Page:Buchan - The Thirty-Nine Steps (Grosset Dunlap, 1915).djvu/27

 fire of battle in his gimlety eyes. If he was spinning me a yarn he could act up to it.

"Where did you find out this story?" I asked.

"I got the first hint in an inn on the Achensee in Tyrol. That set me inquiring, and I collected my other clues in a fur-shop in the Galician quarter of Buda, in a Strangers' Club in Vienna, and in a little book-shop off the Racknitzstrasse in Leipsic.  I completed my evidence ten days ago in Paris.  I can't tell you the details now, for it's something of a history.  When I was quite sure in my own mind I judged it my business to disappear, and I reached this city by a mighty queer circuit.  I left Paris a dandified young French-American, and I sailed from Hamburg a Jew diamond merchant.  In Norway I was an English student of Ibsen collecting materials for lectures, but when I left Bergen I was a cinema-man with special ski films.  And I came here from Leith with a lot of pulp-wood propositions in my pocket to put before the London newspapers.  Till yesterday I