THE DUMPLING

THE OPIUM DEN.

THE DUMPLING

A DETECTIVE LOVE STORY
OF A GREAT LABOUR RISING

BY

COULSON KERNAHAN

Author of

"GOD AND THE ANT," Etc.

Illustrated by

STANLEY L. WOOD

New York

B.W. DODGE AND COMPANY

1907

Copyright, 1906

By WILLIAM T. BELDING

NEW YORK

Copyright, 1907

B.W. DODGE AND COMPANY

NEW YORK

To

Lord and Lady Northcliffe:

WITH SINCERE REGARD.

29, Cannon Place,
Brighton
June 6th, 1906.

CONTENTS.

Prologue | 1
CHAPTER I.
The Opium Den | 15
CHAPTER II.
The Man with the Picture Eyes | 26
CHAPTER III.
The Lucifer that Saved my Life | 33
CHAPTER IV.
Criminals, Chemicals, and a Crucible | 40
CHAPTER V.
A Pair of Handcuffs | 46
CHAPTER VI.
The Millionaires' Club | 55
CHAPTER VII.
I am Snubbed by Scotland Yard | 65
CHAPTER VIII.
"Wanted" by the Police | 73
CHAPTER IX.
"Dead Man's Point" | 83
CHAPTER X.
I turn Burglar | 92
CHAPTER XI.
"What's your little game?" | 103
CHAPTER XII.
John Carleton's Burglar Alarm | 112
CHAPTER XIII.
The Face at the Broken Window | 120
CHAPTER XIV.
Miss Clara "Saves my Life" | 126
CHAPTER XV.
My Friend the Dumpling | 138
CHAPTER XVI.
The Ghost in the Garden | 145
CHAPTER XVII.
The Man with Gorilla Arms | 152
CHAPTER XVIII.
I Play the Craven | 159
CHAPTER XIX.
The Dumpling's Secret | 176
CHAPTER XX.
The New Napoleon | 187
CHAPTER XXI.
The Kindness—and Unkindness—of Kate | 192
CHAPTER XXII.
The Inexplicable Conduct of Miss Clara | 201
CHAPTER XXIII.
Kate's Confession | 211
CHAPTER XXIV.
I Discover the Identity of the Dumpling | 216
CHAPTER XXV.
John Carleton's Double | 221
CHAPTER XXVI.
"Only Starving" | 229
CHAPTER XXVII.
Re-enter the Dumpling | 243
CHAPTER XXVIII.
Mutiny and a Mesmerist | 249
CHAPTER XXIX.
The Mystery of the Third Man | 257
CHAPTER XXX.
Forty Miles in a Perambulator! | 267
CHAPTER XXXI.
The Great Insurrection Begins | 279
CHAPTER XXXII.
Bloodshed | 287
CHAPTER XXXIII.
The Battle of Tower Hill | 292
CHAPTER XXXIV.
London in Revolution | 299
CHAPTER XXXV.
The Great Fight in Fleet Street | 303
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Prince Dumpling | 313
CHAPTER XXXVII.
The Man in the Cellar | 319
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
The Mantle of Napoleon | 325
CHAPTER XXXIX.
"God Save the King!" | 333

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

In the Opium Den Frontispiece
"There peered through a broken pane of glass ... the white and wicked face of the Dumpling."
"The Dumpling was making a desperate dash for liberty"
"I fell back in incredulous horror"

THE DUMPLING.

PROLOGUE.

It was an impudent thing to do!

No matter how scorching the July sun, no matter how alluring the thought of paddling out to ascertain whether the richly wooded lake-side looked equally lovely from the water; no matter how cunningly old Satan had spread his snare of mischief "for idle hands to do," by guiding me to the very spot where the little boat lay moored at the water's edge; no matter with what sophistry these, and many other excuses which I pleaded to a pricking conscience, seemed to mitigate the offence, the fact remains that I acted in a way which was as impudent as it was unpardonable.

The owner of the property generously allowed the public to use a particular footpath through the park. Hence my offence in straying from the permitted footpath and in exploring unpermitted copses and woodlands, until I came to this beautiful sheet of water, was for that very reason all the more graceless and heinous.

But in July, when the holiday spirit is in one's blood, and when all the world is holiday-making with us, the conventionalities exist only to be set aside. Chaste matrons who, in chill December, would consider that to exhibit more than two inches of stocking above the ankle would be to pass the high-water mark of propriety, and even, to save a new skirt from being muddied, would hesitate to hitch that garment higher by another inch, will, in demoralising July, discard these same stockings altogether, and disport and display themselves, knee-bare, with never a blush, upon the beach at Margate or at Brighton.

And I who, when in my proper mind and in dress-coated, white-chokered garb, would not so much as pass a lady in the stalls of a theatre without first apologising for troubling her and asking for her permission, acted on this occasion, and under the demoralising spell of holiday-making and midsummer madness, as any other bounder would act on a Bank Holiday. No hand had pulled aside the drawn lodge-blind to gaze at the intruder as I entered the park gates; no surly keeper had pointed me to a notice board, warning all and sundry that the public must keep to the footpath, as I strolled along; no tradesman's cart had rattled briskly up the drive to receive or to deliver orders; and when between an avenue of trees I caught a glimpse of the house, it looked so shuttered and sleepy, that I was persuaded "the family"—whoever the family might be—was away, and that none would come to warn me of my trespass. Then the path I had taken, between the trees, had led me down to the water's edge and to the very spot where the boat lay moored.

Thrusting conscience and the conventionalities aside, I seated myself and sculled lightly out to the middle of the lake. For a good half-hour I pulled hither and thither as my fancy prompted, and as the various views to be obtained from the water seemed most alluringly to open; and then, shipping the sculls, I lay down full length in the bottom of the boat, my arm under my head as a pillow, and my face turned skyward to the sun.

I suppose I must have dropped off into a doze, from which I was aroused by a slight rippling of the water. Being only half awake I did not trouble myself greatly about the matter. "A swan passing," I murmured sleepily; "or possibly a water-rat or moor-hen. Let 'em pass. They're quite welcome, and I'm too comfortable to stir."

But stirred I soon was, and to some purpose. Had my boat been lying at the wooded lake-side, instead of in the centre of this beautiful sheet of water, I should have thought at first that a wind-blown branch of July's own roses had dipped down to rest her unopened blossoms upon the frail craft's side. For suddenly, upon the gunwale of the boat—just as if a handful of blush rose-buds had shyly peeped over—there appeared four of the tiniest, daintiest, most exquisitely tapered finger-tips that ever were seen upon mortal hand. Pink, petite, faultlessly formed and finely proportioned, with pearly, oval nails, as symmetrically cut, as perfectly set and polished as rare opals, the finger-tips upon which I looked were so lovely that a king might have craved, as a royal boon, permission to stoop his lips to kiss them. In all the wide world I was ready to swear there was only one other set of finger-tips as beautiful, and the very next instant that other set, like love-bird hastening to perch beside its mate, was laid upon the edge of the boat, which now began to rock sideways, as if someone in the water were working up impetus for a spring.

"Lazy bones! lazy bones! Wake up! wake up!" cried a merry voice; and then—Venus rising from the foam was not half so beautiful—there bobbed up, framed in clinging golden hair, at the side of the boat, the fairest young face, the most lovely head and neck and shoulders I have ever seen.

My awakening had come; and the whole thing had happened so suddenly that I do not know which of us was more surprised. All I do know is that the shame and consternation on her face at seeing me were so comic that, but for my anxiety to spare her blushes, I should have laughed outright. Small time, however, had I to laugh; small time had she to blush; for, in her dismay, she suddenly let go her hold of the edge of the boat, which, released from her weight, rolled over like a turning porpoise, as neatly tilting me out of the other side and into the water as if I had been a left crust shaken out of an up-gathered tablecloth by a housewife's hand.

That those who begin by playing the fool generally end by finding the fat in the fire is proverbial. In making free with other folk's property I had behaved not only like a fool, but like a mannerless schoolboy; and now, if the fat could not exactly be said to be in the fire, the fool was undoubtedly in the water. Fortunately for this particular fool he happened to be an expert swimmer, or my silly holiday escapade might have ended tragically for my fair capsizer as well as for myself. She, however, showed herself as what, in sporting parlance, is known as "a good pluck'd 'un."

A moment's hysterical screaming and frantic beating of the water may be passed by as no more than a concession to her sex, an acknowledgment of a woman's weakness, and can in no way be said to detract from the courage which she afterwards displayed. In the next instant she had grabbed me (somewhat painfully for me, I admit) by the hair, and manfully—if I may use that word of a woman—raising my head out of the water, had gasped agitatedly, "Can you swim?"

I do not deny that I behaved abominably. I was already as over head and eyes in love with this peerless Lady of the Lake as I had a moment ago been over head and ears in water; and to swim unromantically ashore, there perhaps to be handed over to the care of the local constable, with the prospect of being brought up before my fair capsizer's father (who was very possibly a magistrate) as a common trespasser, if not as a common thief, did not appeal to me as either romantic or as likely to further my suit. But to appear to owe my life to her, to be in a position to hail her as a heroine and as my preserver, and myself henceforth and for ever her grateful and adoring slave, who, even if he devoted all his remaining years to her service, could never hope to repay her for thus snatching him from a watery grave—to do this was to put myself in a very different light. Were I to admit that I could swim, she would, without the shadow of a doubt, haughtily point me in one direction, while she with equal haughtiness would swim away in the other. But to proclaim myself no swimmer, and consequently helpless, would constitute an appeal to her womanhood which she, being clearly an expert in the water, could not and would not refuse. To do so would at once establish a relationship between us more intimate than I could hope to attain in a twelvemonth spent or misspent in meeting her at her own home (even could I get invited there), or at the houses of mutual acquaintances, supposing such mutual acquaintances to exist. Frankly, I would have pawned my soul for another five minutes in her company. To speak the unpalatable truth meant that the five minutes would undoubtedly be denied me;—meant that she and I must part, never perhaps to meet again. To lie, meant not only making that coveted five minutes my own, but possibly meant more—immeasurably, infinitely more, than this. The thought of what that lie might mean, might win for me, turned my love-sick soul well-nigh delirious. It might mean (and to one man, at least, on earth Paradise seemed possible again) that a hand so soft, so delicate that I could have crushed a dozen such hands in my own huge grasp as easily as one crumples up a score of rose-leaves, yet so fateful for all its feebleness that, even as easily as one could crush the rose-leaves, so more easily could that tiny hand crush and kill the joy which was upspringing in my heart;—a hand so small that it could not span the half of my wrist, yet could hold the whole of my hopes and my heaven—a lie might mean that this tiny hand would for full five paradisiacal minutes be given into my care and keeping, while its owner should be my guardian angel, a wingless angel in a bathing dress, to guide me safely ashore!

Which was it to be—Truth or Falsehood?

"Speak the truth and you'll shame the Devil!" thundered Duty.

"Tell a falsehood, and you won't make a fool of yourself," whispered Desire.

Unhesitatingly I plumped for falsehood.

"I can't swim a stroke," I said.

We got ashore—or nearly so, at least; and that I in no way assisted to accelerate the journey will be plain, as the phrase goes, to the meanest intelligence.

But sit down in cold blood—if not, fortunately as I was then, in wet clothes—to describe that elysian passing, I may not.

Spirit readers of mine—if spirit readers of mortal book there be—who have been borne on angel pinions to heaven, may be able to enter into my feelings at being thus wafted through magic waters by an angel hand. Gross mortals of flesh and blood may not. But spirit readers have this advantage over me—that whereas they, at the end of their journey, saw the gates of Heaven open, I, at the end of mine, saw the gates of Paradise too rudely closed.

When we were some ten yards from the shore, and while I was rehearsing to myself the touching scene of our landing—I falling on my knees before her, and, in a voice which I intended doing my best to make appear broken with emotion, calling the heavens to witness that but for her I should now be weltering in my grave (I was not exactly sure what "weltering" meant, but it sounded wet and weedy and watery, and, as Milton had used the word in a similar sense, it could not be far wrong)—she, her beautiful eyes suffused with tears, one or two of which, I arranged, should drop upon my upturned worshipping face, would then bend over me and, laying a hand tenderly on my head, would sob, "My poor fellow! Do not give way. You are safe. The danger is past!"—while I was rehearsing this pretty and touching picture, she suddenly stopped. Thus far she had been swimming, and swimming strongly on her breast, striking out with her left arm and supporting my head with her right. Now, as I say, she stopped, and I feared that she was becoming exhausted.

"Put down your feet," she said, "and see if you can feel the ground."

I did so, and found that we were in water sufficiently shallow to allow me to stand upright with my chin well above the surface.

"Yes," I said, "we're safe. My feet are on the ground. How can I ever thank you? How can——"

"Then wade the rest of the way," she cut me short, cruelly. "Don't trespass any more! Don't take boats that don't belong to you, and don't get out of your depth again until you have learned to swim."

The next instant she had dived under and was gone, the flick of her tiny heels, as they came together when she threw them up, seeming like the snap of a derisive finger in my face.

Feeling, and looking, more foolish than I remember ever to have felt and looked before, I waded clumsily to the bank, telling myself, by way of comfort, that her curt dismissal and her sharp words were the result only of the inevitable reaction which comes after a time of tension and nerve strain. But from a clump of rushes, behind which I had reason to think my late rescuer lay hidden, came a sound suspiciously like suppressed laughter; and in somewhat of a temper—for no one likes to be ridiculed by a beautiful woman—I clambered up the bank, an ungainly figure, on all fours.

Again came that rippling music from behind the rushes; so, with a very scarlet face, and with as upright a carriage of head and body as I could assume—a carriage, which I may say for the benefit of the reader was intended to express wounded dignity, but which I had a sneaking suspicion savoured more of self-conscious stiffness and injured pride—I walked angrily away, some verses by Austin Dobson running in my head:

"And that's how I lost her—a jewel,
Incognita—one in a crowd,
Nor prudent enough to be cruel,
Nor worldly enough to be proud."

"Only my Incognita," I said to myself as I entered the hotel, "is 'prudent enough to be cruel' and 'worldly enough to be proud.' Never mind! I've found her, and by heaven! if mortal man can do it, I'll win her yet. How lovely she looked! How divinely lovely! And was there ever a woman since the world began with such beautiful hands?"

At this point my meditations were interrupted by the entrance of the waiter with an express letter in his hand for me, marked "Very Urgent."

It was from the editor of the Charing Cross Magazine.

"Dear Mr. Rissler," it ran. "Waldorf, the American millionaire, has bought the magazine. He's got a friend who has done some rather bad drawings of what he thinks looks like the inside of an Opium Den. But the chief has bought them, and has promised his friend to have an article written up to them, to go into the next number.

"You're the man to do it, and I want you to come back by first train, so as to root out an East End Opium Den this very night, and let us have copy to-morrow. Don't fail."

"H'm!" I said to myself, twiddling the letter between my fingers. "What a nuisance! I shall never rest till I have found out all about my Lady of the Lake, and I meant to have begun investigations this very night. But a poor devil of a writer of magazine articles and detective stories can't afford to offend the powers that be—especially so influential an editor as Harrison, or so wealthy a proprietor as Waldorf. So to London I must go, worse luck: to London I must go!"

Within half an hour I had changed my clothes, packed, paid my bill, and was in the train.

"Good-bye, my lovely Lady Disdain, my dear and lovely Lady of the Lake," I said, kissing my hand in the direction of my late escapade, as we puffed out of the station; "or rather au revoir, for soon, very soon, we shall meet again."

CHAPTER I.

THE OPIUM DEN.

I did not half like the look of things.

Of the two Chinamen who were placidly smoking opium in a corner of the opium den I had no fear. Though their bodies lay immovable as logs, the eyes of these Chinamen turned continually in their sockets, following my movements about the room. But they were merely idly curious, not threatening, in the intentness of their stare. They reminded me of pigs lolling on a muck-heap in the sunshine, too lazy to move, too lazy almost to blink, but keeping meanwhile a watchful eye upon the movements of an intrusive terrier.

What I did not like was the curious behaviour of the half-dozen men whom I had found knocking their heads together in a corner when I had entered. My appearance upon the scene had caused them to start apart so guiltily that I was convinced the conference they were holding was for no good purpose; and when, after a few whispered words, two of them stole softly out, and stationed themselves at the foot of the staircase as if to cut off my retreat, while two others got between me and the door, I could not but feel uneasy.

The two who remained—one of whom seemed to be the leader of the gang—were now holding a conference, the subject of which was evidently myself, and, judging by the lowering looks they cast in my direction, they were not about to move a resolution according me a vote of welcome.

On my road from Poplar Station to Limehouse Causeway I had not passed a single policeman, and no one, except the old negro to whom I had offered a couple of shillings if he would take me to a place where they "smoked the opium," had seen me enter the house. Accepting my offer, he had turned at right angles out of Limehouse Causeway, and walked for some distance till we came to a narrow court.

Out of this he had piloted me at right angles into another narrower and quite unlighted court, blocked up at the end by lath palings, and so forming a cul-de-sac. At the darkest and farthest corner he had stopped in front of what appeared to be an unlighted house, and pushing open a door which led into a dark and evil-smelling passage, had said: "In thar, sah!" had spat upon and pocketed my florin, and taken himself off.

I entered, and encountering no one, groped my way along the passage until it ended at a closed door, with a staircase immediately on the right. In my groping I chanced to put my fingers upon the handle. Turning it, I pushed open the door, and found myself in what seemed like a disused kitchen. There was a dresser along one side, and a copper for boiling clothes stood in a corner. The only light came from a small window opening upon a yard, and as the room was practically empty and unfurnished, I tiptoed out, and, closing the door silently, made my way up the staircase to the first landing. Here were two doors, under each of which a chink of feeble light was to be seen. I knocked at the nearest door, and receiving no answer, turned the handle. It was locked, but a scuffling noise within, and the prompt extinguishing of the light, told me that the room was not untenanted. Knocking at the second door, a gruff voice commended me so whole-heartedly and enthusiastically to the care and protection of one who, in polite circles, goes generally unmentioned, that, not desiring the further acquaintance of the party or parties on the other side of the door, I continued my way upstairs.

On the second landing was a window, immediately below which was the small walled-in yard that I had seen from the kitchen, and beyond this a patch of waste land. Just then the moon, which, like a cruiser with "lights down," had been gliding silently and unseen across the dark sea of the sky, came out for a moment from behind the clouds to sweep her searchlight over this enclosed patch of ground, as over alien waters; and, in the white surprise of the searchlight, I saw that dead cats, cabbage stalks, and offal of all sorts were rotting and festering on the unsavoury spot, and that beyond, on the other side of a dilapidated fence, was the river.

"From the point of view of a criminal," I said to myself, "this staircase offers unique advantages. For the committal of a crime, here, surely, is a vantage ground which is ideal and ready-made to hand. A stranger, ascending the staircase, as I am, in the dark, could be knocked on the head with impunity, and nobody be the wiser. Under cover of night, the body could be dropped out of the window, conveyed across that fever-breeding piece of waste land, and hoisted over yonder fence into the river. In an hour a corpse would be borne miles away from the scene of the crime, leaving never so much as a trace behind to tell how, and by whose hand, it came there."

The thought was not reassuring; and when, the next instant, I arrived at the topmost landing, and, on opening a door and entering the den, saw two evil-looking rascals hurry out to cut off my retreat by the staircase, while two others got between me and the door, as already described, I began to realise that the hospitality which seemed likely to be pressed upon me would not be of the nature of an invitation to stay to tea.

Just at this moment I was aware of a dull noise in the distance. There was a slight but ever-increasing vibration in the boards beneath me, a gathering rumble and roll as of approaching thunder, and with a hoarsely discordant shriek, an ear-splitting babel-tumult and roar, which seemed to shake the house to its foundations, an express train hurtled by, almost outside the very windows.

Under the present condition of electric communication, and with no apparatus, the sending of a telephonic message for help to the police office would have been scarcely less impossible of accomplishment than making known my present danger to anyone on board the train; yet so unreasoning are we in the causes which arouse or allay our nervousness, that the consciousness of my near presence to the railway did more to bolster up my courage than all my philosophy. "With the trains and their living freights so near at hand, I don't feel altogether cut off from the outside world," I said to myself; and as the two men in the corner were still whispering together, I plucked up heart to take stock of my surroundings.

The den was lit by a single paraffin lamp, to the unassisted industry of which I was at first inclined to ascribe the vile atmosphere of the place.

"That light we see is burning in my hall.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world,"

says Portia. The light which I saw burning in the den did not shed its beams very far; but in the matter of shedding smells in a world, nice or naughty, I judged its capacity at a low estimate as forty horse-power! An ordinary motor-car, in its most perfumed moments, leaves trailing clouds of glory and cherry blossom in its wake compared to that lamp's distribution of oily odours on the atmosphere.

Add to this the insufferable and sickening stench of opium—a stench which I can only compare to a choice blending of onions and bad tobacco—and the reader will not wonder when I say that my stomach signalled for full speed astern, by retching rebelliously under my breast-bone.

Greasy as was the atmosphere, the dirty yellow distempering of the walls was in places even greasier. The chief articles of furniture were two raised mattresses, the bare wall behind them being literally coated with dirt and grease, rubbed from the chaste persons and fastidious clothes of many smokers. Above these mattresses a crudely coloured and revolting representation of the Crucifixion was incontinently fastened, and upon the mattresses lay the Chinamen of whom I have already spoken.

Of the two men still whispering in the corner, the leader was of singular appearance. In figure he was dumpy and comfortably rounded, which was, I suppose, the reason of the nickname, "The Dumpling," which I afterwards heard applied to him. His neck was so short, and his huge head was set so closely upon his high shoulders, and thrust forward so prominently, as almost to suggest the hunchback. But if the figure was grotesque, the clean-shaven face was striking and powerful. It was absolutely grey in hue, like the face of a dead or dying man; but so far from being spare and haggard, as one would have expected from so unhealthy and colourless a complexion, the face, like the neck, was full, and the features of the fleshly aquiline type. The forehead was high and intellectual, but the eyes were his most singular feature. Accustomed as I am, as the phrase goes, "to read character," this man utterly baffled me, for the eyes of two totally different men looked out from the same head. On the occasion of which I am speaking his eyes, when they rested upon me, seemed the incarnation of all that is cunning, cruel, treacherous. Yet in the eyes of this same man, as I came to know him thereafter, I have seen the most singular and gentle melancholy.

Even on this eventful evening, when I saw him at his worst, his eyes, as he turned from me to the fellow to whom he was speaking, and for whom he seemed to entertain something like affection, softened as if in response to some inner workings of his mind, and I saw in their depths a dumb, inarticulate look like that one sees sometimes in the eyes of a dog.

As he was talking he turned suddenly—perhaps because of something which his companion had said—and looked me straight in the eyes. I shall no doubt be laughed at when I say that I was suddenly seized by the most singular sense of helplessness. My powers seemed paralysed at their centre. Minded as I was to struggle or to cry out against the influence he was exerting upon me, I could do neither. Then—whether the result of mesmerism or of thought suggestion on his part, or of a sort of second sight on mine, I cannot say; but I saw, as in a tableau, myself lying helpless upon my back, with this man kneeling on my chest, his eyes looking into mine as they were looking now, and an upraised knife in his hand.

What could it mean?

I am not a nervous, neurotic person, but a healthy, normal, open-air being, who has never dabbled in the mysteries of spiritualism, hypnotism, second-sight, or clairvoyance; nor had such tableaux as I saw when looking into this man's eyes ever before presented themselves to me.

For a moment he held me thus, and then there was the sound of a laugh. Whether it was the man then standing before me in the opium den who thus laughed, or whether it was the man I had seen kneeling on my chest, a knife in his hand and my life at his mercy, I do not know, and matters nothing, for the face was the same. Then suddenly he turned from me, another being altogether.

"No, don't, old man; think of the risk you run," I heard him say to his friend, laying a hand affectionately on the other's shoulder, those inscrutable eyes of his—all the cunning and cruelty gone—becoming liquid and appealing.

But to myself I said: "One day—perhaps within the next hour, perhaps to-morrow, perhaps in the far future—this man, knife in hand, will kneel over my prostrate and helpless figure, as I saw him kneel just now; and when that moment comes—come it to-night, to-morrow, or come it ten years hence—one of us two must leap the barrier which fences this world from the next, ere he shall escape. Which of us two shall it be? And when shall that moment come?"

As I so spoke the two men turned to me. Evidently they had arrived at some decision, and that they meant to do me a mischief, if not to murder me outright, I knew as surely as if someone had whispered their plans in my ear. Once again their leader fixed me with his eyes. Once again I was conscious of the same strange feeling of helplessness; and once again figures shaped themselves before me as in a tableau. Two men were lying in wait on a dark staircase to brain yet another man—myself—as he groped his way out.

CHAPTER II.

THE MAN WITH THE PICTURE-EYES.

"Good evening."

It was the leader of the gang who had spoken, smiling and rubbing his hands softly the one on the other, as pleased, apparently, as any purring cat.

"Good evening," I responded curtly.

"May we ask to what we owe the pleasure of your presence here?" he continued suavely, but watching me closely meanwhile.

"My presence here?" I said, as if surprised by the question. "Why shouldn't I come here, any more than you? It is a public place, isn't it? And I came here to smoke opium, as you and your friends have done, I suppose; just as one goes to a tavern for a glass of beer."

"Not at all," he replied. "This is a private house, just as much as your own house is, and you have no more right to force your way into it, than I have to force myself into yours. You stand in the position of a trespasser. For all I know to the contrary, you may even be what in America they call an area sneak-thief, except for the fact that you have sneaked your way to the top of the house instead of to the area. May I ask who directed you here? I must ask, for I insist upon having an answer."

"'Must' and 'insist' are not palatable words or pleasant," I said; "but I don't know that I have any objection to tell you. It was a negro match-seller whom I saw outside Poplar Station. I offered him two shillings if he would take me to an opium den, and it was to this house he led me."

"Ah! A negro match-seller, and outside Poplar Station. Oh, yes. I think I know the fellow. We must look into this."

He stopped to cast a sidelong glance at the other man, who nodded and, walking to the door, stood whispering to his two confederates outside. Fearing that they were planning to attack me from behind, I twisted my head slightly so as to keep half an eye and the whole of an ear towards them, but not so much so as not to have the other eye open to any movement of their leader, who was still in the room. As he was silent, I was now able to give both ears to the whispering outside; but what it was about I could not for all the sharpness of my hearing make out, except for the fact that I distinctly caught the words "Black Sam."

Then, greatly to my relief, the two men, with whom the fellow at the door was whispering, nodded and took their departure, clumping heavily down the staircase to the second landing, to the first, and thence to the door. Here I distinctly heard a sound as of the letting go of a spring latch, which in all probability locked the door from the inside. Then the door was banged to, as if to ensure that it was securely shut; but even this did not satisfy them, for, if I were not very much mistaken, they tried it, before leaving, by pushing heavily against it from the outside.

To know that the front door of the house was in all probability locked, and that, if my hosts and I came to hand-grips, my chances of escaping, by making a bolt for the street, were now cut off, was not reassuring. But I drew what consolation I could from the fact that the assailing force by which I was surrounded was reduced from six to four—two in the room and two on the staircase outside; and so I put as bold a face as I could upon it when the man, who had been cross-examining me, opened fire once more, his companion standing meanwhile just inside the door.

"And now, sir," resumed the counsel for the prosecution, "that we know to whom we are indebted for the pleasure of your company here, will you be so very good as to tell us why you are here at all?"

Thus far I had told him the truth, and I saw no reason why I should not continue to do so. It was Lord Beaconsfield, I think, who said that, when he wished to mystify his opponents, he almost invariably did so by telling them the truth. That being the last thing they expected from him, they would jump to the conclusion that the facts were the other way about, and so go hopelessly wrong at the start.

My reasons for deciding to be frank were based upon no such subtlety. That I had, quite unintentionally, blundered into a den of criminals, seemed evident; and undoubtedly the next best thing to do was to get out. I am not, I hope, altogether a coward, but one man, caught as I was, like a rat in a trap, is no match for four, possibly for six—for how was I to know that the two who had been stationed outside the door, and had apparently departed upon some errand, might not return? I could not even be positive that they had not been told off to wait for me in the dark court outside, so that in the event of my managing to escape unharmed from the house, they might prevent me from reaching the street. In coming to the place at all, I had beyond question put my head between the jaws of a lion; and the man who, with his head between a lion's jaws, plays the fool by trying to twist the beast's tail, must not be surprised if, within the next two seconds, his own head be not on speaking, or even on nodding terms, with his own body.

"I don't mind telling you why I'm here," I said civilly. "Why should I? It is only because I have been asked to write an article on opium dens for the Charing Cross Magazine. The den I visited once before in Ratcliff Highway has been pulled down, and a big Board School built on the site. I knew that there were dens somewhere in the neighbourhood of Limehouse Causeway, but I didn't know exactly where to find them, so I took the train to Poplar, gave a negro match-seller—who, I guessed, knew something of the locality—a couple of shillings to take me to 'where they smoked the opium.' He brought me here, where I am, and where apparently I ought not to be, judging by what you say. If I have intruded or trespassed, I'm sorry. So, with your kind permission, sir, I'll say 'Good evening' and take myself off."

"Stop a moment," he said, looking at me more amicably. "Your explanation is quite straightforward and satisfactory, and now that you've made it, I don't mind telling you the reason for what you must have thought strange behaviour on our part.

"This place, as you see for yourself, is an opium den, and these gentlemen," indicating the Chinamen on the mattresses, the two men at the foot of the stairs, and his companion, "are sailors. Opium smoking is forbidden among sailors in the employ of English vessels, and we thought when you came in that you were an officer from one of the vessels, who had managed to find out the den, and had come here to make yourself unpleasant. That is why I sent those men to guard the door and the stairs. If you had been what we thought you—well, I'm afraid you'd have been rather roughly handled. We don't intend to allow ships' officers, or anyone else, to come here interfering with our pleasures or with our takings, for, of course, we don't run the den out of charity. Now that I know it's all right, I'll just have a word with my friends on the stairs, and tell them that they needn't stand on guard any more. They'll be glad to get away, for they are thirsty rascals both, and were just off for a drink when you came in."

Taking his companion by the arm, he walked out upon the landing, where all four of them began whispering together.

Scarcely were they out of the room when, from the mattress where the two Chinamen lay, a single word, uttered softly, warningly, stealthily, almost in a whisper, under the breath, reached my ear.

It was my own Christian name, spoken in unmistakable English: "Max!"

CHAPTER III.

THE LUCIFER THAT SAVED MY LIFE.

Surprised, not to say startled, I certainly was, and all the more so for the reason that I recognised the voice of the speaker. It was that of my long time friend and at one time colleague, Robert Grant, the detective.

When I turned round—not suddenly or abruptly, for I feared to attract the attention, possibly the suspicion, of the four men still whispering on the landing—the two Chinamen were still sucking nonchalantly at their flute-shaped opium pipes, and still eyeing me, as I have already said, as pigs, lying on a muck-heap in the sunshine, eye a terrier who has entered their domain.

Stretching my arms, I affected to yawn, as if tired of waiting the result of the conference outside. Then, hands deep in my trousers pockets, I slouched leisurely across the room and bent over the Chinamen's mattress, as if to examine the picture of the Crucifixion which was plastered on the wall above.

The nearer of the two Chinamen made a great pretence of puffing noisily at his pipe, as if trying hard to prevent it from going out, but between each puff came a volley of whispered words in soft staccato:

"Make pretence to be friendly with them—disarm suspicion—but get away—if they'll let you—go to police station—say it's me—arrest the lot. Look out—they're coming—go away!"

The "they" were the leader and the other man.

They now returned to the room, still whispering, and the two who had been on guard at the head of the stairs, after noisily calling out "Good-night," made their way down, and so into the street, for we could distinctly hear them unlocking the door, which this time—as I did not hear it banged to—they had apparently left open.

"I don't think much of your Art Exhibition," I said, turning to the leader of the gang and jerking my thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the hideous representation of the Crucifixion, at which I had made pretence to be looking. "It reminds me of what I once said to a famous art critic and æsthete about a picture that hung in some cheap bachelor lodgings of mine.

"'I have a picture in my room,' I said to him, 'that will give your æsthetic senses a cold chill, not to say a shock. It's "Daniel in the Lions' Den," done in chromo—four colours—and loud enough to win a whistling match.'

"'How terrible!' said my friend. 'But I can imagine something even more terrible.'

"'What is it?' I inquired.

"'A poor lion in a den of Daniels,' was the reply."

I told this story, as the reader will have surmised, in pursuance of Grant's advice to "make pretence to be friendly," and apparently it had the desired effect, for the leader of the gang seemed amused.

"I think I can place the man who said it," he said. "I used to meet him often in Paris. No; we're not great on Art here, and that picture over the couch is a terror. I've made it all right for you with my friends. Would you like to smoke a pipe of opium, now you're here? You can if you like."

"That's very kind of you, but I don't think I'll stop to-night," I replied. "Fact is, you gave me a fright between you, for really I thought you meant knocking me on the head."

He laughed.

"All right; come some other night, if you like. I'm sorry if we frightened you, but of course we have to protect ourselves, and really I thought at first that you had come here to interfere with our customers and with our business. But it is all right now, and if you want to be off, we won't detain you. Good-night."

"Good-night," I answered pleasantly, glad to get away, and making for the door. With my hand on the handle I turned and looked back. My late host, the man whom I have called the leader, was standing—a sort of pocket caricature of Napoleon—his hands behind his back, and his short legs straddled widely apart. His great head, resting almost on his shoulders, was thrust forward, vulture-wise, the eyes glittering venomously out of the dead-white face. On the mattress behind him, the two men whom I had supposed to be Chinamen, but one of whom I now knew to be Detective Grant, pulled away at their pipes as nonchalantly as ever, the ghastly figure of the Crucified One stretching bare arms over them on the wall.

"Good-night," smiled the leader again. "Good-night, and bon voyage."

I do not know why I shuddered—perhaps out of fear for Grant; perhaps at the thought of the sacred figure of the Saviour in such surroundings; perhaps merely because I was tired and overstrained.

But with the shudder shaking me, almost like an ague, I turned, closed the door, and made my way down the stairs.

From the second landing window, the yard which lay immediately underneath and the stretch of waste land beyond, looked more darkly-desolate than ever. A single light on the far side of the river made a snake of fire, writhing and twisting as if in the throes of torturing agony upon the water. Otherwise, nothing moved, nothing stirred.

Arrived at the first landing I saw that the chink of light from under the two doors had gone, so that the stairs, leading down to the passage and to the kitchen door, were in absolute darkness. As I reached the bottom of the stairs and turned into the passage, I was immensely relieved to see that the front door stood ajar, evidently as the two men who had just gone out had left it. The whiff of outer air which blew through the opening was infinitely sweet after the reek and stench of opium in the den upstairs. My spirits rose at a bound. Surely I must have been mistaken in thinking the house other than merely a place for the smoking of opium. If anything illicit, anything in the nature of crime, were carried on here, the door would not have been left ajar, as I now found it, nor have been left unlatched and unlocked as it was when I had first come to the place.

