Men of Affairs Part 54

"Not yet."

"Mus' be taught."

"Ha ha!" said Richard again and banged the dish cover against the table implements of a foodless tray that had marked the hour of a meal time.

"Don't fidget!" roared Van Diest, emitting a cloud of tobacco smoke.

"Don't smoke!" Richard countered in the same tone.

"I shmoke on purpose."

"And I fidget on purpose."

With a sweep of the hand he sent the tray with a crashing to the floor.

"Ach! Ach! Ach!" cried Van Diest, and was almost choked with a violent attack of coughing.

"I make you to speak! I make you to speak! What if I burn you with my cigar--what if I----" he stopped abruptly and dropped his voice almost to a whine. "You don't know how goot I make myself to you. I wa.s.s a very kind man. At my home I keep the birds."

"Poor darlings," said Richard.

"The canaries; and you look what I haf here. A portrait of my little granddaughter Sibelle. She sit on my knee the Sunday afternoon and listen to the tale of Hansell and Grethel. She call me Grandparkins."

Richard swept the photograph aside with the back of his hand.

"I'm not sitting on anyone's knee, Grandparkins," he said.

A bright purple ran over Van Diest's features in blotches and streaks.

He rose to his feet and held out a quivering forefinger.

"You pay very heavy to make fun of my heart, Mister Barraclough. If you haf any senses at all you know that all mens wa.s.s the two mens--the home man and the business man--and the one ha.s.s nothing to do with the udter."

"Leave it at that," said Richard. "I'm not feeling altogether at home just now."

"That was your last word?"

"My last word."

"So!" said Van Diest. "So!" His eyebrows went up and down and he seemed lost in thought for a moment. Finally: "You go into the bedroom now please."

He gave the order slowly and to Richard's hypersensitive ears it held a threat of real and imminent danger. It sounded as the burial service must sound to a man who stands upon a trap with a knotted cord around his throat.

"No!" said Richard. "No!"

"The bedroom."

"No!"

An impa.s.se. They stood like duellists trying to read intention in each other's eyes.

Hugo Van Diest made the mistake of his life when he abandoned mental force for violence. The hand he raised to strike Richard across the face never reached its mark; instead he felt himself go tottering backward across the room. There was not much force in the blow Richard struck, but the science was good and he put his weight into it. Van Diest took it on the point and as he measured his length on the floor he saw Richard make a dash for the door which had remained unlocked during the interview.

Ezra P. Hipps caught him on the landing outside and put on a jiu-jitsu armlock which closed the argument and sent Richard staggering toward his bedroom beaten it is true, but absurdly enough triumphant.

"Listen you," he gasped, his back against the panel. "You think I can be made to speak--you're wrong--You think I can be tortured and beaten and bullied into giving up the secret. You're wrong--wrong. There's something inside of me that'll lick you, lick you hollow. Do your d.a.m.ndest, my lads, my breaking point is outside your reach." And as a Parthian arrow he said "Blast you!" and banged the door.

CHAPTER 29.

INDIVIDUAL RESOURCE.

A point of interest arises as to how long one determined girl armed with a revolver can hold up three desperate men also armed and further fortified by greed of gold. Your average tough is not greatly alarmed by a pistol in the hands of a woman. He banks on the theory that so long as she thinks she is aiming in his direction, he is moderately secure from harm. It is when she is pointing at some other object fear arises as to his safety and well being.

In this particular instance, however, there was an unusually threatening quality in the demeanour of Jane. She trained her gun like any artilleryman and in a manner not lightly to be dismissed by the casual process of a rush. Added to which the position in which these adventurers found themselves--a compact ma.s.s in a single doorway--did not offer good opportunities for acts of individual or concerted heroism. They formed, as it were, a unified target, the bull's-eye of which was the centre of Alfred Bolt's immense corporation. To suppose that any marksman, however indifferent, could fail to register a hit upon so broad an invitation was to betray unreason.

Dirk who had had previous experience in similar situations remarked with melancholy that the steely eyed Amazon who commanded their destinies kept carefully out of reach of his foot. This was a pity since he was contemplating trying the effect of kicking her on the knee-cap, a proceeding which if performed adroitly is often fruitful of happy results. Bolt, too, knew a very effective means of ramming his head into the solar plexus of an adversary, but this again was a form of attack dependent on proximity.

It was Harrison Smith's able staff work that won the day. An old enough trick, heaven knows, but one that generally works. He waited till her eyes were upon him, then shifted the direction of his gaze to a point somewhere behind Jane's back and nodded very quickly.

She is hardly to be blamed for having swung round, but in the second before she had recovered her wits and realised the bluff, the pistol had been s.n.a.t.c.hed away and the three men were pouring through the French windows into the garden.

It was Mrs. Barraclough who caught her by the arm and prevented her from following.

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried Jane. "I've failed, failed."

"Nonsense, my dear," said the old lady. "You girls have been just wonderful." She pointed to an horizon of trees a mile away, where a cloud of dust showed against the shadows. "Look what a lovely start he has. My Anthony would never let himself be caught by a pack of such--such----" She hesitated for lack of a word and added "Dirty dogs" with astonishing vehemence.

"But what are we to do now?" wailed Jane.

"Let us walk down to the village church together and I don't think it would be wrong if we said a little prayer."

They had reached the front garden when the Ford car, making a considerable fuss about it, banged and snorted past the front gate.

There are those perhaps who will condemn Mrs. Barraclough's action, but let them remember she was a mother. After all it stands to the credit of any mid-Victorian lady who, notwithstanding the ravages of seventy years, is able to pick up a flower pot and hurl it accurately into a moving vehicle. The Reverend Prometheus Bolt caught the missile full in the side of the head and the last view the old lady had of him was under a shower of dirt and broken pottery, while from his lips arose a cloud of invective more azure than the skies.

From where the car had been standing appeared Cynthia the cook. In her hand she carried a watering can, her cheeks were flushed and her eyes wild.

"I'd have done in their car if you'd held 'em a moment longer," she panted indignantly. "Didn't have time to slash their tyres but I did manage to get about half a pint of water in the petrol tank before they slung me into the hedge."

And very valuable was the help thus afforded for within a mile the Ford had banged and snuffled itself to a standstill and twenty minutes were lost draining the tank and blotting up the rust coloured drops from the bottom of the float chamber. Both Dirk and Bolt were in favour of returning to the house in order to conduct a punitive campaign, but Harrison Smith would not hear of this.

"We must push the d.a.m.n car all we know how," he said, Working feverishly at the union of the induction pipe with a spanner that didn't fit. "If we haven't caught up with them by eight o'clock I shall drop Bolt at a post office and he must get through to the Chief."

"What, the Dutchman?"

"No choice. It's infernal luck, but better that than let him get through with the thing."