hat request; but now---- A woman indeed! No
woman's hand could have nailed that grim figure to the wall of Gleer
Cottage, at least not alone, not without assistance. This he realized;
and brushing the suggestion aside, jumped into the limousine and slammed
the door upon himself.

"Drive to Clarges Street! I must see Cleek! Full speed now! Don't let
the devil himself stop you!" he cried; and in a moment they were
bounding away townward at a fifty-mile clip that ate up the distance
like a cat lapping cream.

CHAPTER THREE

THE SHADOW THAT LAY BEHIND

It had but just gone midnight when the car slowed down before the house
in Clarges Street. Here in company with his faithful henchman, Dollops,
and attended upon by an elderly housekeeper and a deaf-and-dumb maid of
all work, there dwelt--under the name and guise of "Captain Horatio
Burbage," a superannuated seaman--that strange and original genius who
chose to call himself "Hamilton Cleek," but who was known to the police
of two continents by the sobriquet of "The Man of the Forty Faces."

In the merest fraction of a minute Narkom was out of the limousine, had
crossed the narrow pavement, mounted the three shallow steps, and was
standing in the shadow of a pillared porch, punching a signal on the
button of an electric bell. In all he could not have been kept waiting
more than a minute, but it seemed forty times that length when he at
last heard a bolt slip, and saw, in the gap of the open door, the figure
of a slim, red-headed youth arrayed in a bed quilt, a suit of pink
flannelette pajamas, and a pair of white canvas tennis shoes.

"Come in, sir, come in quick!" this young man whispered, in the
broadest of Cockney accents, as he opened the door just wide enough for
Narkom to sidle into the semi-dark passage.

"Where's your master, Dollops?" put in the superintendent. "Speak up! Is
he in? I've got to see him at once!"

The voice which answered came, not from Dollops, but from the dark top
of the dim staircase.

"Come up, Mr. Narkom," it said. "I thought that young beggar had gone to
bed ages ago and was just coming down myself to let you in. Come along
up. You know the way."

Narkom acted upon the invitation so promptly that he was up the stairs
and in the cozy, curtained, and lamp-lit room which Cleek called his den
almost as quickly as his host himself. In fact, Cleek had scarcely time
to sweep into the drawer of his writing table a little pile of somet