by H. F. Heard
Somehow the tone he used, and the slight start I had had, put me on the defensive. After all, I was not the helpless fellow that I had been. I was a bit of a detector, now, as well as he.
“Mr. Mycroft,” I said, pulling myself together, “I know when we last parted I was, perhaps, a little discourteous in my wish to get back to my retired life. Well, Life has kicked me out of my soft seat and somehow I have managed to fall on my feet or to get a footing.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, with that knowing lightness. “I can now call you confrere, and,” he added rallyingly, “if occasionally I fall into the old habit of saying, ‘Don’t you see?’ take it as a compliment, not as a criticism.”
“A compliment?”
“Because we are now colleagues.”
Yes, of course, as of yore I was flattered. So when he went on to ask whether I could spare him half an hour, for he had an interesting story to tell me and stood in great need of my advice, I asked him along to my place.
“Yes,” he commented as we entered, “yes, if you will forgive a personal remark, I thought when we last met that if Fate really made you fly you had feathers which would carry you. I’d heard of your work and seen it. The flair will out, Mr. Silchester. But now you will want to know why particularly I am today your client. I am out here on a very peculiar trail. I don’t think any of us detectives”—I felt like Queen Victoria when Disraeli, fresh from the success of his histrionic novels, remarked to the authoress of Leaves from a Highland Journal, “We authors, Ma’m”—“have ever been given, if I may use a modern phrase, a stranger assignment. I want to be quite frank with you, Mr. Silchester, and so will start at once by saying that I cannot be wholly. This is, I say it advisedly, the biggest and,” he paused as though reckoning, “yes, the most curiously and many-facetedly dangerous thing I have ever been on.”
That second part of the description, I own, made my rising curiosity begin to yield before the cautious sense of letting sleeping snakes sleep on.
He continued, though, “But one thing we can be open about. It is the point on which you can help me. It is the reason why I came to ask your aid. There is a man somewhere in this quarter of the world that a few men who are respected or to be reckoned with in most quarters of the world—and for whom I am working on this assignment—want above everyone else to be able to contact. And the last man to see and talk with that man was, Mr. Silchester, you. Do you know, and if so, will you trust me with the information as to where a Mr. Intil may be?”
I couldn’t help feeling a certain trust in the old fellow. With that trust there sprang up, too, a sudden revived interest in that queer little broken-off piece of a case. For answer, then, I stretched over to my filing cabinet, took out the slip I’d looked up a few weeks before, and placed it on my desk in front of Mr. Mycroft.
“Clue found,” mused the old sleuth.
I told him the story frankly, though I was a bit nervous as to what he’d think of the Miss Brown incident.
His reply, “Neat, very neat. And we’d all do better if we used the subconscious more,” pleased me. “I wonder whether I would have pounced on that clue without a collaborator?” he added. “Some time, if you would be so good, I’d be obliged if you would introduce an old-fashioned reasoner to one who has evidently made flair really follow a special scent.
“And now to our muttons. There is one thing I may and indeed must tell you about Mr. Intil. You two collaborators were right in sensing something of more than routine interest in him; and what you have told me puts me greatly in your debt. It falls into place: we are a step on. Briefly, as you may well have guessed, though Intil may be more than a little mad and—well, I’ll leave my further suppositions for the present—he is on the track of something big. Perhaps I should be more exact and give you a better sense, too, of the bigness of his quarry if I say he has tracked, I believe, someone who has a trail leading to something beside which pirate gold is nursery stuff. Now that’s all I ought to say. To repeat your quotation from Miss Brown, ‘One can easily know too much to find out more.’ But I want to be quite definite as far as we have gone. I am asking you, Mr. Silchester, to come in with me on this hunt.”
He saw my hesitation. “Frankly, I need your help. You have met Intil and you could point him out. I don’t think he suspects you. I do think he suspects me—or that someone from my clients is after him. He is one of those who prefer business by mail and no personal contacts with those who might surmise the full nature of that which he believes he has to sell.”
