all my recent experiences, I was not yet up to the subtle workings of the detective mind, and when Cherry said this I turned and stared at him in blank wonder.
“The boat?” I exclaimed. “Why, what of it? And which boat, Mr. Cherry?”
“There’s only one boat in question, my lad!” he answered. “The boat that Tom Scripture says he saw drawn up on the beach at Fliman’s End. He saw a boat there, and he saw a man! Now we suppose—I suppose, anyhow!—the man to have been your strangely-behaving uncle, Mr. Joseph Krevin. I think Mr. Krevin went to Fliman’s End, for purposes of his own, when he left your house during Tuesday night—that is, early on Wednesday morning. He left his Zellerquist & Vanderpant brandy bottle—empty, Ben!—there, anyway, in the cave. Yes—I feel sure Uncle Joseph was the big man in dark-coloured clothes whom Tom Scripture saw through his very good glass, bought, a bargain, on the Hard at Kingshaven. But, if he was—how did Uncle Joseph get the boat there?”
“Can’t follow you!” I said. “I don’t see what you mean!”
“You don’t see why he shouldn’t have a boat there?” he remarked, laughing. “But now let your mind go back to what we saw when we went there with Veller, and the boy and girl. We saw one set of footprints in the sand, Ben, the smooth, untouched sand, above high-water mark, and those prints led from the cave to the edge of the beach at that mark—to where the sands are no longer dry but wet from regular washing of the tides. From the cave, mind you! But nothing to the cave! Now supposing Uncle Joseph, when he left your house in the early morning, had appropriated somebody’s boat here in the creek—there are plenty of small boats about, as we can see at this moment: there they are!—and had pulled himself round to Fliman’s End, beaching his boat while he went up to the cave, there’d have been a track across those sands to the cave! But there wasn’t! And that leads me to think—what I’ve thought all along,” he concluded, with sudden abruptness. “Just that!”
“And that is—what?” I asked.
“That when Krevin left your house he went to Fliman’s End to keep a previously-made appointment!” he answered sharply. “Cut-and-dried affair, my lad! Somebody came to meet him there—with a boat. Who?”
“Tom Scripture said nothing about seeing any man in the boat, or about it,” said I. “If there’d been a man in charge of it”
“Scripture mayn’t have seen him—evidently didn’t see him,” he interrupted. “The man may have been sitting in the boat, waiting until Krevin went down to him—he even may have been lying down in the boat, asleep. But that’s how I figure it, Ben—somebody took a boat to Fliman’s End that morning to meet Uncle Joseph and took Uncle Joseph away from Fliman’s End in that boat, and that somebody must have been a somebody belonging to these parts! That’s flat!—and again I say—who?”
“Supposing the boat had come off from a ship—outside the bar?” I suggested.
“I think not, Ben,” he answered. “Tom Scripture sailed his craft outside the bar, and if he’d seen any vessel hanging about there, he’d have told us. No!—it’s pretty much what I’ve been thinking all through—if Krevin and the dead man, Cousins, were fellow-conspirators in the Kang-he vase affair, as I’m sure they were, I think they’d a third accomplice. And who the devil he may be licks me altogether—so far—though he’s probably the man whose handwriting is on the envelope I’ve got! However, here we are at our place—and there’s your good sister, looking out for us.”
Keziah was at the door of our house, gazing along the lane, her hand shading the sun from her eyes. At sight of us, she retreated indoors, and when we presently walked in she was doing just what I knew she would be doing—making the tea. She gave us an admonitory look.
“You’re late!” she said. “You should have been here half an hour ago. I knew what time that London train came in, and how long it would take you to walk down from the station, and I had tea ready to the minute—all but making the tea. And I want mine—long past my regular hour!”
“It’s very kind of you to have tea ready at all, ma’am,” said Cherry. “We’d have hurried if we’d known, but we found some highly important business awaiting us, and had to attend to it. Well, here’s Ben, home again, safe and sound, and in the best of health and spirits, ma’am—and I hope we find you so?”