He laughed.
“You are in a cleft stick, my little friend, and if you take my tip you will stick to the friends who know you.”
He laughed again.
“Suppose I come down into Spain and burgle your house—” her eyes lit up—“and I would do it! Or, suppose, when you have—settled down—and when you have all deposited your symbols of success in your banks, I planned a little coup and smashed your banks? I could do it easily and I would do it,” she said. “What would you do?”
Their faces were a study. The Colonel was stroking his white moustache. Francis Stockmar was scowling horribly. Mr. Cunningham was staring blankly at the opposite wall.
“Naturally you would not play such a low-down trick upon your old friends,” said the Colonel soothingly; “nobody believes you would, Kate. I mean, it would be tragic for some of us, after spending years of our lives accumulating a little nest egg to find we had become beggars in a night. Of course, speaking personally, I should consider myself exonerated from any responsibility I had in regard to our relationship and I should have to tell the police—”
“You would call the police, too, would you? Would you, Stockmar?”
“Yas,” said the stolid Austrian, “of goorse. The mooney to recover, ain’t it?”
“And you?”
“I don’t think you would do anything so treacherous,” said Mr. Cunningham; “naturally, we would not take that sort of thing lying down.”
“Naturally,” said Colling Jacques, “the whole matter is this, when we go back to the respectable world and obey the laws, we, as citizens, are entitled to the protection which the laws give us.”
“I see. You are, so to speak, touching wood. The wood is the law.”
“That is it,” he said.
Kate got up and walked to the one window of the room and looked out upon the dreary yard with its tangle of twisted machinery, its rusted boilers, its chaos of rotting cement bags.
“Well, you can all do as you like,” she turned on them, “but I tell you this, that if you think you are going to—settle down—at my expense, and if you think I have been planning and scheming and playacting and lying in order that you might all become respected parish councillors, you have made a mistake. You talk about my friends, if you are my friends, God help me! There is one man in the world who is worth the whole crowd of you.”
She was interrupted by a crash as though a heavy body had been thrown against a door. Somebody fumbled with the lock and Gregori jumped up and threw it open. They half carried, half pushed a gagged and bound man through the doorway. Behind him peered the saturnine, malignant face of his captor, Doctor Garon.
“Got him,” he said triumphantly.
“Who is it?” asked Gregori, staring at the half conscious man.
The girl did not ask. She went suddenly cold, for she knew it was Michael Pretherston.
XVII
The Independent Strategy of Señor Gregori
It is a fact worth remarking upon, that in all her career, though she had been associated with the most desperate of criminals, and though she had been surrounded on all sides by men who would stop at nothing to gain their ends, Kate had never witnessed an act of violence. Such arrests of members of the confederation as she had seen had been very humdrum affairs. The arrival of two strangers, a consultation carried on in a low tone by a pleasant detective officer, an urgent call to somebody to “get my hat” and the disappearance, very often for a long time, of the member affected. She had never seen a fellow creature manhandled nor did she believe that there was in her confederates the tigerish malignity which was now displayed. She looked from face to face in amazement and horror as they crowded round the handcuffed figure and flung him into a chair.
Michael had been choked to insensibility at the first attack. With the loosening of the rope, he had recovered consciousness and put up a fight, and had been hammered back to insensibility by the three men who had watched him from the moment he had crossed the open ground to the east of the railway, and had lain in wait for him. They had manacled him with his own handcuffs. This he realized, as he came back to consciousness, with his head throbbing and every bone in his body aching.
He leant his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands, striving to collect his thoughts. It was the cold steel of the handcuff against his nose which was the starting point from whence he unravelled the situation. The blow which had felled him had fortunately been broken by his soft felt hat and he raised his hand and gingerly felt the bump which Dr. Garon’s loaded cane had raised.
“Now then, wake up,” said Gregori’s voice roughly, “let’s have a look at you.”
Michael raised his head and looked at the speaker.
“Hello, Gregori,” he said dully. He looked round the room and caught the girl’s eyes and for a moment held them.
“You seem to have tumbled into it, my young friend,” said Colonel Westhanger.
Michael slowly shifted his eyes to the speaker and smiled.
“We all seem to have tumbled into it, you worse than anybody. This means a life sentence for you, Colonel.”
The old man’s face went white.
“It is only bluff,” said Garon; “he is here by himself. I have been watching him for an hour. You tried to pull off the job on your lonely!”
“Alone,” said the Colonel and the girl watching him saw his face go hard. “Alone! Are you sure?”
“Absolutely sure,” said the doctor.
He sat straddle-legged on a chair leaning on the back and puffing the cigar he had just lighted.
“It
