“What the devil are you doing here?” asked Anthony. “And who let you come up?”’
“I pass where I please,” said the stranger. His voice was guttural and foreign, though his English was idiomatic enough.
“Another Dago,” thought Anthony.
“Well, get out, do you hear?” he went on aloud.
The man’s eyes were fixed on the packet of letters which Anthony had caught up.
“I will get out when you have given me what I have come for.”
“And what’s that, may I ask?”
The man took a step nearer.
“The Memoirs of Count Stylptitch,” he hissed.
“It’s impossible to take you seriously,” said Anthony. “You’re so completely the stage villain. I like your get up very much. Who sent you here? Baron Lollipop?”
“Baron?” The man jerked out a string of harsh-sounding consonants.
“So that’s how you pronounce it, is it? A cross between gargling and barking like a dog. I don’t think I could say it myself—my throat’s not made that way. I shall have to go on calling him Lollipop. So he sent you, did he?”
But he received a vehement negative. His visitor went so far as to spit upon the suggestion in a very realistic manner. Then he drew from his pocket a sheet of paper which he threw upon the table.
“Look,” he said. “Look and tremble, accursed Englishman.”
Anthony looked with some interest, not troubling to fulfil the latter part of the command. On the paper was traced the crude design of a human hand in red.
“It looks like a hand,” he remarked. “But, if you say so, I’m quite prepared to admit that it’s a cubist picture of Sunset at the North Pole.”.
“It is the sign of the Comrades of the Red Hand. I am a Comrade of the Red Hand.”
“You don’t say so,” said Anthony, looking at him with much interest. “Are the others all like you? I don’t know what the Eugenic Society would have to say about it.”
The man snarled angrily.
“Dog,” he said. “Worse than dog. Paid slave of an effete monarchy. Give me the Memoirs, and you shall go unscathed. Such is the clemency of the Brotherhood.”
33
