II

That deplorable passion for adventure, which had turned the hope of the

last Opposition into a guerrilla warrior in South Africa, but which the

Home Secretary of England might have subdued before accepting his

portfolio, was by no means a dead volcano as Topham Vinson sallied forth

with his extraordinary companion. It was to be noticed that he took with

him a thick stick instead of an umbrella, though the deserted streets

had become moist with a midnight drizzle. What he expected can only be

surmised. But the odds are that it did not include the shriek of a

police-whistle in the sedate region of Wigmore Street, and the

instantaneous bolting of Doctor Dollar round the first corner to the

left!

Now, the Secretary of State was one of those men who keep up their games

out of a cold-blooded regard for the figure; he considered himself as

fit at forty as any man in England, and he gave chase with his usual

confidence. But the long-legged doctor would have left him behind with

the lamp-posts, but for the fact that he was really tearing toward the

sound, not flying from it as his pursuer was so ready to suppose. In a

matter of seconds they had both fetched up at a brilliantly lighted

house, where a more than usually obese policeman was alternately

pounding on the door and splitting the sober welkin with his whistle.

"Stop that infernal row!" cried Doctor Dollar, with incensed authority.

"Out of the way with you--this is my house!"

And the Home Secretary arrived on the scene of an imminent assault on

his police, just in time to divert the outraged officer's attention by

asking what had happened, while the doctor found his key.

"Lord only knows!" said the policeman, kicking some broken glass on one

side. "Murder, it sounds like; there's somebody been loosing off----"

And even as he spoke somebody loosed off again! The terrific report was

followed by screams within and a fresh shower of glass from the

fanlight. But by this time Doctor Dollar had his latch-key in the lock.

If the door had opened outward, a tangled trio would have fallen into

the street; as it was, it hardly would open for the man in white who was

struggling with a woman (in red flannel) and a boy (in next to nothing)

on the mat.

Dollar exclaimed "Barton!" in blank amazement. But it was not the

unlucky Barton who had run amuck. "They won't let me at him! They'll get

the lot of us shot dead!" he spluttered, with ungrateful objurgations;

and then the newcomers grasped the situation. On the stairs, at the end

of the narrow passage, they beheld an enormous revolver, against a

background of pink sleeping-suit, with a ferocious eye looking down the

barrel.

The crime doctor slipped in front of the Hogarthian group, and stood

between everybody and the armed man--shaking his head with an expression

that nobody else could see.

"Ozzie, I'm surprised at you!" they heard him say with severity. "I

thought you were a better sportsman than to go playing the fool the one

night I'm out. If you want to frighten people, do it where you don't

damage their property; if you mean murder, I'm your mark, my lad! Aim

at my waistcoat buttons and perhaps you'll get me in the mouth; that's

better; now blaze away!"

But the pink-striped miscreant was not lowering his barrel to improve

his aim. He lowered it altogether. And his other wild eye was open now,

and both were blinking with unlovely woe.

"I--I didn't mean any harm," he faltered. "It was only a rag--and I'll

pay for the door."

"It'll be a great rag, won't it, if you fire bang into your own foot?

Better give me that thing before you do." Dollar held out the steadiest

of hands. "No, t'other way round if you don't mind; 'tisn't manners to

pass knives and forks business-end first. Ta! Now make yourself scarce

before Barton goes for you by kind permission of his family."

The young man in pink stood wildly staring, then fled up-stairs with a

smothered sob.

"After him, Barton, before he does something silly," said the doctor

under his breath. "My dear Mrs. Barton, you shall tell me the whole

thing from A to Z in the morning; go down to bed like a good soul, and

be satisfied that you prevented bloodshed. Bobby, take one of the

decanters from the tantalus and give your mother a good nightcap." He

turned round as the unpresentable pair made off. The street-door was

shut; the Home Secretary had sole possession of the mat. "Why, Mr.

Vinson, what's happened to the myrmidon?"

