alliances were made and broken, why certain men
disappeared, and where the sinews of war came from.
The aim of the whole conspiracy was to get Russia and
Germany at loggerheads.

When I asked Why, he said that the anarchist lot
thought it would give them their chance. Everything
would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a
new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the
shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage.
Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.
Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated
Russia worse than hell.

"Do you wonder?" he cried. "For three hundred years
they have been persecuted, and this is the return
match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but
you have to go far down the backstairs to find him.
Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have
dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von
und zu Something, an elegant young man who talks
Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your
business is big, you get behind him and find a
prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and
the manners of a hog. He is the German business man
that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you're
on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the
real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little
white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a
rattlesnake. Yes, sir, he is the man who is ruling the
world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of
the Tsar, because his aunt was outraged and his father
flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga."

I could not help saying that his Jew-anarchists seemed
to have got left behind a little.

"Yes and no," he said. "They won up to a point, but they
struck a bigger thing than money, a thing that couldn't
be bought, the old elemental fighting instincts of man.
If you're going to he killed you invent some kind of flag
and country to fight for, and if you survive you get to
love the thing. Those foolish devils of soldiers have
found something they care for, and that has upset the
pretty plan laid in Berlin and Vienna. But my friends
haven't played their last card by a long sight. They've
gotten the ace up their sleeves, and unless I can keep
alive for a month they are going to play it and win."

"But I thought you were dead," I put in.

"_i_ Mors janua  vitae _i_" he smiled. (I recognized the
quotation: it was about all the Latin I knew.) "I'm
coming to that, but I've got to put you wise about a lot
of things first. If you read your newspaper, I guess you
know the name of Constantine Karolides?"

I sat up at that, for I had been reading about him that
very afternoon.

"He is the man that has wrecked all their games. He is
the one big brain in the whole show, and he happens
also to be an honest man. Therefore he has been
marked down these twelve months past. I found that
out--not that it was difficult, for any fool could guess as
much. But I found out the way they were going to get
him, and that knowledge was deadly. That's why I have
had to decease."

He had another drink, and I mixed it for him myself, for
I was getting interested in the beggar.

"They can't get him in his own land, for he has a
bodyguard of Epirotes that would skin their
grandmothers. But on the 15th day of June he is
coming to this city. The British Foreign Office has taken
to having international tea-parties, and the biggest of
them is due on that date. Now Karolides is reckoned
the principal guest, and if my friends have their way he
will never return to his admiring countrymen."

"That's simple enough, anyhow," I said. "You can warn
him and keep him at home."

"And play their game?" he asked sharply. "If he does
not come they win, for he's the only man that can
straighten out the tangle. And if his Government are
warned he won't come, for he does not know how big
the stakes will be on June the 15th."

"What about the British Government?" I said. "They're
not going to let their guests be murdered. Tip them the
wink, and they'll take extra precautions."

"No good. They might stuff this city with plain-clothes
detectives and double the police and Constantine
would still he a doomed man. My friends are not
playing this game for candy. They want a big occasion
for the taking off, with the eyes of all Europe on it. He'll
be murdered by an Austrian, and there'll be plenty of