Page:Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (Grosset Dunlap, 1915).djvu/26

 be murdered. Tip them the wink, and they'll take extra precautions."

"No good. They might stuff your city with plain-clothes detectives and double the police and Constantine would still be a doomed man.  My friends are not playing this game for candy.  They want a big occasion for the taking off, with the eyes of all Europe on it.  He'll be murdered by an Austrian, and there'll be plenty of evidence to show the connivance of the big folk in Vienna and Berlin.  It will all be an infernal lie, of course, but the case will look black enough to the world.  I'm not talking hot air, my friend.  I happen to know every detail of the hellish contrivance, and I can tell you it will be the most finished piece of blackguardism since the Borgias.  But it's not going to come off if there's a certain man who knows the wheels of the business alive right here in London on the 15th day of June.  And that man is going to be your servant, Franklin P.  Scudder."

I was getting to like the little chap. His jaw had shut like a rat-trap, and there was the