The Agony Column, page 48 by Earl Derr Biggers
<< Return to Title Details & Download49
"It happens to be the truth," said Hughes. "The American has confessed as much to me."
"Then," said Bray to me, and his little blinking eyes were on me with a narrow calculating glance that sent the shivers up and down my spine, "you are under arrest. I have exempted you so far because of your friend at the United States Consulate. That exemption ends now."
I was thunderstruck. I turned to the colonel, the man who had suggested that I seek him out if I needed a friend--the man I had looked to to save me from just such a contingency as this. But his eyes were quite fishy and unsympathetic.
"Quite correct, Inspector," he said. "Lock him up!" And as I began to protest he passed very close to me and spoke in a low voice: "Say nothing. Wait!"
I pleaded to be allowed to go back to my rooms, to communicate with my friends, and pay a visit to our consulate and to the Embassy; and at the colonel's suggestion Bray agreed to this somewhat irregular course. So this afternoon I have been abroad with a constable, and while I wrote this long letter to you he has been fidgeting in my easy chair. Now he informs me that his patience is exhausted and that I must go at once. So there is no time to wonder; no time to speculate as to the future, as to the colonel's sudden turn against me or the promise of his whisper in my ear. I shall, no doubt, spend the night behind those hideous, forbidding walls that your guide has pointed out to you as New Scotland Yard. And when I shall write again, when I shall end this series of letters so filled with--
The constable will not wait. He is as impatient as a child. Surely he is lying when he says I have kept him here an hour.
Wherever I am, dear lady, whatever be the end of this amazing tangle, you may be sure the thought of you--Confound the man!
YOURS, IN DURANCE VILE.
This fifth letter from the young man of the Agony Column arrived at the Carlton Hotel, as the reader may recall, on Monday morning, August the third. And it represented to