ch
vultures and falcons, and lo and behold! two plump thrushes had
blundered into it.

Presently a third figure arrived, a young man on a bicycle, with a bag
of golf-clubs slung on his back. He strolled round to the tennis lawn
and was welcomed riotously by the players. Evidently they were
chaffing him, and their chaff sounded horribly English. Then the plump
man, mopping his brow with a silk handkerchief, announced that he must
have a tub. I heard his very words--'I've got into a proper lather,'
he said. 'This will bring down my weight and my handicap, Bob. I'll
take you on tomorrow and give you a stroke a hole.' You couldn't find
anything much more English than that.

They all went into the house, and left me feeling a precious idiot. I
had been barking up the wrong tree this time. These men might be
acting; but if they were, where was their audience? They didn't know I
was sitting thirty yards off in a rhododendron. It was simply
impossible to believe that these three hearty fellows were anything but
what they seemed--three ordinary, game-playing, suburban Englishmen,
wearisome, if you like, but sordidly innocent.

And yet there were three of them; and one was old, and one was plump,
and one was lean and dark; and their house chimed in with Scudder's
notes; and half a mile off was lying a steam yacht with at least one
German officer. I thought of Karolides lying dead and all Europe
trembling on the edge of earthquake, and the men I had left behind me
in London who were waiting anxiously for the events of the next hours.
There was no doubt that hell was afoot somewhere. The Black Stone had
won, and if it survived this June night would bank its winnings.

There seemed only one thing to do--go forward as if I had no doubts,
and if I was going to make a fool of myself to do it handsomely. Never
in my life have I faced a job with greater disinclination. I would
rather in my then mind have walked into a den of anarchists, each with
his Browning handy, or faced a charging lion with a popgun, than enter
that happy home of three cheerful Englishmen and tell them that their
game was up. How they would laugh at me!

But suddenly I remembered a thing I once heard in Rhodesia from old
Peter Pienaar. I have quoted Peter already in this narrative. He was
the best scout I ever knew, and before he had turned respectable he had
been pretty often on the windy side of the law, when he had been wanted
badly by the