All this went through my brain in a flash while my foot was between the last step of the staircase and the passage floor. Then suddenly the picture I had seen, when looking in the eyes of the leader of the gang, flashed before me—the picture of a man in a dark passage, as I at that moment was, and two other men waiting to brain him as he groped his way out.

"It's precious dark here!" I said aloud as if to myself, and in the most unconcerned voice I could assume. "I must go carefully, for I nearly came a cropper over the break-neck stairs in going up."

Meanwhile, I had been feeling stealthily in my pocket for a match-box.

Ah! I had it!

Slipping out a vesta, I struck it sharply, and placing the palm of my open hand between the flame and myself, so as to shade my own face and to cast what light there was in the direction of the door, I scanned the passage as if I had of a sudden become all eyes. Stretched across, just where it would take me over the ankle and so cause me to stumble forward, was a piece of wire. Behind the door, and with what looked like an iron bar, upraised ready to strike as I fell, was a man; and in case he failed to finish me, another—for I saw the white face of him peeping through the chink of the partly opened door—stood outside. And then, as the light in my hand suddenly flickered and went out, I heard behind me the stealthy steps of someone creeping down the stairs.

CHAPTER IV.

CRIMINALS, CHEMICALS, AND A CRUCIBLE.

Smoking may, as some good folk aver, be a vile and filthy habit, but it was the fact that I am a smoker which saved my life that night. On my way to the den I had fancied a pipe, and finding I had no matches, had been at the outlay of a penny in the purchase of a box. But for the fact that I happened to have these lucifers with me, and so was able to obtain a light, I should have blundered into the trap that was so cunningly set for me. But for the fact that, in the moment of striking the match, the light had fallen upon the kitchen door, and I had seen that a key stood in the lock on the outside, I might never have needed pipe or matches more.

To remount the stairs would have been madness, for the four men—two above and two below—would thus have me at such disadvantage between them, that my fight for life was likely to be short. To go forward, weaponless as I was, with two armed and sturdy ruffians waiting for me at the street door and possibly with two others prepared to act as reinforcements outside—would have been equally mad, especially as the leader and his confederate were already almost on my heels, and so could knock me on the head from behind. But the key on the outside of the kitchen door offered me the chance at least of a fight for my life. Whisking it out, quicker than any conjuror, I threw open the door, and shutting it with a bang as I entered the kitchen, set my left knee and the whole weight of my shoulders and body against the panels, while I slipped the key into its place, and, turning it, locked myself in, and my opponents out.

The next moment I heard the voice of the leader on the stairs outside:

"What's that? Who's gone into the kitchen? You cursed bunglers! Don't say you haven't killed your man. He mustn't leave the place alive. It's Robert Grant, the detective. I'd had word that he'd tracked us, and meant trying to get in here to-night. Parker and Smudgy, fast as you can to the yard. If you look slippy and put your back into it, you'll be in time to cut off his escape, should he try to get out behind. If he does, kill him on the spot. No mistake about it this time, mind, even if you have to shoot! Now go. Joggers, you and I'll see to things this side. First shut and lock the front door, and pocket the key. It'll be safer so. We've got to break in this door, and if he managed to rush us, he might slip past, and so get out. Have you got your knife and revolver handy? Be ready to use 'em the instant the door's down."

Clearly I had no time to spare. Striking another vesta I took one lightning peep around. By the light I saw that what, when I had peeped into the room before, I had taken to be an ordinary kitchen copper, was a strange-looking vat, with something like a stove under it.

Opening a cupboard which the darkness had caused me to overlook on my previous entrance, I saw that the top shelf was full of bottles, jars, and tins, all containing what I took to be chemicals. On the bottom shelf was something like a crucible, and beside it lay half a dozen metal things shaped like neckless bottles, and reminding me a little of artillery slugs. What did it all mean? Was I in a coiners' den—an illicit distillery—an infernal machine factory? Ha! I must be off! Already someone was making frantic but systematic efforts to prise open the door.

One more hurried glance around. Who knew but that I might light upon something in the nature of a clue to the mystery? No; that was all. Except for the things of which I have spoken, the place was absolutely empty.

Stop a moment. What was that lying curled up in a corner? A cat—a dog? No; it was a fur cap.

Bang! They were trying to break open the door. The next instant I was at the window. Screwed up, was it? No matter. Snatching up the fur cap and twisting it around my fist that it might serve as a sort of buffer or boxing-glove, and so protect my hand from broken glass, I knocked out enough of the framework, and of the glass, to allow me to scramble through, with no more serious hurt than a few scratches and some rents in my clothing. Within the next ten seconds I was across the yard, and, by the aid of an empty box, had scaled the wall, and was over on the waste land. Here I stopped for an instant to take my bearings, for at that moment the inconsiderate moon broke out from behind the clouds, and with such brightness that I could scarcely hope to escape being seen, and so would have been an easy target for a passable marksman. The piece of waste land was enclosed on my right and on my left by corrugated zinc fences. I could easily have climbed them, but the scuffling and scraping of my feet and body against the metal would have advertised my whereabouts to the enemy; and by this time I knew that the two men, Smudgy and Parker, whom their leader had sent to cut off my retreat, must be close at hand. Selecting the fence which cast the darker shadow, I made straight for it, and then turning off at right angles, I scuttled along half crouching, and keeping as close to cover as a mouse keeps to the wainscot when hieing him to his hole. I was now going—and purposely—in the direction of the river, where the fencing was of wood, not of metal, and so might be scaled less noiselessly. Moreover, two or three stunted trees threw ragged shadows across the moonlight in that quarter, and so might serve to screen me from my pursuers. Just as I reached these trees I heard voices on the other side, so I dropped like a dead thing in the shadow at the foot of the fence, and lay listening.

I was none too soon, for the next instant someone scrambled up on the other side of the fence, to spy out the land. For a moment I feared that I was discovered, though I dared not look up. I knew by the place from which the sound came that the speaker was exactly over my head.

"Can't see anything, Smudgy," the voice said. "But I can hear the Dumpling breaking in the door. We'll hop over and make sure that Grant doesn't get out by the window. You go one side of that iron fence and I'll go the other, and then, between us, we can't miss him if he comes out; but stay in the shadow till you get to the house.

"Keep your eyes skinned, for if we were to miss our man this time, the Dumpling would be like a madman. Steady does it. Right O! But stop a moment. What's that in the shadow there, under the trees, just where I jumped?"

CHAPTER V.

A PAIR OF HANDCUFFS.

The fellow had walked some way in the direction of the house after vaulting the fence, but now he turned and retraced his steps towards the spot where I was lying, with my legs drawn up to my body. As he stopped to bend over me, I let out with my left foot, as viciously as a kicking horse, taking him in the stomach, and with such force that he doubled up like a hinged draught-board, and lay quite still.

Then I leapt to my feet.

"Jones! Jim! Wilson!" I shouted, using, haphazard, the first names which came to my tongue. "Here they are! Over the fence as fast as you can, and we'll nab the two of 'em!"

As I spoke I kicked out a heel behind me, scraping it against the fence as if someone were endeavouring to clamber up on the other side.

"Fast as you can!" I yelled again, making noise enough for three, and rushing in the direction of the other man, shouting as I ran.

The dodge succeeded; for supposing, as I wished him to suppose, that he had walked into a police ambush, he made a bolt for the house, I after him, still yelling imaginary instructions to imaginary men.

No sooner was he gone than I whipped back to the other fellow, who I suppose had fainted from pain, for he lay quite still where he had fallen. But he was armed, as I knew, for I had heard the leader tell the two of them not to hesitate to shoot. I had run risks enough, and more than enough for my liking, on this eventful evening; so, partly to equip myself with a weapon, in case of the other man's discovering my ruse and returning, partly to disarm the gentleman on the ground, in the event of his recovering consciousness sufficiently to join in the pursuit of me, I slipped my hand into his pocket in search of fire-arms. The first thing on which I lighted was, strangely enough, a pair of handcuffs, and, under the impulse of the moment, I snapped them around the unconscious man's wrists. Then, having possessed myself of his weapon—an ugly revolver—I walked to the fence and looked over it, in preparation to vault. The river washed almost to the fence's foot, and, but for the fact that a boat was fastened to a stake driven into the mud, my retreat would have been entirely cut off. Evidently Parker and Smudgy must have taken a boat from somewhere to get round to the back of the place. That, then, was what the leader had meant when he spoke of the "yard," and had urged them to "put their backs into it."

Oh, well! the boat which had served their purpose would serve mine. But stop a minute. No one was coming from the house, where I could still hear the besiegers battering at the kitchen door. It was a daring idea, this of mine! But why shouldn't I carry it out? To take a prisoner, instead of myself being taken prisoner or being murdered, would be to turn the tables on my enemies with a vengeance. The man was unconscious; he was handcuffed; and even if he proved to be heavy, I knew myself to be fairly strong.

Kneeling on one knee, I raised his insensible body so that his head and chest and trunk lay inertly over my left shoulder, where I could best bear the weight. The next thing to do was to get upon my feet. It was not easy of accomplishment, for the man was heavily built, and I, though tall, am somewhat slight. But I managed it at last, and staggered to the fence, upon which I hoisted my burden, where he lay for all the world like a straw-stuffed Guy Fawkes, his silly head and his body and shoulders lolling helplessly towards the river, his hips and legs hanging down limply on the side of the fence that faced the house. Then I scrambled over myself, muttering, "You come along o' me to Westminster, my pretty. A man who can hang both sides of a fence, as you can, is wasted outside of Parliament."

I hauled him over, a bit at a time, until at last I was able to lower him gently to the ground. Then I dragged him—through the water I am sorry to say—to the boat, and with no small difficulty contrived to tumble him in. This was the most troublesome part of the business, for the boat behaved as coyly as a girl when a sweetheart tries to snatch a first kiss—dodging this way and that, ducking and dipping, till the pair of us were like to be thrown headlong into the water. But I achieved my purpose at last, and having lashed my captive's ankles together with the rope—the "painter" yachtsmen call it, do they not?—by which the boat had been fastened, I took up the oars and rowed out into mid-river.

By this time my captive was beginning to show signs of returning consciousness, his revival being accelerated, no doubt, by the wetting he had received in being dragged into the boat. Apparently he was still in pain from my kick, for he groaned feebly once or twice, and then moaned: "I feel sick."

"Yes," I said, "and you'll feel sicker before I've done with you."

It was brutal to speak thus to a man defenceless, and in pain; but I had been under a terrible strain that evening, and now that the danger was passed, the inevitable reaction had come, and none could have been more surprised than I was to find the reaction take the form of something like savagery. By nature I am by no means vindictive; but, remembering that this very man had gone round to the back of the opium den with the deliberate intention of murdering me, I took, I am ashamed to say, a cruel and catlike pleasure in having him thus at my mercy, and in seeing him a prey to the same terrors which I had been compelled to endure. Police magistrates and His Majesty's judges may to-day replace the rude justice of the primæval forest; but in spite of the humanising and refining influence of civilisation, the beast in us dies hard.

"Where am I?" he inquired, trying to raise his head.

"You're clearly a man of very little originality," I said, still exulting savagely in having him at my mercy, instead of being—as earlier in the evening I was like to be—at his. "'Where am I?' is what they all say—whether on the stage, or in a novel, or in real life—on recovering from a faint. But, if you particularly wish to know where you are, I don't mind telling you. You are in a boat on the river Thames, somewhere off Limehouse; but you'll be in even less comfortable quarters before long, if I'm not much mistaken."

"Who are you?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "anyone listening to our conversation might think that I was 'A' and you were 'Q' in Mangnall's book of Questions and Answers. I should think you'd know who I was without having to make so many inquiries, Mr. Parker. I'm the man you and your friend Smudgy were told off to murder not so very many minutes ago. Now you are my prisoner, and with your very kind permission, or without it, I'm going to hand you over to the police."

"For God's sake don't do that!" he cried, trying to rise. This his handcuffed wrists and bound ankles prevented him from accomplishing; finding which, to my surprise and dismay, he fell back blubbering like a baby.

"Give me a chance, Mr. Grant," he begged. "I've gone against the law I know, but I've been drove to it, sir, drove to it by being out of work so long."

"Look here," I said; "tell me what you and the man you call the Dumpling and the other rascals are after, and if I find you've told me the truth and kept nothing back, I'll let you go. It is your only chance; and considering the way you'd have treated me, I think it is a very generous offer.

"There's a mystery, and it strikes me a very wicked and criminal mystery, about all this—that opium den with its crucible, and chemicals, and queer instruments in the kitchen, the Dumpling, the Chinamen, yourself, and the other men. I've got to know all about it, and to know it now and here, this night, and in this boat. Make a clean breast of it; tell me everything, and I'll let you go. Refuse, and I take you straight, handcuffed and tied up as you are, to the police. Come, no beating about the bush. Which is it to be? 'Yes' or 'No'?"

"I can't help myself," he answered. "You say you've got to know about the Dumpling and the house, and the rest of us, and what we're after, and that I've got to choose between telling and being handed over to the police. You swear, you take your Davy, you'll let me go free if I tell?"

"I swear it," I said. "Tell me all, and I swear to loose you and put you ashore free and unfollowed—when you've done."

"Very well," he replied sullenly, doggedly. "I'll tell. But the Dumpling"—with an oath—"will find me out and kill me if he gets to know that I've peached."

"We'll hope he doesn't hear," I said, settling myself down to listen, but pulling gently at the oars meantime.

Then Parker began his story.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MILLIONAIRES' CLUB.

"It's this way," Parker began a trifle importantly—and something there was in his way of saying even these three words which made me suspect him to be a man fond of the sound of his own voice. Though entirely uneducated, he had, as I afterwards heard, a keen memory, and a ready knack of picking up scraps of information, both of which stood him in good stead in the speeches upon social subjects which he was apt to deliver in the parks on Sunday afternoons, and at other places where debaters foregather.

"It was this way, Mr. Grant. What with the strikes, and the work going out of the country, to Germany and America, and never coming back, in consequence of the strikes, things have been cruel hard in East London this winter, and when a big firm of ship-builders closed their yards, and went North, that meant starvation to thousands of us. Then the Dumpling turned up, and used to address meetings of the unemployed. 'Law!' he says to them as was agitating to have the law altered, 'while you are asking for law, your wives and children are starving. The law won't do nothing for you unless you force it; and the rate you're going on, you won't force it—not an inch in ten years; and where will you be then? Starved, and in your graves, you and your wives and children. You can send a score or two of your Labour leaders to Parliament, and much good that will do you. They can't make laws; there aren't enough of them in Parliament to do it. They get voted down, and then where are you? Look here, boys,' he says; 'it's Parliament as makes the laws, and Parliament, even this Parliament, a big part of it, is made up of landowners, and landlords, and company promoters, and capitalists, and big employers, and sweaters. They aren't going to make laws against themselves—'tain't likely. For one poor man in Parliament there's fifty rich, and you haven't got no chance there. But, boys,' he says, a-wagging his finger at us, 'for every rich man in Parliament there's hundreds and thousands out o' Parliament as is poor and starving. You're in a minority in Parliament, and minorities always get crushed. We have got it on the authority of a Cabinet Minister—and he ought to know. But it's them as is in a minority outside. If you have men's blood in your veins, you'll up and crush them. You're a thousand to one, you poor, what sweat and slave and starve to make money for the rich folk to spend. What I say to you is: Don't plead for your rights no more. You take 'em, as you can if you like, and let the rich people have a turn at the pleading. It's you who hold the whip—not them. If the down-trodden people of the country was only to rise up and assert their rights, the landlords and landowners and grabbers and sweaters couldn't hold out for one hour. Come out of it, boys! Come out of it, all of you who are men and not monkeys. Monkeys!' he says. 'Yes, you are monkeys. You are like monkeys chained to a piano-organ, and the piano-organ that's what they call Parliament. The poor man he has to do the dancing and get the whip, same as the monkey does, and the rich man gets the money and chooses the tune. But, boys,' he says, 'do you think if there was a million o' monkeys for every man as kept a monkey and an organ—do you think the monkeys would go on letting themselves be kept like slaves upon a chain? Not they! They'd be up and fight for their lives and liberty with nails and teeth.'"

All this time we had been drifting slowly down the river on the slack of the tide. The night was now very dark and inclined to be foggy, so I turned the boat's head round, and began to pull towards town.

"What was the scheme that was to be carried out to-night?" I questioned.

"What are we going back for, and where are you taking me?" asked Parker suspiciously, counter-questioning.

"I'm going back," I replied, "because it's getting very dark and promises to be foggy. Get on with your story, but do your best to cut it short."

"I don't want to make it any longer than I can help," was the reply; "but if I don't tell it my own way I can't tell it at all. Well, that's the way the Dumpling talked to us, and there was no denying that what he said was true. And he did more than talk at meetings. He got hold of Smudgy and me and some more of us, and said if we'd throw in our lot with him he'd see we were paid something each week out of a fund that had been started in America and Germany and other places, for the benefit of agitators and workers in the cause of liberty all over the world. And he kept his word, too. We got it regular each week, and by and by he put us on to little jobs—I needn't stop to tell you about them now—that put more money in our way. We kicked at some of them at first, but he's a nasty man to argue with, and pointed out that we were helping the cause by taking money from the rich to use it for them as was working in the cause of the poor, and after that we said——"

"You're rather long-winded, my friend," I interrupted; "and again I must point out to you that it's getting cold and foggier and late. Can't you cut the thing shorter yet, and come to the opium den and to-night's work?"

"That's just what I was going to," replied Parker in an injured tone. "Perhaps I am a bit long-winded. The Dumpling used to say I was, and he's one of them clever ones what ought to know. He said once——"

"Oh, never mind what he said!" I interrupted impatiently. "Get on quickly to the opium den and to-night's work. It's of that I wish to hear."

"One night," continued Parker, "the Dumpling asked Smudgy and me if we'd like to stand in with him in a little scheme he'd got to make a pot of money. And this very night we was to meet in that opium den—us as was in it—to arrange things. I didn't half like the job, that's the fact, especially when I found that detectives were on the track. But the Dumpling isn't the sort of man you find it easy to say 'No' to, when he turns that north eye of his on you. Makes me feel quite helpless, he does, and cold all down my back."

I nodded.

"Yes, I can believe he's not a pleasant customer to come the wrong side of; but that's no excuse for you and Smudgy trying to murder me."

"We didn't mean murdering you or anyone else," protested Parker. "The Dumpling he says to us, 'Boys,' he says, 'I've got everything arranged, and we'll carry this thing through to-night. But I don't play no losing games. Grant, the detective, is on our track, and if he comes between us and our business—him and his blue coats—he'll have to take the consequences. So you'd better be armed,' he says, and he gives Smudgy and me and the other chaps a revolver each, and a knife. 'Don't shoot unless you have to, or unless I tell you to,' he says. 'Them as plays the game we're going to play had best keep a silent tongue in their head, and there's no tongue so silent and so sure as a sharp knife. It does the work and don't holloa about it. But pistols is noisy servants. So don't use the shooting irons unless you're compelled to.'

"Smudgy and me we took the knives—I've got mine on me now—and the pistols, but we agreed we wouldn't use 'em. Nabbing a bit o' money's one thing, but getting nabbed for murder's quite another."

"What was the business you were to carry out to-night?" I interrupted once more. "Are you trying to talk out the time, under the idea that you'll be rescued, or something of that sort?"

"I'm coming to it now," replied Parker sulkily. "It's you as keeps putting me off with interruptions. There's a club what they call 'The Millionaires' Club.' There aren't many in it—seven, I think the Dumpling said; but they're all millionaires, and all of 'em was quite poor men once, poor as me and Smudgy. Now they've got millions, and live in mansions in Park Lane, and has ten-course dinners off gold and silver plates. But I say, Mr. Grant, can't I be untied now? I'm numb with cold and with lying here so long. I've very nearly finished my story, and, if you'll loose me, I'll promise to finish it faithful to the end."

"There's no reason why you shouldn't have your ankles free and sit up," I said, hauling in the sculls and laying them alongside as I stooped to unfasten the rope that was lashed about Parker's feet. "We'll talk about taking the handcuffs off when you've done. Go on—I'm listening. This knot here's rather tight, but I can hear what you say while I'm undoing it."

"Once a month," continued Parker, whilst I was tugging at the knot, "these millionaires meet secretly in the back parlour in a public-house out Shadwell way, and have a feed o' tripe and onions, or pigs' trotters or chitlings or faggots, or stewed eels or fried fish, or something of that sort, and drink four half out of pint pots, and smoke shag tobacco in clay pipes, and play shove-ha'penny and pitch-and-toss for coppers. It's coming off to-night, this Crœsus bean-feast and blow-out, as the Dumpling calls it; and he's planned to kidnap one of 'em on their way home, and make him pay a thumping big sum for ransom money. The place was to be—— Hi! Look out, there! There's a big ship coming out of the fog just behind you. My God! She's on us. And me tied up like this! Let me loose, for Christ's sake! It's murder. It's——"

Simultaneously with a sudden crash—under the impact of which the boat seemed to shiver like a live thing—the blurred fog-blinded lights on the river banks broke into zigzagging globes of yellow light that shot backwards and forwards, upward and downward and sideways before my eyes, as gnats dart and dance and dodge among themselves on a summer eve. Then these lights all ran together into a streak of yellow fire. The boat seemed to leap forward and to rise under us, as a horse which has staggered to its knees, when hit by a bullet, strives to struggle forward and to its feet under its rider; and the next instant the frail craft went to pieces and fell away from under us.

In that instant I saw the ghastly face of Parker staring up horror-stricken at what looked like the high and perpendicular side of a house which was about to fall upon us, and that, in the act of overtoppling, seemed momentarily to hang and hover and brood gloatingly above our head. Then there came the deadly and numbing chill of ice-cold and rushing water that sucked us down and under, as if to the falling house's very foundations.

CHAPTER VII.

I AM SNUBBED BY SCOTLAND YARD.

It was "murder," as Parker had said. Even as I went down I was conscious of the horror, of the inhumanity, of letting a poor devil, tied hand and foot like a dog in a sack, go to his doom with never a chance of making a fight for his life. For myself, being a fair swimmer, and accustomed to a cold dip in rough seas, winter and summer, I was in no such fear as entirely to lose my presence of mind. The danger lay, of course, in my being sucked under the ship's bottom and drowned before I could make my way to the surface; but as the steamer was going very slowly and had taken us side-on, rather than with the prow, I managed in a very few seconds to get clear of her wash, and up, with open eyes, on the top of the water. Apparently no one on board the steamer was aware that she had struck and sunk a rowing boat, for she went slowly but steadily on her way, as if nothing had happened. Had we not chanced to enter a fog bank a few minutes before the collision, and had I not been engaged in loosening Parker's bonds, the probability is that the accident would not have occurred. What most concerned me, however, was not the cause of the mishap, but the whereabouts of poor Parker. Again and again I crossed and re-crossed the subsiding wash of the vessel's wake; again and again I halloed and called the unhappy man by name; but all, alas, to no purpose. Except for the answering bark of a dog from a barge in-shore, the hooting of the steamer's fog-horn, and the washing of the water, there was no reply, and, being somewhat exhausted, I gave up the search and struck out for the nearest shore. It had been slack water for the last half-hour, and the tide was, fortunately for me, only just upon the turn; so, without being carried far out of my course, I was able to reach the river's bank in safety. Wet as I was, I could not walk the streets without attracting attention, but, luckily for me, the very first vehicle which came along was a doctor's carriage. I shouted to the driver to stop, and explaining my plight to his master by saying I had been run down in the fog while on the river, asked him to be so very good as to drive me to the police station. He not only consented, but plied me with a restorative of some sort which he had in his bag; and when I reached the station I was, except for a shivering fit, not very much the worse for my wetting. There, while I was having a rub down and changing into the clothes—a policeman's uniform—which was provided for me, I told my story. The superintendent was very civil. He said he was aware of the existence of the opium den in question, but otherwise knew of nothing criminal in connection with it, but would at once send a sufficient number of men to raid the place. He also rang up the river police on the telephone, suggesting that a boat should be sent out in search of Parker's body, and instructed a plain-clothes officer to accompany me in a cab to the address which I gave as my lodging. Whether this was done in order to verify the address, and because he suspected the truth of my story, I did not know, and did not care. It was a reasonable enough precaution to take, and, having nothing to conceal, I did not resent his taking it, and, indeed, was not sorry to have a companion upon my journey, for, now that the excitement which had buoyed me up was passing, I began to feel somewhat exhausted.

Next morning I took cab to Scotland Yard, where I sent in my name and business, and was at once received in audience by one of the heads. He greeted me courteously, heard my story out, interpolating a few shrewd and pointed questions now and then, and occasionally making a note.

When I had come to an end of my narrative he bowed gravely, and said:

"Thank you, Mr. Rissler. The superintendent at the station where you called has already communicated with us in regard to your statement. I'm not sure that what you have told us will be of any practical assistance, except in so far as it confirms what we already know. But we are obliged to you in any case. You have done rightly in coming to us. We will communicate with you should we want your further assistance. We have your address, I think? Thank you very much. Good morning."

"You know this man, the Dumpling, as they call him?" I inquired eagerly, ignoring my dismissal.

"Perfectly."

"What is there against him?"

"Nothing—absolutely nothing. He holds views which in some countries would get him into trouble, but in England one can talk anarchy or anything else as much as one likes, so long as one's actions keep within the law. And he keeps doubtful company. In fact, I may go so far as to say that we suspect him of knowing something beforehand of more than one outrage with which we have had to deal, though we have not yet been able to implicate him directly."

"And what's his name?" I asked.

Scotland Yard, as personified in the official before me, lifted its eyebrows and shrugged its shoulders.

"Really, Mr. Rissler, I don't think I must answer any more questions. As I have said, you have done quite right in coming to us, though you haven't told us anything we didn't know before. But the matter is in the hands of Detective Grant, and I think you may safely leave it there."

"Oh, yes," I said. "Grant's a good man. He's a friend of mine. We worked together, he and I, in more than one case in the past."

"Indeed!"

Scotland Yard did not seem particularly interested in these autobiographical details, either about myself or about Grant.

"Indeed," it repeated with an air of bland boredom, rising from its chair to indicate that the interview was at an end.

"I've done some detective work myself, as you perhaps know," I went on; "and having been pitchforked, as it were, into this particular case, I'm more than inclined to see if I can make anything of it; in which case, should I discover anything, I should, of course, acquaint you with my discoveries, so that we could co-operate together."

"You are very considerate," replied Scotland Yard, sarcastically; "but I fancy we are tolerably competent to do our work without outside assistance. I've heard of you, Mr. Rissler. You do a little investigation on your own account, don't you?—and then write stories about it after. Well, with the story-writing I have no fault to find. I haven't read any of your stories, but I'm told they are quite harmless. But, really, don't you think this is a case which is best let alone by amateurs? We can't stop you from interfering as they do in medicine, where quacks are pulled up pretty sharp by the law, but if you take my advice you'll let the detection of crime alone, except in novels, where I have no doubt you acquit yourself very creditably. But really I can't spare any more time for further discussion. Again we are obliged to you for having come to us with your story. If anything should transpire to make it necessary to communicate with you again, you shall hear from us. Good morning."

"Quacks!" I said to myself, angrily, as I stalked out with my head in the air. "I've been the means, as they know, of bringing more than one criminal to justice, and here I'm called a quack by a supercilious representative of officialdom."

Outside in Whitehall I called a cab.

"—— police station," I said. "You can wait and bring me back, so don't raise your eyebrows. If I don't come back, I'll pay your fare all the same."

"Right, sir," he said, evidently in good spirits at the prospect of a long and lucrative job, the good spirits in question being manifested at somebody else's expense.

"What! both of you awake!" he called out in surprised astonishment to a couple of carmen who blocked his way for a moment with their vans.

Then, chuckling at the fact that a somewhat limited vocabulary could not bear the strain which an apparently unlimited knowledge of his family tree placed upon it, and so necessitated the inclusion and description of himself and his entire ancestry in one simple and comprehensive colour-scheme, he whipped up his horse, and directed its head eastward.

CHAPTER VIII.

"WANTED" BY THE POLICE.

On the previous night the police superintendent at —— had treated me with a courtesy which was almost deferential; and had himself accompanied me to my cab to say:

"Good-night, sir, and I hope you'll be none the worse for your wetting."

Witnessing my rather ceremonious "send off," the very young and perhaps recently-enlisted member of the force, on duty in the outer office, had evidently been duly impressed with the fact that I was a person of some weight. On my presenting myself at the station next morning, he greeted me with a smile of obsequious respect, and without waiting to report my call to the superintendent, conducted me importantly, and with a great air of knowing when and to whom to accord honour, straight into the august presence of his chief. The somewhat officious air with which he announced "Mr. Rissler, sir," was speedily changed into a look of blank and crest-fallen surprise, for instead of receiving me as a favoured caller, the superintendent—who, as we entered, had his ear glued to the telephone—jumped up in a passion, and shouted:

"How dare you show this person, or any person, into my room without permission?"

Looking at me viciously, as at one who had been guilty of the crime of obtaining a respectful reception under false pretences, the unfortunate constable stammered out:

"Very sorry, sir; but thought that the gentlem—person—was a friend of yours." And, saluting with a proper air of chastened humility, he withdrew.

Scarcely had the door closed behind him before the telephone bell clashed its discordant jangling at the superintendent's very ear, jarring the nerves of both of us, and causing him almost to jump in his shoes.

Then I "tumbled" to the situation. If I was not very much mistaken, he had been in communication with Scotland Yard at the moment of my entrance, the subject of the conference being none other than my humble self; and, judging by the marked difference in my reception, and by the way in which, with one ear stooped to the telephone, he was glaring at me with both eyes, his last night's reception of myself and his communicativeness had not come in for his chief's commendation. That he had been receiving something of a jacketing his first few words told.

"Are you there? Oh, it's you, sir, again—is it? Yes, sir, I did hear what you said just now, and am very sorry. What do you say? No, sir, I didn't leave the telephone before you had done speaking. I shouldn't think of doing such a thing, but somebody came into my room and interrupted me. Will you excuse me a second, sir, while I turn them out? Then I think I can explain why I acted as I did."

Without taking his ear from the telephone, and without saying a word, he pointed me peremptorily to the door, seeing which, I of course instantly withdrew to the outer office, where I was surveyed with supercilious scorn by the youthful constable, who a few minutes before had so deferentially ushered me into the superintendent's room. Turning my back contemptuously upon him, I studied a board upon which were displayed the portraits of certain characters "wanted" by the police. The young constable, who apparently attributed his downfall from official favour to a malicious and deeply-laid plot on my part, sought, in vulgar parlance, "to get back a bit of his own" by affecting to find a resemblance between some of the "wanteds" and myself, examining first their faces, and then my features, with an interest which I could not but consider offensive.

Obviously the only card left for me to play was to appear unconscious of the comparison which he was instituting, and while I was doing this to the best of what I fear was a poor ability, the door opened, and the superintendent came out.

"You want to see me, Mr.—er—Rissler, isn't it?" he inquired rudely. "What is it? I've no time to spare this morning."

"I won't keep you long," I said. "But you were good enough to say last night that you would send some of your men to inspect the opium den, and I called in to hear what happened, and to ask whether Parker's body had been found."

"You called to hear what had happened, and to ask this, and to ask that!" he said insolently. "Since when have you been appointed to the head office in New Scotland Yard, that you come here to cross-examine me on my own business? Pretty fine pass the force is coming to, if we're to take every Tom, Dick, and Harry into our confidence. I've nothing to tell you, sir, except to advise you to confine your attention to your own business, and leave other people to attend to their own. Good morning."

Turning on his heel he walked into his room again, slamming the door behind him; so, affecting not to see the insolent grin on the face of my friend the youthful constable, who had been present during my snubbing, I put my hat on my head and stepped into the street.

"But I'll find out the result of the raiding of the den yet," I said to myself. "The superintendent here, and his men, were friendly enough to me last night, and I strongly suspect that the orders to tell me nothing have only just arrived from New Scotland Yard. If I can find the policeman within whose beat the den is, it is possible that he has not yet received instructions that I'm to be kept in the dark, and that half-a-crown may open his mouth. Anyhow, it can do no harm to have a try."

Nor was I wrong in my conjecture. The policeman—when I found him, which I did with little difficulty—was friendly and communicative.

"Oh, you're the gent, are you, sir, who laid the information about the opium den? I wasn't at the station when you called, but I came in directly after, and heard the superintendent talking about it. He'd be glad to see you, I think, sir, if you was to look in. Oh, yes; he sent five men round to the place at once. But, Lord, sir, the rascals had got wind of it, and when our men got there, the birds had flown. Cleared out—that's what they had, every man Jack of them. There was the broken window, just as you said, and there was the marks on the door, a-showin' as somebody had tried to break it in, or to batter it down, but them as had been there had all cleared out, and they'd taken the chemicals and tools and other things, what you saw there with 'em. The chief he's trying to track the rascals down, and to find where they've moved to, for they must have put them things somewhere. It stands to reason they can't walk about with them in the street. But though he clapped two of our best men on the job, they hadn't found anything when I came out on beat."

"And Parker's body?" I inquired. "Has it been found?"

"Not as I've heard on, sir. But holloa, what's this?"

The constable and I had been strolling on together while talking, and on turning the corner of a small and evil-smelling street we saw a knot of people gathered outside a sweet shop.

"Now, then! What's all this? Stand aside there, will you?" he commanded, shouldering the crowd aside.

At the door a wretched hag, her lank grey hair falling in dishevelled wisps upon her shoulders, and the pores of her face so choked with dirt that the grime lay in lines along the wrinkles, was clawing at the air with one skinny hand and arm, alternately sobbing and screaming hysterically.

"Come, come, my good woman!" said the constable sharply. "Stop that noise, and tell me what it's all about."

Shaking her head, as if to convey that she was powerless to speak, the wretched creature clutched wildly at the door lintel, and then fell in a swoon almost at his feet.

"Who is the woman? And what's the trouble?" inquired the constable of the bystanders. "Do any of you know her?"

"Macintyre's her name," volunteered a respectable looking woman in the crowd. "She keeps the sweet shop inside, and lets her rooms as lodgings. I never heard anything against her. But I don't know what's the matter. She'd only just come out into the street before you came."

"She lives here, does she?" inquired the constable. "Stand aside there, and I'll have a look inside and see if anything's wrong."

Then a small voice, that sounded quite near to the pavement, shrilled from the spot where the crowd pressed thickest.

It came from a wee, wizened girl-child, who looked as if she might be ten and talked with the precision and self-possession of twenty—so pitifully sharpened do the wits of the children of the streets become in the struggle for existence.

