"the room clerk--"

"--took a nap," broke in the Chief. But Delamater could not be
satisfied with the explanation.

"He got his, all right," he conceded, "--got it in a locked room nine
stories above the street, with no possible means of bringing it upon
himself--and no way for the murderer to escape. I tell you there is
something more to this: just the letter to the Secretary, as if this
Eye of Allah were spying upon him--"

The Chief waved all that aside. "A clever spy," he insisted. "Too
clever for you. And a darn good guesser; he had us all fooled. But
we're dealing with a madman, not a ghost, and he didn't sail in
through a ninth story window nor go out through a locked door; neither
did he spy on the Secretary of State in his private office. Don't try
to make a supernatural mystery out of a failure, Del."

The big man's words were tempered with a laugh, but there was an edge
of sarcasm, ill-concealed.

* * * * *

And then came the next note. And the next. The letters were mailed at
various points in and about the city; they came in a flood. And they
were addressed to the President of the United States, to the Secretary
of War--of the Navy--to all the Cabinet members. And all carried the
same threat under the staring eye.

The United States, to this man, represented all that was tyrannical
and oppressive to the downtrodden of the earth. He proposed to end
it--this government first, then others in their turn. It was the
outpouring of a wildly irrational mind that came to the office of the
harassed Chief of the United States Secret Service, who had
instructions to run this man down--this man who signed himself The Eye
of Allah. And do it quickly for the notes were threatening. Official
Washington, it seemed, was getting jumpy and was making caustic
inquiries as to why a Secret Service department was maintained.

The Chief, himself, was directing the investigation--and getting
nowhere.

"Here is the latest," he said one morning. "Mailed at New York."
Delamater and a dozen other operatives were in his office: he showed
them a letter printed like all the others. There was the eye, and
beneath were words that made the readers catch their breath.

"The Eye of Allah sees--it has warned--now it will destroy. The day of
judgment is at hand. The battleship _Maryland_ is at anchor in the
Hudson River at New York. No more shall it be the weapon of a despot
government. It will be dest