"I thought you would like me to get rid of him," said Topham

Vinson dryly. "He's waiting outside to explain matters to the

reinforcements--as a joke."

"Rather an unconvincing joke!" said the doctor, wiping his forehead with

the back of his hand.

"I'm glad you admit it, Doctor Dollar. Am I to understand that the whole

thing was a practical joke, carefully rehearsed for my benefit?"

The doctor opened his shining eyes.

"Does it look like one? Hark back a little, Mr. Vinson!"

"There's no need. I didn't think of it till you put the word into my

mouth. But it's well, rather a coincidence, doctor, coming on top of the

one about my watch--and you of all men catching the thief!"

"Yet this is the sort of thing that's always liable to happen when one's

back is turned, and always will be until----"

"Yes?" said the Home Secretary, as Dollar paused and looked at him.

"Until you make it at least as difficult to buy revolvers and

ammunition, Mr. Vinson, as a dose of prussic acid! Here's a young man,

unsteady, and an epileptic, who has just been placed under my care. I

don't run a private asylum, nor is he ripe for one. I must give him his

head a little, and this happens in a minute! If it should lead to fresh

revolver regulations--but I mustn't forget myself in my excitement. If

you would come in here and smoke a cigarette, I shall have to make a

round directly to see how things are quieting down, and should be only

too glad to take you with me."

The round was made after further conversation in a dining-room as

Spartan as the rest of the crime doctor's characteristic abode. An

instructed taste in aged but uncomfortable oak gave it the chill

severity of a refectory; and the suggestion was strengthened by a glance

into the minute consulting-room next door, which struck the visitor,

perhaps in the light of one of Dollar's own similitudes, as a sort of

monkish cell and confessional in one. The carven table, rugged yet

elaborate, pale with age, might once have been an altar; the chair

behind it was certainly an ecclesiastical chair. The cumbrous pieces

were yet the fruit of a fastidious eye, and apparently its only fruit.

Everything else throughout the house was ultra-sanitary, refreshingly

utilitarian, twentieth century. No shred nor thread made for dust on the

linoleum, no picture harbored it on the glazed paper. Walls and floors

were of the same uncompromising type up-stairs and down. Yet, when a

peep was taken through one of the numbered doors above, hothouse flowers

bloomed in glass bowls on glass tables, and the bedroom ware was glass

again. The very books were bound in glassy vellum; there was a pile of

them beside the bed, in which a very young man, swathed in bandages, lay

reading under the green glass shade of an electric lamp.

The doctor expressed his sorrow for the occurrence down-stairs; the

patient, scarcely looking up, said that since he could not have moved to

save his life, he had gone on reading all the time; and they left him at

it, obviously glad to be rid of them.

"That," whispered the doctor on the landing, "is a young fellow who will

one day be--well, never mind! Until he came to me he had never of his

own free will read anything but a bad novel or a newspaper; he is now

deep in the immortal work of another weak young man who was swayed by

strength, and is himself for the time being under Doctor Johnson's

salutary thumb."

"What was his weakness?"

"Pyromania."

"_What?_"

"A passion for setting places on fire. He started it as quite a small

boy; they licked it out of him then. All his boyhood he went in fear of

the rod, and it kept him straight. Only the other day he goes up to

Oxford, and promptly sets fire to his rooms."

"Some form of atavism, I presume?"

"A very subtle case, if I were free to give you its whole history."

"I should be even more interested in your treatment."

"Well, I needn't tell you that he's bandaged up for burns; but you might

not guess that he has come by this lot since I've had him, if not almost

at my hands."

"Nonsense, man!"

"At any rate I'm responsible for what happened, and it's going to cure

him. It was a case of undisciplined imagination acting on a bonnet with

just one bee in it. He had never realized what a hell let loose a fire

really was; now he _knows_ through his own skin."

The statesman's eyebrows were like the backs of two mutually displeased

cats.

"But surely that's an old wives' trick pushed beyond all bounds?"

