creature! The ignorant, blind swine! You had him — Him! — under your
hand; oh hell, you fool, you fool!"
I felt sure he was somebody," said Akbar, "but I had no orders."
"And no brains, no brains," snarled the other. "Look here; I'll tell you how
to get your step in the Lodge if you'll give me a hundred pounds."
"Do you mean it?" cried Akbar, entirely his own man in a moment, for
abject fear and obsessing ambition combined to make his advancement the
tyrant of his whole tormented mind. "Will you swear it?" [119]
Balloch made an ugly face. "By the black sow's udder, I will."
His whole frame trembling with excitement, Akbar Pasha drew a cheque-
book from his pocket, and filled in a blank for the required sum.
Balloch snatched it greedily. "This is worth your money," he said. "That
man Iff is in the second grade, perhaps even the first, of their dirty Order; and
we sometimes think he's the most powerful of the whole damned crew. That
fool Grey's a child to him. I know now how the Watcher was destroyed. Oh!
S.R.M.D. will pay somebody for this! But listen, man — you bring that old
beast's head on a charger — or Grey's, either! — and you can have any grade
you dare ask for! And that's no lie, curse it! Why," he went on with
increasing vehemence, "the whole thing's a plant of ours. Monet-Knott's one
of us; we use him to blackmail Lavinia King — about all he's fit for, the prig!
And we got him to drag that dago woman in front of Master Grey's dog nose!
And  now they bring in Simon Iff. Oh, it s too much! We've even lost their
trail. Ten to one they're safe in their Abbey to-night. Be off! No, wait for me
here; I'll bring back orders. And while I'm gone, get that son of yours here —
he's got more sense than you. We'll have to trace Grey somehow — and astral
watchers won't do the trick when Simon Iff's about."
Balloch rose to his feet, buttoned his coat around him, put on a tall silk hat,
and was gone without wasting another word upon his subordinate.
The Turk would have given his ears to have dared to follow him. The
mystery of S.R.M.D.'s personality and abode were shrouded in the blackest
secrecy. Akbar had but the vaguest ideas of the man; he was a formless ideal
of terrific power and knowledge, a sort of incarnated Satan, the epitome of
successful [120] iniquity. The episode of the "Watcher" had not diminished
the chief's prestige in his eyes; it was evidently an "accident"; S.R.M.D. had
sent out a patrol and it had been ambushed by a whole division, as it were. So
trivial a "regrettable incident" was negligibly normal.
Akbar had no thought but of S.R.M.D. as a Being infinitely great in