That evening the nightly concert of the “Carpentaria Band” was held in the great court of the Exposition Palace, partly because the weather was threatening, and partly because the Y.M.C.A. wished it so. The stalwart members of the Y.M.C.A. were prominent and joyous, and they pervaded the City to the number of some fifty thousand. They were nearly all young, and they were all, without exception, enthusiastic. They had taken possession of practically the whole of the tables on the three tiers of balconies that surrounded the court, and there was also a considerable sprinkling of them on the ground floor. They liked Carpentaria; they liked his music; they liked his way of conducting. They admired him when he split the drums of their ears, and they equally admired him when he wooed those organs with a hint of sound that was something less than a whisper. They violently cheered his marches, and with the same violence they cheered his serenades and his cradlesongs.

Consequently Carpentaria was content. He was more than content—he glowed with pleasure. He was the centre of the vast illuminated court, with its ornate architecture, and its wonderful roof, and its serried rows of lights. All eyes were centred on him. He swayed not only his band, but the multitude, by a single movement of the slim baton—that magic bit of ivory which he held in his hand. He said to himself that he had never had a better, a more appreciative and enthusiastic audience in the whole of his glorious career. The result was, that-he conducted in his most variegated and polychromatic manner. He did things with his wand that no conductor had ever done with a wand before; he performed gyrations, contortions, and acrobatics beyond all his previous exploits. In a word, he surpassed himself.

He was in the very act of surpassing himself, in his renowned “Cockney Serenade,” when he observed, out of the tail of his eye, a middle-aged man, who was forcing his way at all costs across the floor of the hall towards the bandstand.

When seven thousand people are packed on chairs on a single floor, it is not the quietest task in the world to penetrate through them. And the middle-aged man was not doing it quietly, in fact, he was making decidedly more noise than the “Cockney Serenade,” and attracting quite as much attention.

A number of ardently musical young men on the grand balcony leaned over the wrought-iron parapet and advised the middle-aged man to lie down and die, in a manner unmistakably ferocious. (It is extraordinary how ferocious a youth can be on mere lemonade.) But the middle-aged man continued his course, and he arrived at the bandstand, despite official and unofficial protests, simultaneously with the conclusion of the serenade.

Gales of applause swept about the court, and Carpentaria bowed, and bowed again—bowed innumerably, all the time regarding the middle-aged man with angry and suppressed curiosity. The middle-aged man had lifted up a hand and pulled the triangle-player by the belt of his magnificent uniform, and the triangle-player had bent down to speak to him.

“What is it? What is it?” asked Carpentaria, his nerves on edge.

“A person insists on speaking to you, sir,” replied the triangle-player.

“He cannot,” snapped Carpentaria.

“He says he shall,” said the triangle-player.

“I’ll——” Carpentaria began an anathema, and then stopped. He went to the rail of the bandstand and leaned over to the middle-aged man.

“At your age,” he said grimly, “you ought to know better than to interrupt my concerts in this way. Who are you? What do you want?”

“My name is Gloucester, sir,” was the answer. “Doubtless you recollect.”

“I do nothing of the kind,” said Carpentaria.

“I’m in charge of the—er——” Here Gloucester stood up on tiptoe in an endeavour to whisper directly into Carpentaria’s ear—“the strong-rooms.”

“Well,” asked Carpentaria, “what do you want?”

“Been robbed, sir.”

“Great Heavens, man!” Carpentaria exploded. “You come to interrupt my concert because the strong-rooms have been robbed!”

“Two thousand five hundred pounds, sir.”

“I don’t care if it’s two thousand times two thousand five hundred pounds. Go away! Go and worry Mr. Ilam.”

“That’s just it, sir. Mr. Ilam has been taken, too.”

By this time the multitudinous eyes of the audience were fixed on Carpentaria and his interlocutor, and everybody was sapiently saying to everybody else that something extraordinary must have occurred.

“What do you mean—Mr. Ilam been taken?” Carpentaria demanded.

“He’s been carried off—he carried the money off—he was forced to, sir. Revolver, sir. Can’t you come, sir?”

“Can I come? Ye gods! Man, do you know what a concert is? Can I come? Of course I can’t come!”

“Mr. Ilam may be dead, sir.”

“We shall have leisure to bury him after the concert,” said Carpentaria. “Go away. Go and consult Lapping, head of the police department. Or, rather, don’t. You’ll upset the audience making your way out. Sit down. Sit right down there, and don’t move. We’re going to play my new arrangement of the ‘Glory Song’ with variations. You’ll see it will bring the house down. It will be something you’ll remember as long as you live.”

“But, sir,” pleaded Mr. Gloucester pathetically.

“Sit down—and listen,” Carpentaria repeated sternly.

He returned to the centre of his men. He rapped the magic wand on his desk, and the next moment the band had burst deliriously into the now famous orchestral arrangement of the “Glory Song.” The audience was thrilled by the waves of sound that emanated from the instruments, especially when the variations began. So the entertainment continued, while Mr. Gloucester, consuming his middle-aged impatience as best he could, ruminated upon the strange caprices of employers. He had been an employÉ all his life; he had never commanded; and his conclusion, at the age of fifty odd, was to the effect that the nature of employers is incomprehensible, and that you never know what they will do next.

