“_Mors janua vitæ_,” he smiled. (I recognized the quotation: it was about all

the Latin I knew.) “I’m coming to that, but I’ve got to put you wise about a lot

of things first. If you read your newspaper, I guess you know the name of

Constantine Karolides?”

 

I sat up at that, for I had been reading about him that very afternoon.

 

“He is the man that has wrecked all their games. He is the one big brain in the

whole show, and he happens also to be an honest man.

 

Therefore he has been marked down these twelve months past. I found that out—not

that it was difficult, for any fool could guess as much.

 

But I found out the way they were going to get him, and that knowledge was

deadly. That’s why I have had to decease.”

 

He had another drink, and I mixed it for him myself, for I was getting

interested in the beggar.

 

“They can’t get him in his own land, for he has a bodyguard of Epirotes that

would skin their grandmothers. But on the 15th day of June he is coming to this

city. The British Foreign Office has taken to having international tea-parties,

and the biggest of them is due on that date.