o
kill Mr. Hunter?"

"No, I swear it."

"Then why don't you take the hint I have given you? It will be too
late when you are brought before a judge. Believe me, I shall waste no
more breath in persuading you. It is now or never."

The Frenchman rose again, this time more slowly. He glanced around at
the ring of faces, and, for a moment, his gaze dwelt contemplatively on
Clancy. Perhaps he was vouchsafed some intuition that this man was to
be feared, but Clancy remained unemotional as a Sioux Indian. When he
spoke, it was with a certain dignity, and, oddly enough, his words,
though uttered in English, savored of a literal translation from the
French mint which coined them.

"Monsieur," he said, "I am a man who regards loyalty to his friends
before all."

"An excellent quality, even in a criminal, if your friends are loyal to
you," replied Steingall with equal seriousness of manner.

"But the woman who betrayed us--may she be eaten up with cancer!--is
not my friend. Those others are."

"I have met with no woman. I have good reason to think that you have
no real notion of the influences which led your Hungarian friends, as
you call them, to commit a murder. But I rather respect your
sentiment, so, to give you one final chance, I tell you now just how
you were brought into this thing. You are a thief, and the associate
of thieves, but you have never, so far as our records go, been
convicted. Your real name is not Lamotte, though you have passed under
it long enough in New York to establish some sort of claim to it, and
you were sentenced to two years' imprisonment at Toulon eight years ago
for a breach of military discipline. On your release you consorted
with anarchists in Paris, and, to escape arrest as a suspect after a
dynamite outrage on the Grand Boulevard, you emigrated to America. You
are a clever mechanic, and, had you tried to earn an honest living, you
would have succeeded, but some kink in your nature drove you to crime,
mixed up with a good deal of political froth. When you heard that
precious pair of fanatics, Martiny and Rossi, plotting in Morris
Siegelman's cafe to prevent a marriage between an English lady of great
wealth and a wretched little Frenchman, so that the cause of a
Hungarian party might benefit if Count Ladislas Vassilan secured the
lady and the money, especially the money, you thought you saw a way
towards striking a blow at the Austrian monarchy and also benefiting
your