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or among gentry in red shirts? Maybe you're rubbing shoulders

with it at this moment.'

'That's what Kipling says,' he said, his eyes brightening, and he

quoted some verse about 'Romance bringing up the 9.15'.

'Here's a true tale for you then,' I cried, 'and a month from now

you can make a novel out of it.'

Sitting on the bridge in the soft May gloaming I pitched him a

lovely yarn. It was true in essentials, too, though I altered the

minor details. I made out that I was a mining magnate from Kimberley,

who had had a lot of trouble with I.D.B. and had shown up a gang.

They had pursued me across the ocean, and had killed my best friend, and

were now on my tracks.

I told the story well, though I say it who shouldn't. I pictured a

flight across the Kalahari to German Africa, the crackling, parching

days, the wonderful blue-velvet nights. I described an attack on my

life on the voyage home, and I made a really horrid affair of the

Portland Place murder. 'You're looking for adventure,' I cried;

'well, you've found it here. The devils are after me, and the police

are after them. It's a race that I mean to win.'

'By God!' he whispered, drawing his breath in sharply, 'it is all

pure Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.'

'You believe me,' I said gratefully.

'Of course I do,' and he held out his hand. 'I believe everything

out of the common. The only thing to distrust is the normal.'

He was very young, but he was the man for my money.

'I think they're off my track for the moment, but I must lie close

for a couple of days. Can you take me in?'

He caught my elbow in his eagerness and drew me towards the

house. 'You can lie as snug here as if you were in a moss-hole. I'll

see that nobody blabs, either. And you'll give me some more

material about your adventures?'

As I entered the inn porch I heard from far off the beat of an

engine. There silhouetted against the dusky West was my friend,

the monoplane.

He gave me a room at the back of the house, with a fine outlook

over the plateau, and he made me free of his own study, which was

stacked with cheap editions of his favourite authors. I never saw the

grandmother, so I guessed she was bedridden. An old woman called

Margit brought me my meals, and the innkeeper was around me at

all hours. I wanted some time to myself, so I invented a job for him.

He had a motor-bicycle, and I sent him off next morning for the daily

paper, which usually arrived with the post in the late afternoon. I

told him to keep his eyes skinned, and make note of any strange

figures he saw, keeping a special sharp look-out for motors and

aeroplanes. Then I sat down in real earnest to Scudder's note-book.

He came back at midday with the SCOTSMAN. There was nothing in

it, except some further evidence of Paddock and the milkman, and a

repetition of yesterday's statement that the murderer had gone

North. But there was a long article, reprinted from THE TIMES, about

Karolides and the state of affairs in the Balkans, though there was no

mention of any visit to England. I got rid of the innkeeper for the

afternoon, for I was getting very warm in my search for the cypher.

As I told you, it was a numerical cypher, and by an elaborate

system of experiments I had pretty well discovered what were the

nulls and stops. The trouble was the key word, and when I thought

of the odd million words he might have used I felt pretty hopeless.

But about three o'clock I had a sudden inspiration.

The name Julia Czechenyi flashed across my memory. Scudder

had said it was the key to the Karolides business, and it occurred to

me to try it on his cypher.

It worked. The five letters of 'Julia' gave me the position of the

vowels. A was J, the tenth letter of the alphabet, and so represented

by X in the cypher. E was XXI, and so on. 'Czechenyi' gave

me the numerals for the principal consonants. I scribbled that

scheme on a bit of paper and sat down to read Scudder's pages.

In half an hour I was reading with a whitish face and fingers that

drummed on the table.

I glanced out of the window and saw a big touring-car coming

up the glen towards the inn. It drew up at the door, and there was

the sound of people alighting. There seemed to be two of them,

men in aquascutums and tweed caps.

Ten minutes later the innkeeper slipped into the room, his eyes

bright with excitement.

'There's two chaps below looking for you,' he whispered.

'They're in the dining-room having whiskies-and-sodas. They asked

about you and said they had hoped to meet you here. Oh! and they

described you jolly well, down to your boots and shirt. I told them

you had been here last night and had gone off on a motor bicycle

this morning, and one of the chaps swore like a navvy.'

I made him tell me what they looked like. One was a dark-eyed

thin fellow with bushy eyebrows, the other was always smiling and

lisped in his talk. Neither was any kind of foreigner; on this my

young friend was positive.

I took a bit of paper and wrote these words in German as if they

were part of a letter -

... 'Black Stone. Scudder had got on to this, but he could not

act for a fortnight. I doubt if I can do any good now, especially

as Karolides is uncertain about his plans. But if Mr T. advises

I will do the best I ...'

I manufactured it rather neatly, so that it looked like a loose page

of a private letter.

'Take this down and say it was found in my bedroom, and ask

them to return it to me if they overtake me.'

Three minutes later I heard the car begin to move, and peeping

from behind the curtain caught sight of the two figures. One was

slim, the other was sleek; that was the most I could make of my

reconnaissance.

The innkeeper appeared in great excitement. 'Your paper woke

them up,' he said gleefully. 'The dark fellow went as white as death

and cursed like blazes, and the fat one whistled and looked ugly.

They paid for their drinks with half-a-sovereign and wouldn't wait

for change.'

'Now I'll tell you what I want you to do,' I said. 'Get on your

bicycle and go off to Newton-Stewart to the Chief Constable. Describe

the two men, and say you suspect them of having had something to do

with the London murder. You can invent reasons. The two will come back,

never fear. Not tonight, for they'll follow me forty miles along the

road, but first thing tomorrow morning. Tell the police to be here

bright and early.'

