highway. For I was thinking desperately of what I had found in
Scudder's pocket-book.

The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the
Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference were
eyewash, and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you shall hear.
I had staked everything on my belief in his story, and had been let
down; here was his book telling me a different tale, and instead of
being once-bitten-twice-shy, I believed it absolutely.

Why, I don't know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn, if
you understand me, had been in a queer way true also in spirit. The
fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger
destiny than the killing of a Dago. It was so big that I didn't blame
Scudder for keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone hand.
That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me something
which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so immortally big that
he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all for himself. I didn't
blame him. It was risks after all that he was chiefly greedy about.

The whole story was in the notes--with gaps, you understand, which he
would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down his authorities,
too, and had an odd trick of giving them all a numerical value and then
striking a balance, which stood for the reliability of each stage in
the yarn. The four names he had printed were authorities, and there
was a man, Ducrosne, who got five out of a possible five; and another
fellow, Ammersfoort, who got three. The bare bones of the tale were
all that was in the book--these, and one queer phrase which occurred
half a dozen times inside brackets. '(Thirty-nine steps)' was the
phrase; and at its last time of use it ran--'(Thirty-nine steps, I
counted them--high tide 10.17 p.m.)'. I could make nothing of that.

The first thing I learned was that it was no question of preventing a
war. That was coming, as sure as Christmas: had been arranged, said
Scudder, ever since February 1912. Karolides was going to be the
occasion. He was booked all right, and was to hand in his checks on
June 14th, two weeks and four days from that May morning. I gathered
from Scudder's notes that nothing on earth could prevent that. His
talk of Epirote guards that would skin their own grandmothers was all
billy-o.

The second thing was that this war was going to come as a mighty
surprise to Britain.