Part 4

“The same treatment,” suggested Jimmy, with approval, “would also do a world of good to this playful and affectionate animal—unless he is a vegetarian, in which case don’t bother.”

The householder glowered at him.

“Who are you?” he demanded.

“My name,” began Jimmy, “is——”

“Say,” said Spike, “he’s a champion burglar, boss——”

“Eh!” he said.

“He’s a champion burglar from de odder side. He sure is. From Lunnon. Gee, he’s de guy! Tell him about the bank you opened, and de jools you swiped from de duchess, and de what-d’ye-call-it blow-pipe.”

It seemed to Jimmy that Spike was showing a certain want of tact. When you are discovered by a house-holder—with revolver—in his parlour at half-past three in the morning, it is surely an injudicious move to lay stress on your proficiency as a burglar. The householder may be supposed to take it for granted. The side of your character which should be advertised in such a crisis is the non-burglarious. Allusion should be made to the fact that as a child you attended Sunday-school regularly, and to what the curate said when you took the Divinity prize. The idea should be conveyed to the householder’s mind that, if let off with a caution, your innate goodness of heart will lead you to reform and avoid such scenes in future.

With some astonishment, therefore, Jimmy found that these revelations, so far from prejudicing the man with the revolver against him, had apparently told in his favour. The man behind the gun was regarding him rather with interest than disapproval.

“So you’re a crook from London, are you?”

Jimmy did not hesitate. If being a crook from London was a passport into citizens’ parlours in the small hours, and, more particularly, if it carried with it also a safe-conduct out of them, Jimmy was not the man to refuse the _role_. He bowed.

“Well, you’ll have to come across now you’re in New York. Understand that. And come across good.”

“Sure, he will,” said Spike, charmed that the tension had been relieved and matters placed upon a pleasant and business-like footing. “He’ll be good. He’s next to de game, sure.”

“Sure,” echoed Jimmy courteously. He did not understand; but things seemed to be taking a turn for the better, so why disturb the harmony?

“Dis gent,” said Spike respectfully, “is boss of de cops. A police-captain,” he corrected himself.

A light broke upon Jimmy’s darkness. He wondered he had not understood before. He had not been a newspaper-man in New York for a year without finding out something of the inner workings of the police force. He saw now why the other’s manner had changed.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. “We must have a talk together one of these days.”

“We must,” said the police-captain significantly.

“Of course, I don’t know your methods on this side, but anything that’s usual——”

“I’ll see you at my office. Spike Mullins will show you where it is.”

“Very well. You must forgive this preliminary informal call. We came in more to shelter from the rain than anything.”

“You did, did you?”

Jimmy felt that it behoved him to stand on his dignity. The situation demanded it.

“Why,” he said, with some hauteur, “in the ordinary course of business I should hardly waste time over a small crib like——”

“It’s banks for his,” murmured Spike rapturously. “He eats dem alive. And jools from duchesses.”

“I admit a partiality for jewels and duchesses,” said Jimmy. “And now, as it’s a little late, perhaps we had better—— Ready, Spike? Good night, then. Pleased to have met you.”

“I’ll see you at my office.”

“I may possibly look in. I shall be doing very little work in New York, I fancy. I am here merely on a vacation.”

“If you do any work at all,” said the policeman coldly, “you’ll look in at my office, or you’ll wish you had when it’s too late.”

“Of course, of course. I shouldn’t dream of omitting any formality that may be usual. But I don’t fancy I shall break my vacation. By the way, one little thing. Have you any objection to my carving a ‘J’ on your front door?”

The policeman stared.

“On the inside. It won’t show. It’s just a whim of mine. If you have no objection.”

“I don’t want any of your——” began the policeman.

“You misunderstand me. It’s only that it means paying for a dinner. I wouldn’t for the world——”

The policeman pointed to the window.

“Out you get,” he said abruptly. “I’ve had enough of you. And don’t you forget to come to my office.”

Spike, still deeply mistrustful of the bulldog Rastus, jumped at the invitation. He was through the window and out of sight in the friendly darkness almost before the policeman had finished speaking. Jimmy remained.

