those
+famous naps of yours."
+
+"With the prospect of a bottle with you? Impossible! I have been waiting
+and waiting, with my tongue hanging out."
+
+"Too bad. Why did you not look around, help yourself? Why not?" the
+lieutenant demanded. "Have I not given you freedom of ship? It is yours,
+everything here 'yours!"
+
+"I want nothing but an end to this great thirst," Lanyard protested.
+
+"Then--God in Heaven!--why we standing here? Come!"
+
+Releasing the handrail the Prussian took careful aim for the alleyway door,
+launched himself toward it, slipped on the greasy metal grating, and would
+have fallen heavily but for Lanyard.
+
+Cursing pettishly, he stood up, threw off Lanyard's arms without thanks,
+and made a new attempt, this time shooting headlong through the alleyway,
+to bring up against the wing table in the third forward compartment, the
+kitchen and messroom in one.
+
+"A great pity," he muttered, opening a locker and fumbling in its
+depths--"rotten pity...."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Keep you waiting so long. Not my fault." The lieutenant brought forth two
+bottles of champagne and one of brandy. "You open them, Herr Doctor, like
+'good fellow," he said, placing the three on the table. "I just wish you
+'understand no discourtesy meant ... unavoidably detained ... beastly
+commander ... drunk. Give 'my word, hopelessly drunk. Poor fool...."
+
+"If my judgment is sound," Lanyard said, "this noble vessel will soon need
+a new commander."
+
+"True. Quite true." The Prussian placed two aluminium cups upon the table
+and half filled one with brandy, then brimmed it with champagne. "Try
+that," he said thickly, "That will keep your tail up, my friend."
+
+"Many thanks," Lanyard protested, filling another cup with undiluted
+champagne. "I prefer one thing at a time."
+
+"Unfortunate ... don't know what is good ... King's peg ... wonderful
+drink. No matter. To 'new commander--prosit!"
+
+He drained his cup at a gulp.
+
+"To the new commander!" Lanyard echoed, and drank judiciously.
+"Excellent.... How long can he last, do you think, at this pace?"
+
+"No telling--not long--too long for my liking. Shall I tell 'something?"
+He filled his cup again, half and half, and sat down, his wicked, rat-like
+face more than ever pale and repulsive. "Not 'whisper of this, mind--though
+I think 'crew sometimes suspects: he's going mad!"
+
+"Not that Bavarian?"
+
+The lieutenant nodded wisely. "If 'knew him as I know him, 'never be
+surprised, my friend. You think too much drink. Yes, but not entirely. He
+keeps seeing things, hearing them, especially by night."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+"Faces." The Prussian licked his lips, glanced furtively over his shoulder,
+and drank. "Dead faces, eyes eaten out, seaweed in their hair.... And
+voices--he's forever hearing voices ... people trying to talk, 'can't
+make him understand because 'mouths 'full of water, you know. But they
+understand one another, keep discussing how to get at him.... He tells me
+about it ... I tell you, it is Hell to hear him talk ... especially when
+submerged, as last night. Then he hears them fumbling all over the hull
+with their stumpy fingers, trying to find 'way in, talking about him. And
+he tells me, and keeps insisting, till sometimes I seem to hear them, too.
+But I don't. Before God, I don't! You don't believe I do, do you?"
+
+His eyes rolled wildly.
+
+"Why should you?"
+
+"Just so: why should I?" The lieutenant's accents rose to a shrill pitch.
+"I have not his record ... still in training when he sent _Lusitania_ to
+the bottom. Yes: it was he, second-in-command, in charge of torpedo tubes.
+His own hand fired that torpedo...."
+
+He fell silent, staring moodily into his cup, perhaps thinking of the
+number of torpedoes it had been his own lot to discharge upon errands of
+slaughter.
+
+And the dead silence of the ship was made audible by a stealthy drip-drip
+of water from the seams, and the furtive slaver of the tide on the outer
+plates.
+
+A shiver ran through the body of the Prussian. He pulled himself together
+with obvious effort, looked up with an uncertain grin, and passed a shaking
+hand across his writhing lips.
+
+"All foolishness, of course, but 'gets on one's nerves ... constant
+association with man like that.... 'Know what he's doing now, or was, when
+I came away? Sitting up with doors and windows locked and blinds drawn,
+drinking brandy neat. He can't sleep by night if sober, or without 'light
+in the room. If he does, he knows they will get him ... people he hears
+crawling up from the sea, slopping round the house, mumbling, whimpering in
+the dark--"
+
+He broke off abruptly, with a whisper more dreadful than a
+shriek--"_God_!"--and jumped to his feet, whipping the automatic from his
+belt.
+
+A footfall sounded in one of the after compartments. Others followed.
+
+Someone was coming slowly down the alleyway, someone with dragging, heavy
+feet.
+
+The lieutenant waited motionless, as one petrified with terror.
+
+The bulkhead doorway framed the figure of the commander. He paused there,
+louring at his subaltern with haunted eyes ablaze in a face like parchment.
+
+"So!" he said, nodding. "As I thought. It is thus I find you, fraternising
+with one who may be, for all we know, an enemy to the Fatherland. You
+drunken, babbling fool! Get ashore!" His angry foot thumped the grating.
+"Get ashore, and report yourself under arrest!"
+
+With no more warning than a strangled snarl, the lieutenant shot him
+through the head.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+UNDER THE ROSE
+
+
+Vague stupefaction replaced the scowl upon the countenance of the
+commander. He swayed, a hand faltering to his forehead, where dark blood
+was beginning to well from a cleanly drilled puncture. Then he collapsed
+completely, falling prone across the raised sill of the bulkhead opening. A
+convulsive tremor shook savagely his huge frame.
+
+Thereafter he was quite still.
+
+The report of that one shot had reverberated stunningly within those narrow
+walls of steel. Momentarily Lanyard looked to see the alarmed anchor watch
+appear; so too, apparently, the lieutenant, who remained immobile, pistol
+poised in a hand for the moment strangely steady, gaze fixed upon the mouth
+of the alleyway.
+
+But through a long minute no other sounds were audible than that ceaseless
+dripping from frames and seams, with that muted, terrible mouthing of
+waters on the plates.
+
+Unable either to fathom or forecast the workings of the drink-maddened
+mentality masked by that rat-like face, Lanyard waited with a hand covertly
+grasping the automatic in his pocket. There was no telling; at any moment
+that murderous mania might veer his way. And he was not content to die, not
+yet, not in any event by the hand of a decadent little beast of a Boche.
+
+Slowly the arm of the lieutenant dropped, lowering the pistol till its
+muzzle chattered on the top of the table: a noise that broke the spell upon
+his senses. He looked down in dull brutish wonder, then roused and with a
+gesture of horror let the weapon fall clattering.
+
+His glance shifting to the body of his commander, he started violently,
+backing up against the plates to put all possible distance between himself
+and his handiwork. His lips moved, framing phrases at first incoherent,
+presently articulate in part:
+
+"... _done it at last!... Knew I must soon_...."
+
+Abruptly he looked up at Lanyard.
+
+"Bear witness," he cried: "I was provoked beyond human endurance. He
+insulted me in your presence ... me!... that scum!"
+
+Lanyard said nothing, but met his gaze with a blank, non-committal stare,
+under which the eyes of the lieutenant wavered and fell.
+
+Then with a start he realised anew the significance of that still figure at
+his feet, and tried to shake some of the swagger back into his wretched,
+fear-racked being.
+
+"A good job!" he muttered defiantly. "And you will stand by me, I know....
+Only there is nothing in that, of course, no justification possible before
+a court martial. Even your testimony could not save me ... I am done for,
+utterly...."
+
+He hung his head. Lanyard heard whispered words: "_degraded," "dishonour,"
+"firing squad_"....
+
+A chronometer in the central operating compartment tolled eight bells.
+
+With a sharp cry the lieutenant dropped to his knees. "He can't be dead!"
+he shrilled. "It is all play-acting, to frighten me!"
+
+Frantically he sought to turn the body over.
+
+Lanyard's hand shot swiftly out, capturing the automatic on the table. With
+rapid and sure gestures he extracted and pocketed the clip, drew back the
+breech, ejecting into his palm the one shell in the barrel, and replaced
+the weapon, all before the Prussian gave over his insane efforts to
+resurrect the dead.
+
+"He is dead enough," he announced, eyeing Lanyard morosely--"beyond
+helping.... Look here; are you with me or against me?"
+
+"Need you ask?"
+
+"I count on you, then. Good. I think we can cover this up."
+
+He checked and stood for a while lost in thought.
+
+"How?" Lanyard roused him.
+
+"Simply enough: I go on deck, send the watch ashore on some trumped-up
+errand. They suspect nothing, thinking the commander and I have you in
+charge. If they heard that shot, I will say one of us dropped a bottle
+of champagne, and it exploded.... When they are gone, I bring the dory
+alongside; and with your help it should be an easy matter to carry this
+body up, weight it, row it out to the middle of the lagoon, dump it
+overboard. Then we return. Our story is, the commander followed the anchor
+watch ashore; if later he wandered off, got lost in the woods in his
+alcoholic delirium, that is no affair of ours. Do you understand?"
+
+"Perfectly," said Lanyard with a look of fatuous innocence. "But how about
+the water--is it deep enough?"
+
+The Prussian took no pains to dissemble his scorn of this question,
+seemingly so witless. "To cover the body? Why, even here there is
+sufficient depth at low tide for us to submerge completely, barring the
+periscopes. And it is deeper yet in the middle."
+
+"Thanks," Lanyard replied meekly.
+
+"Have another drink? No?" The Prussian tossed off a half cupful of
+undiluted brandy, and shuddered. "Then stop here. I'll be back in a--"
+
+"Half a minute." The lieutenant halted in the act of stepping across the
+body. Lanyard levelled a hand at the automatic. "Do you mind taking that
+with you? I have no desire to be found here with it and a dead man, should
+anything prevent your return."
+
+With a sickly grimace the murderer snatched up the weapon, thrust it in its
+holster, and hurriedly departed.
+
+Lanyard watched him pass through the alleyway and turn toward the companion
+ladder, then followed quietly.
+
+As the lieutenant climbed out on deck, Lanyard ascended to the conning
+tower and waited there, listening. He could not quite make out what was
+said; but after a few brusque words of command two pair of boots rang on
+the gangplank and thumped away down the stage. At the same time Lanyard let
+himself noiselessly out through the hatch.
+
+As soon as his vision grew reconciled to the change from light to darkness,
+he discovered the slender figure of the lieutenant skulking on tip-toe
+after the retreating anchor watch; about midway on the landing stage,
+however, he paused and bent over one of the piles, apparently fumbling with
+the painter of a small boat moored in the black shadows below.
+
+At this Lanyard began to move along the deck, one by one working the
+mooring lines clear of their cleats and dropping them gently overboard,
+till but two were left to hold the U-boat in place.
+
+Throughout he kept watch upon the manoeuvres of the lieutenant--saw him
+drop over the side of the stage, heard a thump of feet as he landed in a
+boat, and a subsequent creak of oar-locks.
+
+The small boat was rounding the bows of the submarine when the adventurer
+ducked back through conning tower to hold.
+
+He was standing where he had been left when the lieutenant came below.
+
+"It's all right," this last announced with shabby bravado as he stepped
+over the body in the doorway. "We are rid of that damned watch for a time.
+They won't return within half an hour at least. I have the dory moored
+amidships. If we are lively, this dirty job will be over in no time at
+all."
+
+Lanyard nodded. "I am ready."
+
+"No need to hurry--plenty of time for one more drink." The Prussian
+splashed brandy into the cup, filling it to the brim. "And God knows I need
+it!"
+
+Lanyard watched critically as, with head well back, he drained that
+staggering dose of raw spirit gulp by gulp without once removing the cup
+from his lips. No mortal man could drink like that and stand up under it:
+it was now a mere question of time....
+
+Hardly that: the hand of the murderer shook and wavered widely as he put
+down the cup. For a moment he swayed with eyes fixed and glazing, features
+visibly losing plasticity, then lurched forward, knocking the brandy bottle
+to the floor, swung around a full half turn in blind effort to re-establish
+equilibrium, fell backward upon the table, and lay racked from head to foot
+with savage spasms, hands clawing empty air, chest labouring vainly to win
+sufficient oxygen to combat the poison with which his system was saturated.
+
+Moving to his side, Lanyard laid a hand upon the left breast. The man's
+heart was hammering his ribs with agonizing blows, at first rapid, by
+degrees more slow and feeble.
+
+No power on earth could save him now: he had committed suicide as surely as
+murder.
+
+Wasting not another glance or thought upon him Lanyard hurried aft to the
+central operating room.
+
+The time he had spent there, an hour earlier, was by no means lost in
+purposeless marvelling. He boasted a certain aptitude for mechanics,
+perhaps legitimately inherited from that obscure origin of his, largely
+fostered by the requirements of his craft; into the bargain, he had been
+privileged ere now to gain some slight insight into the principles of
+submersible operation. If obliged to work swiftly and in some instances
+upon the advice of intuition rather than practical knowledge, he went not
+unintelligently about his task, made few false moves.
+
+Turning first to the diving controls, he adjusted the hydroplanes to their
+extreme downward inclination, then made the rounds of the vent valves,
+opening all wide. With a sharp hissing and whistling the air from the
+auxiliary tanks was driven inboard, and as Lanyard manipulated the wheels
+operating the forward and aft groups of Kingston valves, to the hissing was
+added the suck and gurgle of water flooding the main and auxiliary ballast
+and adjusting tanks.
+
+Immediately the U-boat began to sink. Lanyard delayed only to close the
+switches which controlled the electric motors. As their drone gained volume
+he grasped the rifle and swarmed up the companion-ladder, passing through
+the conning tower to deck with little or nothing to spare--with, in fact,
+barely time to throw off the two mooring lines and jump into the small boat
+before water, sweeping hungrily up over deck and bridge, began to cascade
+through conning tower and torpedo hatchways.
+
+Constrained to cut the painter lest the dory be drawn down with the
+fast-sinking submarine, he fitted oars to locks and put his back to them,
+swinging the small boat hastily clear of whirlpools which formed as the
+waves closed over the spot where the U-boat had rested.
+
+From first to last less than five minutes' activity had been needed for
+the task of scotching this water-moccasin of the salt seas and putting its
+keepers at the mercy of the country whose hospitality they had too long
+abused.
+
+Well content, after a little, Lanyard lay on his oars and contemplated with
+much interest what the night permitted to be visible: the landing stage, no
+more than a dark, vague mass in the darkness; the land picked out with but
+few lights, mainly at windows of the base buildings, painting dim ribbons
+upon the polished floor of the lagoon.
+
+Methodically these were eclipsed as a moving figure passed before them.
+
+Listening intently, Lanyard could distinguish the slow footfalls of an
+unsuspecting sentry--no other sounds, more than gentle voices of the night:
+murmurs of blind wavelets, the plaintive whisper of a little breeze belated
+amid the tree-tops of that dark forest, and a slow, weary soughing of
+swells upon the distant ocean shore.
+
+Perceiving as yet not the slightest indication of an alarm ashore, Lanyard
+ventured to continue rowing, but with utmost caution, lifting and dipping
+his blades as gingerly as though they were fashioned of brittle glass, and
+for want of a better guide keeping the stern of the dory square to the
+shank of the T-stage.
+
+In time the bows grounded lightly on sand. The melancholy voice of the sea
+now seemed a heavier sighing in the stillness. He pushed off and rowed on
+parallel with a dark shore line, so close in that his starboard oar touched
+bottom at each stroke.
+
+At intervals he paused and rested, striving vainly to garner some clue to
+his bearings. Inexorably the blackness forbade that. He might have failed
+ere dawn to grope a way out of that trap had not the disappearance of the
+submarine been discovered within the hour.
+
+A sudden clamour rose in the quarter of the landing stage, first one great
+shout of dismay, then two voices bellowing together, then others. Several
+rifle-shots were fired in the air. More lights broke out in windows ashore.
+Many feet drummed resoundingly upon the stage, and the confusion of voices
+attained a pitch of wild, hysteric uproar. Of a sudden a flare was lighted
+and tossed far out upon the bosom of the lagoon.
+
+Surprised by that sharp and merciless blue glare, Lanyard instinctively
+shipped oars and picked up the rifle. He could see so clearly that
+huddle of figures upon the head of the landing stage that he confidently
+apprehended being fired upon at any moment; but minutes lengthened and
+he was not. Either the Germans were looking for bigger game than a dory
+adrift, or the dazzling flare hindered more than aided their vision.
+
+At length persuaded that he had not been detected, Lanyard put aside the
+rifle and resumed the oars. Now his course was made beautifully clear to
+him: the blue light showed him that outlet to the sea which he sought
+within a hundred yards' distance.
+
+Presently the flare began to wane. It was not renewed. Altogether unseen,
+unsuspected, Lanyard swung the dory into the breach, and drove it seaward
+with all his might.
+
+Swiftly the lagoon was shut out by narrow closing banks. The blue glare
+died out behind a black profile of rounded dunes. Lanyard turned the bow
+eastward, rowing broadside to the shore.
+
+After something more than an hour of this mode of progress, he struck in
+toward the beach, disembarked in ankle-deep waters, slung the rifle over
+his shoulder by its strap and, pushing the dory off, abandoned it to the
+whim of the sea.
+
+Then again he set his face to the east, following the contour of the beach
+just within the wash of the tide: thereby making sure that there should
+be no trail of footprints in the sand to guide a possible pursuit in the
+morning.
+
+The rising sun found him purposefully splashing on, weary but enheartened
+by the discovery that he had left behind the more thickly wooded section of
+the island.
+
+Presently, turning in to the dry beach for the first time, he climbed
+to the summit of a dune somewhat higher than its fellows, and took
+observations, finding that he had come near to the eastern extremity of the
+island.
+
+At some distance to his right a wagon road, faintly rutted in sand and
+overgrown with beach grass, struck inland.
+
+Following this at a venture, he came, at about eight o'clock, upon the
+outskirts of a waterside community.
+
+Before proceeding he hid the magazine rifle in a thicket, then made a wide
+detour, and picked up a roadway which entered the village from the north.
+
+If his disreputable appearance was calculated to excite comment, readiness
+in disbursing money to remedy such shortcomings made amends for Lanyard's
+taciturnity. Within two hours, shaved, bathed, and inconspicuously dressed
+in a cheap suit of ready-made clothing, he was breakfasting famously upon
+the plain fare of a commercial tavern.
+
+The town, he learned, was the one-time important whaling port of Edgartown.
+He would be able to leave for the mainland on a ferry steamer sailing early
+in the afternoon.
+
+Ten minutes before going abroad he filed a long telegram in code addressed
+to the head of the British Secret Service in New York....
+
+Consequences manifold and various ensued.
+
+When the telegram had been delivered and decoded--both transactions being
+marked by reasonable promptitude--the head of the British Secret Service
+in New York called the British Embassy in Washington on the long distance
+telephone.
+
+Shortly thereafter an attaché of the British Embassy jumped into a
+motor-car and had himself driven to one of the cardinal departments of the
+Federal Government.
+
+When he had kicked his heels in an antechamber upward of an hour, he was
+received, affably enough, by the head of the department, a smug, open-faced
+gentleman whose mood was largely preoccupied with illusions of grandeur,
+who was, in short, interested far more in considering how splendid it was
+to be himself than in hearing about any mare's-nest of a German U-boat base
+on the south shore of Martha's Vineyard.
+
+He was, however, indulgent enough to promise to give the matter his
+distinguished consideration in due course.
+
+He even went so far as to have his secretary make a note of what alleged
+information this young Englishman had to impart.
+
+During the night he chanced to wake up and recall the matter, and concluded
+that, all things considered, it would do no harm to give the United States
+Navy a little amusement and exercise, even if it should turn out that the
+rumour of this submarine base was a canard.
+
+So, the next morning, he went to his desk some time before noon, and issued
+a lot of orders. One of them had to do with the necessity for absolute
+secrecy.
+
+During the day several minor officials of the department might have been,
+and indeed were, observed going about their business with painfully
+tight-lipped expressions.
+
+Also many messages were transmitted by wireless, telephone, and telegraph,
+to various persons charged with the defense of the Atlantic Coast; some of
+these were code messages, some were not.
+
+That same night a great forest fire sprang up on the south shore of
+Martha's Vineyard, both preceded and accompanied by a series of heavy
+explosions.
+
+The first United States vessel to reach the lagoon found only charred
+remains of a landing stage and several buildings and, at the bottom of the
+lagoon, an incoherent mass of wreckage, a twisted and shattered chaos of
+steel plates and framework that might possibly have been a perfectly sound
+submarine, though sunken, had somebody not been warned in ample time
+to permit its destruction through the agency of trinitrotoluene, that
+enormously efficient modern explosive nicknamed by British military and
+naval experts "T.N.T.," and by the Germans "Trotyl."
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+RESURRECTION
+
+
+The early editions of those New York evening newspapers which Lanyard
+purchased in Providence, when he changed trains there en route from New
+Bedford to New York, carried multi-column and most picturesque accounts of
+the _Assyrian_ disaster.
+
+But the whole truth was in none.
+
+Lanyard laid aside the last paper privately satisfied that, for no-doubt
+praiseworthy reasons of its own, Washington had seen fit to dictate the
+suppression of a number of extremely pertinent circumstances and facts
+which could hardly have escaped governmental knowledge.
+
+Already, one inferred, a sort of censorship was at work, an effective if
+comparatively modest precursor to that noble volunteer committee which was
+presently with touching spontaneity to fasten itself upon an astonished
+Ship of State before it could gather enough way to escape such cirripede
+attachments.
+
+Presumably it was not thought wise to disconcert a great people, in the
+complacence of its awakening to the fact that it was remotely at war with
+the Hun, with information that a Boche submersible was, or of late had
+been, operating in the neighbourhood of Nantucket.
+
+Unanimously the sinking of the _Assyrian_ was ascribed to an internal
+explosion of unknown origin. No paper hinted that German secret agents
+might possibly have figured incogniti among her passengers. There was
+mention neither of the flare which had burned on her after deck to make
+the _Assyrian_ a conspicuous target in the night, nor of any of the other
+untoward events which had led up to the explosion. Nothing whatever
+was said of the shot fired at the submerging U-boat by a United States
+torpedo-boat destroyer speeding to the rescue.
+
+Still, the bare facts alone were sufficiently appalling. Reading what had
+been permitted to gain publication, Lanyard experienced a qualm of horror
+together with the thought that, even had he drowned as he had expected to
+drown, such a fate had almost been preferable to participation in those
+awful ten minutes precipitated by that pale messenger of death which had so
+narrowly missed Lanyard himself as he rested on the bosom of the sea.
+
+Within ten minutes after receiving her coup de grâce the _Assyrian_ had
+gone under; barely that much time had been permitted a passenger list of
+seventy-two and a personnel of nearly three hundred souls in which to rouse
+from dreams of security and take to the lifeboats.
+
+Thanks to the frenzied haste compelled by the swift settling of the ship,
+more than one boat had been capsized. Others had been sunk--literally
+driven under--by masses of humanity cascading into them from slanting
+decks. Others, again, had never been launched at all.
+
+The utmost efforts of the destroyer, fortuitously so near at hand, had
+served to rescue but thirty-one passengers and one hundred and eighty of
+the crew.
+
+In the list of survivors Lanyard found these names:
+
+  Becker, Julius--New York
+  Brooke, Cecelia--London
+  Crane, Robert T.--New York
+  Dressier, Emil--Geneva
+  O'Reilly, Edmund--Detroit
+  Putnam, Bartlett--Philadelphia
+  Velasco, Arturo--Buenos Aires
+
+Among the injured, Lieutenant Lionel Thackeray, D.S.O., was listed as
+suffering from concussion of the brain, said to have been contracted
+through a fall while attempting to aid the launching of a lifeboat.
+
+In the long roster of the drowned these names appeared:
+
+  Bartholomew, Archer--London
+  Duchemin, André--Paris
+  Von Harden, Baron Gustav--Amsterdam
+  Osborne, Captain E. W.--London
+
+Of all the officers, Mr. Sherry was a solitary survivor, fished out of the
+sea after going down with his ship.
+
+No list boasted the name "Karl."
+
+Lacking accommodations for the rescued, it was stated, the destroyer had
+summoned by wireless the east-bound freight steamship _Saratoga_, which had
+trans-shipped the unfortunates and turned back to New York....
+
+Throughout the best part of that journey from Providence to New York
+Lanyard sat blankly staring into the black mirror of the window beside
+his chair, revolving schemes for his immediate future in the light of
+information derived, indirectly as much as directly, from these newspaper
+stories.
+
+Retrospective consideration of that voyage left little room for doubt that
+the designs of the German agents had been thoughtfully matured. They had
+been quiet enough between their first stroke in the dark and their last,
+between the burglary of Cecelia Brooke's stateroom the first night out and
+those murderous attacks on Bartholomew and Thackeray. Unquestionably,
+had they bided their time pending that hour when, according to their
+information, the submersible would be off Nantucket, awaiting their signal
+to sink the _Assyrian_--a signal which would never have been given had
+their plans proved successful, had they not made the ship too hot to hold
+them, and finally had they not made every provision for their own escape
+when the ship went down.
+
+Lanyard was confident that all of their company had been warned to hold
+themselves ready, and consequently had come off scot free--all, that is,
+save that victim of treachery, the unhappy Baron von Harden.
+
+If the number of that group which Lanyard had selected as comprising a
+majority of his enemies, those nine who had discussed the Lone Wolf in the
+smoking room, was now reduced to five--Becker, Dressier, O'Reilly, Putnam,
+and Velasco--or four, eliminating Putnam, of whose loyalty there could be
+no question--Lanyard still had no means of knowing how many confederates
+among the other passengers these four might not have had.
+
+And even four men who appreciated what peril to their plans inhered in the
+Lone Wolf, even four made a ponderable array of desperate enemies to have
+at large in New York, apt to be encountered at any corner, apt at any time
+to espy and recognise him without his knowledge.
+
+This situation imposed upon him two major tasks of immediate moment: he
+must hunt down those four one by one and either satisfy himself as to their
+innocence of harmful intent or put them permanently _hors de combat_; and
+he must extinguish utterly, once and for all time, that amiable personality
+whose brief span had been restricted to the decks of the _Assyrian_,
+Monsieur André Duchemin.
+
+That one must be buried deep, beyond all peradventure of involuntary
+resurrection.
+
+Fortunately the last step toward the positive metamorphosis indicated had
+been taken that very morning, when the Gallic beard of Monsieur Duchemin
+was erased by the razor of a New England barber, whose shears had likewise
+eradicated every trace of a Continental mode of hair-dressing. There
+remained about Lanyard little to remind of André Duchemin but his eyes; and
+the look of one's eyes, as every good actor knows, is something far more
+easy to disguise than is commonly believed.
+
+But it was hardly in human nature not to mourn the untimely demise of so
+useful a body, one who carried such beautiful credentials and serviceable
+letters of introduction, whose character boasted so much charm with a
+solitary fault--too facile vulnerability to the prying eyes of those to
+whom Paris meant those days and social strata in which Michael Lanyard
+had moved and had his being. Witness--according to Crane--the demoniac
+cleverness of the Brazilian in unmasking the Duchemin incognito.
+
+Suspicion was taking form in Lanyard's reflections that he had paid far
+too little attention to Seńor Arturo Velasco of Buenos Aires, whose
+avowed avocation of amateur criminologist might easily be synonymous with
+interests much less innocuous.
+
+Or why had Velasco been so quick to communicate recognition of Lanyard to
+an employee of the United States Secret Service?
+
+For that matter, why had he felt called so publicly to descant upon the
+natural history of the Lone Wolf? In order to focus upon that one the
+attentions of his enemies? Or to put him on guard?
+
+It was altogether perplexing. Was one to esteem Velasco friend or foe?
+
+Lanyard could comfort himself only with the promise he should one day know,
+and that without undue delay.
+
+Alighting in Grand Central Terminus late at night, he made his way to
+Forty-second Street and there, in the staring headlines of a "Late Extra,"
+read the news that the steamship _Saratoga_ had suffered a crippling
+engine-room accident and was limping slowly toward port, still something
+like eighteen hours out.
+
+Wondering if it were presumption to construe this as an omen that the stars
+in their courses fought for him, Lanyard went west to Broadway afoot, all
+the way beset with a sense of incredulity; it was difficult to believe that
+he was himself, alive and at large in this city of wonder and space, where
+people moved at leisure and without fear on broad streets that resembled
+deep-bitten channels for rivers of light. He was all too wont with nights
+of dread and trembling, with the mediaeval gloom that enwrapped the cities
+of Europe by night, their grim black streets desolate but for a few,
+infrequent, scurrying shapes of fright.... While here the very beggars
+walked with heads unbowed, and men and women of happier estate laughed and
+played and made love lightly in the scampering taxis that whisked them
+homeward from restaurants of the feverish midnight.
+
+A people at war, actually at grips with the Blond Beast, arrayed to
+defend itself and all humanity against conquest by that loathsome incubus
+incarnate, a people heedless, carefree, irresponsible, refusing to credit
+its peril....
+
+Here and there a recruiting poster, down the broad reaches of Fifth Avenue
+a display of bunting, no other hint of war-time spirit and gravity....
+
+Longacre Square, a weltering lake of kaleidoscopic radiance, even at this
+late hour thronged with carnival crowds, not one note of sobriety in the
+night....
+
+Lanyard lifted a wondering gaze to the livid sky whose far, clear stars
+were paled and shamed by the up-flung glare, like eyes of innocence peering
+down into a pit of hell.
+
+Inscrutable!
+
+Yet one could hardly be numb to the subtle, heady intoxication of those
+cool, immaculate, sea-sweet airs which swept the streets, instilling
+self-confidence and lightness of spirit even in heads shadowed with the woe
+of war-worn Europe.
+
+Lanyard had not crossed the Avenue before he found himself walking with a
+brisker stride, holding his own head high....
