"I do not know," he said simply. "Poltavo was telling me something of his plans. He drew the cross and was beginning to explain its meaning, and then for some reason he stopped, crumpled up the paper, and threw it into the fireplace. At the time I attached some importance to it, and, after he had gone, I rescued it, but——"
"You don't understand it?"
"I don't," said the man, and T. B. knew that he spoke the truth.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE FLIGHT
It must have been whilst Poltavo was in Paris that the ruling spirit of the Maria Braganza discovered that Count Poltavo was indispensable, and that strange reconciliation occurred. Through what agency Baggin and he came into touch is not known. It is generally supposed that the warship ventured close to the French or Spanish coast and sent a message of good will flickering through space, and that some receiving station, undiscovered and undemolished—there must have been a score of such stations—received it, and transmitted it to Poltavo.
News of him came to Smith from Van Ingen, who, following a faint clue of the Spanish dancer, had gone to Tangier. Work at the Embassy had become unendurable to him, since the disappearance of the Nine Men had marked also the disappearance of Doris, and despite the expostulations of the ambassador, who was sorely distressed by certain international complications of the situation—for both Baggin and Grayson were Americans—despite also the detective's blunt advice to let the business alone and return to the Embassy, Van Ingen had set forth on his wild-goose chase.
The afternoon of his arrival, he climbed to the Marshan, the plateau that commands Tangier. Here are villas, in which Moorish, Spanish, and English styles of architecture, struggling for supremacy, have compromised in a conglomerate type. And here, idling along the promenade, scanning every figure as it passed, he had come face to face with Catherine Dominguez.
At his start of surprise, for he had not expected such good fortune, the lady paused, uncertainly.
The young man uncovered with a sweeping bow. "Pardon!" he exclaimed gallantly, in Spanish, "but so often have I seen the lovely face of the 'Belle Espagnole' in the newspapers that I recognised it before I was aware!"