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The Lone Wolf: A Melodrama

by Louis Joseph Vance · English · Gutenberg #9378 · 462,963 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lone Wolf: A Melodrama

Author: Louis Joseph Vance


        
Release date: November 1, 2005 [eBook #9378]
                Most recently updated: June 6, 2016

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9378

Credits: Produced by Suzanne Shell, Jayam Subramanian and PG Distributed Proofreaders


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LONE WOLF: A MELODRAMA ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell, Jayam Subramanian and PG
Distributed Proofreaders










   THE LONE WOLF

        By
  LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

       1914



      CONTENTS

 I.     TROYON'S

 II.    RETURN

 III.   A POINT OF INTERROGATION

 IV.    A STRATAGEM

 V.     ANTICLIMAX

 VI.    THE PACK GIVES TONGUE

 VII.   L'ABBAYE

 VIII.  THE HIGH HAND

 IX.    DISASTER

 X.     TURN ABOUT

 XI.    FLIGHT

 XII.   AWAKENING

 XIII.  CONFESSIONAL

 XIV.   RIVE DROIT

 XV.    SHEER IMPUDENCE

 XVI.   RESTITUTION

 XVII.  THE FORLORN HOPE

 XVIII. ENIGMA

 XIX.   UNMASKED

 XX.    WAR

 XXI.   APOSTATE

 XXII.  TRAPPED

 XXIII. MADAME OMBER

 XXIV.  RENDEZVOUS

 XXV.   WINGS OF THE MORNING

 XXVI.  THE FLYING DEATH

 XXVII. DAYBREAK



THE LONE WOLF



I

TROYON'S

It must have been Bourke who first said that even if you knew your way
about Paris you had to lose it in order to find it to Troyon's. But
then Bourke was proud to be Irish.

Troyon's occupied a corner in a jungle of side-streets, well withdrawn
from the bustle of the adjacent boulevards of St. Germain and St.
Michel, and in its day was a restaurant famous with a fame jealously
guarded by a select circle of patrons. Its cooking was the best in
Paris, its cellar second to none, its rates ridiculously reasonable;
yet Baedeker knew it not. And in the wisdom of the cognoscenti this was
well: it had been a pity to loose upon so excellent an establishment
the swarms of tourists that profaned every temple of gastronomy on the
Rive Droit.

The building was of three storeys, painted a dingy drab and trimmed
with dull green shutters. The restaurant occupied almost all of the
street front of the ground floor, a blank, non-committal double doorway
at one extreme of its plate-glass windows was seldom open and even more
seldom noticed.

This doorway was squat and broad and closed the mouth of a wide,
stone-walled passageway. In one of its two substantial wings of oak a
smaller door had been cut for the convenience of Troyon's guests, who
by this route gained the courtyard, a semi-roofed and shadowy place,
cool on the hottest day. From the court a staircase, with an air of
leading nowhere in particular, climbed lazily to the second storey and
thereby justified its modest pretensions; for the two upper floors of
Troyon's might have been plotted by a nightmare-ridden architect after
witnessing one of the first of the Palais Royal farces.

Above stairs, a mediaeval maze of corridors long and short, complicated
by many unexpected steps and staircases and turns and enigmatic doors,
ran every-which-way and as a rule landed one in the wrong room, linking
together, in all, some two-score bed-chambers. There were no salons or
reception-rooms, there was never a bath-room, there wasn't even running
water aside from two hallway taps, one to each storey. The honoured
guest and the exacting went to bed by lamplight: others put up with
candlesticks: gas burned only in the corridors and the
restaurant--asthmatic jets that, spluttering blue within globes obese,
semi-opaque, and yellowish, went well with furnishings and decorations
of the Second Empire to which years had lent a mellow and somehow
rakish dinginess; since nothing was ever refurbished.

With such accommodations the guests of Troyon's were well content. They
were not many, to begin with, and they were almost all middle-aged
bourgeois, a caste that resents innovations. They took Troyon's as they
found it: the rooms suited them admirably, and the tariff was modest.
Why do anything to disturb the perennial peace of so discreet and
confidential an establishment? One did much as one pleased there,
providing one's bill was paid with tolerable regularity and the hand
kept supple that operated the cordon in the small hours of the night.
Papa Troyon came from a tribe of inn-keepers and was liberal-minded;
while as for Madame his wife, she cared for nothing but pieces of
gold....

To Troyon's on a wet winter night in the year 1893 came the child who
as a man was to call himself Michael Lanyard.

He must have been four or five years old at that time: an age at which
consciousness is just beginning to recognize its individuality and
memory registers with capricious irregularity. He arrived at the hotel
in a state of excitement involving an almost abnormal sensitiveness to
impressions; but that was soon drowned deep in dreamless slumbers of
healthy exhaustion; and when he came to look back through a haze of
days, of which each had made its separate and imperative demand upon
his budding emotions, he found his store of memories strangely dulled
and disarticulate.

The earliest definite picture was that of himself, a small but vastly
important figure, nursing a heavy heart in a dark corner of a fiacre.
Beside him sat a man who swore fretfully into his moustache whenever
the whimpering of the boy threatened to develop into honest bawls: a
strange creature, with pockets full of candy and a way with little boys
in public surly and domineering, in private timid and propitiatory. It
was raining monotonously, with that melancholy persistence which is the
genius of Parisian winters; and the paving of the interminable strange
streets was as black glass shot with coloured lights. Some of the
streets roared like famished beasts, others again were silent, if with
a silence no less sinister. The rain made incessant crepitation on the
roof of the fiacre, and the windows wept without respite. Within the
cab a smell of mustiness contended feebly with the sickening reek of a
cigar which the man was forever relighting and which as often turned
cold between his teeth. Outside, unwearying hoofs were beating their
deadly rhythm, _cloppetty-clop_....

Back of all this lurked something formlessly alluring, something sad
and sweet and momentous, which belonged very personally to the child
but which he could never realize. Memory crept blindly toward it over a
sword-wide bridge that had no end. There had been (or the boy had
dreamed it) a long, weariful journey by railroad, the sequel to one by
boat more brief but wholly loathsome. Beyond this point memory failed
though sick with yearning. And the child gave over his instinctive but
rather inconsecutive efforts to retrace his history: his daily life at
Troyon's furnished compelling and obliterating interests.

Madame saw to that.

It was Madame who took charge of him when the strange man dragged him
crying from the cab, through a cold, damp place gloomy with shadows,
and up stairs to a warm bright bedroom: a formidable body, this Madame,
with cold eyes and many hairy moles, who made odd noises in her throat
while she undressed the little boy with the man standing by, noises
meant to sound compassionate and maternal but, to the child at least,
hopelessly otherwise.

Then drowsiness stealing upon one over a pillow wet with tears ...
oblivion....

And Madame it was who ruled with iron hand the strange new world to
which the boy awakened.

The man was gone by morning, and the child never saw him again; but
inasmuch as those about him understood no English and he no French, it
was some time before he could grasp the false assurances of Madame that
his father had gone on a journey but would presently return. The child
knew positively that the man was not his father, but when he was able
to make this correction the matter had faded into insignificance: life
had become too painful to leave time or inclination for the adjustment
of such minor and incidental questions as one's parentage.

The little boy soon learned to know himself as Marcel, which wasn't his
name, and before long was unaware he had ever had another. As he grew
older he passed as Marcel Troyon; but by then he had forgotten how to
speak English.

A few days after his arrival the warm, bright bed-chamber was exchanged
for a cold dark closet opening off Madame's boudoir, a cupboard
furnished with a rickety cot and a broken chair, lacking any provision
for heat or light, and ventilated solely by a transom over the door;
and inasmuch as Madame shared the French horror of draughts and so kept
her boudoir hermetically sealed nine months of the year, the transom
didn't mend matters much. But that closet formed the boy's sole refuge,
if a precarious one, through several years; there alone was he ever
safe from kicks and cuffs and scoldings for faults beyond his
comprehension; but he was never permitted a candle, and the darkness
and loneliness made the place one of haunted terror to the sensitive
and imaginative nature of a growing child.

He was, however, never insufficiently fed; and the luxury of forgetting
misery in sleep could not well be denied him.

By day, until of age to go to school, he played apprehensively in the
hallways with makeshift toys, a miserable, dejected little body with
his heart in his mouth at every sudden footfall, very much in the way
of femmes-de-chambre who had nothing in common with the warm-hearted,
impulsive, pitiful serving women of fiction. They complained of him to
Madame, and Madame came promptly to cuff him. He soon learned an almost
uncanny cunning in the art of effacing himself, when she was imminent,
to be as still as death and to move with the silence of a wraith. Not
infrequently his huddled immobility in a shadowy corner escaped her
notice as she passed. But it always exasperated her beyond measure to
look up, when she fancied herself alone, and become aware of the
wide-eyed, terrified stare of the transfixed boy....

That he was privileged to attend school at all was wholly due to a
great fear that obsessed Madame of doing anything to invite the
interest of the authorities. She was an honest woman, according to her
lights, an honest wife, and kept an honest house; but she feared the
gendarmerie more than the Wrath of God. And by ukase of Government a
certain amount of education was compulsory. So Marcel learned among
other things to read, and thereby took his first blind step toward
salvation.

Reading being the one pastime which could be practiced without making a
noise of any sort to attract undesirable attentions, the boy took to it
in self-defence. But before long it had become his passion. He read, by
stealth, everything that fell into his hands, a weird mélange of
newspapers, illustrated Parisian weeklies, magazines, novels: cullings
from the débris of guest-chambers.

Before Marcel was eleven he had read "Les Misérables" with intense
appreciation.

His reading, however, was not long confined to works in the French
language. Now and again some departing guest would leave an English
novel in his room, and these Marcel treasured beyond all other books;
they seemed to him, in a way, part of his birthright. Secretly he
called himself English in those days, because he knew he wasn't French:
that much, at least, he remembered. And he spent long hours poring over
the strange words until; at length, they came to seem less strange in
his eyes. And then some accident threw his way a small English-French
dictionary.

He was able to read English before he could speak it.

Out of school hours a drudge and scullion, the associate of scullions
and their immediate betters, drawn from that caste of loose tongues and
looser morals which breeds servants for small hotels, Marcel at eleven
(as nearly as his age can be computed) possessed a comprehension of
life at once exact, exhaustive and appalling.

Perhaps it was fortunate that he lived without friendship. His concept
of womanhood was incarnate in Madame Troyon; so he gave all the hotel
women a wide berth.

The men-servants he suffered in silence when they would permit it; but
his nature was so thoroughly disassociated from anything within their
experience that they resented him: a circumstance which exposed him to
a certain amount of baiting not unlike that which the village idiot
receives at the hands of rustic boors--until Marcel learned to defend
himself with a tongue which could distil vitriol from the vernacular,
and with fists and feet as well. Thereafter he was left severely to
himself and glad of it, since it furnished him with just so much more
time for reading and dreaming over what he read.

By fifteen he had developed into a long, lank, loutish youth, with a
face of extraordinary pallor, a sullen mouth, hot black eyes, and dark
hair like a mane, so seldom was it trimmed. He looked considerably
older than he was and the slightness of his body was deceptive,
disguising a power of sinewy strength. More than this, he could care
very handily for himself in a scrimmage: la savate had no secrets from
him, and he had picked up tricks from the Apaches quite as effectual as
any in the manual of jiu-jitsu. Paris he knew as you and I know the
palms of our hands, and he could converse with the precision of the
native-born in any one of the city's several odd argots.

To these accomplishments he added that of a thoroughly practised petty
thief.

His duties were by day those of valet-de-chambre on the third floor; by
night he acted as omnibus in the restaurant. For these services he
received no pay and less consideration from his employers (who would
have been horrified by the suggestion that they countenanced slavery)
only his board and a bed in a room scarcely larger, if somewhat better
ventilated, than the boudoir-closet from which he had long since been
ousted. This room was on the ground floor, at the back of the house,
and boasted a small window overlooking a narrow alley.

He was routed out before daylight, and his working day ended as a rule
at ten in the evening--though when there were performances on at the
Odéon, the restaurant remained open until an indeterminate hour for the
accommodation of the supper trade.

Once back in his kennel, its door closed and bolted, Marcel was free to
squirm out of the window and roam and range Paris at will. And it was
thus that he came by most of his knowledge of the city.

But for the most part Marcel preferred to lie abed and read himself
half-blind by the light of purloined candle-ends. Books he borrowed as
of old from the rooms of guests or else pilfered from quai-side stalls
and later sold to dealers in more distant quarters of the city. Now and
again, when he needed some work not to be acquired save through
outright purchase, the guests would pay further if unconscious tribute
through the sly abstraction of small coins. Your true Parisian,
however, keeps track of his money to the ultimate sou, an idiosyncrasy
which obliged the boy to practise most of his peculations on the
fugitive guest of foreign extraction.

In the number of these, perhaps the one best known to Troyon's was
Bourke.

He was a quick, compact, dangerous little Irishman who had fallen into
the habit of "resting" at Troyon's whenever a vacation from London
seemed a prescription apt to prove wholesome for a gentleman of his
kidney; which was rather frequently, arguing that Bourke's professional
activities were fairly onerous.

Having received most of his education in Dublin University, Bourke
spoke the purest English known, or could when so minded, while his
facile Irish tongue had caught the trick of an accent which passed
unchallenged on the Boulevardes. He had an alert eye for pretty women,
a heart as big as all out-doors, no scruples worth mentioning, a secret
sorrow, and a pet superstition.

The colour of his hair, a clamorous red, was the spring of his secret
sorrow. By that token he was a marked man. At irregular intervals he
made frantic attempts to disguise it; but the only dye that would serve
at all was a jet-black and looked like the devil in contrast with his
high colouring. Moreover, before a week passed, the red would crop up
again wherever the hair grew thin, lending him the appearance of a
badly-singed pup.

His pet superstition was that, as long as he refrained from practising
his profession in Paris, Paris would remain his impregnable Tower of
Refuge. The world owed Bourke a living, or he so considered; and it
must be allowed that he made collections on account with tolerable
regularity and success; but Paris was tax-exempt as long as Paris
offered him immunity from molestation.

Not only did Paris suit his tastes excellently, but there was no place,
in Bourke's esteem, comparable with Troyon's for peace and quiet.
Hence, the continuity of his patronage was never broken by trials of
rival hostelries; and Troyon's was always expecting Bourke for the
simple reason that he invariably arrived unexpectedly, with neither
warning nor ostentation, to stop as long as he liked, whether a day or
a week or a month, and depart in the same manner.

His daily routine, as Troyon's came to know it, varied but slightly: he
breakfasted abed, about half after ten, lounged in his room or the café
all day if the weather were bad, or strolled peacefully in the gardens
of the Luxembourg if it were good, dined early and well but always
alone, and shortly afterward departed by cab for some well-known bar on
the Rive Droit; whence, it is to be presumed, he moved on to other
resorts, for he never was home when the house was officially closed for
the night, the hours of his return remaining a secret between himself
and the concierge.

On retiring, Bourke would empty his pockets upon the dressing-table,
where the boy Marcel, bringing up Bourke's petit déjeuner the next
morning, would see displayed a tempting confusion of gold and silver
and copper, with a wad of bank-notes, and the customary assortment of
personal hardware.

Now inasmuch as Bourke was never wide-awake at that hour, and always
after acknowledging Marcel's "bon jour" rolled over and snored for
Glory and the Saints, it was against human nature to resist the allure
of that dressing-table. Marcel seldom departed without a coin or two.

He had yet to learn that Bourke's habits were those of an Englishman,
who never goes to bed without leaving all his pocket-money in plain
sight and--carefully catalogued in his memory....

One morning in the spring of 1904 Marcel served Bourke his last
breakfast at Troyon's.

The Irishman had been on the prowl the previous night, and his rasping
snore was audible even through the closed door when Marcel knocked and,
receiving no answer, used the pass-key and entered.

At this the snore was briefly interrupted; Bourke, visible at first
only as a flaming shock of hair protruding from the bedclothes,
squirmed an eye above his artificial horizon, opened it, mumbled
inarticulate acknowledgment of Marcel's salutation, and passed
blatantly into further slumbers.

Marcel deposited his tray on a table beside the bed, moved quietly to
the windows, closed them, and drew the lace curtains together. The
dressing-table between the windows displayed, amid the silver and
copper, more gold coins than it commonly did--some eighteen or twenty
louis altogether. Adroitly abstracting en passant a piece of ten
francs, Marcel went on his way rejoicing, touched a match to the fire
all ready-laid in the grate, and was nearing the door when, casting one
casual parting glance at the bed, he became aware of a notable
phenomenon: the snoring was going on lustily, but Bourke was watching
him with both eyes wide and filled with interest.

Startled and, to tell the truth, a bit indignant, the boy stopped as
though at word of command. But after the first flash of astonishment
his young face hardened to immobility. Only his eyes remained constant
to Bourke's.

The Irishman, sitting up in bed, demanded and received the piece of ten
francs, and went on to indict the boy for the embezzlement of several
sums running into a number of louis.

Marcel, reflecting that Bourke's reckoning was still some louis shy,
made no bones about pleading guilty. Interrogated, the culprit deposed
that he had taken the money because he needed it to buy books. No, he
wasn't sorry. Yes, it was probable that, granted further opportunity,
he would do it again. Advised that he was apparently a case-hardened
young criminal, he replied that youth was not his fault; with years and
experience he would certainly improve.

Puzzled by the boy's attitude, Bourke agitated his hair and wondered
aloud how Marcel would like it if his employers were informed of his
peculations.

Marcel looked pained and pointed out that such a course on the part of
Bourke would be obviously unfair; the only real difference between
them, he explained, was that where he filched a louis Bourke filched
thousands; and if Bourke insisted on turning him over to the mercy of
Madame and Papa Troyon, who would certainly summon a sergent de ville,
he, Marcel, would be quite justified in retaliating by telling the
Préfecture de Police all he knew about Bourke.

This was no chance shot, and took the Irishman between wind and water;
and when, dismayed, he blustered, demanding to know what the boy meant
by his damned impudence, Marcel quietly advised him that one knew what
one knew: if one read the English newspaper in the café, as Marcel did,
one could hardly fail to remark that monsieur always came to Paris
after some notable burglary had been committed in London; and if one
troubled to follow monsieur by night, as Marcel had, it became evident
that monsieur's first calls in Paris were invariably made at the
establishment of a famous fence in the rue des Trois Frères; and,
finally, one drew one's own conclusions when strangers dining in the
restaurant--as on the night before, by way of illustration--strangers
who wore all the hall-marks of police detectives from
England--catechised one about a person whose description was the
portrait of Bourke, and promised a hundred-franc note for information
concerning the habits and whereabouts of that person, if seen.

Marcel added, while Bourke gasped for breath, that the gentleman in
question had spoken to him alone, in the absence of other waiters, and
had been fobbed off with a lie.

But why--Bourke wanted to know--had Marcel lied to save him, when the
truth would have earned him a hundred francs?

"Because," Marcel explained coolly, "I, too, am a thief. Monsieur will
perceive it was a matter of professional honour."

Now the Irish have their faults, but ingratitude is not of their number.

Bourke, packing hastily to leave Paris, France and Europe by the
fastest feasible route, still found time to question Marcel briefly;
and what he learned from the boy about his antecedents so worked with
gratitude upon the sentimental nature of the Celt, that when on the
third day following the Cunarder Carpathia left Naples for New York,
she carried not only a gentleman whose brilliant black hair and glowing
pink complexion rendered him a bit too conspicuous among her
first-cabin passengers for his own comfort, but also in the second
cabin his valet--a boy of sixteen who looked eighteen.

The gentleman's name on the passenger-list didn't, of course, in the
least resemble Bourke. His valet's was given as Michael Lanyard.

The origin of this name is obscure; Michael being easily corrupted into
good Irish Mickey may safely be attributed to Bourke; Lanyard has a
tang of the sea which suggests a reminiscence of some sea-tale prized
by the pseudo Marcel Troyon.

In New York began the second stage in the education of a professional
criminal. The boy must have searched far for a preceptor of more sound
attainments than Bourke. It is, however, only fair to say that Bourke
must have looked as far for an apter pupil. Under his tutelage, Michael
Lanyard learned many things; he became a mathematician of considerable
promise, an expert mechanician, a connoisseur of armour-plate and
explosives in their more pacific applications, and he learned to grade
precious stones with a glance. Also, because Bourke was born of
gentlefolk, he learned to speak English, what clothes to wear and when
to wear them, and the civilized practice with knife and fork at table.
And because Bourke was a diplomatist of sorts, Marcel acquired the
knack of being at ease in every grade of society: he came to know that
a self-made millionaire, taken the right way, is as approachable as one
whose millions date back even unto the third generation; he could order
a dinner at Sherry's as readily as drinks at Sharkey's. Most valuable
accomplishment of all, he learned to laugh. In the way of by-products
he picked up a working acquaintance with American, English and German
slang--French slang he already knew as a mother-tongue--considerable
geographical knowledge of the capitals of Europe, America and Illinois,
a taste that discriminated between tobacco and the stuff sold as such
in France, and a genuine passion for good paintings.

Finally Bourke drilled into his apprentice the three cardinal
principles of successful cracksmanship: to know his ground thoroughly
before venturing upon it; to strike and retreat with the swift
precision of a hawk; to be friendless.

