Dumpling E-Book

Coulson Kernahan

• Herausgeber: Librorium Editions
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

No matter how scorching the July sun, no matter how alluring the thought of paddling out to ascertain whether the richly wooded lake-side looked equally lovely from the water; no matter how cunningly old Satan had spread his snare of mischief "for idle hands to do," by guiding me to the very spot where the little boat lay moored at the water's edge; no matter with what sophistry these, and many other excuses which I pleaded to a pricking conscience, seemed to mitigate the offence, the fact remains that I acted in a way which was as impudent as it was unpardonable.
The owner of the property generously allowed the public to use a particular footpath through the park. Hence my offence in straying from the permitted footpath and in exploring unpermitted copses and woodlands, until I came to this beautiful sheet of water, was for that very reason all the more graceless and heinous.

Leseprobe

THE DUMPLING

THE OPIUM DEN.

THE DUMPLING

A DETECTIVE LOVE STORY OF A GREAT LABOUR RISING

BY

COULSON KERNAHAN

© 2024 Librorium Editions

ISBN : 9782385746810

THE DUMPLING.

PROLOGUE.

It was an impudent thing to do!

No matter how scorching the July sun, no matter how alluring the thought of paddling out to ascertain whether the richly wooded lake-side looked equally lovely from the water; no matter how cunningly old Satan had spread his snare of mischief "for idle hands to do," by guiding me to the very spot where the little boat lay moored at the water's edge; no matter with what sophistry these, and many other excuses which I pleaded to a pricking conscience, seemed to mitigate the offence, the fact remains that I acted in a way which was as impudent as it was unpardonable.

The owner of the property generously allowed the public to use a particular footpath through the park. Hence my offence in straying from the permitted footpath and in exploring unpermitted copses and woodlands, until I came to this beautiful sheet of water, was for that very reason all the more graceless and heinous.

But in July, when the holiday spirit is in one's blood, and when all the world is holiday-making with us, the conventionalities exist only to be set aside. Chaste matrons who, in chill December, would consider that to exhibit more than two inches of stocking above the ankle would be to pass the high-water mark of propriety, and even, to save a new skirt from being muddied, would hesitate to hitch that garment higher by another inch, will, in demoralising July, discard these same stockings altogether, and disport and display themselves, knee-bare, with never a blush, upon the beach at Margate or at Brighton.

And I who, when in my proper mind and in dress-coated, white-chokered garb, would not so much as pass a lady in the stalls of a theatre without first apologising for troubling her and asking for her permission, acted on this occasion, and under the demoralising spell of holiday-making and midsummer madness, as any other bounder would act on a Bank Holiday. No hand had pulled aside the drawn lodge-blind to gaze at the intruder as I entered the park gates; no surly keeper had pointed me to a notice board, warning all and sundry that the public must keep to the footpath, as I strolled along; no tradesman's cart had rattled briskly up the drive to receive or to deliver orders; and when between an avenue of trees I caught a glimpse of the house, it looked so shuttered and sleepy, that I was persuaded "the family"—whoever the family might be—was away, and that none would come to warn me of my trespass. Then the path I had taken, between the trees, had led me down to the water's edge and to the very spot where the boat lay moored.

Thrusting conscience and the conventionalities aside, I seated myself and sculled lightly out to the middle of the lake. For a good half-hour I pulled hither and thither as my fancy prompted, and as the various views to be obtained from the water seemed most alluringly to open; and then, shipping the sculls, I lay down full length in the bottom of the boat, my arm under my head as a pillow, and my face turned skyward to the sun.

I suppose I must have dropped off into a doze, from which I was aroused by a slight rippling of the water. Being only half awake I did not trouble myself greatly about the matter. "A swan passing," I murmured sleepily; "or possibly a water-rat or moor-hen. Let 'em pass. They're quite welcome, and I'm too comfortable to stir."

