BOOK III. OLIFA 307

EPILOGUE 397

MAPS

I. THE REPUBLIC OF OLIFA _End-papers_
II. THE EASTERN PASSES _p._ 338
III. THE GRAN SECO RAILWAY _p._ 358

PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE BY SIR RICHARD HANNAY

I

This story begins, so far as I am concerned, in the August
of 192–, when I had for the second time a lease of the
forest of Machray. Mary and Peter John and the household
had gone north at the end of July, but I was detained for
ten days in London over the business of a Rhodesian land
company, of which I had recently become chairman. I was
putting up at my club, and one morning I was rung up by
Ellery Willis of the American Embassy, who had been
wiring about me all over the country. He seemed to be in
a hurry to see me, so I asked him to luncheon.

I had known Willis in the War, when he had had a field
battery with the American 2nd Corps. After that he had
been on the Headquarters Staff at Washington, and was
now a military attaché at the London Embassy. He seemed
to have a good many duties besides the study of military
affairs, and when I met him he was always discoursing
about world-politics and the need of England and America
getting close to each other. I agreed with him about that,
but used to tell him that the best way was not to talk too
much, but to send Englishmen and Americans fishing
together. He was an ardent, rather solemn young man, but
with a quick sense of humour, and Mary said he was the
best dancer in London.

He cut at once into business.

“You are a friend of Mr Blenkiron’s–John S. Blenkiron,”
he said. “I want to know if you have heard from
him lately?”

“Not for months,” I said. “Blenkiron was never a
regular correspondent, and the fount has dried up since last
December.”

He looked grave. “That’s bad,” he said.

“There’s nothing wrong?” I asked anxiously.

“Only that nobody knows what has become of him.”

“But that was always the old ruffian’s way. He likes to
cover his tracks, like Providence, and turn up suddenly when
he is not expected. There’s a lot of the child in him.”

Willis shook his head. “I expect there’s more to it this
time than that. I’ll tell you what we know. He made a
dive back into Wall Street last fall, and did some big things
in electrolytic zinc. Then he went to Santa Catalina, and
returned to New York in the second week of January. On
the 27th day of that month he sailed for Panama in a fruit-steamer,
having previously shut up his office and wound up
his affairs as if he were thinking of his decease. From
that day no one has clapped eyes on him. He has nothing
in the way of family life, but I needn’t tell you that he has
plenty of friends, and they are beginning to get anxious. All
that we can find out is that last March a little Jew man
turned up in New York with an order from Mr Blenkiron
for a quarter of a million dollars. It was all right, and the
money was handed over, and the shape it took was a draft
on Valparaiso to be paid after countersignature by our
consul there. We got in touch with the consul, and heard
that the money had been collected on Mr Blenkiron’s instructions
by some fellow with a Spanish name.”

“That sounds queer,” I said.

“It certainly does. But there’s something queerer still.
In June Mr Neston of the Treasury got a letter–he had been
a business associate of Mr Blenkiron’s at one time and they
used to go bass-fishing in Minnesota. It didn’t come by
mail, but was handed in one evening at Mr Neston’s private
residence. It bore no name, but there could be no doubt it
was from Mr Blenkiron. I have seen a copy of it with
Mr Neston’s commentary, and I can tell you it was great
stuff. The writer warned his old friend that there might
be trouble brewing in certain parts of the world which he
did not specify, and he begged him, as he was a good
American, to keep his eyes skinned. He also said that he, the
writer, might have to ask some day soon for help, and that
he counted on getting it. The funny thing was that the
letter was in a kind of cypher. I understand that Mr Blenkiron
used to write to his friends in a high-coloured version
of our national slang, and that he had a good many private
expressions that were Choctaw to those that did not know
him. That letter might have been read as the perfectly
natural expression of a light-headed American, who had
been having too many cocktails and was writing drivel about
his health and his habits and the fine weather. But,
knowing how to construe it, it made Mr Neston sit up and
take notice. . . . There was another thing. I have said
that the letter had no name, but it was signed all the same.
It seems that in any very important and intimate communication
Mr Blenkiron used to make a hieroglyphic of his
surname and stick J. S. after it in brackets. That was
meant to be a kind of S.O.S. to his friends that the thing
was mighty important. Well, this letter had the hieroglyphic
in three places, scrawled in as if the writer had been
playing absent-mindedly with his pen. Mr Neston’s conclusion
was that Mr Blenkiron had written it in some place
where he was not allowed to communicate freely, and might
be in considerable danger.”

