after it he followed Sir Tancred into the billiard room, and steadily
drinking brandies and sodas, watched him play pool. At eleven he went
to bed. Tinker had gone to bed long before, but his door was just
open, and he saw the financier go into his room. Five minutes later he
stole across the corridor, and, without knocking, opened the door and
went in. The financier was sitting at a table, gazing through a mist
of tears at a nice, new nickel-plated revolver. He had no real
intention of blowing his brains out, but with the childlike, emotional
spirit of his race, he had persuaded himself that he had, and was
luxuriating in his woe.
"What do you want?" he moaned.
"I've come to show you a way of getting to Paris," said Tinker, closing
the door softly.
"Mein Gott!" cried the millionaire, relapsing into his vernacular in
his excitement. "How? How?"
"By Herr Schlugst's flying-machine."
"A flying-machine! Is the boy mad?"
"No, I'm not. I've been with Herr Schlugst on three trial trips; and
the last two he let me work it most of the time. It's as easy as
winking, once you know how to do it, and he says I understand it as
well as he does. It's all ready for the journey. We've only got to
get into it without waking him; and he sleeps like a log."
"Mein Gott! Mein Gott! What a plan! I'm to fly in the air with a
little boy! Oh, good gracious me! Good gracious me! What am I to
do?" And he stamped up and down, wringing his hands.
"It's that or the revolver," said Tinker sweetly.
The financier clutched at his hair and raved: fear and avarice,
conflicting, tore at his vitals. He owed his millions to no genuine
force of character, but to luck, industry, and dishonesty. In this
great crisis of his life he was helpless. Tinker, trained from
babyhood by his wise father to study his fellow creatures, understood
something of this, and began to goad him to the effort.
"It's a lot of money to lose," said he thoughtfully.
"The sweat of my brow! The sweat of my brow!" groaned the financier,
who had really made it by the nimbleness of his tongue.
"And it seems a pity to blow your brains out, which hurts a good deal,
before you've tried every chance," said Tinker.
The financier groaned.
"At any rate, if we did come a cropper, you'd be no worse off."
"Ah!" cried the financier, stopping short. "Why shouldn't I wake Herr
Schlugst, and get him to take me?"
"Because he won't," said Tinker quietly. "He told me that nothing
would induce him to try a flight in the night. He's all right in the
daytime, but the darkness funks him. Foreigners are like that; they'll
go to a certain point all right, but there they stop. That's what I've
noticed. I notice these things, you know." He spoke indulgently.
It never occurred to the financier to doubt him; he was already a
little under the influence of the cooler head. He walked up and down a
little longer; and Tinker said no more. He had been taught to leave
people to themselves when he saw them beginning to come to his way of
thinking.
At last, with a horrible grimace which showed the depth of his agony,
the financier cried, "I'll come! I'll come! I'll trust my life--oh,
my precious life--to you. After all, you rescued the Kernaby child;
and you had to fight to do it! I'll risk it! Oh, my money! My money!"
"Very good," said Tinker. "I'll come for you at half-past twelve. Put
on your warmest great-coat. It'll be cold." And he slipped gently out
of the room.
Five minutes later the distracted financier rang his bell, and ordered
a bottle of 1820 liqueur brandy. It was the best thing he could have
done: a private detective, who was sitting on guard in a room lower
down the corridor to see that he did not go downstairs again, believed
him to have thrown up the sponge, and to be drowning his sorrow, and
allowed himself to become immersed in the current number of the _Family
Herald_.
As was his practice, Sir Tancred, on his way to bed, looked in on
Tinker, and found him sleeping the profound sleep of youth and
innocence. But no sooner did he hear his father in bed and still, than
he rose from that profound sleep of youth and innocence, dressed, even
to his great-coat. He took a letter from his pocket, and put it
prominently on the dressing-table. It ran:
DEAR FATHER:
I have taken Bloomenroot to Parris in Herr Shlugst flyingmacheen.
Bring him to meet me at the Ifell Tower.
Your affectionate son
TINKER.
Then, with his boots in his hand, he stole across to the financier's
room. Thanks to the brandy, the financier looked very much wound up.
