Through the open doors of the reception hall I could see the broad Teutonic back of Herr Wilhelm Friedrich Nebel, Ambassador from the newly stabilized Middle-European Confederacy. Half the stuffed shirts in Washington were crowded around him, trying to make themselves heard over the blare of the band and I recognized three of the President's own private bodyguards. I knew that there were Secret Service men posted all over the grounds to forestall this very thing, yet in spite of them this little man with the outlandish gun had crept within fifty feet of his goal. Had he picked them off, one by one, with his silent darts?
The man was stirring. Bill had him now in a grip that would take more than wildcat tactics to break. I parted the bushes so that a shaft of light fell on his face. Surely I knew that forked beard, those piercing black eyes, the shock of bristling hair. Suddenly I remembered. "Bill! It's Dampier!"
Pierre Dampier, France's greatest physicist, the confrere of Einstein and Heisenberg and Poincare, who had dropped out of sight so mysteriously five years before. Dampier here, in Washington, sniping at the Middle-European Ambassador with an electric gun!
The little man was staring at me with those beady eyes. For a moment I thought he would deny it. Then his face changed. The fury, the madness went out of it and were replaced by a great weariness that made him seem years older. He slumped in Bill's grasp, then stiffened proudly.
"Yes, gentlemen," he admitted. "Pierre Dampier, at your service."
This was no ordinary assassination. Big as the news was, Dampier made it bigger. And news was what Bill and I were here for.
"Bill," I said, "this is our story. No one else even suspects it. Are you going to turn him over to the police or do we get the whole yarn, ourselves, first?"
He nodded. "You're right," he agreed. "We'll never get it if we let him go now. Washington has a way of hushing those things up." He turned to the little Frenchman. "Monsieur Dampier we are newspaper men, we two. There's a reason for what you tried to do tonight, a good reason, or you wouldn't have attempted it. Will you tell us that reason, and let us explain to the world why the great Pierre Dampier has chosen to play the role of a common murderer?"