t glow of his cigar; it was scrawled with green ink.

"Don't you remember his original invitation to you?" he asked, "and the
compliment to your criminal exploit? 'That trick of yours,' he says,
'of getting one detective to arrest the other'? He has just copied your
trick. With an enemy on each side of him, he slipped swiftly out of the
way and let them collide and kill each other."

Flambeau tore Prince Saradine's card from the priest's hands and rent it
savagely in small pieces.

"There's the last of that old skull and crossbones," he said as he
scattered the pieces upon the dark and disappearing waves of the stream;
"but I should think it would poison the fishes."

The last gleam of white card and green ink was drowned and darkened;
a faint and vibrant colour as of morning changed the sky, and the moon
behind the grasses grew paler. They drifted in silence.

"Father," said Flambeau suddenly, "do you think it was all a dream?"

The priest shook his head, whether in dissent or agnosticism, but
remained mute. A smell of hawthorn and of orchards came to them through
the darkness, telling them that a wind was awake; the next moment it
swayed their little boat and swelled their sail, and carried them onward
down the winding river to happier places and the homes of harmless men.

The Hammer of God

The little village of Bohun Beacon was perched on a hill so steep
that the tall spire of its church seemed only like the peak of a small
mountain. At the foot of the church stood a smithy, generally red with
fires and always littered with hammers and scraps of iron; opposite to
this, over a rude cross of cobbled paths, was "The Blue Boar," the only
inn of the place. It was upon this crossway, in the lifting of a leaden
and silver daybreak, that two brothers met in the street and spoke;
though one was beginning the day and the other finishing it. The Rev.
and Hon. Wilfred Bohun was very devout, and was making his way to some
austere exercises of prayer or contemplation at dawn. Colonel the Hon.
Norman Bohun, his elder brother, was by no means devout, and was sitting
in evening dress on the bench outside "The Blue Boar," drinking what
the philosophic observer was free to regard either as his last glass on
Tuesday or his first on Wednesday. The colonel was not particular.

The Bohuns were one of the very few aristocratic families really dating
from the Middle Ages, and their pennon had actually seen Palestine.
But i