“I shall be delighted——” he had begun, when he stopped. In the doorway was standing a girl—a girl whom he recognized. Her startled look told him that she too had recognized him.

Now for the first time since he had set out from his flat that night in Spike’s company Jimmy was conscious of a sense of the unreality of things. It was all so exactly as it would have happened in a dream. He had gone to sleep thinking of this girl, and here she was. But a glance at McEachern brought him back to earth. There was nothing of the dream-world about the police-captain.

The policeman, whose back was towards the door, had not observed the addition to the company. Molly had turned the handle quietly and her slippered feet made no sound. It was the amazed expression on Jimmy’s face that caused him to look towards the door.

“Molly!”

She smiled, though her face was still white. Jimmy’s evening clothes had reassured her. She did not understand how he came to be there, but evidently there was nothing wrong. She had interrupted a conversation, not a conflict.

“I heard the noise and you going downstairs, and I sent the dogs down to help you, father,” she said. “And then, after a little while, I came down to see if you were all right.”

Mr. McEachern was perplexed. Molly’s arrival had put him in an awkward position. To denounce him as a cracksman was impossible. Jimmy knew too much about him. The only real fear of the policeman’s life was that some word of his moneymaking methods might come to his daughter’s ears.

Quite a brilliant idea came to him.

“A man broke in, my dear,” he said. “This gentleman was passing and saw him.”

“Distinctly,” said Jimmy. “An ugly-looking customer!”

“But he slipped out of the window and got away,” concluded the policeman.

“He was very quick,” said Jimmy. “I think he may have been a professional acrobat.”

“He didn’t hurt you, father?”

“No, no, my dear.”

“Perhaps I frightened him,” said Jimmy airily.

Mr. McEachern scowled furtively at him.

“We mustn’t detain you, Mr.——”

“Pitt,” said Jimmy. “My name is Pitt.” He turned to Molly. “I hope you enjoyed the voyage.”

The policeman started.

“You know my daughter?”

“By sight only, I’m afraid. We were fellow-passengers on the _Mauretania_. Unfortunately I was in the second cabin. I used to see your daughter walking the deck sometimes.”

Molly smiled.

“I remember seeing you—sometimes.”

McEachern burst out:

“Then you——”

He stopped and looked at Molly. Molly was bending over Rastus, tickling him under the ear.

“Let me show you the way out, Mr. Pitt,” said the policeman shortly. His manner was abrupt, but when one is speaking to a man whom one would dearly love to throw out of the window abruptness is almost unavoidable.

“Perhaps I should be going,” said Jimmy.

“Good night, Mr. Pitt,” said Molly.

“I hope we shall meet again,” said Jimmy.

“This way, Mr. Pitt,” growled McEachern, holding the door.

“Please don’t trouble,” said Jimmy. He went to the window, and, flinging his leg over the sill, dropped noiselessly to the ground.

He turned and put his head in at the window again.

“I did that rather well,” he said pleasantly. “I think I must take up this sort of thing as a profession. Good night.”

★ 8 ★ _At Dreever_

In the days before the Welshman began to expend his surplus energy in playing Rugby football he was accustomed, whenever the monotony of his everyday life began to oppress him, to collect a few friends and make raids across the border into England, to the huge discomfort of the dwellers on the other side. It was to cope with this habit that Dreever Castle, in Shropshire, came into existence. It met a long-felt want. In time of trouble it became a haven of refuge. From all sides people poured into it, emerging cautiously when the marauders had disappeared. In the whole history of the castle there is but one instance recorded of a bandit attempting to take the place by storm, and the attack was an emphatic failure. On receipt of a ladleful of molten lead, aimed to a nicety by one John, the Chaplain—evidently one of those sporting parsons—this warrior retired, done to a turn, to his mountain fastnesses, and is never heard of again. He would seem, however, to have passed the word round among his friends, for subsequent raiding parties studiously avoided the castle, and a peasant who had succeeded in crossing its threshold was for the future considered to be “home” and out of the game.

