The face of Professor Flick was livid with fear. Great pearls of perspiration stood out on his forehead. Mr. Copping of Omaha stood composed and firm, like a man with his back to the wall who just turns up his sleeves and gets his sword and dagger ready and is prepared to try the last chance—the very last.
'We are American citizens,' he said stoutly; 'the flag of the Stars and Stripes defends us wherever we go.'
'God bless the flag of the Stars and Stripes,' Ericson exclaimed, 'and if it shelters you I shall have nothing more to say. But only just try if it will either claim you or shelter you. I remember now that you both of you did take refuge for a long time in Southern California, but if you prove yourselves American citizens, then you can be made to answer to American reading of international law, and the flag of the Great Republic will not shelter convicts from a prison in Gloria when they are accused of dynamite outrage in England. Sir Rupert, Mr. Coroner, I have only to ask you to do your duty.'
'This will be an international question,' Mr. Andrew Copping quietly said. 'There will be a row over this.'
'No there won't,' Professor Flick declared abruptly. 'Look here, we have made a muddle of this. My comrade in this business has been managing things pretty badly; he always wanted to boss the show too much. Now I am getting sick of all that, don't you see? I have had the dangerous part always, and he has had the pleasure of bullying me. Now I am tired of all that, and I have made up my mind, and I am just going to have the bulge on him by turning—what do you call it?—Queen's evidence.'
Then Mr. Andrew Copping suddenly thrust himself into the front.
'No you don't—you bet you don't!' he exclaimed. 'You are a coward and a traitor, and you shall never give Queen's evidence or any other evidence against me.'
Those who stood around thought he was going to strike Professor Flick. Some ran between, but they were not quick enough. Copping made one clutch at his breast, and then, with a touch that seemed as light as if he were merely throwing his hand into the air unpurposing, he made a push at the breast of Professor Flick, and Professor Flick went down as the bull goes down in the amphitheatre of Madrid or Seville when the hand of the practised swordsman has touched him with the point in just the place where he lived. Professor Flick, as he called himself, was dead, and the whole plot was revealed and was over.
By a curious stroke of fate it was Ericson who caught the dying Professor Flick as he fainted and died, and it was Hamilton who gripped the murderer, the so-called Copping. Copping made no struggle; the police took quiet charge of him—and of his weapon.
'Well, I think,' said Sir Rupert with a shudder, 'we have case enough for a committal now.'