One evening, at the Poodle Dog Café, Hall waited vainly for John Gray to join him at dinner. The theatre, as usual, had been planned for afterwards. But John Gray did not come, and by half past eight Hall returned to the St. Francis Hotel, under his arm a bundle of current magazines, intent on early to bed. There was something familiar about the walk of the woman who preceded him towards the elevator, and, with a quick intake of breath, he hurried after.
“Grunya,” he said softly, as the elevator started.
In one instant she gave him a startled glance from trouble-burdened eyes, and the next instant she had caught his hand between both of hers and was clinging to it as if for strength.
“Oh, Winter,” she breathed. “Is it you? That is why I came to the St. Francis. I thought I might find you. I need you so. Uncle Sergius is mad, quite mad. He ordered me to pack up for a long journey. We sail tomorrow. He compelled me to leave the house and to come to a downtown hotel, promising to join me later, or to join me on the steamer tomorrow morning. I engaged rooms for him. But something is going to happen. He has some terrible plan in mind, I know. He—”
“What floor, sir?” the elevator operator interrupted.
“Go down again,” Hall ordered, for there was no one else in the car.
“Wait,” he cautioned. “We will go to the Palm Room and talk.”
“No, no,” she cried. “Let us get out on the street. I want to walk. I want fresh air. I want to be able to think. Do you think I am mad, Winter? Look at me. Do I look it?”
“Hush,” he commanded, pressing her arm. “Wait. We will talk it over. Wait.”
It was patent that she was in a state of high excitement, and her effort to control herself on the down-trip of the elevator was successful but pitiful.
“Why didn’t you communicate with me?” he asked, when they had gained the sidewalk and were walking to the corner of Powell, where he intended directing their course across Union Square. “What became of you when you reached San Francisco? You received my message at Denver. Why didn’t you come to the St. Francis?”
“I haven’t time to tell you,” she hurried on. “My head is bursting. I don’t know what to believe. It seems all a dream. Such things are not possible. Uncle’s mind is deranged. Sometimes I am absolutely sure there is no such thing as the Assassination Bureau. It is an imagining of Uncle Sergius. You, too, have imagined it. This is the twentieth century. Such an awful thing cannot be. I . . . I sometimes wonder if I have had typhoid fever, or if I am not even now in the delirium of fever, with nurses and doctors around me, raving all this nightmare myself. Tell me, tell me, are you, too, a sprite of fantasy—a vision of a disease-stricken brain?”
“No,” he said gravely and slowly. “You are awake and well. You are yourself. You are now crossing Powell Street with me. The pavement is slippery. Do you not feel it underfoot? See those tire chains on that motorcar. Your arm is in mine. This is a real fog drifting across from the Pacific. Those are real people on yonder benches. You see this beggar, asking me for money. He is real. See, I give him a real half-dollar. He will most likely spend it on real whiskey. I smelled his breath. Did you? It was real, I assure you, very real. And we are real. Please grasp that. Now, what is your trouble? Tell me all.”
“Is there truly an organization of assassins?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“How do you know? Is it not mere conjecture? May you not be inoculated with uncle’s madness?”
Hall shook his head sadly. “I wish I were. Unfortunately, I know otherwise.”
“How do you know?” she cried, pressing the fingers of her free hand wildly to her temple.
“Because I am Temporary Secretary of the Assassination Bureau.”
She recoiled from him, half withdrawing her arm from his and being restrained only by a reassuring pressure on his part.
“You are one of the band of murderers that is trying to kill Uncle Sergius!”
“No; I am not one of the band. I merely have charge of its funds. Has you—er—your Uncle Sergius told you anything about the—er—the band?”
“Oh, endless ravings. He is so deranged that he believes that he organized it.”
“He did,” Hall said firmly. “He is crazy, there is no doubt of that; but nevertheless he made the Assassination Bureau and directed it.”
Again she recoiled and strove to withdraw her arm.
“And will you next admit that it is you who paid the Bureau fifty thousand dollars in advance for his death?” she demanded.
“It is true. I admit it.”
“How could you?” she moaned.
“Listen, Grunya, dear,” he begged. “You have not heard all. You do not understand. At the time I paid the fee I did not know he was your father—”
He broke off abruptly, appalled at the slip he had made.
“Yes,” she said, with growing calmness, “he told me he was my father, too. I took it for so much raving. Go on.”
