Kate Plus 10

The Earl of Flanborough pressed a bell push by the side of his study table and, after an interval of exactly three seconds, pressed it again, though the footman’s lobby could not have been far short of fifty yards from the library and the serving man was never born who could sprint that distance in three seconds.

Yet, in such awe was his lordship held that morning by his man-servants, his maidservants and everything within his gates, that Sibble, the first footman, made the distance in five.

“Why the dickens don’t you answer my bell when I ring?” snapped the Earl and glared at his red-faced servant.

Sibble did not reply, knowing by experience that, even as silence was insolence, speech could be nothing less than impertinence.

“One of these days you will be too clever,” she said bitterly. “I have seen better men than you and cleverer men than you go out, Michael Pretherston. You and your Prevention of Crimes Act! You can’t put that bluff over me. The Act does not come into operation until you have a conviction against my name, and that you will never get, you brute!”

“Kate, Kate!” murmured Michael. “There’s a lady present.”

She nodded.

“I guess I’ll get my kit together,” she said; “it hasn’t been exactly a holiday trip.”

“My sympathies are entirely with you,” said Michael; “it must have been awfully dull after the gay orgies of Crime Street.”

“There is one thing I have always wanted to know,” said the girl, pinching her lip thoughtfully.

She walked to the desk, and Lord Flanborough was too much taken back to arrest her progress. Without a word she opened the silver box on the table and took out a cigarette.

“I have always wanted to know what kind of dope this dear old gentleman smoked.”

She looked at the cigarette critically and with an exclamation of disgust threw it back on the desk.

“Gold Flavours!” she said scornfully; “can you beat it, Mike? And he has a hundred thousand a year!”

“You must make allowances for the decadence of the governing classes,” said the soothing Michael.

He turned and nodded farewell to the girl and with Miss Tenby’s arm in his he passed out of the room, and Lord Flanborough and his daughter looked at one another in speechless amazement.

“I will tell you, Michael Pretherston,” she said, pointing a white finger toward him. “We will play fair. I am going to do a big thing. I am going to make the most wonderful steal that the world has ever known. That is why I found Reggie. That is why I made a martyr of myself and endured the boredom of Lord Flanborough’s society.”

She clapped her hands like a child.

“It’s a big thing, Michael, but it’s full of complications, wonderfully full of strategy, and I am going to do it all with your assistance.”

He jumped up and flung out his hand.

“Put it there, Kate,” he said.

“This is going to be the big thing for both of us and I am going to be the victor. If you win you have whatever you’re after. If I win, you have me,” she said with a little laugh.

He looked at her in silence.

“I can almost see you gripping my arm and pushing me into the steel pen,” she said. “I can see you sitting in court in a brown⁠—no, a blue⁠—overcoat, with your hat nicely balanced on your knees, looking up at me in the dock and wondering how I am going to take it.”

A cloud passed over his face.

“You’re a pessimistic little devil,” he growled. “No, I wasn’t thinking about that.”

“What were you thinking about?” she asked, her eyes wide open in surprise.

Michael walked a pace or two, then stopped and whistled, and well might he whistle, for there plain to be seen and not to be confused with any other track was the deep and narrow furrow and the broad impression which could have only been made by railway wheels!

He followed the track for another hundred yards where it struck the main road and a tram line and from there every trace disappeared.

Very weary and dishevelled he presented himself to T. B. Smith and made his report.

“You don’t seriously suggest that they took a railway train off the line and put it on the road, do you?” asked T. B. in wonder. “It’s impossible!”

“Of course it’s impossible,” said Michael irritably; “the whole thing is impossible. You can’t steal a railway train⁠—but they’ve done it!”

He found with the assistant commissioner Sir Ralph whose agitation was pathetic.

“It’s pretty rough on me, old man,” said the baronet with that friendliness which the superior person invariably adopts in a moment of his misfortune. “I have lost a wife and a railway train in twenty-four hours. What the dickens are you laughing at?”

“Nothing,” said Michael recovering his gravity. “It was almost worth everything to see your face!”