“‘Speaking of Colonel Hammond,’ Cantrell said, with a drunken smile, ‘I’ve got the whole documents here. They were never trusted to the mails, but they trusted me. I’ve never brought them out before--but we have fallen into the arms of our friends. Isn’t it so?’ “We all acquiesced, and then there was interesting reading. Routledge, it was the great story I had been looking for--all that I wanted to know about one of the most damnable military expeditions ever transacted. I said to myself the world ought to know about this. That was because I was a newspaper man. Then I said again, ‘The world ought to know about this,’ and that was the humanitarian end. I was thinking of Ireland and India. “Two of the secret-service men were asleep finally. Cantrell moved about and served on legs of hot wax. “‘I’m glad you put that back in the safe, Cantrell,’ I said, when the envelope was safely in my pocket. ‘You could do a lot of damage to England with that just now.’ “I glanced at the secret agent who was awake, and found that he was not in on my steal. I should have made a joke of it, if he had been. The fact is, I did not really have the idea of stealing the papers until I found that I had done it.... Cantrell locked the safe, and the world was mine--all in a coat pocket!... You mind, when Cantrell was killed, or assassinated, the safe was blown open--quite a while afterward? I had been back to England and to Ireland with Noreen in the meantime. “God, how I have whipped the English!... When your name was spoken last night at the Armory, the faces about me were like a lot of blood-mad dogs--nostrils dilated and hackles up. I had to love you, Routledge, to turn loose upon you--the Hate of London!” “And you had the Hammond papers all the time you were in England and Ireland?” Routledge inquired. “Of course. I had only a few weeks in Europe before I was called back to the Bhurpal skirmish-stuff. You had stayed in India----” “But when and where did you get the papers to the Russian spies, Jerry?” “In Bhurpal--as that affair opened. It was weeks before I met you that night of the gathering when the two British forces came together. I stopped at the Rest House in Sarjilid, on the way by train from Calcutta to the front. It was there I heard a Russian sentence from an alleged Parsee. I was onto the spy in a moment, but first I want to tell you why I turned over the papers to him. First, rather, I want a drink of whiskey. I’m talking thick and fast, and it burns out the energy.” Routledge served him. “Why you gave Cantrell’s papers to the first Russian spy you met in India is what I want to know,” he said carelessly. “Listen, then. The idea came to me before I went out to India on that Bhurpalese mix-up. I told you that Noreen and I took a little trip to Ireland. I shouldn’t have gone back to Tyrone--where her mother bloomed--where I was a boy. I shouldn’t have gone back!” The old man’s voice trembled, but he did not lose his point.