But stirred I soon was, and to some purpose. Had my boat been lying at the wooded lake-side, instead of in the centre of this beautiful sheet of water, I should have thought at first that a wind-blown branch of July's own roses had dipped down to rest her unopened blossoms upon the frail craft's side. For suddenly, upon the gunwale of the boat—just as if a handful of blush rose-buds had shyly peeped over—there appeared four of the tiniest, daintiest, most exquisitely tapered finger-tips that ever were seen upon mortal hand. Pink, petite, faultlessly formed and finely proportioned, with pearly, oval nails, as symmetrically cut, as perfectly set and polished as rare opals, the finger-tips upon which I looked were so lovely that a king might have craved, as a royal boon, permission to stoop his lips to kiss them. In all the wide world I was ready to swear there was only one other set of finger-tips as beautiful, and the very next instant that other set, like love-bird hastening to perch beside its mate, was laid upon the edge of the boat, which now began to rock sideways, as if someone in the water were working up impetus for a spring.

"Lazy bones! lazy bones! Wake up! wake up!" cried a merry voice; and then—Venus rising from the foam was not half so beautiful—there bobbed up, framed in clinging golden hair, at the side of the boat, the fairest young face, the most lovely head and neck and shoulders I have ever seen.

My awakening had come; and the whole thing had happened so suddenly that I do not know which of us was more surprised. All I do know is that the shame and consternation on her face at seeing me were so comic that, but for my anxiety to spare her blushes, I should have laughed outright. Small time, however, had I to laugh; small time had she to blush; for, in her dismay, she suddenly let go her hold of the edge of the boat, which, released from her weight, rolled over like a turning porpoise, as neatly tilting me out of the other side and into the water as if I had been a left crust shaken out of an up-gathered tablecloth by a housewife's hand.

That those who begin by playing the fool generally end by finding the fat in the fire is proverbial. In making free with other folk's property I had behaved not only like a fool, but like a mannerless schoolboy; and now, if the fat could not exactly be said to be in the fire, the fool was undoubtedly in the water. Fortunately for this particular fool he happened to be an expert swimmer, or my silly holiday escapade might have ended tragically for my fair capsizer as well as for myself. She, however, showed herself as what, in sporting parlance, is known as "a good pluck'd 'un."

A moment's hysterical screaming and frantic beating of the water may be passed by as no more than a concession to her sex, an acknowledgment of a woman's weakness, and can in no way be said to detract from the courage which she afterwards displayed. In the next instant she had grabbed me (somewhat painfully for me, I admit) by the hair, and manfully—if I may use that word of a woman—raising my head out of the water, had gasped agitatedly, "Can you swim?"

I do not deny that I behaved abominably. I was already as over head and eyes in love with this peerless Lady of the Lake as I had a moment ago been over head and ears in water; and to swim unromantically ashore, there perhaps to be handed over to the care of the local constable, with the prospect of being brought up before my fair capsizer's father (who was very possibly a magistrate) as a common trespasser, if not as a common thief, did not appeal to me as either romantic or as likely to further my suit. But to appear to owe my life to her, to be in a position to hail her as a heroine and as my preserver, and myself henceforth and for ever her grateful and adoring slave, who, even if he devoted all his remaining years to her service, could never hope to repay her for thus snatching him from a watery grave—to do this was to put myself in a very different light. Were I to admit that I could swim, she would, without the shadow of a doubt, haughtily point me in one direction, while she with equal haughtiness would swim away in the other. But to proclaim myself no swimmer, and consequently helpless, would constitute an appeal to her womanhood which she, being clearly an expert in the water, could not and would not refuse. To do so would at once establish a relationship between us more intimate than I could hope to attain in a twelvemonth spent or misspent in meeting her at her own home (even could I get invited there), or at the houses of mutual acquaintances, supposing such mutual acquaintances to exist. Frankly, I would have pawned my soul for another five minutes in her company. To speak the unpalatable truth meant that the five minutes would undoubtedly be denied me;—meant that she and I must part, never perhaps to meet again. To lie, meant not only making that coveted five minutes my own, but possibly meant more—immeasurably, infinitely more, than this. The thought of what that lie might mean, might win for me, turned my love-sick soul well-nigh delirious. It might mean (and to one man, at least, on earth Paradise seemed possible again) that a hand so soft, so delicate that I could have crushed a dozen such hands in my own huge grasp as easily as one crumples up a score of rose-leaves, yet so fateful for all its feebleness that, even as easily as one could crush the rose-leaves, so more easily could that tiny hand crush and kill the joy which was upspringing in my heart;—a hand so small that it could not span the half of my wrist, yet could hold the whole of my hopes and my heaven—a lie might mean that this tiny hand would for full five paradisiacal minutes be given into my care and keeping, while its owner should be my guardian angel, a wingless angel in a bathing dress, to guide me safely ashore!

