"It'll give 'em hell if they run up against it--make no blooming error about that!" rapped out the superintendent too "hot in the choler" to be choice of words. "It's a nasty little handful to fall foul of when its temper is up; and this damned spy business, done behind a mask of friendship in times of peace----Look here, Cleek! If it comes to the point, just give me a gun with the rest. I'll show the Government that I can lick something beside insurance stamps for my country's good--by James, yes!"
"Just so," said Cleek, with one of his curious, crooked smiles. He was used to these little patriotic outbursts on the part of Mr. Narkom whenever the German bogey was dragged out by the Press. "But let us hope it will not come to that. It would be an embarrassment of riches so far as our friends the editors are concerned, don't you think, to have two wars on their hands at the same time? And I see by papers that the long-threatened Mauravanian revolution has broken out at last. In short, that our good friend Count Irma has made his escape from Sulberga, put himself at the head of the Insurgents, and is organizing a march on the capital----"
Here he pulled himself up abruptly, as if remembering something, and, before Mr. Narkom could put in a word, launched into the subject of the case in hand and set him thinking and talking of other things.
It had gone nine by all the reliable clocks in town when the wild race to the coast came to an end, and after darting swallowlike through the wind-swept streets of Portsmouth, the limousine, mud splashed and disreputable, rushed up to the guarded entrance of the suspended dock master's house at Portsea; and precisely one and a quarter minutes thereafter Cleek stood in the presence of the three men most deeply concerned in the clearing up of this mystifying affair.
He found Sir Charles Fordeck, a dignified and courtly gentleman of polished manners and measured speech, although now, quite naturally, labouring under a distress of mind which visibly disturbed him. He found Mr. Paul Grimsdick, his secretary, a frank-faced, straight-looking young Englishman of thirty; Mr. Alexander MacInery, a stolid, unemotional Scotsman of middle age, with a huge knotted forehead, eyebrows like young moustaches, and a face like a face of granite; and he found, too, reason to believe that each of these was, in his separate way, a man to inspire confidence and respect.