+
+On impulse, despite the lateness of the hour, albeit with misgivings
+justified in the issue, he hailed a taxicab and had himself driven to the
+headquarters of the British Secret Service in America, an unostentatious
+dwelling on the northwest corner of West End Avenue at Ninety-fifth Street.
+
+Here a civil footman answered the door and Lanyard's enquiries with the
+information that Colonel Stanistreet had unexpectedly been called out
+of town and would not return before evening of the next day, while his
+secretary, Mr. Blensop, had gone to a play and might not come home till all
+hours.
+
+More impatient than disappointed, Lanyard climbed back into his cab, and in
+consequence of consultation with its friendly minded chauffeur, eventually
+put up for the night in an Eighth Avenue hotel of the class that made
+Senator Raines famous, a hostelry brazenly proclaiming accommodations "for
+gentlemen only," whereas it offered entertainment for both man and beast
+and catered rather more to beast than to man.
+
+However, it served; it was inconspicuous and made no demands upon a shabby
+traveller sans luggage, more than payment in advance.
+
+Early abroad, Lanyard breakfasted with attention fixed to the advertising
+columns of the _Herald_, and by mid-morning was established as sub-tenant
+of a furnished bachelor apartment on Fifty-eighth Street near Seventh
+Avenue, a tiny nest of few rooms on the street level, with entrances from
+both the general lobby and the street direct: an admirable arrangement for
+one who might choose to come and go without supervision or challenge.
+
+Lacking local references as to his character, Lanyard was obliged to pay
+three months' rent in advance in addition to making a substantial deposit
+to cover possible damage to the furnishings.
+
+His name, a spur-of-the-moment selection, was recorded in the lease as
+Anthony Ember.
+
+At noon he brought to his lodgings two trunks salvaged from a storage
+warehouse wherein they had been deposited more than three years since, on
+the eve of his flight with his family from America, an affair of haste and
+secrecy forbidding the handicap of heavy impedimenta.
+
+Thus Lanyard became once more possessor of a tolerably comprehensive
+wardrobe.
+
+But, those trunks released more than his personal belongings; intermingled
+were possessions that had been his wife's and his boy's. As he unpacked,
+memories peopled those perfunctorily luxurious lodgings of the transient
+with melancholy ghosts as sweet and sad as lavender and rue.
+
+For hours on end the man sat idle, head bowed down, hands plucking
+aimlessly at small broidered garments.
+
+And if in the sweep and turmoil of late events he seemed to have forgotten
+for a little that feud which had brought him overseas, he roused from this
+brief interlude of saddened dreaming with the iron of deadly purpose newly
+entered into his soul, and in his heart one dominant thought, that now his
+hour with Ekstrom could not, must not, be long deferred.
+
+In the street there rose an uproar of inhuman bawling. Lanyard went to the
+private door, hailed one of the husky authors of the din, an itinerant
+news-vendor, and disbursed a nickel coin for one cent's worth of spushul
+uxtry and four cents' worth of howling impudence.
+
+He found no more of interest in the newspaper than the information that the
+_Saratoga_ had been sighted off Fire Island and was expected to dock in New
+York not later than eight o'clock that night.
+
+This, however, was acceptable reading. Lanyard had work to do which were
+better done before "Karl" and his crew found opportunity to communicate
+directly with their collaborators ashore, work which it were unwise
+to initiate before nightfall lent a cloak of shadows to hoodwink the
+ever-possible adventitious German spy.
+
+Nor was he so fatuous as to fancy it would profit him to call before nine
+o'clock at the house on West End Avenue. No earlier might he hope to find
+Colonel the Honourable George Fleetwood-Stanistreet near the end of his
+dinner, and so in a mood approachable and receptive.
+
+But there could be no harm in reconnaissance by daylight.
+
+He whiled away the latter part of the afternoon in taxicabs, by dint of
+frequent changes contriving in the most casual fashion imaginable to pass
+the Seventy-ninth Street branch of the Wilhelmstrasse no less than four
+times.
+
+Little rewarded these tactics other than a fairly accurate mental
+photograph of the building and its situation--and a growing suspicion that
+the United States Government had profited nothing by England's lessons
+of early war days in respect of the one way to cope with resident enemy
+aliens.
+
+The house stood upon a corner, occupying half of an avenue block--the
+northern half of which was the site of a towering apartment house in
+course of construction--and loomed over its lesser neighbours a monumental
+monstrosity of architecture, as formidable as a fortress, its lower tiers
+of windows barred with iron, substantial iron grilles ready to bar its
+main entrance, even heavier gates guarding the carriage court in the
+side street. In all a stronghold not easy for the most accomplished
+house-breaker to force; yet the heart of it was Lanyard's goal; for there,
+he believed, Ekstrom (under whatever _nom de guerre_) lay hidden, or if not
+Ekstrom, at least a clear lead to his whereabouts.
+
+Certainly that one could not be far from the powerful wireless station
+secretly maintained on the roof of this weird jumble of architectural
+periods, its aërials cunningly hidden in the crowning atrocity of its
+minaret: a station reputedly so powerful that it could receive Berlin's
+nightly outgivings of news and orders, and, in emergency, transmit them to
+other secret stations in Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela.
+
+Yet the shrewdest scrutiny of eyes trained to detect police agents at
+sight, however well disguised, failed to espy one sign of any sort of
+espionage upon this nest of rattlesnakes.
+
+Apparently its tenants came and went as they willed, untroubled by and
+contemptuous of governmental surveillance.
+
+A handsome limousine car pulled up at its carriage block as Lanyard drove
+by, one time, and a pretty woman, exquisitely gowned, alighted and was
+welcomed by hospitable front doors that opened before she could ring: a
+woman Lanyard knew as one of the most daring, diabolically clever, and
+unscrupulous creatures of the Wilhelmstrasse, one whose life would not have
+been worth an hour's purchase had she ventured to show herself in Paris,
+London, or Petrograd at any time since the outbreak of the war.
+
+He drove on, deep in amaze.
+
+Indications were not wanting, on the other hand, that enemy spies
+maintained close watch upon the movements of those who frequented the house
+on West End Avenue. A German agent whom Lanyard knew by sight was strolling
+by as his taxi rounded its corner and swung on down toward Riverside Drive.
+
+This more modest residence possessed a brick-walled garden at the back, on
+the Ninety-fifth Street side. And if the top of the wall was crusted with
+broken glass in a fashion truly British, it had a door, and the door a
+lock. And Lanyard made a note thereon.
+
+And when he went home to dress for dinner, he opened up the false bottom
+of one of his trunks and selected from a store of cloth-wrapped bundles
+therein one which contained a small bunch of innocent-looking keys whose
+true _raison d'ętre_ was anything in the world but guileless.
+
+Later he did himself very well at Delmonico's, enjoying for the first time
+in many years a well-balanced dinner faultlessly cooked and served amid
+quiet surroundings that carried memory back half a decade to the Paris that
+was, the Paris that nevermore will be....
+
+At nine precisely he paid off a taxicab at the corner of Ninety-fifth
+Street.
+
+While waiting on the doorstep of the corner house, he raked the street
+right and left with searching glances, and was somewhat reassured.
+Apparently he called at an hour when the Boche pickets were off duty; at
+the moment there was no pedestrian visible within a block's distance
+on either hand, nobody that he could see skulked in the areas of the
+old-fashioned brownstone houses across the way.
+
+The neighbourhood was, indeed, quiet even for an upper West Side
+residential quarter. A block over to the east Broadway was strident in the
+flood of its nocturnal traffic; a like distance to the west Riverside Drive
+hummed with pleasure cars taking advantage of the first bland night of that
+belated spring. But here, now that the taxi had wheeled away, there was
+never a car in sight, nor even a strolling brace of sidewalk lovers.
+
+The door opened, revealing the same footman.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet? I will see, sir."
+
+Lanyard entered.
+
+"If you will be kind enough to be seated," the footman suggested,
+indicating a small waiting room. "And what name shall I say?"
+
+It had been Lanyard's intention to have himself announced simply as the
+author of that telegram from Edgartown. Obscure impulse made him change his
+mind, some premonition so tenuous as to defy analysis.
+
+"Mr. Anthony Ember."
+
+"Thank you, sir."
+
+After a little the footman returned.
+
+"If you will come this way, sir...."
+
+He led toward the back of the house, introducing Lanyard to a spacious
+apartment, a library uncommonly well furnished, rather more than
+comfortably yet without a trace of ostentation in its complete luxury, a
+warm room, a room intimately lived in, a room, in short, characteristically
+British in atmosphere.
+
+Waist-high bookcases lined the walls, broken on the right by a cheerful
+fireplace with a grate of glowing cannel coal, in front of it a great club
+lounge upholstered, like all the chairs, in well-used leather. Opposite the
+chimney-piece, a handsome thing in carved oak, a door was draped with a
+curtain that swung with it. In the back of the room two long and wide
+French windows stood open to the night, beyond them that garden whose
+wall had attracted Lanyard's attention. There were a number of paintings,
+portraits for the most part, heavily framed, with overhead picture-lights.
+In the middle of the room was a table-desk, broad and long, supporting a
+shaded reading lamp. On the far side of the table a young man sat writing,
+with several dockets of papers arranged before him.
+
+As Lanyard entered, this one put down his pen, pushed back his chair, and
+came round the table: a tallish, well-made young man, dressed a shade too
+foppishly in spite of an unceremonious dinner coat, his manner assured,
+amiable, unconstrained, perhaps a little over-tolerant.
+
+"Mr. Ember, I believe?" he said in a voice studiously musical.
+
+"Yes," Lanyard replied, vaguely annoyed with himself because of an
+unreasoning resentment of this musical quality. "Mr. Blensop?"
+
+"I am Mr. Blensop," that one admitted gracefully. "And how may I have the
+pleasure of being of service?"
+
+He waved a hand toward an easy chair beside the table, and resumed his own.
+But Lanyard hesitated.
+
+"I wished to see Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+Mr. Blensop looked up with an indulgent smile. His face was round and
+smooth but for a perfectly docile little moustache, his lips full and red,
+his nose delicately chiselled; but his eyes, though large, were set cannily
+close together.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet is unfortunately not at home. I am his secretary."
+
+"Yes," said Lanyard, still standing. "In that case I'd be glad if you would
+be good enough to make an appointment for me with Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+"I am afraid he will not be home till very late to-night, but--"
+
+"Then to-morrow?"
+
+Mr. Blensop smiled patiently. "Colonel Stanistreet is a very busy man," he
+uttered melodiously. "If you could let me know something about the nature
+of your business...."
+
+"It is the King's," said Lanyard bluntly.
+
+The secretary went so far as to betray well-bred surprise. "You are an
+Englishman, Mr. Ember?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+And for all he knew to the contrary, so Lanyard was.
+
+"I am Colonel Stanistreet's secretary," the young man again suggested
+hopefully.
+
+"That is precisely why I ask you to make an appointment for me with your
+employer," Lanyard retorted politely.
+
+"You won't say what you wish to see him about?"
+
+A trace of asperity marred the music of those tones; Mr. Blensop further
+indicated distaste of the innuendo inherent in Lanyard's use of the word
+"employer" by delicately wrinkling his nose.
+
+"I am sorry," Lanyard replied sufficiently.
+
+The door behind him opened, and the footman intruded.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop...."
+
+"Yes, Walker?"
+
+The servant advanced to the table and proffered a visiting card on a tray.
+Mr. Blensop took it, arched pencilled brows over it.
+
+"To see me, Walker?"
+
+"The gentleman asked for Colonel Stanistreet, sir."
+
+"H'm.... You may show him in when I ring."
+
+The footman retired. Mr. Blensop looked up brightly, bending the card with
+nervous fingers.
+
+"You were saying your business was...?"
+
+"I was not," Lanyard replied with disarming good humour. "I'm afraid that
+is something much too important and confidential to reveal even to Colonel
+Stanistreet's secretary, if you don't mind my saying so."
+
+Mr. Blensop did mind, and betrayed vexation with an impatient little
+gesture which caused the card to fly from his fingers and fall face
+uppermost on the table. Almost instantly he recovered it, but not before
+Lanyard had read the name it bore.
+
+"Of course not," said the secretary pleasantly, rising. "But you understand
+my instructions are rigid ... I'm sorry."
+
+"You refuse me the appointment?"
+
+"Unless you can give me an inkling of your business--or perhaps bring a
+letter of introduction."
+
+"I can do neither, Mr. Blensop," said Lanyard earnestly. "I have
+information of the gravest moment to communicate to the head of the British
+Secret Service in this country."
+
+The secretary looked startled. "What makes you think Colonel Stanistreet is
+connected with the British Secret Service?"
+
+"I don't think so; I know it."
+
+After a moment of hesitation Mr. Blensop yielded graciously. "If you can
+come back at nine to-morrow morning, Mr. Ember, I'll do my best to persuade
+Colonel Stanistreet--"
+
+"I repeat, my business is of the most pressing nature. Can't you arrange
+for me to see your employer to-night?"
+
+"It is utterly impossible."
+
+Lanyard accepted defeat with a bow.
+
+"To-morrow at nine, then," he said, turning toward the door by which he had
+entered.
+
+"At nine," said Mr. Blensop, generous in triumph. "But do you mind going
+out this way?"
+
+He moved toward the curtained door opposite the chimney-piece. Lanyard
+paused, shrugged, and followed. Mr. Blensop opened the door, disclosing a
+vista of Ninety-fifth Street.
+
+"Thank _you_, Mr. Ember. _Good_-night," he intoned.
+
+The door closed with the click of a spring latch.
+
+Lanyard stood alone in the street, looking swiftly this way and that, his
+hand closing upon that little bunch of keys in his pocket, his humour
+lawless.
+
+For the name inscribed on that card which Mr. Blensop had so carelessly
+dropped was one to fill Lanyard with consuming anxiety for better
+acquaintance with its present wearer.
+
+Written in pencil, with all the individual angularity of French
+chirography, the name was André Duchemin.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+REINCARNATION
+
+
+It took a little time and patience but, on his third essay, Lanyard found
+a key which agreed with the lock. He permitted himself a sigh of relief;
+Ninety-fifth Street was bare, the door set flush with the outside of the
+wall afforded no concealment to the trespasser, while the direct light of a
+street lamp at the corner made his lonely figure uncomfortably conspicuous.
+
+Apparently, however, he had not been observed.
+
+Gently pushing the door open, he slipped in, as gently closed it, then for
+a full minute stood stirless, spying out the lay of the land.
+
+Fitting precisely his anticipations, the garden discovered a fine English
+flavour; it was well-kept, modest, fragrant and, best of all, quite dark,
+especially so in the shadow of the street wall. Only a glimmer of starlight
+enabled him to pick out the course of a pebbled footpath. A border of deep
+turf between this and the wall muffled his footsteps as he moved toward the
+back of the house.
+
+The library windows, deeply recessed, opened on a low, broad stoop of
+concrete, with a pergola effect above, and a few wicker pieces upon a grass
+mat underfoot.
+
+Noiselessly Lanyard stepped across the low sill and paused in the cover of
+heavy draperies, commanding a tolerably full view of the library if one
+somewhat unsatisfactory, since the light within was by no means bright.
+Still, this circumstance had its advantages for him; with his dark topcoat
+buttoned to the throat and its collar turned up to hide his linen, he was
+confident he would not be detected unless he gave his presence away by an
+abrupt movement--something which the Lone Wolf never made.
+
+At the moment Mr. Blensop seemed to be engaged in the surprising occupation
+of discoursing upon art to his caller.
+
+The latter occupied that chair which Lanyard had refused, on the far side
+of the table. Thus placed, the lamplight masked more than revealed him,
+throwing a dull glare into Lanyard's eyes. His man sat in a pose of earnest
+attention, bending forward a trifle to follow the exposition of Mr.
+Blensop, who stood beneath a portrait on the wall between the chimney-piece
+and the windows, his attitude incurably graceful, a hand on the switch
+controlling the picture-light. Apparently he had just finished speaking,
+for he paused, looking toward his guest with a quiet and intimate smile as
+he turned off the light.
+
+"And that's all there is to it," he declared, moving back to the table.
+
+"I see," said the other thoughtfully.
+
+Lanyard felt himself start almost uncontrollably: rage swept through him,
+storming brain and body, like a black squall over a hill-bound lake. For
+the moment he could neither see or hear clearly nor think coherently.
+
+For the voice of this latest incarnation of André Duchemin was the voice of
+"Karl."
+
+When the tumult of his senses subsided he heard Blensop saying, "I'll
+write it out for you," and saw him pick up a pad and pencil and jot down a
+memorandum.
+
+"There you are," he added, ripping off the sheet and passing it across the
+table. "Now you can't go wrong."
+
+"I precious seldom do," his caller commented drily.
+
+"I think--" Blensop began, and checked sharply as the man Walker came into
+the room.
+
+"Beg pardon, Mr. Blensop--"
+
+There was an accent of impatience in those beautifully modulated tones:
+"Well, what is it now?"
+
+"A lady to see you, sir."
+
+Blensop took the card from the proffered salver. "Never heard of her," he
+announced brusquely at a glance. "She asked for Colonel Stanistreet or for
+me?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, sir. But when I said he was not at home, she asked to
+see his secretary."
+
+"Any idea what she wants?"
+
+"She didn't say, sir--but she seemed much distressed."
+
+"They always are. H'm.... Young and good-looking?"
+
+"Quite, sir."
+
+"Dessay I may as well see her," said Mr. Blensop wearily. "Show her in when
+I ring."
+
+Walker shut himself out of the room.
+
+"It's just as well," Blensop added to his caller. "You understand, my clear
+fellow--?"
+
+"Assuredly." The man got up; but Blensop contrived exasperatingly to keep
+between him and the windows. "I'm to be back at midnight?"
+
+"Twelve sharp; you'll be sure to find him here then. Mind leaving by this
+emergency exit?"
+
+"Not in the least."
+
+"Then _good_-night, my dear Monsieur Duchemin!"
+
+Was there a hint of irony in Blensop's employment of that style? Lanyard
+half fancied there was, but did not linger to analyse the impression.
+Already the secretary had opened the side door.
+
+In a bound Lanyard cleared the stoop, then ran back to the door in the
+wall. But with all his quickness he was all too slow; already, as he
+emerged to Ninety-fifth Street, his quarry was rounding the Avenue corner.
+
+Defiant of discretion, Lanyard gave chase at speed but, though he had not
+thirty yards to cover, again was baffled by the swiftness with which "Karl"
+got about.
+
+He had still some distance to go when the peace of the quarter was
+shattered by a door that slammed like a pistol shot, and with roaring
+motor and grinding gears a cab swung away from the curb in front of the
+Stanistreet residence and tore off down the Avenue.
+
+Swearing petulantly in his disappointment, Lanyard pulled up on the corner.
+The number on the license plate was plainly revealed as the vehicle showed
+its back to the street lamp. But what good was that to him? He memorised
+it mechanically, in mutinous appreciation of the fact that the taxi was
+setting a pace with which he could not hope to compete afoot.
+
+The rumble of another motor-car caught his ear, and he looked round
+eagerly. A second taxicab--undoubtedly that which had brought the young
+woman now presumably closeted with Mr. Blensop--was moving up into the
+place vacated by the first.
+
+In two strides Lanyard was at its side.
+
+"Follow that taxi!" he cried--"number seventy-six, three-eighty-five. Don't
+lose sight of it, but don't pass it--don't let them know we're following!"
+
+"Engaged," the driver growled.
+
+"Hang your engagement! Here"--Lanyard pressed a golden eagle into the
+fellow's palm--"there will be another of those if you do as I say!"
+
+"Le's go!" the driver agreed with resignation.
+
+If the cab was moving before Lanyard could hop in and shut the door, the
+other had already established a killing lead; and though Lanyard's man
+demonstrated characteristic contempt for municipal regulations governing
+the speed of motor-driven vehicles, and racketed his own madly down the
+Avenue, he was wholly helpless to do more than keep the tail-lamp of the
+first in sight.
+
+More than once that dull red eye seemed sardonically to wink.
+
+Still, Lanyard did not think "Karl" knew he was pursued. His conveyance had
+passed the corner before Lanyard emerged from the side street. There being
+no reason that Lanyard knew of why the spy should believe himself under
+suspicion, his haste seemed most probably due to natural desire to avoid
+adventitious recognition, coupled with, no doubt, other urgent business.
+
+At Seventy-second Street the chase turned east, with Lanyard two blocks
+behind, and for a few agonizing moments was altogether lost to him. But at
+Broadway the tide of southbound traffic hindered it momentarily, and it
+swung into that stream with its pursuer only a block astern.
+
+Thereafter through a ride of another mile and a half, the distance between
+the two was augmented or abbreviated arbitrarily by the rules of the road.
+
+At one time less than two cab-lengths separated them; then a Ford, driven
+Fordishly, wandered vaguely out of a crosstown street and hesitated in the
+middle of the thoroughfare with precisely the air of a staring yokel on
+a first visit to the city; and Lanyard's driver slammed on the emergency
+brake barely in time to escape committing involuntary but justifiable
+flivvercide.
+
+When he was able once more to throw the gears into high, the chase was a
+long block ahead.
+
+They were entering Longacre Square before he made up that loss.
+
+And at Forty-fourth Street, again, a stream of east-bound cars edged in
+between the two, reducing Lanyard's driver to the verge of gibbering
+lunacy.
+
+A car resembling "Karl's" was crossing Broadway at Forty-second Street when
+Lanyard was still on Seventh Avenue north of the Times Building.
+
+But only a minute later his driver pulled up in front of the Hotel
+Knickerbocker, and Lanyard, peering through the forward window, saw the
+number 76-385 on the license plate of a taxicab drawing away, empty, from
+the curb beneath the hotel canopy.
+
+He tossed the second gold piece to the driver as his feet touched the
+sidewalk, and shouldered through a cluster of men and women at the main
+entrance to the lobby.
+
+That rendezvous of Broadway was fairly thronged despite the slack
+mid-evening hour, between the dinner and the supper crushes; but Lanyard
+reviewed in vain the little knots of guests and loungers; if "Karl" were
+among them, he was nobody whom Lanyard had learned to know by sight on
+board the _Assyrian_.
+
+With as little success he searched unobtrusively all public rooms on the
+main floor.
+
+It was, of course, both possible and probable that "Karl," himself a guest
+of the hotel, had crossed directly to the elevators and been whisked aloft
+to his room.
+
+With this in mind, Lanyard paused at the desk, asked permission to examine
+the register and, being accommodated, was somewhat consoled; if his chase
+had failed of its immediate objective, it now proved not altogether
+fruitless. A majority of the _Assyrian_ survivors seemed to have elected to
+stop at the Knickerbocker. One after another Lanyard, scanning the entries,
+found these names:
+
+  Edmund O'Reilly--Detroit
+  Arturo Velasco--Buenos Aires
+  Bartlett Putnam--Philadelphia
+  Cecelia Brooke--London
+  Emil Dressier--Genčve
+
+Half inclined to commit the imprudence of sending a name up to Miss
+Brooke--any name but André Duchemin, Michael Lanyard, or Anthony
+Ember--together with a message artfully worded to fix her interest without
+giving comfort to the enemy, should it chance to go astray, the adventurer
+hesitated by the desk; and of a sudden was satisfied that such a move would
+be not only injudicious but waste of time; for, now that he paused to think
+of it, he surmised that the young woman--"young and good-looking", on
+Walker's word--who had called to see Colonel Stanistreet was none other
+than this same Cecelia Brooke.
+
+What more natural than that she should make early occasion to consult the
+head of the British Secret Service in America?
+
+A pity he had not waited there in the window! If he had, no doubt the
+mystery with which the girl had surrounded herself would be no more mystery
+to Lanyard; he would have learned the secret of that paper cylinder as well
+as the part the girl had played in the intrigue for its possession, and so
+be the better advised as to his own future conduct.
+
+But in his insensate passion for revenge upon one who had all but murdered
+him, he had forgotten all else but the moment's specious opportunity.
+
+With a grunt of impatience Lanyard turned away from the desk, and came face
+to face with Crane.
+
+The Secret Service man was coming from the direction of the bar in company
+with Velasco, O'Reilly, and Dressier.
+
+Of the three last named but one looked Lanyard's way, O'Reilly, and his
+gaze, resting transiently on the countenance of André Duchemin minus the
+Duchemin beard, passed on without perceptible glimmer of recognition.
+
+Why not? Why should it enter his head that one lived and had anticipated
+his own arrival in New York by twenty hours whom be believed to be buried
+many fathoms deep off Nantucket?
+
+As for Crane, his cool gray, humorous eyes, half-hooded with their heavy
+lids, favoured Lanyard with casual regard and never a tremor of interest
+or surprise; but as he passed his right eye closed deliberately and with a
+significance not to be ignored.
+
+To this Lanyard responded only with a look of blankest amaze.
+
+Chatting with an air of subdued self-congratulation pardonable in such
+as have come safe to land through many dangers of the deep, the quartet
+strolled round the desk and boarded one of the elevators.
+
+Not till its gate had closed did Lanyard stir. Then he went away from there
+with all haste and cunning at his command.
+
+The route through the café to Broadway offered the speediest and least
+conspicuous of exits. From the side door of the hotel he plunged directly
+into the mouth of the Subway kiosk and, chance favouring him, managed to
+purchase a ticket and board a southbound local train an instant before its
+doors ground shut.
+
+Believing Crane would take the next elevator down, once he had seen the
+others safely in their rooms, Lanyard was content to let him find the lobby
+destitute of ghosts, to let him fume and wonder and think himself perhaps
+mistaken.
+
+The last thing he desired was entanglement with the American Secret
+Service. For Crane he entertained personal respect and temperate liking,
+thought the man socially an amusing creature, professionally a deadly peril
+to one who had a feud to pursue.
+
+Leaving the train at Grand Central, the adventurer passed through the back
+ways of the Terminus, into the Hotel Biltmore, upstairs to its lobby,
+thence out by the Vanderbilt Avenue entrance, walking through Forty-fourth
+Street to Fifth Avenue, where he chartered a taxicab, gave the address
+of his lodgings, and lay back in the corner of its seat satisfied he had
+successfully eluded pursuit and very, very grateful to the Subway system
+for the facilities it afforded fugitives like himself through its warren of
+underground passages.
+
+One thing troubled him, however, without respite: the Brooke girl was on
+his conscience. To her he owed an accounting of his stewardship of that
+trust which she had reposed in him. It was intolerable in his understanding
+that she should be permitted to go one unnecessary hour in ignorance of the
+truth about that business--the truth, that is, as far as he himself knew
+it.
+
+If through Crane or in some unforseeable fashion she were to learn that
+André Duchemin lived, she would think him faithless. If she knew that
+Duchemin had been one with Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf, she would not be
+surprised. But that, too, was intolerable; even the Lone Wolf had his code
+of honour.
+
+Again, if she remained in ignorance of the fact that Lanyard had escaped
+drowning, she would continue to believe her secret at the bottom of the sea
+with him; whereas, in the hands of the enemy, in the possession of "Karl"
+and his, confederates, it was potentially Heaven only knew how dangerous a
+weapon.
+
+Abruptly Lanyard reflected that at least one doubt had been eliminated by
+that encounter in the Knickerbocker. It was barely possible that "Karl" had
+gone to the bar on entering and added himself to Crane's party, but it
+was hardly creditable in Lanyard's consideration. He was convinced that,
+whether or not Velasco, O'Reilly, and Dressier were parties to the Hun
+conspiracy, none of these was "Karl."
+
+As for the Brooke matter, he felt it incumbent upon him immediately to find
+some safe means of communicating with the girl. She could be trusted not to
+betray him to the police, however much she might at first incline to doubt
+him. But he would persuade her of his sincerity, never fear!
+
+The telephone offered one solution of his difficulty, an agency
+non-committal enough, provided one were at pains not to call from one's
+private station, to which the call might be traced back.
+
+With this in mind he stopped and dismissed his taxicab at Fifty-seventh
+Street and Sixth Avenue, and availed himself of a coin-box telephone booth
+in the corner druggist's.
+
+The experience that followed was nothing out of the ordinary. Lanyard,
+connected with the Knickerbocker promptly, with the customary expenditure
+of patience laboriously spelled out the name B-r-double-o-k-e, and was told
+to hold the wire.
+
+Several minutes later he began to agitate the receiver hook and was
+eventually rewarded with the advice that the Knickerbocker operator, being
+informed his party was in the rest'runt, was having her paged.
+
+Still later the central operator told him his five minutes was up and
+consented to continue the connection only on deposit of an additional
+nickel.
+
+Eventually, in sequel to more abuse of the hook, he received this response
+from the Knickerbocker switchboard: "Wait a min'te, can't you? Here's your
+party."
+
+Lanyard was surprised at the eagerness with which he cried: "Hello!"
+
+A click answered, and a bland voice which was not the voice he had expected
+to hear: "Hello? That you, Jack?"
+
+He said wearily: "I am waiting to speak with Miss Cecelia Brooke."
+
+"Oh, then there _must_ be some mistake. This is Miss _Crooke_ speaking."
+
+Lanyard uttered a strangled "Sorry!" and hung up, abandoning further effort
+as hopeless.
+
+That matter would have to stand over till morning.
+
+Time now pressed: it was nearly eleven; he had a rendezvous with Destiny to
+keep at midnight, and meant to be more than punctual.
+
+Walking to his apartment house, he proceeded to establish an alibi by
+entering through the public hallway and registering with the telephone
+attendant a call for seven o'clock the next morning.
+
+In the course of the next half hour Lanyard let himself quietly out of the
+private door, slipped around the block and boarded a Riverside Drive bus.
+
+Alighting at Ninety-third Street, he walked two blocks north on the Drive,
+turned east, and without misadventure admitted himself a second time to the
+Stanistreet garden.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+DEFAMATION
+
+
+It was hardly possible to watch Mr. Blensop functioning in his vocational
+capacity without reflecting on that cruel injustice which Nature only too
+often practises upon her offspring in secreting most praiseworthy qualities
+within fleshy envelopes of hopelessly frivolous cast.
+
+The flowing gestures of this young man, his fluting accents, poetic eyes,
+and modestly ingratiating moustache, the preciosity of his taste in dress,
+assorted singularly with an austere devotion to duty rare if unaffected.