"It's my Granny—that's who it is. She's got a lodger in the back room, Black Sam. Somebody gave him two shillings yesterday, and he came home drunk last night, quite early, and went to bed. I know he was drunk, for two gentlemen came to see him about ten, but Granny told them he was in bed, and drunk, in the back room, and they couldn't see him till this morning. I heard a funny noise in his room in the night. It woke me up. It sounded like someone trying to scream, and not being able to; and I thought I heard people moving about. So I woke Granny up and told her so, but she was cross with me for waking her, and said it was only his drunken snoring I'd heard. But just now, as Black Sam didn't get up, Granny and I went into his room. The window was wide open, and Sam was lying on the floor all over blood. And please, sir, there's a big hole in his throat, and he's quite cold, and I think he's dead."

"Black Sam!" Surely I had heard that name before? Why, yes, and no longer ago than on the preceding evening. When the leader of the gang in the opium den had asked me who it was that directed me there, I had replied, "A negro match-seller, whom I saw outside Poplar station." His comment had been "Ah! a negro match-seller—and outside Poplar station. I think I know the fellow. We must look into this!"

Then his confederates had whispered together, the only words that I had overheard being the dead man's name, "Black Sam." Two of the gang had then left the house, as if on some errand. That was, I remembered—for the clock struck soon after—just before ten. It was at ten that two men had called to see the negro. They had been told that he had come home drunk, and was lying in the back room asleep. Was it they who had entered that room by the window in the dead of the night and murdered him?

CHAPTER IX.

"DEAD MAN'S POINT."

As the murder of Black Sam plays no further part in this story, I do not propose to describe in detail the ghastly scene which presented itself when, in company with the police officer, I entered the death chamber.

Sensational enough, and more than enough, this narrative of the hunting down of a master-criminal must necessarily be, without the gratuitous description of scenes—no matter how impressive—which have no direct bearing upon my story. Of the murder of Black Sam it was necessary to tell as much as I have told, if the reader is to follow, step by step, my first meeting, and my final struggle with, the man around whom the narrative centres. When to what I have already related, I add that, whatever the motive for the crime, the subsequent investigation established the fact that the motive was at least not robbery, we may dismiss the murder of Black Sam from memory, and pass on to my efforts to get upon the trail of the man who was the instigator of the crime—the man whose acquaintance I had so eventfully, if casually, made on the occasion of my visit to the opium den.

My first step must, of course, be to get into communication with Grant. Until I had seen him, and learnt his views, I did not feel free seriously to enter upon the case at all. That he already had it in hand, I had been told by New Scotland Yard, and that he was making progress was clear from the fact that, disguised as a Chinaman, he had contrived to enter the meeting-place of the gang, possibly even to overhear some of their plans. It is not likely that, without very strong actual or presumptive evidence of their guilt, he would have bidden me make my way to the nearest police station, and ask, in his name, that a body of men be sent to make prisoners of the entire gang. Grant was a private detective, not a New Scotland Yard man; but he was perhaps the only private detective whom New Scotland Yard can be said to have recognised. He had been of such frequent assistance to the chiefs of the Criminal Investigation Department, and his relations with them were so friendly, that his standing had come to be in a sense semi-official, and no reasonable request by him was likely to be refused.

If, on communicating with him, I found that he had, as seemed probable, the case more or less complete, I should, of course, recognise that his was the prior right, and that any interference on my part, except by his invitation or his permission, would be an impertinence. If, however, as I hoped, he had still links to fill in, before completing the chain, my intention was to ask him to allow me to work in connection with him. It has been said by a great thinker that "the things that are for you, gravitate towards you," and judging by the way in which the Fates had involved me—as by some law of gravitation—into the matter of the opium den mystery, the working out of that mystery to its unravelment seemed to be my destiny.

In the meantime, where was Grant? I had left him in the den, disguised as a Chinaman, his identity apparently unsuspected even by the Dumpling.

It is, of course, within the bounds of possibility that the Dumpling had all the time known perfectly well that my story of having come to the den merely in search of "copy" was likely to be true, and that the supposed Chinaman upstairs, smoking opium, was in reality Detective Grant. I say, it is within the bounds of possibility that it is so, but in my own mind I was entirely convinced that the identity of Grant with the Chinaman was quite unsuspected. If that were so, the fact that I had made good my escape from the den would cause—and evidently had caused—something like a panic among the members of the gang. It was no doubt because they believed me to be Grant, and knew me to be uninjured and at large, that, within an hour or two of my escape, they had cleared out of the den, taking all their effects with them.

In the meantime—to repeat the question I have already put—where was Grant? Had he, after I had gone that evening, said or done anything to arouse suspicion, and been murdered by the Dumpling's orders? Or had he been allowed to depart, unsuspected and unharmed? And was his present mysterious disappearance due to the fact that he had followed up the gang after the flight, and was still engaged in watching their movements and in completing the chain of evidence against them? For that he had—either of his own, or of somebody else's choosing—vanished, and left no trace behind, was absolutely certain. I had gone straight from the scene of the negro's murder to the nearest post office, and had wired to Grant's chambers in Adelphi Terrace, asking for an appointment, and that a reply be sent immediately to the Savage Club, where I intended to lunch. Arrived at the club I found Grant's man-servant awaiting me. He said that his master had gone out the previous morning, and had neither returned nor sent a message. There was, of course, nothing unusual in this, for a detective's goings and comings are necessarily uncertain; but, remembering the circumstances under which I had last seen my friend, I could not help feeling uneasy.

In a restless mood I strolled out of the club and walked City-wards, along the Embankment. From the headquarters of an evening newspaper, in the neighbourhood of Tudor Street, the newsboys were rushing, shouting as they ran, and making of the place a very Babel with their bellowings.

"'Ere y'are, sir! Terrible river tragedy! Three bodies found in the Thames this morning!"

Purchasing a paper from the nearest boy, I scanned it eagerly, anxiously. Beyond a paragraph recording the bare fact that the bodies of three men, supposed to be sailors, had been found at Dead Man's Point, Canvey Island, the spot where the corpses of those drowned in the Thames are sometimes washed ashore, there was little to satisfy my curiosity. I had not walked a score of yards before a fresh bevy of newsboys burst from another newspaper distributing centre.

"Spesh'l!" they yelled. "Great river mystery! Three persons drowned in the Thames! Mysterious circumstances! Suspected murder! 'Ere y'are, Sir! Spesh'l! Latest particulars!"

Again I purchased a paper, to find, in the stop-press portion of the print, the following paragraph:

"THE GREAT RIVER MYSTERY.

"The bodies have been removed to 'The Lobster Smack Inn,' Hole Haven, Canvey Island, to await identification."

In my present mood, action of some sort was imperative, and as a cab was passing, I hailed it, and calling out "Fenchurch Street Station—fast as you can," jumped in.

At Fenchurch I took the first train to Benfleet, ferrying over the creek which at high tide separates Canvey from the mainland, and making my way across the island to the "Lobster Smack" at Hole Haven, where I asked to be allowed to see the bodies.

They were lying in an outhouse, side by side, each figure decently covered by a cloth. The first to be exposed I recognised without surprise, and at a glance, as that of the hapless Parker. He was dressed just as he had been when I last saw him, and with the handcuffs still on his wrists.

The second body was, to the best of my belief, that of his late associate, Smudgy. I could not swear to the features, for Smudgy had been stationed at the top of the staircase while I was in the opium den, and I had kept too close an eye upon the Dumpling, and the man who had remained with him in the room, to pay much attention to what was going on outside. Unless I was very much mistaken, however, the shabby greeny-fawn dust coat and the frayed shepherds' plaid trousers were the same which I had seen upon one of the two men who had remained on guard at the head of the stairs, and had afterwards been despatched, in company with Parker, to cut off my retreat at the back of the house. When I had last seen him, he had been in full flight across the moon-lit space of waste land, and in a direction away from the river. Whether he was dead or alive when he got into the water, or how he came to be there at all, I had no means of knowing, and could only conjecture that, finding he had been duped, and fearing the Dumpling's anger on hearing of my escape, Smudgy had returned to the river in search of myself and Parker, and had been accidentally drowned. The third body was next uncovered. Apparently the corpse, in its passage down the river, had been caught by the screw of a passing steamer, and so cut and crushed as to be unrecognisable. The bones of all the limbs were twisted and broken, the body beaten almost into a pulp, and the whole of the face sliced off, as if by a stroke of the steamer's swiftly revolving screw.

Then, for the first and, I hope, last time in my life, I fainted—fainted from sheer horror, for around the otherwise naked body was a leather belt from which a ragged inch of what had once been trousering still clung. Looking more closely, I saw that it was of blue silk, with tiny zigzagged threads of silver interwoven. Not many hours ago I had seen a man who, to my positive knowledge, always wore a leather belt (he had at one time been a sailor) around his waist. He had then been clad in Chinese trousering of the identical pattern—blue silk with a tiny zigzagged thread of interwoven silver. That man was my unhappy friend, Robert Grant, and, looking again at the body, I saw that some sort of yellow dye had recently been used to stain the face and hands and neck.

CHAPTER X.

I TURN BURGLAR.

As I had now decided to devote myself to finding the man known as the Dumpling, and to the clearing up of the mystery of my friend's death and of the opium den, the first question to be asked (it was the question I put to myself as I walked away from the inn) was, "Did the Dumpling really believe me to be Grant?" If that were so, it was possible that Grant had to the last successfully maintained his disguise, and had met his death accidentally while shadowing the fugitives, who had probably made their escape by way of the water. Or it was possible that, without suspecting the supposed Chinaman to be Grant, something may have happened after my departure to arouse the Dumpling's suspicions in regard to Grant's good faith, in which case short work would no doubt be made of the intruder.

What was more likely, for instance, than that, hearing the uproar downstairs, after I had locked myself in the kitchen, and fearing that I was being murdered, Grant had rushed down to my assistance, and so betrayed himself? In which case, the Dumpling would have made no bones about knocking him on the head, or otherwise despatching him and throwing the body into the river. But, apart from the question whether my friend had met his death by accident or by intention, the facts seemed to justify me in assuming that the Dumpling had really believed me to be Grant, the detective. The reader will remember that, after I had locked myself in the kitchen, the Dumpling had called out, "Don't say you haven't killed your man! He mustn't leave the place alive. It's Robert Grant, the detective. I had word that he'd tracked us, and meant trying to get in here to-night."

All this seemed strongly to point to the fact that the Dumpling did indeed believe me to be the hated detective. How he had got wind of Grant's intention to effect an entrance to the den, or how Grant had contrived successfully to effect that entrance, and to disarm suspicion, I did not know; but, supposing that news of the threatened danger had only reached the ears of the Dumpling a few moments before my arrival, and before he had time to turn his suspicions in other directions—the fact that the news was followed by the entrance of a suspicious stranger, who could give no better explanation for his presence than a lame and apparently trumped-up story about a commission to write a magazine article on opium dens, would certainly lend colour to the assumption that I was the expected man. The determined and desperate efforts which had subsequently been made to murder me, all seemed to point the same way; and I decided to start my investigation by assuming that the Dumpling and his accomplices had believed, and still believed, me to be none other than Robert Grant, the detective.

If that were so, my escape would cause something like a panic among them, and would lead to their taking immediate steps to discover my whereabouts, and to put me out of the way. The first of these immediate steps would be to set a watch upon Grant's house; and to discover whether this was being done, must be my very first business. The fact that Grant's house was being watched—unless, of course, I could satisfy myself that the watching was being done by the police—would not only go far to prove the accuracy of my theory, but would also be the means of putting me upon the track of the Dumpling or of his accomplices.

Naturally, I had to go to work very carefully. Were I, even if skilfully disguised, to do so much as walk twice, or even once, up the street in which Grant's house was situated, I should be in danger of attracting attention. Shadowing the house by concealing myself in dark doorways and lurking around corners, was quite out of the question, and the common plan of posing as a lodger, and hiring a room or rooms in an opposite or neighbouring house, would be equally impracticable.

Even if I commissioned a friend to make the necessary inquiries, I should have to take possession of my lodgings—if suitable lodgings with a view of the street were found, which was by no means certain—more or less openly; and having once taken possession, I could not get in and out without attracting attention.

Everyone who knows the West End of London is familiar with the somewhat shabby side streets which borrow gentility and grandeur from the fact that they are situated near, or off, a fashionable square, from which they take their name. Grant lived in Taunton Place, a modest little street consisting of two rows of small houses which abutted upon the many mansions of aristocratic Taunton Square. Driving through Taunton Place, sitting well back and out of sight in the recesses of a four-wheel cab, I observed an empty house on the opposite side of the way to Grant's, and almost at the corner where Taunton Place and Taunton Square converged. Waiting till night had set in, I burgled this empty house from the back, and began my watch.

The result was in every way satisfactory. Grant's house was undoubtedly being watched, and by a man who, it was not difficult to see, was doing double duty. He was keeping a constant eye not only upon No. 10, Taunton Place, where Grant resided, but also upon a big, pretentious, bow-windowed and pillar-porticoed mansion known as No. 5, Taunton Square.

Again and again I saw him pass the windows of the big house and look in; again and again I saw him watching, from his corner, everyone who called either at No. 10, Taunton Place, or at No. 5, Taunton Square.

After a time a well-dressed man walked up to No. 5, Taunton Square, knocked, and, when the door was opened, entered. He remained there for twenty minutes, and when he came out was promptly followed by the shadower. The coast being thus clear, I left my own post, and on making inquiries at a tavern where I called for a glass of beer, was told that No. 5, Taunton Square had recently been taken by a gentleman from America, named Carleton, a widower and reputed millionaire, who lived there with his daughter, Kate, and his unmarried sister. Here again was an interesting discovery which promised developments. The hapless Parker had told me of seven millionaires who once a month repaired to a tavern in Shadwell, where they dined upon humble fare, drank "four half" out of pint pots, and smoked shag tobacco in clay pipes. It did not seem to be an improbable story, and, personally, I had a secret and sneaking sympathy—due possibly to my own low tastes—with anything which promised so complete and sensible a return to nature. I have myself partaken—not lavishly, perhaps, but with gusto—of malt liquors, served in pewter pots in country taverns, have smacked my lips (another evidence of a debased nature), and have sat back in my chair, sighing with replete contentment, and possibly with an inner man by no means indifferently fortified by that excellent complement to good beer—bread and cheese. At such times I have called life good, and have found myself in peace and charity with all my neighbours.

Did all self-made millionaires renew their youth, and remind themselves of their struggling days, by becoming members of the club of which Parker had spoken, they would afterwards, I am persuaded, return to the scene of their splendour in a humble and chastened frame of mind, which might possibly prompt them to do something more permanent, and more sensible, for their less fortunate fellow creatures than the founding of free libraries. I may add that I do not claim any copyright in the idea, and that should Mr. Andrew Carnegie be as assiduous a reader of my instructive writings as it is to be hoped a gentleman so interested in the free circulation of sound literature should be, he need fear no action for infringement of copyright, should he be disposed to devote the remainder of his—I fear—fast vanishing millions to such a purpose.

But to return to my story.

According to Parker's statement, the Dumpling, whose studies of natural history had possibly led him to the conclusion that every creature which comes into the world is so constituted that other and smaller creatures should prey upon it, had so far fallen in with the existing scheme of things as to decide to play the part of a plutocratic parasite. His plan was forcibly to kidnap a millionaire when on his way to or from the Shadwell banquet, and to hold him to ransom for an immense sum, which was to go into the pockets of the Dumpling and his accomplices. The fact, then, that a shadower—presumably acting on behalf of Dumpling and Company—was carefully watching the house of a millionaire, seemed not only to confirm the truth of Parker's story, but to point to the very man whom the Dumpling intended to kidnap and to bleed.

To trap a fox, it is of service to know upon which particular chicken-house he is concentrating his attention.

While Brer Fox Dumpling was engaged in stalking and carrying off Brer Rooster Millionaire, Brer Rabbit Rissler might, by keeping an eye upon Brer Rooster, succeed in learning the whereabouts of, and ultimately in stalking and trapping, Brer Fox himself. For the moment the Dumpling's shadower was off duty, as regards the watch he was keeping upon No. 10, Taunton Place and No. 5, Taunton Square; being engaged, as I had reason to know, in following up the caller at Mr. Carleton's house.

Having satisfied myself that no understudy had come to take the shadower's place or to relieve guard, I jumped into the first four-wheeler that passed.

"Drive to No. 5, Taunton Square," I said to the cabby, "and when we are there, get down and knock at the door. Meanwhile, I'll wait in the cab till the door's opened, so that I can slip in at once. If anybody asks you who I am and where you took me up, say at the Hotel Cecil, and that you think I'm on a company-promoting job, as you have driven me already to the houses of half a dozen company-director millionaires. Here's half-a-crown—no, I'll make it two half-crowns, if you do as I tell you, and hold your tongue."

With a nod and a grin he opened the cab-door and I got in. In less than two minutes we were at No. 5, Taunton Square, and the instant the door of the house was opened, in reply to the driver's knock, I was out of the cab and had slipped inside and shut the door behind me, before the astonished flunkey could as much as ask my name.

"Is Mr. Carleton in?" I snapped. "I've got some very important news for him, and must see him without a moment's delay."

I spoke authoritatively, even sharply, and in no way as a stranger who is unassured of his welcome.

"No, sir," the fellow answered respectfully. "He isn't in just now."

"When will he be?" I demanded.

"Well, sir, that's just what I can't say. If you'll take a seat in the library, I'll ask Miss Kate if she has any news. She'll be——"

"Yes," I said peremptorily, "that'll do. Take me to her at once. Don't delay in sending up word. There's not an instant to lose. Take me to her straight."

Somewhat doubtfully, but scarcely liking to disobey one who spoke with so confident an air, the man led the way to a door at the end of the hall, and was just about to knock when it opened, and I saw standing before me none other than my Lady of the Lake.

"Forgive this intrusion," I said, "but I bring you news of your father."

"I am relieved to hear it," she answered cordially, but quite coolly. "It is very strange that he should neither have returned last night nor sent a message. You are sure that he is safe and well?"

For the moment I was so taken aback that I faltered. Was I, then, too late? Had the Dumpling already carried out his villainous purpose? Then, pulling myself together, I answered, cheerfully:

"Yes, he is safe and well—make yourself quite easy about that; and I know with whom he is staying. I will tell you all about it, if you will allow me."

"Please come in," she said.

CHAPTER XI.

"WHAT'S YOUR LITTLE GAME?"

Then she recognised me. Except for the fact that her face suddenly flamed and then as suddenly hardened, her breeding stood her in good stead, and with cold, clear eyes, which looked as indifferently into mine as if I had been a stranger calling to solicit a subscription to some charity, she pointed me to a chair.

"You bring me news of my father?" she inquired, with a composure which was possibly assumed for my benefit, or, rather, for my discomfiture.

"That is why I am here," I answered, bowing gravely, and in my turn assuming an indifference which I strove to make as studied as her own.

"He is safe and well," I went on. "Of that let me assure you positively. He is detained only upon a matter of business, and but for the fact that other people, as well as himself, are concerned in it, he could return, if he chose, this very night."

This much I said to allay her anxiety. That it was a diplomatic rather than an exact statement of the facts, I do not deny, but though I would unhesitatingly have told a lie to spare her, I was at least within the truth in saying that the moment of Mr. Carleton's return lay entirely within his own choice, since, once he had consented to pay the ransom demanded by the Dumpling—and the money, as well as the safety of his kidnappers, was secured—Mr. Carleton would in all probability be set at liberty, and could then return, as I had said. Into the question whether he would or would not consent thus to be bled of a large sum of money, I had no intention of entering. The business before me was to break the bad news as gently and as gradually as possible; and in breaking bad news it does not always do to blurt out the undiluted truth.

"Thank you," she said stiffly. "I wonder, in that case, that my father did not communicate with me himself. Am I to understand that you are his messenger? And am I to content myself with the bare knowledge, and only on your assurance, that my father is detained on business, and may or may not return to-night?"

"That's as you choose, Miss Carleton," I made answer, somewhat foolishly.

"You have the advantage of me, sir," she replied icily, "for, to the best of my belief, you and I have never met before. Is that not so?"

It is a woman's prerogative to forget or to remember, as her instinct or her inclinations dictates, and, in view of the somewhat unusual and unconventional circumstances of our first meeting, I was by no means sure that I did not like and admire her the more, rather than the less, for the way in which she had met the situation. Unhesitatingly I fathered the lie, and with similar hardihood.

"That is so," I replied coldly.

Rightly or wrongly, I fancied that she softened slightly, so feeling that I should do myself more justice if I told my story while her manner was less freezing, I came to the point at once.

"May I tell you what I know, and how I came to know, of the business which has detained your father?" I inquired. "I shall not keep you many minutes."

"I shall be curious to hear it," she answered, speaking more graciously than hitherto, and, seating herself in a dark corner where I could not see her face, she prepared to listen.

I told the thing well, better—though, of course, much more briefly—than I have told it in these pages, for the excitement with which she listened, suppressed and controlled though it was, seemed to communicate itself to me. The only moment when she bristled, if I may use so inapplicable a word about so lovely a woman, was at the start.

"All that I have to tell has happened within the last twenty-four hours," I began, "for only yesterday I was taking a country holiday, and, I fear, kicking up my heels like a mischievous colt who has broken out of bounds, and is sadly in need of a sound whipping to teach him to behave himself. But," I made haste to get on, for the air around me seemed suddenly to turn chilly, "since then, short time ago as it is, I have had a 'breaking in,' and been made to answer to lash and spur, and to look death in the face, and to fight for my life, in so extraordinary a way, that my only fear is you'll not believe my story when you hear it."

Then I told of my recall to town, of my commission to visit the opium den, and of the subsequent happenings up to the moment when I had stepped out of the cab and into her house. As I brought my recital to a close, the door opened, and a lumpy-figured, masculine-looking woman, hard-faced, large-featured, entered the room. Her skin was rough, red and grained like brick-dust, and on either cheek was a patch of darker red—almost of purple—which might have been put on by means of a stencil plate, so hard, so abrupt, and so definite were the lines where it began or ended. An incipient moustache and a deep voice seemed to enter a protest, less against the petticoats she was wearing than against her small and well-formed hands and feet.

"Clara!" she exclaimed menacingly, "who is this?"

Knowing that Miss Carleton's name was Kate, I was somewhat astonished to hear her thus addressed, for it was not until later that I learned the facts. The elder lady, who was Miss Carleton's only aunt, had felt not a little aggrieved that her niece had not been called after herself. So, by way of entering a protest against the omission of the compliment which she felt ought to have been paid to her, and notwithstanding Mr. Carleton's annoyance, and the fact that everybody else called the girl Kate, the elder lady insisted upon addressing her niece as Clara, as though the girl were actually her namesake.

"Clara!" she repeated. "Who is this?"

The rising remonstrant inflexion which she placed upon her niece's name, and the way in which she said "Who is this?" her deep voice booming like a three-peal bell, sounding first a high, then a low, and then a deep bass growling note, took me so by surprise that I stared at her open-mouthed.

"This gentleman has brought me news of my father, aunt," replied Kate tremulously. "He's afraid, I'm afraid, that father has been made a prisoner by blackmailers, and that he won't be released until money has been paid for ransom."

"How absurd!" said the other lady, and in spite of the seriousness of the situation, it was as much as I could do to refrain from laughing, so irresistibly, so ludicrously, did her voice remind me of Mr. Penley in Charley's Aunt.

Then, like a bell which pauses for a moment between its chimes, she boomed again, "How very absurd!"

Miss Carleton turned appealingly to me. "Will you please tell my aunt what you have just told me?" she said.

Haltingly and half-heartedly I repeated my story, the elder lady pursing up her fleshy lips, rolling her eyes, and indulging in long-drawn sniffs, so plainly indicating an incredulity which was lost in admiration and wonder at its own magnificent power of control, that I bungled the thing sadly, and was not surprised when, at the end of the narrative, she rose majestically from her chair, and rang a rich peal of warning and command.

"Clara, leave the room. I will join you, shortly."

She spoke as before, on one note, until she came to the last few words, when her voice suddenly dropped an entire octave, and then sank in rumbling silence, by falling, first one, and then another, note. This, I found, was her invariable way of speaking. In effect, it reminded me of a person walking with even step along a corridor, until he reaches a flight of stairs, down eight of which he suddenly falls, at one flight, recovering himself sufficiently, at the ninth, to rise and stalk majestically down the last two or three.

If, in the course of my story, I do not again allude to this peculiarity, it will not be because she ever lost the mannerism in question, but because, the mannerism having already been fully described, a repeated description of it in detail would, I fear, soon become wearisome. It is so much easier, so much cheaper, if I may use the word, to caricature a mannerism than to indicate character—to describe a personal eccentricity than to indicate a type—that I am not a little shamefaced at having written at such length regarding this peculiarity of one of my characters. So marked a feature could not, however, be passed over in silence, for I do not recall one solitary occasion when she failed to drop her voice in the way I have described when coming to the end of what she had to say.

Miss Carleton gone, her aunt, regarding me majestically, rang the bell. When the man-servant appeared, she pointed at me.

"I wish to confer with my niece, Metcalfe. Meanwhile, that person must not leave the house or this room. If he attempts to do so, call up the other men-servants, and secure him."

With a warning glance at Metcalfe, and a glare at me, the good lady left the room.

She was away about twenty minutes. On returning she dismissed the servant, and seating herself, wheeled round in her chair, to turn all her batteries upon my unhappy self. Her voice was, I fancied, a shade less stately, a shade sharper, a shade brisker, and more business-like:

"What's your little game?"

CHAPTER XII.

JOHN CARLETON'S BURGLAR ALARM.

I stared at her blankly.

"Game?" I said. "Game? I haven't any game. You've heard my story. It's the truth. I haven't anything else to tell or any game to play. What do you take me for?"

"Rats!" she answered, shortly.

Then she strode over to a side table upon which lay a square box with a button, like that of an electric bell.

"Have you ever seen one of these?" she inquired, pointing at it. "It is my brother's own invention, and he is thinking of patenting it. When this button is pressed (there's one of the machines in each room), every door leading out of the house, and every window (they are all of plate glass) by which it would be possible to escape, is simultaneously and automatically locked; a burglar alarm is set ringing in the kitchen, in the hall, and in all the men-servants' rooms, as well as in the stables; and by a particularly ingenious arrangement, of which my brother is especially proud, communication is also established with the nearest police station. Once inside the house, no thief, or burglar, if this button is pressed and the machinery is set going, can hope to escape, for he is as neatly trapped as any rat.

"Well, young man (I haven't been told your name), since it has leaked out that my brother is a millionaire and a philanthropist, every known dodge in the begging-letter line and in the blackmailing line has been tried on us; but, for sheer brazenry, I must say that your tale beats all. My niece believes in you—more fool she!—but I'll tell you what I think: every word that you have told us—except, perhaps, the fact of my brother having been kidnapped by this man you call the Dumpling—is an entire concoction; and if he really has been kidnapped as you say, why, you are clearly the kidnapper's accomplice, and have come here to sound us, and to pave the way for the abominable blackmailing which you call holding to ransom. If any further proof of your confederacy with the blackmailer is needed, that proof is supplied by the facts which my niece has just made known to me. She tells me that only yesterday morning, when she and I were at my brother's country house, she found that someone had rowed out to the centre of the lake in our boat, and, supposing it was I who was in the boat and that I had fallen asleep, she swam out and found you in it. You were there, of course, in your capacity of spy and shadower to your employer, and in order to acquaint yourself with my brother's movements. It's a pity she didn't leave you to be drowned—not that you'll be that, for I clearly foresee another fate in store for you, and a less pleasant one. And now, if you please, I propose sending for the police. I wonder if they'll believe your story."

"No," I said smilingly, "they won't. I can tell you that before you send, if it will be saving you any trouble."

"Ho! ho!" she said, triumphantly. "So you admit that I'm one too many for you. You're not such a fool as I thought. Anyhow, you're 'cute enough to know when you're dealing with a clever woman. It's wise of you. If you had persisted in brazening me out with that preposterous tale, you'd have been clapped between four walls this very night. I mean what I say. But I'm not a hard-hearted woman, and, by the look of you, you ought to be a cut above being the accomplice of criminals and blackmailers."

After a pause, during which she regarded me with a stern but not altogether unfriendly eye, the good lady spoke again, this time almost pityingly:

"An accomplice of criminals and blackmailers! What brought you to it, young man? Drink—debt—gambling—or worse? Come, now, I don't want to be hard upon you. Make a clean breast of it, and I'll do what I can to help you back to an honest life. You have already confessed the falsehood of your story, and if——"

"I have done nothing of the sort," I interrupted indignantly. "My story is perfectly true—every word of it; and if you'll let me——"

"Your story perfectly true!" she thundered. "Why, you told me just now, with your own mouth, when I was going to send for the police—and that reminds me: I'll ring the bell and send for them now—that you knew they wouldn't believe it. If you're not the——"

"I know they won't believe it, because I've already told them," I cut in. "I see a telephone bell in the corner there. Ring up Inspector S——, of New Scotland Yard, or the Superintendent at —— Station, and ask them whether I haven't already been to them with the identical story. They don't believe me now, because they don't want to; but when the inquest is held and the facts come out, they'll find, and you'll find, that every word I have said is perfectly true. Or," I added—for she had actually rung the bell when threatening to send for the police, and the servant had come to the door in response—"or send out and buy an evening paper. You'll find the fact of the finding of the three bodies off Canvey Island, just as I have told you."

"You can go, Metcalfe," she said to the waiting servant. "I shan't want you at present."

Then she turned to me again.

"I don't know what to do," she said undecidedly. "If I let you go, and your story turns out to be a lie, you'll have decamped of course when you're wanted. If I hand you over to the police, you'll be in safe keeping and——"

"It will mean a night in gaol, if you give me in charge at this hour," I interrupted, "in which case I shall certainly bring an action against you for false imprisonment."

"Yes," she said meditatively, walking over to a side-table and turning over some books as she spoke. "Yes, I suppose you would; and if your story is true I'm not sure that I should blame you if you did, for no one likes to be imprisoned when they've only told the truth. For the matter of that, I don't know that I shouldn't dislike the publicity of an action for false imprisonment more than you'd dislike the imprisonment; and my brother—there's no escape from that fact—would be furious with me for getting my name and his into the papers. I didn't believe a word of your story when I first heard it, but looking at you more closely, I must say that you don't look or talk like a liar, and I've a good mind to follow my instincts and trust you, after all."

The magnanimity of this sudden outburst of confidence in my integrity was somewhat lessened by the fact that, while affecting to turn over some books on the side-table, she had all the time been scanning an evening newspaper which lay neatly folded on the top of a pile of books. I had purchased a copy of the same journal earlier in the evening, and was well aware that a paragraph, describing the finding of the three bodies, was printed in large type at the top of the first page. Folded as the paper was, this paragraph was the most prominent item of news, and could scarcely fail to catch even a cursory eye.

Possibly the reading of the paragraph sufficiently confirmed my story to assist her to a decision.

"Come here, young man. I want to have a look at you," she said peremptorily, walking over to the light.

I obeyed, and for half a minute was subjected to the scrutiny of her keen but not unkindly eyes.

"That'll do!" she said, pushing me away testily. "I'm going to make a fool of myself; but anyhow, I'm going to trust you, fool or no fool. And now tell me what it is you want."

Some instinct told me that she was a woman to gain whose confidence one must give one's confidence. Looking her full in the face I made answer boldly:

"I want to marry your niece."

CHAPTER XIII.

THE FACE AT THE BROKEN WINDOW.

Miss Clara sat down—perhaps I should say collapsed down. But for the fact that a huge Chesterfield stood immediately at her back, ready to receive the fair burden of her charms, I am persuaded that her ultimate destination would have been the floor. The suddenness of my statement "dropped" her as neatly as a good marksman "drops" his bird.

Sinking—"all of a flutter," as she afterwards described it, thus unconsciously confirming the aptness of my bird imagery—upon the Chesterfield, this truly remarkable woman merely observed, "Well, I never!" and then as speedily recovering herself, sat up and said, quietly:

"I knew there was something behind it all along."

This was said, I may observe, not in relation to the Chesterfield which had so fortunately been behind her, but to my story.

"Of course you did," I said. "Anyone could see that with half an eye. There are two things behind it. First, I want you to help me to marry your niece, and second, I want to help you to get your brother out of the hands of these blackmailers."

In thus coupling our common interests, and in thus bespeaking, if not assuming, her assistance on my behalf, I was taking a good deal for granted, but she did not seem to resent it.

"You have plenty of impudence, young man," she said, smiling grimly. "You'll be wanting someone to help you to marry me next."

"That," I answered, "is the one regret I shall have, if I succeed in winning your niece. It will prevent me from ever hoping to win the heart and hand (and what a pretty hand it is too!) of her charming and accomplished aunt."

Then I told of my well-deserved ducking in the lake, admitting frankly that I had lied when I had said I could not swim, but pleading my cause and the excuses to be urged in my favour with all the eloquence at my command, and, judging by her increasing friendliness, not altogether without success.

"And now," I said, when I had made an end of it, "now about your brother and the kidnapping?"

"Yes," she replied, "we have to think of that. I expect you think that both Kate and I have taken it coolly, considering. But, you see, you don't know my brother. If you did, you'd have very little fear about his being able to take care of himself, wherever he is. What do you propose?"

"First of all," I said, "I'll ask you to ascertain whether the house is still being watched. You are taking me very much on trust, and if it should turn out that the shadower has returned to his post, or another shadower has been put on duty, it will go a little way to confirm my story, and to prove that I'm not altogether an impostor."

"I either trust people altogether, or don't trust them at all," she answered. "But you've been frank with me, so I'll tell you now that I haven't taken you so entirely upon trust as you imagine. There's an evening paper on that table which has an account of the finding of the bodies, just as you mentioned; and when I went upstairs to speak to my niece, I took the opportunity to peep up and down the road from behind the blinds. There is a man watching this house, and also a house somewhere in Taunton Square, just as you said. It certainly is very curious. Come in!"

The last two words were spoken in response to a knock. The door, when opened, revealed Metcalfe with a telegram on a salver. She read the slip of orange paper quite coolly, and then passed it to me, saying, "From my brother."

It was as follows:—

Hope Kate and you not anxious last night. Letter I wrote early yesterday morning explaining was called to Glasgow on business not posted by oversight. Only just discovered it in my pocket. So sorry. May be away some days.—John.

"So, you see, he's safe enough," Miss Clara said, smiling. "Do you really think you're right in thinking he is one of the millionaires they want to kidnap? I admit it is a curious coincidence that someone should be watching the house."

