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At the same time he dropped a hand into the pocket where nestled his automatic. Fortunately Ekstrom had chosen a table in a corner well removed from any in use. Lanyard could speak without fear of being overheard. But for a moment he refrained.
He must not forget that Ekstrom was playing double; as yet none but Lanyard knew he had stolen the document and done a murder to cover the theft from his associates and leave him free to sell to England without exciting their suspicion.
Would this deadly ache of loneliness be less poignant with Ekstrom dead? With lack-lustre eyes he looked round that cheerless room, reckoning its perfunctory pretense of comfort the forlornest mockery. To lodgings such as this he was condemned for life, to an interminable sequence of transient quarters, sordid or splendid, rich or mean, alike in this common quality of hollow loneliness....
"Stand aside!" The almost puerile measure of his disappointment was betrayed in the thrust with which he shouldered Ekstrom out of the way, so forcibly that the man was sent staggering wildly half a dozen paces. "Don't move, assassin!... Pardon, mademoiselle: one moment," Lanyard muttered, with his one free hand undoing the gag.
Captain Ekstrom fell in with me and mistook me for Downing Street's representative. And here are the plans." "You are the Lone Wolf then?" "I am, as far as concerns you, monsieur, merely the person in possession of these plans, who offers them through you, to France, for a price."
Then one raged through it, plying vicious elbows. As he paused against the light Lanyard identified unmistakably the silhouette of Ekstrom. So that one had, after all, escaped the net of his own treachery! The 'bus guard was shaking Lanyard's arm with an ungentle hand. "Here, now, you got no business boardin' a Special." From his pocket Lanyard whipped the first bank-note his fingers encountered.
I held out until tonight; then just as I was about to go to bed he received a telephone message, and told me you were driving a taxi and followed by Apaches and wouldn't live till daylight if I persisted in refusing." "You came alone?" "No. Three men brought me to the gate. They're waiting outside, in the park." "Apaches?" "Two of them. The other is Captain Ekstrom." "Ekstrom!"
He delayed, then, only long enough to change his clothing and to conceal about him certain properties which it seemed unwise to expose to chance discovery on the part of Ekstrom or in the ever-possible event of police intervention. Within five minutes from the time of his return he was closing behind him the private door.
Yet he had little doubt but that the pursuing machine had risen from the aerodrome of Count Remy de Morbihan at St.-Germain-en-Laye; that it was nothing less, in fact, than De Morbihan's Valkyr, reputed the fastest monoplane in Europe and winner of a dozen International events; and that it was guided, if not by De Morbihan himself, by one of the creatures of the Pack quite possibly, even more probably, by Ekstrom!
"Then I return to myself these prints, pending negotiations for their transfer to France." "How did you come by them?" demanded Monsieur Ducroy, after a moment's thought. "Need monsieur ask? Is France so ill-served by her spies that you do not already know of the misfortune one Captain Ekstrom recently suffered in London?" Ducroy shook his head. Lanyard received this indication with impatience.
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