by H. F. Heard
“What’s queer about it?”
“Why it’s a sort of circle thing with no bars, only this hoop thing.”
“Well, many ponies are sometimes kept in cages like that. It gives them more freedom.”
“Yes, but they have a perch, don’t they?”
“Of course; hasn’t this polly?”
“I can’t see what he’s sitting on. Now, isn’t that queer!” (Thank heaven, the infantile curiosity of the subconscious was now roused.) “But I can see one sort of thing—a number of them. Round the hoop of his cage are little knots.” The medium’s hand rose. “There’s one, quite bunchy, at the top.” Her finger pointed up. “And another, not so bunchy, right under the polly.” She pointed down. “And just under the point of his bill is another, rather a squiggle than a bunch, that one. Oh, I can see them so clearly. There are twelve of them.” Then, with a sudden failing of interest: “But I don’t know what they are. And it’s such a silly bird sitting there yawning on and on, with his wing. Oh, it makes me yawn. Oh, I’m so tired and sleepy. No, I don’t want you; go away.”
And, suiting the deed to the word, the medium yawned widely and then began to breathe deeply once more. She settled back in her chair. Her head fell to one side. It wasn’t much that she had brought through, but it was something definite. I felt pretty certain that as far as it went I had caught an answer. Intil stirred; I waved him back to his chair.
“But—” he began.
“Be silent,” I hissed, so successfully that he was.
Miss Brown began to stir. She muttered, almost whimpered. A questioning note came into this low whinny. Her body again jerked once or twice. She cleared her throat, sighed and sat up.
“Well,” she said, “how long was I away?”
“A short spell.”
“Did anything worth having come through?”
“Yes, quite enough.”
“What!” interrupted Intil.” You give her a lot of hints and helps and then she rambles on, romancing all about birds all made up.…”
“Mr. Intil!” I shot in. “If you’re as stupid as you’re ill-mannered you’ll never find anything.”
“Oh, it’s easy to be abusive when you want to cover up failure,” he sneered, and so got right under my skin. I hadn’t intended to tell the boorish fool anything. But the sitting had been a good one, and I had got from it my clue, I felt sure.
“There you’re wrong, as usual. How you can be a prospector and so blind beats me!”
“Oh, so you, who couldn’t discover anything yourself, you’re going to flatter yourself now by pretending that you understand this mummery!”
I rose and opened the door. “Please leave the house! And let me tell you that the answer to your question was given! The initial passage of your message really runs: ‘When the hands of the clock stand at twenty minutes to three!”
I meant to surprise him but never expected quite such a success. He looked at me for a moment, then turned and literally ran through the door, through the hallway, plucked open the hall door, and slammed it behind him. And we heard his feet as he scampered off down the road.
Chapter II
I went back to Miss Brown.
“Don’t tell me what happened,” were her first words. “That little fellow interested me. There’s more in this, I fancy, than my ‘control’ gets at. If we find ourselves back on this trail again it will be all the better for me to know as little as possible, or my surface mind will interfere.”
I knew her method—the rule of all authentic “mediums.” Otherwise the surface mind interferes, tries to make premature sense of what has come through from deeper levels and all’s spoilt.
“Well, you know,” I answered, “that you did get onto the question which was bothering our queer client; you know that you gave me the answer which earlier, on my own, I failed to give him and that he was—well, one can’t say content, but obviously struck with our joint effort.”
She smiled, “You’ll let me know, then, if he turns up again. There’s certainly some very odd business he’s mixed in.”
My own hunch told me with just as much emphasis that this was so. I took leave of Miss Brown, telling her I’d certainly call her should our queer little whale that had just sounded, spout again in our waters.
Several months passed, however, and I recalled Mr. Intil only when on my half-yearly check-up of my case-file I saw the one-line entry under the INs—“Intil: by self, no result: collab: Miss Brown. Clue found. n.f.” The case had evidently closed itself and when n.f. comes at the end it is usually a signal of finality. For n.f. means “no fee.”
