n the
Tottenham Court Road, reporting my movements and my whereabouts;
therefore I knew not from one day to another when I should receive
sudden orders to rejoin him.

The London papers had been full of the affair of the six novels, for it
was now well known that the person who had abstracted the jewels was the
same who had executed such a neat manoeuvre at Gilling's. One or two
of the papers actually published leaderettes upon the subject, severely
criticising the incompetency of the police in such matters. I have
since heard, however, that at Scotland Yard there is a proverb that the
wealthier the thief the less chance of his being caught. Bindo and his
friends certainly did not lack funds. The various hauls they had made,
even since my association with them, must have put many thousands into
their pockets.

They were a clever and daring trio. They never met unless absolutely
necessary in order to arrange some ingenious piece of trickery, and they
could all live weeks at the same hotel without either, by word or sign,
betraying previous knowledge of each other. Indeed, Count Bindo di
Ferraris was the very acme of well-dressed, well-groomed scoundrelism.

Under the name of Ernest Crawford I was idling away some pleasant weeks
at the Europaeischer Hof, in the Alstadt, in Dresden, where I had made
the acquaintance of a fair-haired Englishman named Upton, and his wife,
a fluffy little woman some five years his junior. They had arrived at
the hotel about a week after I had taken up my quarters, and as they
became friendly I often took them for runs. Upton was the son of a rich
Lancashire cotton-spinner, and was, I believe, on his honeymoon.
Together we saw the sights of Dresden, the Royal Palace, the Green
Vault, the museums and galleries, and had soon grown tired of them all.
Therefore, almost daily we went for runs along the Elbe valley,
delightful at that season of the vintage.

One evening, while we were sitting at coffee in the lounge and I was
chatting with Mrs. Upton, her husband was joined by a friend from
London, a tall, rather loud-spoken, broad-shouldered man, with a pair of
merry, twinkling eyes and a reddish moustache. He was a motor-expert, I
soon discovered, for on the afternoon following his arrival, when I
brought the car round to the hotel, he began to examine it critically.

I had invited him to go with us to the Golden Hoehe, about six miles
distant, and take tea at the restaurant, and he sat at my