He held it out to me, between his finger and thumb.
“I found it lying on the deck here,” he explained. “A mercy it was not trodden on. I’m thankful much, for I prize it ver’ much.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Aglae,” I said, and hid the smile his tricky little foreign flavor of speech rose in me. As a matter of fact, if what I’ve heard is correct, the man is Scotch, bred and born and reared. It shows what even a Scotchman can come down to!
After he had gone, with one of his dinky little bows, I overhauled the hen-coop; but in a casual sort of way, so that no one, looking on, could suspect I was doing more than making one of my usual bi-daily visits to my chuck-chucks, and feeding them with bread-crumbs.
If I had not read the cypher message, I should certainly not have discovered the marks that Mr. Aglae had made on the coop; they were merely three small dots in a triangle, like this . . ., with a tiny 17 in the centre. The thing had just been jotted down on one of the legs of the coop with a piece of sharp-pointed chalk, and it could have been covered with a ha’penny.
I grinned to myself and went to the carpenter’s shop for a piece of chalk. I made Chips sharpen it to a fine point with a chisel; then I put it in my pocket and continued my afternoon stroll round the decks.
I wanted first to place Mr. Aglae; for it would spoil part of the amusingness of my plot, if he were on the spy, and saw what I was going to do. I found him away aft, in the upper-deck smoke-room, reading Le Petit Journal, and looking most subtly foreign and most convincingly innocent.
“You little devil!” I thought; and went right away to the well-deck. Here, in an unobtrusive way, I copied Mr. Aglae’s private signature faithfully onto the hen-coop above the one in which I was carrying my brother’s black ring-necks. The coop was occupied for the voyage by the bulk of Mr. Brown’s confounded pigeons, which, I had insisted, must not be brought again into the saloon.
After I had re-duplicated the mark, I lifted out four of my ring-necks from the bottom coop, and put them into the top one, among Mr. Brown’s pigeons. My argument was that, when the searchers boarded us with the pilot, they would find both these coops marked, and both with hens in them, and would act accordingly. They would have to open the upper coop to remove the four hens, and there would be a general exodus of Mr. Brown’s pigeons, which would redouble the confusion and general glad devilment of my little plot.
Mr. Brown would be enormously angry and enormously vociferous. I could picture him thundering: “I have never heard of such a thing! Confound you, Sir! I shall write to The Times about this.”
And then, it seemed to me, Number 17 would have to come and make some kind of semi-public explanation, of what he could never properly explain; and ever after his value as a diamond spy would be decreased something like 25 per cent; for quite a lot of people aboard (maybe some of them in the diamond-running business) would be able to get a good, square look at the famous Number 17, and for all time afterwards, in whatever way he might try to veil his charming personality, he would run chances of being recognised at some awkward and premature moment; at least, from his point of view!
But, of course, at first, Mr. Aglae (Number 17) would be only partly involved in any cheerful little net of difficulties. He would know, all the time, that these curious complications were only trifling; for had he not made the greatest capture of years. Let Mr. Brown be apologised to; even compensated, if such compensation were legally his right. The great thing would be to reduce the black ring-necks to poultry, as speedily as possible, and then to pick his triumph from their gizzards!
I wriggled quietly with pleasure, as I saw it all. And then the official appraiser’s brief explanation to the Chief; and the salty flavour of the Chief’s explanation to Number 17, that there was no law against a sea-Captain feeding his pet hens with bits of glass, cut or otherwise, for the improvement, or otherwise, of their digestions.
Then there would be the replacing of my five dozen ring-necks, or their equivalent in good, honest dollars, treasury dollars, I presume. I calculated rapidly that even as the prestige of Number 17 must come down, so the price of my hens should as infallibly go up.
I snicked the lesser door of the upper coop shut, and watched my four hens and Mr. Brown’s pigeons. The hens clucked, and walked odd paces in the dignified and uncertain fashion affected by all hens of a laying age. The pigeons fluttered a bit, and then resumed their wonted cooing; and after that, all was comfortable in that ark; for the hens discovered pigeon-food to be very good hen-food also, and set to work earnestly to fill the unfillable.
