Sea-wise Bahaman corespondents of American press services were of one mind concerning Lanyard's disappearance from the Port Royal, arguing that the known conditions of time and tide ruled it out of all consideration as a sane attempt at escape. The stories they cabled North were accordingly published, for the most part, under headlines something in this sense:

LONE WOLF SUICIDES AT SEA

Lanyard, these reports related, had gone overboard, rather than submit to arrest, after dark of a moonless night, when the Port Royal was standing into Northeast Providence Channel, her position being approximately midway between its jaws. Thus, if he dreamed to win to land either in the North, where Hole-in-the-Wall Lighthouse sentinels the southernmost point of Great Abaco Island, or in South, where Egg Island Light warns of the perils lying off the northerly tip of Eleuthera, the fugitive had undertaken a ten-mile pull against the drag of the strong offshore current which was setting through the channel at the time; a task which must have thwarted the stoutest effort of the strongest swimmer, even assuming that the sharks with which those waters swarm had been content to let him pass unmolested. Something which, the consensus maintained, in the case of Lanyard, the sharks indisputably hadn't.

That cry of "Man overboard!" had brought the Port Royal to a prompt and a dead halt; the waters roundabout had been lavishly sown with ring-buoys as well as with floating flares, guided by whose weird illumination a life-boat quartered the theatre of the mystery for upwards of an hour before the steamer called it in and proceeded. Nevertheless the authorities who boarded her at Nassau, in their disappointment indisposed to accept the suicide theory, insisted on a thorough rummage of the vessel which accomplished little toward hushing the murmurs of dissatisfaction with which, at length and empty-handed, they took themselves ashore.

These doubters had at least one confrÈre of weathered judgment in New York, who gave free tongue to his conviction that the Lone Wolf was one wise bird and a tough fish to drown. And the faith of this one in the will-to-live animating the hybrid monstrosity of his figure had good justification in the outcome, when, one night more than a month after the event of the alleged suicide, a glare beating directly into his face roused him from the slumbers of an honest man to find that some marauder had added the cool insolence of switching on the bedside lamp to the felonious injury of housebreaking.

One who in his time had done much to make life a misery to men of wicked ways, and more than once had figured as the target of an assassin's weapon, the householder had long been accustomed to sleep with a pistol ready to his hand. But his instinctive fumble for it drew a blank this time; so, with such composure as he could command, he turned attention to the agent of its confiscation.

This person had cheekily drawn up a chair to the bedside and made himself at home in it, one of the detective's cigars between his teeth and a highball of the detective's precious pre-Prohibition Scotch in his hand testifying to amiable readiness to be sociable, provided his host had no real objection to advance.

A semi-blinded stare was met by a smile that flashed teeth of notable whiteness in a face deeply bronzed where it didn't boast a lush overgrowth of beard. This last was sparely shot with grey, and so was hair that also wanted shearing; but the rich complexion of the miscreant was clear, his eyes were luminous with vitality, he had in every particular the look of one who had consorted long and profitably with Nature in her least sophisticated phases. As for his costume, it was altogether shocking, comprising simply a cotton singlet, a coat without much definite shape or colour, a pair of ragged trousers belted with an end of rope, and foot-gear that would have kindled the envy of a slapstick clown of the cinema.

"Well!" the detective summed up his scrutiny—"if that front didn't make you the spit of the devil, I'd lay long odds you were none other than my poor dear pal, the late Mike Angelo Lanyardi."

"It isn't sporting to bet on a certainty," the guest severely pointed out. "And I'm sorry you think I'm late, my good Crane; but I'd rather far be that than never."

"It would be a whole lot healthier for you to be never, in this neck-o'-the-woods. If you haven't got sense enough to stay put in your watery grave—"

"How shall an unquiet spirit withstand the temptation thus to revisit these glimpses of the moonshine?" Lanyard sipped his drink with unaffected relish. "Prime stuff, my friend! and I will be glad to fetch you its fellow if you'll only be nice and forget for a time you're a limb of the law whose sworn duty it is to pinch out of hand revisitants, like me, from another and a wetter world."