And the last of these was the greatest.

"You're a promising lad," he said--so often that Lanyard would almost
wince from that formula of introduction--"a promising lad, though it's
sad I should be to say it, instead of proud as I am. For I've made you:
but for me you'd long since have matriculated at La Tour Pointue and
graduated with the canaille of the Santé. And in time you may become a
first-chop operator, which I'm not and never will be; but if you do,
'twill be through fighting shy of two things. The first of them's
Woman, and the second is Man. To make a friend of a man you must lower
your guard. Ordinarily 'tis fatal. As for Woman, remember this, m'lad:
to let love into your life you must open a door no mortal hand can
close. And God only knows what'll follow in. If ever you find you've
fallen in love and can't fall out, cut the game on the instant, or
you'll end wearing stripes or broad arrows--the same as myself would,
if this cursed cough wasn't going to be the death of me.... No, m'lad:
take a fool's advice (you'll never get better) and when you're shut of
me, which will be soon, I'm thinking, take the Lonesome Road and stick
to the middle of it. 'He travels the fastest that travels alone' is a
true saying, but 'tis only half the truth: he travels the farthest into
the bargain.... Yet the Lonesome Road has its drawbacks, lad--it's
_damned_ lonely!"

Bourke died in Switzerland, of consumption, in the winter of
1910--Lanyard at his side till the end.

Then the boy set his face against the world: alone, lonely, and
remembering.



II

RETURN

His return to Troyon's, whereas an enterprise which Lanyard had been
contemplating for several years--in fact, ever since the death of
Bourke--came to pass at length almost purely as an affair of impulse.

He had come through from London by the afternoon service--via
Boulogne--travelling light, with nothing but a brace of handbags and
his life in his hands. Two coups to his credit since the previous
midnight had made the shift advisable, though only one of them, the
later, rendered it urgent.

Scotland Yard would, he reckoned, require at least twenty-four hours to
unlimber for action on the Omber affair; but the other, the theft of
the Huysman plans, though not consummated before noon, must have set
the Chancelleries of at least three Powers by the ears before Lanyard
was fairly entrained at Charing Cross.

Now his opinion of Scotland Yard was low; its emissaries must operate
gingerly to keep within the laws they serve. But the agents of the
various Continental secret services have a way of making their own laws
as they go along: and for these Lanyard entertained a respect little
short of profound.

He would not have been surprised had he ran foul of trouble on the pier
at Folkestone. Boulogne, as well, figured in his imagination as a
crucial point: its harbour lights, heaving up over the grim grey waste,
peered through the deepening violet dusk to find him on the packet's
deck, responding to their curious stare with one no less insistently
inquiring.... But it wasn't until in the gauntlet of the Gare du Nord
itself that he found anything to shy at.

Dropping from train to platform, he surrendered his luggage to a ready
facteur, and followed the man through the crush, elbowed and
shouldered, offended by the pervasive reek of chilled steam and
coal-gas, and dazzled by the brilliant glare of the overhanging
electric arcs.

Almost the first face he saw turned his way was that of Roddy.

The man from Scotland Yard was stationed at one side of the platform
gates. Opposite him stood another known by sight to Lanyard--a highly
decorative official from the Préfecture de Police. Both were scanning
narrowly every face in the tide that churned between them.

Wondering if through some fatal freak of fortuity these were acting
under late telegraphic advice from London, Lanyard held himself well in
hand: the first sign of intent to hinder him would prove the signal for
a spectacular demonstration of the ungentle art of not getting caught
with the goods on. And for twenty seconds, while the crowd milled
slowly through the narrow exit, he was as near to betraying himself as
he had ever been--nearer, for he had marked down the point on Roddy's
jaw where his first blow would fall, and just where to plant a
coup-de-savate most surely to incapacitate the minion of the
Préfecture; and all the while was looking the two over with a manner of
the most calm and impersonal curiosity.

But beyond an almost imperceptible narrowing of Roddy's eyes when they
met his own, as if the Englishman were struggling with a faulty memory,
neither police agent betrayed the least recognition.

And then Lanyard was outside the station, his facteur introducing him
to a ramshackle taxicab.

No need to speculate whether or not Roddy were gazing after him; in the
ragged animal who held the door while Lanyard fumbled for his facteur's
tip, he recognized a runner for the Préfecture; and beyond question
there were many such about. If any lingering doubt should trouble
Roddy's mind he need only ask, "Such-and-such an one took what cab and
for what destination?" to be instantly and accurately informed.

In such case to go directly to his apartment, that handy little
rez-de-chaussée near the Trocadéro, was obviously inadvisable. Without
apparent hesitation Lanyard directed the driver to the Hotel Lutetia,
tossed the ragged spy a sou, and was off to the tune of a slammed door
and a motor that sorely needed overhauling....

The rain, which had welcomed the train a few miles from Paris, was in
the city torrential. Few wayfarers braved the swimming sidewalks, and
the little clusters of chairs and tables beneath permanent café awnings
were one and all neglected. But in the roadways an amazing concourse of
vehicles, mostly motor-driven, skimmed, skidded, and shot over
burnished asphalting all, of course, at top-speed--else this were not
Paris. Lanyard thought of insects on the surface of some dark forest
pool....

The roof of the cab rang like a drumhead; the driver blinked through
the back-splatter from his rubber apron; now and again the tyres lost
grip on the treacherous going and provided instants of lively suspense.
Lanyard lowered a window to release the musty odour peculiar to French
taxis, got well peppered with moisture, and promptly put it up again.
Then insensibly he relaxed, in the toils of memories roused by the
reflection that this night fairly duplicated that which had welcomed
him to Paris, twenty years ago.

It was then that, for the first time in several months, he thought
definitely of Troyon's.

And it was then that Chance ordained that his taxicab should skid. On
the point of leaving the Ile de la Cité by way of the Pont St. Michel,
it suddenly (one might pardonably have believed) went mad, darting
crabwise from the middle of the road to the right-hand footway with
evident design to climb the rail and make an end to everything in the
Seine. The driver regained control barely in time to avert a tragedy,
and had no more than accomplished this much when a bit of broken glass
gutted one of the rear tyres, which promptly gave up the ghost with a
roar like that of a lusty young cannon.

At this the driver (apparently a person of religious bias) said
something heartfelt about the sacred name of his pipe and, crawling
from under the apron, turned aft to assess damages.

On his own part Lanyard swore in sound Saxon, opened the door, and
delivered himself to the pelting shower.

"Well?" he enquired after watching the driver muzzle the eviscerated
tyre for some eloquent moments.

Turning up a distorted face, the other gesticulated with profane
abandon, by way of good measure interpolating a few disconnected words
and phrases. Lanyard gathered that this was the second accident of the
same nature since noon that the cab consequently lacked a spare tyre,
and that short of a trip to the garage the accident was irremediable.
So he said (intelligently) it couldn't be helped, paid the man and over
tipped precisely as though their journey had been successfully
consummated, and standing over his luggage watched the maimed vehicle
limp miserably off through the teeming mists.

Now in normal course his plight should have been relieved within two
minutes. But it wasn't. For some time all such taxis as did pass
displayed scornfully inverted flags. Also, their drivers jeered in
their pleasing Parisian way at the lonely outlander occupying a
position of such uncommon distinction in the heart of the storm and the
precise middle of the Pont St. Michel.

Over to the left, on the Quai de Marché Neuf, the façade of the
Préfecture frowned portentously--"La Tour Pointue," as the Parisian
loves to term it. Lanyard forgot his annoyance long enough to salute
that grim pile with a mocking bow, thinking of the men therein who
would give half their possessions to lay hands on him who was only a
few hundred yards distant, marooned in the rain!...

In its own good time a night-prowling fiacre ambled up and veered over
to his hail. He viewed this stroke of good-fortune with intense
disgust: the shambling, weather-beaten animal between the shafts
promised a long, damp crawl to the Lutetia.

And on this reflection he yielded to impulse.

Heaving in his luggage--"Troyon's!" he told the cocher....

The fiacre lumbered off into that dark maze of streets, narrow and
tortuous, which backs up from the Seine to the Luxembourg, while its
fare reflected that Fate had not served him so hardly after all: if
Roddy had really been watching for him at the Gare du Nord, with a mind
to follow and wait for his prey to make some incriminating move, this
chance-contrived change of vehicles and destination would throw the
detective off the scent and gain the adventurer, at worst, several
hours' leeway.

When at length his conveyance drew up at the historic corner, Lanyard
alighting could have rubbed his eyes to see the windows of Troyon's all
bright with electric light.

Somehow, and most unreasonably, he had always believed the place would
go to the hands of the house-wrecker unchanged.

A smart portier ducked out, seized his luggage, and offered an
umbrella. Lanyard composed his features to immobility as he entered the
hotel, of no mind to let the least flicker of recognition be detected
in his eyes when they should re-encounter familiar faces.

And this was quite as well: for--again--the first he saw was Roddy.



III

A POINT OF INTERROGATION

The man from Scotland Yard had just surrendered hat, coat, and umbrella
to the vestiaire and was turning through swinging doors to the
dining-room. Again, embracing Lanyard, his glance seemed devoid of any
sort of intelligible expression; and if its object needed all his
self-possession in that moment, it was to dissemble relief rather than
dismay. An accent of the fortuitous distinguished this second encounter
too persuasively to excuse further misgivings. What the adventurer
himself hadn't known till within the last ten minutes, that he was
coming to Troyon's, Roddy couldn't possibly have anticipated; ergo,
whatever the detective's business, it had nothing to do with Lanyard.

Furthermore, before quitting the lobby, Roddy paused long enough to
instruct the vestiaire to have a fire laid in his room.

So he was stopping at Troyon's--and didn't care who knew it!

His doubts altogether dissipated by this incident, Lanyard followed his
natural enemy into the dining-room with an air as devil-may-care as one
could wish and so impressive that the maitre-d'hotel abandoned the
detective to the mercies of one of his captains and himself hastened to
seat Lanyard and take his order.

This last disposed of; Lanyard surrendered himself to new
impressions--of which the first proved a bit disheartening.

However impulsively, he hadn't resought Troyon's without definite
intent, to wit, to gain some clue, however slender, to the mystery of
that wretched child, Marcel. But now it appeared he had procrastinated
fatally: Time and Change had left little other than the shell of the
Troyon's he remembered. Papa Troyon was gone; Madame no longer occupied
the desk of the caisse; enquiries, so discreetly worded as to be
uncompromising, elicited from the maitre-d'hôtel the information that
the house had been under new management these eighteen months; the old
proprietor was dead, and his widow had sold out lock, stock and barrel,
and retired to the country--it was not known exactly where. And with
the new administration had come fresh decorations and furnishings as
well as a complete change of personnel: not even one of the old waiters
remained.

"'All, all are gone, the old familiar faces,'" Lanyard quoted in
vindictive melancholy--"damn 'em!"

Happily, it was soon demonstrated that the cuisine was being maintained
on its erstwhile plane of excellence: one still had that comfort....

Other impressions, less ultimate, proved puzzling, disconcerting, and
paradoxically reassuring.

Lanyard commanded a fair view of Roddy across the waist of the room.
The detective had ordered a meal that matched his aspect well--both of
true British simplicity. He was a square-set man with a square jaw,
cold blue eyes, a fat nose, a thin-lipped trap of a mouth, a face as
red as rare beefsteak. His dinner comprised a cut from the joint,
boiled potatoes, brussels sprouts, a bit of cheese, a bottle of Bass.
He ate slowly, chewing with the doggedness of a strong character
hampered by a weak digestion, and all the while kept eyes fixed to an
issue of the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail, with an effect of
concentration quite too convincing.

Now one doesn't read the Paris edition of the London Daily Mail with
tense excitement. Humanly speaking, it can't be done.

Where, then, was the object of this so sedulously dissembled interest?

Lanyard wasn't slow to read this riddle to his satisfaction--in as far,
that is, as it was satisfactory to feel still more certain that Roddy's
quarry was another than himself.

Despite the lateness of the hour, which had by now turned ten o'clock,
the restaurant had a dozen tables or so in the service of guests
pleasantly engaged in lengthening out an agreeable evening with
dessert, coffee, liqueurs and cigarettes. The majority of these were in
couples, but at a table one removed from Roddy's sat a party of three;
and Lanyard noticed, or fancied, that the man from Scotland Yard turned
his newspaper only during lulls in the conversation in this quarter.

Of the three, one might pass for an American of position and wealth: a
man of something more than sixty years, with an execrable accent, a
racking cough, and a thin, patrician cast of features clouded darkly by
the expression of a soul in torment, furrowed, seamed, twisted--a mask
of mortal anguish. And once, when this one looked up and casually
encountered Lanyard's gaze, the adventurer was shocked to find himself
staring into eyes like those of a dead man: eyes of a grey so light
that at a little distance the colour of the irises blended
indistinguishably with their whites, leaving visible only the round
black points of pupils abnormally distended and staring, blank, fixed,
passionless, beneath lashless lids.

For the instant they seemed to explore Lanyard's very soul with a look
of remote and impersonal curiosity; then they fell away; and when next
the adventurer looked, the man had turned to attend to some observation
of one of his companions.

On his right sat a girl who might be his daughter; for not only was
she, too, hall-marked American, but she was far too young to be the
other's wife. A demure, old-fashioned type; well-poised but unassuming;
fetchingly gowned and with sufficient individuality of taste but not
conspicuously; a girl with soft brown hair and soft brown eyes; pretty,
not extravagantly so when her face was in repose, but with a slow smile
that rendered her little less than beautiful: in all (Lanyard thought)
the kind of woman that is predestined to comfort mankind, whose
strongest instinct is the maternal.

She took little part in the conversation, seldom interrupting what was
practically a duologue between her putative father and the third of
their party.

This last was one, whom Lanyard was sure he knew, though he could see
no more than the back of Monsieur le Comte Remy de Morbihan.

And he wondered with a thrill of amusement if it were possible that
Roddy was on the trail of that tremendous buck. If so, it would be a
chase worth following--a diversion rendered the more exquisite to
Lanyard by the spice of novelty, since for once he would figure as a
dispassionate bystander.

The name of Comte Remy de Morbihan, although unrecorded in the Almanach
de Gotha, was one to conjure with in the Paris of his day and
generation. He claimed the distinction of being at once the homeliest,
one of the wealthiest, and the most-liked man in France.

As to his looks, good or bad, they were said to prove infallibly fatal
with women, while not a few men, perhaps for that reason, did their
possessor the honour to imitate them. The revues burlesqued him; Sem
caricatured him; Forain counterfeited him extensively in that
inimitable series of Monday morning cartoons for Le Figaro: one said
"De Morbihan" instinctively at sight of that stocky figure, short and
broad, topped by a chubby, moon-like mask with waxed moustaches,
womanish eyes, and never-failing grin.

A creature of proverbial good-nature and exhaustless vitality, his
extraordinary popularity was due to the equally extraordinary
extravagance with which he supported that latest Gallic fad, "le
Sport." The Parisian Rugby team was his pampered protégé, he was an
active member of the Tennis Club, maintained not only a flock of
automobiles but a famous racing stable, rode to hounds, was a good
field gun, patronized aviation and motor-boat racing, risked as many
maximums during the Monte Carlo season as the Grand Duke Michael
himself, and was always ready to whet rapiers or burn a little harmless
powder of an early morning in the Parc aux Princes.

But there were ugly whispers current with respect to the sources of his
fabulous wealth. Lanyard, for one, wouldn't have thought him the
properest company or the best Parisian cicerone for an ailing American
gentleman blessed with independent means and an attractive daughter.

Paris, on the other hand--Paris who forgives everything to him who
contributes to her amusement--adored Comte Remy de Morbihan ...

But perhaps Lanyard was prejudiced by his partiality for Americans, a
sentiment the outgrowth of the years spent in New York with Bourke. He
even fancied that between his spirit and theirs existed some subtle
bond of sympathy. For all he knew he might himself be American...

For some time Lanyard strained to catch something of the conversation
that seemed to hold so much of interest for Roddy, but without success
because of the hum of voices that filled the room. In time, however,
the gathering began to thin out, until at length there remained only
this party of three, Lanyard enjoying a most delectable salad, and
Roddy puffing a cigar (with such a show of enjoyment that Lanyard
suspected him of the sin of smuggling) and slowly gulping down a second
bottle of Bass.

Under these conditions the talk between De Morbihan and the Americans
became public property.

The first remark overheard by Lanyard came from the elderly American,
following a pause and a consultation of his watch.

"Quarter to eleven," he announced.

"Plenty of time," said De Morbihan cheerfully. "That is," he amended,
"if mademoiselle isn't bored ..."

The girl's reply, accompanied by a pretty inclination of her head
toward the Frenchman, was lost in the accents of the first speaker--a
strong and sonorous voice, in strange contrast with his ravaged
appearance and distressing cough.

"Don't let that worry you," he advised cheerfully. "Lucia's accustomed
to keeping late hours with me; and who ever heard of a young and pretty
woman being bored on the third day of her first visit to Paris?"

He pronounced the name with the hard C of the Italian tongue, as though
it were spelled Luchia.

"To be sure," laughed the Frenchman; "one suspects it will be long
before mademoiselle loses interest in the rue de la Paix."

"You may well, when such beautiful things come from it," said the girl.
"See what we found there to-day."

She slipped a ring from her hand and passed it to De Morbihan.

There followed silence for an instant, then an exclamation from the
Frenchman:

"But it is superb! Accept, mademoiselle, my compliments. It is worthy
even of you."

She flushed prettily as she nodded smiling acknowledgement.

"Ah, you Americans!" De Morbihan sighed. "You fill us with envy: you
have the souls of poets and the wealth of princes!"

"But we must come to Paris to find beautiful things for our women-folk!"

"Take care, though, lest you go too far, Monsieur Bannon."

"How so--too far?"

"You might attract the attention of the Lone Wolf. They say he's on the
prowl once more."

The American laughed a trace contemptuously. Lanyard's fingers
tightened on his knife and fork; otherwise he made no sign. A sidelong
glance into a mirror at his elbow showed Roddy still absorbed in the
Daily Mail.

The girl bent forward with a look of eager interest.

"The Lone Wolf? Who is that?"

"You don't know him in America, mademoiselle?"

"No...."

"The Lone Wolf, my dear Lucia," the valetudinarian explained in a dryly
humourous tone, "is the sobriquet fastened by some imaginative French
reporter upon a celebrated criminal who seems to have made himself
something of a pest over here, these last few years. Nobody knows
anything definite about him, apparently, but he operates in a most
individual way and keeps the police busy trying to guess where he'll
strike next."

The girl breathed an incredulous exclamation.

"But I assure you!" De Morbihan protested. "The rogue has had a
wonderfully successful career, thanks to his dispensing with
confederates and confining his depredations to jewels and similar
valuables, portable and easy to convert into cash. Yet," he added,
nodding sagely, "one isn't afraid to predict his race is almost run."
"You don't tell me!" the older man exclaimed. "Have they picked up the
scent--at last?"

"The man is known," De Morbihan affirmed.

By now the conversation had caught the interest of several loitering
waiters, who were listening open-mouthed. Even Roddy seemed a bit
startled, and for once forgot to make business with his newspaper; but
his wondering stare was exclusively for De Morbihan.

Lanyard put down knife and fork, swallowed a final mouthful of Haut
Brion, and lighted a cigarette with the hand of a man who knew not the
meaning of nerves.

"Garçon!" he called quietly; and ordered coffee and cigars, with a
liqueur to follow....

"Known!" the American exclaimed. "They've caught him, eh?"

"I didn't say that," De Morbihan laughed; "but the mystery is no
more--in certain quarters."

"Who is he, then?"

"That--monsieur will pardon me--I'm not yet free to state. Indeed, I
may be indiscreet in saying as much as I do. Yet, among friends..."

His shrug implied that, as far as _he_ was concerned, waiters were
unhuman and the other guests of the establishment non-existent.

"But," the American persisted, "perhaps you can tell us how they got on
his track?"

"It wasn't difficult," said De Morbihan: "indeed, quite simple. This
tone of depreciation is becoming, for it was my part to suggest the
solution to my friend, the Chief of the Sûreté. He had been annoyed and
distressed, had even spoken of handing in his resignation because of
his inability to cope with this gentleman, the Lone Wolf. And since he
is my friend, I too was distressed on his behalf, and badgered my poor
wits until they chanced upon an idea which led us to the light."

"You won't tell us?" the girl protested, with a little moue of
disappointment, as the Frenchman paused provokingly.

"Perhaps I shouldn't. And yet--why not? As I say, it was elementary
reasoning--a mere matter of logical deduction and elimination. One made
up one's mind the Lone Wolf must be a certain sort of man; the rest was
simply sifting France for the man to fit the theory, and then watching
him until he gave himself away."

"You don't imagine we're going to let you stop there?" The American
demanded in an aggrieved tone.

"No? I must continue? Very well: I confess to some little pride. It was
a feat. He is cunning, that one!"

De Morbihan paused and shifted sideways in his chair, grinning like a
mischievous child.

By this manoeuvre, thanks to the arrangement of mirrors lining the
walls, he commanded an indirect view of Lanyard; a fact of which the
latter was not unaware, though his expression remained unchanged as he
sat--with a corner of his eye reserved for Roddy--speculating whether
De Morbihan were telling the truth or only boasting for his own
glorification.