I was still humming when he added, “Honestly, I would not have asked your help before you became what you are now, a trained researcher, and, of course, neither would you have accepted.” (Oh, that frank, sensible, kindly flattery!) “Besides, and another of course, as we are both professional men I can speak openly to you. Secretive men are not unseldom trustworthy. I don’t want to make one unnecessary mystification. I want to tell you that our game is not only dangerous. It is dangerous enough, no doubt, but it is far more valuable than it is risky. As I have said, and said advisedly, it is a treasure hunt, and a treasure hunt beside which Potosi silver, Inca gold, and Eldorado itself, all rolled into one, would be so much waste-product.”
Even when I had mistrusted Mr. Mycroft I had to own that he was highly accurate. This must be a serious proposition and, equally, it must be a very big one. My old caution still retracted me.
“Why me?” I questioned. “You want a bloodhound, not a truffle-hound, for your job.”
He smiled, “I’ll do the heavy old dog on the trail if you will play the dog that smells the hidden root. We’ll need both types, I believe.”
“My work …” I was putting up my last defense. I felt the humor of it, I who had idled nearly the whole of my life. But leaving my office was leaving now my home and my hobby—and my livelihood.
“If this search reaches its goal you won’t have to think too much about costs. I’m making you a straight offer. I am a businessman and have made businesslike arrangements with my clients. Money is really no matter to them—nor need it be. I am prepared to offer you one-third of the fee that I am promised. I am not being quixotic in this. It is one of such a size that it does not mean much to a man of my age.”
I knew there was really little use opposing Mr. Mycroft once he wanted a thing. I realized also that he made ample provision for whomever he employed. Business was, I knew also, just now none too brisk with me. Of course I yielded.
As he left he remarked, “May we meet tomorrow morning? I have a few preliminary inquiries to make and then we can start on our hunt.”
“But,” I said, “I have no idea where Intil is. I have seen him only once—months ago, and then he literally fled.”
“Oh,” replied Mr. Mycroft, “it is not quite so blind a chase as that. I have more than a suspicion along what track our man is moving and so where we may hope to catch a glimpse of him if we can recognize him when he passes. That is where you can yield your first important service. And these facts rule our rendezvous. You know the little Church of the Angels after which this amazing but not specifically angelic town takes its name?”
“The little old building by the square?”
“Very well; be in there at ten-thirty tomorrow morning. And now, if there is a back way out of your office, it would be no harm if I took it. Blessed are the inconspicuous, for they shall not be asked why they were where they were.”
I showed him how he could get to the back of the quiet block in which my small office stood, and I had hardly finished pointing out the way before he was gone.
At ten-thirty the next morning—I was always punctual even when leisured—I slipped into the shabby little church. Dark and poor inside, it was an excellent meeting place. A few Mexicans were at their prayers. Every now and then someone looked in but, finding nothing to see, went out. It positively smelled commonplace and unsuspicious. When my eyes were used to the rather dismal dusk—from the glare outside—I found myself a seat and after a few mi
nutes someone sat down beside me.
“When I leave here,” said a whisper which just reached my ear, “don’t follow for two minutes. Then go to the stone seat at the other side of the square. As you approach it you will see a man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and big sun-glasses move off, going toward the city’s center. Don’t come up with him—follow him till he goes into a drugstore. Go in and take a seat near the window. Immediately opposite the drugstore is a shop with scientific instruments in it. Keep your eye on that. It is a big shop and plenty of people go into it. Should you see Mr. I., put your hand up to the back of your coat collar as though you were adjusting it. Then go back to your office and I’ll call you.”
That became my drill for some days. I never sighted Intil, though I watched until my neck had a crick in it from looking sideways. After some two hours Mr. Mycroft would walk out and I would follow at a respectful distance. After the first day, the first and second acts were omitted, the meeting in the church and the trailing from the square, but the watch in the drugstore seemed all the longer for that. I forget how many times we had gone through this ritual—I up in the window and Mr. Mycroft, in true spider fashion watching his web in the background, when on getting off duty and meeting in my office I asked him why he thought that Intil would ever turn up and, if so, why at that spot and time.
