s 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 your city with plain-clothes detectives and
double the police and Constantine would still be 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 evidence to show the
connivance of the big folk in Vienna and Berlin. It will all be an
infernal lie, of course, but the case will look black enough to the
world. I'm not talking hot air, my friend. I happen to know every
detail of the hellish contrivance, and I can tell you it will be the
most finished piece of blackguardism since the Borgias. But it's not
going to come off if there's a certain man who knows the wheels of the
business alive right here in London on the 15th day of June. And that
man is going to be your servant, Franklin P. Scudder.'

I was getting to like the little chap. His jaw had shut like a
rat-trap, and there was the fire of battle in his gimlety eyes. If he
was spinning me a yarn he could act up to it.

'Where did you find out this story?' I asked.

'I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me
inquiring, and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician
quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna, and in a little
bookshop off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipsic. I completed my evidence
ten days