rments into the floor.

Then we bound our fine fellow with his own rope-ladder, reloaded both
revolvers with unexpurgated cartridges discovered upon his person, and
prepared to hold a grand reception of his staff and "pupils." But those
young gentlemen had not misconstrued the cannonade. And it was some days
before the last of the gang was captured.

They were all tried together at the December sessions of the Central
Criminal Court, when their elaborate methods were very much admired. The
skilful impersonation of the typical Army coach by the head of the gang,
and the adequate acting of his confederates in the subordinate posts of
pupils and servants, were features which appealed to the public mind.
The taking of the house in Mulcaster Park, as a base for operations
throughout a promising neighbourhood, was a measure somewhat
overshadowed by the brilliant blind of representing it as the scene of
the first robberies. It was generally held, however, that in presenting
a predestined victim with a revolver and doctored cartridges, the master
thief had gone too far, and that for that alone he deserved the
exemplary sentence to which he listened like the officer and gentleman
he had never been. So the great actor lives the part he plays.

It is a perquisite of witnesses to hear these popular trials with a
certain degree of comfort; and so it was that I was able to nudge Uvo
Delavoye, at the last soldierly inclination of that bald bad head,
before it disappeared from a world to which it has not yet returned.

"Well, at any rate," I whispered, "you can't claim any Witching Hill
influence this time."

"I wish I couldn't," he answered in a still lower voice.

"But you've just heard that our bogus colonel has been a genuine
criminal all his life."

"I wasn't thinking of him," said Uvo Delavoye. "I was thinking of a
still worse character, who really did the thing I felt so like that
night before we heard them in the bathroom. Not a word, Gilly! I know
you've forgiven me. But I'm rather sorry for these beggars, for they
came to me like flowers in May."

And as his face darkened with a shame unseen all day in that doleful
dock, it was some comfort to me to feel that it had never been less like
its debased image at Hampton Court.

CHAPTER VII

The Locked Room

It was no great coincidence that we should have been speaking of Edgar
Nettleton that night. Uvo Delavoye was full of him just then, and I had
the man on