turning; then driving with a vague eye, just wide enough awake to
keep on the highway. For I was thinking desperately of what I had
found in Scudder's pocket-book.

The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns about the
Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference
were eyewash, and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you
shall hear. I had staked everything on my belief in his story, and
had been let down; here was his book telling me a different tale,
and instead of being once-bitten-twice-shy, I believed it absolutely.

Why, I don't know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn, if
you understand me, had been in a queer way true also in spirit. The
fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger
destiny than the killing of a Dago. It was so big that I didn't blame
Scudder for keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone
hand. That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me
something which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so
immortally big that he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all
for himself. I didn't blame him. It was risks after all that he was
chiefly greedy about.

The whole story was in the notes--with gaps, you understand,
which he would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down
his authorities, too, and had an odd trick of giving them all a
numerical value and then striking a balance, which stood for the
reliability of each stage in the yarn. The four names he had printed
were authorities, and there was a man, Ducrosne, who got five out
of a possible five; and another fellow, Ammersfoort, who got three.
The bare bones of the tale were all that was in the book--these,