s no
further use for you. Now, I'll take you to a nice, quiet hotel for the
night. In with you. . . . Mind the step. Let me give you a friendly
hand. . . . No, that seat, if you please, close up in the corner.
I'll go next. Mr. Curtis, you don't object to being squeezed a little,
I'm sure, though the three of us will crowd the back seat, and if the
gentleman who says nothing and admits nothing will only change his
mind, and tell us exactly how he has spent a rather exciting evening,
the story will help pass the journey quite pleasantly."

But Anatole Labergerie, whose accent was that of a Frenchman with a
very complete knowledge of English, had evidently determined on a
policy of silence, and no word crossed his lips during the greater part
of the long run to the police station-house in 30th Street, in which
precinct, the 23rd, the murder had occurred, and to which McCulloch was
attached.

His presence in the car acted as an effectual damper on conversation in
so far as Curtis and Devar were concerned. If their suspicions were
justified, he was a principal in an atrocious crime, and mere
propinquity with such a wretch induced a feeling of loathing comparable
only with that shrinking from physical contact to which mankind yields
when confronted with leprosy in its final forbidding form.

But McCulloch was jubilant. He regarded his prisoner with the almost
friendly interest taken in his quarry by the slayer of wild beasts to
whose rifle has fallen some peculiarly rare and dangerous "specimen."
He enlivened the road with anecdotes of famous criminals, and each
story invariably concluded with a facetious reference to the "chair" or
a "lifer." Once or twice he gave details of the breaking up of some
notorious gang owing to information extracted from one of its minor
members, who, in consequence, either escaped punishment or received a
light sentence; but the captive remained mute and apparently
indifferent, whereupon Curtis, who had been revolving in his mind
certain elements in a singularly complex mystery, broke fresh ground by
saying:

"The strangest feature of this affair is probably unknown to you, Mr.
McCulloch. To all intents and purposes, the men who killed the
journalist were acting in concert with a Frenchman named Jean de
Courtois, and their common object was to prevent a marriage arranged
for last night. Yet this same de Courtois was found gagged and bound
in his room at the Central Hotel shortly