“Anything wrong, sir?” asked the electrician daringly.
“Nothing,” was the sharp reply. “Finish your work, refix these globes, and go.”
The electrician, ill-satisfied and curious, looked at the floating box and the broken length of wire.
“Curious-looking thing, sir,” he said. “If you ask me—”
“I don’t ask you anything; finish your work,” the great journalist interrupted.
“Beg pardon, I’m sure,” said the apologetic artisan.
Half an hour later the editor of the Megaphone sat discussing the situation with Welby. Welby, who is the greatest foreign editor in London, grinned amiably and drawled his astonishment.
“I have always believed that these chaps meant business,” he said cheerfully, “and what is more, I feel pretty certain that they will keep their promise. When I was in Genoa”—Welby got much of his information first hand—“when I was in Genoa—or was it Sofia?—I met a man who told me about the Trelovitch affair. He was one of the men who assassinated the King of Serbia, you remember. Well, one night he left his quarters to visit a theatre—the same night he was found dead in the public square with a sword thrust through his heart. There were two extraordinary things about it.” The foreign editor ticked them off on his fingers. “First, the general was a noted swordsman, and there was every evidence that he had not been killed in cold blood, but had been killed in a duel; the second was that he wore corsets, as many of these Germanized officers do, and one of his assailants had discovered this fact, probably by a sword thrust, and had made him discard them; at any rate when he was found this frippery was discovered close by his body.”
“Was it known at the time that it was the work of the Four?” asked the editor.
Welby shook his head.
“Even I had never heard of them before,” he said resentfully. Then he asked, “What have you done about your little scare?”
“I’ve seen the hall porters and the messengers, and every man on duty at the time, but the coming and the going of our mysterious friend—I don’t suppose there was more than one—is unexplained. It really is a remarkable thing. Do you know, Welby, it gives me quite an uncanny feeling; the gum on the envelope was still wet; the letter must have been written on the premises and sealed down within a few seconds of my entering the room.”
“Were the windows open?”
“No; all three were shut and fastened, and it would have been impossible to enter the room that way.”
The detective who came to receive a report of the circumstances endorsed this opinion.
“The man who wrote this letter must have left your room not longer than a minute before you arrived,” he concluded, and took charge of the letter.
Being a young and enthusiastic detective, before finishing his investigations he made a most minute search of the room, turning up carpets, tapping walls, inspecting cupboards, and taking laborious and unnecessary measurements with a foot-rule.
“There are a lot of our chaps who sneer at detective stories,” he explained to the amused editor, “but I have read almost everything that has been written by Gaboriau and Conan Doyle, and I believe in taking notice of little things. There wasn’t any cigar ash or anything of that sort left behind, was there?” he asked, wistfully.
“I’m afraid not,” said the editor, gravely.
“Pity,” said the detective, and wrapping up the “infernal machine” and its appurtenances, he took his departure.
Afterwards the editor informed Welby that the disciple of Holmes had spent half an hour with a magnifying glass examining the floor.
“He found half a sovereign that I lost weeks ago, so it’s really an ill wind—”
All that evening nobody but Welby and the chief knew what had happened in the editor’s rooms. There was some rumour in the subeditor’s department that a small accident had occurred in the sanctum.
“Chief busted a fuse in his room and got a devil of a fright,” said the man who attended to the shipping list.
“Dear me,” said the weather expert, looking up from his chart, “do you know something like that happened to me; the other night—”
The chief had directed a few firm words to the detective before his departure.
“Only you and myself know anything about this occurrence,” said the editor, “so if it gets out I shall know it comes from Scotland Yard.”
“You may be sure nothing will come from us,” was the detective’s reply; “we’ve got into too much hot water already.”
“That’s good,” said the editor, and “that’s good” sounded like a threat.
So that Welby and the chief kept the matter a secret till half an hour before the paper went to press. This may seem to the layman an extraordinary circumstance, but experience has shown most men who control newspapers that news has an unlucky knack of leaking out before it appears in type. Wicked compositors—and even compositors can be wicked—have been known to screw up copies of important and exclusive news and to throw them out of a convenient window, where they have fallen close to a patient man standing in the street below and have been immediately hurried off to the office of a rival newspaper and sold for more than their weight in gold. Such cases have been known.
But at half-past eleven the buzzing hive of Megaphone House began to hum, for then it was that the subeditors learnt for the first time of the “outrage.”
It was a great story—still another Megaphone scoop, headlined half down the page with “The ‘Just Four’ again—Outrage at the office of the Megaphone—Devilish Ingenuity—Another Threatening Letter—The Four Will Keep Their Promise—Remarkable Document—Will the Police Save Sir Philip Ramon?”
“A very good story,” said the chief complacently, reading the proofs. He was preparing to leave, and was speaking to Welby by the door.
“Not bad,” said the discriminating Welby. “What I think—hullo!”
The last was addressed to a messenger who appeared with a stranger.
“Gentleman wants to speak to somebody, sir—bit excited, so I brought him up; he’s a