I admitted that it looked like it, and said that if Blenkiron
had been captured by bandits and held up to ransom, I could
vouch for it, from what I knew of him, that his captors had
done the worst day’s work of their lives. I asked what
his Government was doing about it.

“Nothing official,” said Willis, “for we are in this
difficulty. We are afraid of spoiling Mr Blenkiron’s game,
whatever it may be. Washington has a very high respect
for his talents, and we should hate to cross him by being
officious. All the same, we are anxious, and that is why
I have come to you.”

He proceeded to give me one of his lectures on international
affairs. America, by his way of it, was in a delicate
position, in spite of being rich enough to buy up the globe.
She was trying to set her house in order, and it was a large-sized
job, owing to the melting-pot not properly melting
but leaving chunks of undigested matter. That was the
real reason why she could not take a big hand in
world-affairs–the League of Nations and so forth; she had too
much to do at home, and wanted all her energies for it.
That was the reason, too, why she was so set on prohibition
of all kinds–drink, drugs, and aliens. But her hand might
be forced, if anything went wrong in the American continent
itself, because of her Monroe Doctrine. She didn’t want
any foreign complications at the moment. They would be
very awkward for her, and possibly very dangerous, and
she would resolutely keep out of them, unless they occurred,
so to speak, opposite her front yard, in which case she would
be bound to intervene. Therefore, if anyone wanted to do
her the worst kind of turn, he would stir up trouble in some
place like South America. Willis believed that Blenkiron
had got on the track of something of the kind, and was trying
to warn her.

That sounded reasonable enough, but what was not reasonable
was Willis’s straight request that I should put on my
boots and go and look for him. “We can’t do anything
officially,” he repeated. “An American would be suspected
where an Englishman would get through. Besides, I
believe you are his closest friend.”

Of course I at once disabused him of that notion. I knew
old Blenkiron too well to be nervous about him; he could no
more be badly lost than Ulysses. I saw Willis’s point about
American politics, but they were no concern of mine. I told
him in so many words that my travelling days were over,
that I was a landowner and a married man and the father
of a son, with all sorts of prior duties. But he was so
downcast at my refusal, and so earnest that something
should be done, that I promised to put the matter before
Sandy Arbuthnot. I proposed in any case to go to Laverlaw
for a couple of days on my way to Machray.

II

Laverlaw is a very good imitation of the end of the world.
You alight at a wayside station in a Border valley, and drive
for eight miles up a tributary glen between high green hills;
then, when the stream has grown small and you think that
the glen must stop, it suddenly opens into an upland paradise–an
amphitheatre of turf and woodland which is the park,
and in the heart of it an old stone castle. The keep was
once a peel-tower, famous in a hundred ballads, and the house
which had grown round dated mostly from the sixteenth
century. I had never been there before, for the old Lord
Clanroyden had lived sick and solitary for years, and Sandy
had only succeeded in the previous February. When I
arrived in the early gloaming, with that green cup swimming
in amber light and the bell-heather on the high ground
smouldering in the sunset, I had to rub my eyes to make sure
that the place was not a dream. I thought it the right kind of
home for Sandy, a fairy-tale fortress lying secret in the hills,
from which he could descend to colour the prose of the world.