"The devil himself couldn't twist the King's English into such ornery knots," Crane declared. "I'm convinced: it is indeed the Lone Wolf who lurks behind those lovely whiskers."

"You may be right," Lanyard admitted. "Unhappily, I for one can't altogether share your certainty."

Crane made nothing of that, so let it pass. "Such behind the case," he pursued, "a man-size slug of Scotch would be some solace to my conscience."

"On your promise to be peaceable?" Lanyard stipulated, rising.

"Speaking as one who has seen you act up when your sense of self-preservation was hitting on all six, I don't mind passing you my word, you're in no danger of my starting any rukus without a gun."

"Or with one, I trust very truly."

"If you'd had the common decency to trust me at all, I wouldn't be missing my gat this minute."

"Common decency not being the same thing, one takes it, as common sense?"

"You don't have to worry," Crane insisted with an air of some aggrievance. "If I can't round you up without a gun, you can run loose and wild for all of me."

"On that understanding, then . . ." Lanyard tossed the weapon back to the bed. "Forgive a simple precaution not inspired by any real doubt of your good disposition toward an old friend, or your sporting attitude toward a professional antagonist . . ."

The broad of his back was a shining mark for Crane as he strode away to an adjoining room, where he made a light, and from which he presently returned with a box of cigars and a musical glass.

Crane had not stirred. The pistol rested where it had fallen. Lanyard tendered the drink and the open box.

"Astonishing," he mused, "what a sound taste in cigars one finds prevalent among members of a venal and brutalized constabulary!"

He remarked in pained astonishment that the bed was quaking with Crane's silent mirth.

"Don't mind me!" the detective protested: "it's myself I'm giving the laugh, not you. I've been figuring for some time now, you were about due to stage a gaudy resurrection; but this beats my craziest notions of what the show would be like. I'm a pretty old mule of a dick, and a tough audience for trick stuff, but I've got to hand it to you, Lanyard: I've never yet been able to dope out what your next dodge would be nor how you'd pull it. So, whenever you get all set to explain what the hell you mean by sitting there and looking like that—well, you needn't be afraid I'll walk out on you."

"You don't like my make-up?" Lanyard drew a long face over his vestments. "Do you know? I rather fancied it. These jibs seem so appropriate to my newly adopted calling. Behold in me, if you please, my dear Crane, a seafaring man fully three weeks of age."

"That leaves a couple to be accounted for, then, since the night you took to the big drink."

"There were two weeks before I became what I am," Lanyard confessed, "when, not to put too fine a point on it, I was purely and beautifully a beachcomber in those enchanting Bahamas."

"I've got a hunch this is going to be good." Crane grinned luxuriously through cigar-smoke. "At least, I don't imagine you've got the crust to think you stand any show of getting whatever it is you want out of me, without coming through with a full account of yourself from then right up to now."

"A stipulation of quid pro quo is always reasonable and in order," Lanyard agreed. "Yet I am afraid you may find my story a poor exchange for what I wish to learn from you, my friend . . ."

"It's your risk. Shoot."

"You are wondering how I eluded the authorities at Nassau? That was elementary. . . . On the other hand, one must admit one was dealing, aboard the Port Royal, with gentry of small experience and less imagination. . . . When I left my stateroom by way of its window, I found myself with scant stomach for a long swim in black water: it needs the hot blood of youth to contemplate without a qualm adventures like that. There was a deck-chair nearby, and in it somebody's steamer-rug; I folded up the one in the other, and cast them overboard. In the darkness they passed for the shape of a man to startled eyes on the main deck below; nobody questioned the alarm I raised of 'Man overboard!' There was much excitement then; but other than the ship's officers, nobody knew the unfortunate was a notorious criminal trying to evade arrest, nobody else was looking for AndrÉ Duchemin—and I was careful enough to make myself insignificant. When the boat was lowered to scour the seas for me, all hands honoured the performance with undivided attention, it was easy to take refuge in one of the life-boats swung inboard on its davits on the opposite side of the deck; I wormed my way in under the canvas cover and lay snug till the Port Royal took the pilot aboard outside Nassau and with him the police agents. It was still quite dark; and as the blood-hounds swarmed up one side, the Lone Wolf dropped down the opposite, unseen. There were a number of vessels riding at anchor in the roadstead, and when I had put a good distance between myself and the Port Royal I picked out a little schooner of unkempt appearance, climbed aboard her while the anchor-watch snored, and hid myself in her hold."

