without, and these stood at attention—close-lipped, dark-browed, eager, like human tigers waiting for the word to spring. Every eye was fixed on the door through which that pretended mute should be led in; but although others had come at the first call, he came not even at the second, and the magistrate had just issued an impatient command for the case to be called yet a third time, when there was a clatter of hasty footsteps and the keeper of the detention rooms burst into the court pale as a dead man and shaking in every nerve.
“M’sieur le Juge!” he cried out, extending his two arms. “Soul of Misfortunes, how shall I tell? He is not there—he is gone—he is escape, that unknown one. When I shall unlock the room and call for Jean Lamareau, the drunkard, at the case before the last, there shall come out of the dimness to me what I shall think is he and I shall bring him here and he shall be fine and dismissed. But, m’sieur, he shall not be Jean Lamareau after all! I shall go now and call for the unknown and I shall get no answer; I shall go in and make of the place light, and there he shall be, that real Jean Lamareau—stripped of his clothes, choked to unconsciousness, alone on the floor, and the other shall have paid his fine and gone!”
A great cry went up, a wild confusion filled the court. The Apaches within rose and ran with the news to the Apaches without; and these, joining forces, scattered and ran through the streets in the direction the escaped prisoner had been seen to take.
But through it all Narkom sat there squeezing his hands together and laughing in little shaking gusts that had a heart throb wavering through them; for to him this could mean but one thing.
“Cleek!” he said, leaning down and shrilling a joyous whisper into Dollops’ ear. “But one man in all the world could have done that thing—but one man in all the world would have dared. It was he—it was Cleek! God bless his bully soul!”
“Amen, sir,” said Dollops, swallowing something; then he rose at Narkom’s bidding and followed him outside.
A minute later a gamin brushing against them put out a grimy hand and said whiningly:
“Boulogne, messieurs. Quai des Anges. Third house back from the waterside; in time for the noon boat across to Folkestone. Give me two francs, please. The monsieur said you would if I said that to you when you came out.”
The two francs were in his hand almost as he ceased speaking, and in less than a minute later a fiacre was whirling Narkom and Dollops off to the railway station and the next outgoing train to Boulogne. It was still short of midday when they arrived at the Quai des Anges and made their way to the third house back from the waterside—a little tavern with a toy garden in front and a sort of bowered arcade behind—and there under an almond tree, with a cigarette between his fingers and a bunch of flowers in his buttonhole, they came upon him at last.
“Guv’ner! Oh, Gawd bless you, guv’ner, is it really you again?” said Dollops, rushing up to him like a girl to a lover.
“Yes, it is really I,” he answered with one of his easy laughs. Then he rose and held out his hand as Narkom advanced; and for a moment or two they stood there palm in palm, saying not one word, making not one sound.
“Nearly did for me, my overzealous friend,” said Cleek, after a time. “I could have kicked you when you turned up with that lot at the Seven Sinners. Another ten minutes and I’d have had that in my hands which would have compelled his Majesty of Mauravania to give Irma his liberty and to abdicate in his consort’s favour. But you came, you dear old blunderer; and when I looked up and recognized you—well, let it pass! I was on my way back to London when I chanced to see Count Waldemar on watch beside the gangway of the Calais packet—he had slipped me, the hound, slipped me in Paris—and I saw my chance to run him down. Gad! it was a close squeak that, when you let those Apaches know that I had just crossed over from this side and had gone aboard the packet because I saw Waldemar. They guessed then. I couldn’t speak there, and I dared not speak in the court. They were there, on every hand—inside the building and out—waiting to knife me the instant they were sure. I had to get out—I had to get past them, and—voila.”
He turned and laid an affectionate hand on Dollops’ shoulder and laughed softly and pleasantly.
“New place all right, old chap? Garden doing well, and all my traps in shipshape order, eh?”
“Yes, sir, Gawd bless you, sir. Everything, sir, everything.”
“Good lad! Then we’ll be off to them. My holiday is over, Mr. Narkom, and I’m going back into harness again. You want me, I see, and I said I’d come if you did. Give me a few days’ rest in old England, dear friend, and then—out with your riddles and I’m your man again.”
CHAPTER I
“This will be it, I think, sir,” said Lennard, bringing the limousine to a halt at the head of a branching lane, thick set with lime and chestnut trees between whose double wall of green one could catch a distant glimpse of the river, shining golden in the five o’clock light.
“Look! see! There’s the sign post—‘To the Sleeping Mermaid’—over to the left there.”
“Anything pinned to it or hanging on it?” Mr. Narkom spoke from the interior of the vehicle without making even the slightest movement toward alighting, merely glancing at a few memoranda scribbled on the back of a card whose reverse bore the words “Taverne Maladosie Quai des Anges, Boulogne,” printed upon it in rather ornate script.
“A bit of rag, a scrap of newspaper, a fowl’s feather—anything? Look sharp!”
“No, sir, not a thing of any sort that I can see from here. Shall I nip over and make sure?”
“Yes. Only don’t give away the fact that you are examining it in case there should be anybody on the lookout. If you find the smallest thing—even a carpet tack—attached to the post, get back into your seat at once and cut off townward as fast as you can make the car travel.”
“Right you are, sir,” said Lennard, and forthwith did as he had been bidden. In less than ninety seconds, however, he was back with word that the post’s surface was as smooth as your hand and not a thing of any sort attached to it from top to bottom.
Narkom fetched a deep breath of relief at this news, tucked the card into his pocket, and got out immediately.
“Hang round the neighbourhood somewhere and keep your ears open in case I should have to give the signal sooner than I anticipate,” he said; then twisted round on his heel, turned into the tree-bordered lane, and bore down in the direction of the river.
When still short, by thirty yards or so, of its flowered and willow-fringed brim, he came upon a quaint little diamond-paned, red-roofed, low-eaved house set far back from the shore, with a garden full of violets and primroses and flaunting crocuses in front of it, and a tangle of blossoming things crowding what once had been a bower-bordered bowling green in the rear.
“Queen Anne, for a ducat!” he commented as he looked at the place and took in every detail from the magpie in the old pointed-topped wicker cage hanging from a nail beside the doorway to the rudely carved figure of a mermaid over the jutting, flower-filled diamond-paned window of the bar parlour with its swinging sashes and its oak-beam sill, shoulder high from the green, sweet-smelling earth.
“How the dickens does he ferret out these
