ars."

He stared at me uncomprehendingly.

"I don't know," he said haltingly. "I have very little English."

"Oh, that's it!" I cried, speaking French with a barbarous accent.
"You only speak French?"

"Yes, yes," he replied eagerly. "It is so difficult to make oneself
understood. This spirit is not cognac, it is some kind of petrol!"

Finishing my bitter, I ordered two glasses of good brandy and placed
one before "Le Balafre."

"Try that," I said, continuing to speak in French, "You will find it
is better."

He sipped from his glass and agreed that I was right. We chatted
together for ten minutes and had another drink, after which my
dangerous-looking acquaintance wished me good-night and went out. The
car had come from the West, and I strongly suspected that my man either
lived in the neighbourhood or had come there to keep an appointment.
Leaving my cab outside the public-house, I followed him on foot, down
Three Colt Street to Ropemaker Street, where he turned into a narrow
alley leading to the riverside. It was straight and deserted, and I
dared not follow further until he had reached the corner. I heard his
footsteps pass right to the end. Then the sound died away. I ran to
the corner. The back of a wharf building--a high blank wall--faced a
row of ramshackle tenements, some of them built of wood; but not a
soul was in sight.

I reluctantly returned to the spot at which I had left the cab--and
found a constable there who wanted to know what I meant by leaving a
vehicle in the street unattended. I managed to enlist his sympathy by
telling him that I had been in pursuit of a "fare" who had swindled me
with a bad half-crown. The ruse succeeded.

"Which street did he go down, mate?" asked the constable.

I described the street and described the scarred man. The constable
shook his head.

"Sounds like one o' them foreign sailormen," he said. "But I don't
know what he can have gone down there for. It's nearly all Chinese,
that part."

His words came as a revelation; they changed the whole complexion of
the case. It dawned upon me even as he spoke the word "Chinese" that
the golden scorpion which I had seen in the Paris cafe was of Chinese
workmanship! I started my engine and drove slowly to that street in
which I had lost the track of "Le Balafre." I turned the cab so that
I should be ready to drive off at a moment's notice, and sat there
wondering what my next move should be. How long I had been there I