* * * *
The searchers came aboard with the pilot, and after the usual preliminaries, my presence was requested at the opening of the hen-coop. I noticed that Mr. Aglae was still in the upper smoke-room as I passed, and there he appeared intent to stay. I admired his judgment.
The officials gathered on the well-deck, and the Chief explained that they had received certain information which they were acting upon; and asked me formally whether I had any diamonds to declare.
“I’m sorry to say that I’ve left my diamond investments at home this trip, Mister,” I said. “I’ve nothing I’m setting out to declare, except you’ve been put on to some mare’s nest!”
“We happen to think otherwise, Cap’n,” he said. “I’ve given you your chance, and you’ve chucked it. Now you’ve got to take what’s coming to you!”
He turned to one of his men.
“Open the lower coop, Ellis,” he told him. “Rake out those chickens. Hand ’em over to the poulterer.”
As each chicken was taken out it was handed to the poulterer, and the man killed it then and there. My little plan was making things unfortunate, of course, for my brother’s ring-necks; but, after all, they were fulfilling their name, and I felt that, eventually, I should have nothing personally to grumble about.
But, in spite of this pleasant inward feeling, I protested formally and vigourously against the whole business, and pointed out that someone would have to pay, and keep on paying, for an “outrage” (as I called it) of this kind.
The Chief merely shrugged his shoulders, and told the man to rake out the four hens from the upper coop. The man reached in his hand through the trap; but, of course, the hens sidestepped him in a dignified fashion. Then the man grew a little wrathy, and whipped down the whole front of the coop, and plunged in, head and shoulders, to get them.
Instantly, what I had planned, happened. There was a multitudinous, harsh, dry whisper of a hundred pairs of wings; and then, hey! the air was white with pigeons. The man backed out of the coop, with a couple of my ring-necks in each hairy fist; and met the blast of his superior’s wrath—
“You clumsy goat!” snarled the Chief— “What—” And then the second thing that I had foreseen, occurred—
“Confound you, Sir!” yelled Mr. Brown, dashing in among us, breathless. “Confound you! Confound you! You’ve loosed all my pigeons! What the blazes does this mean! What the blazes….”
“You may well ask, Sir, what it means,” I answered. “I think these officials have gone mad!”
But Mr. Brown was already, to all appearances, quite oblivious of any one or anything, except his beloved pigeons.
He had lugged out a big gold watch and a notebook, and was making frantic efforts to achieve a lightning-like series of time-notes, staring up with a crick in his neck, trying crazily to identify the directions taken by various of his more particular birds.
He had, of course, to give it up almost at once, for already the bulk of the birds had made their preliminary circles, and were now shooting away for the coast, at various angles.
Then Mr. Brown proved himself more of a man than I had hitherto supposed possible in one who flew pigeons. He attained a height of denunciatory eloquence, which not only brought most of the first-class passengers to the spot; but caused a number, even of the married women, to withdraw hastily.
The Chief made several attempts to pacify him; but it was useless, a
nd he made dumb-show then to the poulterer to set about opening up my brother’s five dozen ring-necks, which that man did with admirable skill, until the well-deck looked like a slaughter house. And still Mr. Brown continued to express himself.
At last the Chief sent a messenger, and (evidently much against his will) Mr. Aglae had to come and explain.
Mr. Brown ceased to denunciate for a moment, while Mr. Aglae explained, and the passengers crowded nearer, until the Chief asked me to tell them to retire. But I shrugged my shoulders. It fell in well with my plans for the spy’s flattening, to have as many witnesses as possible.
“I never marked your coop, Sir,” said Number 17, warmly. “It was the Captain’s coop of hens that I marked….”
“Rubbish!” interpolated the Chief; “here’s your mark on both coops!”
It struck me, in that moment, that possibly the Chief would not be sorry to weaken Number 17’s position; for that man may have been climbing the promotion-ladder a little too rapidly for the Chief’s piece of mind, though I knew the Chief would not dare to say much, in case the capture proved as important as Number 17 had described it to be.