+
+Beyond question, whether or not naturally a man of studious and
+conscientious temper, Mr. Blensop figured to admiration in the role of such
+an one.
+
+Seated, the shaded lamplight an aureole for his fair young head, he wrought
+industriously with a beautiful gold-mounted fountain pen for fully five
+minutes after Lanyard had stolen into the draped recess of the French
+window, pausing only now and again to take a fresh sheet of paper or
+consult one of the sheaves of documents that lay before him.
+
+At length, however, he hesitated with pen lifted and abstracted gaze
+focussed upon vacancy, shook a bewildered head, and rose, moving directly
+toward the windows.
+
+For as long as thirty breathless seconds Lanyard remained in doubt; there
+was the barest chance that in his preoccupation Blensop might pass through
+to the garden without noticing that dark figure flattened against the
+inswung half of the window, in the dense shadow of the portičre. Otherwise
+the game was altogether up; Lanyard could see no way to avoid the necessity
+of staggering Blensop with a blow, racing for freedom, abandoning utterly
+further effort to learn the motive of "Karl's" impersonation of Duchemin.
+
+He gathered himself together, waited poised in readiness for any
+eventuality--and blessed his lucky stars to find his apprehensions idle.
+
+Three paces from the windows, Mr. Blensop made it plain that he was after
+all not minded to stroll in the garden. Pausing, he swung a high-backed
+wing chair round to face the corner of the room, switched on a reading
+lamp, sat down and selected a volume of some work of reference from the
+well-stocked book shelves.
+
+For several minutes, seated within arm's length of the trespasser, he
+studied intently, then with a cluck of satisfaction replaced the volume,
+extinguished the light, and went back to his writing.
+
+But presently he checked with a vexed little exclamation, shook his pen
+impatiently, and fixed it with a frown of pained reproach.
+
+But that did no good. The cussedness of the inanimate was strong in this
+pen: since its reservoir was quite empty it mulishly refused more service
+without refilling.
+
+With a long-suffering sigh, Mr. Blensop found a filler in one of the desk
+drawers, and unscrewed the nib of the pen.
+
+This accomplished, he paused, listened for a moment with head cocked
+intelligently to one side, dropped the dismembered implement, and got up
+alertly. At the same moment the door to the hallway opened, and two women
+entered, apparently sisters: one a lady of mature and distinguished charm,
+the other an equally prepossessing creature much her junior, the one
+strongly animated with intelligent interest in life, the other a listless
+prey to habitual ennui.
+
+To these fluttered Mr. Blensop, offering to relieve them of their wraps.
+
+"Permit me, Mrs. Arden," he addressed the elder woman, who tolerated him
+dispassionately. "And Mrs. Stanistreet ... I say, aren't you a bit late?"
+
+"Frightfully," assented Mrs. Stanistreet in a weary voice. "It must be all
+of midnight."
+
+"Hardly that, Adele," said Mrs. Arden with a humorous glance.
+
+"Dinner, the play, supper, and home before twelve!" commented Blensop,
+shocked. "I say, that is going some, you know."
+
+"George would insist on hurrying home," the young wife complained.
+"Frightfully tiresome. We were so comfy at the Ritz, too...."
+
+"The Crystal Room?" Dissembled envy poisoned Blensop's accents.
+
+"Frightfully interestin'--everybody was there. I did so want to
+dance--missed you, Arthur."
+
+"I say, you didn't, did you, really?"
+
+"Poor Mr. Blensop!" Mrs. Arden interjected with just a hint of malice.
+"What a pity you must be chained down by inexorable duty, while we fly
+round and amuse ourselves."
+
+"I must not complain," Blensop stated with humility becoming in a dutiful
+martyr, a pose which he saw fit quickly to discard as another man came
+briskly into the room. "Ah, good evening, Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+"Evening, Blensop."
+
+With a brusque nod, Colonel Stanistreet went straightway to the desk,
+stopping there to take up and examine the work upon which his secretary had
+been engaged: a gentleman considerably older than his wife, of grave and
+sturdy cast, with the habit of standing solidly on his feet and giving
+undivided attention to the matter in hand.
+
+"Anything of consequence turned up?" he enquired abstractedly, running
+through the sheets of pen-blackened paper.
+
+"Three persons called," Blensop admitted discreetly. "One returns at
+midnight."
+
+Stanistreet threw him a keen look. "Eh!" he said, making swift inference,
+and turned to his wife and sister-in-law. "It is nearly twelve now. Forgive
+me if I hurry you off."
+
+"Patience," said Mrs. Arden indulgently. "Not for worlds would I hinder
+your weighty affairs, dear old thing, but I sleep more sound o' nights when
+I know my trinkets are locked up securely in your safe."
+
+With a graceful gesture she unfastened a magnificent necklace and deposited
+it on the desk.
+
+"Frightful rot," her sister commented from the doorway. "As if anybody
+would dare break in here."
+
+"Why not?" Mrs. Arden enquired calmly, stripping her fingers of their
+rings.
+
+"With a watchman patrolling the grounds all night--"
+
+"Letty is sensible," Stanistreet interrupted. "Howson's faithful enough,
+and these American police dependable, but second-storey men happen in the
+best-guarded neighbourhoods. Be advised, Adele: leave your things here with
+Letty's."
+
+"No fear," his wife returned coolly. "Too frightfully weird...."
+
+She drifted across the threshold, then hesitated, a pretty figure of
+disdainful discontent.
+
+"But really, Colonel Stanistreet is right," Blensop interposed vivaciously.
+"What do you imagine I heard to-night? The Lone Wolf is in America!"
+
+"What is that you say?" Mrs. Arden demanded sharply.
+
+"The Lone Wolf ... Fact. Have it on most excellent authority."
+
+"The Lone Wolf!" Mrs. Stanistreet drawled. "If you ask me, I think the Lone
+Wolf nothing in the world but a scapegoat for police stupidity."
+
+"You wouldn't say that," Mrs. Arden retorted, "if you had lived in Paris as
+long as I. There, in the dear old days, we paid that rogue too heavy a tax
+not to believe in him."
+
+"Frightful nonsense," insisted the other. "I'm off. 'Night, Arthur. Shall
+you be long, George?"
+
+"Oh, half an hour or so," her husband responded absently as she
+disappeared.
+
+With a little gesture consigning her jewellery, heaped upon the desk, to
+the care of her brother-in-law, Mrs. Arden uttered good-nights and followed
+her sister.
+
+Blensop bowed her out respectfully, shut the door and returned to the desk.
+
+"What's this about the Lone Wolf?" Stanistreet enquired, sitting down to
+con the papers more intently.
+
+"Oh!" Blensop laughed lightly. "I was merely repeating the blighter's own
+assertion. I mean to say, he boasted he was the Lone Wolf."
+
+"Who boasted he was the Lone Wolf?"
+
+"Chap who called to-night, giving the name of Duchemin--André Duchemin. Had
+French passports, and letters from the Home Office recommending him rather
+highly. Useful creature, one would fancy, with his knowledge of the right
+way to go about the wrong thing. What? Ought to be especially helpful to us
+in hunting down the Hun over here."
+
+"Is this the man who returns at midnight?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I thought it best to make the appointment."
+
+"Why?"
+
+"He said he had crossed on the _Assyrian_, said it significantly, you know.
+I fancied he might be the person you have been expecting."
+
+Stanistreet looked up with a frown. "Hardly," he said--"if, that is, he is
+really what he claims to be. I wonder how he came by those letters."
+
+"Does seem odd, doesn't it, sir? A confessed criminal!"
+
+"An extraordinary man, by all accounts.... Those other callers--?"
+
+"Nobody of importance, I should say. A man who gave his name as Ember and
+got a bit shirty when I asked his business. Told him you might consent to
+see him at nine in the morning."
+
+"And the other?"
+
+"A young woman--deuced pretty girl--also reticent. What was her name?
+Brooke--that was it: Cecelia Brooke."
+
+"The devil!" Stanistreet exclaimed, dropping the papers. "What did you say
+to her?"
+
+"What could I say, sir? She refused to divulge a word about her business
+with us. I told her--"
+
+Warned by a gesture from Colonel Stanistreet, Blensop broke off. Walker was
+opening the door.
+
+"Well, Walker?"
+
+"A Mr. Duchemin, sir, says Mr. Blensop made an appointment with you for
+twelve to-night."
+
+"Show him in, please."
+
+The footman shut himself out. Blensop clutched nervously at Mrs. Arden's
+jewels.
+
+"Hadn't I better put these in the safe first?"
+
+"No--no time." Stanistreet opened a drawer of the desk--"Here!"--and closed
+it as Blensop hastily swept the jewellery into it. "Safe enough there--as
+long as he doesn't know, at all events. But don't forget to put them away
+after he goes."
+
+"No, sir."
+
+Again the door opened. Walker announced: "Mr. Duchemin." Stanistreet rose
+in his place. A man strode in with the assurance of one who has discounted
+a cordial welcome.
+
+Through the gap which he had quietly created between the portičre and the
+side of the window, Lanyard stared hungrily, and for the second time that
+night damned heartily the inadequate light in the library.
+
+The impostor's face, barely distinguishable in the up-thrown penumbra
+of the lampshade, wore a beard--a rather thick, dark beard of negligent
+abundance, after a mode popular among Frenchmen--above which his features
+were an indefinite blur.
+
+Lanyard endeavoured with ill success to identify the fellow by his
+carriage; there was a perceptible suggestion of a military strut, but that
+is something hardly to be termed distinctive in these days. Otherwise, he
+was tall, quite as tall as Lanyard, and had much the same character of
+body, slender and lithe.
+
+But he was "Karl" beyond question, confederate and murderer of Baron von
+Harden, the man who had thrown the light bomb to signal the U-boat,
+the brute with whom Lanyard had struggled on the boat deck of the
+_Assyrian_--though the latter, in the confusion of that struggle, had
+thought the German's beard a masking handkerchief of black silk.
+
+Now by that same token he was no member of that smoking-room coterie upon
+which Lanyard's suspicions had centered.
+
+On the other hand, any number of passengers had worn beards, not a few of
+much the same mode as that sported by this nonchalant fraud.
+
+Vainly Lanyard cudgelled his wits to aid a laggard memory, haunted by a
+feeling that he ought to know this man instantly, even in so poor a light.
+Something in his habit, something in that insouciance which so narrowly
+escaped insolence, was at once strongly reminiscent and provokingly
+elusive....
+
+Pausing a little ways within the room, the fellow clicked heels and bowed
+punctiliously in Continental fashion, from the hips.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, I believe," he said in a sonorous voice--"Karl's"
+unmistakable voice--"chief of the American bureau of the British Secret
+Service?"
+
+"I am Colonel Stanistreet," that gentleman admitted. "And you, sir--?"
+
+"I have adopted the name of André Duchemin," the impostor stated. "With
+permission I retain it."
+
+Colonel Stanistreet inclined his head slightly. "As you will. Pray be
+seated."
+
+He dropped back into his chair, while "Karl" with a murmur of
+acknowledgment again took the armchair on the far side of the desk, where
+the lamp stood between him and the secret watcher.
+
+"My secretary tells me you have letters of introduction...."
+
+"Here." Calmly "Karl" produced and offered those purloined papers.
+
+"You will smoke?" Stanistreet indicated a cigarette-box and leaned back to
+glance through the letters.
+
+During a brief pause Blensop busied himself with collecting together the
+documents which had occupied him and began reassorting them, while "Karl,"
+helping himself to a cigarette, smoked with manifest enjoyment.
+
+"These seem to be in order," Stanistreet observed. "I note from this code
+letter that your true name is Michael Lanyard, you were once a professional
+French thief known as 'The Lone Wolf', but have since displayed every
+indication of desire to reform your ways, and have been of considerable
+use to the Intelligence Office. I am desired to employ your services in my
+discretion, contingent--pardon me--upon your continued good behaviour."
+
+"Precisely," assented "Karl."
+
+"Proceed, Monsieur Duchemin."
+
+"It is an affair of some delicacy.... Do we speak alone, Colonel
+Stanistreet?"
+
+"Mr. Blensop is my confidential secretary...."
+
+"Oh, no objection. Still--if I may venture the suggestion--those windows
+open upon a garden, I take it?"
+
+"Yes. Blensop, be good enough to close the windows."
+
+"Certainly, sir."
+
+Stepping delicately, Blensop moved toward the end of the room.
+
+Again Lanyard was confronted with the alternatives of incontinent flight or
+attempting to remain undetected through the adoption of an expedient of the
+most desperate audacity. He had prepared against such contingency, he did
+not mean to go; but the feasibility of his contemplated manoeuvre depended
+entirely upon chance, its success in any event was forlornly problematic.
+
+"Karl" remained hidden from him by the lamp, so he from "Karl." Colonel
+Stanistreet, facing his caller, sat half turned away from the windows.
+Everything rested with Blensop's choice, which of the two windows he would
+elect first to close.
+
+A right-handed man, he turned, as Lanyard had foreseen, to the right, and
+momentarily disappeared in the recess of the farther window.
+
+In the same instant Lanyard slipped noiselessly from behind the portičre,
+and dropped into that capacious wing chair which Blensop had thoughtfully
+placed for him some time since.
+
+Thus seated, making himself as small and still as possible, he was wholly
+concealed from all other occupants of the library but Blensop; and even
+this last was little likely to discover him.
+
+He did not. He closed and latched the farther window, then that wherein
+Lanyard had lurked, and ambled back into the room with never a glance
+toward that shadowed corner which held the wing chair.
+
+And Lanyard drew a deep breath, if a quiet one. Behind him the conversation
+had continued without break. It was true, he could see nothing; but he
+could hear all that was said, he had missed no syllable, and now every
+second was informing him to his profit....
+
+"Your secretary, no doubt, has told you I am a survivor of the _Assyrian_
+disaster."
+
+"Yes...."
+
+"You were, I believe, expecting a certain communication of extraordinary
+character by the _Assyrian_, to be brought, that is, by an agent of the
+British Secret Service."
+
+After an almost imperceptible pause Stanistreet said evenly: "It is
+possible."
+
+"A communication, in fact, of such character that it was impossible to
+entrust it to the mails or to cable transmission, even in code."
+
+"And if so, sir...?"
+
+"And you are aware that, of the two gentlemen entrusted with the care of
+this document, one was drowned when the _Assyrian_ went down, and the other
+so seriously injured that he has not yet recovered consciousness, but
+was transferred directly from the pier to a hospital when the _Saratoga_
+docked."
+
+"What then, Monsieur Duchemin?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet," said the impostor deliberately, "I have that
+communication. I will ask you not to question me too closely as to how it
+came into my possession. I have it: that is sufficient."
+
+"If you possess any document which you conceive to be so valuable to the
+British Government, monsieur, and consequently to the Allied cause, I have
+every confidence in your intention to deliver it to me without delay."
+
+A note of mild derision crept into the accents of "Karl."
+
+"I have every intention of so doing, my dear sir.... But you must
+appreciate I have incurred considerable personal danger, hardship, and
+inconvenience in taking good care of this document, in seeing that it did
+not fall into the wrong hands; in short, in bringing it safely here to you
+to-night."
+
+A slightly longer pause prefaced Stanistreet's reply, something which
+he delivered in measured tones: "I am able to promise you the British
+Government will show due appreciation of your disinterested services,
+Monsieur--Duchemin."
+
+"Not disinterested--not that!" the cheat protested. "Gentlemen of my
+kidney, sir, seldom put themselves out except in lively anticipation of
+favours to come."
+
+"Be good enough to make yourself more clear."
+
+"Cheerfully. I possess this document. I understand its character is such
+that Germany would pay a round price for it. But I am a good patriot. In
+spite of the fact that nobody knew I possessed it, in spite of the fact
+that I need only have quietly taken it to Seventy-ninth Street to-night--"
+
+"Monsieur Duchemin!" Stanistreet's voice was icy. "Your price?"
+
+"Sorry you feel that way about it," said "Karl" with ill-concealed
+insincerity. "You must know thieving is no more what it once was. Even I,
+too, often am put to it to make both ends--"
+
+"If you please, sir--how much?"
+
+"Ten thousand dollars."
+
+Silence greeted this demand, a lull that to Lanyard seemed endless. For in
+his fury he was trembling so that he feared lest his agitation betray him.
+The very walls before his eyes seemed to quake in sympathy. He was aware of
+the ache of swollen veins in his temples, his teeth hurt with the pressure
+put upon them, his breath came heavily, and his nails were digging
+painfully into his palms.
+
+"Blensop?"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"How much have we on hand, in the emergency fund?"
+
+"Between ten and twelve thousand dollars, sir."
+
+"Intuition, monsieur, is an indispensable item in the equipment of a
+successful _chevalier d'Industrie_. So, at least, the good novelists tell
+us...."
+
+"Open the safe, Blensop, and fetch me ten thousand dollars."
+
+"Very good, sir."
+
+"I presume you won't object to satisfying me that you really have this
+document, before I pay you your price."
+
+"It is this which makes it a pleasure to deal with an Englishman, monsieur:
+one may safely trust his word of honour."
+
+"Indeed...."
+
+"Permit me: here is the document. Use that magnifying glass I see by your
+elbow, monsieur; take your time, satisfy yourself."
+
+"Thanks; I mean to."
+
+Another break in the dialogue, during which the eavesdropper heard an
+odd sound, a sort of muffled swishing ending in a slight thud, then the
+peculiar metallic whine of a combination dial rapidly manipulated, finally
+the dull clank of bolts falling back into their sockets.
+
+"Your _coffre-fort_--what do you say?--strong-box--safe--is cleverly
+concealed, Colonel Stanistreet."
+
+There was no direct reply, but after a moment Stanistreet announced
+quietly: "This seems to be an authentic paper.... Monsieur Duchemin, what
+knowledge precisely have you of the nature of this document?"
+
+"Surely monsieur cannot have overlooked the circumstance that its seals
+were intact."
+
+"True," Stanistreet admitted. "Still...."
+
+"I trust Monsieur does not question my good faith?"
+
+"Why not?" Stanistreet enquired drily.
+
+"Monsieur!"
+
+"Oh, damn your play-acting, sir! If you can be capable of one infamy, you
+are capable of more. None the less, you are right about an Englishman's
+word: here is your money. Count it and--get out!"
+
+"Thanks"--the impostor's tone was an impertinently exact imitation of
+Stanistreet's--"I mean to."
+
+"Permit me to excuse myself," Stanistreet added; and Lanyard heard the
+muffled scrape of chair-legs on the rug as the Englishman got up.
+
+"Gladly," the spy returned--"and ten thousand thanks, monsieur!"
+
+The secretary intoned melodiously: "This way, Monsieur Duchemin, if you
+please."
+
+"Pardon. Is it material which way I leave?"
+
+"What do you mean?" Stanistreet demanded.
+
+"I should be far easier in my mind if monsieur would permit me to go by way
+of his garden, rather than run the risk of his front door."
+
+"What's this?"
+
+"In these little affairs, monsieur, I try to make it a rule to avoid
+covering the same ground twice."
+
+"You have the insolence to imply I would lend myself to treachery!"
+
+"I beg monsieur's pardon very truly for suggesting such a thing.
+Nevertheless, one cannot well be overcautious when one is a hunted man."
+
+"Blensop ... be good enough to see this man out through the garden."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Again, monsieur, my thanks."
+
+"Good-night," said Stanistreet curtly.
+
+Blensop passed Lanyard's chair, unlatched and opened the window and stood
+aside. An instant later "Karl" joined him, swung on a heel, facing back,
+clicked heels again and bowed mockingly. Apparently he got no response, for
+he laughed quietly, then turned and went out through the window, Blensop
+mincing after.
+
+With a struggle Lanyard mastered the temptation to dash after the spy,
+overtake and overpower him, expose and give him up to justice. Only the
+knowledge that by remaining quiescent, by biding his time, he might be
+enabled to redeem his word to the Brooke girl, gave him strength to be
+still.
+
+But he suffered exquisitely, maddened by the defamation imposed upon his
+nick-name of a thief by this brazen impostor.
+
+Nor was wounded _amour-propre_ mended by an exclamation in the room behind
+his chair, the accents of Colonel Stanistreet thick with contempt:
+
+"The Lone Wolf! Faugh!"
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+RECOGNITION
+
+
+Presently Blensop came back, closed the window, and passed blindly by
+Lanyard, his reappearance saluted by Stanistreet in tones that shook with
+contained temper.
+
+"You saw that animal outside the walls?"
+
+Mildly injured surprise was indicated in the reply: "Surely, sir!"
+
+"And locked the door after him?"
+
+"Yes, sir--securely."
+
+"Howson anywhere about?"
+
+"I didn't see him. Daresay he's prowling somewhere within call. Do you wish
+to speak to him?"
+
+"No.... But you might, if you see anything of him, tell him to keep an
+extra eye open to-night. I don't trust this self-styled Lone Wolf."
+
+"Naturally not, sir, under the circumstances."
+
+Stanistreet acknowledged this with an irritated snort. "No matter," he
+thought aloud; "if it has cost us a pretty penny, we have got this safe in
+hand at last. I've not had too much sleep, I can promise you, since the
+report came through of Bartholomew's death and Thackeray's disablement.
+Nor am I satisfied that this Monsieur Duchemin came by the document
+fairly--confound his impudence! If he hadn't put me on honour, tacitly, I'd
+not hesitate an instant about informing the police."
+
+"Rather chancy course to take in this business, what?"
+
+"I don't know.... That Yankee invention known as the 'frame-up' would
+easily make America too small for the Lone Wolf without the British Secret
+Service ever being mentioned in the matter."
+
+"Yes; but suppose the beast knows the contents of this paper, suspects
+the authorship of the 'frame-up'--as he instinctively would--and blabs?
+Messages have been unsealed and copied and resealed before this."
+
+"That one consideration ties my hands.... Here, my boy: take this and
+put it in the safe--and don't forget Mrs. Arden's things, of course.
+Good-night."
+
+"Trust me, sir. Good-night."
+
+A door closed with a slight jar, and for half a minute the room was so
+positively quiet that Lanyard was beginning to wonder if Blensop himself
+had gone out with his employer, when he heard a low and musical chuckle,
+followed by a soft clashing as the secretary scooped Mrs. Arden's jewellery
+out of the desk drawer.
+
+Itching with curiosity, Lanyard turned with infinite care and peered round
+the wing of the chair, thus gaining a view of the wall farthest from the
+street.
+
+Blensop remaining invisible, Lanyard's interest centred immediately upon
+the safe the ingenuity of whose concealment had excited "Karl's" favourable
+comment, and with much excuse.
+
+One of the portraits--that upon whose merits Blensop had descanted to
+"Karl" earlier in the night--was, Lanyard saw, so mounted upon a solid
+panel of wood that, by means of hidden mechanism, it could be moved
+sidelong from its frame, uncovering the face of a safe built into the wall.
+
+This last now stood open, its door, swung out toward Lanyard, showing
+a simple arrangement of dials and locks with which he was on terms of
+contemptuous familiarity; only the veriest tyro of a cracksman would want
+more than a good ear and a subtle sense of touch in order to open it
+without knowledge of the combination.
+
+With all its reputation for efficiency and astuteness the British Secret
+Service entrusted its mysteries to an antiquated contraption such as this!
+
+Humming a blithe little air, Blensop moved into Lanyard's field of vision
+and stopped between him and the safe, deftly pigeonholing therein the
+docketed papers and Mrs. Arden's jewels. Then, closing the door, he shot
+its bolts, gave the dial a brisk twirl, located a lever in the side of the
+frame and thrust it into its socket.
+
+With the same swish and thud which had puzzled Lanyard at first hearing,
+the portrait slipped back into place.
+
+Rounding on a heel, Blensop paused, head to one side, a slight frown
+shadowing his bland countenance, and stood briefly rooted in some
+perplexity of obscure origin. Twice he shook a peevish head, then smiled
+radiantly and brought his hands together in an audible clap.
+
+"I have it!" he cried in delight and, dancing briskly toward the desk, once
+more disappeared.
+
+Now what was this which Mr. Blensop so spontaneously had, and from the
+having of which he derived so much apparently innocent enjoyment? Wanting
+an answer, Lanyard settled back in disgust, then sat sharply forward, gaze
+riveted to the near sash of the adjacent window.
+
+In showing "Karl" out, Blensop had moved the portičres, exposing more
+glass than previously had been visible. Now this mirrored darkly to the
+adventurer a somewhat distorted vision of Blensop standing over the
+desk, seemingly employed in no more amusing occupation than filling his
+fountain-pen. But undoubtedly he was in the highest spirits; for the lilt
+of his humming rose sweet and clear and ever louder.
+
+To this accompaniment he pocketed his pen, two-stepped to the windows,
+drew the portičres jealously close, returned to the desk, switched off the
+reading lamp, and left the room completely dark but for a dim glow from the
+ash-filmed embers of the fire.
+
+But before he went out the secretary interrupted his humming to laugh
+with a mischievous élan which completely confounded Lanyard. He was not
+unacquainted with the Blensop type, but the secret glee which seemed to
+animate this specimen was something far beyond his comprehension.
+
+As the door softly closed Lanyard moved silently across the room and bent
+an ear to its panels, meanwhile drawing over his hands a pair of thin white
+kid gloves.
+
+From beyond came no sound other than a faint creaking of stair-treads
+quickly silenced.
+
+Opening the door, Lanyard peered out, finding the hallway deserted and
+dimly lighted by a single bulb of little candle-power at its far end, then
+scouted out as far as the foot of the stairs, listened there for a little,
+hearing no sounds above, and reconnoitred through the other living rooms,
+at length returning to the library persuaded he was alone on the ground
+floor of the house.
+
+A Yale lock was fixed to the library side of the door. Lanyard released its
+catch, insuring freedom from interruption on the part of anybody who lacked
+the key, crossed to the other side door, left this on the latch and, having
+thus provided an avenue for escape, turned attention to business, in brief,
+to the safe.
+
+Turning on the picture-light he found and operated the lever, with his
+other hand so restraining the action of the panel that it moved aside
+without perceptible jar.
+
+Then with an ear to that smooth, cold face of enamelled steel, he began
+to manipulate the combination. From within the door a succession of soft
+clicks and knocks punctuated the muted whine of the dial, speaking
+a language only too intelligible to the trained hearing of a thief;
+synchronous breaks and resistance in the action of the dial conveyed
+additional information through the medium of supersensitive finger tips.
+Within two minutes he had learned all he needed to know, and standing back
+twirled the knob right and left with a confident hand. At its fourth stop
+he heard the dull bump of released tumblers, grasped the handle, and
+twisted it strongly. The door swung open.
+
+Systematically Lanyard searched the pigeonholes, emptying all but one,
+examining minutely their contents without finding that slender roll of
+paper.
+
+Mystified, he hesitated. The thing, of course, was somewhere there, only
+hidden more cunningly than he had hoped. It was possible, even probable,
+that Blensop had stowed the cylinder away in a secret compartment.
+
+But the interior arrangement was disconcertingly simple. Lanyard saw no
+sign of waste space in which such a drawer might be secreted. Unless, to be
+sure, one of the pigeonholes had a false back....
+
+He began a fresh examination, again emptying each pigeonhole and sounding
+its rear wall without result till there remained only that in which Blensop
+had placed the Arden jewels.
+
+It was necessary to move these, but Lanyard long withheld his hand,
+reluctant to touch them, for that same reason which had influenced him to
+avoid them in his first search.
+
+Jewels such as these he both worshipped and desired with the passionate
+adoration of connoisseur and lover in one. He feared violently the
+temptation of physical contact with such stuff.
+
+For his was no thief's errand to-night, but a matter, as he conceived
+it, of his private honour, something apart and distinct from the code of
+rogue's ethics which guided his professional activities. He had pledged
+his word to Cecelia Brooke to keep safe for her that cylinder of paper, to
+return it upon her demand for whatsoever disposition she might choose to
+make of it. It was no concern of his what that choice might turn out to
+be, any more than it was his affair if the document were a paper of
+international importance. But she must and should, if act of his could
+compass it, be given opportunity to redeem her word of honour if, as one
+believed, that likewise were involved in the fate of the document.
+
+He had stolen into this house like a thief because he had given his pledge
+and perforce had been made false to that pledge, because he had been
+despoiled of the concrete evidence of the trust reposed unasked in him, and
+because he had learned that his spoiler was to meet Stanistreet in this
+room at midnight.
+
+He was here solely to make good his word, to take away that cylinder, could
+he find it, and to return it to the girl ... not to thieve....
+
+Never that!...
+
+Slowly, reluctantly, inevitably he put forth his hand and selected from
+among those brilliant symbols of his soul's profound damnation the
+necklace, a rope of diamonds consummately matched, a rivulet of frozen
+fire, no single stone less lovely than another.
+
+"Admirable!" he whispered. "Oh, admirable!"
+
+Hesitant to do this thing which to him, by the strange standard of his
+warped code, spelled dishonour, he would and he would not; and while he
+paltered, was visited by an oddly vivid memory of the clear and candid eyes
+of Cecelia Brooke, seemed veritably to see them searching his own with
+their look of grieving wonder ... the eyes of one woman who had reckoned
+him worthy of her trust....
+
+Almost he won victory in this fight he was foredoomed to lose. Under the
+level and steadfast regard of those eyes his hand went out to replace the
+necklace, moved unsteadily, faltered....
+
+Beyond the windows an incautious footfall sounded. In the darkness out
+there someone blundered into a piece of wicker furniture and disturbed it
+with a small scraping sound, all but inaudible, but to the thief as loud as
+the blast of a police whistle.
+
+Instantly and instinctively, in two simultaneous gestures, Lanyard dropped
+the necklace into an inner pocket of his coat and switched off the
+picture-light.
+
+With hands now as steady and sure as they had been vacillant a moment
+since, he closed the safe door noiselessly, shot its bolts, and was yards
+away, crouching behind an armchair, before the man outside had ceased to
+fumble with the window fastenings.
