sia 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
Tzar, 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 be 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.

'MORS JANUA VITAE,' 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
wa