“'I could have been king here in this land,' he said, waving his hand toward the interior, 'I could have bribed and shot my way to the throne of Albania. Don't you realize what that means to a man like me? There is still a chance and if I could keep your wife alive, if I could see her broken in reason and in health, a poor, skeleton, gibbering thing that knelt at my feet when I came near her I should recover the mastery of myself. Believe me,' he said, nodding his head, 'your wife will have the best medical advice that it is possible to obtain.'
“Kara went out and I did not see him again for a very long time. He sent word, just a scrawled note in the morning, to say my wife had died.”
John Lexman rose up from his seat, and paced the apartment, his head upon his breast.
“From that moment,” he said, “I lived only for one thing, to punish Remington Kara. And gentlemen, I punished him.”
He stood in the centre of the room and thumped his broad chest with his clenched hand.
“I killed Remington Kara,” he said, and there was a little gasp of astonishment from every man present save one. That one was T. X. Meredith, who had known all the time.
CHAPTER XXII
After a while Lexman resumed his story.
“I told you that there was a man at the palazzo named Salvolio. Salvolio was a man who had been undergoing a life sentence in one of the prisons of southern Italy. In some mysterious fashion he escaped and got across the Adriatic in a small boat. How Kara found him I don't know. Salvolio was a very uncommunicative person. I was never certain whether he was a Greek or an Italian. All that I am sure about is that he was the most unmitigated villain next to his master that I have ever met.