“One of us is being shadowed. Is it you or me?”
“Me,” he said. “As long as you stay with me, I am safe. Let us slip
into this place....”
He pushed open the swing door of a wine shop, and we went inside. He
ordered a bottle of cheap wine, and before it had been brought, three
men entered and sat near the door.
My strange acquaintance sipped a little wine, spoke to me loudly in
English about the weather, and whispered the words, “Follow me quickly!”
He rose from the table, and went rapidly out of the back door of the
restaurant into the courtyard, and out through a side door into the
street by which we had entered. It was dark, but as we walked we
saw, at the end of the street, under a lantern, three men standing
motionless.
“Hell!” said my acquaintance.
He plunged into a narrow alley, and then through a labyrinth of little
streets until suddenly we emerged on the square opposite our hotel.
“How’s that for geographical knowledge?” he asked.
“Good!” I said. “But after this I do not desire your company. I don’t
understand why these men followed you, and I don’t like the game,
anyhow.”
He regretted my annoyance, and was so polite and amusing that I
relented toward him, especially as he told me he was going to Vigo next
day.
He wished me good-by that night when he went to bed. But next morning
when I left Lisbon for Oporto, he was on the platform, and said that he
had changed his plans and was going to the same place as myself.
I was now convinced that he was really shadowing me, and told him so.
But he shook his head and laughed.
“Nothing of the kind. I like your company, because you’re the only
Englishman in this land of dagoes. Also I want you to get me that
handful of pebbles.”
He returned again to the subject of those ridiculous pebbles. I could
get them easily for him on the seashore by Oporto. It would give me
very little trouble. It would be an enormous favor to him.... I refused
to consider the idea.
In Oporto he took me into a jeweler’s shop and bought a little
cedarwood box about five inches square.
“I want enough pebbles to fill this box,” he said. “Surely you can get
them for me?”
“Surely you can get them yourself,” I answered.
But he shook his head, and said that was impossible.
We were again followed down the streets of Oporto. My companion drew
my attention to the fact, and then sidestepped into an umbrella shop.
But he did not buy an umbrella. He bought a very neat, and rather
expensive, sword stick, and offered to give me another like it.
“It may be useful,” he remarked.
I declined the sword stick, but accepted the thick cudgel which he had
been carrying since I knew him.
That is practically the end of the story. He left Oporto two days
later, and before going made one last request. It was that I should
send a telegram which he had written out, to an address in South
Kensington. It was to the following effect:
“_Arriving in London Saturday. Cannot get the pebbles._”
What is the meaning of that mystery? I cannot give a guess, and have
sometimes thought of offering the problem to Conan Doyle.
Sometimes, also, I have wondered whether it is in any way connected
with an incident that took place in the abandoned palace of King
Manuel, or rather, in his garden. From the newspaper reports it
appeared that some of the royal jewels had been buried before the
flight of King Manuel. Perhaps it was for the purpose of digging for
them that three men, of whom one was believed to be an Englishman,
had entered the palace garden on the night of my arrival in Lisbon.
A sentry had discovered them and fired. The men fired back, and the
sentry was wounded, before they escaped over the wall.
Was that man “believed to be an Englishman” my mysterious acquaintance?
I am tempted to think so, yet I cannot provide a theory for the
pebbles from the seashore, the jewel box, the shadowing in the streets
of Lisbon, the purchase of the sword stick, and the eagerness for my
company.
All that has nothing to do with the political prisoners and my mission
of inquiry. The end of that story is that after the publication of my
articles in _The Daily Chronicle_, and many papers on the Continent,
Affonso Costa declared a general amnesty and the prison doors were
unlocked for a great “jail-delivery” of Royalists.
How far my articles had any influence toward that action, I do not
know. Certainly I received some share in the credit, and for months
afterward there were Portuguese visitors at my little house in Holland
Street, to kiss my hand--as the deliverer of their relatives and
friends--much to the amusement of my wife.
But the real deliverer of the prisoners was little Miss Tenison, who
had pulled all the wires from her haunted house.