+
+If this were the watchman Howson, doubtless he would be satisfied with
+finding the room dark and apparently untenanted, and would go off upon his
+rounds unsuspecting. If he did not, or if he noticed the displaced panel,
+then would come Lanyard's time to break cover and run for it.
+
+With a faint creak one of the windows swung inward. Curtain-rings clashed
+dully on their poles. Someone came through the portičres and paused,
+pulling them together behind him. The beam of an electric flash-lamp lanced
+the gloom and its spotlight danced erratically round the walls.
+
+Now there was no more thought of flight in Lanyard's humour, but rather a
+firm determination to stand his ground. This was no night watchman, but a
+housebreaker, one with no more title to trespass upon those premises than
+himself; and at that an unskilled hand at such work, the rawest of amateurs
+practising methods as clumsy and childish as any actor playing at burglary
+on a stage before a simple-minded audience.
+
+The noise he made on entering alone proved that, then this fatuous business
+with the flash-lamp. And as he moved inward from the windows it became
+evident that he had not even had the wit to close the portičres completely;
+a violet glimmer of starlight shone in through a deep triangular gap
+between them at the top.
+
+For all that, the intruder seemed to know what he wanted and where to seek
+it, betrayed a nice acquaintance with the room, proceeding directly to the
+safe picked out by his lamp.
+
+Arrived beneath it he uttered a low sound which might have been interpreted
+as surprise due to finding the panel already out of place. If so, surprise
+evidently roused in him no suspicion that all might not be well. On the
+contrary, he quite calmly located and turned the switch controlling the
+picture-light.
+
+Immediately, as its rays gushed down and disclosed the man, Lanyard
+rose boldly from his place in hiding. Now there was no more need for
+concealment; now was his enemy delivered into his hands.
+
+The man was "Karl."
+
+His back to Lanyard, unconscious of that one's catlike approach, the spy
+put up his flash-lamp, searched in a waistcoat pocket and produced a slip
+of paper, and bent his face close to the combination dial, studying its
+figures; but abruptly, like a startled animal, whirled round to face the
+windows.
+
+One of the sashes was thrown back roughly, and a figure clad in the gray
+livery of a private watchman parted the portičres and entered the library.
+
+"Everything all right in here, Mr. Blensop?"
+
+Lanyard saw the sheen of blue steel in the hands of "Karl," and leaped too
+late: even as he fell upon the spy's shoulders, the pistol exploded.
+
+The watchman reeled back with a choking cry, caught wildly at the
+portičres, and dragged them down with him as he fell.
+
+His screams of agony made hideous the night. And the second cry was no more
+than uttered when Lanyard, even in the heat of his struggle, heard sounds
+indicating that already the household was alarmed.
+
+But the door would hold for a while; it was not probable that the first to
+come downstairs would think to bring with him the key. Time enough to
+think of escape when Lanyard had settled his score with this one: no light
+undertaking; not only was the score a long one, longer than Lanyard then
+dreamed, but, as he had learned to his cost, the man was an antagonist of
+skill and strength not to be despised.
+
+Nevertheless, aided by the surprise of his onslaught, Lanyard succeeded
+in disarming the spy, forcing him to drop the pistol at the outset, and
+through attacking from behind had him at a further disadvantage. For all
+that he found his hands full till, by a trick of jiu-jitsu, he wrenched one
+of the fellow's arms behind him so roughly as almost to dislocate it at the
+shoulder and, forcing the forearm up toward his shoulder blades, held him
+temporarily helpless.
+
+"Be still, you murderous canaille!" he growled--"or must I tear your arm
+from its socket? Still, I say!"
+
+"Karl" uttered a grunt of pain and ceased to struggle.
+
+Pinning him against the bookcase, Lanyard hastily rifled his pockets, at
+the first dip bringing forth a thin sheaf of American bank-notes with the
+figures $1000 conspicuous on the uppermost.
+
+"Ten thousand dollars," he said grimly--"precisely my fee for the use of my
+name--to say nothing of its abuse!"
+
+A torrent of untranslatable German blasphemy answered him. Intelligible was
+the half-frantic demand: "Who the devil are you?"
+
+"Take a look, assassin--see for yourself!" Lanyard twisted the spy around
+to face him, holding him helpless against the wall with a knee in his
+middle and a hand gripping his throat inexorably. "Do you know me now--the
+man you thought you'd drowned a hundred fathoms deep?"
+
+Blows thundered on the hallway door. Neither heeded. The spy was staring
+into Lanyard's face, his eyes starting with horror and affright.
+
+"Lanyard!" he gasped. "Good God! will you never die?"
+
+"Never by your hand--" Lanyard began, but stopped sharply.
+
+For a moment he glared incredulously, and in that moment knew his enemy.
+
+"Ekstrom!" he cried; and the man at his mercy winced and quailed.
+
+The din in the hallway grew louder. Voices cried out for the key. Somebody
+threw himself against the door so heavily that it shook.
+
+The emergency forced itself upon Lanyard's consciousness, would not be
+denied. Its dilemma seemed calculated to unseat his reason. If he lingered,
+he was lost. Either he must grant this creature new lease of life, or be
+caught and pay the penalty of murder for an execution as surely just as any
+in the history of mankind.
+
+It was bitter, too bitter to have come to this his hour so long desired, so
+long deferred, so arduously sought, and have the fruits of it snatched from
+his craving grasp.
+
+He could not bring himself to this renunciation; slowly his fingers
+tightened on the other's throat.
+
+Driven to desperation by the light of madness that began to flicker in
+Lanyard's eyes, the Prussian abruptly put all he had of might and fury into
+one final effort, threw Lanyard off, and in turn attacked him, fighting
+like a lunatic for footroom, for space enough to turn and make for the
+windows.
+
+In spite of all he could do Lanyard saw the man work away from the wall and
+manoeuvre his back toward the windows; then he flew at him with redoubled
+fury, driving home blow after blow that beat down Ekstrom's guard and sent
+him staggering helplessly, till an uppercut, swinging in under his uplifted
+forearms, put an end to the combat. Ekstrom shot backward half a dozen
+feet, stumbled over the prostrate body of the watchman, and crashed
+headlong into the windows, going down in a shower of shattered glass.
+
+In one and the same instant Lanyard darted back and dropped upon his knees
+in the shadow of the club lounge, and the door to the hallway slammed open.
+A knot of men, to the number of half a dozen, tumbling into the library,
+saw that figure floundering amid the ruins of the window, and made for it,
+passing on the other side of the lounge, between it and the fireplace.
+
+Unseen, Lanyard rose, ran crouching across the room; found the side door,
+opened it just far enough to permit the passage of his body, and drew it to
+behind him.
+
+Ninety-fifth Street was a lonely lane of midnight quiet. He sped across it
+like the shadow of a cloud wind-hunted.
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+AU PRINTEMPS
+
+
+In those days New York nights were long; this was still young when Lanyard
+sauntered sedately from a side street and stopped on a corner of Broadway
+in the Nineties; he had not long to wait ere a southbound taxicab hove in
+sight and sheered over to the curb in answer to his signal.
+
+It was still something short of one o'clock when he was set down at his
+door.
+
+Wearily he let himself in by the private entrance, made a light, and
+without troubling even to discard his overcoat threw himself into a chair.
+Leaden depression weighed down his heart, and the flavour of failure was
+as aloes in his mouth. Thrice within an hour he had fallen short of his
+promises, to Cecelia Brooke, to himself, to his _idée fixe_. His three
+chances, to redeem his word to the girl, to measure up to his queer
+criterion of honour, to rid his world of Ekstrom, all had slipped through
+fingers seemingly too infirm to profit by them.
+
+He felt of a sudden old; old, and tired, and lonely.
+
+The uses of his world, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable! What was
+his life? An emptiness. Himself? A shuttlecock, the helpless sport of
+his own failings, a vain thing alternately strutting and stumbling, now
+swaggering in the guise of an avenger self-appointed, now sneaking in the
+shameful habiliments of a felon self-condemned.
+
+What had prevented his dealing out to Ekstrom the punishment he had so well
+earned? That insatiable lust for loot of his. But for that damning evidence
+against him of the stolen necklace in his pocket he might have had his will
+of Ekstrom, and justified himself when discovered by proving that he had
+merely done justice to a thief who sold what he had stolen and stole back
+to steal again what he had sold.
+
+Self-contempt attacked self-conceit like an acid. He saw Michael Lanyard
+a sorry figure, sitting stultified with self-pity ... crying over spilt
+milk....
+
+Impatiently he shook himself. What though he had to-night forfeited his
+chances? He could, nay, would, make others. He must....
+
+To what end? Would life be sweeter if one found a way to restore to Cecelia
+Brooke her precious document and to smuggle back to Mrs. Arden her pilfered
+diamonds? Would this deadly ache of loneliness be less poignant with
+Ekstrom dead?
+
+With lack-lustre eyes he looked round that cheerless room, reckoning its
+perfunctory pretense of comfort the forlornest mockery. To lodgings such as
+this he was condemned for life, to an interminable sequence of transient
+quarters, sordid or splendid, rich or mean, alike in this common quality of
+hollow loneliness....
+
+His aimless gaze wandered toward the door opening on the public hallway,
+and became fixed upon a triangular shape of white paper, the half of an
+envelope tucked between door and sill.
+
+Presently he rose and got the thing, not until he touched it quite
+persuaded he was not the victim of an optical hallucination.
+
+A square envelope of creamy paper, it was superscribed simply in a hand
+strange to him, _Anthony Ember, Esq_., with the address of his apartment
+house.
+
+Tearing the envelope he found within a double sheet of plain notepaper
+bearing a message of five words penned hastily:
+
+  "_Au Printemps_--
+  "_one o'clock_--
+  "_Please_!"
+
+Nothing else, not another word or pen-scratch....
+
+Opening the door Lanyard hailed the hall-attendant, a sleepy and not
+over-intelligent negro.
+
+"When did this come for me?"
+
+"'Bout anour ago, Mistuh Embuh."
+
+"Who brought it?"
+
+"A messenger boy done fotch it, suh--look lak th' same boy."
+
+"What same boy?"
+
+"Same as come in when you do, 'bout 'leven o'clock--remembuh?"
+
+Lanyard nodded, recalling that on his way up the street from Sixth Avenue
+he had been subconsciously irritated by the shrill, untuneful whistling of
+a loutish youth in Western Union uniform, who had followed him into the
+house and become engaged in some minor altercation with the attendants
+while Lanyard was unlocking the door to his apartment.
+
+"What of him?"
+
+"Why, he bulge in heah an' say we done send a call, an' we tell him we don'
+know nuffin' 'bout no call, an' he sweah an' carry on, an' aftuh you done
+gone in he ast whut is yo' name, an' somebody tell him an' he go away. An'
+then 'bout haffanour aftuhwuds he come back with that theah lettuh--say to
+stick it undeh yo' do, ef yo' ain't home. Leastways he look to me lak th'
+same boy. Ah dunno fo' suah."
+
+Repeated efforts failing to extract more enlightenment from this source,
+Lanyard again shut himself in with the puzzle.
+
+Somebody had set a messenger boy to dog him and find out his name and
+address. Not Crane: Lanyard had seen that one disappear in the elevator of
+the Knickerbocker and had thereafter moved too quickly to permit of Crane's
+returning to the lobby, calling a messenger boy, and pointing out Lanyard.
+
+For that matter, Lanyard was prepared to swear nobody had followed him from
+the Knickerbocker to the Biltmore.
+
+Vaguely he seemed to recall a first impression of the boy at the time when
+he emerged from the drug store after his unprofitable effort to telephone
+Cecelia Brooke, an indefinite memory of a shambling figure with nose
+flattened against the druggist's window, apparently fascinated by the
+display of a catch-penny corn cure.
+
+Was there a link between that circumstance and the long delay which Lanyard
+had suffered in the telephone booth? Had the Knickerbocker operator been
+less stupid and negligent than she seemed? Was the truth of the matter that
+Crane had surmised Lanyard would attempt communication with the Brooke girl
+and had set a watch on the switchboard for the call?
+
+Assuming that the Secret Service man had been clever enough for that,
+it was not difficult to understand that Lanyard had purposely been kept
+dangling at the other end of the wire till the call could be traced back to
+its source and a messenger despatched from the nearest Western Union office
+with instructions to follow the man who left the booth, and report his name
+and local habitation.
+
+Sharp work, if these inferences were reasonable. And, satisfied that
+they were, Lanyard inclined to accord increased respect to the detective
+abilities of the American.
+
+But this note, this hurried, unsigned scrawl of five unintelligible words:
+what the deuce did it mean?
+
+On the evidence of the handwriting a woman had penned it. Cecelia Brooke?
+Who else? Crane might well have been taken into her confidence, subsequent
+to the sinking of the _Assyrian_, and on discovering that Lanyard had
+survived have used this means of relieving the girl's distress of mind.
+
+But its significance?... "Au Printemps" translated literally meant "in the
+springtime," and "in the springtime at one o'clock" was mere gibberish,
+incomprehensible. There is in Paris a department store calling itself "Au
+Printemps"; but surely no one was suggesting to Lanyard in New York a
+rendezvous in Paris!
+
+Nevertheless that "Please!" intrigued with a note at once pleading and
+imperative which decided Lanyard to answer it without delay, in person.
+
+"_Au Printemps--one o'clock--please_!"
+
+Upon the screen of memory there flashed a blurred vision of an electric
+sign emblazoning the phrase, "Au Printemps," against the façade of a
+building with windows all blind and dark save those of the street level,
+which glowed pink with light filtered through silken hangings; a building
+which Lanyard had already passed thrice that night without, in the
+preoccupation of his purpose, paying it any heed; a building on Broadway
+somewhere above Columbus Circle, if he were not mistaken.
+
+Already it was one o'clock. Fortunately he was still in evening dress, and
+needed only to change collar and tie to repair the disarray caused by his
+encounter with Ekstrom.
+
+In two minutes he was once more in the street.
+
+Within five a cab deposited him in front of the Restaurant Au Printemps, an
+institution of midnight New York whose title for distinction resided mainly
+in the fact that it opened its upper floors for the diversion of "members"
+about the time when others put up their shutters.
+
+Lanyard's advent occurred at the height of its traffic. The dining rooms on
+the street level were closed and unlighted: but men and women in pairs
+and parties were streaming across the sidewalk from an endless chain of
+motor-cars and being ground through the revolving doors like grist in the
+hopper of an unhallowed mill, the men all in evening dress, the women in
+garments whose insolence outrivalled the most Byzantine nights of L'Abbaye
+Thęlčme.
+
+Drawn in with the current through the turnstile door, Lanyard found himself
+in an absurdly little lobby thronged to suffocation, largely with people
+of the half-world--here and there a few celebrities, here and there small
+tight clusters of respectabilities making a brave show of feeling at
+ease--all waiting their turn to be lifted to delectable regions aloft in an
+elevator barely big enough to serve in a private residence.
+
+For a moment Lanyard lingered unnoticed on the outskirts of this
+assemblage, searching its pretty faces for the prettier face he had come to
+find and wondering that she should have chosen for her purpose with him a
+resort of this character. His memory of her was sweet with the clean smell
+of the sea; there was incongruity to spare in this atmosphere heady with
+the odours of wine, flesh, scent, and tobacco. Perplexing....
+
+A harpy with a painted leer and predacious eyes pounced upon him, tore away
+his hat and coat, gave him a numbered slip of pasteboard by presenting
+which he would be permitted to ransom his property on extortionate terms.
+
+And still he saw no Cecelia Brooke, though his aloof attitude coupled with
+an intent but impersonal inspection of every feminine face within his
+radius of vision earned him more than one smile at once furtively
+provocative and unwelcome.
+
+By degrees the crowd emptied itself into the toy elevator--such of it, that
+is, as was passed by a committee on membership consisting of one chubby,
+bearded gentleman with the look of a French diplomatist, the empressement
+of a head waiter and the authority of the Angel with the Flaming Sword.
+_Personae non gratae_ to the management--inexplicably so in most
+instances--were civilly requested to produce membership cards and, upon
+failure to comply, were inexorably rejected, and departed strangely
+shamefaced. Others of acceptable aspect were permitted to mingle with
+the upper circles of the elect without being required to prove their
+"membership."
+
+In the person of this suave but inflexible arbiter Lanyard identified a
+former maître d'hôtel of the Carlton who had abruptly and discreetly fled
+London soon after the outbreak of war.
+
+He fancied that this one knew him and was sedulous both to keep him in the
+corner of his eye and never to meet his regard directly.
+
+And once he saw the man speak covertly with the elevator attendant,
+guarding his lips with a hand, and suspected that he was the subject of
+their communication.
+
+The lobby was still comfortably filled, a constant trickle of arrivals
+replacing in measure the losses by election and rejection, when Lanyard,
+watching the revolving doors, saw Cecelia Brooke coming in.
+
+She was alone, at least momentarily; and in his sight very creditably
+turned out, remembering that all her luggage must have been lost with the
+_Assyrian_. But what Englishwoman of her caste ever permitted herself to be
+visible after nightfall except in an evening gown of some sort, even though
+a shabby sort? Not that Miss Brooke to-night was shabbily attired: she was
+much otherwise; from some mysterious source of wardrobe she had conjured
+wraps, furs, and a dancing frock as fresh and becoming as it was, oddly
+enough, not immodest. And with whatever cares preying upon her secret mind,
+she entered with the light step and bright countenance of any girl of her
+age embarked upon a lark.
+
+All that was changed at sight of Lanyard.
+
+He bowed formally at a moment when her glance, resting on him, seemed about
+to wander on; instead it became fixed in recognition. Instantly her smile
+was erased, her features stiffened, her eyes widened, her lips parted, the
+colour ebbed from her cheeks. And she stopped quite still in front of the
+door till lightly jostled by other arrivals.
+
+Then moving uncertainly toward him, she said, "Monsieur Duchemin!" not
+loudly, for she was not a woman to give excuse for a scene under any
+circumstances, but in a tone of complete dumbfounderment.
+
+Covering his own dashed contenance with a semblance of unruffled
+amiability, he bowed again, now over the hand which the girl tentatively
+offered, letting it rest lightly on his fingers, touching it as lightly
+with his lips.
+
+"It is such a pleasant surprise," he said at a venture, then added
+guardedly: "But my name--I thought you knew it was now Anthony Ember."
+
+Her eyes were blank. "I don't understand," she faltered. "I thought you ...
+I never dreamed.... Is it really you?"
+
+"Truly," he averred, lips smiling but mind rife with suspicion and
+distrust.
+
+This was not acting; he was convinced that her surprise was absolutely
+unfeigned.
+
+So she had not expected to find him "Au Printemps" at one o'clock in the
+morning, till that very moment had believed him as dead as any of those
+poor souls who had perished with the _Assyrian_!
+
+Therefore that note had not come from her, therefore Lanyard had
+complimented Crane without warrant, crediting him with another's
+cleverness. Then whose...?
+
+And while Lanyard's head buzzed with these thoughts, an independent chamber
+of his mind was engaged in admiring the address with which the girl was
+recovering from what must have been, what plainly had been, a staggering
+shock. Already she had begun to grapple with the situation, to take herself
+in hand and dissemble; already her face was regaining its accustomed cast
+of self-confidence, composure, and intelligent animation. Throughout she
+pursued without a break the thread of conventional small talk.
+
+"It is a surprise," she said calmly. "Really, you are a most astonishing
+person, Mr. Ember. One never knows where to look for you."
+
+"That is my good fortune, since it provides me with unexpected pleasures
+such as this. You are with friends?"
+
+"With a friend," she corrected quietly--"with Mr. Crane. He stopped outside
+to pay our taxi-driver. How odd it seems to find any place in the world as
+much alive as this New York!"
+
+"It seems almost impossible," Lanyard averred--"indeed, somehow wrong. I've
+a feeling one has no right to encourage so much frivolity. And yet...."
+
+"Yes," she responded quickly. "It is good to hear people laugh once more.
+That is why Mr. Crane suggested coming here to-night, to cheer me up. He
+said Au Printemps was unique, promised I'd find it most amusing."
+
+"I'm sure...." Lanyard began as Crane entered, breezing through the
+turnstile and comprehending the situation in a glance.
+
+"Hello!" he cried. "Didn't I tell you everybody alive would be here?"
+
+Nor was Cecelia Brooke less ready. "But fancy meeting Mr. Ember here! I had
+no idea he was in New York--had you?"
+
+"Perhaps a dim suspicion," Crane admitted with a twinkle, taking Lanyard's
+hand. "Howdy, Ember? Glad to see you, gladder'n you'd think."
+
+"How is that?" Lanyard asked, returning the cordiality of his grasp.
+
+Crane's penetrating accents must have been audible in the remotest corner
+of the ground-floor rooms: he made no effort to modulate them to a quieter
+pitch.
+
+"You can help me out of a fix if you feel like it. You see, I promised Miss
+Brooke if she'd take me for her guide, she'd see life to-night; and now,
+just when we're going good, I've got to renig. Man I know held me up
+outside, says I'm wanted down town on special business and must go. I might
+be able to toddle back later, but can't bank on it. Do you mind taking over
+my job?"
+
+"Chaperoning Miss Brooke's investigations into the seamy side of current
+social history? That will be delightful."
+
+"Attaboy! If I'm not back in half an hour you'll see her safely home, of
+course?"
+
+"Trust me."
+
+"And you'll excuse me, Miss Brooke? I hope you don't think--"
+
+"What I do think, Mr. Crane, is that you have been most kind to a lonely
+stranger. Of course I'll excuse you, not willingly, but understanding you
+must go."
+
+"That makes me a heap easier in my mind. But I' got to run. So it's
+good-night, unless maybe I see you later. So long, Ember!"
+
+With a flirt of a raw-boned hand, Crane swung about, threw himself
+spiritedly into the revolving door, was gone.
+
+"Amazing creature," Lanyard commented, laughing.
+
+"I think him delightful," the girl replied, surrendering her wraps to a
+maid. "If all Americans are like that--"
+
+"Shall we go up?"
+
+She nodded--"Please!"--and turned with him.
+
+The committee on membership himself bowed them into the elevator. Several
+others crowded in after them. For thirty seconds, while the car moved
+slowly upward, Lanyard was free to think without interruption.
+
+But what to think now? That Crane, actuated by some motive occult to
+Lanyard, had engineered this apparently adventitious _rencontre_ for the
+purpose of throwing him and the Brooke girl together? Or, again, that Crane
+was innocent of guile in this matter--that other persons unknown, causing
+Lanyard to be traced to his lodgings, had framed that note to entice him to
+this place to-night? In the latter event, who was conceivably responsible
+but Velasco, Dressier, O'Reilly--any one of these, or all three working in
+concert? The last-named had looked Lanyard squarely in the face without
+sign of recognition, back there in the lobby of the Knickerbocker,
+precisely as he should, if implicated in the conspiracies of the Boche;
+though it might easily have been Velasco or Dressier who had recognized the
+adventurer without his knowledge....
+
+The car stopped, a narrow-chested door slid open, a gush of hectic light
+coloured morbidly the faces of alighting passengers, a blare of syncopated
+noise singularly unmusical saluted the astonished ears of Lanyard and
+Cecelia Brooke. She met his gaze with a smiling _moue_ and slightly lifted
+eyebrows.
+
+"More than we bargained for?" he laughed. "But there is always something
+new in this America, I promise you. Au Printemps itself is new, at all
+events did not exist when I was last in New York."
+
+Following her out, he paused beside the girl in a constricted space hedged
+about with tables, waiting for the maître d'hôtel to seat those who had
+been first to leave the elevator.
+
+The room, of irregular conformation, held upward of two hundred guests and
+habitués seated at tables large and small and so closely set together
+that waiters with difficulty navigated narrow and tortuous channels of
+communication. In the middle, upon a small dancing floor, rudely octagonal
+in shape, made smaller by tables crowded round its edge to accommodate the
+crush, a mob of couples danced arduously, close-locked in one another's
+arms, swaying in rhythm with the over-emphasized time beaten out by a
+perspiring little band of musicians on a dais in a far corner, their
+activities directed by an antic conductor whose lantern-jawed, sallow face
+peered grotesquely out through a mop of hair as black and coarse and lush
+as a horse's mane.
+
+Execrable ventilation or absence thereof manufactured an atmosphere that
+reeked with heat animal and artificial and with ill-blended effluvia from a
+hundred sources. Perhaps the odour of alcohol predominated; Lanyard thought
+of a steam-heated wine-cellar. He observed nothing but champagne in any
+glass, and if food were being served it was done surreptitiously. Sweat
+dripped from the faces of the dancers, deep flushes discoloured all not so
+heavily enamelled as to preserve an inalterable complexion, the eyes of
+many stared with the fixity of hypnosis. Yet when the music ended with an
+unexpected crash of discord these dancers applauded insatiably till the
+jaded orchestra struck up once more, when they renewed their curious
+gyrations with quenchless abandon.
+
+The Brooke girl caught Lanyard's eye, her lips moved. Thanks to the din, he
+had to bend his head near to hear.
+
+She murmured with infinite expression: "Au Printemps!"
+
+The maître d'hôtel was plucking at his sleeve.
+
+"Monsieur had made reservations, no?" Startled recognition washed the man's
+tired and pasty countenance. "Pardon, monsieur: this way!" He turned and
+began to thread deviously between the jostling tables.
+
+Dubiously Lanyard followed. He likewise had known the maître d'hôtel at
+sight: a beastly little decadent whose cabaret on the rue d'Antin, just off
+the avenue de l'Opéra, had been a famous rendezvous of international spies
+till war had rendered it advisable for him to efface himself from the ken
+of Paris with the same expedition and discretion which had marked the
+departure from London of his confrčre who now guarded the lower gateway to
+these ethereal regions of Au Printemps.
+
+The coincidence of finding those two so closely associated worked with the
+riddle of that note further to trouble Lanyard's mind.
+
+Was he to believe Au Printemps the legitimate successor in America of that
+less pretentious establishment on the rue d'Antin, an overseas headquarters
+for Secret Service agents of the Central Powers?
+
+He began to regret heartily, not so much that he had presented himself in
+answer to that note, but the responsibility which now devolved upon him of
+caring for Miss Brooke. Much as he had wished to see her an hour ago, now
+he would willingly be rid of her company.
+
+Why had he been lured to this place, if its character were truly what he
+feared? Conceivably because he was believed--since it now appeared he had
+cheated death--still to possess either that desired document or knowledge
+of its whereabouts.
+
+Naturally the enemy would not think otherwise. He must not forget that
+Ekstrom was playing double; as yet none but Lanyard knew he had stolen the
+document and done a murder to cover the theft from his associates and leave
+him free to sell to England without exciting their suspicion.
+
+Consequently, Lanyard believed, he had been invited to this place to
+be sounded, to be tempted, bribed, intimidated--if need be, and
+possible--somehow to be won over to the uses of the Prussian spy system.
+
+Leading them to the farther side of the room, the maître d'hôtel paused
+bowing and mowing beside a large table already in the possession of a party
+of three.
+
+Lanyard's eyes narrowed. One of the three was Velasco, another a young man
+unknown to him, a mannerly little creature who might have been written by
+the author of "What the Man Will Wear" in the theatre programmes. The third
+was Sophie Weringrode, the Wilhelmstrasse agent whom he had only that
+afternoon observed entering the house in Seventy-ninth Street.
+
+He stopped short, in a cold rage. Till that moment a mirror-sheathed pillar
+had hidden from him Velasco and the Weringrode; else Lanyard had refused
+to come so far; for obviously there were no unreserved tables, indeed few
+vacant chairs, in that part of the room.
+
+Not that he minded the cynical barefacedness of the dodge; that was indeed
+amusing; he was sanguine as to his ability to dominate any situation that
+might arise, and to a degree indifferent if the upshot should prove his
+confidence misplaced; and he did not in the least object to letting the
+enemy show his cards. But he did enormously resent what was, after all,
+something quite outside the calculations of these giddy conspirators, the
+fact that he must either beat incontinent retreat or introduce Cecelia
+Brooke to the company of Sophie Weringrode.
+
+His face darkened, a stinging reproof for the maître d'hôtel trembled on
+his tongue's tip; but that one was busily avoiding his eye on the far side
+of the table, drawing out a chair for "mademoiselle," while Velasco and the
+Weringrode were alert to read Lanyard's countenance and forestall any steps
+he might contemplate in defiance of their designs.
+
+At first glimpse of the Brooke girl Velasco jumped up and hastened to her,
+with eager Latin courtesy expressing his unanticipated delight in the
+prospect of her consenting to join their party. And she was suffering with
+quiet graciousness his florid compliments.
+
+At the same time the Weringrode was greeting Lanyard in the most intimate
+fashion--and damning him in the understanding of Cecelia Brooke with every
+word.
+
+"My dear friend!" she cried gayly, extending a bedizened hand. "I had begun
+to despair of you. Is it part of your system with women always to be a
+little late, always to keep us wondering?"
+
+Schooling his features to a civil smile, Lanyard bowed over the hand.
+
+"In warfare such as ours, my dear Sophie," he said with meaning, "one uses
+all weapons, even the most primitive, in sheer self-defense."
+
+The woman laughed delightedly. "I think," she said, "if you rose from the
+dead at the bottom of the sea, _Tony_, it would be with wit upon your
+lips.... And you have brought a friend with you? How charming!" She shifted
+in her chair to face Cecelia Brooke. "I wish to know her instantly!"
+
+Velasco was waiting only for that opening. "Dear princess," he said,
+instantly, "permit me to present Miss Cecelia Brooke ... Princess de
+Alavia...."
+
+Completely at ease and by every indication enjoying herself hugely, the
+girl bowed and took the hand the Weringrode thrust upon her. Her eyes,
+a-brim with excitement and mischief, veered to Lanyard's, ignored their
+warning, glanced away.
+
+"How do you do?" she said simply. "I didn't understand Mr. Ember expected
+to meet friends here, but that only makes it the more agreeable. May we sit
+down?"
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+FINESSE
+
+
+The person in the educated evening clothes was made known as Mr. Revel.