"Perhaps I have jumped to conclusions somewhat," I said. "But if someone is really watching the house again, I ought to be at work, not wasting any more of your time and my time by gossiping here—especially as it turns out after all that Mr. Carleton is safe. If there is any back door I could slip out by, I think I'll either follow the shadower myself, and see if I can't find out where he comes from, or perhaps even try to get New Scotland Yard to arrest him on suspicion. He's the only clue I've got to the whereabouts of the Dumpling, and it won't do for me to lose sight of him. What's that noise, I wonder, in the street? There's something amiss, clearly. It won't do for me to be seen leaving the house. Would you mind letting your servant inquire?"

"Certainly, if you wish it," she said, ringing the bell.

"Metcalfe, just find out what that disturbance in the street is," she said, when the man appeared, "and come back to report to me."

"I have been out to see already, m'm," Metcalfe answered respectfully. "A man's been stabbed—killed, too. They say he's a brother of Mr. Grant the detective, who lives at No. 10, Taunton Place, and very like him, and that a man who has been hanging about the street all day stabbed him just as he was coming out of No. 10. Why he did it nobody knows, unless the murderer's a criminal that Mr. Grant was after, and stabbed the brother, thinking it was the detective himself. And the worst of it is he's got away, too! But what's that?"

From the back of the house there came a sound that was suspiciously like the stealthy breaking of glass.

It so happens that I have extraordinary sharp hearing, and was able with some exactness to locate the direction whence the sound came.

Calling out "Follow me, Metcalfe!" I dashed down the stairs and through a door which led to a corridor, at the end of which was a conservatory. A cold wind indicated either an open door or window—perhaps a broken window. As I raced along the corridor—the bewildered Metcalfe so far behind me that I could hear his heavy steps descending the stairs—I saw that though all the other plants in the conservatory were perfectly still, one white-blossomed flower in a pot was swaying and moving as if in a draught, and the next moment there peered, through a broken pane of glass behind it, the white and wicked face of the Dumpling.

CHAPTER XIV.

MISS CLARA "SAVES MY LIFE."

One arm was stretched through the broken window towards the conservatory door, which he was trying to unlock; but seeing that someone was approaching he withdrew his arm hurriedly, and the white face that had been peering through the jagged hole in the window-pane disappeared. The next instant I was at the conservatory door, all agog to unfasten it and to give chase, when suddenly, from every part of the building, came the ringing of alarm bells, and, with a sharp click, a bolt upon the conservatory door slid into its place. Clearly Miss Clara had pressed the button of the burglar alarm, thus locking the very door to which my hand was then stretched, and so effectually shutting me in, and a possible housebreaker out. With one twist of my fist I turned the key to which the Dumpling had been directing his attention. Then I tried to slide back the only remaining fastening—the bolt which had been shot into its place by the burglar alarm. It held fast, and cursing Miss Clara, her inventful brother, and his too ingenious burglar box, I tugged at the door with all my strength, but to no purpose. The thing would not budge an inch, and when I snatched up a piece of rockwork from a fernery and bashed desperately at the hateful bolt, I only made matters worse. So far from loosening, the bolt seemed only to set its teeth, bulldogwise, the more tenaciously for my blows. Grinning with rage, and with the strain of concentrating all the strength of my body into my two fists, I threw down the rockwork, with a word I hesitate to repeat, but which Metcalfe, upon whose foot the piece of rockwork fell, had no hesitation in forcibly repeating, what time he limped upon one leg around the conservatory with a grin of pain upon his face more beautiful to behold than the grin which had so recently been upon mine. For the present it was clear that, thanks to Miss Clara and the invention of her resourceful brother, the quarry had escaped me. Long before I could have knocked out sufficient glass to crawl through the conservatory window, long before Miss Clara could have reversed the action of the machine and so released the lock upon the door, the Dumpling would be far away.

"THERE PEERED THROUGH A BROKEN PANE OF GLASS ... THE WHITE AND WICKED FACE OF THE DUMPLING."

Under the circumstances I thought it wise to put the best face I could upon my defeat, delicately hinting at the same time to Metcalfe that I should be personally obliged if he would make it convenient to do the same upon his pain, since much as one might admire a stone gargoyle which bore a resemblance to a human face, a human face which bore a striking likeness to a stone gargoyle in pain was less admirable and more alarming.

"And now," I said, "we'll return to the drawing-room and to Miss Clara, and get her to open the conservatory door so that we can search the garden without delay."

The returning to the drawing-room was easier to speak of than to accomplish, for the door, leading into the corridor from the conservatory, had been securely locked by the same fell agency which had so effectually interfered to prevent my giving chase to the Dumpling; and it was some time before I could persuade the parties, on the other side, that the persons clamouring for entrance were not burglars or murderers, but only Metcalfe and myself.

After a word or two to Miss Clara, I returned, accompanied by Metcalfe, to the conservatory, and thence to the garden. As I had feared, all was to no purpose. The broken window-pane was the only evidence of our recent visitor, for though we scoured the place from end to end, we could not find as much as a footprint by way of a clue. Without a warrant from the police—which I had no possibility of obtaining—I could not hope to explore the neighbouring garden, where it was possible the Dumpling might still be concealed; so we returned, somewhat chapfallen, to the house. Miss Clara, who was awaiting us with a perturbed countenance, refused to share my dissatisfaction at the result which had been brought about by her ill-timed action in setting the burglar alarm at work.

"In all probability I saved your life," she said calmly. "A man like that, who had just committed a murder, and no doubt had come here to commit another, or to burgle the house, was tolerably sure to have been armed; and if you had been able to open the conservatory door and to follow him out, he would in all probability have shot you at sight."

"I thought you said that all the windows were plate glass," I grumbled. "If so, how did the man contrive to break that pane and to get an arm through?"

"I said all the windows in the house," corrected Miss Clara. "The conservatory isn't in the house, and no one could get into the house, from the conservatory, without passing through the corridor door, which, as you know, was fast locked, like the rest of the doors and the windows, when I pressed the burglar bell.

"Well, you have done your best, Mr. Rissler. No man can do more. We shall have the police here directly. They have been a long time in coming as it is, but I expect the entire staff is out hunting for the murderer of poor young Grant. What shall we do when they come?"

"Tell them the facts, of course," I said, "and let them see the broken window-pane and examine the garden for themselves. If I hadn't supposed they were already on the way here, and if I hadn't been in such a hurry to get out and search the garden, as not to give myself a moment to think, I should have urged upon you the necessity of sending for them before. Hush! Was that a ring at the front door? I think so. Very possibly it is they."

It was—a sergeant and an ordinary constable, decent fellows, honest fellows, conscientious fellows, both of them, but not, I imagine, overburdened either of them with brains. Plainly they did not associate the attempt to enter the house with the murder. The impression they gave was that they thought a mere alarm of burglary very small beer when compared with an actual murder. Miss Clara told them that while she and I were talking, we heard the sound of falling glass below, that I had gone down and had seen a man's face at a broken window. She explained the circumstances which prevented me from following him, and added that I believed the face to be that of a man respecting whom I had laid information at Scotland Yard that very morning.

The sergeant and the constable listened to Miss Clara's statement without excitement, and when she had made an end of it expressed a wish to see the conservatory, the broken window and the garden, made a few notes, took my name and address, accepted readily the glass of whisky and water which Miss Clara suggested, but declined with equal readiness the half-crown which the same lady, by way of compensation for the trouble to which she had put them, endeavoured to press into their hands, and remarking that they had done no more than their duty, wished us good-night and so departed.

Then I turned to my hostess and unfolded my own plans.

"To tell the honest truth, Miss Carleton," I said, "I was not at all anxious to be mixed up in this new development. I shall have more than enough advertisement at the inquest, which is to be held to-morrow, on the three bodies found off Canvey, and if I am called as a witness at the inquest which will have to be held on the body of young Grant—the police and the public will begin to think my connection with both murders somewhat suspicious. If I were to have followed my inclinations I should have pretended that I was anxious to learn more of the circumstances of young Grant's murder, and should have asked you to let me slip out to see if I could pick up any news, so as to be out of the way when the police called. But a murder, a brutal murder, has been committed, and though I am still smarting from the undeserved snubbing I received when I called at Scotland Yard this morning, I should feel that I was behaving not only like a bad citizen, but as little less than a criminal, were I to keep back anything which would assist the police in their search. And now, may I get on to something else which I very much wish to say? The fact that the face I saw at the broken window was that of the Dumpling, is to me very significant. It is, you must admit, a strong confirmation of the theories I have formed, and of which I have already told you. Why did I watch Grant's house? Because if the Dumpling believed Grant to be alive, I was tolerably sure he would lose no time in putting Grant out of the way. What was the result of my watching? This—that I found someone was watching Grant's house, and not only Grant's house, but this house as well. Then came the question, Why was he watching this house? I knew from Parker that the Dumpling had planned to kidnap certain millionaires, and to hold them to ransom. Hearing on inquiry that your brother was a millionaire, I thought it not unlikely that it was he who was to have been kidnapped last night. I think so still, but I am inclined to believe that my appearance at the opium den upset the calculations of the conspirators, and so prevented them from carrying out their plans. They are still watching this house, however. Why? Because they are waiting for your brother's return so that they may learn his movements, and lay their plans accordingly.

"Then came the murder of young Grant. It may have been, or it may not have been, the work of the Dumpling and his accomplices. Personally, I haven't a moment's doubt that it was so. While all the neighbourhood is hunting for the murderer, a man tries to remove a pane of glass in your conservatory. Who is this man? Is he a burglar who, with no connection whatever with the murder, has chanced to choose this particular night to break into your house? I don't think so. He could hardly have failed to hear that a murder had just been committed in your immediate neighbourhood, and if so, would he be fool enough to select the very night when he knows the police will be wide awake and on the watch? Not likely. If he had been an ordinary burglar, he would have had his diamond with him, and would have cut out, not broken, that pane of glass. The man who broke the glass was a fugitive, and in desperate straits.

"Possibly he thought that at this hour of the night no one would be likely to come into the conservatory, and that he could lie in hiding till the hue and cry had passed. Possibly he hoped to slip through the house unobserved, and so make his way into the street from the front, in order to disarm suspicion. A man who had just committed a murder was not likely to walk boldly out of the front door of such a house as this.

"But why did the Dumpling hit upon this particular house? Was it by chance, and because it was the first which came handy when he managed to evade his pursuers by scaling a wall and lying in hiding, while they went by? I don't think so. That he did escape by scaling a wall I have very little doubt; but I believe that he made his way to the house deliberately, and with set intention. It is quite clear to me that he has designs of some sort upon this house or upon its master. Even if the design were no more than a burglary, you may be tolerably sure that so clever a criminal as he doesn't attempt to burgle a house without first acquainting himself with the position of the different rooms, and all the difficulties which would be presented in getting in and in getting out. My belief is that the Dumpling chose this house for his hiding-place deliberately. Upon this house, for some reason of his own, he is keeping a watch, and it is from this house that I must set my counter-watch for him. I have a strange presentiment that it will not be long before we shall see him here again. Someone—something—there is in this house upon whom, or upon which, he has designs. It may be its master; it may be only its master's money. To-night, if you will be so good, so very good, Miss Carleton, as to trust me thus far, I want to conceal myself in the garden. If nothing comes of it, no harm is done. If any attempt is made to enter, I shall be there to frustrate it and to give the alarm. You perhaps think my request a strange as well as a foolish one. But listen. Whether the man, looking in at the broken window-pane of the conservatory, recognised me—whether he even saw me at all, I do not know. But I saw him, and for one second's space, before the white face of him disappeared, I not only saw him, but looked him full in the eyes. And in that second I saw something else. As in a dream-tableau, I saw that same man creeping stealthily, and at the darkest, deadest hour of the night, towards the same window, and through the same garden."

CHAPTER XV.

MY FRIEND THE DUMPLING.

Romantic, Miss Clara may or may not have been; superstitious she certainly was not. For some reason of her own she had formed a not unflattering opinion of my intelligence—an opinion which, I fear, my reference to these dream-tableaux did not a little to shake. And when Miss Clara thought poorly of a person or of a thing, she said so with a directness which was somewhat disconcerting. Her comment on the words with which I closed my last chapter was:

"Mr. Rissler, don't be a fool!"

"I try not," I said lamely. "What's the particular folly of mine you have in mind at the present moment?"

"Why, this dream-tableau business, of course," she answered. "You're no fool—quite the contrary—in most respects; but I've no patience with this nonsense about dream men kneeling on your chest in a dream garden. If you've got anything on your chest, you should look after your digestion—not talk about your dreams. And that reminds me. I generally take a glass of hot milk and a biscuit before going to bed. If you are going to sit up out of doors all night in the garden, as you propose, you'll want something more substantial. Oblige me by ringing that bell. I suppose you smoke," she said, when I had made a substantial supper. "If so, you may. My brother's a great smoker, so you need have no scruples.

"What I like about you," she continued, when I had lit up in accordance with her permission, "is that you're a young man who can make up his mind. To tell me, within the first half-hour you'd ever seen me, that you wanted to marry my niece when you'd only seen her once before, was about as brazen a piece of impudence as I've ever heard of. But I'd rather a man should be that sort than one of your 'Oh, I'm sure I don't mind which' and 'I haven't any choice in the matter' kind of person."

"I count myself fortunate in the possession of your good opinion, Miss Carleton," I said with a bow.

"None of your blarney!" she answered gruffly. "Not that I mind a person being pleasant-spoken and pleasant-mannered," she added, "although Heaven knows I'm rough enough in ways and in speech myself. There's something waiting on the tip of your tongue to say. What is it?"

"There is, but your penetration alarms me," I said. "It was merely to wonder whether I might venture to inquire where your niece has been all this while, and during all these disturbing events?"

"You may. She's in her own room. I told her to stay there till I called her down. I sent up word to her not to be alarmed, before I rang the burglar bell. That's why it didn't go off before you got to the conservatory door. If I'd rung when you left the room as I should have done except for alarming Clara, you would not have got further than the corridor door."

"That was very dear and considerate and thoughtful of you," I replied. "I'm going to be very fond of you, if you'll let me, before I've done, Miss Carleton."

"Done what?" she asked grimly, but not ill-pleased.

"This cigar," I replied promptly. "I suppose you thought I was going to say before I'm your nephew-in-law; but, hasten that happy day as I would—and it cannot come too soon for me—it would seem an interminable long time to wait, if I had to put off being fond of you till then. I suppose I shan't be seeing Miss Kate again to-night."

"You'll not!" she answered bluntly. "And if you call her Kate instead of Clara, you'll not be seeing her at all, if I have anything to do with it, for call people out of their right names, no one shall, while I can help it."

The logic of a lady who, in spite of the fact that she persistently called her own niece out of the name which had been given the girl at her christening, the name by which everyone else, from her own father downwards, habitually called her, yet could thus lay down the law, was too fearful a thing for a mere male to contemplate, so I smiled weakly, and said, "I beg your pardon! 'Miss Clara,' I meant, of course. How silly of me!"

Incidentally I made a note in my memory to the effect that the best way out of the dilemma would be, when speaking of my Lady of the Lake, to refer to her as "your niece," or as "Miss Carleton."

"No," said Miss Clara, philosophically, and with the air of one who, not expecting too much from fallen human nature, is always ready to be tolerant, and to make allowance; "no, I don't say, and I don't see, that it is silly of you. That is too severe a word, and the mistake is not unnatural on your part, when you remember that her own father made it twenty years ago, and has gone on doing it ever since."

As she spoke the clock struck eleven.

"Is it so late?" I said. "I had no idea. Now, with your permission, Miss Carleton, I'll be off to the garden. I shall never forget your goodness to me to-night—taking me on trust, as you have, when everything was against me, and making me feel, now that I am about to say good-night, as if I were saying it, not to one who an hour or so ago was a complete stranger to me, but to a dear and kind and generous friend. How shall I ever thank you?"

"Don't try," she said laconically, rising. "Good-night."

I sprang to open the door for her, stooping low to raise to my lips the surprisingly small and white and well-formed hand which she extended to me.

"And now," I said to myself, when she had gone, "now for my vigil in the garden. In my dream picture only a night ago, I saw myself lying on my back, the man I am seeking kneeling over me, knife in hand. The place where this happened I could not see. But to-night, in another dream picture, I saw the same man crouched low to steal by dead of night through a garden. I wonder whether that garden and the place of my first dream are one and the same? I wonder whether it was good fortune or an evil fate which guided my feet to the opium den yesterday, and brought me and that same man to this house to-night? I wonder whether he or I have met and striven in this or in some pre-existent world? I wonder why it is that only when looking in his eyes do I see these pictures which come and go so strangely in my brain? But most of all, I wonder whether I might venture to ring the bell, and ask the gentle Metcalfe to bring me a drink. All this 'wondering' and this 'whethering' makes me feel not only uncommonly dry, but also more like the hero who never was on sea or land except in the pages of a shilling shocker, or in a melodramatic play, than like an ordinary, everyday young man who fancies that a pipeful of tobacco taken in conjunction with liquid refreshment in the shape of a stiff 'whisky,' would suit his complaint down to the ground. Anyhow, I'll try. Then for the garden, for my dream picture, and possibly for our friend and enemy, the Dumpling!"

CHAPTER XVI.

THE GHOST IN THE GARDEN.

The place selected in which to keep my watch had, I imagine, been intended by the builder for a coal-cellar; but from the fact that the walls of thick cement were set around with shelves, partitioned into squares, I concluded that some subsequent tenant had seen fit to turn it into a wine-cellar. One entered from the garden, and passing down a few stone steps, came to a wooden door like that of a coal-cellar or tool-house, opening upon a short passage, the walls of which were evenly cemented. At the end of this passage another door—of iron this time, and fitted with a patent lock—had been added; and, as it did not seem likely that anyone would trouble to protect garden tools or coals by the addition of an extra door, such as one sees in a strong room or on a safe, the presumption was, as I say, that the place had been intended for the storage or the laying down of wine. But whatever its purpose, it made a serviceable sentry-box, for by leaving the two doors open I could command a view of the garden. Seeing by the light of a vesta, which I struck on entering, that a naked gas-jet was fixed to the wall, and finding that the gas was laid on, I lit it for a moment or two while I had time to look round. Had I chosen to keep the inner door shut, I could have left the light burning all night, and with no fear of its gleam being seen from outside. But in that case I could not have kept the necessary eye upon the garden; so, after I had turned an empty champagne case into a somewhat uneasy and uncomfortable seat, I put out the light, and, opening both doors wide, sat down to commence my watch.

One!

Two!

Three!

"Three o'clock and a wet night!" I said to myself, yawning wearily. "The policeman, whom I've just heard pass, isn't likely to get wet feet, judging by the thickness of the boots he's wearing. I wonder how he manages to walk like that? One might think he did it purposely, to warn the gentle burglar to lie low while law-and-order is passing. First of all comes his heel with a flick, and then the flat of his foot with a flack, like the double beat of a flail. Flick-flack, flick-flack, flick-flack!

"But perhaps I'm blaming the poor man without a cause. It may be that it is only because we hear the policeman's tramp, sounding and echoing on an empty pavement, that we think it peculiar; and possibly my own footfalls could as readily be recognised were they heard at night, when other sounds are still.

"Now he's stopped. Trying a door or window perhaps. Now he's on the move again. Flick-flack, flick-flack, flick-flack! It seems to me that, listening here as I am, I could locate his whereabouts all down the street. All down the street, did I say? Yes, and down the next street, and the street after that, if one wished to do so. I'm sure I don't. All I want now is to see this thing through, and to get home to a cold bath and a bed. And it won't be long now, for very likely that is Robert's last beat down this way for the night—or, rather, for the morning.

"Was that something stirring at the end of the garden? Another cat, I expect. How that other brute made me jump—creeping in upon me so stealthily that I didn't know it was there, till I saw its horrible eyes, glaring at me like a ghost out of the dark!

"Here's another yawn coming. Y-a-a-a-a-ow!

"There's another yawn gone, and I seem to see quite a procession of yawns looming up before me. What a queer place it is—this thread of territory, which I call 'Half-Awake-Land'! It's a sort of boundary line—no more—between Dream-Land and Waking-Land, and as one can't stand on a boundary line, any more than one can stand on a stretched thread, I keep tumbling in and out, first into Dream-Land and then into Waking-Land all the time. One of the funny things about Half-Awake-Land is that all one's thoughts turn into pictures.

"When I yawned a few minutes ago, I said to myself that I saw 'quite a procession of yawns looming up before me,' and then, as I say, my thoughts turned into pictures, and the earth, as far as ever I could see, seemed to have as many cracks or crevasses in it as a newly ploughed field has furrows. As I looked each crack yawned open, like the huge mouth of some rude person who gapes in your face, without having the decency even to gape behind his hand, so that the world seemed to wrinkle away to the horizon's edge in a thousand opened mouths.

"Then all of a sudden I saw a great Sleep-Sea in front of me. All the waves upon it were yawns, and they came rolling in upon me, one after the other, till I feared I was going to be carried off my feet by a bigger yawn than any of the others, and so washed away and drowned.

"What a farrago of nonsense, half-soliloquy, half sleep-talking, I've been thinking or speaking—I hardly know which. Hullo! Nodding again! This won't do! If it hadn't been that I'm sitting up, instead of lying down, I should have dropped right off to sleep that time. I was nearly off my seat, as it was. It was the forward lurching of my head and body which woke me, and the jerk seemed sharp enough to snap one's backbone at the neck, not to speak of making one's heart jump inside one, like a frightened frog. What tricks one's brain plays in a moment's snatched sleep! Three seconds ago I was awake and talking about one's thoughts turning into pictures when one is half-awake and half-asleep. After that I reminded myself that I must keep awake, lest the Dumpling should steal in upon me unawares. Then I suppose that for a second's space I dropped off; and again the thought turned into a picture in my brain. I was sitting, just as I am now, looking at the incandescent burner of that lamp-post in the side street to the right of the garden. And that reminds me. It's a strong light, and if I don't get a little farther back it is just possible that I might be seen by anybody who looked over the wall at the garden's end. That's better! No one could see me here; I'm well in the shadow. Yes, I was sitting here, blinking, as I say, at the incandescent light on the lamp-post, and as I sat I saw a black object, like the crouched figure of a man, creeping along in the shadow of the wall. It was the over-wrought brain playing tricks again—projecting out of itself the picture of the person of whom one had been thinking, so that one could easily believe that what one saw was the actual flesh-and-blood person himself. I'm morally sure I shall fall asleep in dead earnest if I sit here any longer. I think I'll steal outside for a moment or two, if only to stretch my legs, and to shake off the drowsiness which is coming over me."

Very lightly and on tip-toe I crept out—to receive a sudden, sickening, crushing blow, which brought me blinded, and with the blood running down into my eyes and mouth, to my knees.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE MAN WITH GORILLA ARMS.

The only wonder is that I wasn't killed outright, as would have happened had my antagonist been as tall as I. But enormously strong as the Dumpling was, my superior height saved my life. He had struck at me with a life-preserver heavily loaded with lead, but being many inches less in stature than I, he had struck short. Hence the blow which, had it taken me directly on the head, as intended, would have made a very batter-pudding of my brains, did no more than inflict a nasty skin-wound, more of a graze than a gash, above one temple. Even had the blow fallen directly on my shoulder, I should in all probability have been disabled for the rest of my life. Luckily for me, however, the loaded life-preserver barely scraped, instead of smashing, my shoulder-blade, and though for the moment I fell—dazed and blinded by my own blood—to my knees, my hurts were by no means serious. As I lay, half stupefied by the suddenness of the attack and by the blow, yet not too stupefied to forget to shield my head, lest my antagonist should strike again, I was seized around the waist, by arms so abnormally long and strong that they were more like those of a gorilla than of a man, and was carried swiftly to the cellar. To say that unconsciously I feigned unconsciousness may seem a queer way of describing what followed; but it is a fact that I lay, apparently as lifeless, on the cellar floor, as if I had been a spider, shamming death in the presence of an enemy. And this I did automatically as far as I can remember, without knowing why I did it.

"I hope he isn't dead, poor devil!" said the Dumpling aloud, to himself, and in a tone of voice which, in view of the fact that my death was the fact he had a few moments before had in view, and had, indeed, done his best to compass, struck me as unnecessarily anxious. His methods reminded me somewhat of modern warfare, in which we first do everything in our power to put a bullet into a man, by means of a gun, and then do everything in our power, by means of good surgery, to get it out. It always seems to me that—since once we have wounded a man, our chief anxiety is to restore the status quo by healing his wound—the desired end might be attained, and the status quo established, by means considerably less expensive to ourselves and undoubtedly less painful to him.

"I hope he isn't dead," muttered the Dumpling again, laying me down with surprising gentleness. "It's one of the servants, I suppose, who has been ordered to be on watch all night in case there's a second attempt to break into the house, and I have no quarrel with him."

As he spoke I suddenly seized him by the legs and toppled him over, fastening on him like a bulldog the instant he was down. From the first it was clear that I was wholly outmatched, and had no chance. I had him on his back, one knee on his chest, and my hands at his throat; but he put up his two hands very much in the same indifferent way in which he would have gone to work to fasten—or to unfasten—a collar-stud, and taking my two wrists, one in each of his fists, he forced them apart, and away from his neck, as easily as a clamp or a vice opens or shuts by the twisting of the screw. As if to show his strength, he held my two hands powerless, thus, for a few seconds, and then with a contemptuous laugh he swung me away from him and aside, as easily as a man, who is teaching a child to jump, swings the little one from a chair to the floor.

What followed I have never ceased to regret. The man had had it in his power, then and there, to strangle me as I lay. With an antagonist whose arms were, as I have said, as long and as strong as a gorilla's, and whose hands held one in a grip of iron, it was useless—athletic and muscular as I am—to struggle. I was as a child in his grasp; and, remembering that he had—whether from a contempt which was more cruel than a blow, or from some instinct of chivalry which made him disdainful of so puny an opponent—set me free of his own accord, and, in a sense, thrown my liberty in my face, remembering all this, I am ashamed to record what followed. The only point to be urged in my excuse is that I was beside myself with wounded vanity and by the humiliation which had been put upon me—I was about to have written by the humiliation of my defeat; but defeat comes after a contest, and between him and me there had been, thus far, as little appearance of contest as there is when a strapping nursemaid takes a naughty child across her knees, and, in spite of the culprit's tears and kicks, administers the necessary number of smacks. Whether what I have urged, in extenuation of what I did, will be accounted any excuse by the reader, I cannot say; but the fact remains that, mad with impotent anger, and burning for some sort of revenge, I rose to my feet and struck him, unprepared as he was, full in the face, and with all my might.

With a snarl like that of a wild beast he closed with me, and for a few seconds—for my fury seemed temporarily to endow me with a giant's strength—we rolled over and over, each striving to pin the other to the ground.

Even at this distance of time, as I seek to recall that moment, I can well believe that the bloody, bestial savagery of the fight—except for the short, gasping, hissing intaking and expulsion of breath, we fought in silence—might have turned a possible onlooker sick with loathing and disgust. But it was soon over. The strain I had put upon myself, when first grappling with him, was too terrific to last. My strength suddenly failed me, and I fell backward, his fingers upon my throat.

In our struggle we had worked our way out of the cellar and into the passage which led to the garden, and, as I went crashing backward, I saw for one instant, by the light from the lamp-post in the side street, that his right hand was already at his hip-pocket in search of a knife. The next instant he was kneeling on my chest, the knife upraised to strike—just as I had foreseen in the dream-tableau. As he bent over me to get a yet firmer grip upon my throat, the yellow lamp-light fell across my face. Out of his face, which had now turned white and haggard, the blood-fury seemed suddenly to die.

"My God!" he gasped. "It's Grant the detective—and I've killed the wrong man!"

Then there came into his eyes a look which, seeing it again in dreams even now, years after, makes me awake with a cry, to find the cold perspiration from my forehead running down into my eyes, my limbs trembling and my heart leaping like a frightened creature.

"I've got you at last, Grant, have I!" he said, in a voice of cold and slow and deadly calmness. "Just now—seeing him go in and out of your house, and, striking in the dark, as I did—I killed a man whom I believed to be you. But there can be no mistake this time. I've got you now, and this time"—he took a firmer grip of the knife—"this time, I rather guess you're going to die."

CHAPTER XVIII.

I PLAY THE CRAVEN.

Then I played the craven. It is useless to say any more. It is idle to urge an excuse. I played the craven, and pleaded to the man at whom, a few minutes before, when he was unprepared, and after he had spared my life, I had struck a cowardly blow.

"Don't strike!" I gasped. "I'm not Grant—Grant is dead. I've seen his body. I'll tell you about it, if you'll not strike."

"This," he said—almost drawled—in slow, deliberate accents, "is very extraordinary and most interesting. I won't promise to spare your life. But I'll hear your tale. I'll promise nothing else, young man, whoever you are, till I've heard you out."

My momentary panic was over. Already I was beginning to feel ashamed of myself. Already the manhood which had deserted me was returning.

"Stop a moment," I said. "I won't have my life on false pretences. I lost my nerve just now and played the coward; but, please God, I'll play the man again. I'm not Grant, it is true, and Grant is dead; but I'm your enemy, and I meant and mean to hunt you down. So knife me now if you want to, but before you do so, I'd like to ask your pardon for striking you, after you'd spared my life, and when you were unprepared. It was a cad's blow—a coward's blow—and I am ashamed of it."

I stopped short, red-faced and choking. He gave an uneasy, abrupt laugh, and, rising, put back his knife.

"Get up!" he said; "I guess you mean playing the game fairly. As for the bit of a blow, we'll say no more about it. Perhaps I deserved it. It does not do to think an opponent's beaten and means throwing up the sponge too early in the game. For what happens after I've heard your story—whether I kill you, as kill you I assuredly can this moment and in this place—I promise nothing till I've heard you out. This much, however, I will say. You tell me you are my enemy, and that you meant and still mean hunting me down. Well, that's straight talk, and I'll say this much of straight talk to you in return. If you are my enemy only, I wouldn't and couldn't kill you for any reason under the sun. If you're the enemy of the cause I have at heart, I'd find you out and kill you though all Scotland Yard itself acted as your bodyguard and protector. That's the state of the market, young man. First of all, let me ask you whether that yarn you spun in the opium den about your having come there by chance as an author in search of copy was true?"

"Every word of it," I answered.

"Well, now, tell me what you have been doing since, and how you came to be in this house, and in this garden. I have got to know, and it will go better with you, if you tell me with your own lips, than if you force me to find it out for myself, as I most assuredly shall. I don't want to kill you. It is horrible to me to have to take a life—unless the safety of the cause is concerned, and then I'd kill you or anyone else as unconcernedly—much more unconcernedly than I'd kill a superfluous litter of kittens brought into the world by the family cat."

Doubt his sanity I might and did, but of his seriousness and sincerity I was in no sense sceptical. If I refused to speak, the chances were that I should not be allowed to leave the place alive. In the matter of personal strength, I was hopelessly outmatched, and as my revolver had dropped out of my hand when I had received the blow which felled me, and had been secured by him, I was, save for a pocket-knife, entirely unarmed.

All things considered, to tell him my story seemed the best course to pursue. He would learn very little that mattered or that he could not find out without me; whereas it was quite possible that if, in return, I could induce him to speak of the "cause" to which he was so warmly attached, and in the interests of which he was ready to stop at nothing, I might, on the contrary, learn something which would be very well worth the knowing.

"I'll tell you my story," I bargained, "if you in return will tell me what is this cause which you say you have at heart. Who knows that it might not be a cause with which I myself sympathise, and might wish to befriend?"

"I agree," he said quietly. "But first I think we'll shut the door and have a light. I've been in this place before. If I can help it, I never enter any place without finding out all I can about it beforehand. There's a gas-jet, and if you'll wait a moment, I'll light it. It can't be seen from the outside."

Commencing with the invitation to write an article on the opium den, I very briefly narrated what had befallen me, keeping back nothing except my love for Kate, and the fact of the dream-tableaux, neither of which seemed to me to come within my bargain.

He listened without a comment, though he now and then interpolated a pointed question. When I had done, he lit a cigarette, and began to pace backward and forward.

"Mr. Rissler," he said abruptly, after a short silence, "were you ever poor?"

"Ever poor?" I laughed. "If you had asked me if I were ever rich, I might, by thinking hard, remember a time when I had a few pounds in hand. But ever poor? My dear sir, I can't recall a time when I was ever anything else."

He nodded gravely.

"I have heard your story. Now listen to mine. I'm not without hope of enlisting your sympathy. Not for myself: I need, and will have, the sympathy of no man; but for the cause for which I fight, for which I hope and believe I shall be able to persuade you to fight. My mother was a poor woman—a woman of the people; my father—my God! the irony of it—a gentleman. He was, if the truth were known, something more than a gentleman. We are all gentlemen to-day, or think we are, and one has to make a distinction. He was more than a gentleman. He was an aristocrat. He was more, even, than an aristocrat; but we will not talk further of that now. She was my mother, but not his wife. She was the mother of his child, and he left her and her child to starve. We did not starve; but I pass over those years. When I was ten, she broke down, worked out, worn out, wearied out. Then I took over her burden. No matter what my work, no matter who my employer. There are thousands of such employers as he; there are millions of such workers as I—workers whom no law protects. You may not be cruel to a cat or dog; you may not over-work a horse. These are offences which are punishable by law. But your fellow-men and fellow-women, your clerk, your shop-assistant, your warehouse-man—these you may starve, sweat, over-work, underpay, these you may do to death if you like, and none shall say you nay. The sweating, the over-work, and the underpay are the least of the evils they endure.

"The one and only aim of most employers is making money. And 'making' money means taking money, the money which is the rightful property of others—means, in point of fact, swindling. But a good business man is shy of swindling his customers. The customer is a free agent. If he discovers he is being swindled he will take his custom elsewhere, and loss of custom means loss of money, which will not suit your business man. So he must needs look for somebody else to sweat and swindle—somebody who cannot take himself elsewhere at choice; and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the somebodies are the unfortunate employees. They must be made to do the greatest possible amount of work at the least possible rate of pay. And that they be compelled to endure this wholesale blood-sucking and robbery, they must of necessity be kept in a state of subjection, of fear, of slavery, and bondage. All feeling of independence, of having a soul or a conscience to call their own, must be taken from them. They are the chattels of their master, the creatures of his will, depending—they and their wife and child, if wife or child there be—upon his whim and pleasure for the roof which covers their head, for the clothes they wear, for the very food which keeps body and soul together. Let them once feel any sense of independence—let them once feel that they can obtain shelter and clothes and food at the hands of another employer, and they will no longer consent to be sweated and robbed, underfed, underpaid, and overworked.

"There are several ways of bringing the unhappy employees to this state of servile subjection. One is to browbeat, to bully, and to intimidate, till their nerve be gone and their spirit be broken. But why stand it, you ask? Why not throw off these chains, and seek work at the hands of some employer who is considerate and just. The reason is that such an employer is not easy to find, and, when found, the chances are a hundred to one against his having a vacancy on his staff.