“Well, then, I did not know he was your father; nor did I know he was insane. Afterwards, when I learned, I pleaded with him. But he is mad. So are they all, all mad. And he is up to some new madness right now. You dread that something is going to happen. Tell me what are your suspicions. We may be able to prevent it.”
“Listen!” She pressed close to him and spoke quickly in a low, controlled voice. “There is much explanation needed from both of us and to both of us. But first to the danger. When I arrived in San Francisco, why I do not know save that I had a presentiment, I went first to the morgue, then I made the round of the hospitals. And I found him, in the German Hospital, with two severe knife wounds. He told me he had received them from one of the assassins . . .”
“A man named Harding,” Hall interrupted and guessed. “It happened up on the Nevada desert, near Winnemucca, on a railroad train.”
“Yes, yes; that is the name. That is what he said.”
“You see how everything dovetails,” Hall urged. “There may be a great deal of madness in it, but the madness even is real, and you and I, at any rate, are sane.”
“Yes, but let me hurry on.” She pressed his arm with renewed confidence. “Oh, we have so much to tell each other. Uncle swears by you. But that is not what I want to say. I rented a furnished house, on the tip-top of Rincon Hill, and as soon as the doctors permitted, I moved Uncle Sergius to it. We’ve been keeping house there for the last few weeks. Uncle is entirely recovered—or Father, rather. He is my father. I believe that now, for it seems I must believe everything. And I shall believe . . . unless I wake up and find it all a nightmare. Now Un—Father has been tinkering about the house the last few days. Today, with everything packed for our voyage to Honolulu, he sent the luggage aboard the steamer, and sent me to a hotel. Now I know nothing about explosives, save glints and glimmerings from my reading; but just the same I know he has mined the house. He has dug up the cellar. He has opened the walls of the big living room and closed them again. I know he has run wires behind the partitions, and I know that today he was making things ready to run a wire from the house to a clump of shrubbery in the grounds near the gateway. Possibly you may guess what he plans to do.”
Hall was just remembering John Gray’s failure to keep the theatre engagement.
“Something is to happen there tonight,” Grunya went on. “Uncle intends to join me later tonight at the St. Francis, or tomorrow morning on the steamer. In the meantime—”
But Hall, having reasoned his way to action, was urging her by the arm, back out of the park to the corner where stood the waiting row of taxicabs.
“In the meantime,” he told her, “we must rush to Rincon Hill. He is going to kill them. We must prevent it.”
“If only he isn’t killed,” she murmured. “The cowards! The cowards!”
“Pardon me, dear, but they are not cowards. They are brave men, and they are the most likable chaps, if a bit peculiar, under the sun. To know them is to love them. There has been too much killing already.”
“They want to kill my father.”
“And he wants to kill them,” Hall retorted. “Don’t forget that. And it is by his order. He is as mad as a hatter, and they are precisely as mad as so many more hatters. Come! Quick, please! Quick! They are assembling there now in the mined house. We may save them—or him, who knows?”
“Rincon Hill—time is money—you know what that means,” he said to the taxi driver, as he helped Grunya in. “Come on, now! Burn up that juice! Rip up the pavement, anything you want, as long as you get us there!”
Rincon Hill, once the aristocratic residence district of San Francisco, lifts its head of decayed gentility from out of the muck and ruck of the great labor ghetto that spreads away south of Market Street. At the foot of the hill, Hall paid off the cab, and he and Grunya began the easy climb. Though it was still early in the evening, no more than half past nine, few persons were afoot. Chancing to glance back, Hall saw a familiar form pass across the circle of light shed by a street lamp. He drew Grunya into the house shadows of the side street and waited, and in a few minutes was rewarded by seeing Haas go by, walking in his peculiar, effortless, cat-like way. They continued on, half a block behind him, and when, at the crest of the hill, under the light from the next street lamp, they saw him vault a low, old-fashioned iron fence, Grunya nudged Hall’s arm significantly.
“That is the house, our house,” she whispered. “Watch him. Little he dreams he is going to his death.”
“Little I dream he is either,” Hall whispered back skeptically. “In my opinion Mr. Haas is a very difficult specimen to kill.”
“Uncle Sergius is very careful. I have never known him to blunder. He has arranged everything, and when your Mr. Haas goes through that front door—”
She broke off. Hall had gripped her arm savagely.
“He’s not going through that front door, Grunya. Watch him. He’s prowling to the rear.”
