Adventures of Martin Hewitt (16 page)

The stranger glanced sharply at me, and I could see that my manner and
tone rather disconcerted him. Burt Hewitt came forward at once. “Oh, yes,” he
said “just so—quite a natural sort of thing. As a matter of fact, I
quite expected you. Your umbrella’s wet—do you mind putting it in the
stand? Thank you. Come into my private office.”

We entered the inner room, and Hewitt, turning to the stranger, went on:
“Yes, that is a very extraordinary piece of music, that Flitterbat Lancers. I
have been having a little bit of practice with it myself, though I’m really
nothing of a musician. I don’t wonder you are anxious to keep it to yourself.
Sit down.”

The stranger, with a distrustful look at Hewitt, complied. At this moment,
Hewitt’s clerk, Kerrett, entered from the outer office with a slip of paper.
Hewitt glanced at it, and crumpled it in his hand. “I am engaged just now,”
was his remark, and Kerrett vanished.

“And now,” Hewitt said, as he sat down and suddenly turned to the stranger
with an intent gaze, “and now, Mr Hoker, we’ll talk of this music.”

The stranger started and frowned. “You’ve the advantage of me, sir,” he
said; “you seem to know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

Hewitt smiled pleasantly. “My name,” he said, “is Hewitt, Martin Hewitt,
and it is my business to know a great many things. For instance, I know that
you are Mr Reuben B. Hoker, of Robertsville, Ohio.”

The visitor pushed his chair back, and stared. “Well—that gits me,”
he said. “You’re a pretty smart chap, Mr Hewitt. I’ve heard your name before,
of course. And—and so you’ve been a-studyin’ the Flitterbat Lancers,
have you?” This with a keen glance at Hewitt’s face. “Well, s’pose you have.
What’s your idea?”

“Why,” answered Hewitt, still keeping his steadfast gaze on Hoker’s eyes,
“I think it’s pretty late in the century to be fishing about for the Wedlake
jewels.”

These words astonished me almost as much as they did Mr Hoker. The great
Wedlake jewel robbery is, as many will remember, a traditional story of the
‘sixties. I remembered no more of it at the time than probably most men do
who have at some time or another read the
causes celèbres
of the
century. Sir Francis Wedlake’s country house had been robbed, and the whole
of Lady Wedlake’s magnificent collection of jewels stolen. A man named
Shiels, a strolling musician, had been arrested and had been sentenced to a
long term of penal servitude. Another man named Legg—one of the
comparatively wealthy scoundrels who finance promising thefts or swindles and
pocket the greater part of the proceeds—had also been punished, but
only a very few of the trinkets, and those quite unimportant items, had been
recovered. The great bulk of the booty was never brought to light. So much I
remembered, and Hewitt’s sudden mention of the Wedlake jewels in connection
with my broken window, Mr Reuben B. Hoker, and the Flitterbat Lancers,
astonished me not a little.

As for Hoker, he did his best to hide his perturbation, but with little
success. “Wedlake jewels, eh?” he said; “and—and what’s that to do with
it, anyway?”

“To do with it?” responded Hewitt, with an air of carelessness. “Well,
well, I had my idea, nothing more. If the Wedlake jewels have nothing to do
with it, we’ll say no more about it, that’s all. Here’s your paper, Mr
Hoker—only a little crumpled.” He rose and placed the article in Mr
Hoker’s hand, with the manner of terminating the interview.

Hoker rose, with a bewildered look on his face, and turned toward the
door. Then he stopped, looked at the floor, scratched his cheek, and finally
sat down and put his hat on the ground. “Come,” he said, “we’ll play a square
game. That paper has something to do with the Wedlake jewels, and, win or
lose, I’ll tell you all I know about it. You’re a smart man and whatever I
tell you, I guess it won’t do me no harm; it ain’t done me no good yet,
anyway.”

“Say what you please, of course,” Hewitt answered, “but think first. You
might tell me something you’d be sorry for afterward.”

