prise. 'He has a hobby for half-baked
youth, just as another rich man might fancy orchids or fast trotters.
You sure can place him right enough.'

'I dare say. Only I don't know enough to be positive.'

He sucked at his cigar for a minute or so. 'I guess, Dick, if I told
you all I've been doing since I reached these shores you would call me
a romancer. I've been way down among the toilers. I did a spell as
unskilled dilooted labour in the Barrow shipyards. I was barman in a
hotel on the Portsmouth Road, and I put in a black month driving a
taxicab in the city of London. For a while I was the accredited
correspondent of the Noo York Sentinel and used to go with the rest of
the bunch to the pow-wows of under-secretaries of State and War Office
generals. They censored my stuff so cruel that the paper fired me. Then
I went on a walking-tour round England and sat for a fortnight in a
little farm in Suffolk. By and by I came back to Claridge's and this
bookshop, for I had learned most of what I wanted.

'I had learned,' he went on, turning his curious, full, ruminating eyes
on me, 'that the British working-man is about the soundest piece of
humanity on God's earth. He grumbles a bit and jibs a bit when he
thinks the Government are giving him a crooked deal, but he's gotten
the patience of Job and the sand of a gamecock. And he's gotten humour
too, that tickles me to death. There's not much trouble in that quarter
for it's he and his kind that's beating the Hun ... But I picked up a
thing or two besides that.'

He leaned forward and tapped me on the knee. 'I reverence the British
Intelligence Service. Flies don't settle on it to any considerable
extent. It's got a mighty fine mesh, but there's one hole in that mesh,
and it's our job to mend it. There's a high-powered brain in the game
against us. I struck it a couple of years ago when I was hunting Dumba
and Albert, and I thought it was in Noo York, but it wasn't. I struck
its working again at home last year and located its head office in
Europe. So I tried Switzerland and Holland, but only bits of it were
there. The centre of the web where the old spider sits is right here in
England, and for six months I've been shadowing that spider. There's a
gang to help, a big gang, and a clever gang, and partly an innocent
gang. But there's only one brain, and it's to match that that the
Robson Brothers settled my duodenum.'

I was listening with a quickened pulse, for now at last