My work all that time was routine stuff. Once or twice my mind did go back to the man but mainly because I was still feeling a distinct pleasure at the way that I had caught hold of the clue which Miss Brown threw out in trance. And soon that little success was buried under others. I enjoyed my life in my quiet way. Puzzles that pay—it was a lucky stroke that put me where I could still amuse myself and at the same time earn a living.
Then one day I was going down the street with my mind, I believe, actually turning over the solution of a set riddle when automatically I stepped aside, not looking up, so as not to disturb my train of thought. Someone was in my path, I was vaguely aware. But when I shifted, the figure I wasn’t looking at, by trying to avoid, shifted too. I looked up pettishly. It was one of those silly little subconscious duels in courtesy—each of us was giving way so spontaneously to the other that we managed to keep in each other’s way. That pedestrian double-stutter has always seemed to me the best demonstration, of the need for intelligent selfishness. Then I saw that I was mistaken. My vis-à-vis was not trying to get out of my way but into it. He was a man, distinguished I am sure he knew himself to be. He was old: white but very—not erect, there was nothing military about him—but limber, I think, is the word, lithely loose—odd, I thought, in an old man. He had heightened his remarkable appearance by a short, sharp white beard. I looked then at his eyes. They were on mine. He was blocking my path deliberately. But where had I seen those eyes? Surely one knew them, and surely, as he was not a hold-up man, surely he must think he knew me, too?
“Mr. Silchester,” he said.
“Mr. Mycroft!” I exclaimed. “Where did you drop from?”
“As you see—” what a familiar opening, always asking me to see what was of course obvious and of course overlooked by me—“I am on your track.”
Somehow the tone he used, and the slight start I had had, put me on the defensive. After all, I was not the helpless fellow that I had been. I was a bit of a detector, now, as well as he.
“Mr. Mycroft,” I said, pulling myself together, “I know when we last parted I was, perhaps, a little discourteous in my wish to get back to my retired life. Well, Life has kicked me out of my soft seat and somehow I have managed to fall on my feet or to get a footing.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, with that knowing lightness. “I can now call you confrere, and,” he added rallyingly, “if occasionally I fall into the old habit of saying, ‘Don’t you see?’ take it as a compliment, not as a criticism.”
“A compliment?”
“Because we are now colleagues.”
Yes, of course, as of yore I was flattered. So when he went on to ask whether I could spare him half an hour, for he had an interesting story to tell me and stood in great need of my advice, I asked him along to my place.
“Yes,” he commented as we entered, “yes, if you will forgive a personal remark, I thought when we last met that if Fate really made you fly you had feathers which would carry you. I’d heard of your work and seen it. The flair will out, Mr. Silchester. But now you will want to know why particularly I am today your client. I am out here on a very peculiar trail. I don’t think any of us detectives”—I felt like Queen Victoria when Disraeli, fresh from the success of his histrionic novels, remarked to the authoress of Leaves from a Highland Journal, “We authors, Ma’m”—“have ever been given, if I may use a modern phras
e, a stranger assignment. I want to be quite frank with you, Mr. Silchester, and so will start at once by saying that I cannot be wholly. This is, I say it advisedly, the biggest and,” he paused as though reckoning, “yes, the most curiously and many-facetedly dangerous thing I have ever been on.”
That second part of the description, I own, made my rising curiosity begin to yield before the cautious sense of letting sleeping snakes sleep on.
He continued, though, “But one thing we can be open about. It is the point on which you can help me. It is the reason why I came to ask your aid. There is a man somewhere in this quarter of the world that a few men who are respected or to be reckoned with in most quarters of the world—and for whom I am working on this assignment—want above everyone else to be able to contact. And the last man to see and talk with that man was, Mr. Silchester, you. Do you know, and if so, will you trust me with the information as to where a Mr. Intil may be?”
