He might have been a travelling salesman waiting for his samples on the veranda of a country hotel and he had about him a kind of sophisticated look as if he took a sort of blasé pleasure in watching the world go round. His feet rested upon the rung of his tilted chair, forming his knees into a sort of desk upon which lay a French newspaper. The tilting of his knees, the tilting of his chair, the tilting of his hat and the rakish tilt of his cigar, gave him the appearance of great self-sufficiency, as if, away down in his soul, he knew what he was there for, and cared not a whit whether anyone else did or not.
Tom Slade paused on the lower step and stared. Then with a slowly dawning smile supplanting his look of astonishment, he ejaculated,
The man made not the slightest change in his attitude except to smile the while he worked his cigar over to the other corner of his mouth. Then he cocked his head slightly sideways.
"H'lo, Tommy," said he.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SMOKE AND FIRE
Mr. Carleton Conne, of the United States Secret Service, had come over from Liverpool via Dover on a blind quest after an elusive spy. There had been a sort of undercurrent of rumor, with many extravagant trappings, that a mysterious agent of the Kaiser was on his way to Europe with secrets of a most important character. Some stories had it that he was intimately related to Bloody Bill himself; others that he gloried in a kinship with Ludendorf, while still other versions represented him as holding Mexico in the palm of his hand. Dark stories floated about and no one knew just where they originated.