"Every man in a situation knows that there are thousands out, and that, were he to resign his post, it would be filled, almost at a moment's notice, and at any wage which an employer chose to offer. Such knowledge as that gives pause to the man who is minded to assert his independence, for out of his meagre salary it is almost impossible to save; and to be out of work even for a week or two, with nothing to fall back upon, means not only starvation for him and his, but means that every week he is out, the longer is he likely to remain so. It means shabby clothes; for how, without money, can he buy new clothes to keep up the appearance which is of so much importance to him when applying for a post? It means that in an incredibly short time he begins to look shabby and broken-down—begins to look, in fact, like one of life's derelicts, and, of life's derelicts, employers are apt to fight shy.

"Another reason why a man hesitates to throw off his chains is that some employers have been known to refuse a character to the clerk or assistant who has asserted his independence, and the independence of his class, by discharging himself; and at the man who comes seeking work, without a 'character,' no other employer will look. For an employee to dare to prove that he has been overworked and underpaid by discharging himself, and finding new employment, where the work is less and the rate of pay higher, would be an example (your employer argues) which would demoralise the whole staff. Such a state of things approaches to sacrilege, blasphemy, anarchy. It must not be permitted. Of the man who dares so to act, so to set employers as a class at defiance, an object-lesson must be made, lest so dangerous an example infect the workers who remain. I have known cases where, to such a man, not only has a character been refused, but where a trumped-up charge of theft, or insubordination, or other misconduct, has been brought against him, that he and his fellow-slaves may be taught the salutary lesson that, against Capital, Labour has no chance; against the employer, the employee has no appeal. It is slavery, a thousand times worse than that of the Chinese coolies about which some good folk have such tender consciences.

"In England we do not flog our white slaves. We only break their nerves, crush their spirit, and bully the manhood out of them. Two of my fellow-workers went out of their minds; one of us took his own life. You look incredulous—you think that sort of thing uncommon. They haven't enough mind left, most of them, to go out of it, so abject and cringing and timid do they become; and they haven't enough pluck left in them—broken-spirited as they are—to take their lives. So they only die, the weakly ones, or drag out their wretched lives, the strong ones, in daily terror of being discharged and of being thrown homeless, moneyless, to starve upon the streets. Perhaps to starve, and so to make an end of it, would be the best thing that could happen to them. For many employers, in addition to the sweating, encourage a system which leaves their employees with less spirit to call their own than a dog, less soul in their wretched bodies than a worm.

"In many business houses a system of espionage is established by which the wretched workers are encouraged to sneak and pry and play the cut-throat upon each other. If your fellow-slave gets two shillings a week more than you get, and you can detect him in a moment's slackness, a single mistake, and report it to the employer, it is possible that the poor wretch may be discharged and you may get his post and his extra pay. But you, in your turn, know that the man immediately below you is watching you greedily and in the same way, lest you, also, be guilty of a slip or an omission that, by reporting the matter to his principals, he may work you out, as you had worked out your predecessor, and so he may slip into your vacant shoes and your pay.

"It is a system of infamy—a system which breeds men and women who are lower in the scale of being than a louse. You think I exaggerate. But do you know what it is to wake up each morning so weary that you had scarce the strength to struggle up that you might go forth to work for the day's bread?

"I do, and so do tens of thousands in this London to-day.

"Do you know what it is to be so broken of spirit, so weary of the cringing and the fawning, as to feel, each morning, that if death had come to you in the night, and so spared you this waking, you had counted it a happy release?

"I do, and so do tens of thousands in this London to-day.

"And, more terrible still, do you know what it is to be so abject a thing, so infamous a creature, that you are content to play the cut-throat to your fellow-slave, to pry and spy and carry tales, in the hope that you may be appointed to replace him, and so put another shilling a week in your own pocket, and another sovereign in that of the tyrant and blood-sucker, to curry favour with whom you are ready to do this infamous thing?

"Again I say I do; again I say, and so do tens of thousands in this city of London to-day.

"For me those days of slavery and infamy are gone. For millions of my fellow-men and fellow-women those days of slavery and infamy remain; but a man who has once been through what I have, who has lived and starved and eaten his heart out among the poor in their squalid, sordid surroundings, can never forget it so long as he lives. Their cry is ever in my ears; the cry of men whom these monsters have made less than men, breaking the man's heart in them, turning them into curs and cravens, robbing them of the very birthright of their manhood, that, like bullocks and steers, they may be broken to bow themselves to the yoke and lash, and meekly to obey their tyrant's bidding. The cry of wan-faced, hollow-eyed women, working a week of winter days and nights in a fireless garret till their chilled fingers can scarce hold the needle, and for a wage, that on the streets to which—small wonder!—such women are, by starvation and despair, too often driven, can be earned at so light a cost. But most of all, the cry of little children—little hollow-eyed children, crying silently because they are hungry and cold, stretching wan hands for the bread——My God! I cannot bear to think of it; I shall go mad. I sometimes think I am mad when I brood over their sufferings and their wrongs. A great writer has put it on record that when he looks upon his fellow-men and fellow-women, and remembers that pain and sorrow and disease, for themselves and their dear ones, are the inevitable lot of all, and death the only certainty—when he sees them smiling, flirting, posturing, grimacing on the very edge of Eternity, he is filled with amazement and contempt.

"Contempt! To me the sight of haggard, careworn men, of weary-faced and unlovely women, leading starved and joyless lives, out of which all hope and beauty and poetry are irretrievably crushed and gone, yet forcing themselves, in face of such terrible odds, to smile and laugh and take life lightly—is a sight for gods to wonder at, is magnificent, is heroic, is sublime.

"And me, God has upraised to right the wrongs of the poor. The love that I bear to these my people, of whom I am one, burns more steadily than ever within me; but side by side with it there has sprung up a fiercer flame—the fires of fierce and relentless hate of their oppressors. Me, God has marked out to be the avenger of the poor.

"As God sent the rainbow as a sign to his servant Noah, so to me by a sign has He signified His will. To me, as I walked the streets of this great city, a message came, bidding me turn my steps to the nation's museum, there to seek the sign. And in the Egyptian court of the museum I found it. There, stretching half the length of that great hall, where stand the sarcophagi of Israel's taskmasters, the Pharaohs, is a clenched arm and fist, of solid granite, and of such giant proportions, that one single blow from it would make to fall the side of a house, and bring to death and destruction all who dwell therein.

"And as I looked the word of the Lord came to me, saying, 'Behold, I make of thee My fist and arm of granite, that thou mayest strike and slay without mercy My enemies and thy enemies, them that oppress and grind down My people. Strike then, slay and spare not, else shall it be to thee as to Saul, who, when bidden by Me utterly to destroy the Amalekites, spared many, bringing thereby upon himself and upon his house the just and heavy vengeance of God.'"

The man was mad—mad as it is possible for a man to be; but there was method in his madness. In all that had been said, no single word had been dropped which afforded any clue in regard to the crimes he had committed or meant to commit. Passionate as had been his outpourings in the cause of the poor and of the oppressed, and vehement as had been his declaration of war against the oppressor, he had given me no inkling of the means at his command for the carrying on of the war he was waging, no clue in regard to his associates, their methods, or their meeting-places. Not one word of all he had said could be adduced against him in court, as evidence in connection with any crime with which he might be charged.

Then from under his cape of Christ-like compassion, the cunning and cruel eyes of the madman peeped.

"But I mustn't tell you too much—anything you could use against me," he said with a leer, "until I know whether you are for the oppressor or the oppressed. Tell me you are on our side, Rissler, and none shall raise finger to harm or to injure you.

"But"—and now his voice was terrible to hear, the blue blaze in his eyes terrible to see—"let me have cause to suspect you of assisting the enemy, the people's enemy, God's enemy, and I'd throttle the life out of you, tear the heart out of you, this night, this moment, in this place. Which is it to be?"

CHAPTER XIX.

THE DUMPLING'S SECRET.

The man, as I have said before, was mad—stark, staring mad, and with a madman one must go warily. Had I too profusely protested my sympathy, too readily declared myself an adherent, his cunning would, I am persuaded, have led him to doubt my sincerity, in which case his promise to strangle the life, or to tear the heart out of me, would, I believe, have been fulfilled.

Under the circumstances I thought it best not to appear too eager.

"You can't frighten me with your threats," I said, quietly. "I did lose my nerve some time ago. But I've got it back again now, and while I'm willing to hear all you have to say about a cause with which I'm not only ready but anxious to throw in my lot, I'm not going to be bounced or threatened into doing so. The co-operation of a man who, in making so momentous a choice, is capable of being threatened or talked into standing in with you, who jumps, in fact, to your whistling, isn't worth having. There are more momentous matters than my life hanging to this, and before I say definitely I'm with you—as is my wish—there are one or two more questions I must ask."

With no one will an appeal to sanity find more favour than with the insane. "Do let us be reasonable" is the best of all arguments to use to those whose reason is affected. Evidently the man before me was favourably impressed by what I had said.

"You are quite right," he replied cordially. "We want the co-operation of no one who is not persuaded in his own mind of the righteousness of our cause. From what I've seen of you, Mr. Rissler, you are just the sort of man with whom I should like to be associated in my work. Your getting out of that opium den with a whole skin when, believing you to be Grant, I'd given the strictest orders that you shouldn't leave the place alive, proves you to be a man ready of resource and quick of brain, just such a man whose co-operation would ensure the final success of the cause. It will be a red-letter day for us if we could induce you to throw in your lot with us. Ask your questions, then, and I'll give you a straight reply."

"Well," I said, "tell me in a word what is the end at which you are aiming."

"I'm aiming," he said, "to create first in England, and afterwards all over the world, such an upheaval of the social order of things as took place in France at the time of the Great Revolution. But with this difference. The French Revolution was aimed at the aristocrat. You'll think me inconsistent, I fear, when I say that it is not with the aristocrat that I have my chief quarrel. I hold no brief for the aristocracy. Many of them—most of them, perhaps—are lazy, extravagant, self-indulgent, luxury-loving, selfish, and vicious, as I know to my cost. I don't blame them very much for that, any more than I blame the very poor for their want of cleanliness, their thriftlessness, their hand-to-mouth methods of living, and for seeking solace from the cold, the squalor, and the misery of their surroundings, in the warmth and light and companionship of the public-house. Both classes are to some extent the outcome of circumstances. The aristocracy have most of them their sense of noblesse oblige, and have the honour of a great name to keep up. On the whole, they do it tolerably well. They distribute largess generously, they entertain lavishly, they pay those who work for them fairly, and they treat those who work for them well. The aristocracy, it is true, has got, first, to give way, and, ultimately, to go, just as the monarchy has got to give way and to go before the advance of democracy.

"Do you know what King Edward—wise man! foreseeing man!—is reported to have said? I tell it to you as it was told to me. It may be true, or it may not. Personally, I believe it is, and it adds to the admiration to which, in spite of myself, I am compelled, for his wisdom and for his foresight. He is reported to have said, 'My grandson is likely to be the last King of England. The whole face of things is changing, not in this country only, but in Germany, Austria, Russia, in Europe, and all over the world. The monarchy will last my time. It may last my son's. Possibly it will last his son's time. I shall not be there to see. But those who are alive, when my grandson dies, may possibly see an end of the monarchy in England!'

"That is what King Edward is reported to have said, and whether he said it or did not say it, it is true. We are on the verge of a death struggle between the masses and the classes. Much will depend upon the side with which the great middle classes throw in their lot. If the middle classes decide for what we call the classes, the struggle will necessarily be prolonged. If the middle classes decide, as I believe they will, for the masses, the end will come soon, and with awful swiftness. One of the two—the masses or the classes—must go. Can you doubt for one moment which it will be? Even now the death-knell of the monarchy and the aristocracy is sounding. Already the day of democracy has dawned. King Labour is coming into his own.

"But the democracy of to-day doesn't see the real danger in front of it. It is so busy, abusing and striving to sweep away the monarchy and the aristocracy, that it doesn't see that it is playing into the hands of an infinitely greater danger—the plutocracy.

"As things stand now, King and Court and House of Lords are some sort of check upon the encroachments of the plutocracy. Sweep King and Court and House of Lords away, and the country will be at the mercy of the mere man of money. And what will the poor get out of him? Better a thousand times for the poor to be in the hands—be under the heels, if you like—of the monarchy and the aristocracy, than be given over, tied hand and foot, to the tender mercies of the mere money-grabber, with no name to uphold, no sense of chivalry to inspire, no conscience to control, no object in life, save to get and keep and grind out money from man, woman, and child. It is not the monarchy or the aristocracy who is the enemy of the people. It is your capitalist, your mill and factory owner, your middleman, your wholesale and retail merchants, your employers of labour. It is against him and all of his tribe that I would stir up a revolution in England which should make as clean a sweep of the lot of them as the French Revolution made of the aristocrat.

"Do I carry you with me thus far, Mr. Rissler? If not, it were idle to say more."

"You carry me completely," I replied, "But—forgive me asking—how is what you propose accomplishing to be done? Thus far you have dealt only in generalisations, but generalisations by themselves never yet brought about a revolution."

"You are absolutely right," he replied quickly. "In the ordinary way I should say it could not be done for another twenty, thirty, perhaps another hundred years. There is only one way; but there is a way. There is only one man who can do it; but there is such a man, as you yourself will admit when you hear his name."

He stopped, and for at least half a minute looked at me searchingly, as if uncertain how far he was justified in taking me into his confidence, but muttering to himself meanwhile, in language which, by the word or two I caught, I knew to be French. So close was his face to mine that I saw what at first I thought was my own face mirrored in his eyes. But, as I looked, the picture-face in his eyes became more definite, and I knew that the face I saw there was not mine. It was a face there was no mistaking; a face which every schoolboy, every child, would have recognised at sight.

And now it seemed to be growing larger until what had been a tiny picture, in the pupils of the Dumpling's eyes, was the life-size head of a man, looking at me with eyes of its own—eyes so stern, so cold, so cruel, so commanding, that the bidding of the set lips beneath them few men would dare to disobey. At the bidding of those lips, at one glance from those eyes—men, regiments, an army, even, had gone forth unhesitatingly to die.

That all this could be seen in the picture, which is formed in the pupils of one man's eyes, sounds incredible, and I can only explain it by saying that what I saw lay not in the pupils themselves, but lay behind those pupils, through which I looked as one looks through a window.

Then suddenly the face which I had seen faded away. Silhouetted against the sky, I saw the solitary figure of a man standing upon the rocky point of an island, and looking out—the soul of him more lonely than that lone island, so far away from other land, and surrounded by a wasteful wilderness of waters—the heart of him torn with unrest, wilder, sadder, more hopeless, than the surging, sobbing unrest of those surrounding seas.

Then, too, this picture faded, and I was looking upon the face of the Dumpling, and listening to the words which fell sharply, incisively, from his lips.

Clearly he had decided to trust me with his great secret, and something of the excitement which I saw upon his face communicated itself to me as I listened.

"Why has the Great Revolution, why has the cause of Labour failed thus far?" he asked, turning upon me almost savagely. "I will tell you," he went on, without waiting for an answer. "Because great revolutions are only brought about by great men; and for ten, twenty, thirty years, perhaps more, the womb of England has been barren of great men. The histories of religions, we are told, are written in the life-stories of great men. The histories of politics are no more than the life-stories of great men. To-day there are parties, but no politics. What are your Labour party, your Liberal party, if you like—your Campbell-Bannermans, Asquiths, Bryces, Birrells, Morleys, Burnses, Keir Hardies? Amiable men, able men, capable men, well-meaning men, conscientious men, but spoken of in a comparative sense, as compared with your real makers of history, of statecraft, what are they? Mediocrities, every one of them. Parnell had it in his power to have been a great man had he lived, and had he not made a mess of his life, but for the rest"—he stopped short for a moment—"for the rest," he went on, "judged by any standard of greatness, for the rest"—he snapped his fingers contemptuously—"that! The whole of them combined couldn't do in a year what one great man—a Napoleon, for instance—could do in an hour. The great revolution has failed of coming thus far, the cause of Labour has failed thus far, for one reason, and one reason only—there is no Napoleon to lead the people to victory. Once find Labour her Napoleon, and Labour will rule the land.

"Listen!

"I who stand before you am he—not Labour's Napoleon only, not merely the Napoleon of Labour, but Napoleon the Corsican, Napoleon the First Consul, Napoleon the Emperor himself! In me you see not only Napoleon re-incarnate, but Napoleon's very self—the conqueror of Europe, the Cæsar of France, now come again to earth, even as the Christ came two thousand years ago, to save and to redeem the people. I am here to lead the leaderless armies of Labour to victory—I am here to set King Labour on his rightful throne. The world has waited over-long for the coming of Napoleon. But at last he is come. I who stand before you am he!"

CHAPTER XX.

THE NEW NAPOLEON.

"You say—I read it in your eyes—that I am mad," the Dumpling went on, after a pause. "Wait and see. If mad I am, then mad were Cæsar, Alexander, Moses—mad even perhaps the Christ Himself.

"You say—again I see it in your eyes—you say: 'This man claims to be Napoleon, and condescends to become a criminal, a thief, a concocter of plots to entrap and kidnap millionaires.' But listen. Napoleon is unchanged. Should I, a hundred years ago, have hesitated to torture a rich Jew—had I so chosen—to wring from him his millions for the carrying on of my wars? Money I must have. Money I will have, if I am to lead the legions of Labour to victory. These millionaires, these wealthy parvenus whom I hold to ransom, are but the base pawns in the game, from whom I wring the means of carrying on my war. I stop at nothing. I scruple at nothing, so long as I achieve my end. At this moment the mines are laid for a revolution which shall shake England to its centre. I, who hold the strands of the whole network of the conspiracy in my single hand, have not scrupled, in laying and carrying out my plans, to use base tools—thieves and rogues and criminals. What are they to me? I achieve my purpose. That is enough.

"And now again I read your thoughts, and this time you say: 'This man, this Cæsar in conception, this criminal in act, preaches humanity and practises inhumanity; this man speaks of the poor with Christ-like compassion, even while his hands are red with his fellow-creatures' blood.' But whom have I slain? My enemies? Never! My enemies, my deadliest enemy, I would not stoop so much as to strike across the face. But God's enemies, the enemies of God's cause, against them I will use all the cunning and craft of my brain, to wipe them off the face of the earth. This negro of whom you have spoken, this man Black Sam—he was slain at my command because he was the enemy of God, the enemy of God's cause. It was he who betrayed us to Grant, the detective. Therefore I slew him. Therefore would I slay a thousand such as he. When I was on earth a hundred years ago, I never counted the cost. I have sent regiments to certain destruction that I might carry out my end. And am I changed? Yes; changed, inasmuch as, to-day, I would sacrifice not a regiment, but an army—not a legion, but a whole nation—so long as I attained my end. Am I not Napoleon? And does Napoleon ever count the cost?"

Then, all in a moment, he ceased his restless pacings, starting back and staggering wildly at some sudden thought, as a hit soldier starts and staggers when he feels the bullet.

"My God!" he cried piteously, "I am forgetting! This man, this young Grant whom to-night I killed, thinking him to be his brother, was no enemy of the Cause! My hands are red with innocent blood. I have done murder! I have slain an innocent man. Ah! if he have wife and child—a wife whom I have made a widow, a child whom my hands have orphaned! My God! My God! Have pity on them! Protect them, comfort them, for I Thy servant have done this thing. I have taken innocent blood!"

I have seen strange sights in my somewhat adventurous life, but a stranger spectacle than this madman, this wholesale murderer, the blood of whose recent victims was surely as yet wet and warm upon his hands, pacing backwards and forwards, his face literally distorted by anguish of soul, as he cried out upon God to have pity upon the victims of his crime, I am not likely soon to see again.

As he spoke, and as I stood watching him in amazement, there was a sound like the scrunching of feet on the loose gravel outside.

Then a voice:

"There's someone in there, I'll swear, sergeant. Didn't you hear 'em speaking? Turn your bullseye this way a moment, will you?... Ah! Would you? Lay hold of him, sergeant; he's past me. Quick—or he'll get away!"

At the first hint of a sound outside, the Dumpling had turned off the gas and stepped softly, swiftly to the door. As it opened I saw the figures of the two policemen, their helmets and shoulders outlined darkly but clearly against the light which streamed from the incandescent gas-lamp in the side street, their lower limbs and feet lost in the shadow thrown by the garden wall. I was too dazzled by the sudden flashing of the bullseye to see more than that the Dumpling was making a desperate dash for liberty; but my ears told me the rest.

"THE DUMPLING WAS MAKING A DESPERATE DASH FOR LIBERTY."

The Dumpling had got clean away, perhaps to put the fuse to the mines of which he had spoken as laid and ready, and to spring upon a startled country the surprise of his great rebellion.

I heard his footsteps and the footsteps of his out-distanced, defeated pursuers die away in the distance, and then, creeping noiselessly out, I scaled the wall and made my way home to my own rooms and to bed. I had had more than enough of adventure for one night.

CHAPTER XXI.

THE KINDNESS—AND UNKINDNESS—OF KATE.

When I awoke next morning it was with a singular feeling of depression—the reaction, I told myself, from the excitement of the last few days. Life seemed flat and at loose ends. I was in love, with small prospect of bringing my suit to a successful issue. Nor, in the matter of the Dumpling, could I persuade myself that I had any reason for self-congratulation. I had heroically set out to trap and to catch a criminal, instead of which I had been made a prisoner myself.

That I was here in bed, and between the blankets, was due neither to my own skill nor to my own strength, for I had been hopelessly outwitted in the former quality, and ignominiously made to feel my own inferiority in the latter. That I was here at all, instead perhaps of lying strangled in a cellar, was due to the arrival of the police on the previous evening.

Had their appearance not cut short my discussion with the Dumpling, the issue of that discussion might have been disastrous to myself. The most difficult part of my task—to convince the Dumpling that I was sufficiently in sympathy with himself and with his projects, safely to be allowed at large—was all to come. In dealing with a madman, one never knows what sudden warp his cunning and his mania will take; and but for the interruption, it might have been my life, instead of the conversation, which was prematurely cut short.

Another reason for my feeling thus stale and "cheap" on this particular morning was that the ardour with which I had taken up the hunting down of the Dumpling had considerably cooled. I am sympathetic by nature, and, mad though he was, this man's passionate denunciation of the wrongs of the poor, and the terrible and, I fear, only too true picture which he had drawn of their sufferings, had strangely moved me. The tragedy of poverty, the fact that a man's spirit could be so broken, that he could be brought to such infamy as to pawn his very manhood, to become, as the Dumpling had said, like bullocks and steers, and to bow his head to the yoke, for the sake of a roof to cover the heads of wife and children; the fact that women could be brought to such a pass as to be compelled to choose between starvation or the streets, had come home to me with new and awful significance. Even as out of the mouth of babes and sucklings God brings forth wisdom, so out of the mouth of a madman and a fanatic had some of the sternest and most terrible facts of life been brought to my realisation.

When such things could be, it seemed to me that to be spending time and strength in playing at being a detective, and in writing what a newspaper once aptly described as "harmless little tales with titles that appal," was almost criminal. I was more than minded to throw the whole thing up, and to occupy myself, instead, in doing what little I could to relieve the suffering of my less fortunate fellow-creatures.

With these thoughts still seething in my brain, I dressed, and after breakfasting, sallied out to make my report to Miss Clara.

She received me with the same cordiality with which we had parted, and on learning that I had news to impart, sent word to that effect to Kate, who, she said, would be equally interested to hear it.

I told my story, just as I have set it down in the previous chapter, omitting nothing, and giving the Dumpling's words in regard to the poor and their sufferings almost as those words had fallen from his lips.

Upon one of my listeners, at least, the narrative had a most unexpected effect. Kate heard me throughout with very evident sympathy, and was clearly alarmed and disturbed at the risk I had run in my encounter with the Dumpling. Otherwise she was not in any sense moved. But upon the elder woman's face, as I unfolded my story, there suddenly came a look like that of one who has received a crushing blow. For a moment or two I feared she was about to faint; but by an effort she collected herself, and sat out the remainder of the recital quietly and impassively.

When I had made an end of my narrative her only comment was, "Quite exciting, I'm sure!" Then she rose, and walking to the door, beckoned Kate to her. Whispering a few words in the girl's ears—not more than a dozen at most—she passed out.

Kate turned to me.

"Mr. Rissler," she said, "I want you to promise that you will do nothing of the sort again."

"Nothing of what sort, Miss Carleton?" I asked, wondering whether she was speaking for herself, or from instructions she had received from her aunt.

"This detective work?" she replied.

"But why?" I asked. "What difference can it make to you in what way I employ myself?"

"For one thing," she said ruefully, "you'll be killed to a certainty. This dreadful man is clearly too clever for you."

"I fail to see the certainty, either of my being killed or of my being so hopelessly outwitted in cleverness," I replied stiffly; for it was somewhat mortifying to one's pride thus to be pronounced a fool and a failure.

"Besides, even if it be so," I added ungenerously, "my getting killed, or not killed, is my own affair, and cannot greatly concern you, to whom—as you reminded me yesterday—I am a stranger."

"Well, so you were—then. Almost a stranger, that is," she added, diplomatically. "But, you see, we know something more of you now. Promise you'll give it up from this time forth—'d'reckly moment,' as I used to say when I was a child, and was too impatient to wait for what I wanted."

On my first meeting with this extraordinary young woman I had been very properly snubbed and put in my place. On my second, I had been coldly informed that I must consider myself a stranger—as if only by effacing my previous behaviour entirely from her memory could my undesirable presence be endured at all. Yet now, on our third meeting, she was pouting her dainty lips at me, and pleading, in the prettiest way possible, that I would reconstruct and re-order my entire life to humour her unaccountable caprice.

Extraordinary, inexplicable, as her conduct was, the novelty of finding myself in the rôle of someone who was to be considered and conciliated, instead of a nobody who was to be effaced and ignored, was highly agreeable. Even had I been disposed to accede, off-hand, to her request—which I certainly was not—the situation was too pleasant for me to wish prematurely to end it.

"But why," I asked, "should you wish me to give up my detective work, or trouble yourself about me at all?"

"You are very unkind," she said, suddenly breaking down and, to my indescribable astonishment and dismay, bursting into tears.

Recalling, at this lapse of time, the course of our conversation on that occasion, I do not consider that I was guilty of any unpardonable offence against good taste or good manners; but at the moment, and at sight of her tears, my behaviour struck me as blackguardly beyond belief.

"Oh, please, Miss Carleton, don't cry!" I gasped imploringly. "I was a beast, a blackguard, a bully. Forgive me—won't you forgive me? I wouldn't do or say or even think a thing that would hurt you for worlds—for—for—I—I—love you. I loved you from the moment I saw you in the boat. I shall love you as long as ever I live."

When, for the first time, a man tells a woman, and with evident sincerity, that he loves her, he not unnaturally expects that she would receive his declaration with some consciousness of the fact that what he says is, to him at least, a matter of supreme importance. Kate, on the contrary, took my avowal with what I considered ill-timed levity. Possibly that avowal told her nothing of which she was not already aware; possibly she did not approve of the suddenness with which I had sprung it upon her, or of the unconventionality of my wooing; possibly she merely wished to gain time before giving me an answer. Be that as it may, she not only proved herself to be a very self-possessed young person, but a calculating little body into the bargain. Having brought me metaphorically to my knees, having reduced me to a condition in which I was not likely to deny her anything, she suddenly released one eye from the eclipsing handkerchief which, a moment before, had hidden both. Regarding me out of the corner of this eye, but with the other still behind the handkerchief—like a horseman who, with one foot in the stirrup, waits the final word which shall decide whether he is to ride away or to stay—she smiled at me through her tears, and with the air of one making a bargain said:

"Then you promise?"

"Promise what?" I asked.

"To give up this detective work."

"Why, no! I can't promise that," I replied.

"I hate you! I hate you!" she cried, and, springing to her feet, flung angrily out of the room.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE INEXPLICABLE CONDUCT OF MISS CLARA.

A younger and more pessimistically disposed man than I might conceivably have been plunged into the depths of despair at being thus told by the woman he loved that she hated him. But, on the whole, I was not inclined to be altogether dissatisfied with the interview. Never before—even though her words were sympathetic and her manner not unkindly—had she failed to make me realise that I was kept at a distance; that I was an unvouched-for stranger, between whom and her the barriers of custom and convention still necessarily existed. But her words and her acts of to-day—so it seemed to me—were a tacit admission that the barrier had been removed. She had concerned herself sufficiently in my career to express a wish in regard to it (though here I fear she acted on her aunt's instigation rather than from any impulse or inclination of her own); she had made the granting of that wish a favour to herself, and had even suffered me to declare my love unreproved. Her tears had, I admit, at the moment utterly dismayed me; but remembering the subsequent by-play of the uneclipsed eye, I was now disposed to think either that those tears were caused by pique at the fact that I had not more promptly acceded to her request, or that they were no more than the legitimate use of a woman's natural weapon for the confounding and undoing of man. Possibly, too—so I tried to persuade myself—the exclamation "I hate you—I hate you!" was less an expression of personal dislike than a pretty woman's very pardonable exhibition of captiousness at finding herself thwarted where she had expected immediate submission and consent. With the assistance of Miss Clara, I hoped soon to regain whatever ground I had lost in her niece's favour, and as, after leaving us, the older lady had made straight for the garden, and had (as I could see from the window) been pacing it bareheaded, hands clasped behind her and deep in thought, I ventured to lift the window, and to ask her to spare me a moment before I went.

She came in at once, looking, I thought, a trifle tired and pale, but otherwise all trace of agitation was gone, and she spoke with all her usual self-possession.

"Mr. Rissler," she said, coming to the point as usual, the instant the door was closed; "what have you and Clara been talking about?"

"My work," I answered laconically. "I'm to throw up crime investigation, and devote myself to something else."

"And you have promised?"

"Well, no, I haven't. I had the temerity to ask for some reason why I should be called upon to take so extraordinary a course, with the result that your niece first burst into tears, and then flung out of the room in a passion. Do you know why?"

She did not condescend to answer.

"Mr. Rissler," she said, "give up this detective work at once. Devote all your time to book-writing, and I'll stand your friend. Refuse, and you do not enter the house or see Clara again."

"The devil is in it!" I exclaimed rudely and with exasperation. "I'll do anything to please you, who have proved yourself so true and so generous a friend. But surely I'm entitled to a reason. I admit frankly that I'm less keen on this work than I was before I heard the Dumpling's passionate plea for the poor—a plea which seemed to me a sort of conscription, calling upon and compelling every able-bodied man to enlist himself and to take up arms in so sacred a cause. I don't say that I mightn't see my way, sooner or later, perhaps even at once, to give up the detective business, if giving it up means pleasing you and winning your niece—who, by the bye, has just done me the honour to declare that she hates me, so there seems small enough occasion to consider that aspect of the case. But when a man has devoted years of his life to any particular career, and has even made some small success at it, you can hardly expect him to throw up everything at a moment's notice, and without any sort of reason being given for the request. What is your reason? What is your niece's reason? For some reason the two of you must surely have."

"It isn't respectable, for one thing," replied Aunt Clara doggedly.

"Respectable!" I said. "Is that it? Frankly, I have always felt that there isn't very much difference, after all, between the man who uses his brains to track down and to capture a criminal—as a detective does—and the man who uses his brains to make out a case against the criminal and get him convicted—as the barrister does—and the man who, after he has listened to all that can be said about the case by everybody concerned, sums it up, and, when a verdict has been returned, passes sentence. They are all three—judge, barrister, and detective—officers of the law and servants of the King and of the public; and I'm not sure that the detective's isn't the most important and useful work of the three. Anyhow, it is the most difficult."

"Bosh!" said Miss Clara shortly. "You'll be telling me next that you might just as well be a hangman, for he's as much an officer of the law and a servant of the King and of the public as the other three; and so, according to your showing, equally respectable. Bosh, Mr. Rissler! Bosh!"

"All right. Bosh it is, then!" I replied amicably. "Anything for a quiet life, and I admit I hadn't thought of your holding trumps all the time, and playing the hangman card. Anyhow, I'm answered on that score. What a wonderful woman you are! Judge, barrister, and detective all rolled into one. A great lawyer was lost to the world when it was decided that you should come into it wearing petticoats instead of a wig and gown."

"You're a fool!" said Miss Clara, not ill-pleased, in spite of the uncompromising plainness of her language.

"And now, what about the detective business?" she went on. "Are you going to give it up, or are you not? For you have got to decide one way or the other before you come here again. I wouldn't see my niece for the present, if I were you. She'll come round in time, like the rest of us, if she's left alone. There's nothing a woman hates so much as being taken at her word, and left alone. There are many more women who have gone back on what they'd said, and let a man have his own way, after swearing they wouldn't—there are many more who have done that, and been brought round to another way of thinking, just by being left alone, than by any other way. Pestering a woman, pleading with her, imploring her, is precious little use. You take the tip from me, young man—I know."

"You're a wonder, Miss Carleton, as I said before," I answered. "And I'll take a tip from you as eagerly as I'd take a kiss, if you'd give me one."

"Oh, bosh! Don't bother me! You're a fool—as I told you before," she retorted. "But think it over; take time, if you like, but think it over, and if you are a wise man and decide to do as I wish, as both of us wish, I'll stand your friend."

"Miss Carleton," I said, "I'll be frank with you. It doesn't want much thinking over. I had thought it over before I came here, and had practically decided for the present, at all events, to leave the detective work alone. The singular and to me entirely inexplicable attitude which you and your niece have chosen to take up, in giving me, so to speak, an ultimatum either to drop the work or to consider myself forbidden this house, aroused, just for a moment, an Irishman's love of fight, an Irishman's cussedness and contradictoriness. But I'll do as you say, and for the present, at all events, will leave Dumpling-hunting and detective work alone. I don't make any great sacrifice in doing so, as far as the Dumpling is concerned; for when he went away he was in too much of a hurry to leave me his visiting card, and I don't know where to find him if I wanted to. The only clue I have to him is concerned with this house, the doors of which, unless I drop detective work, must, you say, be closed to me. Moreover, whatever may have been his purpose in coming here and in watching this place (and I still suspect that he intends, or intended, to kidnap your brother), it is likely that that purpose he has for the present dropped. In fact, after so narrowly escaping capture here at the hands of the police, this house—for some time, at least—he is likely carefully to avoid. So even that clue is 'off.'"

"I'm very glad to hear it," was her reply. "Yes, what is it, Metcalfe? Do you want me?"

"If you please, m'm," answered Metcalfe, who had opened the door while Miss Clara was speaking, and was standing in an apologetic way with one hand on the handle. "I knocked twice, but you were talking and didn't hear me," he went on. "Miss Kate sent me. She'd like a word with you at once, please, and before Mr. Rissler goes."

"All right—I'll come."

Then, Metcalfe having made his bow and gone, she turned to me:

"You'll find the Times there on the table. I shan't be away long."

