Page:Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (Grosset Dunlap, 1915).djvu/24

 in Berlin and Vienna. But my friends haven't played their last card by a long sight. They've gotten the ace up their sleeves, and unless I can keep alive for a month they are going to play it and win."

"But I thought you were dead,' I put in.

"Mors janua vitæ," he smiled. (I recognized the quotation: it was about all the Latin I knew.) "I'm coming to that, but I've got to put you wise about a lot of things first. If you read your newspaper, I guess you know the name of Constantine Karolides?"

I sat up at that, for I had been reading about him that very afternoon.

"He is the man that has wrecked all their games. He is the one big brain in the whole show, and he happens also to be an honest man.  Therefore he has been marked down these twelve months past.  I found that out—not that it was difficult, for any fool could guess as much.  But I found out the way they were going to get him, and that knowledge was deadly.  That's why I have had to decease."