Tinker bade him write on a sheet of notepaper, "Don't call me till
eleven," pinned it on the outside of his bedroom door, locked it, and
took the key. He left the sitting-room door unlocked. Then he opened
the window, and, followed by his protégé, who was already shivering
with dread, he stepped out on to the balcony with the air of the leader
of an army. The balcony ran round the hotel, as a way of escape during
a fire; it was broad, and since the night was starry, but fairly dark,
they were little likely to be seen from below by the detectives
watching the hotel doors. They walked round to the back, came through
a window into a bathroom, through the bathroom on to the servants'
staircase, and went right down into the basement.
"I get up early in the morning before the servants, and I had to find a
way out," said Tinker in an explanatory whisper.
He led the way through the kitchen into a long passage, set with the
doors of cellars on either side. At the end of the passage was a short
ladder with rounded iron rungs, by which barrels were lowered, and
Tinker, mounting three rungs, pushed back a bolt, raised the heavy trap
a little, and peered about from under it.
"The street's clear," he said. "Come on!"
He slipped out on to the pavement, helped the clumsy financier through
the trap, caught his hand, and ran him across the street into a narrow
lane.
"There!" he said cheerfully. "That's the most difficult part of the
business! You're out of the hotel, and not a soul knows it!"
The financier's spirits brightened. Tinker had shown him his mettle,
and he began to have confidence. Besides, he had drunk a good deal of
the bottle of brandy. They hurried through the town by byways, and up
on to the cliffs. As they neared the palisade, and saw the great bulk
of the balloon looming through the starlight, the panting financier's
spirits sank: his teeth chattered, and his knees knocked together.
"Oh, buck up! Buck up!" said Tinker impatiently. "You're all right!
You're all right!"
It was a matter of a few seconds for him to climb the door of the
palisades, drop lightly on the other side, and open it. He steered the
financier gingerly round the planes, past the propelling and steering
fans, and got him into the car. He set him well forward in the bows of
it, and began to let the rope unwind from the windlass which moored the
flying-machine. All the while he heard the steady snores of Herr
Schlugst, sleeping in his iron hut.
The flying-machine rose slowly with very little creaking for all the
greatness of the planes; the last of the rope ran out, and the lights
of the town sank like stones in water beneath them.
"Right away!" cried Tinker joyfully, and the financier gasped.
When the lights of the town were a mere blur beneath them, Tinker
switched on the electric lamps, and the millionaire saw him sitting on
a wicker seat in the stern of the boat-shaped car, surrounded by
levers, instruments, and dials. Tinker bade him grip the steel rails
on either side of the car, and get ready for a swoop. Then he set the
motor going, and steered round the flying-machine on to her course.
She rose and rose, moving steadily forward at the same time, far above
the sound of the waves of the Channel.
Now Herr Schlugst did not rely so much on his propeller for speed as on
his skilful adaptation of the principle on which the bird swoops. When
the aneroid told Tinker that the car had reached the height of 3000
feet, he opened a valve, and let the gas escape slowly from the
balloon. The instant she began to sink he switched to a slight
downward angle the great planes, some seventy feet long, which were
fixed parallel to the car. The machine began to glide downwards on
them, gathering momentum from the weight of the car, at a quickly
increasing speed, until she was tearing through the air at the rate of
forty miles an hour, and sinking a hundred feet in the mile. The
financier sat hunched up, gasping and shivering as the air whizzed past
his ears and shrilled among the ropes. Tinker, with an air of cheerful
excitement, kept the machine on her course, and watched the aneroid:
his face of a seraph was peculiarly appropriate to these high
altitudes, though the millionaire was too busy with his fears to
observe the fact.
In half an hour the machine had rushed down to five hundred feet above
the sea: Tinker switched the planes to the same angle upwards: and the
momentum drove her up the incline of the air with little diminished
speed. Then he turned a tap and let the stored gas, compressed in an
aluminum cylinder, flow into the balloon, and restored the whole
machine to its former buoyancy. Moving more and more slowly the higher
it rose, the flying-machine once more gained the height of 3000 feet,
and once more swooped down from it. At the beginning of the upward
sweep, Tinker said, "Another swoop like that will bring us to Paris."
The financier, who had spent the time qualifying for a place among the
invertebrates, only groaned. Tinker was disgusted; but he said, "Cheer
up! You're the first man who has ever crossed the Channel in a
flying-machine. You'll be in the History books!"