But she was away long—so long, indeed, that she did not return at all. For almost an hour I was left alone, and then the door opened a few inches, and instead of Miss Clara, Kate slipped quickly in.

Closing it, but with one hand still holding the handle, she faced me. She looked deadly pale, and trembled violently.

"Mr. Rissler," she said, "my aunt tells me that you have promised her what you refused to promise me—that you will in future abandon the dangerous and not altogether creditable line of work you have taken up in constituting yourself a detective. Is that so?"

"That is so," I answered hotly; "but in regard to its being a discreditable occupation, and in regard to my having promised Miss Carleton what I would not promise to you, I must protest——"

"Forgive me," she said coldly, "but I cannot argue the matter, or listen to any explanation or protestation. I have come here to ask you—to bid you—for my aunt, as well as for myself, to leave this house instantly, and never, under any circumstances, to enter it again."

CHAPTER XXIII.

KATE'S CONFESSION.

"I will give no such promise," I began furiously. "I will——"

Then I stopped short.

"Forgive me. I have some decent instincts left, I hope—in spite of my being a detective," I added bitterly. "You are, of course, within your rights; and if you so command, I have no option but to obey. But even you cannot command me or compel me to cease from loving you. Am I to have no explanation?"

"You are to have no explanation," she repeated in a dull, dreamy voice, as if her thoughts were elsewhere, and with her eyes fixed on a far-off space of sky which she could see through the window.

"Except, perhaps—you have already said it—it is because you hate me," I prompted bitterly.

Moveless as a listening sleep-walker, she made answer:

"It is not because I hate you."

"Do you, or do you not, hate me?" I pleaded.

And again, dully, indifferently, like one speaking in her sleep, she replied:

"I do not hate you."

"But you dislike me," I urged.

With the same troubled, far-off look in her beautiful eyes, she repeated, automatically:

"I do not dislike you."

For a moment, like the defiant fluttering of a banner over a besieged and well-nigh surrendered city, Hope sprang up to raise her red flag upon the ramparts of my heart; but at the sight of the dull indifference in the girl's eyes, banner and banner-bearer sank back.

"Perhaps even," I said in a foolish and feeble spirit of attempted irony, "perhaps even you like me."

"Perhaps even," she echoed, "I like you."

"Kate," I cried, all the blood in my veins running riot, "it is not possible—for God's sake don't play with me—but it is not possible—tell me—it is not possible, it can't be—that—that—you care."

In a moment she was alive again. Her eyes, all her soul in them, left the far-off skies, and leapt to meet mine.

"I care," she said, softly.

The next instant, and before I could stay her, she was gone.

It is fortunate I did not see Miss Clara as I left the house. Had I met that dear creature on my way out, I should, to a dead certainty, not only have kissed her on the spot, but with never a thought for horrified servants or scandalised neighbours, should have put my arm around her capacious waist, and then and there have compelled her to dance a Highland fling with me. That Metcalfe thought I had been drinking (as I had—deep draughts of the most intoxicating of all elixirs, the elixir of love), I am positive. Detecting me in the act of tweaking the nose of the stone bust of a celebrated Nonconformist divine, which stood in a recess at the bottom of the stairs, and of painstakingly (mere absence of mind that!) wiping my boots on the doormat, as if I were about to enter a drawing-room instead of passing out into a muddy street, he inquired solicitously whether I wouldn't like a cab, remarking with a surreptitious glance at the boots with which I had been performing such unnecessary antics on the doormat:

"Yes, sir; the streets is very muddy, but you'll get home nice and dry and comfortable in a keb."

Telling him that I was tired out and half asleep from my long watch overnight, and that to walk home would be the surest way to awaken and freshen me, I slipped a sovereign into his palm, and made my way into the streets, all the blood in my body dancing in my veins, all the joy of first love singing in my brain.

At my rooms I found the expected notice requiring me to attend and to give evidence at the inquest to be held that day at noon upon the bodies of the three men who had been found drowned in the Thames.

That the inquiry was not wanting in painful interest the reader will readily surmise, but except to say that I was subjected to a severe and suspicious examination, I do not propose further to enter upon the details of the inquest here.

I come now to a point in my narrative when the trend of events takes a new turn, and when I shall have to relate happenings of infinitely greater importance than the circumstances under which Parker and Smudgy, the negro Black Sam, and the two Grants, met their death. These were but the "curtain-raisers" preceding the drama in which the man known to the readers of this history as "the Dumpling" took so remarkable a part. Up to this point my tale—I had to tell it as it happened—has been little more than a detective story. Now we shall soon come to a story of quite another sort.

CHAPTER XXIV.

I DISCOVER THE IDENTITY OF THE DUMPLING.

The inquest over—for two mortal days I was kept hanging about Southend, to the mortuary of which the bodies had been taken—I returned to town, eager to see Kate, and to compel from her dear lips a second sweet admission that I was not without a place in her heart. Something there was in the look of the house—the drawn blinds of the reception rooms, the fact that, except for the hall and the basement, the place was in darkness—which turned me cold and sick with apprehension and with a sense of coming evil.

"Good evening, Metcalfe," I said, when the door was opened by that worthy. "Are the ladies in?—Miss Carleton, or Miss Kate?"

"No, sir," he said, looking at me queerly. "They have left town, but there's a letter—two letters—for you, sir. If you'll come in I'll get them."

"Left town?" I said, blankly. Then, recovering myself—for I did not desire to enliven the ennui of Metcalfe and his fellow-servants by providing them with matter for speculation and discussion concerning the relations which existed between their young mistress and myself—I added, unconcernedly:

"Oh, yes—of course. I had forgotten it was to be so soon, and I have been out of town myself. Where are the letters, Metcalfe?"

"On the library table, sir. Perhaps you'll walk in. Can I get you some coffee, sir?"

"No, thank you. I'm just up from the country, and haven't dined. But I'll go into the library to read my letters. If any answer should happen to be wanted, I could write it there, and so catch an early post. I shan't want you any more, Metcalfe. Don't wait."

The man withdrew, and I opened the first of my letters.

It was from Kate.

Good-bye, dear Max; good-bye for ever. Something horrible has happened, and you and I must never see each other again. So we have gone—my aunt and I. It was the only way. If you love me, do not try to find us. It will be quite useless. If you love me, keep your promise—the promise, I mean, that you refused to me. You will not refuse it to me now, I know—the first and last promise I shall ever ask from you. One thing more, only, I will ask you—not to promise, but to believe; and that is that the answer I gave to your last question, as we stood together by the window, was true.—Kate.

I suppose it was because I had opened it, prepared for some shock, some calamity, that I read this letter with such calmness, such impassiveness. Instead of springing up to stride the room, like one beside himself, instead of gasping "Gone!—and for ever! My God! What can it mean?" I rose quietly from my chair, and, thrusting the letter into my pocket, walked over leisurely to stir the fire. That there was an obstacle of some sort between Kate and me, I had realised the last time she and I had stood in this same room together, and she had confessed her love. But bogeys—most of all the bogeys of a woman's making and imagining, paralyse and appal her as they may—do not greatly alarm the average man. That which she pronounces to be an insurmountable obstacle, he first surveys on all sides to satisfy himself that it is an obstacle at all, and then calmly goes to work to discover how that obstacle can best be overcome. Kate loved me; I loved her. Given these facts, I saw no reason to despair.

So, as I say, instead of indulging in the usual heroics with which—when the heroine by word of mouth, or by letter, informs the hero that there is some occult reason why she "can never be his"—we are all familiar in the pages of a novel, or on the stage, I merely stirred the fire meditatively.

"Now for Miss Clara's epistle," I said, opening the second letter. "Let us see if she can throw any light on the mystery."

My dear Boy (it ran),—I have some very bad news for you. I kept it to myself while you were telling us your adventures the other morning, for I did not want to upset you, until the actual necessity for action had come. It concerns myself and Clara, very nearly and very terribly—how nearly and how terribly Clara does not know, for I wish to spare her as much pain as I can. All the time you and she and I were together that morning I knew, though she and you did not, that it would be our last meeting for, perhaps, a long time. During that time it will be a great relief to Clara and to me to be assured of your personal safety; and that you are safe—so long as you are engaged in detective work—neither she nor I can ever be sure. In all probability you noticed that before leaving you and Clara together, I took her aside for a moment to give her some instructions. These instructions were that she was to use all her influence to get you to promise to abandon the dangerous pursuit in which you are engaged, and to devote yourself instead to novel-writing. As Clara failed to obtain such a promise, I returned, to see if I could not obtain that promise myself. You were very good to me. You always have been good to me, and gave me the required promise at once. I am very grateful, my dear boy, for that and for all the consideration and affection you have shown to an ugly old woman.

Then I went back to Clara and told her that for the present she and you must not meet again. I did not tell her the truth; for the truth—of which she has no suspicion—is too horrible to tell. All she knows is that something terrible has happened, and that for some time—whether long or short I cannot now say—you and she must not meet again. Knowing me and my affection for you as you do, you will realise that I should not say this were the necessity not absolute and imperative. Please God, all will come right one day. Good-bye, my dear boy. God bless you. Your affectionate and faithful friend,—C.C.

As I read this extraordinary letter, the explanation of Miss Clara's and Kate's inexplicable attitude came to me in a flash. Dolt, blockhead, addle-brained idiot that I was! I—a detective! It was well for me—it was high time, indeed—that I had decided to give up detective work. Fool that I was not to have seen it before!

The Dumpling and Kate's father, the elder Miss Carleton's brother, were one and the same man!

CHAPTER XXV.

JOHN CARLETON'S DOUBLE.

That Kate and her aunt were now aware of the identity of John Carleton with the Dumpling, I was absolutely sure. I could point back, even, to the moment when—to the latter, at least—the suspicion which afterwards became certainty was first aroused.

It was when I was repeating, word for word, as they had fallen from his lips, the Dumpling's expressions about the poor, that the first sign of agitation had been noticeable in the elder woman. Then, when I went on to speak of his mania in regard to his being none other than Napoleon—then it was, as I clearly remembered, that the self-possessed and by no means impressionable Miss Clara had astonished and alarmed me by looking as if she were about to faint.

Doubtless she had heard him say the same thing before and in the same words, and so had no difficulty in identifying the speaker as her brother.

Kate, on the contrary, had apparently heard me out without connecting her father with the Dumpling. She had shown no sign of dismay or agitation, while listening to my story, and when her aunt had called her aside, at its conclusion, and had urged her to obtain from me the promise to give up my detective work, Kate had undertaken the task somewhat light-heartedly, as witness the episode of the uneclipsed eye.

It must have been after Kate had left me, that the elder woman had spoken of some great and impending danger. How much of the truth she had told her niece I did not know; but when the poor girl returned alone to speak to me, she seemed visibly aged, and was trembling in every limb. Then it was that, by her aunt's command, she forbade me ever again to enter the house. Were I to do so, John Carleton and I must sooner or later come face to face, and that I should be the means of arresting—perhaps of bringing to the gallows—the father of the girl I loved, was too horrible to contemplate.

Of all conceivable happenings, nothing could so irretrievably part Kate and myself for ever as that, whereas could Miss Clara contrive to obtain a medical certificate, to the effect that her brother was of unsound mind, and have him put under restraint, the further committal of crimes by him would effectively be prevented, and Carleton, once out of the way, Kate and I might come together again. That, I believed, was the end for which Miss Clara was working, and as it was an end which would spare Kate from being publicly branded as the daughter of a madman and a murderer, I could not but feel myself in sympathy with it.

That John Carleton and the Dumpling were one and the same man, there was no room for doubt. That fact explained everything. That was why Mr. John Carleton had absented himself unexpectedly from his home, and caused thereby some anxiety to his sister and daughter. He had intended no doubt to return thither, after superintending the carrying out of the projected kidnapping operation—instead of which my unexpected appearance, and subsequent escape from the opium den, had compelled him to devote himself to the clearing out of the bombs, chemicals, and other contents of the place, before the arrival of the police. The telegram from Glasgow was, of course, a fake. He might have instructed some accomplice of his to despatch a telegram from that place, or the whole thing, post-mark and all, might have been a forgery.

Which of the two suppositions was true I did not greatly care. It was enough for me to know that in discovering the reason for Mr. John Carleton's non-return to his family that night, I had discovered also the reason for several of his subsequent acts. I had discovered, for instance, his reason for watching No. 5, Taunton Square, not, as in my anxiety to form a theory of some sort, I had supposed—because one of the millionaires whom he was scheming to kidnap, and to hold to ransom, lived there, but because that house was his home, and because, before returning to its shelter, he wished to satisfy himself that all was secure, and that no police trap had been set for him. It was because the house was his own that he had taken shelter in the garden after the murder of young Grant. A hiding-place of some sort it was necessary speedily to find, for the police were everywhere on the watch; and once he could obtain entrance to his own house he would be safe. Nor would that entrance be difficult to obtain. None knew better than he that, by the breaking of a certain pane of glass in the conservatory, he would be able to shoot back the bolt on the conservatory door; and but for my accidental presence, he would in all probability have effected undisturbed the purpose at which he aimed.

He had, no doubt, done his best to deaden the noise he made in breaking the glass; and, far away as the conservatory was from the living rooms and from the servants' quarters, the sound would have passed unheeded but for my abnormally acute sense of hearing. Even if it had been heard, and had Metcalfe or Miss Clara hurried thither, some plausible story of his having been accidentally shut out, or other explanation, would have been forthcoming, and no one was likely to give a respectable householder in charge for forcing his way into his own residence, or to connect the fact of his doing so with a recent murder.

That was why, having failed in the first attempt, he had returned, at dead of night—to discover me emerging from the wine cellar. That was why he knew there was a gas-jet laid on there, though he had tried to explain away his knowledge of the fact, and had done his best to throw dust in my eyes, by telling me that he made it a rule never to enter a place without finding out all he could about it beforehand.

I could have kicked myself for my density in not having seen daylight before, but the possibility of connecting my lovely Lady of the Lake and her eminently respectable, if somewhat unconventional, aunt with a criminal of the Dumpling type, was so unthinkable that I may, perhaps, be forgiven for not having entertained it until it was thus forced upon me.

Of one thing I was certain—that whatever the explanation, the good faith of Kate and Miss Clara was above suspicion. Unknown to them, the man was leading a double life. They may, perhaps, have wondered at his absences from home, and at his trouble in contriving a pretended burglar alarm, which, I had little doubt, had been invented for quite another purpose than was pretended. The fact that he had fitted up a police call for protection against burglars, seemed to point to him as a reputable member of society and a person of means. No doubt, when he was absent from home, the use to which the thing was put was actually that of a burglar alarm. But when he was at home, I thought it more than possible that he would be at the trouble of making a disconnection (it could be done by the turning of a switch) between his house and the police station, and that in cases of emergency—as, for instance, a surprise visit by the police—the so-called burglar alarm could as effectively be used against the officers of the law as against burglars. The simultaneous locking of all doors and windows must necessarily delay the entrance of the officers who had come to arrest him, and in the meantime Mr. Carleton would no doubt be making good his escape by some secret means of exit, known only to himself.

That his sister and his daughter and possibly his servants were his dupes, and in no sense his accomplices, I was absolutely convinced. But dupes his sister and daughter could be no more. They, at least, knew something of the truth, if not the whole of it. Hence their letters to me; hence their endeavours to induce me to give up Dumpling hunting and detective work; and hence their disappearance. And now that I, too, knew the truth, later though my knowledge might be, I was confronted with the question, "How, in view of what you know, do you propose to act?"

CHAPTER XXVI.

"ONLY STARVING!"

Given the fact that I had promised to refrain from further detective work, the fact that the two Miss Carletons had disappeared and had forbidden me to try to find or to follow them, "How did I now propose to act?" was the question before me.

It was answered next morning as I sat at breakfast.

Opening my newspaper, I read that, owing to the removal of the works of two of the greatest ship-building firms from Thames Side to the North, thousands of men had been thrown out of work, and the greatest destitution prevailed. "The condition of things in East London"—so it was stated in the newspaper—"is more terrible than has been known within the memory of anyone now alive, and it is no exaggeration to say that at this moment hundreds, if not thousands, of women and children are starving." Some instances which had come under the personal notice of the writer of the article were then given. Even to read them was painful; to try to realise them was heart-breaking.

"This may, or may not, be a piece of newspaper exaggeration, for the purpose of sensationalism," I said; "but if the half of what this man says be true, what right have I to be sitting here before a comfortable breakfast while little children are crying vainly for bread?"

I pushed my almost untasted breakfast away from me. I felt as if, with the wail of starving children in my ears, another mouthful of food would choke me.

"I can, of course, sit down and send a cheque to a church fund for the unemployed or to a charitable institution," I went on, "and in the majority of cases that is the wisest and best course to pursue. Organisation, especially expert organisation, can make even a small sum go further than can any amount of inexpert individual effort; in addition to which, nine out of ten of the people who happen to be charitably disposed are unable, for various reasons, to distribute their charity at first hand, and in person. I don't know that it is always desirable that they should do so. Their very kindness of heart makes them easy to be imposed upon; and promiscuous and amateur almsgiving is, I fear, often responsible for the springing up of a class of anything but amateur alms-cadgers and spongers. But I know the 'ins' and 'outs' of the East End of London. I'm not altogether unacquainted with the fact that the greater the need, the more pitiful and deserving the case, the harder is it to find. Your decent, deserving, hard-working man, whom ill-health and misfortune have brought to want, will creep away secretly to starve, in silence to suffer and to die, while your rascally loafer, who has never done an honest day's work in his life, seizes upon every opportunity of 'times being bad,' or of men being known to be out of work, to parade the streets, hymn-howling and copper-cadging for the wherewithal to spend in the public-house. I know something of the ways and wiles of gentlemen of this kidney, something of the silent suffering and dogged, splendid pride of the other class; and being myself, for the present, at least, a genuine member of the unemployed, and having, moreover, a system of my own invention for getting at the facts, I think I'll go east and investigate things for myself. For novel writing or other literary work my mind is just now too unsettled, and as I am not one who can for any length of time remain inactive, I will make the start this morning and this moment, and be off."

Taking the train to Shadwell, I deliberately set to work to find the most squalid and poverty-stricken slum in the whole district. Then I entered the nearest baker's shop.

It is curious how readily the poor sum up a new comer. The slatternly but not unkindly-looking woman who popped out from a back room saw at a glance that I had not called in the usual course of business, and as she came forward, her foolish, expressionless face lost something of its normal vacancy, until her vague eyes, indeterminate nose, open mouth and dropped chin, seemed for all the world to shape themselves into a human note of interrogation.

"Yes, sir?" she inquired respectfully, with a slight inclination.

"Good morning," I said, with an effort to make voice, manner, and expression as pleasant as possible. "Good morning. I hope I haven't disturbed you. I'm not a customer—for the present, at all events."

"No, sir?" she replied, in a non-committal interrogative tone of voice, which implied, though it left unspoken, the question, "Now I wonder what in the world he wants?"

"It's this way," I went on. "I have been reading in my paper (I live in quite another part of London, by the bye) that there are hundreds, thousands even, of women and children starving out this way. Well, now, I don't accept for gospel truth everything I read in the papers, but it seemed to me that if I came out for myself to a place like Shadwell, found a poor street like this, and made my way to the nearest shop—which happens to be yours—anyone like yourself could tell me something of the real facts of the case. It seems to me, too, that if you would be so good as to help me—which I'm sure you will—you could put me in the way of getting at the genuine, the deserving cases. I mean the cases which, perhaps because the people in question don't attend any particular church, and so, not having their names on the visiting list, get overlooked by the clergy and ministers who are doing such splendid work; as well as the cases where, perhaps because of a pride, to which I take off my hat, the sufferers can't humble themselves to beg or to apply for parish relief.

"Understand me, please. I don't come from any newspaper. I'm not working in connection with any charity, or any church, and I haven't very much money to spend. But if women and children are really starving, as I read in the newspapers, I want to do what little I can to help. Do you know of any such cases?"

"The last customer I served before you came in, sir, was a woman," she made answer. "I served her with a farthing's-worth of bread. That's all she and her three children have for to-day."

The unemotional, matter-of-fact way in which she spoke was infinitely more significant than if she had put the point of exclamation to her statement by any melodramatic show of feeling, any play of features, or gestures of hands.

"But such cases are not common!" I protested.

"No," she said dully. "They're not. It's much commoner not to have the farthing's-worth of bread."

"Would you mind giving me that poor woman's name and address? I pledge you my word," I added, perhaps unnecessarily, "that I'll say no word to hurt her pride or wound her feelings."

"18, Cripps Court," was the reply; "and her name's Frost. But there's five families living in the house, most of 'em in one room, and two of them are Frost. The one you want is Mrs. Fred Frost."

"Thank you very much. It is very good of you to take this trouble," I said. "Are there any other cases equally bad that you know? If so, I'd be grateful to be told of them."

"Lots," was the laconic reply. "I can give you enough names, without your going out of this street, to keep you busy for a week. There's a couple at No. 9, in the top room. They've pawned every stick they've got, and are sleeping on bare boards on the floor. I know they haven't had anything to eat for two days. But you won't want anything to do with them, I expect. The man's a thief by trade, and the woman—well, she's worse, and I know for certain they ain't husband and wife."

"I don't care what they are," I replied hotly. "They're fellow-creatures, made of the same flesh and blood as we are, and they're in want. What name shall I ask for them by?"

"Lowe," she said. "That's the name they go by, anyway."

Thanking the good woman behind the counter for her help, I set out to find Mrs. Fred Frost.

The door of No. 18, Cripps Court, was opened by a wan, haggard-looking woman, whom the summons had apparently disturbed in the act of suckling a sickly-looking baby, which she held on one arm, while the hand of her other arm was fumbling at the unbuttoned bosom of her dress.

"Good morning," I said, raising my hat. "Can you tell me, please, if Mrs. Fred Frost is in?"

"No, sir, she's not," she answered civilly; "her baby's dead, and she's gone to find her husband, who's trying to get a job at the docks."

"Oh! Poor woman! I'm very sorry!" I said, gently. "The fact is, her name has been given me as one whose husband is out of work, and I ventured to call to see if she'd allow me to send in some groceries, and other things by way of being of some small assistance during the hard time. If you'll allow me, I'll call again."

"She'll be very grateful to you, sir, I'm sure," the woman replied. "Having the child ill has made it very hard for her just lately."

"Is there anybody else living here with whom things are going badly? If so, perhaps you'd tell me! I can't do very much, but what I can do, in the way of sending in some tea and some meat and a few groceries, I'd be very glad to."

"Well, sir," answered the woman, "there's an old couple in the back room, living alone with their little grandson (the child's father and mother are dead). But they've gone out—all three of them—to try and get a relief ticket somewhere. If you were to ask for them when you come back to see Mrs. Frost, you'll see for yourself by the very look of them how things are. The little boy—he's all right. They've managed it, though I don't know how, between them, 'cept by starving themselves to give to him, for skin and bone is about all that's left of the two old people."

"I'm very much obliged to you," I said. "And I shall venture, as I say, to call in again, perhaps in an hour's time. Good morning."

"Good morning, sir, and thank you," she said quietly.

As I was turning away the sun, which had not before been visible that morning, suddenly broke out from behind the clouds. Standing, as she had been, in a dark passage, and partly behind the half-opened door, she was so much in the shadow that I could not observe her closely; nor, for the matter of that, had I tried to do so, being anxious not to seem curious or inquisitive. But as the sun fell full upon her face, and I marked the hollows in her cheeks, and the dark rings around her eyes, I stopped suddenly, impulsively.

"Please don't think me impertinent," I said. "But you look far from strong yourself. I hope—I do hope—your husband isn't out of work, too."

"Yes, sir; he's been out five weeks now, come Tuesday."

"And have you any children? Again I ask you to forgive me."

"There's no offence, sir," she said quietly, but I saw that she was trying hard to stay the trembling of her lips.

"Yes, sir, I've five, and—and—there's been no food in the house since yesterday."

"Yet you never asked help for yourself!" I said, gentle reproach perhaps in my voice, but wonder and reverence at my heart. "You are a brave woman, a true woman, and I honour and respect you. But, for the children's sake, you mustn't refuse, if I ask you to let me try to be of some little help while the hard time lasts."

She was sobbing piteously now—more, I suspect, because she was faint and weak and in want of food than for any other reason.

"I'm sure I've—I've—I've tried hard to get some work, and so's Joe."

Then she pulled herself together.

"Will you come in, sir?"

Uncovering, I followed her into the wall-bare room. I say wall-bare advisedly, for, except for an old box in the corner, every stick of furniture had, as I discovered, been pawned or sold for food. Yet here seven of my fellow-creatures, made in the image of God, were herded together, within the space of a few square feet.

A wan, ragged, and unkempt man was sitting on the upturned box, his elbows on his knees, his hands thrust in the hair that was bushed over his ears.

He leapt up morosely, savagely, at my entrance, and muttered something about "More —— spies!"

But I was not born an Irishman for nothing. Three minutes had not passed before I had won him to friendliness; five minutes had not gone by before the youngest child was sitting on my knee, listening, open-mouthed, to stories about a performing dog.

After a little time I said:

"Now I wonder if Timmy there—he's nine, you said, Mrs. Wright—I wonder whether he's a good hand at shopping, and if he'd come with me to get a few things at the butcher's, and the baker's, and the grocer's, and then help me to bring them back? Do you know, Timmy, I'm a very, very greedy man, and want a cup of tea badly; and somehow I've got an idea that your mother, here, is a good hand at making tea; and when you and I come back, I'm going to beg her to be so very kind as to make me a cup, and then, while all the rest of you have a cup too, and something to eat with it, I'll finish that story of mine about the dog."

But I had miscalculated Timmy's strength. He and I stopped at the first shop we came to—a grocer's—and borrowed a wicker basket. It had the word "Margarine" stencilled or painted in big black letters on one side; and by the same token, as, for weeks to come, I had occasion to borrow that same basket, and came to be a familiar figure in the streets, I was known and spoken of in the district as "Mr. Margarine." Into this basket Timmy and I stacked away tea, sugar, butter, and other groceries. Then we returned to my friend the woman in the baker's shop, and added to our store a loaf or two of bread.

"And now, Timmy," I said, "I daresay this kind lady could find you a piece of cake and a glass of milk. Meanwhile, I'll run across the road and interview the butcher."

I had hardly entered the butcher's shop before I heard the sudden pulling up of a horse and cart in the street, and saw the driver hastily dismounting.

Timmy, supposing I had meant him to follow at once with the basket, had taken it up, and must have passed out almost at my heels. Half-way across the street he had suddenly reeled and fallen, and now lay white and unconscious.

"What's the matter?" I asked the woman who was kneeling beside him with his head on her arm.

"Oh, nothing!" she answered, bitterly. "You've got eyes in your head, haven't you, and can see for yourself? He's fainted for want of food—that's what's the matter. He's only starving!"

CHAPTER XXVII.

RE-ENTER THE DUMPLING.

"He's only starving!" the woman had said. But as I stooped to lift the frail little figure from the ground, as I hurried with it across the street and into the baker's shop, there to wet the white lips with a restorative—a prayer that was like the spurting of blood from a wound, a prayer that shot a pang of actual physical pain to my heart—so poignant, so terrible was my remorse—surged up unuttered but not unheard, within me.

"Lord Christ, lover of little children, spare and heal this Thy stricken little child. Forgive and pardon such as I, who, living our selfish, easeful lives, have closed our ears and shut our eyes to the suffering and the misery around us. Help us to repent. Lash us, if need be, with Thy whip of pain, burn us, if it seem good to Thee, with the scorching of fire, but awaken us, arouse us, thaw this cruel, frozen heart within us, that we be forgetful of the sufferings of these our fellow-creatures no more. Amen."

And the prayer was heard—as every prayer that is uttered in earnest is heard—on high. The restorative did its work. The cup of warm milk, which—perhaps with a thought of Him who said, "And whosoever shall give to drink one of these little ones a cup of cold water only ... shall in no wise lose his reward"—was held to his lips by the good woman, put new life into him; and before long Timmy and I were able to gather together our belongings, and to return to No. 18, Cripps Court.

There, his mother brewing the tea, and the rest of the household sitting around discussing the contents of my basket, I made the happiest meal of my life. The Wright family were equally happy, and listened to the continuation of my story of the performing dog with uproarious laughter.

The mere fact that one, not in their own station of life, could, by coming among them as one of themselves—asking no questions, laying down no laws, but by talking to the children, taking the little ones upon his knee, to show his watch or the dog's head on his walking-stick—so please and delight them, was to me tragic.

The good fellowship, the realisation of the common bond of human sympathy which—whether they wear corduroy or broadcloth, silk hats or coster caps, satin gown or cotton frock—should bind men and women together, seemed to cheer them in spirit as much, if not more, than their bodies had been cheered by the food.

After a time Mrs. Wright departed, taking the children with her, to execute some shopping commissions for me, and then Wright and I settled down for a chat.

It was not long before I learned his reason for fearing, when I had first entered, that I was what he had called "another of the —— spies."

"It's this way, sir," he said. "Two ladies called afore you come. The missis was out, or she wouldn't have let 'em in, but they came in without bein' asked, and sat down—at least, one on 'em did—on this box, and the other, she walked all around the place, sniffing like to herself, and talking aloud about what she called the 'dirt.'

"'So your name's Wright, and you're out of work, are you?' says the sitting-down one to me.

"'Yes,' I says, short like.

"'And what church do you attend?'

"'I don't attend none,' I says. 'The missis she goes sometimes of a Sunday evening, and the kids goes to Sunday school.'

"'And wot church does your wife go to—and what Sunday school do the children attend?' puts in the other lady, having done all the sniffing round she could.

"'Wesleyan,' I says.

"'H'm!' she says. 'Dissenters! That's bad! Don't you and your wife know that the Church of England is the Established Church of the land, and that it's displeasing to Almighty God—not to say anything about your wife's duty—in letting the children attend a sectarian place of worship?'

"'No,' I says; 'I don't.'

"'And what wages do you earn when you're in work, Wright?' she says.

"'Well,' I says, 'when I was a farm labourer I only made thirteen bob a week, but since I come to town I got about eighteen shillings when I was in work.'

"'And how much did you save out of that?'

"'Why, nothink,' I said. 'I 'ad a 'ouse then, and the rent was eight and six a week; and nine and six don't go far to feed and clothe five.'

"'Nonsense!' she says. 'You should always put by a percentage of what you earn, no matter how small it is, against a rainy day. The improvidence, the thriftlessness, of you poor is criminal! I'm afraid you're an idle, worthless fellow, Wright,' she says, 'and not deserving of any help until I see that you've reformed your ways.'"

Then, moved perhaps by the memory of his recent privations, he suddenly seemed to lose all self-control. Springing to his feet, he shook his clenched fist in the air, as with flaming face and voice hoarse with frenzy, he shouted:

"Reform my ways? Idle, worthless fellow, am I? Ah! but the days of grinding us down are gone. The days of them that oppress the poor are over! It's Labour that's going to lord it now, and make the laws, and rule the land. The millions on millions who starve and sweat and labour are no longer to be the toys and tools of the few thousands that sweat them, so that the idle few may live on the fat of the land. The millions have found their leader at last—the man to organise them into armies, and to lay the mines of the revolution that's close at hand, the man that's——"

"Cease your ranting!" I interrupted sternly, for his voice had risen to a screech. "Do you want to arouse the neighbourhood? I've heard all that stuff before, and from the lips of the man who first uttered it—for you are not speaking your own words. You are only speaking words that have been put into your mouth. Wrongs you have, no doubt, but rant and rioting won't right them, and I tell you——"

I was not allowed to finish the sentence. Someone who had no doubt been listening in the passage outside suddenly sprang in, and before I could turn—for my back was to the door—had seized me so as to pin both my arms to my sides.

I did not need to be told the name of my assailant, to see his face, or to hear his voice. Only one man whom I had ever met had arms of such gorilla-like length, of such giant strength.

It was the Dumpling!

CHAPTER XXVIII.

MUTINY AND A MESMERIST.

"You noisy fool, Wright!" he said, still holding me in his iron grip. "I heard you ranting in the street outside." Then, "Am I hurting you, Mr. Rissler?" he asked.

Foolishly I opened my mouth to reply, but hardly had I done so before a handkerchief was thrust between my lips, and stuffed the next instant half-way down my throat.

"Now, Wright," he said, "you can tie his hands and feet while I hold him. Do it so that the knot won't give, but carefully, so as not to hurt him. Come along, my good man! You are very slow! Do as I bid you, and be quick about it!"

Somewhat to my surprise, and more so, evidently, to the Dumpling's, Wright refused point-blank.

"I won't," he said, not budging from where he stood. "The gentleman's been kind to me and mine, and lift a hand against him I won't."

"Do as I bid you!" was the answer, in a voice that was almost a hiss.

"I won't," was the dogged reply.

The next jiffey I was lifted off my feet by the Dumpling's powerful arms, and, before I knew what he was about, I was lying upon my back on the floor, bewildered but unharmed.

Putting a knee upon my chest, and holding me down meanwhile with both hands, he raised his head and looked Wright straight in the eyes.

For the space of a few seconds the fellow stood gaping at the Dumpling as if fascinated. Then his eyes dulled to a fixed, foolish stare, and finally the lids of them drooped and closed. He was mesmerised—that fact was evident.

"Open your eyes," the Dumpling commanded.

Wright did so.

"Put your hand in my right-side pocket, and you'll find a strap."

Automatically the other obeyed.

"Strap his ankles securely. No; it is no use your struggling, Rissler," he went on, as, getting my feet against the wainscot for leverage, I put all my strength into an effort to throw him off.

Then, looking over his shoulder, he inquired:

"Have you got that strap, Wright?"

"I have got the strap," the other replied mechanically.

"Then be ready to use it," said the Dumpling. "Slip it around his ankles when I say 'Now'!"

Still holding me down with both hands, he suddenly straddled his powerful knees open, as if they had been a pair of nut-crackers, and the two legs of me—outside which his own legs now lay—the two halves of a walnut. Then he closed his knees, clipping mine together within them, as the pair of crackers might clip the shell; and though I struggled with all my strength, for I was furious at finding myself proved to be not only as a child in his hands, but as an infant upon his knees—or between them—I knew, when I heard him say 'Now,' that I was as neatly hobbled as any horse.

"It's a pity you put us and yourself to all this unnecessary trouble," he said philosophically. "Now, then, Wright, look in his pockets for a handkerchief, and lash his wrists while I hold them together."

As he spoke, the five fingers of his right hand closed on my left hand, as the talons of a pouncing hawk close upon a field-mouse.

Then, in spite of my futile efforts, he drew my left hand towards my right, and suddenly spanning the two with the fingers of his single hand, nonchalantly arranging the set of his collar with the other meanwhile, he said:

"Now, Wright, just tie his wrists together, will you?" and once again the mesmerised man did as he was bidden.

Rising, the Dumpling turned from me to Wright. Looking that worthy full in the eyes, he said, in a low voice:

"You are awake."