Such was Dreever in the olden times. To-day the Welshman having calmed down considerably, it had lost its militant character. The old walls still stood, grey, menacing, and unchanged, but they were the only link with the past. The castle was now a very comfortable country-house, nominally ruled over by Hildebrand Spencer Poyns de Burgh John Hannasyde Coombe-Crombie, twelfth Earl of Dreever (“Spennie” to his relatives and intimates), but in reality the possession of his uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Julia Blunt.

Spennie’s position was one of some embarrassment. At no point in their history had the Dreevers been what one might call a parsimonious family. If a chance presented itself of losing money in a particularly wild and futile manner, the Dreever of the period had invariably sprung at it with the vim of an energetic bloodhound. The South Sea Bubble absorbed £200,000 of good Dreever money, and the remainder of the family fortune was squandered to the ultimate farthing by the sportive gentleman who had held the title in the days of the Regency, when Watier’s and the Cocoa Tree were in their prime, and fortunes had a habit of disappearing in a single evening. When Spennie became Earl of Dreever there was about eighteenpence in the old oak chest.

This is the point at which Sir Thomas Blunt breaks into Dreever history. Sir Thomas was a small, pink, fussy, obstinate man, with a genius for trade and the ambition of a Napoleon, probably one of the finest and most complete specimens of the came-over-Waterloo-Bridge-with-half-a-crown-in-my-pocket-and-now-look-at-me class of millionaire in existence. He had started almost literally with nothing. By carefully excluding from his mind every thought except that of making money, he had risen in the world with a gruesome persistence which nothing could check. At the age of fifty-one he was chairman of Blunt’s Stores, Ltd., a member of Parliament, silent as a wax figure, but a great comfort to the party by virtue of liberal contributions to its funds, and a knight. This was good, but he aimed still higher; and, meeting Spennie’s aunt, Lady Julia Coombe-Crombie, just at the moment when, financially, the Dreevers were at their lowest ebb, he had effected a very satisfactory deal by marrying her, thereby becoming as one might say, the chairman of Dreever, Ltd. Until Spennie should marry money, an act on which his chairman vehemently insisted, Sir Thomas held the purse, and, except in minor matters ordered by his wife, of whom he stood in uneasy awe, had things entirely his own way.

One afternoon, a year after the events recorded in the preceding chapter, he was in his private room, looking out of the window. The view from that window was very beautiful. The castle stood on a hill, the lower portion of which, between the house and the lake, had been cut into broad terraces. The lake itself, with its island with the little boathouse in the centre, was a glimpse of Fairyland.

But it was not altogether the beauty of the view that had drawn Sir Thomas to the window. He was looking at it more because the position enabled him to avoid his wife’s eye; and, just at the moment, he was rather anxious to avoid his wife’s eye. A somewhat stormy board meeting was in progress, and Lady Julia, who constituted the board of directors, had been heckling the chairman. The point under discussion was one of etiquette, and in matters of etiquette Sir Thomas felt himself at a disadvantage.

“I tell you, my dear,” he said to the window, “I am not easy in my mind.”

“Nonsense!” snapped Lady Julia. “Absurd! Ridiculous!”

Lady Julia Blunt, when conversing, resembled a Maxim gun more than anything else.

“But your diamonds, my dear?”

“I can take care of them.”

“But why should you have the trouble? Now, if we——”

“It’s no trouble.”

“When we were married there was a detective——”

“Don’t be childish, Thomas. Detectives at weddings are quite customary.”

“But——”

“Bah——”

“I paid twenty thousand pounds for that rope of pearls,” said Sir Thomas obstinately. Switch things on to a cash basis and he was more himself.

“May I ask if you suspect any of our guests of being criminals?” inquired Lady Julia, frostily.

Sir Thomas looked out of the window. At the moment the sternest censor could have found nothing to cavil at in the movements of such of the house-party as were in sight. Some were playing tennis, some clock golf, and others were smoking.

“Why not,” he began.

“Of course. Absurd! Quite absurd!”

“But the servants. We have engaged a number of new servants lately.”

“With excellent recommendations.”

