Hillyard seized upon the report and read it through, and then the others upon the top of that.  Cloth, saddlery, equipment of various kinds were needed in England, and a great sea-borne trade had sprung up between the two countries, so that ships constantly went to and fro.  In more than one of these reports the hieroglyph B.45 appeared.  But never a hint which could lead to his detection—­never anything personal, not a clue to his age, his business, his appearance, even his abode—­nothing but this baffling symbol B.45.

“You have cabled all this home, of course,” Hillyard observed to Fairbairn.

“Yes.  They know nothing of the B.45.  They are very anxious for any details.”

“He seems to be a sort of letter-box,” said Hillyard, “a centre-point for the gathering in of information.”

Fairbairn shook his head.

“He is more active than that,” he returned, and he pointed to a passage here and there, which bore him out.  It was the first time that Martin Hillyard had come across this symbol, and he was utterly at a loss to conjecture the kind of man the symbol hid.  He might be quite obscure, the tenant of some suburban shop, or, again, quite prominent in the public eye, the owner of a fine house, and generous in charities; he might be of any nationality.  But there he was, somewhere under the oak-trees of England, doing his secret, mean work for the ruin of the country.  Hillyard dreamed that night of B.45.  He saw him in his dreams, an elusive figure without a face, moving swiftly wherever people were gathered together, travelling in crowded trains, sitting at the dinner-tables of the great, lurking at the corners of poor tenements.  Hillyard hunted him, saw him deftly pocket a letter which a passing stranger as deftly handed him, or exchange some whispered words with another who walked for a few paces without recognition by his side, but though he hurried round corners to get in front of him and snatch a glance at his face, he could never come up with him.  He waked with the sunlight pouring in between the lattices of his shutters from the Plaza Cataluna, tired and unrefreshed.  B.45!  B.45!  He was like some figure from a child’s story-book!  Some figure made up of tins and sticks and endowed with malevolent life.  B.45.  London asked news of him, and he stalked through London.  Where should Hillyard find his true image and counterpart?

* * * * *

It is not the purpose of this narrative to describe how one Christobal Quesada, first mate of the steamship Mondragon, utterly overreached himself by sending in a report of a British hospital ship, sure to leave the harbour of Alexandria with gun-carriages upon her deck; how the report was proved to be a lie; how it was used as the excuse for the barbarous sinking of the great ships laden with wounded, and ablaze from stern to stern with green lights, the red cross glowing amidships like a wondrous jewel; how Christobal Quesada was removed from his ship in a French port, and after being duly arraigned for his life, met his death against a prison wall.  Fairbairn wrote to Martin Hillyard: