“The position is this. The President of Power B has an overwhelming desire to have his photograph taken by Clarence Mulliner. Consent to take it, and our difficulties will be at an end. Overcome with gratitude, he will sign the treaty, and the Anglo-Saxon race will be safe.”
Clarence did not hesitate. Apart from the natural gratification of feeling that he was doing the Anglo-Saxon race a bit of good, business was business; and if the President took a dozen of the large size finished in silver wash it would mean a nice profit.
“I shall be delighted,” he said.
“Your patriotism,” said the visitor, “will not go unrewarded. It will be gratefully noted in the Very Highest Circles.”
Clarence reached for his appointment-book.
“Now, let me see. Wednesday?—No, I’m full up Wednesday. Thursday?—No. Suppose the President looks in at my studio between four and five on Friday?”
The visitor uttered a gasp.
“Good heavens, Mr. Mulliner,” he exclaimed, “surely you do not imagine that, with the vast issues at stake, these things can be done openly and in daylight? If the devils in the pay of Power A were to learn that the President intended to have his photograph taken by you, I would not give a straw for your chances of living an hour.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
“You must accompany me now to the President’s suite at the Milan Hotel. We shall travel in a closed car, and God send that these fiends did not recognize me as I came here. If they did, we shall never reach that car alive. Have you, by any chance, while we have been talking, heard the hoot of an owl?”
“No,” said Clarence. “No owls.”
“Then perhaps they are nowhere near. The fiends always imitate the hoot of an owl.”
“A thing,” said Clarence, “which I tried to do when I was a small boy and never seemed able to manage. The popular idea that owls say ‘Tu-whit, tu-whoo’ is all wrong. The actual noise they make is something far more difficult and complex, and it was beyond me.”
“Quite so.” The visitor looked at his watch. “However, absorbing as these reminiscences of your boyhood days are, time is flying. Shall we be making a start?”
“Certainly.”
“Then follow me.”
It appeared to be holiday-time for fiends, or else the night-shift had not yet come on, for they reached the car without being molested. Clarence stepped in, and his masked visitor, after a keen look up and down the street, followed him.
“Talking of my boyhood—” began Clarence.
The sentence was never completed. A soft wet pad was pressed over his nostrils: the air became a-reek with the sickly fumes of chloroform: and Clarence knew no more.
When he came to, he was no longer in the car. He found himself lying on a bed in a room in a strange house. It was a medium-sized room with scarlet wallpaper, simply furnished with a wash-hand stand, a chest of drawers, two cane-bottomed chairs, and a “God Bless Our Home” motto framed in oak. He was conscious of a severe headache, and was about to rise and make for the water-bottle on the washstand when, to his consternation, he discovered that his arms and legs were shackled with stout cord.
As a family, the Mulliners have always been noted for their reckless courage; and Clarence was no exception to the rule. But for an instant his heart undeniably beat a little faster. He saw now that his masked visitor had tricked him. Instead of being a representative of His Majesty’s Diplomatic Service (a most respectable class of men), he had really been all along a fiend in the pay of Power A.
No doubt he and his vile associates were even now chuckling at the ease with which their victim had been duped. Clarence gritted his teeth and struggled vainly to loose the knots which secured his wrists. He had fallen back exhausted when he heard the sound of a key turning and the door opened. Somebody crossed the room and stood by the bed, looking down on him.
The newcomer was a stout man with a complexion that matched the wallpaper. He was puffing slightly, as if he had found the stairs trying. He had broad, slab-like features; and his face was split in the middle by a walrus moustache. Somewhere and in some place, Clarence was convinced, he had seen this man before.
And then it all came back to him. An open window with a pleasant summer breeze blowing in; a stout man in a cocked hat trying to climb through this window; and he, Clarence, doing his best to help him with the sharp end of a tripod. It was Jno. Horatio Biggs, the Mayor of Tooting East.
A shudder of loathing ran through Clarence.
“Traitor!” he cried.
“Eh?” said the Mayor.
“If anybody had told me that a son of Tooting, nursed in the keen air of freedom which blows across the Common, would sell himself for gold to the enemies of his country, I would never have believed it. Well, you may tell your employers—”
“What employers?”
“Power A.”
“Oh, that?” said the Mayor. “I am afraid my secretary, whom I instructed to bring you to this house, was obliged to romance a little in order to ensure your accompanying him, Mr. Mulliner. All that about Power A and Power B was just his little joke. If you want to know why you were brought here—”
Clarence uttered a low groan.
“I have guessed your ghastly object, you ghastly object,” he said quietly. “You want me to photograph you.”
The Mayor shook his head.
“Not myself. I realize that that can never be. My daughter.”
“Your daughter?”
“My daughter.”
“Does she take after you?”
“People tell me there is a resemblance.”
“I refuse,” said Clarence.
“Think well, Mr. Mulliner.”
“I have done all the thinking that is necessary. England—or, rather, Great Britain—looks to me to photograph only her fairest and loveliest; and though, as a man, I admit that I loathe beautiful women, as a photographer I have a duty to consider that is higher than any personal feelings. History has yet to record
