burn had gone and his head was covered
with a short, though thick crop of chestnut.

"You exposed yourself. Harmless would all this have been, powerless to
hurt you, if you had kept your self-possession and turned it off as a
joke--your own. But your abashed mien, your complete confusion, your
utter disconcertment, betrayed you, even if you had no longer left any
question by crying out that you have been exposed. Yes, exposed,
Anderson Walkley, by the sudden confronting of you with the implements
of your craft, the weapons you had _used_ in _your_ trade, and the
belief thus aroused in your guilty mind that your secret was known,
that your identity had been detected."

"Asbury Fuller, what business is it of yours?" and Leadbury snatched
up a large pair of hair clippers and waved them with a menacing
gesture.

"Everyman to the weapons of his trade," exclaimed Asbury Fuller, and
the hair clippers seemed suddenly enveloped in a mass of white flame,
as the rapier played about them. Cling, clang, across the room flew
the clippers, twisted from Leadbury's hand as neatly as you please.

"Asbury Fuller?" cried the Commander of the Legion of Honor. "Asbury
Fuller?" and he deftly fastened beneath his nose an elegant false
moustache with waxed ends.

With his hands before his eyes as if to forefend his view from some
dreadful apparition, the man in the corner sank upon his knees,
gibbering, "William Leadbury, come back from the dead!"

"William Leadbury, alive and well, here to claim his own from you,
Anderson Walkley, outlaw and felon. Your plans were well-laid, but I
am not dead. You signed the papers of the Ingar Gulbrandson in your
proper person. Then as she was about to sail, I was brought aboard
ostensibly drunk, but really drugged, under the name of Anderson
Walkley. The Gulbrandson was found sunk. Her crew of four had utterly
disappeared. Dead, of course. The records gave their names. I had
become Anderson Walkley and was dead. You had seized my property and
my identity. I had been in Chicago but two days and no one had become
familiar enough with my appearance to make any question when you with
your clean-shaven face came down on the morning after my
kidnaping and told the people at the hotel that you were William
Leadbury and had shaved your moustache off over night. Whatever
difference they might have thought they saw, was easily explained by
the change occasioned by the removal of your moustache. Had your
minion