Tom Tiddler's Island, стр. 39
“Irregularly. She was here last week.”
“Last week? I never saw her,” Colin objected.
“No. You were out all day with Mrs. Trent, down the coast in your motor-boat. The launch was away again before you turned up in the evening. Do you remember what day that was?”
Something in Northfleet’s tone as he uttered the last sentence made Colin look up sharply.
“What day it was? One forgets the days of the week in this place. Lemme see . . . Last Thursday, was it? I mean Thursday in last week.”
“That’s correct. Does it suggest anything?”
Thursday? Colin knew he had seen the word somewhere. Of course! It was in the cipher message. He pulled the paper towards him and re-read the sentence: “The final lot of the last three thousand was sent off on Thursday and got through safe.”
“You mean that motor-launch took away the stuff, whatever it is?”
“Very curious coincidence, if it didn’t,” Northfleet commented. “At least, it took ‘part’ of it away.”
“And the rest went in the yacht, eh?”
“If it did, it went disguised as petrol.”
“Petrol tins might hold anything, and you didn’t see inside them,” said Colin weightily. “What did the launch bring in, did you see?”
“A lot of boxes and parcels,” Northfleet answered, making no concealment of the fact that he had watched the whole affair. “They might have been simply groceries and so forth. In fact, one box at least was that. It had no lid and I could see tins and jam-jars in it as they carried it up from the jetty. I was up on the hill with a good pair of glasses—the ones I use for bird-watching,” he explained with a faint grin.
“Ha! Thrilling, no doubt,” said Colin, acknowledging the thrust. “But what’s more to the point: what did the launch take away with her when she went?”
“Two wooden boxes, like ammunition boxes, rather. They were iron-clamped, I could see. And they seemed pretty heavy, to judge by the way they carried them—two men to the box.”
“Ah!” said Colin, in what he hoped was an indifferent tone.
How many of these gold bricks could one pack into an ammunition box, he wondered. If the box was full, it would make a heavyish load to carry over rough ground, certainly. Then a fresh thought prompted him to ask a question.
“What crew has she, did you see?”
“Two men. That was all I saw.”
“Like these foreign scoundrels on the yacht?” Colin inquired.
Northfleet shook his head.
“I didn’t go near them, so I didn’t hear them speak. But I had a good look at them through my glasses. English, I’d say. Gentlemen, possibly—or, at any rate, they’d been gentlemen at one time. Miss Arrow mentioned them to me once, and that’s the impression I got from the way she spoke. It fits in with some other information I have from another source.”
Colin was busy with his new line of thought.
“Four men at Heather Lodge; two fellows at least on the yacht; and these two on the motor-launch. That’s eight men to divide the profits, whatever they are. If all that gang are making a good thing out of it, the receipts must run into big figures.”
“They do,” Northfleet confirmed succinctly.
As well they might, Colin thought, if those boxes were packed with gold bricks. Ruffa must be Tom Tiddler’s Ground and no mistake.
“Another thing the launch brought was a load of petrol tins,” Northfleet went on, supplementing his earlier list. “Some of them may be for re-fuelling the yacht and the rest must be benzene for the Heather Lodge gas plant.”
He paused for a moment, then and added:
“Do these points suggest anything to you, Trent?”
Colin pondered for a while without hitting upon anything.
“No, I don’t see much in it,” he confessed.
Northfleet put forward his interpretation with obvious diffidence.
“Perhaps this is straining the thing a bit, but here’s an explanation, for what it’s worth,” he said. “If the yacht needs re-fuelling, she must have come a longish distance without touching a port. On her looks, she had a for bigger effective radius than the motor-launch, and yet it’s the launch that brings the petrol tins, and the yacht that takes them away.”
“If it was petrol that they held,” Colin objected. “It might have been poteen. Perhaps Arrow’s running an illicit still. He may be, for all we know.”
“Pigs might fly,” said Northfleet contemptuously. “Stick to the facts. That short-radius motor-launch brings the tins. Therefore its trips are well within its ordinary radius of action. The yacht’s engine’s only an auxiliary, and yet she has been eating up her supply, apparently. Obviously she’s had a far longer trip than the motor-launch. Besides, the launch drops in here fairly regularly, whilst I’ve only seen the yacht once or twice since I came to Ruffa. That points the same way, on the probabilities of the case. I don’t say the thing’s proved, naturally. Still it suggests things.”
But Colin was in no mood for idle discussions about the effective radius of yachts or motor-launch. A new and brilliant idea had crossed his mind, and he blurted it out on the spur of the moment.
“I say, you know. Remember the Traprain Law business over on the East Coast. Archaeology stunt. They dug up a place there and found a sea-rover’s hoard. Gold vessels all bashed up and squashed for easy carriage. Heaps of them. Some old Norse pirate had looted an abbey on the Normandy coast, or somewhere thereabouts. Going up the North Sea he’d got into trouble, somehow. Came ashore at Traprain Law, cached his plunder, and probably got scuppered on the way home. Never came back for the stuff anyhow.”
“Well?” Northfleet prompted, with more interest than he had hitherto shown in Colin’s speculations.
“Well, don’t you see?” Colin pursued in high excitement. “That tunnel’s the very place for a cache—under the floor or behind some