one you were wearing when you were here before!"

There was a moment's pause in which I saw myself quite plainly in the colonel's head. Then, with a grunt and a shrug, he reached out his left hand for the shoe, but his right slid inside his Jaeger jacket, and that same second my arms were round him. I felt and grabbed his revolver as soon as he did, and I held the barrel clear of our bodies while he emptied all six chambers through his garments into the floor.

Then we bound our fine fellow with his own rope-ladder, reloaded both revolvers with unexpurgated cartridges discovered upon his person, and prepared to hold a grand reception of his staff and "pupils." But those young gentlemen had not misconstrued the cannonade. And it was some days before the last of the gang was captured.

They were all tried together at the December sessions of the Central Criminal Court, when their elaborate methods were very much admired. The skilful impersonation of the typical Army coach by the head of the gang, and the adequate acting of his confederates in the subordinate posts of pupils and servants, were features which appealed to the public mind. The taking of the house in Mulcaster Park, as a base for operations throughout a promising neighborhood, was a measure somewhat overshadowed by the brilliant blind of representing it as the scene of the first robberies. It was generally held, however, that in presenting a predestined victim with a revolver and doctored cartridges, the master thief had gone too far, and that for that alone he deserved the exemplary sentence to which he listened like the officer and gentleman he had never been. So the great actor lives the part he plays.

It is a perquisite of witnesses to hear these popular trials with a certain degree of comfort; and so it was that I was able to nudge Uvo Delavoye, at the last soldierly inclination of that bald bad head, before it disappeared from a world to which it has not yet returned.

"Well, at any rate," I whispered, "you can't claim any Witching Hill influence this time."

"I wish I couldn't," he answered in a still lower voice.

"But you've just heard that our bogus colonel has been a genuine criminal all his life."

"I wasn't thinking of him," said Uvo Delavoye. "I was thinking of a still worse character, who really did the thing I felt so like that night before we heard them in the bathroom. Not a word, Gilly! I know you've 

 Prev. P 92/136 next