“There is no rear,” she said. “The hill falls away in a bulkhead down to the next back yard, forty feet below. He’ll prowl back to the front. The garden is very small.”
“He’s up to something,” Hall muttered, as the dark form came in sight again. “Ah ha! Mr. Haas! You’re the wily one! See, Grunya, he’s crawled into that shrubbery by the gate. Is that where the wire was run?”
“Yes; it’s the only thick clump of shrubbery a man can hide in. Here comes somebody. I wonder if it’s another of the assassins.”
Not waiting, Hall and Grunya walked on past the house to the next corner. The man who had come from the other direction turned into Dragomiloff’s house and walked up the steps to the door. They heard it, after a momentary delay, open and shut.
Grunya insisted on accompanying Hall. It was her house, she said, and she knew every inch of it. Besides, she still had the pass-key, and it would not be necessary to ring.
The front hall was lighted, so that the house number showed plainly, and they walked boldly past the bushes that concealed Haas, unlocked the front door, and entered. Hall hung his hat on the rack and pulled off his gloves. From the door to the right came a murmur of voices. They paused outside to listen.
“Beauty is a compulsion,” they heard one voice master the conversation.
“That’s Hanover, the Boston associate,” Hall whispered.
“Beauty is absolute,” the voice went on. “Human life, all life, has been bent to beauty. It is not a case of paradoxical adaptation. Beauty was not bent to life. Beauty was in the universe when man was not. Beauty will remain in the universe when man has vanished and again is not. Beauty is—well, it is beauty, that is all, the first word and the last, and it does not depend upon little maggoty men a-crawl in the slime.”
“Metaphysics,” they could hear Lucoville sneer. “Pure illusory metaphysics, my dear Hanover. When a man begins to label as absolute the transient phenomena of an ephemeral evolution—”
“Metaphysician yourself,” they heard Hanover interrupt. “You would contend that nothing exists save in consciousness, that when consciousness is destroyed, beauty is destroyed, that the thing itself, the vital principle to which developing life has been bent, is destroyed. When we know, all of us, and you should know it, that it is the principle only that persists. As Spencer has well said of the eternal flux of force and matter, with its alternate rhythm of evolution and dissolution, ‘ever the same in principle but never the same in concrete result.’ ”
“New norms, new norms,” Lucoville blurted in. “New norms ever appearing in successive and dissimilar evolutions.”
“The norm itself!” Hanover cried triumphantly. “Have you considered that? You, yourself, have just asserted that the norm persists. What then, is the norm? It is the eternal, the absolute, the outside-of-consciousness, the father and the mother of consciousness.”
“A moment,” Lucoville cried excitedly.
“Bah!” Hanover went on with true scholarly dogmatism. “You attempt to resurrect the old exploded, Berkeleyan idealism. Metaphysics—generations behind the times. The modern school, as you ought to know, insists that the thing exists of itself. Consciousness, seeing and perceiving the thing, is a mere accident. ’Tis you, my dear Lucoville, who are the metaphysician.”
There was a clapping of hands and rumble of approval.
“Hoist by your own petard,” they heard one mellow voice cry in an unmistakable English accent.
“John Gray,” Hall whispered to Grunya. “If the theatre were not so hopelessly commercialized, he would revolutionize the whole of it.”
“Logomachy,” they heard Lucoville begin his reply. “Word-mongering, tricks of speech, a shuffling of words and ideas. If you chaps will give me ten minutes, I’ll expound my position.”
“Behold!” Hall whispered. “Our amiable assassins, adorable philosophers. Now, would you rather believe them madmen than cruel and brutal murderers?”
Grunya shrugged her shoulders. “They may bend beauty any way they please, but I cannot forget that they are bent on killing Uncle Sergius—my father.”
“But don’t you see? They are obsessed by ideas. They take no count of mere human life—not even of their own. They are in slavery to thought. They live in a world of ideas.”
“At fifty thousand per,” she retorted.
It was his turn to shrug his shoulders.
“Come,” he said. “Let us enter. No, I’ll go first.”
He turned the door handle and went in, followed by Grunya. The conversation stopped abruptly, and seven men, seated comfortably about the room, stared at the two intruders.
“Look here, Hall,” Harkins said with evident irritation. “You were to be kept out of this. And we kept you out. Yet here you are, and with a—pardon me—a stranger.”
“And if it had depended on you fellows, I should have been kept out,” Hall answered. “Why so secret?”
