man and only said, in a low
voice, "What crime do you mean?"

"I have helped English justice," replied Prince Michael. "I have
avenged your king's officers; I have done the work of his hangman.
For that truly I deserve to be hanged."

And he turned to the police with a gesture that did not so much
surrender to them, but rather command them to arrest him.

This was the story that Horne Fisher told to Harold March, the
journalist, many years after, in a little, but luxurious, restaurant
near Piccadilly. He had invited March to dinner some time after the
affair he called "The Face in the Target," and the conversation had
naturally turned on that mystery and afterward on earlier memories
of Fisher's life and the way in which he was led to study such
problems as those of Prince Michael. Horne Fisher was fifteen years
older; his thin hair had faded to frontal baldness, and his long,
thin hands dropped less with affectation and more with fatigue. And
he told the story of the Irish adventure of his youth, because it
recorded the first occasion on which he had ever come in contact
with crime, or discovered how darkly and how terribly crime can be
entangled with law.

"Hooker Wilson was the first criminal I ever knew, and he was a
policeman," explained Fisher, twirling his wine glass. "And all my
life has been a mixed-up business of the sort. He was a man of very
real talent, and perhaps genius, and well worth studying, both as a
detective and a criminal. His white face and red hair were typical
of him, for he was one of those who are cold and yet on fire for
fame; and he could control anger, but not ambition. He swallowed the
snubs of his superiors in that first quarrel, though he boiled with
resentment; but when he suddenly saw the two heads dark against the
dawn and framed in the two windows, he could not miss the chance,
not only of revenge, but of the removal of the two obstacles to his
promotion. He was a dead shot and counted on silencing both, though
proof against him would have been hard in any case. But, as a matter
of fact, he had a narrow escape, in the case of Nolan, who lived
just long enough to say, 'Wilson' and point. We thought he was
summoning help for his comrade, but he was really denouncing his
murderer. After that it was easy to throw down the ladder above him
(for a man up a ladder cannot see clearly what is below and behind)
and to throw himself on the ground as another victim of the
catastrophe.