“It’s a guess-deduction,” he said, “like most detection. But part of the reasoning is evident enough. I don’t want to irritate you as I used. I know you have sharpened your powers of observation. But you have not as yet given them a cutting edge in the direction of criminal detection. So have patience with me. I believe we are right over the hole our big fish will visit and one day he’ll slip along about the hour of our vigil.”
His assurance kept me going, especially when, at the end of the first fortnight, I think it was, as we met in my office after the usual blank watch, Mr. Mycroft produced a check—quite a surprisingly large one. He did the whole thing in that quick, businesslike way which makes one feel one isn’t just being paid. Here, anyhow, were results. He must think, and those who employed him, whoever they were, that there was a big fish to be landed, if they were so generous with the ground-bait.
Then one day while I was scanning in a routine way the customers going in and out of the store opposite my coffee-bar coign, I saw a man coming out carrying a largish case. He was dressed in leather jerkin, “blue jeans,” and cactus boots, and under his big hat I thought I saw even a bit of whisker on his face. It was the typical turn-out of the High Sierra hiker, a uniform without which nowadays an ordinary businessman would no sooner go calling on the Desert and the Mountains than a New Yorker would be married without wearing a high hat. The man turned quickly down the street, and then something about his walk—I put my hand to the back of my collar and saw, in the glass facing me, Mr. Mycroft move quickly out of the door and across the street. For a moment I watched the two wide-brimmed hats, drawing closer together in the street crowd. Then a streetcar came between and both were lost.
I went back to my office and waited. Finally I did a little routine work. I had already told my typist secretary, whose efficiency was disguised under an appearance made up to establish the right to be called Miss Delamere, that she needn’t wait. I had myself decided to stay on only another half-hour. Then Mr. Mycroft walked in. He looked pretty tired, I thought.
“We’ve got him and lost him,” were his first words. “You were right, I’m sure. That was the man we want, Intil. And we’ll get him yet. But he’s left town.”
“Then how do you expect to get him?” I asked, perhaps a little irritated. “This is a very big country, Mr. Mycroft and, hereabouts, an empty one.”
“That is why,” he replied, “trailing will be easier.”
“But he could hide out anywhere for, literally, a thousand miles.”
My acquaintance with the huge Southwest, though slight, made me feel that I must impress my superior knowledge on a fellow countryman who, as it were, had maybe only just stepped out from the close, inch-measured confinements of our native isle.
“That man of ours,” said the old fellow, “isn’t hiding out. He’s going to a hiding place, maybe, but not to hide himself. All right, I’ll give you some proof to go on. Why did we watch that instrument store all these days and why for just those hours? Have you ever heard of the Etvos Balance? It was the first and father of a number of superfine detectors. There are the electromagnetic detectors which are so sensitive to electric currents that they can record an addition to the general earth-current when they are above streams, above water running at great depths, water which is showing that it is in touch with ore because a current is being so given off. There are the gravimetric detectors which will show the presence of a mass of ore or a coal seam a thousand and more feet down, by the slight change in the gravitation-field made by the buried mass which weighs a little more—or less—than the main mass of rock around it.”
I hadn’t heard of these super-gadgets and didn’t very much want to. To hurry on the story, I asked, “Granted that Intil was buying one of these, why should he not get it at any hour of the day?” “That’s why,” said my old dominie, the “step-by-step” and “you mustn’t be in a hurry” lecturer coming back on him, “that is why you must first understand the nature of these new detectors. Some people think that instruments supersede men. That is just the reverse of the truth. The finer the instrument, the more skilled must be the user. Indeed, some of these machines are almost human in their delicacy and intuitive power. Some are too sensitive, like great scholars, to work save at night; and one of these superfine gravimetric instruments has actually taken its own initiative in discovery and found things which we had never asked it to find, for we never knew they were to be found.”