+For Lanyard's benefit and his own he vacated the chair beside Sophie
+Weringrode, seating himself to one side of Cecelia Brooke, who had Velasco
+between her and the soi-disant princess.
+
+Already a waiter had placed and was filling glasses for Lanyard and the
+girl.
+
+With the best grace he could muster the adventurer sat down, accepted
+a cigarette from the Weringrode case, and with openly impertinent eyes
+inspected the intrigante critically.
+
+She endured that ordeal well, smiling confidently, a handsome creature with
+a beautiful body bewitchingly gowned.
+
+Time, he considered, had been kind to Sophie--time, the mysteries of the
+modern toilette, and the astonishing adaptability of womankind. Splendidly
+vital, like all of her sort who survive, she seemed mysteriously able to
+renew that vitality through the very extravagance with which she squandered
+it. She had lived much of late years, rapidly but well, had learned much,
+had profited by her lessons. To-night she looked legitimately the princess
+of her pretensions; the manner of the grande dame suited her type; her
+gesture was as impeccable as her taste; prettier than ever, she seemed at
+worst little more than half her age.
+
+And her quick intelligence mocked the privacy of his reflections.
+
+"Fair, fast, and forty," she interpreted smilingly.
+
+He pretended to be stunned. "Never!" he protested feebly.
+
+The woman reaffirmed in a series of rapid nods. "Have I ever had secrets
+from you? You are too quick for me, monsieur: I do not intend to begin
+deceiving you at this late day--or trying to."
+
+"Flattery," he declared, "is meat and drink to me. Tell me more."
+
+She laughed lightly. "Thank you, no; vanity is unbecoming in men; I do not
+care to make you vain."
+
+Aware that Cecelia Brooke was listening all the while she seemed to be
+enchanted with the patter of Mr. Revel and the less vapid observations of
+Velasco, Lanyard sought to shunt personalities from himself.
+
+"And now a princess!"
+
+"Did you not know I had married? Yes, a princess of Spain--and with a
+castle there, if you must know."
+
+"Quite a change of atmosphere from Berlin," he remarked. "But it has done
+you no perceptible harm."
+
+That won him a black look. "Oh, Berlin!" she said with contemptuous lips.
+"I haven't been there since the beginning of the war. I wish never to see
+the place again. True: I was born an Austrian; but is that any reason why I
+should love Germany?"
+
+She leaned forward, her fan gently tapping the knuckles of his hand.
+
+"Pay less attention to me," she insisted, with a nod toward the middle of
+the room. "You are missing something. Me, I never tire of her."
+
+The floor had been cleared. A drummer on the dais was sounding the
+long-roll crescendo. At the culminating crash the lights were everywhere
+darkened save for an orange-coloured spot-light set in the ceiling
+immediately above the dancing floor. Into that circular field of torrid
+glare bounded a woman wearing little more than an abbreviated kirtle of
+grass strands with a few festoons of artificial flowers. Applause roared
+out to her, the orchestra sounded the opening bars of an Americanised
+Hawaiian melody, the woman with extraordinary vivacity began to perform a
+denatured hula: a wild and tawny animal, superbly physical, relying with
+warrant upon the stark sensuality of her body to make amends for the
+censored phrases of the primitive dance. The floor resounded like a great
+drum to the stamping of her bare feet, till one marvelled at such solidity
+of flesh as could endure that punishment.
+
+Sophie Weringrode lounged negligently upon the table, bringing her head
+near Lanyard's shoulder.
+
+"Play fair," she said between lips that barely moved.
+
+Without looking round Lanyard answered in the same manner: "Why ask more
+than you are prepared to give?"
+
+"The police ran you out of America once. We need only publish the fact that
+Mr. Anthony Ember is the Lone Wolf...."
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Leave Berlin out of it before this girl."
+
+Lanyard shrugged and laughed quietly. "What else?"
+
+"We can't talk now. Ask me for the next dance."
+
+The woman sat back in her chair, attentive to the posturing of the dancer,
+slowly fanning herself.
+
+Lanyard's semblance of as much interest was nothing more; furtively his
+watchfulness alternated between two quarters of the room.
+
+On the farther edge of the circle of tropical radiance he had marked down a
+table at which two men were seated, Dressier and O'Reilly. No more question
+now as to the personnel of the conspiracy; even Velasco had thrown off
+the mask. The enemy had come boldly into the open, indicating a sense of
+impudent assurance, indicating even more, contempt of opposition. No
+longer afraid, they no longer skulked in shadows. Lanyard experienced a
+premonition of events impending.
+
+In addition he was keeping an eye on the door to the elevator shaft. Once
+already it had opened, letting a bright window into the farther wall of the
+shadowed room, discovering the figure of the maître d'hôtel in silhouette,
+anxiety in his attitude. He was waiting for somebody, waiting tensely. So
+were the others waiting, all that crew and their fellow workers scattered
+among the guests. Lanyard told himself he could guess for whom.
+
+Only Ekstrom was wanting to complete the circle. When he appeared--if by
+chance he should--things ought to begin to happen.
+
+If tolerably satisfied that Ekstrom would not come--not that night, at all
+events--Lanyard, none the less, continued to be jealously heedful of that
+doorway.
+
+But the hula came to an end without either his vigilance or the impatience
+of the maître d'hôtel being rewarded. Writhing with serpentine grace to the
+edge of the illuminated area, the dancer leaped back into darkness and the
+folds of a wrap held by a maid, in which garment she was seen, bowing and
+laughing, when the lights again blazed up.
+
+Without ceasing to play, changing only the time of the tune, the orchestra
+swung into a fox-trot. Lanyard glanced across the table to see Cecelia
+Brooke rising in response to the invitation of dapper Mr. Revel.
+
+In his turn, he rose with Sophie Weringrode. "Be patient with me,"
+he begged. "It is long since I danced to music more frivolous than a
+cannonade."
+
+"But it is simple," the woman promised--"simple, at least, to one who can
+dance as you could in the old days. Just follow me till you catch the step.
+It doesn't matter, anyway; I desire only the opportunity to converse."
+
+Yielding to his arms, she shifted into French when next she spoke.
+
+"You do admirably, my friend. Never again depreciate your dancing. If you
+knew how one suffers at the feet of these Americans--!"
+
+"Excellent!" he said. "Now that is settled: what is it you are instructed
+to propose to me?"
+
+She laughed softly. "Always direct! Truly you would never shine as a secret
+agent."
+
+"Not as they shine," Lanyard countered--"in the dark."
+
+"Don't be a fraud. We are what we are, and so are you. Let us not begin to
+be censorious of one another's methods of winning a living."
+
+"Agreed. But when do we begin to talk business?"
+
+"Why do you continue so persistently antagonistic?"
+
+"I am French."
+
+"That is silly. You are an outlaw, a man without a country. Why not change
+all that?"
+
+"And how does one effect miracles?"
+
+"Germany offers you a refuge, security, freedom to ply your trade
+unhindered--within reasonable limits."
+
+"And in exchange what do I give?"
+
+"Your services, as and when required, in our service."
+
+"Beginning when?"
+
+"To-night."
+
+"With what specific performance?"
+
+"We want, we must without fail have, that document you took from the Brooke
+girl."
+
+"Perhaps we had better continue in English. You are speaking a tongue
+unknown to me."
+
+"Don't talk rot. You know well what I mean. We know you have the thing.
+You didn't steal it to turn it over to England or the States. What is your
+price to Germany?"
+
+"Whatever you have in mind, believe me when I say I have nothing to sell to
+the Wilhelmstrasse."
+
+"But what else can you do with it? What other market--?"
+
+"My dear Sophie, upon my word I haven't got what you want."
+
+"Then why so keen to get the Brooke girl on the telephone as soon as you
+found out where she was stopping?"
+
+"How did you learn about that, by the way?"
+
+"Let the credit go to Seńor Velasco. He saw you first."
+
+"One thought as much.... Nevertheless, I haven't what you want."
+
+"You gave it back to Miss Brooke?"
+
+"Having nothing to give her, I gave her nothing."
+
+The woman was silent throughout a round of the floor; then, "Tell me
+something," she requested.
+
+"Can I keep anything from you?"
+
+"Are you in love with the English girl?"
+
+Lanyard almost lost step, then laughed the thought to derision. "What put
+that into your pretty head, Sophie?"
+
+"Do you not know it yourself, my friend?"
+
+"It is absurd."
+
+She laughed maliciously. "Think it over. Possibly you have not stopped to
+think as yet. When you know the truth yourself, you will be the better
+qualified to fib about it. Also, you will not forget...."
+
+"What?" he demanded bluntly as she paused with intention.
+
+"That as long as she possesses the document--since you have it not--her
+life is endangered even more than yours."
+
+"She hasn't got it!" Lanyard declared, as nearly in panic as he ever was.
+
+"Ah!" the woman jeered. "So you confess to some knowledge of it after all!"
+
+"My dear," he said, teasingly, "do you really want to know what has become
+of that paper?"
+
+"I do, and mean to."
+
+"What if I tell you?"
+
+Her eyes lifted to his in childlike candour. "Need you ask?"
+
+"You are irresistible.... Ask Karl."
+
+She demanded sharply: "Whom?"
+
+"Ekstrom."
+
+"Ah!" Again the adventuress was silent for a little. "What does he know?"
+
+"Ask him, enquire why he murdered von Harden, then what business took him
+to Ninety-fifth Street twice this evening--once about nine o'clock, again
+at midnight."
+
+"You must be mad, monsieur. Karl would not dare...."
+
+"You don't know him--or have forgotten he was trained in the International
+Bureau of Brussels, and there learned how to sell out both parties to a
+business that won't bear publicity."
+
+"I wonder," the woman mused. "Never have I wholly trusted that one."
+
+"Shall I give you the key?"
+
+"If you love Karl as little as I...."
+
+"But where do you suppose the good man is, this night of nights?"
+
+"Who knows? He was not here when I arrived at midnight. I have seen nothing
+of him since."
+
+"When you do--if he shows himself at all--look him over carefully for signs
+of wear and tear."
+
+"Yes, monsieur? And in what respect?"
+
+"Look for cuts about his head and hands, possibly elsewhere. And should he
+confess to an affair with a wind-shield in a motor accident, ask him what
+happened to the study window in the house at Ninety-fifth Street."
+
+Impish glee danced in the woman's eyes. "Your handiwork, dear friend?"
+
+"A mere beginning.... You may tell him so, if you like."
+
+He was subjected to a convulsive squeeze. "Never have I felt so kindly
+disposed toward an enemy!"
+
+"It is true, I were a better foe to Germany if I kept my counsel and let
+Ekstrom continue to play double."
+
+The music ceasing, to be followed by the inevitable clamour for more,
+Lanyard offered an arm upon which Sophie rested a detaining hand.
+
+"No--wait. We dance this encore. I have more to say."
+
+He submitted amiably, the more so since not ill-pleased with himself. And
+when again they were moving round the floor, she bore more heavily upon his
+shoulder and was thoughtful longer than he had expected. Then--
+
+"Attention, my friend."
+
+"I am listening, Sophie."
+
+"If what you hint is true--and I do not doubt it is--Karl's day is done."
+
+"More nearly than he dreams," Lanyard affirmed grimly.
+
+"I shan't be sorry. I am German through and through; what I do, I do for
+the Fatherland, and in that find absolution for many things I care not to
+remember. If through what you tell me I may prove Karl traitor, I owe you
+something."
+
+"Always it has been my fondest hope, Sophie, some day to have you in my
+debt."
+
+Her fingers tightened on his. "Do not jest in the shadow of death. Since
+you have been unwise enough to venture here to-night, you will not be
+permitted to leave alive--unless you pledge yourself to us and prove your
+sincerity by producing that paper."
+
+"That sounds reasonable--like Prussia. What next?"
+
+"I have warned you, so paid off my debt. The rest is your affair."
+
+"Do you imagine I take this seriously?"
+
+"It will turn out seriously for you if you do not."
+
+"How can I be prevented from leaving when I will, from a public
+restaurant?"
+
+"Is it possible you don't know this place? It is maintained by the
+Wilhelmstrasse. Attempt to leave it without coming to a satisfactory
+understanding, and see what happens."
+
+"What, for instance?"
+
+"The lights would be out before you were half across the room. When they
+went up again, the Lone Wolf would be no more, and never a soul here would
+know who stabbed him or what became of the knife."
+
+"Are you by any chance amusing yourself at my expense?"
+
+Once more the woman showed him her handsome eyes: he found them frankly
+grave, earnest, unwavering.
+
+"If you will not listen, your blood be on your own head."
+
+"Forgive me. I didn't mean to be rude...."
+
+"Still, you do not believe!"
+
+"You are wrong. I am merely amused."
+
+"If you understood, you could never mock your peril."
+
+"But I don't mock it. I am enchanted with it. I accept it, and it renews
+my youth. This might be Paris of the days when you ran with the Pack,
+Sophie--and I alone!"
+
+The woman moved her pretty shoulders impatiently. "I think you are either
+mad or ... the very soul of courage!"
+
+The encore ended; they returned to the table, Sophie leaning lightly on
+Lanyard's arm, chattering gay inconsequentialities.
+
+Dropping into her chair, she bent over toward Cecelia Brooke.
+
+"He dances adorably, my dear!" the intrigante declared. "But I dare say you
+know that already."
+
+The English girl shook her head, smiling. "Not yet."
+
+"Then lose no time. You two should dance well together, for you are more of
+a size. I think the next number will be a waltz. We get altogether too few
+of them; these American dances, these one-steps and foxtrots, they are not
+dances, they are mere romps, favourites none the less. And there is always
+more room on the floor; so few waltz nowadays. Really, you must not miss
+this opportunity."
+
+This playful insistence, the light stress she laid upon her suggestion that
+Cecelia Brooke dance with him, considered in conjunction with her recent
+admonition, impressed Lanyard as significantly inconsistent. Sophie was no
+more a woman to make purposeless gestures than she was one sufficiently
+wanting in finesse to signal him by pressures of her foot. There was sheer
+intention in that iteration: "... _lose no time ... you must not miss this
+opportunity_." Something had happened even since their dance; she had
+observed something momentous, and was warning him to act quickly if he
+meant to act at all.
+
+With unruffled amiability, amused, urbane, Lanyard bowed his petition
+across the table, and was rewarded by a bright nod of promise.
+
+Lighting another cigarette, he lounged back, poised his wine glass
+delicately, with the eye of a connoisseur appraised its pale amber tint,
+touched it lightly to his lips, inhaling critically its bouquet, sipped,
+and signified approval of the vintage by sipping again: all without missing
+one bit of business in a scene enacted on the far side of the room,
+directly behind him but reflected in a mirror panel of the wall he faced.
+
+The diplomatist charged with the task of discriminating the sheep from the
+goats in the lower lobby had come up to confer with his colleague, the
+maître d'hôtel of the upper storey. When Lanyard first saw the man he was
+standing by the elevator shaft, none too patiently awaiting the attention
+of the other, who, caught by inadvertence at some distance, was moving to
+join him, with what speed he could manage threading the thick-set tables.
+
+Was this what Sophie had noticed? Had she likewise, perhaps, received some
+secret signal from the guardian of the lower gateway?
+
+A signal possibly indicating that Ekstrom had arrived
+
+They met at last, those two, and discreetly confabulated, the maître
+d'hôtel betraying welcome mitigation of that nervous tension which had
+heretofore so palpably affected him; and, as the other stepped back into
+the elevator, Lanyard saw this one's glance irresistibly attracted to the
+table dedicated to the service of the Princess de Alavia. Something much
+resembling satisfaction glimmered in the fellow's leaden eyes: it was
+apparent that he anticipated early relief from a distasteful burden of
+responsibility.
+
+Then, at ease in the belief that he was unobserved, he turned to a near-by
+table round which four sat without the solace of feminine society--four
+men whose stamp was far from reassuring despite their strikingly quiet
+demeanour and inconspicuously correct investiture of evening dress.
+
+Two were unmistakable sons of the Fatherland; all were well set up, with
+the look of men who would figure to advantage in any affair calling for
+physical competence and courage, from coffee and pistols at sunrise in the
+Parc aux Princes to a battle royal in a Tenderloin dive.
+
+Their table commanded both ways out, by the stairs and by the elevator,
+much too closely for Lanyard's peace of mind.
+
+And more than one looked thoughtfully his way while the maître d'hôtel
+hovered above them, murmuring confidentially.
+
+Four nods sealed an understanding with him. He strutted off with far more
+manner than had been his at any time since the arrival of Lanyard, and
+vented an excess of spirits by berating bitterly an unhappy clown of a
+waiter for some trivial fault.
+
+The first bars of another dance number sang through the confusion of
+voices: truly, as Sophie had foretold, a waltz.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+DANSE MACABRE
+
+
+Trained in the old school of the dance, Lanyard was unversed in that
+graceless scamper which to-day passes as the waltz with a generation
+largely too indolent or too inept of foot to learn to dance.
+
+His was that flowing waltz of melting rhythm, the waltz of yesterday,
+that dance of dances to whose measures a civilization more sedate in its
+amusements, less jealous of its time, danced, flirted, loved, and broke its
+hearts.
+
+Into the swinging movement of that antiquated waltz Lanyard fell without
+a qualm of doubt, all ignorant as he was of his benighted ignorance; and
+instantly, with the ease and gracious assurance of a dancer born, Cecelia
+Brooke adapted herself to his step and guidance, with rare pliancy made her
+every movement exquisitely synchronous with his.
+
+No need to lead her, no need for more than the least of pressures upon her
+yielding waist, no need for anything but absolute surrender to the magic of
+the moment....
+
+Effortless, like creatures of the music adrift upon its sounding tides,
+they circled the floor once, twice, and again, before reluctantly Lanyard
+brought himself to shatter the spell of that enchantment.
+
+Looking down with an apologetic smile, he asked:
+
+"Mademoiselle, do you know you can be an excellent actress?"
+
+As if in resentment the girl glanced upward sharply, with clouded eyes.
+
+"So can most women, in emergency."
+
+"I mean ... I have something serious to say; nobody must guess your
+thoughts."
+
+She said simply: "I will do my best."
+
+"You must--you must appear quite charmed. Also, should you catch me
+smirking like an infatuated ninny, remember I am only doing my own
+indifferent best to act."
+
+Laughter trembled deliciously in her voice: "I promise faithfully to bear
+in mind your heartlessness!"
+
+"I am an ass," he enunciated with the humility of conviction. "But that
+can't be helped. Attend to me, if you please--and do not start. This place
+turns out to be a nest of Prussian spies. I was brought here by a trick. I
+understand the order is I may not leave alive."
+
+Playing her part so well as almost to embarrass Lanyard himself, the girl
+smiled daringly into his eyes.
+
+"Because of that packet?" she breathed.
+
+"Because of that, mademoiselle."
+
+"Where is it?"
+
+For an instant Lanyard lost countenance absolutely. Through sheer good
+fortune the girl was now dancing with face averted, her head so nearly
+touching his shoulder that it seemed to rest upon it.
+
+Nevertheless, it was at cost of an heroic struggle that he fought down all
+signs of that shock with which it had been borne in upon him that he dared
+not assure the girl her packet was in safe hands.
+
+If he had failed in his efforts to restore the thing to her, that she might
+consign it as she saw fit and so discharge her personal trust, till now
+Lanyard had solaced himself with a hazy notion that she would in turn be
+comforted when she learned the document was in the keeping of her country's
+Secret Service.
+
+Impossible to tell her that: his own act had rendered it impossible,
+that act the outcome of wilful trifling with his infirmity, his itch for
+thieving.
+
+Of a sudden the pilfered necklace secreted in an inner pocket of his
+waistcoat, above his heart, seemed to have gained the weight of so much
+lead. The hideous consciousness of the thing stung like the bite of live
+coals.
+
+This woman was in distress; he yearned to lighten her burden; he could do
+that with half a dozen words; his guilt prohibited.
+
+A thief!
+
+Now indeed the Lone Wolf tasted shame and realized its bitterness....
+
+Puzzled by his constraint, the girl's eyes again sought his; and warned
+in time by the movement of her head, he mustered impudence to meet their
+question with the look of tenderness that went with the rôle she suffered
+him to play.
+
+"What is the matter?"
+
+"I am ashamed that I have failed you...."
+
+"Don't think of that. I know you did your best. Only tell me what became of
+it."
+
+"It was stolen; when I returned to my stateroom that night I was held up
+and robbed. The thief shot at me, killed his confederate, decamped by
+way of the port. I pursued. Another aided him to overpower and cast me
+overboard."
+
+"Yet you escaped...!"
+
+Strange she should seem more intrigued by that than concerned about her
+loss!
+
+"I escaped, no matter how...."
+
+"You don't know who stole the packet?"
+
+"I don't recall the man among the passengers, but he may have been in one
+of the boats, a fellow of about my stature, with a flowing beard...."
+
+He sketched broadly Ekstrom as he had seen him in the Stanistreet library.
+
+Her eyes quickened.
+
+"One such escaped in our boat, the second steward; I think his name was
+Anderson."
+
+"Doubtless the same."
+
+"Then it is gone!"
+
+For once in his acquaintance with her, that brave spirit seemed to falter:
+she became a burden, bereft for a little of all grace and spontaneity.
+
+He was constrained to swing her forcibly into time.
+
+Almost instantly she recollected herself, covered her lapse with a little
+laugh innocent of any hint of its forced falsity, and showed him and the
+room as well a radiant countenance: all with such address and art that the
+incident might well have escaped notice, otherwise have passed for a bit of
+natural by-play.
+
+Yet distress was too eloquent in the broken query: "What _am_ I to do?"
+
+Heartsick, self-sick to boot, he essayed to suggest that she consult
+Colonel Stanistreet, but lacking so much effrontery, stammered and fell
+silent.
+
+Perhaps misinterpreting, she cried in quick contrition: "I am forgetting!
+Forgive me. I should have said: what are you to do?"
+
+He whipped his wits together.
+
+"Look down, turn your face aside, smile.... I have a plan, a desperate
+remedy, but the best I can contrive. When next the lift comes up, we must
+try to be near it. There is one row of tables which we must break through
+by main force. Leave that to me, follow as I clear a way, go straight into
+the lift. If anything happens, run down the stairway on the left. The
+ground floor is two flights below. If I am any way detained, don't stop--go
+on, get your wraps, take the first taxi you see, return directly to the
+Knickerbocker. I will telephone you later."
+
+"If you live," she breathed.
+
+"Never fear for me...."
+
+"But if I do? Do you imagine I could rest if I thought you had sacrificed
+yourself for me?"
+
+"You must not think that. I am far too selfish--"
+
+"That is not so. And I refuse positively to do as you wish unless you tell
+me how I may communicate with you."
+
+Resigned to humour her, he recited his address and the number of the house
+telephone, and when she had memorized both by iteration, resumed:
+
+"Once outside, if anybody tries to hinder you, don't let them intimidate
+you into keeping quiet, but scream, scream at the top of your lungs. These
+beasts abominate a screaming woman, or any other undue noise. Not only will
+that frighten them off, but it will fetch the nearest policeman."
+
+The music ceased. She stood flushed, smiling, adorably pretty, eyes
+star-like for him alone.
+
+"We are not far from the lift now," she said just audibly.
+
+"But the door is shut. Hush. Here comes the encore. Once more around...."
+
+They drifted again into that witching maze of melody and movement made one.
+
+"You are silent," she said, after a little. "Why?"
+
+Lanyard answered with a warning pressure on her hand.
+
+The elevator was stationary at the floor, its door wide, the maître d'hôtel
+engaged in a far quarter of the room, while those four formidable guardians
+of the exit were gossiping with animation over their glasses.
+
+"Steady. Now is our time."
+
+Abruptly they stopped. A couple that had been following them avoided
+collision by a close margin. Over his partner's head the man scowled
+portentously--and dissipated his display of temper on Lanyard's indifferent
+back.
+
+Upon those guests who sat between the dancing floor and elevator, Lanyard
+wasted no consideration. Pushing roughly between two adjoining tables, he
+lifted one chair with its astonished occupant bodily out of the way, then
+turned, swung an arm round the girl's waist, all but threw her through the
+lane he had created, followed without an instant's pause.
+
+It was all so quickly accomplished that the girl was in the car before
+another person in the room appreciated what was happening. And Lanyard, in
+the act of slamming the door shut without heed for the protesting operator,
+saw only a room full of amazed faces with gaping mouths and rounded
+eyes--and one man of the four at the near-by table in the act of rising
+uncertainly, with a stupefied look.
+
+Elbowing the boy aside, he seized the operating lever and thrust it to the
+notch labelled "Descend." An instant of pause followed: like its attendant
+the elevator seemed stalled in inertia of stupefaction.
+
+Beyond the door somebody loosed an infuriated screech. Angry hands
+drummed on the glass panel. With a premonitory shudder the car started
+spasmodically, moved downward at first gently, then with greater speed,
+coming to an abrupt stop at the street level with a shock that all but
+threw its passengers from their feet.
+
+Up the shaft that senseless punishment of the panel continued. Some other
+intelligence conceived the notion for ringing for the car to return: its
+annunciator buzzed stridently, continuously.
+
+Unlatching the lower door, Lanyard threw it back, stepped out, finding the
+lobby deserted but for a simpering group of coat-room girls, to one of whom
+he flipped a silver dollar.
+
+"Find this lady's wraps--be quick!"
+
+Deftly catching the coin, the girl snatched the check from Cecelia Brooke,
+and darted into the women's dressing room.
+
+Throughout a wait of agonising suspense, the elevator boy remained cowering
+in a corner of the car, staring at Lanyard as at some shape of terror,
+while the ignored buzzer droned without cessation to persistent pressure
+from above.
+
+Out of the dark entrance to the lower dining room the bearded diplomatist
+popped with the distracted look of a jack-in-the-box about to be ravished
+of its young.
+
+"Monsieur is not leaving?" he expostulated shrilly, darting forward.
+
+Lanyard stopped him with a look whose menace was like a kick.
+
+"I am seeing this lady to her cab," he said in a cold and level voice.
+
+The coat-room girl emerged from her lair with an armful of wraps and furs.
+
+Again the bearded one made as if to block the doorway.
+
+"But, monsieur--mademoiselle--!"
+
+Lanyard caught the fellow's arm and sent him spinning like a top.
+
+"Out of the way, you rat!" he snapped; then to the girl: "Be quick!"
+
+As she shouldered into a compartment of the revolving door incoherent yells
+began to echo down the staircase well. At length it had occurred to those
+above to utilize that means of descent.
+
+Wedged in the wheeling door, a final glimpse of the lobby showed Lanyard
+the startled, putty-like mask of the maître d'hôtel at the head of
+the stairway with, beyond him, the head of one who, though in shadow,
+uncommonly resembled Ekstrom--but Ekstrom as he was in the old days,
+without his beard.
+
+That picture passed like a flash on a cinema screen.
+
+They were on the sidewalk, and the girl was running toward a taxicab, the
+only vehicle of its sort in sight, at the curb just above the entrance.
+
+Coatless and bareheaded, Lanyard swung to face the door porter, a towering,
+brawny animal in livery, self-confident and something more than keen to
+interfere; but his mouth, opening to utter some sort of protest, shut
+suddenly without articulation when Lanyard displayed for his benefit a .22
+Colt's automatic. And he fell back smartly.
+
+Jerking open the cab door, the girl stumbled into the far corner of the
+seat. The motor was churning in promising fashion, the chauffeur settling
+into place at the wheel. Into his hand Lanyard thrust a ten-dollar bill.
+
+"The Knickerbocker," he ordered. "Stop for nobody. If followed steer for
+the nearest policeman. There'll be no change."
+
+He closed the door sharply, leaned over it, dropped the little pistol into
+the girl's lap.
+
+"Chances are you won't want that--but you may."
+
+She bent forward quickly, eyes darkly lustrous with alarm, and placed a
+hand upon his arm.
+
+"But you?"
+
+"It is I whom they want, not you. I won't subject you to the hazard of my
+company."
+
+Gently Lanyard lifted the hand from his sleeve, brushed it gallantly with
+his lips, released it.
+
+"Good-night!" he laughed, then stepped back, waved a hand to the
+chauffeur--"Go!"
+
+The taxicab shot away like a racing hound unleashed. With a sigh of relief
+Lanyard gave himself wholly to the question of his own salvation.
+
+The rank of waiting motor-cars offered no hope: all but one were private
+town cars and limousines, operated by liveried drivers. A solitary roadster
+at the head of the line tempted and was rejected; even though it had no
+guardian chauffeur, something of which he could not be sure, he would
+be overhauled before he could start the motor and get the knack of its
+gear-shift mechanism. Even now Au Printemps was in frantic eruption, its
+doors ejecting violently a man at each wild revolution.
+
+Down Broadway an omnibus of the Fifth Avenue line lumbered, at no less
+speed than twenty miles an hour, without passengers and sporting an
+illuminated "Special" sign above the driver's seat.
+
+Dashing out into the roadway, Lanyard launched himself at the narrow
+platform of the unwieldy vehicle and, in spite of a yell of warning from
+the guard, landed safely on the step and turned to repel boarders.
+
+But his manoeuvre had been executed too swiftly and unexpectedly. The group
+before Au Printemps huddled together in ludicrous inaction, as if stunned.
+Then one raged through it, plying vicious elbows. As he paused against the
+light Lanyard identified unmistakably the silhouette of Ekstrom.
+
+So that one had, after all, escaped the net of his own treachery!
+
+The 'bus guard was shaking Lanyard's arm with an ungentle hand.
+
+"Here, now, you got no business boardin' a Special."
+
+From his pocket Lanyard whipped the first bank-note his fingers
+encountered.
+
+"Divide that with the chauffeur," he said crisply--"tell him to drive like
+the devil. It's life or death with me!"
+
+The protruding eyeballs of the guard bore witness to the magnitude of the
+bribe.
+
+"You're on!" he breathed hoarsely, and ran forward through the body of the
+conveyance to advise the driver.
+
+Swarming up the curved stairway to the roof, Lanyard dropped into the rear
+seat, looking back.
+
+The group round the doorway was recovering from its stupefaction. Three
+struck off from it toward the line of waiting cars. Of these the foremost
+was Ekstrom.
