The Complete Four Just Men Read Free Page A

Provinces.’
    ‘Killed?’
    Manfred’s moustache curled in scornful derision.
    ‘Bah! Who ever killed a man with a bomb! Yes, yes; I know it has been done – but so clumsy, so primitive, so very much like undermining a city wall that it may fall and slay – amongst others – your enemy.’
    Poiccart was reading the telegram deliberately and without haste, after his fashion.
    ‘The Prince was severely injured and the would-be assassin lost an arm,’ he read, and pursed his lips disapprovingly. The hands of Gonsalez, never still, opened and shut nervously, which was Leon’s sign of perturbation.
    ‘Our friend here – ’ Manfred jerked his head in the direction of Gonsalez and laughed – ‘our friend has a conscience and – ’
    ‘Only once,’ interrupted Leon quickly, ‘and not by my wish you remember, Manfred; you remember, Poiccart – ’ he did not address Thery – ‘I advised against it. You remember?’ He seemed anxious to exculpate himself from the unspoken charge. ‘It was a miserable little thing, and I was in Madrid,’ he went on breathlessly, ‘and they came to me, some men from a factory at Barcelona. They said what they were going to do, and I was horror-stricken at their ignorance of the elements of the laws of chemistry. I wrote down the ingredients and the proportions, and begged them, yes, almost on my knees, to use some other method. “My children,” I said, “you are playing with something that even chemists are afraid to handle. If the owner of the factory is a bad man, by all means exterminate him, shoot him, wait on him after he has dined and is slow and dull, and present a petition with the right hand and – with the left hand – so!” ’ Leon twisted his knuckles down and struck forward and upward at an imaginary oppressor. ‘But they would listen to nothing I had to say.’
    Manfred stirred the glass of creamy liquid that stood at his elbow and nodded his head with an amused twinkle in his grey eyes.
    ‘I remember – several people died, and the principal witness at the trial of the expert in explosives was the man for whom the bomb was intended.’
    Thery cleared his throat as if to speak, and the three looked at him curiously. There was some resentment in Thery’s voice.
    ‘I do not profess to be a great man like you, señors. Half the time I don’t understand what you are talking about – you speak of governments and kings and constitutions and causes. If a man does me an injury I smash his head – ’ he hesitated – ‘I do not know how to say it . . . but I mean . . . well, you kill people without hating them, men who have not hurt you. Now, that is not my way . . . ’ He hesitated again, tried to collect his thoughts, looked intently at the middle of the roadway, shook his head, and relapsed into silence.
    The others looked at him, then at one another, and each man smiled. Manfred took a bulky case from his pocket, extracted an untidy cigarette, re-rolled it deftly and struck a government match on the sole of his boot.
    ‘Your-way-my-dear-Thery – ’ he puffed – ‘is a fool’s way. You kill for benefit; we kill for justice, which lifts us out of the ruck of professional slayers. When we see an unjust man oppressing his fellows; when we see an evil thing done against the good God – ’ Thery crossed himself – ‘and against man – and know that by the laws of man this evildoer may escape punishment – we punish.’
    ‘Listen,’ interrupted the taciturn Poiccart: ‘once there was a girl, young and beautiful, up there – ’ he waved his hand northward with unerring instinct – ‘and a priest – a priest, you understand – and the parents winked at it because it is often done . . . but the girl was filled with loathing and shame, and would not go a second time, so he trapped her and kept her in a house, and then when the bloom was off turned her out, and I found her. She was nothing to me, but I said, ‘Here is a wrong that the law