I couldn’t help feeling a certain trust in the old fellow. With that trust there sprang up, too, a sudden revived interest in that queer little broken-off piece of a case. For answer, then, I stretched over to my filing cabinet, took out the slip I’d looked up a few weeks before, and placed it on my desk in front of Mr. Mycroft.
“Clue found,” mused the old sleuth.
I told him the story frankly, though I was a bit nervous as to what he’d think of the Miss Brown incident.
His reply, “Neat, very neat. And we’d all do better if we used the subconscious more,” pleased me. “I wonder whether I would have pounced on that clue without a collaborator?” he added. “Some time, if you would be so good, I’d be obliged if you would introduce an old-fashioned reasoner to one who has evidently made flair really follow a special scent.
“And now to our muttons. There is one thing I may and indeed must tell you about Mr. Intil. You two collaborators were right in sensing something of more than routine interest in him; and what you have told me puts me greatly in your debt. It falls into place: we are a step on. Briefly, as you may well have guessed, though Intil may be more than a little mad and—well, I’ll leave my further suppositions for the present—he is on the track of something big. Perhaps I should be more exact and give you a better sense, too, of the bigness of his quarry if I say he has tracked, I believe, someone who has a trail leading to something beside which pirate gold is nursery stuff. Now that’s all I ought to say. To repeat your quotation from Miss Brown, ‘One can easily know too much to find out more.’ But I want to be quite definite as far as we have gone. I am asking you, Mr. Silchester, to come in with me on this hunt.”
He saw my hesitation. “Frankly, I need your help. You have met Intil and you could point him out. I don’t think he suspects you. I do think he suspects me—or that someone from my clients is after him. He is one of those who prefer business by mail and no personal contacts with those who might surmise the full nature of that which he believes he has to sell.”
I was still humming when he added, “Honestly, I would not have asked your help before you became what you are now, a trained researcher, and, of course, neither would you have accepted.” (Oh, that frank, sensible, kindly flattery!) “Besides, and another of course, as we are both professional men I can speak openly to you. Secretive men are not unseldom trustworthy. I don’t want to make one unnecessary mystification. I want to tell you that our game is not only dangerous. It is dangerous enough, no doubt, but it is far more valuable than it is risky. As I have said, and said advisedly, it is a treasure hunt, and a treasure hunt beside which Potosi silver, Inca gold, and Eldorado itself, all rolled into one, would be so much waste-product.”
Even when I had mistrusted Mr. Mycroft I had to own that he was highly accurate. This must be a serious proposition and, equally, it must be a very big one. My old caution still retracted me.
“Why me?” I questioned. “You want a bloodhound, not a truffle-hound, for your job.”
He smiled, “I’ll do the heavy old dog on the trail if you will play the dog that smells the hidden root. We’ll need both types, I believe.”
“My work …” I was putting up my last defense. I felt the humor of it, I who had idled nearly the whole of my life. But leaving my office was leaving now my home and my hobby—and my livelihood.
“If this search reaches its goal you won’t have to think too much about costs. I’m making you a straight offer. I am a businessman and have made businesslike arrangements with my clients. Money is really no matter to them—nor need it be. I am prepared to offer you one-third of the fee that I am promised. I am not being quixotic in this. It is one of such a size that it does not mean much to a man of my age.”
I knew there was really little use opposing Mr. Mycroft once he wanted a thing. I realized also that he made ample provision for whomever he employed. Business was, I knew also, just now none too brisk with me. Of course I yielded.
As he left he remarked, “May we meet tomorrow morning? I have a few preliminary inquiries to make and then we can start on our hunt.”
“But,” I said, “I have no idea where Intil is. I have seen him only once—months ago, and then he literally fled.”
“Oh,” replied Mr. Mycroft, “it is not quite so blind a chase as that. I have more than a suspicion along what track our man is moving and so where we may hope to catch a glimpse of him if we can recognize him when he passes. That is where you can yield your first important service. And these facts rule our rendezvous. You know the little Church of the Angels after which this amazing but not specifically angelic town takes its name?”
