Hector looked at him with a livid, dazed face. “My stolen letter’s here, in his own possession! . . . it fell out from these books . . . he had it all the time! Stand aside, Ewen, and let me get at him! No, he’s not worth steel, I’ll wring the treacherous neck of him!”
“Will you?” rang out Glenshian’s voice, breathless yet mocking, behind Ardroy. “You’ll lose a little blood first, I fancy!” He had snatched up his sword from somewhere, got between the winged chair in which he had been sitting and the corner of the hearth, and was awaiting them, a flush on his pale face and his lips drawn back over his teeth—a real wolf at bay. “I suppose you’ll need to come on both at once to give each other courage!”
Ewen gripped at Hector’s shoulder, but fury had lent that young man the agility of an eel. He slipped past Ardroy and his sword came out with a swish. “Keep the door, you, lest we be interrupted!” he cried, pushed aside the chair, and next moment was thrusting frantically at the man backed against the wall.
Himself shocked and revolted, Ewen rushed to the door and locked it, but ran back at once crying, “Hector, stop! this is madness!” To have Hector either wounded by or wounding young Glenshian here, in a brawl in a London house, would be disastrous; moreover, by the vigour of his assault, it looked as if more than wounding was in Mr. Grant’s mind, and that would be more disastrous still. Ardroy’s protest went entirely disregarded; he might not have been there. Glaring at each other, the two combatants thrust and parried without pause, steel clicking upon steel with a celerity rarely heard in a school of arms. But Glenshian was already panting, and the sweat was running in little rivers down his face. “Stop, in God’s name!” cried Ewen again; “the man’s ill, remember, Hector!”
For all response the young officer unexpectedly cut over his opponent’s blade, and all but got him in the chest; and Ewen in despair tugged out his own sword with the intention of beating up both blades. But that was not easy to do without exposing one of the duellists to a thrust from the other; and if—another method—he seized Hector, the nearer, by the shoulder and dragged him away, Glenshian would almost certainly rush at his adversary and run him through during the operation. So Ewen dropped his own sword and snatched up the heavy shawl which had fallen from the convalescent’s shoulders; then, waiting his opportunity, flung it unfolded over its owner’s head, seized his brother-in-law by the collar and swung him away staggering, and rushing in, at no small risk to himself, upon the entangled young man against the wall, who, almost screaming with rage, was just freeing himself, he seized him round the body, pinning his arms to his sides so that his still-held sword was useless.
Behind him Hector, cursing him now, was evidently preparing to come on again, and Ewen was by no means sure that he might not find his excited point in his own back. But from Finlay MacPhair there was a most unlooked-for end of resistance. His objurgations ceased, his head fell back and his knees gave; the sword in his hand went clattering to the uncarpeted floor. He would have followed it had not Ewen held him up. Hector, breathing hard, came to a standstill.
“Where have you wounded him?” demanded Ewen.
“I haven’t touched the filthy carrion,” answered Hector, inexpressibly sulky. “You prevented me, curse you! Why the devil——”
“Then it is merely exhaustion,” said Ewen. “Here, help me lift him to the bed, or that chair; he’s swooning.”
“Shamming, more like,” said Hector disgustedly. “Put him on the floor; I’d say throw him out of window but that . . . Oh, very well.”
He came to lend a hand, for big and powerful as Ewen was, the now completely unconscious Glenshian was neither small nor light. They carried him with little ceremony to the bed in the corner and dumped him on it. Ewen leant over him for a moment, shrugged his shoulders and left him there, merely observing, “He said he had not recovered of his illness.”
“Luckily for him,” was Hector’s comment.
The two stood looking at each other in the middle of the room.
“I cannot believe it!” said Hector, out of breath and still a trifle livid. “But here’s the letter.” He pulled it out of his pocket. “I knew my own writing in an instant. But what would he want with it—and how did it get into his hands?”
“We do not know yet what he wanted with it,” answered Ewen gropingly. “As to the way in which it came to his hands—he may have got it from Mr. Pelham.”
“You don’t believe that tale of a double, of course?”
“Not now.” Ewen put his hand over his eyes. “Oh, Hector, as you say, ’tis incredible! It’s like a dark, dark passage . . . one cannot see where it leads. A MacPhair of Glenshian!”
“I am going to see if there are more papers of the sort,” said Hector, beginning to rummage feverishly among the books which he had tumbled to the floor. Ewen came to his assistance. But the little pile of volumes—most of them French, and indecent—had evidently not been used as a hiding-place, nor indeed would they have made a good one. A few bills had been pushed underneath or between them, and with the bills, by some extraordinary inadvertence, Hector’s stolen letter.
“Look at your letter again,” suggested Ardroy, “and see if it bears traces of what hands it has been in.”
Hector studied it anew. “Yes, the names have been deciphered, sometimes with queries. And on the back, see, are some words in pencil. ‘You will please to return this when you have finished with it.’ But they are not signed.”
“The question is,” said Ewen reflectively, “whether Mr. Pelham handed over the letter to Glenshian, for whatever purpose, or whether Glenshian sent it to him in the first instance.”
“Yes, that is the question. And how, in the latter case, did it first come into Glenshian’s hands?”
Dark and slippery paths indeed, such as Archie had hinted at last autumn! Ewen looked round the room. There was a writing-desk in one corner. Should they break it open? The key, no doubt, was on that limp, unstirring figure on the bed, but Ewen, at least, could not bring himself to search for it there. Hector was apparently less troubled with scruples or repugnance. He went and stooped over it, and came back not with keys, but with a pocket-book, and pulled the contents out on to the table.
“More bills,” said he. “A paper of accounts . . . an assignation, or what looks like it . . . a letter in cipher, addressed to Mr. Alexander Jeanson (who is he? ’tis probably an alias) and—hallo, here’s a letter from Lille!”
He caught it up, ran his eyes over it, uttered a sound as if he had been stabbed to the heart, and handed it to Ewen.
Ewen read: ‘Lille, February 15th, 1753. I shall punctually attend to the recommendation which you sent me by the young gentleman from Troy, and should it come to pass that my namesake is taken, I’ll contrive that the loss which that gentleman has sustained shall serve as a cloak to cover Pickle, to whom commend me. C. S.’
“I don’t understand,” said Ewen, puzzled. “Who signs ‘C. S.’—is it a pretended letter from the Prince? Who is ‘Pickle’, and who is ‘the young gentleman from Troy’?”
“Myself,” answered Hector in a suffocated voice. “Is not my name a Trojan one? And ‘C. S.’—I know his writing; he has but reversed his initials, and see the reference to ‘my namesake’s’ capture—is that fox Samuel Cameron, of my regiment,
