e bulk sprawled in
fantastic helplessness across the floor. Only von Bruenig had moved; he
was sitting up on his hands, staring in a half-dazed fashion down the
barrel of Latimer's Mauser.

It was Latimer himself who renewed the conversation.

"Come and fix up these two, Ellis," he said. "I will see to the
other."

The man who had burst in with Tommy, a lithe, hard-looking fellow in a
blue suit, walked crisply across the room, and pulling out a pair
of light hand-cuffs snapped them round von Bruenig's wrists. He then
performed a similar service for the still unconscious Savaroff.

The next moment Latimer, Tommy, and I were kneeling round the
prostrate figure of the doctor. We lifted him up very gently and
turned him over on to his back, using a rolled-up rug as a pillow for
his head. He had been shot through the right lung and was bleeding at
the mouth.

Latimer bent over and made a brief examination of the wound. Then with
a slight shake of his head he knelt back.

"I'm afraid there's no hope," he remarked dispassionately. "It's a
pity. We might have got some useful information out of him."

There was a short pause, and then quite suddenly the dying man opened
his eyes. It may have been fancy, but it seemed to me that for a
moment a shadow of the old mocking smile flitted across his face. His
lips moved, faintly, as though he were trying to speak. I bent down to
listen, but even as I did so there came a fresh rush of blood into his
throat, and with a long shudder that strange sinister spirit of his
passed over into the darkness. I shall always wonder what it was that
he left unsaid.

CHAPTER XXIV

EXONERATED

It was Tommy who pronounced his epitaph. "Well," he observed, "he was
a damned scoundrel, but he played a big game anyhow."

Latimer thrust his hand into the dead man's pocket, and drew out a
small nickel-plated revolver. One chamber of it was discharged.

"Not a bad shot," he remarked critically. "Fired at me through his
coat, and only missed my head by an inch."

He got up and looked round the room at the shattered window and the
other traces of the fray, his gaze coming finally to rest on the
prostrate figure of Savaroff.

"That was a fine punch of yours, Lyndon," he added. "I hope you
haven't broken his neck."

"I don't think so," I said. "Necks like Savaroff's take a lot of
breaking." Then, suddenly remembering, I added hastily: "By the way,
you know that there are two more of the