Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah (best e book reader android .TXT) 📖

“Dear Sir,—I have to-day consulted Mr Louis Carlyle, who thinks that you would like to see me. I will call again in the morning, say at nine o’clock. If this is too soon or otherwise inconvenient I entreat you to leave a message fixing as early an hour as possible. to leave a message fixing as early an hour as possible.
Yours faithfully,

Herbert Draycott.”

“P.S.—I should add that I am the renter of a safe at the Lucas Street depository. H. D.”

A description of Mr Draycott made it clear that he was not the West-End bookmaker. The caller, the servant explained, was a thin, wiry, keen-faced man. Carrados felt agreeably interested in this development, which seemed to justify his suspicion of a plot.

At five minutes to nine the next morning Mr Draycott again presented himself.

“Very good of you to see me so soon, sir,” he apologized, on Carrados at once receiving him. “I don’t know much of English ways—I’m an Australian—and I was afraid it might be too early.”

“You could have made it a couple of hours earlier as far as I am concerned,” replied Carrados. “Or you either for that matter, I imagine,” he added, “for I don’t think that you slept much last night.”

“I didn’t sleep at all last night,” corrected Mr Draycott. “But it’s strange that you should have seen that. I understood from Mr Carlyle that you—excuse me if I am mistaken, sir—but I understood that you were blind.”

Carrados laughed his admission lightly.

“Oh yes,” he said. “But never mind that. What is the trouble?”

“I’m afraid it means more than just trouble for me, Mr Carrados.” The man had steady, half-closed eyes, with the suggestion of depth which one notices in the eyes of those whose business it is to look out over great expanses of land or water; they were turned towards Carrados’s face with quiet resignation in their frankness now. “I’m afraid it spells disaster. I am a working engineer from the Mount Magdalena district of Coolgardie. I don’t want to take up your time with outside details so I will only say that about two years ago I had an opportunity of acquiring a share in a very promising claim—gold, you understand, both reef and alluvial. As the work went on I put more and more into the undertaking—you couldn’t call it a venture by that time. The results were good, better than we had dared to expect, but from one cause and another the expenses were terrible. We saw that it was a bigger thing than we had bargained for and we admitted that we must get outside help.”

So far Mr Draycott’s narrative had proceeded smoothly enough under the influence of the quiet despair that had come over the man. But at this point a sudden recollection of his position swept him into a frenzy of bitterness.

“Oh, what the blazes is the good of going over all this again!” he broke out. “What can you or anyone else do anyhow? I’ve been robbed, rooked, cleared out of everything I possess,” and tormented by recollections and by the impotence of his rage the unfortunate engineer beat the oak table with the back of his hand until his knuckles bled.

Carrados waited until the fury had passed.

“Continue, if you please, Mr Draycott,” he said. “Just what you thought it best to tell me is just what I want to know.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” apologized the man, colouring under his tanned skin. “I ought to be able to control myself better. But this business has shaken me. Three times last night I looked down the barrel of my revolver, and three times I threw it away.... Well, we arranged that I should come to London to interest some financiers in the property. We might have done it locally or in Perth, to be sure, but then, don’t you see, they would have wanted to get control. Six weeks ago I landed here. I brought with me specimens of the quartz and good samples of extracted gold, dust and nuggets, the clearing up of several weeks’ working, about two hundred and forty ounces in all. That includes the Magdalena Lodestar, our lucky nugget, a lump weighing just under seven pounds of pure gold.

“I had seen an advertisement of this Lucas Street safe-deposit and it seemed just the thing I wanted. Besides the gold, I had all the papers to do with the claims—plans, reports, receipts, licences and so on. Then when I cashed my letter of credit I had about one hundred and fifty pounds in notes. Of course I could have left everything at a bank but it was more convenient to have it, as it were, in my own safe, to get at any time, and to have a private room that I could take any gentlemen to. I hadn’t a suspicion that anything could be wrong. Negotiations hung on in several quarters—it’s a bad time to do business here, I find. Then, yesterday, I wanted something. I went to Lucas Street, as I had done half-a-dozen times before, opened my safe, and had the inner case carried to a room.... Mr Carrados, it was empty!”

“Quite empty?”

“No.” He laughed bitterly. “At the bottom was a sheet of wrapper paper. I recognized it as a piece I had left there in case I wanted to make up a parcel. But for that I should have been convinced that I had somehow opened the wrong safe. That was my first idea.”

“It cannot be done.”

“So I understand, sir. And, then, there was the paper with my name written on it in the empty tin. I was dazed; it seemed impossible. I think I stood there without moving for minutes—it was more like hours. Then I closed the tin box again, took it back, locked up the safe and came out.”

“Without notifying anything wrong?”

“Yes, Mr Carrados.” The steady blue eyes regarded him with pained thoughtfulness. “You see, I reckoned it out in that time that it must be someone about the place who had done it.”

“You were wrong,” said Carrados.

“So Mr Carlyle seemed to think. I only knew that the key had never been out of my possession and I had told no one of the password. Well, it did come over me rather like cold water down the neck, that there was I alone in the strongest dungeon in London and not a living soul knew where I was.”

“Possibly a sort of up-to-date Sweeney Todd’s?”

“I’d heard of such things in London,” admitted Draycott. “Anyway, I got out. It was a mistake; I see it now. Who is to believe me as it is—it sounds a sort of unlikely tale. And how do they come to pick on me? to know what I had? I don’t drink, or open my mouth, or hell round. It beats me.”

“They didn’t pick on you—you picked on them,” replied Carrados. “Never mind how; you’ll be believed all right. But as for getting anything back——” The unfinished sentence confirmed Mr Draycott in his gloomiest anticipations.

“I have the numbers of the notes,” he suggested, with an attempt at hopefulness. “They can be stopped, I take it?”

“Stopped? Yes,” admitted Carrados. “And what does that amount to? The banks and the police stations will be notified and every little public-house between here and Land’s End will change one for the scribbling of ‘John Jones’ across the back. No, Mr Draycott, it’s awkward, I dare say, but you must make up your mind to wait until you can get fresh supplies from home. Where are you staying?”

Draycott hesitated.

“I have been at the Abbotsford, in Bloomsbury, up to now,” he said, with some embarrassment. “The fact is, Mr Carrados, I think I ought to have told you how I was placed before consulting you, because I—I see no prospect of being able to pay my way. Knowing that I had plenty in the safe, I had run it rather close.