---

Lanyard paused to puff his cigar into a glow, and chuckled. "That was a sorry shift, out of the frying-pan into the fire for the poor old Lone Wolf. . . . The schooner turned out to be a rum-runner. Her owners had put into Nassau for a night's carouse. In the morning they came aboard, weighed anchor, and set sail. When I reckoned the time ripe to declare myself, a jury of noble headaches sat on my case, decided that a stowaway with so lame a story could be nothing but a spy of the United States Internal Revenue Service; and, true to piratical tradition, sentenced me to be marooned on a desert isle. That very night the foul deed was done: the next sun rose to shine upon an outcast from humankind squatting forlornly on the beach of a desolate cay, God only knew where, and trying to recall his Robinson Crusoe . . .

"I had a thin time of it for several days, my friend! I lived frugally on the fruits of the land, when and if found, and such creatures of the shallow sea as I was able to snare with naked hands. The fruits were not sustaining, and the raw seafood made me wretchedly sick.

"The cay was one of an endless chain—little islets, some nothing more than rocks, some mere sandbanks dry only at low tide, separated by narrow channels of no great depth. I made my laborious way from one to another; but when at length I did stumble across a settlement it was only a huddle of wattled huts inhabited by negro sponge-fishers, their wives and progeny, who spoke a patois unintelligible to my ears, lived in squalour indescribable, and discovered boundless contempt for a white man in such plight. For all that, they gave me cooked food of a kind into which I did not care to enquire too closely, being contented enough to have it stay on my stomach.

"Their headman had enough English to strike a bargain with me. . . . I had fled in my shirt and trousers, the only valuable I possessed was a wrist-watch in a gold case. Sea-water had put it out of service, but the negro coveted it with great lust, and agreed in exchange for it to convey me in his boat to another island on which there were white men. Thus it fell out that, some ten days after my dive into the harbour of Nassau, I found myself on a cay of good size which served one particular band of rum-runners as a secret rendezvous and dÉpÔt.

"My condition at that juncture was so pitiable as to make my tale seem credible; I posed as a French sailor who had been washed overboard from a passing vessel during a blow that had recently swept the islands. The rum-runners were a rough lot, but humane: they took me in, fed and clothed me, would have let me kill myself with drink had I been so minded, and raised no objection when I prayed for a chance to work my passage on the first vessel that put in to take on a cargo for the States. Having eaten their bread and salt, I shall not betray their confidence: it is enough that I was set ashore not too far from this city. And here I am."

Lanyard saluted the detective with his glass; and in an explosive grunt Crane proclaimed that he would be everlastingly damned. "You went through all that hell to come back here and stick your fool head into the noose that's waiting for it!"

"My dear friend: I didn't like to dash your expectations . . ."

"Don't you realize what you're up against?—wanted for a dozen jobs pulled off in the last six months! a price of fifty thousand cold-drawn dollars on your head!"

"But, by all accounts, the Lone Wolf was drowned to death in the middle of Northeast Providence Channel on the night of the fifth of June."

"Don't suppose anybody takes any stock in that yarn today, do you?"

The stress on the adverb caused Lanyard's eyes to widen. "And why not?"

"See here!" Crane bounced up in his bed and with every evidence of strong emotion levelled a bony forefinger; but second thought closed the lips that stormy indignation had opened, bewilderment blanked out the fire that had flamed up in his eyes, frustration slackened his arm; in mild despair he fell back upon his pillow. "I don't get you," he uttered feebly—"that's all: I just don't get you."

"But, my dear sir, it is now and ever will be my ambition to make sure that you, in your official capacity, never do get me."