The car rose and rose: Tinker had just resolved to swoop from 3500 feet
this time, when of a sudden she rose out of the windless area into a
stiff breeze, icily chill. They learnt what had happened by the
balloon bumping down on their heads with apparent intent to smother
them, and in a breath the car was spinning round, and jerking furiously
to and fro. The millionaire screamed and bumped about the car, and
bumped and screamed. Tinker set his teeth, jammed the flying-machine
into the teeth of the wind, switched down the planes, and tried to
drive her down. It was no use; she was whirled along like a piece of
thistledown. Then he opened the valve and let her sink. In three
minutes she had fallen below the wind, and was shooting swiftly on the
downward swoop. The financier was staring at him with a frenzied eye.
Tinker closed the valve, and said with a joyous brightness, "She was
quite out of control for a good five minutes!"
[Illustration: "She was quite out of control for a good five minutes!"]
The financier frankly gave it up; with a rending gasp he fell back in a
dead faint.
Tinker shrugged his shoulders, regulated the pace of the machine by
letting gas flow from the cylinder into the balloon till it was of the
proper buoyancy, then roped the senseless financier to the bottom of
the car, and came back to the helm.
The wind they had risen into had been blowing towards the east, so they
had not lost ground during their tossing, but they had been driven
south of their course, and he did not know exactly how to get back to
it. On the dark earth beneath he could see towns as blurs of light on
all sides of him, but no one of them was big enough to be Paris. He
let the machine swoop on down to five hundred feet, and up again. On
the upward course, from fifteen hundred feet he saw a great blur of
light on the northern horizon: it was Paris, and he was swooping past
it. He steered the machine round without taking the way off her, and
swooped down towards the city. At the end of the swoop he was already
over the suburbs, and he switched off the electric lamps. He took the
way off the machine by switching up the planes; and then, using only
the propeller, circled round, seeking for the Eiffel Tower. Presently
he saw it looming through the first dim grey light of the dawn, steered
over it, let fall a grapnel, and hooked it into the railings which ran
round it; took a turn of the rope round the windlass, and wound the
machine down to within twenty feet of the top. Then he went to the
financier, unroped him, and kicked him in the ribs ungently.
As he kicked, saying, "Get up! Get up!" an astonished voice below
cried, "Qui vive?"
Looking over the side of the car Tinker saw dimly the figure of a
gendarme, and said briskly, "Santos-Dumont!"
"Vive Santos-Dumont!" cried the gendarme with enthusiasm.
Tinker went back to the financier, and kicked him again.
"Where am I? Where am I?" he murmured faintly.
"On the top of the Eiffel Tower," said Tinker.
"What? Saved! Saved!" cried the financier, for all the world as
though he had been in a melodrama; and he sat up.
"I should like the five thousand pounds, please," said Tinker, brought
back by the touch of earth from his aerial dreams to cold reality.
"Five thousand pounds!" cried the financier, every faculty alert at the
mention of money. "No, no! How am I to get five thousand pounds?
Five hundred now! Five hundred pounds is an enormous sum--an enormous
sum for a little boy, or even fifty! Yes, yes; fifty!"
"That's really very tiresome," said Tinker very gently. "I never
thought you'd be so foolish as to leave all that money in empty rooms
in an hotel. Well, well, we must fly straight back and get it. I hope
we shall have as good luck as we had coming over." And he turned to
the levers.
"Here! here! here!" screamed the financier; tore a button off his coat
in his haste to get at his breast pocket; whipped out his notecase, and
with trembling fingers took five notes from the bundle which stuffed
it, and thrust them into Tinker's hand.
Tinker counted them, made sure that each was for a thousand pounds, and
put them in his pocket. Then he looked down at the gendarme, and said
in French:
"I want to drop my assistant. Will you conduct him to the bottom of
the tower?"
"Mais oui! Avec plaisir, Monsieur le Comte!" cried the gendarme,
striking himself hard on the chest to show his eager enthusiasm.
"Merci bien," said Tinker, lowering the rope ladder.
The gendarme held it steady, and the financier descended gingerly.
When he was off it, and the gendarme had loosed it, Tinker said "Au
revoir! and mind you wire to my father at once, and let the grapnel
rope slip out of the windlass." Lightened of the financier, the
machine shot up into the air.
