Cyril McNeile

“ Do you know Sir John Haverton?"
"Morning, Sir John. Jolly old Cabinet merry and bright? Or did you all go down on Purple Polly at Goodwood yesterday?"
Sir John rose a little grimly.
"We have other things to do besides backing horses, Captain Drummond. I think we have met at Lady Meltrose's house, haven't we?"
"More than likely," said Hugh affably. "I don't often dine there: she ropes in such a ghastly crowd of bores, don't you know."
"I feel sure, Captain Drummond, that you're an admirable judge." Sir John turned to Sir Bryan Johnstone and held out his hand. "Well, I must be off. ”

“ And it was administered by the beneficent clergyman calling himself the Reverend Theodosius Longmoor—the most amazing international criminal of this or any other age—the man who, with Miss Janet and the Italian, has vanished into thin air, right under McIver's nose."
"And you mean to say that this man has been in England and you haven't laid him by the heels?" said Sir John incredulously.
"Unfortunately that is what I mean," answered the other. "The police of four continents know about him, but that's a very different thing from proof. ”

“ You were to be found dead in your railway carriage."
"What!" roared Sir John, springing to his feet.
"It would very likely have failed," said Sir Bryan calmly, "but they would have tried again. They don't like you or your views at all—these gentlemen. But those are the least important. From time immemorial wild, fanatical youths have done similar things: the danger was far greater and more subtle. And perhaps the most dangerous activity of all was what I have spoken about already—Maybrick Hall was the headquarters of these poisonous Proletarian Sunday Schools. ”

“ A devil of the most inhuman description. He literally had the rifle raised to kill the girl, when the Black Gang, having cut the wire fence, arrived in the nick of time. And it was then that the leader of that gang, who had thought he was on the point of seeing his wife's brains dashed out, took advantage of the utter confusion and sprang on the Russian with a roar of rage. The man who told us stated that he had never dreamed such a blow was possible as the rifle thrust which pierced clean through the Russian. ”

“ He bustled out of the office, and Hugh sank into a chair with a sigh of relief.
"The old boy's clothes seem full of body this morning, Tum-tum," he remarked as the door closed. "Indigestion—or don't the elastic-sided boots fit?"
"Do you know what we have been discussing, Hugh?" said the other quietly.
"Not an earthly, old man. Was it that new one about the girl in the grocer's shop?"
"We've been discussing the leader of the Black Gang," said Sir Bryan, with his eyes fixed on the man sprawling in the chair opposite. ”

“ There was an uninhabited island off the west coast of Mull, which is uninhabited no longer. He may have everything he finds there, with my love.—The leader of the Black Gang."
Sir John laid down the paper and stared at the Director of Criminal Investigation.
"Is this the rambling of a partially diseased intellect?" he inquired with mild sarcasm.
"Nothing of the sort," returned the other shortly. "McIver and ten plain-clothes men went immediately to Maybrick Hall. And they found it a very peculiar place. There were some fifteen men there—trussed up like so many fowls, and alive. ”

“ You have in front of you there the definite proofs that 80 per cent of the men engaged in this plot are not visionaries, swayed by some grandiloquent scheme of world reform—are not martyrs sacrificing their lives for what seems to them the good of the community—but criminals, and in many cases murderers. ”

“ Such a thing, of course, could not be admitted officially: the abduction of anyone is a criminal offence. But we came to the conclusion that the Black Gang was undoubtedly an extremely powerful and ably led organisation whose object was simply and solely to fight the Red element in England. ”

“ But for you to understand it better I must go back two or three months, to the time when we first became aware of the existence of the Black Gang. A series of very strange disappearances were taking place: men were being spirited away, without leaving a trace behind them. ”

“ And going downstairs they found the chairs recently occupied by the clergyman and Miss Janet empty also. Moreover from that moment no trace of any of them has been found. It is as if the earth had opened and swallowed them. Which brings us to the packet enclosed with the letter from the leader of the Black Gang. ”

“ You have there before you the definite proofs that 80 per cent. of these men think only of one thing—the lining of their own pockets, and to carry out that object they are prepared to utterly destroy sound labour in this and every other country. ”

“ To return to the island. McIver went there, and after some little difficulty located it, out of the twenty or thirty to which the description might apply. He found it far from uninhabited, just as that letter says. He found it occupied by some fifty or sixty rabid anarchists—the gentlemen who had so mysteriously disappeared—who were presided over by twenty large demobilised soldiers commanded by an ex-sergeant-major of the Guards. The sixty frenzied anarchists, he gathered, were running a state on communist lines, as interpreted by the ex-sergeant-major. ”