"You smoke?" queried Clubfoot. "No!"--he held up his hand to stop me as I was reaching for my cigarette case, "you shall have a cigar--not one of our poor German Hamburgers, but a fine Havana cigar given me by a member of the English Privy Council. You stare! Aha! I repeat, by a member of the English Privy Council, to me, the Boche, the barbarian, the Hun! No hole and corner work for the old doctor. _Der Stelze_ may be lame, Clubfoot may be past his work, but when he travels _en mission_, he travels _en prince_, the man of wealth and substance. There is none too high to do him honour, to listen to his views on poor, misguided Germany, the land of thinkers sold into bondage to the militarists! Bah! the fools!" He snarled venomously. This man was beginning to interest me. His rapid change of moods was fascinating, now the kindly philosopher, now the Teuton braggart, now the Hun incorporate. As he limped across the room to fetch his cigar case from the mantelpiece, I studied him. He was a vast man, not so much by reason of his height, which was below the medium, but his bulk, which was enormous. The span of his shoulders was immense, and, though a heavy paunch and a white flabbiness of face spoke of a gross, sedentary life, he was obviously a man of quite unusual strength. His arms particularly were out of all proportion to his stature, being so long that his hands hung down on either side of him when he stood erect, like the paws of some giant ape. Altogether, there was something decidedly simian about his appearance his squat nose with hairy, open nostrils, and the general hirsuteness of the man, his bushy eyebrows, the tufts of black hair on his cheekbones and on the backs of his big, spade like hands. And there was that in his eyes, dark and courageous beneath the shaggy brows, that hinted at accesses of ape-like fury, uncontrollable and ferocious. He gave me his cigar which, as he had said, was a good one, and, after a preliminary sip of his wine, began to speak. "I am a plain man, Herr Doktor," he said, "and I like plain speaking. That is why I am going to speak quite plainly to you. When it became apparent to that person whom it is not necessary to name further greatly desired a certain letter to be recovered, I naturally expected that I, who am a past member in affairs of this order, notably, on behalf of the person concerned, would have been entrusted with the mission. It was I who discovered the author of the theft in an English internment camp; it was I who prevailed upon him to acquiesce in our terms; it was I who finally located the hiding place of the document ... all this, mark you, without setting foot in England."