Brighter Buccaneer by Leslie Charteris Page B

Gable look like something the cat brought in. Just a friendly tip, old dear.”
    He waved to the two stupefied men and wandered away; they stood gaping dumbly at his back.
    It was Mr. Lesbon who spoke first, after a long and pregnant interval.
    “Of course you won’t settle, Joe,” he said half-heartedly.
    “Won’t I?” snarled Mr. Mackintyre. “And let him have me up before Tattersall’s Committee for welshing? I’ve got to settle, you fool!”
    Mr. Mackintyre choked.
    Then he cleared his throat. He had a great deal more to say, and he wanted to say it distinctly.
The Tough Egg
    CHIEF INSPECTOR TEAL caught Larry the Stick at Newcastle trying to board an outward-bound Swedish timber ship. He did not find the fifty thousand pounds’ worth of bonds and jewellery which Larry took from the Temple Lane Safe Deposit; but it may truthfully be reported that no one was more surprised about that than Larry himself.
    They broke open the battered leather suit-case to which Larry was clinging as affectionately as if it contained the keys of the Bank of England, and found in it a cardboard box which was packed to bursting-point with what must have been one of the finest collections of small pebbles and old newspapers to which any burglar had ever attached himself; and Larry stared at it with glazed and incredulous eyes.
    “Is one of you busies saving up for a rainy day?” he demanded, when he could speak; and Mr. Teal was not amused.
    “No one’s been to that bag except when you saw us open it,” he said shortly. “Come on, Larry-let’s hear where you hid the stuff.”
    “I didn’t hide it,” said Larry flatly. He was prepared to say more, but suddenly he shut his mouth. He could be an immensely philosophic man when there was nothing left for him to do except to be philosophic, and one of his major problems had certainly been solved for him very providentially. “I hadn’t anything to hide, Mr. Teal. If you’d only let me explain things I could’ve saved you busting a perfickly good lock and making me miss my boat.”
    Mr. Teal tilted back his bowler hat with a kind of weary patience.
    “Better make it short, Larry,” he said. “The night watchman saw you before you coshed him, and he said he’d recognize you again.”
    “He must’ve been seeing things,” asserted Larry. “Now, if you want to know all about it, Mr. Teal, I saw the doctor the other day, and he told me I was run down. ‘What you want, Larry, is a nice holiday,’ he says-not that I’d let anyone call me by my first name, you understand, but this doc is quite a good-class gentleman. ‘What you want is a holiday,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you take a sea voyage?’ So, seeing I’ve got an old aunt in Sweden, I thought I’d pay her a visit. Naturally, I thought, the old lady would like to see some newspapers and read how things were going in the old country —”
    “And what did she want the stones for?” inquired Teal politely. “Is she making a rock garden?”
    “Oh, them?” said Larry innocently. “Them was for my uncle. He’s a geo - geo -“
    “Geologist is the word you want,” said the detective, without smiling. “Now let’s go back to London, and you can write all that down and sign it.”
    They went back to London with a resigned but still chatty cracksman, though the party lacked some of the high spirits which might have accompanied it. The most puzzled member of it was undoubtedly Larry the Stick, and he spent a good deal of time on the journey trying to think how it could have happened.
    He knew that the bonds and jewels had been packed in his suit-case when he left London, for he had gone straight back to his lodgings after he left the Temple Lane Safe Deposit and stowed them away in the bag that was already half-filled in anticipation of an early departure. He had dozed in his chair for a few hours, and caught the 7.25 from King’s Cross-the bag had never been out of his sight. Except … once during the morning he