But the detective wasn't in a humour to be patient with persiflage. "I don't get you," he mulishly reiterated. "If you're aiming to give me some sort of a steer, I don't connect with the big idea, when your one best bet—and I know you're wise enough to know it—is to keep all the scenery you can between you and me all the time, and not come stalling around in fancy dress to give me an earful that don't matter a whoop if it ain't true. Because, I tell you this, Lanyard! . . ."

Crane was again sitting up and brandishing an admonitory forefinger. "Let me tell you this here and now, for your own good: As long as I believed in you, there wasn't much you could name I wouldn't have done for you; but the way things look now, unless you're prepared to come through with something more nourishing to my confidence than drawing-room manners and a baby stare, you're monkeying with high explosive this very minute; because just as soon as ever you leave this flat and I'm no longer bound by my promise not to mix things up with you"—a move of a disgusted hand designated the pistol whose return had put the detective on his honour—"I'm going to light out after you and camp on your trail night and day till I get you right—so help me!"

"Amen!" Lanyard piously chanted. "No: don't be angry, but believe I mean that in all seriousness. Had I not expected to find such fidelity to principle in you, that even friendship cannot corrupt, I should have held to my ancient rule and played a lone hand in this game of Blind Wolf's Buff: I am here tonight for a single purpose: to ask your aid and offer you mine in the business of bringing the Lone Wolf to book, whether he prove to be myself or some impostor trading on my old-time reputation."

"So that's the song and dance, eh?"

Lanyard shrugged. "I must not resent your tone, matters being as they have been made to seem. But I shall persuade you of my sincerity before I bid you good night, and more, that grounds exist for reasonable doubt concerning my guilt of the crimes imputed to me; or . . . I will surrender to you forthwith and let the law take its course."

In a hard stare Crane wondered aloud: "You mean that, Lanyard?" But a smile was all his answer; and after another little pause the detective silently extended a hand which Lanyard leaned forward to grasp. "Now lay 'em on the table, face up."

"I have every confidence in your charity," Lanyard responded, sitting back; "but what I shall tell you now will test it. On the night of the third of November last—"

"That night after you pulled that turn with Mallison at little Mrs. McFee's?"

"Precisely—"

"Night of the day you disappeared!"

"'Disappeared'?"

"Nobody I know has seen hair nor hide of you since."

"That's most interesting," Lanyard commented, making mental memoranda. "You know nothing, then, of a motor accident on the Armonk Road in which I was involved on the night in question?"

"First I've heard of it."

"There was such an accident, notwithstanding, in which I sustained grave injuries; I bear a new scar upon my head, beneath the hair, that satisfies me at least one hurt was grave."

"Well!" Crane laughed shortly—"guess you ought to know if anybody."

"That's the very point: I ought to—but I don't."

"Mean to say you don't remember—?"

"Between the moment when I was struck and thrown by a motor-car that night of November, and the moment when, on the morning of the fifth of June, I bumped my head badly, falling from a companion-ladder on the Port Royal, I remember nothing. For all I know of my life between these dates, I am indebted to a lady who may or may not be a sacred vessel of the unbiased truth—Mademoiselle Delorme."

"Liane Delorme!" cried Crane—"where in time did you meet up with that war-horse?"

"On board the Port Royal."

"Funny! that dame sailed for France last February—by request—and specially requested not to come back, too."

"You are sure?"

"Made it my business to see her off. The Lone Wolf had just begun to be a regular pest, about that time, and I thought maybe little Liane knew more than she was willing to let on. So we got the Government to put on the screws; it amounted to her being deported, though she was given to understand the Government's memory might go bad if her's got good. But she left swearing in seven languages, none of 'em ladylike, she didn't know the first thing about you and was a cruelly misjudged woman and all like that."

"Yet she must have returned, to have sailed on the Port Royal with me."

"Oh! there are a hundred different ways, all good, for an undesirable alien to sneak into this country—by rail from Canada or Mexico, or through any port but New York—running next to no risk of being spotted and held up except by accident."

