The echoes of the boom came to T. B. Smith in his little room overlooking the Thames Embankment, but brought him little satisfaction. The Nine Men had failed this time. Would they fail on the next occasion?
Who they were he could guess. From what centre they operated, he neither knew nor guessed. For T. B. they had taken on a new aspect. Hitherto they had been regarded merely as a band of dangerous and clever swindlers, Napoleonic in their method; now, they were murderers--dangerous, devilish men without pity or remorse.
The man Moss by some accident had been associated with them--a tool perhaps, but a tool who had surprised their secret. He was not the type of man who, of his own intelligence, would have made discoveries. He mentioned Hyatt and "the man on the Eiffel Tower." That might have been the wanderings of a dying man, but Hyatt had come to light.
Hyatt, with his curiously intellectual face; here, thought T. B., was the man, if any, who had unearthed the secret of the Nine.
Likely enough he shared confidence with Moss; indeed, there was already evidence in T. B.'s hands that the two men had business dealings. And the third--"the man on the Eiffel Tower"? Here T. B. came against a wall of improbability.
The room was a long one, full of dazzling islands of light where shaded lamps above the isolated sub-editors' desks threw their white circles. This room, too, was smirched with black shadows; there were odd corners where light never came. It never shone upon the big bookcase over the mantelpiece, or in the corner behind the man who conned the foreign exchanges, or on the nest of pigeonholes over against the chief "sub."
When he would refer to these he must needs emerge blinking from the blinding light in which he worked and go groping in the darkness for the needed memorandum.
He was sitting at his desk now, intent upon his work.
At his elbow stood a pad, on which he wrote from time to time.
Seemingly his task was an aimless one. He wrote nothing save the neat jottings upon his pad. Bundles of manuscript came to him, blue books, cuttings from other newspapers; these he looked at rather than read, looked at them in a hard, strained fashion, put them in this basket or that, as the fancy seized him, chose another bundle, stared at it, fluttered the leaves rapidly, and so continued. He had the appearance of a man solving some puzzle, piecing together intricate parts to make one comprehensive whole. When he hesitated, as he sometimes did, and seemed momentarily doubtful as to which basket a manuscript should be consigned, you felt the suggestion of mystery with which his movements were enveloped, and held your breath. When he had decided upon the basket you hoped for the best, but wondered vaguely what would have happened if he had chosen the other.