t
should a pledge bind under such conditions? The sanctity of an oath is
a fine thing for theological subtlety. I had no such subtlety. I knew
that the argument in favour of wrong is pleasing to the mental palate;
and I put it from me, believing that the breaking of my bond would put
me upon the immoral plane of the men to whom it had been given.

I was in the very throes of such a mental struggle when the strange
event of the day happened. I chanced to look up from the book I had
been trying to read, and I saw a remarkable object upon the leads
outside my window. It was the figure of a man with a collapsible neck,
a wonderful neck, which expanded appallingly, and again was withdrawn
into a narrow and herring-like chest. The fellow might have been thirty
years of age; he might have been fifty; there was no hair on his face,
no colour in his hollow cheeks; only a nervous movement of the
bony-fingers, and that awful craning of the collapsible neck. I saw in
a moment that he was looking into my room; and presently, when he had
given me innumerable nods and winks, he took a knife from his pocket,
and opened the catch, stepping into the chamber with the nimble foot of
a goat upon a crag-path. Then he drew a chair up to mine, and, making
more signs and inexplicable motions of the eye, he slapped me upon the
knee, and said--

"In the name of the law!"

This was uttered with such ridiculous levity that I laughed at him.

"Yes," he went on, unmoved, "I take you by surprise; but business, Mr.
Mark Strong," and he became very serious, while his neck went out like
a yard-measure and he cast a quick glance round the room.

"Business," he said, when he had satisfied himself that we were alone,
"and in two words. In the first place I have wired to your friend, Mr.
Roderick Stewart, and I expect him from Portsmouth in a couple of
hours; in the second, your other friend, the doctor, is under lock and
key, on the trifling charge of murder in the Midlands, to begin with.
When we have Captain Black, the little party will be complete."

I looked at him, voiceless from the surprise of it. The magical neck
was absorbed in the chest again, and he went on--

"I needn't tell you who I am; but there's my card. We have six men in
the street outside, and another half dozen watching the leads here. You
will be sensible enough to follow my instructions absolutely. Black, we
know, leaves the country to-night in his steamer--yesterday at
Ramsga