"You interest me more every minute. Pray bear in mind I have seen no newspapers, while you, I daresay, have read more than one report of my disappearance from the Port Royal . . . No doubt, then, you can tell me who claimed the honour of having recovered the necklace."

"What necklace?"

"The one I am credited with having stolen from the wife of your worthy Chief of Police."

"Guess you mean Commissioner of Police—Commissioner Enright." Frankly mistrustful examination of Lanyard's face ended in the generous verdict: "Somebody's been kidding you, son."

"I will not dispute that—I begin to be distressed to discriminate the statements of fact which have recently been made me from what would seem to have been the fictions of a lively fancy. I have, for example, on the one hand, your word, as I understand it, that the good wife of Commissioner Enright did not, shortly prior to the sailing of the Port Royal, suffer the loss by theft of a valuable diamond necklace."

"Nor at any other time. Or if she did—and if he's got a wife—the Commish kept it darned quiet."

"On the other hand, I am suspected of having done much business in the Lone Wolf's well-known line—"

"Sure are."

"During a period which began, I take it, about the first of the year—"

"Some time before Christmas."

"And ended with my late but well-timed decease."

"Thought I told you nobody in this burg takes any stock in that fairy tale."

"But you didn't answer my question: Why not?"

"Because all New York knows, if the Lone Wolf was drowned last June, his ghost goes prowling on."

"What are you telling me?"

"Just what you hear: When the news leaked out that you'd croaked in the Bahamas, everybody who had anything worth stealing drew a long breath and turned over to get a few winks of badly needed sleep. Right there was the wide open chance your ghost couldn't overlook without losing face in the spirit underworld. And didn't: no ghost ever walked that shook a livelier hoof. If it's any satisfaction to you, its latest manifestations have converted the entire Police Department of the City of New York into a posse of wild-eyed spiritualists."

"And you, my friend?"

Crane twinkled like a roguish wooden Indian. "Who, me? I ain't all converted yet. An hour ago I was wabbly, but now I see you sitting before me as large as life and twice as unnatural, I'm just on the fence. One thing I'm sure of: You ain't noticeably demised. But that isn't saying you're not responsible for the performances that have been given in your name, these last few weeks."

"While I was sustaining life on shellfish in the Bahamas?"

"That's your story. I don't say it isn't gospel: but you've got to admit you'd have told it, or something like it, if you had been in Town here all the time. Not only that, but how do I know you aren't what they call psychic—a medium—able to swing a mean ectoplasm?"

"But—bear with me, my friend, remembering that this to me is the gravest of questions—admit that any one capable of trading on my posthumous reputation must have been equally capable of impersonating me while I was still presumed to be alive."

"That's reasonable . . ."

Lanyard had a thoughtful moment. "Do me another favour," he resumed—"allow me to use your good offices to make another test of my information. Take that telephone on the table by your elbow, call the Hotel Walpole, ask for Madame de Montalais. If she is no longer stopping there, find out, if you can, when she left, and whether the management knows her present address."

"Madame de Montalais . . ." Crane took the telephone instrument to his bosom and called for the Walpole, but while he waited for the connection made no secret of the spirit of inquisitiveness in which he was mulling over that strange new name. "If it's a fair question—"

"The lady with whom I dined at the Inn of the Green Woods, an hour before my misfortune on the Armonk Road."

Before Crane could comment, the Walpole answered; and after some delay the hotel detective, none too well pleased to be waked up at three in the morning but obligingly bestirring himself on behalf of a colleague, reported that Madame de Montalais had "checked out" to sail for France on the ninth of March, leaving the forwarding address of ChÂteau de Montalais, near the town of Nant, in the Department of the LozÈre.

Lanyard nodded doleful acknowledgement of this facer to hopes cruelly reanimated by the discovery that Liane Delorme had, in the course of their conference on board the Port Royal, and for reasons of her own that remained illegible, been guilty of more than one lache in respect of the truth. "That avenue is closed, then. I feared it would be. But give me a moment now to put my thoughts in order . . ."

