Once out of the house my fears for Wharton Kendrick became more lively, and I hastened to the Coleman residence. "Take my card to Colonel Kendrick," I said briskly to the man who opened the door. He looked at it doubtfully a moment. But my assured air, and the "Attorney at law" that announced my business in unmistakable type impressed him, and he called a fellow servant to his side, gave him the card with a word of instruction, and advised me to be seated. After a few minutes of waiting I wondered whether I would not have done better, after all, to ask speech with the master of the house, and I was just on the point of requesting the Cerberus to take my name to Mr. Coleman, when my dubitations were cut short by the opening of a door, and a sudden outburst of voices, which softened to an indistinguishable murmur as it closed again, and Colonel Kendrick came walking down the hall. "Ah, Hampden," he said gravely, stroking his flame-tinted whiskers, "I’m not sure whether I am glad to see you or not. What has happened? Anything?" "Well, I’m in no doubt about being glad to see you," I returned. "I’ve been suspecting you were knocked on the head." "Pooh!" said Wharton Kendrick. "I’m in no danger. Don’t worry about me. What you want to do is to find out what the other fellow is doing. Can you tell me that?" "Certainly. He left his office at six o’clock, went directly to his house, and hasn’t stirred out of it since." "Very good. Now, I believe you had something to tell me." And his eye wandered uneasily to the door from behind which the confused murmur swelled with tantalizing indistinctness. "Yes: I have been hunting you all day to tell you that I received word this morning that the Council of Nine had bought a thousand rifles." This bit of news brought no answering sign of surprise on the face of my client. "Well," he said thoughtfully, "I wasn’t much behind you in getting the information. I heard about it this afternoon on the street." "On the street!" I exclaimed. "It was told to me as a profound secret." It seemed an altogether perplexing thing that the information that Clark had considered it death to reveal should be the talk of commercial San Francisco. "Well," said Wharton Kendrick with a smile, "if it’s a secret it’s one that needs a good deal of help in keeping it. I heard it from a dozen different directions." "There will be some astonished men in the Council if they hear of this report," I said. A grim smile wrinkled Wharton Kendrick’s ruddy cheeks, and drove for a moment the thoughtful look from his eyes. He put his hands in his pockets and threw himself back in his chair. "Well," he said, "you can expect them to have an attack of heart disease at the breakfast-table then. It will all be in the papers in the morning. But, to tell the truth, I got the impression that the nine members of the Council and all their friends were giving their afternoon to circulating the report."