CHAPTER XI

INFORMATION RECEIVED

"Sarcastic swine!" muttered Armstrong, savagely, as he set off with Warrender behind the rotund little chef.

"So confoundedly polite I could have kicked him," returned Warrender, in the same undertone. "His beastly Latin, too! What did he take us for?"

"What we are--a couple of mugs. And Pratt's worse, with his absurd theories. Of course these chaps aren't in it. Rush is at the bottom of it, and the other fellow, though he looked like a foreigner, is very likely only some ugly freak of a Devonian after all."

"Well, I'll be hanged if I stand any more of Rush's nonsense. Next time anything happens, I'll get old Crawshay to set that bobby moving we saw the other day. I'm sick of it."

Ill-humour had for the moment got the upper hand, and they were conscious only of their soreness as they followed their guide through the unkempt grounds. Their attention was attracted presently by the tower that reared itself out of a thicket some little distance on their left. It was a square much-dilapidated building of stone, encrusted with moss and ivy, reaching a height of some fifty or sixty feet. The window openings were boarded up with deal planks that were evidently new.

"Is the tower used for anything now?" Warrender asked the Swiss.

"Ze tower? No, it is ruin, fall to pieces," replied the man.

"I say, we _are_ a couple of lunatics!" cried Armstrong. "We've left the dinghy at the ferry. What's the good of the short cut? Pratt can't work the motor."

"Hang it! I'd clean forgotten."

"Zen ve go back?" said the guide, eagerly. He had come to the end of the open grounds; the rest of the way lay through a wilderness of shrubs that promised laborious walking.

"No, I'm hanged if we do," said Warrender. "Now we've come so far we'll not go back."

"Zen how you cross ze river?"

"Swim it. You needn't come. We'll forge straight ahead. Thanks."

He tipped the man, and plunged with Armstrong into the thicket. Ten minutes' battling with the intricately woven mass of greenery brought them to the brink of the stream almost exactly opposite to their camping-place. They stripped, bundled their clothes upon their heads, and made short work of the thirty-foot channel.

"My aunt! In native garb!" cried Pratt, as they walked up still unclothed. "'Here be we poor mariners.' Shipwrecked? Lost the dinghy?"

"No, only our tempers," replied Armstrong. "The dinghy's still at the ferry."

"I say, my uncle hasn't got back, has he?" asked Pratt.

"No. Why?"

"I thought perhaps you had met him, and got a taste of _his_ temper, that's all. 'Tell me not in mournful numbers'--but tell me anyhow you like the cause of this Ulyssean exhibition."

Warrender began the narrative as he towelled himself, continued it through his dressing, and concluded it when he had dropped into his chair by Pratt's side. Pratt listened with ever-growing merriment.

"You priceless old fatheads!" he exclaimed. "When the beggar chucked Latin at you why didn't you pelt him with Greek, Phil?--or with sines and hypotenuses, and all that, Jack? Don't you remember how some Cambridge josser floored a heathen bargee by calling him an isosceles triangle? I wish I'd gone."

"I wish you had!" echoed Warrender. "But when a fellow's so dashed polite----"

"Polite! I tell you what it is: you're both too serious for this flighty world. When you consider that it's gyrating at the rate of I don't know how many thousand miles a minute, it's unnatural, positively indecent, for any one to be so stuggy. The art of life is to effervesce. But, you know, the important feature of your morning's entertainment seems not to have sufficiently impressed you."

"What's that?" asked Armstrong.

"Rod's wife. _Cherchez la femme_! You oughtn't to have come away without having had a word with her."

"How on earth could we?" said Warrender. "We weren't asked into the house, and if we had been----"

"My dear chap, if a fair lady beckoned to me out of her casement window I'd find some means of receiving her behests. Rod's wife, _nee_ Molly Rogers, didn't make signs to you for nothing, and I foresee that I shall have to turn our skipping-rope into a rope ladder, and----"

"Oh, don't go on gassing," Armstrong interposed, irascibly. "Can't you be serious?"

"Solemnity itself. We've got to fetch that dinghy. I want to go to the post office. Very well, after lunch Phil shall run me up in the motorboat. I'll have a word with Rogers on the way, and I bet my boots I won't come back without some little addition to our dossier."

Pratt's programme was carried out. Warrender and he found Joe Rogers pulling spring onions in his garden behind the inn. The man had placed his wig on a pea-stick, and his bald pate glowed in the sunlight like a pink turnip.

"Good-afternoon, Joe," said Pratt, genially. "I wonder how it is that you sailormen so often take to gardening when your sea days are over?"

"I can't tell 'ee, sir, 'cept it be as we loves the look o' vegetables, being without 'em so long at a time. The old woman do say it keeps me out o' mischief."