“The little old building by the square?”
“Very well; be in there at ten-thirty tomorrow morning. And now, if there is a back way out of your office, it would be no harm if I took it. Blessed are the inconspicuous, for they shall not be asked why they were where they were.”
I showed him how he could get to the back of the quiet block in which my small office stood, and I had hardly finished pointing out the way before he was gone.
At ten-thirty the next morning—I was always punctual even when leisured—I slipped into the shabby little church. Dark and poor inside, it was an excellent meeting place. A few Mexicans were at their prayers. Every now and then someone looked in but, finding nothing to see, went out. It positively smelled commonplace and unsuspicious. When my eyes were used to the rather dismal dusk—from the glare outside—I found myself a seat and after a few minutes someone sat down beside me.
“When I leave here,” said a whisper which just reached my ear, “don’t follow for two minutes. Then go to the stone seat at the other side of the square. As you approach it you will see a man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and big sun-glasses move off, going toward the city’s center. Don’t come up with him—follow him till he goes into a drugstore. Go in and take a seat near the window. Immediately opposite the drugstore is a shop with scientific instruments in it. Keep your eye on that. It is a big shop and plenty of people go into it. Should you see Mr. I., put your hand up to the back of your coat collar as though you were adjusting it. Then go back to your office and I’ll call you.”
That became my drill for some days. I never sighted Intil, though I watched until my neck had a crick in it from looking sideways. After some two hours Mr. Mycroft would walk out and I would follow at a respectful distance. After the first day, the first and second acts were omitted, the meeting in the church and the trailing from the square, but the watch in the drugstore seemed all the longer for that. I forget how many times we had gone through this ritual—I up in the window and Mr. Mycroft, in true spider fashion watching his web in the background, when on getting off duty and meeting in my office I asked him why he thought that Intil would ever turn up and, if so, why at that spot and time.
“It’s a guess-deduction,” he said, “like most detection. But part of the reasoning is evident enough. I don’t want to irritate you as I used. I know you have sharpened your powers of observation. But you have not as yet given them a cutting ed
ge in the direction of criminal detection. So have patience with me. I believe we are right over the hole our big fish will visit and one day he’ll slip along about the hour of our vigil.”
His assurance kept me going, especially when, at the end of the first fortnight, I think it was, as we met in my office after the usual blank watch, Mr. Mycroft produced a check—quite a surprisingly large one. He did the whole thing in that quick, businesslike way which makes one feel one isn’t just being paid. Here, anyhow, were results. He must think, and those who employed him, whoever they were, that there was a big fish to be landed, if they were so generous with the ground-bait.
Then one day while I was scanning in a routine way the customers going in and out of the store opposite my coffee-bar coign, I saw a man coming out carrying a largish case. He was dressed in leather jerkin, “blue jeans,” and cactus boots, and under his big hat I thought I saw even a bit of whisker on his face. It was the typical turn-out of the High Sierra hiker, a uniform without which nowadays an ordinary businessman would no sooner go calling on the Desert and the Mountains than a New Yorker would be married without wearing a high hat. The man turned quickly down the street, and then something about his walk—I put my hand to the back of my collar and saw, in the glass facing me, Mr. Mycroft move quickly out of the door and across the street. For a moment I watched the two wide-brimmed hats, drawing closer together in the street crowd. Then a streetcar came between and both were lost.
I went back to my office and waited. Finally I did a little routine work. I had already told my typist secretary, whose efficiency was disguised under an appearance made up to establish the right to be called Miss Delamere, that she needn’t wait. I had myself decided to stay on only another half-hour. Then Mr. Mycroft walked in. He looked pretty tired, I thought.
“We’ve got him and lost him,” were his first words. “You were right, I’m sure. That was the man we want, Intil. And we’ll get him yet. But he’s left town.”