A tall cadaverous-looking man opened the door and entered. As his eye fell upon us, he paused on the threshold.
"I beg your pardon," he said. "I-I"m afraid I"m in the wrong-"
"Not at all-come in and sit down," said Holmes, cordially. "That is if you are our friend and partner, Cato-Darlington couldn"t wait-"
"Couldn"t wait?" said Cato.
"Nope," said Holmes. "He was very much annoyed by the delay, Cato. You see he"s on bigger jobs than this puny little affair of Bar, LeDuc"s, and your failure to appear on schedule time threw him out. Pearls aren"t the only chips in Darlington"s game, my boy."
"Well-I couldn"t help it," said Cato. "Bar, LeDuc"s messenger didn"t get down there until five minutes of six."
"Why should that have kept you until eight?" said Holmes.
"I"ve got a few side jobs of my own," growled Cato.
"That"s what Darlington imagined," said Holmes, "and I don"t envy you your meeting with him when he comes in. He"s a cyclone when he"s mad and if you"ve got a cellar handy I"d advise you to get it ready for occupancy. Where"s the stuff?"
"In here, said Cato, tapping his chest.
"Well," observed Holmes, quietly, "we"d better make ourselves easy until the Chief returns. You don"t mind if I write a letter, do you?"
"Go ahead," said Cato. "Don"t mind me."
"Light up," said Holmes, tossing him a cigar, and turning to the table where he busied himself for the next five minutes, apparently in writing.
Cato smoked away in silence, and picked up Holmes"s copy of the Salmagundi Magazine which lay on the bureau, and shortly became absorbed in its contents. As for me, I had to grip both sides of my chair to conceal my nervousness. My legs fairly shook with terror. The silence, broken only by the scratching of Holmes"s pen, was becoming unendurable and I think I should have given way and screamed had not Holmes suddenly risen and walked to the telephone, directly back of where Cato was sitting.
"I must ring for stamps," he said. "There don"t seem to be any here. Darlington"s getting stingy in his old age. h.e.l.lo," he called, but without removing the receiver from the hook. "h.e.l.lo-send me up a dollar"s worth of two-cent stamps-thank you. Good-bye."
Cato read on, but, in a moment, the magazine dropped from his hand to the floor. Holmes was at his side and the cold muzzle of a revolver pressed uncomfortably against his right temple.
"That bureau cover-quick," Raffles cried, sharply, to me.
"What are you doing?" gasped Cato, his face turning a greenish-yellow with fear.
"Another sound from you and you"re a dead one," said Holmes. "You"ll see what I"m doing quickly enough. Twist it into a rope, Jim," he added, addressing me. I did as I was bade with the linen cover, s.n.a.t.c.hing it from the bureau, and a second later we had Cato gagged. "Now tie his hands and feet with those curtain cords," Holmes went on.
Heavens! how I hated the job, but there was no drawing back now! We had gone too far for that.
"There!" said Holmes, as we laid our victim out on the floor, tied hand and foot and as powerless to speak as though he had been born deaf and dumb. "We"ll just rifle your chest, Cato, and stow you away in the bath-tub with a sofa-cushion under your head to make you comfortable, and bid you farewell- not au revoir, Cato, but just plain farewell forever."
The words were hardly spoken before the deed was accomplished. Tearing aside poor Cato"s vest and shirt-front, Raffles placed himself in possession of the treasure from Bar, LeDuc & Co., after which we lay Darlington"s unhappy confederate at full length in the porcelain-lined tub, placed a sofa-cushion under his head to mitigate his sufferings, locked him in, and started for the elevator.
"Great Heavens, Raffles!" I chattered, as we emerged upon the street. "What will be the end of this? It"s awful. When Sir Henry returns-"
"I wish I could be there to see," said he, with a chuckle.
"I guess we"ll see, quick enough. I leave town to-morrow," said I.
"Nonsense," said Holmes. "Don"t you worry. I put a quietus on Sir Henry Darlington. He"ll leave town to-night, and we"ll never hear from him again-that is, not in this matter."
"But how?" I demanded, far from convinced.
"I wrote him a letter in which I said: "You will find your treasure in the bath-tub,"" laughed Holmes.
"And that will drive him from New York, and close his mouth forever!" I observed, sarcastically. "So very likely!"