+
+Simultaneously the 'bus, lumbering drunkenly, lurched into Columbus Circle,
+and the roadster left the curb carrying in addition to the driver two
+passengers--Ekstrom on the running-board.
+
+Tardily Lanyard repented of that impulse which had moved him to bestow his
+one weapon upon Cecelia Brooke.
+
+The night air had a biting edge. A chill rain had begun to drizzle down in
+minute globules of mist, which both lent each street light its individual
+nimbus of gold and dulled deceitfully the burnished asphaltum, rendering
+its surface greasy and treacherous. More than once Lanyard feared lest
+the 'bus skid and overturn; and before the old red brick building between
+Broadway and Eighth Avenue shut out the western sector of the Circle, he
+saw the roadster, driven insanely, shoot crabwise toward the curb, than
+answer desperate work at the wheel and whirl madly, executing a volte-face
+so violent that Ekstrom's hold was broken and he was hurled a dozen feet
+away. And Lanyard's chances were measurably advanced by the delay required
+in order to pick up the sprawling one, start the engine anew, and turn more
+cautiously to resume the pursuit.
+
+Striking diagonally across Broadway the 'bus swung into Fifty-seventh
+Street at the moment when the roadster turned the corner of Columbus
+Circle.
+
+The head of the guard lifted above the edge of the roof. Clinging to the
+supports of the stairway, he addressed Lanyard in accents of blended
+suspicion and respect.
+
+"Lis'n, boss: is this all right, on the level, now?"
+
+"Absolutely, unless that racing-car catches up with us, in which case
+you'll have a dead man--myself--on your hands."
+
+"Well ... we don't wanna lose our jobs, that's all."
+
+"You won't unless I lose my life."
+
+"Anything you'd like me to do?"
+
+"Go down, wait on the platform, if anybody attempts to get aboard kick him
+in the act."
+
+"Sure I will!"
+
+The guard disappeared.
+
+Wallowing like a barge in a strong seaway, the omnibus crossed Seventh
+Avenue and sped downhill toward Sixth with dangerous momentum. Shortly,
+however, this began to be modified by the brakes, a precaution against
+mishap which even the fugitive must approve. Ahead loomed the gaunt
+structure of the Sixth Avenue "L," bridging the roadway at so low an
+elevation as to afford the omnibus little more than clear headroom. Once
+beneath it a single bounce up from the surface-car tracks must mean a
+wreck.
+
+But the pursuit was less than half a block astern and gaining swiftly, even
+as the speed of the omnibus was growing less and desperately less.
+
+At what seemed little better than a snail's pace it began to pass beneath
+the span of the Elevated.
+
+Like a racing thoroughbred the roadster swept up alongside, motor chanting
+triumphantly, running-board level with the platform step.
+
+Ekstrom, poised to leap aboard, hesitated; a pistol in his hand exploded; a
+shattered window fell crashing.
+
+There was a yell from the guard, not of pain but of fright. Apparently he
+executed a von Hindenburg retreat. Without more opposition Ekstrom gained
+the platform.
+
+In the same breath Lanyard stood up. The lowermost girder of the "L" was
+immediately overhead. He grasped it, doubled his legs beneath him, swung
+clear. The omnibus shot from under him, the roadster convoying.
+
+Drawing himself up, he seized a round iron upright of guard-rail and heaved
+his body in over the edge of the platform round the switching-tower, which
+was at this hour dark and untenanted.
+
+In the street below a police whistle shrieked, and a fusillade of pistol
+shots woke scandalised echoes.
+
+Bending almost double Lanyard moved rapidly northward on the footway beside
+the western tracks, and so gained the old station on the west side of
+Fifty-eighth Street, for years dedicated to the uses of desuetude. Through
+this he crept, then down the stairs, encountering at the lower landing an
+iron gate which obliged him to climb over and jump.
+
+Not a soul paid the least attention to this matter of a gentleman in
+evening dress without hat or top coat dropping from the stairway of a
+disused elevated station at two o'clock in the morning.
+
+In New York anything can happen, and most things do, without stirring up
+meddlesome impulses in innocent bystanders.
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+FORCE MAJEURE
+
+
+This visit to his rooms was the briefest of the several Lanyard made that
+night, considerations of mortal urgency dictating its drastic abbreviation.
+
+If the events of the last few hours had meant anything whatever they had
+demonstrated two truths which shone like beacon lights: that Manhattan
+Island was overpopulated as long as both he and Ekstrom remained on it;
+that Ekstrom had been goaded to the verge of aberration by the discovery
+that Lanyard had come safely through the _Assyrian_ débâcle to take up anew
+his self-appointed office of Nemesis to the Prussian spy system in general
+and to the genius of its American bureau in particular.
+
+Henceforth that one would know no more rest while Lanyard lived.
+
+Thus that little street-level apartment forfeited whatever attractions it
+originally had possessed in the adventurer's estimation. Not only was the
+address known to Ekstrom's associates, and so open to him, but its peculiar
+characteristics, its facilities for access from the street direct, rendered
+it a highly practicable death-trap for a hunted man.
+
+Lanyard was well persuaded he need only wait there long enough to receive a
+deputation from Seventy-ninth Street. And with any assurance that Ekstrom
+would come alone, he might have been content to wait. Not only had he
+through too intimate acquaintance with his methods every assurance that
+Ekstrom would never brave alone what he could induce another to risk with
+him, but Lanyard was never one willing to play the passive part.
+
+A banal axiom of all warfare applied: The advantage is with him who fights
+upon the offensive.
+
+Since midnight the offensive had shifted from Lanyard's grasp to the
+enemy's. He was determined to recapture it; and that was something never to
+be accomplished by sitting still and waiting for events to unfold, but only
+by carrying the war into the enemy's camp.
+
+He delayed, then, only long enough to change his clothing and to conceal
+about him certain properties which it seemed unwise to expose to chance
+discovery on the part of Ekstrom or in the ever-possible event of police
+intervention.
+
+Within five minutes from the time of his return he was closing behind him
+the private door.
+
+Wearing a quiet lounge suit but no top coat, with a hat not so soft as to
+lack character but soft enough to stick upon one's head in time of action,
+and carrying a stick neither brutishly stout nor ineffectively slender,
+he strolled up to Seventh Avenue, turned north, entered Central Park--and
+strolled no more.
+
+Kindly shadows enfolded him, engulfed him altogether. One minute after he
+had passed through the gateway he would have defied unaided apprehension
+by the most zealous officer of the peace. He went swiftly and secretly,
+avoiding all lighted ways.
+
+Not till then did conscience stir and remind him of his slighted promise to
+call up Cecelia Brooke.
+
+No time now for that; the errand that engaged him was of a nature to brook
+no more procrastination. The girl must wait. He was sorry if, as she had
+protested, solicitude for his welfare must interfere with her night's rest.
+But what must be, must: until he saw the end of this adventure he could be
+influenced by no minor consideration whatsoever.
+
+Not that he seriously believed Cecelia's sleep would be uneasy because of
+him. That was too much.
+
+His temper was grim and skeptical. The resentment roused by the trap that
+had so nearly laid him by the heels, together with the subsequent effort to
+assassinate him out of hand, had settled into a phase of smouldering fury
+whose heat consumed like misty vapours every lesser emotion, every humane
+consideration.
+
+Some by-thought recalling the Weringrode's innuendo that he was in love
+without his knowledge, moved him to laugh outright if strangely, an
+unpleasant laugh that held as much of pain as of derision.
+
+What room in that dark heart of his for love?... the heart of a thief and a
+potential assassin, the heart of the Lone Wolf!...
+
+How was he to know he had hardly left his lodgings before their hush was
+interrupted by the grumble of the house telephone?
+
+Intermittently for upward of three minutes that sound persisted. When
+at length it discontinued the quiet of the untenanted rooms reigned
+undisturbed for a brief time only.
+
+An odd metallic stridor became audible, a succession of scrapings of
+stealthy accent at the private entrance. Its latch clicked. The door swung
+back against the wall with a muffled bump. Two pairs of furtive feet padded
+in the little private hallway. The flash of an electric hand-lamp flickered
+hither and yon like a searching poignard, picked out the door to the one
+bedchamber and vanished. There was guarded whispering, then a thud as one
+of the intruders gained the middle of the bedchamber in a bound. An instant
+later a switch snapped, and the room was flooded with light.
+
+Beneath the chandelier stood a man in evening dress the worse for
+misadventure, one knee of his trousers cut open, both legs caked with
+a film of half-dry mud, his linen dingy with mud-stains, his top coat
+shockingly bedraggled. He was bareheaded, apparently having lost his hat; a
+black smear across one cheek added emphasis to the pallor of newly shaven
+jowls; and his eyes were blazing.
+
+"Stole away!" he muttered briefly in disgust, then called: "Ed!"
+
+As quietly as a shadow a second man joined him, greeting him with a "Hush!"
+
+This gentleman was in far more presentable repair and a more equable frame
+of mind. There was even a glint of amusement in his hard blue eyes. His
+countenance had an Irish cast.
+
+"Hush?" the other iterated with contempt. "What for? The hound's not here."
+
+"No, Karl," Ed admitted; "but there are others in the house. If it's known
+to them that Lanyard's out, they may turn in a police alarm; and I for one
+have had enough of bulls for one night."
+
+Karl grunted disdainfully. "I told you this would be a waste of time...."
+
+"And I agreed with you entirely. But you would come."
+
+"Lanyard's no such fool as to stick round a place he knows I know about."
+Karl's hands twitched and his features worked nervously. "He knows me too
+well, knows that if ever I lay hands on him again--"
+
+His voice was rising to an hysterical pitch when the other checked him with
+a sibilant hiss. At the same time his hand darted out and switched off the
+light. Karl uttered a startled ejaculation.
+
+"_Sssh_!" his companion repeated.
+
+In the street a motor-car was rumbling, stationary before the door. Then
+the remote grinding of the house door-bell was heard.
+
+"Let's get out of this," suggested the Irishman. "It's no good waiting,
+anyway."
+
+"Hold hard! We won't go till we have a clear field."
+
+The Prussian stole out into the sitting room and stood listening at the
+door to the public hallway, his companion standing by with a mutinous air.
+
+"Oh, come along!" he insisted, in a stage whisper.
+
+"Shut up! Listen...."
+
+Shuffling footfalls traversed the hallway. The front door was opened. The
+clear voice of an Englishwoman was answered in the slurring patois of a
+negro.
+
+"No'm, he ain't in."
+
+The next enquiry was intelligible: the speaker had entered the hallway.
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Yas'm. Sumbody done call him up 'bout ten min'tes ago, an' I rung an' rung
+an' he don' answer. He ain't in or he don' mean to answer nobody, tha's
+all."
+
+"I am very anxious about him. Have you a key to his rooms?"
+
+"Yas'm, I got a pass-key, but--"
+
+"Please use it. Take this. Go in and make sure he is out, or if at home
+that he is all right."
+
+"Yas'm, thanky ma'am, but--"
+
+"Do as I tell you. I will see that you don't get into trouble."
+
+"All right, ma'am." The negro chuckled, probably over his tip. "Yo' sho'
+has got the p'suadin'est way...."
+
+The Irishman caught the German's arm. "Come out of this," he pleaded.
+
+"No fear. I'll see it through. That's the Brooke girl the fool got in with
+on the boat. She may know something...."
+
+"But--"
+
+"Leave this to me. You look out for the negro. I'll take care of Miss
+Cecelia Brooke."
+
+Swearing unhappily, the Irishman flattened against the wall to one side of
+the door. Karl waited behind it as it admitted the hall attendant, who made
+directly toward the central chandelier.
+
+"Yo' jes' wait, ma'am, an' I'll mek a light an'--"
+
+But the girl had impetuously followed him in.
+
+The light went up, and Karl put a heavy shoulder against the door, closing
+it with a slam. The negro turned and stood with gaping mouth and staring
+eyes, dumb with terror. The girl recognised Karl with a little cry, and
+darted back toward the door. Immediately he caught her in his arms. Her
+lips opened, but their utterance was stifled by a handkerchief thrust
+between them with the dexterity of a practised hand.
+
+Without one word of warning the Irishman stepped forward and struck the
+negro brutally in the face. The boy reeled, whimpering. Two more blows
+delivered with murderous ferocity silenced him altogether. He collapsed
+like a broken puppet, insensible on the floor, his face a curious ashen
+colour beneath its glossy skin of brown.
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+RIPOSTE
+
+
+The drizzle had grown thicker, the night blacker, the early morning air
+still more chill. But Lanyard was moving too swiftly to be affected by
+this last circumstance; the first he anathematised with the perfunctory
+bitterness of a skilled artisan who sees his work in a fair way to be
+obstructed by elemental depravity. Another of his trade would have termed
+such weather conditions ideal, and so might the Lone Wolf on an everyday
+job; but the prospect of a footing rendered insecure by rain trebled the
+hazards attending a plan of campaign that would brook neither revision nor
+delay.
+
+There was only one way to break into the house on Seventy-ninth Street;
+this Lanyard had appreciated upon his first reconnaissance of the previous
+afternoon. He could have wished for more time in which to prepare and
+assemble tested equipment instead of relying upon chance to supply
+the requisite gear; but with all time at his disposal the mechanical
+difficulties of the problem would remain. Far from indifferent to these,
+Lanyard addressed himself to their conquest doggedly and with businesslike
+economy of motion.
+
+Shunning the public paths he went over the park wall like a cat, sped
+across town through Eightieth Street, and so came to that plot of land upon
+which an apartment building was in process of erection, immediately to the
+north of the American headquarters of the Prussian spy system.
+
+Walled in with stone two storeys deep, its gaunt skeleton of steel had
+been joined together as far as the seventh level. How much higher it was
+destined to rise was immaterial; for Lanyard's purpose it was enough that
+the frame had already outgrown its neighbour on the south.
+
+A litter of lumber, huge steel girders, and other material narrowed the
+side street to half its normal width. The sidewalk space was trampled earth
+roofed with heavy planks for the protection of pedestrian heads, a passage
+lighted by electric bulbs widely spaced; midway in this an entrance to
+the structure was flanked by a wooden shanty, by day a tool house, after
+working hours a shelter for the night watchman. This boasted one glazed
+window dull with orange light.
+
+Approaching with due precaution, Lanyard peered in. The light came from a
+single electric bulb and a potbellied sheet-iron stove, glowing red. Near
+by, in a chair tipped against the wall, sat the watchman, corncob pipe
+in hand, head drooping, eyes closed, mouth ajar. A snore of the first
+magnitude seemed to vibrate the very walls. On the floor beside the chair
+stood a two-quart tin pail full of arid emptiness.
+
+Dismissing further consideration of the watchman as a factor, satisfied
+that the entire neighbourhood as well was sound asleep, Lanyard darted up
+the plank walk that led into the building, then paused to get his bearings.
+
+Effluvia of mortar and damp lumber saluted him in an uncanny place whose
+darkness was slightly qualified by a faint refracted glow from the low
+canopy of cloud and by equally dim shafts of diffused street light. There
+was more or less flooring of a temporary character over a sable gulf of
+cellars, and overhead a sullen, weeping sky cross-hatched with stark black
+ironwork.
+
+With infinite patience Lanyard groped his way through that dark labyrinth
+to the foot of a ladder ascending an open shaft wherein a hoisting tackle
+dangled.
+
+Here he stumbled over what he had been seeking, a great coil of one-inch
+hempen cable, from which he measured off roughly what he would require, if
+his calculations were correct, and something over. This length he re-coiled
+and slung over his shoulder: an awkward, weighty handicap. Nevertheless he
+began to climb.
+
+Above the third level there was merely steel framework; he had somewhat
+more light to guide him, with a view of the north wall of the Seventy-ninth
+Street house, bright in the glare of avenue lamps.
+
+The wall was absolutely blank.
+
+At the seventh level the ladders ended. He stepped off upon a foot-wide
+beam, paused to make sure of his poise, and began to walk the girders with
+a sureness of foot any aviator might have envied.
+
+At regular intervals he encountered uprights: between these he had to
+depend upon his sense of direction and equilibrium to guide him safely
+across those narrow walks of steel made slippery by rain.
+
+But, thanks to forethought, his footwork was faultless: he wore shoes old,
+well-broken, very soft, flexible, and silent.
+
+The building was in the shape of a squat E, with two courts facing south.
+On this seventh level the first court was bridged by a single girder, the
+middle of which was Lanyard's immediate objective. Since it lacked uprights
+he took it cautiously on hands and knees until approximately equidistant
+from both ends, when he straddled it, took the cable from his shoulders,
+uncoiled a length and made it fast round the girder with a clove hitch:
+giddy work, in that darkness, on that greasy span, fashioning by simple
+sense of touch the knot upon which his life was to depend, half of the time
+prone upon the girder and fishing blindly beneath it for the rope's end,
+with nothing but a seventy--foot drop between him and eternity, not even
+another girder to break a fall....
+
+He was now immediately opposite the minaret, at an elevation of about
+twenty feet above the roof he wished to reach, and as far away, or perhaps
+a trifle farther.
+
+Still he detected no signs of life about that nest of spies: if the
+wireless were in operation its apparatus was well-housed; there was no
+sound of the spark, never a glimmer of its violet flash.
+
+Laboriously--the knot completed to his satisfaction--Lanyard returned via
+the eastern arm of the E, paying out the coiled cable as he progressed,
+working round to the north side of the court.
+
+Once again pausing opposite the minaret, he knotted the end of the cable
+loosely round an upright connecting with the sixth level, let it slide
+down, followed it, repeated the process, and rested finally on the fifth.
+
+Now his ordeal approached a climax which he contemplated with what calmness
+he could while securing the rope beneath the arms.
+
+In another sixty seconds or less it must be demonstrated whether his dead
+reckoning would set him down safe and sound on the roof or dash him against
+the walls of the Seventy-ninth Street house, to swing back and dangle
+impotently in mid-air till daylight and police discovered him--unless,
+escaping injury, he were able to pull himself up hand over hand to the
+girder.
+
+With one arm round the upright to prevent the sag of rope from dragging him
+over prematurely, he essayed a final survey.
+
+Either the murk deceived or Lanyard had judged shrewdly. His feet were on
+an approximate level with the coping round the roof, and he stood about as
+far from the upper girder to which the rope was hitched as that was distant
+from the coping.
+
+One look up and round at those louring skies, duskily flushed by subdued
+city lights: with no more ceremony Lanyard released the upright and
+committed his body to space.
+
+If the downward sweep was breathless, what followed was breath-taking:
+once past the nadir of that giant swing, he was borne upward by an impetus
+steadily and sensibly slackening.
+
+Instant followed leaden-winged instant while the wall, looming like
+a mountainside, seemed to be toppling, insensately bent upon his
+annihilation; even so his momentum, decreasing with frightful swiftness,
+seemed possessed of demoniac desire to frustrate him.
+
+After an age-long agony of doubt it became evident he was not destined
+to crash into the wall, but not that he was to gain the coping: through
+fractions of a second hideously protracted this last drew near, nearer,
+slowly, ever more slowly.
+
+And he was twisting dizzily....
+
+With frantic effort he crooked an arm over the coping at a juncture when,
+had he not acted instantly, he must have swung back. There was a racking
+wrench, as though his arm were being torn from its socket.
+
+At the end of a struggle even more wearing he flung his other arm across
+the ledge, and for some time hung there, at the end of an almost taut rope,
+unable to overcome its resistance and pull himself in over the coping,
+stubbornly refusing to loose his grasp.
+
+Presently, grown desperate, he let go with his right hand, holding fast
+only with the left, fumbled in a pocket, found his knife, opened it with
+his teeth, and began, to saw at the rope round his chest.
+
+Strand after strand parted grudgingly till it fell away altogether and
+reaction from its tension threw him against the coping with such violence
+that he all but lost his hold. Dropping the knife, he swept his right arm
+up and once more hooked his fingers over the inside of the ledge.
+
+Far down the knife clinked suggestively upon stone.
+
+Breathing deep, Lanyard braced knees and feet against the wall, worried,
+heaved, hauled, squirmed like a mad thing, in the end rolled over the top
+and fell at length upon the roof, panting, trembling, bathed in sweat,
+temporarily tormented by impulses to retch.
+
+By degrees regaining physical control, he sat up, took his bearings, and
+crept toward the foot of the minaret.
+
+A small, narrow doorway in its base was on the latch. He passed through to
+the landing of a dark winding stairway with a dim light at the bottom of
+its circular well.
+
+While he stood attentive, intermittent stridor troubled the stillness,
+originating at some point on the floors below: the proscribed wireless was
+at work.
+
+Hearing no other sounds, Lanyard went on down the steps, at their foot
+pausing to spy out through a half-open doorway to the topmost storey.
+
+Nobody moved in the corridor. He saw nothing but a line of closed doors,
+presumably to servants' quarters. Now, however, the vibrant rasp of the
+radio spark was perceptibly stronger and had a background of subdued noise,
+echoes of distant voices, deadened sounds of hasty footfalls, now and again
+a heavy thump or the bang of a door.
+
+Moving out, he commanded the length of the corridor. Toward one end a door
+stood open. He could see no more of the room beyond than a narrow patch of
+wall fitfully illuminated by a play of violet light.
+
+Then a man stepped out of this operating room, turning on the threshold to
+utter some parting observation; and Lanyard retired hastily to the shaft of
+the minaret stairway, but not before recognising Velasco.
+
+A moment later the Brazilian passed his lurking-place, walking with bended
+head, a worried frown darkening his swarthy countenance; and Lanyard
+emerged in time to see his head and shoulders vanish down a stairway at the
+far end of the corridor.
+
+Following with discretion, Lanyard leaned over the head of the main
+staircase well, looking down three flights to the ground floor, to which
+Velasco was descending.
+
+The house seemed veritably to hum with secret and, to judge by the pitch of
+its rumour, well-nigh panic activity. One divined a scurrying as of
+rats about to desert a sinking ship. Untoward events had thrown this
+establishment into a state of excited confusion: their nature Lanyard could
+not surmise, but their conjunction with his designs was exasperatingly
+inopportune. To search this place and find his man--if he were there at
+all--without being discovered, while its inmates buzzed about like so many
+startled hornets, was a fair impossibility; to attempt it was to court
+death.
+
+None the less he was inflexible in determination to go on, to push his luck
+to its extremity, by sheer force to bend fortuity to his service and suffer
+without complaint whatever the consequences of its recoil.
+
+Yet even as he advanced a foot to begin the descent, he withdrew it.
+
+On the ground floor, a door closing with a resounding crash had proved the
+signal for an outburst of expostulant, acrimonious voices: some half a
+dozen men giving angry tongue at one and the same time, their roars of
+polysyllabic gutturalisms fusing into utterly unintelligible clamour.
+
+One thought of a mutiny in a German madhouse.
+
+Moment after moment passed, the squall persisting with unmitigated
+viciousness. If now and again it subsided momentarily, it was only into
+uglier growls and swiftly to rise once more to high frenzy of incoherence.
+
+Two of the disputants appeared in the square frame of the staircase well,
+oddly foreshortened figures brandishing wild arms, one of them Velasco, the
+other a man whom Lanyard failed to identify, seemingly united in common
+anger directed at the head of some person invisible.
+
+Abruptly, with a gesture of almost homicidal fury, the Brazilian darted out
+of sight. The other followed.
+
+Then the object of their wrath took to the stairs, stopping at the rail
+of the first landing and gesticulating savagely over the heads of his
+audience, Velasco and the others returning amid a knot of fellows to bay
+round the newel post.
+
+His voice, full-throated, cried them all down--Ekstrom's deep and resonant
+voice, domineering over the uproar, hectoring one after another into sullen
+silence.
+
+In the beginning employing nothing but terms and phrases of insolence and
+objurgation untranslatable, when he had secured a measure of attention he
+delivered a short address in tones of unqualified contempt.
+
+"I will have obedience!" he stormed. "Let no one misunderstand my status
+here: I am come direct from His Majesty the Emperor with full power and
+authority to command and direct affairs which you have, individually,
+collectively, proved yourselves either unfit or unable to cope with. What I
+do, I do in my absolute discretion, with the full sanction and confidence
+of the Kaiser. He who questions my judgment or my actions, questions the
+wisdom of the All-Highest. Let it be clearly understood I am answerable
+to no one under God but myself and my Imperial master. Henceforth be good
+enough to hold your tongues or take the consequences--and be damned to you
+all!"
+
+Briefly he stood glowering down at their upturned faces, then sneered, and
+turned away.
+
+"Come along, O'Reilly," he said. "Fetch the woman, and give no more heed to
+swine-dogs!"
+
+His hand slipped up the rail to the first floor, vanished.
+
+If O'Reilly followed with the woman mentioned, both kept back from the rail
+and so out of Lanyard's field of vision.
+
+The group at the foot of the stairs moved away, grumbling profanely.
+
+At once Lanyard began to descend, rapidly and without care to avoid
+detection.
+
+One flight down he met face to face a manservant, evidently a footman, with
+an armful of clothing which he was conveying from one chamber to another.
+The fellow stopped short, jaw dropping, eyes popping; whereupon Lanyard
+paused and addressed him in German with a manner of overbearing contempt,
+that is to say, in character.
+
+"You're wanted upstairs in the radio room," he said--"at once!"
+
+The servant bleated one word of protest: "But--!"
+
+"Be silent. Do as I bid you. It is an emergency. Drop those things and go!
+Do you hear, imbecile?"
+
+Completely cowed and cheated, the man obeyed literally, letting his burden
+of garments fall to the floor and bounding hurriedly up the stairs.
+
+Another flight was negotiated without misadventure; on this floor as well
+servants were flitting busily to and fro, but none favoured the adventurer
+with the least attention.
+
+Midway down the third flight he pulled up to one side of the landing, and
+reconnoitred. It was on the next floor below, the first above the street,
+that Ekstrom had stopped. But in what quarter thereof? The exigency forbade
+the risk of one false turn. If Lanyard were to take Ekstrom unawares it
+must be at the first cast.
+
+From the ground floor came semi-coherent snatches of surly comment, like
+growls of a thunderstorm passing off into the distance:
+
+"_At a time such as this_...."
+
+"... _Secret Service snapping at our heels_ ..."
+
+"... _base on the Vineyard discovered_ ..."
+
+"... _Au Printemps raided, Sophie Weringrode under arrest. God knows
+whether she will hold her tongue_!"
+
+"_Trust her! But this ass_ ..."
+
+"_Bringing a woman here, putting all our necks into a halter_ ..."
+
+Immediately opposite the foot of the stairway, on the first storey, a door
+opened. O'Reilly came alertly forth, closed the door behind him, paused,
+fished in his pocket for a cigarette case, lighted and inhaled with deep
+appreciation, meantime eavesdropping on the utterances below with his head
+cocked to one side and a malicious smile shadowing his handsome Irish face.
+
+In his own good time he shrugged an indifferent shoulder, thrust his hands
+into his pockets, and sauntered coolly on down the stairs.
+
+The moment he disappeared, Lanyard went into action, in two bounds cleared
+landing and stairs, in another threw himself upon the door. It opened
+readily. Entering, he put his back to it, with his left hand groped for,
+found and turned a key, his right holding ready the automatic pistol he had
+taken from the lockers of the U-boat.
+
+The room was a combination of administrative bureau and study, very
+handsomely if somewhat over-decorated and furnished, with an atmosphere as
+distinctively German as that of a Bierstube, the sombreness of its colour
+scheme lending weight to its array of massive desks, tables, chairs,
+bookcases, and lounges.
+
+Between great draped windows and an impressive chimney-piece opposite,
+beside a broad, long desk, in a straight-backed chair sat a woman, gagged,
+bound as to her wrists, strips of cloth which had but lately bound ankles
+as well on the floor about her feet.
+
+That woman was Cecelia Brooke.
+
+Ekstrom stood behind her, in the act of loosening the knots which held the
+gag secure.
+
+For a space of thirty seconds, transfixed by the apparition of his enemy,
+he did not stir other than to raise weaponless hands in deference to the
+pistol trained upon his head. But the blood ebbed from his face, leaving
+it a ghastly mask in which shone the eyes of a man who sees certain death
+closing in upon him and is powerless to combat it, even to die fighting for
+life. And his lips curled back in a snarl neither of contempt nor of hatred
+but of terror.
+
+And for as long Lanyard remained as motionless, rooted in a despondency
+of thwarted hopes no less profound than the despair of the Prussian,
+apprehending what that one could not yet guess, that once more, and now
+certainly for the last time, vengeance was denied him, the fulfilment of
+all his labours and their sole purpose snatched from his grasp.
+
+The instincts of a killer were not his. Barring injudicious attempt to
+summon aid or take the offensive, Ekstrom was safe from injury at the hands
+of Michael Lanyard. His cunning, his favour in the countenance of fortune,
+or whatever it was that had enabled him to make the girl his prisoner and
+bring her here, bade fair to prove his salvation.
+
+Deep in Lanyard's consciousness an echo stirred of half-forgotten words:
+"_Vengeance is mine_...."
+
+The sense of frustration brewed a hopelessness as stark as that of a
+brow-beaten child. A blackness seemed to be settling down upon his
+faculties. A mist wavered momentarily before his eyes. He gulped
+convulsively, swallowing what had almost been a sob.
+
+But he spoke in a voice positively dispassionate.
+
+"Keep your hands up."
+
+Lanyard removed and pocketed the key, crossed to the middle of the room
+without once letting his gaze waver from the face of the Prussian,
+passed behind him, planted the muzzle of the pistol beneath Ekstrom's
+shoulder-blade, and methodically searched him, finding and putting aside on
+the desk one automatic, nothing else.
+
+"Stand aside!"
+
+The almost puerile measure of his disappointment was betrayed in the thrust
+with which he shouldered Ekstrom out of the way, so forcibly that the man
+was sent staggering wildly half a dozen paces.
+
+"Don't move, assassin!... Pardon, mademoiselle: one moment," Lanyard
+muttered, with his one free hand undoing the gag.
