The Lost Naval Papers

At the beginning of the month of September, 1916, there appeared in the _Cornhill Magazine_ a story entitled "The Lost Naval Papers." I had told this story at second hand, for t...

Madame Gilbert and Captain Rust travelled to Brighton on the Friday evening in the Pullman train. They occupied different carriages. Their hotel, one of those facing the sea whi...

Dawson laid the letter and the telegram upon his breakfast-table, and bent his head over them. In a few minutes he had weighed them up, sorted out their relative significance, a...

I had seen nothing of Dawson during my intimate association with Madame Gilbert. He had written to me copiously--for a very busy man he was a curiously voluminous letter-writer....

It was a little past noon, and Dawson had much work to do before he could be free to speed north by the midnight train. First he skipped across to the Yard and into the private...

If one believed Dawson's own accounts of his exploits--I can conceive no greater exercise in folly--one would conclude that he never failed, that he always held the strings by w...

"Every man to his trade," said Dawson. "I didn't go into the difficulties of our job to those high folks at the Admiralty, but they are not at all small. You have a head on you,...

I took the letter from Dawson and glanced through it. The first sheet and the last had been written very recently--just before the boy had left his quarters for the last time to...

We had a whole day to fill in before we could get any news of Dawson's vigil in the _Malplaquet_, and I have never known a day as drearily long. Cary and I were both restless as...

Neither Madame Gilbert nor Captain Rust are very communicative concerning their adventures, until they begin to speak of that day when first they met one another in the courtyar...

Perhaps I ought to have seen it coming, but I didn't. For a moment, as a washerwoman might say, I was struck all of a heap. Then the delicious thought that I--by nature a vagabo...

The mind of Dawson has the queerest limitations. He is entirely free from any sense of proportion. If I wrote of those incidents which he pressed upon me, this book would be int...

When at last I arrived at Cary's flat it was very late, and I was exceedingly tired and out of temper. A squadron of Zeppelins had been reported from the sea, the air-defence co...

Dawson entered, and we stood eyeing one another like two strange dogs. Neither spoke for some seconds, and then, recollecting that I was a host in the presence of a visitor, I e...

I have never been able to plan this book upon any system which would hold together for half a dozen consecutive chapters. I am the victim of my characters who come and go and pu...

Cary tried to shake my resolution, but I was obdurately silent. While he canvassed the whole position, bringing to bear his really profound knowledge of naval equipment and rout...

Dawson showed no malice towards the Admiral or myself for our treatment of him. I do not think that he felt any; he was too fully occupied in collecting the spoils of victory to...