CHAPTER XVII

SOME MUST WATCH

I looked at Bruce in astonishment. In everything but the bare form of the words he had been accused of having, himself, stolen the necklace, and it was amazing the way the accusation had brought him back to life again. His moment of collapse was past. His face was afire with anger. He turned upon me.

“I decline to rest under this infamous charge,” he said. “I insist upon being searched at once; that my room and my effects be searched. That necklace was gone when I waked up this morning.”

He turned upon Mr. Smith. “You can’t accuse an honest man of theft and get away with it.”

“I’m glad you’ve made that discovery,” the old gentleman replied quietly. “However, I haven’t made a charge. Nothing but the same sort of insinuation which you made against your cousin. The necklace may have been stolen after he and Judy left the house last night. I’m inclined to think it was.”

“Have we got to go on _talking_?” Bruce demanded of me. “Can’t we go in my room and begin the search?”

It was rather pathetic, his turning to me like that. Relatively, I suppose, I seemed like a friend. It’s a fact that I was sorry for him and that I believed he knew no more of the present whereabouts of the necklace than I did.

Old Eagle-Eye was in charge, however, and I referred to him for his consent. He gave it by rising, with a bow to old Mrs. Corbin.

“I think we’d better adjourn up-stairs,” he said. “That’s the real field of battle anyhow.”

“You’ll come too, sir, won’t you?” Bruce asked me. And when I agreed, he handed me my crutches and helped me to my feet.

“I’ve never been searched before,” he remarked gloomily as we rode up in the elevator together. “I’ve never even seen a man searched.”

“I never have either,” I confessed nervously. I think I dreaded the ordeal almost as much as he. There is something rather horrifying about the idea.

But we might have spared our apprehensions, for the search, as it happened, never came off.

The elevator shaft on the top floor opens directly into the billiard room. Bruce opened the door when the car stopped and stepped out, but since there was a slight inequality between levels, he turned back instantly to caution me about it. I swung myself out without difficulty, but I all but lost my balance and fell back into the car from sheer astonishment at what I saw.

“Good lord!” I gasped. “Punch, what in the world are you doing?”

Mr. Smith was at my side in an instant, and his right hand went under his coat, even before he saw what I was looking at.

The little boy never turned his head. He was standing beside the billiard table, covering with his trusty rifle one of the closed doors down at the end of the room. He was still very pale, but his eyes were shining now, and his hands were steady.

“Look out,” he said quietly. “He’s in the trunk closet.”

“Who is?” Bruce demanded. “What do you mean?”

But Mr. Smith asked no questions. He whipped out the automatic pistol from under his coat.

“It’s all right if you’re sure he’s there,” he said. “I’ve got the door covered too.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure,” said Punch. “I saw a drop of oil on the hinge. That’s how I know.”

“Any other way out of it than through that door?” Mr. Smith asked briskly, but speaking low as the boy had done.

“No,” said Punch. “It’s an awfully big place. It goes clear around the corner. But that’s the only way out, unless he’s made a hole in the roof.”

“They’re slate shingles,” Mr. Smith observed. “He’s still in there, then.”

“What are they talking about?” Bruce demanded of me.

“The thief’s in there,” Mr. Smith told him. “Punch’s ghost, the man in pajamas. Look here, can you shoot quick and straight if you have to? If you can I’ll give you this pistol. I’m going to open the door.”

He held the weapon out to Bruce. “With my apologies,” he added.

“Thanks very much, sir,” said Bruce. “But I’ll open the door myself.”

Mr. Smith nodded.

“Stand to one side when you do,” he cautioned him. “Don’t get in our line of fire.”

“If he’s the man who stole the necklace,” Bruce remarked, “you won’t have to shoot. Not if I can get my hands on him.”

I don’t very much mind admitting that my own emotions combined a lively curiosity about that door whose oiled hinges had indicated it as the robber’s hiding-place, with an intense desire to get back into the elevator. Try participating in a scene like that upon a pair of crutches before you allow yourself to feel too contemptuous over this admission.

Bruce had already started for the door, but he couldn’t go in a straight line to it because of the corner of the billiard table. Before he could get around this obstruction a new voice spoke and halted him in his tracks.

“Really there’s no need for any sort of violence,” it stated, irritably. “I’ll open the door myself. I’ll hold my hands out before me and you’ll see that it won’t be necessary to shoot. That’s quite understood, is it?”

“Perfectly,” Mr. Smith agreed. “We won’t do anything impulsive. Open the door.”

The door swung open noiselessly, and there, true to his promise, stood a man holding out a pair of empty hands.

