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embosomed was approached by a flight of marble steps, flanked by gilded nymphs
and tritons. Down these steps ran an active young man with black hair, a snub
nose, and a flower in his buttonhole, who seized him and drew him aside before
he could ascend the stair.
 I say, whispered the young man,  I m Potter old Gid s secretary, you know:
now, between ourselves, there is a sort of a thunderbolt being forged, isn t
there, now?
 I came to the conclusion, replied Byrne cautiously,  that the Cyclops had
something on the anvil. But always remember that the Cyclops is a giant, but
he has only one eye. I think Bolshevism is 
While he was speaking the secretary listened with a face that had a certain
almost Mongolian immobility, despite the liveliness of his legs and his
attire. But when Byrne said the word  Bolshevism , the young man s sharp eyes
shifted and he said quickly:
 What has that oh yes, that sort of thunderbolt; so sorry, my mistake. So
easy to say anvil when you mean ice-box.
With which the extraordinary young man disappeared down the steps and Byrne
continued to mount them, more and more mystification clouding his mind.
He found the group of three augmented to four by the presence of a
hatchet-faced person with very thin straw-colored hair and a monocle, who
appeared to be a sort of adviser to old Gallup, possibly his solicitor, though
he was not definitely so called. His name was Nares, and the questions which
he directed towards Byrne referred chiefly, for some reason or other, to the
number of those probably enrolled in the revolutionary organization. Of this,
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as Byrne knew little, he said less; and the four men eventually rose from
their seats, the last word being with the man who had been most silent.
 Thank you, Mr. Byrne, said Stein, folding up his eyeglasses.  It only
remains to say that everything is ready; on that point I quite agree with Mr.
Elias. Tomorrow, before noon, the police will have arrested Mr. Elias, on
evidence I shall by then have put before them, and those three at least will
be in jail before night. As you know, I attempted to avoid this course. I
think that is all, gentlemen.
But Mr. Jacob P. Stein did not lay his formal information next day, for a
reason that has often interrupted the activities of such industrious
characters. He did not do it because he happened to be dead; and none of the
rest of the program was carried out, for a reason which Byrne found displayed
in gigantic letters when he opened his morning paper:  Terrific Triple Murder:
Three Millionaires Slain in One Night. Other exclamatory phrases followed in
smaller letters, only about four times the size of normal type, which insisted
on the special feature of the mystery: the fact that the three men had been
killed not only simultaneously but in three widely separated places Stein in
his artistic and luxurious country seat a hundred miles inland, Wise outside
the little bungalow on the coast where he lived on sea breezes and the simple
life, and old Gallup in a thicket just outside the lodge-gates of his great
house at the other end of the county. In all three cases there could be no
doubt about the scenes of violence that had preceded death, though the actual
body of Gallup was not found till the second day, where it hung, huge and
horrible, amid the broken forks and branches of the little wood into which its
weight had crashed, like a bison rushing on the spears: while Wise had clearly
been flung over the cliff into the sea, not without a struggle, for his
scraping and slipping footprints could still be traced upon the very brink.
But the first signal of the tragedy had been the sight of his large limp straw
hat, floating far out upon the waves and conspicuous from the cliffs above.
Stein s body also had at first eluded search, till a faint trail of blood led
the investigators to a bath on the ancient Roman model he had been
constructing in his garden; for he had been a man of an experimental turn of
mind with a taste for antiquities.
Whatever he might think, Byrne was bound to admit that there was no legal
evidence against anybody as things stood. A motive for murder was not enough.
Even a moral aptitude for murder was not enough. And he could not conceive
that pale young pacifist, Henry Home, butchering another man by brutal
violence, though he might imagine the blaspheming Jake and even the sneering
Jew as capable of anything. The police, and the man who appeared to be
assisting them (who was no other than the rather mysterious man with the
monocle, who had been introduced as Mr. Nares), realized the position quite as
clearly as the journalist.
They knew that at the moment the Bolshevist conspirators could not be
prosecuted and convicted, and that it would be a highly sensational failure if
they were prosecuted and acquitted. Nares started with an artful candor by
calling them in some sense to the council, inviting them to a private conclave [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]