Sir Thomas was on the point of suggesting that the recommendations might be forged, but his courage failed him. Julia was sometimes so abrupt in these little discussions. She did not enter into his point of view. He was always a trifle inclined to treat the castle as a branch of Blunt’s Stores. As proprietor of the stores he had made a point of suspecting everybody, and the results had been excellent. In Blunt’s Stores you could hardly move in any direction without bumping into a gentlemanly detective efficiently disguised. For the life of him Sir Thomas could not see why the same principle should not obtain at Dreever. Guests at a country house do not as a rule steal their host’s possessions, but then it is only an occasional customer at a store who goes in for shop lifting. It was the principle of the thing, he thought. Be prepared against every emergency. With Sir Thomas Blunt suspiciousness was almost a mania. He was forced to admit that the chances were against any of his guests exhibiting larcenous tendencies, but, as for the servants, he thoroughly mistrusted them all except Saunders, the butler. It had seemed to him the merest prudence that a detective from a private inquiry agency should be installed at the castle while the house was full. Somewhat rashly he had mentioned this to his wife, and Lady Julia’s critique of the scheme had been terse and unflattering.

“I suppose,” said Lady Julia sarcastically, “you will jump to the conclusion that this man whom Spennie is bringing down with him to-day is a criminal of some sort?”

“Eh? Is Spennie bringing a friend?”

There was not a great deal of enthusiasm in Sir Thomas’s voice. His nephew was not a young man whom he respected very highly. Spennie regarded his uncle with nervous apprehension, as one who would deal with his shortcomings with vigour and severity. Sir Thomas, for his part, looked on Spennie as a youth who would get into mischief unless he had an eye fixed on him. So he proceeded to fix that eye.

“I had a wire from him just now.”

“Who is his friend?”

“He doesn’t say. He just says he’s a man he met in London.”

“H’m!”

“And what does ‘H’m!’ mean?” demanded Lady Julia.

“A man can pick up strange people in London,” said Sir Thomas judicially.

“Nonsense.”

“Just as you say, my dear.”

Lady Julia rose.

“As for what you suggest about the detective, it is, of course, absolutely absurd.”

“Quite so, my dear.”

“You mustn’t think of it.”

“Just as you say, my dear.”

Lady Julia left the room.

What followed may afford some slight clue to the secret of Sir Thomas Blunt’s rise in the world. It certainly suggests singleness of purpose, which is one of the essentials of success.

No sooner had the door closed behind Lady Julia than he went to his writing-table, took pen and paper, and wrote the following letter:

“To the Manager, Wragge’s Detective Agency, Holborn Bars, London, E.C.

“Sir,—With reference to my last of the 28th ult., I should be glad if you would send down immediately one of your best men. Am making arrangements to receive him. Kindly instruct him to present himself at Dreever Castle as applicant for position of valet to myself. I will see and engage him on his arrival, and further instruct him in his duties.—Yours faithfully, Thos. Blunt.

“P.S.—I shall expect him to-morrow evening. There is a good train leaving Paddington at 2.15.”

He read it over and put in a couple of commas, then placed it in an envelope, and lit a cigar with the air of one who can be checked—yes, but vanquished, never.

★ 9 ★ _A New Friend and an Old One_

On the night of the day on which Sir Thomas Blunt wrote his letter to Wragge’s, Jimmy Pitt was supping at the Savoy.

If you have the money and the clothes, and do not object to being turned out into the night just as you are beginning to enjoy yourself, there are few things pleasanter than supper at the Savoy Hotel, London. But as Jimmy sat there, eyeing the multitude through the smoke of his cigarette, he felt, despite all the brightness and glitter, that this was a flat world and that he was very much alone in it.

A little over a year had passed since the merry evening at Police-Captain McEachern’s. During that time he had covered a good deal of new ground. His restlessness had reasserted itself. Somebody had mentioned Morocco in his hearing, and a fortnight later he was in Fez.