His appearance is rather hard to describe, since the obvious facts about it seemed fortuitous and somehow contradictory to the truer ones. He was, for example, unmistakably dirty and disheveled. Yet he looked as if he ought to be scrupulously clean and tidy. You felt that it was contradictory to his nature to go more than twenty-four hours without a shave, although a shadow of colorless beard upon his plump cheeks proclaimed that he had done so. He was plump, although he happened just now to be rather haggard and hungry-looking. His suit of clothes was cheap and shapeless, yet something about him proclaimed him a fop. His grimy hands were small and finely formed, and as fastidious as Mr. Smith’s.

His glance shifted swiftly from one to another of us, coming to rest at last in sour contemplation upon Punch.

The boy had been gazing at him intently, groping for an identification. Now he got it.

“Why,” he cried, “he’s the man who was hanging the new window shades. He must have been in there ever since Wednesday.”

That afforded me a grin. I turned to Mr. Smith. “That’s been Punch’s theory from the beginning, you know,” I remarked. “He discussed with me Wednesday morning the danger that one of the artisans about the place would conceal himself in the house and steal the necklace when he got a chance. He spent most of that day and the next patrolling the house, trying to guard against that very thing happening.”

“Good for Punch,” said Mr. Smith, but in so preoccupied a tone that it fell far short of the handsome acknowledgment I wanted for the boy’s cleverness.

I persisted, speaking now to Punch. “I wonder if you were right about the actual moment when the imitation necklace was taken?”

Without pausing I put the thing up to the burglar. “Was it Thursday afternoon about two o’clock, just before the guests got here, that you made your raid on Mrs. Corbin’s safe?”

The man didn’t answer. But to put it this way doesn’t at all describe what happened. It was utterly preposterous. This trapped little rat of a thief, haggard, grimy, unshaved, tried to make me feel--and almost, I swear, succeeded--as if I’d just spoken to a duke to whom I’d not been properly introduced. He did it with a perfectly impassive face and an almost imperceptible turning of the shoulders.

But at that, old Mr. Smith got what he’d been looking for.

“Raglan, by George!” he exclaimed. “This is a real pleasure. But man, I’d hardly have known you!”

The thief showed no reciprocal delight in the recognition. Indeed his look of disgust deepened. But he spoke for the first time since he’d opened the door.

“Really,” he said, “I should hope not. I’ve been living in that filthy box room three days, feeding on a particularly nasty sort of American milk chocolate. I haven’t been able to shave since Thursday night.”

He spoke with a marked British accent, which didn’t, however, satisfy my ear. It was just about as good an imitation, I decided, as Victoria’s Japanese pearls.

“Horribly unpleasant, I should think,” Mr. Smith agreed sympathetically.

Then he explained to the rest of us. “Mr. Raglan is not only one of the most expert gem thieves in the world; he’s also admitted to be the best dressed man in his profession.”

Bruce Applebury wasn’t in a sympathetic mood. He made no acknowledgment whatever of the honor of the introduction to so eminent a craftsman. He said to Mr. Smith, “We must call the police at once, of course. Shall I telephone?”

“Oh, there’s no hurry, I think,” said Mr. Smith. “It’s still frightfully early.”

He turned to the thief. “Raglan,” he said, “I’m going to propose a bargain. You produce the necklace; save us the trouble of a search for it. If you’ll do that, I’ll take the liberty of promising you, although I’m merely one of Mrs. Corbin’s guests, a bath and a shave, a change of linen, and a really good breakfast. All that before presenting you to the police--and the photographers.”

“Done,” said Raglan, without a moment’s hesitation. “Thanks very much.”

He slid his right hand under his coat toward his left armpit.

“Look out!” Bruce cried sharply. “He’s after a gun.”

Raglan’s answer was to unbutton his coat and throw it back, showing that there was no weapon there.

But Mr. Smith had betrayed no perturbation, even before he got this reassurance. “Unless Raglan has changed his well-known methods,” he said, “he doesn’t carry a gun. He has a strong aversion to the more unpleasant forms of violence. He has compromised with necessity to the length of a delicately wielded blackjack, and you’ll probably find that his equipment includes a small bottle of chloroform. But it’s not on record that he’s ever killed any one.”

Raglan made no comment upon these remarks. He was busy with the lining of his sleeve, just beneath the armpit. He had, it appeared, a long pocket in there. Presently he pulled out the necklace.

