Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 2, September 24, 1927

“There were four of us met one night in a shanty outside a diamond town. It was a tough shop — bad whites, worse blacks, hell-fire to drink, and life hanging on a thread. The other three were named Goort, Bradley, and Pink.

“Goort was big and brutal. Bradley was older than we were — a fellow nearly forty — a stiff proposition who still could remember the days when he was at Eton. Pink was a year my junior. Funny how names sometimes fit.

“He was little and slim — looked as though he had got tuberculosis, but hadn’t. Was a non-smoker and non-drinker. Yellow hair and gray eyes. It was he who killed Goort afterward. I saw him do it. He got him in Du Toit’s Pan Road in Kimberley at three o’clock in the morning. Threw a knife at him from a doorway. However—”

Bordington helped himself to a cigar. His hands were shaking so that he could hardly hold the matchflame to its tip.

Smith’s even voice droned on: “We four — that night — stood together in a bit of a scrap — nothing. We formed a partnership) — The Fellowship of Strangers — and we got down to things. Not going to trouble you with all we did. But when Pink killed Goort he lifted from round Goort’s waist a belt with fifty thousand dollars in it. When Bradley... er... died — snakebite, you know — the thing got into his bed one night—”

Bordington leaned forward, his face gray. “You devil! Did you put the snake—”

Smith shook his head. “No. I paid a ‘boy’ to do it. I’m no good at snakes myself.”

Bordington sat back as though pushed roughly. “Go on,” he said, through his teeth.

“As I said, when Bradley died, Pink and I shared something like seventy-five thousand. We were in fair circumstances. Then — various things happened. Pink lost his money. I came to Europe with about fifty thousand pounds, the only member of the Fellowship left. The Fellowship still exists, but in a different guise. There is no longer equal partnership. I have a number of men working for me on commission. Trevelyan is one of them.”

“I see. You are the head of the gang of criminals of whose existence we have always been confident.”

“The newspapers have paid me certain compliments,” admitted Smith.

Bordington studied him, and in the silence of that examination tried to conceive the depth of the man’s villainy. He could picture the horror of those hidden years in South Africa, years whose adventurings had been but grimly hinted at in Smith’s recent account. They had been a formidable quartet, Goort, Bradley, Pink, and Smith.

But Goort had gone — murdered openly by Pink; Bradley had gone, killed cunningly by Smith; and — last of all — the little devil, Pink himself, had been ground flat by the master scoundrel.

Chapter II

Blackmail and a Curse

“And now,” added Smith, “we will talk about you. As I have already said, you have been lucky. Six months ago a pauper; to-day a man of comparative affluence. It is something on which to congratulate oneself. There is, however, one little fly in the ointment. There always is. This side of paradise I guess there are more flies than ointment. And in that connection I’ll give you a word of advice. Never write letters.”

Bordington’s tongue touched his lips. “I thought so,” he said softly.

Smith smiled with some geniality. “Of course. You’re no fool. That’s why you accepted my invitation to come here. You guessed that note had strayed; that Trevelyan had forgotten to burn it.”

Smith selected another cigar. “When a man with a title, and holding a responsible official position in his majesty’s government, finds the old family home, everything his forefathers prized, in danger of coming under the hammer, it’s a great temptation to him to do something crooked — a kind of honorable dishonor, if that’s not too involved. D’you get me? He sacrifices himself to save the face of his ancestors, kind of thing.”

Bordington, who had been hanging his head, looked up at Smith. “You are a shrewd man,” he said. “You read me very correctly!”

“My job,” said Smith pleasantly. “I’ve earned my living by reading people correctly. However, there it is. It was nothing — that matter with Trevelyan. I’ll admit that. Just a bit of information which wasn’t supposed to leak out — and your moniker on what I believe the historians call a scrap of paper. Well, that was what we were after — that scrap of paper and your signature. The information was nothing to us.”

Bordington nodded mechanically. For the moment he was not seeing Smith, but before his eyes was a mind picture of the scene in the Hotel de Paris the previous winter, when Trevelyan had dined him well, when just too much Pol Roger had been drunk, when Trevelyan seemed the finest of fine fellows and the whole world’s arms were outflung generously.

That was when the scrap of paper had been signed. They had been clever. Trevelyan, darkly handsome, young, gifted with an Oxford accent and impeccable manners, had “worked” Bordington six months before that night.