"Pushed further than I intended, Mr. Vinson, I must confess. I only

meant him to see a serious fire. So I arranged with the brigade to ring

me up when there was a really bad one, and with my man to take the boy

out at night for all his walks. There was another good reason for that;

and altogether nothing can have seemed more natural than the way they

both appeared on the scene of this ghastly riding-school affair."

"I know what's coming!" cried the Home Secretary. "This is the fellow

who dashed in to help save the horses, and got away afterward without

giving his name!"

"That's it. He says he'll hear those horses till his dying hour! He was

in the thick of it before Barton or anybody else could stop him--they

only succeeded in stopping poor Barton from following. Well, I can take

no credit for the very last thing I should have dreamt of allowing; but

I fancy the odds are fairly long that the tempting element will never,

never again tempt our young friend up-stairs!"

They had drifted down again during this recital; and he who had led the

way stood staring at the crime doctor, in his monkish cell, with that

intent inscrutability which was one of Topham Vinson's most effective

masks; but now it was a mask imperfectly adjusted, with the warm light

of admiration breaking through, and the shadow of something else

interfering with that light. When Doctor Dollar had marched upon the

loaded revolver, talking down the barrel as to an infant pointing a

popgun--daring another daredevil to shoot him dead--the same admiring

look had come over the face behind him, qualified in precisely the same

fashion. But then the doctor had not seen it, and now it made him wince

a little, as though he dreaded something that was bound to come.

This was what came:

"Doctor Dollar, I should prefer not to ask you to show me or tell me any

more. I know a good man when I see one, and I know good work when I

catch him at it. Perhaps that was necessary in the case of such

extraordinary work as yours; yet you say it was a sheer coincidence that

I caught you at it to-night--or rather that such tough work was waiting

for you when we got here?"

"Do you still doubt it? Why, you yourself insisted on coming round to

see the place in the middle of this blessed night!"

"Exactly. That establishes your second coincidence; but with all

respect, doctor, I don't believe in two of the same sort on the same

night to the same two people!"

"What was the other coincidence?" demanded the doctor, huskily.

"Your catching _any_ old pickpocket with my watch--and letting him off!

Come, doctor, do one more thing for me, and I'll do all in my power for

you and your great work. That is, of course, if you still want me to

take the interest I certainly should have taken if I had seen your

letters."

"If!" cried the young man from the fulness of his heart. "Your interest

is the one thing I do want of you, and you are the one person I want to

interest!"

His eyes shone like big brown lamps, straight enough now in their

intensity, and dim with the glory of their vision. He could tremble,

too, it seemed, where the stake was not dear life, but a life's dearer

work. And Topham Vinson was almost moved himself; he really was absorbed

and thrilled; but not to the detriment of his penetrative astuteness,

his political instinct for a bargain.

"Come, then," said he: "show me the fellow who sneaked my watch."

"Show him to you? What do you mean?"

The doctor had not started. But the injured eye showed its injury once

more.

"It was one of your patients who picked my pocket," said the Home

Secretary, with as much confidence as though he had known it all the

time. "Would you have been in such a hurry to wash your hands of anybody

else, and to undo what he'd done?"

Dollar made no answer, no denial; but he glanced at a venerable

one-handed clock, whose unprotected pendulum shaved the wall with noisy

sweeps. It was two o'clock in the morning, but already night must have

been turned into dreadful and disturbing day for all the inmates. The

doctor abandoned that excuse unmade, and faced his visitor in

desperation.

"So you want to see him--now?"

"I do. I have my reasons. But it shall end at that--if I do see him.

_That_ won't nip my goodwill in the bud!" It was obvious what would.

"You shall see him," said the doctor, as though racking his mind once

more. "But there are difficulties you perhaps can't quite appreciate. It

means giving away a patient--don't you see?"

"Perfectly. It seems to me a very proper punishment, since it's all

he'll get. Yet you don't want to lose your hold. Couldn't you send him

down here on some pretext, instead of taking me up to him?"