Here and now, I make my apologies for the banal philosophizings I had addressed, at lunch time on the previous day, to its substitute. It was worth all the labor it had cost. It was above price--a masterpiece. The glory of it held the five of us spellbound, the connoisseur, the disappointed thief, the lover who had tried to include it in his bargain, the small boy and myself. We didn’t speak; we hardly breathed. I think Raglan might have bolted had he not been bound by the same enchantment as the rest of us.

At last old Mr. Smith broke the spell.

“Punch,” he said, “take this down-stairs and give it to your grandmother. Tell her that none of her guests nor of her family had anything to do with its disappearance. Nor her servants either. Ask her if she’s willing that Belden should send up a good hearty breakfast to an old acquaintance of mine whom I am entertaining in my room.”

Punch’s hands were shaking as Mr. Smith gently deposited the treasure in the cup he made of them. I remembered the negligence with which the imitation had been reconsigned to the boy’s old pocket handkerchief the day before and wondered that I had not guessed the truth from that.

“I’m to tell Gran nothing but that?” Punch asked, his eyes dancing with excitement. “And I’m not to tell any one else anything at all?”

“Not if you can help it,” said old Eagle-Eye with a grin. “We must keep our bargain with Raglan if we can. Go on and find Belden, if your grandmother gives you leave, and order the breakfast from him. Then come back here.”

Punch darted off on his errand.

I think perhaps the return of the necklace to Mrs. Corbin served to remind Bruce of his own injuries and disappointments. It was with a very sulky expression that he watched the boy disappear down the stairs.

“I really can’t understand,” he said, turning impatiently back to Mr. Smith, “why a professional criminal should be treated with such extraordinary consideration. He ought to be in handcuffs now and on his way to jail.”

“Surely you can understand keeping a bargain,” Mr. Smith answered suavely. “I’ve heard you discourse feelingly on that subject within the hour.”

Applebury’s only reply to that was an angry shrug of the shoulders. I think he suspected the old gentleman of meaning to let the thief go altogether now that the necklace was recovered.

I didn’t go as far as that, but I was a little uneasy lest his zest in the new game he was playing--I hadn’t yet made out what it was--should betray the old gentleman into trusting too far to Mr. Raglan’s dislike of violence.

“My room and bath are entirely at your disposal now, Mr. Raglan,” he said, leading the way toward his door and opening it. “As to the change of linen I promised you, I’m afraid I’d been counting on Mr. Applebury’s acquiescence in my bargain. My own perhaps can be made to serve.”

Bruce’s face on hearing the suggestion that he provide the burglar with a shirt and a suit of underclothes was a study in outraged astonishment. But he was prevented from further expressing his feelings by Raglan’s answer. Raglan, it appeared, was equally affronted by the proposal.

“That won’t be necessary,” he said coldly. “I have a bag with me. Perhaps the young man will bring it out. I’d be glad to fetch it myself but I don’t suppose that would quite meet your ideas. It’s standing on the first box around the corner.”

“Get it out, will you, Applebury?” said old Mr. Smith.

I really thought Bruce would burst. His neck distinctly swelled above his collar. But he marched off in high dudgeon toward the trunk closet, to return a moment later lugging a big black case of a nondescript sort. It was rather battered, and would have passed muster all right as the sort of thing a workman could carry tools in.

Bruce set it down without a word, and walked off to his own room. I have never seen him, I remark with thankfulness, since.

Raglan picked up the bag and followed Mr. Smith into his room, I swinging along after them on my crutches, feeling rather nervous over Bruce’s defection. That little man might easily be too much, I thought, for Mr. Smith and me.

Raglan would have carried the bag straight on through into the bathroom if Mr. Smith hadn’t halted him.

“I think perhaps,” he said, “you’d better take off your clothes out here. Then you can bathe and shave in privacy, and we can wait your convenience.”

I saw the point to that, as Raglan did, and felt a little better. There was a window in the bathroom, big enough for a man to climb out of, and there might be a handy down-spout that would take him to the ground. But no thief, no matter how desperate, would try to escape without his clothes.

Raglan, stripped to his underwear, opened the bag, lifted out a tray of tools, and selected his clean linen. Then he went into the bathroom and locked the door behind him.

“I suppose,” I remarked, “he might have had that necklace hidden where we’d have had the devil’s own time finding it.”

“No, I hardly think so,” Mr. Smith dissented politely. “No, that’s not the reason I’m coddling him. He’s dirty and miserable, and ravenously hungry, I suspect. When he’s clean and fed, he’ll be expansive. I want him to tell me how he did it, and if they’ll only let us alone for half an hour, I believe he will.--Ah, here’s Punch. Now we’ll know.”