Which was it to be—Truth or Falsehood?

"Speak the truth and you'll shame the Devil!" thundered Duty.

"Tell a falsehood, and you won't make a fool of yourself," whispered Desire.

Unhesitatingly I plumped for falsehood.

"I can't swim a stroke," I said.

We got ashore—or nearly so, at least; and that I in no way assisted to accelerate the journey will be plain, as the phrase goes, to the meanest intelligence.

But sit down in cold blood—if not, fortunately as I was then, in wet clothes—to describe that elysian passing, I may not.

Spirit readers of mine—if spirit readers of mortal book there be—who have been borne on angel pinions to heaven, may be able to enter into my feelings at being thus wafted through magic waters by an angel hand. Gross mortals of flesh and blood may not. But spirit readers have this advantage over me—that whereas they, at the end of their journey, saw the gates of Heaven open, I, at the end of mine, saw the gates of Paradise too rudely closed.

When we were some ten yards from the shore, and while I was rehearsing to myself the touching scene of our landing—I falling on my knees before her, and, in a voice which I intended doing my best to make appear broken with emotion, calling the heavens to witness that but for her I should now be weltering in my grave (I was not exactly sure what "weltering" meant, but it sounded wet and weedy and watery, and, as Milton had used the word in a similar sense, it could not be far wrong)—she, her beautiful eyes suffused with tears, one or two of which, I arranged, should drop upon my upturned worshipping face, would then bend over me and, laying a hand tenderly on my head, would sob, "My poor fellow! Do not give way. You are safe. The danger is past!"—while I was rehearsing this pretty and touching picture, she suddenly stopped. Thus far she had been swimming, and swimming strongly on her breast, striking out with her left arm and supporting my head with her right. Now, as I say, she stopped, and I feared that she was becoming exhausted.

"Put down your feet," she said, "and see if you can feel the ground."

I did so, and found that we were in water sufficiently shallow to allow me to stand upright with my chin well above the surface.

"Yes," I said, "we're safe. My feet are on the ground. How can I ever thank you? How can——"

"Then wade the rest of the way," she cut me short, cruelly. "Don't trespass any more! Don't take boats that don't belong to you, and don't get out of your depth again until you have learned to swim."

The next instant she had dived under and was gone, the flick of her tiny heels, as they came together when she threw them up, seeming like the snap of a derisive finger in my face.

Feeling, and looking, more foolish than I remember ever to have felt and looked before, I waded clumsily to the bank, telling myself, by way of comfort, that her curt dismissal and her sharp words were the result only of the inevitable reaction which comes after a time of tension and nerve strain. But from a clump of rushes, behind which I had reason to think my late rescuer lay hidden, came a sound suspiciously like suppressed laughter; and in somewhat of a temper—for no one likes to be ridiculed by a beautiful woman—I clambered up the bank, an ungainly figure, on all fours.

