“He dropped full forty feet into a tree—from the tree to the ground, and went off like a cat!”
“Earl Dexter has escaped us,” I said, “and he has the slipper!”
“God help him!” replied Bristol. “For by now he has that hell-pack at his heels! What a case! Heavens above, it will drive me mad!”
CHAPTER XIX
A RAPPING AT MIDNIGHT
Inspector Bristol finished his whisky at a gulp and stood up, a tall, massive figure, stretching himself and yawning.
“The detective of fiction would be hard at work on this case, now,” he said, smiling, “but I don’t even pretend to be. I am at a standstill and I don’t care who knows it.”
“You have absolutely no clue to the whereabouts of Earl Dexter?”
“Not the slightest, Mr. Cavanagh. You hear a lot about the machinery of the law, but as a matter of fact, looking for a clever man hidden in London is a good deal like looking for a needle in a haystack. Then, he may have been bluffing when he told you he had the Prophet’s slipper. He’s already had his hand cut off through interfering with the beastly thing, and I really can’t believe he would take further chances by keeping it in his possession. Nevertheless, I should like to find him.”
He leaned back against the mantelpiece, scratching his head perplexedly. In this perplexity he had my sympathy. No such pursuit, I venture to say, had ever before been required of Scotland Yard as this of the slipper of the Prophet. An organization founded in 1090, which has made a science of assassination, which through the centuries has perfected the malign arts, which, lingering on in a dark spot in Syria, has suddenly migrated and established itself in London, is a proposition almost unthinkable.
It was hard to believe that even the daring American cracksman should have ventured to touch that blood-stained relic of the Prophet, that he should have snatched it away from beneath the very eyes of the fanatics who fiercely guarded it. What he hoped to gain by his possession of the slipper was not evident, but the fact remained that if he could be believed, he had it, and provided Scotland Yard’s information was accurate, he still lurked in hiding somewhere in London.