“I could have told you that,” said Jimmie Dale evenly; “but you’ve got it now from a source that you won’t question. I told you the buttons were off the foils tonight, but you don’t seem to realise it yet. Three nights ago you laid a trap for me—and the Pippin died. Do you understand what I mean now by naked foils? You’ve one chance for life—and that’s to answer my question. But I’ll play fair with you, and tell you that I’m going to see that the police get you even if you do answer. Those documents and that blackjack are here in this place, and the Secret Service men know where to find them.” Jimmie Dale’s watch was in his hand. “It’s five minutes to twelve. They’ll be here at midnight. I’ve got to make my getaway before they come. I need two minutes for that, including locking you in so that you can’t get away. That leaves you three minutes to make up your mind. If you answer, you can have whatever chance your lawyers can get you; if you refuse, you and I settle our score before I leave. It’s three minutes against a possible commutation of sentence to life imprisonment. Where is Marre?”
The misshapen, shrunken thing was rocking on its feet. There was no answer.
“There are two minutes left,” said Jimmie Dale in a monotone.
The man’s eyes, coal black, hunted, the pupils gone, swept the room. His lips were working; his hands, clenching and unclenching, clawed at the table.
“One!” said Jimmie Dale.
There was a scream of ungovernable fury, the crash of the toppling table, and, reaching out with both hands for Jimmie Dale’s weapon, Hunchback Joe hurled himself forward—but quick as the other was, Jimmie Dale was quicker, and with his left hand, palm open, pushed full into the man’s face, he flung the other back.
And then there came a cry—a cry in a woman’s voice;
“Marre!”
It was the Tocsin’s voice from the rear doorway of the office. It was her voice; Jimmie Dale could never mistake it even in its startled cry—but he did not look. His eyes were on the man who was standing on the other side of the overturned table, whose beard where he, Jimmie Dale, had grasped the other’s face had been wrenched away, and whose shrunken figure seemed to tower up now in height, and whose deformity was a padded coat, awry now because of the erect and upright posture in which the man stood. It was Clarke, the master of disguise, who once had impersonated Travers, the chauffeur; it was Marre—Wizard Marre.
There was a ghastly smile on the man’s face.