avo?"

"Poltavo," smiled T. B., "can wait for just a little while."

He paid the bill and the two men passed out of the hotel and crossed
Piccadilly. A man who had been lounging along apparently studying the
shop windows saw them out of the corner of his eye and followed them
carelessly. Another man, no less ostentatiously reading a newspaper, as
he walked along the pavement on the opposite side of the thoroughfare,
followed close behind.

T. B. and his companion turned into Burlington Arcade and reached Cork
Street. Save for one or two pedestrians the street was utterly deserted,
and the first of the shadowers quickened his pace. He put his hand in
his tail pocket and took out something which glinted in the April
sunlight, but before he could raise his hand the fourth man, now on his
heels, dropped his newspaper, and flinging one arm around the shadower's
neck, and placing his knee in the small of the other's back, wrenched
the pistol away with his disengaged hand.

T. B. turned at the sound of the struggle and came back to assist the
shadowing detective. The prisoner was a little man, sharp-featured, and
obviously a member of one of the great Latin branches of the human race.
A tiny black moustache, fierce scowling eyebrows, and liquid brown eyes
now blazing with hate, spoke of a Southern origin.

Deftly the three police officers searched and disarmed him; a pair of
adjustable handcuffs snapped upon the man's thin wrists, and before the
inevitable crowd could gather the prisoner and his custodians were being
whirled to Vine Street in a cab.

They placed the man in the steel dock and asked him the usual questions,
but he maintained a dogged silence. That his object had been
assassination no one could doubt, for in addition to the automatic
pistol, which he had obviously intended using at short range, trusting
to luck to make his escape, they found a long stiletto in his breast
pocket.

More to the point, and of greater interest to T. B., there was a
three-line scrawl on a piece of paper in Italian, which, translated,
showed that minute instructions had been given to the would-be murderer
as to T. B.'s whereabouts.

"Put him in a cell," said T. B. "I think we are going to find things
out. If this is not one of Poltavo's hired thugs, I am greatly
mistaken."

Whatever he was, the man offered no information which might assist the
detective in his search for the truth, but maintained an unbroken
silence, and T.