The crime doctor's face lit up as if by electricity.

"I can and I will!" he cried. "Wait here, Mr. Vinson. He's another

reader; he shall come down for a book!"

The great man waited with the satisfaction of a slightly overbearing

personality for once very nearly overborne. He was now intensely

interested in the crime doctor and his unique establishment. It was an

interest that he had no intention of sharing with his closest colleague,

until he had gone deeper into a theory and practise that were already a

revelation to him. They might both prove unworkable on any large scale,

and yet they might light the way to sensational legislation of the very

type that Topham Vinson was the very man to introduce. Boundless

ambition was one of the forces of a nature that responded to the call of

any sufficiently dazzling crusade; but the passion for adventure ran

ambition hard; and a crusade calculated to gratify both appetites was

dazzling even to eyes of triple steel!

Only, he must show this new ally his power before they struck up their

alliance; that was the great reason for insisting on seeing the

pickpocket. But there was a little reason besides. An excellent memory

had supplied Mr. Vinson with a kind of post-impression of the

pickpocket. And within one minute of the doctor's departure, and one

second of the patient's prompt appearance, a certain small suspicion

had been confirmed.

"I think we've met before, my man?" he had begun. His man started

stagily--was altogether of the stage--a bearded scarecrow in rags too

ragged to be true. Vinson found the switches and made more light. "Not

half a bad disguise," he continued, "whoever you may be! I suppose

they're supplied on the premises for distinguished patients?"

"How do you know it's a disguise?" croaked the hairy man, with downcast

eyes.

"Well, you don't look a distinguished patient, do you?" said the Home

Secretary airily. "On the other hand, your kit doesn't convince me at

all; looks to me as if it would fall to pieces but for what the ladies

call a foundation--eh?"

And he swooped down on the ragged tails as their owner turned a

humiliated back. And the "foundation" was a perfectly good overcoat

turned inside out; moreover, it was a coat that Topham Vinson seemed to

know; it was a coat that he suddenly remembered, as he shot up to his

full height and then stood deadly still.

The pickpocket had not turned round. But his wig and beard lay at his

elbow on the mantelpiece; his diminished head had sunk into his hands;

and the electric light blazed upon a medallion of silver hair, up above

one burning ear.

"Doctor--Dollar!" exclaimed Topham Vinson. And the ingenuous ring of his

own startled voice only added to his sense of outrage.

"Yes! I was the man.... It was only to get at you--you know that!"

It was a hoarse voice muttering to the wall, in a dire discomfiture that

had its effect on the insulted Minister.

"So that was your weakness!" The plain comment was icier than any sneer.

"Picking and stealing--and your hand still keeps its cunning!"

"Yes. That was how my wound had taken me." There was less shame in the

hoarse voice, thanks to the bracing coldness of the other. "It started

in the field hospital--orderlies laughed and encouraged me--nurses at

Netley just as bad! Everybody treated it as a joke; the doctor used to

ask for his watch or his handkerchief after every visit; and the great

score was when he thought I had one, and it was really the other--or

both--or the keys out of his trousers pocket! It amused the ward and

made me popular--made me almost suicidal--because I alone knew that I

couldn't help doing it to save my life.... And the rest _you_ know."

"I do, indeed!"

"This beastly kit, I had it made on purpose so that I could run after

you one minute with what I'd taken from you the minute before! It was a

last attempt to gain your ear--to get you interested. And now----"

"And now," said Topham Vinson, with a kind hand on the bent shoulders,

yet a keen eye on the bent head--"and now I suppose you think you've put

the lid on it? So you have, my dear doctor--on any sneaking doubts I had

about you! You've struck a job after my own heart, and you've led me

into it as I never was led into anything in my life before. Well, you've

just got to keep me in it now; and I'm conceited enough to believe I

shall be worth my place. Don't you think you might turn round, Doctor

Dollar, and let us shake hands on that?"