Sandy met me at the gates and made me get out of the
car and walk the rest of the way with him. In his shocking
old tweeds, with his lithe figure, his girlish colouring, and
his steady, glowing eyes, he fitted well into that
fantastic landscape. You could see that he was glad to
have me there, and he made me welcome with all his old
warmth, but in the half-mile walk I felt a subtle change in
him. His talk didn’t bubble over as it used to, and I had a
feeling that he was rather making conversation. I wondered
if being a peer and a landowner and that sort of thing had
sobered him, but I promptly dismissed the idea. I wasn’t
prepared to believe that external circumstances could have
any effect on one who had about as much worldliness as a
fakir with his begging-bowl.

All the same there was a change, and I was conscious of
it during the evening. Archie Roylance and his young wife
were staying there–like me, for the first time. I am prepared
to rank Janet Roylance second only to Mary as the
prettiest and most delightful thing in the world, and I knew
that she and Sandy were close friends. In the daytime she
was always, so to speak, booted and spurred, and seemed to
have the alertness and vigour of an active boy; but
in the evening she used to become the daintiest little
porcelain lady; and those who saw Janet as a Dresden
shepherdess in a drawing-room would scarcely believe that
it was the same person who that morning had been scampering
over the heather. She was in tremendous spirits, and
Archie is a cheerful soul, but they found it heavy going
with Sandy.

We dined in what had been the hall of the thirteenth-century
keep–stone walls, a fireplace like a cave, and Jacobean
rafters and panelling. Sandy wore the green coat of
some Border club, and sat like a solemn sprite in the great
chair at the head of his table, while Janet tried to keep the
talk going from the other end. The ancient candelabra,
which gave a dim religious light, and the long lines of mailed
or periwigged Arbuthnots on the wall made the place too
heavy a setting for one whom I had always known as a
dweller in tents. I felt somehow as if the old Sandy were
being shackled and stifled by this feudal magnificence.

The Roylances, having been married in the winter, had
postponed their honeymoon, and Janet was full of plans for
bringing it off that autumn. She rather fancied the East.
Sandy was discouraging. The East, he said, was simply
dusty bric-à-brac, for the spirit had gone out of it, and there
were no mysteries left, only half-baked Occidentalism. “Go
to Samarkand, and you will get the chatter of Bloomsbury
intellectuals. I expect in Lhasa they are discussing Freud.”

I suggested South Africa, or a trip up through the Lakes
to the Nile. Janet vetoed this, because of Archie’s stiff leg;
she thought big-game hunting would be bad for him, and
she considered with justice that if he were in the neighbourhood
of wild beasts he would go after them.

Archie himself was inclined to South America. He said
he had always had a romance about that part of the world,
and he understood that it was the only place which still
held some geographical secrets. Also it appeared that,
though a poor linguist, he could talk a sort of Spanish, owing
to having spent some time in the Madrid Embassy.

“I’ve never been there,” said Sandy, “and I never want
to go. It’s too big and badly put together, like a child’s
mud castle. There’s cannibal fish, and every kind of noxious
insect, and it’s the happy home of poisons, and the people
are as ugly as sin. The land isn’t built according to our
human scale, and I have no taste for nightmares.”

“All the same, it’s tremendously important,” Archie
replied. “Charles Lamancha says that all the big problems
of the future will be concerned with the New World. It
might be rather useful to me in politics if I went and had a
look round.”

Sandy laughed. “Better go to the States. That’s the
power-house where you press the button.”

This gave me the chance to talk about Blenkiron, and I
told them what I had heard from Ellery Willis. Archie,
who had only seen Blenkiron in the last year of the War,
was rather excited; Sandy, who knew him intimately, was
apathetic.

“He’ll turn up all right. Trust John S. You can’t
mislay a battered warrior like that. You’d better tell
Willis that he is doing a very poor service to Blenkiron by
starting a hue-and-cry. The old man won’t like it a bit.”

“But, I assure you, Willis is very much in earnest. He
wanted me to start out right away on a secret expedition,
and to quiet him I promised to speak to you.”

“Well, you’ve spoken,” said Sandy, “and you can tell
him I think it moonshine. Blenkiron will come back to his
friends when his job is done, whatever it may be. . . .
Unless Archie likes to take the thing on?”