“It was the Chief’s orders. He invited us here. And since we obeyed his instructions and didn’t let you in on it, our only conclusion is that it is he who let you in.”
“No he didn’t,” Hall laughed. “And you might as well ask us to be seated. This, gentlemen, is Miss Constantine. Miss Constantine, Mr. Gray; Mr. Harkins; Mr. Lucoville; Mr. Breen; Mr. Alsworthy; Mr. Starkington; and Mr. Hanover—with the one exception of Mr. Haas, the surviving members of the Assassination Bureau.”
“This is broken faith!” Lucoville cried angrily. “Hall, I am disappointed!”
“You do not understand, friend Lucoville. This is Miss Constantine’s house. In the absence of her father you are her guests, all of you.”
“We were given to understand it was Dragomiloff’s house,” Starkington said. “He told us so. We came separately, yet, since we all arrived here we can only conclude that there was no mistake of street and number.”
“It is the same thing,” Hall replied, with a quiet smile. “Miss Constantine is Dragomiloff’s daughter.”
On the instant Grunya and Hall were surrounded by the others, and hands were held out to her. Her own hand she put behind her, at the same time taking a backward step.
“You want to kill my father,” she said to Lucoville. “It is impossible that I should take your hand.”
“Here, this chair; be seated, dear lady,” Lucoville was saying, assisted by Starkington and Gray in bringing the chair to her. “We are highly honored—the daughter of our Chief—we did not know he had a daughter—she is welcome—any daughter of our Chief is welcome—”
“But you want to kill him,” she continued her objection. “You are murderers.”
“We are friends, believe me. We represent an amity that is higher and deeper than life and death. Dear lady, human life is nothing—less than a bagatelle. Life! Why, our lives are mere pawns in the game of social evolution. We admire your father, we respect him; he is a great man. He is—or, rather, he was—our Chief.”
“Yet you want to kill him,” she persisted.
“And by his orders. Be seated, please.” Lucoville succeeded in his attentions, insofar as she sank down in the chair. “This friend of yours, Mr. Hall,” he went on. “You do not refuse him as a friend. You do not call him a murderer. Yet it was he who deposited the fifty-thousand-dollar fee for your father’s life. You see, dear lady, already he has half destroyed our organization. Yet we do not hold it against him. He is our friend. We honor him because we know him to be a man, an honest man, a man of his word, an ethicist of no mean dimensions.”
“Isn’t it wonderful, Miss Constantine!” Hanover broke in ecstatically. “Amity that makes death cheap! The rule of right! The worship of right! Does it not make one hope? Think of it! It proves that the future is ours; that the future belongs to the right-thinking, right-acting man and woman; that such fierce, feeble stirrings and animal yearnings of the beastly clay, love of self and love of kindred flesh and blood, vanish away as dawn mist before the sun of the higher righteousness! Reason—and, mark me, right reason—triumphs! All the human world, some day, will comport itself, not according to the flesh and the abysmal mire, but according to high right reason!”
Grunya bowed her head and threw up her arms in admission of befuddled despair.
“You can’t resist them, eh?” Hall exulted, bending over her.
“It is the chaos of super-thinking,” she said helplessly. “It is ethics gone mad.”
“So I told you,” he answered. “They are all mad, as your father is mad, as you and I are mad insofar as we are touched by their thinking. And now what do you think of our lovable assassins?”
“Yes, what do you think of us?” Hanover beamed over the top of his spectacles.
“All I can say,” she replied, “is that you don’t look like it—like assassins, I mean. As for you, Mr. Lucoville, I will take your hand, I will take the hands of all of you, if you will promise to give up this attempt to kill my father.”
“You have a long way, Miss Constantine, to climb upwards to the light,” Hanover chided regretfully.
“Kill? Kill?” Lucoville queried excitedly. “Why this fear of killing? Death is nothing. Only the beasts, the creatures of the mire, fear death. My dear lady, we are beyond death. We are full-statured intelligences, knowing good and evil. It is no more difficult for us to be killed than it is for us to kill. Killing—why, it occurs in every slaughterhouse and meat-canning establishment in the land. It is so common that it is almost vulgar.”
