The historic and even heroic traditions of Welkin Castle kept a dozen of the Prime Minister’s private secretaries busy for a week, looking up encyclopædias and chronicles and books of history. But the Prime Minister himself was more worried about another problem. How did these mysterious letters get into the house, or rather into the garden? None of them came by post and none of the servants knew anything whatever about them. Moreover, the Prime Minister, in an unobtrusive way, was very carefully guarded. Prime Ministers always are, but he had been especially protected ever since the Vegetarians a few years before had gone about killing everybody who believed in killing animals. There were always plain-clothes policemen at every entrance of his house and garden. And from their testimony it would appear certain that the letter could not have got into the garden; but for the trifling fact that it was lying there on the garden-table. Lord Eden cogitated in a grim fashion for some time; then he said as he rose from his chair: “I think I will have a talk to our American friend Mr. Oates.” Whether from a sense of humour or a sense of justice, Lord Eden summoned Enoch Oates before the same special jury of three; or summoned them before him, as the case may be. For it was even more difficult than before to read the exact secret of Eden’s sympathies or intentions; he talked about a variety of indifferent subjects leading up to that of the letters, which he treated very lightly. Then he said quite suddenly: “Do you know anything about those letters, by the way?” The American presented his poker face to the company for some time without reply. Then he said: “And what makes you think I know anything about them?” “Because,” said Horace Hunter, breaking in with uncontrollable warmth, “we know you’re hand and glove with all those lunatics in the League of the Long Bow who are kicking up all this shindy.” “Well,” said Oates calmly, “I’ll never deny I like some of their ways. I like live wires myself; and, after all, they’re about the liveliest thing in this old country. And I’ll tell you more. I like people who take trouble; and, believe me, they do take trouble. You say they’re all nuts; but I reckon there really is method in their madness. They take trouble to keep those crazy vows of theirs. You spoke about the fellows who carried off the astronomer in an aeroplane. Well, I know Bellew Blair, the man who worked with Pierce in that stunt, and believe me he’s not a man to be sniffed at. He’s one of the first experts in aeronautics in the country; and if he’s gone over to them, it means there’s something in their notion for a scientific intellect to take hold of. It was Blair that worked that pig’s stunt for Hilary Pierce; made a great gasbag shaped like a sow and gave all the little pigs parachutes.” “Well, there you are,” cried Hunter. “Of all the lunacy----”