"I am awake," repeated Wright, automatically, as his eyes, still fixed in a stupid stare, turned sluggishly in their sockets, following his master's movements.

Lifting his dropped left arm slightly, the Dumpling touched, with a finger tip, the finger tips of the other's loosely open hand. Then he put his right hand on Wright's shoulder, and with a gentle shake, said:

"Wake!"

Wright came to himself with a start, and looked foolishly around.

"What did you mean by disobeying me just now?" asked the Dumpling with sudden fierceness.

"I'm sorry, sir; I never done it before, as you know, and I'm sorry if I opened my mouth too wide and made a noise. Me and mine has gone through hard times since you were here last. The money you left us was finished nigh upon two weeks ago, and not knowing where you was, and not being able to get any work, we've had nothing to eat. This gentleman here has been very kind to us, and though I've never disobeyed you before, sir, I couldn't lift hand against him, and that's a fact."

The Dumpling seemed genuinely concerned.

"Has it been so bad as that with you, my poor fellow?" he said gravely. "Humphreys shall answer to me for this. I had to be away, it's true, but I left plenty of money with him for all requirements, and I particularly told him that no one, who is in with us, should be allowed to want.

"I'm glad my friend on the floor has been good to you," he continued. "He's of the right stuff, and ought to be with us, Wright—will be with us one day, I hope and believe. You needn't be anxious about him. I don't mean to do him any harm. On the contrary, I want to do him a good turn, if he'll let me. My reason for gagging him was because, when I first came in, I thought you and he were quarrelling. One doesn't do a man any serious amount of damage by sticking a piece of rag in his mouth and tying him up for a half-hour. He, on the other hand, not understanding the situation, and supposing himself to be in danger, might have called out and brought the police about our ears. He'd be sorry for it after, when he knew the facts, so we protected ourselves, and protected him against himself, by taking the precaution of making sure of him first. See?

"Well, now, I want to have a few words with the gentleman, and I can do so better if he and I are alone. You stay outside the door meanwhile, Wright, and see that no one comes in."

Wright gone, and the door closed and locked, the Dumpling turned to me.

"Now, Mr. Rissler, to finish our interrupted conversation of the other night. But first of all about that gag. If I take it off, will you give me your promise, your parole, not to call or cry out, or do anything to bring outsiders in? Nod if you agree. Shake your head, if not."

I nodded.

"All right," he said. "But you'll be more comfortable sitting up, with your back to the wall, than lying on the floor full length. See, I'll prop you up that way, and now to take off the gag."

While he was doing so I was planning a little surprise for him. Up to now he had, no doubt, for reasons of his own, been very careful to conceal his name from me. He had, to be sure, declared himself to be Napoleon, but Napoleon's present address is not to be found in any directory available for the purpose.

That my theory of the identity of John Carleton, of No. 5, Taunton Square, with the man whom I knew as the Dumpling was correct, I was, in my own mind, entirely persuaded; but I was shy of theories, and anxious to replace them by actual knowledge. I was curious, too, to see what effect the fact that his real name was known to me would have upon him. Would he admit it? Would he deny it? Would it arouse him to anger or to fear? Means of knowing I had none, other than by putting the matter to the test; so, no sooner was I sitting up, with the gag removed, than I looked him straight in the face and shot my bolt.

"Well, and how are you, Mr. John Carleton?" I said.

CHAPTER XXIX.

THE MYSTERY OF THE THIRD MAN.

That my knowledge of his identity would come to him as a surprise, I was tolerably sure; and, in springing it thus suddenly upon him, I hoped to gather by his face, which I was watching narrowly meanwhile, whether he were moved by anger or by dismay.

The result was a fiasco, a fizzle, an abject failure. Either he was the most consummate of actors, or, as is more likely, I the most consummate of fools; for he looked at me at first with bewilderment, and then with amusement, and finally burst into a hearty laugh.

"So that's who you think I am, is it?" he chuckled. "I saw by that speaking countenance of yours that you were hatching an egg (you are an Irishman, aren't you? so you won't mind my mixing my metaphors), but I didn't expect so weird a fowl as this."

He took that morning's paper from his pocket, and holding it open before me, pointed to a paragraph, which ran as follows:

"The freedom of the City of Carlisle will to-day, at noon, be conferred upon Mr. John Carleton, the eminent inventor, who was born in that city, and has devoted a large portion of the fortune he amassed in America to improving the homes of the poor in the place of his birth. Miss Clara Carleton and her niece, Miss Kate Carleton, have left 5, Taunton Square, W., for Homburg, where Mr. Carleton will shortly join them."

"I admit," commented the Dumpling ironically, "that the fact of Mr. Carleton devoting a portion of his fortune to improving the homes of the poor, points suspiciously to me. How are you to be sure, Mr. Rissler, that I didn't send that paragraph myself to the newspaper, in the expectation of meeting you here, and, by showing it to you, to put you off the scent? And the portrait! Stop a minute—there is a portrait. It's in another part of the paper. Ah! here it is."

The portrait, which was inscribed "John Carleton, Esq., the eminent inventor and philanthropist," was that of a flat-foreheaded, clean-shaven man, absolutely bald, and so shrunken and fleshless of face as to seem all skin and bone. The striking resemblance to a skull, caused by his singular fleshlessness, was heightened by the fact that he wore huge glasses of great magnifying power, out of which his hollow eyes loomed cavernously.

"It's like me, isn't it?" said the Dumpling. "But then you are not to be deceived by anything of that sort, are you? It may dupe the police, but you will see at a glance that that portrait is only myself, cleverly got up to look like somebody else. And when you read in to-morrow's papers an account of the ceremony at Carlisle—and, by the bye," pulling out his watch, "it's just about taking place now—you will say to yourself, 'What a thing it is to be a detective! Here's all this hullaballoo about the conferring of the freedom of the City of Carlisle upon Mr. John Carleton at noon yesterday; and all the time I could have told them—if they'd only asked me, which for some inexplicable reason they didn't—that the real John Carleton was at 18, Cripps Court, Shadwell.'"

Then the bantering tone died out of his voice.

"I've chaffed you a bit about the mistake, Mr. Rissler, but it was a very natural mistake to fall into," he said. "My coming to No. 5, Taunton Square, twice in a night, my shadowing it beforehand, my knowing all about it—no, I can't see, as I say, that you are very much to blame, after all. It is curious that you should have thought me to be John Carleton when, if there is one man in all the world with whom I would not, for all the world can offer, change places, that one man is John Carleton.

"When I tell you the story of my life, as I hope I shall one day, you will understand and appreciate—but not till then—my reason for speaking as I do. But now to talk of other matters. You have thought over what I said to you the other night?"

"I have," I answered.

"And you are going to throw in your lot with us?"

"No."

"Rissler," he said gravely, "don't compel me to kill you, as kill you I must under certain circumstances. There is blood on my hands already, and more blood on my hands there must, of necessity, be before my work is done; but, of all men in the world, you are the one man whom I am most anxious to spare. You must see for yourself that you know too much, that you are too dangerous to be left at large, except as one of us. I have shown my heart, my hopes, my dreams, to you, as I have shown them to no other man. Can I do nothing, say nothing, to influence you? You feel as I do about the poor, as witness the fact of what you have done for Wright and his family. What moved you to do that? What brought you here, in Wright's house, at all?"

He stopped, as if expecting an answer; so, briefly as possible, I told him of the impression that had been made upon me by his words about the poor, and that, for the time, at least, I had thrown up my detective work, in order to devote myself to doing what lay in my power to alleviate the sufferings of my fellow-creatures.

He was genuinely moved, and when he inquired how I came to know of Wright, and I told him of my system of making inquiries at a small shop, in the very poorest district, he put a hand upon my shoulder, and said excitedly:

"Rissler, you have no choice in this matter. God has called you to the task, and you may not say Him nay. It is only a question of time. Two days—only two days ago, you were against us. You announced yourself as my enemy, as one who was set upon hunting me down. Now you tell me of your own accord—and I believe you—that you have abandoned this ignoble work of hunting down a fellow-creature who, whether his methods be right or wrong in your eyes, is at least consumed with a passionate desire to spend and to sacrifice everything he has, life itself, if necessary, to succour and to help the poor and the oppressed.

"Two days ago, Rissler, as I say, you were against us. To-day you are against us no more. Two days ago you cared nothing for the sufferings of the poor, you gave no thought to them. To-day you are here amongst them, ministering to them with your own hand. If two days have wrought this change in you, what change may not another two days work? Another two days may see you working with us, one of us, leading the Labour hosts in this battle of the Lord.

"Now, listen to me. I'll be frank with you, and tell you that from the first moment I saw you something within me warned me to beware of you, and cried out, 'Kill! kill! kill!' That night in the wine cellar, to-day in this squalid room, I should, had I followed my impulses, have strangled you without mercy, without remorse, and without a thought. Why don't I kill you? Why do I spend time which I can't afford to spend? Why do I run risks which I never ought to run, in talking to you, in explaining things to you, in trying to persuade you to join us?

"I will tell you. It is because God has revealed to me that you are destined to play a great part in the history of this rising. It was by no chance that you came that night to the opium den. It was by no chance, it was not entirely by your resourcefulness and skill, that you escaped with your life. It was no chance which drew you to the house in Taunton Square, no chance which sent you here to Cripps Court.

"The part you are to play, God has not yet revealed to me; but I will tell you what I believe that part to be. The army I command may be counted by many millions, but leader there is only one—myself. And the battle—which shall be called Armageddon—the battle which shall set Labour upon the throne as Lord and Ruler of this land—that battle approaches, and in that battle I shall fall. If I fall, all falls, unless God raise up a second in command who shall be the leader of the people after I am gone. That leader I believe you are marked out to be. That is why I dare not kill you; that is why I am going to do the maddest thing a sane man ever did.

"Of my own will I set you free to go from here unharmed. As yet you are not with us. As yet God has not made known His will to you. As yet, though I have twice appealed to you to throw in your lot with us, you have resisted my entreaty. But I am not dismayed. Once again I shall come to you. Once again I shall appeal to you, and that third time I shall give you such assured proof of the triumph of our cause, that after that third time I shall need to appeal to you no more. The victory will be won. Our cause, the people's cause, God's cause, you will, on that third appeal, espouse. Of my own accord I set you free."

As he spoke these last words, he stooped to unfasten my bonds, and, in doing so, looked me for a moment in the eyes. Once again a dream-tableau seemed to shape itself before me.

I saw myself—as one might see another person—in some dark place underground. By my side stood the Dumpling, and far back in the shadow was another man.

In my dream I could not see the face of the third man. I could see the Dumpling's face, and upon it was a look of fiendish triumph as he pointed me to the third man. But I could see my own face, and on my own face, as it was turned to the face of the third man, was such a look of incredulous horror as, waking or dreaming, I shall never see upon human face again.

Then the dream passed. I was free of my bonds, and the Dumpling was holding open the door.

"Good-bye, Rissler!" he said. "We shall meet again and soon; and that meeting will mean great things for both of us."

Without a word, without so much as a "Thank you" or a "Good day," I passed out, like one who walks in his sleep. I could think of nothing save the unseen face of the third man in my dream, and of the incredulous horror which had been upon my own face on realising who that third man was.

CHAPTER XXX.

FORTY MILES IN A PERAMBULATOR!

My discomfiture at the Dumpling's derisive repudiation of the supposition that he was John Carleton was completed next morning, when John Carleton himself returned to town, and John Carleton in the flesh I with my own eyes several times saw, as he went in and out of his house in Taunton Square.

"That man," said I to myself, "should be an object-lesson to you in the futility of theory building. First, you called yourself a fool for not having seen that John Carleton was the Dumpling, and the Dumpling, John Carleton. Now, you have the pleasure of knowing yourself a double-distilled donkey, for ever having supposed anything of the sort."

Upon the theory—the fact, as I had thought it to be—that John Carleton and the Dumpling were one and the same man, rested the only explanation I had to offer in regard to the letter I had received from the two Miss Carletons, aunt and niece. That theory being now entirely exploded, their extraordinary behaviour remained as much, if not more, of a mystery than ever.

A mystery—so far as I was concerned—I decided that it might remain. Of detective work and of theory building I had had more than enough, and so I betook myself that very afternoon to Shadwell, to renew the investigations which my meeting with the Dumpling had interrupted.

The first name on my list was that of a tailor's "hand," named Holmes, a widower who, I was told, had five young children, and was out of work. He was a consumptive-looking creature, hollow of cheek, eye, and chest, and with a hacking cough.

"Yes, sir," he said civilly, in reply to my inquiries. "It is quite true that I am out of work, and that I have children; but I can't take your help, asking your pardon all the same, sir, for seeming rude and ungrateful."

"On the contrary," I said, "it is I who have to apologise to you, Mr. Holmes, for what you might very well think my impertinence in coming here at all. But I happened to hear, quite by chance, how beautifully you keep your children; and how nice they always look; and learning that you were out of work, and being very, very fond of children (I haven't any myself: I wish I had), I thought there wouldn't be any harm, at least, in calling, just to see whether there were any little thing I could do for you, until you're in work again. I'm a working man, as you are, though I happen to work with a pen, while you happen to work with a needle. And I'm a poor man, too, for the matter of that; but just lately I chanced, by a stroke of luck, to make a pound or two more than usual, and when I have a stroke of luck I like to share it with someone who has been less lucky—just as I believe you'd be ready to share your good luck, when it comes, with me, if I happened to need it. But I respect your independence and pride, and I ask you again to forgive me for calling."

"It isn't pride, sir," he said; "and, if the children were in absolute want, I'd take your help and thank God for it. It's this way, sir. This week we have just enough money left out of my savings to last us—me and the children—in bread. It has only been bread, and dry bread, it's true; and if when Monday comes I haven't got work, there won't even be bread, for my money will be entirely gone. If you should be this way then, and would look in, and I haven't found work, I will take your help—putting it the way you do, sir—and thank God for it. But when I know of hundreds of little children who haven't had even a piece of bread for days, I can't take——But I thank you kindly. God bless you, sir. I must go now. I hear one of the children calling. Good afternoon."

He closed the door in my face—not rudely, but in haste, lest I should see how shaken he was by emotion; and bowing my head, and with my own heart rising strangely in my throat, I turned away.

Just for the moment, I did not feel like facing the eyes in the street; so, as a slight rain was falling, I took shelter in a dark passage leading to a court, and stood there out of sight of passers, to collect my thoughts.

It was not long before my attention was attracted by a curious sight. A gipsy-like, wolf-faced man was wheeling a child's perambulator, in which, to my astonishment, I saw curled up the figure of a full-grown woman. I recognised the couple at a glance. Walking once along the high road from Epping to London, I had seated myself upon a five-barred gate by the wayside for a quiet smoke. The gate stood between thick hedge-rows, and, as it was set back a little, the folk passing along the road could not see me until they were almost level with the gate. By and by I heard what struck me as a very pretty altercation between a man and a woman who were approaching me slowly, but whom as yet I could not see. The man, as I discovered when they came into sight, was wheeling a perambulator (the same perambulator, in fact) in which were a number of ferns and primrose roots that he was carrying to London to sell. This perambulator the woman was pleading to be allowed to take a turn at pushing, urging that as the man had been up since four in the morning to gather the ferns and primroses, and had had to wheel the perambulator five miles out and five miles back, he must consequently be very tired. He, protesting that he was not tired at all, point-blank refused, declaring that, as she had only just come out of hospital, she must be much more tired than he. And so the petty quarrel continued, until the pair came opposite to the gate, and I saw that she was a sickly, blear-eyed, unlovely woman, and he an unkempt, gipsy-like fellow with lean face and hungry, wolf's eyes.

Well, to cut a long story short, I had contrived to make their acquaintance, and had found that, underneath their rags and dirt, beat two honest and unselfish hearts. I had told them to come always to me if in need of assistance of any sort—an invitation of which they took advantage only once, and then when their straits were desperate. On every other occasion I had found them touchily independent, and though I sometimes bought flowers, bullrushes, mistletoe, or fern-roots from them for the decoration of my house or garden, they would not accept a farthing from me in the shape of charity. If I wished to buy the wares they had for sale, that was another matter; and even then I have reason to know that I got more flowers, bullrushes, or fern roots for sixpence than their usual customers got for a shilling.

For some twelvemonth we continued the best of friends. Then suddenly their visits ceased, and I set eyes on neither again until I saw the pair of them at Shadwell—the woman curled up in the perambulator, and the man pushing it.

"Nash!" I called out, running after them. "Nash, where have you been all this time? And why haven't you and Mrs. Nash been to see me?"

"We have been doing pretty much the same as usual, sir," he replied stiffly; "and thank you for asking." Then touching his ragged cap, he said brusquely, "Good day, sir," and, pushing the perambulator before him, passed along.

But I was not thus easily to be shaken off. At first he stood very much on his dignity, answering my questions, in regard to himself and his doings, with civil but manifest unwillingness, but at last I contrived—and then only with difficulty—to discover wherein I had offended.

On the last occasion, when they had visited me, I had said to him, as he was passing out: "Well, good-bye, Nash. Mind, if ever you get into trouble, be sure to come or to send to me, and I'll do my best to get you out."

By "trouble" I had meant illness, or the inability to scrape together the small sum they paid as rent for the miserable hovel in which they lived.

But in George Nash's world "trouble"—so I learned for the first time—has only one meaning when applied to a man (the word is used in a different sense in regard to a woman), and that meaning—jail.

"I don't see why you should have thought that of us, sir," Nash said with quiet dignity. "Poor we may be, but at least we've managed to keep honest. And the inside of a prison we're never likely to see. We thank you kindly for what you've done for us, sir, the missis and me, but if you think as we're that sort, well, sir, we've made a mistake about you, and you've made a mistake about us, and we wish you good-day."

Turning doggedly to the perambulator, he touched his hat and passed on.

"Why, my dear fellow," I said hotly, following him, and taking him by the hand, "such a thought never entered my head. I'd leave you—and for the matter of that I have left you or your wife—in my room alone with every farthing I possess lying about openly, and never even dream of counting it, or of thinking of it at all.

"Well," I went on, when I had at last persuaded him that he had done me an injustice, "well, and what on earth is the meaning of Mrs. Nash being cooped up in this perambulator? She looks very white and thin. I do hope she isn't ill."

"Yes, sir; she's very ill," was the answer. "Got something wrong inside her, the doctor said, that'll have to be cut out. I'm taking her to Reading now."

"To Reading?" I said. "But why to Reading? I can easily arrange to get her into a good hospital for women here."

"No, sir, thank you kindly. She's set on going to Reading, and nowhere else. The doctor there (she's been there afore, you know) don't treat poor folk as some other doctors do. They don't mean not to be kind, but they speak so sharp, it frightens her. The doctor at Reading—ah! he is different. She ain't a bit afraid of him. She won't go anywhere but to Reading. She's set on it, sir, and so am I."

Knowing the man as I did, I could see that it was no use to argue with him.

"I see," I said. "Quite right, George. I'll come with you as far as Paddington, if you'll let me. Shadwell Station is some way yet. You look hot and tired already, and so I'll take a turn at pushing the pram while you rest. But if I may make a suggestion, I should say that the best thing to do is to steer for the nearest place where we're likely to find a four-wheeled cab and let me drive you to Paddington. How did you propose taking Mrs. Nash there?"

"Same way as I'm taking her to Reading, sir," he said unconcernedly; "in the pram, of course."

"The pram!" I ejaculated. "My dear Nash, what nonsense! It's forty miles! You can't wheel a grown woman forty miles in a child's perambulator."

"Can't I, sir?" he said, smiling with an air of superiority. "I've taken her there twice before in the perambulator, and by picking up a bit of work on the way we've managed nicely."

Then he looked at me queerly.

"Mr. Rissler," he said in a low voice, "will you take a word from a man as you've been a friend to, and as'd like to prove himself a friend of yours? I can't answer no question, and I didn't ought to say what I'm going to say. I know as you're the poor man's friend, though you are one of the gentry. But there's them as don't know it; and, sir, believe me, there's trouble ahead for the likes o' you—bitter trouble, bloody trouble. You take my word for it. And this is what I want to say to you, sir. When the trouble comes, if you should find yourself among enemies, if you should find yourself in danger o' your life, as'll happen to many like you afore long, just you throw up your left arm with your fist closed, and say, 'God and Napoleon and the Dumpling strike with a granite arm!'"

He looked furtively around him as if afraid of being overheard by eavesdroppers, and then repeated the sentence, "'God and Napoleon and the Dumpling strike with a granite arm!' That's the word, sir. Do you think you can remember it?"

Inwardly amused at the seriousness with which the foolish fellow was taking the Dumpling's rhodomontade, but hiding my amusement under a face portentously grave, lest I should give my well-meaning friend offence, I replied:

"Yes, I can remember it, and I'll be sure to bear your words in mind, if necessity comes. Thank you very much, Nash."

But to myself I said:

"A grown woman! Wheeled forty miles in a perambulator to undergo an operation! And for no other reason than that the doctor at Reading is kind and doesn't speak sharp to the poor! My God!"

CHAPTER XXXI.

THE GREAT INSURRECTION BEGINS.

Looking back now upon the time of which I am writing, I cannot altogether acquit myself of criminal negligence for failing to realise—until it was too late to take action—how insidiously and how thoroughly the Dumpling was doing his work. Nash's warning—though I was by no means disposed to take it seriously—had not been altogether a surprise to me, for I knew already that inflammatory speeches were being delivered, inflammatory literature circulated broadcast. To these I attached small importance, having too much faith in the common sense and in the conservatism of my fellow-countrymen to believe that the Dumpling could induce them to take concerted action upon any considerable scale. I have since learned that secret meetings were held nearly every night; but instead of one mass meeting, which must inevitably have attracted the attention of the police, the Dumpling, a prince of organisers, had arranged for innumerable small gatherings in every part of London. At each of these meetings some member of the General Council, and therefore in close touch with the Dumpling himself, would preside, and in this way their leader's plans were made known, a plan of campaign laid down, and concerted action arranged in the most secret yet thorough way. Immense sums of money, so I afterwards learned, were expended in the purchase and in the secret storage of arms; and foreign mercenaries and expert marksmen, whose services the Dumpling had requisitioned, were constantly pouring into London to place themselves at his orders.

Had I still been engaged in detective work, something of all this must, I think, have come to my notice; but I am so constituted as to be able to do one thing only at a time. Whatever pursuit I take up, into that pursuit I throw myself heart and soul, to the exclusion of everything else. This temperamental defect—if a defect it be—may be the secret of some of my many failures; it may be the secret of my few successes. Concentration of interests generally means limitation of interests, and whether one be racking the heavens nightly through a telescope in search of new worlds, or only peering through a microscope, to isolate bacilli of this or that disease—one is equally apt to become absent-minded in other matters. So entirely had I given myself up to studying the problem of the poor, that I had eyes for nothing else.

It is not, however, my intention further to describe, in these pages, the harrowing scenes I witnessed while so occupied. Were I a commissioner, appointed to report to a Committee of Inquiry upon the condition of the poor, I should, it is true, have painful, revolting, and even incredible facts to recount. I could give chapter and verse in proof of inconceivable infamy. I could give instances of men, women, and even children living under circumstances more degrading than could be found in any so-called savage race. I should, in common honesty, be compelled to admit that by many of these who are most in evidence, as in search of work—work is the very last thing in the world that they really desire to find. Hymn-bawling in the streets is the nearest most of them have ever come to earning their bread by the sweat of their brow; a few hours processioning and posing as unemployed, the hardest day's work many of them ever did.

And yet, admitting all this, and speaking as one who has seen something of the poor, and of their homes, I say, and in all sincerity, of the very poor as a whole, that I find it hard to express my admiration, my respect, and my reverence for the unselfishness, the courage, and the nobility which I have known them to display.

There came a time at last when the strenuousness of the work I was doing began to tell terribly upon me. It has been said that profound sympathies are always in association with keen sensibilities, and that keen sensibilities expose their possessor to a depth of anguish utterly unintelligible to those who are differently constituted. In my own case the hopelessness of the struggle in which I was engaged weighed constantly upon me. Men and women—and, worst of all, little children—were starving literally by the thousand, and all my efforts could do no more than bring relief each day to perhaps a dozen. My money was gone; the health by which I could earn more money was fast giving way, and what I had accomplished, and could hope to accomplish, seemed, when compared with what remained to be done, like the taking of a drop of water from the sea.

One evening, after visiting a case of destitution and misery so harrowing that it was only by a tremendous effort I was able to control myself, and to speak cheerfully and hopefully to the sufferers, I came out into the dark street, and, once alone, to my unspeakable disgust and dismay, burst into tears.

When a man of strong physique, normal by nature, and in no sense hysterical, gets into a condition so over-wrought as this, he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, as was proved in my own person.

The next morning I was so seriously ill that I was compelled to keep my bed for some days, after which I was ordered to Brighton.

I returned to my chambers in Adelphi Terrace on Sunday morning, to find London dull to the very point of stagnation. So few people I do not ever remember, even on a Sunday, to have seen in the streets. The Strand was for once justified of its name, for it was like some sea strand or beach from which the tide has withdrawn, leaving a long stretch of untenanted sands. Yet that same night the returning up-gathered tidal wave swept and broke over London like a devastating sea.

A meeting of the unemployed was, I saw by the papers, to be held that afternoon in Victoria Park. Instead of the few thousands whom the public had expected to assemble, the meeting—no doubt by pre-concerted action—mustered nearly half a million. The organisation of this unwieldy mob was wonderful.

At five minutes to three the people were sullenly, suspiciously silent. At three a bugle-call was heard, and suddenly in their midst the red flag was raised, and at that sight the hounds of insurrection gave tongue, baying for blood, in one prolonged and awful roar, that might have been heard a mile away.

Then the Dumpling, who was standing on the pedestal of a drinking fountain, raised his hand, and again the bugle-call rang out. Another roar burst forth as, in every part of the open space of the park, poles were set up, on the top of which were immense black boards, each with a letter of the alphabet printed prominently upon it in white. With one accord the multitude broke up to sort itself into huge companies, according to the letter of the alphabet under which each had been previously instructed to place himself. Another bugle-call, and from hundreds of houses, surrounding the park, companies of men were seen to come forth, carrying weapons for distribution. For months this secret storage of weapons in private houses had been going on all over London, with the result that when the outbreak came, every man knew where to obtain a weapon. In the neighbourhood of the park itself it was, of course, not possible to store a sufficient number of rifles to arm more than some few thousands of men; but those so armed had been more or less drilled and trained to shoot. They were placed in the van of the Labour army with the foreign mercenaries—expert riflemen—immediately in the forefront, ready to resist the first attacking force, whether of the military or of the police.

Then, at a signal from the Dumpling, the bugle was once again sounded, and the westward march commenced by a route so planned that weapons for those still unarmed could be picked up at the various storage centres on the way.

The rebel army, more than half a million strong, and led by its new Napoleon, was marching on London. The Revolution of which the Dumpling had so often boasted had begun.

CHAPTER XXXII.

BLOODSHED.

When, at the head of his Labour legions, the Dumpling set forth on that eventful Sunday afternoon to march westwards, he and his lieutenants—and, by means of his lieutenants, his men—knew exactly what work lay in front of them. That work done, the order had gone forth that the multitude was to break up, and each man was to return quietly to his home, so that next day, at the hour appointed, the legions might re-assemble, rested and ready for the fray. It was known that the Dumpling had told off a certain number of picked and tried men to patrol the streets after the hour of dismissal, and through the night, and that these patrols would deal summarily with all who disobeyed orders.

The man with a genius for organisation is rare. The man who has not only a genius for organisation, but has also a genius for compelling other people implicitly to accept his orders, and to abide by his organisation —the man who can, at will, mould mankind in the lump, as the potter moulds clay—comes only once in a hundred years. Such a man was the Dumpling. Instead of letting his vast army straggle invertebrately westwards under his single command, his system of subdividing it into companies, each under a separate picked leader, taking orders from himself, worked out with surprisingly successful results. There was no aimless moving from place to place. Though East London was practically in the hands of the rioters, orders had been given that no man was to leave the ranks, and that London Fields was to be the first halting-place, each company to march thither by a pre-arranged route. At every open space where two or more roads met—as, for instance, Hackney Triangle—and where assailing forces of police or military might be expected, expert riflemen, sent on slightly in advance of the main body, were stationed. At Hackney Triangle it was, indeed, that the first brush with the police occurred. Some two or three hundred of the force, hastily gathered together, attempted to stem the onward march of the rioters. The Dumpling at once came forward, speaking to them considerately, even humanely.

"With you personally," he said, "we have no quarrel; you we have no wish to harm. These people are your brethren, and you are theirs. The only difference between you and them is that you wear the uniform of a Social System to which we are here to put an end. By that ending you will benefit as much as we. You, no less than we, are the servants of an iniquitous system, by which all the hardship, the toil, and the privations of life are apportioned to one class, and all the ease, luxury, wealth, and comfort to another. You are poorly paid; you are iron ruled. You must tramp the streets by day and by night, exposed to burning heat and biting cold, risking your life daily—and for no other reason than that the rich, the vicious, the luxurious, the sweaters of the poor, the oppressors of the people, may increase their ill-gotten gains and live their idle, easy lives of pleasure-seeking and debauchery. In risking your lives to protect your fellow-citizens against crime, you are doing noble and heroic work, for which you are inadequately paid. But we are not criminals. We have done wrong to none. We are men and women like you, compelled at last, at the cost of our lives if it must be, to assert the common right of all God's creatures to live. We and our wives and children have starved and suffered over-long. But our rights we will have, so help us God, and I appeal to you, our brother men, who have many of you wives and children of your own, not to shed our blood, or to compel us to shed yours, in defending ourselves. You have done your work well and faithfully, as witness your heroic attempt—mere handful as you are—to oppose this army of God which, as surely as you and I still breathe the breath of life, is marching on to victory. Brother Englishmen, brother citizens, brother sufferers, let us not shed each other's blood. Join us; throw in your lot with us; cast off the yoke of the tyrant, and you shall share in the rewards which shall soon be ours."

He stopped, panting with passion; and then—the words snapping like three pistol-shots following the one after the other—came the order of the officer in command of the police: "Arrest—that—man!"

"For God's sake, for humanity's sake, don't compel us to violence," interposed the Dumpling with lifted hand. "If you wish to come to hand-grips with us, if you wish to test the temper of the people, you shall have plenty of opportunity, I promise, later on. You have done, at this point, all that is required. You have done your duty bravely and well. Few as you are, compared to us, you can do nothing more. For the present, at least, retire until the odds are less unequal. It would be suicide, at this juncture, to oppose us by force, for in that case I warn you I shall give my sharp-shooters the order to fire, and you will fall almost to a man."

Again he stopped, and again came the police officer's word of command:

"Officers, do your duty. Arrest that man."

They were the last words he was to speak on earth, for as they passed his lips the Dumpling raised a hand.

"God's will be done!" he said. "I can say no more. Riflemen, make ready! Present! Fire!"

The result was what he had foretold. The gallant little band of police fell, dead or dying, almost to a man.

CHAPTER XXXIII.

THE BATTLE OF TOWER HILL.

From that moment onward the rebels carried all before them. The first encounter with soldiery was at London Fields, where a regiment of militia, hastily summoned from a neighbouring barracks, was drawn up. The militia showed more discretion than the police, for after discharging one volley, and being raked by a withering fire from the rebel sharp-shooters in return, they retreated in disorder.

This time the Dumpling was less merciful.

"They have deliberately raised hand against the people, to do murder!" he said. "And by the God whose instrument I am, for every life they have taken, a score of them shall fall!"

Instructions were given to the rebel riflemen to continue firing so long as one of the soldiers remained within range. The result was disastrous to the retreating troops. In an open space with no available cover, they could be picked off one after the other by the Dumpling's practised marksmen, with the result that scarcely a round dozen escaped to tell the tale.

Flushed with victory, the rebels re-formed, and the march was resumed, this time to Tower Hill, where the Dumpling scored his first great success of generalship.

Anticipating that at Tower Hill serious military resistance would be offered, he had laid his plans accordingly. An enormous empty warehouse, commanding the open space in front of the Tower, had been rented by one of his agents, under the pretence that it was to be the central office and storage house of a firm of tea merchants. At this warehouse, chests and packages, purporting to contain tea, but containing in reality rifles and ammunition, had for some days past been delivered, and a number of men—nominally clerks, packers, and warehousemen, but in reality expert riflemen, disloyal Boers and foreign mercenaries—constituted the staff, and were, on the Sunday afternoon in question, concealed upon the premises.

The secreting of these expert riflemen in a position where they could command Tower Hill and riddle with bullets any troops assembled below, was, however, only one item in the Dumpling's carefully planned campaign. Knowing that it would be from the east or north-east the rioters would approach, the officer in command of the troops had placed his batteries so that the guns could rake both the Minories and Royal Mint Street—the thoroughfares by which the rebel forces must almost of necessity come. Upon Royal Mint Street and the Minories the attention of the soldiers was consequently riveted, and when the military scouts, who had been sent out to ascertain the movements of the enemy, came galloping back to say that one half of the Dumpling's forces was approaching from the north by way of the Minories and the other half from the east by Royal Mint Street—the command was:

"Now, boys, they're coming down the two streets upon which we've got our guns trained. Keep cool! Be ready! But don't fire and don't move, any of you, until I give the word." And to Royal Mint Street and the Minories every eye was turned.

All this the Dumpling had foreseen, and had laid his plans accordingly. Why he should have been so anxious to time his arrival at Tower Hill almost at the moment of five, those who were not acquainted with his plan of campaign could not understand. They did not know that, at that hour, a huge contingent of armed rebels, recruited from Bermondsey and South London and under the leadership of the Dumpling's most trusted lieutenant, was punctually to cross Tower Bridge, to the dismay and consternation of the troops, who had looked for no onslaught from that quarter. Nor did those who were not in the Dumpling's confidence know that, at the same time, yet another contingent of armed rebels, under able leadership, would converge upon Tower Hill from Thames Street and Great Tower Street, so that the soldiers were simultaneously attacked from the north, south, east, and west, and that at a moment when they were looking for danger only from two quarters.

Everything worked out exactly as the Dumpling had planned it. At five minutes to five the vanguards of the advancing armies were seen approaching from Royal Mint Street and the Minories. Almost at the very moment that the soldiers were preparing to fire, the windows of the tea warehouse were opened, and a deadly volley poured upon the unfortunate gunners by the riflemen who had been concealed within its walls. Utterly taken aback and dismayed, the soldiers turned to see whence the attack came—only to find hostile armies, in each case with picked marksmen in the van, approaching on every hand.

Then the Dumpling gave the word to charge. In ten minutes scarcely a soldier was left alive, their guns and their ammunition were taken, and the Tower of London, and its armouries, were in the hands of the Dumpling.

Contrary to the expectations of his lieutenants, he announced that he had no intention of remaining there, or even of leaving men in occupation.