“Say, will you listen to what I say, and tell me if you think I’ve been
swindled or not? My two hundred and fifty dollars is gone now, and I guess I
won’t go skirmishing after it anymore if you think it’s no good. Will you do
that much?”

“As I said before,” Hewitt replied, “tell me what you please, and if I can
help you I will. But remember, I don’t ask for your secrets.”

“That’s all right, I guess, Mr Hewitt. Well, now, it was all like this.”
And Mr Reuben B. Hoker plunged into a detailed account of his adventures
since his arrival in London.

Relieved of repetitions, and put as directly as possible, it was as
follows: Mr Hoker was a wagon-builder, had made a good business from very
humble beginnings, and intended to go on and make it still a better.
Meantime, he had come over to Europe for a short holiday—a thing he had
promised himself for years. He was wandering about the London streets on the
second night after his arrival in the city, when he managed to get into
conversation with two men at a bar. They were not very prepossessing men,
though flashily dressed. Very soon they suggested a game of cards. But Reuben
B. Hoker was not to be had in that way, and after a while, they parted. The
two were amusing enough fellows in their way, and when Hoker saw them again
the next night in the same bar, he made no difficulty in talking with them
freely. After a succession of drinks, they told him that they had a
speculation on hand—a speculation that meant thousands if it
succeeded—and to carry out which they were only waiting for a paltry
sum of £50. There was a house, they said, in which was hidden a great number
of jewels of immense value, which had been deposited there by a man who was
now dead. Exactly in what part of the house the jewels were to be found they
did not know. There was a paper, they said, which was supposed to contain
some information, but as yet they hadn’t been quite able to make it out. But
that would really matter very little if once they could get possession of the
house. Then they would simply set to work and search from the topmost chimney
to the lowermost brick, if necessary. The only present difficulty was that
the house was occupied, and that the landlord wanted a large deposit of rent
down before he would consent to turn out his present tenants and give them
possession at a higher rental. This deposit would come to £50, and they
hadn’t the money. However, if any friend of theirs who meant business would
put the necessary sum it their disposal, and keep his mouth shut, they would
make him an equal partner in the proceeds with themselves; and as the value
of the whole haul would probably be something not very far off £20,000, the
speculation would bring a tremendous return to the man who w as smart enough
to put down his £50.

Hoker, very distrustful, skeptically demanded more detailed particulars of
the scheme. But these the two men (Luker and Birks were their names, he
found, in course of talking) inflexibly refused to communicate.

“Is it likely,” said Luker, “that we should give the ‘ole thing away to
anybody who might easily go with his fifty pounds and clear out the bloomin’
show? Not much. We’ve told you what the game is, and if you’d like to take a
flutter with your fifty, all right; you’ll do as well as anybody, and we’ll
treat you square. If you don’t—well, don’t, that’s all. We’ll get the
oof from somewhere—there’s blokes as ‘ud jump at the chance. Anyway, we
ain’t going to give the show away before you’ve done somethin’ to prove
you’re on the job, straight. Put your money in, and you shall know as much as
we do.”

Then there were more drinks, and more discussion. Hoker was still
reluctant, though tempted by the prospect, and growing more venturesome with
each drink.

“Don’t you see,” said Birks, “that if we was a-tryin’ to ‘ave you we
should out with a tale as long as yer arm, all complete, with the address of
the ‘ouse and all. Then I s’pose you’d lug out the pieces on the nail,
without askin’ a bloomin’ question. As it is, the thing’s so perfectly
genuine that we’d rather lose the chance and wait for some other bloke to
find the money than run a chance of givin’ the thing away. It’s a matter o’
business, simple and plain, that’s all. It’s a question of either us trustin’
you with a chance of collarin’ twenty thousand pounds or you trustin’ us with
a paltry fifty. We don’t lay out no ‘igh moral sentiments, we only say the
weight o’ money is all on one side. Take it or leave it, that’s all. ‘Ave
another Scotch?”

