“I trust we shall meet again,” and the Baron, still smiling, bowed, turned on his heel and vanished.
Grey, who had been listening, now rejoined the Captain.
“He followed us, evidently,” he ventured.
“He is a serpent,” Lindenwald commented, gravely, “and one to be feared. He crawls in the grass, gives no sign and strikes with poisoned fang where and when least expected. We must be very wary—very wary, indeed, until we are quite sure he has left the city. Ah, and that is not the worst—how can we ever be sure? This is a case, Herr Arndt, where caution is more advisable than valour.”
“And your advice is?” Grey queried.
“My advice is never to go out unaccompanied. Already he is setting his traps, arranging his pitfalls. You cannot conceive of his ingenuity. I am vexed because I feel myself unequal to combat his trickery. In fair fight I have no fear, but to fence with von Einhard is to be always in danger of the impalpable.”
When they had separated and Grey was alone in his room, he flung himself into a comfortable chair, lighted a cigarette and gave himself up to reflection. The gravity of the affair was not to be minimized, yet he could not repress a smile as he thought of the triangular form the matter had assumed and of the complications, ramifications and cross-purposes that had developed. Personally his object was to detect and bring to justice those persons who had, for some reason not yet divulged, been using him as a cat’s-paw to attain an end of which he was also ignorant. He had, of course, every reason to believe that in this plot Captain Lindenwald was a prominent factor, and as such his hand was against him. Meanwhile the machinery of international justice had been set in motion to bring about his own apprehension, extradition and punishment for a crime he had never contemplated and never willingly committed. Whether to this infraction Captain Lindenwald had been a party he had no means of knowing, but now it had turned out that another enemy was in the field—an aggressive foe seeking his life—and in this new battle Captain Lindenwald, strangely enough, was, it would seem, his staunch ally. He wondered whether any man had ever before been so harassed, so persecuted, so maligned, so humiliated through no fault of his own; and his sense of injury waxed more galling and his resentment more turbulently avid. He grew impatient of every hour’s delay in the chase, restless under his enforced inaction and fretful over the tardy revelation of past events and the development of future plans.
Then the thought of the box at the Gare du Nord recurred to him, and he got up and rang for Johann. But the youth knew nothing of it.
“Lutz, perhaps,” he said; “it is possible that Lutz knows. I will send him to you, Herr Arndt.”
And a little later Lutz came in. His air was timid and his manner uneasy. His eyes were furtive and refused to meet his master’s, and his fingers were in constant motion.