“I understand perfectly,” I assented.  “You are a marked man.  Until you get those papers safe in the hands of your ‘people,’ you must be very cautious.”

“That’s right,” he said.  Then he smiled craftily.

“I wonder if you’re on yet to which my people are.”

I assured him that I had no idea, but that from the avidity with which he had abused them I guessed he was working for the Walker-Keefe crowd.

He both smiled and scowled.

“Don’t you wish you knew?” he said.  “I’ve told you a lot of inside stories, Mr. Crosby, but I’ll never tell on my pals again.  Not me!  That’s my secret.”

At the door of the hotel he bade me a hasty goodbye, and for a few minutes I believed that Schnitzel had passed out of my life forever.  Then, in taking account of my belongings, I missed my field-glasses.  I remembered that, in order to open a trunk for the customs inspectors, I had handed them to Schnitzel, and that he had hung them over his shoulder.  In our haste at parting we both had forgotten them.

I was only a few blocks from the hotel, and I told the man to return.

I inquired for Mr. Schnitzel, and the clerk, who apparently knew him by that name, said he was in his room, number eighty-two.

“But he has a caller with him now,” he added.  “A gentleman was waiting for him, and’s just gone up.”

I wrote on my card why I had called, and soon after it had been born skyward the clerk said:  “I guess he’ll be able to see you now.  That’s the party that was calling on him, there.”

He nodded toward a man who crossed the rotunda quickly.  His face was twisted from us, as though, as he almost ran toward the street, he were reading the advertisements on the wall.

He reached the door, and was lost in the great tide of Broadway.

I crossed to the elevator, and as I stood waiting, it descended with a crash, and the boy who had taken my card flung himself, shrieking, into the rotunda.

“That man—­stop him!” he cried.  “The man in eighty-two—­he’s murdered.”

The clerk vaulted the desk and sprang into the street, and I dragged the boy back to the wire rope and we shot to the third story.  The boy shrank back.  A chambermaid, crouching against the wall, her face colorless, lowered one hand, and pointed at an open door.

“In there,” she whispered.

In a mean, common room, stretched where he had been struck back upon the bed, I found the boy who had elected to meddle in the “problems of two governments.”

In tiny jets, from three wide knife-wounds, his blood flowed slowly.  His staring eyes were lifted up in fear and in entreaty.  I knew that he was dying, and as I felt my impotence to help him, I as keenly felt a great rage and a hatred toward those who had struck him.

I leaned over him until my eyes were only a few inches from his face.

“Schnitzel!” I cried.  “Who did this?  You can trust me.  Who did this?  Quick!”