Skorvsky stared at the ceiling. “What then? A secret? Yes, I thought that about you while we were talking to the others to-day. There is something deep about you, my new friend. You are a power. Possibly you are not even really an American.”

“That is wrong.”

“You assure me that I am right. But I will agree with you. You are, let us say, the very epitome of the man Mr. Mencken and Mr. Lewis tell us about so charmingly. I am Russian and I cannot know all of America. You might divulge your errand, perhaps?”

“Suppose I said it was to set the world aright?”

Skorvsky laughed lightly. “Then I should throw myself at your feet.”

Both men were in deadly earnest, Hugo not quite willing to adopt the Russian’s almost effeminate delicacy, yet eager to talk to him, or to someone like him—someone who was more than a great self-centred wheel in the progress of the nation. Hugo yielded a little further. “Yet that is my purpose. And I am not altogether impotent. There are things I can do—” He got up from the table and stretched himself with a feline grace.

“Such as?”

“I was thinking of your two compatriots who were recently given such wretched justice. Suppose they were liberated by force. What then?”

“Ah! You are an independent communist?”

“Not even that. Just a friend of progress.”

“So. A dreamer. One of the few who have wealth. And you have a plan to free these men?”

Hugo shrugged. “I merely speculated on the possible outcome of such a thing; assume that they were snatched from prison and hidden beyond the law.”

Skorvsky meditated. “It would be a great victory for the cause, of course. A splendid lift to its morale.”

“The cause of Bolshevism?”

“A higher and a different cause. I cannot explain it briefly. Perhaps I cannot explain it at all. But the old world of empires is crumbled. Democracy is at its farcical height. The new world is not yet manifest. I shall be direct. What is your plan, Mr. Danner?”

“I couldn’t tell you. Anyway, you would not believe it. But I could guarantee to deliver those two men anywhere in the country within a few days without leaving a trace of how it was done. What do you think of that, Skorvsky?”

“I think you are a dangerous and a valuable man.”