"Mat!... Chota Malachi! ... You lubber, where's my tobacco?... Mat!... Lysgaard!... To hell with the Ki!... Mathison, Hallowell and Company, and be damned to you!... Mat!... Lysgaard!"
Slowly Mathison drew back. The berserker lust to kill evaporated, leaving him cold and sick. The revelation that the name of the murderer was Lysgaard was insignificant beside the fact that Hallowell had reached out from Beyond and saved his friend from carrying blood-guilty hands to Hilda Nordstrom, who waited down-stairs!
CHAPTER XVII
Meantime the jar of the battle had not passed unnoticed. The guests in the rooms adjoining and below had been telephoning the office. The clerk, aware that there were Secret Service operatives at all exits, hastily summoned them. And four plunged into Mathison's room just as he stepped away from the bed.
"It's all over, gentlemen," he said, thickly. "The man on the bed is wanted on two accounts—theft of naval plans and murder. He is Karl Lysgaard. In 1916, to cover his espionage endeavors, he became a naturalized citizen. Ostensibly he is Danish; but he was born in Holtenau, near enough to the Kiel Canal to make him a first-class Prussian. Take him to the Tombs, and keep your eye on him while taking him there. I will appear against him in the morning. The woman known as The Yellow Typhoon...."
"Has vanished," whispered one of the operatives.
"Escaped?"