"All the same," he said, "the place is too well guarded for any Spanish murderer to get up. Besides, Tom here is makin' all his arrangements and he'll have Miss Juanita out of it in no time."
"The circumstances," Arthur went on calmly, "are perfectly well known to a few people at the head of the Government in Brazil. I had a long and intimate conversation with Don Francisco Torromé, Minister of Police to the Republic. He told me that the Hermandad is intensely revengeful, wicked, and unscrupulous. Moreover, it's rich; and money wouldn't be allowed to stand in the way of getting at Morse. What is lacking is energy. These people make the most complete and fiendish plans, they dream the most fantastic and devilish dreams, and then they say 'Manana'—which means, 'It will do very well to-morrow'—and go to sleep in the sun."
"Then after all, Morse is in no danger!" I cried, immensely relieved. "You said the danger was real, but you spoke figuratively."
"Sorry, old chap, not a bit of it. There's some one on the track with energy enough to pull the lid off the infernal regions if necessary. In short, the Hermandad have engaged the services of an international scoundrel of the highest intellectual powers, a man without remorse, an artist in crime—I should say, and most Chiefs of Police in the kingdoms of the world would agree with me—the most dangerous ruffian at large. You've seen him, Tom, I pointed him out to you at a little Soho restaurant where we dined once together. His name is Mark Antony Midwinter, and he traveled from Brazil, together with a friend, by the same boat that I did."
"Then he must be in London now!" said Pat Moore, with the air of announcing another great discovery.
"But look here!" I cried. "I told you, before you sailed for South America, I told you what I saw at the Ritz Hotel that night. It was the very same man, Mark Antony Midwinter, as you call him, running like a hare from old Morse, who was shooting fireworks round him with a smile on his face. That's not the man you think he is. He may be a devil, but that night he was a devil of a funk."
"Wait a bit, my son," said Arthur. "I have thought about that incident rather carefully. Remember that Morse was given a certain time in which to come in line and join the Hermandad. From what I have heard of the punctilious, senile Marquis da Silva, he wouldn't have allowed the campaign against Morse to be started a moment before the time of immunity was up. Might not Midwinter at that time, quite ignorant that the towers were being built as a refuge for Morse, have tried to go behind his own employers and offer to betray them, and to drop the whole business for a million or so? From what I know of the man's career I should think it extremely probable."
I whistled. Arthur seemed to have penetrated to the center of that night's mystery. There was nothing more likely. I could imagine the whole scene, the panther man laying his cards on the table and offering to save Morse and Juanita from certain death—Morse, already half maddened by what hung over him, chuckling in the knowledge that he had built an impregnable refuge, dismissing the scoundrel with utter firmness and contempt.
"I believe you've hit it, Arthur," I said. "It fits in like the last bit of a jig-saw puzzle."
"I'm pretty sure myself, but even now you don't know all. Quite early in his life, when Midwinter—he's the last of the Staffordshire Midwinters, an ancient and famous family—was expelled from Harrow, he went out to South America. Morse was at that time in the wilds of Goyaz, where he was developing his mines. There was a futile attempt to kidnap the child, Juanita, who was then about two years old, and Midwinter was in it. The young gentleman, I understand, was caught. Morse was then, as doubtless he is now, a man of a grim and terrible humor. He took young Midwinter and treated him with every possible contemptuous indignity. They say his head was shaved; he was birched like a schoolboy by Morse's peons; he was branded, tarred and feathered, and turned contemptuously adrift. The fellow came back to Europe, married a celebrated actress in Paris, who is now dead, and has been, as I say, one of the most successful uncaught members of the higher criminal circles that ever was. He made an attempt at the Ritz, swallowing his hatred. It failed. His employers in Brazil know nothing of it. He is here in London—as Pat so wonderfully discovered—supplied with unlimited money, burning with a hatred of which a decent man can have no conception, and confronted with his last chance in the world."