Again came that rippling music from behind the rushes; so, with a very scarlet face, and with as upright a carriage of head and body as I could assume—a carriage, which I may say for the benefit of the reader was intended to express wounded dignity, but which I had a sneaking suspicion savoured more of self-conscious stiffness and injured pride—I walked angrily away, some verses by Austin Dobson running in my head:

"And that's how I lost her—a jewel,Incognita—one in a crowd, Nor prudent enough to be cruel, Nor worldly enough to be proud."

"Only my Incognita," I said to myself as I entered the hotel, "is 'prudent enough to be cruel' and 'worldly enough to be proud.' Never mind! I've found her, and by heaven! if mortal man can do it, I'll win her yet. How lovely she looked! How divinely lovely! And was there ever a woman since the world began with such beautiful hands?"

At this point my meditations were interrupted by the entrance of the waiter with an express letter in his hand for me, marked "Very Urgent."

It was from the editor of the Charing Cross Magazine.

"Dear Mr. Rissler," it ran. "Waldorf, the American millionaire, has bought the magazine. He's got a friend who has done some rather bad drawings of what he thinks looks like the inside of an Opium Den. But the chief has bought them, and has promised his friend to have an article written up to them, to go into the next number.

"You're the man to do it, and I want you to come back by first train, so as to root out an East End Opium Den this very night, and let us have copy to-morrow. Don't fail."

"H'm!" I said to myself, twiddling the letter between my fingers. "What a nuisance! I shall never rest till I have found out all about my Lady of the Lake, and I meant to have begun investigations this very night. But a poor devil of a writer of magazine articles and detective stories can't afford to offend the powers that be—especially so influential an editor as Harrison, or so wealthy a proprietor as Waldorf. So to London I must go, worse luck: to London I must go!"

Within half an hour I had changed my clothes, packed, paid my bill, and was in the train.

"Good-bye, my lovely Lady Disdain, my dear and lovely Lady of the Lake," I said, kissing my hand in the direction of my late escapade, as we puffed out of the station; "or rather au revoir, for soon, very soon, we shall meet again."

CHAPTER I.

THE OPIUM DEN.

I did not half like the look of things.

Of the two Chinamen who were placidly smoking opium in a corner of the opium den I had no fear. Though their bodies lay immovable as logs, the eyes of these Chinamen turned continually in their sockets, following my movements about the room. But they were merely idly curious, not threatening, in the intentness of their stare. They reminded me of pigs lolling on a muck-heap in the sunshine, too lazy to move, too lazy almost to blink, but keeping meanwhile a watchful eye upon the movements of an intrusive terrier.

What I did not like was the curious behaviour of the half-dozen men whom I had found knocking their heads together in a corner when I had entered. My appearance upon the scene had caused them to start apart so guiltily that I was convinced the conference they were holding was for no good purpose; and when, after a few whispered words, two of them stole softly out, and stationed themselves at the foot of the staircase as if to cut off my retreat, while two others got between me and the door, I could not but feel uneasy.

The two who remained—one of whom seemed to be the leader of the gang—were now holding a conference, the subject of which was evidently myself, and, judging by the lowering looks they cast in my direction, they were not about to move a resolution according me a vote of welcome.

On my road from Poplar Station to Limehouse Causeway I had not passed a single policeman, and no one, except the old negro to whom I had offered a couple of shillings if he would take me to a place where they "smoked the opium," had seen me enter the house. Accepting my offer, he had turned at right angles out of Limehouse Causeway, and walked for some distance till we came to a narrow court.

Out of this he had piloted me at right angles into another narrower and quite unlighted court, blocked up at the end by lath palings, and so forming a cul-de-sac. At the darkest and farthest corner he had stopped in front of what appeared to be an unlighted house, and pushing open a door which led into a dark and evil-smelling passage, had said: "In thar, sah!" had spat upon and pocketed my florin, and taken himself off.