"Do go on--please!" the girl begged prettily.

"I can deny you nothing, mademoiselle.... Well, then! From what little
was known of this mysterious creature, one readily inferred he must be
a bachelor, with no close friends. That is clear, I trust?"

"Too deep for me, my friend," the elderly man confessed.

"Impenetrable reticence," the Count expounded, sententious--and
enjoying himself hugely--"isn't possible in the human relations. Sooner
or later one is doomed to share one's secrets, however reluctantly,
even unconsciously, with a wife, a mistress, a child, or with some
trusted friend. And a secret between two is--a prolific breeder of
platitudes! Granted this line of reasoning, the Lone Wolf is of
necessity not only unmarried but practically friendless. Other
attributes of his will obviously comprise youth, courage, imagination,
a rather high order of intelligence, and a social position--let us say,
rather, an ostensible business--enabling him to travel at will hither
and yon without exciting comment. So far, good! My friend the Chief of
the Sûreté forthwith commissioned his agents to seek such an one, and
by this means several fine fish were enmeshed in the net of suspicion,
carefully scrutinized, and one by one let go--all except one, the
veritable man. Him they sedulously watched, shadowing him across Europe
and back again. He was in Berlin at the time of the famous Rheinart
robbery, though he compassed that coup without detection; he was in
Vienna when the British embassy there was looted, but escaped by a
clever ruse and managed to dispose of his plunder before the agents of
the Sûreté could lay hands on him; recently he has been in London, and
there he made love to, and ran away with, the diamonds of a certain
lady of some eminence. You have heard of Madame Omber, eh?" Now by
Roddy's expression it was plain that, if Madame Omber's name wasn't
strange in his hearing, at least he found this news about her most
surprising. He was frankly staring, with a slackened jaw and with
stupefaction in his blank blue eyes.

Lanyard gently pinched the small end of a cigar, dipped it into his
coffee, and lighted it with not so much as a suspicion of tremor. His
brain, however, was working rapidly in effort to determine whether De
Morbihan meant this for warning, or was simply narrating an amusing
yarn founded on advance information and amplified by an ingenious
imagination. For by now the news of the Omber affair must have thrilled
many a Continental telegraph-wire....

"Madame Omber--of course!" the American agreed thoughtfully. "Everyone
has heard of her wonderful jewels. The real marvel is that the Lone
Wolf neglected so shining a mark as long as he did."

"But truly so, monsieur!"

"And they caught him at it, eh?"

"Not precisely: but he left a clue--and London, to boot--with such
haste as would seem to indicate he knew his cunning hand had, for once,
slipped."

"Then they'll nab him soon?"

"Ah, monsieur, one must say no more!" De Morbihan protested. "Rest
assured the Chief of the Sûreté has laid his plans: his web is spun,
and so artfully that I think our unsociable outlaw will soon be making
friends in the Prison of the Santé.... But now we must adjourn. One is
sorry. It has been so very pleasant...."

A waiter conjured the bill from some recess of his waistcoat and served
it on a clean plate to the American. Another ran bawling for the
vestiaire. Roddy glued his gaze afresh to the Daily Mail. The party
rose.

Lanyard noticed that the American signed instead of settling the bill
with cash, indicating that he resided at Troyon's as well as dined
there. And the adventurer found time to reflect that it was odd for
such as he to seek that particular establishment in preference to the
palatial modern hostelries of the Rive Droit--before De Morbihan,
ostensibly for the first time espying Lanyard, plunged across the room
with both hands outstretched and a cry of joyous surprise not really
justified by their rather slight acquaintanceship.

"Ah! Ah!" he clamoured vivaciously. "It is Monsieur Lanyard, who knows
all about paintings! But this is delightful, my friend--one grand
pleasure! You must know my friends.... But come!"

And seizing Lanyard's hands, when that one somewhat reluctantly rose in
response to this surprisingly over-exuberant greeting, he dragged him
willy-nilly from behind his table.

"And you are American, too. Certainly you must know one another.
Mademoiselle Bannon--with your permission--my friend, Monsieur Lanyard.
And Monsieur Bannon--an old, dear friend, with whom you will share a
passion for the beauties of art."

The hand of the American, when Lanyard clasped it, was cold, as cold as
ice; and as their eyes met that abominable cough laid hold of the man,
as it were by the nape of his neck, and shook him viciously. Before it
had finished with him, his sensitively coloured face was purple, and he
was gasping, breathless--and infuriated.

"Monsieur Bannon," De Morbihan explained disconnectedly--"it is most
distressing--I tell him he should not stop in Paris at this season--"

"It is nothing!" the American interposed brusquely between paroxysms.

"But our winter climate, monsieur--it is not fit for those in the prime
of health--"

"It is I who am unfit!" Bannon snapped, pressing a handkerchief to his
lips--"unfit to live!" he amended venomously.

Lanyard murmured some conventional expression of sympathy. Through it
all he was conscious of the regard of the girl. Her soft brown eyes met
his candidly, with a look cool in its composure, straightforward in its
enquiry, neither bold nor mock-demure. And if they were the first to
fall, it was with an effect of curiosity sated, without hint of
discomfiture.... And somehow the adventurer felt himself measured,
classified, filed away.

Between amusement and pique he continued to stare while the elderly
American recovered his breath and De Morbihan jabbered on with
unfailing vivacity; and he thought that this closer scrutiny discovered
in her face contours suggesting maturity of thought beyond her apparent
years--which were somewhat less than the sum of Lanyard's--and with
this the suggestion of an elusive, provoking quality of wistful
languor, a hint of patient melancholy....

"We are off for a glimpse of Montmartre," De Morbihan was
explaining--"Monsieur Bannon and I. He has not seen Paris in twenty
years, he tells me. Well, it will be amusing to show him what changes
have taken place in all that time. One regrets mademoiselle is too
fatigued to accompany us. But you, my friend--now if you would consent
to make our third, it would be most amiable of you."

"I'm sorry," Lanyard excused himself; "but as you see, I am only just
in from the railroad, a long and tiresome journey. You are very good,
but I--"

"Good!" De Morbihan exclaimed with violence. "I? On the contrary, I am
a very selfish man; I seek but to afford myself the pleasure of your
company. You lead such a busy life, my friend, romping about Europe,
here one day, God-knows-where the next, that one must make one's best
of your spare moments. You will join us, surely?"

"Really I cannot to-night. Another time perhaps, if you'll excuse me."

"But it is always this way!" De Morbihan explained to his friends with
a vast show of mock indignation. "'Another time, perhaps'--his
invariable excuse! I tell you, not two men in all Paris have any real
acquaintance with this gentleman whom all Paris knows! His reserve is
proverbial--'as distant as Lanyard,' we say on the boulevards!" And
turning again to the adventurer, meeting his cold stare with the De
Morbihan grin of quenchless effrontery--"As you will, my friend!" he
granted. "But should you change your mind--well, you'll have no trouble
finding us. Ask any place along the regular route. We see far too
little of one another, monsieur--and I am most anxious to have a little
chat with you."

"It will be an honour," Lanyard returned formally....

In his heart he was pondering several most excruciating methods of
murdering the man. What did he mean? How much did he know? If he knew
anything, he must mean ill, for assuredly he could not be ignorant of
Roddy's business, or that every other word he uttered was rivetting
suspicion on Lanyard of identity with the Lone Wolf, or that Roddy was
listening with all his ears and staring into the bargain!

Decidedly something must be done to silence this animal, should it turn
out he really did know anything!

It was only after profound reflection over his liqueur (while Roddy
devoured his Daily Mail and washed it down with a third bottle of Bass)
that Lanyard summoned the maitre-d'hôtel and asked for a room.

It would never do to fix the doubts of the detective by going elsewhere
that night. But, fortunately, Lanyard knew that warren which was
Troyon's as no one else knew it; Roddy would find it hard to detain
him, should events seem to advise an early departure.



IV

A STRATAGEM

When the maitre-d'hôtel had shown him all over the establishment
(innocently enough, en route, furnishing him with a complete list of
his other guests and their rooms: memoranda readily registered by a
retentive memory) Lanyard chose the bed-chamber next that occupied by
Roddy, in the second storey.

The consideration influencing this selection was--of course--that, so
situated, he would be in position not only to keep an eye on the man
from Scotland Yard but also to determine whether or no Roddy were
disposed to keep an eye on him.

In those days Lanyard's faith in himself was a beautiful thing. He
could not have enjoyed the immunity ascribed to the Lone Wolf as long
as he had without gaining a power of sturdy self-confidence in addition
to a certain amount of temperate contempt for spies of the law and all
their ways.

Against the peril inherent in this last, however, he was self-warned,
esteeming it the most fatal chink in the armour of the lawbreaker, this
disposition to underestimate the acumen of the police: far too many
promising young adventurers like himself were annually laid by the
heels in that snare of their own infatuate weaving. The mouse has every
right, if he likes, to despise the cat for a heavy-handed and
bloodthirsty beast, lacking wit and imagination, a creature of simple
force-majeure; but that mouse will not advisedly swagger in cat-haunted
territory; a blow of the paw is, when all's said and done, a blow of
the paw--something to numb the wits of the wiliest mouse.

Considering Roddy, he believed it to be impossible to gauge the
limitations of that essentially British intelligence--something as
self-contained as a London flat. One thing only was certain: Roddy
didn't always think in terms of beef and Bass; he was nobody's facile
fool; he could make a shrewd inference as well as strike a shrewd blow.

Reviewing the scene in the restaurant, Lanyard felt measurably
warranted in assuming not only that Roddy was interested in De
Morbihan, but that the Frenchman was well aware of that interest. And
he resented sincerely his inability to feel as confident that the
Count, with his gossip about the Lone Wolf, had been merely seeking to
divert Roddy's interest to putatively larger game. It was just possible
that De Morbihan's identification of Lanyard with that mysterious
personage, at least by innuendo, had been unintentional. But somehow
Lanyard didn't believe it had.

The two questions troubled him sorely: Did De Morbihan _know_, did he
merely suspect, or had he only loosed an aimless shot which chance had
sped to the right goal? Had the mind of Roddy proved fallow to that
suggestion, or had it, with its simple national tenacity, been
impatient of such side issues, or incredulous, and persisted in
focusing its processes upon the personality and activities of Monsieur
le Comte Remy de Morbihan? However, one would surely learn something
illuminating before very long. The business of a sleuth is to sleuth,
and sooner or later Roddy must surely make some move to indicate the
quarter wherein his real interest lay.

Just at present, reasoning from noises audible through the bolted door
that communicated with the adjoining bed-chamber, the business of a
sleuth seemed to comprise going to bed. Lanyard, shaving and dressing,
could distinctly hear a tuneless voice contentedly humming "Sally in
our Alley," a rendition punctuated by one heavy thump and then another
and then by a heartfelt sigh of relief--as Roddy kicked off his
boots--and followed by the tapping of a pipe against grate-bars, the
squeal of a window lowered for ventilation, the click of an
electric-light, and the creaking of bed-springs.


Finally, and before Lanyard had finished dressing, the man from
Scotland Yard began placidly to snore.

Of course, he might well be bluffing; for Lanyard had taken pains to
let Roddy know that they were neighbours, by announcing his selection
in loud tones close to the communicating door.

But this was a question which the adventurer meant to have answered
before he went out....

It was hard upon twelve o'clock when the mirror on the dressing-table
assured him that he was at length point-device in the habit and apparel
of a gentleman of elegant nocturnal leisure. But if he approved the
figure he cut, it was mainly because clothes interested him and he
reckoned his own impeccable. Of their tenant he was feeling just then a
bit less sure than he had half-an-hour since; his regard was louring
and mistrustful. He was, in short, suffering reaction from the high
spirits engendered by his cross-Channel exploits, his successful
get-away, and the unusual circumstances attendant upon his return to
this memory-haunted mausoleum of an unhappy childhood. He even shivered
a trifle, as if under premonition of misfortune, and asked himself
heavily: Why not?

For, logically considered, a break in the run of his luck was due. Thus
far he had played, with a success almost too uniform, his dual rôle, by
day the amiable amateur of art, by night the nameless mystery that
prowled unseen and preyed unhindered. Could such success be reasonably
expected to attend him always? Should he count De Morbihan's yarn a
warning? Black must turn up every so often in a run of red: every
gambler knows as much. And what was Michael Lanyard but a common
gambler, who persistently staked life and liberty against the blindly
impartial casts of Chance?

With one last look round to make certain there was nothing in the
calculated disorder of his room to incriminate him were it to be
searched in his absence, Lanyard enveloped himself in a long
full-skirted coat, clapped on an opera hat, and went out, noisily
locking the door. He might as well have left it wide, but it would do
no harm to pretend he didn't know the bed-chamber keys at Troyon's were
interchangeable--identically the same keys, in fact, that had been in
service in the days of Marcel the wretched.

A single half-power electric bulb now modified the gloom of the
corridor; its fellow made a light blot on the darkness of the
courtyard. Even the windows of the conciergerie were black.

None the less, Lanyard tapped them smartly.

"_Cordon_!" he demanded in a strident voice. "_Cordon, s'il vous plait!
_"

"_Eh? _" A startled grunt from within the lodge was barely audible.
Then the latch clicked loudly at the end of the passageway.

Groping his way in the direction of this last sound, Lanyard found the
small side door ajar. He opened it, and hesitated a moment, looking out
as though questioning the weather; simultaneously his deft fingers
wedged the latch back with a thin slip of steel.

No rain, in fact, had fallen within the hour; but still the sky was
dense with a sullen rack, and still the sidewalks were inky wet.

The street was lonely and indifferently lighted, but a swift searching
reconnaissance discovered nothing that suggested a spy skulking in the
shelter of any of the nearer shadows.

Stepping out, he slammed the door and strode briskly round the corner,
as if making for the cab-rank that lines up along the Luxembourg
Gardens side of the rue de Medicis; his boot-heels made a cheerful
racket in that quiet hour; he was quite audibly going away from
Troyon's.

But instead of holding on to the cab-rank, he turned the next corner,
and then the next, rounding the block; and presently, reapproaching the
entrance to Troyon's, paused in the recess of a dark doorway and,
lifting one foot after another, slipped rubber caps over his heels.
Thereafter his progress was practically noiseless.

The smaller door yielded to his touch without a murmur. Inside, he
closed it gently, and stood a moment listening with all his senses--not
with his ears alone but with every nerve and fibre of his being--with
his imagination, to boot. But there was never a sound or movement in
all the house that he could detect.

And no shadow could have made less noise than he, slipping cat-footed
across the courtyard and up the stairs, avoiding with super-developed
sensitiveness every lift that might complain beneath his tread. In a
trice he was again in the corridor leading to his bed-chamber.

It was quite as gloomy and empty as it had been five minutes ago, yet
with a difference, a something in its atmosphere that made him nod
briefly in confirmation of that suspicion which had brought him back so
stealthily.

For one thing, Roddy had stopped snoring. And Lanyard smiled over the
thought that the man from Scotland Yard might profitably have copied
that trick of poor Bourke's, of snoring like the Seven Sleepers when
most completely awake....

It was naturally no surprise to find his bed-chamber door unlocked and
slightly ajar. Lanyard made sure of the readiness of his automatic,
strode into the room, and shut the door quietly but by no means
soundlessly.

He had left the shades down and the hangings drawn at both windows; and
since these had not been disturbed, something nearly approaching
complete darkness reigned in the room. But though promptly on entering
his fingers closed upon the wall-switch near the door, he refrained
from turning up the lights immediately, with a fancy of impish
inspiration that it would be amusing to learn what move Roddy would
make when the tension became too much even for his trained nerves.

Several seconds passed without the least sound disturbing the stillness.

Lanyard himself grew a little impatient, finding that his sight failed
to grow accustomed to the darkness because that last was too absolute,
pressing against his staring eyeballs like a black fluid impenetrably
opaque, as unbroken as the hush.

Still, he waited: surely Roddy wouldn't be able much longer to endure
such suspense....

And, surely enough, the silence was abruptly broken by a strange and
moving sound, a hushed cry of alarm that was half a moan and half a sob.

Lanyard himself was startled: for that was never Roddy's voice!

There was a noise of muffled and confused footsteps, as though someone
had started in panic for the door, then stopped in terror.

Words followed, the strangest he could have imagined, words spoken in a
gentle and tremulous voice:

"In pity's name! who are you and what do you want?"

Thunderstruck, Lanyard switched on the lights.

At a distance of some six paces he saw, not Roddy, but a woman, and not
a woman merely, but the girl he had met in the restaurant.



V

ANTICLIMAX

The surprise was complete; none, indeed, was ever more so; but it's a
question which party thereto was the more affected.

Lanyard stared with the eyes of stupefaction. To his fancy, this thing
passed the compass of simple incredulity: it wasn't merely improbable,
it was preposterous; it was anticlimax exaggerated to the proportions
of the grotesque.

He had come prepared to surprise and bully rag the most astute police
detective of whom he had any knowledge; he found himself surprised and
discountenanced by _this_...!

Confusion no less intense informed the girl's expression; her eyes were
fixed to his with a look of blank enquiry; her face, whose colouring
had won his admiration two hours since, was colourless; her lips were
just ajar; the fingers of one hand touched her cheek, indenting it.

The other hand caught up before her the long skirts of a pretty
robe-de-chambre, beneath whose edge a hand's-breadth of white silk
shimmered and the toe of a silken mule was visible. Thus she stood,
poised for flight, attired only in a dressing-gown over what, one
couldn't help suspecting, was her night-dress: for her hair was down,
and she was unquestionably all ready for her bed....But Bourke's
patient training had been wasted if this man proved one to remain long
at loss. Rallying his wits quickly from their momentary rout, he
reasserted command over them, and if he didn't in the least understand,
made a brave show of accepting this amazing accident as a commonplace.

"I beg your pardon, Miss Bannon--" he began with a formal bow.

She interrupted with a gasp of wondering recognition: "Mr. Lanyard!"

He inclined his head a second time: "Sorry to disturb you--"

"But I don't understand--"

"Unfortunately," he proceeded smoothly, "I forgot something when I went
out, and had to come back for it."

"But--but--"

"Yes?"

Suddenly her eyes, for the first time detached from his, swept the room
with a glance of wild dismay.

"This room," she breathed--"I don't know it--"

"It is mine."

"Yours! But--"

"That is how I happened to--interrupt you."

The girl shrank back a pace--two paces--uttering a low-toned
monosyllable of understanding, an "_O!_" abruptly gasped.
Simultaneously her face and throat flamed scarlet.

"_Your_ room, Mr. Lanyard!"

Her tone so convincingly voiced shame and horror that his heart misgave
him. Not that alone, but the girl was very good to look upon. "I'm
sure," he began soothingly; "it doesn't matter. You mistook a door--"

"But you don't understand!" She shuddered.... "This dreadful habit! And
I was hoping I had outgrown it! How can I ever explain--?"

"Believe me, Miss Bannon, you need explain nothing."

"But I must...I wish to...I can't bear to let you think...But surely
you can make allowances for sleepwalking!"

To this appeal he could at first return nothing more intelligent than a
dazed repetition of the phrase.

So that was how...Why hadn't he thought of it before? Ever since he had
turned on the lights, he had been subjectively busy trying to invest
her presence there with some plausible excuse. But somnambulism had
never once entered his mind. And in his stupidity, at pains though he
had been to render his words inoffensive, he had been guilty of
constructive incivility.

In his turn, Lanyard coloured warmly.

"I beg your pardon," he muttered.

The girl paid no attention; she seemed self-absorbed, thinking only of
herself and the anomalous position into which her infirmity had tricked
her. When she did speak, her words came swiftly:

"You see...I was so frightened! I found myself suddenly standing up in
darkness, just as if I had jumped out of bed at some alarm; and then I
heard somebody enter the room and shut the door stealthily...Oh, please
understand me!"

"But I do, Miss Bannon--quite."

"I am so ashamed--"

"Please don't consider it that way."

"But now that you know--you don't think--"

"My dear Miss Bannon!"

"But it must be so hard to credit! Even I... Why, it's more than a year
since this last happened. Of course, as a child, it was almost a habit;
they had to watch me all the time. Once... But that doesn't matter. I
_am_ so sorry."

"You really mustn't worry," Lanyard insisted. "It's all quite
natural--such things do happen--are happening all the time--"

"But I don't want you--"

"I am nobody, Miss Bannon. Besides I shan't mention the matter to a
soul. And if ever I am fortunate enough to meet you again, I shall have
forgotten it completely--believe me."

There was convincing sincerity in his tone. The girl looked down, as
though abashed.

"You are very good," she murmured, moving toward the door.

"I am very fortunate."

Her glance of surprise was question enough.

"To be able to treasure this much of your confidence," he explained
with a tentative smile.

She was near the door; he opened it for her, but cautioned her with a
gesture and a whispered word: "Wait. I'll make sure nobody's about."

He stepped noiselessly into the hall and paused an instant, looking
right and left, listening.

The girl advanced to the threshold and there checked, hesitant, eyeing
him anxiously.

He nodded reassurance: "All right--coast's clear!"

But she delayed one moment more.

"It's you who are mistaken," she whispered, colouring again beneath his
regard, in which admiration could not well be lacking, "It is I who am
fortunate--to have met a--gentleman."

