And then, as one man, who had passed him like a hurricane, turned, paused, and jogged back to his tribe, Cecil saw that he had a mole on his chin. He stood still to watch the splendid fellow, and he noticed something far more important than the mole--he perceived that the revolver in the man’s right hand had a chased butt. “I can’t swear to it,” Cecil mused. “But if that isn’t my revolver, stolen from under my pillow at the Hôtel St. James, Algiers, on the tenth of January last, my name is Norval, and not Thorold.” And the whole edifice of his ideas concerning the robbery at the Hôtel de Paris began to shake. “That revolver ought to be at the bottom of the Mediterranean,” he said to himself; “and so ought Mrs. Macalister’s man with the mole, according to the accepted theory of the crime and the story of the survivors of the shipwreck of the _Perroquet Vert_.” He walked on, keeping the man in sight. “Suppose,” he murmured--“suppose all that stuff isn’t at the bottom of the Mediterranean after all?” A hundred yards further on, he happened to meet one of the white-clad native guides attached to the Royal Hotel where he had lunched. The guide saluted and offered service, as all the Biskra guides do on all occasions. Cecil’s reply was to point out the man with the mole. “You see him, Mahomet,” said Cecil. “Make no mistake. Find out what tribe he belongs to, where he comes from, and where he sleeps in Biskra, and I will give you a sovereign. Meet me at the Casino to-night at ten.” Mahomet grinned an honest grin and promised to earn the sovereign. Cecil stopped an empty landau and drove hurriedly to the station to meet the afternoon train from civilisation. He had arrived in Biskra that morning by road from El Kantara, and Lecky was coming by the afternoon train with the luggage. On seeing him, he gave that invaluable factotum some surprising orders. In addition to Lecky, the millionaire observed among the passengers descending from the train two other people who were known to him; but he carefully hid himself from these ladies. In three minutes he had disappeared into the nocturnal whirl and uproar of Biskra, solely bent on proving or disproving the truth of a brand-new theory concerning the historic sack of the Hôtel St. James. But that night he waited in vain for Mahomet at the packed Casino, where the Arab chieftains and the English gentlemen, alike in their tremendous calm, were losing money at _petits chevaux_ with all the imperturbability of stone statues. II. Nor did Cecil see anything of Mahomet during the next day, and he had reasons for not making inquiries about him at the Royal Hotel. But at night, as he was crossing the deserted market, Mahomet came up to him suddenly out of nowhere, and, grinning the eternal, honest, foolish grin, said in his odd English-- “I have found--him.” “Where?” “Come,” said Mahomet, mysteriously. The Eastern guide loves to be mysterious.