He seemed to want to drop the subject, but Janet
broke in:

“I always understood that Mr Blenkiron had no relations
except the nephew who was killed in the War. But I met a
girl last month who was a niece or a cousin of his. She
told me she had been staying in the Borders and had been
taken to see you at Laverlaw.”

Sandy looked up, and I could have sworn that a shade of
anxiety passed over his face.

“Her name was Dasent,” Janet went on. “I can’t
remember her Christian name.”

“Probably Irene–pronounced Ireen,” said Sandy. “I
remember her. She came over with the Manorwaters. She
seemed to have got a little mixed about Scotland, for she
wanted to know why I wasn’t wearing a kilt, and I told her
‘because I was neither a Highlander nor a Cockney stockbroker.'”

He spoke sharply, as if the visit had left an unpleasant
memory.

“I should like to meet a niece of Blenkiron’s,” I said.
“Tell me more about her.”

In reply Sandy made a few comments on American young
women which were not flattering. I could see what had
happened–Sandy at a loose end and a little choked by his
new life, and a brisk and ignorant lady who wanted to
enthuse about it. They had met ‘head on,’ as Americans
say.

“You didn’t like her?” I asked.

“I didn’t think enough about her to dislike her. Ask
Janet.”

“I only saw her for about an hour,” said that lady. “She
came to stay with Junius and Agatha at Strathlarrig just
when I was leaving. I think I rather liked her. She was
from South Carolina, and had a nice, soft, slurring voice.
So far as I remember she talked very little. She looked
delicious, too–tallish and slim and rather dark, with deep
eyes that said all sorts of wonderful things. You must
be as blind as a bat, Sandy, if you didn’t see that.”

“I am. I don’t boast of it–indeed I’m rather ashamed
of it–but I’m horribly unsusceptible. Once–long ago–when
I was at Oxford, I was staying in the West Highlands,
and in the evening we sat in a room which looked over the
sea into the sunset, and a girl sang old songs. I don’t
remember whether she was pretty or not–I don’t remember
her name–but I remember that her singing made me want
to fall in love. . . . Since I grew up I’ve had no time.”

Janet was shocked. “But, Sandy dear, you must marry.”

He shook his head. “Never! I should make a rotten
husband. Besides, Dick and Archie have carried off the
only two women I love.”

After that he seemed to cheer up. I remember that he took
to telling stories of poisons–I suppose the mention of South
America set him off on that. He showed us a box with
three tiny pellets in it, things which looked like discoloured
pearls, and which he said were the most mysterious narcotics
in the world, and one of the deadliest poisons. They reminded
me of pills I once got from an old Portugee prospector,
which I carried about with me for years but never touched,
pills to be used if you were lost in the bush, for one was said
to put you into a forty-hours sleep and two gave a painless
death. Sandy would explain nothing further about them,
and locked them away.

What with one thing and another we had rather a jolly
evening. But next morning, when the Roylances had gone, I
had the same impression of some subtle change. This new
Sandy was not the one I had known. We went for a long
tramp on the hills, with sandwiches in our pockets, for
neither of us seemed inclined to shoulder a gun. It was a
crisp morning with a slight frost, and before midday it had
become one of those blazing August days when there is not
a breath of wind and the heather smells as hot as tamarisks.
We climbed the Lammer Law and did about twenty miles
of a circuit along the hill-tops. It was excellent training
for Machray, and I would have enjoyed myself had it not
been for Sandy.

He talked a great deal and it was all in one strain, and–for
a marvel–all about himself. The gist of it was
that he was as one born out of due season, and mighty
discontented with his lot.

“I can’t grow old decently,” he said. “Here am I–over
forty–and I haven’t matured one bit since I left
Oxford. I don’t want to do the things befitting my age
and position. I suppose I ought to be ambitious–make
speeches in the House of Lords–become an expert on some
rotten subject–take the chair at public dinners–row my
weight in the silly old boat–and end by governing some
distant Dominion.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because I don’t want to. I’d rather eat cold mutton
in a cabman’s shelter, as Lamancha once observed about
political banquets. Good Lord, Dick, I can’t begin to tell
you how I loathe the little squirrel’s cage of the careerists.
All that solemn twaddle about trifles! Oh, I daresay it’s
got to be done by somebody, but not by me. If I touched
politics I’d join the Labour Party, not because I think them
less futile than the others, but because as yet they haven’t
got such a larder of loaves and fishes.”

