e me my
marching orders.

'Sir Walter,' I said, 'three years ago you and I sat in this very room.
We thought we were done to the world, as we think now. We had just that
one miserable little clue to hang on to--a dozen words scribbled in a
notebook by a dead man. You thought I was mad when I asked for
Scudder's book, but we put our backs into the job and in twenty-four
hours we had won out. Remember that then we were fighting against time.
Now we have a reasonable amount of leisure. Then we had nothing but a
sentence of gibberish. Now we have a great body of knowledge, for
Blenkiron has been brooding over Ivery like an old hen, and he knows
his ways of working and his breed of confederate. You've got something
to work on now. Do you mean to tell me that, when the stakes are so
big, you're going to chuck in your hand?'

Macgillivray raised his head. 'We know a good deal about Ivery, but
Ivery's dead. We know nothing of the man who was gloriously resurrected
this evening in Normandy.'

'Oh, yes we do. There are many faces to the man, but only one mind, and
you know plenty about that mind.'

'I wonder,' said Sir Walter. 'How can you know a mind which has no
characteristics except that it is wholly and supremely competent? Mere
mental powers won't give us a clue. We want to know the character which
is behind all the personalities. Above all we want to know its foibles.
If we had only a hint of some weakness we might make a plan.'

'Well, let's set down all we know,' I cried, for the more I argued the
keener I grew. I told them in some detail the story of the night in the
Coolin and what I had heard there.

'There's the two names Chelius and Bommaerts. The man spoke them in the
same breath as Effenbein, so they must be associated with Ivery's gang.
You've got to get the whole Secret Service of the Allies busy to fit a
meaning to these two words. Surely to goodness you'll find something!
Remember those names don't belong to the Ivery part, but to the big
game behind all the different disguises ... Then there's the talk about
the Wild Birds and the Cage Birds. I haven't a guess at what it means.
But it refers to some infernal gang, and among your piles of records
there must be some clue. You set the intelligence of two hemispheres
busy on the job. You've got all the machinery, and it's my experience
that if even one solitary man keeps chewing on at a problem he
discovers something.'

My enthusiasm was beginning to str