"Now, Rogers," called his better half from an upper window, "put on your hair this minute. Drat the man! Do 'ee want to catch your death of sunstroke?"

Rogers gave a sly look at his visitors as he donned his wig.

"It do make my skull itch terrible," he said. "But she's a good woman."

"I jolly well hope I shall be looked after as well when my time comes," said Pratt. "But I'm not thinking of matrimony yet. What age did you marry at, Joe?"

"Thirty-one, just the same age as my sister Molly, but not in such a hurry. My missus took a deal o' courting; 'twas five years' hard labour; whereas Molly give in in less than a month."

"He came, he saw--he conquered. Must be something fascinating about him. Has she lost her cold, by the way? My friends happened to see her this morning."

"Well now, if that ain't too bad. She haven't been nigh me for a good fortnight, and she didn't ought to go about the village without looking in."

"They saw her at the house. She seemed to be catching flies or something at the window. I gather you don't like her husband."

"I've nothing against him, 'cept his name and furren nature. My missus told her she was cutting a rod for her own back."

"Surely he doesn't beat her?"

"That wasn't her meaning. Rod's his name, and the missus do have a way of taking up a word and twisting of it about, you may say. 'A rod in pickle,' says she. 'Tis just a clappering tongue; there's no sense in it. But it do seem as Molly have turned her back on all her old friends. 'Tis like this: they furriners bain't favourites in the parish, and Molly sticks to her husband, as 'tis her duty. That's what I make of it."

"Well, I dare say she chose the pick of the bunch. How many are there of them, by the bye?"

"Four, leaving out the secretary. They don't go about in the village much. None of 'em comes here 'cept that feller you saw t'other day, and he don't come often. _I_ don't get no good of 'em. 'Twas different in the old days."

"Things will take a turn," said Pratt, consolingly. "When my--when Mr. Pratt returns I dare say he'll quarrel with the foreigners, and get English servants again."

"And be ye all right on the island, sir?"

"Having a ripping time. We're always on the look-out for the ghost, but he seems rather shy. I can sympathise with him, being so bashful myself."

"You do seem to have a bit of a bump one side of the head, sir. No inseck have been poisoning 'ee, I hope."

"No. Insects love me too well to disfigure me. I'm inclined to think it was a worm, or something like a leech, perhaps. It's a trifle; a molehill, not a mountain. To-morrow both sides will be equal, and the angles subtended at the base as right as ever. Good-bye; keep your hair on."

"Well, old man, we've spent a profitable quarter of an hour," said Pratt, as he went on with Warrender to the village. "The number of Gradoff s staff is confirmed; therefore the chap I collared is not one of them. As to Rod's wife, there's no mystery about her. She's disgusted, as any sensible person would be, at the petty narrow-mindedness of the natives who dislike her husband simply because he's of another breed, and so she cuts 'em dead."

"But what did her movements at the window mean?" asked Warrender. "It certainly looked as if she wanted help or something."

"Nothing of the sort, depend upon it. She was waving you off; she's as careful of Rod as Rogers's missus is of him; she was afraid Armstrong would go for Rod as he went for the Swede. I'm always ready to own up when I'm wrong. My old theories won't hold water. I think I'll give up detecting and go in for the Bar. You only have to stick to your brief; needn't have an idea of your own."

"Well, it seems to me we're not much for'arder."

"Quite a mistake. The issue is narrowed down. Clear our minds of the foreign menagerie and all that, and concentrate on Rush. That's the ticket."

Calling at the post office, he was handed a letter from his London friend, who reported that the scrap of paper was torn from a copy of the _Pravda_. Only part of the date of issue was visible--the word June; and the incomplete paragraph of text appeared to relate to the high prices of perambulators.

"There you are," said Pratt. "Much cry and little wool. It proves nothing except that some one, some time or other, had a Russian newspaper, which was partly burnt along with other papers, no doubt equally uninteresting and unimportant. What we have to do is simply to weave a spider's web for Rush."

"You change your mind twice a day, and are cock-sure every time," Warrender remarked.

"A clear proof that I ought to go in for politics, after all. I'm glad it's settled at last. Percy Pratt, M.P.--reverse 'em, you get P.M., Prime Minister; then Sir Percy, Bart.; Baron Pratt, Viscount, Earl--why not Duke while I'm about it? But do dukes play the banjo, I wonder?"

"You're better qualified for the part of Mad Hatter, I fancy. Come, let's step it out."

The evening of that day turned out rather cool and overcast. A breeze sprang up in the south-west, refreshing after the still heat. After early supper, Armstrong, declaring that he was getting flabby for want of exercise, set off in the dinghy for a pull down the river. Pratt thought it a good opportunity for testing Armstrong's report of the sounds he had heard in the cottage, and went off alone, leaving Warrender on guard at the camp.