+
+He made slow work of that, fumbling while watching Ekstrom with unremitting
+intentness, hoping against hope that his enemy might make one false move,
+one only, by some infatuate endeavour to turn the tables excuse his
+killing.
+
+But Ekstrom would not. Recovery of his equilibrium had been coincident with
+the shock administered to his hardihood and sense of security by Lanyard's
+entrance. He stood now in a pose of insouciant grace, hands idly clasped
+before him, disdain glimmering in languid-lidded eyes, contempt in the set
+of his lips--an ensemble eloquent of brazen effrontery, the outgrowth of
+perception of the fact that Lanyard, being what he was, could neither shoot
+him down in cold blood nor, with the Brooke girl present, even attempt to
+injure him: compunctions unassembled in the make-up of the Boche, therefore
+when discovered in men of other races at once despicable and ridiculous....
+
+The gag came away.
+
+"Mademoiselle has not been injured?" Lanyard enquired, solicitous.
+
+The girl coughed and gasped, shaking her head, enunciating with difficulty
+in little better than a husky whisper: "... roughly handled, nothing
+worse."
+
+Lanyard's face burned as if his blood were molten mercury. "_Nothing
+worse_!" Appreciation of what handling she must have suffered, if she had
+resisted at all, before those beasts could have bound her, excited an
+indignation from whose light, as it blazed in Lanyard's eyes, even Ekstrom
+winced.
+
+The hand was tremulous with which he sought to loose her wrists, so much so
+that she could not but notice.
+
+"Don't mind me--look to that man!" she begged. "Leave me to unfasten these
+with my teeth. He can't be trusted for a single instant."
+
+"Mademoiselle," Lanyard mumbled, instinctively employing the French
+idiom--"you have reason."
+
+For an instant only he hesitated, swayed this way and that by the maddest
+of impulses, then resigned himself absolutely to their ascendancy.
+
+"This goes beyond all bounds," he said in an undertone.
+
+Deliberately leaving the Englishwoman to free herself according to her
+suggestion--forgetful, indeed, for the moment, that she was not altogether
+free--he moved to the desk and left his own automatic there beside
+Ekstrom's.
+
+"Mademoiselle," he said mechanically, without looking at the girl, without
+power to perceive aught else in the world but the white, evil face of his
+enemy, "for what I am about to do, I beg you forgive me, of your charity. I
+can endure no more. It is too much...."
+
+He strode past her.
+
+She twisted in her chair, then rose, following him with wide eyes of alarm
+above her hands, whose bonds her teeth worried without rest.
+
+Ekstrom had not stirred, though one flash of pure exultation had
+transfigured his countenance on comprehension of Lanyard's purpose: thanks
+to the silly scruples of this animal, one more chance for life was granted
+him.
+
+Nor would the Prussian give an inch when Lanyard paused, confronting him
+squarely, within arm's length.
+
+"Ekstrom," the adventurer began in a voice lacking perceptible inflection
+... "what is between you and me needs no recounting. You know it too
+well--I likewise. It is my wish and my intention to kill you with my
+two hands. Nothing can prevent that, not even what you count upon, my
+reluctance--to you incomprehensible--to commit an act of violence in the
+presence of a woman. But because Miss Brooke is here, because you have
+brought her here by force, because you are what you are and so have treated
+her insolently ... before we come to our final accounting, you shall get
+down upon your knees and ask her pardon."
+
+He saw no yielding in the eyes of the Prussian, only arrogance; and when he
+paused, he was answered in one phrase of the gutters of Berlin, couched in
+the imagery of its lowest boozing-kens, so unspeakably vile in essence
+and application that Lanyard heard it with an incredulity almost
+stupefying--almost, not altogether.
+
+It was barely spoken when those lips that framed it were crushed by a blow
+of such lightning delivery that, though he must have been prepared for it,
+Ekstrom's guard was still lowered as he reeled back, lost footing, and went
+to his knees.
+
+Panting, snarling, uttering teeth and blasphemy, the Prussian recoiled like
+a serpent, gathered himself together and launched headlong at Lanyard, only
+to be met full tilt by a second blow and a third, each more merciless than
+its predecessor, beating him down once more.
+
+This time Lanyard did not wait for him to come back for punishment, but
+closed in, catching him as he strove to rise, meeting each fresh effort
+with ruthless accuracy, battering him into insanity of despair, so that
+Ekstrom came back again and again without thought, animated only by
+frenzied brute instinct to find the throat of his tormenter, and ever and
+ever failing; till at length he crumpled and lay crushed and writhing, then
+subsided into insensibility, was quite still but for heaving lungs and the
+spasmodic clutchings of his broken and ensanguined fingers....
+
+With a start, a broken sigh, a slight movement of the hand interpreting a
+crushing sense of the futility of human passion, Lanyard relaxed, drew back
+from standing over his antagonist, abstractedly found a handkerchief and
+dried his hands, of a sudden so inexpressibly shamed and degraded in his
+own sight that he dared not look the girl's way, but stood with hang-dog
+air, avoiding her regard.
+
+Yet, could he have mustered up heart, he might have surprised in her eyes
+a light to lift him out from this slough of humiliation, to obliterate
+chagrin in a flood of wonder and--misgivings.
+
+When, however, he did after a moment turn to her, that look was gone,
+replaced by one that reflected something of his own apprehension; for a
+heavy hand was hammering on the study door, and more than one voice on the
+other side was calling on "Karl" to open.
+
+Either the servant whom Lanyard had met and victimised on his way
+downstairs had given the alarm, or else the noise of the encounter within
+the study had brought that pack of spies to the door, wildly demanding
+admission.
+
+Steadied by one swift exchange of alarmed glances with the girl, Lanyard
+hastily reviewed the room, seeking some avenue of escape. None offered but
+the windows. He ran to them, tore back their draperies, and found them
+closed with shutters of steel and padlocked.
+
+Simultaneously the din at the door redoubled.
+
+With a worried shake Lanyard crossed to the chimney-piece, ducked his head,
+and stepped into its huge fireplace. One upward glance sufficed to dash his
+hopes: here was no way out, arduous though feasible; immediately above the
+fireplace the flue narrowed so that not even the most active man of normal
+stature might hope to negotiate its ascent.
+
+He returned with only a gesture of disconcertion to answer the girl's look
+of appeal.
+
+"Can we do nothing?" she asked, raising her voice a trifle to make it heard
+above the tumult in the corridor.
+
+"There's no help for it, I'm afraid," he said, going to the desk and taking
+up the pistols--"nothing to do but shoot our way out, if we can. Take
+this," he added, offering her one of the weapons, which she accepted
+without spirit. "If you can't get your own consent to use it, give it to me
+when I've emptied the other."
+
+She breathed a dismayed "Yes ..." and wonderingly consulted his face, since
+he did not stir other than thoughtfully to replace his pistol on the desk,
+then stood staring at his soot-smeared palms.
+
+"What is it?" she demanded nervously. "Why do you hesitate?"
+
+As one fretted by inconsequential questions, he merely shook his head,
+glancing sidelong once at the unconscious Prussian, again with calculation
+toward the door.
+
+This he saw quivering under repeated blows.
+
+With brusque decision he said: "Get a chair--brace it beneath the
+door-knob, please!"--and leaving her without more explanation turned back
+to the fireplace.
+
+Motionless, in dumb confusion, the girl stood staring after him till roused
+by a blow of such splintering force as to suggest that an axe had been
+brought into play upon the door, then ran to a ponderous club chair and
+with considerable exertion managed to trundle it to the door and tip it
+over, wedging its back beneath the knob.
+
+By this time it had become indisputably patent that an axe was battering
+the panels. But the door, in character with the room, was a substantial
+piece of workmanship and needed more than a few blows, even of an axe, to
+break down its barrier of solid oak.
+
+She looked round to discover Lanyard kneeling beside Ekstrom, insanely--so
+it seemed to the girl--engaged in blackening the upper half of the man's
+face with a handful of soot.
+
+Unconsciously uttering a little cry of distress she sped to his side and
+caught his shoulder with an importunate hand.
+
+"In Heaven's name, Monsieur Duchemin, what are you doing? Is this a time
+for childishness--?"
+
+He responded with a smile of boyish mischief so genuine that her doubts of
+his reason seemed all too well confirmed.
+
+"Making up my understudy," he said simply. And brushing his hands over the
+rug to rid them of superfluous soot, Lanyard rose. "Please go back and
+stand by the door--on the side of the hinges. I'll be with you in one
+minute."
+
+Resigned to humour this lunatic whim--what else could she do?--the girl
+retreated to the position designated, and watched with ever darker doubts
+of his sanity, while Lanyard hurriedly drew the shells from his automatic
+and carefully placed its butt in the slack grasp of Ekstrom's fingers.
+
+Then, lifting from a near-by table a great cut-glass bowl of flowers, the
+adventurer inverted it over Ekstrom's body.
+
+Expending its full force upon the man's chest, that miniature deluge
+splashed widely, wetting his face, half filling his open mouth. Some of
+the soot was washed away, but not a great deal: enough stuck fast to suit
+Lanyard's purpose.
+
+Roused by that cool shock, half strangled as well, Ekstrom coughed
+violently, squirmed, spat out a mouthful of water, and lifted on an elbow,
+still more than half dazed.
+
+Joining the girl by the door, Lanyard saw the Prussian sit up and glare
+blankly round the room, a figure of tragic fun, drenched, woefully
+disfigured, eyes rolling wildly in the wide spaces round them which Lanyard
+had left unblackened.
+
+Swinging the club chair away from the door, the adventurer placed it with
+its back to the room.
+
+"Get down behind that," he indicated shortly, and drew the key from his
+pocket. "Don't show yourself for your life. And let me have that pistol,
+please."
+
+A bright triangular wedge of steel broke through one of the panels as he
+fitted and turned the key in the lock.
+
+His wits clearing, Ekstrom saw him and with a howl of fury staggered to his
+feet, clutching the unloaded pistol and endeavouring to level it for steady
+aim.
+
+Simultaneously Lanyard turned the knob and let the door fly open, remaining
+beside the chair that hid the girl.
+
+A knot of spies, O'Reilly and Velasco among them, whirled into the room,
+pulled up at sight of that strange, grim figure, disguised beyond all
+recognition by its half-mask of black, facing and menacing them with a
+pistol.
+
+O'Reilly fired in the next breath, his shot echoed by half a dozen so
+closely bunched as to resemble the rattle of a mitrailleuse.
+
+At the first report the pistol dropped from Ekstrom's grasp. He carried a
+hand vaguely to his throat, staggered a single step, uttered a strangled
+moan, and fell forward, his body fairly riddled, his death little short of
+instantaneous.
+
+While the fusillade was still resounding Lanyard, seizing the girl's wrist,
+unceremoniously dragged her from behind the chair and thrust her through
+the door, retreating after her with his face to the roomfull, his pistol
+ready.
+
+None of that lot paid him any heed, the attention of all wholly absorbed by
+the tragedy their violent hands had wrought. Velasco, the first to stir,
+ran forward and dropped to his knees beside the dead man. Others followed.
+
+Gently Lanyard drew the door to, locked it on the outside, and at the sound
+of a choking cry from Cecelia Brooke, whirled smartly round, prepared if
+need be to make good his promise to clear with gun-play a way to the street
+though opposed by every inmate of the establishment.
+
+But the first face he saw was Crane's.
+
+The Secret Service man stood within a yard. To him as to a rock of refuge
+Cecelia Brooke had flown, to his hand she was clinging like a frightened
+child, trying to speak, failing because she choked on sobs and gasps of
+horror.
+
+Behind him, on the landing at the head of the staircase, running up from
+below, ascending to the upper storeys, were a score' or more of men of
+sturdy and business-like bearing and indubitably American stamp. Of
+these two were herding into a corner a little group of frightened German
+servants.
+
+Lanyard's stare of astonishment was met by Crane's twisted smile.
+
+"My friend," he said, as quietly as anyone could with his accent of a
+quizzical buzz-saw, "I sure got to hand it to you. Every time I try to pull
+anything off on the dead quiet you beat me to it clean. Everywhere I think
+you ain't and can't be, that's just where you are. But I ain't complaining;
+I got to admit, if you hadn't staged your act to occupy the minds of those
+gents in there, we might've had a lot more difficulty raiding this joint."
+
+Quickly he wound an arm round the waist of Cecelia Brooke when, without
+warning, she swayed blindly and would have fallen.
+
+"Here, now!" he protested. "That's no way to do.... Why, she's flickered
+out! Well, Monsieur Duchemin-Lanyard-Ember, to a man up a tree this looks
+like your job. You take this little lady off my hands and see her home, and
+I'll just naturally try and finish what I started--or what you did. For,
+son, I got to give you credit: you sure are one grand li'l trouble-hound!"
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+QUESTION
+
+
+Through the breathing hush of that dark hour which foreruns the dawn, that
+hour in which the head that knows a wakeful pillow is prone to sudden
+and disquieting apprehension of its insignificance and it's soul's dread
+isolation, the cab sped swiftly south upon the Avenue, shadowed reaches of
+the park upon its right, upon its left the dull, tired faces of those homes
+whose tenants lay wrapped in the cotton-wool of riches.
+
+The rain had ceased. A little wind was blowing up. There was a fresh
+smell in the air. Sidewalks began to be maculated with spreading areas of
+dryness, but the roadway was still wet and shining, the wide black mirror
+of a myriad lights.
+
+Through the windows of the speeding cab an orderly procession of street
+lamps, marching past, threw each its fugitive and pallid glimmer. Periods
+of modified darkness intervened, when the face of the girl in her corner
+seemed a vision subtle and wraithlike. But ever the recurrent lights
+revealed her sweetly incarnate if deep in enervation of crushing weariness.
+
+Once she stirred and sighed profoundly; and Lanyard, bending toward her,
+asked if he could be in any way of service.
+
+She replied in an undertone scarcely better than a whisper: "Thank you, I
+am quite comfortable.... Please--what time is it?"
+
+The cab was passing Sixtieth Street. Lanyard caught a fleeting glimpse of a
+street clock with a dial like a little golden moon.
+
+"It's just four."
+
+"Thank you...."
+
+"Very tired?"
+
+"Very...."
+
+He had the maddest notion that her head inclined to droop toward his
+shoulder. Perhaps the motion of the cab.... If so, she recovered easily.
+
+"Can I do anything?"
+
+"No, thank you, only ..." An ungloved hand stirred from her lap and for
+the merest instant rested lightly above his own, or hovered rather, barely
+touching it with a touch tenuous and elusive, no sooner realised than gone.
+"I mean," she murmured, "I am a bit too overwrought, too tired, to talk."
+
+"I quite understand," he said. "Please forget I'm here; just rest."
+
+Perhaps she smiled drowsily. Or was that, too, a freak of his imagination?
+Lanyard assured himself it was, in excess of consideration even tried to
+persuade himself he had dreamed that ghost of a caress upon his hand. It
+seemed so little like her.
+
+Not that anything had happened more than a gesture of transient
+inadvertence due to fatigue. It could not have been intentional, that act
+of intimacy, when the girl was altogether engrossed in young Thackeray.
+
+There was something one must not forget, something that gave the lie flatly
+to that innuendo of the Weringrode's. Ignorant of the circumstances the
+intrigante had leaped blindly at conclusions, after the habit of her kind.
+
+True, Sophie had not implied that this girl cared for him, but vice versa:
+either supposition, however, was as absurd as the other. As if Lanyard
+could love a woman who loved another! As if the name of love meant aught
+to him but the memory of a sweetness like a vagrant air of Spring that had
+breathed fitfully for a season upon the Winter of his heart!
+
+A corner of Lanyard's mouth lifted in a sneer. That precious heart of
+his! the heart of a thief upon which even now the fruits of his thieving
+weighed....
+
+Irritated, he wrenched his thoughts into another channel, and began to
+piece together inconsecutive snatches of information gained from Crane
+in the confusion of the quarter hour just past, while the Secret Service
+operatives were busy rounding up the inmates of that spy-fold and searching
+for evidences of their impudent activities.
+
+It appeared that Washington had at length, however tardily, roused out of
+its inertia and at midnight had telegraphed instructions to arrest out
+of hand every enemy alien in the land against whom there was evidence of
+conspiracy or even a ponderable suspicion.
+
+So unexpected was this order that Crane had volunteered to show Cecelia
+Brooke that midnight rendezvous of the Prussian spy system without the
+least notion that he might be required before morning to lead a raiding
+force against the establishment; and even when a messenger stopped him as
+he turned to enter Au Printemps, he was not advised concerning the cause of
+this demand for his immediate presence at headquarters.
+
+The first cast of what Crane aptly termed the dragnet had brought in the
+management and service staff to a man, with a number of the restaurant's
+habitues, including Sophie Weringrode and her errand-boy, the exquisite Mr.
+Revel.
+
+Velasco, however, had somehow mysteriously managed to slip through the
+meshes and had straightway hastened to spread the alarm.
+
+As for O'Reilly and Dressier, they had left with Ekstrom in pursuit of
+Lanyard less than five minutes before, and so had escaped not only arrest
+but all knowledge of the raid prior to their return to Seventy-ninth
+Street.
+
+The second cast of the net had been made at the latter place as soon as
+the watchers were able to assure Crane that Ekstrom and O'Reilly had
+returned--Dressier having anticipated them there by something like half an
+hour.
+
+By daybreak, then, these gentry would be interned on Ellis Island....
+
+And break of day impended visibly in grayish shades that stole westward
+through the cross-town streets like clouds of secret agents spying out the
+city against invasion by the serried lances of the sun.
+
+A garish twilight washed Forty-second Street from wall to wall by the time
+the car swung round in front of the Knickerbocker. As yet, however, there
+was little evidence that the town was growing restive in its sleep with
+premonition of the ardour of another day.
+
+Lanyard stepped down and offered the girl a hand in whose palm her slender
+fingers rested lightly for an instant ere she passed on, while he turned to
+bid the driver wait. Following, he overtook her in the entrance, where by
+tacit consent both paused and lingered in an odd constraint. There was so
+much to be said that was impossible to say just then.
+
+Visibly the woman drooped, betraying physical exhaustion in every line of
+her pose, seeming scarcely strong enough to lift the silken lashes that
+trembled upon cheeks a little drawn and pale, with the faintest of bluish
+rings beneath the eyes.
+
+"I must not keep you," Lanyard broke the silence. "I merely wished to say
+good-night and ... I am sorry."
+
+"Sorry?" she echoed.
+
+"That you had such an unhappy experience," he explained--"thanks to your
+thoughtfulness for me. I do not deserve so much consideration; and that
+only makes me feel all the more regretful."
+
+"It was silly of me," she admitted with a shadowy, rueful smile. "I'm
+afraid my silliness makes too much trouble...."
+
+He commented honestly: "I don't understand."
+
+"If I had only been patient enough to wait for you to call me...."
+
+"Forgive that oversight. I was pressed for time, as you may imagine."
+
+"Oh, it all comes back to my own stupidity. I might have known you had come
+through all right."
+
+"How should you?"
+
+"Why not?--when you turn up here in New York safe and sound after being
+drowned on the _Assyrian_!--as if that were not proof enough that you bear
+a charmed life!"
+
+"Charmed!" he laughed.
+
+"And you haven't yet told me how you survived that adventure."
+
+"You are kind to be interested, and I am unfortunate in never seeing you
+save under circumstances unfavourable for yarn-spinning."
+
+"You might be more fortunate."
+
+"Only tell me how!"
+
+"If you cared to ask me to dine with you to-morrow--I mean, to-night--"
+
+"You would--?"
+
+He was distressed by consciousness that his voice had thrilled impetuously.
+But perhaps she had not noticed; there was no change in the even
+friendliness of her tone.
+
+"I'm as inquisitive as any woman that ever lived. Even if I wished to, I'm
+afraid I shouldn't be able to resist an invitation to hear your Odyssey."
+
+"Delmonico's at eight?"
+
+"Thank you," she said primly.
+
+"You make me too happy. May I call for you?"
+
+"Please." She offered a hand whose touch he found cool, steady, and
+impersonal. "Good morning, Mr. Ember."
+
+He stood in a stare while she went quickly through the lobby to a waiting
+elevator, then roused and went back to his cab.
+
+It was by daylight that he reentered his rooms and found them tenanted by
+a negro boy bound and gagged, bruised and sore, and scared beyond
+intelligible expression.
+
+Freeing him and salving his injuries bodily and spiritual with a liberal
+douceur, Lanyard exacted an oath of silence, then turned him out.
+
+He had approximately five hours to put in somehow before his appointment
+with Colonel Stanistreet at nine, and was too well versed in the lore of
+late hours to think of giving any part of that time to sleep. By so doing
+he would only insure a mutinous awakening, with mind and body sluggish and
+unrested. If, on the other hand, he remained awake, he would go to that
+interview in a state of supernormal animation exceedingly to be desired if
+he were to round out this adventure without discredit.
+
+For its end was not yet. He had still a part to play whose lines were not
+yet written, whose business remained to be invented. He neither dared
+shirk that appointment, for reasons of policy, nor wished to, while there
+remained reparation to be accomplished, a wrong to be righted, justice to
+be done, a question to be answered.
+
+Only when these matters had been put in order would he feel his honour
+discharged of its burdens, himself free once more to drop out and go in
+peace his lonely ways in life, ways henceforth to be both lonely and
+aimless.
+
+For, when he strove to peer into the future, only an emptiness confronted
+him. With Ekstrom accounted for finally and forevermore, there was nothing
+to come but the final accounting of the Lone Wolf with that civilization
+which had bred and suffered him.
+
+One way presented itself to make that reckoning even. The Foreign Legion of
+France asks no embarrassing questions of its recruits, and enlistment in
+its ranks offers with anonymity a consoling certainty.
+
+Thus alone might he find his way home to the heart of that enigma whence he
+had emerged, a nameless waif astray in grim Parisian by-ways....
+
+This vision of his end contenting him, he began to scheme a campaign
+for the day that was simple enough in prospect: a little chicanery with
+Stanistreet, a personal appeal to Crane to restore the passports of
+Monsieur André Duchemin which must have been found on Ekstrom's body, a
+berth on some steamer sailing for Europe, then the last evanishment.
+
+One detail alone troubled him, his promise to the Brooke girl that she
+should dine with him that night.
+
+Reminded of this obligation, figuratively he seized Michael Lanyard by the
+scruff of his neck and shook him with a savage hand. What insensate folly
+was ever his, what want of wit and strength to keep out of temptation's
+ways! Why must he have fallen in so readily with her suggestion? Why this
+infatuate thirst for sympathy, this eagerness to violate the seals of
+reticence at the wish of a strange woman? Was there any reasonable
+explanation of the strange lack of his wonted self-sufficiency in the
+company of Cecelia Brooke?
+
+No matter. If he might not contrive somehow to squirm out of that
+engagement, he could at all events school himself to decent reticence. He
+promised himself to make his account of the submarine adventure drearily
+bald and trite, to minimize to the last degree his part therein, above all
+things to refrain from painting the Lone Wolf in romantic colours.
+
+She was much too good a sort, too straight, sincere, fair-minded,
+honest--the sort of girl who deserved the Thackeray sort of man, never a
+thief.
+
+If she even dreamed....
+
+Lanyard brought forth from its hiding place the necklace, weighed it in
+his hand, examined it minutely. Granting its marvellous perfection, he
+recognized no more its beauty, dispassionately reviewed in turn each stone
+of matchless loveliness, no more susceptible to their seductive purity,
+perceiving in them nothing but hard, bright, translucent pebbles, cold,
+soulless, cruel.
+
+One by one they slipped through his fingers like beads of an unholy rosary.
+
+At length, crushing them together in the hollow of his palm, he stood a
+while in thought, then turning to his writing-desk bundled the necklace in
+wrappings of white tissue secured with rubber bands, counted carefully the
+sheaf of bills he had taken from Ekstrom, sealed the whole amount in a
+plain, long envelope, and put this aside in company with the necklace.
+
+Already two hours had passed and, since he meant to call at the house on
+West End Avenue well in advance of the hour when Cecelia Brooke might be
+there--presuming Blensop to have given her the same appointment as he had
+given "Mr. Ember," that is, nine o'clock--it was now time to prepare.
+
+Returning to his bedchamber, he laid out a carefully selected change of
+clothing, shaved, parboiled himself in a hot bath, chilled him to the
+pith in one of icy coldness, and dressed with scrupulous heed to detail,
+studiously effacing every sign of his sleepless night.
+
+That experience was in no way to be surmised from his appearance when he
+sallied forth to breakfast at the Plaza.
+
+At eight precisely, presenting himself at the Stanistreet residence, he
+desired the footman to announce him as the author of a certain telegram
+from Edgartown.
+
+He was obliged to wait less than a minute, the footman returning in haste
+to request him to step into the library.
+
+This apartment--which he found much as he had last seen it, eight hours
+ago, its window shattered, the portičres down, the furniture in some
+disorder--was, on his introduction, occupied by two persons, one an
+elderly, iron-gray gentleman of untidy dress and unobtrusive habit in spite
+of a discerning cool, gray eye, the other Mr. Blensop in the neatest of
+one-button morning-coat effects, with striped trouserings neither too smart
+nor too sober for that state of life unto which it had pleased God to call
+him, and fair white spats.
+
+If his attire was radiant, so was the temper of the secretary sunny. He
+tripped forward in sprightliest fashion, offering cordial hands to the
+caller till he recognized him, and even then was discountenanced only for
+the briefest moment.
+
+"My dear Mr. Ember!" he purred soothingly--"why didn't you tell me last
+night it was you who had sent that telegram? If I had for a moment
+suspected the truth you should have had your appointment with Colonel
+Stanistreet at any hour you might have cared to name, no matter how
+ungodly!"
+
+Lanyard bowed gravely. "Thank you," he said. "And Colonel Stanistreet--?"
+
+"Is just finishing breakfast. He will be down directly. Please be seated,
+make yourself entirely at ease. And will you excuse me--?"
+
+"With pleasure," Lanyard assured him, his gravity unbroken.
+
+A doubt clouded Mr. Blensop's bright eyes, but its transit was
+instantaneous. He turned forthwith to join the iron-gray man before the
+portrait which concealed the safe.
+
+"And now, Mr. Stone," said Mr. Blensop, with indulgence.
+
+"Well, sir," said Mr. Stone quietly, "if you'll be good enough to show me
+how this contraption works, maybe I'll find out something interesting,
+maybe not."
+
+Mr. Blensop proceeded to oblige by operating the lever and sliding aside
+the portrait.
+
+"Thanks," said Mr. Stone, producing a magnifying glass from a waistcoat
+pocket and beginning to peer myopically at the face of the safe. "I take
+it nobody's been pawing over this since the late, as you might say,
+unpleasantness?"
+
+"Not a soul has touched it. By Colonel Stanistreet's order it was covered
+as soon as we found it had been tampered with."
+
+"_Um-m_," Mr. Stone acknowledged, bending close to his work.
+
+Partially, perhaps, by way of administering an urbane rebuke to Lanyard for
+his readiness to dispense with his society, Mr. Blensop remained in
+the neighbourhood of Mr. Stone, hovering round him like a domesticated
+humming-bird.
+
+"Do you find anything?" he enquired, when Stone straightened up.
+
+"Fingerprints a-plenty," Mr. Stone admitted with a hint of temper--"a slew
+of the damn things. Looks like you must've called in the neighbours to help
+make a good show. However, we'll see what we can make of 'em."
+
+He conjured from some recess in his clothing a squat bottle, from another a
+stopper in which was fitted a blowpipe, joined the two together, approached
+the safe with one end of the pipe between his lips and sprayed it with a
+thin film of white powder, the contents of the bottle.
+
+"I say, do tell me what that's for?"
+
+"That," said Mr. Stone patiently, "is to make the fingerprints stand out,
+so we can get a good likeness of 'em."
+
+He put the bottle aside, blinked at the safe approvingly, and by further
+exercise of powers of legerdemain materialized a pocket kodak and a
+flashlight pistol.
+
+"Can't I help you?" Blensop offered eagerly. "I used to be rather a dab at
+amateur photography, you know."
+
+"Well, I'm kind of stuck on pressing the button myself," Stone confessed,
+adjusting the focus. "But if you want to work that flashlight, I don't
+mind."
+
+"Delighted," Mr. Blensop asserted. "How does it go, now?"
+
+"Like this." Stone set his camera down to demonstrate. "Now just stand
+behind me," he concluded, "and pull the trigger when I say 'now'."
+
+"I'll do my best, but--I say--will it bang?"
+
+Stone had taken up the camera once more. His sole answer was a grunt upon
+which his hearers placed two distinct interpretations--Lanyard's affording
+him considerable gratification.
+
+"If you're ready," said Stone--"_now_"
+
+Mr. Blensop squinted unbecomingly and pressed the trigger. A vivid flare
+lifted from the pan of the pistol, and winked out in a cloud of vapour,
+slowly dissipating.
+
+"Is that all?"
+
+"Yes, sir--that's all of that." Stone stowed the camera away about his
+person and from another cranny produced a small cardboard box of glass
+slides, one of which he offered. "Now if you'll just run your fingers
+through your hair and rest them on this slide, light but steady...."
+
+"What for?" Blensop demanded with a giggle of nervous reluctance. "You
+don't think I'm the thief, do you?"
+
+"No, sir, I don't. But if I haven't got your fingerprints, how am I going
+to tell them from the thief's?"
+
+"Oh, I see," Blensop said with a note of allayed apprehension, and put
+himself on record.
+
+The door opening to admit Colonel Stanistreet, Lanyard rose. At sight of
+him the Englishman checked and stared enquiringly, his eyes shadowed by
+careworn brows; for it was apparent that, if the events of the night had
+not depressed the spirits of the secretary, his employer had known little
+sleep or none since the burglary.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet," Blensop said melodiously, abandoning Stone to his
+unsupervised devices, "this is Mr. Ember, the gentleman who called last
+night before you got home. It appears he is the person who sent us that
+telegram from Edgartown day before yesterday."
+
+"Indeed? Ember is not the name with which the message was signed."
+
+"The message was purposely left unsigned," Lanyard explained.
