ened," he said quietly. "Mr. Vanderpole met
with an accident in a taxicab this evening. From the latest reports, it
seems that he is dead!"

CHAPTER IX. INSPECTOR JACKS SCORES

There followed a few days of pleasurable interest to all Englishmen
who travelled in the tube and read their halfpenny papers. A great
and enlightened Press had already solved the problem of creating the
sensational without the aid of facts. This sudden deluge, therefore, of
undoubtedly tragical happenings became almost an embarrassment to
them. Black headlines, notes of exclamation, the use of superlative
adjectives, scarcely met the case. The murder of Mr. Hamilton Fynes was
strange enough. Here was an unknown man, holding a small position in his
own country,--a man apparently without friends or social position. He
travelled over from America, merely a unit amongst the host of other
passengers; yet his first action, on arriving at Liverpool, was to make
use of privileges which belonged to an altogether different class of
person, and culminated in his arrival at Euston in a special train with
a dagger driven through his heart! Here was material enough for a least
a fortnight of sensations and countersensations, of rumored arrests and
strange theories. Yet within the space of twenty-four hours the affair
of Mr. Hamilton Fynes had become a small thing, had shrunk almost into
insignificance by the side of the other still more dramatic, still more
wonderful happening. Somewhere between the Savoy Hotel and Melbourne
Square, Kensington, a young American gentleman of great strength, of
undoubted position, the nephew of a Minister, and himself secretary to
the Ambassador of his country in London, had met with his death in a
still more mysterious, still more amazing fashion. He had left the hotel
in an ordinary taxicab, which had stopped on the way to pick up no
other passenger. He had left the Savoy alone, and he was discovered
in Melbourne Square alone. Yet, somewhere between these two points,
notwithstanding the fact that the aggressor must have entered the cab
either with or without his consent, Mr. Richard Vanderpole, without
a struggle, without any cry sufficiently loud to reach the driver or
attract the attention of any passer-by, had been strangled to death by
a person who had disappeared as though from the face of the earth. The
facts seemed almost unbelievable, and yet they were facts. The driver
of the taxi knew only that three times duri