I gave central the number, while he fell to at the little secret drawer of the desk again.  The grinding of the wheels of a passing trolley interfered somewhat with giving the number and I had to wait a moment.

“Ah—­Walter—­here’s the list!” almost shouted Kennedy, as he broke open a black-japanned dispatch box in the desk.

I bent over it, as far as the slack of the telephone wire of the receiver at my ear would permit.  Annenberg had worked with amazing care and neatness on the list, even going so far as to draw at the top, in black, a death’s head.  The rest of it was elaborately prepared in flaming red ink.

Craig gasped to observe the list of world-famous men marked for destruction in London, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, St. Petersburg, and even in New York and Washington.

“What is the date set?” I asked, still with my ear glued to the receiver.

“To-night and to-morrow,” he replied, stuffing the fateful sheet into his pocket.

Rummaging about in the drawer of the table, I had come to a package of gold-tipped cigarettes which had interested me and I had left them out.  Kennedy was now looking at them curiously.

“What is to be the method, do you suppose?” I asked.

“By a poison that is among the most powerful, approaching even cyanogen,” he replied confidently, tapping the cigarettes.  “Do you smell the odor in this room?  What is it like?”

“Stale tobacco,” I replied.

“Exactly—­nicotine.  Two or three drops on the mouth-end of a cigar or cigarette.  The intended victim thinks it is only natural.  But it is the purest form of the deadly alkaloid—­fatal in a few minutes, too.”

He examined the thin little cigarettes more carefully.  “Nicotine,” he went on, “was about the first alkaloid that was recovered from the body by chemical analysis in a homicide case.  That is the penetrating, persistent odor you smelled at Fortescue’s and also here.  It’s a very good poison—­if you are not particular about being discovered.  A pound of ordinary smoking tobacco contains from a half to an ounce of it.  It is almost entirely consumed by combustion; otherwise a pipeful would be fatal.  Of course they may have thought that investigators would believe that their victims were inveterate smokers.  But even the worst tobacco fiend wouldn’t show traces of the weed to such an extent.”

Miss Lowe answered at last and Kennedy took the telephone.

“What is at five hundred and one East Fifth?” he asked.

“A headquarters of the Group in the city,” she answered.  “Why?”

“Well, I believe that the plans of that gun are there and that the Baron—­”

“You damned spies!” came a voice from behind us.

Kennedy dropped the receiver, turning quickly, his automatic gleaming in his hand.

There was just a glimpse of a man with glittering bright blue eyes that had an almost fiendish, baleful glare.  An instant later the door which had so unexpectedly opened banged shut, we heard a key turn in the lock—­and the man dropped to the floor before even Kennedy’s automatic could test its ability to penetrate wood on a chance at hitting something the other side of it.