Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 11
That left only the people at Heather Lodge; and here Colin felt he was on the right track. The Dinnets, without saying much, had managed to convey the impression that some of the Heather Lodge lot were not to their taste. Well, if what he had seen to-night was a specimen, the Dinnets were fully justified. No wonder they didn’t like that type.
Colin’s reasoning took him a step further in the elimination. The man he had glimpsed could hardly be Arthur Arrow himself. Arrow, if he was an acquaintance of Craigmore’s, must be a gentleman. Craigmore would never associate with an obvious “tough” of the most brutal type. That excluded Arrow from the list; and the only remaining “possibles” were the three hangers-on at Heather Lodge. It must be one of them.
At this point Colin found himself floundering among problems to which he could find no solutions. If this fellow was one of the Heather Lodge brigade, what took him abroad long after midnight? Ruffa was hardly the place for late evening calls, Colin reflected whimsically. The only places the man could have visited were Wester Voe and Northfleet’s shieling. Considering the Dinnets’ views, a visit to them was improbable; and the shieling, Colin had gathered, was on the other side of Ruffa, away from the bay. If the man had been at the shieling and had got hurt on the way back to Heather Lodge he would never have come near the lupin field.
“Perhaps he saw the lights on here and was sneaking round the place, spying on us,” Colin mused, none too amiably. “I don’t see how else he could have got to where he was.”
It seemed possible, but not very probable at that hour of the morning.
Then another question suggested itself to Colin. If this was one of the Heather Lodge lot, how had he managed to blunder into trouble? Ruffa was hardly more than an islet. A man who had lived on it for any length of time ought to know it like the palm of his hand—quite well enough, at least, to keep clear of dangerous ground even in the dark. And yet it looked as though the fellow had fallen over some drop among the rocks. It would take a fair amount to knock out a tough of that type. His head was bleeding, too; and that looked as though he’d had a bad smash.
That brought Colin up against a further mystery. From what he had seen of the man, he had got the impression that the fellow was pretty far through—completely done up. And yet, within a few minutes, he must have pulled himself together and done a very smart bit of crawling if he got far enough away to evade Colin’s search. That seemed the fishiest part of the business to Colin. Why should an injured man creep away into the darkness when he knew that help was coming?
At the back of Colin’s mind the affair was beginning to take on an unpleasant aspect. For one thing, there was Jean to be considered. Of course he would always be about with her if she roamed over the island. There was nothing in it, really, he assured himself. Still, he had a very distinct feeling that neighbours of this kind were hardly what he would hove chosen on the strength of their looks. A fellow like the one he had seen wasn’t the kind who would stick at much. And the mere look of him would give Jean the creeps. She was a nervous girl in some ways.
“Nuisance, having a crew of that sort on the island,” he reflected uncomfortably, before dismissing the matter from his mind.
As he shifted in his chair, something pressed against his side; and he suddenly remembered the piece of metal which he had picked up when hunting for the tumbler. It had slipped from his memory until that moment. He put his hand into his pocket and pulled it out—a roughly rectangular block of some material which looked like phosphor-bronze.
Colin stared at it for some seconds, completely at a loss to know what to make of it. It had evidently been crudely cast, and he turned it over to see if it bore any inscription. There was nothing of the sort on the surface; it seemed to be just a block of metal.
“It must be lead by the weight,” Colin inferred, as he mechanically hefted it. “But what the deuce is it gold-plated for?”
Then a grin twisted his mouth as a ludicrous notion shot into his mind.
“It’s a gold brick, by Jove!” he ejaculated in amusement at his own jest. “That poor bloke must have been hurrying across hot-foot to sell me it, as soon as he heard the innocents had arrived in town—in such a flurry that he tripped over his own feet on the way. Must be a devil of a competition in the trade, here on Ruffa, if he was in such a sweat to get in first. Moderate-minded cove, too, one’d think, if he was offering a thing of this size. The usual gold brick’s as big as a bar of soap, they say. Evidently he didn’t want to try us too high.”
Much entertained by his simple conceit, he sat turning the little block over and over in his hands; and as he did so he grew more puzzled by the nature of the thing. For what honest purpose could one gold-plate a lump of lead? And the skin of the thing certainly had all the look of gold-leaf. If this was the sort of thing that the gold-brick swindlers used, it was quite good enough to take in a not over-bright client, especially if the patter was plausible.
The more he looked at the thing the less wild his idea began to appear. He