y; "don't forget White."

They stared at him.

"What do you mean?" asked Crewe with a frown.

White had been a favourite of his.

"How could it be White?"

"Why shouldn't it be White?" said the colonel. "When did Jack o'
Judgment make his first appearance? I'll tell you. About the time we
started getting busy framing up something against White. Did we ever see
him when White was with us--no! Isn't it obviously somebody who has been
a business associate and knows our little ways? Why, of course it is.
Tell me somebody else?

"You don't suggest it is 'Snow' Gregory, anyway?" he added
sarcastically.

Crewe shivered and half-closed his eyes.

"For heaven's sake don't mention 'Snow' Gregory," he said irritably.

"Why shouldn't I?" snarled the colonel. "He's worth money and life and
liberty to us, Crewe. He's an awful example that keeps some of our
business associates on the straight path. Not," he added with elaborate
care, "not that we were in any way responsible for his untimely end. But
he died--providentially. A doper's bad enough, but a doper who talks and
boasts and tells me, as he told me in this very room, just where he'd
put me, is a mighty dangerous man, Crewe."

"Did he do that?" asked Crewe with interest.

The colonel nodded.

"In this very room where you're standing," he said impressively, "at the
end of that table he stood, all lit up with 'coco' and he told me things
about our organisation that I thought nobody knew but myself. That's the
worst of drugs," he said, shaking his head reprovingly; "you never know
how clever they'll make a man, and they made 'Snow' a bit too clever.
I'm not saying that I regretted his death--far from it. I don't know how
he got mixed up in the affair----"

"Oh, shut up!" growled Pinto; "why go on acting before us? We were all
in it."

"Hush!" said the colonel with a glance at the door.

There was a silence. All eyes were fixed on the door.

"Did you hear anything?" asked the colonel under his breath.

His face was a shade paler than they had ever remembered seeing it.

"It is nothing," said Pinto; "that fellow's got on your nerves."

The colonel walked to the sideboard and poured out a generous portion of
whisky and drank it at a gulp.

"Lots of things are getting on my nerves," he said, "but nothing gets on
my nerves so much as losing money. Crewe, we've got to go after that
Yorkshireman again--at least somebody has got to go after him."

"And that someb