The talk went on and the drinks went on, and it all ended, at
“chucking-out time,” in Reuben B. Hoker handing over five £10 notes, with
smiling, though slightly incoherent, assurances of his eternal friendship for
Luker and Birks.

In the morning he awoke to the realization of a bad head, a bad tongue,
and a bad opinion of his proceedings of the previous night. In his sober
senses it seemed plain that he had been swindled. All day he cursed his
fuddled foolishness, and at night he made for the bar that had been the scene
if the transaction, with little hope of seeing either Luker or Birks, who had
agreed to be there to meet him. There they were, however, and, rather to his
surprise, they made no demand for more money. They asked him if he understood
music, and showed him the worn old piece of paper containing the Flitterbat
Lancers. The exact spot, they said, where the jewels were hidden was supposed
to be indicated somehow on that piece of paper. Hoker did not understand
music, and could find nothing on the paper that looked in the least like a
direction to a hiding-place for jewels or anything else.

Luker and Birks then went into full particulars of their project. First,
as to its history. The jewels were the famous Wedlake jewels, which had been
taken from Sir Francis Wedlake’s house in 1866 and never heard of again. A
certain Jerry Shiels had been arrested in connection with the robbery, had
been given a long sentence of penal servitude, and had died in jail. This
Jerry Shiels was an extraordinarily clever criminal, and travelled about the
country as a street musician. Although an expert burglar, he very rarely
perpetrated robberies himself, but acted as a sort of traveling fence,
receiving stolen property and transmitting it to London or out of the
country. He also acted as the agent of a man named Legg, who had money, and
who financed any likely looking project of a criminal nature that Shiels
might arrange.

Jerry Shiels traveled with a “pardner”—a man who played the harp and
acted as his assistant and messenger in affairs wherein Jerry was reluctant
to appear personally. When Shiels was arrested, he had in his possession a
quantity of printed and manuscript music, and after his first remand his
“pardner,” Jimmy Snape, applied for the music to be given up to him, in
order, as he explained, that he might earn his living. No objection was
raised to this, and Shiels was quite willing that Snape should have it, and
so it was handed over. Now among the music was a small slip, headed
Flitterbat Lancers, which Shiels had shown to Snape before the arrest. In
case of Shiels being taken, Snape was to take this slip to Legg as fast as he
could.

But as chance would have it, on that very day Legg himself was arrested,
and soon after was sentenced also to a term of years. Snape hung about in
London for a little while, and then emigrated. Before leaving, however, he
gave the slip of music to Luker’s father, a rag-shop keeper, to whom he owed
money. He explained its history, and Luker senior made all sorts of fruitless
efforts to get at the information concealed in the paper. He had held it to
the fire to bring out concealed writing, had washed it, had held it to the
light till his eyes ached, had gone over it with a magnifying glass—all
in vain. He had got musicians to strum out the notes on all sorts of
instruments—backwards, forwards, alternately, and in every other way he
could think of. If at any time he fancied a resemblance in the resulting
sound to some familiar song-tune, he got that song and studied all its words
with loving care, upside-down, right-side up—every way. He took the
words Flitterbat Lancers and transposed the letters in all directions, and
did everything else he could think of. In the end he gave it up, and died.
Now, lately, Luker junior had been impelled with a desire to see into the
matter. He had repeated all the parental experiments, and more, with the same
lack of success. He had taken his “pal” Birks into his confidence, and
together they had tried other experiments till at last they began to believe
that the message had probably been written in some sort of invisible ink
which the subsequent washings had erased altogether. But he had done one
other thing: he had found the house which Shiels had rented at the time of
his arrest, and in which a good quantity of stolen property—not
connected with the Wedlake case—was discovered. Here, he argued, if
anywhere, Jerry Shiels had hidden the jewels. There was no other place where
he could be found to have lived, or over which he had sufficient control to
warrant his hiding valuables therein. Perhaps, once the house could be
properly examined, something about it might give a clue as to what the
message of the Flitterbat Lancers meant.