I never saw a man look so bewildered as the spy when he saw that both coops were marked. Then he turned and looked straight at me; but I gave him a good healthy back-stare.
“So,” I said aloud, for everyone to hear, “you’re a beastly spy? I don’t wonder I’ve felt crawly every time you’ve passed me this trip!”
The little man glared at me, and I thought he was going to lose control, and come for me; but at that moment Mr. Brown, having rested, began again.
During the fluent period that followed, the poulterer worked stolidly and quickly and I saw that he was resurrecting quite a number of my cut-glass ornaments.
They had brought out the official appraiser with them, so important had they considered the case, from Number 17’s message; and that man, breaking himself from the charmed circle of Mr. Brown’s listeners, walked over to the poulterer, and began to examine the “diamonds.”
I watched him, quietly, and saw him test the first one carefully; then frown, and pick up another. At the end of five minutes, both he and the poulterer finished their work almost simultaneously; and I saw the appraiser throw down the last of the “diamonds” contemptuously on to the hatch.
“Mr. Franks,” he called aloud, to the Chief, “I have to report that there is not a single diamond in the crops of these—er—poultry. There are a large number of pieces of cut-glass, such as can be bought for ten cents a dozen; but no diamonds. I imagine our Mr. Aglae has made a thumper for once.”
I grinned, as I realised that Number 17 was not loved, even by the appraiser. But I laughed outright, when I looked from the Chief’s face to Number 17’s, and then back again.
Mr. Brown had halted spasmodically, in his fiftieth explanation of the remarkable and unprintable letter that he meant to write to The Times, on the subject of his outrage. And now he commenced again, but, by mutual consent, everyone moved away sufficiently far to hear themselves speak; and there and then the Chief said quite some of the things he was thinking, and feeling, about Number 17’s “capture.”
Number 17 said not a word. He looked stunned. Abruptly, a light came into his eyes, and he threw up his hand, to silence the Chief.
“Good Lord, Sir!” he said, in a high, cracking voice of complete comprehension. “The pigeons! The pigeons! We’ve been done brown. The hens were a blind, worked off on me to keep me from smelling the pigeon pie. Carrier pigeons, Sir! What a fool I’ve been!”
I explained that he had no right to make such a libellous and unfounded statement, and Mr. Brown’s proposed letter to The Times grew in length and vehemence. Eventually, Mr. Aglae had to apologise as publicly as he had slandered both Mr. Brown and me. But that did not prevent us from presenting our bills for compensation for damage done. And what is more, both of us got paid our own figure; for neither the Treasury, nor its officers, were eager for the further publicity which would have inevitably accompanied the fighting of our “bills of costs.”
* * * *
It was, maybe, a week later, that Mr. Brown and I had dinner together.
“Pigeons—” said Mr. Brown, meditatively—” I like ’em best with a neat little packet of diamonds fixed under their feathers.”
“Same here!” I said, smiling reminiscently. I filled my glass.
“Pigeons!” I said.
“Pigeons!” said Mr. Brown, raising his glass.
And we drank.
The Red Herring
S.S. Calypso,
August 10.
We docked this morning, and the Customs gave us
the very devil of a turn-out; but they found nothing.
“We shall get you one of these days, Captain Gault,” the head of the searchers told me. “We’ve gone through you pretty carefully; but I’m not satisfied. We’ve had information that I could swear was sound, but where you’ve hidden the stuff, I’ll confess, stumps me out.”
“Don’t be so infernally ready to give the dog the bad name, and then add insult to injury by trying to hang him,” I said. “You know you’ve never yet caught me trying to shove stuff through.”
The head searcher laughed.
“Don’t rub it in, Captain,” he said. “That’s just it! Take that last little flutter of yours, with the pigeons, and the way you made money both ways, both on the hens and on the diamonds; and all the rest of your devil’s tricks. You’ve got the nerve! You ought to be able to retire by now!”
“I’m afraid I’m neither so fortunate nor so clever as you seem to think, Mr. Anderson,” I told him. “You had no right to kill my hens, and I made your man apologise for his abominable suggestion about the pigeons!”
