h
his glasses or asking apparently artless questions of passengers or
passing deckhands. Again a sailor seemed disposed to be communicative;
he pointed out more than one monster in steel, red raw with surface
rust, and gave particulars of a completed power which would have
surprised the Admiralty Superintendent. They would not, however, have
surprised Mr. Cary, in whose ingenious brain they had been conceived.
This second trip, like the first, was declared by Dawson to have been
a great success. "Did you know me?" he asked. "I was a clean-shaven
naval doctor, about as unlike the army colonel of the first trip as a
pigeon is unlike a gamecock. Hagan is off to London to-night by the
North-Western. There are two copies of your Notes. One is going by
Edinburgh and the east coast, and another by the Midland. Hagan has
the original masterpiece. I will look after him and leave the two
other messengers to my men. I have been on to the Yard by 'phone, and
have arranged that all three shall have passports for Holland. The two
copies shall reach the Kaiser, bless him, but I really must have
Hagan's set of Notes for my Museum."

"And what will become of Hagan?" asked Cary.

"Come and see," said Mr. Dawson.

Dawson entertained Cary at dinner in a private room at the Station
Hotel, waited upon by one of his own confidential men. "Nobody ever
sees me," he observed, with much satisfaction, "though I am
everywhere." (I suspect that Dawson is not without his little
vanities.) "Except in my office and with people whom I know well, I
am always some one else. The first time I came to your house I wore a
beard, and the second time looked like a gas inspector. You saw only
the real Dawson. When one has got the passion for the chase in one's
blood, one cannot bide for long in a stuffy office. As I have a jewel
of an assistant, I can always escape and follow up my own victims.
This man Hagan is a black heartless devil. Don't waste your sympathy
on him, Mr. Cary. He took money from us quite lately to betray the
silly asses of Sinn Feiners, and now, thinking us hoodwinked, is after
more money from the Kaiser. He is of the type that would sell his own
mother and buy a mistress with the money. He's not worth your pity. We
use him and his like for just so long as they can be useful, and then
the jaws of the trap close. By letting him take those faked Notes we
have done a fine stroke for the Navy, for the Yard, and for Bill
Dawson. We have got in