Tinker's task was done: he had only to restore the machine to Herr
Schlugst; but he had a long while to wait. He realised suddenly that
he was hungry and very, very sleepy. By letting some gas escape, he
reduced the machine to a controllable buoyancy, and set about warming
the coffee which the thoughtful Herr Schlugst had ready made. Then
with brown bread, butter, and German sausage, he made an excellent
breakfast. It was light by the time he had finished; and he set about
looking for a sleeping-place, for he could not keep awake long. A wood
on a hill some miles away seemed to him the spot he sought. He swooped
gently for it, and was soon anchored to a tree-top and sleeping
peacefully. It was past noon when a shouting awoke him. He looked
down to find the wood full of people, four or five bold photographic
spirits in the tree to which he was anchored, but nowhere near his
grapnel, which was among the smaller branches. The roads leading to
the wood were choked with bicycles, motor-cars, and pedestrians; and a
station near was disgorging a crowd of people from an excursion train.
It was time to be going.
He cut the grapnel rope, and started leisurely for Paris. He reached
it in about an hour, and circled about it, observing it from above.
Then he came to the Eiffel Tower, and practised steering round it, to
the great joy of an excited and applauding crowd which thronged its top
and stages. It was a great moment. He steered away over Paris, made a
meal of the coffee, brown bread, and sausage left, and came back.
He was growing tired of waiting, and was meditating crossing over the
top of the tower and pouring a little water from the ballast tank on
the sympathetic crowd, when he saw his father and Herr Schlugst forcing
their way through it. At once he rose above the tower and let down the
grapnel. A dozen hands seized it, and drew down the machine. Tinker
let the stored gas flow into the balloon to allow for Herr Schlugst's
extra weight; and lowered the rope-ladder. The bursting Teuton came
clambering up it, forcing down the car and planes by his weight on to
the heads of the crowd, which was forced to hold them up with a
thousand hands.
"Ach, you young tevil my machine to sdeal!" he cried, tumbling into the
car.
"You shouldn't have refused to take me with you," said Tinker,
preparing to slip over the other side on to anyone's head.
"What haf you broke? What haf you broke?" cried Herr Schlugst, looking
round at the instruments with a practised eye, and seeing them unharmed.
"Nothing. What should I break anything for?" said Tinker scornfully.
"No; dere is nodings broke, schoundrel. But vere--vere is mine von
tousand pound? I ask you! Vare is mine von tousand pound! You haf
ruined me! Ruined me!"
"Oh, that's all right!" said Tinker. "I had a passenger who paid his
fare. Here are two thousand pounds." And he gave him two of the notes.
Herr Schlugst opened his mouth and stared at the notes, "Doo tousand
pound! Doo tousand pound!" he muttered thickly. "You vas von
vonder-child! Von vonder-child!"
Tinker bade him good-bye, and slipped out of the car, leaving him to
fly to some smooth place in the environs, where he could dismantle his
machine. Sir Tancred was too thankful for Tinker's safety to be very
angry with him: and they descended the tower surrounded by gendarmes,
who were put to it to preserve Tinker from the embraces of excited
persons of either sex. One fat Frenchman, indeed, kissed him on both
cheeks, crying, "Vive le rosbif! vive le rosbif!" before he could ward
him off.
At the bottom of the tower Mr. Blumenruth, radiant and triumphant,
burst through the throng, flung himself upon them, and dragged them to
a smart victoria which awaited them. He told them joyously that he had
cleared eighty-seven thousand pounds, and protested that they should be
his guests at his hotel as long as they stayed in Paris. On the way to
it Sir Tancred got down to buy some cigars, and he was barely in the
shop when the financier said in a jerky way to Tinker, "I saw a very
neat little motor-car, which I should like to make you a present of.
But I say--I don't want you to tell anyone--how--how ill I was up
there. My spirit was all right, of course; but that rarefied
air--acting on business worries--produced a state of nervous
prostration. I--I wasn't quite myself, in fact."
Tinker looked at him with intelligent interest, and, closing one of his
sunny blue eyes, said thoughtfully, "Nervous prostration? Is the motor
a Panhard?"
"Yes," said Mr. Blumenruth.
"If you hadn't been so--so--upset, I've no doubt you'd have sailed the
machine yourself," said Tinker warmly.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE BARON AND THE MONEY-LENDER
Sir Tancred would only stay four days in Paris with the grateful
Blumenruth, because he wished Hildebrand Anne to have the sea air, for
it seemed to him that he had not yet got back his full strength after
the scarlet fever. They returned, therefore, to Brighton, and when the
weather grew hotter, removed to the more bracing East Coast. Tinker
was for sharing the three thousand pounds he had made out of his trip
in the flying-machine equally with his father; but Sir Tancred would
not hear of it. Chiefly to please him, however, he borrowed a thousand
of it at five per cent., and invested the rest in Tinker's name. With
this thousand-pound note and three notes of fifty pounds, he paid off
the loan of a thousand pounds which he had borrowed from Mr. Robert
Lambert, a money-lender, five years before, with the balance of the
interest up to date, and found himself once more unencumbered save for
a few small debts, and with plenty of money for his immediate needs.