“You did so, Cap’n,” he said. “But we’ll get you yet. And I’ll eat my hat if you get a thing through the gates this time, even if we’ve missed finding it now. We’re bound to get you at last. Good morning, Captain!”
“Good morning, Mr. Anderson!” I said. And he went ashore.
There you have the position. I’ve got £6000 worth of pearls in a remarkable little hiding-place of my own aboard; and somehow word has been passed to the Customs, and it’s going to make the getting of them ashore a deuced difficult thing, that will take some planning. All my old methods, they’re up to. Besides, I never try the same plan twice, if I can help it; for it is altogether too risky.
And a lot of them are not so practicable as they appear at first. That carrier pigeon idea, for instance, was both good and bad; but Mr. Brown and I lost nearly a thousand pounds’ worth of stones through it; for there’s a class of oaf with a gun who would shoot his own mother-in-law if she passed him on wings. Perhaps he’d not be really to blame in such circumstances; but he is certainly to blame when he looses off at a “carrier.” Any shooting man should be able to recognise them from the common or garden variety. But I fancy the aforementioned oaf does the recognising cheerfully, and shoots promptly. Some of these gentlemen must have made a haul! That was why we never loosed the pigeons before reaching port. We never meant to trust all that value in the air, except as a last resort.
Anyway, Mr. Anderson and his lot have got it in for me; and I shall have a job to get the stuff safely into the right hands by the 20th, which is the date we sail.
August 11.
I have hit on what I believe is rather a smart notion, and I began to develop it today.
When I went up to the dock gates this morning, with my bag, I was met by a very courteous and superior person of the Customs Department, who invited me to step into his office. Here, I was again invited into quite a snug little cubicle, and there two searchers made a very thorough examination of me (very thorough indeed!), also of my bag; but, as you may imagine, there was nothing dutiable within a hundred yards of me—that is, nothing of mine.
At the conclusion of the search, after the superior and affable personage had departed, pleasingly apologetic, I was left to acquire clothing and me
ntal equilibrium in almost equal quantities, for I can tell you I was a bit wrathy. And then—perhaps it was just because my mental pot was so a-boil—up simmered the idea; and I began straight away on the aforementioned developing.
By the time that I had completed my dressing, I had learned not only that the names of the two official searchers were Wentlock and Ewiss, but also the numbers of their respective families, and other pleasing details. I dispensed tact and bonhomie with liberality, and eventually suggested an adjournment to the place across the road, for a drink.
But my two new (very new) friends shook their heads at this. The “boss” might see them. It would not do. I nodded a complete comprehension. Would they be off duty tonight? They would, at 6:30 prompt.
“Meet me at the corner at seven o’clock,” I said. “I’ve nothing to do and no one to talk to. We’ll make an evening of it.”
They smiled cheerfully and expansively, and agreed—well, as only such people do agree!
August 18.
The dinner came off, and was in every way a success, both from their point and my point of view. And I think I may say the same of the two dinners that followed on the 15th and the 17th. That was yesterday.
It is now the evening of the 18th, and I’m jotting down what happened, in due order.
It was last night, at our third little dinner together (which for a change I had aboard), that we got really friendly over some of my liqueur whisky. And I saw the chance had come to ask them straight out if they were open to make a fiver each.
The two men looked at each other for a few moments without speaking.
“Well, Sir, it all depends,” said Wentock, the older of the two.
“On what?” I asked.
“We’ve our place to think of,” he said. “It’s no use asking us to risk anything, if that’s what you mean, Sir.”
“There’s no risk at all,” I told him. “At least, I mean the risk is so infinitesimal as hardly to count at all. What I want you to do is simply this. Tonight, if you agree, I’ll hand you over this bag I’ve got here with me. Take it down to the gates tomorrow, and put it somewhere handy in the office. When I come off from the ship, to come ashore through the gates, I shall be carrying another bag, exactly the same as this in every detail. You see, I’ve got two of them, made exactly alike.
Boats of the Glen Carrig and Other Nautical Adventures Page 31