Her diffident smile, together with the candour of her eyes, embarrassed
him to such extent that for the moment he was unable to frame a reply.

"Good night," she whispered--"and thank you, thank you!"

Her room was at the far end of the corridor. She gained its threshold
in one swift dash, noiseless save for the silken whisper of her
garments, turned, flashed him a final look that left him with the
thought that novelists did not always exaggerate, that eyes could shine
like stars....

Her door closed softly.

Lanyard shook his head as if to dissipate a swarm of annoying thoughts,
and went back into his own bed-chamber.

He was quite content with the explanation the girl had given, but being
the slave of a methodical and pertinacious habit of mind, spent five
busy minutes examining his room and all that it contained with a
perseverance that would have done credit to a Frenchman searching for a
mislaid sou.

If pressed, he would have been put to it to name what he sought or
thought to find. What he did find was that nothing had been tampered
with and nothing more--not even so much as a dainty, lace-trimmed wisp
of sheer linen bearing the lady's monogram and exhaling a faint but
individual perfume.

Which, when he came to consider it, seemed hardly playing the game by
the book.

As for Roddy, Lanyard wasted several minutes, off and on, listening
attentively at the communicating door; but if the detective had stopped
snoring, his respiration was loud enough in that quiet hour, a sound of
harsh monotony.

True, that proved nothing; but Lanyard, after the fiasco of his first
attempt to catch his enemy awake, was no more disposed to be
hypercritical; he had his fill of being ingenious and profound. And
when presently he again left Troyon's (this time without troubling the
repose of the concierge) it was with the reflection that, if Roddy were
really playing 'possum, he was welcome to whatever he could find of
interest in the quarters of Michael Lanyard.



VI

THE PACK GIVES TONGUE

Lanyard's first destination was that convenient little rez-de-chaussée
apartment near the Trocadéro, at the junction of the rue Roget and the
avenue de l'Alma; but his way thither was so roundabout that the best
part of an hour was required for what might have been less than a
twenty-minute taxicab course direct from Troyon's. It was past one when
he arrived, afoot, at the corner.

Not that he grudged the time; for in Lanyard's esteem Bourke's epigram
had come to have the weight and force of an axiom: "The more trouble
you make for yourself, the less the good public will make for you."

Paradoxically, he hadn't the least intention of attempting to deceive
anybody as to his permanent address in Paris, where Michael Lanyard,
connoisseur of fine paintings, was a figure too conspicuous to permit
his making a secret of his residence. De Morbihan, moreover, through
recognizing him at Troyon's, had rendered it impossible for Lanyard to
adopt a nom-de-guerre there, even had he thought that ruse advisable.

But he had certain businesses to attend to before dawn, affairs
demanding privacy; and while by no means sure he was followed, one can
seldom be sure of anything, especially in Paris, where nothing is
impossible; and it were as well to lose a spy first as last. And his
mind could not be at ease with respect to Roddy, thanks to De
Morbihan's gasconade in the presence of the detective and also to that
hint which the Count had dropped concerning some fatal blunder in the
course of Lanyard's British campaign.

The adventurer could recall leaving no step uncovered. Indeed, he had
prided himself on conducting his operations with a degree of
circumspection unusually thorough-going, even for him. Yet he was
unable to rid himself of those misgivings roused by De Morbihan's
declaration that the theft of the Omber jewels had been accomplished
only at cost of a clue to the thief's identity.

Now the Count's positive information concerning the robbery proved that
the news thereof had anticipated the arrival of its perpetrator in
Paris; yet Roddy unquestionably had known nothing of it prior to its
mention in his presence, after dinner. Or else the detective was a
finer actor than Lanyard credited.

But how could De Morbihan have come by his news?

Lanyard was really and deeply perturbed....

Pestered to distraction by such thoughts, he fitted key to latch and
quietly let himself into his flat by a private street-entrance which,
in addition to the usual door opening on the court and under the eye of
the concierge, distinguished this from the ordinary Parisian apartment
and rendered it doubly suited to the adventurer's uses.

Then he turned on the lights and moved quickly from room to room of the
three comprising his quarters, with comprehensive glances reviewing
their condition.

But, indeed, he hadn't left the reception-hall for the salon without
recognizing that things were in no respect as they ought to be: a hat
he had left on the hall rack had been moved to another peg; a chair had
been shifted six inches from its ordained position; and the door of a
clothes-press, which he had locked on leaving, now stood ajar.

Furthermore, the state of the salon, which he had furnished as a lounge
and study, and of the tiny dining-room and the bed-chamber adjoining,
bore out these testimonies to the fact that alien hands had thoroughly
ransacked the apartment, leaving no square inch unscrutinized.

Yet the proprietor missed nothing. His rooms were a private gallery of
valuable paintings and antique furniture to poison with envy the mind
of any collector, and housed into the bargain a small museum of rare
books, manuscripts, and articles of exquisite workmanship whose
individuality, aside from intrinsic worth, rendered them priceless. A
burglar of discrimination might have carried off in one coat-pocket
loot enough to foot the bill for a twelve-month of profligate
existence. But nothing had been removed, nothing at least that was
apparent in the first tour of inspection; which, if sweeping, was by no
means superficial.

Before checking off more elaborately his mental inventory, Lanyard
turned attention to the protective device, a simple but exhaustive
system of burglar-alarm wiring so contrived that any attempt to enter
the apartment save by means of a key which fitted both doors and of
which no duplicate existed would alarm both the concierge and the
burglar protective society. Though it seemed to have been in no way
tampered with, to test the apparatus he opened a window on the court.

The lodge of the concierge was within earshot. If the alarm had been in
good order, Lanyard could have heard the bell from his window. He heard
nothing.

With a shrug, he shut the window. He knew well--none better--how such
protection could be rendered valueless by a thoughtful and fore-handed
housebreaker.

Returning to the salon, where the main body of his collection was
assembled, he moved slowly from object to object, ticking off items and
noting their condition; with the sole result of justifying his first
conclusion, that whereas nothing had escaped handling, nothing had been
removed.

By way of a final test, he opened his desk (of which the lock had been
deftly picked) and went through its pigeon-holes.

His scanty correspondence, composed chiefly of letters exchanged with
art dealers, had been scrutinized and replaced carelessly, in disorder:
and here again he missed nothing; but in the end, removing a small
drawer and inserting a hand in its socket, he dislodged a rack of
pigeon-holes and exposed the secret cabinet that is almost inevitably
an attribute of such pieces of period furniture.

A shallow box, this secret space contained one thing only, but that one
of considerable value, being the leather bill-fold in which the
adventurer kept a store of ready money against emergencies.

It was mostly for this, indeed, that he had come to his apartment; his
London campaign having demanded an expenditure far beyond his
calculations, so that he had landed in Paris with less than one hundred
francs in pocket. And Lanyard, for all his pride of spirit,
acknowledged one haunting fear that of finding himself strapped in the
face of emergency.

The fold yielded up its hoard to a sou: Lanyard counted out five notes
of one thousand francs and ten of twenty pounds: their sum, upwards of
two thousand dollars.

But if nothing had been abstracted, something had been added: the back
of one of the Bank of England notes had been used as a blank for
memorandum.

Lanyard spread it out and studied it attentively.

The handwriting had been traced with no discernible attempt at
disguise, but was quite strange to him. The pen employed had been one
of those needle-pointed nibs so popular in France; the hand was that of
an educated Frenchman. The import of the memorandum translated
substantially as follows:

_"To the Lone Wolf--
 "The Pack sends Greetings
 "and extends its invitation
 "to participate in the benefits
 "of its Fraternity.
 "One awaits him always at
 "L'Abbaye Thêléme."_

A date was added, the date of that very day...

Deliberately, having conned this communication, Lanyard produced his
cigarette-case, selected a cigarette, found his briquet, struck a
light, twisted the note of twenty pounds into a rude spill, set it
afire, lighted his cigarette there from and, rising, conveyed the
burning paper to a cold and empty fire-place wherein he permitted it to
burn to a crisp black ash.

When this was done, his smile broke through his clouding scowl.

"Well, my friend!" he apostrophized the author of that document which
now could never prove incriminating--"at all events, I have you to
thank for a new sensation. It has long been my ambition to feel
warranted in lighting a cigarette with a twenty-pound note, if the whim
should ever seize me!"

His smile faded slowly; the frown replaced it: something far more
valuable to him than a hundred dollars had just gone up in smoke ...



VII

L'ABBAYE

His secret uncovered, that essential incognito of his punctured, his
vanity touched to the quick--all that laboriously constructed edifice
of art and chicane which yesterday had seemed so substantial, so
impregnable a wall between the Lone Wolf and the World, to-day rent,
torn asunder, and cast down in ruins about his feet--Lanyard wasted
time neither in profitless lamentation or any other sort of repining.

He had much to do before morning: to determine, as definitely as might
in discretion be possible, who had fathomed his secret and how; to
calculate what chance he still had of pursuing his career without
exposure and disaster; and to arrange, if investigation verified his
expectations, which were of the gloomiest, to withdraw in good order,
with all honours of war, from that dangerous field.

Delaying only long enough to revise plans disarranged by the
discoveries of this last bad quarter of an hour, he put out the lights
and went out by the courtyard door; for it was just possible that those
whose sardonic whim it had been to name themselves "the Pack" might
have stationed agents in the street to follow their dissocial brother
in crime. And now more than ever Lanyard was firmly bent on going his
own way unwatched. His own way first led him stealthily past the door
of the conciergerie and through the court to the public hall in the
main body of the building. Happily, there were no lights to betray him
had anyone been awake to notice. For thanks to Parisian notions of
economy even the best apartment houses dispense with elevator-boys and
with lights that burn up real money every hour of the night. By
pressing a button beside the door on entering, however, Lanyard could
have obtained light in the hallways for five minutes, or long enough to
enable any tenant to find his front-door and the key-hole therein; at
the end of which period the lamps would automatically have extinguished
themselves. Or by entering a narrow-chested box of about the dimensions
of a generous coffin, and pressing a button bearing the number of the
floor at which he wished to alight, he could have been comfortably
wafted aloft without sign of more human agency. But he prudently
availed himself of neither of these conveniences. Afoot and in complete
darkness he made the ascent of five flights of winding stairs to the
door of an apartment on the sixth floor. Here a flash from a pocket
lamp located the key-hole; the key turned without sound; the door swung
on silent hinges.

Once inside, the adventurer moved more freely, with less precaution
against noise. He was on known ground, and alone; the apartment, though
furnished, was untenanted, and would so remain as long as Lanyard
continued to pay the rent from London under an assumed name.

It was the convenience of this refuge and avenue of retreat, indeed
which had dictated his choice of the rez-de-chaussée; for the
sixth-floor flat possessed one invaluable advantage--a window on a
level with the roof of the adjoining building.

Two minutes' examination sufficed to prove that here at least the Pack
had not trespassed....

Five minutes later Lanyard picked the common lock of a door opening
from the roof of an apartment house on the farthest corner of the
block, found his way downstairs, tapped the door of the conciergerie,
chanted that venerable Open Sesame of Paris, "_Cordon, s'il vous
plait!_" and was made free of the street by a worthy guardian too
sleepy to challenge the identity of this late-departing guest.

He walked three blocks, picked up a taxicab, and in ten minutes more
was set down at the Gare des Invalides.

Passing through the station without pause, he took to the streets
afoot, following the boulevard St. Germain to the rue du Bac; a brief
walk up this time-worn thoroughfare brought him to the ample, open and
unguarded porte-cochére of a court walled with beetling ancient
tenements.

When he had made sure that the courtyard was deserted, Lanyard
addressed himself to a door on the right; which to his knock swung
promptly ajar with a clicking latch. At the same time the adventurer
whipped from beneath his cloak a small black velvet visor and adjusted
it to mask the upper half of his face. Then entering a narrow and
odorous corridor, whose obscurity was emphasized by a lonely guttering
candle, he turned the knob of the first door and walked into a small,
ill-furnished room.

A spare-bodied young man, who had been reading at a desk by the light
of an oil-lamp with a heavy green shade, rose and bowed courteously.

"Good morning, monsieur," he said with the cordiality of one who greets
an acquaintance of old standing. "Be seated," he added, indicating an
arm-chair beside the desk. "It seems long since one has had the honour
of a call from monsieur."

"That is so," Lanyard admitted, sitting down.

The young man followed suit. The lamplight, striking across his face
beneath the greenish penumbra of the shade, discovered a countenance of
Hebraic cast.

"Monsieur has something to show me, eh?"

"But naturally."

Lanyard's reply just escaped a suspicion of curtness: as who should
say, what did you expect? He was puzzled by something strange and new
in the attitude of this young man, a trace of reserve and constraint....

They had been meeting from time to time for several years, conducting
their secret and lawless business according to a formula invented by
Bourke and religiously observed by Lanyard. A note or telegram of
innocent superficial intent, addressed to a certain member of a leading
firm of jewellers in Amsterdam, was the invariable signal for
conferences such as this; which were invariably held in the same place,
at an hour indeterminate between midnight and dawn, between on the one
hand this intelligent, cultivated and well-mannered young Jew, and on
the other hand the thief in his mask.

In such wise did the Lone Wolf dispose of his loot, at all events of
the bulk thereof; other channels were, of course, open to him, but none
so safe; and with no other receiver of stolen goods could he hope to
make such fair and profitable deals.

Now inevitably in the course of this long association, though each
remained in ignorance of his confederate's identity, these two had come
to feel that they knew each other fairly well. Not infrequently, when
their business had been transacted, Lanyard would linger an hour with
the agent, chatting over cigarettes: both, perhaps, a little thrilled
by the piquancy of the situation; for the young Jew was the only man
who had ever wittingly met the Lone Wolf face to face....

Why then this sudden awkwardness and embarrassment on the part of the
agent?

Lanyard's eyes narrowed with suspicion.

In silence he produced a jewel-case of morocco leather and handed it
over to the Jew, then settled back in his chair, his attitude one of
lounging, but his mind as quick with distrust as the fingers that,
under cover of his cloak, rested close to a pocket containing his
automatic.

Accepting the box with a little bow, the Jew pressed the catch and
discovered its contents. But the richness of the treasure thus
disclosed did not seem to surprise him; and, indeed, he had more than
once been introduced with no more formality to plunder of far greater
value. Fitting a jeweller's glass to his eye, he took up one after
another of the pieces and examined them under the lamplight. Presently
he replaced the last, shut down the cover of the box, turned a
thoughtful countenance to Lanyard, and made as if to speak, but
hesitated.

"Well?" the adventurer demanded impatiently.

"This, I take it," said the Jew absently, tapping the box, "is the
jewellery of Madame Omber."

"_I_ took it," Lanyard retorted good-naturedly--"not to put too fine a
point upon it!"

"I am sorry," the other said slowly.

"Yes?"

"It is most unfortunate..."

"May one enquire what is most unfortunate?"

The Jew shrugged and with the tips of his fingers gently pushed the box
toward his customer. "This makes me very unhappy," he admitted: "but I
have no choice in the matter, monsieur. As the agent of my principals I
am instructed to refuse you an offer for these valuables."

"Why?"

Again the shrug, accompanied by a deprecatory grimace: "That is
difficult to say. No explanation was made me. My instructions were
simply to keep this appointment as usual, but to advise you it will be
impossible for my principals to continue their relations with you as
long as your affairs remain in their present status."

"Their present status?" Lanyard repeated. "What does that mean, if you
please?"

"I cannot say monsieur. I can only repeat that which was said to me."

After a moment Lanyard rose, took the box, and replaced it in his
pocket. "Very well," he said quietly. "Your principals, of course,
understand that this action on their part definitely ends our
relations, rather than merely interrupts them at their whim?"

"I am desolated, monsieur, but ... one must assume that they have
considered everything. You understand, it is a matter in which I am
wholly without discretion, I trust?"

"O quite!" Lanyard assented carelessly. He held out his hand.
"Good-bye, my friend."

The Jew shook hands warmly.

"Good night, monsieur--and the best of luck!"

There was significance in his last words that Lanyard did not trouble
to analyze. Beyond doubt, the man knew more than he dared admit. And
the adventurer told himself he could shrewdly surmise most of that
which the other had felt constrained to leave unspoken.

Pressure from some quarter had been brought to bear upon that eminently
respectable firm of jewel dealers in Amsterdam to induce them to
discontinue their clandestine relations with the Lone Wolf, profitable
though these must have been.

Lanyard believed he could name the quarter whence this pressure was
being exerted, but before going further or coming to any momentous
decision, he was determined to know to a certainty who were arrayed
against him and how much importance he need attach to their antagonism.
If he failed in this, it would be the fault of the other side, not his
for want of readiness to accept its invitation.

In brief, he didn't for an instant contemplate abandoning either his
rigid rule of solitude or his chosen career without a fight; but he
preferred not to fight in the dark.

Anger burned in him no less hotly than chagrin. It could hardly be
otherwise with one who, so long suffered to go his way without let or
hindrance, now suddenly, in the course of a few brief hours, found
himself brought up with a round turn--hemmed in and menaced on every
side by secret opposition and hostility.

He no longer feared to be watched; and the very fact that, as far as he
could see, he wasn't watched, only added fuel to his resentment,
demonstrating as it did so patently the cynical assurance of the Pack
that they had him cornered, without alternative other than to supple
himself to their will.

To the driver of the first taxicab he met, Lanyard said "L'Abbaye,"
then shutting himself within the conveyance, surrendered to the most
morose reflections.

Nothing of this mood was, however, apparent in his manner on alighting.
He bore a countenance of amiable insouciance through the portals of
this festal institution whose proudest boast and--incidentally--sole
claim to uniquity is that it never opens its doors before midnight nor
closes them before dawn.

He had moved about with such celerity since entering his flat on the
rue Roget that it was even now only two o'clock; an hour at which
revelry might be expected to have reached its apogee in this, the
soi-disant "smartest" place in Paris.

A less sophisticated adventurer might have been flattered by the
cordiality of his reception at the hands of that arbiter elegantiarum
the maitre-d'hôtel.

"Ah-h, Monsieur Lanya_rrr_! But it is long since we have been so
favoured. However, I have kept your table for you."

"Have you, though?"

"Could it be otherwise, after receipt of your honoured order?"

"No," said Lanyard coolly, "I presume not, if you value your peace of
mind."

"Monsieur is alone?" This with an accent of disappointment.

"Temporarily, it would seem so."

"But this way, if you please...."

In the wake of the functionary, Lanyard traversed that frowsy anteroom
where doubtful wasters are herded on suspicion in company with the
corps of automatic Bacchanalians and figurantes, to the main
restaurant, the inner sanctum toward which the naïve soul of the
travel-bitten Anglo-Saxon aspires so ardently.

It was not a large room; irregularly octagonal in shape, lined with
wall-seats behind a close-set rank of tables; better lighted than most
Parisian restaurants, that is to say, less glaringly; abominably
ventilated; the open space in the middle of the floor reserved for a
handful of haggard young professional dancers, their stunted bodies
more or less costumed in brilliant colours, footing it with all the
vivacity to be expected of five-francs per night per head; the tables
occupied by parties Anglo-Saxon and French in the proportion of five to
one, attended by a company of bored and apathetic waiters; a string
orchestra ragging incessantly; a vicious buck-nigger on a dais shining
with self-complacence while he vamped and shouted "_Waitin' foh th'
Robuht E. Lee_"...

Lanyard permitted himself to be penned in a corner behind a table,
ordered champagne not because he wanted it but because it was
etiquette, suppressed a yawn, lighted a cigarette, and reviewed the
assemblage with a languid but shrewd glance.

He saw only the company of every night; for even in the off-season
there are always enough English-speaking people in Paris to make it
possible for L'Abbaye Thêléme to keep open with profit: the inevitable
assortment of respectable married couples with friends, the men chafing
and wondering if possibly all this might seem less unattractive were
they foot-loose and fancy-free, the women contriving to appear at ease
with varying degrees of success, but one and all flushed with dubiety;
the sprinkling of demi-mondaines not in the least concerned about
_their_ social status; the handful of people who, having brought their
fun with them, were having the good time they would have had anywhere;
the scattering of plain drunks in evening dress.... Nowhere a face that
Lanyard recognized definitely: no Mr. Bannon, no Comte Remy de
Morbihan....

He regarded this circumstance, however, with more vexation than
surprise: De Morbihan would surely show up in time; meanwhile, it was
annoying to be obliged to wait, to endure this martyrdom of ennui.

He sipped his wine sparingly, without relish, considering the single
subsidiary fact which did impress him with some wonder--that he was
being left severely to himself; something which doesn't often fall to
the lot of the unattached male at L'Abbaye. Evidently an order had been
issued with respect to him. Ordinarily he would have been grateful:
to-night he was merely irritated: such neglect rendered him
conspicuous....

The fixed round of delirious divertissement unfolded as per schedule.
The lights were lowered to provide a melodramatic atmosphere for that
startling novelty, the Apache Dance. The coon shouted stridently. The
dancers danced bravely on their poor, tired feet. An odious dwarf
creature in a miniature outfit of evening clothes toddled from table to
table, offensively soliciting stray francs--but shied from the gleam in
Lanyard's eyes. Lackeys made the rounds, presenting each guest with a
handful of coloured, feather-weight celluloid balls, with which to
bombard strangers across the room. The inevitable shamefaced Englishman
departed in tow of an overdressed Frenchwoman with pride of conquest in
her smirk. The equally inevitable alcoholic was dug out from under his
table and thrown into a cab. An American girl insisted on climbing upon
a table to dance, but swayed and had to be helped down, giggling
foolishly. A Spanish dancing girl was afforded a clear floor for her
specialty, which consisted in singing several verses understood by
nobody, the choruses emphasized by frantic assaults on the hair of
several variously surprised, indignant, and flattered male
guests--among them Lanyard, who submitted with resignation....

