A Thief in the Night - E. W. Hornung (phonics reader .TXT) 📗

a shot to do battle for my body with Barney Maguire! Jack-the-Giant-killer wasn’t in it with you, Bunny!”

“It was no credit to me⁠—it was rather the other thing,” said I, remembering my rashness and my luck, and confessing both in a breath. “You know old Swigger Morrison?” I added in final explanation. “I had been dining with him at his club!”

Raffles shook his long old head. And the kindly light in his eyes was still my infinite reward.

“I don’t care,” said he, “how deeply you had been dining: in vino veritas, Bunny, and your pluck would always out! I have never doubted it, and I never shall. In fact, I rely on nothing else to get us out of this mess.”

My face must have fallen, as my heart sank at these words. I had said to myself that we were out of the mess already⁠—that we had merely to make a clean escape from the house⁠—now the easiest thing in the world. But as I looked at Raffles, and as Raffles looked at me, on the threshold of the room where the three sleepers slept on without sound or movement, I grasped the real problem that lay before us. It was twofold; and the funny thing was that I had seen both horns of the dilemma for myself, before Raffles came to his senses. But with Raffles in his right mind, I had ceased to apply my own, or to carry my share of our common burden another inch. It had been an unconscious withdrawal on my part, an instinctive tribute to my leader; but I was sufficiently ashamed of it as we stood and faced the problem in each other’s eyes.

“If we simply cleared out,” continued Raffles, “you would be incriminated in the first place as my accomplice, and once they had you they would have a compass with the needle pointing straight to me. They mustn’t have either of us, Bunny, or they will get us both. And for my part they may as well!”

I echoed a sentiment that was generosity itself in Raffles, but in my case a mere truism.

“It’s easy enough for me,” he went on. “I am a common housebreaker, and I escape. They don’t know me from Noah. But they do know you; and how do you come to let me escape? What has happened to you, Bunny? That’s the crux. What could have happened after they all dropped off?” And for a minute Raffles frowned and smiled like a sensation novelist working out a plot; then the light broke, and transfigured him through his burnt cork. “I’ve got it, Bunny!” he exclaimed. “You took some of the stuff yourself, though of course not nearly so much as they did.”

“Splendid!” I cried. “They really were pressing it upon me at the end, and I did say it must be very little.”

“You dozed off in your turn, but you were naturally the first to come to yourself. I had flown; so had the gold brick, the jewelled belt, and the silver statuette. You tried to rouse the others. You couldn’t succeed; nor would you if you did try. So what did you do? What’s the only really innocent thing you could do in the circumstances?”

“Go for the police,” I suggested dubiously, little relishing the prospect.

“There’s a telephone installed for the purpose,” said Raffles. “I should ring them up, if I were you. Try not to look blue about it, Bunny. They’re quite the nicest fellows in the world, and what you have to tell them is a mere microbe to the camels I’ve made them swallow without a grain of salt. It’s really the most convincing story one could conceive; but unfortunately there’s another point which will take more explaining away.”

And even Raffles looked grave enough as I nodded.

“You mean that they’ll find out you rang me up?”

“They may,” said Raffles. “I see that I managed to replace the receiver all right. But still⁠—they may.”

“I’m afraid they will,” said I, uncomfortably. “I’m very much afraid I gave something of the kind away. You see, you had not replaced the receiver; it was dangling over you where you lay. This very question came up, and the brutes themselves seemed so quick to see its possibilities that I thought best to take the bull by the horns and own that I had been rung up by somebody. To be absolutely honest, I even went so far as to say I thought it was Raffles!”

“You didn’t, Bunny!”

“What could I say? I was obliged to think of somebody, and I saw they were not going to recognize you. So I put up a yarn about a wager we had made about this very trap of Maguire’s. You see, Raffles, I’ve never properly told you how I got in, and there’s no time now; but the first thing I had said was that I half expected to find you here before me. That was in case they spotted you at once. But it made all that part about the telephone fit in rather well.”

“I should think it did, Bunny,” murmured Raffles, in a tone that added sensibly to my reward. “I couldn’t have done better myself, and you will forgive my saying that you have never in your life done half so well. Talk about that crack you gave me on the head! You have made it up to me a hundredfold by all you have done tonight. But the bother of it is that there’s still so much to do, and to hit upon, and so precious little time for thought as well as action.”

I took out my watch and showed it to Raffles without a word. It was three o’clock in the morning, and the latter end of March. In little more than an hour there would be dim daylight in the streets. Raffles roused himself from a reverie with sudden decision.

“There’s only one thing for it, Bunny,” said he. “We must trust each other and divide the