Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 20
Then the extraordinary incongruity of such paraphernalia on an island like Ruffa struck him in its full force. Jean, fortunately, had not seen the hostile movement; but as she came forward she stared with frank curiosity at the holsters.
Colin thought it advisable to go forward at once. Evidently this person’s suspicions, if he had any, should be allayed as soon as possible.
“Can I see Mr. Arrow?” he asked, resolutely ignoring the peculiarities of the situation. “My name’s Trent. I’m staying at Wester Voe over yonder.”
The ferret-faced man examined him with a pair of gimlet eyes before replying.
“Mr. Arrow is busy,” he said succinctly.
Again Colin had the impression of a man speaking a foreign language. The bluntness with which he had been repulsed roused his obstinacy.
“Mrs. Trent would like to see the garden. May we go in and look round?”
“No.”
“Surely that can’t do any harm?” Colin persisted, feeling that he was not showing up very well before Jean.
“It is not permitted.”
Then, as a concession, the ferret-faced man added an explanatory sentence.
“It is a dangerous process that Mr. Arrow is working on.”
“So you’re put on guard here to warn people off, eh?”
“That is so.”
“And you’re so anxious for their safety that you carry a brace of pistols to persuade them to move on,” was Colin’s inward comment.
“Would you and the lady please go now?” the ferret-faced man suggested, politely enough but with a distinctly unfriendly note in his tone. “It is best not to come too near when Mr. Arrow is working.”
“I’ll go in a minute,” Colin conceded. “I just want to ask one thing. If the hare-lipped man’s in, just now, I’d like to have a word or two with him.”
“Hare-lipped? I do not understand.”
“Hare-lipped,” repeated Colin, and then tried to elucidate his meaning partly by a gesture. “Split lip. As if he’d got his lip cut open with a knife and it hadn’t healed right. A cleft in it. Is that clear?”
“Ach! mit einer Hasenscharte?” the red-haired man exclaimed. His eyes lighted up for a moment and then turned sullenly suspicious.
“No, there is no such man in this house. I know nothing about him.”
“But I’ll bet you do,” Colin commented to himself. “You gave yourself away that time, my gunman friend.”
Aloud, however, he accepted the statement.
“Oh, very well. It’s nothing important.”
He turned away with Jean, leaving the guard staring after them in obvious doubt and perplexity.
“What was that you said about a hare-lipped man, Colin?” Jean demanded as soon as they were out of earshot.
Colin saw that lie had betrayed himself, but he recovered his ground instantaneously.
“I was just trying to find out if he was a Mason,” he explained glibly.
“Oh, so that’s one of your pass-words, is it? I’ll try it on the next Freemason I come across and give him a start. Perhaps Mr. Northfleet’s one. I’ll try it on him. Colin,” she went on seriously, “that man had two huge pistols in these holsters. Did you see that? What on earth could he want with them on Ruffa? It doesn’t look—well, quite what one would expect here. I don’t half like the look of that, Colin.”
But Colin, once launched into deceit, found his path unexpectedly smooth. He was more than a little disturbed himself by what he had seen, but he was determined to quieten Jean’s doubts.
“You don’t suppose he means to shoot people with them, do you?” he said derisively. “Who is there to shoot on a place like this? You, or me, or the Dinnets, or Northfleet, perhaps. You’ve got too vivid an imagination, that’s what’s wrong with you, dear. Look at the fuss you made over a harmless hound. And now you get all sorts of blood-and-thunder Deadwood Dick notions because a man happens to have a revolver. I expect he brought them out to practice with, to while away the time when he’s on guard there. And if old Arrow is brewing some dangerous explosive or something of that sort, it seems to me only decent of him to put a fellow on point-duty to warn us off. You’re on the wrong track again.”
“Well, you may be right,” Jean admitted rather hesitatingly. “I don’t see myself who he could want to shoot hereabouts. Still—it’s queer, Colin. It’s no wonder the Dinnets don’t like those men at Heather Lodge. That was a nasty little creature at the gate; and the other man wasn’t very friendly either.”
“If we don’t hurry up we’ll get no bathe before lunch,” Colin pointed out, abruptly closuring the discussion. “Come along—as you’re always saying to me.”
But as he walked on by Jean’s side Colin began to find that his soothing explanation raised awkward questions in his own mind. For, after all, he had been sound enough, so far as he went. There was nobody on Ruffa who was likely to need an armed guard to keep them away from the gate of Heather Lodge in broad daylight. And yet, there the guard was—and obviously very much on the alert, too. Colin had a vivid recollection of that threatening gesture as he hove in sight round the corner.
“These fellows are afraid of something,” he inferred easily enough. “And that hound points in the same direction. If they wanted a dog as a pet, they’ve got Miss Arrow’s mongrel already on the premises. That wolf-hound is meant for serious business.”
Then in his mind Jean’s passing reference to The Hound of the Baskervilles acted like a seed-crystal in a supersaturated solution. A whole series of previously isolated thoughts suddenly fitted themselves together into a pattern, and in Colin’s mental theatre a sinister drama began to unfold itself. He saw a stranger with a harelip landing on the island; a stealthy figure slinking under the wall of Heather Lodge in the darkness; some drugged meat thrown