The Law of the Four Just Men quotes

Your story sounds as though you had read of that famous, or infamous, association called the Four Just Men, which existed some years ago, but which is now happily dispersed. Those men set themselves to punish where the law failed.

It is a monstrous assumption that the law ever fails!

You have committed a very serious offence, and the fact that you were at the moment of your arrest and capture in possession of a loaded revolver, serves very gravely to aggravate your crime. You will be kept in penal servitude for seven years.”

He was a man of comfortable fortune, and that fortune had been got together in scraps—sometimes the scraps were unusually large—by the exercise of qualities which were not handicapped by such imponderable factors as conscience or remorse.

Life to this tall, broad-shouldered, grey-faced man was a game, and Jeffrey Storr, against whom he harboured no resentment, was a loser.

He could think dispassionately of Storr in his convict clothes, wearing out the years of agony in a convict prison, and at the mental picture could experience no other emotion than that of the successful gambler who can watch his rival’s ruin with equanimity.

He let himself into his narrow-fronted house, closed and double-locked the door behind him, and went up the shabbily carpeted stairs to his study.

The ghosts of the lives he had wrecked should have crowded the room; but Mr. Stedland did not believe in ghosts.

He rubbed his finger along a mahogany table and noted that it was dusty, and the ghost of a well-paid charlady took shape from that moment.

“Murder, my dear Manfred is the most accidental of crimes,” said Leon Gonsalez

, removing his big shell-rimmed glasses and looking across the breakfast-table with that whimsical earnestness which was ever a delight to the handsome genius who directed the operations of the Four Just Men.

“That’s their look out,” said Mr. Ballam comfortably. “They get a lot of fun. There’s only one life and you’ve got to die once.”

“Some men die twice,” said Leon soberly.

“Some men who under the influence of a noxious drug go fantee and wake to find themselves murderers. There’s a drug in the East which the natives call ‘bal.’ It turns men into raving lunatics.”

In those days the Four Just Men were a menace to the sleep of many cunning men who had evaded the law, yet had not evaded this ubiquitous organisation, which slew ruthlessly in the name of Justice.

Poiccart was growing onions!

He sighed and repeated the words aloud.

He offered his hand. It was the first time he had done so, and she took it in her big limp palm and shook it feebly.

“Very few people have shaken hands with Amelia Jones,” thought Gonsalez

, and he went back to the flat in Jermyn Street to find Manfred asleep before the fire.

“Well-bred, I repeat,” said Gonsalez firmly. “

Breeding is merely a quality acquired through lifelong association with gentlefolk.

Put the son of a duke in the slums and he’ll grow up a peculiar kind of slum child, but a slum child nevertheless. Think of the horror of it.

Mrs. Jones slept well that night, and in a dainty cubicle somewhere in the west of England a slim girlish figure in pyjamas snuggled into her pillow and sighed happily.

But Bash Jones slept soundest of all.

“Absolutely none,” said Leon shortly. “The man is a genuine agent. He has the names of some of the best people on his books and they all speak loudly in his praise.

The lie that is half a lie is easier to detect than the criminal who is half honest.

If the chief cashier of the Bank of England turned forger, he would be the most successful forger in the world. This man has covered himself at every point.

“The rest is simple,” said Manfred, “and I will leave you to work out the details, my dear Leon, with every confidence that Mr. Homer Lynne will be very sorry indeed that he departed from the safe and narrow way.”

There was no more painstaking, thorough or conscientious workman that Leon Gonsalez.

The creation of punishment was to him a work of love. No General ever designed the battle with a more punctilious regard to the minutest detail than Leon.

There were diamond rings on his fat fingers, and a cable chain across his figured waistcoat. He was attired in a very bright blue suit, perfectly tailored, and violently yellow boots encased his feet, which were small for a man of his size.

In fact, Mr. Spaghetti Jones was a model of what Mr. Spaghetti Jones thought a gentleman should be.

It was not his rich attire, nor his greatness of bulk, which ensured for him Leon’s fascinated interest. Gonsalez had strolled to the back of the stand whilst the race was in progress, and the paddock was empty. Empty save for Mr.

He slashed twice at the other’s face with his little penknife, and the man jumped back with a cry.

“You’re a naughty boy,” said Jones, returning to the contemplation of his nails, “and you’ll be at Sandown when I tell you.”

With that he turned and walked away.

“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Leon gently.

“If you saw my face I should be obliged to kill you, and that I have no desire to do. Sit down.”

Mr. Jones obeyed wonderingly, and his wonder increased when Leon began to strip his patent shoes and silk socks, and to roll up the legs of his trousers.

He lay down on the bed and in a few minutes was fast asleep.

Leon had that gift of sleeping at will, which has ever been the property of great commanders.

Jones looked from the sleeper to the veiled man who lounged in an easy chair facing him. Two eyes were cut in the veil, and the watcher had a book on his knee and was reading.

“It’s an extraordinary thing, sir,” said the gaoler to the divisional surgeon. “I can’t get this man to keep awake.”

“Perhaps he would like a cold bath,” said the surgeon helpfully.

He was tried and acquitted.

Between the hour of his arrest and his release he had acquired the popularity which accumulates about the personality of successful politicians and good-looking murderers

, and he had been carried from the Sessions House shoulder high through a mob of cheering admirers, who had discovered nothing admirable in his character, and were not even aware of his existence, till the iron hand of the law closed upon his arm.

The landlady was not prepared to take a definite standpoint.

“Some think one thing and some think the other,” she replied, in the true spirit of diplomacy.

“He’s always been a nice man, and he attended my husband when he was home last.”

He was a good-looking young man with regular features, a carefully trimmed black moustache and tiny black side-whiskers.

“Light-blue eyes I do not like,” said Leon to himself, “and I should like to see you without a moustache.”

“I’ve been sent down from London to ask to what charities you are distributing your wife’s money, Dr. Twenden,” said Leon, with the brisk and even rude directness of a London reporter.