“Yes, yes,” I said. “But what about Intil?”
He chuckled. “We have time, Mr. Silchester. Let an old man refresh and unbend his mind by glorifying his profession. ‘What a piece of work is man.’ I have had so often to look at him misusing his gifts and all toiled and snarled because he let the net of his own cunning (a noble word once) wrap him round. Let me stretch up my mind and give thanks for an intelligence which is so clean and clear and lovely in its instruments.”
The outburst did touch me. After all, the real detective, I realized, how often he must despair as to whether in all this coil and riddle, cross-hatched and double-crossed, there can be any sense, any drift, any goal.
“I see you relent. Will you go a step further? Will you be British with me and have some real China tea?” He drew from his pocket a small pouch. “I carry always a little Ichang with me. Tri-methylxanthine—that is the tonic for detective minds. Alcohol for obvious action; caffeine for common council; theine for thought.”
I boiled some water and soon we were more at our ease than any other drink can make the high-strung.
As he sipped his cup Mr. Mycroft went on, “You’ll see quite soon why all this has to do with Intil and why we can, in consequence, let him have a little rope. As I’ve said, there’s an instrument so sensitive that it has discovered something about which we only know that this instrument records it! So superfine that it will only work at night (seeking the nights screening out of the day’s magnetic disturbances), it won’t work even all night. In the middle, generally somewhere about the witching hour of one A.M. it just gives a series of, at present, indecipherable signals. Why? We don’t know. All we can think is that at that hour in the unseen world around us, some force or tide goes by. This may be a wave from the new ocean of discovery, breaking on the narrow, land-locked beaches of our senses. Its bearing on Intil and us”—I own I looked my relief over my cup—“is that such instruments, I need hardly tell you after that, have to be learnt. Beside some of them a violin is obvious.
“Salesmanship in this department has to be scholarship. In brief, that instrument store, as you must have gathered, stocks all geological prospecting instruments. This great state of California is a state founded on mi
nerals, from gold to oil. The ordinary gear can be sold straight away without directions. But the latest scientific instruments must be demonstrated. When I came here to track Intil, the first thing I did, of course, was to find the first and finest geological detector instrument store. I discovered that they had had an inquiry for a very peculiar instrument, one which has only of late been on the geological market, a detector specifically for radioactive ores. Fortunately, they had not as yet received one from the scientific instrument manufacturers. But they had that week received an advice, from what is here called the East, that it was about to be dispatched. At the same time I discovered, to my relief on your behalf, that the only man who could demonstrate the finest instruments they stocked attended only for a couple of hours every morning. They pay him to be on duty for a few ‘advanced’ customers who will want this advanced stuff. His own principal job is in a natural history museum.
“I was therefore as certain as I needed to be that Intil would go to that shop at that hour. He did; he took delivery of the instrument and had it demonstrated to him the day we saw him. Further, I trailed him to the railway depot, saw him take ticket and where to, and that he did get on the train. Then I went back to the instrument store and had a friendly word with the manager, who asked me to call in three days’ time, for he hoped to have another example of the ‘balance’ in stock by then. It was kind of him to wish to show me the instrument, but I had to say that I’d have to come in later. For in three days’ time you and I, Mr. Silchester, should leave the city behind. With your leave, we are bound for the wilderness—the trackless desert.”
“To find a man when you only know the station he’s getting off at, or, maybe, only changing trains?” I protested.
“No, no, I have my clues and have made some plans. Will you come?”
I felt none too sure, but I did say yes and we parted.
Chapter III
“The train doesn’t go till two P.M.,” said Mr. Mycroft as he came into my office when I was cleaning up things preparatory, as he warned me, to perhaps a fortnight’s absence. “But we have some shopping to do. And do you mind if I still behave with a certain secrecy? Do you mind putting yourself in my hands to that degree—so as not to ask questions?”
