The little man had told me a pack of lies. All his yarns⁴ about the Balkans and the Jew-Anarchists and the Foreign Office Conference were eyewash, and so was Karolides. And yet not quite, as you shall hear. I had staked everything on my belief in his story, and had been let down; here was his book telling me a different tale, and instead of being once-bitten-twice-shy, I believed it absolutely.

Why, I don’t know. It rang desperately true, and the first yarn³, if you understand me, had been in a queer way true also in spirit. The fifteenth day of June was going to be a day of destiny, a bigger destiny than the killing⁵ of a Dago. It was so big that I didn’t blame Scudder for keeping me out of the game and wanting to play a lone⁶ hand. That, I was pretty clear, was his intention. He had told me something which sounded big enough, but the real thing was so immortally⁷ big that he, the man who had found it out, wanted it all for himself. I didn’t blame him. It was risks after all that he was chiefly greedy about.

The whole story was in the notes—with gaps, you understand, which he would have filled up from his memory. He stuck down his authorities, too, and had an odd trick of giving them all a numerical value and then striking a balance, which stood for the reliability⁸ of each stage in the yarn. The four names he had printed were authorities, and there was a man, Ducrosne, who got five out of a possible five; and another fellow, Ammersfoort, who got three. The bare bones of the tale were all that was in the book—these, and one queer phrase which occurred half a dozen times inside brackets. (“Thirty-nine steps”) was the phrase; and at its last time of use it ran—(“Thirty-nine steps, I counted them—high tide 10.17 p.m.”). I could make nothing of that.

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