"Then I saw my danger. I was afraid of the police. I saw a newspaper sheet. It was a great newspaper--I wrote a letter--and sought lodgings in a little hotel near the river. There was no answer to my letter. I waited in hiding for two days before I realised that I had given no address. I wrote again. All this time I have been seeking Hyatt. I have telegraphed to Cornwall, but the reply comes that he is not there. Then in the newspaper I learn of his death. M'sieur, I am afraid."
He wiped the drops of sweat from his forehead with a shaky hand.
He was indeed in a pitiable condition of fright, and T. B., upon whose nerves the mysterious "bears" were already beginning to work, appreciated his fear without sharing it.
There came a knock at the outer door of the office, and the editor moved to answer it.
There was a whispered conversation at the door, the door closed again, and the editor returned with raised brows.
"T. B.," he said, "that wretched market has gone again."
"Gone to blazes! Spanish Fours are so low that you'd get pain in your back if you stooped to pick them up."
"I'll use your telephone," he said, and stooped over the desk. He called for a number, and after an interval--
"Yes--that you, Maitland? Go to 375 St. John Street, and take into custody Count Ivan Poltavo on a charge of murder. Take with you fifty men and surround the place. Detain every caller, and every person you find in the house."
He hung up the receiver. "It is a bluff, as my gay American friend says," he remarked to the editor, "because, of course, I have no real evidence against him. But I want a chance to ransack that studio of his, anyway.
"Now, my friend," he said in French, "what shall we do with you?"
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders listlessly.
"What does it matter?" he said. "They will have me--it is only a matter of hours."
"I take a brighter view," said T. B. cheerily; "you shall walk with us to Scotland Yard and there you shall be taken care of."
Reluctantly the engineer accompanied the detective and the editor from the building. A yellow fog lay like a damp cloth over London, and the Thames Embankment was almost deserted.
"Do you think he followed you here?" asked T. B.
"I am sure." The Frenchman looked from left to right in an agony of apprehension. "He killed Hyatt and he killed Moss--of that I am certain--and now----"