of killing and might just as well as not have settled. No sir; I was never a bloodthirsty man.
But Chu-Chu was. Chu-Chu was wolf or weasel, snake or tiger, according to the hunting-ground and the game he was out for. He had seldom pulled off a big job without leaving blood in his wake, and his reputation as a killer was so bad that even the swells of his own mob were afraid of him, and he usually had to work alone. In Ivan's big organisation of European thieves there were a good many hard, desperate people, yet I do not believe that there was a single one who would have dared to hold Chu-Chu up at the point of a gun in the presence of Ivan himself, as I had done, and prove him a liar to his chief, to say nothing of depriving him of gems worth a fortune. That alone was plenty to set Chu-Chu on my trail, to say nothing of my having tried to kill him in his motor on the road to Boulogne.
So here we were, each out for the other's pelt. The odds were a bit with me, I thought, and for a variety of reasons. In the first place, I was more of a cosmopolitan and less of a pronounced type, and therefore able to play easily the rôle of Frenchman, Englishman, or American. Then I had no little mannerisms, while Chu-Chu was known to his associates as "the man who smiles," and had a trick of smiling slightly to himself. His figure was average, as far as one could see through his clothes, and his physical strength was said to be phenomenal, while his face was an uncommon one for its prominent bony structures. Chu-Chu's features suggested a Spanish or possibly Basque origin, with high cheek bones, red-lipped mouth, the upper lip dropping to a