He set off like a docile child, while I worked at Scudder's notes.

When he came back we dined together, and in common decency I

had to let him pump me. I gave him a lot of stuff about lion hunts

and the Matabele War, thinking all the while what tame businesses

these were compared to this I was now engaged in! When he went

to bed I sat up and finished Scudder. I smoked in a chair till

daylight, for I could not sleep.

About eight next morning I witnessed the arrival of two

constables and a sergeant. They put their car in a coach-house under the

innkeeper's instructions, and entered the house. Twenty minutes

later I saw from my window a second car come across the plateau

from the opposite direction. It did not come up to the inn, but

stopped two hundred yards off in the shelter of a patch of wood. I

noticed that its occupants carefully reversed it before leaving it. A

minute or two later I heard their steps on the gravel outside the window.

My plan had been to lie hid in my bedroom, and see what

happened. I had a notion that, if I could bring the police and my

other more dangerous pursuers together, something might work

out of it to my advantage. But now I had a better idea. I scribbled a

line of thanks to my host, opened the window, and dropped quietly

into a gooseberry bush. Unobserved I crossed the dyke, crawled

down the side of a tributary burn, and won the highroad on the far

side of the patch of trees. There stood the car, very spick and span

in the morning sunlight, but with the dust on her which told of a

long journey. I started her, jumped into the chauffeur's seat, and

stole gently out on to the plateau.

Almost at once the road dipped so that I lost sight of the inn,

but the wind seemed to bring me the sound of angry voices.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Adventure of the Radical Candidate

You may picture me driving that 40 h.p. car for all she was worth

over the crisp moor roads on that shining May morning; glancing

back at first over my shoulder, and looking anxiously to the next

turning; then driving with a vague eye, just wide enough awake to

keep on the highway. For I was thinking desperately of what I had

found in Scudder's pocket-book.

The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the

Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference

were eyewash, and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you

shall hear. I had staked everything on my belief in his story, and

had been let down; here was his book telling me a different tale,

and instead of being once-bitten-twice-shy, I believed it absolutely.

Why, I don't know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn, if

you understand me, had been in a queer way true also in spirit. The

fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger

destiny than the killing of a Dago. It was so big that I didn't blame

Scudder for keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone

hand. That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me

something which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so

immortally big that he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all

for himself. I didn't blame him. It was risks after all that he was

chiefly greedy about.

The whole story was in the notes - with gaps, you understand,

which he would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down

his authorities, too, and had an odd trick of giving them all a

numerical value and then striking a balance, which stood for the

reliability of each stage in the yarn. The four names he had printed

were authorities, and there was a man, Ducrosne, who got five out

of a possible five; and another fellow, Ammersfoort, who got three.

The bare bones of the tale were all that was in the book - these,

and one queer phrase which occurred half a dozen times inside

brackets. '(Thirty-nine steps)' was the phrase; and at its last time of

use it ran - '(Thirty-nine steps, I counted them - high tide 10.17

p.m.)'. I could make nothing of that.

The first thing I learned was that it was no question of preventing

a war. That was coming, as sure as Christmas: had been arranged,

said Scudder, ever since February 1912. Karolides was going to be

the occasion. He was booked all right, and was to hand in his

checks on June 14th, two weeks and four days from that May

morning. I gathered from Scudder's notes that nothing on earth

could prevent that. His talk of Epirote guards that would skin their

own grandmothers was all billy-o.

The second thing was that this war was going to come as a

mighty surprise to Britain. Karolides' death would set the Balkans

by the ears, and then Vienna would chip in with an ultimatum.

Russia wouldn't like that, and there would be high words. But

Berlin would play the peacemaker, and pour oil on the waters, till

suddenly she would find a good cause for a quarrel, pick it up, and

in five hours let fly at us. That was the idea, and a pretty good one

too. Honey and fair speeches, and then a stroke in the dark. While

we were talking about the goodwill and good intentions of Germany

our coast would be silently ringed with mines, and submarines

would be waiting for every battleship.

But all this depended upon the third thing, which was due to

happen on June 15th. I would never have grasped this if I hadn't

once happened to meet a French staff officer, coming back from

West Africa, who had told me a lot of things. One was that, in

spite of all the nonsense talked in Parliament, there was a real

working alliance between France and Britain, and that the two

General Staffs met every now and then, and made plans for joint

action in case of war. Well, in June a very great swell was coming

over from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less than a

statement of the disposition of the British Home Fleet on mobilization.

At least I gathered it was something like that; anyhow, it was

something uncommonly important.

But on the 15th day of June there were to be others in London -

others, at whom I could only guess. Scudder was content to call

them collectively the 'Black Stone'. They represented not our Allies,

but our deadly foes; and the information, destined for France, was

to be diverted to their pockets. And it was to be used, remember -

used a week or two later, with great guns and swift torpedoes,

suddenly in the darkness of a summer night.

This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a

country inn, overlooking a cabbage garden. This was the story that

hummed in my brain as I swung in the big touring-car from glen to glen.

My first impulse had been to write a letter to the Prime Minister,

but a little reflection convinced me that that would be useless. Who

would believe my tale? I must show a sign, some token in proof,

and Heaven knew what that could be. Above all, I must keep going

myself, ready to act when things got riper, and that was going to be

no light job with the police of the British Isles in full cry after me

and the watchers of the Black Stone running silently and swiftly on

my trail.

I had no very clear purpose in my journey, but I steered east by

the sun, for I remembered from the map that if I went north I

would come into a region of coalpits and industrial towns. Presently