as a member of
the United States Secret Service until after the war when, at the
request of Mr. Kitson, who is known to you, I came to Europe to devote
all my time to watching Miss Cresswell and Doctor van Heerden. All that
you know.

"One day when searching the doctor's rooms in his absence, my object
being to discover some evidence in relation to the Millinborn murder, I
found this."

He took a newspaper cutting from his pocket-book and laid it on the
table.

"It is from _El Impartial_, a Spanish newspaper, and I will translate it
for you.

"'Thanks to the discretion and eminent genius of Dr. Alphonso
Romanos, the Chief Medical Officer of Vigo, the farmers of the
district have been spared a catastrophe much lamentable' (I am
translating literally). 'On Monday last, Senor Don Marin Fernardey,
of La Linea, discovered one of his fields of corn had died in the
night and was already in a condition of rot. In alarm, he notified
the Chief of Medicines at Vigo, and Dr. Alphonso Romanos, with that
zeal and alacrity which has marked his acts, was quickly on the
spot, accompanied by a foreign scientist. Happily the learned and
gentle doctor is a bacteriologist superb. An examination of the
dead corn, which already emitted unpleasant odours, revealed the
presence of a new disease, the verde orin (green rust). By his
orders the field was burnt. Fortunately, the area was small and
dissociated from the other fields of Senor Fernardey by wide
_zanzas_. With the exception of two small pieces of the infected
corn, carried away by Dr. Romanos and the foreign medical-cavalier,
the pest was incinerated.'"

"The Foreign Medical-Cavalier," said Beale, "was Doctor van Heerden. The
date was 1915, when the doctor was taking his summer holiday, and I have
had no difficulty in tracing him. I sent one of my men to Vigo to
interview Doctor Romanos, who remembers the circumstances perfectly. He
himself had thought it wisest to destroy the germ after carefully noting
their characteristics, and he expressed the anxious hope that his whilom
friend, van Heerden, had done the same. Van Heerden, of course, did
nothing of the sort. He has been assiduously cultivating the germs in
his laboratory. So far as I can ascertain from Professor Heyler, an old
German who was in van Heerden's service and who seems a fairly honest
man, the doctor nearly lost the culture, a