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Page 29
"Quite correct, Inspector," he said. "Lock him up!" And as I began
to protest he passed very close to me and spoke in a low voice: "Say
nothing. Wait!"
I pleaded to be allowed to go back to my rooms, to communicate with
my friends, and pay a visit to our consulate and to the Embassy; and
at the colonel's suggestion Bray agreed to this somewhat irregular
course. So this afternoon I have been abroad with a constable, and
while I wrote this long letter to you he has been fidgeting in my
easy chair. Now he informs me that his patience is exhausted and
that I must go at once. So there is no time to wonder; no time to
speculate as to the future, as to the colonel's sudden turn against
me or the promise of his whisper in my ear. I shall, no doubt,
spend the night behind those hideous, forbidding walls that your
guide has pointed out to you as New Scotland Yard. And when I
shall write again, when I shall end this series of letters so
filled with--
The constable will not wait. He is as impatient as a child.
Surely he is lying when he says I have kept him here an hour.
Wherever I am, dear lady, whatever be the end of this amazing
tangle, you may be sure the thought of you--Confound the man!
YOURS, IN DURANCE VILE.
This fifth letter from the young man of the Agony Column arrived
at the Carlton Hotel, as the reader may recall, on Monday morning,
August the third. And it represented to the girl from Texas the
climax of the excitement she had experienced in the matter of the
murder in Adelphi Terrace. The news that her pleasant young
friend--whom she did not know--had been arrested as a suspect in
the case, inevitable as it had seemed for days, came none the less
as an unhappy shock. She wondered whether there was anything she
could do to help. She even considered going to Scotland Yard and,
on the ground that her father was a Congressman from Texas,
demanding the immediate release of her strawberry man. Sensibly,
however, she decided that Congressmen from Texas meant little in
the life of the London police. Besides, she night have difficulty
in explaining to that same Congressman how she happened to know
all about a crime that was as yet unmentioned in the newspapers.
So she reread the latter portion of the fifth letter, which pictured
her hero marched off ingloriously to Scotland Yard and with a
worried little sigh, went below to join her father.
CHAPTER VII
In the course of the morning she made several mysterious inquiries
of her parent regarding nice points of international law as it
concerned murder, and it is probable that he would have been struck
by the odd nature of these questions had he not been unduly excited
about another matter.
"I tell you, we've got to get home!" he announced gloomily. "The
German troops are ready at Aix-la-Chapelle for an assault on Liege.
Yes, sir--they're going to strike through Belgium! Know what that
means? England in the war! Labor troubles; suffragette troubles;
civil war in Ireland--these things will melt winter in Texas.
They'll go in. It would be national suicide if they didn't."
His daughter stared at him. She was unaware that it was the
bootblack at the Carlton he was now quoting. She began to think he
knew more about foreign affairs than she had given him credit for.
"Yes, sir," he went on; "we've got to travel--fast. This won't be
a healthy neighborhood for non-combatants when the ruction starts.
I'm going if I have to buy a liner!"
"Nonsense!" said the girl. "This is the chance of a lifetime. I
won't be cheated out of it by a silly old dad. Why, here we are,
face to face with history!"
"American history is good enough for me," he spread-eagled. "What
are you looking at?"
"Provincial to the death!" she said thoughtfully. "You old dear
--I love you so! Some of our statesmen over home are going to
look pretty foolish now in the face of things they can't understand
I hope you're not going to be one of them."
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