flask of it about with me for months. Where I
got it matters nothing; the whole point is that a mere sniff reduces
flesh to clay. I have never had any opinion of suicide, as you know,
but I always felt it worth while to be forearmed against the very
worst. Well, a bottle of this stuff is calculated to stiffen an
ordinary roomful of ordinary people within five minutes; and I
remembered my flask when they had me as good as crucified in the small
hours of this morning. I asked them to take it out of my pocket. I
begged them to give me a drink before they left me. And what do you
suppose they did?"

I thought of many things but suggested none, while Raffles turned this
much of his statement into sufficiently fluent Italian. But when he
faced me again his face was still flaming.

"That beast Corbucci!" said he--"how can I pity him? He took the
flask; he would give me none; he flicked me in the face instead. My
idea was that he, at least, should go with me--to sell my life as
dearly as that--and a sniff would have settled us both. But no, he must
tantalize and torment me; he thought it brandy; he must take it
downstairs to drink to my destruction! Can you have any pity for a
hound like that?"

"Let us go," I at last said, hoarsely, as Raffles finished speaking in
Italian, and his second listener stood open-mouthed.

"We will go," said Raffles, "and we will chance being seen; if the
worst comes to the worst this good chap will prove that I have been
tied up since one o'clock this morning, and the medical evidence will
decide how long those dogs have been dead."

But the worst did not come to the worst, more power to my unforgotten
friend the cabman, who never came forward to say what manner of men he
had driven to Bloomsbury Square at top speed on the very day upon which
the tragedy was discovered there, or whence he had driven them. To be
sure, they had not behaved like murderers, whereas the evidence at the
inquest all went to show that the defunct Corbucci was little better.
His reputation, which transpired with his identity, was that of a
libertine and a renegade, while the infernal apparatus upstairs
revealed the fiendish arts of the anarchist to boot. The inquiry
resulted eventually in an open verdict, and was chiefly instrumental
in killing such compassion as is usually felt for the dead who die in
their sins.

But Raffles would not have passed this title for this tale.

TO CATCH A THI