Chapter IV: The Snows of the Yukon

O’Hagan, with some research, recently established the fact, in the case of Betty Chatterton, that “there was good blood on the mother’s side.” I fancy he slept better after that. As a child of the people (I use my friend’s phraseology) Miss Chatterton was a disturbing element in the Captain’s philosophy.

He turned to the dressing-room. Let us accompany him.

On the landing stood the maid.

“Please, sir,” said she, timidly, “may I go in and finish packing the basket?”

“Presently, my good girl,” replied the Captain, “presently.”

Sir Brian Dillon was seated where O’Hagan first had found him. He was smoking a cigarette. His face was somewhat pale.

He rose, as the Captain entered, and very deliberately threw the cigarette into the tiny hearth. To any but a student of indications, he must have appeared quite composed. O’Hagan knew it to be otherwise. Yet he was unprepared for Dillon’s action. Dillon, silently, leapt at him across the room!

I say he was unprepared. In a certain sense he was. But, on the other hand, a pupil of Myuku is never unprepared. O’Hagan dropped his cane, instinctively (the Higher Jiu-jitsu is essentially instinctive). He grasped the fist which whizzed within half an inch of his right ear, performing one of those lightning movements unachievable by any other man of my acquaintance. He thrust it up. He twisted it to the right—down—and doubled the arm behind Dillon’s back. Daintily, he clasped the other wrist and held the left arm inert, outstretched at an angle of forty-five from his opponent’s side.

This, you may know, is a simple trick, which can be performed, with luck, by several members, individually, of the Metropolitan and City Police forces.

Dillon made one attempt to break away—and then stood still, looking back across his shoulder at O’Hagan.

“By God, I’ll kill you!”

There was something shocking in the murderous intent which beaconed from his eyes.

“Later, you shall be afforded every opportunity. But, first, you must hear me. Shall I release you?”

No humiliation can equal that which it is in the power of the expert Jiu-Jitsuist to inflict. An enraged man, though he be outclassed, overweighted, may fight to the last and keep his pride. But this supreme inertia, this being petrified, posed as for a ballroom scene in a “living-picture,” with frenzied anger boiling in the veins and no muscle responding to the mind’s urgent commands, is something that must be experienced fully to be appreciated.

Dillon panted.

“If I release you,” added O’Hagan icily, “it will be upon parole; upon the understanding that you conserve your resentment for a more fitting time.”

“Release me!”

“Upon that understanding?”

“Curse you! . . . _yes!_”

O’Hagan dropped his hands, stepped back to the little mantelpiece and leaned upon it, raising his monocle before his right eye.

“Sir Brian Dillon,” he said deliberately, “you may have heard my name; for I knew your father well.”

The other’s fingers twitched. He glared directly at O’Hagan, and thrust his hands deeply in his pockets.

“Your father would have known the gross nature of your insult to me. Strong man as you are, he would have forced you to apologise, or have knocked you down. Do your memories bear me out?”

Dillon swallowed, emotionally.

“You add insult to the most awful injury one man can inflict upon another——”

“Stop!” O’Hagan’s big eyes blazed. He took a step forward. “Stop! By God, sir, if you presume to cast such an innuendo in my face I will break your neck, though I hang for it!”

There was a species of subdued ferocity in his manner that had forced conviction upon anyone. No man born of woman could have doubted him.

“You slander me. It is no excuse that you do so, thinking I am he who died on the Yukon border last March.”

A puzzled expression mingled and conflicted with the others which flitted across Dillon’s face.

“Since Sheila Cavanagh and I met at Dunnamore Castle—a childish meeting which your wife had forgotten—we never had set eyes upon each other until that day in St. James’s Park. Despite the passage of years, I knew her again. How dare you—I repeat, sir, how dare you presume to deny me the privilege of your wife’s friendship!”

Dillon’s expression changed again—to one of bewilderment.

“Then,” he gasped, “you are not——”

O’Hagan raised his head.

“Let him rest in peace,” he said sternly. “He was an honourable man, unfortunate in love. You wrong him villainously. If she had cared for him he would be alive to-day. It was something very like suicide—and therefore I charge you, Brian Dillon, never to breathe a word of his unhappy end, never to speak his name to your wife.”

“I don’t know his name. How do you——”

“I buried him in the snow!” said Captain O’Hagan with impressive finality.

Dillon dropped limply on to the big property-basket.

“Then Sheila never cared for him! And he is dead! And it was you, an old friend, and a friend of my father’s, whom——”

“You have been a villain to her!—a villain to Miss Chatterton—doubly a villain to me!——”

Sir Brian sprang up, his face boyish, bright with a glad contrition.

“Captain O’Hagan!” he cried, “will you take my hand? A hundred thousand times I apologise! _Can_ you forgive me! Do you think Sheila can?”

* * * * *

“At such times,” my mendacious friend has informed me, “to lie becomes a virtue. Dillon distrusted his wife’s old admirer—whose name he had quixotically, though fortunately, avoided learning. Therefore, preparatory to peace, the anonymous gentleman had to be whitewashed. His whitewashing accomplished, next, in order to insure Dillon’s silence respecting his history, he had to be buried for ever.

“I buried him in the eternal snows, Raymond. What more appropriate tomb for the rejected lover?”

EXPLOIT THE FIFTH.

HE DEALS WITH DON JUAN.

EXPLOIT THE FIFTH.
HE DEALS WITH DON JUAN.