by Van Powell
Chapter 19 DISQUIETING DEDUCTIONS
Of all his loyal staff, most dependable, sincere and trustworthy was thehandy man, Potiphar Potts. Roger knew that.
Honesty compelled him, all the same, to connect the fact stated in thatmystifying letter with a fact that had not been important when it hadcome to him.
Potts, on that memorable night, holding the ponies while Roger had goneto Clark, had, as they discovered on their safe return, gone on into thecamp.
When they had gotten back, to report to Doctor Ryder the substitutionfor the false Eye of the one they had brought, Potts had seemed uneasy,though Roger had accepted the man's own explanation.
"I'm worried about our idea of you leaving the wedge in the thing thatworks the rock door," he had said, "it sounded good when we made theplan. If we wedged the mechanical levers, we said, they couldn't get outthat way and chase us or anything."
Roger said he still thought it a sound idea.
"I don't, now," Tip had declared. "They may not go in at the temple tosee about us for days, and what difference would it make whether thelower end is blocked if they did come down that way? They'd go back, madas hornets, and we _would_ be in for it!"
If they had left everything as before, Potts had insisted, anyone usingthe lower entrance would suspect nothing, and might not even know theyhad come out that way.
"I'm going back and fix it the way we found it," he had said.
Loyal, honest, faithful Tip! Why, Roger wondered, did his mind persistin telling him that Potts had stayed away from camp a long time and whydid he associate that with the present threat?
Truly enough, he _had_ actually seen--helped replace--that gem. Withequal sureness, the note said that the gem was gone. It was no trick ofdeduction to assume that the note had been prepared by the lamas, soonafter he had escaped. They had shown how clever they were at pretendingto be able to read his mind, telling about the lab.
He recalled that he had kept a record in a booklet, of radioconversations from his portable set in the lamasery to the camp set.
They had specimens of his handwriting. A clever man, forging for thepurpose of conveying a threat, perhaps planning some harm to Roger onthe trip home, had certainly, to all appearances, made the note.
Well, his mind ran on, if they had been so sure that the gem was gone,and if they had supposed that in vanishing he and Potts had taken it,the note would be their natural Tibetan way to account to Grover foranything that might have happened to Roger later.
Nothing had; but the note had been despatched, with the probableknowledge that the letter, by mail, might get a faster trip, a moredirect route than the travelers might use. It had been so.
Who besides Potts could have known that the genuine gem was in itsplace?
Not the camp people; and they did not know the secret of the tunnel.
Neither Clark nor Doctor Ryder had left camp for any protracted period.
"But," Roger remonstrated with his stubborn idea, "if Tip had beentempted to take it, the Eye of Om was available all the way there."
His prodding deduction shook that off. Potts would not have dared to tryfor it on the way to the temple. But--after it was supposed to be inplace, so that his party would not know of its abstraction!----Rogerfought, but so did his insistent suspicion.
He decided not to tell Grover.
"I--I hesitated because--well, it came to me that somebody else _could_have taken it, later. We got away from that locality as fast as wecould, and met the 'plane the next day, after I had radioed our agreedsignal to a British aviation field in India to despatch it."
"We can find out something by photographing the fingerprints on thenote, and so on, with routine procedure," Grover dismissed Roger'spoorly explained hesitation. "Suppose you let Tip do it."
Roger agreed eagerly.
A fine way that would be to see Tip's reaction.
Roger took him the note with Grover's orders.
"Gone? The Eye--gone?"
Surprise seemed genuine. And Tip--Roger felt sure--was too slow of witto act so cleverly as to seem innocent under this surprise.
"Glory-to-Grandma!" Potts gasped, "And--I--went back----"
"But you wouldn't take it!"
Potts made a wry face.
"Maybe--maybe--" he seemed to find it hard to go on; but he forced hislips to form the sounds sent up by his vocal chords.
"I declare, Rog', if I took the Eye, I didn't mean to."
"If you took it--how could you help meaning to?"
"I picked up what I thought was the subterfuge----"
"Substitute?"
"Yes. Thrown away by Clark, I supposed. Like Toby done before."
"Where is it?"
"I--uh--why--tell truth, Rog', I--I thrown it away. Back in Bombay. Ifigured it wasn't a safe idea to keep it, after all."
So there it stood!