ser's office,
and passed his card through the little window to the man inside the
cage.

"I should like to see M. Pigot, of the Paris _Service du Surete_" he
said. "Perhaps you will be so kind as to have a steward take my card
to him?"

"That is unnecessary, sir," replied the purser, courteously. "That is
M. Pigot yonder--the gentleman with the white hair, with his back to
us. You will have to wait for a moment, however; the gentleman
speaking with him is from the French consulate, and has but this
moment come aboard."

I could not see Inspector Pigot's face, but I could see that he held
himself very erect, in a manner bespeaking military training. The
messenger from the legation was a youngish man, with waxed moustache
and wearing an eyeglass. He was greeting M. Pigot at the moment, and,
after a word or two, produced from an inside pocket an
official-looking envelope, tied with red tape and secured with an
immense red seal.

M. Pigot looked at it an instant, while his companion added a
sentence in his ear; then, with a nod of assent, the detective turned
down one of the passage-ways, the other man at his heels.

"Official business, no doubt," commented the purser, who had also
been watching this little scene. "M. Pigot is one of the best of our
officers, and you will find it a pleasure to talk with him. He will
no doubt soon be disengaged."

"Yes, but meanwhile my esteemed contemporaries will arrive," said
Godfrey, with a grimace. "They are on my heels--here they are now!"

In fact, for the next twenty minutes, reporters from the other papers
kept arriving, till there was quite a crowd before the purser's
office. And from nearly every paper a special man had been detailed
to interview M. Pigot. Evidently all the papers were alive to the
importance of the subject. There was some good-natured chaffing, and
then one of the stewards was bribed to carry the cards of the
assembled multitude to M. Pigot's stateroom, with the request for an
audience.

The steward went away laughing, and came back presently to say that
M. Pigot would be pleased to see us in a few minutes. But when five
minutes more passed and he did not appear, impatience broke out anew.
The lords of the press were not accustomed to being kept waiting.

"I move we storm his castle," suggested the _World_ man.

And just then, M. Pigot himself stepped out into the companionway. In
an instant he was surrounded.

"My good friends of the press," he s