"Yes, that'll be fine!" said Dick. "Come on!"
"Not so fast!" said a harsh voice behind them. They spun around, and there, grinning a little, but looking highly determined and dangerous, was the same man they had seen the day before, and who had questioned them, when the tire of their taxicab blew out! But now he was not in uniform, but in a plain suit of clothes.
"So you are spying on my house, are you?" he said. "And you lied to me yesterday! No troops were sent to Croydon at all!"
"Well, you hadn't any business to ask us!" said Dick, pluckily. "If you hadn't asked us any questions, we'd have told you no lies."
"I think perhaps you know too much," said the spy, nodding his head. "You had better come with me. We will look after you in this house that interests you so greatly."
He made a movement forward. His hand dropped on Dick's shoulder. But as it did so Harry's feet left the ground. He aimed for the spy's legs, just below the knee, and brought him to the ground with a beautiful diving tackle—the sort he had learned in his American football days. It was the one attack of all others that the spy did not anticipate, if, indeed, he looked for any resistance at all. He wasn't a football player, so he didn't know how to let his body give and strike the ground limply. The result was that his head struck a piece of hard ground with abnormal violence, and he lay prone and very still.
"Oh, that was ripping, Harry!" cried Dick. "But do you think you've killed him?"
"Killed him? No!" said Harry, with a laugh. "He's tougher than that, Dick!"
But he looked ruefully at the spy.
"I wish I knew what to do with him," he said. "He'll come to in a little while. But—"