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.