During August and September they stayed at different country houses;
and Fortune being in a kindly mood, the money remained untouched. In
the middle of October they came to London to their usual rooms in the
Hotel Cecil; and Sir Tancred was one morning at breakfast disagreeably
surprised to receive from Mr. Robert Lambert a demand for the immediate
payment of 1450 pounds. At first he thought it was a mistake, then he
remembered that he had paid Mr. Lambert in notes; and that Mr. Lambert
had promised to get at once from his bank the promissory note on which
the money had been borrowed, and send it to him. The promissory note
had not come, and the matter had passed from Sir Tancred's mind. Now,
he perceived that, if Mr. Lambert chose to deny that payment, he was in
no little of a plight.
After breakfast, therefore, he took a hansom, and drove to Mr.
Lambert's office. The worthy money-lender received him at once, and
with no less delay began to deny with every appearance of honest
indignation that he had been paid the debt. Sir Tancred grew
exceedingly disagreeable; he set forth with perfect frankness his
opinion of Mr. Lambert's character, declared that he would rather go to
that uncomfortable abode of contemptuous debtors, Holloway, than be
swindled in so barefaced a fashion; and exclaiming, "You may go to your
native Jericho, before I pay you a farthing, you thieving rascal!" went
out of the office, and banged the door behind him.
The worthy money-lender smiled an uncomfortable and malignant smile at
the banged door, and at once gave instructions to his manager to take
proceedings. Sir Tancred explained the transaction to Tinker; warned
him against laxness in matters of business; prepared for immediate
flight; and they caught the midnight mail from Euston. By the time an
indefatigable bailiff had ascertained next day that they had left
London, they were eating their dinner, in a secure peace, at Ardrochan
Lodge in Ardrochan forest, which Sir Tancred had borrowed for the while
from his friend Lord Crosland.
Hildebrand Anne was used to long periods unenlivened by companions of
his own age; and he began forthwith to make the best of the forest.
Some days he stalked the red deer with his father; some days were
devoted to his education, fencing, boxing, and gymnastics; and on the
others he explored the forest on a shaggy pony. It was of a
comfortable size, forty square miles or thereabouts, stretches of wild
heath, broken by strips of wood, craggy hills, and swamps, full of
streams, and abounding in many kinds of animals. It was an admirable
place for Indians, outlaws, brigands, and robber barons, and Tinker
practised all these professions in turn, with the liveliest
satisfaction.
At first it was something of a tax on his imagination to be a whole
band of these engaging persons himself; with one companion it would
have been easy enough, but his imagination presently compassed the
task. And when he found his way to the Deil's Den, a low stone tower
on a hill some six miles from Ardrochan, his favourite occupation was
that of robber baron. It would have been more proper to put the tower
to its old use of a lair of a Highland cateran; but, to his shame,
Tinker funked the dialect with which such a person must necessarily be
cursed.
The Deil's Den had earned its name in earlier centuries from the bloody
deeds of its first owners. No gillie would go within a mile of it,
even in bright sunshine. Tinker's carelessness of its ghosts, a
headless woman and a redheaded man with his throat cut, had won him the
deepest respect of the village, or rather hamlet, of Ardrochan. Twice
he had constrained himself to wait in the tower till dusk, in the hope
that his fearful, but inquiring, spirit would be gratified by the sight
of one or other of these psychic curiosities.
It was a two-storied building, and its stone seemed likely to last as
long as the hills from which it had been quarried. In some thought
that it might be used as a watch-tower by his keepers, Lord Crosland
had repaired its inside, and fitted it with a stout door and two
ladders, one running to the second story and another to the roof. From
here the keen eyes of Hildebrand Anne, Baron of Ardrochan, scanned
often the countryside, looking for travelling merchants or wandering
knights; while his gallant steed Black Rudolph, whose coat was drab and
dingy, waited saddled and bridled below, and Blazer the bloodhound
sniffed about the burn hard by. Blazer had a weakness for rats quite
uncommon in bloodhounds.