Of the principals in that night’s drama he had seen nothing more. It was only when walking home on air, rejoicing over the strange chance which had led to his finding and having speech with the lady of the _Mauretania_—he had reached Fifty-Ninth Street—that he realised that he had also lost her. It suddenly came home to him that not only did he not know her address, but was also ignorant of her name. Spike had called the man with the revolver “boss” throughout—only that and nothing more. Except that he was a police captain, Jimmy knew as little about him as he had done before their meeting. And Spike, who held the key to the mystery, had vanished. His acquaintances of that night had passed out of his life like figures in a waking dream. As far as the big man with the pistol was concerned, this did not distress him. He had only known that massive person for about a quarter of an hour, but to his thinking that was ample. Spike he would have liked to have met again, but he bore the separation with fortitude. There remained the girl of the ship, and she had haunted him with unfailing persistence during every one of the three hundred and eighty-four days which had passed since their meeting.

It was the thought of her that had made New York seem cramped. For weeks he had patrolled the more likely streets, the Park, and Riverside Drive in the hope of meeting her. He had gone to the theatres and restaurants, but with no success. Sometimes he had wandered through the Bowery on the chance of meeting Spike. He had seen red heads in profusion, but none that belonged to his young disciple in the art of burglary. In the end he had wearied of the search, and, to the disgust of Arthur Mifflin and his other friends of the Strollers’, had gone out again on his wanderings. He was greatly missed, especially by that large section of his circle which was in a perpetual state of wanting a little to see it through till Saturday. For years Jimmy had been to these unfortunates a human bank on which they could draw at will. It offended them that one of those rare natures which are always good for two dollars at any hour of the day should be allowed to waste itself on places like Morocco and Spain—especially Morocco, where, by all accounts, there were brigands with almost a New York sense of touch.

They argued earnestly with Jimmy. They spoke of Raisuli and Kaid Maclean. But Jimmy was not to be stopped. The gadfly was vexing him, and he had to move.

For a year he had wandered, realising every day the truth of Horace’s philosophy for those who travel—that a man cannot change his feelings with his climate, until finally he had found himself, as every wanderer does, at Charing Cross.

At this point he had tried to rally. This running away, he told himself, was futile. He would stand still and fight the fever in him.

He had been fighting it now for a matter of two weeks, and already he was contemplating retreat. A man at lunch had been talking about Japan——

Watching the crowd, Jimmy had found his attention attracted chiefly by a party of three a few tables away. The party consisted of a girl, rather pretty; a lady of middle-age and stately demeanour, plainly her mother; and a light-haired, weedy young man in the twenties. It had been the almost incessant prattle of this youth and the peculiarly high-pitched, gurgling laugh which shot from him at short intervals which had drawn Jimmy’s notice upon them. And it was the curious cessation of both prattle and laugh which now made him look again in their direction.

The young man faced Jimmy; and Jimmy, looking at him, could see that all was not well. He was pale. He talked at random.

Jimmy caught his eye. There was a hunted look in it.

Given the time and the place, there were only two things which could have caused that look. Either the light-haired young man had seen a ghost, or he had suddenly realised that he had not enough money to pay the bill.

Jimmy’s heart went out to the sufferer. He took a card from his case, scribbled the words, “Can I help?” on it, and gave it to a waiter to take to the young man, who was now in a state bordering on collapse.

The next moment the light-haired one was at his table, talking in a feverish whisper.

“I say,” he said, “it’s frightfully good of you, old chap; it’s frightfully awkward. I’ve come out with too little money. I hardly like to——. You’ve never seen me before——”

“Don’t rub in my misfortunes,” pleaded Jimmy. “It wasn’t my fault.”

He placed a £5 note on the table.

“Say when,” he said, producing another.

“I say, thanks fearfully,” the young man said. “I don’t know what I’d have done.” He grabbed at the note. “I’ll let you have it back to-morrow. Here’s my card. Is your address on your card? I can’t remember. Oh, by Jove, I’ve got it in my hand all the time.” The gurgling laugh came into action again, freshened and strengthened by its rest. “Savoy Mansions, eh? I’ll come round to-morrow. Thanks frightfully again, old chap. I don’t know what I should have done.”

“It’s been a treat,” said Jimmy deprecatingly.