ckon you're a cool customer. I reckon,
too, you're an honest man, and not afraid of playing a bold hand. I'm
going to confide in you. I need help worse than any man ever needed
it, and I want to know if I can count you in.'

'Get on with your yarn,' I said, 'and I'll tell you.'

He seemed to brace himself for a great effort, and then started on the
queerest rigmarole. I didn't get hold of it at first, and I had to
stop and ask him questions. But here is the gist of it:

He was an American, from Kentucky, and after college, being pretty well
off, he had started out to see the world. He wrote a bit, and acted as
war correspondent for a Chicago paper, and spent a year or two in
South-Eastern Europe. I gathered that he was a fine linguist, and had
got to know pretty well the society in those parts. He spoke
familiarly of many names that I remembered to have seen in the
newspapers.

He had played about with politics, he told me, at first for the
interest of them, and then because he couldn't help himself. I read
him as a sharp, restless fellow, who always wanted to get down to the
roots of things. He got a little further down than he wanted.

I am giving you what he told me as well as I could make it out. Away
behind all the Governments and the armies there was a big subterranean
movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people. He had come on
it by accident; it fascinated him; he went further, and then he got
caught. I gathered that most of the people in it were the sort of
educated anarchists that make revolutions, but that beside them there
were financiers who were playing for money. A clever man can make big
profits on a falling market, and it suited the book of both classes to
set Europe by the ears.

He told me some queer things that explained a lot that had puzzled
me--things that happened in the Balkan War, how one state suddenly came
out on top, why alliances were made and broken, why certain men
disappeared, and where the sinews of war came from. The aim of the
whole conspiracy was to get Russia and Germany at loggerheads.

When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it would give
them their chance. Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they
looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the
shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said,
had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it,
and the Jew hated Rus