More to cover his disconsolation than for the reason alleged, he bent forward with an elbow on a knee and a hand shading his eyes. "You tell me," he presently pursued, "no one you know has seen me in the flesh since we met at Folly McFee's . . ."

"Any number of reputable citizens have caught glimpses of you," Crane corrected—"and very much in the flesh, very busy raising particular hell with their property rights."

"But nobody in fact who knew me personally, who could swear to my identity with the man who passed for me?"

"Nobody. Just the same, the descriptions they turned in were middling good portraits of the Lone Wolf in action. More than that, there's that flashlight photo—"

"I was coming to that: Liane mentioned it, and I have wondered . . . It was secured, I believe, when the Lone Wolf descended upon the family fold of the Stuyvesant Ashes?"

"It was so."

"Have you a copy at hand, by any chance?"

Crane grunted testily, drew a rusty leather wallet from under his pillow, and from the papers with which it was stout sorted out an unmounted photographic print of post-card size. "Gaze on that," he recommended in grim humour, "and see if maybe it don't put a kick in the poor dear memory."

Lanyard hitched his chair nearer the light and with eyes bent over the print. But his first glance caused his heart to fail him: idle to challenge the fidelity of that likeness, as well deny the lineaments that looked out from one's shaving mirror every morning . . .

The man whom the flashlight had surprised was kneeling with one ear to a safe built in flush with a wall, his face turned squarely to the camera as he eavesdropped upon the hidden tumblers clicking and thumping in response to manipulation of the combination-dial by his slender, clever fingers. The latter were neatly gloved in white kid, for the man wore formal evening clothes beneath an inverness cloak of good theatrical effect. The hand that wasn't busy with the dial held an electric torch whose beam, of course, had been too weak to register in the intense glare of the flashlight explosion. On the rug between his knee and the wall lay an open leather case stocked with what appeared to be a compact kit of burglar's tools.

"Well!" Crane urged, not without a shade of professional malice, when Lanyard's silent contemplation of the photograph threatened to know no end: "how about it?"

Lanyard straightened up and cheerfully smiled. "Pretty thing," he said—"jolly well done . . . If you can find yourself another, I'd be grateful for the gift of this."

"You're much obliged. I can lay my hands on a gross or two any time I want. The Police Department struck 'em off by the thousand."

"Pity!" Lanyard deplored: "such a curiosity really ought to be a rarity. Thus does commercial photographing ring the death-knell of Art."

"But joking aside—" Crane began with some asperity.

"You ask too much," Lanyard interrupted. "Do you honestly expect me to gaze on this and keep a straight face?"

"If you want my opinion, I'll say it's no laughing matter for you."

"But do you tell me that as one who has given this photograph close and intelligent study?"

"What's the matter with it? Don't you think it does your fatal beauty justice?"

"But more: I am overcome by the appreciation which this drives home of the dashing figure I cut of old in the popular eye. Prior to this, I have always imagined that the public took the gentleman cracksman with a grain of salt—holding his attitudinizing in romantic evening dress properly peculiar to his appearances on the stage and the cinema screen. And you, my dear Crane! a man of your wide acquaintance with the ways of crooks taking this blatant bit of imposition seriously—!"

Crane's mouth tightened, his brows combatively beetled. "There are crooks and crooks. I never thought so badly of you as to suppose you worked like the rank and file."

"But like this!" Lanyard gave the print a derisive flick of fingernails. "Take my word for it, I was never such an ass."

"Never did a job in a full dress suit?"

"Never to my knowledge did I costume myself like a man in a play when deliberately setting out to open a safe. Furthermore"—Lanyard wrinkled a nose of scorn over the photograph—"never in my life have I been caught wearing a soft-bosomed shirt with a tail coat: an antic one cheerfully resigns to dancing men. By-the-bye: whatever did become of Mallison?"

"Jumped his bail," the detective growled—"along with the others you rounded up for me that night at Mrs. McFee's."

"And you have never been able to find him?"

"Not a chance."