“I want a job,” he declared a little later. “I was meant
by Providence to be in a service, and to do work under
discipline–not for what it brought me, but because it had
to be done. I’m a bad case of the inferiority complex.
When I see one of my shepherds at work, or the hands
coming out of a factory, I’m ashamed of myself. They
all have their niche, and it is something that matters, whereas
I am a cumberer of the ground. If I want to work I’ve
got to make the job for myself, and the one motive is
personal vanity. I tell you, I’m in very real danger of
losing my self-respect.”

It was no good arguing with Sandy in this mood, though
there were a great many common-sense things I wanted to
say. The danger with anyone so high-strung and imaginative
as he is that every now and then come periods of self-disgust
and despondency.

“You’re like Ulysses,” I told him. “The fellow in
Tennyson’s poem, you know. Well, there’s a widish world
before you, and a pretty unsettled one. Ships sail every day
to some part of it.”

He shook his head.

“That’s the rub. As I’ve told you, I can’t grow up.
There’s a couple of lines by some poet that describes me
accurately: ‘He is crazed by the spell of far Arabia, It
has stolen his mind away.’ Far Arabia–that’s my trouble.
But the Ulysses business won’t do for an ageing child of
forty. Besides, what about the mariners? Where are the
‘free hearts, free foreheads?’ We used to have a rather
nice little Round Table, Dick, but it is all broken up now and
the wood turned into cigar-boxes for wedding presents.
Peter is dead, and you and Archie are married, and Leithen
and Lamancha are happy parts of the machine.”

“There’s still Blenkiron.”

“He doesn’t count. He was a wandering star, that
joined us and revolved cheerfully with us for a little, and
then shot back to where it belonged. . . . You can’t alter
it by talking, my dear chap. I’m the old buccaneer
marooned on a rock, watching his ancient companions
passing in ocean liners.”

We had reached the top of the hill above Laverlaw and
were looking down into the green cup filled with the afternoon
sunlight, in which the house seemed as natural a thing
as a stone from the hillside. I observed that it was a very
pleasant rock to be marooned on. Sandy stared at the
scene, and for a moment did not reply.

“I wish I had been born an Englishman,” he said at last.
“Then I could have lived for that place, and been quite
content to grow old in it. But that has never been our way.
Our homes were only a jumping-off ground. We loved them
painfully and were always home-sick for them, but we were
very little in them. That is the blight on us–we never had
any sense of a continuing city, and our families survived only
by accident. It’s a miracle that I’m the sixteenth Clanroyden.
. . . It’s not likely that there will be a seventeenth.”

III

I left Laverlaw rather anxious about Sandy, and during
our time at Machray I thought a good deal about my friend.
He was in an odd, jumpy, unpredictable state of mind, and
I didn’t see what was to be the outcome of it. At Machray
I had a piece of news which showed his restlessness.
Martendale, the newspaper man, came to stay, and was
talking about boats, for his chief hobby is yacht-racing.

“What’s Arbuthnot up to now?” he asked. “I saw him
at Cowes–at least I’m pretty sure it was he. In an odd
get-up, even for him.”

I said that I had been staying with Sandy in August and
that he had never mentioned Cowes, so I thought he must
be mistaken. But Martendale was positive. He had been
on the Squadron lawn, looking down on the crowd passing
below, and he had seen Sandy, and caught his eye. He
knew him slightly, but apparently Sandy had not wanted
to be recognised and had simply stared at him. Martendale
noticed him later, lunching out of a paper bag with the
other trippers on the front. He was dressed like a yacht’s
hand, rather a shabby yacht’s hand, and Martendale said
that he thought he had a glimpse of him later with some
of the crew of the big Argentine steam yacht, the _Santa
Barbara_, which had been at Cowes that year. “The dago
does not make an ornamental sailor,” said Martendale, “and
if it was Arbuthnot, and I am pretty certain it was, he
managed to assimilate himself very well to his background.
I only picked him out of the bunch by his clean-cut face.
Do you happen to know if he speaks Spanish? They were
all jabbering that lingo.”

