And again with his pencil he underscored the letters of the first paragraph of the cipher:  “P.L.A. shipped nine hundred horses on freight steamer Don Carlos from N. Y.”

“So we get L, on, Don.”

“London!” cried Hargrave.  “The nine-hundred horses are to come into London!”

And in his excitement he took the gold piece out of his pocket and pitched it up.  He had been stooping over the table.  The fog was creeping into the room.  And in the uncertain light about the ceiling he missed the gold piece and it fell on the table before Sir Henry.  The gold piece did not ring, it fell dull and heavy, and the big Baronet looked at it openmouthed as though it had suddenly materialized out of the yellow fog entering the room.

“My word!” he cried.  “One of the nine hundred horses!”

Hargrave stopped motionless like a man stricken by some sorcery.

“One of the nine hundred horses!” he echoed.

The Baronet was digging at the gold piece with the blade of his knife.

“Precisely!  In the criminal argot a counterfeit American twenty-dollar gold piece is called a `horse.’

“Look,” he said, and he dug into the coin with his knife, “it’s white inside, made of Babbit metal, milled with a file and gold-plated.  Where did you get it?”

The American stammered.

“Where could I have gotten it?” he murmured.

“Well,” the Baronet said, “you might have got it from a big, old, pasty-faced Alsatian; that would be ‘Dago’ Mulehaus.  Or you might have got it from an energetic, middle-aged, American woman posing as a social leader in the States; that would be `Hustling’ Anne; both bad crooks, at the head of an international gang of counterfeiters.”

XII.  The Spread Rails

It was after dinner, in the great house of Sir Henry Marquis in St. James’s Square.

The talk had run on the value of women in criminal investigation; their skill as detective agents . . . the suitability of the feminine intelligence to the hard, accurate labor of concrete deductions.

It was the American Ambassadress, Lisa Lewis, who told the story.

It was a fairy night, and the thing was a fairy story.

The sun had merely gone behind a colored window.  The whole vault of the heaven was white with stars.  The road was like a ribbon winding through the hills.  In little whispers, in the dark places, Marion told me it.  We sat together in the tonneau of the motor.  It was past midnight, of a heavenly September.  We were coming in from a stately dinner at the Fanshaws’.

A fairy story is a nice, comfortable human affair.  It’s about a hero, and a thing no man could do, and a princess and a dragon.  It tells how the hero found the task that was too big for other men, how he accomplished it, circumvented the dragon and won the princess.