have to take care of Luke Cheyne. Last we heard of him, he was out that way.”
There was a moment’s silence. Paul Viotti was stroking his black moustache.
“A pity about Luke,” he sighed. “He should not have left us. Luke will have to go. Only a few days ago I had a pleasant little chat with Inspector Haygon down at Police Headquarters. I am afraid there is no doubt it was Luke who tipped Conyers off. He didn’t clear out for nothing.”
“What about the stock?” Edward Staines demanded.
“Never been so low,” Viotti confided. “And listen, boys, I’ve an offer for the lot. Four hundred and fifty thousand cash. The stuff’s worth more, but it would clean things up nicely.”
“I’m for making the move,” Tom Meredith declared. “I’d sooner find myself alive at the Ritz Bar this time next month, taking one with Charlie, than feeding the worms up at Woodlawn.”
“Disgusting fellow,” Marcus Constantine drawled. “I take it we’re all agreed upon the move. We’ve drunk many a highball to our luck in this little room before we’ve gone out into the hard world. We’ll drink one now to ‘La Belle France’!”
They all crowded around the sideboard and helped themselves, for no waiter ever crossed the threshold of their sanctum whilst their session was in progress. Paul Viotti alone remained at the table. He had made a million dollars by bootlegging, but it was his boast that he had never yet touched a drop of hard liquor in his life.
“Come along, you boys,” he called out presently. “Let’s start the game. I ante five hundred. Very cheap to see me. Come along, all of you.”
They took their places. The heavily curtained windows reduced the roar of the avenue beyond the square to something stifled and monotonous, but the rattle of the overhead railway and the sirens from the steamships and ferries on the river came as reminders that they were in the heart of the great city.
“I guess,” Tom Meredith remarked thoughtfully, “it will seem quiet at first in Monte Carlo.”
“Maybe we’d soon all be quieter,” Paul Viotti grinned, “if we stayed on here.”
That was the afternoon when it was decided that the most dangerous gang of liquor dealers in the United States should disband and enter upon a fresh sphere of operations in Europe.
Certainly Roger Sloane’s environment was all right. He was seated in a wisteria-wreathed arbour with his back to the snow-capped Alpes-Maritimes and before him the most enchanting landscape in the world. Little wafts of perfume floated up to him from a grove of orange trees just below, and beyond, the mellowing meadows and flower farms faded downwards to the blue streak of the Mediterranean. The Estérels made a silvery background on his right. The ancient hill town of La Bastide hemmed him in on the nearer left—a village so ancient that it was almost impossible to tell the inhabited dwellings from the crawling masses of grey stone. The sunshine was a live thing that morning, dancing and gleaming through the trees and amongst the flowers which stocked his garden. Without a doubt his environment was beyond reproach, yet before him on the rude Provençal table was a neat pile of manuscript paper clipped into a leather case, it’s pages virgin of even one disfiguring scrawl. For three successive mornings he had lounged in this miniature paradise, had soaked himself in the sunshine, been sung to by countless sweet-throated birds, had feasted his eyes upon this mass of colouring and absorbed the perfume of an everchanging nosegay of delicious scents. Not a line written. And he called himself an author!
Along the stony footpath which fringed his domain came an unusual sight, a pedestrian tourist. His attire was strange and his gait peculiar. He walked with a loping slouch, a staff in his right hand, and although more than fully grown, he wore what seemed in the distance to be the undress uniform of a Boy Scout. As he drew nearer, he paused in the middle of the path to stare at Sloane—a little rudely, the latter thought. The occupant of the arbour rose to his feet and sauntered to the wall. The newcomer was, at any rate, a curiosity worth looking at. Besides, there was something familiar about his slouch.
The two men scrutinised one another in perfunctory fashion, perhaps at first a little insolently. Then came almost simultaneous recognition.
“Holy Jupiter!” the pedestrian exclaimed. “It’s the poet!”
“Erskine!” the other young man gasped. “Pips Erskine!”
They babbled a few senseless commonplaces. They had been at a preparatory school and Oxford together, but during the four years since they had slipped into the larger world they had not met.
“How are things with you, Pips?” Roger Sloane asked.
“So-so. And you?”
“I keep free from debts and melancholia. What,” he continued, “for the love of Mike, is the meaning of that musical-comedy costume of yours? Have we gone back to the days of Drury Lane? Are you Dick Whittington searching for the Lord Mayor of these parts? You won’t like him when you find him. He’s a small fruit farmer and seldom sober. He comes of a Corsican family, his name’s Viotti, he hasn’t got a gilliflowers and carnations and even the wild roses, which had taken root in its moss-encrusted interstices. His climb had been long and strenuous. He had always possessed the gift of concentration and his eyes were fixed thirstily upon the villa. His friend struck a gong.
“Gin and tonic, whisky and Perrier or country wine?” the latter enquired.
“Gin and tonic,” was the prompt response. “A double, if you don’t mind. I have walked from Nice.”
Sloane gave the order to the white-coated butler who had hastened out from the house. Then he established his friend in a comfortable wicker chair, pushed the cigarettes across to him and filled his own pipe.
“So you really are a lord,” he exclaimed, with a touch of the young American’s curiosity toward an inherited title lurking in his tone.
“I certainly am,” Erskine assured him. “Only a baron, I regret to say. But, after all, I’ve always had a lurking weakness for barons. Ancient history is full of the records of their deeds. Runnymede, for instance—”
The drinks were brought and served. Sloane gave orders for luncheon.
“What, then, is your full designation nowadays?” he enquired of his guest.
“Reginald Phillip Erskine, as before, but I am commonly known now as Lord Erskine. The baronry—”
“That will do,” Roger Sloane interrupted. “I shall continue to call you Pips.”
“How flows the inspiration?” Erskine enquired. “Seems to me a pretty tidy spot for ink-slinging.”
Sloane pointed ruefully to the untouched sheets of manuscript paper. Leisure, environment, opportunity—all favorable. Not a line written.
“I seem to lack mental energy out here,” he complained, stretching his muscular limbs. “I wake up in the morning brimful of ideas and by the time I settle down I can do nothing but listen to the bees, smell the flowers and warm myself in the sunshine.”
“The highest forms of literary effort,” Erskine began. “I mean, the best sort of stuff in your line, was never turned out by any one leading a life of contemplation. The very atmosphere here is soporific…. How did your investments withstand this Wall Street débâcle?”
“Gallantly,” Roger Sloane admitted. “Besides, my uncle’s popped off since our college days and I’ve touched again.”
“There you are,” Erskine pointed out. “You lack the incentive for mental exertion. The stories may form in your brain, but in this atmosphere they will never materialise…. Just a drain more, thanks.”
“What do you suggest, then?” Sloane enquired, having ministered for the second time to his friend’s thirst.
“A breaking away from this life of æsthetic indolence, a life of travel and action,” the visitor urged.
“You