for change.'
'Now I'll tell you what I want you to do,' I said. 'Get on your

bicycle and go off to Newton-Stewart to the Chief Constable. Describe
the two men, and say you suspect them of having had something to do

with the London murder. You can invent reasons. The two will come back,
never fear. Not tonight, for they'll follow me forty miles along the

road, but first thing tomorrow morning. Tell the police to be here
bright and early.'

He set off like a docile child, while I worked at Scudder's notes.
When he came back we dined together, and in common decency I

had to let him pump me. I gave him a lot of stuff about lion hunts
and the Matabele War, thinking all the while what tame businesses

these were compared to this I was now engaged in! When he went
to bed I sat up and finished Scudder. I smoked in a chair till

daylight, for I could not sleep.
About eight next morning I witnessed the arrival of two

constables and a sergeant. They put their car in a coach-house under the
innkeeper's instructions, and entered the house. Twenty minutes

later I saw from my window a second car come across the plateau
from the opposite direction. It did not come up to the inn, but

stopped two hundred yards off in the shelter of a patch of wood. I
noticed that its occupants carefully reversed it before leaving it. A

minute or two later I heard their steps on the gravel outside the window.
My plan had been to lie hid in my bedroom, and see what

happened. I had a notion that, if I could bring the police and my
other more dangerous pursuers together, something might work

out of it to my advantage. But now I had a better idea. I scribbled a
line of thanks to my host, opened the window, and dropped quietly

into a gooseberry bush. Unobserved I crossed the dyke, crawled
down the side of a tributary burn, and won the highroad on the far

side of the patch of trees. There stood the car, very spick and span
in the morning sunlight, but with the dust on her which told of a

long journey. I started her, jumped into the chauffeur's seat, and
stole gently out on to the plateau.

Almost at once the road dipped so that I lost sight of the inn,
but the wind seemed to bring me the sound of angry voices.

CHAPTER FOUR
The Adventure of the Radical Candidate

You may picture me driving that 40 h.p. car for all she was worth
over the crisp moor roads on that shining May morning; glancing

back at first over my shoulder, and looking anxiously to the next
turning; then driving with a vague eye, just wide enough awake to

keep on the highway. For I was thinking desperately of what I had
found in Scudder's pocket-book.

The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the
Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference

were eyewash, and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you
shall hear. I had staked everything on my belief in his story, and

had been let down; here was his book telling me a different tale,
and instead of being once-bitten-twice-shy, I believed it absolutely.

Why, I don't know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn, if
you understand me, had been in a queer way true also in spirit. The

fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger
destiny than the killing of a Dago. It was so big that I didn't blame

Scudder for keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone
hand. That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me

something which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so
immortally big that he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all

for himself. I didn't blame him. It was risks after all that he was
chiefly greedy about.

The whole story was in the notes - with gaps, you understand,
which he would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down

his authorities, too, and had an odd trick of giving them all a
numerical value and then striking a balance, which stood for the

reliability of each stage in the yarn. The four names he had printed
were authorities, and there was a man, Ducrosne, who got five out

of a possible five; and another fellow, Ammersfoort, who got three.
The bare bones of the tale were all that was in the book - these,

and one queer phrase which occurred half a dozen times inside
brackets. '(Thirty-nine steps)' was the phrase; and at its last time of

use it ran - '(Thirty-nine steps, I counted them - high tide 10.17
p.m.)'. I could make nothing of that.

The first thing I learned was that it was no question of preventing
a war. That was coming, as sure as Christmas: had been arranged,

said Scudder, ever since February 1912. Karolides was going to be
the occasion. He was booked all right, and was to hand in his

checks on June 14th, two weeks and four days from that May
morning. I gathered from Scudder's notes that nothing on earth

could prevent that. His talk of Epirote guards that would skin their
own grandmothers was all billy-o.

The second thing was that this war was going to come as a
mighty surprise to Britain. Karolides' death would set the Balkans

by the ears, and then Vienna would chip in with an ultimatum.
Russia wouldn't like that, and there would be high words. But

Berlin would play the peacemaker, and pour oil on the waters, till
suddenly she would find a good cause for a quarrel, pick it up, and

in five hours let fly at us. That was the idea, and a pretty good one
too. Honey and fair speeches, and then a stroke in the dark. While

we were talking about the goodwill and good intentions of Germany
our coast would be silentlyringed with mines, and submarines

would be waiting for every battleship.
But all this depended upon the third thing, which was due to

happen on June 15th. I would never have grasped this if I hadn't
once happened to meet a French staff officer, coming back from

West Africa, who had told me a lot of things. One was that, in
spite of all the nonsense talked in Parliament, there was a real

working alliance between France and Britain, and that the two
General Staffs met every now and then, and made plans for joint

action in case of war. Well, in June a very great swell was coming
over from Paris, and he was going to get nothing less than a

statement of the disposition of the British Home Fleet on mobilization.
At least I gathered it was something like that; anyhow, it was

something uncommonly important.
But on the 15th day of June there were to be others in London -

others, at whom I could only guess. Scudder was content to call
them collectively the 'Black Stone'. They represented not our Allies,

but our deadly foes; and the information, destined for France, was
to be diverted to their pockets. And it was to be used, remember -

used a week or two later, with great guns and swift torpedoes,
suddenly in the darkness of a summer night.

This was the story I had been deciphering in a back room of a
country inn, overlooking a cabbage garden. This was the story that

hummed in my brain as I swung in the big touring-car from glen to glen.
My first impulse had been to write a letter to the Prime Minister,

but a little reflection convinced me that that would be useless. Who
would believe my tale? I must show a sign, some token in proof,

and Heaven knew what that could be. Above all, I must keep going
myself, ready to act when things got riper, and that was going to be

no light job with the police of the British Isles in full cry after me
and the watchers of the Black Stone runningsilently and swiftly on

my trail.
I had no very clear purpose in my journey, but I steered east by

the sun, for I remembered from the map that if I went north I
would come into a region of coalpits and industrial towns. Presently

I was down from the moorlands and traversing the broad haugh of
a river. For miles I ran alongside a park wall, and in a break of the