histical brotherhood that a debt of vengeance had been
paid and a traitor punished; but the brotherhood did not need any such
sign. If the man were Lovetski it would know of his death without any
such silly nonsense as that. It knew the men it "marked," and it knew
when those men died, and by whose hand, too; and it did not go about
placarding its victims with clues to their identity or signs of whose
hands had directed the exterminating blow.

And Ferdinand Lovetski it never had "marked"--never had issued any
death sentence against, never had sought to punish, never, indeed, had
taken any interest in--for the simple reason that, as Cleek knew, the
man had been in his grave these seven years past! He knew that beyond
all question; for in those dark other times that lay behind him
forever--in his old "Vanishing Cracksman" days, in those repented years
when he and Margot had cast their lot together and he had been the
chosen consort of the queen of the Apaches--in those wild times
Lovetski, down on his luck, bankrupt through dissipation, a thief by
nature, and a lazy vagabond at heart, had joined the Apaches and become
one of them. Not for long, however. Within six months word had come to
him of the death of a relative in his native Russia, and of a little
property that was now his by right of inheritance; and he was for saying
good-bye to his new colleagues and journeying on to Moscow to claim his
little fortune. But the law of the Apaches is the law of the
commonwealth, and Margot and her band had demanded the usual division.
Lovetski had rebelled against it; he had sworn that he would not share;
that what was his should remain his only as long as he lived and--it
did. But five days later his knife-jagged body was fished out of the
Seine and lay in the morgue awaiting identification; Margot went thrice
to see it before it went into the trench with others that were set down
in the records as unknown.

That was seven years ago; and now here was Lord St. Ulmer, or some one
in his room, burning labels that had to do with the days when that dead
man was in honest business, and had lost it simply through dissipation
after the police had discovered that 63 Essex Row was used in part as a
meeting place for several "wanted" aliens, and had raided it and closed
it up.

Lovetski had never belonged to the brotherhood; he had never even known
that they met under that roof until the time of the raid; but he had
been arrested with