There was bitterness in that to win a quick, keen look from Lanyard; but Crane added nothing more than a grin half-sheepish, half-sullen.

"He must be shrewder than I thought, that one."

"I don't know . . . he's got brains enough to lay low and stand in with Morphew, that's all."

"And the devil takes care of his own."

"You got the idea exactly."

"But tell me, why does this great city of yours tolerate its Morphews?"

"What's it going to do? You can't pin anything on a guy like Morphew; he always keeps well inside the law, never turns a trick with his own hand; and pulls too strong an oar politically not to be able to look after the people he hires to do his dirty work. Stands to reason, he's got to; he can't afford to risk somebody's turning State's evidence for lack of protection."

"But surely a man of his type must have enemies in high places as well as friends—"

"Maybe so; but they're not in the saddle just now; we'll have to be patient and wait for New York to pull another of its periodical spasms of civic virtue before an ordinary dick like me can go out after the likes of Morphew without hearing a still small voice whispering at his shoulder, if he cares anything about his job he'd better lay off. Remember that time we raided the Clique Club? That had a follow-up that still sticks in my crop . . ."

"But if Morphew were actually caught, as you say, with the goods on—"

"That's different: prove anything on that bird and outraged public sentiment will do the rest."

"Do you happen to know where he lives?"

Crane recited the address in sulky abstraction from which he emerged abruptly with a gleam of alarm. "Look here! don't tell me you're simp enough to dream of starting anything with Morphew—"

"My dear friend: I never was, it was Morphew took the offensive with me, unprovoked—"

"And you're a glutton for punishment, eh?"

"Do you take me for one to endure such malice without striking a blow for self-respect? What way I shall take with the animal I am as yet undecided, I count on events to show it to me; and now I count on something more—your passive countenance, at least."

"Oh, don't worry! I won't ever come between you two; and if I ever see a chance to land on Morphew when he isn't looking, because he's too busy keeping his guard up against you—you can bet your life I'll do it. All the same, if you'll take a fool's advice, you'll quit right now, admit you're licked and let it go at that."

"It may be your advice is wiser than you think," Lanyard conceded.

"Well: I'm not going to lose any sleep on your account. Morphew's out of Town, nobody seems to know just where . . ."

"Like Mallison, eh?"

"Why keep fretting about Mallison? He's out."

"Perhaps . . ."

"What do you mean, 'perhaps'?"

"Jumping one's bail is not precisely proof of a clear conscience; that act of the dancing yegg's ought to be enough for you—no matter what your mind may be with respect to my guilt or innocence."

"Don't get your point."

"It's rather an obvious point in the sight of one who knows what I know—that Mallison claimed to be on intimately friendly terms with the Stuyvesant Ashes, with Mrs. Ashe, at least; Mary, I remember he called the lady, in mentioning her to Folly McFee."

"Well?"

"Is it not at least a curious circumstance that this print, this so well posed and composed likeness of the Lone Wolf wearing his working clothes for the night shift, should have been snapped in the home of people reputed to be on friendly terms with Mallison?"

"That only goes to show how little you know New York Society, if you've got any idea the Ashes—one of the oldest and best families in Town—would lend themselves to any frame-up engineered by a cheap little crook like that egg."

"One infers that no Ashe has ever been known to be guilty of a mis-step—"

"I don't say that. The men of that family have always stepped out pretty lively—"

"But isn't it possible Mallison may have known something which the present Stuyvesant Ashe preferred to keep secret from the general public? You're surely not forgetting blackmail was one of Mallison's ways of earning a dishonest living."

"Meaning you believe Mallison blackmailed Stuyvesant Ashe and his wife into letting him snap a phoney photograph of some one made up to look like you, trying to open their safe?"

"Really, you read my mind."

"Well!" Crane snorted his contempt—"that bright little theory blows up like a toy balloon somebody pokes a hot cigarette into—because the bird you see in front of that safe got away with every little thing it held. I guess you won't go so far as to tell me the Stuyvesant Ashes would fall for blackmail to that extent."

