The Four Just Men (1920). Edgar Wallace

fine old man, fiery, and oratorical. I sat at the back of a little hall whilst he pleaded eloquently in French for the rights of man. He was a Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Mirabeau, a broad- viewed Bright, and the audience was mostly composed of Cockney youths, who had come that they might boast they had stood in the temple of Anarchism.”

      Poiccart tapped the table impatiently.

      “Why is it, George, that an element of bathos comes into all these things?”

      Manfred laughed.

      “You remember Anderson? When we had gagged him and bound him to the chair, and had told him why he had to die—when there were only the pleading eyes of the condemned, and the half-dark room with a flickering lamp, and you and Leon and poor Clarice masked and silent, and I had just sentenced him to death—you remember how there crept into the room the scent of frying onions from the kitchen below.”

      “I, too, remember,” said Leon, “the case of the regicide.” Poiccart made a motion of agreement.

      “You mean the corsets,” he said, and the two nodded and laughed.

      “There will always be bathos,” said Manfred; “poor Garcia with a nation’s destinies in his hand, an amusement for shop-girls—tragedy and the scent of onions—a rapier thrust and the whalebone of corsets—it is inseparable.”

      And all the time Thery smoked cigarettes, looking into the fire with his head on his hands.

      “Going back to this matter we have on our hands,” said Gonsalez. “I suppose that there is nothing more to be done till—the day?”

      “Nothing.”

      “And after?”

      “There are our fine art reproductions.”

      “And after,” persisted Poiccart.

      “There is a case in Holland, Hermannus van der Byl, to wit; but it will be simple, and there will be no necessity to warn.”

      Poiccart’s face was grave.

      “I am glad you have suggested van der Byl, he should have been dealt with before—Hook of Holland or Flushing?”

      “If we have time, the Hook by all means.”

      “And Thery?”

      “I will see to him,” said Gonsalez easily; “we will go overland to Jerez—where the girl is,” he added laughingly.

      The object of their discussion finished his tenth cigarette and sat up in his chair with a grunt.

      “I forgot to tell you,” Leon went on, “that to-day, when we were taking our exercise walk, Thery was considerably interested in the posters he saw everywhere, and was particularly curious to know why so many people were reading them. I had to find a lie on the spur of the minute, and I hate lying”—Gonsalez was perfectly sincere. “I invented a story about racing or lotteries or something of the sort, and he was satisfied.”

      Thery had caught his name in spite of its anglicised pronunciation, and looked inquiry.

      “We will leave you to amuse our friend,” said Manfred, rising. “Poiccart and I have a few experiments to make.”

      The two left the room, traversed the narrow passage, and paused before a small door at the end. A larger door on the right, padlocked and barred, led to the studio. Drawing a small key from his pocket, Manfred opened the door, and, stepping into the room, switched on a light that shone dimly through a dust-covered bulb. There had been some attempt at restoring order from the chaos. Two shelves had been cleared of rubbish, and on these stood rows of bright little phials, each bearing a number. A rough table had been pushed against the wall beneath the shelves, and on the green baize with which the table was covered was a litter of graduated measures, test tubes, condensers, delicate scales, and two queer-shaped glass machines, not unlike gas generators. Poiccart pulled a chair to the table, and gingerly lifted a metal cup that stood in a dish of water. Manfred, looking over his shoulder, remarked on the consistency of the liquid that half filled the vessel, and Poiccart bent his head, acknowledging the remark as though it were a compliment.

      “Yes,” he said, satisfied, “it is a complete success, the formula is quite right. Some day we may want to use this.”

      He replaced the cup in its bath, and reaching beneath the table, produced from a pail a handful of ice-dust, with which he carefully surrounded the receptacle.

      “I regard that as the multum in parvo of explosives,” he said, and took down a small phial from the shelf, lifted the stopper with the crook of his little finger, and poured a few drops of a whitish liquid into the metal cup.

      “That neutralises the elements,” said Poiccart, and gave a sigh of relief. “I am not a nervous man, but the present is the first comfortable moment I have had for two days.”

      “It makes an abominable smell,” said Manfred, with his handkerchief to his nose.

      A thin smoke was rising from the cup.

      “I never notice those things,” Poiccart replied, dipping a thin glass rod into the mess. He lifted the rod, and watched reddish drops dripping from the end.

      “That’s all right,” he said.

      “And it is an explosive no more?” asked Manfred.

      “It is as harmless as a cup of chocolate.”

      Poiccart wiped the rod on a rag, replaced the phial, and turned to his companion.

      “And now?” he asked.

      Manfred made no answer, but unlocked an old-fashioned safe that stood in the corner of the room. From this he removed a box of polished wood. He opened the box and disclosed the contents.

      “If Thery is the good workman he says he is, here is the bait that shall lure Sir Philip Ramon to his death,” he said.

      Poiccart looked. “Very ingenious,” was his only comment; then—“Does Thery know, quite know, the stir it has created?”

      Manfred closed the lid and replaced the box before he replied.

      “Does Thery know that he is the fourth Just Man?” he asked; then slowly, “I think not—and it is as well as he does not know; a thousand pounds is roughly thirty-three thousand pesetas, and there is the free pardon—and the girl at Jerez,” he added thoughtfully.

       A brilliant idea came to Smith, the reporter, and he carried it to the chief.

      “Not bad,” said the editor, which meant that the idea was really very good—“not bad at all.”

      “It occurred to me,” said the gratified reporter, “that one or two of the four might be foreigners who don’t understand a word of English.”

      “Quite so,” said the chief; “thank you for the suggestion. I’ll have it done tonight.”

      Which dialogue accounts for the fact that the next morning the Megaphone appeared with the police notice in French, Italian, German—and Spanish.

      CHAPTER VI THE OUTRAGE AT THE ‘MEGAPHONE’

       Table of Contents

       The editor of the Megaphone, returning from dinner, met the super- chief on the stairs. The super-chief, boyish of face, withdrew his mind from the mental contemplation of a new project (Megaphone House is the home of new projects) and inquired after the Four Just Men.

      “The excitement is keeping up,” replied the editor. “People are talking of nothing else but the coming debate on the Extradition Bill, and the Government is taking every precaution against an attack upon Ramon.”