 And then, just when he was on the point of consigning the Pack to the
devil for inflicting upon him such cruel and inhuman punishment, the
Spanish girl picked her way through the mob of dancers who invaded the
floor promptly on her withdrawal, and paused beside his table.

"You're not angry, mon coco?" she pleaded with a provocative smile.

Lanyard returned a smiling negative.

"Then I may sit down with you and drink a glass of your wine?"

"Can't you see I've been saving the bottle for you?"

The woman plumped herself promptly into the chair opposite the
adventurer. He filled her glass.

"But you are not happy to-night?" she demanded, staring over the brim
as she sipped.

"I am thoughtful," he said.

"And what does that mean?"

"I am saddened to contemplate the infirmities of my countrymen, these
Americans who can't rest in Paris until they find some place as deadly
as any Broadway boasts, these English who adore beautiful Paris solely
because here they may continue to get drunk publicly after half-past
twelve!"

"Ah, then it's la barbe, is it not?" said the girl, gingerly stroking
her faded, painted cheek.

"It is true: I am bored."

"Then why not go where you're wanted?" She drained her glass at a gulp
and jumped up, swirling her skirts. "Your cab is waiting, monsieur--and
perhaps you will find it more amusing with that Pack!"

Flinging herself into the arms of another girl, she swung away,
grinning impishly at Lanyard over her partner's shoulder.



VIII

THE HIGH HAND

Evidently his first move toward departure was signalled; for as he
passed out through L'Abbaye's doors the carriage-porter darted forward
and saluted.

"Monsieur Lanyarr'?"

"Yes?"

"Monsieur's car is waiting."

"Indeed?" Lanyard surveyed briefly a handsome black limousine that, at
pause beside the curb, was champing its bits in the most spirited
fashion. Then he smiled appreciatively. "All the same, I thank you for
the compliment," he said, and forthwith tipped the porter.

But before entrusting himself to this gratuitous conveyance, he put
himself to the trouble of inspecting the chauffeur--a capable-looking
mechanic togged out in a rich black livery which, though relieved by a
vast amount of silk braiding, was like the car guiltless of any sort of
insignia.

"I presume you know where I wish to go, my man?"

The chauffeur touched his cap: "But naturally, monsieur."

"Then take me there, the quickest way you know."

Nodding acknowledgement of the porter's salute, Lanyard sank gratefully
back upon uncommonly luxurious upholstery. The fatigue of the last
thirty-six hours was beginning to tell on him a bit, though his youth
was still so vital, so instinct with strength and vigour, that he could
go as long again without sleep if need be.

None the less he was glad of this opportunity to snatch a few minutes'
rest by way of preparation against the occult culmination of this
adventure. No telling what might ensue of this violation of all those
principles which had hitherto conserved his welfare! And he entertained
a gloomy suspicion that he would be inclined to name another ass, who
proposed as he did to beard this Pack in its den with nothing more than
his wits and an automatic pistol to protect ten thousand-francs, the
jewels of Madame Omber, the Huysman plans, and (possibly) his life.

However, he stood committed to his folly, if folly it were: he would
play the game as it lay.

As for curiosity concerning his immediate destination, there was little
enough of that in his temper; a single glance round on leaving the car
would fix his whereabouts beyond dispute, so thorough was his knowledge
of Paris.

He contemplated briefly, with admiration, the simplicity with which
that affair at L'Abbaye had been managed, finding no just cause to
suspect anyone there of criminal complicity in the plans of the Pack: a
forged order for a table to the maitre-d'hotel, ten francs to the
carriage-porter and twenty more to the dancing woman to play parts in a
putative practical joke--and the thing had been arranged without
implicating a soul!...

Of a sudden, ending a ride much shorter than Lanyard would have liked,
the limousine swung in toward a curb.

Bending forward, he unlatched the door and, glancing through the
window, uttered a grunt of profound disgust.

If this were the best that Pack could do...!

He had hoped for something a trifle more original from men with wit and
imagination enough to plot the earlier phases of this intrigue.

The car had pulled up in front of an institution which he knew
well--far too well, indeed, for his own good.

None the less, he consented to get out.

"Sure you've come to the right place?" he asked the chauffeur.

Two fingers touching the visor of his cap: "But certainly, monsieur!"

"Oh, all right!" Lanyard grumbled resignedly; and tossing the man a
five-franc piece, applied his knuckles to the door of an outwardly
commonplace hôtel particulier in the rue Chaptal between the impasse of
the Grand Guignol and the rue Pigalle.

Now the neophyte needs the introduction of a trusted sponsor before he
can win admission to the club-house of the exclusive Circle of Friends
of Humanity; but Lanyard's knock secured him prompt and unquestioned
right of way. The unfortunate fact is, he was a member in the best of
standing; for this society of pseudo-altruistic aims was nothing more
nor less than one of those several private gambling clubs of Paris
which the French Government tolerates more or less openly, despite
adequate restrictive legislation; and gambling was Lanyard's ruling
passion--a legacy from Bourke no less than the rest of his professional
equipment.

To every man his vice (the argument is Bourke's, in defence of his
failing). And perhaps the least mischievous vice a professional
cracksman can indulge is that of gambling, since it can hardly drive
him to lengths more desperate than those whereby he gains a livelihood.

In the esteem of Paris, Count Remy de Morbihan himself was scarcely a
more light-hearted plunger than Monsieur Lanyard.

Naturally, with this reputation, he was always free of the handsome
salons wherein the Friends of Humanity devoted themselves to roulette,
auction bridge, baccarat and chemin-de-fer: and of this freedom he now
proceeded to avail himself, with his hat just a shade aslant on his
head, his hands in his pockets, a suspicion of a smile on his lips and
a glint of the devil in his eyes--in all an expression accurately
reflecting the latest phase of his humour, which was become largely one
of contemptuous toleration, thanks to what he chose to consider an
exhibition of insipid stupidity on the part of the Pack.

Nor was this humour in any way modified when, in due course, he
confirmed anticipation by discovering Monsieur le Comte Remy de
Morbihan lounging beside one of the roulette tables, watching the play,
and now and again risking a maximum on his own account.

A flash of animation crossed the unlovely mask of the Count when he saw
Lanyard approaching, and he greeted the adventurer with a gay little
flirt of his pudgy dark hand.

"Ah, my friend!" he cried. "It is you, then, who have changed your
mind! But this is delightful!"

"And what has become of your American friend?" Asked the adventurer.

"He tired quickly, that one, and packed himself off to Troyon's. Be
sure I didn't press him to continue the grand tour!"

"Then you really did wish to see me to-night?" Lanyard enquired
innocently.

"Always--always, my dear Lanyard!" the Count declared, jumping up. "But
come," he insisted: "I've a word for your private ear, if these
gentlemen will excuse us."

"Do!" Lanyard addressed in a confidential manner those he knew at the
table, before turning away to the tug of the Count's hand on his
arm--"I think he means to pay up twenty pounds he owes me!"

Some derisive laughter greeted this sally.

"I mean that, however," Lanyard informed the other cheerfully as they
moved away to a corner where conversation without an audience was
possible--"you ruined that Bank of England note, you know."

"Cheap at the price!" the Count protested, producing his bill-fold.
"Five hundred francs for an introduction to Monsieur the Lone Wolf!"

"Are you joking?" Lanyard asked blankly--and with a magnificent gesture
abolished the proffered banknote.

"Joking? I! But surely you don't mean to deny--"

"My friend," Lanyard interrupted, "before we assert or deny anything,
let us gather the rest of the players round the table and deal from a
sealed deck. Meantime, let us rest on the understanding that I have
found, at one end, a message scrawled on a bank-note hidden in a secret
place, at the other end, yourself, Monsieur le Comte. Between and
beyond these points exists a mystery, of which one anticipates
elucidation."

"You shall have it," De Morbihan promised. "But first, we must go to
those others who await us."

"Not so fast!" Lanyard interposed. "What am I to understand? That you
wish me to accompany you to the--ah--den of the Pack?"

"Where else?" De Morbihan grinned.

"But where is that?"

"I am not permitted to say--"

"Still, one has one's eyes. Why not satisfy me here?"

"Your eyes, by your leave, monsieur, will be blindfolded."

"Impossible."

"Pardon--it is an essential--"

"Come, come, my friend: we are not in the Middle Ages!"

"I have no discretion, monsieur. My confrères--"

"I insist: there will be trust on both sides or no negotiations."

"But I assure you, my dear friend--"

"My dear Count, it is useless: I am determined. Blindfold? I should say
not! This is not--need I remind you again?--the Paris of Balzac and
that wonderful Dumas of yours!"

"What do you propose, then?" De Morbihan enquired, worrying his
moustache.

"What better place for the proposed conference than here?"

"But not here!"

"Why not? Everybody comes here: it will cause no gossip. I am here--I
have come half-way; your friends must do as much on their part."

"It is not possible...."

"Then, I beg you, tender them my regrets."

"Would you give us away?"

"Never that: one makes gifts to one's friends only. But my interest in
yours is depreciating so rapidly that, should you delay much longer, it
will be on sale for the sum of two sous."

"O--damn!" the Count complained peevishly.

"With all the pleasure in life.... But now," Lanyard went on, rising to
end the interview, "you must forgive me for reminding you that the
morning wanes apace. I shall be going home in another hour."

De Morbihan shrugged. "Out of my great affection for you," he purred
venomously, "I will do my possible. But I promise nothing."

"I have every confidence in your powers of moral suasion, monsieur,"
Lanyard assured him cheerfully. "Au revoir!"

And with this, not at all ill-pleased with himself, he strutted off to
a table at which a high-strung session of chemin-de-fer was in process,
possessed himself of a vacant chair, and in two minutes was so
engrossed in the game that the Pack was quite forgotten.

In fifteen minutes he had won thrice as many thousands of francs.
Twenty minutes or half an hour later, a hand on his shoulder broke the
grip of his besetting passion.

"Our table is made up, my friend," De Morbihan announced with his
inextinguishable grin. "We're waiting for you."

"Quite at your service."

Settling his score and finding himself considerably better off than he
had imagined, he resigned his place gracefully, and suffered the Count
to link arms and drag him away up the main staircase to the second
storey, where smaller rooms were reserved for parties who preferred to
gamble privately.

"So it appears you succeeded!" he chaffed his conductor good-humouredly.

"I have brought you the mountain," De Morbihan assented.

"One is grateful for small miracles...."

But De Morbihan wouldn't laugh at his own expense; for a moment,
indeed, he seemed inclined to take umbrage at Lanyard's levity. But the
sudden squaring of his broad shoulders and the hardening of his
features was quickly modified by an uneasy sidelong glance at his
companion. And then they were at the door of the cabinet particulier.

De Morbihan rapped, turned the knob, and stood aside, bowing politely.

With a nod acknowledging the courtesy, Lanyard consented to precede
him, and entered a room of intimate proportions, furnished chiefly with
a green-covered card-table and five easy-chairs, of which three were
occupied--two by men in evening dress, the third by one in a
well-tailored lounge suit of dark grey.

Now all three men wore visors of black velvet.

Lanyard looked from one to the other and chuckled quietly.

With an aggrieved air De Morbihan launched into introductions:

"Messieurs, I have the honour to present to you our confrère, Monsieur
Lanyard, best known as 'The Lone Wolf.' Monsieur Lanyard--the Council
of our Association, known to you as 'The Pack.'"

The three rose and bowed ceremoniously, Lanyard returned a cool,
good-natured nod. Then he laughed again and more openly:

"A pack of knaves!"

"Monsieur doubtless feels at ease?" one retorted acidly.

"In your company, Popinot? But hardly!" Lanyard returned in light
contempt.

The fellow thus indicated, a burly rogue of a Frenchman in rusty and
baggy evening clothes, started and flushed scarlet beneath his mask;
but the man next him dropped a restraining hand upon his arm, and
Popinot, with a shrug, sank back into his chair.

"Upon my word!" Lanyard declared gracelessly, "it's as good as a play!
Are you sure, Monsieur le Comte, there's no mistake--that these gay
masqueraders haven't lost their way to the stage of the Grand Guignol?"

"Damn!" muttered the Count. "Take care, my friend! You go too far!"

"You really think so? But you amaze me! You can't in reason expect me
to take you seriously, gentlemen!"

"If you don't, it will prove serious business for you!" growled the one
he had called Popinot.

"You mean that? But you are magnificent, all of you! We lack only the
solitary illumination of a candle-end--a grinning skull--a cup of blood
upon the table--to make the farce complete! But as it is.... Messieurs,
you must be rarely uncomfortable, and feeling as foolish as you look,
into the bargain! Moreover, I'm no child. ... Popinot, why not
disembarrass your amiable features? And you, Mr. Wertheimer, I'm sure,
will feel more at ease with an open countenance--as the saying runs,"
he said, nodding to the man beside Popinot. "As for this gentleman," he
concluded, eyeing the third, "I haven't the pleasure of his
acquaintance."

With a short laugh, Wertheimer unmasked and exposed a face of decidedly
English type, fair and well-modelled, betraying only the faintest
traces of Semitic cast to account for his surname. And with this
example, Popinot snatched off his own black visor--and glared at
Lanyard: in his shabby dress, the incarnate essence of bourgeoisie
outraged. But the third, he of the grey lounge suit, remained
motionless; only his eyes clashed coldly with the adventurer's.

He seemed a man little if at all Lanyard's senior, and built upon much
the same lines. A close-clipped black moustache ornamented his upper
lip. His chin was square and strong with character. The cut of his
clothing was conspicuously neither English nor Continental.

"I don't know you, sir," Lanyard continued slowly, puzzled to account
for a feeling of familiarity with this person, whom he could have sworn
he had never met before.

"But you won't let your friends here outdo you in civility, I trust?"

"If you mean you want me to unmask, I won't," the other returned
brusquely, in fair French but with a decided transatlantic intonation.

"American, eh?"

"Native-born, if it interests you."

"Have I ever met you before?"

"You have not."

"My dear Count," Lanyard said, turning to De Morbihan, "do me the
favour to introduce this gentleman."

"Your dear Count will do nothing like that, Mr. Lanyard. If you need a
name to call me by, Smith's good enough."

The incisive force of his enunciation assorted consistently with the
general habit of the man. Lanyard recognized a nature no more pliable
than his own. Idle to waste time bickering with this one....

"It doesn't matter," he said shortly; and drawing back a chair, sat
down. "If it did, I should insist--or else decline the honour of
receiving the addresses of this cosmopolitan committee. Truly,
messieurs, you flatter me. Here we have Mr. Wertheimer, representing
the swell-mobsmen across Channel; Monsieur le Comte standing for the
gratin of Paris; Popinot, spokesman for our friends the Apaches; and
the well-known Mr. Goodenough Smith, ambassador of the gun-men of New
York--no doubt. I presume one is to understand you wait upon me as
representing the fine flower of the European underworld?"

"You're to understand that I, for one, don't relish your impudence,"
the stout Popinot snapped.

"Sorry.... But I have already indicated my inability to take you
seriously."

"Why not?" the American demanded ominously. "You'd be sore enough if we
took you as a joke, wouldn't you?"

"You misapprehend, Mr.--ah--Smith: it is my first aim and wish that you
do not take me in any manner, shape or form. It is you, remember, who
requested this interview and--er--dressed your parts so strikingly!"

"What are we to understand by that?" De Morbihan interposed.

"This, messieurs--if you must know." Lanyard dropped for the moment his
tone of raillery and bent forward, emphasizing his points by tapping
the table with a forefinger. "Through some oversight of mine or
cleverness of yours--I can't say which--perhaps both--you have
succeeded in penetrating my secret. What then? You become envious of my
success. In short, I stand in your light: I'm always getting away with
something you might have lifted if you'd only had wit enough to think
of it first. As your American accomplice, Mr. Mysterious Smith, would
say, I 'cramp your style.'"

"You learned that on Broadway," the American commented shrewdly.

"Possibly.... To continue: so you get together, and bite your nails
until you concoct a plan to frighten me into my profits. I've no doubt
you're prepared to allow me to retain one-half the proceeds of my
operations, should I elect to ally myself with you?"

"That's the suggestion we are empowered to make," De Morbihan admitted.

"In other words, you need me. You say to yourselves: 'We'll pretend to
be the head of a criminal syndicate, such as the silly novelists are
forever writing about, and we'll threaten to put him out of business
unless he comes to our terms.' But you overlook one important fact:
that you are not mentally equipped to get away with this amusing
impersonation! What! Do you expect me to accept you as leading spirits
of a gigantic criminal system--you, Popinot, who live by standing
between the police and your murderous rats of Belleville, or you,
Wertheimer, sneak-thief and black-mailer of timid women, or you, De
Morbihan, because you eke out your income by showing a handful of
second-storey men where to seek plunder in the homes of your friends!"

He made a gesture of impatience, and lounged back to wait the answer to
this indictment. His gaze, ranging the four faces, encountered but one
that was not darkly flushed with resentment; and this was the
American's.

"Aren't you overlooking me?" this last suggested gently.

"On the contrary: I refuse to recognize you as long as you lack courage
to show your face."

"As you will, my friend," the American chuckled. "Make your profit out
of that any way you like."

Lanyard sat up again: "Well, I've stated your case, messieurs. It
amounts to simple, clumsy blackmail. I'm to split my earnings with you,
or you'll denounce me to the police. That's about it, isn't it?"

"Not of necessity," De Morbihan softly purred, twisting his moustache.

"For my part," Popinot declared hotly, "I engage that Monsieur of the
High Hand, here, will either work with us or conduct no more operations
in Paris."

"Or in New York," the American amended.

"England is yet to be heard from," Lanyard suggested mockingly.

To this Wertheimer replied, almost with diffidence: "If you ask me, I
don't think you'd find it so jolly pleasant over there, if you mean to
cut up nasty at this end."

"Then what am I to infer? If you're afraid to lay an information
against me--and it wouldn't be wise, I admit--you'll merely cause me to
be assassinated, eh?"

"Not of necessity," the Count murmured in the same thoughtful tone and
manner--as one holding a hidden trump.

"There are so many ways of arranging these matters," Wertheimer
ventured.

"None the less, if I refuse, you declare war?"

"Something like that," the American admitted.

"In that case--I am now able to state my position definitely." Lanyard
got up and grinned provokingly down at the group. "You can--all four of
you--go plumb to hell!"

"My dear friend!" the Count cried, shocked--"you forget--"

"I forget nothing!" Lanyard cut in coldly--"and my decision is final.
Consider yourselves at liberty to go ahead and do your damnedest! But
don't forget that it is you who are the aggressors. Already you've had
the insolence to interfere with my arrangements: you began offensive
operations before you declared war. So now if you're hit beneath the
belt, you mustn't complain: you've asked for it!"

"Now just what _do_ you mean by that?" the American drawled ironically.

"I leave you to figure it out for yourselves. But I will say this: I
confidently expect you to decide to live and let live, and shall be
sorry, as you'll certainly be sorry, if you force my hand."

He opened the door, turned, and saluted them with sarcastic punctilio.

"I have the honour to bid adieu to Messieurs the Council of--'The
Pack'!"



IX

DISASTER

Having fulfilled his purpose of making himself acquainted with the
personnel of the opposition, Lanyard slammed the door in its face,
thrust his hands in his pockets, and sauntered down stairs, chuckling,
his nose in the air, on the best of terms with himself.

True, the fat was in the fire and well a-blaze: he had to look to
himself now, and go warily in the shadow of their enmity. But it was
something to have faced down those four, and he wasn't seriously
impressed by any one of them.

Popinot, perhaps, was the most dangerous in Lanyard's esteem; a
vindictive animal, that Popinot; and the creatures he controlled, a
murderous lot, drug-ridden, drink bedevilled, vicious little rats of
Belleville, who'd knife a man for the price of an absinthe. But Popinot
wouldn't move without leave from De Morbihan, and unless Lanyard's
calculations were seriously miscast, De Morbihan would restrain both
himself and his associates until thoroughly convinced Lanyard was
impregnable against every form of persuasion. Murder was something a
bit out of De Morbihan's line--something, at least, which he might be
counted on to hold in reserve. And by the time he was ready to employ
it, Lanyard would be well beyond his reach. Wertheimer, too, would
deprecate violence until all else failed; his half-caste type was as
cowardly as it was blackguard; and cowards kill only impulsively,
before they've had time to weigh consequences. There remained "Smith,"
enigma; a man apparently gifted with both intelligence and
character.... But if so, what the deuce was _he_ doing in such company?

Still, there he was: and the association damned him beyond
consideration. His sorts were all of a piece, beneath the consideration
of men of spirit....

At this point, the self-complacence bred of his contempt for Messrs. de
Morbihan et Cie. bred in its turn a thought that brought the adventurer
up standing.

