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puffing and blowing, his coarse face streaming with sweat, but his automatic held ready for instant use. Carruthers made a final adjustment to his noose. An Arizona cowboy whom he had befriended had taught him all the secrets of the lasso. With a hiss the cord snaked out. Krask heard it. The next thing he knew was that the Mauser had been snatched from his hand. He paused, baffled. Then panic seized him. He turned to run. He did not get far
.
    “One more step,” said Carruthers pleasantly but with a steely ring to his voice, “and you’re a dead man!”
    Professor Barstow sighed. It was years since he had read anything like that. Barstow the mathematician had no use for Barstow the romantic. Yet, in some men the romantic vision never fades. Pure reason may distort it; everyday life may leave it uncultivated; yet it remains—to trap men in their weaker moments, and sometimes trick them into strength. Reason had worn the Professor to the verge of collapse. Romance, in the highly coloured person of “Conway Carruthers,” beckoned. It was, therefore, understandable that the Professor should turn to the beginning of the book and start to read in earnest.
    Your true adventure and mystery story lover demands but one thing from heroes—competence. Be he detective or be he master criminal he must be a paragon. If he is at a loss it must be only momentarily; his vast armoury of experience must be ready at a moment’s notice to supply a weapon equal to any desperate occasion or a train of thought leading ultimately, if circuitously, to the correct goal.
    Professor Barstow was no exception among such readers.
    Conway Carruthers more than satisfied his requirements.
    Nothing was beyond the powers of this remarkable man. His age, judging by his relations with other characters in thebook, might have been in the neighbourhood of forty. Against this estimate, however, must be set the evidence of his physical prowess which would have done credit to an Olympian athlete of twenty-five. On the other hand, he had somehow found time during his adult lifetime to save the lives of, or otherwise befriend, natives of a remarkable number of countries. The gratitude of these fortunates contributed largely to his success. Certain death might stare him in the face and he would extricate himself from his predicament by means of a trick learnt from a Patagonian Indian or a Bessarabian moujik. The outcome of a humanitarian encounter with a Chinese juggler or a Batavian stevedore would retrieve an apparently hopeless situation from disaster. Yet this curious erudition would have been useless without his amazing insight into human character and motives. Indeed, his ability to perceive enemies was only equalled by his talent for creating them. Let him but get near enough to a man to observe that his eyes were set too close together and Carruthers could read the evil there like an open book. Under Carruthers’ steely regard, moreover, apparently innocent occurrences were shown in their true and sinister colours. From the glint of the murderer’s knife descending behind him (and perceived in the nick of time) to the slight scratch by the keyhole of the old escritoire, nothing escaped him. Withal he was the very soul of discretion. Kings, queens, cabinet ministers, ambassadors, eastern potentates—all poured their confidences into his ears. Behind that high, clear-cut forehead reposed state secrets of awe-inspiring portent. Yet the lips of Conway Carruthers were sealed irrevocably. Free from the fears and the vanities, the blunderings and the shortcomings of ordinary men, he was of that illustrious company which numbers Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, Arsène Lupin, Bulldog Drummond and Sexton Blake among its members.
    Groom and his business momentarily forgotten, the Professorfollowed Conway Carruthers on the trail of his prey. In London he saw an attempt on Carruthers’ life foiled; in Paris he saw the
Chef de la Sûreté
welcome Carruthers as an old