“Excuse me, sir.” He timidly touched Carpentaria when the concert was over.

Carpentaria, it appeared, in the rush and fever of the music, had forgotten all about him, and was on the point of leaving the court deafened by applause.

“Ah, yes!” said Carpentaria. “That thief. Two thousand five hundred pounds. And you say that Mr. Ilam has been carried off. Tell me all about that. Come this way. Come into the street—it is always the most private place.”

And in the Central Way, near the fountain, upon which coloured lights were reflected from below, Mr. Gloucester related in detail to Carpentaria the episode of the theft.

“You say it was a man dressed in blue, with grey hair?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And there were three of you, including Mr. Ilam, and you could not manage to disarm him?”

“It might have meant death for the first of us, sir.”

“Well,” said Carpentaria absently, “what if it did?”

Mr. Gloucester grunted.

“You said I was to consult Mr. Lapping, sir. Shall we go there?”

“No,” said Carpentaria, “not yet. I will look into it myself first. The principal mystery is that of the doorkeeper. What is his name?”

“Wiggins.”

“And he has disappeared?”

“He was not there when I left, sir. And he could not have been there when the thief entered.”

“Why not?”

“Because he would not have allowed the thief to enter, sir. He has strict orders.”

“Humph! Come along.”

They hastened up the Central Way, in a northerly direction. The rain had kept off, and the illuminations, which were superb, evidently met with the ecstatic approval of the Y.M.C.A. adherents, who paraded to and fro, and filled the flying cars, with the hectic enjoyment of people who feel that closing time is near. The progress made by Carpentaria and his companion was therefore not of the quickest.

“It’s more than an hour since,” said Mr. Gloucester, daring to show his. discontent.

“What is?” asked Carpentaria.

“Since the crime occurred.”

“The fellow must have calculated on my concert,” replied Carpentaria. “He probably knew that everybody in this City runs to me when the slightest thing goes wrong.”

“The slightest thing!” repeated Mr. Gloucester bitterly—but not aloud, only in his secret soul.

They hurried round by the side of the Storytellers’ Hall, and so to the passage at the back. And standing at the entrance to the vaults, underneath a solitary jet of electric light, was Wiggins, the doorkeeper of the heart of the City. He was a man aged about thirty-five, six feet two high, and not quite so broad.

“So you’re here!” exclaimed Carpentaria.

“Yes, sir.”

“Where have you been since—since Mr. Ilam arrived here?”

“I did what you told me, sir,” said Wiggins, with an air of independence. Wiggins was not a Mr. Gloucester.

“What was that?” demanded Carpentaria, mystified.

“Why, your note, sir.”

“What note?”

Wiggins pulled a crumpled paper from his pocket and handed it to Carpentaria, who read:

“Come to me in my office at once. If I am not there, wait for me. The bearer will take your duties meanwhile.

“C. Carpentaria.”

“Oh!” said Carpentaria. “And who brought this?”

“A Soudanese, sir.”

“Which Soudanese?”

“I don’t know. They’re all alike to me.”

“And it didn’t occur to you that this note was forged?”

“No, sir. Why should it?”

“It didn’t occur to you,” Carpentaria continued, “that I was conducting my concert, and that therefore I couldn’t possibly be in my office?”

“I didn’t know anything about any concert, sir. I’m doorkeeper here——”

“Not know about my concert!” cried Carpentaria. Then he calmed himself. “Mr. Ilam came before the Soudanese brought the note to you?”

“Yes, sir, but only a few seconds before. He had but just gone in when the Soudanese came. I was talking to the driver of the motor-car as was waiting, sir, here in front of the door.”

“Oh. So there was a motor-car?”

“Yes, sir. It was one of the City cars. No. 28, sir. To take the money away, sir.”

“Good. Who was the driver? Do you know his name?”

“I think his name’s Pratt, sir.”

“Then you left immediately and went to my office and waited for me, and then?”

“Then I got tired of waiting and I came back here, sir.”

“Good,” said Carpentaria. “Mr. Gloucester, the garage is indicated as our next resort.”

The immense garage of the City was close to the northern entrance gates. And it, too, was guarded by a doorkeeper, hidden in a little box near the double-wooden doors.

“I want to know if Car No. 28 has come in,” said Carpentaria.

“Yes, sir,” was the reply. “Came in twenty minutes ago.”

“Did you see it?”

“Yes, sir,” said the doorkeeper.

“Who was driving it?”

“I didn’t notice, sir.”

“Show us the car, if you please.”

They passed into the desert expanse of the garage, where a few men were cleaning cars. Car No. 28 was in its place. In shape it was rather like a police-van, but smaller. Carpentaria noticed that its wheels were very dirty.

“Open it,” said he.

The key was found, and the interior of the car exposed to the light of a lantern. And at the extremity of the car could be seen a vague mass, a collection of limbs and clothes on the floor.

“Get in,” said Carpentaria, “and see what that is.”

The next moment two men were dragged out of the car in a state of stupor. One was the Soudanese entitled “Spats,” who had become Ilam’s bodyguard, and the other wore the uniform of an automobile driver.

“Who is this?” Carpentaria asked.

“It looks precious like Pratt, the man as usually drives this car, sir,” answered the doorkeeper.

All the attendants in the place had now gathered round.