The devil! Who was he, Michael Lanyard, that held himself above such
vermin, yet lived in such a way as practically to invite their
advances? What right was his to resent their opening the door to
confraternity, as long as he trod paths so closely parallel to theirs
that only a sophist might discriminate them? What comforting
distinction was to be drawn between on the one hand a blackmailer like
Wertheimer, a chevalier-d'industrie like De Morbihan, or a patron of
Apaches like Popinot, and on the other himself whose bread was eaten in
the sweat of thievery?

He drew a long face; whistled softly; shook his head; and smiled a wry
smile.

"Glad I didn't think of that two minutes ago, or I'd never have had the
cheek..."

Without warning, incongruously and, in his understanding, inexplicably,
he found himself beset by recurrent memory of the girl, Lucia Bannon.

For an instant he saw her again, quite vividly, as last he had seen
her: turning at the door of her bed-chamber to look back at him, a
vision of perturbing charm in her rose-silk dressing-gown, with rich
hair loosened, cheeks softly glowing, eyes brilliant with an emotion
illegible to her one beholder....

What had been the message of those eyes, flashed down the dimly lighted
length of that corridor at Troyon's, ere she vanished?

Adieu? Or au revoir? ...

She had termed him, naïvely enough, and a gentleman.

But if she knew--suspected--even dreamed--that he was what he was?...

He shook his head again, but now impatiently, with a scowl and a
grumble:

"What's the matter with me anyway? Mooning over a girl I never saw
before to-night! As if it matters a whoop in Hepsidam what she
thinks!... Or is it possible I'm beginning to develop a rudimentary
conscience, at this late day? Me!..."

If there were anything in this hypothesis, the growing-pains of that
late-blooming conscience were soon enough numbed by the hypnotic spell
of clattering chips, an ivory ball singing in an ebony race, and
croaking croupiers.

For Lanyard's chair at the table of chemin-de-fer had been filled by
another and, too impatient to wait a vacancy, he wandered on to the
salon dedicated to roulette, tested his luck by staking a note of five
hundred francs on the black, won, and incontinently subsided into a
chair and an oblivion that endured for the space of three-quarters of
an hour.

At the end of that period he found himself minus his heavy winnings at
chemin-de-fer and ten thousand francs of his reserve fund to boot.

By way of lining for his pockets there remained precisely the sum which
he had brought into Paris that same evening, less subsequent general
disbursements.

The experience was nothing novel in his history. He rose less resentful
than regretful that his ill-luck obliged him to quit just when play was
most interesting, and resignedly sought the cloak-room for his coat and
hat.

And there he found De Morbihan--again!--standing all garmented for the
street, mouthing a huge cigar and wearing a look of impatient
discontent.

"At last!" he cried in an aggrieved tone as Lanyard appeared in the
offing. "You do take your time, my friend!"

Lanyard smothered with a smile whatever emotion was his of the moment.

"I didn't imagine you really meant to wait for me," he parried with
double meaning, both to humour De Morbihan and hoodwink the attendant.

"What do you think?" retorted the Count with asperity--"that I'm
willing to stand by and let you moon round Paris at this hour of the
morning, hunting for a taxicab that isn't to be found and running
God-knows-what risk of being stuck up by some misbegotten Apache? But I
should say not! I mean to take you home in my car, though it cost me a
half-hour of beauty sleep not lightly to be forfeited at my age!"

The significance that underlay the semi-humourous petulance of the
little man was not wasted.

"You're most amiable, Monsieur le Comte!" Lanyard observed
thoughtfully, while the attendant produced his hat and coat. "So now,
if you're ready, I won't delay you longer."

In another moment they were outside the club-house, its doors shut
behind them, while before them, at the curb, waited that same handsome
black limousine which had brought the adventurer from L'Abbaye.

Two swift glances, right and left, showed him an empty street, bare of
hint of danger.

"One moment, monsieur!" he said, detaining the Count with a touch on
his sleeve. "It's only right that I should advise you ... I'm armed."

"Then you're less foolhardy than one feared. If such things interest
you, I don't mind admitting I carry a life-preserver of my own. But
what of that? Is one eager to go shooting at this time of night, for
the sheer fun of explaining to sergents de ville that one has been
attacked by Apaches? ... Providing always one lives to explain!"

"It's as bad as that, eh?"

"Enough to make me loath to linger at your side in a lighted doorway!"

Lanyard laughed in his own discomfiture. "Monsieur le Comte," said he,
"there's a dash in you of what your American pal, Mysterious Smith,
would call sporting blood, that commands my unstinted admiration. I
thank you for your offered courtesy, and beg leave to accept."

De Morbihan replied with a grunt of none too civil intonation,
instructed the chauffeur "To Troyon's," and followed Lanyard into the
car.

"Courtesy!" he repeated, settling himself with a shake. "That makes
nothing. If I regarded my own inclinations, I'd let you go to the devil
as quick as Popinot's assassins could send you there!"

"This is delightful!" Lanyard protested. "First you must see me home to
save my life, and then you tell me your inclinations consign me to a
premature grave. Is there an explanation, possibly?"

"On your person," said the Count, sententious.

"Eh?"

"You carry your reason with you, my friend--in the shape of the Omber
loot."

"Assuming you are right--"

"You never went to the rue du Bac, monsieur, without those jewels: and
I have had you under observation ever since."

"What conceivable interest," Lanyard pursued evenly, "do you fancy
you've got in the said loot?"

 "Enough, at least, to render me unwilling to kiss it adieu by leaving
you to the mercies of Popinot. You don't imagine I'd ever hear of it
again, when his Apaches had finished with you?"

 "Ah!... So, after all, your so-called organization isn't founded on
that reciprocal trust so essential to the prosperity of
such--enterprises!"

"Amuse yourself as you will with your inferences, my friend," the Count
returned, unruffled; "but don't forget my advice: pull wide of Popinot!"

"A vindictive soul, eh?"

"One may say that."

"You can't hold him?"

"That one? No fear! You were anything but wise to bait him as you did."

"Perhaps. It's purely a matter of taste in associates."

"If I were the fool you think me," mused the Count "I'd resent that
innuendo. As it happens, I'm not. At least, I can wait before calling
you to account."

"And meantime profit by your patience?"

"But naturally. Haven't I said as much?"

"Still, I'm perplexed. I can't imagine how you reckon to declare
yourself in on the Omber loot."

"All in good time: if you were wise, you'd hand the stuff over to me
here and now, and accept what I chose to give you in return. But
inasmuch as you're the least wise of men, you must have your lesson."

"Meaning--?"

"The night brings counsel: you'll have time to think things over. By
to-morrow you'll be coming to offer me those jewels in exchange for
what influence I have in certain quarters."

"With your famous friend, the Chief of the Sûreté, eh?"

"Possibly. I am known also at La Tour Pointue."

"I confess I don't follow you, unless you mean to turn informer."

"Never that."

"It's a riddle, then?"

"For the moment only.... But I will say this: it will be futile, your
attempting to escape Paris; Popinot has already picketted every outlet.
Your one hope resides in me; and I shall be at home to you until
midnight to-morrow--to-day, rather."

Impressed in spite of himself, Lanyard stared. But the Count maintained
an imperturbable manner, looking straight ahead. Such calm assurance
would hardly be sheer bluff.

"I must think this over," Lanyard mused aloud.

"Pray don't let me hinder you," the Count begged with mild sarcasm. "I
have my own futile thoughts...."

Lanyard laughed quietly and subsided into a reverie which, undisturbed
by De Morbihan, endured throughout the brief remainder of their drive;
for, thanks to the smallness of the hour, the streets were practically
deserted and offered no obstacle to speed; while the chauffeur was
doubtless eager for his bed.

As they drew near Troyon's, however, Lanyard sat up and jealously
reconnoitered both sides of the way.

"Surely you don't expect to be kept out?" the Count asked dryly. "But
that just shows how little you appreciate our good Popinot. He'll never
object to your locking yourself up where he knows he can find you--but
only to your leaving without permission!"

"Something in that, perhaps. Still, I make it a rule to give myself the
benefit of every doubt."

There was, indeed, no sign of ambush that he could detect in any
quarter, nor any indication that Popinot's Apaches were posted
thereabouts. Nevertheless, Lanyard produced his automatic and freed the
safety-catch before opening the door.

"A thousand thanks, my dear Count!"

"For what? Doing myself a service? But you make me feel ashamed!"

"I know," agreed Lanyard, depreciatory; "but that's the way I am--a
little devil--you really can't trust me! Adieu, Monsieur le Comte."

"Au revoir, monsieur!"

Lanyard saw the car round the corner before turning to the entrance of
Troyon's, keeping his weather-eye alert the while. But when the car was
gone, the street seemed quite deserted and as soundless as though it
had been the thoroughfare of some remote village rather than an artery
of the pulsing old heart of Paris.

Yet he wasn't satisfied. He was as little susceptible to psychic
admonition as any sane and normal human organism, but he was just then
strongly oppressed by intuitive perception that there was something
radically amiss in his neighbourhood. Whether or not the result of the
Count's open intimations and veiled hints working upon a nature
sensitized by excitement and fatigue, he felt as though he had stepped
from the cab into an atmosphere impregnated to saturation with nameless
menace. And he even shivered a bit, perhaps because of the chill in
that air of early morning, perhaps because a shadow of premonition had
fallen athwart his soul....

Whatever its cause, he could find no reason for this; and shaking
himself impatiently, pressed a button that rang a bell by the ear of
the concierge, heard the latch click, thrust the door wide, and
re-entered Troyon's.

Here reigned a silence even more marked than that of the street, a
silence as heavy and profound as the grave's, so that sheer instinct
prompted Lanyard to tread lightly as he made his way down the passage
and across the courtyard toward the stairway; and in that hush the
creak of a greaseless hinge, when the concierge opened the door of his
quarters to identify this belated guest, seemed little less than a
profanity.

Lanyard paused and delved into his pockets, nodding genially to the
blowsy, sleepy old face beneath the guardian's nightcap.

"Sorry to disturb monsieur," he said politely, further impoverishing
himself in the sum of five francs in witness to the sincerity of his
regret.

"I thank monsieur; but what need to consider me? It's my duty. And what
is one interruption more or less? All night they come and go...."

"Good night, monsieur," Lanyard cut short the old man's garrulity; and
went on up the stairs, now a little wearily, of a sudden newly
conscious of his vast and enervating fatigue.

He thought longingly of bed, yawned involuntarily and, reaching his
door, fumbled the key in a most unprofessional way; there were weights
upon his eyelids, a heaviness in his brain....

But the key met with no resistance from the wards; and in a trice,
appreciating this fact, Lanyard was wide-awake again.

No question but that he had locked the door securely, on leaving after
his adventure with the charming somnambulist....

Had she, then, taken a whim to his room?

Or was this but proof of what he had anticipated in the beginning--a
bit of sleuthing on the part of Roddy?

He entertained little doubt as to the correctness of this latter
surmise, as he threw the door open and stepped into the room, his first
action being to grasp the electric switch and twist it smartly.

But no light answered.

"Hello!" he exclaimed softly, remembering that the lights could readily
have been turned off at the bulbs. "What's the good of that?"

In the same breath he started violently, and swung about.

The door had closed behind him, swiftly but gently, eclipsing the faint
light from the hall, leaving what amounted to stark darkness.

His first impression was that the intruder--Roddy or whoever--had
darted past him and out, pulling the door to in that act.

Before he could consciously revise this misconception he was fighting
for his life.

So unexpected, so swift and sudden fell the assault, that he was caught
completely off guard: between the shutting of the door and an onslaught
whose violence sent him reeling to the wall, the elapsed time could
have been measured by the fluttering of an eyelash.

And then two powerful arms were round him, pinioning his hands to his
sides, his feet were tripped up, and he was thrown with a force that
fairly jarred his teeth, half-stunning him.

For a breath he lay dazed, struggling feebly; not long, but long enough
to enable his antagonist to shift his hold and climb on top of his
body, where he squatted, bearing down heavily with a knee on either of
Lanyard's forearms, hands encircling his neck, murderous thumbs digging
into his windpipe.

He revived momentarily, pulled himself together, and heaved mightily in
futile effort to unseat the other.

The sole outcome of this was a tightening pressure on his throat.

The pain grew agonizing; Lanyard's breath was almost completely shut
off; he gasped vainly, with a rattling noise in his gullet; his
eyeballs started; a myriad coruscant lights danced and interlaced
blindingly before them; in his ears there rang a roaring like the voice
of heavy surf breaking upon a rock-bound coast.

And of a sudden he ceased to struggle and lay slack, passive in the
other's hands.

Only an instant longer was the clutch on his throat maintained. Both
hands left it quickly, one shifting to his head to turn and press it
roughly cheek to floor. Simultaneously he was aware of the other hand
fumbling about his neck, and then of a touch of metal and the sting of
a needle driven into the flesh beneath his ear.

That galvanized him; he came to life again in a twinkling, animate with
threefold strength and cunning. The man on his chest was thrown off as
by a young earthquake; and Lanyard's right arm was no sooner free than
it shot out with blind but deadly accuracy to the point of his
assailant's jaw. A click of teeth was followed by a sickish grunt as
the man lurched over....

Lanyard found himself scrambling to his feet, a bit giddy perhaps, but
still sufficiently master of his wits to get his pistol out before
making another move.



X

TURN ABOUT

The thought of Lanyard's pocket flash-lamp offering itself, immediately
its wide circle of light enveloped his late antagonist.

That one was resting on a shoulder, legs uncouthly a-sprawl, quite
without movement of any perceptible sort; his face more than
half-turned to the floor, and masked into the bargain.

Incredulously Lanyard stirred the body with a foot, holding his weapon
poised as though half-expecting it to quicken with instant and violent
action; but it responded in no way.

With a nod of satisfaction, he shifted the light until it marked down
the nearest electric bulb, which proved, in line with his inference, to
have been extinguished by the socket key, while the heat of its bulb
indicated that the current had been shut off only an instant before his
entrance.

The light full up, he went back to the thug, knelt and, lifting the
body, turned it upon its back.

Recognition immediately rewarded this manoeuvre: the masked face
upturned to the glare was that of the American who had made a fourth in
the concert of the Pack--"Mr. Smith," Quickly unlatching the mask,
Lanyard removed it; but the countenance thus exposed told little more
than he knew; he could have sworn he had never seen it before. None the
less, something in its evil cast persistently troubled his memory, with
the same provoking and baffling effect that had attended their first
encounter.

Already the American was struggling toward consciousness. His lips and
eyelids twitched spasmodically, he shuddered, and his flexed muscles
began to relax. In this process something fell from between the fingers
of his right hand--something small and silver-bright that caught
Lanyard's eye.

Picking it up, he examined with interest a small hypodermic syringe
loaded to the full capacity of its glass cylinder, plunger drawn
back--all ready for instant service.

It was the needle of this instrument that had pricked the skin of
Lanyard's neck; beyond reasonable doubt it contained a soporific, if
not exactly a killing dose of some narcotic drug--cocaine, at a venture.

So it appeared that this agent of the Pack had been commissioned to put
the Lone Wolf to sleep for an hour or two or more--_perhaps_ not
permanently!--that he might be out of the way long enough for their
occult purposes.

He smiled grimly, fingering the hypodermic and eyeing the prostrate man.

"Turn about," he reflected, "is said to be fair play.... Well, why not?"

He bent forward, dug the needle into the wrist of the American and shot
the plunger home, all in a single movement so swift and deft that the
drug was delivered before the pain could startle the victim from his
coma.

As for that, the man came to quickly enough; but only to have his
clearing senses met and dashed by the muzzle of a pistol stamping a
cold ring upon his temple.

"Lie perfectly quiet, my dear Mr. Smith," Lanyard advised; "don't speak
above a whisper! Give the good dope a chance: it'll only need a moment,
or I'm no judge and you're a careless highbinder! I'd like to know,
however--if it's all the same to you--"

But already the injection was taking effect; the look of panic, which
had drawn the features of the American and flickered from his eyes with
dawning appreciation of his plight, was clouding, fading, blending into
one of daze and stupour. The eyelids flickered and lay still; the lips
moved as if with urgent desire to speak, but were dumb; a long
convulsive sigh shook the American's body; and he rested with the
immobility of the dead, save for the slow but steady rise and fall of
his bosom.

Lanyard thoughtfully reviewed these phenomena.

"Must kick like a mule, that dope!" he reflected. "Lucky it didn't get
me before I guessed what was up! If I'd even suspected its strength,
however, I'd have been less hasty: I could do with a little information
from Mr. Mysterious Stranger here!"

Suddenly conscious of a dry and burning throat, he rose and going to
the washstand drank deep and thirstily from a water-bottle; then set
himself resolutely to repair the disarray of his wits and consider what
was best to be done.

In his abstraction he wandered to a chair over whose back hung a light
dressing-gown of wine-coloured silk, which, because it would pack in
small compass, was in the habit of carrying with him on his travels.
Lanyard had left this thrown across his bed; and he was wondering
subconsciously what use the man had thought to make of it, that he
should have taken the trouble to shift it to the chair.

But even as he laid hold of it, Lanyard dropped the garment in sheer
surprise to find it damp and heavy in his grasp, sodden with viscid
moisture. And when, in a swift flash of intuition, he examined his
fingers, he discovered them discoloured with a faint reddish stain.

Had the dye run? And how had the American come to dabble the garment in
water--to what end?

Then the shape of an object on the floor near his feet arrested
Lanyard's questing vision. He stared, incredulous, moved forward, bent
over and picked it up, clipping it gingerly between finger-tips.

It was one of his razors--a heavy hollow-ground blade--and it was foul
with blood.

With a low cry, smitten with awful understanding, Lanyard wheeled and
stared fearfully at the door communicating with Roddy's room.

It stood ajar an inch or two, its splintered lock accounted for by a
small but extremely efficient jointed steel jimmy which lay near the
threshold.

Beyond the door ... darkness ... silence...

Mustering up all his courage, the adventurer strode determinedly into
the adjoining room.

The first flash of his hand-lamp discovered to him sickening
verification of his most dreadful apprehensions.

Now he saw why his dressing-gown had been requisitioned--to protect a
butcher's clothing.

After a moment he returned, shut the door, and set his back against it,
as if to bar out that reeking shambles.

He was very pale, his face drawn with horror; and he was powerfully
shaken with nausea.

The plot was damnably patent: Roddy proving a menace to the Pack and
requiring elimination, his murder had been decreed as well as that the
blame for it should be laid at Lanyard's door. Hence the attempt to
drug him, that he might not escape before police could be sent to find
him there.

He could no longer doubt that De Morbihan had been left behind at the
Circle of Friends of Harmony solely to detain him, if need be, and
afford Smith time to finish his hideous job and set the trap for the
second victim.

And the plot had succeeded despite its partial failure, despite the
swift reverse chance and Lanyard's cunning had meted out to the Pack's
agent. It was _his_ dressing-gown that was saturate with Roddy's blood,
just as they were his gloves, pilfered from his luggage, which had
measurably protected the killer's hands, and which Lanyard had found in
the next room, stripped hastily off and thrown to the floor--twin
crumpled wads of blood-stained chamois-skin.

He had now little choice; he must either flee Paris and trust to his
wits to save him, or else seek De Morbihan and solicit his protection,
his boasted influence in high quarters.

But to give himself into the hands, to become an associate, of one who
could be party to so cowardly a Crime as this ... Lanyard told himself
he would sooner pay the guillotine the penalty....

Consulting his watch, he found the hour to be no later than half-past
four: so swiftly (truly treading upon one another's heels) events had
moved since the incident of the somnambulist.

This left at his disposal a fair two hours more of darkness: November
nights are long and black in Paris; it would hardly be even moderately
light before seven o'clock. But that were a respite none too long for
Lanyard's necessity; he must think swiftly in contemplation of instant
action were he to extricate himself without the Pack's knowledge and
consent.

Granted, then, he must fly this stricken field of Paris. But how? De
Morbihan had promised that Popinot's creatures would guard every
outlet; and Lanyard didn't doubt him. An attempt to escape the city by
any ordinary channel would be to invite either denunciation to the
police on the charge of murder, or one of those fatally expeditious
forms of assassination of which the Apaches are past-masters.

He must and would find another way; but his decision was frightfully
hampered by lack of ready money; the few odd francs in his pocket were
no store for the war-chest demanded by this emergency.

True, he had the Omber jewels; but they were not negotiable--not at
least in Paris.

And the Huysman plans?

He pondered briefly the possibilities of the Huysman plans.

In his fretting, pacing softly to and fro, at each turn he passed his
dressing-table, and chancing once to observe himself in its mirror, he
stopped short, thunderstruck by something he thought to detect in the
counterfeit presentment of his countenance, heavy with fatigue as it
was, and haggard with contemplation of this appalling contretemps.

And instantly he was back beside the American, studying narrowly the
contours of that livid mask. Here, then, was that resemblance which had
baffled him; and now that he saw it, he could not deny that it was
unflatteringly close: feature for feature the face of the murderer
reproduced his face, coarsened perhaps but recognizably a replica of
that Michael Lanyard who confronted him every morning in his
shaving-glass, almost the only difference residing in the scrubby black
moustache that shadowed the American's upper lip.

After all, there was nothing wonderful in this; Lanyard's type was not
uncommon; he would never have thought himself a distinguished figure.