“Probably,” I said. “He’s one of the best linguists
alive. But, all the same, I think you were mistaken. I
saw him a fortnight later, and, I can tell you, he isn’t in
the humour for escapades.”

In November, when I ran up to London from Fosse for
a few days, I got further news of Sandy which really disquieted
me. It appeared that he had gone down to the
grass countries to hunt–a fact which in itself surprised
me, for, though a fine horseman, he had always professed
to hate hunting society. But for some reason or other he
kept a couple of horses at Birkham and spent a lot of time
there. And he seemed to have got mixed up with a rather
raffish lot, for since the War the company in the Shires
has not been what you might call select. The story told
to me was that at a dinner where much champagne was
swallowed Sandy had had a drunken row with a young
profiteering lout, which had just about come to blows. He
seemed to have behaved rather badly at dinner and worse
later, for after having made a scene he had bolted, shown
the white feather, and refused to take responsibility for
what he had done.

Of course I didn’t believe a word of it. In the first
place, Sandy was as abstemious as a Moslem; in the second
place, he had the temper of a seraph and never quarrelled;
and, in the third place, he didn’t keep any white feathers in
his collection. But the story was repeated everywhere and,
I am sorry to say, was believed. You see, Sandy had a
great reputation in a vague way, but he hadn’t the kind of
large devoted acquaintance which could be always trusted
to give the lie to a slander. And I am bound to say that
this story was abominably circumstantial. I had it from
an eye-witness, quite a decent fellow whose word it was
hard to disbelieve. He described a horrid scene–Sandy,
rather drunk and deliberately insulting an ill-tempered oaf
in the same condition, and then, when it almost came to
fisticuffs, funking the consequences, and slipping off early
next morning without a word of explanation.

I hotly denied the whole thing, but my denials did not
carry very far. Sandy had disappeared again, and his
absence gave gossip its chance. The ordinary story was
that he had taken to drink or drugs–most people said drugs.
Even those who believed in him began to talk of a bad
break-down, and explained that the kind of life he had led
was bound some day to exact its penalty. I tried to get hold
of him, but my telegrams to Laverlaw brought the answer
that his lordship had gone abroad and left no address for
letters.

Three days after Christmas I got the shock of my life.
I opened _The Times_ and found on the foreign page a short
telegram from New York which reported the death of Mr
John Scantlebury Blenkiron on board his yacht at Honolulu.
The message said that he had once been well known as a
mining engineer, and that at various times he had made
_coups_ in Wall Street.

I took the first train to London and interviewed Ellery
Willis at the Embassy. He confirmed the news, for he had
had a wire from Washington to the same effect.

“What did he die of?” I demanded. “And what was
he doing at Honolulu? And in a yacht? He loathed the
sea. He used to say that he would as soon take to yachting
for pleasure as make his meals off emetics.”

“He must have been ill some time,” Willis suggested.
“That would account for his disappearance. He wanted
to be by himself, like a sick animal.”

I simply wouldn’t credit it, and I asked Willis to wire
for details. But none came–only a recapitulation of the
bare fact. When a week later I got the American papers,
my scepticism was a little shaken. For there were obituaries
with photographs. The writers enlarged on his business
career, but said nothing about his incursions into politics,
nor did they give any further news of his illness. I was
almost convinced, but not quite. The obituaries were full,
but not full enough, for Blenkiron had been a big figure,
and one would have expected the press to go large on his
career and personality. But the notices all gave me the
impression of having been written to order and deliberately
keeping wide of the subject. There was nothing in the way
of personal reminiscences, no attempt to describe his
character or assess his work. The articles were uncommonly
like the colourless recitals you find in a biographical
dictionary.

