it really — —”
“Enough to wreck the House, sir,” was the reply.
The Premier, with a troubled face, paced the floor of his private room.
He stopped once to look moodily through the window that gave a view of a crowded terrace and a mass of excited politicians gesticulating and evidently all speaking at once.
“Very, very serious — very, very serious,” he muttered. Then aloud, “We said so much we might as well continue. Give the newspapers as full an account of this afternoon’s happenings as they think necessary — give them the text of the letter.” He pushed a button and his secretary entered noiselessly.
“Write to the Commissioner telling him to offer a reward of a thousand pounds for the arrest of the man who left this thing and a free pardon and the reward to any accomplice.”
The Secretary withdrew and the Scotland Yard expert waited.
“Have your people found how the machine was introduced?”
“No, sir; the police have all been relieved and been subjected to separate interrogation. They remember seeing no stranger either entering or leaving the House.”
The Premier pursed his lips in thought.
“Thank you,” he said simply, and the expert withdrew.
On the terrace Aldgate East and the oratorical member divided honours.
“I must have been standing quite close to it,” said the latter impressively; “‘pon my word it makes me go cold all over to think about it. You remember, Mellin? I was saying about the duty of the Ministry — —”
“I asked the waiter,” said the member for Aldgate to an interested circle, “when he brought the letter: ‘Where did you find it?’
“On the floor, sir!” he said. “I thought it was a medicine advertisement; I wasn’t going to open it, only somebody — —”
“It was me,” claimed the stout gentleman from Brondesbury proudly; “you remember I was saying — —’’
“I knew it was somebody,” continued Aldgate East graciously. “I opened it and read the first few lines. ‘Bless my soul,’ I said — —”
“You said, ‘Well, I’m damned,’” corrected Brondesbury.
“Well, I know it was something very much to the point,” admitted Aldgate East. “I read it — and, you’ll quite understand, I couldn’t grasp its significance, so to speak. Well — —”
The three stalls reserved at the Star Music Hall in Oxford Street were occupied one by one. At half past seven prompt came Manfred, dressed quietly; at eight came Poiccart, a fairly prosperous middle-aged gentleman; at half past eight came Gonsalez, asking in perfect English for a programme. He seated himself between the two others.
When pit and gallery were roaring themselves hoarse over a patriotic song, Manfred smilingly turned to Leon, and said:
“I saw it in the evening papers.”
Leon nodded quickly.
“There was nearly trouble,” he said quietly. “As I went in somebody said, ‘I thought Bascoe had paired,’ and one of them almost came up to me and spoke.”
Chapter III
One Thousand Pounds Reward
To say that England was stirred to its depths — to quote more than one leading article on the subject — by the extraordinary occurrence in the House of Commons, would be stating the matter exactly.
The first intimation of the existence of the Four Just Men had been received with pardonable derision, particularly by those newspapers that were behindhand with the first news. Only the Daily Megaphone had truly and earnestly recognised how real was the danger which threatened the Minister in charge of the obnoxious Act. Now, however, even the most scornful could not ignore the significance of the communication that had so mysteriously found its way into the very heart of Britain’s most jealously guarded institution. The story of the Bomb Outrage filled the pages of every newspaper throughout the country, and the latest daring venture of the Four was placarded the length and breadth of the Isles.
Stories, mostly apocryphal, of the men who were responsible for the newest sensation made their appearance from day to day, and there was no other topic in the mouths of men wherever they met but the strange quartet who seemed to hold the lives of the mighty in the hollows of their hands.
Never since the days of the Fenian outrages had the mind of the public been so filled with apprehension as it was during the two days following the appearance in the Commons of the ‘blank bomb’, as one journal felicitously described it.
Perhaps in exactly the same kind of apprehension, since there was a general belief, which grew out of the trend of the letters, that the Four menaced none other than one man.
The first intimation of their intentions had excited widespread interest. But the fact that the threat had been launched from a small French town, and that in consequence the danger was very remote, had somehow robbed the threat of some of its force. Such was the vague reasoning of an ungeographical people that did not realise that Dax is no farther from London than Aberdeen.
But here was the Hidden Terror in the Metropolis itself. Why, argued London, with suspicious sidelong glances, every man we rub elbows with may be one of the Four, and we none the wiser.
Heavy, black-looking posters stared down from blank walls, and filled the breadth of every police noticeboard.
£1000 REWARD
Whereas, on August 18, at about 4.30 o’clock in the afternoon, an infernal machine was deposited in the Members’ SmokeRoom by some person or persons unknown.
And whereas there is reason to believe that the person or persons implicated in the disposal of the aforesaid machine are members of an organised body of criminals known as The Four Just Men, against whom warrants have been issued on charges of wilful murder in London, Paris, New York, New Orleans, Seattle (USA), Barcelona, Tomsk, Belgrade, Christiania, Capetown and Caracas.
Now, therefore, the above reward will be paid by his Majesty’s Government to any person or persons who shall lay such information as shall lead to the apprehension of any of or the whole of the persons styling themselves The Four Just Men and identical with the band before mentioned.
And, furthermore, a free pardon and the reward will be paid to any member of the band for such information, providing the person laying such information has neither committed nor has been an accessory before or after the act of any of the following murders.
(Signed)
Ryday Montgomery, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Home Affairs.
J. B. Calfort, Commissioner of Police.
Here followed a list of the sixteen crimes alleged against the four men.
God Save the King
All day long little knots of people gathered before the broadsheets, digesting the magnificent offer.
It was an unusual hue and cry, differing from those with which Londoners were best acquainted. For there was no appended description of the men wanted; no portraits by which they might be identified, no stereotyped ‘when last seen was wearing a dark blue serge suit, cloth cap, check tie’, on which the searcher might base his scrutiny of the passerby.
It was a search for four men whom no person had ever consciously seen, a hunt for a will-o’-the-wisp, a groping in the dark after indefinite shadows.
Detective Superintendent Falmouth,