"Clear out the place—take all we want," he said to the half-dozen who were entirely in his confidence, "and then evacuate it. That's the ticket! To remain here would be telling the King's troops where to find us. That they must never know. Ours is to be a guerilla warfare. We meet on no two days in the same place. Each night, our day's work done, we disband—to re-assemble next day and to descend upon our enemies from North, South, East, or West, or possibly from all four corners of the compass together, as the chances of war may make necessary. As a strategic position, the Tower of London is of no earthly use to us. But we haven't done all our work here yet.

"First, call up the string of forage vans which I have ordered to keep well in our rear, and give instructions to the men to have a good meal. The last three vans have red crosses upon them, as if to indicate that they contain hospital requirements. So they do—two of them, that is. The third contains the bombs and explosives which we carried away that night from the opium den. Before leaving this place we have to construct a secret mine—you must do the work yourselves—by which we can at any time blow up the Tower and everyone in it, in case the enemy should garrison it and use it as vantage ground against us. Get to work at once and report to me when all is ready, for we have other business on hand to-night, that London and England and all the world may know we mean to carry out what we have begun."

Two hours later, the bugle-calls to re-assemble were sounded, and the rebel army re-formed to march westward by way of the Minories and Leadenhall Street to Cornhill, and so to the Bank of England, the Stock Exchange, the Royal Exchange, and the Mansion House, all of which were sacked and looted by the revolutionaries.

This—so the Dumpling had decided—was to end the work for that day. The bugles of dismissal were sounded; and little by little the great armies of Labour melted away.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

LONDON IN REVOLUTION.

Because the Rising had seemingly broken out in one day, because on the Saturday night London had gone to bed in peace and quietness, on the Sunday night London was aflame, and, on the Monday morning, London was apparently at peace again—because of all this, some hope was entertained in certain high official quarters that the trouble would subside as suddenly as it had arisen.

So, at least—possibly for the prevention of panic—it was pretended, and when, at mid-day, there was no sign of a reassembling of the forces under the Dumpling's command the belief was expressed in certain early afternoon papers that the threatened safety of the Empire was assured.

But the police were wiser. They knew that though the firing of the fuse had been but a night's, or even a moment's, work, the laying of the mine had been going on for years; and though the suddenness of the rising, coming as it did on a Sunday, had taken them unawares, it had not found them altogether unprepared, as after-events proved.

But on Monday, at mid-day, a sudden reaction set in. The wildest rumours were afloat of some awful danger that assailed not only London, but the very Empire.

The fact of the Dumpling's extraordinary resemblance to Napoleon, and of his claim to be the great Napoleon himself, had got abroad, and religious fanatics proclaimed him to be the Beast of the Book of Revelation, the anti-Christ who was to come. Them and their diatribes no sane man heeded; but that something was afoot which directly menaced our very existence as a nation, was believed by all. It was openly stated that the Dumpling and the German Emperor were acting in concert, and that it was from Germany that the arms and the funds which furnished the rioters with the sinews of war had come.

The Kaiser was depicted as not only jealous of the popularity of King Edward, but as hating the form of Limited Monarchy which exists in England, and as anxious to establish, first in Europe, and finally all over the world, the autocratic rule which prevails in his own country and in Russia. The Dumpling—so it was openly stated—had succeeded in convincing the Kaiser of the genuineness of his claim to be the re-incarnation of Napoleon. An agreement had been come to between the two men by which it was arranged that, if the Kaiser would assist the Dumpling to obtain supreme power in England, this country should be put under the rule of an Absolute Monarchy even more despotic and more autocratic than that of Russia and Germany. That once achieved, the German Emperor and the Dumpling would combine against France, and re-establish the Monarchy there.

Already, so it was stated, the German war squadron was on its way to England, and German vessels of every sort were conveying an army of half a million of men to this country, nominally to assist King Edward's troops in crushing the rebellion. Once, however, they had succeeded in effecting a landing, the real purpose for which they had come here would be revealed, and they would co-operate with the Dumpling's forces, and officially recognise his claim to be Emperor of England and of France. The fact that a German squadron had sailed with sealed orders the day before the outbreak, lent some colour to this preposterous theory, and the fact, also, that undoubtedly something in the nature of a panic prevailed at Court, went far to support it. What was wrong there nobody knew. The Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister, it was known, had been hastily summoned, and had driven to Buckingham Palace in hot haste, surrounded on every side by escorts large enough to be spoken of as small armies. An hour after their arrival, the King, so it was stated, had, in response to a loyal demonstration outside the Palace, appeared for a moment at a window, hurriedly bowed, and as hurriedly retired.

Clearly something was wrong at Court, and what that something was, and how intimately concerned in it I was to be, I could not in my wildest dreams have conceived.

CHAPTER XXXV.

THE GREAT FIGHT IN FLEET STREET.

Until three o'clock on Monday afternoon there was no new disturbance, no reassembling of the rioters; but soon after that hour it was clear that something was astir. This time there was no marching in companies, but the vast crowds that were quietly but systematically pouring cityward from every quarter were clearly acting under instructions, and according to some method of organisation. So far as I could see, it was towards the open space in front of the Royal Exchange that the crowd was converging, and thither I allowed myself to be carried with the stream.

On this occasion it was quite clear that the mob was neither sanguine nor confident, and for this there were reasons. The first was the absence of the Dumpling. That he was to have met his lieutenants at a certain hour, and at a certain place, that morning, but for some unaccountable cause had failed to keep the appointment, was already common knowledge. When he was present, that heterogeneous gathering seemed organic. It acted not as a mob, but as one man; and one man, in a sense, it was, since each contingent—come as it might from Bermondsey, from Poplar, or from Canning Town—seemed like one of the limbs of a human body, of which this man, the Dumpling, was the controlling brain.

By his absence, however, this body politic seemed dismembered. The magnetism exercised by his single personality was extraordinary. So long as he was known to be at their head, the rioters followed their appointed leaders, his lieutenants, with fearless confidence, moving and acting in concert, not like an undisciplined mob, but like drilled troops, trained and controlled by a master of men. Now, in a single day, the whole movement seemed, in his absence, to have gone to pieces.

Another reason for the nervousness of the rioters was the mysterious action, or inaction, of the military and the police. No attempt either to prevent the people from assembling, or to disperse them when assembled, had been made; and no blue or red-coated myrmidons of the civil or of the military forces had attempted to bar the thoroughfares, or to offer opposition of any sort to the revolutionaries. With the Dumpling present, as their leader and head, the absence of the police and of the military would have been counted by the mob as a signal proof of the completeness of their victory. With him away, it seemed ominous of ambush, pregnant with evil; and when the Dumpling's second in command announced that he intended, in their leader's absence, to carry out the plan of campaign as arranged by their leader himself, and gave the order for the riflemen to form up, and for the rank and file to fall in behind, the order, though obeyed, was obeyed spiritlessly and unwillingly.

Then came the news that troops, mounted and on foot, were approaching by way of Queen Victoria Street and Cheapside; and as the trees of a great forest sway and waver before the coming of a storm, so over the rebel army there passed a sudden tremor, as if the members of that army were undecided whether to fight or to fly.

Sharp and clear, however, came the words of command, and sullenly the legions of Labour prepared for the fray. Once again victory rested with the revolutionaries. Nor was I surprised, for to me, at that stage of the struggle, it seemed as if the police and the soldiers had bided their time too long. An armed mob gathered together in the space known as the Poultry, and holding all the approaches, would be difficult to dislodge, presenting as it did a solid phalanx to any opposing force which, owing to the comparative narrowness of the converging thoroughfares, would of necessity be compelled to present a somewhat narrow front to the rebel army. Queen Victoria Street, it is true, being broad, would allow the soldiery to come on in companies, forming an attacking line of formidable length. This, however, the Dumpling's second in command had realised, for, immediately facing Queen Victoria Street, he placed the pick of the rebel riflemen. No sooner did the troop of cavalry, which was advancing upon the rioters, come within range, than the barrels of the riflemen, and the saddles of the front row of soldiery, were almost simultaneously emptied. After each volley Queen Victoria Street was for a moment blocked by a line of dead and dying soldiers and horses, but no sooner was the opposing line re-formed, and ready to come on, before another volley from the rebel riflemen emptied every saddle again.

In Queen Victoria Street, at least, the victory of the rebels was complete, and what happened to the troops in Queen Victoria Street, happened upon a smaller scale to the police and to the military who attempted to disperse the mob by making charges by way of Cheapside, Lombard Street, and the other narrower approaches. Recognising the hopelessness of the position, and anxious to husband their strength for the final struggle, the officers in command of the police and of the military gave the word for withdrawal. In this withdrawal the mob saw a tacit admission of defeat, and became more reckless, more eager for destruction, more difficult of organisation. Freed from the restraining and controlling influence of the Dumpling, it swept along Cheapside to St. Paul's and down Ludgate Hill, no longer an organised rising with a definite end in view, but a rabble of reckless ruffians, ready and greedy to rob, to rape, to wreck, and to destroy.

At Ludgate Circus it divided, part going westward by way of Fleet Street and the Strand, another part by way of St. Bride Street, and yet another by the Embankment.

Then it was that the police and the soldiery showed how prepared they were for the outbreak, how admirable was their organisation. Suddenly down St. Bride Street, and moving by some inside and unseen motor-power, there appeared a procession of engines of war, the like of which none of the rioters had ever seen. These engines had been constructed secretly and in sections so as to be ready to put together and run out at a moment's notice, and had been concealed at the various fire stations till such time as they should be required.

Imagine, if you can, that a square-built fort had suddenly detached itself at the corners, so as to break up into four armed sections, each of which presented on either side an iron-plated front, almost as steep and almost as high as the side of a house, with gun-mouths grinning out at regular intervals. Armoured trains the rioters had heard of, but armoured sides of an iron-built house, moving, each complete in itself, upon unseen wheels in a long procession down St. Bride Street, was something entirely new. For an instant the mob surged back, awed and wondering. Then, like an angry sea leaping against a breakwater, it flung itself forward upon the first of these new and advancing engines of war.

But for the tragic loss of life, the impotency of the rush would have been ludicrous. It was as if a child, by the throwing of a handful of sand, had tried to stop a motor-car going at the top of its speed. The huge instrument of war not only did not swerve an inch from its course, but, so great was its weight, that it passed, without so much as a bump, over the bodies of those who fell beneath it, scrunching bone and limb into shapeless and quivering pulp.

Then from either side belched sheets of flame, and, for the first time since the rising, the mob fell back and away, leaving the monsters of war-mechanism to accomplish their manœuvres unhindered.

On the four moving walls filed, like a troop of ambling elephants. The foremost wheeled heavily round the obelisk in the centre of Ludgate Circus till it blocked London southwards by barricading off New Bridge Street and Blackfriars Bridge. The second steered round the obelisk westward, till it faced and closed Fleet Street. The third stretched itself eastward across the foot of Ludgate Hill; and the fourth, by spanning the road where St. Bride Street and Farringdon Street bifurcate, thus closed those roads to all comers.

The four walls now formed a huge square, and as soldiers "dress" the line and close up in a drill yard, so at a given signal—a shrill whistle twice repeated—the four sides edged closer and closer together, till, if I may use such a term, they touched elbows. Then came a second signal—the same whistle three times repeated—and now there were the clink and rattle of bolts and chains. The four walls were locked impregnably together, thus forming a fort, facing London on every side. No sooner was the locking accomplished than, upon the walls of the fort, hundreds of policemen swarmed to complete the closing up of the streets. At a word of command from above, iron barriers shot out to the required lengths from the four corners of the fort below, and when it was impossible to adjust these barriers with sufficient nicety, absolutely to close every opening, huge sacks of sand were hurled from the walls, so that in less than five minutes the army of rioters was divided up into four separate wings, each for the moment effectually cut off from holding any communication with any of the others.

The great body of the rebel army and the riflemen were, however, now west of Ludgate Circus, and passing up Fleet Street and the Strand; so that the closing of the ways seemed for a few minutes to have come too late.

But the authorities who had anticipated this outbreak, and prepared for it by constructing these street-barricading forts, knew what they were about. From mouth to mouth of the rebels, passing up Fleet Street, Strandwards, the word was repeated that similar forts now blocked advance at Charing Cross.

Panic-stricken, the mob surged down the side streets to the Embankment, only to find that similar barriers had been erected at either end. Then the forts at every point opened fire, and with terrible results. The scenes that followed I do not wish further to describe, except to say that, for the present at least, the rout of the leaderless rebels was complete, and only a shattered section escaped to press on to Buckingham Palace, the point to which all contingents of that great army had been instructed to converge.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

PRINCE DUMPLING.

At Charing Cross, soon after the defeat and dispersion of the rebels, I had caught sight of a face which set my heart beating wildly—the proud, pale face of Kate, who was sitting at the window of a hotel. Sending up my name, I was at once admitted, Kate clinging to me, and crying over me, as if I were a soldier returned from the wars.

"I won't leave you again, darling," I said, "no matter what you or your aunt may command or urge. How is that kindest of friends of mine?"

"I haven't seen her since soon after you—you—you—left us," was the reply. "She went away by herself on some important business, and was to have returned to-day to Taunton Square, where I have been staying for the last week by myself. But something happened there that—that frightened and upset me, Max dear, so I came on here, and left word to Aunt Clara where to find me. Ah! here she is."

Miss Clara kissed first Kate and then me, after which, turning to her niece, she said:

"What was it that frightened you and drove you away from Taunton Square? The rioters?"

"No, aunt. I—I—hardly know how to tell you and Max. It was so terrible. It was—it was—the Dumpling."

"The Dumpling!" exclaimed Miss Clara and I together.

"Yes, the Dumpling," replied Kate, putting her hands before her eyes, as if to shut out some hateful vision. "I wasn't so much afraid of him as of what I saw in his eyes—that awful picture——"

"I have something to tell you about him myself," said Miss Clara, quietly. "Something that it is time both you and Max knew. But, first, let us hear your story."

"I was sitting alone one evening in the dark in the conservatory," said Kate, "and feeling suddenly cold and frightened—I did not know at what—I put out a hand and switched on the electric light. There, glaring in at me from the window outside, I saw a man's face. It was the man Max called the Dumpling. I recognised him at once by the description. The face was gone almost as I looked, but before it went I saw a picture in its eyes—a picture that seemed to be—that something tells me was true, but is so awful that I can hardly bear to think, still less to speak, of it. But speak of it I must, for I can bear the suspense no longer.

"I saw myself as a girl, standing in a church before an altar, being married to this terrible man! Aunt, darling! Tell me it was all a dream, and that it isn't true. It seemed hideously, cruelly true as I saw it; and I know, now, that I have seen him before—that the man is no stranger to me, and that I knew him long ago."

"Yes, darling," said the elder Miss Carleton, taking the sobbing girl in her arms, "it is quite true. Listen, and you shall hear the facts. I can tell them in a very few words. You were a mere girl of seventeen at a boarding school in America when you first met this man. He was one of the masters, and was known as 'The Prince,' because he claimed to be a son of Napoleon the Third, and, in fact, I believe there was truth in his claim. But he fell desperately in love with you, and you, an innocent girl, with no thought of husband or love-making, laughed at him. All this you will remember yourself. What you will not remember is that the man, who has strange occult powers, hypnotised or mesmerised you one day, and when you were in that state, and did not know what you were doing, compelled you to go through the form of marriage with him. I was staying in the neighbourhood of the school at the time, so as to be near you, your dear mother being recently dead; and hearing that you had been seen going out with 'The Prince'—no one knew why—I found out in what direction you and he had gone, and followed, for I disliked and distrusted him from the first. But I was too late. The ceremony was over. You were—and, I fear, are—the man's wife. Even if we had gone to law, to attempt to upset the marriage, we might not have won, for hypnotic influence is hard to prove in the unsympathetic atmosphere of the law courts, and, even if we had won, the scandal and shock might have killed you, for you were already worn to a shadow by fretting for your mother. I shrank from the thought of such a scandal, as I knew you would have shrunk; and, rightly or wrongly, I did what seemed best to me under the circumstances. I am not long in making up my mind, and, my mind once made up, I do not hesitate to act.

"You were sitting, white and trembling, in a pew near the door. 'The Prince' had followed the minister into an inner room or vestry, perhaps to pay the fee. The key of the vestry door was on the outside. Without a moment's hesitation I turned the key, locking the two of them in, so as to give us a few minutes in which to get away. Then I got you out, half supporting you, half carrying you, to where my own carriage was waiting, lifted you in, jumped in myself, and told the coachman to drive with all possible speed to the railway station. Here we were just in time to catch an express to New York, and when you recovered from the mesmeric state into which you had been thrown, and I found that you knew nothing of what had happened, I determined to keep my own counsel, and have told no one—not even your own father—the facts. From New York we went next day to Europe, travelling from country to country, so that the villain who had ruined your life might never find you. I had hoped that he was long since dead, and it was only when Max was telling us of the Dumpling's claim to be Napoleon that the horrible possibility—a possibility which afterwards became a certainty—occurred to me.

"Even in those far-away days he had dreams of a revolution which he was one day to accomplish in England; even then he was passionately in sympathy with the poor, and talked about them exactly as he talked to Max. I recognised, from Max's description, the man whom he called 'The Dumpling,' as the man you and I had long ago known as 'The Prince,' and realised that he had tracked us at last. That was why Max saw him shadowing the house, and that is why you saw his face watching you through the window-pane. That was why I sent Max away, for while that man lives you can never be Max's wife."

"She shall be my wife," I interrupted, "if only she will consent to do me such high honour; for be this man 'Prince,' or be he 'Dumpling,' he has no power to come between Kate and me. You have told your story—now listen to mine."

CHAPTER XXXVII.

THE MAN IN THE CELLAR.

"Yesterday night—so much has happened since then that it is difficult to believe it was so short a time ago—yesterday night, after the rioters had disbanded and gone home, I returned to my rooms in Adelphi Terrace, and after I had had some supper, I stepped out on the balcony, to smoke and to listen if all was quiet.

"As I re-entered my room, someone, concealed behind one of the heavy curtains, seized me suddenly from behind, and as I turned angrily to free myself and to see who was my assailant, another man stepped out from behind the curtain on the other side of the window, and before I could prevent him, clapped a handkerchief saturated with chloroform over my nose and mouth.

"When I came to myself, I found myself sitting in a strange room in the presence of the Dumpling.

"'Mr. Rissler,' he said, 'I am very sorry to have been compelled to chloroform and to abduct you. Believe me, no harm is intended you. That I should have an immediate interview at this point was imperative, and to bring you here, in the way in which you have been brought, was the safest, and quickest, and most convenient method. You might have refused to come, or you might have frittered away invaluable time in profitless discussions. And I, at least at the present juncture, have no time to waste. You know that the revolution, of which I have already spoken to you, has begun in earnest, and you know, no doubt, that success has crowned our efforts to-day, and that London is practically at our mercy.

"'My reason for sending for you is that I have something to show you which will convince even you—difficult as you have been to persuade—of the folly of refusing to make terms with us; something that will induce you at last to throw in your lot with us, to become one of us, and my acknowledged successor when I fall; something that even you cannot deny is incontrovertible proof of our absolute and complete success.

"'No, don't say anything at this point, please,' he interrupted, holding up a repressing hand, for I was about to protest that nothing he could say, or could show me, would have the slightest influence in inducing me even to consider his proposition.

"'I know what you are going to say,' he went on. 'You are about to repudiate me and all my work. But wait! Say nothing yet which you might afterwards regret and wish to withdraw. God has marked you out for this work as surely as He has marked me, and that God is behind us, is working with us and for us, even you will admit when you see the proof which I shall soon put before you. I have never despaired of winning you, Rissler. Like Saul of Tarsus, you have fought against God and against His prophets, but even as Saul was convinced and converted to God's will by the sign which came to him on the road to Damascus, even so will you be convinced and converted by the sign which I am about to make known to you. As Saul hardened his heart before the coming of the heavenly vision, even so have you hardened your heart against God's will. But God can change your heart and open your eyes at a word, even as He opened the eyes and changed the heart of Saul; and ere I die I shall see you an acknowledged leader and hope of the armies of Labour and of the Lord.'

"He walked over to a cupboard in a corner, and, to my astonishment, took out a huge military cloak with an immense collar, and a three-cornered hat like that worn by Napoleon.

"Drawing the cloak over his shoulders, and donning the hat, he stood for some minutes, his huge head sunk between his shoulders till his chin lay on his chest, his short legs straddled apart, and his hands clasped behind him, deep in thought. Amused as I was by his ranting and by the theatrical way in which he posed and dressed the part, his likeness to the great Napoleon was so uncanny, so extraordinary, that, in spite of myself, I was awed and impressed. Then, with the single word 'Come,' he turned and went out, I following him.

"Coming to the front door of the house, he opened it cautiously and looked out. We were in a narrow and shabby side street of what I judged to be the East End of London. At the moment of our emergence not a single soul was in sight. The Dumpling crossed the road and gave four slow and deliberate knocks at a door.

"'Who is there?' said a voice inside.

"'God and Napoleon and the Dumpling strike with granite arm!' was the reply, and the door was immediately opened, the Dumpling and I stepping inside. We were in the narrow hall or passage of a small dwelling house. The man who had admitted us closed the door, and then resumed his chair, which was placed just inside the door. A newspaper which he had been reading lay beside him on the floor, and two small paraffin lamps burned—or, rather, smoked—beside him on another chair.

"'All quiet, doorkeeper?' asked the Dumpling.

"'All quiet, sir,' was the answer.

"Then the Dumpling took up one of the lamps.

"'This way, Rissler,' he said, walking along the passage, till he came to a door leading to the basement or kitchen portion of the house. Producing a bunch of keys from his pocket, he unlocked the door, and when he and I had passed through, locked it carefully again.

"Passing down some stairs, we came to a stone-flagged passage, along which we walked to another door, leading to a sort of underground cellar. This door the Dumpling also unlocked, and, after we had entered, re-locked; and as he did so, the dream-picture which I had once seen in his eyes, the picture of the Dumpling, myself, and a third and unknown man, standing together in an underground room, came back to me, and I knew that the place I was now in was the place I had seen in the tableau.

"Then the Dumpling touched a spring, and a hidden door flew open, revealing a smaller inner room. A man, nonchalantly smoking a cigar, was standing in a far corner, and as, obeying the Dumpling's signal, I passed through the door and saw his face, I gave a short, sharp cry, and fell back in incredulous horror.

"'My God!' I said. 'It is not possible! The King!'"

"I FELL BACK IN INCREDULOUS HORROR."

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE MANTLE OF NAPOLEON.

"'On the contrary,' said the Dumpling, with a short laugh of devilish triumph, 'on the contrary, it is quite possible with a King so trustful that he goes out for an evening stroll unattended. I admit that it cost us much laying of plans, and that we had mapped out, and prepared for the abduction, half a hundred times before the actual chance came which it was safe to take. But, as you know, my dear Rissler, I don't do things by halves. London is practically in my hands, and when the fact of the King's disappearance leaks out, and we carry out the master-stroke which is planned to come off to-morrow, the campaign will practically be at an end, and victory, absolute and assured, be ours. They are doing their best at Court to keep the King's disappearance secret, and have even gone so far, I am told, as to fix up an imitation King, to come to the window and bow and show himself, and dupe the public—as, for some inexplicable reason, they always do try to dupe the public when the health or the life or the death of royal persons is concerned. But they can't keep the secret much longer, and now that London is in our hands, and his Majesty is here in safe keeping and our prisoner, I trust and believe that he will prove reasonable and accede to our very moderate terms.'

"It is, perhaps, not difficult for a King to impress onlookers with his kingliness, when he is throned and robed and surrounded by bowing courtiers, or when he is seen at the head of his army. But never had King of England looked kinglier than King Edward the Seventh looked when, a prisoner and alone, in squalid, sordid surroundings, he turned, and thundered out:

"'Terms! I make no terms with murderers!'"

"'Murderers!'" hissed the Dumpling, menacingly. 'Remember that you are in my hands, my prisoner, unarmed and defenceless, and take back that word, or by God you shall answer for it with your life.'

"'I am in God's hands,' replied the King quietly, 'and He will see to it that I am soon taken out of the hands of such as you. As for your threats,' he laughed contemptuously, 'I will take back no word of what I have said, even to save my life. But I waste breath arguing with one who is a madman as well as a murderer!'

"'And when your Majesty is once more in possession of the liberty which he is so convinced God is about to restore to him, what do you propose to do with me?' inquired the Dumpling mockingly.

"'With you!' said the King stolidly, but with infinite contempt. 'With you! Nothing. I am this country's King, not the common hangman. You shall be dealt with by the proper authorities—make yourself easy about that. You shall be examined, and if you are pronounced insane, will be clapped between walls, out of the way of working mischief to yourself or to others. If you are sane, you will be shot or hanged, or whatever it is they do to traitors and treason-workers. I'm tolerably well versed in methods of procedure, but fortunately you are the first traitor who's directly crossed my path.

"'But listen to me, you sir. Whatever punishment it is that is meted out to such as you—whether hanging by the common hangman or whether it be to be shot like a dangerous dog—I'll lift no hand to stay it. Not because of the personal indignity and affront you have dared to offer to me, but because' (his voice rose, and he looked terrible in his kingly wrath), 'because' (and now there was a tremor of pity in his tone), 'because by you the blood of my loyal and true soldiers, my brave officers, has been spilt, and because you have been the means of bringing untold misery and suffering upon my people, whom you have led away by your treason and by your devilries. For that, believe me, unsparing vengeance shall be exacted.'

"The Dumpling, who was livid with passion, turned away, and taking off his cloak (his hat he had placed on a chair when coming in) laid it upon a table.

"As he did so, I saw the handle of a dagger protruding from an inner pocket, and as he turned to face the King again, I whipped it out, and thrusting it under my coat, clapped my left arm lightly against my side, to keep the weapon from slipping down. Then the King turned to me:

"'As for you, sir, I do not know who you may be, and do not greatly care. But that you should be privy to this traitor and villain's devilry, proclaims you villain and traitor too, and I promise that you, as well as he, shall receive short shrift when you come into the hands of justice.'

"'Sir,' I said, falling on one knee and bowing lowly, 'believe me that I am no traitor, and no friend of this man, but your Majesty's loyal and loving subject, who is prepared to defend, with his own life, your Majesty's sacred person.'

"Then I rose and turned to the Dumpling, who was laughing derisively.

"'Very pretty indeed!' he said, slapping me jovially on the back. ''Pon my word, Rissler, I had no idea you were such a born courtier—and actor! It tripped off your tongue as readily as if you had been rehearsing it for weeks, and the way you dropped on your knee, and bowed, couldn't be beaten in the best Court circles—or on the stage. Don't tell me that you didn't all along suspect the surprise I had in store for you. You have been rehearsing that bow and knee-drop before a cheval-glass, I'll wager, and many a time. It does you credit, anyhow; and whether it was a rehearsed or an unprepared effect, it proves you to be a man of parts, and one who is an acquisition to any cause.

"'But what you have said puts a different complexion upon my plans for your future,' he went on. 'I should like a word with you in the other room before we go any farther. Your Majesty must excuse my friend here and myself if we retire for a few moments.'

"Taking up the cloak and hat from the chair, he put both on and walked towards the door.

"'Have I your permission, Sir, to hear what this man has to say?' I inquired, turning to the King. 'I go or stay, as you may command, and am ready, if need be, as I have said, to prove my loyalty with my life.'

"There is no keener judge of character in all England than the King, and the look which, for a moment, he bent upon me was so searching, so penetrating, so compelling, that I admit I found it hard to face.

"'You keep queer company!' he said with stern bluffness; and something there was, in the way he looked and spoke, which, even in that most eventful moment of my life, recalled past scenes of English history to my memory, and reminded me strangely of more than one of his great ancestors.

"'My company,' I replied gravely, 'is not of my choosing. What has happened to me might have happened to your Majesty's most loyal subject—might conceivably have happened, I venture humbly to suggest, to one who is subject to none in this kingdom. I am here, not by my own consent, but by compulsion. An hour ago I was suddenly taken by surprise, and from behind, by superior numbers, and before I could resist or summon assistance, was forcibly drugged, abducted, and carried senseless to this place. Believe me, Sir, that I am as little deserving of reproach, on the score of the company I keep, as I am unworthy to stand in the august presence in which I now find myself.'

"So saying, I dropped again upon one knee, and bent my head. When I looked up, I saw that the knitting of the brows over the eyes, which had been so sternly bent upon me, was relaxed. By a gesture he bade me to rise, and then, without speaking, nodded to the door, to indicate that I had his permission to withdraw. Walking backwards, I passed out, to find the Dumpling, who had preceded me, on the other side.

"After closing the door, locking it, and pocketing the key, he took my arm in a friendly way, and led me into another room, lit by a smoky lamp.

"'My dear Rissler,' he began, 'I don't deny that you have disappointed me, but, after all, it is only what I might have expected, and my regard for you is so great that——'

"His hand was feeling, as he spoke, for the dagger which had been in the inside pocket of his cloak. Missing it, he turned suddenly upon me, his eyes blazing with maniacal fury and fire; but before he could lift hand, I struck him squarely, with all my strength, between the eyes, and, as he reeled back, I snatched at the handle of the dagger, and stabbed him to the heart at one stroke."

CHAPTER XXXIX.

"GOD SAVE THE KING!"

Kate gave a terrible cry as the words fell from my lips, and snatching away the hand which I had been holding, staggered, white and faint, to the sofa.

"Don't turn from me, darling," I said, kneeling beside her. "No one who fears God and honours his King, who loves his country, could have acted other than I did. The man meant well, meant nobly, I believe, originally, and his passion and devotion to the cause of the poor I shall remember with reverence to the end of my life. But his well-meaning had passed into mania, so that he had become, as you know, a relentless and wholesale murderer, whose very existence was a menace to the nation. I struck because I was compelled, and in self-defence. I had no option, for his intention at the moment was to murder me. Had I spared him, he would either have died at the hangman's hands, or, more horrible still, have dragged out his remaining years in a madhouse. You are a woman, darling; not a girl any longer—a brave woman, a true woman, and must see that, terrible as it was and is, I should have been a traitor to my King and country had I failed to act as I did, for, mad for blood as the man was, he might—would, I believe, within the next few minutes—have murdered the King himself."

"It is horrible!" she said, shuddering. "Horrible! But I will be brave, dear, and I do see, horrible as it is, that you are right. Is he dead?"

"He is dead," I replied.

Again she buried her face in her hands and sank back sobbing. But soon the sobs became less frequent, and at last she was composed enough to motion to me with her hand to finish the story.

"And what happened then?" interposed Miss Clara.

"Then," I went on, "I took the keys out of the dead man's pocket, and arraying myself in the Napoleon cloak, the huge collar of which I drew up to my ears, and clapping the hat on my head, well down over my eyes, I made my way to the front door. The man in charge was still at his post, and looked up for a moment on hearing me turn the key in the lock, but seeing the hat and cloak of his leader, did not trouble himself to look again. Making a show of locking the door, I turned, and with my head sunk on my chest, my legs straddled apart in imitation of the Dumpling, and my hand—the right—holding the dagger behind me, I walked slowly towards him. He slipped the paper he had been reading into his pocket, and rose, as if to open the door for me, but, before shooting back the bolt, he turned, and raising his hand soldier-wise in salute, said:

"Shall I send word, sir, that——"

"He stopped short with a sudden gasp of surprise, realising, as his eyes fell upon me, that something was wrong; but, before he could utter a word or raise a hand, my dagger was in his heart."

Again Kate reeled, as if about to faint.

"More blood on your hands! Another life taken! The first, perhaps, had to be, but this man had done no direct harm, this man——"

"Kate," I interrupted her sternly, "this, too, as you put it, 'had to be.' The issues at stake were too tremendous to justify me in running any risk. And this man was an English-speaking foreign mercenary, whom I, with my own eyes, saw deliberately murder two policemen and a soldier in cold blood and without mercy."

"And the King?" she gasped, white to the lips.

"The King," I said, "is safe. I stayed only to put the body out of sight, and to cover up the traces of the tragedy, before going back to set him free. The rising is over. It is the King himself who has given it its death-blow. When the contingent of rioters, who had succeeded in passing the barriers, reached Buckingham Palace, the King declared his intention of going out himself to meet them. Notwithstanding the Queen's tears, the Prince's entreaties, his Ministers' prayers, he refused to be turned from his purpose.

"'I am not afraid of my people,' he said unconcernedly, 'and I do not think my people will harm me.'

"Walking to a window on the ground floor, he threw it up, and standing upon a chair in sight of all, spoke to the crowd.

"'My friends!' he said. 'My people, whom I have loved, and who have never yet before failed in love to me, you have been misled by a madman and a murderer, who is now dead. The uproar began with him, and with his death it will assuredly end. Your leaders, those who have planned and carried out this treason and this devilry, and those who have shed blood, must answer to the law for what they have done, and must answer, it may be, with their lives.

"'But for you, my people, who have been blinded, duped, and misled by the dead arch-traitor who called himself the Dumpling, to you, my people, if you now disperse and go to your homes, free pardon and forgiveness shall be extended. It is your King who says it, and your King's word is enough.

"'And now, listen. I am not afraid of my people, and I do not think there is one sane man among my people who would harm me. See, I come out to you of my own accord, unescorted, unattended, and unarmed.'

"Stepping upon the window-sill, he said, laughingly:

"'I am not so young or as light-footed as I used to be. Will one of you lend me a hand?'

"A hundred hands were extended, and then, hatless as he was, he leapt down into the courtyard among his subjects, as much at home and with as little fear as if he were among a crowd of sightseers on a race-course or at a review.

"At the words and at the action, there arose such a cheer as London has never heard before, and though some traitors there were, who murmured among themselves, and looked at him darkly, not one of them dared raise hand against the Sovereign, knowing that to do so would be the signal for the people to tear the traitor limb from limb.

"The rebellion is over, Kate. The King himself, as I have said, gave it the death-blow. Before I left the Palace, the people had thrown down their arms to a man, and all London is ringing on every hand with the cry 'God save the King!'"

"Thank God!" she said, "for the King's sake and the people's. But hush, Max! What is that shouting in the street? It is coming nearer. Pray God the rioting has not broken out again."

"I have no fear of that," I said. "But come, dear, let us see."

Together we walked to the window. The shouting and cheering in the street were terrific, but this was no disloyal mob—these were no revolutionaries. They were cheering a gentleman who, unattended, and without escort, was riding slowly by in an open carriage.

"It is the King!" Kate gasped.

"Yes," I said. "It is the kingliest ruler, the bravest man, the truest gentleman in Christendom!"

And raising the window, she and I stepped out hand in hand upon the balcony, to join in the jubilation and welcome that rose from a thousand throats in a roar louder than the roar of the central seas.

"The King! God bless him!"

"The King! The King! The King!"

"God save the King!"