"I tell you nothing, because I know nothing—I do but recommend the possibility to your thoughtful consideration. Conceding the thanklessness of trying to get the Stuyvesant Ashes to contradict the story they told, I can only point out its more glaring absurdities." Smilingly Lanyard put the print into the detective's hands. "Look closely, my good Crane! and tell me how you would describe the look of this alleged Lone Wolf."

"Looks sort of flabbergasted," Crane replied. "Who wouldn't with a flashlight going off all of a sudden under his nose when he's keyed up to G trying to pull off a big job?"

"But have you never observed that a man actually taken by surprise never shows it in a flashlight photograph? The flash comes and goes too quickly for such an one to put on an appropriate expression for the camera to catch. It is the man who is, as you put it, all keyed up in expectation of the flash who looks startled in the picture."

Crane took another look. "Something in that, maybe," he grudged.

"Consider then, these other anomalies: Not only am I represented as being idiot enough to go a-burgling in evening dress—"

"But you claim you didn't know what you were doing when all this happened."

"What I claim is, if it is fair to assume a rap on the head caused me to revert to foregone ways of knavery, it is only fair to assume further that I would have displayed at least a little reverence for the principles of common sense that formerly guided my errant footsteps. The succÈs fou of the Lone Wolf in pre-War Paris did not result from the expenditure of a medium of mental effort. That one never touched burglar's tools, far less carried a kit of them, once he had served out his apprenticeship. If he could solve the secret of a safe by ear—as the fellow in this amusing picture would have us believe he can—why burden himself with tools which, if found upon him, would spell his damnation in the esteem of the police? Finally, we are asked to believe not only that the Lone Wolf neglected to search for burglar-alarm wiring on this occasion—and if he had taken that first precaution of all competent cracksmen he could hardly have overlooked the wire which led to the flashlight—but that after the flash had gone off in his face he proceeded methodically to open the safe, abstract what valuables it contained, and make good his escape!"

"Well!" Crane argued in the last ditch—"but we've always been told the Lone Wolf was a cool hand."

Lanyard laughed aloud. "But I am in a position to assure you the coolth of that hand would have been nothing compared with the coldness of his feet, had anything like this ever happened to him; I have my low pride, my friend, and while I will never admit the Lone Wolf was a white-livered cur, I am free to confess that, in circumstances such as must have attended the taking of this photograph, he would have tucked tail between legs and ingloriously have run for cover without an instant of needless delay."

"I don't know," Crane reluctantly conceded. "All you say sounds reasonable enough, and I've got a mean feeling I was the world's prize dumbell not to think of your arguments before. But admitting all that—where does it get us?"

"To the point I promised to bring you to, where you are obliged to admit I may not have been the author of those recent robberies attributed to the Lone Wolf."

"And where do we go from there?"

"I can speak only for myself," said Lanyard, rising: "I go to find out the truth. I do not know what happened, where I lay hid, or what I did, in all those seven months. It may be this conviction that I feel, that I had no hand in the crimes imputed to me, is merely a mirage of vain hope cheating my good judgement. It is possible I shall find I myself am the man—even the posing popinjay one sees in this snapshot. In that event—one so subject to spells of criminal activity in phases of submerged consciousness is too dangerous to remain at large; I shall return and let you put me where I can do no more harm. But I don't believe you need hope to see me again on these terms; and if we should chance to meet before I succeed in satisfying myself—well! bear in mind, I ask no quarter. It is your duty to lay me by the heels if you can—and if you do, the fault will be mine, I'll have no right to complain. I have only one favour to ask of you, and that runs on all fours with your duty: don't let anxiety to bag Michael Lanyard make you forget that Mallison likewise is at liberty and may very well turn out to be the key to all this mystery."

Crane's face wrinkled into a radiating grin. "Funny thing about all this is," he asserted, "I believe in you—I even believe you'll come in and take your medicine like a little man if you find you're the guilty party." He wrung Lanyard's hand with painful cordiality. "Go to it, old son: maybe I'm being kidded to a fare-ye-well, but I'm for you. You won't mind my not getting up to see you to the window?"

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