"No, Jenkins, not that, but the address, my dear boy, the address. I put that message in an envelope, and left it on his table where he"ll surely see it the first thing when he gets back to-night, addressed to "Bob Hollister," Diamond Merchant, Cell No. 99, Pentonville Prison."
"Aha!" said I, my doubts clearing.
"Likewise-Ho-ho," said Holmes. "It is a delicate intimation to Sir Henry Darlington that somebody is on to his little game, and he"ll evaporate before dawn."
A week later, Holmes brought me a magnificent pearl scarf-pin.
"What"s that?" I asked.
"Your share of the swag," he answered. "I returned the pearl necklace to Bar, LeDuc & Co., with a full statement of how it came into my possession.
They rewarded me with this ruby ring and that stick-pin."
Holmes held up his right hand, on the fourth finger of which glistened a brilliant blood-red stone worth not less than fifteen hundred dollars.
I breathed a sigh of relief.
"I wondered what you were going to do with the necklace," I said.
"So did I-for three days," said Holmes, "and then, when I realized that I was a single man, I decided to give it up. If I"d had a wife to wear a necklace-well, I"m a little afraid the Raffles side of my nature would have won out."
"I wonder whatever became of Darlington," said I.
"I don"t know. Sommers says he left town suddenly that same Wednesday night, without paying his bill," Holmes answered.
"And Cato?"
"I didn"t inquire, but, from what I know of Bob Hollister, I am rather inclined to believe that Cato left the Powhatan by way of the front window, or possibly out through the plumbing, in some way," laughed Holmes. "Either way would be the most comfortable under the circ.u.mstances."
X THE MAJOR-GENERAL"S PEPPERPOTS
I had often wondered during the winter whether or no it would be quite the proper thing for me to take my friend Raffles Holmes into the sacred precincts of my club. By some men-and I am one of them-the club, despite the bad name that clubs in general have as being antagonistic to the home, is looked upon as an inst.i.tution that should be guarded almost as carefully against the intrusion of improper persons as is one"s own habitat, and while I should never have admitted for a moment that Raffles was an undesirable chap to have around, I could not deny that in view of certain characteristics which I knew him to possess, the propriety of taking him into "The Heraclean" was seriously open to question. My doubts were set at rest, however, on that point one day in January last, when I observed seated at one of our luncheon-tables the Reverend Dr. Mulligatawnny, Rector of Saint Mammon-in-the-Fields, a highly esteemed member of the organization, who had with him no less a person than Mr. E. H. Merryman, the railway magnate, whose exploits in Wall Street have done much to give to that golden highway the particular kind of perfume which it now exudes to the nostrils of people of sensitive honor. Surely, if Dr. Mulligatawnny was within his rights in having Mr. Merryman present, I need have no misgivings as to mine in having Raffles Holmes at the same table. The predatory instinct in his nature was as a drop of water in the sea to that ocean of known acquisitiveness which has floated Mr. Merryman into his high place in the world of finance, and as far as the moral side of the two men was considered respectively, I felt tolerably confident that the Recording Angel"s account- books would show a larger balance on the right side to the credit of Raffles than to that of his more famous contemporary. Hence it was that I decided the question in my friend"s favor, and a week or two later had him in at "The Heraclean" for luncheon. The dining-room was filled with the usual a.s.sortment of interesting men-men who had really done something in life and who suffered from none of that selfish modesty which leads some of us to hide our light under the bushel of silence. There was the Honorable Poultry Tickletoe, the historian, whose articles on the shoddy quality of the modern Panama hat have created such a stir throughout the hat trade; Mr. William Darlington Ponkapog, the poet, whose epic on the "Reign of Gold" is one of the longest, and some writers say the thickest, in the English language; James Whistleton Potts, the eminent portraitist, whose limnings of his patients have won him a high place among the caricaturists of the age, Robert Dozyphrase, the expatriated American novelist, now of London, whose latest volume of sketches, ent.i.tled Intricacies, has been equally the delight of his followers and the despair of students of the occult; and, what is more to the purpose of our story, Major-General Carrington c.o.x, U.S.A., retired. These gentlemen, with others of equal distinction whom I have not the s.p.a.ce to name, were discussing with some degree of simultaneity their own achievements in the various fields of endeavor to which their lives had been devoted. They occupied the large centre-table which has for many a year been the point of contact for the distinguished minds of which the membership of "The Heraclean" is made up; the tennis-net, as it were, over which the verbal b.a.l.l.s of discussion have for so many years volleyed to the delight of countless listeners.