I entered, and encountering no one, groped my way along the passage until it ended at a closed door, with a staircase immediately on the right. In my groping I chanced to put my fingers upon the handle. Turning it, I pushed open the door, and found myself in what seemed like a disused kitchen. There was a dresser along one side, and a copper for boiling clothes stood in a corner. The only light came from a small window opening upon a yard, and as the room was practically empty and unfurnished, I tiptoed out, and, closing the door silently, made my way up the staircase to the first landing. Here were two doors, under each of which a chink of feeble light was to be seen. I knocked at the nearest door, and receiving no answer, turned the handle. It was locked, but a scuffling noise within, and the prompt extinguishing of the light, told me that the room was not untenanted. Knocking at the second door, a gruff voice commended me so whole-heartedly and enthusiastically to the care and protection of one who, in polite circles, goes generally unmentioned, that, not desiring the further acquaintance of the party or parties on the other side of the door, I continued my way upstairs.

On the second landing was a window, immediately below which was the small walled-in yard that I had seen from the kitchen, and beyond this a patch of waste land. Just then the moon, which, like a cruiser with "lights down," had been gliding silently and unseen across the dark sea of the sky, came out for a moment from behind the clouds to sweep her searchlight over this enclosed patch of ground, as over alien waters; and, in the white surprise of the searchlight, I saw that dead cats, cabbage stalks, and offal of all sorts were rotting and festering on the unsavoury spot, and that beyond, on the other side of a dilapidated fence, was the river.

"From the point of view of a criminal," I said to myself, "this staircase offers unique advantages. For the committal of a crime, here, surely, is a vantage ground which is ideal and ready-made to hand. A stranger, ascending the staircase, as I am, in the dark, could be knocked on the head with impunity, and nobody be the wiser. Under cover of night, the body could be dropped out of the window, conveyed across that fever-breeding piece of waste land, and hoisted over yonder fence into the river. In an hour a corpse would be borne miles away from the scene of the crime, leaving never so much as a trace behind to tell how, and by whose hand, it came there."

The thought was not reassuring; and when, the next instant, I arrived at the topmost landing, and, on opening a door and entering the den, saw two evil-looking rascals hurry out to cut off my retreat by the staircase, while two others got between me and the door, as already described, I began to realise that the hospitality which seemed likely to be pressed upon me would not be of the nature of an invitation to stay to tea.

Just at this moment I was aware of a dull noise in the distance. There was a slight but ever-increasing vibration in the boards beneath me, a gathering rumble and roll as of approaching thunder, and with a hoarsely discordant shriek, an ear-splitting babel-tumult and roar, which seemed to shake the house to its foundations, an express train hurtled by, almost outside the very windows.

Under the present condition of electric communication, and with no apparatus, the sending of a telephonic message for help to the police office would have been scarcely less impossible of accomplishment than making known my present danger to anyone on board the train; yet so unreasoning are we in the causes which arouse or allay our nervousness, that the consciousness of my near presence to the railway did more to bolster up my courage than all my philosophy. "With the trains and their living freights so near at hand, I don't feel altogether cut off from the outside world," I said to myself; and as the two men in the corner were still whispering together, I plucked up heart to take stock of my surroundings.

The den was lit by a single paraffin lamp, to the unassisted industry of which I was at first inclined to ascribe the vile atmosphere of the place.

"That light we see is burning in my hall. How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world,"

says Portia. The light which I saw burning in the den did not shed its beams very far; but in the matter of shedding smells in a world, nice or naughty, I judged its capacity at a low estimate as forty horse-power! An ordinary motor-car, in its most perfumed moments, leaves trailing clouds of glory and cherry blossom in its wake compared to that lamp's distribution of oily odours on the atmosphere.

Add to this the insufferable and sickening stench of opium—a stench which I can only compare to a choice blending of onions and bad tobacco—and the reader will not wonder when I say that my stomach signalled for full speed astern, by retching rebelliously under my breast-bone.

