"Devotedly your servant,
"Michael Lanyard."
Monk read and in silence pa.s.sed this communication over to Phinuit, while Lanyard addressed the envelope.
"Quite in order," was Phinuit"s verdict, accompanied by a yawn.
Lanyard folded the note, sealed it in the envelope, and affixed a stamp supplied by Monk, who meanwhile rang for a steward.
"Take this ash.o.r.e and post it at once," he told the man who answered his summons.
"But seriously, Lanyard!" Phinuit protested with a pained expression.... "No: I don"t get you at all. What"s the use?"
"I have not deceived you, then?"
"Not so"s you"d notice it."
"Alas!"--Lanyard affected a sigh--"for misspent effort!"
"Oh, all"s fair outside the law. We don"t blame you for trying it on.
Only we value your respect too much to let you go on thinking we have fallen for that hok.u.m."
"You see," Monk expounded--solemn a.s.s that he was beneath his thin veneer of pretentiousness--"when we know how the British Government kicked you out of its Secret Service as soon as it had no further use for you, we can understand and sympathise with your natural reaction to such treatment at the hands of Society."
"But one didn"t know you knew so much, monsieur le capitaine."
"And then," said Phinuit, "when we know you steered a direct course from London for the Chateau de Montalais, and made yourself persona grata there--Oh, persona very much grata, if I"m any judge!--you can hardly ask us to believe you didn"t mean to do it, it all just happened so."
"Monsieur sees too clearly...."
"Why, if it comes to that--what were you up to that night, p.u.s.s.yfooting about the chateau at two in the morning?"
"But this is positively uncanny! Monsieur knows everything."
"Why shouldn"t I know about that?" Vanity rang in Phinuit"s self-conscious chuckle. "Who"d you think laid you out that night?"
"Monsieur is not telling me----!"
"I guess I owe you an apology," Phinuit admitted. "But you"ll admit that in our situation there was nothing else for it. I"d have given anything if we"d been able to get by any other way; but you"re such an unexpected customer.... Well! when I felt you catch hold of my shirt sleeve, that night, I thought we were done for and struck out blindly.
It was a lucky blow, no credit to me. Hope I didn"t jar you too much."
"No," said Lanyard, reflective--"no, I was quite all right in the morning. But I think I owe you one."
"Afraid you do; and it"s going to be my duty and pleasure to cheat you out of your revenge if fast footwork will do it."
"But where was Captain Monk all the while?"
"Right here," Monk answered for himself; "sitting tight and saying nothing, and duly grateful that the blue prints and specifications of the Great Architect didn"t design me for second-storey work."
"Then it was Jules----?"
"No; Jules doesn"t know enough. It was de Lorgnes, of course. I thought you"d guess that."
"How should I?"
"Didn"t you know he was the premier cracksman of France? That is, going on Mademoiselle Delorme"s account of him; she says there was never anybody like that poor devil for putting the comether on a safe--barring yourself, Monsieur le Loup Seul, in your palmy days. And she ought to know; those two have been working together since the Lord knows when. A sound, conservative bird, de Lorgnes; very discreet, tight-mouthed even when drunk--which was too often."
"But--this is most interesting--how did you get separated, you and de Lorgnes?"
"Bad luck, a black night, and--I guess there"s no more question about this--your friend, Popinot-Dupont. I"ll say this for that blighter: as a self-made spoil-sport, he sure did give service!"
Phinuit gave his whiskey and soda a reminiscent grin.
"And we thought we were being bright, at that! We"d figured every move to the third decimal point. The only uncertain factor in our calculations, as we thought, was you. But with you disposed of, dead to the world, and Madame de Montalais off in another part of the chateau calling the servants to help, leaving her rooms wide open to us--the job didn"t take five minutes. The way de Lorgnes made that safe give up all its secrets, you"d have thought he had raised it by hand! We stuffed the loot into a grip I"d brought for the purpose, and beat it--slipped out through the drawing-room window one second before Madame de Montalais came back with that doddering footman of hers. But they never even looked our way. I bet they never knew there"d been a robbery till the next morning. Do I lose?"
"No, monsieur; you are quite right."
"Well, then: We had left our machine--we had driven over from Millau--just over the brow of the hill, standing on the down-grade, headed for Nant, with the gears meshed in third, so she would start without a sound as soon as we released the emergency brake. But when we got there, it wasn"t. The frantic way we looked for it made me think of you pawing that table for your candle, after de Lorgnes had lifted it behind your back. And then of a sudden they jumped us, Popinot and his crew; though we didn"t know who in h.e.l.l; it might have been the chateau people. In fact, at first I thought it was....
