end.
“My dear chap, are you going into training for a match with that Sir Ralph What’s-his-name of whom Miss Renfrew spoke?” he wheezed when he finally overtook him. “You long, lean beggars are the very old boy for covering the ground. But wait until you get to be my age, by James!”
“Perhaps I shan’t. Perhaps they won’t let me!” threw back Cleek, in a voice curiously blurred, as if he spoke with his teeth hard shut. “Donkeys do die, you know—that little bit of tommyrot about the absence of their dead bodies to the contrary.”
“Meaning what, old chap?”
“That I’ve been as big an ass as any of the thistle-eating kind that ever walked. Gad! such an indiscretion! Such an example of pure brainlessness! And the worst of it is that it’s all due to my own wretched vanity—my own miserable weakness for the theatrical and the spectacular! It came to me suddenly—while I was standing there explaining things to Miss Renfrew—and I could have kicked myself for my folly.”
“Folly? What folly?”
“‘What folly?’ What? Good heavens, man, use your wits! Isn’t it enough for me to be a blockhead without you entering the lists along with me?” said Cleek, irritably. “Or, no! Forgive that, dear friend. My nerves were speaking, not my heart. But in moments like this—when we had built a safe bridge, and my own stupidity has hacked it down—Faugh! I tell you I could kick myself. Didn’t you hear? Didn’t you see?”
“I saw that for some special reason you were suddenly obsessed with a desire to get out of the house in the midst of your talking with Miss Renfrew, if that’s what you refer to—is it?”
“Not altogether. It’s part of it, however. But not the worst part, unfortunately. It was at that moment then the recollection of my indiscretion came to me and I realized what a dolt I had been—how completely I had destroyed our splendid security, wrecked what little still remains of this glorious holiday—when I couldn’t let ‘George Headland’ have the centre of the stage, but needs must come in like the hero of a melodrama and announce myself as Cleek. To Nosworth and his wife! To Nippers! To all that gaping crowd! You remember that incident, surely?”
“Yes. Of course I do. But what of it?”
“What of it? Man alive, with a chap like that Nippers, how long do you suppose it will remain a secret that Cleek is in Yorkshire? In the West Riding of it? In this particular locality? Travelling about with Mr. Maverick Narkom in a caravan—a caravan that can’t cover five miles of country in the time a train or a motor car is able to get over fifty!”
“Good lud! I never thought of that. But wait a bit. There’s a way to overcome that difficulty, of course. Stop here a minute or two and I’ll run back and pledge that Nippers fool to keep his mouth shut about it. He’ll give me his promise, I know.”
“To be sure he will. But how long do you suppose he will keep it? How long do you suppose that an empty-headed, gabbling old fool like that fellow will refrain from increasing his own importance in the neighbourhood by swaggering about and boasting of his intimacy with the powers at Scotland Yard and—the rest of it? And even if he shouldn’t, what about the others? The gathering of rustics that heard what he heard? The gamekeepers from the Droger estate? The Nosworths, as well as they? Can their mouths, too, be shut? They will not love me for this night’s business, be sure. Then, too, they have lived in Paris. The woman is French by birth. Of Montmartre—of the Apache class, the Apache kind—and she will know of the ‘Cracksman,’ be assured. So will her husband. And they won’t take their medicine lying down, believe me. An accused man has the right to communicate with counsel, remember; and a wire up to London will cost less than a shilling. So, as between Margot’s crew and our friend Count Waldemar—la, la! There you are.”
Mr. Narkom screwed up his face and said something under his breath. He could not but follow this line of reasoning when the thing was put before him so plainly.
“And we had been so free from all worry over the beggars up to this!” he said, savagely. “But to get a hint—to pick up the scent—out here—in a wild bit of country like this! Cinnamon, it makes me sweat! What do you propose to do?”
“The only thing that’s left us to do,” gave back Cleek. “Get out of it as quickly as possible and draw a red herring over the scent. In other words, put back to Dollops, abandon the caravan, make our way to some place where it is possible to telephone for the chap we hired it from to send out and get it; then, to make tracks for home.”
“Yes, but why bother about telephoning, old chap? Why can’t we drop in ourselves and tell the man when we get back to Sheffield on our way to London?”
“Because we are not going back to Sheffield, my friend—not going in for anything so silly as twice travelling over the same ground, if it’s all the same to you,” replied Cleek, as he swung off from the highway on to the dark, still moor and struck out for the place where they had left Dollops and the caravan. “At best, we can’t be more than thirty miles from the boundary line of Cumberland. A night’s walking will cover that. There we can rest a while—at some little out-of-the-way hostelry—then take a train over the Scottish border and make for Dumfries. From that point on, the game is easy. There are six trains a day leaving for St. Pancras and eight for Euston. We can choose which we like, and a seven hours’ ride will land us in London without having once ‘doubled on our tracks’ or crossed the route by which we came out of it.”
“By James! what a ripping idea,” said Mr. Narkom approvingly. “Come along then, old chap—let’s get back to the boy and be about it as soon as possible.” Then he threw open his coat and waistcoat to get the full benefit of the air before facing the ordeal, and, falling into step with Cleek, struck out over the moor at so brisk a dog trot that his short, fat legs seemed fairly to twinkle.
CHAPTER XI
By the side of the little chattering stream that flowed through the bit of woodland where Mr. Nippers and his associates had come upon them, they found Dollops, with his legs drawn up, his arms folded across his knees and his forehead resting upon them, sleeping serenely over the embers of a burnt-out fire. He was still “making music,” but of a kind which needed no assistance from a mouth harmonica to produce it.
They awoke him and told him of the sudden change in the programme and of the need for haste in carrying it out.
“Oh, so help me! Them Apaches, eh? And that foreign josser, Count What’s-his-name, too?” said he, rubbing his eyes and blinking sleepily. “Right you are, guv’ner! Gimme two seconds to get the cobwebs out of my thinking-box and I’m ready to face marching orders as soon as you like. My hat! though, but this is a startler. I can understand wot them Apache johnnies has got against you, sir, of course; but wot that Mauravanian biscuit is getting after you for beats me. Wot did you ever do to the blighter, guv’ner? Trip him up in some little bit of crooked business, sir, and ‘did him down,’ as the ’Mericans say?”
“Something like that,” returned Cleek. “Don’t waste time in talking. Simply get together such things as we shall need and let us be off about our business as soon as possible.”
Dollops obeyed instructions upon both points—obeyed them, indeed, with such alacrity that he shut up like an oyster forthwith, dived into the caravan and bounced out again, and within five minutes of the time he had been told of the necessity
