nt when he learned what had
happened to Rodman. The State Department turned it over to the court at
the trial. I think it was one of the things that influenced the judge
in his decision. Still, at the time, there seemed no other reasonable
decision to make. The testimony must have appeared incredible; it must
have appeared fantastic. No man reading the record could have come to
any other conclusion about it. Yet it seemed impossible--at least, it
seemed impossible for me--to consider this great vital bulk of a man as
a monk of one of the oldest religious orders in the world. Every common,
academic conception of such a monk he distinctly negatived. He
impressed me, instead, as possessing the ultimate qualities of clever
diplomacy--the subtle ambassador of some new Oriental power, shrewd,
suave, accomplished.

When one read the yellow-backed court-record, the sense of old, obscure,
mysterious agencies moving in sinister menace, invisibly, around Rodman
could not be escaped from. You believed it. Against your reason, against
all modern experience of life, you believed it.

And yet it could not be true! One had to find that verdict or topple
over all human knowledge--that is, all human knowledge as we understand
it. The judge, cutting short the criminal trial, took the only way out
of the thing.

There was one man in the world that everybody wished could have been
present at the time. That was Sir Henry Marquis. Marquis was chief of
the Criminal Investigation Department of Scotland Yard. He had been in
charge of the English secret service on the frontier of the Shan states,
and at the time he was in Asia.

As soon as Scotland Yard could release Sir Henry, it sent him. Rodman's
genius was the common property of the world. The American Government
could not, even with the verdict of a trial court, let Rodman's death go
by under the smoke-screen of such a weird, inscrutable mystery.

I was to meet Sir Henry and come here with him. But my train into New
England was delayed, and when I arrived at the station, I found that
Marquis had gone down to have a look at Rodman's country-house, where
the thing had happened.

It was on an isolated forest ridge of the Berkshires, no human soul
within a dozen miles of it--a comfortable stone house in the English
fashion. There was a big drawing-room across one end of it, with an
immense fireplace framed in black marble under a great white panel to
the ceiling. It had a wide black-marbl