+
+Stanistreet nodded approval. "I am glad to meet you, Mr. Ember," he said,
+offering a hand. "Be seated. I am most anxious first to express our
+gratitude, next to learn how you came by your information."
+
+"You will find it an interesting story."
+
+"No doubt of that." Stanistreet took the desk chair, opened a cigar
+humidor, and offered it. "I shall be even more interested, however," he
+said with an evanescent trace of humour, "to know who the devil you are,
+sir."
+
+"That is something I am prepared to prove to your satisfaction."
+
+"If you will be so good.... But excuse me for one moment." Stanistreet
+turned in his chair. "Mr. Stone?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Have you finished with the safe? If so, I want my secretary to check over
+its contents carefully and make sure nothing else is missing."
+
+"I'm all through with it, Colonel Stanistreet. Now, if you don't mind,
+I'm going to mouse around and see if I can nose out anything else that's
+useful."
+
+"That shall be entirely as you will. Now, Blensop"--Stanistreet nodded to
+the secretary--"let us make certain...."
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+Blithely Mr. Blensop addressed himself to the safe.
+
+"There has been an accident of some sort, Colonel Stanistreet?" Lanyard
+enquired civilly, nodding toward the shattered French window.
+
+"A burglary, sir."
+
+"The criminal escaped--?"
+
+Stanistreet nodded. "Our watchman surprised him, and was shot for his
+pains--not seriously, I'm happy to say. The burglar got himself tangled
+up in that window, but extricated in time, and went over the garden wall
+before we could determine which way he had taken."
+
+"I trust you lost nothing of value?"
+
+Stanistreet shrugged. "Unhappily, we did--a diamond necklace, the property
+of my sister-in-law, and--ah--a document we could ill afford to part
+with.... But you offered to show me credentials, I believe."
+
+"Such as they are," Lanyard replied. "My passports and letters were stolen
+from me. But these, I think, should serve as well to prove my bona fides."
+
+He laid out in order upon the desk his plunder from the safe aboard the
+U-boat--all but the money--the three cipher codes, the log, the diary
+of the commander, the directory of German secret agents, and such other
+documents as he had selected.
+
+The first Colonel Stanistreet took up with a dubious frown which swiftly
+lightened, yielding, as he pursued his examination into the papers and
+began to recognize their surpassing value to the Allied cause, to a subdued
+glimmer of gratulatory excitement.
+
+But he was at pains to satisfy himself as to the authenticity of each paper
+in turn, providing a lull for which Lanyard was not ungrateful since it
+gave him a chance to adjust his understanding to an unexpected development
+in the affair.
+
+He lounged at ease, smoking, his eyes, half-veiled by lowered lids, keenly
+reviewing the room and its tenants.
+
+Stone, the detective (an operative, Lanyard rightly inferred, of the
+American Secret Service, loaned to the British in order to keep the
+burglary out of police records and newspapers), had wandered out into the
+garden that glowed with young April sunlight beyond the windows. From
+time to time he was to be seen stooping and inspecting the earth with the
+gravity of an earnest, efficient, sober-sided sleuth of the old school.
+
+Blensop was busy before the safe, extracting the contents of each
+pigeonhole in turn, thumbing its dockets of papers, checking each off upon
+a typewritten list several pages in length.
+
+To that lithe and debonair figure Lanyard's gaze oftenest reverted.
+
+So not only had the necklace been stolen but "a document" which the British
+Secret Service "could ill afford to part with"!
+
+Lanyard entertained no least doubt as to the identity of the document in
+question. There could be but one, he felt, which Stanistreet would so
+characterize.
+
+That document had not been in the safe when Lanyard had opened it at
+midnight.
+
+After a moment Mr. Blensop uttered a musical note of vexation. The lead of
+his pencil had broken. He threw it pettishly aside, came over to the desk,
+took up a penholder, dipped it in the ink-well, and returned to his task.
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+CHICANE
+
+
+Colonel Stanistreet put down the last of the papers and slapped his hand
+upon it resoundingly.
+
+"This is one of the most remarkable collections of data, I venture to
+assert, that has ever come into the hands of the British Government. Have
+you any idea of its value?"
+
+Lanyard lifted a whimsical eyebrow. "Some," he admitted drily.
+
+"And what do you ask for it, sir?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+The gaze of the Englishman bored into his eyes; but he met their challenge
+with an unshaken countenance, smiling.
+
+"My dear sir," Stanistreet demanded--"who are you?"
+
+"The name under which I sailed for New York on board the _Assyrian_,"
+Lanyard announced quietly, "was André Duchemin."
+
+Disturbed by a startled exclamation, together with a sound of shuffling and
+a slight thump, he looked round in mild curiosity to see Blensop staggered
+and astare, standing over a litter of documents which had slipped from his
+grasp to the floor. Mastering his emotion quickly enough, the secretary
+knelt with a mumbled apology and began to pick up the papers.
+
+With no more notice of the incident Lanyard returned undivided attention to
+Colonel Stanistreet.
+
+"I had another name," he confessed, "and a reputation none too savoury,
+as, I daresay, you know. Through the courtesy of the British Intelligence
+Office I was permitted to disguise these; but on the _Assyrian_ I was
+recognized--in short, ran afoul of German Secret Service agents who knew
+me, but whom I did not know. On the sixth night out circumstances conspired
+to make me seem a serious obstacle to their schemes. Consequently I was
+waylaid, robbed, and thrown overboard. Within the next few minutes a
+torpedo struck the ship and the submarine which fired it came up under me
+as I struggled to keep afloat. By passing myself off as a Boche spy, I
+succeeded in inducing the commander to take me below, and so reached the
+Martha's Vineyard base. There chance played into my hands: I contrived to
+sink the U-boat and escape, as reported in my telegram."
+
+During a brief silence he found opportunity to observe that Mr. Blensop was
+working with hands that trembled singularly.
+
+"Incredible!" Stanistreet commented.
+
+"Yet here is proof," Lanyard asserted, indicating the papers beneath
+Stanistreet's hand.
+
+"My dear sir, I didn't mean--"
+
+"Pardon!" Lanyard smiled, with a lifted hand. "I never thought you did,
+Colonel Stanistreet. But it is your duty to make sure you are not imposed
+upon by plausible adventurers. Therefore--since my papers have been
+stolen--I am glad to be able to prove my identity with André Duchemin by
+referring to survivors of the _Assyrian_ disaster, among others Mr. Sherry,
+the second officer, Mr. Crane of the United States Secret Service, and a
+countrywoman of yours, a Miss Cecelia Brooke, whose acquaintance I was
+fortunate enough to make."
+
+Stanistreet nodded heavily, and consulted his watch. "Miss Brooke," he
+said, "should be here shortly. Blensop made an appointment with her last
+night, which I confirmed by telephone this morning."
+
+"Then, with permission, I shall remain and ask her to vouch for me,"
+Lanyard suggested in resignation, since it appeared he was not to be
+permitted to escape this girl, that destiny was not yet finished with their
+entanglement.
+
+"I shall be glad if you will, sir.... Monsieur Duchemin," Stanistreet
+began, but hesitated--"or do you prefer another style?"
+
+"I am content with Duchemin."
+
+"That is a matter for your own discretion, but I should warn you it may
+already have acquired an evil odour on this side. To my knowledge it has
+been used within the last twenty-four hours, and the pretensions of its
+wearer supported by your stolen credentials."
+
+"I am not surprised," Lanyard stated reflectively. "A chap with a beard,
+perhaps?"
+
+"Why, yes...."
+
+"Anderson," the adventurer nodded: "that, at least, was his alias when he
+jockeyed himself into the second steward's berth aboard the _Assyrian_."
+
+He glanced idly across the room, discovered Blensop once more at pause in a
+stare, and grinned amiably.
+
+"He came here last night," Stanistreet volunteered deliberately--
+"representing himself as André Duchemin--to sell me a certain paper, the
+same which subsequently, I am convinced, he returned to steal."
+
+"And did," Lanyard added.
+
+"And did," the Briton conceded. "Now you have told me who he is, I promise
+you every effort shall be made to apprehend him and prevent further misuse
+of the name you have assumed."
+
+"It has," Lanyard said tersely.
+
+"I beg your pardon?"
+
+"I say every effort has been made--and successfully--to accomplish the ends
+you mention."
+
+"What's that you say?" Blensop demanded shrilly, crossing to the desk.
+
+"My secretary," Stanistreet explained, "was present at the interview, and
+is naturally interested."
+
+"And very good of him, I'm sure," Lanyard agreed. "I was about to explain,
+Mr. Blensop, that Ekstrom, alias Anderson, was killed in the course of
+a raid on the Prussian spy headquarters in Seventy-ninth Street this
+morning."
+
+"Amazing!" Blensop gasped. "I am glad to hear it," he added, and went
+slowly back to his task.
+
+"I may as well tell you, sir," Lanyard pursued, "I have every reason to
+believe the document sold you last night was one of those stolen from me."
+
+Stanistreet wagged a contentious head.
+
+"I cannot conceive how it could have come into your possession, sir."
+
+"Simply enough. Miss Brooke requested me to take care of it for her."
+
+The eyes of the Englishman grew stony. "Miss Brooke!" he repeated testily.
+"I don't understand."
+
+"It was a document--I do not seek to know its nature from you, sir--of
+vital importance in this present crisis, with the United States newly
+entered into the war."
+
+Stanistreet affirmed with an inclination of his head.
+
+"I may tell you this much, Monsieur Duchemin: if it had not reached this
+country safely.... What am I saying? If it be not recovered without delay,
+the chances of America's early and efficient participation in the war will
+suffer a tremendous setback ... Blensop, be good enough to call up the
+American Secret Service at once and ask whether the document in question
+was found on the body of this--ah--Ekstrom."
+
+"Pardon," Lanyard interposed as Blensop hesitantly approached the
+telephone. "It would be a waste of time. I happen to know, because I was
+there, that no such document was found on Ekstrom's body."
+
+"The devil!" Stanistreet grumbled. "What can have become of it? This
+business grows only the blacker the deeper one seeks to fathom it. I
+must own myself completely at a loss. How it came into the hands of Miss
+Brooke--"
+
+"I can explain that, I think. The document was in the care of two
+gentlemen, Mr. Bartholomew and Lieutenant Thackeray. The former was
+murdered by the Huns in search of it, Lieutenant Thackeray murderously
+assaulted. But for Miss Brooke's intervention the assassins must have
+succeeded. As it was, the young woman herself found it and, one presumes,
+took charge of it because her fiancé was incapacitated, and possibly with
+the notion that she might thereby prevent further mischief of the same
+nature."
+
+"Her fiancé?" Stanistreet echoed blankly.
+
+"Lieutenant Thackeray--"
+
+"Her brother, sir!" the Briton laughed. "Thackeray was his nom de service."
+
+It was Lanyard's turn to stare. "Ah!" he murmured. "A light begins to
+dawn...."
+
+"Upon me as well," Stanistreet confessed. "Miss Brooke and her brother are
+orphans and, before the war, were inseparable companions. I do not doubt
+that, learning he had been commissioned with an uncommonly perilous errand,
+she booked passage by the _Assyrian_ without his consent, in order to be
+near him in event of danger."
+
+"This explains much," Lanyard conceded--"much that perplexed more than one
+can say."
+
+"But in no way advances us on the trail of the purloined document."
+
+"I am afraid, sir," Lanyard lied deliberately, "you may as well abandon all
+hope of ever seeing it again. Ekstrom made away with it: no question about
+that. There was time enough and to spare between his exploit here and his
+death for him to deliver it to safe hands. It is doubtless decoded by this
+time, a copy of it already well on the way to the Wilhelmstrasse."
+
+"I am afraid," Stanistreet echoed--"I am very much afraid you are right."
+
+His thick, spatulate fingers of an executive drummed heavily upon the desk.
+
+Stone's figure darkened the windows.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet?" he called diffidently.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Stone?"
+
+"There's something here I'd like to consult you about, sir, if you can
+spare a minute."
+
+"Certainly." The Englishman rose. "If you will excuse me, Monsieur
+Duchemin...." Half way to the windows he hesitated. "By the bye, Blensop, I
+wish you'd call up Apthorp and ask after Howson's condition."
+
+"Very good, sir," Blensop intoned cheerfully.
+
+"And do it without delay, please. I don't like to think of the poor fellow
+suffering."
+
+"Immediately, sir."
+
+As his employer passed out into the garden with Stone, the secretary
+discontinued his checking and came over to the desk, drawing up a chair and
+sitting down to telephone. At the same time Lanyard got up and began to
+pace thoughtfully to and fro.
+
+"Howson is the wounded night watchman, I take it, Mr. Blensop?"
+
+"Yes--an excellent fellow.... Schuyler nine, three hundred," Blensop cooed
+into the transmitter.
+
+Conceivably that ostensible discomfiture whose symptoms Lanyard had
+remarked had been a transitory humour. Mr. Blensop was now in what seemed
+the most equable and blithe of tempers. His very posture at the telephone
+eloquently betokened as much: he had thrown himself into the chair with
+picturesque nonchalance, sitting with body half turned from the desk, his
+right hand holding the receiver to his ear, his left thrust carelessly
+into his trouser pocket, thus dragging back the lapel of that impeccable
+morning-coat and exposing the bright cap of his gold-mounted fountain pen.
+
+Something in that implement seemed to possess for Lanyard overpowering
+fascination. His gaze yearned for it, returned again and again to it.
+
+He changed his course to stroll up and down behind Blensop, between him and
+the safe.
+
+"I understood Colonel Stanistreet to say the watchman was not seriously
+injured, I believe," he observed, with interest.
+
+"Shot through the shoulder, that is all.... Schuyler nine, three hundred?
+Dr. Apthorp, please. This is Mr. Blensop speaking, secretary to Colonel
+Stanistreet.... Are you there, Dr. Apthorp?"
+
+With professional dexterity Lanyard en passant dropped a hand over the
+young man's shoulder and lightly lifted the pen from its place in the
+pocket of Blensop's waistcoat; the even tempo of his step unbroken, he
+tossed it toward the safe, where it fell without sound upon a heavy Persian
+rug.
+
+"Yes--about Howson," the musical accents continued, "Colonel Stanistreet is
+most solicitous...."
+
+Swiftly Lanyard moved toward the safe, glanced through the French windows
+to assure himself that Stanistreet and Stone were safely preoccupied,
+whipped out the envelope he had prepared, and thrust it into a file of
+papers which did not crowd its pigeonhole; accomplishing the complete
+manoeuvre with such adroitness that, like the business of the pen, it
+passed utterly without the knowledge of the secretary.
+
+"Thank you so much. _Good_ morning, Dr. Apthorp."
+
+Lanyard was passing the desk when Blensop rose, and the footman was
+entering with his salver.
+
+"A lady to see Colonel Stanistreet, sir--by appointment, she says."
+
+Blensop glanced at the card. At the same time Stanistreet came in from the
+garden, leaving Stone to potter about visibly in the distance.
+
+"Miss Brooke is here, sir," the secretary announced.
+
+"Ask her to come in, please."
+
+The footman retired.
+
+"Howson is resting easily, Dr. Apthorp reports," Blensop added, going back
+to the safe. "Has Stone turned up anything of interest, sir?"
+
+"Footprints," Stanistreet replied with a snort of moderate impatience.
+"He's quite upset since I've informed him the man who made them is--"
+
+"_Good God_!"
+
+The interruption was Blensop's in a voice strangely out of tune.
+Stanistreet wheeled sharply upon him.
+
+"What the deuce--!" he snapped.
+
+By every indication the secretary had suffered the most severe shock of his
+experience. His face was ghastly, his eyes vacant; his knees shook beneath
+him; one hand pressed convulsively the bosom of his waistcoat. His
+endeavours to reply evoked only a husky, rattling sound.
+
+"What the devil has come over you?" Stanistreet insisted.
+
+The rattle became articulate: "I've lost it! It's gone!"
+
+"What have you lost?"
+
+"N-nothing, sir. That is--I mean to say--my fountain pen."
+
+"The way you take it, I should say you'd lost your head," Stanistreet
+commented. "You must have dropped the thing somewhere. Look about, see if
+you can't find it."
+
+Thus admonished, the secretary began to search the floor with frantic
+glances, and as the footman ushered in Cecelia Brooke, Lanyard saw the
+young man dart forward and retrieve the pen with a start of relief wellnigh
+as unmanning as the shock of loss had seemed.
+
+With that Lanyard's interest in the fellow waned; he was too poor a thing
+to consider seriously; while here was one who compelled anew, as ever when
+they met, the homage of sincere and marvelling admiration.
+
+Yet another of those miracles of feminine adaptability and makeshift had
+brought the girl to this meeting in the guise of one who had never known a
+broken night or an hour's care, with a look of such fresh tranquility that
+it seemed hardly possible she could be one and the same with that wilted
+little woman whom Lanyard had left in the gray dawn at the entrance to the
+Hotel Knickerbocker. A tailored suit, necessarily borrowed plumage, became
+her so completely that it was difficult to believe it not her own. Her eyes
+were calm and sweet with candour; her colour was a clear and artless glow;
+the hand she offered the Briton was tremorless.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet?"
+
+"I am he, Miss Brooke. It is kind of you to call so early to relieve my
+mind about your brother. I have known Lionel so long...."
+
+"He is resting easily," said the girl. "His complete recovery is merely a
+matter of time and nursing."
+
+"That is good news," said Stanistreet. "Monsieur Duchemin I believe you
+know."
+
+"I have been fortunate in that at least."
+
+Gravely Lanyard saluted the hand extended to him in turn. "Mademoiselle is
+most gracious," he said humbly.
+
+"Then--I understand--Monsieur Duchemin must have told you--?" The girl
+addressed Stanistreet.
+
+"Permit me to leave you--" Lanyard interposed.
+
+"No," she begged--"please not! I've nothing to say that you may not hear.
+You have been too much involved--"
+
+"If mademoiselle insists," Lanyard demurred. "I feel it is not right I
+should stay. And yet--if you will indulge me--I should like very much to
+demonstrate the truth of an old saw...."
+
+Two confused looks were his response.
+
+"I fear I, for one, do not follow," Stanistreet admitted.
+
+"I will explain quite briefly," Lanyard promised. "The adage I have in mind
+is as old as human wit: Set a thief to catch a thief. And the last time it
+was quoted in my hearing, it was not to my advantage. I recall, indeed,
+resenting it enormously."
+
+He paused with purpose, looking down at the desk. A pad of blank paper
+caught his eye. He took it up and examined it with an abstracted manner.
+
+"Well, monsieur: the application of your adage?"
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet, what would you think if I were to tell you the
+combination of your safe?"
+
+"I should be inclined to suspect that you were the devil," Stanistreet
+chuckled.
+
+"By all accounts a gentleman of intelligence: one is flattered.... Very
+well: I proceed to demonstrate black art with the aid of this white
+paper pad. The combination, monsieur, is as follows: nine, twenty-seven,
+eighteen, thirty-six."
+
+A low cry of bewilderment greeted this announcement. Blensop had drawn near
+and was eyeing Lanyard as if under the influence of hypnotism.
+
+"How--how do you know that?" he asked in a broken voice.
+
+"Clairvoyance, Mr. Blensop. I seem to see, as I hold this pad, somebody
+writing upon it the combination for the information of another who had no
+right to have it--somebody using a pencil with a hard lead, Mr. Blensop;
+which was very foolish of him, since it made a distinct impression on the
+under sheet. So you see my magic is rather colourless, after all.... Now,
+a wiser man, Mr. Blensop, would have used a pen, a fountain pen by
+preference, with a soft gold nib, well broken. That would leave no
+impression. If you will lend me the beautiful pen I observe in your pocket,
+I will give a further demonstration."
+
+The eyes of the secretary shifted wildly. He hesitated, moistening dry lips
+with the tip of a nervous tongue.
+
+"And don't try to get out of it, Mr. Blensop, because I am armed and don't
+mean to let you escape. Besides, that good Mr. Stone patrols the garden."
+Lanyard's tone changed to one of command. "That pen, monsieur!"
+
+Blensop's hand faltered to his waistcoat pocket, hesitated, withdrew, and
+feebly extended the pen.
+
+"I think you _are_ the devil," he stammered in an under-tone--"the devil
+himself!"
+
+Deftly unscrewing the pen-point, Lanyard inverted the barrel above the
+desk.
+
+The cylinder of paper dropped out.
+
+"And now, Colonel Stanistreet, if you will call Mr. Stone and have this
+traitor removed...."
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+AMNESTY
+
+
+When Stanistreet had gone out in company with Stone, and the broken,
+weeping Blensop, ending a scene indescribably painful, a lull almost as
+uncomfortable to Lanyard ensued.
+
+Then--"How did you guess?" Cecelia Brooke asked in wonder.
+
+Discountenanced by the admiration glowing in her eyes, Lanyard stood
+fumbling with the disjointed members of Blensop's pen.
+
+"Do not give me too much credit," he depreciated: "anybody acquainted with
+that roll of paper could have guessed that an empty fountain pen would
+furnish an ideal place of concealment for it. Moreover, just before you
+came in, that traitor missed his pen, and his consternation betrayed him
+beyond more doubt to one whose distrust was already astir. As for the
+other, it was true: Blensop did write down the combination on this pad,
+using a pencil with a hard lead; the marks are very plain."
+
+"But for whose use?"
+
+"Ekstrom--Anderson--was here last night, and saw Blensop alone. Colonel
+Stanistreet was not at home. Knowing what we know now, that Blensop was
+a creature of the German system here, bought body, soul, and conscience
+through its studied pandering to his vices, we know he could not well have
+refused to surrender the combination on demand."
+
+"Still I fail to understand...."
+
+"Ekstrom, being Ekstrom, could not resist the opportunity to play double.
+Here was a property he could sell to England at a stiff price. Why not
+despoil the enemy, put the money in pocket, then return, steal the paper
+anew for the use of Germany, and collect the stipulated reward from that
+source? But he reckoned without Blensop's avarice, there; he showed Blensop
+too plainly the way to profit through betraying both parties to a bargain;
+Blensop saw no reason why he should not play the game that Ekstrom played.
+So he stole it for himself, to sell to Germany, but being a poor, witless
+fool, lacking Ekstrom's dash and audacity, was foredoomed to failure and
+exposure."
+
+The girl continued to eye him steadfastly, and he as steadfastly to evade
+her direct gaze.
+
+"Nothing that you tell me detracts from the wonder of your guessing so
+accurately," she insisted. "Now I know what Mr. Crane said of you was true,
+that you are one of the most extraordinary of men."
+
+"He was too kind when he said that," Lanyard protested wretchedly. "It is
+not true. If you must know...."
+
+"Well, Monsieur Lanyard?"
+
+Her tone was that of a light-hearted girl, arch with provocation. Of a
+sudden Lanyard understood that he might no longer stop here alone with her.
+
+"If you will be a little indulgent with me," he suggested, "I will try to
+explain what I mean."
+
+"And how indulgent, monsieur?"
+
+"I have a whim to take the air in this garden. Will you accompany me?"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+As she led the way through the French windows, he noted with deeper
+misgivings how her action matched the temper of her voice, how she seemed
+to-day more deliciously alive and happier than any common mortal.
+
+So light her heart! And all since she had found him here!
+
+At his wits' ends, he conceded now what he had so long denied. With all her
+wit and wisdom, with all her charm of beauty, winsomeness, and breeding,
+with all her ingrained love of truth and honesty, she was no more than
+Nature had meant her to be, a woman with woman's weakness for the man
+she must admire. She liked him, divined in him latent qualities somehow
+excellent. Something in him worked upon her imagination, something, no
+doubt, in the overcoloured, romantic yarns current about the Lone Wolf,
+and so had touched her heart. She liked him too well already, and she was
+willing to like him better.
+
+But that must never be. He must rend ruthlessly apart this illusion of
+romance with which she chose to transfigure the prowling parasite of night,
+the sneaking thief....
+
+The garden was sweet with the bright promise of Spring. A few weeks more,
+and its formal walks would wend a riot of flowers. Now its sunlight made
+amends for what it lacked in beauty of growing things; and its air was warm
+and fragrant and still in the shelter of the red-brick walls.
+
+Midway down that walk, by the side of which a thief had skulked nine hours
+ago, near that door whose lock had yielded to his cunning keys, the girl
+paused and confronted Lanyard spiritedly as he came up with heavy step and
+hang-dog head.
+
+"Well, monsieur?" she demanded. "Do you mean to tantalize me longer with
+your reticence?"
+
+But something in the haggard eyes he showed her made the girl catch her
+breath.
+
+"What is it?" she cried anxiously. "Monsieur Duchemin, what is your
+trouble?"
+
+"Only this truth that I must tell you," he said bitterly: "I merely played
+a part back there, just now. There was neither wit nor guess-work in that
+business; once I had seen Blensop's panic over the fancied loss of his pen,
+the rest was knowledge. I saw him and Ekstrom together last night--skulking
+in those windows, I watched them; and though in my denseness I didn't
+understand, I saw him write upon that pad, tear off and give the sheet to
+Ekstrom. And I knew Ekstrom had not succeeded in stealing back what he had
+sold to Colonel Stanistreet, knew he was guiltless in fact if not in deed."
+
+"But--how could you know that?"
+
+"Because I was there, in the room, when he entered it after it had been
+shut up for the night."
+
+Conscious of her hands that fluttered like wounded things to her bosom, he
+looked away in misery.
+
+"What were you doing there?" she whispered in the end.
+
+"Trying to find that paper, which I had seen Ekstrom sell to Colonel
+Stanistreet, so that I might make good my promise and relieve your distress
+by returning it to you. I had opened the safe before he entered, and
+searched it thoroughly, and knew the paper was not there--though at that
+time it never entered my thick head to suspect Blensop of treachery. It
+was neither Blensop nor Ekstrom, Miss Brooke ... it was I who stole that
+necklace."
+
+She made no sound and did not stir; and though he dared not look he knew
+her stricken gaze was steadfast to his face.
+
+"I will say this much in my defence: I did not come with intent to steal,
+but only to take back what had been stolen from me, and return it to you,
+who had trusted it to my care. I wanted to do that, because I did not then
+understand the ins and outs of this intrigue, and had no means of knowing
+how deeply your honour might be involved."
+
+"But you did _not_ take that necklace!"
+
+"I am sorry.... I saw it, and could not resist it."
+
+"But Mr. Crane assured me you had given up all that sort of thing years
+ago!"
+
+"Notwithstanding that, it seems I may not be trusted...."
+
+After another trying silence she declared vehemently: "I do not believe
+you! You say this thing for some secret purpose of your own. For some
+reason I can't understand you wish to abase yourself in my sight, to make
+me think you capable of such infamy. Why--ah, monsieur!--why must you do
+this?"
+
+"Because it isn't fair to represent myself as what I am not, mademoiselle.
+Once a thief, always--"
+
+"No! It isn't true!"
+
+"Again I am sorry, but I know. You have been most generous to believe in
+me. If anything could save me from myself, it would be your confidence.
+That, I presume, is why I felt called upon to undo my thieving, and make
+good the loss. The money Colonel Stanistreet paid Ekstrom is now in the
+safe, back there in the library. The necklace is ... here."
+
+Blindly he thrust the tissue packet into her hands.
+
+"If you will consent to return it to its owner, when I have gone, I shall
+be most grateful."
+
+Her hands shook so that, when she would open the packet, it escaped her
+grasp and dropped into a little pool of rain-water which had collected in
+a hollow of the walk. Lanyard picked it up, stripped off the soiled and
+sodden paper, dried the necklace with his handkerchief, replaced it in her
+hand.
+
+He heard the deep intake of her breath as she recognized its beauty, then
+her quavering voice: "You give this back because of me...!"
+
+"Because I cannot be an ingrate. I know no other way to prove how I have
+prized your faith in me.... And now, with your leave, I will go away
+quietly by this garden gate--"
+
+"No--please, no!"
+
+"But--"
+
+"I have more to say to you. It isn't fair of you to go like this, when I--"
+
+She interrupted herself, and when next she spoke he was dashed by a change
+in her voice from a tone of passionate expostulation to one of amused
+animation.
+
+"Colonel Stanistreet!" she called clearly. "Do come here at once, please!"
+
+Startled, Lanyard saw that Stanistreet had appeared in the French windows
+in company with Crane. In response to Cecelia's hail both came out into the
+garden, Stanistreet briskly leading, Crane lounging at his heels, champing
+his cigar, his weathered features knitted against the brightness of the
+sun.
+
+"Good morning, Miss Brooke. Howdy, Lanyard--or are you Duchemin again?" he
+said; but his salutations were lost in the wonder excited by the girl's
+next move.
+
+"See, Colonel Stanistreet, what we have found!" she cried, and showed him
+the necklace. "I mean, what Monsieur Duchemin found. It was he who saw it,
+lying beneath that rose-bush over there. Your burglar must have dropped it
+in making his escape; you can see the paper he wrapped it in, all rain-wet
+and muddied."
+
+Stanistreet's eyes protruded alarmingly, and his face grew very red before
+he found breath enough to ejaculate: "God bless my soul!" Breathing hard,
+he accepted the necklace from Cecelia's hands. "I must--excuse me--I must
+tell my sister-in-law about this immediately!"
+
+He turned and trotted hastily back into the house.
+
+Crane lingered but a moment longer. His cheek, as ever, was bulging round
+his everlasting cigar. Was his tongue therein as well? Lanyard never knew;
+the man's eyes remained inscrutable for all the kindly shrewdness that
+glimmered amid their netted wrinkles.
+
+"Excuse _me_!" he said suddenly. "I got to tell the colonel something."
+
+He got lankily into motion and presently passed in through the windows....
+
+Irresistibly her gaze drew Lanyard's. He lifted careworn eyes and realized
+her with a great wistfulness upon him.
+
+She awaited in silence his verdict, her chin proudly high, her face
+adorably flushed, her shining eyes level and brave to his, her generous
+hands outstretched.
+
+"Must you go now?" she said tenderly, as he stood hesitant and shamed.
+"Must you go now, my dear?"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The False Faces, by Vance, Louis Joseph
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