Raffles and I sat apart at one of the smaller tables by the window, where we could hear as much of the conversation at the larger board as we wished-so many members of "The Heraclean" are deaf that to talk loud has become quite de rigueur there-and at the same time hold converse with each other in tones best suited to the confidential quality of our communications. We had enjoyed the first two courses of our repast when we became aware that General Carrington c.o.x had succeeded in getting to the floor, and as he proceeded with what he had to say, I observed, in spite of his efforts to conceal the fact, that Raffles Holmes was rather more deeply interested in the story the General was telling than in such chance observations as I was making. Hence I finished the luncheon in silence and even as did Holmes, listened to the General"s periods-and they were as usual worth listening to.
"It was in the early eighties," said General c.o.x. "I was informally attached to the Spanish legation at Madrid. The King of Spain, Alphonso XII, was about to be married to the highly esteemed lady who is now the Queen-Mother of that very interesting youth, Alphonso XIII. In antic.i.p.ation of the event the city was in a fever of gayety and excitement that always attends upon a royal function of that nature. Madrid was crowded with visitors of all sorts, some of them not as desirable as they might be, and here and there, in the necessary laxity of the hour, one or two perhaps that were most inimical to the personal safety and general welfare of the King. Alphonso, like many another royal personage, was given to the old Haroun Al Raschid habit of travelling about at night in a more or less impenetrable incognito, much to the distaste of his ministers and to the apprehension of the police, who did not view with any too much satisfaction the possibility of disaster to the royal person and the consequent blame that would rest upon their shoulders should anything of a serious nature befall. To all of this, however, the King was oblivious, and it so happened one night that in the course of his wanderings he met with the long dreaded mix-up. He and his two companions fell in with a party of cut-throats who promptly proceeded to hold them up. The companions were speedily put out of business by the attacking party, and the King found himself in the midst of a very serious misadventure, the least issue from which bade fair to be a thorough beating, if not an attempt on his life. It was at the moment when his chances of escape were not one in a million, when, on my way home from the Legation, where I had been detained to a very late hour, I came upon him struggling in the hands of four as nasty ruffians as you will find this side of the gallows. One of them held him by the arms, another was giving him a fairly expert imitation of how it feels to be garroted, which the other two were rifling his pockets. This was too much for me. I was in pretty fit physical condition at that time and felt myself to be quite the equal in a good old Anglo-Saxon fist fight of any dozen ordinary Castilians, so I plunged into the fray, heart and soul, not for an instant dreaming, however, what was the quality of the person to whose a.s.sistance I had come. My first step was to bowl over the garroter. Expecting no interference in his nefarious pursuit and unwarned by his companions, who were to busily engaged in their adventure of loot to observe my approach, he was easy prey, and the good, hard whack that I gave him just under his right ear sent him flying, an unconscious ma.s.s of villanous clay, into the gutter. The surprise of the onslaught was such that the other three jumped backward, thereby releasing the King"s arms so that we were now two to three, which in a moment became two to two, for I lost no time in knocking out my second man with as pretty a solar plexus as you ever saw. There is nothing in the world more demoralizing than a good, solid blow straight from the shoulder to chaps whose idea of fighting is to sneak up behind you and choke you to death, or to stick a knife into the small of your back, and had I been far less expert with my fists, I should still have had an incalculable moral advantage over such riffraff. Once the odds in the matter of numbers were even, the King and I had no further difficulty in handling the others. His Majesty"s quarry got away by the simple act of taking to his heels, and mine, turning to do likewise, received a salute from my right toe which, if I am any judge, must have driven the upper end of his spine up through the top of his head. Left alone, his Majesty held out his hand and thanked me profusely from my timely aid, and asked my name. We thereupon bade each other good-night, and I went on to my lodging, little dreaming of the service I had rendered to the nation.
"The following day I was astonished to receive at the Legation a communication bearing the royal seal, commanding me to appear at the palace at once. The summons was obeyed, and, upon entering the palace, I was immediately ushered into the presence of the King. He received me most graciously, dismissing, however, all his attendants.
""Colonel c.o.x," he said, after the first formal greetings were over, "you rendered me a great service last night."
""I, your majesty?" said I. "In what way?"