"Pardon; have you a match?"
I swallowed my heart down again with a gulp. The fat Italian scratched the match on his shoe, and breathed a soft cloud of smoke.
"Thank you, sare. Now tell me," he took me confidentially by the elbow, "w'at is it you want with Antonio Carucci?"
My car was passing. "I never heard of him," said I as blankly as I could. "You've got the wrong man."
"Excuse me, sare. No mistake at all." He smiled deprecatingly.
The car was almost beyond reach. "All right," I said. "Come in here, and if you can show any right to ask, I'll tell you." Then, as we turned together toward the hotel behind us, I flung him on his face with a sudden wrench, and sprinted after the car. As I clung gasping on the back platform, I heard a shout, and saw him following at a waddling run, waving his arm angrily. The car stopped; and for a sickening instant, I thought that my last device had been in vain. But at that moment a couple of men ran from the sidewalk behind my pursuer and caught him by the coat. The three stood in the middle of the street, wrangling and gesticulating; and the conductor, with a disgusted jerk of the bell, started the car again.
Later in the evening, Maclean called me up on the telephone.
"Say, you made a pretty good getaway for an amateur. Did you see us stop your fat friend?"
"What? Was that you?"
"Sure was it; me and the other one. Now listen. Hello! Can you hear? Those two parties are plain-clothes men after the other party. That's what they let him out for, to watch him, you see? I'm with 'em now. You people better just lie as low as you can, and do nothin' at all, if you want to keep out of it. And if I get wise to anythin' I'll call you up. Good-by."