“Who has not swatted a mosquito?” Starkington shouted. “With one fell swoop of a meat-nourished, death-nourished hand smashed to destruction a most wonderful, sentient, and dazzling flying mechanism? If there be tragedy in death—think of the mosquito, the squashed mosquito, the airy fairy miracle of flight disrupted and crushed as no aviator has ever been disrupted and crushed, not even MacDonald who fell fifteen thousand feet. Have you ever studied the mosquito, Miss Constantine? It will repay you. Why, the mosquito is just as wonderful, in the phenomena of living matter, as man is wonderful.”
“But there is a difference,” Gray put in.
“I was coming to that. And what is the difference? Swat the mosquito.” He paused for emphasis. “Well, he is swatted, isn’t he? And that is all. He is finished. The memory of him is not. But swat a man—by entire generations swat man—and something is left. What is it that is left? Not a peripatetic organism, not a hungry stomach, a bald head, and a mouthful of aching teeth, but thoughts—royal, kingly thoughts. That’s the difference. Thoughts! High thoughts! Right thoughts! Reasoned righteousness!”
“Hold!” Hanover shouted, in his excitement springing to his feet and waving his arms. “Swat—and I accept your word, Starkington, crude though it is, but expressive. Swat—and I warn you, Starkington—swat as much as the tiniest pigment cell of the diaphanous gauze of a new-hatched mosquito’s wing, and the totality of the universe is jarred from its central suns to the stars beyond the stars. Do not forget there is a cosmic righteousness in that pigment cell and in the last atom of the billion atoms that go to compose that pigment cell, and in every one of the countless myriads of corpuscles that go to compose one of those billion atoms.”
“Listen, gentlemen,” Grunya said. “What are you here for? I do not mean in the universe, but here in this house. I accept all that Mr. Hanover has so eloquently said of the pigment cell of the mosquito’s wing. It is evidently not right to—to swat a mosquito. Then, how in the name of sanity can you reconcile your presence here, bent as you are on a red-handed murder, with the ethics you have just expounded?”
An uproar of reconciliation arose from every mouth.
“Hey! Shut up!” Hall bellowed at them, then turned to the girl and commanded peremptorily, “Grunya, stop it. You’re getting touched. In five minutes you’ll be as bad as they are. A truce to argument, you fellows. Cut it out. Forget it. Let’s get down to business. Where is the Chief, Miss Constantine’s father? You say he told you to come here. Why have you come here? To kill him?”
Hanover wiped his forehead, collapsed from his passion of thought, and nodded.
“That is our reasoned intention,” he said calmly. “Of course, the presence of Miss Constantine is embarrassing. I fear we shall have to ask her to withdraw.”
“You are a brute, sir,” she gravely assured the mild-mannered scholar. “I shall remain right here. And you won’t kill my father. I tell you, you won’t.”
“Why isn’t the Chief here, then?” Hall inquired.
“Because it is not yet time. He telephoned to us, talked with us himself, and he said he would meet us here in this room at ten o’clock. It is almost ten now.”
“Maybe he won’t come,” Hall suggested.
“He gave his word,” was the simple but quite convincing answer.
Hall looked at his watch. It marked a few seconds before ten. And ere those seconds had ticked off, the door opened and Dragomiloff, blond and colorless, clad in a gray traveling suit, stepped in, passing a glance over the assemblage from silken eyes of the palest blue.
“Greetings, dear friends and brothers,” he said in his monotonously even voice. “I see you are all here, with the exception of Haas. Where is Haas?”
The assassins who could not lie stared at one another in awkward confusion.
“Where is Haas?” Dragomiloff repeated.
“We—ah—we don’t know exactly, that is it, exactly,” Harkins began haltingly.
“Well, I do, and exactly,” Dragomiloff chopped him short. “I watched you arrive from the upstairs window. I recognized all of you. Haas also arrived. He is now lying in the shrubbery inside the gate on the right-hand side of the walk, and exactly four feet and four inches from the lower hinge of the gate. I measured it the other day. Do you think that was what I intended?”
“We did not care to anticipate your intentions, dear Chief,” Hanover spoke up benignly, but with logical emphasis. “We debated your invitation and your instructions carefully, and it was our unanimous conclusion that we committed no breach of word or faith in assigning Haas to his position outside. Do you remember your instructions?”
“Perfectly,” Dragomiloff assented. “Wait till I go over them to myself.” For a half-minute of silence he reviewed his instructions, then his face thawed into almost a beam of satisfaction. “You are correct,” he announced. “You have committed no breach of right conduct. And now, dear comrades, all our plans are destroyed by this intrusion of my daughter and of the man who is your Temporary Secretary and who I hope some day will be my son-in-law.”