Before rising he turned out the pockets of his counterfeit. But this
profited him little: the assassin had dressed for action with
forethought to evade recognition in event of accident. Lanyard
collected only a cheap American watch in a rolled-gold case of a sort
manufactured by wholesale, a briquet, a common key that might fit any
hotel door, a broken paper of Régie cigarettes, an automatic pistol, a
few francs in silver--nothing whatever that would serve as a mark of
identification; for though the grey clothing was tailor-made, the
maker's labels had been ripped out of its pockets, while the man's
linen and underwear alike lacked even a laundry's hieroglyphic.

With this harvest of nothing for his pains, Lanyard turned again to the
wash-stand and his shaving kit, mixed a stiff lather, stropped another
razor to the finest edge he could manage, fetched a pair of keen
scissors from his dressing-case, and went back to the murderer.

He worked rapidly, at a high pitch of excitement--as much through sheer
desperation as through any appeal inherent in the scheme either to his
common-sense or to his romantic bent.

In two minutes he had stripped the moustache clean away from that
stupid, flaccid mask.

Unquestionably the resemblance was now most striking; the American
would readily pass for Michael Lanyard.

This much accomplished, he pursued his preparations in feverish haste.
In spite of this, he overlooked no detail. In less than twenty minutes
he had exchanged clothing with the American in detail, even down to
shirts, collars and neckties; had packed in his own pockets the several
articles taken from the other, together with the jointed jimmy and a
few of his personal effects, and was ready to bid adieu to himself, to
that Michael Lanyard whom Paris knew.

The insentient masquerader on the floor had called himself "good-enough
Smith"; he must serve now as good-enough Lanyard, at least for the Lone
Wolf's purposes; the police at all events would accept him as such. And
if the memory of Michael Lanyard must needs wear the stigma of brutal
murder, he need not repine in his oblivion, since through this
perfunctory decease the Lone Wolf would gain a freedom even greater
than before.

The Pack had contrived only to eliminate Michael Lanyard, the amateur
of fine paintings; remained the Lone Wolf with not one faculty
impaired, but rather with a deadlier purpose to shape his occult
courses....

Under the influence of his methodical preparations, his emotions had
cooled appreciably, taking on a cast of cold malignant vengefulness.

He who never in all his criminal record had so much as pulled trigger
in self-defence, was ready now to shoot to kill with the most
cold-blooded intent--given one of three targets; while Popinot's
creatures, if they worried him, he meant to exterminate with as little
compunction as though they were rats in fact as well as in spirit....

Extinguishing the lights, he stepped quickly to a window and from one
edge of its shade looked down into the street.

He was in time to see a stunted human silhouette detach itself from the
shadow of a doorway on the opposite walk, move to the curb, and wave an
arm--evidently signaling another sentinel on a corner out of Lanyard's
range of vision.

Herein was additional proof, if any lacked, that De Morbihan had not
exaggerated the disposition of Popinot. This animal in the street,
momentarily revealed by the corner light as he darted across to take
position by the door, this animal with sickly face and pointed chin,
with dirty muffler round its chicken-neck, shoddy coat clothing its
sloping shoulders, baggy corduroy trousers flapping round its bony
shanks--this was Popinot's, and but one of a thousand differing in no
essential save degree of viciousness.

It wasn't possible to guess how thoroughly Popinot had picketed the
house, in co-operation with Roddy's murderer, by way of provision
against mischance; but the adventurer was satisfied that, in his proper
guise as himself, he needed only to open that postern door at the
street end of the passage, to feel a knife slip in between his
ribs--most probably in his back, beneath the shoulder-blade....

He nodded grimly, moved back from the window, and used the flash-lamp
to light him to the door.



XI

FLIGHT

Now when Lanyard had locked the door, he told himself that the gruesome
peace of those two bed-chambers was ensured, barring mischance, for as
long as the drug continued to hold dominion over the American; and he
felt justified in reckoning that period apt to be tolerably protracted;
while not before noon at earliest would any hôtelier who knew his
business permit the rest of an Anglo-Saxon guest to be
disturbed--lacking, that is, definite instructions to the contrary.

For a full minute after withdrawing the key the adventurer stood at
alert attention; but the heavy silence of that sinister old rookery
sang in his ears untroubled by any untoward sound....

That wistful shadow of his memories, that cowering Marcel of the
so-dead yesterday in acute terror of the hand of Madame Troyon, had
never stolen down that corridor more quietly: yet Lanyard had taken not
five paces from his door when that other opened, at the far end, and
Lucia Bannon stepped out.

He checked then, and shut his teeth upon an involuntary oath: truly it
seemed as though this run of the devil's own luck would never end!

Astonishment measurably modified his exasperation.

What had roused the girl out of bed and dressed her for the street at
that unholy hour? And why her terror at sight of him?

For that the surprise was no more welcome to her than to him was as
patent as the fact that she was prepared to leave the hotel forthwith,
enveloped in a business-like Burberry rainproof from her throat to the
hem of a tweed walking-skirt, and wearing boots both stout and brown.
And at sight of him she paused and instinctively stepped back, groping
blindly for the knob of her bed-chamber door; while her eyes, holding
to his with an effect of frightened fascination, seemed momentarily to
grow more large and dark in her face of abnormal pallor.

But these were illegible evidences, and Lanyard was intent solely on
securing her silence before she could betray him and ruin incontinently
that grim alibi which he had prepared at such elaborate pains. He moved
toward her swiftly, with long and silent strides, a lifted hand
enjoining rather than begging her attention, aware as he drew nearer
that a curious change was colouring the complexion of her temper: she
passed quickly from dread to something oddly like relief, from
repulsion to something strangely like welcome; and dropping the hand
that had sought the door-knob, in her turn moved quietly to meet him.

He was grateful for this consideration, this tacit indulgence of the
wish he had as yet to voice; drew a little hope and comfort from it in
an emergency which had surprised him without resource other than to
throw himself upon her generosity. And as soon as he could make himself
heard in the clear yet concentrated whisper that was a trick of his
trade, a whisper inaudible to ears a yard distant from those to which
it was pitched, he addressed her in a manner at once peremptory and
apologetic.

"If you please, Miss Bannon--not a word, not a whisper!"

She paused and nodded compliance, questioning eyes steadfast to his.

Doubtfully, wondering that she betrayed so little surprise, he pursued
as one committed to a forlorn hope:

"It's vitally essential that I leave this hotel without it becoming
known. If I may count on you to say nothing--"

She gave him reassurance with a small gesture. "But how?" she breathed
in the least of whispers. "The concierge--!"

"Leave that to me--I know another way. I only need a chance--"

"Then won't you take me with you?"

"Eh?" he stammered, dashed.

Her hands moved toward him in a flutter of entreaty: "I too must leave
unseen--I _must_! Take me with you--out of this place--and I promise
you no one shall ever know--"

He lacked time to weigh the disadvantages inherent in her proposition;
though she offered him a heavy handicap, he had no choice but to accept
it without protest.

"Come, then," he told her--"and not a sound--"

She signified assent with another nod; and on this he turned to an
adjacent door, opened it gently, whipped out his flash-lamp, and passed
through. Without sign of hesitancy, she followed; and like two shadows
they dogged the dancing spot-light of the flash-lamp, through a
linen-closet and service-room, down a shallow well threaded by a spiral
of iron steps and, by way of the long corridor linking the
kitchen-offices, to a stout door secured only by huge, old-style bolts
of iron.

Thus, in less than two minutes from the instant of their encounter,
they stood outside Troyon's back door, facing a cramped, malodorous
alley-way--a dark and noisome souvenir of that wild mediaeval Paris
whose effacement is an enduring monument to the fame of the good Baron
Haussmann.

Now again it was raining, a thick drizzle that settled slowly, lacking
little of a fog's opacity; and the faint glimmer from the street lamps
of that poorly lighted quarter, reflected by the low-swung clouds, lent
Lanyard and the girl little aid as they picked their way cautiously,
and always in complete silence, over the rude and slimy cobbles of the
foul back way. For the adventurer had pocketed his lamp, lest its beams
bring down upon them some prowling creature of Popinot's; though he
felt passably sure that the alley had been left unguarded in the
confidence that he would never dream of its existence, did he survive
to seek escape from Troyon's.

For all its might and its omniscience, Lanyard doubted if the Pack had
as yet identified Michael Lanyard with that ill-starred Marcel who once
had been as intimate with this forgotten way as any skulking tom of the
quarter.

But with the Lone Wolf confidence was never akin to foolhardiness; and
if on leaving Troyon's he took the girl's hand without asking
permission and quite as a matter-of-course, and drew it through his
arm--it was his left arm that he so dedicated to gallantry; his right
hand remained unhampered, and never far from the grip of his automatic.

Nor was he altogether confident of his companion. The weight of her
hand upon his arm, the fugitive contacts of her shoulder, seemed to
him, just then, the most vivid and interesting things in life; the
consciousness of her personality at his side was like a shaft of golden
light penetrating the darkness of his dilemma. But as minutes passed
and their flight was unchallenged, his mood grew dark with doubts and
quick with distrust. Reviewing it all, he thought to detect something
too damnably adventitious in the way she had nailed him, back there in
the corridor of Troyon's. It was a bit too coincidental--"a bit
thick!"--like that specious yarn of somnambulism she had told to excuse
her presence in his room. Come to examine it, that excuse had been far
too clumsy to hoodwink any but a man bewitched by beauty in distress.

Who was she, anyway? And what her interest in him? What had she been
after in his room?--this American girl making a first visit to Paris in
company with her venerable ruin of a parent? Who, for that matter, was
Bannon? If her story of sleep-walking were untrue, then Bannon must
have been at the bottom of her essay in espionage--Bannon, the intimate
of De Morbihan, and an American even as the murderer of poor Roddy was
an American!

Was this singularly casual encounter, then, but a cloak for further
surveillance? Had he in his haste and desperation simply played into
her hands, when he burdened himself with the care of her?

But it seemed absurd; to think that she... a girl like her, whose every
word and gesture was eloquent of gentle birth and training...!

Yet--what _had_ she wanted in his room? Somnambulists are sincere
indeed in the indulgence of their failing when they time their
expeditions so opportunely--and arm themselves with keys to fit strange
doors. Come to think of it, he had been rather willfully blind to that
flaw in her excuse.... Again, why should she be up and dressed and so
madly bent on leaving Troyon's at half-past four in the morning? Why
couldn't she wait for daylight at least? What errand, reasonable duty
or design could have roused her out into the night and the storm at
that weird hour? He wondered!

And momentarily he grew more jealously heedful of her, critical of
every nuance in her bearing. The least trace of added pressure on his
arm, the most subtle suggestion that she wasn't entirely indifferent to
him or regarded him in any way other than as the chance-found comrade
of an hour of trouble, would have served to fix his suspicions. For
such, he told himself, would be the first thought of one bent on
beguiling--to lead him on by some intimation, the more tenuous and
elusive the more provocative, that she found his person not altogether
objectionable.

But he failed to detect anything of this nature in her manner.

So, what was one to think? That she was mental enough to appreciate how
ruinous to her design would be any such advances? ...

In such perplexity he brought her to the end of the alley and there
pulled up for a look round before venturing out into the narrow, dark,
and deserted side street that then presented itself.

At this the girl gently disengaged her hand and drew away a pace or
two; and when Lanyard had satisfied himself that there were no Apaches
in the offing, he turned to see her standing there, just within the
mouth of the alley, in a pose of blank indecision.

Conscious of his regard, she turned to his inspection a face touched
with a fugitive, uncertain smile.

"Where are we?" she asked.

He named the street; and she shook her head. "That doesn't mean much to
me," she confessed; "I'm so strange to Paris, I know only a few of the
principal streets. Where is the boulevard St. Germain?"

Lanyard indicated the direction: "Two blocks that way."

"Thank you." She advanced a step or two, but paused again. "Do you
know, possibly, just where I could find a taxicab?"

"I'm afraid you won't find any hereabouts at this hour," he replied. "A
fiacre, perhaps--with luck: I doubt if there's one disengaged nearer
than Montmartre, where business is apt to be more brisk."

"Oh!" she cried in dismay. "I hadn't thought of that.... I thought
Paris never went to sleep!"

"Only about three hours earlier than most of the world's capitals....
But perhaps I can advise you--"

"If you would be so kind! Only, I don't like to be a nuisance--"

He smiled deceptively: "Don't worry about that. Where do you wish to
go?"

"To the Gare du Nord."

That made him open his eyes. "The Gare du Nord!" he echoed. "But--I beg
your pardon--"

"I wish to take the first train for London," the girl informed him
calmly.

"You'll have a while to wait," Lanyard suggested. "The first train
leaves about half-past eight, and it's now not more than five."

"That can't be helped. I can wait in the station."

He shrugged: that was her own look-out--if she were sincere in
asserting that she meant to leave Paris; something which he took the
liberty of doubting.

"You can reach it by the Métro," he suggested--"the Underground, you
know; there's a station handy--St. Germain des Prés. If you like, I'll
show you the way."

Her relief seemed so genuine, he could have almost believed in it. And
yet--!

"I shall be very grateful," she murmured.

He took that for whatever worth it might assay, and quietly fell into
place beside her; and in a mutual silence--perhaps largely due to her
intuitive sense of his bias--they gained the boulevard St. Germain. But
here, even as they emerged from the side street, that happened which
again upset Lanyard's plans: a belated fiacre hove up out of the mist
and ranged alongside, its driver loudly soliciting patronage.

Beneath his breath Lanyard cursed the man liberally, nothing could have
been more inopportune; he needed that uncouth conveyance for his own
purposes, and if only it had waited until he had piloted the girl to
the station of the Métropolitain, he might have had it. Now he must
either yield the cab to the girl or--share it with her.... But why not?
He could readily drop out at his destination, and bid the driver
continue to the Gare du Nord; and the Métro was neither quick nor
direct enough for his design--which included getting under cover well
before daybreak.

Somewhat sulkily, then, if without betraying his temper, he signalled
the cocher, opened the door, and handed the girl in.

"If you don't mind dropping me en route..."

"I shall be very glad," she said ... "anything to repay, even in part,
the courtesy you've shown me!"

"Oh, please don't fret about that...."

He gave the driver precise directions, climbed in, and settled himself
beside the girl. The whip cracked, the horse sighed, the driver swore;
the aged fiacre groaned, stirred with reluctance, crawled wearily off
through the thickening drizzle.

Within its body a common restraint held silence like a wall between the
two.

The girl sat with face averted, reading through the window what corner
signs they passed: rue Bonaparte, rue Jacob, rue des Saints Pères, Quai
Malquais, Pont du Carrousel; recognizing at least one landmark in the
gloomy arches of the Louvre; vaguely wondering at the inept French
taste in nomenclature which had christened that vast, louring, echoing
quadrangle the place du Carrousel, unliveliest of public places in her
strange Parisian experience.

And in his turn, Lanyard reviewed those well-remembered ways in vast
weariness of spirit--disgusted with himself in consciousness that the
girl had somehow divined his distrust....

"The Lone Wolf, eh?" he mused bitterly. "Rather, the Cornered Rat--if
people only knew! Better still, the Errant--no!--the Arrant Ass!"

They were skirting the Palais Royal when suddenly she turned to him in
an impulsive attempt at self-justification.

"What _must_ you be thinking of me, Mr. Lanyard?"

He was startled: "I? Oh, don't consider me, please. It doesn't matter
what I think--does it?"

"But you've been so kind; I feel I owe you at least some explanation--"

"Oh, as for that," he countered cheerfully, "I've got a pretty definite
notion you're running away from your father."

"Yes. I couldn't stand it any longer--"

She caught herself up in full voice, as though tempted but afraid to
say more. He waited briefly before offering encouragement.

"I hope I haven't seemed impertinent...."

"No, no!"

Than this impatient negative his pause of invitation evoked no other
recognition. She had subsided into her reserve, but--he fancied--not
altogether willingly.

Was it, then, possible that he had misjudged her?

"You've friends in London, no doubt?" he ventured.

"No--none."

"But--"

"I shall manage very well. I shan't be there more than a day or
two--till the next steamer sails."

"I see." There had sounded in her tone a finality which signified
desire to drop the subject. None the less, he pursued mischievously:
"Permit me to wish you bon voyage, Miss Bannon... and to express my
regret that circumstances have conspired to change your plans."

She was still eyeing him askance, dubiously, as if weighing the
question of his acquaintance with her plans, when the fiacre lumbered
from the rue Vivienne into the place de la Bourse, rounded that
frowning pile, and drew up on its north side before the blue lights of
the all-night telegraph bureau.

"With permission," Lanyard said, unlatching the door, "I'll stop off
here. But I'll direct the cocher very carefully to the Gare du Nord.
Please don't even tip him--that's my affair. No--not another word of
thanks; to have been permitted to be of service--it is a unique
pleasure, Miss Bannon. And so, good night!"

With an effect that seemed little less than timid, the girl offered her
hand.

"Thank you, Mr. Lanyard," she said in an unsteady voice. "I am sorry--"

But she didn't say what it was she regretted; and Lanyard, standing
with bared head in the driving mist, touched her fingers coolly,
repeated his farewells, and gave the driver both money and
instructions, and watched the cab lurch away before he approached the
telegraph bureau....

But the enigma of the girl so deeply intrigued his imagination that it
was only with difficulty that he concocted a non-committal telegram to
Roddy's friend in the Prefecture--that imposing personage who had
watched with the man from Scotland Yard at the platform gates in the
Gare du Nord.

It was couched in English, when eventually composed and submitted to
the telegraph clerk with a fervent if inaudible prayer that he might be
ignorant of the tongue.

_"Come at once to my room at Troyon's. Enter via adjoining room
prepared for immediate action on important development. Urgent. Roddy."_

Whether or not this were Greek to the man behind the wicket, it was
accepted with complete indifference--or, rather, with an interest that
apparently evaporated on receipt of the fees. Lanyard couldn't see that
the clerk favoured him with as much as a curious glance before he
turned away to lose himself, to bury his identity finally and forever
under the incognito of the Lone Wolf.

He couldn't have rested without taking that one step to compass the
arrest of the American assassin; now with luck and prompt action on the
part of the Préfecture, he felt sure Roddy would be avenged by Monsieur
de Paris.... But it was very well that there should exist no clue
whereby the author of that mysterious telegram might be traced....

It was, then, not an ill-pleased Lanyard who slipped oft into the night
and the rain; but his exasperation was elaborate when the first object
that met his gaze was that wretched fiacre, back in place before the
door, Lucia Bannon leaning from its lowered window, the cocher on his
box brandishing an importunate whip at the adventurer.

He barely escaped choking on suppressed profanity; and for two sous
would have swung on his heel and ignored the girl deliberately. But he
didn't dare: close at hand stood a sergent de ville, inquisitive eyes
bright beneath the dripping visor of his kepi, keenly welcoming this
diversion of a cheerless hour.

With at least outward semblance of resignation, Lanyard approached the
window.

"I have been guilty of some stupidity, perhaps?" he enquired with
lip-civility that had no echo in his heart. "But I am sorry--"

"The stupidity is mine," the girl interrupted in accents tense with
agitation. "Mr. Lanyard, I--I--"

Her voice faltered and broke off in a short, dry sob, and she drew back
with an effect of instinctive distaste for public emotion. Lanyard
smothered an impulse to demand roughly "Well, what now?" and came
closer to the window.

"Something more I can do, Miss Bannon?"

"I don't know.... I've just found it out--I came away so hurriedly I
never thought to make sure; but I've no money--not a franc!"

After a little pause he commented helpfully: "That does complicate
matters, doesn't it?"

"What am I to do? I can't go back--I won't! Anything rather. You may
judge how desperate I am, when I prefer to throw myself on your
generosity--and already I've strained your patience--"

"Not much," he interrupted in a soothing voice. "But--half a moment--we
must talk this over."


Directing the cocher to drive to the place Pigalle, he reentered the
cab, suspicion more than ever rife in his mind. But as far as he could
see--with that confounded sergo staring!--there was nothing else for
it. He couldn't stand there in the rain forever, gossiping with a girl
half-hysterical--or pretending to be.

"You see," she explained when the fiacre was again under way, "I
thought I had a hundred-franc note in my pocketbook; and so I have--but
the pocketbook's back there, in my room at Troyon's."

"A hundred francs wouldn't see you far toward New York," he observed
thoughtfully.

"Oh, I hope you don't think--!"

She drew back into her corner with a little shudder of humiliation.

As if he hadn't noticed, Lanyard turned to the window, leaned out, and
redirected the driver sharply: "Impasse Stanislas!"

Immediately the vehicle swerved, rounded a corner, and made back toward
the Seine with a celerity which suggested that the stables were on the
Rive Gauche.

"Where?" the girl demanded as Lanyard sat back. "Where are you taking
me?"

"I'm sorry," Lanyard said with every appearance of sudden contrition;
"I acted impulsively--on the assumption of your complete confidence.
Which, of course, was unpardonable. But, believe me; you have only to
say no and it shall be as you wish."

"But," she persisted impatiently--"you haven't answered me: what is
this impasse Stanislas?"

"The address of an artist I know--Solon, the painter. We're going to
take possession of his studio in his absence. Don't worry; he won't
mind. He is under heavy obligation to me--I've sold several canvasses
for him; and when he's away, as now, in the States, he leaves me the
keys. It's a sober-minded, steady-paced neighbourhood, where we can
rest without misgivings and take our time to think things out."