He had not yet come within sight of the ruins when, above the rustle of the stirred leaves, a strange moaning broke upon his ear. He stopped to listen. While far more impressionable than Armstrong, he had solid musical knowledge which his schoolfellow lacked, and he was struck at once by an unusual quality in the sound he heard.

"That's not the wind in the eaves," he thought. "It's more like the whining of an organ pipe when a lazy blower is letting the wind out."

He hurried on. The sound rose and fell. For some moments it maintained a steady, pure organ note; then with rising pitch it became almost a shriek.

"I don't wonder the rustics are a bit scared," he thought, "but no ghost could produce a tone like that--unless he'd been a cathedral alto in his lifetime. It's due, I expect, to some metal chimney-pot that's got displaced and partly closed. Wonder if I can find it?"

He entered the ruins, and ran up the staircase. A roseate twilight suffused the western sky. Led by the persistent sound, he came to the unroofed room facing the west. The moaning proceeded from some spot above his head. He tried to clamber up the mass of broken masonry that littered the floor, but found that he could not gain the level of the roof except by climbing the jagged brickwork of the broken wall, a feat too perilous in the half light.

"That's the worst of being fat," he said to himself. "I believe Armstrong could do it."

Leaving the room presently, he went idly, without definite motive, into the second room, facing east and overlooking the river and his uncle's grounds. In this direction dusk was already deepening into night; the nearer trees were still distinguishable, but beyond the river all individual objects were blurred by the darkness.

He sat on the paneless window-sill, listening to the strange sound from above, looking out towards the Red House, wondering whereabouts in the wide world his uncle was travelling. All at once, far away, almost on a level with his eyes, he thought he saw a faint red glow. It disappeared in a moment--so quickly that it seemed an illusion. But there it was again, indubitably some small luminous body. "Some one with a lamp in one of the top rooms of the Red House," he thought. Again it disappeared, only to show again after an interval--a third time--a fourth.

To Pratt these phenomena were at first merely sensations of sight, not perceptions of intelligence. But by and by he was struck by the fact that the glow always appeared at the same spot, not here and there, like a lamp carried by a person moving about a room. Then he found himself mentally measuring the intervals between its appearances, expecting their occurrence as regularly as the beats of a striking clock. It was with surprise and a sort of disappointment that he discovered that the intervals were irregular, and with curiosity, after a while, that they were regular and irregular both, as it seemed, fitfully; the glow appeared two or three times at equal intervals, then the intervals became shorter or longer. "Signals, of course," he thought, when the impression of order and purpose became fixed in him. "Who is it? Where is it? What's the game?"

The alternations continued for several minutes, then finally ceased. Pratt got up, left the ruins, and made his way with some difficulty back to camp.

"Armstrong back?" he asked.

"Not yet," replied Warrender. "Time he was. This is the darkest evening we've had. See any one?"

"Not a soul. All quiet here?"

"Absolute peace. _You_ weren't here."

"Thanks. Glad you missed me. Will the sweet, melodious strains of my gentle banjo disturb your serenity?"

"Not a bit. Strum away. But hadn't you better turn in? It's past nine. Old Jack won't get much sleep before second watch if he isn't here soon; no reason why you shouldn't have your full whack, especially after last night's affair."

"I'll stay up till he comes."

Pratt softly thrummed his strings, musing on his discoveries. Half-past nine came; ten o'clock.

"I say, what's happened to Armstrong?" said Warrender. "Surely he hasn't been carried out to sea? Come and help me shove off; I'll run down and see if I can find him. You won't turn in, so you won't mind taking part of my watch."

"Righto! But I dare say Jack's enjoying himself."

They were just about to launch the motor-boat when they caught the dull sound of oars in the distance. They waited. The rising moon struggled through the rack, and cast a faint light on the stream. Presently the dinghy appeared from among the overarching foliage. Armstrong was sculling very quietly.

"Thought you were lost," said Warrender. "It's past ten; your watch starts at eleven-forty."

"All right. Pratt, tie up, will you? Come with me, Warrender."

Armstrong led the way at a long, rapid stride across the clearing and into the thicket. He said nothing, and did not pause until he came to the shore of the western channel.

"Keep well behind this tree," he said, in a whisper, placing himself in shadow.

In a few minutes they heard the splash of oars. A boat emerged from the shades down stream, lit up fitfully by the transient moonbeams. It passed close beneath their hiding-place. It held a single oarsman, whose thickset frame would have been unmistakable even if the moonlight had not touched his face. He pulled out of sight.

"What's he been up to?" said Warrender.

"Let's get back," replied Armstrong. "I wanted a second witness. Pratt will wish to start a new career now, I expect."