The Four Stragglers. Frank L. Packard
answered him—a snarl, and the rattle of an object falling to the ground.
"There were three of them," said the third man composedly. "The valet, who hadn't reached his class in the draft; a Frenchman, who spoke marvellous English, which is perhaps after all the reason why he had not yet, at that time, served in France; and—and some one else."
"Monsieur," said the Frenchman silkily, "you become interesting."
"The curious part of it is," said the third man, "that each of them in turn got the swag, and each of them could have got away with it with hardly any doing at all, if it hadn't been that in turn each one chivied the other. The Frenchman took it from the valet, as the valet, stuffed like a pouter pigeon with diamonds and brooches and pendants and little odds and ends like that, was on his way to a certain pinch-faced fence named Konitsky in a slimy bit of neighbourhood in the East End; the Frenchman, who was an Englishman in France, took the swag to a strange little place in a strange little street, not far from the bank of the Seine, the place of one Père Mouche, a place that in times of great stress also became the shelter and home of this same Frenchman, who—shall I say?—I believe is outstandingly entitled to the honour of having raised his profession to a degree of art unapproached by any of his confreres in France to-day."
"Sacré nom!" said the Frenchman with a gasp. "There is only one Englishman who knew that, and I thought he was dead. An Englishman beside whom the Frenchman you speak of is not to be compared. You are—"
"I haven't mentioned any names," said the third man smoothly. "Why should you?"
"You are right," said the Frenchman. "Perhaps we have already said too much. There is a fourth here."
"No," said the third man. "I had not forgotten him." He toyed with the rifle on his knee. "But I had thought perhaps you would have recognised the valet's face."
"Strike me pink!" muttered the first man. "So Frenchy's the blighter that did me in, was he!"
"It is the uniform, and the dirt perhaps, and the very poor light," said the Frenchman apologetically.
"But you—pardon, monsieur, I mean the other of the three—I did not see him; and monsieur will perhaps understand that I am deeply interested in the rest of the story."
The third man did not answer. A sort of momentary, weird and breathless silence had settled on the thicket, on all around, on the night, save only for the whining of some oncoming thing through the air. Whine … whine … whine. The nerves, tautened, loosened, were jangling things. The third man raised his rifle. And somewhere the whining shell burst. And in the thicket a minor crash; a flash, gone on the instant, eye-blinding.
The first man screamed out:
"Christ! What have you done?"
"I think he was done in anyway," said the third man calmly. "It was as well to make sure."
"Gawd!" whimpered the first man.
"Monsieur," said the Frenchman, "I have always heard that you were incomparable. I salute you! As you said, you had not forgotten. We can speak at ease now. The rest of the story—"
The third man laughed.
"Come to me in London—after the war," he said, "and I will tell it to you. And perhaps there will be—other things to talk about."
"I shall be honoured," said the Frenchman. "We three! I begin to understand now. A house should not be divided against itself. Is it not so? We should go far! It is fate to-night that—"
"Or the devil," said the third man.
"My Gawd!" The first man began to laugh—a cracked, jarring laugh. "After the war, the blinking war—after hell! There ain't no end, there ain't no—"
And then a flare hung again in the heavens, and in the thicket three men sat huddled against the tree trunks, torn, ragged and dishevelled men, but they were not staring into each others' faces now; they were staring, their eyes magnetically attracted, at a spot on the ground where a man, a man murdered, should be lying.
But the man was not there.
The fourth man was gone.
BOOK I: SHADOW VARNE
—I—
THREE YEARS LATER
The East End being, as it were, more akin to the technique and the mechanics of the thing, applauded the craftsmanship; the West End, a little grimly on the part of the men, and with a loquacity not wholly free from nervousness on the part of the women, wondered who would be next.
"The cove as is runnin' that show," said the East End, with its tongue delightedly in its cheek, "knows 'is wye abaht. Wish I was 'im!"
"The police are nincompoops!" said the outraged masculine West End. "Absolutely!"
"Yes, of course! It's quite too impossible for words!" said the female of the West End. "One never knows when one's own—do let me give you some tea, dear Lady Wintern … "
From something that had merely been of faint and passing interest, a subject of casual remark, it had grown steadily, insidiously, had become conversationally epidemic. All London talked; the papers talked—virulently. Alone in that great metropolis, New Scotland Yard was silent, due, if the journals were to be believed, to the fact that that world-famous institution was come upon a state of hopeless and atrophied senility.
With foreknowledge obtained in some amazing manner, with ingenuity, with boldness, and invariably with success, a series of crimes, stretching back several years, had been, were being, perpetrated with insistent regularity. These crimes had been confined to the West End of London, save on a few occasions when the perpetrators had gone slightly afield—because certain wealthy West-Enders had for the moment changed their accustomed habitat. The journals at spasmodic intervals printed a summary of the transactions. In jewels, and plate, and cash, the figures had reached an astounding total, not one penny of which had ever been recovered or traced. Secret wall safes, hidden depositories of valuables opened with obliging celerity and disgorged their contents to some apparition which immediately vanished. There was no clue. It simply happened again and again. Traps had been set with patience and considerable artifice. The traps had never been violated. London was accustomed to crimes, just as any great city was; there were hundreds of crimes committed in London; but these were of a genre all their own, these were distinctive, these were not to be confused with other crimes, nor their authors with other criminals.
And so London talked—and waited.
It was raining—a thin drizzle. The night was uninviting without; cosy within the precincts of a certain well-known West End club, the Claremont, to be exact. Two men sat in the lounge, in a little recess by the window. One, a man of perhaps thirty-three, of athletic build, with short-cropped black hair and clean-shaven face, a one-time captain of territorials in the late war, and though once known on the club membership roll as Captain Francis Newcombe was to be found there now as Francis Newcombe, Esquire; the other, a very much older man, with a thin, grey little face and thin, grey hair, would, on recourse to the club roll, have been found to be Sir Harris Greaves, Bart.
The baronet made a gesture with his cigar, indicative of profound disgust.
"Democracy!" he ejaculated. "The world safe for democracy! I am nauseated with that phrase. What does it mean? What did it ever mean? We have had three years now since the war which was to work that marvel, and I have seen no signs of it yet. So far as I—"
Captain