“What was the aim of your plan?” Starkington asked quickly.
“To destroy you,” Dragomiloff laughed. “And the aim of your plan was?”
“To destroy you,” Starkington admitted. “And destroy you we will. We regret Miss Constantine’s presence, as we likewise do Mr. Hall’s presence. They came uninvited. They can, of course, withdraw.”
“I won’t!” Grunya cried out. “You cold-blooded, inhuman, mathematical monsters! This is my father, and I may be abysmal mire, or anything else you please, but I will not withdraw, and you shall not harm him.”
“You must meet me halfway in this,” Dragomiloff urged. “Let us consider this once that we have failed on both sides. Let me propose a truce.”
“Very well,” Starkington conceded. “A truce for five minutes, during which time no overt act may be attempted and no one may leave the room. We should like to confer together over there by the piano. Is it agreed?”
“Yes, certainly. But first you will please notice where I am standing. My hand is resting against this particular book in this bookcase. I shall not move until you have decided on what course you intend to pursue.”
The assassins drew to the far end of the room and began talking in whispers.
“Come,” Grunya whispered to her father. “You have but to step through the door and escape.”
Dragomiloff smiled forgivingly. “You do not understand,” he said with gentleness.
She clenched her hands passionately, crying, “You are as insane as they.”
“But Grunya, love,” he pleaded, “is it not a beautiful insanity—if you prefer the misnomer? Here thought rules and right rules. It would seem to me the highest rationality and control. What distinguishes man from the lower animals is control. Witness this scene. There stand seven men intent on killing me. Here I stand intent on killing them. Yet, by the miracle of the spoken word we agree to a truce. We trust. It is a beautiful example of high moral inhibition.”
“Every hermit, on top of a pillar or living with the snakes in a cliff cave, has been a beautiful example of such inhibition,” she came back impatiently. “The inhibitions practiced in the asylums are often very remarkable.”
But Dragomiloff refused to be drawn, and smiled and joked until the assassins returned. As before, Starkington was the spokesman.
“We have decided,” he said, “that it is our duty to kill you, dear Chief. There is still a minute to run. When it is gone we shall proceed to our work. Also, in that interval, we again request our two unbidden guests to withdraw.”
Grunya shook her head positively. “I am armed,” she threatened, drawing a small automatic pistol and displaying her inexperience by not pressing down the safety catch.
“It’s too bad,” Starkington apologized. “But we shall have to go on with our work just the same.”
“If nothing unforeseen prevents?” Dragomiloff suggested.
Starkington glanced at his comrades, who nodded, then said, “Certainly, unless nothing unforeseen—”
“And here is the unforeseen,” Dragomiloff interrupted quietly. “You see my hands, my dear Starkington. They bear no weapons. Forbear a minute. You see the book against which my left hand rests. Behind that book, at the back of the case, is a push-button. One firm thrust in of the book presses the button. The room is a magazine of dynamite. Need I explain more? Draw aside that rug on which you are standing—that’s right. Now carefully lift up that loose board. See the sticks lying side by side. They’re all connected.”
“Most interesting,” Hanover murmured, peering down at the dynamite through his spectacles. “Death so simply achieved! A violent chemical reaction, I believe. Some day, when I can spare the time, I shall make a study of explosives.”
And in that moment, Hall and Grunya realized that the philosopher-assassins were truly not afraid of death. As they claimed for themselves, they were not burdened by the flesh. Love of life did not yearn through their mental processes. All they knew was the love of thought.
“We did not guess this,” Gray assured Dragomiloff. “But we apprehended what we did not guess. That is why we stationed Haas outside. You could escape us, but not him.”
“Which reminds me, comrades,” Dragomiloff said. “I ran another wire to the spot in the grounds where Haas is now lurking. Let us hope he does not blunder upon my button I concealed there, else we’ll all go up along with our theories. Suppose one of you goes and brings him in to join us. And while we’re about it, let us agree to another truce. Under the present circumstances, your hands are tied.”
“Seven lives for one,” said Harkins. “Mathematically it is repulsive.”
“It is poor economics,” Breen agreed.
“And suppose,” Dragomiloff continued, “we make the truce till one o’clock and you all come and have supper with me.”
“If Haas agrees,” Alsworthy said. “I am going to get him now.”
Haas agreed and, like any party of friends, they left the house together and caught an electric car for uptown.