Greasy as was the atmosphere, the dirty yellow distempering of the walls was in places even greasier. The chief articles of furniture were two raised mattresses, the bare wall behind them being literally coated with dirt and grease, rubbed from the chaste persons and fastidious clothes of many smokers. Above these mattresses a crudely coloured and revolting representation of the Crucifixion was incontinently fastened, and upon the mattresses lay the Chinamen of whom I have already spoken.

Of the two men still whispering in the corner, the leader was of singular appearance. In figure he was dumpy and comfortably rounded, which was, I suppose, the reason of the nickname, "The Dumpling," which I afterwards heard applied to him. His neck was so short, and his huge head was set so closely upon his high shoulders, and thrust forward so prominently, as almost to suggest the hunchback. But if the figure was grotesque, the clean-shaven face was striking and powerful. It was absolutely grey in hue, like the face of a dead or dying man; but so far from being spare and haggard, as one would have expected from so unhealthy and colourless a complexion, the face, like the neck, was full, and the features of the fleshly aquiline type. The forehead was high and intellectual, but the eyes were his most singular feature. Accustomed as I am, as the phrase goes, "to read character," this man utterly baffled me, for the eyes of two totally different men looked out from the same head. On the occasion of which I am speaking his eyes, when they rested upon me, seemed the incarnation of all that is cunning, cruel, treacherous. Yet in the eyes of this same man, as I came to know him thereafter, I have seen the most singular and gentle melancholy.

Even on this eventful evening, when I saw him at his worst, his eyes, as he turned from me to the fellow to whom he was speaking, and for whom he seemed to entertain something like affection, softened as if in response to some inner workings of his mind, and I saw in their depths a dumb, inarticulate look like that one sees sometimes in the eyes of a dog.

As he was talking he turned suddenly—perhaps because of something which his companion had said—and looked me straight in the eyes. I shall no doubt be laughed at when I say that I was suddenly seized by the most singular sense of helplessness. My powers seemed paralysed at their centre. Minded as I was to struggle or to cry out against the influence he was exerting upon me, I could do neither. Then—whether the result of mesmerism or of thought suggestion on his part, or of a sort of second sight on mine, I cannot say; but I saw, as in a tableau, myself lying helpless upon my back, with this man kneeling on my chest, his eyes looking into mine as they were looking now, and an upraised knife in his hand.

What could it mean?

I am not a nervous, neurotic person, but a healthy, normal, open-air being, who has never dabbled in the mysteries of spiritualism, hypnotism, second-sight, or clairvoyance; nor had such tableaux as I saw when looking into this man's eyes ever before presented themselves to me.

For a moment he held me thus, and then there was the sound of a laugh. Whether it was the man then standing before me in the opium den who thus laughed, or whether it was the man I had seen kneeling on my chest, a knife in his hand and my life at his mercy, I do not know, and matters nothing, for the face was the same. Then suddenly he turned from me, another being altogether.

"No, don't, old man; think of the risk you run," I heard him say to his friend, laying a hand affectionately on the other's shoulder, those inscrutable eyes of his—all the cunning and cruelty gone—becoming liquid and appealing.

But to myself I said: "One day—perhaps within the next hour, perhaps to-morrow, perhaps in the far future—this man, knife in hand, will kneel over my prostrate and helpless figure, as I saw him kneel just now; and when that moment comes—come it to-night, to-morrow, or come it ten years hence—one of us two must leap the barrier which fences this world from the next, ere he shall escape. Which of us two shall it be? And when shall that moment come?"

As I so spoke the two men turned to me. Evidently they had arrived at some decision, and that they meant to do me a mischief, if not to murder me outright, I knew as surely as if someone had whispered their plans in my ear. Once again their leader fixed me with his eyes. Once again I was conscious of the same strange feeling of helplessness; and once again figures shaped themselves before me as in a tableau. Two men were lying in wait on a dark staircase to brain yet another man—myself—as he groped his way out.

CHAPTER II.

THE MAN WITH THE PICTURE-EYES.

