ole body shaking, his face like the face of a dead
man.

"He never done it, I tell you!" pursued Dollops in an absolute
tremble of fright. "I haven't never had a blessed line; and now
this here awful thing has happened. And if he done what he said
he was a-goin' to do--if he come to town and went to that house----"

If he said more, the clanging of a bell drowned it completely. Narkom
had turned to his desk and was hammering furiously upon the call
gong. A scurry of flying feet came up the outer passage, the door
opened in a flash, and the porter was there. And behind him Lennard,
the chauffeur, who guessed from that excited summons that there
would be a call for _him_.

"The limousine--as quick as you can get her round!" said Narkom in
the sharp staccato of excitement. "To the scene of the explosion in
Clarges Street first, and if the bodies of the victims have been
removed, then to the mortuary without an instant's delay."

He dashed into the inner room, grabbed his hat and coat down from the
hook where they were hanging, and dashed back again like a man in
a panic.

"Come on!" he said, beckoning to Dollops as he flung open the door
and ran out into the passage. "If they've 'done him in'--_him!_--if
they've 'got him' after all----Come on! come on!"

Dollops "came on" with a rush; and two minutes later the red
limousine swung out into the roadway and took the distance between
Scotland Yard and Clarges Street at a mile-a-minute clip.

* * * * *

Arrival at the scene of the disaster elicited the fact that the
remains--literally "remains," since they had been well-nigh blown
to fragments--had, indeed, been removed to the mortuary; so thither
Narkom and Dollops followed them, their fears being in no wise
lightened by learning that the bodies were undeniably those of men.
As the features of both victims were beyond any possibility of
recognition, identification could, of course, be arrived at only
through bodily marks; and Dollops's close association with Cleek
rendered him particularly capable of speaking with authority
regarding those of his master. It was, therefore, a source of
unspeakable delight to both Narkom and himself, when, after close and
minute examination of the remains, he was able to say, positively,
"Sir, whatever's become of him, praise God, neither of these here two
dead men is him, bless his heart!"

"So they didn't get him after all!" supplemented Na