"But--" the girl began in an odd tone.

"But permit me," he interposed hastily, "to urge the facts of the case
upon your consideration."

"Well?" she said in the same tone, as he paused.

"To begin with--I don't doubt you've good reason for running away from
your father."

"A very real, a very grave reason," she affirmed quietly.

"And you'd rather not go back--"

"That is out of the question!"--with a restrained passion that almost
won his credulity.

"But you've no friends in Paris--?"

"Not one!"

"And no money. So it seems, if you're to elude your father, you must
find some place to hide pro tem. As for myself, I've not slept in
forty-eight hours and must rest before I'll be able to think clearly
and plan ahead....And we won't accomplish much riding round forever in
this ark. So I offer the only solution I'm capable of advancing, under
the circumstances."

"You are quite right," the girl agreed after a moment. "Please don't
think me unappreciative. Indeed, it makes me very unhappy to think I
know no way to make amends for your trouble."

"There may be a way," Lanyard informed her quietly; "but we'll not
discuss that until we've rested up a bit."

"I shall be only too glad--" she began, but fell silent and, in a
silence that seemed almost apprehensive, eyed him speculatively
throughout the remainder of the journey.

It wasn't a long one; in the course of the next ten minutes they drew
up at the end of a shallow pocket of a street, a scant half-block in
depth; where alighting, Lanyard helped the girl out, paid and dismissed
the cocher, and turned to an iron gate in a high stone wall crowned
with spikes.

The grille-work of that gate afforded glimpses of a small, dark garden
and a little house of two storeys. Blank walls of old tenements
shouldered both house and garden on either side.

Unlocking the gate, Lanyard refastened it very carefully, repeated the
business at the front door of the house, and when they were securely
locked and bolted within a dark reception-hall, turned on the electric
light.

But he granted the girl little more than time for a fugitive survey of
this ante-room to an establishment of unique artistic character.

"These are living-rooms, downstairs here," he explained hurriedly.
"Solon's unmarried, and lives quite alone--his studio-devil and
femme-de-ménage come in by the day only--and so he avoids that pest a
concierge. With your permission, I'll assign you to the studio--up
here."

And leading the way up a narrow flight of steps, he made a light in the
huge room that was the upper storey.

"I believe you'll be comfortable," he said--"that divan yonder is as
easy a couch as one could wish--and there's this door you can lock at
the head of the staircase; while I, of course, will be on guard
below.... And now, Miss Bannon... unless there's something more I can
do--?"

The girl answered with a wan smile and a little broken sigh. Almost
involuntarily, in the heaviness of her fatigue, she had surrendered to
the hospitable arms of a huge lounge-chair.

Her weary glance ranged the luxuriously appointed studio and returned
to Lanyard's face; and while he waited he fancied something moving in
those wistful eyes, so deeply shadowed with distress, perplexity, and
fatigue.

"I'm very tired indeed," she confessed--"more than I guessed. But I'm
sure I shall be comfortable.... And I count myself very fortunate, Mr.
Lanyard. You've been more kind than I deserved. Without you, I don't
like to think what might have become of me...."

"Please don't!" he pleaded and, suddenly discountenanced by
consciousness of his duplicity, turned to the stairs. "Good night, Miss
Bannon," he mumbled; and was half-way down before he heard his
valediction faintly echoed.

As he gained the lower floor, the door was closed at the top of the
stairs and its bolt shot home with a soft thud.

But turning to lock the lower door, he stayed his hand in transient
indecision.

"Damn it!" he growled uneasily--"there can't be any harm in that girl!
Impossible for eyes like hers to lie!... And yet ... And yet!... Oh,
what's the matter with me? Am I losing my grip? Why stick at ordinary
precaution against treachery on the part of a woman who's nothing to me
and of whom I know nothing that isn't conspicuously questionable?...
All because of a pretty face and an appealing manner!"

And so he secured that door, if very quietly; and having pocketed the
key and made the round of doors and windows, examining their locks, he
stumbled heavily into the bedroom of his friend the artist.

Darkness overwhelmed him then: he was stricken down by sleep as an ox
falls under the pole.



XII

AWAKENING

It was late afternoon when Lanyard wakened from sleep so deep and
dreamless that nothing could have induced it less potent than sheer
systemic exhaustion, at once nervous, muscular and mental.

A profound and stifling lethargy benumbed his senses. There was stupor
in his brain, and all his limbs ached dully. He opened dazed eyes upon
blank darkness. In his ears a vast silence pulsed.

And in that strange moment of awakening he was conscious of no
individuality: it was, for the time, as if he had passed in slumber
from one existence to another, sloughing en passant all his three-fold
personality as Marcel Troyon, Michael Lanyard, and the Lone Wolf. Had
any one of these names been uttered in his hearing just then it would
have meant nothing to him--or little more than nothing: he was for the
time being merely _himself_, a shell of sensations enclosing dull
embers of vitality.

For several minutes he lay without moving, curiously intrigued by this
riddle of identity: it was but slowly that his mind, like a blind hand
groping round a dark chamber, picked up the filaments of memory.

One by one the connections were renewed, the circuits closed....

But, singularly enough in his understanding, his first thought was of
the girl upstairs in the studio, unconsciously his prisoner and
hostage--rather than of himself, who lay there, heavy with loss of
sleep, languidly trying to realize himself.

For he was no more as he had been. Wherein the difference lay he
couldn't say, but that a difference existed he was persuaded--that he
had changed, that some strange reaction in the chemistry of his nature
had taken place during slumber. It was as if sleep had not only
repaired the ravages of fatigue upon the tissues of his brain and body,
but had mended the tissues of his soul as well. His thoughts were
fluent in fresh channels, his interests no longer the interests of the
Michael Lanyard he had known, no longer self-centred, the interests of
the absolute ego. He was concerned less for himself, even now when he
should be most gravely so, than for another, for the girl Lucia Bannon,
who was nothing to him, whom he had yet to know for twenty-four hours,
but of whom he could not cease to think if he would.

It was her plight that perturbed him, from which he sought an
outlet--never his own.

Yet his own was desperate enough....

Baffled and uneasy, he at length bethought him of his watch. But its
testimony seemed incredible: surely the hour could not be five in the
afternoon!--surely he could not have slept so close upon a full round
of the clock!

And if it were so, what of the girl? Had she, too, so sorely needed
sleep that the brief November day had dawned and waned without her
knowledge?

That question was one to rouse him: in an instant he was up and groping
his way through the gloom that enshrouded bed-chamber and dining-room
to the staircase door in the hall. He found this fast enough, its key
still safe in his pocket, and unlocking it quietly, shot the beam of
his flash-lamp up that dark well to the door at the top; which was
tight shut.

For several moments he attended to a taciturn silence broken by never a
sound to indicate that he wasn't a lonely tenant of the little
dwelling, then irresolutely lifted a foot to the first step--and
withdrew it. If she continued to sleep, why disturb her? He had much to
do in the way of thinking things out; and that was a process more
easily performed in solitude.

Leaving the door ajar, then, he turned to one of the front windows,
parted its draperies, and peered out, over the little garden and
through the iron ribs of the gate, to the street, where a single
gas-lamp, glimmering within a dull golden halo of mist, made visible
the scant length of the impasse Stanislas, empty, rain-swept, desolate.

The rain persisted with no hint of failing purpose....

Something in the dreary emptiness of that brief vista deepened the
shadow in his mood and knitted a careworn frown into his brows.

Abstractedly he sought the kitchen and, making a light, washed up at
the tap, then foraged for breakfast. Persistence turned up a
spirit-stove, a half-bottle of methylated, a packet of tea, a tin or
two of biscuit, as many more of potted meats: left-overs from the
artist's stock, dismally scant and uninviting in array. With these he
made the discovery that he was half-famished, and found no reason to
believe that the girl would be in any better case. An expedition to the
nearest charcuterie was indicated; but after he had searched for and
found an old raincoat of Solon's, Lanyard decided against leaving the
girl alone. Pending her appearance, he filled the spirit-stove, put the
kettle on to boil, and lighting a cigarette, sat himself down to watch
the pot and excogitate his several problems.

In a fashion uncommonly clear-headed, even for him, he assembled all
the facts bearing upon their predicament, his and Lucia Bannon's,
jointly and individually, and dispassionately pondered them....

But insensibly his thoughts reverted to their exotic phase of his
awakening, drifting into such introspection as he seldom indulged, and
led him far from the immediate riddle, by strange ways to a revelation
altogether unpresaged and a resolve still more revolutionary.

A look of wonder flickered in his brooding eyes; and clipped between
two fingers, his cigarette grew a long ash, let it fall, and burned
down to a stump so short that the coal almost scorched his flesh. He
dropped it and crushed out the fire with his heel, all unwittingly.

Slowly but irresistibly his world was turning over beneath his feet....

The sound of a footfall recalled him as from an immeasurable remove; he
looked up to see Lucia at pause upon the threshold, and rose slowly,
with effort recollecting himself and marshalling his wits against the
emergency foreshadowed by her attitude.

Tense with indignation, quick with disdain, she demanded, without any
preface whatever: "Why did you lock me in?"

He stammered unhappily: "I beg your pardon--"

"Why did you lock me in?"

"I'm sorry--"

"Why did you--"

But she interrupted herself to stamp her foot emphatically; and he
caught her up on the echo of that:

"If you must know, because I wasn't trusting you."

Her eyes darkened ominously: "Yet you insisted I should trust you!"

"The circumstances aren't parallel: you're not a notorious malefactor,
wanted by the police of every capital in Europe, hounded by rivals to
boot--fighting for life, liberty and"--he laughed shortly--"the pursuit
of happiness!"

She caught her breath sharply--whether with dismay or mere surprise at
his frankness he couldn't tell.

"Are you?" she demanded quickly.

"Am I what?"

"What you've just said--"

"A crook--and all that? Miss Bannon, you know it!"

"The Lone Wolf?"

"You've known it all along. De Morbihan told you--or else your father.
Or, it may be, you were shrewd enough to guess it from De Morbihan's
bragging in the restaurant. At all events, it's plain enough, nothing
but desire to find proof to identify me with the Lone Wolf took you to
my room last night--whether for your personal satisfaction or at the
instigation of Bannon--just as nothing less than disgust with what was
going on made you run away from such intolerable associations....
Though, at that, I don't believe you even guessed how unspeakably
vicious those were!"

He paused and waited, anticipating furious denial or refutation; such
would, indeed, have been the logical development of the temper in which
she had come down to confront him.

Rather than this, she seemed calmed and sobered by his charge; far from
resenting it, disposed to concede its justice; anger deserted her
expression, leaving it intent and grave. She came quietly into the room
and faced him squarely across the table.

"You thought all that of me--that I was capable of spying on you--yet
were generous enough to believe I despised myself for doing it?"

"Not at first.... At first, when we met back there in the corridor, I
was sure you were bent on further spying. Only since waking up here,
half an hour ago, did I begin to understand how impossible it would be
for you to lend yourself to such villainy as last night's."

"But if you thought that of me then, why did you--?"

"It occurred to me that it would be just as well to prevent your
reporting back to headquarters."

"But now you've changed your mind about me?"

He nodded: "Quite."

"But why?" she demanded in a voice of amazement. "Why?"

"I can't tell you," he said slowly--"I don't know why. I can only
presume it must be because--I can't help believing in you."

Her glance wavered: her colour deepened. "I don't understand..." she
murmured.

"Nor I," he confessed in a tone as low....

A sudden grumble from the teakettle provided welcome distraction.
Lanyard lifted it off the flames and slowly poured boiling water on a
measure of tea in an earthenware pot.

"A cup of this and something to eat'll do us no harm," he ventured,
smiling uneasily--"especially if we're to pursue this psychological
enquiry into the whereforeness of the human tendency to change one's
mind!"



XIII

CONFESSIONAL

And then, when the girl made no response, but remained with troubled
gaze focused on some remote abstraction, "You will have tea, won't
you?" he urged.

She recalled her thoughts, nodded with the faintest of smiles--"Yes,
thank you!"--and dropped into a chair.

He began at once to make talk in effort to dissipate that constraint
which stood between them like an unseen alien presence: "You must be
very hungry?"

"I am."

"Sorry I've nothing better to offer you. I'd have run out for something
more substantial, only--"

"Only--?" she prompted, coolly helping herself to biscuit and potted
ham.

"I didn't think it wise to leave you alone."

"Was that before or after you'd made up your mind about me--the latest
phase, I mean?" she persisted with a trace of malice.

"Before," he returned calmly--"likewise, afterwards. Either way you
care to take it, it wouldn't have been wise to leave you here. Suppose
you had waked up to find me gone, yourself alone in this strange
house--"

"I've been awake several hours," she interposed--"found myself locked
in, and heard no sound to indicate that you were still here."

"I'm sorry: I was overtired and slept like a log.... But assuming the
case: you would have gone out, alone, penniless--"

"Through a locked door, Mr. Lanyard?"

"I shouldn't have left it locked," he explained patiently.... "You
would have found yourself friendless and without resources in a city to
which you are a stranger."

She nodded: "True. But what of that?"

"In desperation you might have been forced to go back--"

"And report the outcome of my investigation!"

"Pressure might have been brought to induce admissions damaging to me,"
Lanyard submitted pleasantly. "Whether or no, you'd have been obliged
to renew associations you're well rid of."

"You feel sure of that?"

"But naturally."

"How can you be?" she challenged. "You've yet to know me twenty-four
hours."

"But perhaps I know the associations better. In point of fact, I do.
Even though you may have stooped to play the spy last night, Miss
Bannon--you couldn't keep it up. You had to fly further contamination
from that pack of jackals."

"Not--you feel sure--merely to keep you under observation?"

"I do feel sure of that. I have your word for it."

The girl deliberately finished her tea, and sat back, regarding him
steadily beneath level brows. Then she said with an odd laugh: "You
have your own way of putting one on honour!"

"I don't need to--with you."

She analyzed this with gathering perplexity. "What do you mean by that?"

"I mean, I don't need to put you on your honour--because I'm sure of
you. Even were I not, still I'd refrain from exacting any pledge, or
attempting to." He paused and shrugged before continuing: "If I thought
you were still to be distrusted, Miss Bannon, I'd say: 'There's a free
door; go when you like, back to the Pack, turn in your report, and let
them act as they see fit.'... Do you think I care for them? Do you
imagine for one instant that I fear any one--or all--of that gang?"

"That rings suspiciously of egoism!"

"Let it," he retorted. "It's pride of caste, if you must know. I hold
myself a grade better than such cattle; I've intelligence, at least....
I can take care of myself!"

If he might read her countenance, it expressed more than anything else
distress and disappointment.

"Why do you boast like this--to me?"

"Less through self-satisfaction than in contempt for a pack of
murderous mongrels--impatience that I have to consider such creatures
as Popinot, Wertheimer, De Morbihan and--all their crew."

"And Bannon," she corrected calmly--"you meant to say!"

"Wel-l--" he stammered, discountenanced.

"It doesn't matter," she assured him. "I quite understand, and strange
as it may sound, I've very little feeling in the matter." And then she
acknowledged his stupefied stare with a weary smile. "I know what I
know," she added, with obscure significance....

"I'd give a good deal to know how much you know," he muttered in his
confusion.

"But what do _you_ know?" she caught him up--"against Mr.
Bannon--against my father, that is--that makes you so ready to suspect
both him and me?"

"Nothing," he confessed--"I know nothing; but I suspect everything and
everybody.... And the more I think of it, the more closely I examine
that brutal business of last night, the more I seem to sense his will
behind it all--as one might glimpse a face in darkness through a
lighted lattice.... Oh, laugh if you like! It sounds high-flown, I
know. But that's the effect I get.... What took you to my room, if not
his orders? Why does he train with De Morbihan, if he's not blood-kin
to that breed? Why are you running away from him if not because you've
found out his part in that conspiracy?"

His pause and questioning look evoked no answer; the girl sat moveless
and intent, meeting his gaze inscrutably. And something in her
impassive attitude worked a little exasperation into his temper.

"Why," he declared hotly--"if I dare trust to intuition--forgive me if
I pain you--"

She interrupted with impatience: "I've already begged you not to
consider my feelings, Mr. Lanyard! If you dared trust to your
intuition--what then?"

"Why, then, I could believe that Mr. Bannon, your father ... I could
believe it was his order that killed poor Roddy!"

There could be no doubting her horrified and half-incredulous surprise.

"Roddy?" she iterated in a whisper almost inaudible, with face fast
blanching. "Roddy--!"

"Inspector Roddy of Scotland Yard," he told her mercilessly, "was
murdered in his sleep last night at Troyon's. The murderer broke into
his room by way of mine--the two adjoin. He used my razor, wore my
dressing-gown to shield his clothing, did everything he could think of
to cast suspicion on me, and when I came in assaulted me, meaning to
drug and leave me insensible to be found by the police. Fortunately--I
was beforehand with him. I had just left him drugged, insensible in my
place, when I met you in the corridor.... You didn't know?"

"How can you ask?" the girl moaned.

Bending forward, an elbow on the table, she worked her hands together
until their knuckles shone white through the skin--but not as white as
the face from which her eyes sought his with a look of dumb horror,
dazed, pitiful, imploring.

"You're not deceiving me? But no--why should you?" she faltered. "But
how terrible, how unspeakably awful! ..."

"I'm sorry," Lanyard mumbled--"I'd have held my tongue if I hadn't
thought you knew--"

"You thought I knew--and didn't lift a finger to save the man?" She
jumped up with a blazing face. "Oh, how could you?"

"No--not that--I never thought that. But, meeting you then and there,
so opportunely--I couldn't ignore the coincidence; and when you
admitted you were running away from your father, considering all the
circumstances, I was surely justified in thinking it was realization,
in part at least, of what had happened that was driving you away." She
shook her head slowly, her indignation ebbing as quickly as it had
risen. "I understand," she said; "you had some excuse, but you were
mistaken. I ran away--yes--but not because of that. I never dreamed ..."

She fell silent, sitting with bowed head and twisting her hands
together in a manner he found it painful to watch.

"But please," he implored, "don't take it so much to heart, Miss
Bannon. If you knew nothing, you couldn't have prevented it."

"No," she said brokenly--"I could have done nothing ... But I didn't
know. It isn't that--it's the horror and pity of it. And that you could
think--!"

"But I didn't!" he protested--"truly I did not. And for what I did
think, for the injustice I did do you, believe me, I'm truly sorry."

"You were quite justified," she said--"not only by circumstantial
evidence but to a degree in fact. You must know ... now I must tell you
..."

"Nothing you don't wish to!" he interrupted. "The fact that I
practically kidnapped you under pretence of doing you a service, and
suspected you of being in the pay of that Pack, gives me no title to
your confidence."

"Can I blame you for thinking what you did?" She went on slowly,
without looking up--gaze steadfast to her interlaced fingers: "Now for
my own sake I want you to know what otherwise, perhaps, I shouldn't
have told you--not yet, at all events. I'm no more Bannon's daughter
than you're his son. Our names sound alike--people frequently make the
same mistake. My name is Shannon--Lucy Shannon. Mr. Bannon called me
Lucia because he knew I didn't like it, to tease me; for the same
reason he always kept up the pretence that I was his daughter when
people misunderstood."

"But--if that is so--then what--?"

"Why--it's very simple." Still she didn't look up. "I'm a trained
nurse. Mr. Bannon is consumptive--so far gone, it's a wonder he didn't
die years ago: for months I've been haunted by the thought that it's
only the evil in him keeps him alive. It wasn't long after I took the
assignment to nurse him that I found out something about him.... He'd
had a haemorrhage at his desk; and while he lay in coma, and I was
waiting for the doctor, I happened to notice one of the papers he'd
been working over when he fell. And then, just as I began to appreciate
the sort of man I was employed by, he came to, and saw--and knew. I
found him watching me with those dreadful eyes of his, and though he
was unable to speak, knew my life wasn't safe if ever I breathed a word
of what I had read. I would have left him then, but he was too cunning
for me, and when in time I found a chance to escape--I was afraid I'd
not live long if ever I left him. He went about it deliberately; to
keep me frightened, and though he never mentioned the matter directly,
let me know plainly, in a hundred ways, what his power was and what
would happen if I whispered a word of what I knew. It's nearly a year
now--nearly a year of endless terror and..."

Her voice fell; she was trembling with the recrudescent suffering of
that year-long servitude. And for a little Lanyard felt too profoundly
moved to trust himself to speak; he stood aghast, staring down at this
woman, so intrinsically and gently feminine, so strangely strong and
courageous; and vaguely envisaging what anguish must have been hers in
enforced association with a creature of Bannon's ruthless stamp, he was
rent with compassion and swore to himself he'd stand by her and see her
through and free and happy if he died for it--or ended in the Santé!

"Poor child!" he heard himself murmuring--"poor child!"

"Don't pity me!" she insisted, still with face averted. "I don't
deserve it. If I had the spirit of a mouse, I'd have defied him; it
needed only courage enough to say one word to the police--"

"But who is he, then?" Lanyard demanded. "What is he, I mean?"

"I hardly know how to tell you. And I hardly dare: I feel as if these
walls would betray me if I did.... But to me he's the incarnation of
all things evil...." She shook herself with a nervous laugh. "But why
be silly about it? I don't really k

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