It's only one, you
know, and the girls would be so delighted if you'd help entertain him,
for he speaks hardly any English, and their French, poor things, is
horribly insular and boarding-schooly." At last, with much reluctance, Olga consented, and on the Friday she
went up to the big house at eight punctually. Mrs. Davids and the girls were not yet in the drawing-room when she
arrived; but M. de Vouillemont had dressed early, and was standing with
his back to the room, looking intently at some pictures on the wall, as
Olga entered. As she came in, and the servant shut the door behind her, the stranger
turned slowly. In a moment she recognized him. His complexion was
disguised, so as to make him look darker than before; his black
moustache was shaved off; his hair was differently cut and dressed; but
still, as he looked her in the face, she knew him at once. It was
Alexander Niaz! Petrified with fear, she could neither fly nor scream. She stood still
in the middle of the drawing-room, and stared at him fixedly in an agony
of terror. Niaz had evidently tracked her down, and come prepared for his horrid
revenge. Without a moment's delay, his face underwent a hideous change,
and from the cultivated European gentleman in evening clothes that he
looked when she entered, he was transformed as if by magic into a
grinning, gibbering Tartar savage, with his tongue lolling out once
more, as of old in Siberia, in hateful derision of her speechless
terror. Seizing her roughly by the arm, he dragged her after him, not so much
unresisting as rigid with horror, to the open fireplace. A marble fender
ran around the tiled hearth. Laying her down upon the rug as if she were
dead, he placed her small right hand with savage glee upon that
ready-made block, and then proceeded deliberately to take out a small
steel hatchet from inside his evening coat. Olga was too terrified even
to withdraw her hand. He raised the axe on high--it flashed a second in
the air--a smart throb of pain--a dreadful crunching of bone and
sinew--and Olga's hand fell white and lifeless upon the tiled
hearthplace. Without stopping to look at her for a second, he took it
up brutally in his own, and flung it with a horrible oath into the
blazing fire. At that moment, the door opened, and Frank entered. Olga, lying faint and bleeding on the hearth rug, was just able to look
up at him imploringly and utter in a sharp cry of alarm the one word
"Niaz." Frank sprang upon him like an angry lion. "I told her her hand should pay the penalty," the Tartar cried, with a
horrible joy bursting wildly from his livid features; "and now it burns
in the fire over yonder, as she herself shall burn next minute for ever
and ever in fire and brimstone." As he spoke he drew a pistol from his pocket, and pointed it at her with
his finger on the trigger. Next moment, before he could fire, Frank had seized his hand, flung the
pistol to the farther end of the drawing-room, and forced the Tartar
down upon the floor in a terrible life-and-death struggle. Niaz's face, already livid, grew purpler and purpler as they wrestled
with one another on the carpet in that deadly effort. His wrath and
vindictiveness gave a mad energy to his limbs and muscles. Should he be
baulked of his fair revenge at last? Should the woman who had betrayed
him escape scot-free with just the loss of a hand, and he himself merely
exchange a Siberian for an English prison? No, no, never! by St.
Nicholas, never! Ha, madame! I will murder you both! The pistol! the
pistol! A thousand devils! let me go! I will kill you yet! I will kill
you! I will kill you! Then he gasped, and grew blacker and
purpler--blacker and purpler--blacker--blacker--blacker--ever blacker. Presently he gasped again. Frank's hand was now upon his mumbling
throat. They rolled over and over in their frantic struggles. Then a
long, slow inspiration. After that, his muscles relaxed. Frank loosed
him a little, but knelt upon his breast heavily still, lest he should
rise again in another paroxysm. But no: he lay quite motionless--quite
motionless, and never stirred a single finger. Frank felt his heart--no movement; his pulse--quite quiet; his lips--not
a breath perceptible! Then he rose, faint and staggoring, and rang for
the servants. When the doctor came hurriedly from the village to bandage up the
Russian lady's arm, he immediately pronounced that M. de Vouillemont was
dead--stone dead--not a doubt about it. Probably apoplexy under stress
of violent emotion. The inquest was a good deal hushed up, owing to the exceedingly painful
circumstances of the case; and to this day very few people about Torquay
(where she now lives) know how Mrs. Frank Davids, the quiet lady who
dresses herself always in black, and has such a beautiful softened
half-frightened expression, came to lose her right hand. But everybody
knows that Mr. Davids is tenderness itself to her, and that she loves
him in return with the most absolute and childlike devotion. It was worth cutting off her right hand, after all, to be rid of that
awful spectre of Niaz, and to have gained the peaceful love of Frank
Davids. _JOHN CANN'S TREASURE._


Cecil Mitford sat at a desk in the Record Office with a stained and
tattered sheet of dark dirty-brown antique paper spread before him in
triumph, and with an eager air of anxious inquiry speaking forth from
every line in his white face and every convulsive twitch at the
irrepressible corners of his firm pallid mouth. Yes, there was no doubt
at all about it; the piece of torn and greasy paper which he had at last
discovered was nothing more or less than John Cann's missing letter. For
two years Cecil Mitford had given up all his spare time, day and night,
to the search for that lost fragment of crabbed seventeenth-century
handwriting; and now at length, after so many disappointments and so
much fruitless anxious hunting, the clue to the secret of John Cann's
treasure was lying there positively before him. The young man's hand
trembled violently as he held the paper fast unopened in his feverish
grasp, and read upon its back the autograph endorsement of Charles the
Second's Secretary of State--"Letter in cypher from Io. Cann, the noted
Buccaneer, to his brother Will'm, intercepted at Port Royal by his
Ma'ties command, and despatched by General Ed. D'Oyley, his Ma'ties
Captain-Gen'l and Governor-in-Chief of the Island of Jamaica, to me,
H. NICHOLAS." That was it, beyond the shadow of a doubt; and though
Cecil Mitford had still to apply to the cypher John Cann's own written
key, and to find out the precise import of the directions it contained,
he felt at that moment that the secret was now at last virtually
discovered, and that John Cann's untold thousands of buried wealth were
potentially his very own already.