“No, you fool, no!” howled Smathers, fairly dancing with despair.  “Oh, you blithering idiot!  You ninety-seven varieties of a fool!  Do you know who you had in your hands?  Do you know who you let go?  It was that devil ’Forty Faces’—­’The Vanishing Cracksman’—­the man who calls himself ‘Hamilton Cleek’; and the woman was his pal, his confederate, his blessed stool-pigeon—­’Margot, the Queen of the Apache’; and she came over from Paris to help him in that clean scoop of Lady Dresmer’s jewels last week!”

“Heavens!” gulped Collins, too far gone to say anything else, too deeply dejected to think of anything but that he had had the man for whom Scotland Yard had been groping for a year—­the man over whom all England, all France, all Germany wondered—­close shut in the grip of his hands and then had let him go.  The biggest and boldest criminal the police had ever had to cope with, the almost supernatural genius of crime, who defied all systems, laughed at all laws, mocked at all the Vidocqs, and Dupins, and Sherlock Holmeses, whether amateur or professional, French or English, German or American, that ever had been or ever could be pitted against him, and who, for sheer devilry, for diabolical ingenuity and for colossal impudence, as well as for a nature-bestowed power that was simply amazing, had not his match in all the universe.

Who or what he really was, whence he came, whether he was English, Irish, French, German, Yankee, Canadian, Italian or Dutchman, no man knew and no man might ever hope to know unless he himself chose to reveal it.  In his many encounters with the police he had assumed the speech, the characteristics, and, indeed, the facial attributes of each in turn, and assumed them with an ease and a perfection that were simply marvellous, and had gained for him the sobriquet of “Forty Faces” among the police, and of “The Vanishing Cracksman” among the scribes and reporters of newspaperdom.  That he came, in time, to possess another name than these was due to his own whim and caprice, his own bald, unblushing impudence; for, of a sudden, whilst London was in a fever of excitement and all the newspapers up in arms over one of the most daring and successful coups, he chose to write boldly to both editors and police complaining that the title given him by each was both vulgar and cheap.

“You would not think of calling Paganini a ‘fiddler,’” he wrote; “why, then, should you degrade me with the coarse term of ‘cracksman’?  I claim to be as much an artist in my profession as Paganini was in his, and I claim also a like courtesy from you.  So, then, if in the future it becomes necessary to allude to me—­and I fear it often will—­I shall be obliged if you do so as ‘The Man Who Calls Himself Hamilton Cleek.’  In return for that courtesy, gentlemen, I promise to alter my mode of procedure, to turn over a new leaf, as it were, to give you at all times hereafter distinct information, in advance, of such places as I elect for the field of my operations, and of the time when I shall pay my respects to them, and, on the morning after each such visit, to bestow some small portion of the loot upon Scotland Yard as a souvenir of the event.”