Chapter VII: Further Developments

"We spoke at dinner of the wonderful voice and cleverness of the beater, Joe. Mrs. Townley was particularly loud in her praises, and I myself was quite as enthusiastic about him as she. Such a man, I said, was much more than a clever village singer, he had artistic and other talents too, and I was sure it would not be long before he was heard of in London.

"Lord Balin's eye met mine, but he did not smile.

"'We shall miss him when he leaves us!' he said, and he pinched his lips together as if a sudden emotion held him. Knowing Lord Balin's sense of humor, I feared an explosion, and hastened to change the subject. I spoke of the last woodcock that had got up out of shot and had never been seen again. A woodcock is a subject of conversation that will always take English sportsmen from any other talk.

"When I got upstairs it was nearly twelve o'clock. O'Brien and Macgregor were both in my room, the lights turned off and the windows open. The four hounds had been let loose an hour before, they told me, and the keepers gone home. Leaning out of the window, I could just hear the patter of the bloodhounds' feet, and their panting breath, as these fierce creatures ranged over the grass plots and through the shrubberies round the house.

"'The moon,' I said, 'rises at three o'clock. If nothing happens between this and then, we may all go to bed.'

"I had an intuition that something would happen, because I knew the burglar, being disappointed at not finding the jewels in the racquet, as he had been promised, would take some further steps to get hold of them.

"Assuming that he guessed nothing of the arrival of myself and my two subordinates, and there was indeed nothing to betray any of us to Mrs. Townley, or to himself, he would naturally conclude that his accomplice had been prevented by an accident from keeping her word. He would never dream that so clever a woman had been outwitted. The jewels were therefore, he would think, still in her possession, and he would, probably, present himself under his confederate's window at some appointed hour in the night and Mrs. Townley would throw out to him the packet of jewels. This simple and obvious way of getting hold of the jewels had, till now, been rendered impossible in my eyes by the fact that the grounds were closely patrolled by keepers every night up to a certain hour, and after that by fierce bloodhounds.

"But the keeper's revelation that day shook my confidence in the dogs, for, if Coggins went about at night with the watchers and their dogs, these latter would naturally get used to him. I had no doubt that it had been Coggins's original intention to get hold of the jewels in this simple manner. But then, after the night of the robbery, the head keeper, to make things safe, had, as I have said, let loose four instead of two hounds, and Coggins would of course be a stranger to two of these animals, if not to all four. So, to get the jewels, he had to resort to other methods. Hence the attempts of Mrs. Townley to pass the jewels in the wood and the later manœuvre of the tennis racquet. Now that he had been baffled in every attempt, what would he do next? He could not know, yet, that the stolen property had passed for good out of his confidante's possession. What did the heavy bundle brought in by Mrs. Townley portend? What could it contain except some means of getting into the house, possibly a rope ladder, or, more likely, one of those knotted ropes which have lately become a common implement in a modern house-breaker's trade? Did Coggins meditate breaking in, a second time, into Balin Abbey? I was pretty sure that he did--not for purposes of robbery, but to secure the booty he had obtained through his confederate.

"I had made a fair guess, but I had really no idea to what lengths the audacity and insolence of this Prince of Professional Burglars were prepared to carry him.