"I lost de Lorgnes in the shuffle immediately, never did know what had become of him till we got Liane"s wire this morning. I was having all I could do to take care of myself, thank you. I happened to be carrying the grip, and that helped a bit. Somebody"s head got in the way of its swings, and I guess the guy hasn"t forgotten it yet. Then I slipped through their fingers--I"ll never tell you how; it was black as pitch, that night--and beat it blind. I"d lost my flashlamp and had no more idea where I was heading than an owl at noon of a sunny day. But they--the Popinot outfit--seemed to be able to see in the dark all right; or else I was looney with fright. Every once in a while somebody or something would make a pa.s.s at me in the night, and I"d duck and double and run another way.
"After a while I found myself climbing a steep, rocky slope, and guessed it must be the cliff behind the chateau. It was a sort of zig-zag path, which I couldn"t see, only guess at. I was scared stiff; but they were still after me, or I thought they were, so I floundered on. The path, if it was a path, was slimy with mud, and about every third step I"d slip and go sprawling. I can"t tell you how many times I felt my legs shoot out into nothing, and dug my fingers into the muck, or broke my nails on rocks and caught clumps of gra.s.s with my teeth, to keep from going over ... and all the while that all-gone feeling in the pit of my stomach....
"However, I got to the top in the end, and crawled into a hollow and lay down behind some bushes, and panted as if my heart would break, and hoped I"d die and get over with it. But n.o.body came to bother me, so I got up when the first streak of light showed in the sky--there"d been a young cloud-burst just before that, and I was soaked to my skin--and struck off across the cause for G.o.d-knew-where. De Lorgnes and I had fixed that, if anything did happen to separate us, we"d each strike for Lyons and the one who got there first would wait for the other at the Hotel Terminus. But before I could do that, I had to find a railroad, and I didn"t dare go Millau-way, I thought, because the chances were the gendarmes would be waiting there to nab the first bird that blew in all covered with mud and carrying a bag full of diamonds.
"I"d managed to hold onto the grip through it all, you see; but before that day was done I wished I"d lost it. The d.a.m.ned thing got heavier and heavier till it must have weighed a gross ton. It galled my hands and rubbed my legs till they were sore.... I was sore all over, anyway, inside and out....
"Sometime during the morning I climbed one of those b.u.m mounds they call couronnes to see if I could sight any place to get food and drink, preferably drink. The sun had dried my clothes on my back and then gone on to make it a good job by soaking up all the moisture in my system. I figured I was losing eleven pounds an hour by evaporation alone, and expected to arrive wherever I did arrive, if I ever arrived anywhere looking like an Early Egyptian prune....
"The view from the couronne didn"t show me anything I wanted to see, only a number of men in the distance, spread out over the face of the causse and quartering it like beagles. I reckoned I knew what sort of game they were hunting, and slid down from that couronne and travelled.
But they"d seen me, and somebody sounded the view-halloo. It was grand exercise for me and great sport for them. When I couldn"t totter another yard I fell into a hole into the ground--one of those avens--and crawled into a sort of little cave, and lay there listening, to the suck and gurgle of millions of gallons of nice cool water running to waste under my feet, and me dying the death of a dog with thirst.
"After a while I couldn"t stand it any longer. I crawled out, prepared to surrender, give up the plunder, and lick the boots of any man who"d slip me a cup of water. But for some reason they"d given up the chase.
I saw no more of them, whoever they were. And a little later I found a peasant"s hut, and watered myself till I swelled up like a poisoned pup. They gave me a brush-down, there, and something to eat besides, and put me on my way to Millau. It seemed that I was a hundred miles from anywhere else, so it was Millau for mine if it meant a life sentence in a French prison.
"I sneaked into the town after dark, and took the first train north.
n.o.body took any notice of me. I couldn"t see the use of going all round Robin Hood"s barn, as I"d have had to in order to make Lyons. By the time I"d got there, de Lorgnes would have given up and gone on to Paris."
Phinuit finished his drink. "I"ll say it was a gay young party. The next time I feel the call to crime, believe me! I"m going out and s.n.a.t.c.h nursing bottles from kids asleep in their prams.... But they _must_ be asleep."
Monk lifted himself by sections from his chair.
"It was a good yarn first time I heard it," he mused aloud. "But now, I notice, even the Sybarite is getting restless."
In the course of Phinuit"s narrative the black disks of night framed by the polished bra.s.s circles of the stern ports had faded out into dusky violet, then into a lighter lilac, finally into a warm yet tender blue.
Now the main deck overhead was a sounding-board for thumps and rustle of many hurried feet.
"Pilot come aboard, you think?" Phinuit enquired; and added, as Monk nodded and cast about for the visored white cap of his office: "Didn"t know pilots were such early birds."