"Sell them? But--"

"Imbecile! What we must do is to find out who this man is. In the end he

may lead us to him."

"But it may be a trap!"

"Leave that to me. You have work of your own to do, and you had best be

about it. Do you not see beneath? Who but the man who harbours him would

know about the drums? The man in the evening clothes. I was too far away

to see his face. Get me all the morning newspapers. If the advertisement

is in all of them I will send a letter to each. We lost the young woman

yesterday. And nothing has been heard of Vladimir and Stemmler. Bad.

I do not like this place. I move to the house to-night. My old friend

Stefani may be lonesome. I dare not risk daylight. Some fool may have

talked. To work! All of us have much to do to wake up the proletariat

in this country of the blind. But the hour will come. Get me the

newspapers."

Karlov pushed his visitor from the room and locked and bolted the door.

He stepped over to the window again and stared down at the clutter of

pushcarts, drays, trucks, and human beings that tried to go forward

and got forward only by moving sideways or worming through temporary

breaches, seldom directly--the way of humanity. But there was no object

lesson in this for Karlov, who was not philosophical in the peculiar

sense of one who was demanding a reason for everything and finding

allegory and comparison and allusion in the ebb and flow of life. The

philosophical is often misapplied to the stoical. Karlov was a stoic,

not a philosopher, or he would not have been the victim of his present

obsession. The idea of live and let live has never been the propaganda

of the anarch. To the anarch the death of some body or the destruction

of some thing is the cornerstone to his madhouse.

Nothing would ever cure this man of his obsession--the death of Hawksley

and the possession of the emeralds. Moreover, there was the fanatical

belief in his poor disordered brain that the accomplishment of these

two projects would eventually assist in the liberation of mankind.

Abnormally cunning in his methods of approach, he lacked those

imaginative scales by which we weigh our projects and which we call

logic. A child alone in a house with a box of matches; a dog on one

side of Fifth Avenue that sees a dog on the other side, but not the

automobiles--inexorable logic--irresistible force--whizzing up and down

the middle of that thoroughfare. It is not difficult to prophesy what is

going to happen to that child, that dog.




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