total strangers, would
most assuredly have leaped at the chance of appealing to the
consideration and the help of the passing citizen.

Mrs. Sarrasin remorselessly repeated her test words, and the man
repeated them after her.

'That will do,' she said contemptuously; 'the man was never born in
Whitechapel--his East End accent is mere gotten up stage-play.' Then she
spoke some rapid words to her husband in a _patois_ which Ericson did
not understand. The Whitechapel man's eyes flashed fire again.

'You see,' she said to the Dictator, 'he understands me! I have been
saying in Sicilian _patois_ that he is a hired assassin born in England
of Sicilian parents, and brought up, probably, near Snow Hill--and this
Whitechapel gentleman understood every word I said! If you give him the
alternative of going to the nearest police-station and being charged, or
of talking Sicilian _patois_ with me, you will see that he prefers the
alternative of a conversation in Sicilian _patois_ with me.

'I propose that we let him go,' the Dictator said decisively. 'We have
no evidence against him, except that he carries a peculiar knife, and
that he is, as you say, of Sicilian parents.'

'Your Excellency yourself gave me the hint I acted on,' Mrs. Sarrasin
said deferentially, 'when you made the remark that the knife was
Sicilian. I spoke on mere guess-work, acting on that hint.'

'And you were right, as you always are,' Captain Sarrasin struck in with
admiring eyes fixed on his wife.

'Well, he is a poor creature, anyhow,' the Dictator said--and he spoke
now to his friends in Spanish--'and not much up to his work. If he were
worth anything in his own line of business he might have finished the
job with that knife instead of stopping to open a conversation with me.'

'But he has been set on by someone to do this job,' Sarrasin said, 'and
we might get to know who is the someone that set him on.'

'We shall not know from him,' the Dictator replied; 'he probably does not
know who are the real movers. No; if there is anything serious to come
it will come from better hands than his. No, my dear and kind friends,
we can't get any further with _him_. Let the creature go. Let him tell
his employers, whoever they are, that I don't scare, as the Americans
say, worth a cent. If they have any real assassins to send on, let them
come; this fellow won't do; and I can't have paragraphs in the papers to
say that I took any serious alarm from a creature w