I wired about it to Sandy, and got a reply from his butler
that he was still abroad, address unknown. I wished that
I knew where to find the niece who had visited Laverlaw
in the summer, but Janet Roylance, to whom I applied,
could tell me nothing. She and Archie were setting out
almost at once on their delayed honeymoon, and had chosen
South America.

I have one other incident to record before I bring these
preliminaries to a close. Palliser-Yeates came to stay with
us for a week-end in January, and one night, after Mary
had gone to bed, we sat talking in the library. He had
never known Blenkiron, but he was a friend of Sandy, and
to him I unburdened my anxieties. I thought he listened
to me with an odd look on his face.

“You don’t believe the stories?” he asked.

“Not one blessed word,” I said. “But the poor old chap
has managed to get himself a pretty fly-blown reputation.”

“Perhaps he wanted to,” was the astounding answer.

I stared, and asked him what he meant.

“It’s only a guess,” he said. “But Sandy has for a long
time had a unique reputation. Not with the world at large,
but with the people who matter in two hemispheres. He
was known to be one of the most formidable men in the
world. Now, suppose that he was engaged, or about to be
engaged, in some very delicate and dangerous business. He
would be marked down from the start by certain people who
feared him. So he might wish to be counted out, to be
regarded as no longer formidable, and what better way than
to have it generally believed that his nerve had gone and
that he was all to pieces? If I wanted to create that impression,
I would lay the foundation of it in the Shires, where
they make a speciality of scandal. If that was his purpose,
he has certainly succeeded. By this time the rumour has
gone all over Europe in the circles where his name was
known.”

I was digesting this startling hypothesis, when Palliser-Yeates
told me the following story:

He had been in Paris just before Christmas on some
business connected with Argentine banking, and one of his
South American colleagues had taken him to dine at a
restaurant much in vogue among the _rastas_. I think it was
on the Rive Gauche, not a specially reputable place, but
with amazingly good food. The proprietor was from the
Argentine, and all the staff were South Americans. Palliser-Yeates
noticed one of the waiters, not at his own table but
a little way off, and he recognised the man’s face. The
hair and skin were darkened, but he was positive that it was
Sandy–Sandy in a greasy dress suit and a made-up black
tie. When the room filled up and got rather noisy, he made
an errand to speak to the conductor of the orchestra, and
managed to get a word with this waiter. He cannoned
against him in one of the doors and said, “Sorry, Sandy.”
The waiter knew him perfectly, and whispered from behind
his pile of dishes, “Don’t give me away, John. It’s damnably
serious. And never come here again.” So Palliser-Yeates
took himself off, and had scrupulously held his
tongue except for telling me. He said that Sandy looked
well enough, and seemed to have mastered his job, for you
couldn’t detect any difference between him and the rest of
the outfit.

When I heard this, I decided to go to Paris myself and
have a look at the restaurant, for anxiety about Sandy was
coming between me and my sleep. There was something
about Palliser-Yeates’s story which took my memory back
a dozen years to old Kuprasso’s dancing-house in Constantinople
and the man who had led the Company of the
Rosy Hours. Sandy was on the war-path again, and I was
bound to keep an eye on him.

But two days later I had a letter–from Blenkiron. It
had a typed address and a Southampton postmark–which
was no clue, for it had probably been brought over by a
passenger in a ship and posted at the port of arrival. The
handwriting was Blenkiron’s unmistakable scrawl. It ran
as follows:

“_The papers will say I have gotten across the River.
Don’t let that worry you. But the Golden Shore at present
is important and I may have to stay there quite a time.
Therefore keep up the requiems and dirges until further
notice._”

Also at last I got a reply from Sandy, in answer to my
string of letters. It was a telegram from London, so he
had left Paris, and it merely contained Abraham Lincoln’s
words: “You stop still and saw wood.”

After that I stopped still. Both Blenkiron and Sandy
were up to some devilry, and I had an instinct that they
were working together. I have set down here my slender
personal knowledge of the beginning of the strange events
now to be related. The rest comes from the actors themselves.