"Good evening."

It was the leader of the gang who had spoken, smiling and rubbing his hands softly the one on the other, as pleased, apparently, as any purring cat.

"Good evening," I responded curtly.

"May we ask to what we owe the pleasure of your presence here?" he continued suavely, but watching me closely meanwhile.

"My presence here?" I said, as if surprised by the question. "Why shouldn't I come here, any more than you? It is a public place, isn't it? And I came here to smoke opium, as you and your friends have done, I suppose; just as one goes to a tavern for a glass of beer."

"Not at all," he replied. "This is a private house, just as much as your own house is, and you have no more right to force your way into it, than I have to force myself into yours. You stand in the position of a trespasser. For all I know to the contrary, you may even be what in America they call an area sneak-thief, except for the fact that you have sneaked your way to the top of the house instead of to the area. May I ask who directed you here? I must ask, for I insist upon having an answer."

"'Must' and 'insist' are not palatable words or pleasant," I said; "but I don't know that I have any objection to tell you. It was a negro match-seller whom I saw outside Poplar Station. I offered him two shillings if he would take me to an opium den, and it was to this house he led me."

"Ah! A negro match-seller, and outside Poplar Station. Oh, yes. I think I know the fellow. We must look into this."

He stopped to cast a sidelong glance at the other man, who nodded and, walking to the door, stood whispering to his two confederates outside. Fearing that they were planning to attack me from behind, I twisted my head slightly so as to keep half an eye and the whole of an ear towards them, but not so much so as not to have the other eye open to any movement of their leader, who was still in the room. As he was silent, I was now able to give both ears to the whispering outside; but what it was about I could not for all the sharpness of my hearing make out, except for the fact that I distinctly caught the words "Black Sam."

Then, greatly to my relief, the two men, with whom the fellow at the door was whispering, nodded and took their departure, clumping heavily down the staircase to the second landing, to the first, and thence to the door. Here I distinctly heard a sound as of the letting go of a spring latch, which in all probability locked the door from the inside. Then the door was banged to, as if to ensure that it was securely shut; but even this did not satisfy them, for, if I were not very much mistaken, they tried it, before leaving, by pushing heavily against it from the outside.

To know that the front door of the house was in all probability locked, and that, if my hosts and I came to hand-grips, my chances of escaping, by making a bolt for the street, were now cut off, was not reassuring. But I drew what consolation I could from the fact that the assailing force by which I was surrounded was reduced from six to four—two in the room and two on the staircase outside; and so I put as bold a face as I could upon it when the man, who had been cross-examining me, opened fire once more, his companion standing meanwhile just inside the door.

"And now, sir," resumed the counsel for the prosecution, "that we know to whom we are indebted for the pleasure of your company here, will you be so very good as to tell us why you are here at all?"

Thus far I had told him the truth, and I saw no reason why I should not continue to do so. It was Lord Beaconsfield, I think, who said that, when he wished to mystify his opponents, he almost invariably did so by telling them the truth. That being the last thing they expected from him, they would jump to the conclusion that the facts were the other way about, and so go hopelessly wrong at the start.

My reasons for deciding to be frank were based upon no such subtlety. That I had, quite unintentionally, blundered into a den of criminals, seemed evident; and undoubtedly the next best thing to do was to get out. I am not, I hope, altogether a coward, but one man, caught as I was, like a rat in a trap, is no match for four, possibly for six—for how was I to know that the two who had been stationed outside the door, and had apparently departed upon some errand, might not return? I could not even be positive that they had not been told off to wait for me in the dark court outside, so that in the event of my managing to escape unharmed from the house, they might prevent me from reaching the street. In coming to the place at all, I had beyond question put my head between the jaws of a lion; and the man who, with his head between a lion's jaws, plays the fool by trying to twist the beast's tail, must not be surprised if, within the next two seconds, his own head be not on speaking, or even on nodding terms, with his own body.